The Glass Room (35 page)

‘I told you that there was no child, but that was not the truth. We had a daughter. We called her Erika. I don’t imagine you know babies very well …’

‘I knew Liesel Landauer’s babies. I watched them grow up and I love them still.’

‘So imagine a baby like they were. Beautiful, perfect, the loveliest baby you could imagine. Hedda seemed to have found something beyond mere music, a fulfilment she hadn’t ever thought possible. Our perfect baby, born out of a love that some said had crossed forbidden boundaries …’

‘And then?’

‘And then things began to go wrong — various things, small things at first. This piano — I press a combination of keys and it plays a chord. The correspondences are exact.’ He lifts the lid and does that very thing and the chord of C sharp minor, clear and harmonious, sounds through the proportions of the Glass Room. ‘Well, for six months Erika seemed like that: perfect. She grew and developed, smiled and laughed. Knew us, reached out for us as we stood over her cot. And then, like a piano going out of tune, she began to deteriorate. She used to smile at us; and then she couldn’t. She looked at us; and then she didn’t. She used to grasp toys, her rattles, things like that; and then she couldn’t do that either.’

Hana waits, standing there by the windows. There is this compulsion to tell her what he has never told anyone else. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t understand how the armour of his defences has been breached by this woman whom he has paid for sex. It seems absurd. Yet she holds comfort in her arms and between her legs.

‘The condition is known as infantile amaurotic congenital idiocy. That’s the medical term. Amaurotic means blindness. That was just one of her symptoms.’

‘She went
blind
?’

‘There were the signs on her retina. Cherry spot, they call it. Gradually she lost control of her head — it just lolled about. She couldn’t hear, she couldn’t respond to anything. She had learned to grasp things and was just beginning to crawl and then all that stopped. She went from being a happy, smiling, funny child to being completely unresponsive. Then came the spasms and convulsions.’ He gestures, as though to conjure up the whole gamut of symptom and syndrome, the various tricks by which a single mutation can wreak havoc in a human body. ‘It was like winding the clock backwards, unlearning all that she had learned to do. We were told that she would eventually lose all bodily functions, and then finally she would die. The average life of such children is four or five years. There is no way out, no possibility of a cure. Not even a miracle.’

‘What causes it?’

He sits there in the Glass Room among the trappings of scientific measurement, in the pure proportions of the place, and talks of irrationality and senselessness. ‘It’s to do with a chemical, a particular kind of fat that the body makes when it shouldn’t. It accumulates in the brain and somehow turns the nerve cells off, that’s what the specialists say. It’s what they call an inborn error of metabolism. Inside me, inside every cell in my body, there is this genetic mutation. Recessive. You need one from each parent before you have the disease.’

‘So Hedda had it too.’

‘Of course she did. The same mutation, running in our family, but brought together by our union.’ He pauses. ‘It’s one of the Jew diseases.’

‘A
Jew
disease? Is there such a thing?’

‘Jews particularly suffer from it, along with many other diseases of that kind. Degeneracy, you see. They are a degenerate people.’

‘And does having it make you a Jew?’

‘It doesn’t make me a Jew, but some Jew introduced the disease into the family four generations ago. A great-great-grandfather. That is what I believe.’

She comes over from the windows and stands beside the piano. ‘And the baby? When was this? I mean, is the baby still—’

‘Do you know how such children die? Finally they lose the ability to swallow. You try to feed them but they just choke everything up. Either they starve to death or they die of pneumonia. There’s nothing anyone can do. Nothing.’

‘And that’s what happened?’

‘No, that’s not what happened.’ He hesitates, looking up at her. Her expression is full of compassion, compassion tinged with horror. He doesn’t mind the horror; it is the compassion that he resents, the pity that he loathes. He looks around the Glass Room, illuminated at that moment only by the backwash of light from the set sun, and he tells her about the Castle.

The Castle stood on high ground on the edge of a village, a quiet and peaceful village in Upper Austria. It was tall and hunched and secretive, with high walls and windows like small, surprised eyes. There were corner towers with pointed tops and a clock tower with an onion dome and a steeply pitched, grey-tiled roof. It was there that they took Erika.

‘She was four years old by then. We drove from Munich. It is not far but it was winter and the roads weren’t easy. When we arrived everything lay under snow. We parked the car outside the main gate and carried Erika up to the entrance. An orderly came almost immediately when we rang the bell, as though they had been waiting for us. I suppose they had been. They knew we were coming.’

‘A clinic?’

‘A kind of clinic. It was very quick and efficient. Of course there were a few forms to sign but everything had already been taken care of so they only really wanted to confirm our identity. Then we were shown into a waiting room where we could do whatever we wished — say a prayer or something. We tried to say goodbye to Erika, but there was no point by then. The way I look at it, we had already said goodbye to our child months ago. After five minutes a nurse came and took her away.’

Outside the windows the sun has settled below the horizon, the blood-red bladder suddenly bursting all over the sky in a great mess of crimson. Hana is very still. ‘What for?’

‘They took her away to kill her. Painlessly and quickly, an injection of morphia and scopolamine to put her out of her misery. I think …’ What does he think? He thinks that science holds the key to everything, that science will ultimately reveal all the answers and solve all the problems. ‘I think it was for the best.’

‘I don’t know how to take this,’ Hana says quietly.

‘Who does? There aren’t any easy answers. Hedda didn’t find any. A few days later she came back early from the conservatory, ran a bath, climbed in and cut open her veins with one of my razors.’

Why ever did he do it? Why did he tell her? Knowledge is power, and she now has power over both his body and his mind. She knows everything about him, every shadow and every light, every small particle of fear and every minute focus of gratification. She knows how to evoke memory and how to bring, for a moment, forgetting. ‘Stop,’ he tells her, but she doesn’t stop for his words have no power over her. He lies there helpless, on the unforgiving floor of the Glass Room, while she kneels astride him. Her hands are on his throat. Above him the dark maw of her shame threatening him with ecstasy.

‘Please,’ he begs her. ‘Please.’

She lowers her hips. There is no world beyond her. There is no light, no smell, no taste, no touch that is not hers. The Glass Room is not there. The balance and the reason has vanished. There is only her shame enclosing him, suffocating him, enveloping him, her choking fingers bringing sensation and oblivion in equal measure.

‘Someone might have come,’ he says afterwards, pulling on his clothes and trying to find some semblance of normality, some shred of command. ‘You must never come here again, do you understand? Never.’

She smiles. This smile is particular. It starts from a downward turn of the mouth that is almost an expression of contempt, and it ends in warmth and promise. She leans towards his face and her tongue laps across his mouth, tasting herself. ‘“Never” is a word I am not entirely familiar with,’ she says. ‘If we listened to never we would never have done what we just did. And how would you like that?’

They were on the terrace at the back of the house, the girls playing some board game, Katalin helping Martin to draw a picture of the house. They all looked round as Liesel came out with the post. ‘There’s a letter from Oma for the two of you,’ she said. ‘And one from Auntie Hana for me.’

It was a ritual, the reading of the letters, that fragile thread that linked them back to home. Ottilie opened the letter from their grandmother and prepared to read it to Martin. Liesel opened the one from Hana.

Life here is drudgery
, she read
. O can do less and less. You know how he always liked to wear a buttonhole — a rose or a carnation? Well, now things are different and it is impossible to find any flowers but the Star of Bethlehem, and then only a poor imitation in yellow cloth. So he refuses to go out. If he can’t dress properly then he won’t set foot outside the house, that’s what he says. So I have to do everything for him
.

She stopped and looked up. ‘The yellow star,’ she said, to no one in particular. ‘It was in the papers a few days ago. A yellow star. And now Oskar has to wear one.’

‘Would Tatínek have to wear one if we were still at home?’ Ottilie asked.

‘Yes, he would.’

‘And would we have to?’

‘I really don’t know. It just seems …’ She shook her head in disbelief, ‘… absurd. Unbelievable. Like branding cattle. Poor Hana is the only one who goes out now.’

‘Doesn’t she wear the star?’ Martin asked.

‘She’s not a Jew.’

Money is the difficulty as I told you. I can’t really explain the details in a letter but let us say that my scientist contributes to the funds and in exchange I contribute to his well-being. Once or twice a week at the Grand. And once — I’ll confess — just once in the Glass Room. He even played for me, and not too badly. There was a wife and she played the violin, so he’s got talents other than his science. And he has a little boy’s weakness for plums. They cost a lot these days — eighty crowns a kilo. But he gobbles them up.

She stopped reading and looked up, startled, to where bright daylight glittered on the lake. Plums.
Pflaumen
. She felt the blood in her cheeks, remembering laughter in the darkness, a laughter that faded to silence, and strong limbs open and hands on her head, and an intricate perception of touch and taste and scent there at the crux. Ecstasy and shame in intense conjugation.

Should I be telling you this? You’ll think me a disgrace but you cannot imagine what things are like here, Liesel. Really. People in Mĕsto get by selling whatever they have. That’s the way it works. That’s what I do. Nothing more than that. Tell me something happy. Tell me all about you and the children, and even Viktor, the old goat, and the Cuckoo whose circumstances I understand a little better now.

Burn this letter immediately!

Your loving
Hana.

She got up. ‘I must go and answer this,’ she said. ‘I won’t be long.’

She was sitting in her room attempting a reply when she heard Viktor’s car draw up outside. The car door slammed, and then the front door opened and closed and footsteps came up the stairs. Carefully she covered up what she had been writing. There was a knock and Viktor stood there in the doorway, holding a large buff envelope in his hand.

‘The tickets have come,’ he said.

Should she be happy or sad? She felt something physical, a throb of anguish behind her breastbone, as though her heart had stopped. ‘They’ve come?’

‘It’s a ship called the
Magallanes
. That’s Magellan, I think. A Spanish line.’ He glanced at the letter in his hand and attempted the Spanish pronunciation. ‘Compañía Transatlántica. Return tickets—’

‘Return?’

‘I told you, that’s what the Cuban authorities require. A fee of two hundred and fifty dollars for each visa applicant, a letter of credit for two thousand dollars, a caution of five hundred against the visitor’s leaving the country, a one hundred and fifty dollar security against an onward ticket to the country of final destination, and a return ticket so they can put you back on the boat if you can’t go anywhere else.’ He pulled one of the tickets out, a veritable booklet with a liner steaming across the cover towards a vivid sunset. ‘Seven hundred for this alone. It’s a seller’s market.’

‘And Katalin and Marika? Their visas?’

‘That’s all been taken care of.’

She looked back to the view. The past was slipping away, the coast of Bohemia dropping away behind her, Hana standing on the shore waving, as she had stood that day at the aerodrome. ‘We’d better start thinking about packing, then.’

‘I suggest we move immediately. We need to be ready to go as soon as the train tickets are confirmed. I suggest we take a hotel near Geneva, what do you think?’

Of course she agreed with him. He was the planner and the driving force. Where would she be without him? Back in Mĕsto in all probability. He seemed to be fired with enthusiasm, as though departure for the New World were a good thing rather than a disaster. ‘America, you’ve got it better than our old continent,’ he said. ‘We’re going to leave Europe’s useless memories and pointless conflicts behind us.’ They were words from a poem by Goethe. He was always quoting it these days. She remembered the first time he had quoted Goethe to her, on their honeymoon when they had just got to Italy and all seemed settled. She turned from the window, from the sailing boats on the lake and the hills in the distance, and looked at him. ‘Are memories really useless? They’re all we have, aren’t they? There’s nothing else.’

‘There’s the future.’

‘I’m not sure I believe in the future. What they’re doing in our old house, anthropology, race, whatever it was that Hana said. That’s the future.’

‘It won’t last, and at least they haven’t pulled it down ‘

‘I was so happy there. Although it was an illusory happiness, wasn’t it?’

‘Isn’t all happiness illusory?’

‘How cynical you are.’

He came into the room and put his hand on her shoulder. She liked the contact with him, that was a strange thing. Was it absurd to crave contact and yet feel betrayed? ‘You were happy. We were both happy. Isn’t that enough?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t understand you, Viktor, I really don’t. After all these years.’