The Glass Room

by Simon Mawer

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She’s not here. You can leave a message if you like.’

  ‘I wanted to see her this evening.’

  ‘I don’t know if she’ll be around. You come round and she might get a look at you. To see whether she likes what she sees.’

  ‘This evening. Tell her I’ll come this evening. Where are you?’

  ‘Praterstrasse 47.’ And then the phone went down and he walked out into the cooler air of the post office and the racket of the railway station and the crush of people coming in through the entrance archways from the street.

  Outside the station he contemplated the city. Trams clanged on the rails, heading towards the Praterstern. Cars hooted, swirling past the horse-drawn cabs, the future overtaking the past. Crowds pushed past him, sure of where they were going. He could still choose not to do this. He faced a wealth of possibilities and he could still choose.

  Die Goldene Kugel, the Golden Globe, was a restaurant and café halfway down the Praterstrasse. Viktor stepped off the tram and went past the outside tables into the warm plush of the interior. He took a seat at a banquette just inside the door and called for the menu. There was the usual bustle of the early evening, waiters cruising between the tables, early diners ordering, the talk heavy-laden with the Viennese accent. He ordered a quarter of white wine and something to eat and then he waited, not knowing how to make his presence known, not knowing whether he should even be here, not knowing why he was, in fact. In the event it was she who found him.

  ‘It’s Herr Viktor, isn’t it?’ The voice came from behind him. Unmistakeably, even after the passage of months, it was her voice. There was something hoarse about it, laughter lurking in the shadows. He looked round. She had just come in through the main door and stood beside the coatstand on which he had hung his coat and hat. ‘Kata,’ he said. He rose from his seat, suddenly confused, suddenly no longer in control of anything. They shook hands, absurdly they shook hands like two acquaintances meeting by chance. ‘How are you? Sit down. How are you?’ He pulled out a chair. She sat opposite him, a small – smaller than he’d remembered – woman with a kind of prettiness about her features. He was content just to see her, that was the ridiculous thing, almost overwhelmed with happiness in fact. He didn’t understand that either: why should the mere presence of this almost unknown woman make him happy? But he was happy. Like a child.

  She accepted his offer of a cigarette and as she leaned towards him to light it he remembered the taste of tobacco on her mouth. Not unpleasant. Dry as her voice. ‘They told me you were around. Fancy that. How are you keeping?’

  ‘Fine, I’m fine. You’re looking very well.’

  She laughed. ‘Me? Oh, I get along.’ One of the waiters came over and she asked for a glass. ‘I’ve already eaten,’ she said. ‘I’ll just keep you company ’til you’re ready.’

  Why did he like that idea so much? Why did the fact of this girl merely keeping him company make him so content? He poured her some wine, and she sipped and looked at him with that smile, as though she knew something that he didn’t. Maybe that was true, maybe in the way of such women, she did have secret knowledge. ‘Well, well. I’d quite given you up for lost. And here you are.’

  He nodded. Here he was. The fact was evident. Here he was, in a café on the Praterstrasse with a woman who was not his wife but with whom he was going to make love. Was that the expression? Have sex. Fornicate. The words stumbled through his mind and were all chased away by the sight of her sitting there, the particular shape of her face, the curve of cheek and brow that he had recalled so vividly. Heart-shaped. Her eyes were so blue. He hadn’t remembered that accurately. A blue that made them seem transparent, as though you were gazing through them to the horizon. And the childish hands with their bitten fingernails. He pushed his plate aside – ‘Look, I don’t really feel hungry’ – and she smiled as though she understood such matters, the connections between physiology and emotion.

  They went to the same hotel as before. Maybe she was known there, although no one seemed to recognise her. There was the same man on the reception desk, the same porter who, with the same expressionless indifference, showed them to what may have been the same room. But this time they kissed almost like ordinary lovers, her lips just pressing against his, soft and fragile.

  ‘You’re married, aren’t you? Have you got kids?’ Her sharp talk, that Viennese accent moderated by other tones – the sounds of Slovakia, the hints of Magyar. He’d forgotten that, and the rediscovery delighted him.

  ‘A daughter.’

  ‘Lovely little thing, is she?’

  ‘Lovely,’ he agreed. ‘She’s called Ottilie.’

  She unbuttoned her blouse and hung it on the back of a chair. He sat on the bed and watched her step out of her skirt, suddenly transformed from the public figure to the private: the clumsy underclothes, the tapes and clips, the hips that seemed that bit wider than when she was clothed, the curve of her thighs and the narrowness of her knees, as vulnerable as a child’s. Her skin was white, almost luminous in the shadows of the room. ‘How old is she then?’

  ‘She’s just a baby. Seventeen months.’

  ‘I love babies.’

  It seemed an absurd conversation, the kind casual acquaintances might have had anywhere, in any public place. Yet he was having it here, in this narrow room, between the windows with their view, obscured by muslin curtains, of an anonymous Viennese street and the bed in which he was about to have illicit sex, sex that would have shamed him had it been with Liesel. ‘And how’s the work?’ he asked.

  She paused, looking at him, her hands at the buttons of her brassiere. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘Hats.’

  ‘Yeah, hats. I’ve changed job, actually. Get a bit less but I can come and go as I please, more or less.’

  ‘Sounds ideal.’

  She tossed the brassiere aside. Her breasts were full and loose, fuller than Liesel’s. ‘Actually it’s working for myself. I’ve started taking work in, dressmaking stuff. Contacts, you know what I mean? It’s always like that in business, isn’t it?’

  ‘Contacts? Exactly.’

  He reached out and took her hands and pulled her towards him so that she stood directly in front of him. He could feel the warmth of her body. It carried with it her smell, a flowery perfume with, beneath it, something else that was dark and intimate and animal. ‘My little dressmaker,’ he called her. ‘You’re very lovely, aren’t you?’

  But she shook her head. ‘I’m just what you see. Nothing special. A bit of a bitch, at times.’

  ‘Not with me.’

  ‘But you’re paying me to be nice to you, aren’t you?’

  ‘Would you be horrid if I weren’t? Are you horrid to your boyfriend?’

  ‘I don’t have a boyfriend. Not at the moment. I’m off men, really.’

  He cupped one soft breast in his hand, surprised by its mass. ‘What about me?’

  She looked down on him with an expression that he thought might be regret. ‘You’re different. I can’t get someone like you, can I? Except like this. You want me to stay the whole night this time? Because I can, if that’s what you’d like. I’ve made arrangements, see?’

  Of course he did. He wanted to wake in the morning and find her there with him. If not love itself, he wanted the simulacrum of love.

  Completion

  Work continued throughout the autumn – the fittings, the furnishings, those things that transform a shell into a house and a house into a home. Lorries drew up on Blackfield Road and men in grey overalls humped packages into the building while neighbours watched from nearby gardens. Word went round. The doors were hung, the bathrooms were fitted and tiled, in white up to the ceiling so that they took on the plain sterility of a laboratory or clinic, the floors were laid. In the Glass Room they mounted the onyx wall. The slabs had veins of amber and honey, like the contours of some distant, prehistoric landscape. They were polished to a mirror-like gloss, a
nd once in place, the stone seemed to take hold of the light, blocking it, reflecting it, warming it with a soft, feminine hand and then, when the sun set over the Špilas fortress and shone straight in at the stone, glowing fiery red.

  ‘Who would have imagined,’ Hana said when she first saw the phenomenon, ‘that such passion could lie inside inert rock?’

  Finally they laid the linoleum, linoleum the colour of ivory, as lucid as spilled milk. During the day the light from the windows flooded over it and rendered it almost translucent, as though a shallow pool lay between the entrance and the glass; during the evening the ceiling lights – petalled blooms of frosted glass – threw reflections down into the depths. On the upper floor there were rooms, zimmer, boxes with walls and doors; but down here there was room, raum, space.

  Von Abt moved around the place like a sculptor working with a team of assistants, but the novelty was this: the house was both the work of art and the atelier in which it was being created, the means and the end rolled into one. ‘It is like a mother and its child,’ he told Liesel, ‘both at the same time.’

  Curtains of black and natural Shantung silk and beige velvet slid on their runners, closing off areas of the Glass Room as quietly and discreetly as a whispered aside. Carpets – hand-woven woollen rugs – were laid down in their precise geometrical place. And then finally the furniture arrived, the fitted items first: shelves and cupboards for the bedroom, sideboards for the dining area, shelving for the library. Men in white coats moved back and forth like attendants in a medical clinic. Carpenters assembled the circular table. And then came the chairs, the Landauer chairs for the dining table, the Liesel chairs in the sitting area, their steel frames reflecting the light and their upholstery mirroring the carpets, and every piece fitting into the whole, which was like a puzzle in which pieces slotted together in a pattern that it was both intricate and logical.

  Liesel’s mother examined the house with the disapproving eye of the nineteenth century. ‘It’s like an office,’ she said. ‘Like a laboratory, like a hospital. Not like a home at all.’

  ‘Mother, it’s the future.’

  ‘The future!’ the older woman retorted, as though giving vent to a curse. But Viktor and Liesel watched their future world growing around them and they thought that it was a kind of perfection, the finest instrument for living.

  The building was formally signed over and they moved in at the beginning of December, when the weather was cold and sleet dashed itself against the windows and air from the boiler in the basement breathed upwards through the vents at the base of the windows and moved gently through the volume of the Glass Room to bring a warm, dry, gentle atmosphere vaguely reminiscent of a spring day. Liesel stood in a light silk dress and watched the first snowflakes settle, more quietly than feathers, on the garden. The garden itself and the view beyond seemed to be assumed into the interior, the distant Špilas fortress as much a part of the room as a painting hanging on the wall. But inside the room there was no decoration – ornament is crime – except for a single item, a life-size female torso sculpted by the French artist Maillol, the belly faintly swollen as though in early pregnancy, the breasts full, the hips wide, the face with something of the fecund composure of a Renoir nude.

  ‘That is what you need,’ Hana had said of the sculpture after she had seen it in the gallery of a Prague art dealer. ‘Some touch of the female.’

  To Liesel’s surprise, von Abt had agreed. So she and Viktor travelled up to Prague to make the purchase and the sculpture now stood on a plinth beside the onyx wall and looked over her left shoulder at whoever might be in the chairs in the sitting area.

  ‘It is beautiful,’ Liesel said to Viktor, speaking of the sculpture, and the room itself, and of the whole house. ‘Perfect.’

  That was it: perfection. Perfection of proportion, of illumination, of mood and manner. Beauty made manifest.

  Housewarming

  Viktor and Liesel hold a house-warming party. What started out as an informal gathering becomes like the opening of an art exhibition, made worse because the man himself is there – Rainer von Abt. He flies in from Berlin and is fetched from the airfield by the driver. The guests are delighted by this manifestation of the modern age, this architect who descends from the sky for something as ephemeral as a party. Liesel greets him as he steps out of the car. ‘Everyone,’ she warns him as she leads him inside and down the stairs, ‘everyone has been dying to meet you.’

  And there they all are, as hostess and architect enter the Glass Room: the intelligentsia of Město, the musicians and composers, the artists and the architects, the critics and the writers, the businessmen and the industrialists, all of them waiting for the great man’s appearance, along with journalists and a photographer from the society page of one of the local newspapers. The architects Fuchs and Wiesener are there, each full of grudging praise for von Abt’s work; and Filla the cubist who finds echoes of van Doesburg in the plain geometry of the house; and the composer Václav Kaprál with his pretty daughter Vítězslava. Von Abt bows his head over female hands, and shakes manly ones, and pronounces himself delighted with everything but especially delighted with this wonderful house that he has brought to fruition. ‘A work of art like this,’ he tells one of the journalists, ‘demands that the life lived in it be a work of art as well. I am certain that Viktor Landauer and his beautiful wife will do the place justice.’

  Viktor makes a little speech. He welcomes the guests, first in Czech and then in German, and calls for applause for the architect, and when the clapping has died away he talks about André Breton’s new novel, Nadja, which one of the guests – he nods at Hana Hanáková – has lent him. ‘In this novel the author wrote something like this,’ he tells them, and cleverly, although he claims to have prepared nothing, he has the whole passage by heart: ‘“I shall live in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where the words who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond.”’ People laugh at this wittily appropriate quotation. Have they read Breton? If not, they pretend they have. ‘Well, this glass house says who Liesel and I are,’ Viktor tells them, taking her hand. ‘In our wonderful glass house you can see everything. And in this spirit of openness, with no advance notice and no rehearsal, Maestro Němec has agreed to play for us.’

  An expectant hush falls as Němec takes his seat at the piano. ‘I believe,’ he says, ‘that this instrument has never yet been played before an audience.’ There is a call for him to speak up, those at the back cannot hear. He raises his voice a fraction. ‘It gives me much pleasure to caress’ – he touches the Bösendorfer with expert fingers – ‘such an untried maiden in the midst of this beautiful and, until today, virginal glass house.’

  There is more laughter, more applause and then the maestro begins to play – hesitantly at first as though he is unsure of the instrument and is listening for its voice, but then with growing assurance and a faint nod of approval – a piece by Leoš Janáček, mentor of both Kaprál and Němec himself, the man in whose shadow all of the assembled musicians of Město move. When he finishes there are calls for an encore, but he stands and bows and holds out his hand towards Kaprál’s daughter. ‘Let me pass the responsibility on to the next generation,’ Němec says, and a small shiver of delight runs through the guests. Vítězslava Kaprálová is something of a prodigy. Already, at the tender age of fifteen, she is enrolled at the Conservatory and studying composition. She blushes under their collective gaze but still seems remarkably assured as she takes her place at the keyboard. No Janáček for her, but something by Ravel that she is preparing at the Conservatory for her finals, one of the movements from the piano suite Gaspard de la Nuit, entitled ‘Ondine’. It is a delicate, wavering piece that somehow seems appropriate to this space, this room, the winter light flooding the plate-glass windows, the people milling about, their forms
reflected vaguely in the flooring and precisely but laterally compressed in the slender chrome-plated pillars. When the notes – subtle, apparently repeated but never repetitive – die away into the death of the nymph Ondine, the pianist holds herself quite still for a moment, hands poised over the keys, before looking round at her listeners with a quick, nymph-like smile.

  There is more applause, even more than Němec received, and laughter and the clinking of glasses. ‘Bravo,’ they cry, and, ‘výborně!’ How wonderful that a girl so pretty and so young can play with such assurance. And Němec bows towards her and takes her hand – a fragile thing, as light as a bird – and raises it to his lips.

  ‘This is the artistic future of our country,’ he announces. ‘Vitulka and people like her. A young country with so much energy and so much talent.’

  While all this is going on Hana has walked round the other side of the onyx wall and is looking out on the cold garden and the winter trees. ‘What do you think?’ Liesel asks, coming to stand beside her.

  ‘I think she’s only fifteen, so what the hell’s he doing flirting with her?’

  ‘I meant the house.’

  Hana turns. ‘You know what I think about the house, darling. I think it’s mesmerising.’

  ‘I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it,’ Liesel tells her.

  ‘Married a wealthy man, my dear. Enjoy it while you can.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  Hana shrugs, looking at the view once more, the cold outside. Behind them there is more applause, and laughter as Němec takes the place of the girl at the keyboard and breaks into something different, something fashionable and American and Negro. Honky-tonk, he calls it. Some even clap along to the music. It seems so modern, so hopeful and careless.