The Glass Room (40 page)

‘Move on, Herr Landauer,’ the German said quietly. ‘For your own sake, move on. Maybe the delay will only be temporary. Maybe all will be well. Just be patient.’ The official was looking past him to the next family, holding out his hand for their papers, wanting to get the job done. A soldier, a mere child, it seemed to Liesel, pushed them away towards the carriage, pushed them as you might push cattle. He came into the carriage and took Katalin’s and Marika’s suitcases away.

‘What are you doing?’ Viktor demanded. ‘They’ll be coming back. They’re coming with us.’ But the youth just shrugged as he humped the cases out into the corridor.

In the compartment, Martin was crying and asking what had happened. Ottilie was telling him not to worry. ‘It’s just a procedural issue,’ she said, not knowing what the words meant but liking the sound of them. Overhead the sound of gulls seemed jeering and malevolent.

They settled down to wait like a family in a funeral parlour, talking in whispers, breaking off sentences to stare away out of the window. Outside on the platform the queues shifted forward inexorably towards the desks, souls queuing to cross the Styx. Viktor went down the corridor to see what was happening, while Liesel sat with her arms round Ottilie and Martin, as though comforting the bereaved. Viktor was down on the platform talking to someone in uniform. Would he do something stupid, say something stupid, he who was always so balanced and thoughtful, always in possession of a plan? He was gesturing and arguing, and the official shook his head and held out hopeless hands.

‘It’ll be all right,’ Liesel assured the children, while feeling no assurance herself. ‘You know how it is with documents. Things get muddled, mistakes get made. Tatínek will sort things out.’

And then the two figures out on the platform moved. It was a sudden thing, a rapid dance of violence. Viktor made some gesture and the official shouted. A soldier ran across, unslinging his rifle and holding it across his chest. There was a moment of argument and then he drove the butt into Viktor’s body. Viktor staggered backwards. Liesel cried out. Ottilie screamed. The soldier advanced, pushing and shoving with his rifle, driving Viktor back to the steps of the train. A moment later he came into the compartment with blood on his face and on his hands.

‘What were you doing?’ Liesel shouted at him. ‘In God’s name what were you doing?’

He dropped down onto the seat, shaking his head. It was as though the answer to her question was as difficult to understand as the reason for Katalin’s arrest. Just a shake of the head and his fingers touching the swelling on his cheek where the rifle had hit him. ‘Your responsibility is to us!’ she screamed. ‘Your duty is to your family! What the hell happens to us if you get taken away?’

But he sat there, shaking his head and looking at the blood in his hands, as though oblivious to his wife standing over him and screaming. ‘You silly fucking bastard!’ she yelled. ‘That whore is more important to you than your wife and children! You silly fucking bastard!’

And then came the aftermath of the storm and they sat and waited in a strange, ethereal silence. Ottilie wept quietly in the corner. Martin turned away to look at a book. And Liesel and Viktor sat side by side, as far apart as they could get, as far apart as they had ever been, while soldiers walked up and down the platform in that mindless way that they have, striding back and forth, going nowhere. From the corridor windows you could see others down on the track, looking up at the windows of the crowded train as though peering into another world, a civilian world that they did not, would not understand.

Then the engine gave a snort of steam and the carriage jerked forward.

‘We’re going!’

Liesel gave a small cry, of shock, of fear. ‘Where’s Marika?’ Ottilie cried. ‘Mutti, where has Marika gone?’ But there was no answer. The carriages clanked together, jerked and shuddered, and then began to move more smoothly, out of the station area, through a short tunnel and then curving past dilapidated buildings and trundling across a bridge. There was a stretch of brown water below them and then more houses and open fields.

‘We’re going,’ Viktor said. His tone was incredulous. He looked at his wife. The blood had dried on his face, streaks of rust red down his forehead and on his cheeks. ‘What could I have done?’ he asked her. ‘What else could I have done?’

Liesel shrugged and looked away. Suddenly she felt the dreadful enclosure of the compartment. She stood up at the window and put her face to the small opening to breathe in the outside air. There was something new borne on the breeze of their passage over the top of the pungent fumes from the engine. ‘Do you smell it?’ Liesel asked, turning to the children. ‘Do you smell it?’

The breeze came from the west and it carried with it the scent of the ocean.

Later they talked, in hushed tones so as not to wake the children, in allusive tones, in case they were awake and listening. The train trundled on through the darkness. They were in Spain now and there was no longer the constraint of the blackout. Looking out of the window you could see the lights from the neighbouring compartments falling onto the embankment, throwing rough grass and sere trees into momentary life, like frames from an old film.

Viktor sat hunched in the darkness on the lower bunk, and she knew that he was weeping. She knew it by the set of his shoulders and the manner of his breathing and the hesitance in his speech, even though she had never known him weep before. It made her angry. ‘For God’s sake, pull yourself together. You’ll be no use to anyone in this state. You’ve got to pull yourself together and think about what we might do when we get to Bilbao. You’ll be completely useless like this.’

‘I thought …’ he said. ‘I thought …’

‘You don’t know what you thought. You haven’t known what to think for ages now.’

‘I thought everything would be … all right. Her papers, this journey, the whole thing.’

‘And us? Would
we
be all right?’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘You know what I mean.’

One of the children stirred. It was Ottilie, on the bunk above. ‘What time is it?’ she asked.

‘It’s late. We’ve got a long day tomorrow. Go back to sleep.’

‘What are you and Papi talking about? Is it Katalin? Is it that?’

‘Yes, it’s that. Now go back to sleep.’

The train trundled on through the Spanish night, and the sour internecine argument continued, a rapid flow of accusation and recrimination with dark currents underneath. ‘Why did you do this to me, Viktor? Do you hate me so much?’

‘I don’t hate you, Liesel. Don’t be silly.’

‘You must hate me to have done this to me.’

‘I loved her. It’s different. Love for one doesn’t mean hate for another.’

‘Did you ever love me?’

‘Of course.’

‘And now?’

The train rattled on, slipping easily through cuttings and across bridges, passing through darkened stations, sliding through the dark night and carrying with it its cargo of secrets and lies, and silences.

‘Would you weep for
me
?’ she asked.

The news comes through from the Reichsprotektor’s office: the Biometric Centre is to be closed down and all personnel are to be returned to their former occupations. It seems — a phone call to the head office in Berlin confirms this — that the Reichsprotektor does not consider the research work to be justified. If the centre can find no scientific means of distinguishing between Nordic, Slav and Semitic then the work must be flawed. That a difference exists is patent. Anyone of common sense can detect it. That is the trouble with scientists: they can’t quantify and measure common sense.

So the personnel pack their suitcases and draw rail passes for Berlin and Jena and Leipzig and get transport to the station. The measuring instruments and furniture are packed away, the files stacked in boxes for transfer to Berlin, the furniture sent to offices in Mĕsto, in Prague, and in Warsaw. Technicians come and unscrew the Hollerith machines from the floor of the garage and load them onto trucks for despatch to an undertaking that will make more fruitful use of them, the new camp complex being established in Silesia near the town of Oświęcim.

She dreams. Her dreams are subtle and elusive, of flesh and hair and glass and chrome, strange chimerical dreams that are peopled by buildings and built of people. When she awakes those images flee from her as rapidly as the shadows of night are extinguished by a hot, tropic day. Outside her room the cicadas begin early in the morning in short rhythmic pulses, like an engine starting. By midday the sound is constant, a steady mechanical scream in the vegetation along the dried-up stream bed beside the garden.

Darling Hana
, she writes.
The heat here is of a different order of things from that which we know at home. Dead heat, like someone trying to suffocate you
…

But the letters go nowhere. They accumulate in a drawer in her desk. The continent of Europe is sealed off by war, isolated from the outside world, a place of plague. ‘What do you think happened?’ she asks Viktor. But he can only shrug in reply.

She dreams. She dreams of cold. She dreams of glass and light, the Glass Room washed with reflection, and the cool view across the city of rooftops, the cold view through the trees, the crack of snow beneath your boots. She dreams of a place that is without form or substance, that exists only in the manner of dreams, shifting and insubstantial, diffuse, diverse:

space

glass, walls of glass

a quintet of chairs, placed with geometrical precision

a sweep of shining floor — ivory linoleum

white and black

the gleam of chrome

These things move, evolve, transform in the way they do in dreams, changing shape and form and yet, to the dreamer, remaining what they always were:
der Glasraum
,
der Glastraum
, the single letter-change metamorphosing from one into the other: the Glass Room become the Glass Dream.

My dear Liesel
, her mother writes. Somehow — the stamp and postmarks give it away — it has been taken to Switzerland and posted there.
I can only pray that this reaches you. I can’t even say who has taken it for me, in case it goes astray. So, your father and I have moved to Vienna, to be among our people
…

‘Our people!’ Liesel exclaims. ‘What does she mean by that?’

Your uncle and aunt, who have stayed behind, send their love, as do the cousins. Except Ferdinand who cannot because he has gone away to war and we have heard little of what has happened to him …

‘To war? Ferdinand? For whom does he fight? Which side is he
on
, for God’s sake? Which side?’

I have some news of the Hanáková woman and her husband. It seems — the story has done the rounds and I heard it fourth- or fifth-hand — that they have both been arrested. He was a
žid
, of course. They say that he has been sent to Theresienstadt where they are gathering the Jews. Of his wife there are only rumours. Some that she has been sent to Germany, others that she went to Austria, to some kind of work camp. More than that I cannot say. I am sorry not to be more precise but these are difficult days. Of the house, I can say that it was used as some scientific laboratory — can you believe it? — but now it lies empty, looked after by Laník and his sister but in the possession of the authorities. Before we left we tried to get access to the building but were not allowed, although your father spoke with Laník who tells him that everything is all right.

I do hope and pray that all is well with you and Viktor and the children …

Viktor spends much time away from the villa, in the city. He visits offices and consulates, he sits at desks demanding that people write letters, send telegrams. They are looking for a Katalin Kalman and her daughter, last seen in Bayonne in the German-occupied coastal zone of France. They may be in Spain, they may still be in France, they may be somewhere, anywhere. He doesn’t know where. But he wants to find them. And cannot. When he returns in the evening he has the hopeless look of the refugee about him. Liesel comforts the children with lies.

She dreams. In the hot night, alone in her bed beneath the heavy hand of a mosquito net, she dreams. She dreams of Katalin and she dreams of Hana. And when the heat wakes her in the morning, the joy and the ecstasy of the night vanish as quickly as the bats that spend the night circling the house in search of prey. In the day there are only flies and lizards and this box of a room with the white walls and a French window onto the veranda and cane chairs and a brightly coloured bedspread in some kind of Aztec design. Geckos cling to the ceiling as avariciously as she clings to her memories. But memories are not constant, being, like dreams, evanescent things that shift and change, metamorphose and vanish. Flies circle the light fitting in the centre of the room — a hideous thing that the owner claims is Murano glass — while the wind rattles the palm trees outside. Fans whirr behind their metal cages like something aeronautical, like the engines of the flying boat that will take them — Viktor assures her — away. And above all this and below all this is the one constant: the sound of the ocean. How strange that the ocean, that played no part in her life before, that was something imagined, foreign, alien, should have come to dominate it now.