The Glass Room Read online

  There was something shrill about her, as though the story of excitement and plotting was thinly painted over a deep fracture. ‘Can you imagine? A whole hour alone with Eva Mandl in a compartment! Tell me, what do you think is the most beautiful thing about her? Of the things that one can see in polite company, of course. I’m not talking about what she showed to cinema audiences, although heaven knows, I could. Her mouth or her eyes? It’s one or the other, isn’t it? I still can’t make up my mind. Most people say her eyes, but I am inclined towards her mouth. The way her upper lip comes down at the very summit of its curve in a delicious little pout. I touched it with my tongue and she gave a little cry, just as though I had touched her piča.’

  Startled by the language, people at the nearest table looked round.

  ‘Hana! For goodness’ sake, not here!’

  ‘Where then, darling? In private? With you?’ Her laugh was as brittle as overblown glass. ‘Dumme Dinger?’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘But it’s true, isn’t it?’

  Liesel began to gather up her things. ‘Please stop this nonsense. Let’s pay the bill and go.’

  ‘Do you know what she told me?’

  ‘You actually talked?’

  ‘Don’t be spiteful. It was a confession, really. She told me that when she was at finishing school in Lucerne she was seduced by her roommate. She was a mere fifteen years old, and this older girl slipped into her bed one night and showed her what to do. Georgie, that was the girl’s name. Deliciously androgynous, don’t you think? Quite an adept she was, apparently. And Eva was a quick learner.’

  Liesel left some coins on the table and made for the door. ‘Please Hana. I don’t like you in this mood.’

  ‘The mood, my dear, is misery.’

  They went out into the park, Hana’s arm through Liesel’s. Other couples strolled in the sunshine. A nanny pushed two little children in a pram.

  ‘You really are impossible at times, Hanička. Why can’t we just be good friends, like we always were?’

  ‘We are good friends. You know that. But you know we are more than that.’

  ‘Special friends, then. Particular friends. But I have obligations, to my children, to my husband.’

  ‘Obligations sound awfully dull. What about love, Liesi?’

  ‘Love as well.’

  ‘You don’t sound very certain.’

  Liesel laughed. Once, she had felt childish and naive in Hana’s company, but things had changed. Now Hana had become a kind of supplicant. ‘When you’ve had two children things change. There’s a different kind of love.’

  ‘And your love for me? You do love me, don’t you? Tell me that you do.’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘So why can’t you find joy in it? Tell Viktor. Be honest with him.’

  ‘He wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘He would understand more than you think. Look at Oskar.’

  ‘Does Oskar know about me? For God’s sake, Hana!’

  ‘Of course he doesn’t, darling. He knows lots but he doesn’t know about you. You are my one big secret.’

  They walked on in the direction of the Künstlerhaus. Apparently there was a photographic exhibition that they just had to see – Fotoskupina pěti, the group was called, Photo group 5. Why 5? Maybe there were just five of them. Surrealists. They made you look at objects from a completely different viewpoint: a hand became something of great mystery, a mirror became a philosophical statement, an egg was the birth of the whole world. That was what Hana said. She squeezed Liesel’s arm. ‘What would you say if you found out that Viktor had a mistress, Liesi? I mean, no threat to you. Just a woman whom he saw occasionally—’

  ‘Please Hana, must we talk about this kind of thing?’

  ‘But how would you feel?’

  ‘I don’t even think about things like that. Why should I? I’ve got my family and my friends and that is all I need. I don’t want great emotion.’

  ‘You haven’t answered the question.’

  ‘I’m not going to. I once asked Viktor if he had slept with you, do you know that?’ Why did she even mention it? Why didn’t she just let the conversation die? ‘It was when I was ill, shortly after Martin’s birth. You and he were alone together a lot of the time.’

  Hana laughed. ‘And had he slept with me?’

  ‘He said he hadn’t.’

  ‘That’s what I remember too. But would you hate either of us if we had done so?’

  ‘I don’t think I would. Not hate. But I wouldn’t have been happy.’

  ‘You’re being – what’s the word? – neupřímná. Oh, doppelsinnig, something like that. You know what I mean.’

  Liesel didn’t understand. The Czech evaded her, while the German escaped Hana. Quite suddenly, over the word ‘insincere’, they no longer understood each other. ‘Please don’t talk like this, Hanička. Please. I know what you mean and I know it doesn’t make sense, it’s a different thing. Why should feelings always be logical or rational?’

  ‘Viktor would say that they must be.’

  ‘But I’m not Viktor. I love him, but I’m not him. I love him and I love you, but I’m neither of you. And I don’t love you when you are talking like this.’

  Beside the art gallery there was a war veteran begging, holding a tin and waiting mutely for money. His right trouser leg was pinned up to his waist and the space relinquished by his missing limb was startling, as though he had performed some kind of conjuring trick, a thing involving mirrors. Now you see it, now you don’t. Liesel found a crown in her purse and dropped it into his bowl. The man registered nothing, no nod of thanks, no glance upwards at his benefactor, nothing. What if Benno had returned from the war like that, ruined physically and mentally but still alive? Some kinds of life were worse than death, weren’t they?

  They came round the front of the art gallery. The building was a confection of the Vienna Secession, all sinuous window mouldings and exhortatory epigraphs on the walls. Dům umění announced a noticeboard, but the frieze above the portal still said Künstlerhaus and still celebrated the jubilee of Emperor Franz Josef. They paid for their tickets and went inside. The photographs in the exhibition were strange and disorientating. One was a close-up of a single female eye. It watched you wherever you went. Then there was an abstract photograph in which the artist had apparently used the photographic process itself to create a swirling pattern of shade and shape. Another picture showed a female doll, the kind of thing Ottilie played with. But this doll was naked and starkly lit, with its head broken off, and there was machinery coming out through its neck, clockwork machinery, cogwheels and springs.

  ‘I haven’t told you the end of my adventure with Eva Mandl,’ Hana said as they stood looking at this image.

  ‘I’m not sure I want to know.’

  ‘Oh but you do, darling. She spent the night in my bed – that was my reward.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘To try and make you jealous. And the next morning – that was just yesterday. It seems an age. Anyway, the next morning I put her on the train to Prague. Paris, that’s where she wanted to go. I offered to go with her but she said no. She’ll write, she said she’ll write.’

  ‘What does she intend to do?’

  Hana laughed bitterly. ‘She wants to become a movie star.’

  Anschluss

  The radio is on in every bar, in every café, in every living room across the city. Rumour comes quicker than the news broadcasts, conveyed on its own mysterious ether – the Austrian army has fought back against the invasion, hundreds of deaths have been reported, there are riots in Vienna where the Communists have taken to the barricades. There is fighting in the streets between National Socialists and the police. Almost as quickly come the denials: there is no unrest, the Austrian chancellor Schuschnigg has ordered the army not to resist, there must be no shedding of German blood.

  The next day the newspapers print photographs of troops crossing the b
order, and a line of German police marching into some quaint Tyrolean town with villagers raising their arms in the Hitler salute. One picture shows a peasant woman in tears. The German papers claim that they are tears of joy; the Czech papers opt for tears of despair.

  The same morning they tune in to Austrian radio and hear the great sea-sound of the crowd at the Heldenplatz in Vienna, the drums beating and the bands playing and Hitler’s voice crackling out through the quiet and calm of the Glass Room, announcing Anschluss, union. Austria is no longer an independent republic: overnight it has become an eastern province of the greater German Reich, Österreich become Ostmark.

  Where, Viktor wonders, is Kata now?

  ‘It is simply illegal,’ he says. He sounds absurd saying that, absurd and impotent. But more than that, he knows that he sounds absurd as he paces up and down the Glass Room waving the latest edition of Lidové Noviny and talking about the treaties of Versailles and St Germain. Both those accords seem like something out of the history books, like Magna Carta or the Edict of Worms: things that apply to different people in different places a long time ago. ‘If he’s allowed to do this, what the devil will happen next?’

  What happens, like torrential rain after the first crack of thunder, is the arrival of the refugees. They cross the southern border, from Vienna and the other cities, a ragbag collection of men, women and children with whatever possessions they can carry with them. They flood into the country and the city, some by train, some by car, some tramping along the roads pushing handcarts and humping suitcases. The flood runs down streets and amongst the houses, trickling through the alleyways, settling where it can into pools of misery and fear. You cannot go into the city without seeing the human debris washed up against doors and deposited on street corners, the flotsam and jetsam of the new Europe.

  ‘We must do something for them,’ Viktor says. The expanse of the Glass Room is a reproach, a space where the refugees won’t come, won’t find shelter, won’t be able to unroll their blankets and sleep.

  ‘What can we do?’ Liesel asks. ‘This is a problem for governments not individuals. How can we help?’

  ‘It is up to individuals to stir their governments into action.’

  Outside in the garden, oblivious to all this, the children are playing. Ottilie is directing Martin in some complex game. Viktor can hear their voices like the chattering of swallows. Ottilie is clearly the wife of their little family, instructing Martin what to do and how to do it. They have her toy pram with them and Martin’s pedal car. But the pedal car won’t go well on the wet grass.

  He turns to Liesel. She is reading a magazine, one of those dreadful fashion things she borrows from Hana, a catalogue of attenuated women with bored expressions and no breasts. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘I think we may have to consider going ourselves.’

  She looks up. It is strange how he has never become used to her looks, her features, the elongated bone structure and long nose and compressed mouth. Every time he looks at her he thinks of the first time they met, the first glance, the first small stir of attraction. ‘Going? Where?’

  ‘It sounds like running away, doesn’t it? But I don’t see any alternative if things get much worse. I mean, if you look at the situation—’

  The magazine lies open on her lap, showing women wearing peignoirs and negligées. ‘Viktor dear, what are you talking about? Where exactly are we going?’

  She hasn’t understood. He always expects her to understand what he is talking about and usually she does. Usually she follows the flights of his mind. ‘I mean leaving the house, the city, the country, Liesel. I’m talking about leaving all this just as these wretched refugees have left their homes.’ He looks round as though to emphasise the point: all this, the Glass Room, the quiet and the measured, the ineffable balance and rationality of it all. ‘I mean emigrating. We might have to emigrate.’

  Now surely she has understood, but she still hasn’t said anything. The magazine still lies open on her lap, displaying the languid women.

  ‘At least until all this blows over.’

  ‘Blows over?’

  He shrugs. ‘Who knows? Someone might shoot him. He might have a heart attack – God knows, he looks likely to when you hear him ranting and raving in the way he does. But you can’t rely on something like that, can you? We should at least make plans. Just in case.’

  She glances down, and for a moment it seems as though she might continue reading the magazine, but then she looks up again. ‘In case of what?’

  ‘In case of war, my dear. Invasion. By the way things are going the next target is going to be this country. Look at what’s happening in the border territories already.’

  ‘Are you serious about this, Viktor?’

  ‘Would I joke about it?’

  She closes the magazine. There’s the faint slap of glossy paper. ‘But how could we leave? This is where we belong. This is our home. We don’t know anywhere else. Oh, I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to give me some proverb or other: home is where the heart is, something like that. But home is also this house, this city, our family and friends. And what about the business? How can you suggest just abandoning that?’

  He shrugs. ‘I’m a Jew, Liesel, whether I like it or not. Ottilie and Martin are Jews – or half-breeds or whatever they call them nowadays. It’s not by choice. It’s a matter of fact. You can choose not to be a Bolshevik or a homosexual or most of the other things they hate, but you cannot choose not to be a Jew. They decide for you. Jews can’t hold down professional jobs, they can’t own businesses, they pay extra taxes, they can’t marry gentiles, they can’t even visit gentiles in their houses. They get arrested and imprisoned on any pretext whatever. What’s going to happen next? Compulsory divorce for people of mixed marriages? How about that? Jewish children banned from schools? Jews thrown out of their homes? God knows.’

  ‘But all that’s in Germany, not here.’

  ‘Don’t be naive, Liesel. It’s Austria as well now. The Nazis are no more than fifty kilometres away from us here in our nice safe house, and in between them and us are the border territories – which are already German anyway.’ He turns and looks out of the great windows again, as though searching for the first signs of their coming. But nothing has changed. The children are still playing, the city is still there, the air is still smudged with the smoke from a thousand fires. Nothing has changed and yet everything has changed. ‘I don’t want us to be in a panic to get out like all those wretched people from Austria. I don’t want to be grabbing things into a suitcase at the last moment. I don’t want my family to be like that.’

  ‘So where are you planning to go? Not Palestine, for goodness’ sake.’

  ‘Of course not Palestine. Switzerland. I’ve been moving funds …’

  ‘You’ve been what?’

  He looks ahead through the window. What has happened to Kata? He wonders this often. All he knows is that fifteen thousand Schillings were moved out of his Viennese bank account. Nothing more. She just vanished. ‘Advance planning,’ he says to Liesel. ‘Never be caught out without a plan, never be caught out by the market. I’ve been making arrangements. It’s only now that it seemed right to mention it to you.’

  Encounter

  ‘I suppose it’s not unusual for our part of the world, is it?’ Oskar is saying. ‘Empires come and go, countries come and go, people come and go.’ His bald head gleams in the pale lights of the Glass Room. He is sitting in the front row of chairs, with Hana and Liesel on one side and Viktor on the other. Around them people are taking their seats, the Coordin ating Committee for Refugees, a committee of committees, an assembly of the concerned and the self-satisfied, the do-gooders and the worriers, the selfless and the self- serving.

  ‘Look at our own little statelet,’ Oskar continues, ‘carved out of central Europe like an intricate piece of folk art. Now you see it, now you don’t. Here one moment and’ – he clicks his fingers – ‘gone the next.’

  ‘For God’
s sake, Oskar,’ Hana snaps. ‘Have a little more tact.’

  ‘Ah, tact. Like that tactful fellow, Herr Hitler.’

  Businessmen, lawyers, academics take their places. Clerics of various persuasions and religions nod cautiously when they meet, like former enemies eyeing each other across recently dismantled barricades. The talk dies away and the chairman of the committee gets to his feet and begins his address.

  ‘So what sort of stunt is this?’ Oskar whispers loudly.

  Hana tries to hush him to silence. ‘They’ve brought some typical refugees to speak to us.’

  ‘What’s a typical refugee?’

  ‘For God’s sake shut up and listen.’

  Fiddling with his pince-nez, nervously shuffling his papers, anxiously eyeing the bald man in the front row, the chairman endeavours to explain: there is the need for shelter, the need for food, the problem of schooling for displaced children and medical treatment for the sick and care for the elderly, and underneath it all, the pressing need for money. ‘But the intention of this meeting is to try to bring the plight of the refugees home to us all, make their personal, human tragedy part of our own lives. We have decided to introduce you to some witnesses of these terrible events, people who can tell you in their own words what has happened, to share with us the reality that has unfolded in Austria. Perhaps like that we can take these tragic occurrences out of the realm of the newspaper and the newsreel and into our own hearts.’

  There is coming and going round the committee table. The secretary, a middle-aged woman with the manner of a schoolteacher, whispers something in the chairman’s ear. ‘I’m afraid there’s been a bit of a delay,’ the chairman explains. ‘But they’re coming, they’re coming.’

  ‘A nonsense,’ says Oskar. ‘A refugee’s just you and me. There’s nothing to see.’

  ‘Their story,’ Liesel says. ‘They want to tell their story.’

  ‘Their story is anybody’s story. That’s not the point. The point is, they are here and the government has got to do something about them.’