The Glass Room Read online

  Eventually the refugees appear. They are ushered in from the dining area – presumably they’ve been brought down through the kitchens – three adults and three children shuffling round the partition under the direction of the secretary of the committee. With their entry, the Glass Room has taken on something of the quality of a theatre, a small studio theatre of the kind that has become fashionable for avant-garde productions, where the audience sits within touching distance of the actors. No elevated stage, no proscenium arch, just the performance about to begin in the space between the dining area and the door from the stairs. ‘Stand there,’ the secretary tells them. ‘And you, yes, you, go over there.’

  The refugees obey dumbly, confused by their sudden appearance before an audience. There is a middle-aged couple, with between them a ten-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old, bespectacled girl. Their clothes are crumpled, as though they might have spent the night sitting in a third-class railway compartment. Maybe they have. One lens of the girl’s spectacles is cracked, giving her a squint-eyed look. Beside this family of four there is a single woman with her daughter. The daughter is about eight years old, a bright blonde girl in a shabby floral dress. She blushes at the sight of so many people gawping at her. The mother seems to be in her early thirties. She is small and neat, with a sharp, pretty face. Men observe her with close interest. But as she looks back at the audience her expression is one of faint disdain. And those eyes, as pale as the sky at the horizon.

  Kata.

  The whole essence of the Glass Room is reason. That is what Viktor thinks, anyway. For him it embodies the pure rationality of a Greek classical temple, the austere beauty of a perfect composition, the grace and balance of a painting by Mondrian. There are no disturbing curves to upset the rectilinear austerity of the space. There is nothing convolute, involute, awkward or complex. Here everything can be understood as a matter of proportion and dimension. Yet there, standing mere feet away from him, is Kata.

  Her eyes, those transparent eyes, move across the faces in the audience. When they reach him her expression changes fractionally. Is there now a glimpse of fear in her look? He shifts uncomfortably in his chair. The secretary is introducing her guests: a Mr and Mrs Adolf Neumann and their two children, Frederick and Sophia; a Mrs Kalman and her daughter Marika. Mr Neumann is a shopkeeper in the 2nd district. Mrs Kalman is a widow, also from the 2nd district. She has been working in the fashion trade.

  ‘A seamstress,’ Kata says. Her voice is quiet but clear, unfettered by any self-consciousness. ‘When I can get the work,’ she adds, looking directly at Viktor. It is the most open look he has ever received, something between pleading and apology, as though she has, for a moment, opened up her soul to him just as she opened up her body. The same wondrous, glistening vulnerability. ‘I had a bit of money put aside in the bank, but I suppose that’s gone by now—’

  ‘My shop was ransacked,’ Herr Neumann interrupts. That’s what it seems to Viktor, that Kata’s words have been pushed aside. He looks round to see if others in the audience feel the same, but everyone is merely watching the small drama revealing itself on stage, an act from the theatre of the absurd, a dialogue of the dispossessed.

  ‘Windows smashed, everything thrown out on the street. They took things, of course – jewellery, silver, anything they could lay their hands on. The SS, it was, the Black Shirts. They made us go down on our knees to pick up the mess with our bare hands. And then we had to scrub the pavement clean.’ As he talks his wife begins to weep silently. The man breaks off his account to say something to her. They are not words of comfort but words of admonition. ‘Don’t cry in front of all these people! Pull yourself together, woman.’

  Kata seizes the moment to speak for herself. She talks about how the place where she was working – ‘It was Jewish, see?’ – was invaded one morning by uniformed men. They were Austrians, you could tell that. Uniformed, with armbands bearing the Hakenkreuz, but Austrians clearly enough. Raus, raus! they screamed. Out, out! Women were beaten up – ‘There were only women there’ – and the machines were wrecked. Somehow she managed to get away unhurt. She ran straight to her daughter’s school, snatched Marika from her class and together they went back to their flat. The Nazis were already at work on the ground floor of the building. There was a butcher’s shop and they’d smashed the window and thrown everything out into the street, carcasses and all. ‘Someone was pissing on the mess,’ she says.

  There’s a sharp intake of breath at her language. Pissing. The word shocks the audience more than anything else, more than the fact that women have been beaten up or that the butcher was lying there in the gutter, his throat cut with one of his own knives. Pissing on the mess.

  ‘Somehow we got past the soldiers and ran inside. They were laughing, I remember that. They were laughing and calling as we grabbed whatever we could and stuffed it into two suitcases. Then we went back down to the street. One of the men in uniform shouted at us. “Are you Yids as well?” Something like that. But he didn’t try and stop us. I just grabbed my daughter’s hand and we ran all the way to the railway station.’

  It was a decision that was no decision. An instant of caprice. The trains were all going north, to the border. They were packed and Kata and Marika had to queue for six hours before they found a place.

  After the meeting people mill about the six witnesses. Liesel talks to Kata, stooping towards the smaller woman like royalty talking to someone in the crowd, bestowing gracious sympathy and a kindly ear. To Viktor the conjunction seems impossible – Liesel talking to Kata, two women from worlds separated by an unbridgeable gulf, here together beneath the white ceiling of the Glass Room.

  Kata looks up and catches his eye. Liesel follows the direction of her glance. ‘Viktor, come and meet Frau Kalman.’

  He walks towards them slowly. It has all the absurd logic of nightmare, when the things you do are outrageous and yet no one takes any notice. It is outrageous to be reaching out and feeling Kata’s small hand in his, yet no one notices. He raises it to within a mere centimetre of his lips. It is clear, isn’t it, that he holds it a fraction longer than would seem proper? Surely it is obvious that they share a glance that is theirs alone and excludes the whole of the rest of the world. Yet no one notices. Her hand slips away. The contact was fleeting. He wants to keep hold of her. He wants – in a dream world it would happen – to pull her towards him and take her into his arms and still have no one notice.

  ‘Frau Kalman and her daughter have been put up in a school gymnasium,’ Liesel explains to Viktor. ‘I suggested that we might do something for her.’

  ‘Do something?’

  ‘Help them in some way.’

  He hesitates. He should be in command of the situation, lord in his own house, the man who always has a plan. But he isn’t. He feels confused and embarrassed, concerned that matters are out of his control. Control is what he craves.

  Kata looks at him with that steady gaze. ‘The lady tells me that this is your house. I never imagined …’ Her words are poised on the brink of revelation. What did she never imagine? When did she never imagine? ‘… that there could be such a beautiful place.’

  ‘I’m glad you like it.’

  ‘It’s modern, isn’t it? Very modern. I like modern things. Modern is the future, isn’t it?’ She looks round for her daughter. ‘Come here, Mari. Come and meet these kind people.’

  For Viktor it is another dream moment, one amongst many. Will Marika recognise him? But she seems a different creature altogether from the girl he glimpsed on that last occasion, when she opened the door to her mother’s room. The child has become a girl, embarrassed by the attention of the adults. She keeps her eyes down and shuffles her feet and says something that may be hello. Liesel crouches down to her and tips up her chin. ‘What a pretty girl you are, Marika. Are you happy here? Are people looking after you and your mummy?’ She glances up at Kata. ‘She takes after you, doesn’t she? But she hasn’t got your eyes.’

  ‘S
he got them from her father.’

  ‘Her father?’

  ‘He died.’

  ‘Don’t you have any other family?’

  Kata shrugs. ‘I haven’t seen them for years. I was the black sheep who ran away to the big city.’

  Liesel turns to Viktor. ‘I thought of the chata. What do you think?’

  He stares at her, his mind blank. ‘The chata? What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s just a hut really,’ Liesel explains to Kata. ‘We used it as a kind of hideaway when we were children but when I had scarlet fever as a child I actually stayed in it with a nurse. So that Benno wouldn’t catch it.’

  ‘Benno?’

  ‘Benno was my brother.’ She straightens up and grasps Viktor’s arm. ‘Why not the chata? There’s even a cooker, or at least there used to be. And a bathroom of course, but only with a shower. The place is too small to turn round in but you’d manage for the time being.’

  The absurd dream continues: Liesel is suggesting this. She seems to like this woman in her dowdy clothes, the refugee who yet hasn’t acquired the manner of a refugee, the listlessness and the air of defeat that seems to infect most of them. Liesel is fired with enthusiasm and looking round to tell Hana, and taking Kata’s and Marika’s hands, as though by grasping their hands she has grasped an opportunity of doing something concrete for these people. ‘You’ll be your own mistress while you sort yourselves out. And I’m sure we can find you some work. I mean, a dressmaker is always in demand. What do you think, Viktor?’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  Kata’s transparent eyes are turned on him, letting the sky into the room as clearly as the glass windows themselves. ‘It seems too much. We’re only two out of thousands. Why should we get special treatment?’

  ‘What do you think, Viktor?’

  Insensible to the fate of thousands, Viktor looks out through the windows into the garden. The silver birch is still bare after the winter, but there is the most delicate dusting of pale green over the tips of its branches: a pollen of new growth. Beyond it the lawn slopes down towards the rhododendrons. And beyond that, among the bushes, is the chata. He tries to breathe in. Something seems to be suffocating him, starving him of air. ‘You’d have to ask your parents.’

  ‘I’ll ring them straight away, and then we can go down and see it. Just wait there.’

  Excited by the prospect of doing something other than merely talking about matters, Liesel goes to make the call. For a moment Viktor is standing there alone with Kata and her daughter. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘You want me to go, don’t you?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t.’ Someone comes up to say goodbye. The group is breaking up. ‘Viktor,’ Hana calls, ‘there’s someone you must talk to.’

  ‘I’m busy,’ he replies, turning back to Kata. ‘Let me show you the garden. You may be able to get a glimpse of the place. It’s very small. Just a summerhouse really.’

  Hana reaches out and touches his arm as they go past. ‘There’s a problem here that you might be able to solve.’

  ‘I’m just going to show Frau Kalman and her daughter the garden. We’ll only be a moment.’

  They go out through the dining area onto the terrace. It’s a kind of escape, a sudden rush of freedom. Like waking from the claustrophobia of a dream into a world of normality and logic: the cool of the outside air, the hard touch of the concrete steps that go down to the lawn. Marika runs ahead as though she too has been released from some kind of stricture.

  ‘She didn’t recognise me,’ Viktor says.

  ‘I don’t know. She’s a secretive girl. Keeps her thoughts to herself.’

  A breeze shifts the branches of the birch, a cool breath of spring after the heat of the Glass Room. Viktor wants to say a dozen things, dangerous things, the kind of things that leave you open and vulnerable. But he finds only something banal. ‘I didn’t know you were Jewish.’

  ‘I didn’t know you made motor cars. There’s a lot we didn’t know about each other, isn’t there? Landauer, for God’s sake.’ She glances at him and there’s that look in her eye, and for the first time a smile at the corners of her mouth. ‘But I did know you were Jewish.’

  Her words and her glance evoke a small rise of anticipation. Before he can say anything Marika calls, ‘Look, Mutti, a hideout!’ She has gone in amongst the bushes and found traces of Ottilie’s presence amongst the rhododendrons, things that she has taken there to make a house: a couple of old pots, a toy pram but no baby in it, a bucket.

  ‘It’s the children,’ Viktor explains.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘With their nanny. Where did you go? I went to look for you at your flat but there was no one there, and no one seemed to know anything about you. Where the hell did you go?’

  ‘With your fifteen thousand Schillings, you mean?’

  ‘I don’t mean that.’

  ‘There’s a path through the bushes!’ Marika calls. She’s there amongst the shadows and the branches, a small, white-limbed elf.

  ‘Come back, Mari! You’ll get dirty.’

  ‘You haven’t told me what happened.’

  Kata ducks into the shadows of the rhododendrons, following Marika. ‘Where the hell has she gone?’

  He goes after her, following her stooped figure. ‘It’s quite safe. You can see the chata. Just the roof.’

  Kata peers, crouching to look through the leaves. He touches her waist, holds her for a moment. That firm waist, those hips that seemed surprisingly full when she was naked. She moves out of his grasp. ‘Please.’

  And then he makes his confession, his sacrifice, a deliberate demonstration of his weakness. ‘I’ve thought about you every moment of every day since we last saw each other. I know it’s idiotic, but it’s true. And now you’re here …’ He looks back. Liesel has appeared on the terrace looking blindly over the garden, calling his name. She can’t see them, of course she can’t see them, not without her spectacles.

  ‘Marika, come here at once!’ Kata says sharply. The girl stops, arrested by her mother’s tone. ‘Come out here. There’s no time for this. We’ve got to go.’ She holds out her hand to take the girl’s. The moment is over. They step out of the shadows and into the pale afternoon sunlight, blinking up at the house.

  ‘We’re here,’ he calls. ‘We were trying to spot the chata.’

  Liesel runs down the steps. She’s a girl again, excited by her new idea; a large clumsy girl running down the lawn towards her husband and the dowdy woman with her little daughter. ‘It’s fine, Mutti says it’s fine. She says it would be an act of Christian charity.’

  Chata

  She’s there. He doesn’t see her, but he knows that she is there. Down through the garden, through the shadows of the rhododendrons, following the sinuous path that Ottilie has made right to the fence that delineates their garden from that of Liesel’s parents’ house below. She’s there.

  He doesn’t see her but he senses her, smells her almost, her scent coming on the air like the smell of spring, something crisp and fresh mingled with the damp perfume of moss and leaf mould. Standing at the windows of the Glass Room he draws on his cigarette and looks out on the view and wonders whether, climbing up the slope behind the chata, she might be able to catch a glimpse of him, and if she does, what does she think? And if she doesn’t, the question still remains: what does she think?

  ‘I’ll go down and see how she’s settling in,’ Liesel suggests. ‘Do you want to come with me?’

  He blows smoke out in a thin stream. ‘It’s all right. She’s your guest.’

  ‘I think perhaps,’ she says, ‘that I might take Ottilie to play with her little girl. What was her name?’

  ‘I don’t recall.’

  ‘Maria, that was it.’

  ‘I think it was Marika.’

  ‘Yes, Marika. I think it would do Ottilie good, to see how others less fortunate than her live. What do you think?’

  ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘But not
as an exercise in social education, for God’s sake. Just to make friends.’

  ‘Of course.’ So she calls Ottilie down, and the two of them go out onto the terrace together and make their way down the garden.

  Watching them cross the lawn Viktor contemplates chance. It is nothing else. The coincidence might seem some kind of predestination but he knows that it is not so – it is pure caprice. You can call it malicious if you like but in fact it is neutral. Things just happen. One country occupies another; people flee, scatter across the countryside, some here, some there, like thrown dice. Contingency. One fetches up amongst thousands at the railway station at Město; helpers try and organise them; do-gooders do good; and there she is. What was one chance in a million suddenly becomes a certainty. Because it has happened.

  And life goes on. That is the astonishing thing. As normal. Streams are an obvious metaphor – currents, turbulence, dark depths beneath the surface wavelets, drowned bodies out of sight amongst the mud and the weeds. The possibilities of metaphor are almost limitless.

  ‘There’s a piano recital tomorrow evening,’ Liesel tells him a few days later when he’s sitting in the library, reading the newspaper. A radio is on but for the moment there is no news, just some discussion about gardening. When is the best time to take cuttings from fuchsias? It seems absurd to be talking about fuchsias when the world is falling to pieces. ‘Oh?’

  ‘Hana has got us tickets. That Kaprálová girl, you remember? Kundera is giving the première of one of her works. Variations on something or other.’

  ‘They are always variations on something or other. Must we go? I suppose we must.’

  ‘Hana tells me she’s trying to renew her scholarship, to get back to Paris.’

  ‘Hana is?’

  ‘You’re not paying attention, are you? Kaprálová. Vitulka. You know she got that scholarship to study in Paris. You remember. Now she’s trying to get it renewed.’