The Glass Room (31 page)

‘Why don’t you come with me?’ he suggested. ‘Leave Viktor and run away with me to America.’

For an ephemeral moment his tone seemed serious, and the very idea possible, this man snatching her away from enigma into certainty. Then she laughed — ‘Don’t be absurd’ — and he laughed with her and they strolled along the lakeside and onto the landing stage, laughing at the idea of her running off to America as though it was the greatest joke imaginable. She hadn’t laughed like that in years.

Lunch was eaten on the terrace at the back of the house in the pale sunshine, the three of them together at one end of the table, Katalin with the children at the other. The conversation was about the past because that is what exiles talk about, what was and what would never be again: the house in Mĕsto, the light and the balance and the beauty; and the people who had inhabited it, creatures of light and beauty as well. ‘Sometimes I feel that the place never existed,’ Liesel said. ‘That it’s no more than a figment of my imagination. Can we really have been so happy there?’

‘That is why I built it,’ Rainer said. ‘To make you happy.’

‘But now whom are you making happy? Banks in Zurich and universities in America? Why not stay here? We’ll knock this pile down and you can build another house of glass and make us happy again.’

Rainer laughed and caught her hand across the table. ‘Viktor,’ he said, ‘you don’t know how lucky you are with your wife.’

Viktor’s expression was of detached amusement, like an adult with over-enthusiastic children. ‘What makes you think it’s luck? It’s all planned.’

And Liesel thought, watching Katalin at the foot of the table talking to the children and only occasionally joining in the adults’ conversation that, yes, it was a plan, all of it was a plan. While the world itself was thrown around in the storm, Viktor had managed to plan the little world of his family down to the smallest detail. When Rainer came to leave after lunch she found herself absurdly close to tears. Somehow he represented the truly uncertain, the capricious and the dangerous. It was only in the unknown that hope lay. ‘Maybe we’ll meet up in the United States,’ she said as his taxi drew up.

‘And then I will design you another house,’ he assured her.

She had to bend to kiss him goodbye. She’d forgotten that, that she was taller than he. Somehow being with him, you forgot a simple physical fact like that.

*
German
Mist
is ‘muck’ or ‘manure’.

He sits at a window table in the café, watching. The place seethes with talk and laughter, an inchoate sound that reminds him of the noise from some animal colony. Men and women, hooded crows and parakeets, as though a species boundary is being crossed — crows and parakeets mixing together against the laws of nature. He remembers hours, days spent in a hide on the Baltic coast near Peenemünde watching terns nesting — the chattering, the raucous calling, the manoeuvring for mates and territory. Later, in the ornithological section of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, he chloroformed his samples and handed them to the taxidermist for skinning and preserving. The skins lay in drawers, their feathers bright and sharp as though they were still alive; but each with a small inflorescence of cotton wool poking out of its eye sockets. As with these women in the café the faint smell of mothballs clung to their plumage.

‘May I join you, Herr
Oberst
? All the other places appear to be taken.’

Stahl looks up. A woman, perhaps in her thirties, certainly older than he. Her eyes are blue, and bright with something like amusement. Mockery, perhaps. Her hair is just the pale side of chestnut. She is dressed in black, with a small blackbird’s nest of a hat perched on her head. Half rising to his feet, he offers the chair. ‘
Bitte
.’

She sits and orders something called a
turecká
and a small slice of
Sachertorte
. Despite the fact that her German is perfect, she is clearly a Slav. As she speaks to the waiter he examines her, focusing on her mouth, looking for curves and corners, wondering if clues lie there. And her ears, where they are visible beneath her careful hair: the convolute sculpting, the cartilage joining smoothly into the line of the neck. No lobes.

‘So tell me, Herr
Oberst
,’ she asks, turning her eyes on him. ‘To what do we owe the honour of your presence here in our city?’

He smiles, embarrassed by her attention. ‘I’m afraid I cannot claim to be an
Oberst
,
gnädige Frau
. I am a mere Hauptsturmführer.’

‘
Mere
Hauptsturmführer? Hauptsturmführer sounds dreadfully important. But then all Germans are dreadfully important, aren’t they? Anyway, I always promote soldiers. It makes them feel good.’ She peels off her gloves, folds them into her bag and takes out a silver cigarette case. He declines her offer of a cigarette but reaches across the table with his lighter.

‘Is your husband not with you?’ he asks, noticing her wedding ring.

She blows smoke away towards the window, as though with it her husband. ‘I always leave him behind. This café is where I meet my friends, and I’d hardly include my husband amongst my friends, would I? My friends spend money; my husband makes it. The opportunity for a conflict of interests is evident.’

Her order comes. She sips and eats carefully, endeavouring not to touch either coffee or cake with her glistening, scarlet lips. ‘And what about you? Is there a Frau Hauptsturmführer somewhere in the background?’

He hesitates, wondering whether to lie. ‘There was. But now she is dead.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ But she doesn’t seem sorry. She seems merely thoughtful, as though she is trying to assess the truthfulness of that answer. ‘You haven’t told me what you are doing here. Or perhaps you can’t tell me. Perhaps it is terribly secret.’

‘No secret at all. I’m here in the name of science. Beneath my uniform beats the heart of a scientist.’

‘How remarkable. I always thought that scientists were heartless. What kind of scientist are you?’

‘Zoologist, anthropologist, geneticist. I am director of the research centre at the Landauer House.’

Which is when the brittle banter, part sexual, part social, the one shifting over into the other, stops. She holds a forkful of
Sachertorte
suspended in mid air, her lips open. ‘The Landauer House?’

‘You know it?’

‘Very well.’ The chocolate cake goes into her mouth. She lifts her napkin and touches crumbs from her lips. ‘Liesel Landauer was a great friend of mine.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘She went away. Surely you know that, otherwise why should you be in her house?’

‘And you have no contact with her?’

She looks at him thoughtfully. ‘Am I being interrogated, Herr Hauptsturmführer?’

‘I am asking a question about your former friend.’

‘Why should you wish to know?’

‘Because I am intrigued by the house and the minds behind it. The Landauers must have been unusual to build such a place.’

She shrugs. ‘They were people of imagination and culture. They wanted a new life, a modern way of living. That is all. And they had it for just ten years before they were forced to abandon it.’

‘Why?’

‘I am sure you know why, Herr Hauptsturmführer. Viktor Landauer is a Jew. No, that’s not quite right. Like his nominally Christian wife, he is in fact an atheist; but he has what you would term Jewish blood.’

‘I dislike the term “blood”. There is no racial identity in blood. In the genes, perhaps. Jewish genes.’

‘The words don’t matter. The concept does. That is why they left.’

There is a small hiatus in the conversation, a pause while the two of them assess what has been said and what has not been said. ‘Perhaps we ought to introduce ourselves,’ she suggests carefully. ‘I know this is hardly the normal thing to do in polite society, but then we don’t live in normal times, do we? Or maybe even polite society any longer. My name is Hana Hanáková.’

‘Werner Stahl,’ he says. There is a solemn shaking of hands across the table.

‘So what exactly are you doing with the Landauer House?’

‘Would you like to see?’

‘Is that an invitation?’

‘Certainly. Perhaps you could take part in our survey of the human species?’

She considers the suggestion. ‘Only if you’ll treat me to dinner afterwards,’ she decides.

‘Won’t your husband object to that?’

‘My husband,’ she explains, ‘lets me do exactly as I please. Tell me what I would have to do to be part of your survey.’

‘There would be some tests, some photographs, some measurements. It is all very straightforward.’

She looks at him, right at him with those constant and striking eyes. ‘But human beings are not straightforward, Herr Stahl. They are very complex.’

Dearest, lovely Liesel
, she read,
I hope this reaches you quickly. How long the post seems to take these days. To think you are only a day’s train journey away and yet your last letter took three weeks! I suppose they have to read our prattle, but why should it take so long
?

They had carried wicker chairs down the lawn to the lakeside, and a large umbrella with panels of red, white and blue, like a national flag. This was how time passed — not the fleet and nimble time of home but the leaden time of exile, measured not by hours but by the changes in the surface of the lake, from the quiet reflections early in the morning with the far shore flung upside down into the depths, through the daytime when the breeze stirred it to a brilliant, metallic blue, to the violet of evening and the black of night. Sometimes rain turned the surface to beaten silver but now there was some kind of sunshine and the surface was a ruffled azure. Their third summer lived in this limbo that was neither paradise nor hell.

So, I have made the acquaintance of the new occupant of your house. You may be interested in this! The place is being used for official purposes and the man in charge is a ‘dish’, if you know what I mean.
Fešák
, as we used to say. Young and good-looking and strange: rather reserved and shy, and, of course, dumb. He calls himself a scientist and I suppose he is in some way — an anthropologist or something.

Dumb,
nĕmy
, was the word that gave
Nĕmec
, German. Liesel could imagine Hana’s delight at the little joke enshrined in her code word. She looked up from the letter. The three children were already in the water, with Katalin. Viktor was reading the paper. Other newspapers lay on the grass around him. The breeze lifted the corner of one page, alternately obscuring and revealing a map of eastern Europe pierced by black arrows. The headline shouted Invasion. The name B
ARBAROSSA
marched across the page like some bearded monster on the rampage.

He was sitting, would you believe it, in our window seat at the Café Zeman! and so I went over and sat down and introduced myself (there wasn’t a single free place in the whole café — really!) and found him quite charming and we got to talking and of course he mentioned the house and I said that I knew it. So he invited me to have a look round the place and maybe take part in the investigation that they are doing there — it’s an anthropological survey or something (have I spelled that right?), nothing to do with the current situation really, and I thought, well why not? I’ll be able to report back to you on the goings on there.

How are you, and how is the Cuckoo? Write soon and tell me everything. Give Viktor a kiss from me (the devil!) and especial hugs to the children from their Aunt Hana, and an extra one to my goddaughter. And one to you, of course. Many to you my sweet. Let me know how things are going. You seem so very far away.

‘Come in with us!’ Ottilie called.

Liesel looked up. ‘When it’s a bit warmer. Ask your father.’

‘Tatínek is useless. He can’t even swim.’

Viktor lowered his paper and looked at his daughter. ‘Frau Katalin is an excellent swimmer. Why do you need my help?’ Then he tossed the newspaper aside and got up from his chair. ‘I’m going to listen to the news. Find out what’s happening.’

Liesel put on her spectacles. She had to squint against the light to look at Katalin standing there in the water with the children playing round her. The young woman’s hair was slicked back and dripping so that you could see the perfect oval of her head. What did she think as she watched Viktor walk away up the lawn? The fact was he almost never looked at her, barely ever acknowledged her presence. When he did he always called her Frau Kalman and always addressed her as
Sie
, never
du
.

‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’ Katalin called, seeing Liesel watching her.

‘What’s bad?’

‘The news.’

‘Of course it’s bad.’ The fall of Paris last summer paled into insignificance compared with this latest development — the German armies plunging into the Soviet Union, three million men, so the reports said, thousands of tanks, a front of two thousand miles. It seemed incredible. Armageddon, the end of all things. Only the literal part of the brain could assimilate it, not the imaginative part. The imagination could only encompass the personal — Vitulka Kaprálová dying in a hospital in Montpellier; Hana stuck in Mĕsto with Oskar; the house on Blackfield Road abandoned to its fate; and the six of them here, in this incongruous place of peace, where there were boats on the water, where the sun shone during the day and the lights shone at night and people went about their business as they always had with only the newspapers and the wireless to say that the world outside was coming to an end.

Katalin walked out of the water and came over for her towel. Her wet skin was puckered with cold. ‘Should we be frightened?’ she asked, quietly so as not to be heard by the children.

‘I think perhaps we should.’ Liesel looked up at her and put her hand against her thigh. ‘You’ll catch your death. Do you want me to dry you?’

She smiled, and stood willingly, like a child, like Ottilie, while Liesel rubbed her legs; then knelt on the grass to have her hair dried. It seemed absurd that they had this closeness, as though intimacy with Viktor tied them to each other. ‘My mother used to do this,’ Katalin said. ‘We’d have a bath in the kitchen and then I’d sit in front of her and she’d dry my hair just like this.’ She frowned, as though bewildered by circumstance. ‘I haven’t seen her for years, you know that? Not since I left home for Vienna. I don’t even …’ she paused to consider ‘… know if she’s still alive.’