The Glass Room (43 page)

‘
Slivovice
,’ he explains. ‘
Dobrá
.
Slivovice
.’

‘
Slíva
?’ She smiles. Her face lights up when she smiles. From something like a frog it becomes almost beautiful.

‘That’s right.
Slíva
!
Dobrá slivovice
.
Slíva
!’

Recognisable through the fog of incomprehension are shared words. ‘
Dóbrá
,’ she cries, good, and advances on Laník to throw her arms around him and deliver a kiss on each cheek, and then a third as though to confirm the reality of the two. She smells strongly of horses and sweat and ordure. It is not an entirely unpleasant smell. It reminds Laník of his country childhood. Her skin is strangely smooth, like old silk. ‘
Tovarish
!’ she cries, ‘
Tovarish
!’ And then, disturbingly, she kisses him full on the mouth.

The Russians move in. They are battle-weary and battle-scarred, a dozen young men and three women, all with the look of Asia about their features. Where have they come from, how many thousands of miles have they crossed to reach here, this place at the epicentre of Europe? They mount a guard on the horses and hump their equipment down into the Glass Room. There are two machine guns, a mortar, three or four grenade launchers and several rifles. These they strip down and clean. Oil smears the linoleum flooring. Laník’s sister — she has plucked up sufficient courage to come up from the basement — remonstrates with them and they roar with laughter at her protests.

‘Your wife?’ their commander asks Laník.

‘My sister.’ There’s no misunderstanding there. The words are the same in both languages:
zhena
, wife;
sistra
, sister. The officer nods thoughtfully. What is she thinking? She is square and tough, her face lined and her skin burnished by months in the sun and the wind. You can imagine her standing outside a yurt on a desolate Mongolian plain, or riding a horse bare-back into battle. It’s difficult to guess her age. Is she in her forties? Is she that old? ‘
Starshyna
,’ she says when Laník points to her rank badges. It’s another word he understands.
StarŠina
, sergeant-major. She gives off the smell of stables and ordure, the smell of thousands of miles living with the animals, living in barns, living in trenches, living like a gypsy. ‘Rostov, Odessa, Jassy, Kishinev, Bucharest,’ she tells Laník. ‘Budapest, Bratislava. On, on, on.’ She waves her hand at the memory of all those different places. ‘Always men and women die but always more come. Patriotic duty,’ she says. Laník agrees. He has no choice, really, for she is holding his hand and staring into his eyes and nodding as though she has already made up her mind about patriotic duty.

‘She fancies you,’ his sister tells him when he gets away for a moment. ‘I’d watch it.’

‘We’ve got to get them out of here,’ he says.

‘I don’t see how.’

‘At least keep them out of the basement. If they see what we’ve got down there they’ll have it all. What are you going to give them for supper?’

‘Dumplings, stew, what do you think?’

‘Don’t put too much meat with it. It’ll make them suspicious.’

‘We haven’t got too much meat.’

‘Keep the
slivovice
coming anyway. It’ll take their minds off anything else.’

In the Glass Room the Russians have finished their work and are sitting about smoking and laughing. The two young women are lumping Ludmilas with faces like potatoes and hands like hams. And then there’s the sergeant-major with her ripe apple of a face and her leering eyes. She has been in the bathroom upstairs and had some kind of wash. Her hair — as black as axle grease — has been combed. There is even a hint of something red smeared across her lips. When the food is ready she indicates that Laník should sit down beside her. The great circular dining table is lit with candles. It is a feast of the absurd, Laník and his merry men reflected in the blackness of the one remaining window of the Glass Room. There are toasts as they eat, to Comrade Stalin, to the commander-in-chief Comrade Malinovsky, to Comrade Churchill and to the brand new Comrade Truman, to the recently deceased Comrade Roosevelt. After the meal they clear their equipment to the side of the Glass Room while one of the soldiers gets out an accordion and begins to play. Some of them stand up to dance but if the expectation was that they would execute some wild Cossack dance with stamping and leaping the reality is quite different: ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby’, the accordionist plays and two couples, two men and the two girls, the two clumsy Ludmilas, begin to shuffle round the Glass Room for all the world like couples in a bar in London or Paris. When the couples swap over, so that the men are each dancing with one of the girls, there are hoots of lascivious laughter and glances in the direction of their sergeant. ‘Dance,’ they shout, ‘dance!’ and the word is the same in both languages so that Laník knows his fate even before she shrugs and pulls him to his feet to more laughter.

‘Yevgeniya,’ her voice says loudly in his ear as she grabs him round the waist. They shuffle across the floor to a storm of applause. ‘You call me Yevgeniya.’

‘Yevgeniya,’ he repeats dutifully.

‘And you?’

‘Laník.’

She practises the name, her breath hot and alcoholic against his cheek. ‘Lyanik,’ she says, ‘Lyanik.’ The dancing goes on and the
slivovice
goes down, and as the music relaxes so does Sergeant-Major Yevgeniya’s grip on Laník get tighter.

‘You are rich man, Lyanik?’ she whispers. ‘This big house yours? You are
kulak
?’

‘No, I’m poor,’ he insists. ‘The caretaker, that’s all.
Proletář
.’

‘Ah!
Proletarij
.’ She hugs him tighter. ‘
Proletarij
is good. You are child of revolution.’ After a while she releases him for a moment and claps her hands. ‘It’s late,’ she calls, like a mother with her children. ‘There’s work to do tomorrow.’ Laník tries to move away but she is too quick for him. Her hand darts out and grabs his wrist. The men are laying straw pallets out on the floor of the Glass Room and Sergeant-Major Yevgeniya has become incongruously girlish, pulling Laník nearer and smiling coyly. His heart sinks. ‘You come?’ she asks.

‘Where?’

‘With me? You show us the rooms.’

Some of the men are watching, grinning. The two Ludmilas wait with their kitbags over their shoulders and their faces without expression. Reluctantly Laník leads them up the stairs to the top floor where all is quiet and placid, where the candle that Yevgeniya carries throws unsteady shadows across the wall, where the ghosts of the Landauer family walk. ‘Here,’ he says, throwing open the door to one of the rooms. ‘You can sleep here.’

The two Ludmilas hump their kitbags in and close the door. Laník is standing there in the corridor, alone with Sergeant-Major Yevgeniya. ‘In here,’ he suggests, pushing open a second door. It is Frau Landauer’s room,
was
Frau Landauer’s room, a space where there once was her dressing table and wardrobe, her clothes, her make-up and jewellery, the very stuff of her life; where now there is only the bare walls and a bedframe without a mattress.

Yevgeniya pushes him in and closes the door. She looks him up and down, her small eyes shining from deep within their folds of flesh. ‘Lyanik,’ she says, ‘I kill many men, but I won’t kill you.’

He laughs. It isn’t so funny but he laughs all the same. Downstairs in the Glass Room the Russian soldiers settle down for the night. Further down, in the basement, Laník’s sister locks her door and climbs into her bed. On the top floor, in Liesel Landauer’s old room, Laník is enveloped in the smell of horses and the scent of ordure, gripped by armpits and groin, enveloped by lips and legs. He feels that he might suffocate, that he might explode, that he will die. For the moment it is apparent that the war is finally over, but it is not certain what has taken its place.

Tomáš stands at the windows, smoking and looking at the view. Behind him the children go through their exercises. A dozen mats are laid out for this purpose along the floor in front of the onyx wall and Zdenka is putting the children through their paces, although ‘paces’ is rather strong a term for what they do — leg-lifting, leg-bending and stretching, turning this way and that with all the difficulty and awkwardness of geriatrics. When the session is over the children’s parents will come and collect them, and Tomáš and Zdenka will be able to talk together for a while.

They will talk about the past or about the future. Tomáš does not wish to talk about the past, or the future, or anything temporal. For Tomáš there is no such thing as time. He is a doctor (a paediatrician at the children’s hospital down the road) but a small, hard core of his mind is that of a philosopher rather than a physician. The philosopher has decided that past and future are both illusions, that there is only a continuous present, and the present is this view through the window over the city, this cigarette, this vague and milky reflection of Zdenka walking backwards and forwards behind him urging her charges on: ‘Come on, Miloš! You know you can do it. That’s right Zdenka,’ (another Zdenka, the name is not uncommon) ‘show us what you can do. How happy your mother will be when she sees what progress you have made.’

The children are broken approximations of what it means to be a child, polio victims, creatures with twigs and sticks for limbs, and pale hospital faces. In the hospital down the road there are others even worse, one of them in an iron lung, contemplating a future in which the machinery will breathe for her, and people will feed her and the world will be something that she sees inverted, in a mirror. Alenka is her name. The irony is not lost on Tomáš. Alenka is Alice, and her life will be lived through the medium of a looking glass.

If there is no future, Tomáš thinks, then Alenka’s life ought to be more bearable.

He smokes and looks. He has opened one of the window panes and can blow the smoke out into the garden, which is necessary because otherwise Zdenka would not allow him to smoke. ‘You shouldn’t smoke in here,’ she said when he first lit a cigarette. ‘It is against the regulations.’

Regulations. The city, the country, probably the whole world (having travelled little, Tomáš is unsure about the matter) is pinned down by regulations. His own view is that regulations are designed to control the future and if we all live in an eternal present then regulations are, by definition, powerless. When he tells Zdenka this she sighs impatiently like a mother with an unruly child, and tells him that he’ll get himself into trouble one day. It seems absurd that Zdenka should be a mother to him. She is only five foot three inches tall and with a build as slight as a child’s. A dancer’s body. And yet Tomáš imagines her giving birth to him. Sometimes when he touches her intimately, that is what he imagines: Zdenka as both mother (his own mother died during the war) and lover,
matka
and
milenka
.

Tomáš smokes and looks. He would like to live in ignorance of both the past and the future, forever at the pinnacle of time, the eternal present, this moment in what he calls the Glass Room, with this cigarette and this view over the city.

‘Now, one more time,’ Zdenka calls to her charges behind him. ‘Are you ready?’

He first met Zdenka in this very place, the gymnasium that he always calls the Glass Room. It was two years ago, when he had reason to visit the physiotherapy department to follow the progress of one of his patients and discovered this new member of staff on duty. This was, she told him, her first job since abandoning her childhood ambition, which was to be a ballet dancer. From classical dance to recuperative physiotherapy did not seem too much of a leap (that was her joke) and so here she was trying to help children to walk when what she had wanted to do was fly.

He laughed at her joke. There was something tantalising about this small, energetic young woman. How was it that she had so much energy when he himself felt almost debilitated by his work? She seemed to have an optimism that he did not share, a belief in the future that was quite contrary to his. They discussed his patient and then they talked of other things — her ambitions, his lack of them; her hopes, his despair. She had come from a town in the north towards the Polish border, a place called Hranice, which itself means ‘border’. ‘It’s the border between the north and south of the continent,’ she told him proudly when he asked. ‘On one side all the streams run north to the Baltic, on the other side all the streams run south to the Danube and the Black Sea. So I was born at the very watershed of the continent.’ From that moment on, Tomáš has always associated Zdenka with water. My
rusalka
, my nymph, he thought of her. Within a few minutes of meeting her he had invited her for a drink. Perhaps he wanted more of her hopes and ambitions. Within a few days they were seeing each other regularly. Within a week they were making love.

One of the children in the hospital, one of Tomáš’s patients, suffers from a condition that no one has ever seen before. This child is incapable of breathing when she is asleep. When she is awake all is well and she can move her ribs, move her diaphragm, ventilate her lungs, but as soon as she falls asleep she stops breathing. The only solution is to have her sleep on a ventilator. If there isn’t the ventilator she will die of asphyxiation. This is a mystery to the medical profession. It is known as the curse of Ondine.