The Glass Room (47 page)

‘Is that what you want?’ Tomáš asks, touching her cheek with his fingers as though to assure himself of the fragility of her pale skin. He knows that beneath this integument there is muscle and connective tissue and blood and bone, the architecture of a complex machine that is her face. He has explained all this to her, and of course she knows it too. She studied the musculature of the human body, both for her dancing and then for her physiotherapy training. But all she feels is the surface, the touch of his fingers. And all he feels is the surface of her cheek, soft, sleek interface between the world outside and the world within.

‘Of course it is,’ she says.

No one can have any doubt that our city, renowned for its manufacturing, is also a treasure house of architecture. Have we not been fortunate to have one of Europe’s principal architects as city architect ever since the heady days of liberation? So it is no surprise to come across examples of design that are worthy of inclusion in any glossy tome dedicated to the buildings of the century. How is it then, that one such treasure is doing service at the moment as a children’s gymnasium? There is nothing more important to the future of our city, our country and the cause of socialism itself than a healthy and well-looked-after younger generation and your correspondent would be the last person in the world to begrudge sick children the best of environments in which to pursue the treatments necessary for their cure. However, whether such care needs to take place in an architectural treasure is a matter for debate.

The place in question — this architectural treasure — is the Landauer House in the Blackfield district of town. Perhaps you know the place? It’s a pleasant residential area full of bourgeois villas (now, fortunately, occupied on a more rational basis than they were during the pre-Socialist years) overlooking Lužánky Park and the whole of the city centre. Your correspondent went round it with a member of the State Committee for Architectural Heritage, the group appointed by the city council to look into the whole question of how we treat the past. This committee member filled me in about the history of the house. ‘It was built by the prominent capitalist family, the Landauers,’ she told me. ‘In the late nineteen-twenties they obtained the services of the renowned architect Rainer Abt to design what turned out to be the last of Abt’s European work, before he fled to the United States in 1938. In architectural circles the Landauer House is generally considered his masterpiece.’

While the upstairs rooms — bedrooms and bathrooms — are pleasant enough, it is the living room that strikes you. Our photographer was over the moon about the place, hurrying us this way and that to get the perspective right. He kept extolling the merits of the light that floods in from the south-facing windows. ‘Light and space,’ he said, ‘that is everything you need.’ And light and space you certainly have. Can you picture a room of two hundred and thirty square metres for a family of four? But can you also imagine such a room having two entire walls of glass, and with a view right across the city to the Špilas? Apparently the furniture, specially designed for the house (those capitalists certainly spent their money!) has all disappeared, although there are some specimens in the Moravian Museum. But the structure of the building, the striking chrome pillars that support it, the partition wall made of pure onyx slabs that divided the sitting area from the so-called library, the spare and functional flooring of cream linoleum, is in more or less original condition. Only the windows have been changed, the original plate glass, destroyed by a bomb blast during the war, replaced by small panes. In the old days two of the window frames could be lowered, at the touch of a button, into the basement so that you could almost step out into the garden. Although the single panes have now been replaced by more practical windows, I was told that the lowering mechanism is still in working order.

That the place has survived in such fine form we owe to the former caretaker, Josef Laník, who is now on the local District Committee. He recalls the days of the Landauers well enough — a life of indecent luxury, he says — and the dreadful days of the war when he had to maintain the building as best he could while the bombs fell around it, and then the time of liberation when he and his sister defended the building against the Nazis, before finally handing it over, safe and sound, to the fraternal Soviet forces. And now he is hoping to see the building open to the public so that ordinary people can enjoy what was once the privilege of the very few.

There are some strange things in this city of ours. We possess a dragon that is in fact a dried, stuffed crocodile. We have a twisted pinnacle on the portal of the Old Town Hall that tells of an architect’s anger with the city fathers, and a stone manikin on the church of Saint James that marks some medieval argument between the city and the church authorities by baring its buttocks towards the cathedral. And we have a house that is one of the gems of functionalist architecture — but we don’t take any notice of it.

‘Can we meet somewhere?’ the caller asks. The voice is familiar, but Zdenka can’t place it. ‘For a coffee perhaps. Are you free sometime tomorrow morning? Do you know the Zemanova Kavárna?’

‘Yes, but who is this talking?’

There is laughter on the other end of the line. ‘I’m so sorry. I should have said. It’s Comrade Hanáková.’

Zdenka feels a small, shameful snatch of excitement. She regretted Hana’s swift departure that time when the journalist came to see over the department. She wanted to talk with her, tell her things, tell her that this doctor who followed her tour of the house is actually her lover, the one who went to Paris with her, the one for whom she dances. And now she can.

So the next morning she asks one of her colleagues to substitute for her and changes quickly out of her uniform. ‘I’ll be back in half an hour,’ she says. Is that what it takes? Half an hour seems a generic figure, as you might say ‘for a few minutes’.

The meeting with Hana in the café is like a meeting of old friends. There is even an exchange of kisses, cheek to cheek, as though they are sisters. That is how Zdenka feels about this woman. A friend, a sister, but with something more exciting than that in the background because after all you know your sister (she has to imagine that because she is an only child) and you know your friends. But this woman who works for the heritage committee is entirely unknown.

‘How are things with your boyfriend?’ Hana asks.

‘Do you know …?’ Zdenka often starts conversations like that. It annoys Tomáš. ‘You say it when you know that the other person doesn’t know,’ he complains, ‘so why say it?’ But still she keeps the habit, just trying to keep it under control so that it doesn’t sound silly. ‘Do you know what …?’

Hana laughs and catches her hand across the table. ‘You’re so funny. How can I know until you tell me?’

Zdenka blushes. ‘We’re back together again.’

‘That’s good news.’

‘Do you realise that you’ve met him?’

‘I think I do, yes.’

‘You guessed?’

‘I could tell by the way you kept looking at him.’

Now it is Zdenka’s turn to laugh. She is so happy that Hana has met Tomáš, so happy that she knows about him. ‘Was it that obvious? What do you think of him? He’s handsome, isn’t he? A bit of a cynic, but very loving.’

‘He’s a good-looking man. Do you meet there, in the Glass Room?’

‘Yes, we do. Sometimes we get away to his family’s
chata
, but during the week, that’s where we see each other.’

The woman smiles. It is a wry smile, creased with age and experience. ‘The Glass Room appeals to men like him. They find it rational. Cool, balanced, modern. But don’t be fooled.’

What does she mean? She looks round the café, at the people coming and going, at the waiter coming over to them, wiping his hands on his apron. ‘It was here,’ she tells Zdenka, ‘that I met the man who almost destroyed me.’

‘
Destroyed
you?’

‘He was sitting at this very table. Isn’t that strange?’ And she tells Zdenka how splendid he looked in his uniform as he rose from his chair to offer her the only spare seat in the whole café. ‘Really a very lovely young man. A perfect Aryan.’

‘He was a Nazi?’ Zdenka speaks in a whisper, as though that is the greatest crime, fraternising with the enemy, the very people whom she has been brought up to loathe.

‘Who knows what he was? He was a scientist, and a musician. It seems a strange combination, doesn’t it? He was working at the Landauer House. It was some kind of laboratory then, a biometric laboratory. We made love there just like you and Tomáš. That is what you do, isn’t it?’ Her eyes ambush Zdenka, bringing a rush of blood to the girl’s cheeks. ‘Of course it is. Don’t be fooled by the Glass Room. It is only as rational as the people who inhabit it.’

‘This man. Were you in love with him?’

Hana’s expression is bleak, almost as though she is ashamed of what she has to say. ‘I did it because I wanted to help my husband.’

‘Your
husband
?’ Zdenka now pictures a man at home, where before she imagined that Hana was on her own, a self-sufficient single woman. Is there a family? Are there perhaps children, grandchildren even? How old is she? Fifty? Sixty? She realises how little she knows of this woman whose beauty seems scarred by memory.

‘My husband was a Jew. I don’t know what I thought this man might be able to do, but I was desperate, Zdenka. Do you know what it is to be desperate?’

Of course she doesn’t. She knows what it is to be sad and miserable, but those emotions are almost enjoyable. They throw moments of happiness and laughter into a sharper relief. When Tomáš is content, then it is all the better for knowing how unhappy he can be.

‘Your husband,’ she asks, ‘what happened to him?’

‘I don’t really know.’ Suddenly Hana’s face seems ugly, the features clenched as though against a cold wind. ‘They came to our house. I don’t know why. Perhaps my German told them to, perhaps not. I don’t know. I don’t even know what happened to him, either. But the Gestapo came to our house during the night — they always came in the night — and took us both away. That was the last I ever saw of him. I discovered after the war that they sent him to Theresienstadt.’

‘I went there once with the Union of Youth,’ Zdenka said. ‘The place was like a graveyard.’

‘He was there for a year or so and then in January 1943 he was on one of the transports to Auschwitz. That’s all I know. Poor Oskar. That was his name. Oskar. He was much older than me. Good Lord’ — she laughs, but without humour — ‘if he had survived he would be over eighty by now. He was older than me and I betrayed him many times, but he was the only man I ever loved. Does that sound very dramatic? But from where I stand now it seems to be true.’ Now she is holding Zdenka’s hand across the table, and there is a stillness between them as they look at each other.

‘And what happened to you?’ Zdenka asks.

The woman lets slip her hand and looks away, at the café with its grimy walls and tawdry fittings. ‘God, how this place has run down since the old days. It looks like a workers’ canteen. I suppose that’s appropriate, isn’t it? A works canteen in the workers’ paradise. Now that we are all equal who needs a stylish café? That’s the trouble with equality: it’s the equality of the lowest common denominator.’

‘You don’t want to tell me?’

‘Oh, I’ll tell you, if that’s what you want. I ended up in Germany, at Ravensbrück. Do you know about Ravensbrück? It was the only concentration camp for women. Somewhere north of Berlin. Why did I survive? Luck of course. And love. Does that sound incredible? I found love in Ravensbrück. There
was
love in Ravensbrück, among all the fear and the squalor.’ She smiles, a sudden and illuminating smile that pushes the memories aside. ‘Will you dance for me?’ she asks. ‘Will you dance for me in the Glass Room and remind me what beauty can be? Will you do that?’ There is a surprising earnestness in her asking, almost as though she were pleading.

‘Of course,’ Zdenka replies. She reaches across the table and takes Hana’s hand back. ‘Of course I will.’

Zdenka’s feelings for Tomáš are confused. He wants to return to how they were when she was his water nymph, his Ondine dancing for him in the cool spaces of the Glass Room. But surely to return to that is to return to the past. So she is in two minds that afternoon when she meets him in the Glass Room as arranged.

‘I had coffee with that woman from the heritage committee today,’ she tells him. Golden sunlight slants across the roofs of the city and through the windows, lighting up the onyx wall in a strange and fiery glow like the smouldering of embers.

‘Why? What on earth did you want to do that for? They’re planning to take over this place and turn it into a museum, I told you that. Why do you want to encourage her?’ And then, suspiciously, ‘Are you sure about her? What did she ask you? Are you sure she is not an informer?’

The whole country is penetrated by informers and agents of the secret police. One becomes the other, the agent recruiting an informer through threats or blackmail, the informers recruiting others, gossip becoming intelligence, a casual comment — ‘What times we live in!’; ‘Whatever next?’; ‘Who’d have thought things could come to this?’ — becoming a subject for delation. Is Comrade Hanáková someone like this? You can never tell. The expert informer, or worse, the agent provocateur, is well drilled in making self-deprecatory statements in order to lure the unwary into a trap. Is Hana Hanáková such a person?

‘She was going to show me the photographs that they took during the visit to the gymnasium, but she’d forgotten to bring them. She talked about her husband most of the time.

‘She’s got a husband? Remarkable.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I would have thought she’d scare men off.’

‘Her husband is dead. He was a Jew and he died in the camps. She was in the camps as well. In Ravensbrück.’

‘Does that make her trustworthy? Anyway, you don’t need to get the photographs from her. I’ve got a set from Eve. I’ll bring them over.’