The Glass Room

by Simon Mawer

  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.’

  Onyx

  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.

  ‘It’s well sealed underneath,’ von Abt reassured him. ‘Modern materials. We’re not living in the nineteenth century. And when we lay the pavement we’ll put a slope on it. There’s nothing to worry about.’

  ‘But still …’

  They looked round the other rooms, the bare spaces that would be bathrooms and bedrooms. Their voices echoed down the stairs and into the living room, the wide and empty expanse below. Canvas hung where the glass would go, casting the space in shadow. A plank lay abandoned on the floor. There was a bucket with remains of cement in the bottom, and a sheet of newspaper, the title Lidové Noviny plainly visible. The three of them walked round in the twilight, trying to picture the place as it would be, the new life that would be enacted there. Instead there was this concrete space, as large as a garage.

  ‘The partition will be here,’ von Abt said, standing in the middle and holding out his arms, ‘to divide the sitting area from the library area.’

  The partition was a matter of contention. What would the material be? ‘It must be onyx,’ von Abt had insisted when they had discussed the matter in Vienna some days earlier. Onyx seemed absurd, extravagant. I
t was a gemstone, a meretricious material, a thing of cameo brooches and decorative boxes. But then von Abt himself seemed absurd at times, with his dramatic flourishes and his talk of space and light, of volume and thrust. ‘I have considered alabaster and travertine, but have fallen for onyx. It will be the pièce de résistance.’

  He stood now in the shadows of the unfinished living space, and extolled the virtues of his idea, described the complex veining of the rock, the lucidity, the delicate colour of honey and gold. ‘The colour of a young girl’s hair,’ he said, glancing at Liesel. ‘The colour of your daughter’s hair.’

  Viktor looked at the two of them, sensing that small current of sexuality that travelled like a spark between them. The evidence was there plain enough, in the widening of her eyes behind her spectacles, in the faint opening of her lips as though to admit something shameful. He wondered about it not with jealousy but with a calm consideration of the possibilities of faithfulness and betrayal.

  ‘How much would it cost, this onyx?’

  Von Abt’s eloquence stopped. ‘Ah. The cost. The cost is, I am afraid, considerable.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Approximately fifteen thousand dollars. That is about—’

  ‘It is about a small fortune! My God! About half a million crowns. Enough to build an entire house.’

  Von Abt nodded. ‘But think how remarkable it will be, Herr Viktor.’

  ‘Certainly it will be remarkable. There are many people who possess onyx ashtrays. I don’t imagine there’s a single one with an onyx wall.’

  That was the end of the viewing, really, a sour note of cost intruding on the exercise of fantasy that was required to imagine the house as it would be, not as it was – a thing of light and reflection, not this dull box of grey concrete. They saw von Abt off on the Vienna train and returned to their turreted villa in silence.

  ‘You’re angry about Rainer’s proposals, aren’t you?’ Liesel said when they were in the sitting room after dinner.

  He shrugged. ‘They seem extravagant at times. It’s our money he’s spending, not his own.’

  ‘The onyx wall, you mean? Viktor, do you know what “onyx” means? It’s the Greek for a fingernail. It’s Venus’s fingernail, isn’t that wonderful? The fingernail of the goddess of love.’

  ‘Did von Abt tell you that?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, he did.’

  ‘It’s an inordinately expensive fingernail.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so dull, Viktor. If we are going to do something wonderful, then we must make sacrifices.’

  Didn’t she understand? She lived in her protected world, along with Hana Hanáková and her other friends, and they talked about their painters and their musicians and their actors and actresses, and meanwhile the outside world battled with recession and political unrest. When would the one world impinge on the other? And what kind of shock would they feel then?

  He got up and put his book aside. ‘I’m going to bed.’

  ‘Darling, have I made you angry?’

  ‘Of course you haven’t.’

  But she had. She came up to bed later and he lay in the darkness, listening to her as she went to her bathroom to wash, and then crossed the corridor to her room. There was a thin baby’s cry and then silence. She would be feeding Ottilie. Although she sometimes did it openly in front of him, the process always seemed alien, something private between mother and child. Her large, milky breasts were quite changed from the small paps he had once stroked and kissed, indeed her whole body seemed different now, a thing designed for mothering rather than sex. The baby made strange grunting noises as she fed, like a pig suckling. And there wasn’t much difference, was there? A sow feeding her litter, a woman with a baby. Animals both, with animal needs and compulsions. He lay in the darkness and thought of Liesel and motherhood and the new house. It was in this dark and womblike house – the Castle, he called it – that Liesel had conceived their child. What would be conceived in the new house? Other children, perhaps. And what else?

  His mind wandered, in and out of sleep. The onyx wall, he thought of the onyx wall. A fingernail, Venus’s fingernail. He thought of fingernails – Liesel’s, which were long and painted red, and others which were blunt and uncoloured and bitten down to the quick, holding between them a cigarette.

  ‘Have you got a light?’

  Naively he had paused to answer her.

  ‘A light,’ she repeated. ‘D’you have a light?’ There was an air of impatience about her manner, as though she was hurrying to an appointment. All around him was the fairground noise of the Prater, the laughter of children, the calls of stallholders; ahead of him the Nordbahnhof and the train home; and in front of him this woman – smaller than Liesel, with quick, intelligent features and a slight sheen to her complexion – holding an unlit cigarette between her fingers. Her eyes were blue, so pale that they gave the curious illusion of transparency, as though you were looking through them and seeing the sky.

  He fumbled for his lighter and watched as she bent towards the flame. She wore a grey cloche hat and her hair was dark and cut short, not cropped as severely as Liesel’s and her friends’, but short enough to be a statement that she was a modern woman. A Slav, he fancied. There was no more than a smudge of rouge on her cheeks but her lips were a blood-red arabesque. Certainly she was pretty – a neat, precise prettiness – but she wasn’t in other respects remarkable. She might have been a maid out for a walk in the park, dressed up for her day off in a narrow knee-length skirt and a white blouse beneath her neat little jacket. There was a brooch pinned on the lapel, a lump of amber like a boiled sweet.

  She straightened up and blew smoke away. ‘Can I do anything for you then?’

  He hesitated. There in the park, with the Riesenrad, the Giant Wheel, looming over them, he considered what she had said, while she looked around at the crowd, as though to see if anything more interesting was in the offing. She drew on the cigarette in short, sharp snatches, as though she wasn’t really used to smoking. Maybe she was just about to move away. Maybe she had seen another possibility.

  ‘Yes, perhaps you can.’

  ‘All right, then. Where d’you want to go?’

  Why had he not merely dismissed her and gone on to the station to catch the afternoon train back to Město? Curiosity, certainly, and something more, some quality of youth that he saw in her and, incongruously enough, innocence. But many other things. Plain sexuality, of course. The mystery of the unknown. And intangible things: the set of her head, the precise curve of cheek and eyebrow, her gentleness of expression and the quiet amusement that he saw behind her anxious look. ‘What about a ride on the wheel?’

  She seemed startled. ‘That thing? You won’t get me up there.’

  ‘Are you afraid? Why are women always afraid of such things?’

  It was the mention of her gender that did it. He could see it in her expression. She had been about to shrug her shoulders and move on, but now she paused and regarded him carefully, head on one side. ‘That’s not true. Women aren’t afraid. We just have real fears to deal with, not the silly fears that men dream up.’ There was a quality to her answer that startled him, a sharp edge of intelligence that he had not expected.

  ‘Come on then. Prove it.’

  The idea seemed to amuse her. ‘All right.’

  They had to join a short queue. There were some families in front, and a young couple, and then it was their turn. The great wheel, its circumference rising two hundred feet above, wound round and presented a cabin to them, its door held open by the attendant. For a moment it appeared that the group following, two women with half a dozen children between them, might crowd in behind but at the last moment the attendant held them back. Viktor and the young woman stepped alone into the empty cabin.

  The box rocked gently, like a boat at the quayside. She tottered against him and there was that moment of unconsidered contact, his arms holding her, her hair against his face. She made a hasty apology and gripped th
e rail to look out of the window as the gondola shifted forwards and began to climb. ‘D’you know the last time I did this I was about ten years old?’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Fifteen years ago?’

  ‘You don’t look that old.’

  She smiled slyly. ‘And what about you?’

  The park was shrinking below them, the skyline unfolding. A distant view of hills. He thought of the view across Město from the new house; and he thought of Liesel. ‘It’s none of your business.’

  ‘Please yourself.’

  The cabin swayed gently in the breeze. Standing side by side, they looked at the view and seemed to consider their options. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  ‘Kata. And yours?’

  ‘Viktor.’

  Should he have given a false name? Was Kata itself false? What was it really? Katarina, something like that? She was, she told him, Hungarian not Slav, although she came from Slovakia; but then there were many Hungarians living across the border in the new country, weren’t there? Just another group of people cut off from their origins by politicians drawing lines on maps. ‘Like you,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Aren’t you Czechish?’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  Again that knowing smile. ‘You learn things.’

  The wheel rose to its climax and tipped over into the descent. She gave a little gasp and gripped the rail tightly for a moment, then turned to him and laughed. Her laughter was delightful, a bubble of innocence, as though she had never before picked a man up in the Prater. ‘Where do you want to go then?’ she asked. ‘You got a hotel? I can recommend one if you like.’

  ‘That’d be fine. I’ll have to send a telegram first.’

  ‘To your wife?’

  He shrugged, watching the world slowly rising to meet them, the Haupt-Allee with its strolling couples, its bicycle riders, its running children and dogs.

  ‘Don’t worry, most men are like that,’ she said, as though talking about the victims of some debilitating but non-lethal disease. ‘It’s just the way things are.’