The Glass Room (21 page)

‘It’s not like that.’

‘Oh, it
is
like that. It’s exactly like that, Herr Viktor. You may pretend to yourself that it’s not but believe me, I know. Look, I haven’t got much time. Marika comes back from school soon and I’ve got lunch to prepare. And anyway they’ll get suspicious if they see you coming here. I can’t risk that. The old lady watches like a hawk to see what’s going on. I think she’s worried about her husband. As well she might be.’

‘Her husband?’

‘You look surprised. He’s been round as well. Wanted to see how I was doing just the same as you. Called me pet and patted me on the bottom and said he’d look after me.’

‘And you—?’

‘I told him that he could keep his hands to himself or I’d tell his wife.’

‘Am I any different?’

She looks at him without expression. ‘You’re younger.’

‘Is that all?’

She thinks for a moment and then says, ‘No, it’s not all,’ and turns away and finds something to do, some vegetables to put in the basin to wash, a tin of meat to open.

‘What else?’

‘Never you mind.’

‘But I do mind. I mind a great deal. Why didn’t you answer my letters? Why did you just drop me?’

She stops her work, bending over the basin with her hands in the water and her head down. ‘Look, everything I did was for Marika. Going with men, going with you. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘So that’s it really. I just needed a bit of money, and the best way to get it—’

‘I know all that. But you still haven’t answered my question.’

‘I did what you told me. I stopped seeing men. Including you. Wasn’t that allowed in the contract? You told me. That’s up to you, you said.’

‘Of course it was allowed. It’s just …’ He cast around for the right words. ‘It seemed different between us.’ He laughs softly. ‘I must sound very naive.’

She says nothing for a while, and then she speaks very quietly, still without looking round. Her voice sounds tired, as though she has battled against the statement but not been able to suppress it. ‘Okay, I missed you. I didn’t want to, but I did. I missed you. That’s the worst thing that can happen, really. You’ve got to keep your distance. Otherwise …’

‘Otherwise?’

She turns and looks at him. Those pale eyes, the colour of the sky at the horizon. ‘Otherwise you lose what little power you have.’

He nods, he who is always in control, who always has a plan, who is a man of singular qualities — those of reason and decision and power — feels quite powerless now. He reaches inside his jacket for his cigarette case. ‘Do you want one?’

‘Please.’

His hands are unsteady and he has to spin the wheel of his lighter three or four times to conjure up a flame. He lights the cigarette, takes it over to her and places it carefully between her lips. ‘And are you powerless now?’

She speaks through the cigarette, the smoke rising. ‘Of course I am. I’m a refugee, depending on charity. Of course I’m powerless.’

‘You seemed in control at that meeting. You seem in control now.’

She dries her hands and takes the cigarette from her mouth, blowing a stream of smoke away over the sink towards the open window. ‘You learn to hide your feelings, don’t you? How would you survive otherwise?’ There is a shred of tobacco on her lip which she picks off with a quick dart of her tongue then blows away into the sink. Kata the cat, he thinks, remembering. Yet not a cat’s tongue. Not rough, but smooth, licking him. The obstruction swells in his chest. It is a kind of pain, a physical pain centred somewhere behind the breastbone, a swelling growth that threatens to cut off his air supply. But the physical sensation is coupled with a perception of the most sublime happiness. Suffocation and joy, a strange dyad of sensation. With an unsteady hand he takes the cigarette from her fingers and lays it on the side of the sink. Then he leans forward and kisses her. The texture of her lips is familiar, as though it belongs to him. There is a moment when they are like that, just touching. And then she turns her head away. ‘Please,’ she says and moves away to distract herself with arranging things.

‘I’m sorry. I just feel … I don’t know. Helpless. I feel helpless.’

‘
You
feel helpless!’

‘And a bit of a fool.’

‘Look, you’ve got to go. Marika will be back any moment. You’ve got to go.’ And for once he is devoid of words, empty of any plan. He has always prided himself on his ability to manage situations, on his negotiating powers. ‘You could find your way through a minefield, Viktor,’ Oskar said to him once when they were involved in some particularly difficult discussion over import quotas or something. Through a minefield perhaps, but not through this involvement with this creature of flesh and blood, a small thing whose limbs and body he knows more perfectly than he has ever known anyone, a person whose inner sanctum of identity he has never approached.

He turns to the door, then pauses and looks back at her. ‘I thought I’d get over you,’ he says. ‘When I found you’d gone and no one seemed to know where to find you, I thought I’d forget you. It would have been a relief. I could go back to being what I was before, a faithful husband and father. And I found I couldn’t get you out of my mind. Those letters. You say you got them.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well then. You know. That’s all.’ He stands with his hand on the doorknob, trying to gather his thoughts. ‘Look, you’re not safe here.’

‘Not safe?’ She looks round the small cabin, at the innocent clutter of her things and Marika’s. ‘What do you mean, not safe?’

‘I mean in this country. You think you’re safe here but you’re wrong. No one’s safe. I’m planning to take the family to Switzerland. There’s going to be an invasion.’

‘Invasion?’

‘Don’t you listen to the news?’ This is something he can deal with, a matter of facts and opinions, of judgement and decision. ‘Henlein has a secret pact with Hitler. Don’t you know who Henlein is? He’s the leader of the Sudeten Germans. He’s got the German army at his back and he’s demanding self-rule for the border regions. If the government does agree then Henlein will invite the Germans in; if it doesn’t the Germans will use the so-called oppression of the Sudeten Germans as a pretext for invasion. I can’t see any way out of it. One way or another the Germans will be here just as surely as they are in Austria.’

‘And you’re going to leave?’

‘Not immediately, but I’m making arrangements. So that we’re prepared.’

‘Will Switzerland be safe?’

‘Who knows? We might have to move on. To the United States perhaps.’

‘And what’ll happen to me and Marika?’

‘I’ll think of something. I won’t leave you here.’

‘We don’t have any papers. Marika has her birth certificate but I don’t have anything.’

‘We must see what we can do. There’s the refugee office. They issue papers for people without anything. We’ll work something out.’

Outside the air is cool and fresh. There is a sensation of relief. How long has it been? He has lost all sense of time in the close confines of the
chata
, in the presence of Kata. The upstairs window in the big house is closed now. The garden, the hedges and the trees are empty. Not even Marika has appeared. He glances at his watch and sees that it has only been a few minutes. Fifteen, maybe. A part of him, that part that always has a plan, always considers and calculates, tells him that little or no damage has been done. He just dropped by to see how things are going, how the Kalman woman is dealing with life in exile, how she is making ends meet. One has an obligation, just as one has an obligation to one’s work force. But it is a frail voice, barely heard above the storm that is raging in his head. He turns and makes his way up the slope towards the trees that cut off the top of this garden from the bottom of his own property, the trees and bushes that cut him off from Kata. He knows there is a way through the dense undergrowth, the jungle of clutching branches and shielding leaves.

Fuchsias are in bloom, so the gardening programme on the radio says. ‘We ought to have fuchsias,’ Viktor suggests, against his better judgement. Fuchsias are ornament and ornament is crime. ‘I like fuchsias. The Berchtolds out near Slavkov, they breed fuchsias, don’t they? We should pay them a visit and get some.’

‘The Berchtolds are a bore.’

‘Who tells you that? Hana?’

‘Have you seen the news?’

‘Of course I’ve seen. I always see the news.’

The news tells of German troops massing on the border. The Czechoslovak army has been mobilised, sabres are rattling, hearts are beating, engines are roaring, boots are tramping, all that kind of thing. He remembers it all from last time, the last war where he occupied a bureaucratic position behind the front line — some military headquarters in Graz just inside the border from Italy — and watched the thousands go marching off to death. One of them was Liesel’s brother. They met up — the purest chance, the caprice of war — on the edge of a parade ground where Benno’s unit was mustering.

‘My God!’ they both exclaimed as they caught sight of one another. ‘I don’t believe it!’

That is the kind of thing you say, but of course you do believe it. Coincidence happens. Paths cross, journeys meet, lives intersect, like the various progressions of articulate but entirely automatic animals, ants maybe, weaving around on a table top, moving, searching with no more sense than robots. ‘Robot’ was Capek’s word, the linguistic gift of the Czech language to the whole world. Robot, from
robota
. Hard labour, drudgery, the slave labour of the serfs. They talked a bit, those robots called Benno and Viktor, they talked about home, about parents and family, about Liesel who was then no more than a young girl — fourteen, fifteen — with, so Benno said, a crush on Viktor. It was that that turned Viktor’s head. He’d never imagined the possibility that Benno’s sister could admire him, love him even. Being loved was a new experience. Then Benno had to go because his unit was waiting for him and Viktor watched him clambering aboard one of the lorries and turning to wave. The engines roared and off they went, robots climbing up the hill away from the army camp. And that was the last anyone from home saw of him.

And now Viktor can hear the same sounds, the same preparations for war, as though they are being carried towards him on the breeze from the other side of the hill. But the strange thing about this new season of danger and dissolution is that he has almost ceased to care. Or at least he cares far more about what is going on in the
chata
, whose tarpapered roof he can just glimpse if he goes upstairs to the terrace. Or what’s happening down there on the lawn, where, in the evening sunshine two days later he watches Liesel and Kata playing with the children.

He stands and smokes and watches. They are both wearing white, Liesel tall and narrow, slightly stooped, and Kata smaller and vivacious, running with the two girls, then turning and crouching down to encourage Martin, who follows with all the determined clumsiness of a five-year-old. As the little boy runs into her embrace she straightens up and hoists him above her head. Viktor can hear the shrieks of laughter.

Can they see him standing at the windows of the Glass Room? It depends on the light, and your point of view. Sometimes from the garden you can look up and see someone standing there beyond the windows as plain as daylight; sometimes only milkily, through the pale reflection of the day; and sometimes not at all, for there is only the view of sky and the clouds in the whole expanse of glass, so that you seem to be looking through the building, as though the house itself were transparent.

The two women are making their way up the lawn and onto the terrace. Only then does Liesel notice her husband. ‘I didn’t see you there, Viktor. You’re back early from work. Katalin and I have been entertaining the children.’

Kata is looking bright and happy. Her face has taken colour, a faint flush in the cheeks, a smooth, buttery tan from the summer sun. ‘Good afternoon, Herr Landauer,’ she says, and he inclines his head in acknowledgement, watching the sky in her eyes. ‘Frau Kalman,’ he replies. But he wants to call her Kata. He wants to cry out loud, Kata!

The children sit at the table, Martin determined to be as grown up as the two girls. Ottilie and Marika patronise him, tell him to sit properly at the table, not to talk with his mouth full. Marika is a beautiful child, more beautiful by far than Ottilie, a radiant genetic reflection of her mother, except for her eyes, which are dark. She glances at Viktor with all the indifference of a child perceiving an adult to be nothing of importance in her world. There is apparently no memory of that man standing in her mother’s room, no record of clinging monkey-like to her mother and watching him and asking, ‘Are you one of Mutti’s friends?’

‘I’ll leave you ladies to it,’ he says, and retreats to the library where he can read the papers and listen to the noise of the children and hear, just once, Kata’s voice raised to stop the girls doing something that annoys Martin. He wants Kata. More than anything in the world, he wants her.

The next day he goes down to the
chata
again, but this time she’s not there. He finds some paper and a pencil and scribbles a note. There is the question of whether to make it cautious and safe or open and incriminating.
I want to see you
, he writes,
but cannot find the way
.

The weasel words of a coward.

‘It’s a matter of perspective,’ Oskar says. They’ve finished dinner and are sitting in front of the onyx wall. They come together these days for mutual comfort. The house has become a refuge for them, the Glass Room, that least fortress-like of constructions, bringing the consolation of reason and calm, while outside the confines of their particular lives, the world is crumbling. There are riots in the border areas, demands from the German-speaking groups for autonomy, the massing of German troops along the Austrian border, cries for rights, shouts for independence, shouts for secession.

‘What do you mean, perspective?’ Viktor asks. He has returned late from a visit to Prague, where there is panic and treachery in the air.