The Glass Room (53 page)

‘I was here once,’ she says.

‘This isn’t your first visit?’

‘No, I …’

‘Doors,’ Milada says, pointing to the ceiling. ‘Terrace … children.’ Words as disjointed as memories. There is something of the seaside about the terrace — weather-beaten concrete, a pergola made of rusted piping, a plank abandoned in the wet. Ghostly children flit uncertainly across the space, like leaves blown by the wind, one of them Marie herself.

‘What happened to them?’ she asks the guide, hoping that she will understand German. ‘What happened to the family?’

‘Please, no questions. We now descend to the main living room.’

The American woman gives a look of resignation. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ she says, and they follow the guide back to the hall, to the stairs that lead down to the lower floor. Marie remembers. She remembers running and laughing, with Ottilie following her, chasing her, swinging on the rail halfway down, secure in the knowledge that her father is not in the house to stop them. Marie counts the steps as they descend — twelve steps down, then a turn at the landing and a further nine steps down to the lower floor. Milada opens the door and steps forward. ‘You come this way,’ she commands, and they go after her through the door into space.

Marie breathes in sharply, as though startled, as though struggling for breath. She has never remembered it like this. The floor — ivory linoleum — runs away from her feet like a surface of still water mirroring the glass wall beyond it. Chromium pillars stand in the water, their convex surfaces throwing reflections round the place. She can almost hear the lap of liquid as she stands there hesitating to cross, even though Milada is doing just that, walking across the surface as though it were nothing more than linoleum. ‘Here we find ourselves in the living room of the house,’ she says. ‘Upstairs there is the sleeping, down here there is the living.’

She stands in silhouette against the light from the windows. Through the plate glass beyond her you can see the slope of the garden, and beyond that across the roofs of the city. There is the spire of the cathedral in the distance and the castle hill hunched against the clouds, capped by the grim helmet of its fortress. Marie remembers the name. The Špilas. In the Špilas there are prisoners, bad people kept in chains.

Are they Jews?

Not Jews. Jews are good. Tatínek is a Jew.

‘Here,’ Milada says, ‘is celebrated onyx wall. Here family sat.’

And her own mother as well: Marie can see her mother, the figure that haunts her, the presence that resembles her so that she, Marie, is a partial reflection of what her mother might have been, but only the plainness of her, not the beauty, not the lights and darks. And not the eyes. Marie remembers her eyes, the light blue of the sky as it appears now over the castle hill in a break in the cloud.

The American woman is saying something complicated to her son, something that involves frowning and shaking of the head and pointing at this and that. ‘Do you see what I mean?’ she asks, and the young man does see because he nods his head and says, ‘Sure, Mom.’

And Marie tiptoes across the floor and looks round the celebrated onyx wall in case her mother might still be sitting there, like a patient in a doctor’s waiting room, the anteroom to oblivion. But nothing remains except the chair she might have sat in, a low-slung crossed cantilever of aluminium with leather squab cushions. And the memory.

‘Onyx wall is made to the architect’s choice, of one piece of onyx from mountains of Atlas. Observe patterns.’

She does as she is told, observes the patterns, sinuous veins that snake across the stone. The colours are pale gold and amber, streaked with tears. Almost the only colour in the whole space, which otherwise is white and ivory and mirrored chrome and transparent glass. ‘What happened to the family?’ she repeats. ‘Landauer. What happened?’

‘Family left in 1938,’ Milada says impatiently. ‘The house is possession of the city. Museum. Now it is museum.’

But it isn’t a museum. It is vibrant and alive, a chord struck on the piano that stands there in the shadows behind the onyx wall, a complex chord that shimmers and reverberates, gaining volume with the passing of time, echoing as a piano echoes to the noise of children and the crying of adults.

Marie has to put out a hand to steady herself. Then she sits, suddenly, on one of the chairs.

‘Please, it is forbidden to sit!’

‘What’s wrong?’ asks the American woman coming over. ‘Are you all right?’

She shakes her head. Her mother is there, inside her head. Perhaps she’s trying to shake her out. ‘I was here,’ she says, brushing tears from her eyes. ‘My mother and I, we were here.’

‘When?’ asks the
Américaine
. ‘When were you here?’

‘Please,’ the guide says. ‘Not to sit in chair.’

‘Oh, let her be.’ The
Américaine
crouches down, her hand on Marie’s shoulder. ‘Aren’t you feeling well? You just rest a bit and don’t take any notice of her. Maybe we can get you a glass of water.’

‘I’m all right. Really.’ She tries to get up, then sits back down. ‘I used to live here,’ she says to this American woman who seems sympathetic, who will perhaps listen to this tale of loss and forgetting. ‘Many years ago, with my mother. That’s why. The memories.’

‘You used to
live
here?’

‘Before the war. Just a short time. My mother was a nanny. The children, there were the children.’

‘Ottilie and Martin.’

Marie looks up in surprise. ‘That’s right. How do you know that? Ottilie and Martin.’

The American woman’s expression is cut through with confusion. ‘Marika?’ she asks. ‘Are you
Marika
?’

‘How do you know Marika?’

The American woman is on her knees now, holding Marie’s hands. ‘I’m Ottilie,’ she says, an absurd idea because Ottilie is a child, a mere twelve years old, trapped irrevocably in distant memory. But this woman with the weather-beaten face and polished skin and dyed hair is claiming this identity, laughing and crying at the same time while the other two watch, Milada no longer complaining about the chair being sat on, the young man looking bewildered.

‘For God’s sake, I’m Ottilie.’

And all around them is the Glass Room, a place of balance and reason, an ageless place held in a rectilinear frame that handles light like a substance and volume like a tangible material and denies the very existence of time.

The title of this book,
The Glass Room
, needs some explanation. It is, as is clear, a translation of the original German —
Der Glasraum
.
Raum
is, of course, ‘room’. Yet this is not the ‘room’ of English, the
Zimmer
of our holidays, with double bed, wardrobe and writing desk beneath a print of some precipitous Alpine valley. Within the confines of the Germanic ‘room’ there is room for so much more:
Raum
is an expansive word. It is spacious, vague, precise, conceptual, literal, all those things. From the capacity of the coffee cup in one’s hand, to the room one is sitting in to sip from it, to the district of the city in which the café itself stands, to the very void above our heads, outer space,
der Weltraum
. There is room to move in
Raum
.

So:
The Glass Space
, perhaps; or
The Glass Volume
; or
The Glass Zone
. Whichever way you please. Poetry is what is lost in translation, as Robert Frost so memorably said. So we do our best with this sorry and thankless task, aware that we will be condemned for trying and condemned for not trying. Take it as you please: the Glass Room;
der Glasraum
.

Iva Hrazdílková gave advice on the Czech used in the novel, as did Jochen Katzer with the German. Their help is very much appreciated. Any language errors that have slipped through the process are, of course, my own.

Besides her assistance with the Czech language, Iva’s quick-witted and perceptive advice on many aspects of Czech culture and history — particularly that of her native city — has been unstinting and invaluable. I am greatly indebted to her for all the help she has given.

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Swimming to Ithaca
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