The Glass Room (33 page)

‘It was in the way so we moved it downstairs into the basement.’

‘Parties — Christmas, New Year. It was fun.’

‘Christmas isn’t Jewish.’

‘I told you, Viktor Landauer was never an observant Jew. They were modern people, agnostics, free-thinkers. I am more of a believer than they were.’

‘And what do you believe in?’

She smiles, that slanted, ironical smile. ‘Not the compassionate God of the Christians. Some kind of malign life force, I suppose. Something that is always ready to trip you up just when you think things are going all right.’

The photographer signals that he is ready and Stahl holds out his hand for her gown. She looks him straight in the eye. ‘I was expecting to do this in less clinical conditions,’ she says as she undoes the tapes. She slips the gown off and hands it to him with no more concern than if she were handing her coat to a servant.

He looks away from her eyes, away from her smile, at the body. She is a specimen, a type, perhaps even an exemplar. On the form there are boxes to check. Skin colour: ivory. Breasts: pendulous but turned upward at the nipples. Left breast larger than the right. Areolae: oval, earth-brown in colour, nipples pinkish and erect. Some small moles on chest, another below left breast. Belly faintly convex, umbilicus hollow, hips wide, thighs narrow, knees not quite touching. He has noticed that when they are naked, men and women are transformed from what they appear when clothed. The athlete may turn into a plump sybarite, the frump into a sensual fertility figure, the sylph-like beauty into a scrawny scarecrow. Hana Hanáková too has metamorphosed, from sterile elegance into something uneven and erotic. The word
Scham
, shame, sounds in his mind, a cultural parapraxis such as the Jew Freud talked about when he uncovered human shame of everyone for everyone to see. She shifts her legs slightly apart, her eyes fixed on his, watching where he looks. Most women hold their legs together and, like Eve, try to cover their
Scham
with their hands. But not this woman. Her pubic hair is a flock of curls, darker than her head hair, an arrow blurred faintly into her groin; and at the point of the arrow is a glimpse of pink lips.

‘Legs together please. Stand as straight as you can with your arms by your side.’ The camera emits a small, decisive click.

‘Please turn sideways to your right.’

The sinuous arabesque of her back and her buttocks presents itself. Another click.

‘Please face the wall.’

And now there are the complex planes of her shoulders and back, the scapulae visible beneath the flesh, the faint serration of spinal vertebrae curving down between the corrugations of her ribs to the cleft of her buttocks.

‘Thank you.’

She turns to face the camera again, looking him up and down as though he, not she, is the specimen.

‘That is all,’ he tells her.

Again there is that smile. ‘I very much doubt it,’ she replies.

He sits at his desk, fiddling with paperwork. There are returns of ethnic minority groups in the Carpatho-Ruthenia zone, a report by the Bratislava unit working under the aegis of the Slovakian government. For a moment, just a moment, he can forget her. The Bratislava unit has processed one hundred and ninety-three gypsies, from ages thirteen to eighty-seven. The unit is, apparently, to be congratulated.

Afternoon sun bathes the terrace outside. Light pours in through the windows where Hana Hanáková stood. He shifts awkwardly in his seat, crosses and uncrosses his legs, and considers the returns for the month of April: six hundred and seventy-two people assessed, of which three hundred and sixteen Slav, two hundred and thirty-nine Aryan, one hundred and twelve
Mischlinge
of various degrees. Roma and Jews are accounted separately in the addendum. The contemplation of these figures does not hold his attention for long. Impatiently, he gets up from his chair and goes down the corridor to the administrative office. ‘The file for the Hanáková woman,’ he asks the filing clerk. ‘Can I see it as soon as it’s ready?’ Then he returns to his work, signs off the month’s returns and hopes that he has not made any errors. The latest punched cards are all being duplicated, stacked in boxes for the courier that will run them to Prague. From Prague they will be sent to Berlin. In Berlin the sorting will take place, the great black machines whirring through the night, sorting, assembling, analysing, fingering through the records at a rate of one hundred and fifty cards per minute. Patterns and correlations will be revealed. The keys to human race and identity will be discovered.

He puts the returns into the out-tray and turns to the final task, an easy one, a letter from the company that manufactures and maintains the machines themselves, DEHOMAG, the Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft. They wish to reschedule their weekly maintenance visits. Wednesdays rather than Tuesdays.

There is a knock at the door and an assistant comes in with the file he has requested: a plain buff folder with the eagle on the cover, its talons grasping a wreathed
Hakenkreuz
.
Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt, Forschungsstätte für Biologie, Bio metrik Abteilung
. And the name, written in ink:
Hanáková, Hana
.

‘Has this been through the Hollerith section yet?’

‘Not yet, Herr Hauptsturmführer.’

‘Very well.’

The girl goes. He lays the folder down and opens it. There are Hanáková’s details, the centimetres, the kilograms, cranial index and facial index, the shades of eye colour and hair colour, the trivial and the momentous. Mid-phalangeal hair: present; ear lobes: attached; widow’s peak: present. All the quirks and traits that will be measured against the catalogue, counted and sorted so that she will become just one amongst the thousands, a nameless cipher in the racial catalogue, a single drop of water in the great ocean of statistical significance.

Nothing on the form gives the essence of the woman.

He turns over the page to the photographs. From the glossy emulsion Hana Hanáková looks back at him with a faint smile, as though she knew, at that moment of exposure under the lights, that he would be sitting here looking at her image.

She is so unlike Hedda as to seem a different species. Hedda had the delicate look of a child; this woman seems supremely adult. Hedda’s face described the almost perfect oval of the Nordic; this woman has the square jaw line and high zygoma of the Slav. What subtle detail of mind or body makes Hana Hanáková a Slav and made Hedda Nordic? Is it merely a matter of measurement? Is a cranial index of 88.3 and a facial index of 83.5 sufficient? He recalls Hanáková’s smell — that amalgam of things artificial and natural, of scents and perfumes. Is that a Slav scent? He tries to recall Hedda’s smell, but it is as elusive as a dream. Yet if the differences between the races are chemical as well as structural and if every feature of a living organism ultimately comes down to its chemical composition, then surely there must be a way to identify Slav or Nordic or Jew by pure chemistry.

He turns to the photograph of the side view, then to the rear view, to her heart-shaped rump, soft and white, with two dimples on either side. He moves uncomfortably in his chair. Back to the frontal view. Her breasts have the shape of teardrops. What are the laws of physics that determine the hang of flesh and fat, of muscle and ligament and adipose tissue? Her nipples are pointed, asymmetrical in their gaze, like someone with a slight, amusing squint. He shifts his legs. And the faint dome of her belly and the flock of hair with its trace of shadow on the inguinal surface of the thighs. A hint of … he picks up a magnifying glass and holds it over the photograph … yes, a hint of inner lip,
labia minora
, the pliant membrane pushed out of her sexual mouth.

After a while he stands up and returns the file to the registry.

They meet that evening in the café of the Grand Hotel opposite the railway station. The choice is his but it suits her well enough — it is the kind of place where people come and go, where no one is a regular any longer, where she is not known. They sit in the Winter Garden among potted palms and rubber plants, while a quartet plays selections from Strauss and Lehár and couples shuffle round on the exiguous dance floor. He has never encountered anything like this before — this woman with her wit and knowledge, this casual encounter across a dinner table, the unspoken possibilities. She talks of herself, of musicians and artists she has known, of Paris and Vienna, of an intellectual and cultural society that used to exist in this city but is now, she says, dying. And then she asks about him, about his family, and he finds himself telling her about Hedda. ‘She was a violinist. At the Munich conservatory. We used to play together.’

‘You were a musician?’

‘The piano. I played the piano. But I was not a true talent, not like Hedda’s. She was very brilliant. We …’ he hesitates … ‘had known each other all our lives, played together since we were little children.’

‘Childhood sweethearts? How touching. Was she beautiful? I imagine you with a beautiful woman.’

‘I found her beautiful. She was blonde and blue-eyed, a typical Nordic type.’

‘Were you happy together?’

He toys with his food, wondering how to get out of this interrogation that he has brought upon himself. ‘Very happy. We knew each other so well, you see. All those years, as long as we could remember. We were … always very close. But when we married there were difficulties. We were under great pressure.’

‘From whom?’

‘Our family.’ The singular is there. Has she noticed?

‘Tell me.’

He looks down at his plate, at the debris of the meal, the scattered crumbs, the bowl smeared with the traces of fruit and artificial cream. Why should he tell her? Why should all this be known to someone whom he has just met, someone with whom, if the logic of things works out, he will shortly have sex? But it is easier to confess to strangers. ‘Hedda and I were cousins.’

‘Cousins? Is that bad?’

‘We were first cousins. Relatives of the fourth degree. There were people who said that our love was unnatural. Incest, they said it was incest.’

‘But it isn’t.’

‘Not legally, no. But my family is Catholic — Bavaria, you see — so we had to obtain a dispensation from the bishop to marry. And even then there were people who were scandalised. And then …’ He looks away from her and round at the other tables, as though he might find escape. ‘And then she died. It was an accident …’

‘How very sad. Do you have children?’

‘No. No, we do not have any children. Look, I don’t want to talk about it.’

At that moment, mercifully, there is a distraction. A singer appears in front of the band, some refugee from the Vienna cabarets, all brassy hair and scarlet lips. She begins to whisper into the microphone, a Mimi Thoma song called ‘
Märchen und Liebe
’, ‘Fairy Tales and Love’. Stahl lets Hana lead him onto the dance floor. She is almost as tall as he and he feels awkward as they come together, like a young boy at dancing classes. But as they shuffle round he discovers that contact with her is a palliative, that thoughts of Hedda retreat to the back of his mind, and that Hana Hanáková is not disconcerted, merely amused — he feels a breath of laughter in his ear — by his growing erection pressed hard against her.

‘I think we should go upstairs, don’t you?’ she whispers, ‘before it becomes embarrassing.’

So they abandon the table and go up to one of the anonymous bedrooms on the first floor, that costs, so the concierge informs him when he books it, eighty crowns. It is a room that has become used to such assignations, a tawdry place of heavy velvet drapes and shabby furniture. The lighting comes from a few table lamps with weak bulbs. It emphasises the shadows, sculptures the curves and declivities of Hana Hanáková’s body as she undresses for him and lies down on the ornate and forgiving bed.

‘What do you want to do?’ she asks. There’s a hint of impatience about her tone, as though he ought to have made up his mind by now and she doesn’t have much time. But what
does
he want? He bends over her. There is that Slav smell, elusive and evocative, the scent of steppe and forest, of earth and moss. Her hands are on his head, pulling him down to her breasts. ‘There,’ she says as though she has guessed something. His mind wavers. His grasp on scientific truth slips. She is pushing him down over the contours of her body, over the slight swelling of her abdomen and the pout of her umbilicus, down into the froth of hair between her legs. He has never done this before. Never with Hedda, never with anyone. It is a mystery beyond his experience, almost beyond his imagining, something at once tantalising and threatening. She moves her legs apart. The scent is almost overwhelming, an amalgam of things recognised and things unknown. Woodruff and vanilla. The warm perfume of musk. A hint of fruit. A faint breath of ammonia. Hesit antly he tastes the strange flavours, the dark mystery of the Slavic
Scham
, the shame that is always there, the bearded mouth that seems, even as he kisses it, to poke its insolent tongue out at him. He feels faint, his head swirling with scent and taste and touch. And though he tries to move away, her hands are on his head, holding him there, pressing his face into the darkness.

Outside in the corridor there are footsteps and talking, and a woman’s voice raised in a shrill laughter. Doors open and bang closed. Inside the room Hana Hanáková is standing in front of the wardrobe mirror in her skirt and brassiere, doing her hair. Stahl watches. There are deft flocks of hair in the hollows of her armpits. Her fingers work neatly and quickly, as articulate as lips.

‘How much do I pay you?’

She pauses, looking at his reflection. ‘For God’s sake, you don’t
pay
me. That’d be far too sordid. You give me a
present
. A gift. Some mark of your gratitude and admiration.’

He takes some notes from his wallet and puts them on the table. Eighty crowns.

‘I don’t think that’s quite enough admiration,
mein Schatz
,’ she says, watching him in the mirror.

Mein Schatz
. My treasure. There’s sarcasm in the word. He loves her and loathes her, a strange dichotomy of emotion, the one balancing the other. How might it be if the scales tipped decisively one way? Feeling like a child who doesn’t know the value of adult things he takes some more notes out and adds them to the pile. She turns from the mirror, picks the money up and puts it in her handbag. ‘You’ve never tasted a woman like that before, have you?’ she asks.