The Glass Room Page 13

  ‘And when they no longer need you?’ Viktor asks. ‘What becomes of your honorary status then?’

  ‘But they do need the Jews. The Jews still run most of the economy.’

  ‘Yet Jewish businesses are being put under Aryan ownership.’

  ‘That’s the way we’ve got to play it for the moment. Things will change. They’ll get more moderate once they’ve consolidated their power.’

  ‘It’s riding a tiger, if you ask me.’

  The man laughs again. Riding a tiger is what he enjoys. It is only Hana who has threatened to push him off.

  ‘But,’ says Hana, ‘if Oskar and I were living in Germany our relationship would be illegal. A gentile married to a Jew? That’s not allowed.’

  ‘The law is not retroactive, my dear,’ Oskar points out. ‘If you’ll forgive me, you have got to stick to the facts in these issues. Marriages already undertaken are not automatically dissolved. The race laws are quite specific on the point.’

  ‘Which is a typical lawyer’s way of looking at it. Whatever the detail, the new German state is quite plainly saying that people like us are in some way in an illicit relationship. And Viktor and Liesel.’ Hana looks across the table at Mandl, and then turns her gaze back to his wife. ‘From now on, it is, quite simply, illegal for Jews and gentiles to have sex.’

  The menacing fricatives of the word Geschlechtsverkehr circle the table. Sitting between Viktor and Oskar, the professor’s wife blushes.

  ‘The whole thing will just blow over,’ Mandl asserts. ‘There are all sorts against Hitler, quite apart from the industrialists. I spoke to someone in Bremen who claimed that the Army was dead against him. There’s even a contingency plan to take power and reinstate the Kaiser.’

  ‘Would that be any better?’

  Liesel says, ‘Who wants to reinstate a monarchy? And anyway, that would be against the treaty.’ Everyone knows the treaty of Saint-Germain, which came out of that great conclave of the victorious where presidents and prime ministers met to call countries into being from the wreckage of empires.

  ‘The treaties,’ says Mandl scornfully, ‘what are those pieces of paper worth?’

  ‘If nothing else they mean the creation of our own country,’ says Viktor. ‘Which ensures a stable democracy in the heart of Europe.’

  And so the discussion goes on, straws drifting down the stream and being snatched at by desperate hands. After the meal they have their coffee in front of the onyx wall, their reflected images suspended over the darkened lawn. Mandl is describing his work in Italy, selling matériel to the Mussolini government. He uses that word – matériel – and makes it sound like blankets and bedspreads. For the third time the university professor helps himself to brandy from the decanter. ‘What do you think, Landauer?’ he asks, his voice unsteady.

  What does Viktor think? He has a feeling of detachment from them all, from Mandl and his awful ideas of course, but also from the other guests, from Hana, and even from Liesel. He catches his wife’s eye and smiles distractedly. Is it the Glass Room itself that generates this sense of remoteness? In this place, he thinks, almost anything is possible. He looks around at his glass house where there will be no secrets. Standing beside the Maillol torso, Eva Mandl is in deep conversation with Hana. There’s a studied theatricality about Mandl’s wife, as though she is all the time expecting people to be watching her. Carrying her glass of brandy, she strolls with Hana across the room and out onto the terrace. Mandl watches them go, mirrored to perfection by the plate-glass windows of the room, a virtual image that floats out in space until Viktor, getting up from his chair, presses the hidden button. With the faint murmur of hidden machinery, the glass pane slides down into the basement and leaves behind it no replica of the people in the room but only the blackness of the night outside. Out there on the terrace, shadowed by the light from the Glass Room, are Hana and Eva talking.

  ‘I think,’ says Viktor in reply to the question that has almost been forgotten, ‘that if you play with mad dogs you are going to get bitten.’

  ‘What a dreadful man,’ says Hana.

  It is afterwards. The space is empty of guests, the lights turned down. Hana and Liesel are sitting on the Liesel chairs in front of the onyx wall. The curtains are drawn across the windows now, so that the two women are enclosed in their own world. There is a litter of glasses and coffee cups around them. Cigarette ends fill the ashtrays. Hana has decided to stay the night and Oskar has left, perhaps thankful that for once he knows where his wife will be. Viktor has just gone to bed, leaving the two women alone. ‘What a dreadful, dreadful man,’ Hana repeats. ‘Do you know what Eva told me? Apparently he has been buying every print of that film he can find, the one his wife was in. He buys them and destroys them all. It’s pure vandalism. He’s insanely jealous.’

  ‘Is that what you two were talking about? You quite monopolised her.’

  Hana smiles. ‘That and other things. Her ambitions, her desires, her dreams. Isn’t she wonderful? I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much beauty concentrated all in one place. It’s almost too much to accept. She wants to get back into films but he refuses to let her. He keeps her under guard twenty-four hours a day so the poor darling is virtually a prisoner. She’s desperate to get away. She made a run for it in Paris a little while ago but they followed her and dragged her back to their hotel.’ Hana crosses her legs and reaches for another cigarette. ‘You didn’t see her film, did you?’

  ‘Viktor thought it would be mere sensationalism.’

  ‘Oh, but it was beautiful. She was actually called Eva in the film. That’s what she was, a kind of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Naked, she was like …’ Hana shivers. ‘I can’t explain. It was like seeing yourself as you ought to be.’

  ‘You sound quite smitten.’

  ‘Maybe I am.’ She draws on her cigarette and watches Liesel through the cloud of smoke. There is a long and thoughtful silence. The cool box of the Glass Room seems to wait on her words. ‘Could you ever love another woman, Liesi?’ she asks. ‘I mean wholly, sexually.’

  ‘That kind of love? How awful!’

  ‘Why awful? You see Eva Kiesler naked in that film and you think, that’s me. My spirit made flesh, perfected. A man might think, “that’s lovely and I want to fuck it”—’

  ‘Hana!’

  ‘But if you’re a woman you think, “that’s an aspect of me and I want to love her just as I love myself”. I think perhaps there’s nothing more perfect than love of one woman for another. There’s a completeness.’

  Liesel laughs with embarrassment, feeling affection, warmth, something like amusement, and underneath it all a small tremor of shame. Hana is always saying preposterous things, but never as outrageous as this. Perhaps it’s the drink she’s had – starting off with those dry Martinis she was teaching Viktor to make before the evening really began. ‘Darling, you make it sound as though you are talking from experience.’

  ‘Of course I’m talking from experience.’

  Her words are a shock to Liesel, and yet not a surprise. It is as though the Glass Room has prepared her for this, its spirit of transparency percolating the human beings who stand within it, rendering them as translucent as the glass itself. ‘What an extraordinary thing to say, darling. Are you going to tell me you’ve fallen in love with Eva Mandl?’

  ‘Not her, no. Although maybe it wouldn’t be difficult. But not her.’

  ‘Then whom?’

  Hana lifts her cigarette to her mouth and draws the smoke into her lungs. There is the sound of her breath as she exhales. She frowns, her mouth turned down as though in distaste. ‘If I tell you the truth, will you promise not to hate me?’

  ‘Hanička, I could never hate you.’

  Hana shrugs. ‘I wonder.’

  ‘Well, go on.’

  She draws again on the cigarette. Her hand isn’t quite steady. Her expression isn’t quite amused. ‘It’s you, of course,’ she says.

  There is a complete silence. No sound at a
ll in the unequivocal spaces of the Glass Room. No murmur from the garden coming through the velvet curtains. No stirring in the fabric of the building. Cigarette smoke drifts like grey silk above Hana’s head. ‘I’m surprised you never realised, Liesi. Does it shock you?’ A pause. ‘Don’t go back on your word.’

  Liesel searches for something to say. ‘Of course I won’t. But I didn’t expect to have such responsibility all of a sudden. I mean, I don’t want to hurt you, Hanička, I really don’t.’

  ‘Oh, you won’t hurt me, not unless you send me away. Just let it be. We’re not like men, are we? It’s perfectly possible for women just to remain friends without being lovers. How often has that happened?’

  ‘But darling—’

  ‘I should have kept my mouth shut, I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  Hana gets up and goes over to the record player. She puts on another of the records she has brought from Paris. There’s a clarinet playing. ‘J’ai deux amours,’ a woman’s voice sings, a high, fluting sound, the sound of France, the sound of America. The two women talk some more, in subdued tones now, the laughter and the acting gone. They talk of love and friendship and men and women. They talk of Oskar and they talk of Viktor. Liesel watches Hana as though with new eyes and marvels that the form is the same but not the substance. Hana loves her. The word ‘completeness’ comes to her mind and brings with it a shade of guilt. J’ai deux amours.

  ‘Play something for me, Liesi,’ Hana says when the record comes to an end.

  ‘I’m not good enough, not when I’ve been drinking. I make mistakes.’

  ‘I’ll forgive your mistakes. I’ll always forgive your mistakes.’

  So they go over to the piano and Liesel plays something she has been practising, Chopin’s Nocturne in F sharp major, a tender and elegiac piece that seems to express what she feels better than any words. The notes fall softly in the soundbox of the Glass Room, as softly and precisely as autumnal leaves on a still day, and when the piece comes to an end Hana bends and kisses her on the nape of her neck.

  Carefully Liesel closes the lid of the piano. ‘I think we’d better go to bed.’

  Leaving the mess for the maid to clear up in the morning, they turn off the lights and go upstairs. The narrow spaces on the upper floor are clinical and cool, bathed in that milky light that is the mark of this place, whether it comes through the glass panels by day or from the globes in the ceiling by night. They look in on the children and watch them sleeping, they listen at the door of Viktor’s room and hear the faint murmur of his breathing, and then they pause outside the door to the guest room. Liesel turns the handle, then looks at Hana. ‘We are silly things, aren’t we?’ she says.

  Silly things, dumme Dinger. It sounds absurd.

  Loss

  Vienna had changed. The city of dreams had become the city of nightmares, a city of fear and anticipation. A tide of political violence lapped around the ponderous baroque buildings and although the jolly music, the waltzes and the polkas, continued to be played in the cafés and the ballrooms, the dance was a dance of death.

  When Viktor telephoned the Goldene Kugel she had gone.

  What did they mean?

  She’d pushed off – left the area.

  He felt panic bubbling up inside him like vomit. Where was she now?

  They had no idea, no idea at all.

  What was she doing?

  The voice on the other end laughed. ‘What does a girl like that always do?’

  He hurried round to the street where she had her little apartment. It wasn’t difficult to find the place. There was the kasher butcher and the pawnshop across the street, and the heavy door with its peeling paint. The climb up the dingy stairwell towards the attic was vividly familiar. There was the same smell of cabbages or drains, the same damp, the same taint of mould, and when he got to the top and peered out the window, he saw the Riesenrad over the roof tops just as before. But it wasn’t just as before. This time the door to Kata’s apartment was locked and when he knocked the sound was hollow, as though the space inside were empty and he was hammering on a drum.

  ‘Anyone there?’ he called against the wood.

  There was a movement on the stair below. He looked over the banister and saw an old woman peering up at him. ‘I’m trying to find Frau Kata,’ he told her.

  The old crone sucked her teeth and seemed to assess the taste of what she found there. Was this was the woman who looked after Kata’s daughter? ‘Frau Kata,’ he repeated.

  ‘She’s not here.’

  ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘She’s not here.’

  ‘Do you have any idea where she’s gone?’

  ‘She’s not here.’

  ‘But do you know where she’s gone?’

  The movement of the lips, the thoughtful assessment continued. The woman’s face was shrivelled, like one of those shrunken heads he had seen in the anthropological museum, the skin stretched tight across the cheekbones, the hair scraped up and knotted on the top of the head. ‘She’s not here,’ she repeated.

  He came down the stairs. As he approached, the woman backed into the open doorway to her own apartment, slipping behind the door and peering out at him. ‘You keep your distance,’ she said.

  ‘I just want to know where she is. Do you have any idea where she might have gone to?’ He was suddenly inspired. ‘I’m Marika’s uncle. You know Marika, don’t you? I’m her uncle. I’ve come to bring her a present.’

  But the old crone kept chewing on the morsel of whatever it was inside her shrivelled lips, peering at him through the crack in the doorway and repeating, ‘She’s gone away. She’s gone away.’

  Hopelessly he went down the stairs and back out into the street. The sulphurous smell of exhaust fumes tainted the air. On the Praterstrasse there was the roar of lorries and cars, the clatter and clang of trams. Pedestrians gathered on the island in the centre and moved across in herds, like people being driven to their fate by unseen forces. Where was Kata? He went round the corner to the Goldene Kugel and found one of the waiters he thought he recognised. Did he have any idea where Fraülein Kata was? But the man hadn’t seen her for some time. Weeks, he thought. No idea, no idea at all. He enquired at the bar but got the same response. ‘Don’t people phone for her?’ Viktor asked, but the barman only shrugged and turned away to serve another customer.

  Outside on the pavement he stood irresolutely for a while, then began to walk up Praterstrasse towards the railway station. The disproportionate city lay all around him, a city of faded glories and dying significance, a city with a decorative and frivolous surface but with dark secrets at its heart. The slogan Juden raus! was painted on a wall, along with a little stick figure hanging from a crudely painted scaffold. Elsewhere there was a black swastika daubed over a poster that showed a hammer and sickle. Above the roofs of the buildings he could see the arc of the Riesenrad turning slowly in the evening air. In the railway station he wrote a letter and posted it at the office from where he had phoned.

  My darling Kata, I have been to your flat and discovered that you have gone. Please contact me. Please don’t just abandon me.

  Then he wrote his telephone number, and signed the note, With love, Viktor.

  Coda

  ‘It was at the Sacher, darling. Where else?’ They were in the Café Zeman, amidst the chatter and the gossip, sitting at their favourite table where they could see and be seen.

  ‘And you arranged it all?’

  ‘A glorious plot, just like spies. The problem was getting her away from her companion. I’ve told you about her, haven’t I? Some dreadful woman with a moustache like a walrus and jaws like nutcrackers. So I waited for her in the café and as she and the walrus came in, I slipped out to the bathroom. That was the plan, that she was to meet me there. But she didn’t come. There I was, standing in the corridor for about half an hour and wondering whether to put plan B into action.’

  ‘Plan B?’

&n
bsp; ‘Rush in and push a Sachertorte in the walrus’s face and just grab Eva. Anyway, just as I’m about to make my move, out she comes, looking as pale as a ghost but many, many times more lovely. It seems she had had a stand-up row with the walrus. “I don’t care what orders my husband gave you, I’m going to have a piss all by myself!” That’s what she said apparently, with the whole café listening, can you imagine? Poor love, she was almost paralysed with fright. But so brave! So I grab her by the hand and off we go, down the corridor and out of the back entrance, imagining the walrus on our heels.’

  ‘Hanička, this is ridiculous.’

  ‘You think I’m making it up?’

  ‘When was all this?’

  ‘Three days ago. Darling, you knew I was going to Vienna. I told you.’

  ‘But you never told me you were going to meet Eva Mandl.’

  ‘I’m telling you now, darling. You know the back door of the Sacher? The one onto Maysedergasse?’

  ‘I’ve never used it.’

  ‘Of course you haven’t. But it’s there sure enough. I had a taxi waiting, with the engine running and the meter ticking over. A getaway car, just like in the films.’

  ‘You are making this up.’

  ‘I already had the stuff in the taxi. A black suit from Grünbaum and the dearest little pillbox hat with a veil from P&C Habig. We pulled the blinds down and Eva changed there and then. Can you imagine that? Eva Mandl half undressed in a taxi? I had to help her, just had to.’

  ‘Hanička, this is absurd!’

  ‘Liesi, it is true! By the time I’d got her to the Nordbahnhof I’d transformed her into the Merry Widow. No one would have recognised her behind her veil. And we had a private compartment booked on the train. The logic was that the first place they’d look would be the Westbahnhof for the Paris trains, but still we had ten minutes to wait, sitting there in the compartment with the blinds drawn. It felt like an execution chamber. And then finally the whistles blew, the train began to move. And Eva burst into tears and threw herself into my arms.’