The Glass Room (6 page)

‘For me there are many things sacred,’ Liesel insists. ‘My marriage, for example. My baby for another.’

‘Oh darling, don’t be absurd. Your marriage to Viktor is a mere contract.’

‘My marriage to Viktor is very much more than a mere contract. It is a marriage of minds.’

Hana laughs. ‘You’re being sentimental, darling. But your baby is something quite different. Maybe
that
really is the last sacred thing. Really I do rather envy you. However hard I try nothing ever seems to happen with me.’

‘You actually want a baby? How wonderful.’

‘Sometimes, darling, just sometimes. When I’m feeling lonely.’

Beneath the table Liesel touches her belly. Only the day before she fancied that she felt a movement, and now there it is again, a tiny fluttering certainty in the depths of her being. ‘It’s there,’ she cries. ‘I can feel him!’

Hana reaches forward. ‘Let me see.’

‘Not on the outside. Inside, I can feel him inside. Like a bubble bursting.’

‘Perhaps it’s wind.’

Their laughter draws the attention of people at nearby tables. ‘I think it’s true,’ Liesel insists. ‘I think it really is him.’

‘Him?’

‘Or her. Perhaps a her.’

‘Have you had anyone divine it?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Oh, but it works. If you have the powers.’

‘And unscientific.’

‘You and your science. Just because Viktor makes motor cars. You need to make a pendulum with your wedding ring, that’s all. A cotton thread will do. Everyone knows.’ She pauses and looks round as though she might be overheard. ‘
I
can do it.’

‘
You
can do it?’

‘Of course. Dear Viktor may loathe me but I am a woman of many talents.’

So they finish their coffees and, giggling, take a taxi to Hana’s apartment in the centre of town where the operation is performed, Liesel lying on the chaise longue in the drawing room, in the very place, presumably, where the pianist Nĕmec conducts his private performances. Hana ties Liesel’s wedding ring to a length of cotton thread and holds it above her abdomen. ‘I think you should pull your dress up, darling. It works much better if there’s nothing to absorb the aura of gender.’

‘Won’t my own aura of gender interfere with the transmission anyway? How can this possibly work?’

‘You’ve become too cynical. You’re catching it from Viktor.’

‘Viktor is not cynical. He is just realistic.’ But still Liesel complies with the suggestion, shifting her hips to hitch her skirt and petticoat up and expose the gleaming dome of her belly. The umbilicus is everted, and there is a median line that has appeared over the weeks, running from her navel to her pubis almost like a line of symmetry. Hana looks down on her with an expression of amazement. ‘Darling, you are
gorgeous
.’

‘Don’t I look like a clumsy whale?’

Her friend’s eyes shine. She stands there, sharp and elegant and sterile, looking down on the helplessly exposed Liesel. ‘Of course not. You look like a sleek fish. Tamara could have painted you. Goodness, I’m quite …’

‘Quite what?’

For once Hana seems at a loss for words. ‘Overwhelmed … I never dreamed …’

Liesel feels both vulnerable and proud. ‘Never dreamed what?’

‘That it could be so beautiful. May I touch? Does it seem rather strange to ask?’ The improvised pendulum hangs from her finger. ‘May I?’

‘Why would you want to do a thing like that?’

‘I don’t know. I just … do.’ And she kneels down on the floor beside the chaise longue, and strokes her hands across Liesel’s belly like a blind person trying to discover the shape and texture of something that she cannot see. Then something happens that seems so remarkable that they never talk of it afterwards: Hana leans forward and presses her lips against the warm swelling. The contact evokes in Liesel a vague and unnerving sense of sexual desire, focused not on Hana but on her own body, which is so foreign and so strange, so heavy with the future. She rests her hand on Hana’s head in something like benediction, or maybe to comfort her, that she is in this blessed gravid state and Hana is not. And then Hana’s hand slips inside the elastic of her drawers and cups the warm mound of her pubis.

There is a moment of shock, a few seconds of a strange tableau in which the participants are uncertain of the role each is playing, before Liesel shifts her hips. ‘Hana,’ she says quietly, ‘please.’

The hand slips away. Avoiding Liesel’s eyes, Hana gets to her feet. She searches for distraction. ‘The pendulum. We’ve forgotten the pendulum.’ She holds it out as though to demonstrate the hard metallic fact of it, something that can be felt and seen, against whatever it is that the two of them have just experienced, which was a slippery, ineffable emotion that was different for each but nonetheless powerful.
Schlüpfrig
. The ring spins round, catching the light in splashes of gold. Hana holds it still and for a moment the band of gold hovers motionless above Liesel’s everted navel. Then, hesitantly, it begins to turn. An air current? A shiver from Hana’s fingers?

‘Look!’

‘Shh!’

‘It’s turning. A circle. It’s turning a circle!’

‘It’s a girl.’ The turning is obvious now, incontrovertible, a description of a perfect female circle over the smooth and refulgent dome of Liesel’s belly.

‘A girl! Oh Hana, we’ll call her after you.’ And she sits up and hugs her friend as though everything is complete, their love consummated, the gestation over, the child delivered, the matter already decided.

‘Look at what has just come from von Abt,’ Viktor announces one morning, finding Liesel in her room writing letters. Her belly is heavily swollen now. Sometimes the swelling makes her feel big and clumsy; at other times she feels almost translucent, as though the creature inside her can be seen through the wall of her abdomen, a fish swimming there in the ocean of its own amnion, an amphibian climbing out onto a tidal bank, a reptile raising its ugly head, a mammal couched in fur, an animal re-enacting its evolutionary development there in the primeval world of her womb.

‘See what he is proposing?’ He unfolds the architect’s plan on the floor beside her desk, a diazo print showing ghostly lines in dark blue on a pale blue background.
Haus Landauer
is written across the top left-hand corner. There are two perspective drawings, two floor plans, a front elevation and a street elevation: ruled lines as sharp as razor cuts, a mathematical precision that is beyond the natural. There are no straight lines in nature. Not even light travels in straight lines any longer, so it is said. That man Einstein.

‘See what he is suggesting? The house will be sort of hung from the first storey, here. Do you see? Downwards into the garden. The bedrooms and bathrooms on the entrance floor and then the living room below. Huge windows. Plate glass. I mean, the fellow hasn’t really bothered with walls. Just glass.’ His tone is one of amazement and excitement, as though he has just been the witness of a natural phenomenon that you see only once in a lifetime.

Liesel turns to look, spreading her legs so she can lean forward. The plans show Euclidian perfection, as pure as an idea. There is not a curve in the whole proposal. Her own belly is a curve, something aquatic, oceanic, but not this design for a house. Not a curve in sight. She examines the garden elevation, a long, lean rectangle laid sideways across the page and crossed with vertical lines, a rectilinear universe that might have been designed by that new painter whom Rainer talked about, the Dutchman Mondrian. The perspective drawings show all this as a construction of boxes, a child’s game played with wooden blocks. Only a tree, an architect’s conceit sketched in beside the building, gives a brief, ephemeral sense of flow. And as Viktor said, the street entrance seems to be on the top floor with the living room below it. She looks up. ‘“I will build you a house upside down,” that’s what he said.’

‘But is it what we want?’

‘Why not? And this room, all glass!’ She laughs, shifting her belly, leaning forward again. ‘We will be like plants, hothouse plants.’

‘Over-hot in summer, perishing cold in winter, I’d say.’

She examines the plan of the main floor — it is a space, just a space. There are no internal walls, merely space. ‘What’s this line?’

‘He proposes some kind of partition to divide the area. Moveable, I think. And there’s another partition to separate the dining area. See? Where he has put the table and chairs. The semicircle.’

‘At least there’s one curve.’ She puts her finger out and touches the slick surface of the print as though by touching it she might understand it better, like a blind person reading Braille. There are small crosses ranked across the plan like graves marked on the map of a cemetery.

‘And these?’

‘Those are the pillars.’

‘Pillars?’

‘He wants to build a steel frame. Apparently there will be no load-bearing walls at all, just the whole thing hung on a steel frame. And where the uprights pass through the interior he is proposing to clad them in chrome.
Glänzend
, he calls it. Shining. Hard steel rendered as translucent as water.’ Viktor pulls a letter from his pocket and reads. ‘“Steel will be as translucent as water. Light will be as solid as walls and walls as transparent as air. I conceive of a house that will be unlike any other, living space that changes functions as the inhabitants wish, a house that merges seamlessly into the garden outside, a place that is at once of nature and quite aside from nature …” That’s what he says. What is the man going on about?’

‘I think it looks wonderful.’

‘It certainly looks different. More like that department store that the Bat´a people are putting up on Jánská. Do we want to live in a department store? Over here domestic supplies, over there soft furnishings and fabrics, downstairs for cutlery and crockery …’

She laughs. ‘Viktor, you are losing your nerve. It was you who wanted a house for the future and now you seem to hanker after the solid ideas of the past. Next you will be insisting on a turret with crenellations and ogives. Look.’ She points to the top floor, the street level. ‘This is a terrace, a great space, with the rooms like a cluster of tents. Our family camped out on the steppe. The inside and the outside are one and the same thing.’

‘We’re not nomads.’

‘You enter here …’ She traces the curve of stairs — another curve! ‘And then descend into this … this space.’
Raum
, she says and suddenly she sees the space projected into her inner vision, the purity of line, the thrill of emptiness. ‘Can’t you see it? It’ll be wonderful.’

‘I can see it in theory. The fact seems rather remote at the moment. And frightening.’

‘But you take risks in your business. You trust to designers. You approve of the building of new factories and offices.’

‘But do I want to live in a factory? Or an office?’

She straightens up. Once it was Viktor who was committed to the idea of the modern, and now it is she. ‘But this is where
I
want to live.’ She touches her belly. ‘With my daughter and my husband.’

‘How do you know it’s a daughter?’

‘Hana divined the sex. Didn’t I tell you? Astonishing really. With a pendulum.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. That woman’s a menace.’

‘Did you know she’s having an affair with Nĕmec? She says he plays her like a piano.’

‘How disgusting.’ He looks outraged. She has noticed that ever since her pregnancy began he treats her with a kind of remote sterility, as though she were some kind of virginal mother about to give birth to the Messiah or something. ‘Don’t be so prudish, Viktor.’

‘I’m not prudish. You know I’m not prudish. I just don’t want my wife descending to Hana Hanáková’s kind of vulgarity.’

Winter came with snow, sometimes a blizzard, at other times just faint white moths floating down through the cold air. In the garden at the back of their rented house it gathered in the shadows of the plants and survived there even when the daytime temperature rose above zero. The grass took on a bruised, dead look while the hills on the far side of the river lay like corpses beneath their winding sheets. Nature seemed suspended in this icy season, but still things grew — the child in Liesel’s womb, the house in Rainer von Abt’s mind. The one convolute, involute, curved and complex — there are no straight lines in nature — the other simple and linear.

In March, when the ground thawed and the whole world turned to mud, the site for the new house was prepared. A mechanical excavator was hired for the task, a machine that gouged and churned the soil until the top of the hillside resembled the scarred and crevassed landscape of the Tagliamento during the war. From the lip of the street the land was cut away, a step down into the lower stratum of soil which was rust-coloured and as hard as rock. The ramp leading down was clad with planks to stabilise it. ‘All this for a private house,’ muttered the site foreman. ‘Anyone’d think we was building a factory.’

Then they sank the foundations — the piles that would support the frame — and laid the concrete base. Excavators chugged and spluttered in the dank air. Cement mixers churned. The site spread like a lesion on the forehead of the hill. Once the foundations had been completed and the concrete piles driven down into the hard-pan, the frame of the house had to be erected. The steel pillars came from Germany, from the firm of Gossen in Berlin. The joists were I-beams, but the vertical supports were constructed of four angle-beams riveted back to back to make pillars with a cruciform cross-section. The hammering of the riveters and the clangour of steel cut through the tranquillity of Blackfield Road. Never, probably never in the whole world, had a private house been constructed in this manner.