The Glass Room (46 page)

‘It’s a wonderful city,’ the woman agrees, ‘especially when you are young. And in love. Were you in love?’

‘I was,’ Zdenka admits, ‘but it didn’t last.’

‘Often that is the way with Paris.’

The representative from the Committee for Architectural Heritage is a fine-looking woman in her fifties. That is Zdenka’s estimate. But not the kind of fifty that her mother is — a fat and shapeless fifty with slack grey hair, tired features and confusion in her eyes. This woman is slim and elegant, alive. Her face is that of a person who understands things, a face etched in experience. Zdenka feels she will understand about Tomáš.

‘There was this most marvellous coincidence,’ she explains to the woman as they go down the curving stairs into the Glass Room. ‘My boyfriend was on the same conference as me. Can you imagine that? We had five marvellous days together.’

The woman smiles. It is a smile both sympathetic and knowing. ‘But it didn’t last.’

Zdenka returns the smile. It is, she knows, a smile without humour. People are practised in this expression; it is almost a national characteristic. ‘No, it didn’t last. He’s a doctor here at the hospital, in fact. That’s why we went to Paris, to the conference. But now we’ve sort of drifted apart. Do you think that was a result of being together in Paris?’

Why does she ask the woman this? Why does she let these small pieces of intimate knowledge slip out? Once said, words cannot be unsaid. The woman cannot unknow these facts now — that Zdenka has broken with her boyfriend, that he is a doctor at the hospital, that they were in Paris together. If the woman cares to she is now able to identify Tomáš. If the woman tells other people, they will be able to identify him. In this world of reported truth and half-truth, of lie and rumour, Zdenka’s love for Tomáš may be entered on some file, assessed by some functionary, used for or against. ‘Do you know Paris well?’ she asks, hoping that one banal question will distract from the revelation.

‘I went there often before the war. But not since. It’s not so easy these days, is it? You were very lucky.’

Zdenka pushes open the glass door and leads the way through into the gymnasium. The curtains have been pulled back and they walk across a lighted stage with the whole city as their audience. Behind her the visitor gives a small sigh, maybe a sign of longing, maybe a mere exhalation of regret. ‘I’d forgotten how marvellous the place is,’ she says. ‘But what happened to the windows? It used to be all plate glass.’

‘I’ve no idea. I only know it as it is. It’s ideal for what we do here.’ While the woman looks around Zdenka explains about the children. ‘Space and light. Their lives are too often dark and closed, shut away indoors because they can’t go out to play, that kind of thing. Coming here is a kind of liberation for them. And for me. You know I dance here sometimes?’

The woman walks over to the onyx wall and touches it as though caressing the face of a loved one. ‘I didn’t know you were a dancer.’

‘I trained for years until I had an accident. I couldn’t go
en pointe
any longer and that ruined it for me. But I can still do other kinds of dance. I run classes here for children as well. Two evenings a week.’

‘Maybe you’ll dance for me?’

Zdenka blushes. For some reason she blushes beneath the woman’s gaze, as though she has just been asked to do something indecent. The woman smiles. This smile is intense, not a casual thing bestowed unthinkingly, but a kind of communication, as though she is saying that Zdenka has made her smile, that Zdenka is worthy of her smile, and that it is a smile to be shared. ‘This place used to be a place of music,’ she says. ‘Did you know that? Maybe you pick up echoes of it when you dance. Do you think that is possible, that a place can store the echoes of its past? The piano used to be here, just here.’ The woman points. ‘The Landauers used to hold recitals.’

‘Did you know the family? What happened to them?’

The woman shrugs. ‘He was a Jew.’

The word ‘Jew’ clouds Zdenka’s mind. The Jews are like ghosts in the country, forgotten people whose shades haunt the alleyways and streets of certain towns. You think you might see one in the cramped cottages of a one-time Jewish quarter or in the shadows of an abandoned synagogue, but you never do. In Hranice there was an old Jewish cemetery which the children used to venture into, a frightening place of tombstones and ghosts, peopled only by the dead. But there were no living Jews in the town. Then, when she was seventeen, she went to Terezín with the Union of Youth. This was not long after the Communists took power, in the days when she truly believed. Her group had been camping in the hills and they went to visit the Museum of the Resistance in the small fortress outside the town of Terezín itself. Zdenka and a friend had separated from the group and walked down the long straight road that led from the fortress across the river, to the garrison town that had been, so the story went, the ghetto of the Jews. She remembers the moat, the walls, the desolate barrack blocks inside, the weeds growing up in the streets, and the old woman shouting at them from an upstairs window. Was the old woman a Jew, one of the few left behind? Was that possible? What she shouted they didn’t know, but she and her friend ran all the way back to the fortress museum to rejoin the party. They talked about it on the journey back to camp. Why was the town abandoned like that? Why was it only the Resistance that was remembered in the museum of the fortress? Why was the memory of the Jews being left to die?

‘Were the Landauers killed?’ she asks.

‘They were lucky. Lucky or clever, or whatever you want to call it. They escaped at the time of the Nazi invasion. To Switzerland …’

‘And now?’

‘I lost touch with them during the war. When I was deported …’

‘You were
deported
?’

There is a moment of uncertainty in the woman’s expression, as though she is trying to decide what to say. ‘I spent three years in the camps. And when I came back …’ She shrugs. ‘How was I to get in touch again? And then the revolution came. It was a shame. The children must be about your age by now.’

Zdenka says how old she is. She feels that she needs to tell her, to give some personal information to this woman who has come into the place as a stranger but somehow — this is only her second visit — seems a friend.

‘There you are. Martin would be just three years older.’ The woman walks around the onyx wall, reappearing on the other side silhouetted against the light from the windows. ‘I’d like to see you dance,’ she says. ‘In here. In the
Glasraum
.’

That’s what she calls it:
der Glasraum
, in German.

The meeting with the journalist is arranged for two days later at eleven o’clock. There will be a photographer as well. Tomáš discusses it with Zdenka on the phone. ‘There is more to all this business than meets the eye,’ he advises her. ‘Apparently there is a move to try and take the building away from the hospital. People want the place restored, turned into a museum or something. A representative of the hospital ought to be present.’

‘You mean we’d be thrown out?’

‘Something like that.’

After that conversation the woman from the heritage committee does not seem quite so attractive. On the other hand the prospect of seeing Tomáš again gives her a little thrill of excitement. She is waiting, trying to choose the moment when she says to him, come back to me, come back to me on your own terms. Let us meet as we used to, after work has finished, here in the department when everyone else has left for their own houses, their own apartments, their own families and their lives. Our life can be here as you wish, in the Glass Room.
Pokoj
. Tranquillity. That is all she wants, all she will demand from him. The quiet of the Glass Room, the quietness of their making love here in the cool light of the evening.

The woman from the heritage committee arrives at the appointment before all the others, slightly ahead of time in fact. Greeting her at the front door, Zdenka addresses her as
soudružko
, comrade. Comrade Hanáková. That seems to give the correct sense of formality that she feels towards her now. But the woman just laughs. ‘Oh, come on. I think we can dispense with that kind of thing. You must call me Hana. We’re friends, aren’t we? You are going to dance for me.’

Zdenka laughs at the idea, but it is not a dismissive laugh. Rather, it is a happy one. Despite the possibility that the building will be taken away from the department of physiotherapy the idea of dancing for this woman with her grave face and amused eyes seems to Zdenka to be a delight. She tries her name out, as though she hasn’t heard it before. Hana. It seems a name of some beauty, as though beauty can reside in just two syllables that are echoes of each other almost like something in a nursery rhyme. Ha-na.

As she is hanging Hana’s coat, the journalist and the photographer arrive. The photographer is a tall, casually dressed man who says little but immediately starts getting out his equipment — battered black cameras and lenses and a tripod. They are like bits of weaponry that fit together with clicks and grunts. The journalist is the one who does the talking. She shakes Hana’s hand and Zdenka’s hand and smiles very warmly at Zdenka and insists that they call her Eve. ‘We’re waiting for someone from the paediatric department of the hospital,’ Zdenka says.

The journalist raises her eyebrows. ‘Why is that?’

‘They have overall control of this facility. We are really just an offshoot.’

The disparate group wait in the hallway of the building, in the strange aqueous light that comes through the milky panes of glass. People push past on their way from one office to another. Eve asks Hana some questions about the place, about when it was built and by whom. Zdenka glances at her watch. The photographer takes photographs of the hall, moving people aside so that he can get a clear shot. His camera stands on arthropod legs and he invites Zdenka to look through the viewfinder (he has to lower the tripod to her height). To her surprise she discovers the world in a fish bowl, the warped figures of Hana and Eve floating round one side, the curve of the milky glass wall, the staircase winding downwards like a vortex, and the front door bending open and a diminutive Tomáš entering, like a fish swimming into view. Two fishes, for there is someone else following Tomáš, a stout, balding man with a coarse, peasant face.

‘Am I late? I’m very sorry,’ Tomáš says. But he isn’t sorry, Zdenka can see that. He is pleased that he has kept them all waiting. She watches as he shakes hands with the photographer and Hana, and greets the journalist by name. ‘Hello, Eve. Fancy seeing you here.’

‘You know each other?’ Zdenka asks.

‘Old friends,’ says Tomáš.

Zdenka notices that the old friends exchange amused glances. And she can see —
sense
, not see — something else: a small pulse that passes between the two old friends like the small shock of electricity you get in summer when you touch the handle of a car. A pulse of energy. Zdenka senses it but doesn’t quite understand it. ‘Old friends,’ he repeats, and Zdenka wonders where the emphasis lies — on
old
or on
friends
?

Then the bald man introduces himself. He addresses them all as
soudruzi
, comrades. He is, he tells them, chairman of the District Committee with responsibility to the Party for the Blackfield area. Hana, it seems, already knows him. ‘Comrade Laník,’ she says as they shake hands. ‘How you have come up in the world.’

‘That’s the whole point of the revolution, isn’t it?’ he replies. ‘The proletariat is in power now.’

The tour of the house takes an hour. It is led not by Zdenka but by Hana with occasional interruptions by the chairman of the District Committee. This is architecture not physiotherapy, art not science. And she appears to know everything about the place, from the details of the architect himself to the birthdays of the children of the owners. The man called Laník knows other things. He knows the date of construction and the materials used. And what happened to it after the family left, during the war. Together these two recount the history, the story, the past that leads to this present of six people walking round the space, looking at perspectives and vistas, at details and delights. The journalist scribbles away in shorthand, turning over pages of a ring-bound notebook. Comrade Laník insists that Eve explain to her readers how he defended the house against counter-attack by the forces of bourgeois Fascism. Tomáš watches and smiles distantly, as though he understands a deeper truth than a mere recounting of the past. And the shutter of the photographer’s camera makes that repeated mechanical sound, that unlocking and locking of the doors of light to send momentary images from the present into the light trap of the past.

When everything is over there is uncertainty over matters of departure and farewell. And then the following things happen: Laník says he has an important meeting to attend and must bid the comrades farewell; the photographer shoulders his bag of gear and says he has to get the films to the lab; the journalist gives Tomáš a kiss on the cheek and follows the photographer out; and Hana says goodbye and tells Zdenka that she will be in touch. Tomáš and Zdenka are left together in the physiotherapy building, which Zdenka has now come to think of as the Landauer House.

They talk. She wants to know things about the journalist — how they met, how long they have known each other, how well they know each other — but she daren’t ask. There’s a feeling that knowledge is a dangerous matter, that illusions may be nurtured in ignorance, that Eve Whatever-her-name may be an intruder in the mythic world that she and Tomáš have created down here in the Glass Room, the world of Ondine and Palemon, the world of love detached for ever from the incessant pressures of the past and the future. That was the trouble with those days in Paris, that they took the two of them into the world of contingency and consequence, a world where decisions must be made. Better by far to exist in this limbo.

‘Do you want to come round after work?’ she asks. There are people moving around upstairs. One of her colleagues looks in and says, ‘Is it all over? Can ordinary human beings get back to work?’