The Glass Room (12 page)

‘I’m fine. Business is all right, we’re keeping our heads above water. What about you?’

She shrugs. ‘All right. You know.’

But he doesn’t know. She comes out of the anonymous world of the city, out of the mix of German and Slav and Magyar, and there are things he knows about her and things he doesn’t. He knows her taste in chocolates and coffee and wine, her love of popular music and operetta — they have been to the Carl-Theater together and seen something by Lehár — and her views on politics. But he does not know anyone she knows, or where she works, or what she does when she is not with him, or where she lives. She comes whenever he calls her, but from where she comes and to where she returns he has no idea. He guesses only that she has other ‘friends’ like him, but who they are and how often she sees them he does not know. Only once he didn’t send a note in advance and when he rang he found that she couldn’t see him. On that occasion he spent the night alone, consumed by anger and jealousy. But the next time they made an appointment he asked no questions and she told him no stories. She never enquires about his life, so why should he know anything about hers? Their relationship, part venal, part affectionate, exists only in the brief moments when they are together.

‘What do you want to do?’ she asks.

‘I just want to be with you. Isn’t that absurd?’

She puts her head on one side. She is wearing one of her hats, a small thing of black felt with a red feather. ‘Why should it be absurd? It’s nice. I like being with you.’

They book into a different hotel from usual, still one of those that proliferate around railway stations, but where the gilt is a little less faded and the carpets a little less threadbare. They book in, as always, under the name Richter, a name chosen at random on the very first occasion but one which now, with its hints of rightness and rectitude, seems to Viktor to have acquired a certain irony. When they have sex it is with a peculiar intensity, a passion bordering on the very edge of anger. And afterwards she sleeps in his arms, with an innocence that could not be feigned.

Martin was born, there being some problem with his presentation, by forceps delivery. For days after the birth Liesel lay in hospital with a high fever, at times slipping into delirium, sometimes conscious enough to call for her child or her husband or Hana, but often merely there on the mysterious borderline between sleep and unconsciousness. The nursing staff and doctors spoke in hushed voices as though they were already in the presence of the dead. At her mother’s instigation a Catholic priest was even brought in to pray at the bedside and perhaps administer — the matter was never clear — the last rites. Viktor visited as frequently as was possible but it was Hana who devoted herself to Liesel through the dangerous crisis of her illness, thus showing herself, against Viktor’s expectation, to be far more than a fair-weather friend. ‘I almost feel she’s one of the family,’ he confessed when Liesel was on the mend, still bedridden but able to receive visitors. ‘I don’t know how I would have managed without her.’

Liesel regarded her husband from the depths of her pillows. Her face was sculpted into angular and rather intimidating contours by the receding illness. The baby nuzzled hopefully at her breast, trying to suck at milk that wasn’t there. ‘I hope she doesn’t seduce
you
, Viktor.’

Viktor was horrified. ‘Do you really think she would attempt such a thing? And at such a time? I thought she was your closest friend.’

She shrugged. ‘She has a very different way of looking at things from us. Haven’t you understood that yet? She’d probably tell me all about it, and call it sharing.’

‘And what would you feel about it?’

‘
Are
you interested in her?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

She looked away, out through the window where there were trees and a fragment of anonymous sky. ‘Then why ask?’

Starved of its feed, the baby began to cry. A nurse took the baby away. Viktor felt a need to explain, to justify his feelings.

‘Hana is like a sister to me, that’s all,’ he said.

Liesel smiled. ‘Don’t think fraternal love is any protection, my darling. Hana would have no compunction about sleeping with her brother.’

Attenuated by the fever, tall and gaunt like a prisoner of war returning after liberation, Liesel came back home. She had a nurse to tend her during her convalescence. Viktor’s dressing room now became his bedroom so that Liesel could continue her recovery in peace and the nurse could attend her as needed. By day she walked, a cool white ghost, in the open spaces of the Glass Room; by night she lay alone, motionless beneath a sheet. People treated her as though she had come back from the dead, a Lazarus who had no real right to be walking on the earth. With the baby in a bassinet by her side she sat in front of the great glass windows and looked out on the view of the city with the distracted expression of someone who doesn’t quite recognise where she is. Her voice had changed during her illness. It had become soft and melodic, almost ethereal. ‘I almost left you, didn’t I, Viktor?’ she said. ‘What would you have done without me?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘I think you would have soon found another woman. I only hope that you would have chosen wisely.’

‘Why on earth are you talking like this?’

‘Coming close to death changes one, do you know that? That’s what Benno told me in his letters and that’s what I’ve learned now. You consider things that were unthinkable before. I think you would have gone with Hana.’

‘Don’t be absurd.’

‘Oh, you’d have got on well together as long as she stayed with Oskar. You share the same tastes — modern art, music, literature, all that. And Hana would have kept you from falling victim to any pretty woman with a sympathetic smile. She would have been ideal.’

‘You are my ideal,’ he said.

That made her laugh. It was difficult to read her laughter these days. There was irony there, and a certain bitterness. ‘Of course I am, darling. Of course I am.’

In the spring Liesel and Viktor made a return visit to Venice. It was their first holiday alone since Ottilie’s birth and they stayed in the same hotel as they had on their honeymoon, in the very same suite they had had before, attempting — the motive was never expressed openly — to recapture the past. But beneath the calm surface of their affection there was this new remoteness. Perhaps it had to do with the difficulties of the birth and the subsequent illness. Perhaps it was something in his own behaviour, a distance of mind even when there was no distance at all of body. These things are subtle. Whatever the cause, the effect was clear: Liesel, who had once, in that very room in the Venice hotel, arched her back at the surprising moment of orgasm and cried out in an ecstasy as intense as pain, now seemed to have the even tenor of her being barely disturbed by the act of sex. Perhaps this was what one expected as a relationship matured: love translated into affection, and lust into a kind of placid contentment.

A day in the life of the Landauer House. The parents wake early, at six o’clock, the windows of their rooms black with night or flooded with light depending on the season. Make it spring. Dawn is breaking. When the curtains are pulled back and the shutters raised (an electric motor whirrs quietly) they each look out across the terrace and the shadows of the children’s sandpit. One of them — usually it is Viktor — comes through into the other’s room. They talk a while. He bends to kiss her. Once this brief morning kiss would translate into something else, a quickening of the flesh, a quick and affectionate conjunction. But that has become a rare event these days. Soon there is the sound of movement from elsewhere on the same floor: Liba, the nurse, has woken the children and hurried them, grumbling, to their own bathroom.

Liesel and Viktor’s bathroom is cool and spare, like a sunny day in late autumn. Their voices echo against the high tiling as they wash. Liesel takes her bath in the evening, while Viktor has a morning shower. By the time they have finished, the dumbwaiter has rumbled up from the kitchens to present them with a tray bearing coffee. Viktor sips the coffee as he dresses and talks about the coming day, the meetings, the tour of the factory that is scheduled for the afternoon, the telephone conversation he must book with someone in France to discuss the possibility of a joint project — something to do with aircraft, a passion he has. A lightweight, cheap cabin monoplane, ideal for businessmen. The planned partnership with Dornier fell through a few months ago and now he is talking with the Société des Avions Marcel Bloch.

Once dressed Liesel goes to see the children, already awake and dressing under the devoted eye of Liba. Martin is being taught to do up the buttons of his shirt. Ottilie is sitting on the floor to show him how shoe laces are tied — a skill she has only recently acquired and is now trying to diffuse amongst lesser beings with all the enthusiasm of a prophet. She is light and skinny, a proto-beauty whose looks will remain unformed for some years, so much so that throughout her childhood she will consider herself ugly and indeed by most people will be considered plain but interesting until, at the age of about eighteen, it suddenly becomes clear that the solemn structures of Liesel’s face and the austerity of Viktor’s have been melded into something that borrows from each and yet gains some indefinable quality of grace and softness all of its own. But for the moment she is just a little girl with an insistent voice, pale, ill-formed features and awkward legs. ‘That’s not a very elegant way to sit,’ her mother remarks as the girl sits to tie her laces.

‘Liba gave me clean knickers.’

‘That, my dear, is hardly the point.’

Liesel speaks German to the children, while the nanny, Liba — Libĕna, Libĕnka, the language abounds in diminutives — speaks Czech. The result of this is that both children, particularly Ottilie, move easily from one language to the other. ‘They mustn’t be labelled,’ Viktor has always insisted, ‘not by language, nor by culture, nor family or anything. They must be brought up as citizens of the world.’

Once they are dressed, Liba and Liesel take the children downstairs where breakfast is already laid out in the dining area. Viktor greets them in the library where he is drinking a second cup of coffee and glancing through the newspaper. The children are noisy and enthusiastic around him, while he is quiet and thoughtful, probably as a result of what he has been reading in
Lidové Noviny
.

‘Leave Tatínka in peace,’ Liba says, ushering the children to their breakfast.

Liesel glances at the story that Victor has been reading — Jewish doctors in Germany are forbidden to treat non-Jewish patients or something similar — and shakes her head. The story is there, not here. It is over the border in another country, another world, another universe. ‘Surely it’ll all blow over.’

He doesn’t answer. Whether or not it will all blow over is not the point. The point is, this is happening at this very moment, to fellow Jews. In the last few years, since the building of the house in fact, Viktor has come to feel his Jewishness. This is not some atavistic rediscovery of his origins but the acceptance of a simple fact of inheritance, like having a quirky familial deformity, a Habsburg lip perhaps. To some people, to some members of the Deutsches Haus for example, this fact of inheritance marks him. He is a Jew,
ein Jude
,
žid
, a Yid. And now in Germany they have written this identity into law. Were he in Germany he would have to rearrange the ownership and management of Landauerovy Závody so that only Aryans appeared in the executive posts and on the board. Were he in Germany he would have to get another doctor because their family doctor is a gentile. Were he in Germany his marriage to Liesel, while still being valid, would yet be an anomaly because all further marriages of such a kind, between Aryan and non-Aryan, are now illegal. Were they in Germany, Ottilie and Martin would be officially classified as
Mischlinge
, half-breeds, lesser beings.

It is absurd; but it is happening.

‘Oh, I forgot to tell you yesterday. I’ve been invited to join the committee of the Human Rights League.’

‘And will you?’

‘I think so.’ He returns to the newspaper. There’s a story about the recent influx of refugees from Germany, Jews most of them. ‘And the president asked about raising money. That’s why they approached me, I expect. Landauerovka will give something, of course. And I thought we might use the house.’

‘The
house
?’

‘Some kind of charity thing. A recital, who knows? You know how everybody seems to want to see the place. What about asking Nĕmec? A short recital, sixty people at some ridiculously inflated price per head. It might do some good.’

‘Do we really want to open the house to the public?’ Liesel did not enjoy the aftershock of their housewarming party, the speculations of journalists, the intrusion into their family life. With all that attention, she felt there was something vulnerable about Viktor’s and her presence there, as though they were evanescent creatures within the transparent walls of glass, like summer mayflies with their gossamer wings and delicate tails and ephemeral lives.

‘Not really. On the other hand …’ He goes back to his reading. It is a habit he has, of inviting a discussion without pursuing the counter-argument. She imagines him doing this with his managers, hinting at something with that infuriating smile and then leaving them to find the solution to the puzzle, so that when it occurs to them they feel that they have thought of it themselves. ‘On the other hand, what?’

‘On the other hand, my darling Liesel, we have to do something. Now I really must be off.’ He folds his paper and goes across to the dining area where the children and Liesel and the nanny are having breakfast. ‘Laník will be waiting.’ He says this every morning, as though it is the driver’s regular appearance with the car outside that determines his routine, whereas the opposite is the truth: his own routine is what determines everything in what he laughingly refers to as
die Landauerwelt
, the Landauer world.