The Glass Room (7 page)

In April, while the frame grew, the baby was born. They had decided on the modern way, in a clinic run by Doctor živan Jelínek, a physician who had learned the Twilight Sleep technique under the tutelage of Gustav Gauss in Freiburg. It was Hana who had first mooted the idea. ‘Tell me what’s wrong with a little touch of morphia, darling?’ she had asked. So the pain of delivery was blown away by morphine, and any memory of the whole event excised from her mind by scopolamine, a drug culled from henbane and deadly nightshade that kills, among other things, memory; and into this chemical amnesia Ottilie was born.

Rainer von Abt at the building site: it is a late April day with a thin and miserable rain falling. Mud is still the chief feature of the place, mud like a curse clinging to your legs and trying to drag you down into the pit. Von Abt stands in muddied brogue shoes on a plank walkway. Dressed as he is in a dark grey suit and a black overcoat, and wearing a pale grey homburg hat, it would be easy to mistake him for the owner. By his side, in rubber boots, stands the site foreman, muddied, dishevelled and harassed. At the moment there is no concrete form to the construction they are looking at. It is no more than a sketch in bold strokes, written into von Abt’s mind, transferred onto sheets of paper then revised, reconsidered, discussed for the slightest detail, and now drawn out in the bold horizontals and verticals of reddened steel, a three-dimensional maze raised into the misty air. In the past houses have grown organically, like plants, from the ground upwards. But this house is different: it grows from the frame outwards, like an idea developing into a work of art from the central core of inspiration out into the material fact of realisation. Cement mixers churn and vomit. Men tramp back and forth with hods over their shoulders. Ladders stand as sharp diagonals to the rectilinear skeleton of the frame.

The site foreman unfolds a diazo print and gestures upwards towards the top floor where a workman balances across a girder as easily as a child walking along the kerb of a pavement. ‘You want decent load-bearing walls,’ he says, ‘give the thing some stability.’

‘I want nothing of the kind,’ von Abt replies with remarkable good humour. ‘Stability is the last thing I want. This house must float in light. It must shimmer and shine. It must not be stable!’

The man sniffs. ‘It looks more like a machine than a house.’

‘That’s what it is, a machine for living in.’

The foreman shakes his head at the idea of such a machine. He wants four walls around him, made of stone. None of this steel-girder frame nonsense. If that is for anything it is for office blocks — they are putting up a building like that on Jánská at this very moment, but it is going to be a department store, for God’s sake, not a private house.

‘Le Corbusier,’ von Abt says.

‘Eh?’

‘What I said is not original. I cannot take the credit. Le Corbusier got there first.
La machine à habiter
.’

‘What’s that?’

‘French.’

‘Who needs French? It’s bad enough having to deal with German and Czech. You know we had a fight the other day? On the site, right here. Something about politics, a Czech speaker and a German speaker and the stupid thing was, the Czech was called Mlynář and the German was called Müller.’

‘Mlynarsch?’

The foreman laughs at von Abt’s attempt at the pronunciation. ‘It means “miller”. The bastards each had the same name. I slung both of them out on their ears, I did. Well, you can’t have that sort of thing getting in the way of work, can you? Not when things are looking as bad as they are at the moment.’

There is a call from up above, from the top of the staircase of planks that has been built down from street level. The two men look up. There, against the sky, is the silhouette of a woman.

‘Frau Liesel?’ von Abt calls. ‘Is it Frau Liesel Landauer?’ He struggles across the planks and clambers up the uneven staircase to her level. The encounter is a cautious one. When they had first met she was a girl becoming a woman; now she is a woman become a mother. The fulcrum of her life has shifted.

‘I must congratulate you on your great achievement,’ von Abt says, bowing over her hand.

‘You must come and see her,’ she tells him.

‘I’d love to.’

‘She’s beautiful, beautiful. Perfect …’ Perfect what? What feature shall she choose? ‘Fingers, hands. You cannot imagine how perfect. Fingerprints, miniature nails, all perfect.’ She holds out her own as though they might help explain. ‘She sleeps and eats and sometimes looks at you but you don’t know what she is seeing quite. She frowns, as though you aren’t coming up to her standards, but you don’t know what those standards are so you always feel inadequate.’ Liesel laughs. She has been warned that some mothers feel depressed after giving birth, but she feels only exultation. ‘But I’m here to see the house. How is it going? How long will it be? I want to bring Ottilie here.’

They stand on the edge, looking down on the frame. Somewhere down there, defined within the cage of steel, is her house — the rooms, the space, the furniture, the floors, all conceptually there as a sculpture is somehow there in the mind of the sculptor before he completes it. Men climb ladders and tiptoe across the beams as though searching for this mysterious grail. The site engineer, a small man with glasses and energetic arms, is discussing something with the foreman. ‘They all want walls,’ Rainer explains, ‘and I insist that Frau Liesel does not want walls. She wants space and light for her new child. That’s what I tell them.’

He smiles at her and she feels iridescently happy, as though lights have been turned on, multicoloured lights that shimmer and wobble and reflect off moving mirrors. This man has a vision that he is realising for her alone, for her and Viktor and their baby. It seems fantastic. ‘Will you come and see her?’ she asks. It suddenly seems important that she should show him Ottilie. ‘Can I drag you away from your work for a few minutes?’

‘Of course you can.’

Her car is waiting, with the chauffeur, Laník, behind the wheel. They drive round to the other house, the turreted and bastioned one in the Masaryk quarter, the one with small windows and weighty walls, the towers and the turrets. The nurse goes and fetches Ottilie while Liesel entertains von Abt in the sitting room. A maid brings coffee and cakes. They talk enthusiastically of furnishings and interiors, of the space in which to create her family, which is not like the space of this room with its heavy drapes, its furniture like coffins and pews, its chandeliers and heavy flock wallpaper. ‘A new way of life,’ von Abt is saying as the nurse comes in with a bundle of shawls that is Ottilie. ‘That’s what you will have. Away with all this fustian.’

Liesel takes her child. ‘She has been sleeping. In a moment she will awaken and will want to feed. That’s it. Sleep and feeding.’ She laughs at the absurdity of such a life and holds the baby for von Abt to see. He reaches out and strokes a cheek with the tip of one finger, then looks up at Liesel and touches her hand where it holds Ottilie’s shawl aside. ‘It is marvellous to see you so happy.’

‘I
am
very happy,’ she agrees, as though there has been some suggestion that she might not be.

‘Viktor is a lucky man.’

‘We are both of us very lucky.’

The baby wakes, her eyes suddenly there like jewels amongst the crumpled features. She opens a toothless mouth.

‘You see? She is hungry. That is the sum total of her intellectual achievement at the moment. Do you mind if I feed her?’

‘Of course not …’ He makes to go, but she stops him.

‘No, please don’t bother. If you don’t mind … And please don’t look away. You may watch, Rainer. I would like you to watch.’ And there and then, conscious of the immense power she possesses, she unbuttons the front of her dress and releases her breast. Once meagre, her breasts have become functional organs as heavy and full as fruit. As she holds the nipple for the baby, she feels Rainer’s eyes on her like a thrilling touch. And then Ottilie takes the nipple in her hard gums and there is the particular ecstasy of her suck. Liesel looks up directly at him. ‘There,’ she says, and wonders why it is that having Rainer von Abt watch her do this is so important.

‘Pure superstition,’ Viktor said dismissively when the question of Ottilie’s baptism was broached. ‘We profess not to believe so why do we have to do this kind of thing for our child?’

‘For my mother’s sake.’

‘First she insisted on a church wedding, and now she demands that her granddaughter be baptised. She is merciless.’

‘And I want Hana to be her godmother,’ Liesel added.

‘That woman!’

‘She is not
that woman
. She is my dearest friend. You stopped me naming the baby Hana but you must allow me this.’

‘Well she’s hardly going to instil fidelity and modesty in our daughter, is she?’

‘She’ll be very conscious of her responsibilities.’

‘As long as she is also conscious of her irresponsibilities.’

The ceremony — a small, private event limited to family members and the godparents — took place in the Church of the Minorites on Jánská, with Ottilie all in white silk and her godmother Hana Hanáková all in black. They made a beautiful pair at the font, the one small and round, innocent and soft, the other tall and sharp, worldly wise and hard. Viktor stood in the background with Hana’s husband. ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ Oskar whispered in his ear, but it was unclear whether he was talking about the baby or about his own wife. The priest mumbled Latin words and leaned down towards the baby as though to take a bite from her breast. He was, so Oskar explained, breathing on her to drive the devil out. Hana had explained the whole ceremony to him.

‘Is the devil
in
her then? That seems ridiculous. She’s just a baby. Barely capable of focusing her eyes on anyone, never mind harbouring the devil.’ The absurd ceremony reminded Viktor of his own childhood, of being dragged to synagogue at Passover and Yom Kippur, of the impenetrable ritual and incomprehensible language. His father had always remained aloof from such things, while his mother had been the driving force behind the family’s religion. Now, perhaps, Liesel was doing the same with his new family. ‘It’s pure nonsense,’ he whispered to Oskar. ‘Surely mankind is intrinsically good, not intrinsically bad.’

Oskar could barely suppress a laugh. ‘Mankind intrinsically good? Where were you during the war, Viktor?’

After the ceremony a small reception was held in a hotel nearby. The women crowded round the baby. Cousins and aunts exclaimed at the wonders of babyhood and how the daughter resembled her mother and how good she was, while Viktor and Oskar talked of things that occupied the minds of men, matters of the stock market, questions of economics and business. Hana came over, momentarily relieved of her duties as godmother. ‘I must congratulate you on my lovely goddaughter, Viktor,’ she said. ‘Never was there a more beautiful baby.’

‘My contribution was minimal.’

‘But vital.’

She put her arm through her husband’s and bent and kissed him on his bald head. ‘You couldn’t go and find my cigarettes could you, darling?’ she asked. ‘I left my bag somewhere …’

He went off obediently, leaving Viktor and Hana together. ‘I know you don’t like me, Viktor,’ she said.

‘Don’t be absurd. Why should you think something like that?’

She laughed his protest away. Perhaps the champagne had loosened her tongue. ‘Don’t
you
be absurd. I know you don’t like me. You even stopped Liesel naming the baby after me. And truth to tell, I don’t much like you. But let me assure you, there are two things that I love above all. One is your wife and the other is your daughter. I will do all in my power to cherish and protect them both.’

Viktor sipped champagne. Ottilie’s patience, already strained by oil and water and being breathed on by the priest, had finally snapped at the unwarranted attentions of the photographer. She began to cry. Women gathered round to coo and cluck. ‘Cherishing is fine,’ Viktor said to Hana. ‘I hope that protection won’t be necessary.’

The house grew, the baby grew. The latter was a strange and rapid metamorphosis, punctuated by events of moment: the grasp of her hands, the focus of her eyes, her first smile, her recognition of Liesel and then Viktor, the first time she raised herself on her hands, the first laugh. The growth of the house was more measured: the laying of steel beams, the pouring of concrete, the encapsulating of space. And then delay, problems with materials and the workforce, argument and frustration stretching over the summer and the autumn before things were resolved.

‘It happens,’ Viktor said in an unusual display of fatalism. ‘These things happen.’

There was no equivalent ceremony to celebrate the moment when the shell of the house was finally completed that winter, no baptism or naming but only a degree of apprehension as they climbed out of the car to look at the building. It appeared like nothing more than a warehouse, a repository for agricultural machinery or building material perched there up on the hillside. They followed von Abt across bare concrete and into the construction. The empty spaces were heavy with the smell of new cement and plaster. The floor was rough and dusty, the walls plain and plastered white. Rooms were lit by single hundred-watt light-bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

‘What do you think?’

What did they think? It was impossible to say. It was like contemplating a skeleton and trying to work out how the person would have looked. Viktor helped Liesel over a plank and they went out onto the terrace where there was bright sunshine and a gust of wind. Across the roofs of the city the Špilas fortress rode on the crest of a wave beneath a brisk sky of cumulus. ‘I can imagine Ottilie playing here,’ she said. The sandpit was already in place, an integral part of the structure. And benches and a paddling pool, all put there at her request.

Viktor noticed a puddle of rainwater against the parapet wall. ‘That’s the problem of a flat roof, isn’t it?’ He came back to that point often, niggling at it like a tongue searching out an unfamiliar irregularity in a tooth.