The Glass Room (26 page)

‘We really are going, aren’t we?’ she says, not to Viktor, not to herself but somehow to the low line of hills she can see out there beyond the limits of the airfield.

The engine note rises in pitch and the aircraft begins its move forward, swinging its tail from side to side, bumping over the grass. ‘
Bockig
!’ Martin shouts above the engine noise. ‘
Bockig
!’

Liesel tries to shush him to silence but the endeavour is futile. The racket of the engines drowns everything including his child’s voice. She reaches out and holds Viktor’s hand across the aisle and wonders whether this is usual, this monster of noise, the cabin shaking, the aircraft snaking forward, the lurching and bumping.

‘Everything’s fine,’ he mouths when he sees her expression. ‘This is what it’s like.’

At the far end of the airfield the aircraft turns and settles for a moment, the cabin shaking. Then the shaking becomes a shuddering and the engines roar against the brakes, and abruptly the passengers are thrown back into their seats as the machine moves forward, faster and faster, the wheels rumbling beneath them, the grass rushing by, the airport buildings and the fuel trucks and the grim grey military aircraft all rushing by, and a small crowd of spectators at the windows of the terminal building, among whom, Liesel presumes, are Hana and Oskar. And then there is something magic, a sudden lightness, a last kiss of the earth, and they are free, detached, floating up into the
Raum
above them, the ground dropping away, the aircraft rocking and the engines shouting in a call of triumph. Liesel looks down on buildings and streets and the sinuous line of the river, the Svitava, there like a snake winding through the undergrowth. Then more houses, and a factory, surely the Landauer factory, and dense clusters of houses, like decorative stones embedded in concrete, slipping beneath the wings and falling away behind. ‘Oh, Viktor, it’s wonderful!’ she cries, overwhelmed for a moment by the pure sensation. ‘Oh, do look! Do look at that!’

And then there is a line of buildings and a street that somehow she recognises even from this unaccustomed angle: the bulk of the hospital and then a slope of grass and trees, and there, outstanding on the lip of the hill, the long low shape of the house itself, her house, hers and Viktor’s, the pure dimensions of von Abt’s vision drawn with a ruler across the land, the blank wall of glass, the Glass Room,
der Glasraum
. And suddenly she weeps, that she might never see the house again, that all that has happened is past and that the future is uncertain and full of fear.

Laník stands in the centre of the Glass Room examining the place, the chairs that have not yet been packed and sent to storage, the glistening flooring, the wooden partition of the dining area and the honey-coloured partition of the onyx wall, the chrome pillars and the milk-white lights and the plate glass. He feels an immense relief. They have gone. He is his own master. Not that he covets the house in any way. In fact, he dislikes it. ‘Can’t see what they see in the place,’ he has said often enough to his sister. ‘More like a fish tank than a house. And if it’s a house it certainly isn’t a home.’ But whether or not he likes the place, he prefers it to be within his own sphere of influence.

He walks round the room fingering the fittings, running his hand — they all do that, he has noticed — over the surface of the onyx wall. ‘I think you had better board that up,’ Herr Viktor said to him as they were preparing to leave. It was almost the last command given to him before they went to the airport. ‘Plasterboard either side, turn it into an ordinary partition wall. See to it, will you?’

For the moment the matter can wait. The place is his. The sensation is not of unalloyed contentment: he feels like someone in the audience who has suddenly been invited up on stage but then discovers that the set has been abandoned, the actors have all departed and there are only the props left behind. Still, there’s something of the magic of the performance hanging round the place. Faint echoes. Memories of listening from behind the door to the kitchen and occasionally sneaking out for a peep, and hearing things, even — occasionally — seeing things that he can mull over in his mind.

He pours himself a whisky (the glasses have been packed away and shipped, but the drink is still there in the library area) and walks over to the front of the onyx wall to sit in one of the chairs. A Liesel chair, he happens to know. It’s not the kind of chair he likes — much better to have something with proper padded arms, something you can nod off to sleep in, listening to the wireless — but it’s funny to sit in a chair she sat in, her round arse against the same leather. That gives a small stir of pleasure. Paní Landauer. Paní Liesel. As he lights up a cigarette and contemplates the view through the windows, he says the name out loud, savouring it. ‘Liesel.’

There’s a footfall behind him. He turns to see his sister coming out from the kitchens, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘I thought I heard someone in here. What you doing?’

‘Just sitting. I thought I owed it to myself.’

‘It’s not your place to sit, is it?’

‘Isn’t it? Do you reckon it’s theirs still?’

‘Well, it is, isn’t it?’

‘You think they’ll be back? They’ll settle in Switzerland or wherever, won’t they? People like them never really have a fixed home, do they?’

‘What do you mean, “people like them”?’

He sniffs and turns back to the view. ‘Yids.’

‘
She
wasn’t a Yid.’ It has become the past tense now. ‘I’ll miss her, you know that? Miss her, I will.’

‘Not him?’

‘You know I didn’t like him. Cold fish. You said so yourself.’

‘I told you, he’s a Yid. That’s his problem.’

‘You were happy enough to take his money.’

‘He’s got enough of it, hasn’t he? Look at this place.’

She stands in front of him, between him and the windows, her bulk blocking the light. ‘Your tea’s going to be ready soon. You’d best go and wash.’

He looks at her with a sly smile. ‘You know I saw her once? In her bedroom.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘It was almost dark. I was doing something on the terrace, unblocking a drain or something. And I saw her in her room. No clothes on.’

She laughs. ‘You dirty old thing.’

‘I couldn’t help it, could I? The curtains weren’t properly drawn and I just looked round and there she was, naked as the day she was born. Looking at herself in the mirror. Small tits.’ He grins. ‘But a nice bush.’

‘You’re making it up.’

‘No I’m not. She touched herself, you know that? She touched herself
there
. Swear to God.’

‘Since when did you take any notice of God?’

‘Got me stirred up, it did. Like a bloody bargepole—’

She turns to go. ‘I haven’t got time to stand around listening to your dirty talk. I’ve got to get tea ready.’

‘Let’s eat at their dining table,’ he calls after her. ‘No reason why we shouldn’t use the place if we want to.’

‘There’s more,’ he tells her twenty minutes later, when they’re sitting at the round table eating.

‘What do you mean, more?’

‘About them. There’s more about them.’ He lifts food to his mouth and talks through the chewing. When he was a kid she used to stop him doing that but now he’s his own master and he’ll do what he pleases. ‘You know that refugee woman? Kalman. You know her?’

‘Frau Katalin, you mean?’

‘Call her what you like, she was being fucked by him. I’ll bet you didn’t know that, did you?’

‘You just talk dirty. It’s disgusting really, what you say.’

He laughs through his mouthful of pork and potato dumpling. ‘It might be disgusting but it’s true. I caught them at it. One morning when there was no one around. The kids were at school and Frau Liesel had gone somewhere and I went looking for him. Wanted the rest of the day off, I did. Anyway, I go up to the top floor—’

‘You’re not meant to do that.’

‘Well I did it, didn’t I? And I caught them at it in her room. I listened outside the door and they were going at it hammer and tongs, I tell you. Like he was strangling a pig with his bare hands.’

‘You’re lying.’

He laughs again. ‘What do you think, that they’re all like you? These people love it, I tell you. They play the respectable but really they love fucking each other. It’s what they do.’

The villa resembled a small castle, complete with turret and crenellations and a front door that looked as though it would keep out a siege army. A monstrosity in the Wagnerian style, Viktor called it. They settled in amongst the heavy drapes and the heavier furniture and felt like raiders camping in the abandoned ruins of the enemy.

‘It’s only for the time being,’ Liesel told herself. ‘Soon it will all be over and we’ll be able to return.’

At first she tried to imagine it like that, as a holiday, one of those summer vacations when they rented a villa on a lake and spent the days in an idle simulacrum of domestic normality: visiting local sights, taking a sailboat, feeding the ducks, walking in the hills. But holidays are circumscribed by the inevitability of their ending. You know you are going home to pick up those threads of a life that has merely been suspended. This was different. Life had not been suspended, it had been ended and a new one had to be constructed out of a poverty of component parts: this house, this garden, this view of the lake and the mountains, these three adults and three children. Six characters in search of a home.

She wrote sitting at the desk in her bedroom with the view of the lake before her. She wrote in the strange abstraction of exile, talking to people who no longer existed except in memory: her mother, a favourite aunt, an old school friend of Benno’s who wrote to her saying how sorry he was that they had found it necessary to leave and how things were not so bad and at least all that was finest about German culture was being preserved. And Hana.

My Darling Hana,
How are you and Oskar? And how are all our friends? And how is the dear house managing without us? You must go round and see it from time to time. I told Laník that you would, so don’t accept any nonsense from him. I feel quite strange thinking of you being there without us, but you are so much part of me that in a sense it would be me, wouldn’t it? Me by proxy. I miss you, Hanička. Of course I miss you. But I truly believe it won’t be long. This awfulness cannot continue.

But it was not long before the idea of return came to seem absurd. The children were found places in schools nearby and settled in quickly, and Viktor was making plans. His latest project involved the manufacture of instruments for both cars and aircraft. It would combine traditional Swiss expertise in clocks and watches with his own knowledge of the motor industry. During the daytime he was often in Zurich, occasionally in Geneva, meeting people. There were potential investors to persuade, partners to coerce, contacts to establish.

Liesel waited patiently for his return from these outings to the city. There wasn’t much else to do except wait, Katalin doing some needlework and Liesel writing letters or practising the piano. Almost the first thing she had done on arrival was to hire a piano — a Bösendorfer grand just like the one in the Glass Room — and find a piano teacher. Piano teachers were two a penny here, Jewish refugees struggling to make a living.

Right at the start she had invited Katalin to come down from her room and join her in the sitting room. It seemed absurd to pretend that she was a mere employee, a servant of the family. ‘We might as well keep each other company,’ she suggested.

Katalin had seemed hesitant, but perhaps that was to be expected. She came from a different world, and had to adjust to this new experience. They talked about the places they had left behind, about the dream of return, about all those vague aspirations that are symptoms of ennui and exile. Outside a thin rain was smudging the view of the lake.

‘Maybe we’ll be back home before Christmas,’ Liesel suggested. It was always she who suggested the possibility of return. ‘Maybe everything will settle down.’

‘But you can’t go back, can you?’ the younger woman said. ‘You can only go forward.’

Liesel gave a small, humourless laugh. ‘Goodness, we sound like two characters from Chekhov.’

‘What’s Chekhov?’

‘You don’t know Chekhov?’ She didn’t meant to sound so surprised, but Katalin’s manner sometimes belied her ignorance, that was the trouble. It was easy to forget that she did not possess the same
qualities
as their other friends. Qualities,
Eigenschaften
, was a word Liesel liked to use. Viktor was a person of
Eigenschaften
and so, of course, was Hana. The qualities were implied rather than defined: a level of intellectual understanding, a high degree of culture, a certain liberal attitude, a delight in the modern and a loathing of the bad things of the past.
But Katalin is a charming companion for all her limitations
, she wrote to Hana,
and we get on very well
. For they did have things in common and, thrown together by circumstance, were happy enough in each other’s company, going round the market in Zurich together, or taking a steamer trip on the lake with the children, or swimming from the landing stage at the foot of the garden. Katalin turned out to be an excellent swimmer. The first time she ventured into the water she surprised them all by diving off the end of the jetty with a sudden fluid grace that had barely disturbed the water: just a liquid plop! and there she was beneath the surface, swimming strongly and silently towards the shore. The children had clapped as she emerged, as though the dive had been quite unexpected and remarkable; but Liesel saw that Katalin had that about her, something sleek, like an otter.

Summer passed, the first summer in exile, and when the first snowfall came they took the children tobogganing in the hills behind the house. Later, before Christmas, there was the first trip to the ski slopes where Ottilie could show off her skills already learned in the Tatra Mountains. She and Marika were almost inseparable by now, a pair of precocious young females with budding breasts and knowing smiles. Marika had taken to calling Viktor
Onkel
. He seemed to find that amusing. ‘Show me how to ski, Onkel Viktor,’ she would cry. ‘Please show me how to ski.’ Or, ‘When are you going to take us tobogganing, Onkel?’ Or, ‘I want to do ice skating, Onkel Viktor, please come and watch me ice skating.’