The Glass Room (11 page)

Viktor makes a little speech. He welcomes the guests, first in Czech and then in German, and calls for applause for the architect, and when the clapping has died away he talks about André Breton’s new novel,
Nadja
, which one of the guests — he nods at Hana Hanáková — has lent him. ‘In this novel the author wrote something like this,’ he tells them, and cleverly, although he claims to have prepared nothing, he has the whole passage by heart: ‘“I shall live in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where the words
who I am
will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond.”’ People laugh at this wittily appropriate quotation. Have they read Breton? If not, they pretend they have. ‘Well, this glass house says who Liesel and I are,’ Viktor tells them, taking her hand. ‘In our wonderful glass house you can see everything. And in this spirit of openness, with no advance notice and no rehearsal, Maestro Nĕmec has agreed to play for us.’

An expectant hush falls as Nĕmec takes his seat at the piano. ‘I believe,’ he says, ‘that this instrument has never yet been played before an audience.’ There is a call for him to speak up, those at the back cannot hear. He raises his voice a fraction. ‘It gives me much pleasure to caress’ — he touches the Bösendorfer with expert fingers — ‘such an untried maiden in the midst of this beautiful and, until today, virginal glass house.’

There is more laughter, more applause and then the maestro begins to play — hesitantly at first as though he is unsure of the instrument and is listening for its voice, but then with growing assurance and a faint nod of approval — a piece by Leoš Janáček, mentor of both Kaprál and Nĕmec himself, the man in whose shadow all of the assembled musicians of Mĕsto move. When he finishes there are calls for an encore, but he stands and bows and holds out his hand towards Kaprál’s daughter. ‘Let me pass the responsibility on to the next generation,’ Nĕmec says, and a small shiver of delight runs through the guests. Vítĕzslava Kaprálová is something of a prodigy. Already, at the tender age of fifteen, she is enrolled at the Conservatory and studying composition. She blushes under their collective gaze but still seems remarkably assured as she takes her place at the keyboard. No Janáček for her, but something by Ravel that she is preparing at the Conservatory for her finals, one of the movements from the piano suite
Gaspard de la Nuit
, entitled ‘Ondine’. It is a delicate, wavering piece that somehow seems appropriate to this space, this room, the winter light flooding the plate-glass windows, the people milling about, their forms reflected vaguely in the flooring and precisely but laterally compressed in the slender chrome-plated pillars. When the notes — subtle, apparently repeated but never repetitive — die away into the death of the nymph Ondine, the pianist holds herself quite still for a moment, hands poised over the keys, before looking round at her listeners with a quick, nymph-like smile.

There is more applause, even more than Nĕmec received, and laughter and the clinking of glasses. ‘Bravo,’ they cry, and, ‘
výbornĕ
!’ How wonderful that a girl so pretty and so young can play with such assurance. And Nĕmec bows towards her and takes her hand — a fragile thing, as light as a bird — and raises it to his lips.

‘This is the artistic future of our country,’ he announces. ‘Vitulka and people like her. A young country with so much energy and so much talent.’

While all this is going on Hana has walked round the other side of the onyx wall and is looking out on the cold garden and the winter trees. ‘What do you think?’ Liesel asks, coming to stand beside her.

‘I think she’s only fifteen, so what the hell’s he doing flirting with her?’

‘I meant the house.’

Hana turns. ‘You know what I think about the house, darling. I think it’s mesmerising.’

‘I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it,’ Liesel tells her.

‘Married a wealthy man, my dear. Enjoy it while you can.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

Hana shrugs, looking at the view once more, the cold outside. Behind them there is more applause, and laughter as Nĕmec takes the place of the girl at the keyboard and breaks into something different, something fashionable and American and Negro. Honky-tonk, he calls it. Some even clap along to the music. It seems so modern, so hopeful and careless.

‘Well, it’s too good to last, isn’t it?’ says Hana.

‘What is?’

‘Everything.’

‘What do you mean, everything?’

‘The good times. All this. The world we live in.’

She is right, of course. They crowd into the space of the Glass Room like passengers on the observation deck of a luxury liner. Some of them maybe peering out through the windows onto the pitching surface of the city but, in their muddle of Czech and German, almost all are ignorant of the cold outside and the gathering storm clouds, the first sign of the tempest that is coming. They will argue and debate about trivial things, and until it is too late they will largely ignore the storm on the horizon. Of all the people at the party, of all the people applauding the pianists, drinking the champagne, eating the smoked salmon and the chicken legs, it is only Hana Hanáková who feels that breath of cold air as she looks out on the peaceful city and the setting sun.

Is the Landauer House habitable? one of the journalists present at the party asks in an article in the next edition of
Die Form
, the architectural review of the
Deutscher Werkbund
. A debate ensues in the columns of the journal. Some correspondents claim that the whole building is a lapse of political taste, an exercise in bourgeois excess, and that the duty of modern architecture is to house the working class in decent, well-built dwellings like the Weissenhofsiedlung development in Stuttgart or the Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna or the Bata development in Zlin, not to create palaces for plutocrats. Others decry the mean-mindedness of such a critique and extol the purity of line, the austerity of design, the perfection of taste, the sensation they felt (those of them lucky enough to have been invited) of actually being
inside
a work of art. Still others debate the principle of combining dining area with sitting area, study and library. One correspondent even worries about the intrusion of food smells into the sitting area. ‘What if the lady of the house wishes to rearrange the furniture?’ another asks. ‘Will she be able to upset the perfect symmetry of the interior, the careful balance, the proportions? How can one live from day to day in such a place?’

‘Have you seen this?’ Liesel asks Viktor, showing him a copy of the journal.

He glances through it with a disparaging expression and tosses it aside. ‘Absurd,’ he says.

‘But they deserve a response.’

‘Why on earth? Let them argue. It’s like children fighting over something they’ve seen in a shop window. None of them can have it, so what good does fighting do?’

So it is she who, sitting diligently at the desk in the library behind the onyx wall, writes a letter to the editor of
Die Form
. She upbraids their correspondent for speaking without personal knowledge and for introducing political theory into the question of what is simply a home. She and her husband are not victims of Rainer von Abt’s taste but collaborators with him in this inspiring project. In the living area, the curtains, employed to divide off different sections as desired, work wonderfully well in creating spaces with as much privacy as one might wish and she can assure readers of the journal that no cooking smells have intruded on the sitting area from the dining area! Living inside a work of art is an experience of sublime delight — the tranquillity of the large living room and the intimacy of the smaller rooms on the upper floor combined together give her family the most remarkable experience of modern living.

She hands the finished letter to Viktor for his approval. He puts down his copy of
Lidové Noviny
and reads it through, smiling up at her with something other than mere agreement. ‘Come,’ he says, holding out his hand, ‘prove it.’

‘Prove what?’

‘Prove what you say, about creating spaces with as much privacy as one might wish.’

She looks shocked. ‘Not here. Someone might come.’

‘Then your thesis is disproved.’ He still holds her hand, drawing her towards the sofa where he is sitting. His other hand is on her leg, running up the back of her thigh beneath her dress.

‘Viktor!’

And so, with the curtains resolutely drawn to ensure that an intruder improbably clambering down through the dense growth of trees on the slope immediately outside the Winter Garden should not be able to spy on them and the door from upstairs resolutely locked in case the nanny (who was always in her bed by this time) should happen, just happen to come in, and the door to the kitchens also locked in case Laníková, the chauffeur’s sister who does the cooking, should make her presence felt; thus barricaded and shuttered into a space that seems to deny the very possibility of barricading and shuttering, Liesel consents to have her skirt lifted round her waist and her knickers — silk French knickers with disgracefully wide legs (a present from Hana, of course) — pulled down to her ankles.

‘You haven’t got a mackintosh,’ she whispers in Viktor’s ear. Mackintosh, raincoat,
Regenmantel
, is their code word for condom.

‘Does it matter? It’s only a day or two, isn’t it?’

They giggle together and then, suddenly stirred by the moment and perhaps by the laughter, cling tightly to each other for a while, Liesel thinking how much she loves this solemn and successful man who is yet bold enough to construct such a house for her, and loving enough to want her like this, uncomfortably and daringly on the sofa, and paternal enough to adore their daughter as the second most precious thing in his world, the first being, because he tells her this, whispering it in her ear, herself.

Afterwards they settle down to a quiet evening listening to the radio and reading, and as she sits there Liesel fancies that she can feel Viktor’s seed inside her, flooding through her womb, searching for that elusive egg, and perhaps finding it.

At the Landauerovka test circuit the Landauer Popular, that curved beetle of a motor car, chutters round and round the track. Trade delegations from Austria, from Poland, from Germany look on approvingly. The new advertising poster shows the same families as in the summer one, except that now they are heading for snow-capped mountains, their smiles equally cheery as in summer because the Popular car boasts an air-cooled engine originally designed by Oberusal for aircraft. Air Cooling Eliminates Winter Worries, the new slogan boasts. ‘This is the future,’ Viktor explains to prospective customers in his quiet, intense manner. ‘The liberation of the working man and his family.’ He travels to Berlin, to Paris, to Vienna. Everywhere he takes with him the new creed and proclaims it with all the enthusiasm of a prophet. ‘This is where the world of commerce is leading us,’ he explains. ‘Into a world of peace and trade, where the only battles fought are battles for market share.’

Meanwhile, in the cool and luminous house on Blackfield Road, Liesel grows into her new pregnancy. She has taken to wearing white — white blouses, long white dresses — and walking around the house in bare feet. Mistress of her new domain she floats through the ethereal house just as the house itself, supported by steel and artifice, floats above the city.

‘You don’t know how lucky you are, darling,’ Hana tells her, ‘living in this wonderful place when I am condemned to live in a museum. But Oskar won’t move. He says he likes four solid walls around him.’ She looks at Liesel with that equivocal glance, part envy, part desire. ‘And pregnant for a second time! I’ve been trying for a baby for ages—’

‘You’ve been trying to get pregnant?’

‘However much I try nothing seems to happen. I have even’ — Hana whispers it as if someone else might hear, although they are alone together in the white and liberating spaces of the Glass Room — ‘tried to get pregnant by Nĕmec.’

‘Hana!’

She makes a face, that down-turn of the mouth that frightens men and fascinates them. ‘But nothing doing. I’m as sterile as a
babka
.’

Liesel relates the conversation to Viktor with a note of amazement in her voice. ‘Can you imagine trying to get pregnant by one man in order to please another? How fantastic she is!’

But to Viktor it is Liesel who now appears fantastic, a shining refulgent creature whose swollen belly seems to elevate her from the floor of the Glass Room, as though, when she crosses it on her long, naked feet, in fact she is floating a few inches above the shining linoleum. In his mind her pregnancy, born in the physical and erotic, elevates her above mere flesh. How strange, this metamorphosis from flesh to spirit, mediated by the frame of the Glass Room that is intended to be so literal and exact and yet has become sublime. By contrast the compartment of the Vienna train is closed and dark and battered by noise as it rattles through the bleak borderlands. He buries himself in his paper and tries to think of other, neutral things — markets and investments and recession — while the train crosses over the brown slick of the Danube and edges cautiously past tenements and marshalling yards before sliding into the Nordbahnhof. The station is a racket of sound, a great drum of a place. People push past him indifferently as he walks towards the barriers and the post office with its fetid little telephone cabins. The graffito cut into the wood is familiar now:
My little crocodile, I love you
. Her voice whispers in his ear, as though confiding a great secret. ‘I got your note.’

‘I worried that you wouldn’t pick it up.’

‘I’m reliable like that.’

‘So are you free?’

‘Of course I’m free.’

She is waiting at the Goldene Kugel, amid the anonymous bustle of the café, the coming and going of customers, the waiters in their aprons cruising between the tables with trays held upwards on the palms of their hands like circus performers bringing off a deft trick. He sits down at her table and watches her fingering the stem of her wine glass. She never seems nervous, and yet there are those bitten fingernails. ‘How are you doing?’ she asks, and smiles at him as though she means it.