The Glass Room (39 page)

‘Of course I know it,’ he replies. ‘It’s Viktor Landauer’s place.’

‘Was he a friend of yours?’

‘Business associate, friend, yes. Why do you ask? Do you know them?’

The man has a fat, heavy face. A typically sallow Jew complexion. A momentary sympathy is replaced by repugnance. ‘I’m interested.’

‘They went abroad.’

Stahl nods. He watches while they process Hanák, take his blood, measure his dimensions, enter his numbers onto his form. In the photographic area Stahl observes him with the detached eye of a scientist. He sees the paunch, the clumsy paps, the brushwork of black and grey hair across his chest and down his belly, the dark phallus that hangs like a mushroom between his thighs, and he tries to work things out, matters of attraction and repulsion, the urge to hybridisation, the desire for purity and defilement. Naked, the man revolts him. Perhaps all Jews revolt him, but how can you measure revulsion?

Afterwards he goes up to his office and calls down to the registry for that file they put aside for him.
Hanáková
,
Hana
. The file comes within minutes, delivered by Elfriede Lange. He holds her look for a moment as she hands him the folders. She blushes. She is a perfect specimen, with the exact facial proportions of the Teutonic people. Like Hedda. When she has gone he locks the door, then sits at his desk and takes out the photographs. He lays them out on the desk and examines them for a while. If she wasn’t lying, this woman is carrying his child. It seems extraordinary. But how do you measure the extraordinary? How do you measure any of this, the attraction and the repugnance? He remembers the birds on the Baltic coast, the five species of terns. Beautiful, sleek animals, designed for speed. White and grey and crested with black, lying palpitating in the palm of his hand. Fragile, insubstantial things, they watched him with a terrified eye as he put them into the chloroform. You had to steel yourself to do it.

He lifts the telephone receiver and phones one of the departments in the Špilas fortress. Amt IV. There is someone he knows there, a fellow Bavarian, not the kind of person he would call a friend but a contact nevertheless. ‘It’s Stahl at the Biometric Centre,’ he says. ‘Yes, Werner Stahl. How are you?’ Then he explains the problem. ‘She’s subversive, yes. She has been asking questions. And Jew-friendly.’
Judenfreundlich
. ‘Hana Hanáková.’ He repeats the name, and then dictates the spelling in case the man on the other end should make a mistake. The address? Yes, he has her address.

He feels much better now, as though something that was blocking his airway has been removed. He gets up from his desk and walks over to the window. Out there on the terrace the children used to play. Dolls, cars, that kind of thing, that’s what she told him. Two of them, a boy and a girl.
Mischlinge
. Where are they now, he wonders? Later he returns the file to the registry, and takes out another one.
Lange
,
Elfriede
it says on the cover. He opens it and lays those photographs out on the desk. Pale and perfect, her image blushes prettily back at a point just to the right of the camera, the place where he himself had stood watching. He wonders about that cloud of pale hair between her thighs, the texture of it, the scent.

The rhythms of the carriage had become part of their consciousness. It was any break to those rhythms that disturbed them during the night — a half-hour when the train halted somewhere south of Lyon, another pause in an unnamed station where they watched a man attach water hoses to the train, and another near Avignon when the guard passed along the corridor blowing a whistle. An air raid warning. Viktor climbed out of his bunk and let the blinds up but there was nothing to see, just the black of night and, in the faint backwash of light from the sky, an anonymous signal gantry. Cool air came in through the open window, but there was no sound of aircraft, no distant exploding bombs, just the muttering of nighttime and the noise of people in the next compartment talking with subdued voices. In the upper bunks the children slept on.

‘What time is it?’ Liesel asked.

‘Half past two.’

They dozed, and then another whistle sounded the all clear and the train gave a jolt and edged forward and the rhythms were restored and they slept once more until dawn came and they woke finally to a cool, bright morning with the train trundling along through the French countryside — low, scrubby hills, isolated farms, the occasional village. Viktor was standing at the window in his shirtsleeves, looking crumpled from the night. There was rough stubble on his chin. She had not seen him unshaven for years. The train rattled over points and they were passing through another station and this time there was a signboard visible: M
ONTPELLIER
.

‘This is where Vitulka died,’ Liesel said. ‘You remember, Kaprál’s daughter. She married Mucha’s son, you remember? Hana told us in one of her letters. I suppose Mucha had the same idea as us. Getting her to Spain.’

This tenuous coincidence with Vitulka Kaprálová seemed important. It was a thread that stretched across a hostile continent and linked them with home. Reduced to this exiguous compartment, this enforced intimacy, she clung to this thread of association, back through the years, back through different lives, all the way to the Glass Room, and Nĕmec surrendering the piano and Vitulka sitting at the keyboard to play.

‘What was the piece she played? “Ondine,” wasn’t it?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Of course you do. Ravel.’

The train rumbled on, away from the sea now, towards the other side of the country, towards the Atlantic. While Viktor went down the corridor to the bathroom and shaved in cold water, Katalin and Liesel folded the bunks away. There were some bread rolls for breakfast and some milk for the children. ‘It’s sour,’ Ottilie protested.

‘It’s not sour,’ Liesel told her. ‘It’s perfectly all right. Anyway, it’s all we’ve got. There are plenty of people who have nothing.’

Once they had finished, Katalin organised the children with some kind of game. It involved spotting objects in the passing countryside — sheep, rivers, villages — and scoring points if you guessed correctly what would come next. Later in the morning they discovered another landmark. ‘A castle, a castle!’ cried Martin, and when they looked out of the window there were the walls and pointed turrets of a medieval town that Viktor could name. ‘Carcassonne,’ he said. Later they went at a walking pace through Toulouse where the platform was lined with uniformed police. People pushed past in the corridor, straining to see out of the windows. Stories went back and forth. They would be changing trains at Biarritz. They would go straight through to Spain. They’d have to get off at the Spanish border and walk over to another train. Papers would be checked. Papers would not be checked because the train was sealed: in effect they were already in Spain. There were as many theories as people you asked, but in fact no one knew.

In the afternoon the train slid slowly into another station. ‘Soldiers!’ Liesel cried, looking out of the window. The word struck a chill.

Katalin peered over her shoulder. ‘Germans,’ she whispered, as though she might be overheard through the window and over the grinding of the brakes. ‘I thought the Germans were in the north. I thought it was the French in the south.’

But they were Germans, a motley collection of the young and the middle-aged, the lucky ones who were not on the Eastern Front, stern in their grey-green uniforms.

BAYONNE
, a signboard said. The train stopped. There was shouting, the banging open of doors. ‘
Raus
!
Raus
!’ Someone hammered on the window with a cane. ‘
Raus
!
Alle raus
!’

Liesel and Katalin gathered their things. ‘Do we take our suitcases? Do we take everything?’

People pushed and shoved along the corridor, some with bags, some without. Passengers climbed down onto the platform, blinking like animals emerging from a stable. An old woman had to be helped down the steps while people behind her urged her to hurry, shouting at her as though it was all her fault.

On the platform, Liesel grabbed Ottilie and Martin and held them tight. ‘What’s happening?’ she asked Viktor. ‘What are they doing? Why Germans?’ She suddenly had the terrible fear that they would be separated, that women and children would go one way and men would go the other. ‘Stay with us, Viktor,’ she pleaded, as though he had any power over such matters.

‘Line up!’ an officer called in French and German. ‘Get in line! Papers! Have your papers ready!’

Some of the passengers struggled back on board to retrieve their documents. There was more shouting and pushing. German voices railed. Eventually queues formed, awkward, shifting queues, like sheep jostling at a gate. At the head of each queue was a desk, where a pair of officials sat in judgement. They wore uniform and silver gorgets hanging round their necks like symbols of some arcane priesthood.

‘Silence!’

There was a smell amongst the waiting crowd, the smell of stale sweat, of unwashed bodies. ‘People pong,’ exclaimed Ottilie. Talk died down to a low muttering. In the sky above there was something new, great white birds circling and calling, a mocking, jeering sound that reminded Liesel of summers spent in Nice. ‘Seagulls,’ she told the children.

They edged forward, the children wedged in behind Viktor, with Liesel and Katalin standing behind them. Katalin was trembling. Liesel grasped her hand for comfort. At their backs soldiers were going through the train. They could hear them banging around, opening doors and pulling luggage down from racks. Some kind of disturbance broke out at one of the carriages. A man shouted and there was a scuffle as a figure was dragged away. Outside the station an engine revved. The story diffused amongst the waiting passengers, people muttering to one another out of the hearing of the soldiers. Chinese whispers. There were people on board without papers. Stowaways. The Germans had caught them and taken them away.

The queues shuffled forward. Passports were being stamped. Passengers were climbing back on board. Once they had got past the desks, people were going back on board! But some were being taken away, off the platform into one of the station buildings. Problems with papers, questions of identity, that kind of thing. Some were taken away but most were being let through. Relief spread though the crowd like something palpable, a kind of joy, a kind of ecstasy; but it was relief mingled with the fear that when your turn came you might not pass the test.

‘Documents,’ the man said, snapping his fingers under Viktor’s nose. He was stout and middle-aged, with a poor complexion and thinning hair slicked over a bald head. The master race. What had he been before the war? A minor civil servant in Darmstadt or something. Now he had a uniform and a silver plate on his breast with an eagle with wings outspread and the title
Feldgendarmerie
.

Viktor laid their papers out on the desk in neat piles. ‘My family — me, my wife and two children. And the children’s nanny. And her daughter.’

The man turned over the pages, glancing up every now and again. Passports, French transit visas, Spanish visa. He pursed his lips and nodded at the display of documentation, then snapped his fingers again. ‘Tickets.’ The tickets were laid out before him, like someone disclosing a winning hand at poker. But the stakes were high and victory wasn’t guaranteed.

‘Jew?’ he asked, looking up.

Viktor was impassive. He still had that ability, the business negotiator, keeping his cards to himself. ‘Czechoslovak,’ he said.

‘Czechoslovakia no longer exists,’ the official said. ‘Now it is the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.’

‘Moravian, then.’

The man sniffed. ‘And this one?’ He tapped Katalin’s temporary passport, her Nansen passport, a desolate, homeless document. Liesel could feel Katalin’s fingers tighten around her arm.

‘That is our nanny, the children’s nanny. And her daughter.’

The man considered. He was one of those people who has been reared on the importance of pieces of paper. Official stamps were ranked in front of him like stormtroopers in the victory of bureaucracy. ‘Come forward, woman,’ he said.

Katalin stood in front of him, trembling. He looked her up and down, as though what he saw there might be reflected in some aspect of her dubious papers. ‘What is this document?’ he asked.

‘It’s what it says,’ Viktor pointed out. ‘She has no passport. The League of Nations issues these—’

‘I didn’t ask you.’

Katalin shrugged. ‘It’s all I have.’

‘She’s in our employ,’ said Viktor.

‘I didn’t ask you to speak, sir,’ the soldier repeated with elaborate politeness. He held up a hand to call another official over. There was a moment of consultation. They examined the passport and the various visas while Katalin looked on with terrified, rabbit eyes. And then things happened with a disturbing rapidity. A uniformed figure took her by the elbow and led her away towards a nearby hut. Marika shouted, ‘Mama!’ and Liesel grabbed her and pulled her closer. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘It’s all right.’

‘Is this the woman’s child?’

‘It’s all right,’ Liesel replied. ‘She’s with us. We’ll look after her.’

‘She must go with the mother.’

‘What the devil’s going on?’ Viktor demanded.

The official gathered up their documents and handed them to him. ‘A procedural issue. The rest of you may move on.’

The soldier led Marika away, pushing her towards her mother. As they were shoved into the hut Katalin gave a desperate glance over her shoulder. ‘Viktor!’ she cried.

Viktor was shouting. His face was contorted with fear and anger and he was shouting: ‘Her papers are in order! She’s travelling on a refugee passport, a Nansen passport.’

‘I suggest you move back into the train,’ the official said. ‘Unless you wish to find yourself in detention.’

‘We left Czechoslovakia like that. She has everything that’s needed! It was all right for entering France. It’s all right for Spain.’ People were pushing from behind. The crowd was stirring with something animal and feral, the desire to survive, the desire not to be one of the unlucky ones who were taken away, a desire to have the little incident forgotten.