by Simon Mawer
Once dressed Liesel goes to see the children, already awake and dressing under the devoted eye of Liba. Martin is being taught to do up the buttons of his shirt. Ottilie is sitting on the floor to show him how shoe laces are tied – a skill she has only recently acquired and is now trying to diffuse amongst lesser beings with all the enthusiasm of a prophet. She is light and skinny, a proto-beauty whose looks will remain unformed for some years, so much so that throughout her childhood she will consider herself ugly and indeed by most people will be considered plain but interesting until, at the age of about eighteen, it suddenly becomes clear that the solemn structures of Liesel’s face and the austerity of Viktor’s have been melded into something that borrows from each and yet gains some indefinable quality of grace and softness all of its own. But for the moment she is just a little girl with an insistent voice, pale, ill-formed features and awkward legs. ‘That’s not a very elegant way to sit,’ her mother remarks as the girl sits to tie her laces.
‘Liba gave me clean knickers.’
‘That, my dear, is hardly the point.’
Liesel speaks German to the children, while the nanny, Liba – Liběna, Liběnka, the language abounds in diminutives – speaks Czech. The result of this is that both children, particularly Ottilie, move easily from one language to the other. ‘They mustn’t be labelled,’ Viktor has always insisted, ‘not by language, nor by culture, nor family or anything. They must be brought up as citizens of the world.’
Once they are dressed, Liba and Liesel take the children downstairs where breakfast is already laid out in the dining area. Viktor greets them in the library where he is drinking a second cup of coffee and glancing through the newspaper. The children are noisy and enthusiastic around him, while he is quiet and thoughtful, probably as a result of what he has been reading in Lidové Noviny.
‘Leave Tatínka in peace,’ Liba says, ushering the children to their breakfast.
Liesel glances at the story that Victor has been reading – Jewish doctors in Germany are forbidden to treat non-Jewish patients or something similar – and shakes her head. The story is there, not here. It is over the border in another country, another world, another universe. ‘Surely it’ll all blow over.’
He doesn’t answer. Whether or not it will all blow over is not the point. The point is, this is happening at this very moment, to fellow Jews. In the last few years, since the building of the house in fact, Viktor has come to feel his Jewishness. This is not some atavistic rediscovery of his origins but the acceptance of a simple fact of inheritance, like having a quirky familial deformity, a Habsburg lip perhaps. To some people, to some members of the Deutsches Haus for example, this fact of inheritance marks him. He is a Jew, ein Jude, Žid, a Yid. And now in Germany they have written this identity into law. Were he in Germany he would have to rearrange the ownership and management of Landauerovy Závody so that only Aryans appeared in the executive posts and on the board. Were he in Germany he would have to get another doctor because their family doctor is a gentile. Were he in Germany his marriage to Liesel, while still being valid, would yet be an anomaly because all further marriages of such a kind, between Aryan and non-Aryan, are now illegal. Were they in Germany, Ottilie and Martin would be officially classified as Mischlinge, half-breeds, lesser beings.
It is absurd; but it is happening.
‘Oh, I forgot to tell you yesterday. I’ve been invited to join the committee of the Human Rights League.’
‘And will you?’
‘I think so.’ He returns to the newspaper. There’s a story about the recent influx of refugees from Germany, Jews most of them. ‘And the president asked about raising money. That’s why they approached me, I expect. Landauerovka will give something, of course. And I thought we might use the house.’
‘The house?’
‘Some kind of charity thing. A recital, who knows? You know how everybody seems to want to see the place. What about asking Němec? A short recital, sixty people at some ridiculously inflated price per head. It might do some good.’
‘Do we really want to open the house to the public?’ Liesel did not enjoy the aftershock of their housewarming party, the speculations of journalists, the intrusion into their family life. With all that attention, she felt there was something vulnerable about Viktor’s and her presence there, as though they were evanescent creatures within the transparent walls of glass, like summer mayflies with their gossamer wings and delicate tails and ephemeral lives.
‘Not really. On the other hand …’ He goes back to his reading. It is a habit he has, of inviting a discussion without pursuing the counter-argument. She imagines him doing this with his managers, hinting at something with that infuriating smile and then leaving them to find the solution to the puzzle, so that when it occurs to them they feel that they have thought of it themselves. ‘On the other hand, what?’
‘On the other hand, my darling Liesel, we have to do something. Now I really must be off.’ He folds his paper and goes across to the dining area where the children and Liesel and the nanny are having breakfast. ‘Laník will be waiting.’ He says this every morning, as though it is the driver’s regular appearance with the car outside that determines his routine, whereas the opposite is the truth: his own routine is what determines everything in what he laughingly refers to as die Landauerwelt, the Landauer world.
He stoops to kiss Ottilie – she rises in her chair and throws her arms around him – and then Martin, who barely acknowledges his presence, so intent is he on manoeuvring a piece of bread roll into his mouth, and finally Liesel. As he kisses Liesel on the forehead he is suddenly ambushed by the thought of Kata. It has become a tic, this mental reference to Kata. Perhaps it is something to do with guilt after all, although he feels no shame about it. Perhaps it is nothing more than an irrational gesture of the mind, an association of thoughts that would intrigue that other Moravian-German Jew Sigmund Freud, at this very moment at work in Vienna on the first draft of what will be his final book, Moses and Monotheism. Perhaps Viktor needs analysis in order to root out the concatenation of mental processes that lead to this small and fleeting evocation of the woman. But that assumes he would wish to be rid of the thought of her, when the fact is plain: he is quite happy to think of her. Indeed, there are times when he deliberately courts the memory of her, turns it over in his mind with care and attention, listens to her voice, touches her, smells her, tastes her, watches her taste him. This is something that Liesel will never know. No one will ever know. The only person who might know it is Kata herself. And this thought evokes a small stab of pain. What is she doing right now? Does she think of him as he thinks of her, or is she even now waking up in the bed of some other man for whom she evinces exactly the same counterfeit affection as she does for him? Questions that lead one to the next in that moment of saying goodbye to his family and bring with them something more than mere anguish – an intense desire to see her again.
With a cheery little wave to Liesel he makes his way upstairs. Outside, sure enough, the car is already waiting, a Landauer Prezident, a gleaming black limousine with the characteristic curves of the Landauer design team. Laník is there, holding open the door. Liesel does not like Laník, he knows that. ‘He’s sly,’ she complains. ‘And he looks at me.’
‘A cat may look at a queen. Perhaps he’s in love with you.’
‘And he’s always speaking in slang, and then grinning at me because I don’t understand. And he keeps annoying Liba.’
Viktor slides into the shadowy leather interior of the motor car. ‘The office,’ he says through the small hatch in the panel that separates driver from passenger. Then he sits back and contemplates the thought that has been growing like a pearl in the closed oyster of his mind: Kata.
As Viktor drives away to work, the women of the house set about what they have to do – Liba to take the children upstairs to brush their teeth, Liesel to have a word with Laníková about the day’s routine. Today Paní Hanáková is coming for lunch; this e
vening there will be guests for dinner, a business group of some kind. Laníková tuts, tight-lipped, at the prospect of all the fuss and confusion.
While the discussion goes on and Martin plays on the floor with his model cars – tinplate replicas of Landauers – Liba takes Ottilie to school. It is a fifteen-minute walk to the Montessori school that takes up one floor of a late nineteenth-century villa on Parkstrasse. When she returns, Liba takes over the duties of child-care while Liesel goes into the garden. The garden is her particular delight. Viktor tends the conservatory, the so-called Winter Garden that spans the east wall of the Glass Room, while Liesel looks after the garden with the help of the gardener, an ancient and arthritic Czech who calls her milostivá paní, your ladyship, as though any German-speaker with property must be a ladyship of some kind. Then there is the piano practice that she does every day, according to the strict regimen of her teacher who comes once a week for a two-hour lesson. Exercises – arpeggios and scales, with the metronome ticking away – precede a Chopin étude and then the indulgence of the piece she is working on, the liquid notes and the painful silences of Janáček’s On the Overgrown Path. It astonishes her how significant silence can be within the context of a piece of music. The piece seems so suited to the space and elegance of the Glass Room, to the light and shade and the subtle reflections.
Dinner
One of the dinner guests that evening is wearing a small badge in the left lapel of his jacket. The man has come as the head of a Stuttgart consortium that is interested in building the Landauer Popular in Germany under licence, as a rival to the KdF-wagen that Porsche are constructing. Schreiber is his name. He is tall and elegant, exquisite in his impeccable double-breasted suit. He bows over Liesel’s hand and clicks his heels and murmurs Küss die Hand, gnädige Frau as his lips come to within a breath of her skin, and zum Entzücken, charming, when he looks into her eyes. But the lapel badge that marks his jacket like a seal of authenticity is a tilted Hakenkreuz, black on white, ringed by a band of blood-red enamel and the words National-Sozialistische-D.A.P.
Herr Schreiber walks round the Glass Room like a visitor to an exhibition, his head turning this way and that, his hand touching the surfaces as though caressing the face of a loved child. He recognises the Maillol as soon as he sees it, knows of Loos’s architectural work in Vienna; and he loves the Glass Room, sees it as the epitome of all that is best in German culture. ‘You employed a German architect, of course.’
‘Not “of course”,’ Liesel corrects him. ‘There are fine architects here in the city. Fuchs, Wiesener, others.’
Schreiber smiles. ‘Nevertheless you chose a German. And anyway, they sound German to me.’ Does the fact amuse him? Certainly he is amused by something as they sit round the dining table – extended by one section to accommodate ten guests. Perhaps it amuses him to discover this small island of German culture in the midst of a Slav lake. They drink Moravian wine which he pronounces ‘promising’ and he raises his glass to Liesel and Viktor. ‘To German culture and German business, wherever it may be found,’ he says. The maid brings the soup. Bramboračka, potato soup, of course. He sips appreciatively. ‘But tell me, Herr Landauer, how do you find working with this other language, this Slavonic tongue? And with the Slavs themselves? I mean, if you were in Pilsen all your workforce would be German, of course. Yet here you have a mix. Are there not difficulties, conflicts?’
‘Not any that matter.’
‘That is not the experience of the Germans in Pilsen. They are, of course, asking for autonomy – if not actual absorption into the Reich.’
‘They are just victims of political agitation.’
‘Is that so? Or are they merely demanding their rights?’
‘In a democracy, rights also involve duties.’
Schreiber sighs. ‘Ah, democracy. Of course, democracy. It is such a tricky concept, isn’t it? I mean, democracy pure and simple would never have allowed you to build this house, would it? Imagine putting such a proposal to popular vote! Your neighbours would be jealous and vote against you! And yet your German sensibilities have driven you to ignore such democratic reservations and realise your vision. Isn’t that it? Over and above democracy, don’t German people everywhere have a duty to their German blood? That is what National Socialism means.’
‘Are you implying that such a duty falls to me as well?’ Viktor asks.
Schreiber shrugs. The other guests at the table look embarrassed. ‘It falls to all Germans, doesn’t it? Does a Czech German have any less duty towards his national culture?’
Viktor attempts to mirror the man’s smile, an expression that is replete with detached superiority but quite without humour. ‘But I am not a German, Herr Schreiber,’ he says. ‘I am a Jew.’
Memories
‘That woman has the brain of a sparrow.’
Hana, her face bruised with tears, is pacing back and forth in the Glass Room, talking of Němec’s wife. ‘And yet she keeps her hold on him. She blackmails him, really. He’s frightened of her. God knows why but he’s frightened.’
There is a Christmas tree in the south-east angle of the room where the plate-glass windows meet the Winter Garden, a Christmas tree decorated with tinsel and candles and ringed already with wrapped presents. Hana paces between this tree and the open space beyond the Maillol, while Liesel sits in one of the chairs and smokes and watches her friend helplessly. ‘I love him!’ Hana cries, weeping. ‘Don’t you understand that? I love him. I want him with me every moment of my life. And what do I get? The occasional night. A few days when his wife is away on one of her shopping expeditions. She knows about me, that’s what makes it so shitty.’ She uses the Czech word, posraný. When talking to Liesel in German she often resorts to Czech when she wants a vulgarity, as though the language gives her more scope. And anyway, the Glass Room has that effect, of liberating people from the strictures and conventions of the ordinary, of making them transparent. ‘She’s always known about me and up to now she hasn’t given a damn. But now she has told him that he’s got to choose, either her or me. And he’s chosen her. My God, he’s gone running back to her kunda.’
‘Hana! Ottilie might hear.’
She stops her pacing and puts her hand to her mouth. Her eyes, red from weeping, are suddenly wide and bright. There is a bubble of laughter behind the tears. ‘Oh God, do you really think so? Auntie Hana teaches her goddaughter naughty words? But she’s upstairs, isn’t she? She won’t have heard, will she? Oh, dear, I hope not.’
‘I’m sure she hasn’t heard. But you’ve got to be careful. And anyway there’s Laník’s sister. She’s often in the kitchen.’
‘And she doesn’t know what a kunda is?’
Suddenly they are laughing. Of course she knows. That’s probably what Laník calls her. The laughter does something to restore normality for a while, but soon they are back to Hana’s problem. Liesel feels helpless. Her own life – Viktor’s constancy, her two beautiful children, the beautiful house – is almost an affront to Hana. She seems to have everything, while Hana, once again pacing up and down in front of the onyx wall while sleet beats against the windows, feels she has nothing. ‘Do you know, I told Oskar? About Němec, I mean. And do you know what he said? He said, if he’s the one you really want, then I’ll let you go. Can you imagine that? If that’s what you want, I’ll let you go. And then he sort of shrugged and held his hands open like this. “But,” he added, “I’ll always be here to pick up the pieces.” That’s what he told me.’ And there are the tears once more, not for herself this time, nor for Němec, but for her own husband, the squat, unattractive, wealthy Oskar who loves her more completely than anyone but Liesel herself.
Later that evening, when the children have gone to bed, Liesel and Hana sit together on the sofa in the library area and listen to the radio. Viktor is away on some business trip in Vienna, returning in two days. So the two women sit together on their own, Hana with her head in Liesel’s lap while Liesel strokes her friend’s temples in an
effort to bring peace and calm to her, and the radio tells them what was surely expected and inevitable, that the President of the Republic, Tomáš Garrigue – ‘Isn’t garrigue a kind of vegetation?’ asks Hana – Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk has stepped down from office to make way for a younger man. Masaryk is eighty-five years old. His successor a mere fifty-one. Times are changing. ‘I’ll miss the Old Man,’ Hana says, attempting to distract herself. ‘I met him once, in Prague, do you know that? At a concert. We were introduced by a mutual friend. We shook hands and he looked at me, and I suddenly felt ashamed. Can you imagine that? It was as though he could see everything about me, and he forgave me.’ The attempt at distraction hasn’t worked: she begins to weep again, the tears bleeding out of her raw eyes, while Liesel shushes her like a mother with a baby, just as she has done with Ottilie and Martin, a soft sibilant sound to go with the sound of the snow against the windows.
‘I’m sorry Liesel, I’m such a wreck at the moment.’
‘No you’re not.’ Liesel bends down and kisses her on the forehead and then on the cheek where her skin is flushed and damp, and then hesitantly, because it is strange and rather miraculous, on the hot pulp of her lips. Couched in the only intimate part of the Glass Room, freed by their surroundings from all strictures, the two of them talk in whispers.
Recital
All the tickets for the charity recital – sixty-five in total – have been sold within a few days of the announcement. The chairs are set out in arcs on either side of the onyx wall and the piano has been moved so that the focus of the room is changed, directing people away from the glass walls towards the interior of the space. People enter the room making that little gasp of admiration or surprise. Many of them have come to see the place itself as much as listen to Němec’s playing. Hana, her face drawn and solemn, sits at the back, in the library area, while the pianist’s wife, Milada Němcová, takes her seat, triumphantly, at the front. Viktor makes a short introductory speech in which he welcomes everyone and assures them of the value of their support for the Human Rights League, and warns them that, of all the people of Europe, the citizens of their young democracy must look beyond its borders at what is happening to their neighbours. ‘At present it is others who are being oppressed,’ he warns them, ‘but if we stand idly by, it may one day become ourselves.’ Then Němec comes down the stairs to appear like Mephistopheles in the entrance to the Glass Room, bowing to the applause and taking his seat with a dramatic flip of his coattails as though he were on stage at the Stadt-Theater rather than in someone’s living room. For a fearful moment he crouches like a demon over the keys. Then he begins to play, softly, mellifluously, caressing the instrument as Hana claims he once caressed her, a Brahms intermezzo to soothe the flustered souls of those who have heard Viktor’s opening speech. To follow that there is the Janáček piano sonata From the Street, and finally, after an interval, a Schubert sonata played with all the pianist’s legendary verve and attack, his crouching figure like some bird of prey – ‘a vulture,’ Hana whispers to Liesel – clawing the notes from the body of the instrument. All three pieces are interpreted with that accuracy and sensitivity that puts Němec, so the music critic of Moravské Noviny will write in the next edition, among the foremost interpreters of the time. The event will even merit a mention in the cultural pages of Prager Tagblatt under the title Human Rights Bring Cultural Bonus. The evening has been, as the chairman of the League claims in his closing words, both a resounding artistic success and a mark of solidarity with oppressed peoples everywhere.
