The Glass Room (23 page)

He turns away from the view, crosses to the door and climbs the companionway to the cabins, from the expanse of one space into the narrow constrictions of the upstairs. In the hallway he pauses and listens. Here everything is silent, bathed in the still, amniotic light from the glass panels. Along the corridor, past Ottilie’s and Martin’s bedrooms he waits at the furthest door and listens again, fancying that he can hear the quiet interior breath of expectation. ‘Come in,’ she says when he knocks.

She’s standing by the window looking out onto the steep slope and the jungle of trees and bushes. The room itself is bare except for the bright splash of a František Kupka abstract painting on one wall. There are only a few of Kata’s things, those that she managed to take with her in flight from Vienna, things she could cram into the single suitcase, and those she has managed to buy since coming here. On the chest of drawers there’s a photograph of her and Marika in a park, perhaps the Augarten in Vienna, perhaps the Prater. Mother and daughter are smiling and squinting against the light, and Viktor wonders — a small pulse of jealousy — who held the camera.

‘I came to see how you are.’

She turns and accepts his awkward kiss. She’s wearing a plain white blouse and black skirt, the uniform of a governess or a female companion or something. ‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re happy?’

‘I’m confused. So much has happened. I feel that it’s going to go wrong.’

‘It’s not. It’s not going to go wrong.’

There is nothing much more to say, really. Whether it is going to go wrong is not up to her or to him. The wrongness or right-ness of the future is a matter of the purest contingency. Viktor has always worked on the principle that the future is there to be handled, manipulated, bent and twisted to one’s own desires but now he knows how untrue that is. The future just happens. It is happening now, the whole country poised for disaster; it is happening now, his standing there confronting Kata.

Out of the window through the dense fretwork of branches he can just see the sky, small pieces of sky like fragments of a mosaic. Turquoise blue, winter blue, a deeper blue than Kata’s eyes. He wonders what lies beyond the horizon of her gaze. ‘I love you,’ he thinks, and finds the assertion as thrilling as anything he has known, as enrapturing as, say, flying. There is the sudden elevation, the unexpected lightness of spirit, the same sense of your whole material existence being predicated on nothing more than a whim. But he daren’t say it out loud.

‘Everyone seems to be out.’

‘Yes.’ She knows that well enough. She has been party to the fact, walking with the children down the hill to the Montessori school near the hospital, where Martin has just started in the kindergarten. Liesel and Hana are at some organising committee setting up a concert in aid of refugees. They’ll be there all morning.

‘So,’ he says, and there is a moment of indecision, as though, despite both knowing what they are about, there is still some uncertainty about how to proceed. What, in this novel puzzle, are the necessary moves? Then she begins to unbutton her blouse and it is just like it ever was: the quiet matter-of-factness of her gestures as she puts the blouse aside, and shrugs off her brassiere as one might shrug off an inconvenience.

‘We’ll have to be quick,’ she says.

He watches, breathless, as she steps out of her knickers and stands naked in the small, spare room. She has, he realises with a small start of recognition, exactly the body of the Maillol sculpture downstairs in the Glass Room, the same loose breasts, the same swelling to her belly, the same firm thighs and plump shoulders. ‘One of my men-friends only wanted to look,’ she told him once. ‘All he wanted was that I undress and lie down so that he could look at me. He never touched me. I had to do various things — open my legs, bend over, that kind of thing — and he just looked. He must have been short-sighted, I think. He’d look so close that I could feel his breath on me. But he never touched me. Wasn’t that strange?’

But Viktor understands the remote desires of that anonymous
Freund
. He feels that he could spend whole days just looking at the marbled whiteness of Kata’s body, at the curves and creases, at the deft folds of flesh and the sinuous hair. What could be more perfect than to look? And yet mere looking is not enough: while the Maillol torso stands forever motionless and detached in the cool and rational space of the Glass Room, upstairs in the small cabin of her bedroom Viktor goes down on his knees before her. He feels neither fear nor shame: there is only this compulsion filling his whole being so that for those few moments he is helpless. Afterwards, after the convulsions of mind and body, comes the anxiety, the fear of discovery, that razor’s edge of panic. They pull their clothes on, adjust hair and skirt and collar and tie, prepare to return to that ordinary world of convention and decorum. ‘How can this go on?’ she asks.

He doesn’t have an answer to her question. Deception in the Glass House is a new experience for him. He has no idea how to go about it. ‘I think we should all live in glass houses,’ he said years ago. It was at the housewarming party they gave when the house was newly completed. Hana was there, and Oskar probably, and Liesel of course. But there had been others listening. Rainer von Abt himself. And Professor Kundera and the composer Václav Kaprál. And that journalist who had come uninvited with one of the other guests. And the pianist Nĕmec. Dozens and dozens of them all looking up to him and listening to his brave words. ‘If we all lived like that there would be no more secrets, no more deceit. We could all live openly and honestly.’

The little speech amused Hana. ‘You are a spoilsport, Viktor,’ she accused him. ‘I love deceit. Everyone loves deceit. Without deceit there would be no art.’

Leaving Kata in her room Viktor makes his way — feeling light and yet replete — down to the Glass Room. He feels no shame. He has new memories to treasure, new thoughts and sensations to augment the miserly store that he keeps from previous times with Kata. He has love — sexual, spiritual, total — to elevate him above the downward pull of guilt, like a bird rising against the earthly tug of gravity. He feels immensely and illogically happy. Illogically because all this is threatened, this house and the life within it, their presence in this city, in this country. The world is crashing down around them, pulled down by the gravity of events, yet he feels only elation.

He comes through the door and finds Laník standing there in the middle of the Glass Room. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asks sharply.

‘Looking for you, Herr Viktor.’

Is there a sly insolence in the youth’s expression? Liesel says there is, and now Viktor discovers it as well. ‘Why? Why were you looking for me?’

‘I wanted to know if you need me this afternoon. Otherwise I was going to visit my cousin in Šlapanice.’

‘Go,’ Viktor said. ‘Take the afternoon off. If I need to I can drive myself.’

‘Unless …’ Laník pauses. Is that a smile? He seems to consider his words.

‘Unless what?’

‘Unless Fraülein Kalman needs to go anywhere.’

‘
Frau
Kalman,’ Viktor corrects him. ‘And I don’t imagine that she does.’

‘And if she did, you could drive her, Herr Viktor, couldn’t you?’

That summer the Czechoslovak army became Landauer Motors’ largest customer. The contracts were for military vehicles — the Popular car converted for army use and one of the production lines turned over to making lorries. That summer, as always, the family took a holiday at Marienbad, staying at the Hotel Fürstenhof. They took two suites, one for Katalin and the children, the other for Viktor and Liesel. It was a week of fine weather, with crowds thronging the Kolonada and the bands playing Strauss and the illusion of being projected back into the past, when things were settled and the future seemed assured, when King Edward VII was in residence in the Weimar and Emperor Franz Josef was at Klinger’s and all was well with the world. But there were shadows behind the confectionery façades: graffiti on the walls called for
Anschluss
, union, and the flags flying over the spa gardens were the red and black of the Sudetenland. On a drive to the monastery at Teplá the Landauer party encountered a column of army trucks making its way towards the border.

‘Are they going to fight?’ Martin asked his father.

‘They are just on manoeuvres,’ Viktor replied.

That evening a parade of young people — men in lederhosen and knee-length socks, women in dirndls — passed directly below the windows of their rooms. The marchers were watched by an applauding crowd.
Ein Volk
,
ein Reich
,
ein Führer
, a banner proclaimed. A band marched with them and the marchers’ voices were raised in song.
Die Fahne hoch
! they sang,
Die Reihen fest geschlossen
! Further down the road there was an encounter with the police, some shouting and a scuffle which ended with the banner being smashed. But still the parade went on. ‘The flag is high! The ranks are tightly closed!’ they sang and the people on the roadside cheered and waved.

‘What will happen?’ Liesel asked.

‘How the hell do I know what will happen?’ Viktor snapped.

Next morning the town awoke to find itself daubed with swastikas.

‘Tomorrow,’ the voice from the radio says, ‘parliament is going to meet and I shall be making a full statement of the events that have led up to the present anxious and critical situation …’ It is a thin, precise voice, the voice of a cleric enunciating points of theological exactitude. It speaks in English and Oskar frowns, understanding little of the language.

‘Shh,’ Hana says when he complains. ‘Let’s listen.’

They are in the library area behind the onyx wall, Oskar, Hana, Liesel and Viktor. Outside it is evening, a cool autumnal evening, the trees in the garden illuminated by the backwash of light from the sky.

‘An earlier statement would not have been possible,’ the voice goes on, ‘when I was flying backwards and forwards across Europe and the position was changing from hour to hour, but today there is a lull for a brief time and I want to say a few words to you men and women of Britain, and the Empire, and perhaps to others as well.’

Viktor is standing with his back to the others, smoking and looking into the conservatory where cacti and rubber plants take up stylised positions. Hana and Liesel are sitting together on the sofa, holding hands. Oskar is in an armchair, smoking a cigar and frowning as he struggles to grasp what the voice is saying. The Glass Room is immensely still, a space of quiet and calm around them, a barricade against emotion.

‘And first of all I must say something to those who have written to my wife or myself in these last weeks …’

‘His wife!’ Hana exclaims.

‘… to tell us of their gratitude for my efforts and to assure us of their prayers for my success. Most of these letters have come from women, mothers or sisters of our own countrymen; but there are countless others besides, from France, from Belgium, from Italy, even from Germany, and it has been heartbreaking to read of the growing anxieties they reveal and their intense relief when they thought, too soon, that the danger of war was past.’

‘The danger is past?’ Liesel asks, misunderstanding the awkward academic construction.

‘Shh!’

‘If I felt my responsibility heavy before, to read such letters has made it seem almost overwhelming.’ Here the voice pauses, and when it continues there is a sudden and unexpected catch of emotion, even revulsion: ‘How
horrible
, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing …’

Hana gives a cry of disbelief, and Oskar asks, ‘What did he say?’ but the voice doesn’t wait, doesn’t pause for the listeners to take in the import of its words. It continues, thin, exact and pusillanimous, ‘It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which is already settled in principle should be the subject of war. I can well understand the reasons why the Czech government have felt unable to accept the terms which have been put before them in the German memorandum. Yet I believe, after my talks with Herr Hitler, that if only time were allowed, it ought to be possible for the arrangements for transferring the territory that the Czech government has agreed to give to Germany to be settled by agreement under conditions which would ensure fair treatment of the population concerned. You know already that I have done all that one man can do to compose this quarrel. After my visits to Germany I realise vividly how Herr Hitler feels that he must champion other Germans …’

‘Turn it off,’ Hana says.

But Liesel doesn’t move and the voice continues, cutting through the thin rush of the ether, ‘He told me privately, and last night he repeated publicly, that after this Sudeten German question is settled, that is the end of Germany’s territorial claims in Europe.’

Finally Viktor reacts. He laughs. ‘That’s it, then, isn’t it? That is the end.’ He crosses over to the radio and reaches out to turn it off.

‘Wait!’ cries Hana.

‘What for? To hear more of this drivel?’

An argument breaks out between them, a ridiculous dispute about whether they should prolong the agony, whether this irresolute man, who holds the future of their country in his hands, should be allowed to continue. ‘Don’t be childish!’ Hana cries in frustration and fear, and Viktor stays his hand, just in time to hear the voice express its careful anguish over the death of an entire nation:

‘However much we may sympathise with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbour, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her account. If we have to fight, it must be on larger issues than that …’

Viktor turns the radio off.

‘That’s us,’ Hana says. ‘Do you realise that? Us. A small issue. People of whom they know nothing.’

The fact is, she is in tears. Oskar pats her shoulder in a vain attempt to comfort her. But the tears continue.