The Glass Room (3 page)

She was outraged by the idea. ‘Surely not!’

‘You can tell. At least
I
can tell.’

‘Tell what?’ asked von Abt over his shoulder.

Viktor grinned at Liesel. ‘That you are a poet.’

‘Ah!’ The man raised an imperious finger. ‘A poet, yes; but not a poet of words. I am a poet of
form
.’

‘A dancer then?’

‘No.’

‘A sculptor?’

‘A poet of space and structure. That is what I wish to show you.’

Their footsteps crunched over gravel. There were buildings among the trees, a strange mixture of styles, not at all ornate and ancient like the rest of the city, but newly built pavilions that might have housed cafés or restaurants, perhaps an orangery or greenhouse. In the furthest corner of the garden was a ponderous neo-classical building. Von Abt strode up the steps and led them into the echoing hallway. There were groups of people walking round and talking in hushed voices as though they were in church. Footsteps clipped beneath the high vault. There were framed designs mounted on display boards, and glass-topped tables with models made of balsa wood and celluloid. People peered and pointed, shifting their viewpoints like billiard players preparing a shot.

‘Why are you being so mysterious, Herr von Abt?’ Liesel asked.

‘You must call me Rainer, for I am certainly not going to call you Frau Landauer. And I am not mysterious. I am showing you everything I do, in the pure and unremitting light of day.’ He had stopped before one of the displays. The label was in Italian and English:
Progetto per una Padiglione Austriaca; Project for an Austrian Pavilion, Rainer von Abt, 1928
. ‘There!’ he said. ‘
Ecco
!
Voilà
!
Siehe da
!’

Viktor made a small noise — ‘Ah!’ — just as though something had bitten him. ‘So!’ he exclaimed, crouching down to bring his eyes level with the model. He was looking across a green baize lawn, past miniature trees carved from cork, towards a low-lying box with transparent celluloid sides. There were small chairs inside the box, like the furniture made for dollshouses, and narrow pillars of chrome wire and a reflecting pool made out of the kind of mirror that a woman — that Liesel herself — carries in her handbag. The colours of the model were those that von Abt had extolled in their voyage down from Saint Mark’s: ethereal white, glaucous pearl, glistening chrome.

Viktor straightened up with an expansive smile. ‘You are an architect!’

‘I repeat,’ replied Rainer von Abt, ‘I am a poet of space and form. Of light’ — it seemed to be no difficulty at all to drag another quality into his aesthetic — ‘of
light
and space and form. Architects are people who build walls and floors and roofs. I capture and enclose the space within.’

For lunch — ‘You must be our guest,’ Viktor insisted — they found a restaurant that boasted a courtyard where they could eat beneath the luminous leaves of a vine. They ordered
moleche
, soft-shelled crabs, and a white wine called Soave. They toasted each other, glasses clinking together across the table and catching the sunlight. They talked, of art and architecture, of painting and sculpture, of the nonsense of the Dadaists and the absurd found objects of Duchamp, of Cubism and Fauvism and a group of little-known Dutch artists whom von Abt admired. ‘De Stijl, they call themselves. Do you know them? Van Doesburg, Mondrian? Purity of line, focus on shape and proportion.’ The honeymooners did not know this latest group. They knew the word clearly enough —
de stijl
, the style — but the idea of a group of stylish, modern Dutchmen almost seemed a contradiction in terms. Liesel expressed her liking for the
Jugendstil
, the Young Style, and the artists of the Viennese Secession. ‘Klimt painted my mother when she was young,’ she told von Abt. ‘The portrait hangs in the dining room of my parents’ house.’

Von Abt smiled at her. ‘If the daughter is anything to go by she must be a beautiful woman. I am sure that Klimt did her justice.’

‘It is a wonderful painting …’

‘All gilt and tinsel, no doubt. But …’ There was always a but. It seemed that von Abt moved round the world butting into obstacles placed in his way by the less intelligent, less gifted, less imaginative. ‘But as a
style
, what is the Secession? Wagner? Olbrich? Do you know their building in Vienna? Of course you do.’

‘I think it very fine. Bold lines, a statement of intent.’

‘But it looks like a mausoleum! Or a railway station! A building should not look like something! It should just
be
, a shape without references, defined only by the material it is built of and the conception of the architect. As abstract as a painting by De Stijl.’

Viktor was nodding in approval but Liesel protested, ‘What building is abstract? An abstract building would let the rain in.’

Von Abt’s laughter was loud and forthright, so that people at nearby tables looked round to see the source of the noise. ‘I am, you see, a disciple of the great Adolf Loos. You know Loos? He hails, I believe, from your home city.’

‘I have met the man,’ Viktor said. ‘I admire his work. It is a shame he felt the need to flee Mĕsto. But things are different now. The place is looking to the future.’

This seemed to please von Abt. He praised the virtues of his master, the intelligence, the sense of pure uncluttered form. He drew spaces and constructions before them on the table cloth to illustrate his ideas; he cast towers into the sky and — as Viktor later put it — castles into the air. He extolled the virtues of glass and steel and concrete, and decried the millstones of brick and stone that hung about peoples’ necks. ‘Ever since Man came out of the cave he has been building caves around him,’ he cried. ‘Building
caves
! But I wish to take Man out of the cave and float him in the air. I wish to give him a glass space to inhabit.’

Glass Space,
Glasraum
. It was the first time Liesel had heard the expression.

‘Perhaps,’ said Viktor, glancing thoughtfully at his wife and then back to the architect, ‘perhaps you could design a Glass Space for us.’

That evening they dined by candlelight on the balcony of their room, watching the glimmering boats, the gondolas and the sandalos, pass below. There was the slap of the water against wooden piles, not the rhythmic sound of the sea but a hurried noise, like cats lapping in the darkness. ‘What do you think of our friend?’ Viktor asked.

‘A curiosity. He’s very full of energy.’

‘Almost too full. You find him attractive?’

‘He would attract a certain type of woman.’

‘But not my Liesel?’

She smiled. ‘Your Liesel is attracted only by you,’ she said comfortingly.

He took her hand across the table. ‘When you say things like that, I would happily take you immediately, right here at the table.’

‘How outrageous. People would complain and we would both be arrested by handsome
carabinieri
and carried away to that awful gaol that we saw in the Doge’s Palace.’ They had invented this kind of talk over the few days they had been together. It was something new, something slippery, daring.
Schlüpfrig
. Previously such banter had been about strangers; this was the first time that the subject of their amusement was someone known to them, and whereas previous jokes had appeared harmless enough, this seemed more dangerous.

‘What do you think of my suggestion that he might build us our house?’

‘Is he to be trusted with something so precious?’ she asked. ‘We must see his work, mustn’t we? Get references, that kind of thing.’

They had already spoken with architects about the new house. They had discussed proposals, shaken their heads over gables and towers, questioned ornate and mullioned windows, even marched round a balsa wood and celluloid model of something that one studio had suggested. But nothing had seemed right for Viktor’s vision of the future, his desire not to be pinned down by race or creed, his determination to speak Czech as well as German, his insistence on reading
Lidové Noviny
, his talk of
inovace
and
pokrok
, innovation and progress. ‘Let the world move on,’ he would say. ‘We’ — he meant those newly created political beings, the Czechoslovaks — ‘have a new direction to take, a new world to make. We are neither German nor Slav. We can choose our history, that’s the point. It’s up to us, don’t you see? People like us.’

And now there was this fortuitous encounter with a young architect in the amphibious city of Venice, a man whose architectural ideals seemed to be of the future rather than the past.

‘I can send a telegram to Adolf Loos. Von Abt claims to have studied under him.’

‘Claims? Do you doubt his word?’

‘Do you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, we will see. We must arrange to meet him again. Interview him.’ He was suddenly businesslike, a disconcerting manner that he could put on at a moment’s notice. One expected him to gather papers up from the table in front of him and tap them into some kind of order and slip them away inside a leather briefcase, then call for a car to whisk him away to another meeting. ‘We must find out for ourselves what his ideas might be. He gave me his card. I will give him a ring.’

‘Can’t we leave that kind of thing until we’re back home?’

‘Why wait? Why not strike while the iron is hot?’

The meeting with Rainer von Abt took place the next day. He was summoned to their suite at six o’clock in the evening, ostensibly for cocktails but actually to be grilled about the possibility of his designing their house. It was a fine evening, with the windows open and the slop and stir of the water outside like the presence of some large feline animal. Liesel stayed out on the balcony, smoking and sipping her drink and looking out over the basin of St Mark’s towards the Isola San Giorgio, while the two men remained inside the room to talk. She was conscious that von Abt glanced towards her from time to time. She told herself that she was unmoved by his attentions. He was short, dark, bouncing in that boxing manner of his, whereas what she admired was tall and angular and almost stooped when standing or sitting, as though making a concession to people of lesser height than he. Viktor. A man of qualities, a man who was altogether admirable.

‘It is quite a proposition,’ von Abt remarked when Viktor had finished what he had to say. ‘Quite a
difficult
proposition.’

‘Why difficult? Build a house.’ Viktor held his hands open as though to show the simplicity of things. ‘Difficult for me, perhaps, but surely straightforward for an architect. If you asked me to build you a motor car …’

‘Ah, but you build a motor car for a market, don’t you? You might wish to build a motor car to your taste, but actually you build a motor car for a market.’

‘Precisely,’ Viktor agreed. ‘The same with a house. Only the market is me alone. And my wife.’

‘That is exactly the problem with such a commission. You, your wife.’

‘
We
are a problem?’

‘The situation creates a problem. You want someone to build a house, four walls—’

‘Maybe more, maybe more than four.’

‘—and a roof. Doors, windows, upstairs, downstairs, the whole rigmarole. Servants’ quarters, I imagine …’

‘They must go somewhere.’

‘Quite so. But it’ll be working to order.’

‘Rooms for the children,’ Liesel called from the balcony.

Von Abt smiled and inclined his head towards her. ‘Rooms for the children, indeed. However,
I
wish to do different things than mere construction. I wish to create a work of art. A work that is the very reverse of sculpture: I wish to enclose a space.’ And he made a gesture, using both his hands, the space between them as fluid and shifting as the air out of which he modelled it. ‘So. It is not like a client making demands and the artisan or the factory worker listening to those demands and doing what he is told. It is me making my vision in concrete and glass.’

Viktor glanced towards Liesel and smiled. She didn’t know how to read him in this kind of encounter. She was learning how to read him in matters of love and companionship, but she had never seen him in negotiation with a client or a workers’ representative or a supplier. He was smiling, sitting back to consider the matter, with his elbows on the arms of his chair and his hands in front of his face, his long fingers steepled together like the groins of a Gothic vault and his mouth composed in a quiet and confident smile. ‘Show me,’ he said.

‘Show you?’

‘Yes. Prepare some drawings. The kind of thing you would wish to do. The kind of’ — he paused — ‘
space
you would wish to enclose. Just sketches.’ Almost as an afterthought, he added, ‘The site is sloping, quite steeply sloping. Overlooking the whole city. Do you know Mĕsto? Perhaps you don’t. Below the hill is a park — the Lužánky Park. It used to be known as the Augarten but of course the name has been changed. Where we live, everything has two names. Austrian. Czech. It is the way of our world. So, you must imagine a house at the top of a hill, quite a steep hill, and below it a sloping field, and then laid out before it the whole of the city. A magnificent prospect. Make some drawings.’

Von Abt held out his hands helplessly. ‘But how large? I have no information, no idea of what you want.’

‘A family home. I have made that clear. A home for my wife and me and our eventual children. Say’ — he smiled at Liesel — ‘a maximum of three. What area? Say three hundred square metres. Just sketch something out.’

‘I will bring you photographs of some of my work. That will suffice.’

‘I would like to see some ideas.’

‘You
will
see ideas. I work with nothing but ideas.’

Viktor laughed. Liesel had somehow expected that he would be angry, but instead he laughed. ‘Show me your ideas, then. Convince me that you are the man for our house.’

Two days later they met again, by appointment, at Café Florian in the Piazza. St Mark’s stood like a fantasy of Arabian tents at the end of the great space and the orchestra, camped outside the café like a band of nomads, played selections from Verdi’s operas. Rainer von Abt approached their table with all the panache of an opera singer making his entrance. ‘
Ecco
!’ he announced, and placed a portfolio on their table. ‘I have laboured day and night, to the disadvantage of my current work. But the demands of true love are more powerful than mere artistic patronage.’