The Glass Room (37 page)

Your loving,
Liesel

She folded the letter in the envelope and sealed it, then took it downstairs to the concierge’s desk. Just as she was walking away towards the terrace and the sunshine a voice called her back. ‘Madame Landauer!’

It was the concierge himself, resplendent in uniform — a Ruritanian lance-corporal Viktor had described him — coming round the desk, bearing a letter on a silver salver. ‘This has just been delivered, Madame.’

It was stamped and taped and bore the familiar word
Geöffnet
across the flap, and the well-known handwriting on the front. ‘It’s from the person to whom I have just written,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I can have the letter back so that I can reply?’

But there was no possibility of such an irregular action. The post box was the property of the Swiss post, to be opened only by an approved operative. And letters therein were property of the addressee not the sender. He seemed upset that she should not know such things. ‘Such is the law of the land, Madame.’

‘Of course.’ She took the letter with her onto the terrace. It was a bright, breezy morning. Ottilie sat with her sketch book. The wind lifted the corner of the page she was drawing on and she spoke to it harshly, as though it was a deliberately recalcitrant child. Martin was immersed in a book and Katalin was sewing, embroidering initials onto the corner of a linen handkerchief. MK. Her daughter sat and watched the creation of this small tribute to herself.

Liesel took the chair that had been left for her. ‘A letter from Auntie Hana,’ she told them as she sat.

‘Read it to us,’ Ottilie said. ‘Read it to us please. I miss Auntie Hana so much.’

She tore the envelope open, took out the letter and unfolded it. ‘“Darling Liesel”,’ she read out loud. And stopped.
I really don’t know how to tell you this, but I’ll try
…

He is called to the gate. There’s a woman asking for him, insisting on seeing him, won’t take no for an answer. Apparently she knows him, which is why they didn’t just send her packing.

It is her, of course. She is wearing an old grey coat and plain walking shoes that make her look like a refugee, standing in the driving rain and looking like one of the thousands of displaced people who throng the city. Perhaps that is intentional, some kind of disguise. He hurries her across the forecourt, hunched against the wind, away from the curious gaze of the soldiers. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

‘I want to talk.’

‘Not here, for God’s sake.’

‘Where then? How else do I see you when I want?’

He hasn’t seen her for over a week. She hasn’t been in the café where they first met, she hasn’t been answering the phone number that she gave him, she hasn’t been at the Grand Hotel when he went there for a drink. And now here she is, coming suddenly and unexpectedly out of the storm. He shows her into the building and down the stairs into the Biometric Centre. Mercifully, the place is deserted. She kicks off her shoes and crosses the room to the windows. There’s something unsteady about the way she moves, as though a piece of the machinery inside had broken. Beyond the glass it is a ragged autumnal evening, the clouds battering fast across the sky over the castle, gusts of rain thrown like pebbles against the windows, the occasional shaft of sunlight breaking out of the cloud. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he demands. ‘I’ve been trying to get in touch with you but you weren’t answering the phone at the number you gave me.’

‘I’ve been busy.’

‘Doing what?’

‘That’s my business.’

‘And now? Am I your business again? I told you we shouldn’t meet here. Once is enough. People will see you. Questions will be asked. I cannot allow my work to be compromised by your presence here. You must never do this again. If you do—’

‘
What
will you do, Herr Hauptsturmführer?’

‘I’ll have the guards arrest you.’

She laughs. Perhaps she’s drunk. She seems wayward and dangerous, liable to do anything. Outside, the wind hammers at the windows. ‘How was your visitor?’ she asks.

‘My visitor?’

‘Our Lord and Protector. How did you find him? Is he the monster that they say he is?’

‘Who says that?’

‘Everyone says it. Even the newspapers imply as much. Arrests, disappearances, deportations. Thousands of Jews have been rounded up in Prague and sent to Poland. Five thousand, they say. You must know something about it. There’s a rumour—’

‘There are always rumours.’

‘They say the fortress at Terezín is being turned into a ghetto. The Jews are to be concentrated there, that’s the story.’

He shrugs. ‘Perhaps they are. Who knows? It would be a practical solution.’

She walks round the room, touching things as though to assure herself of their reality — the examination couches, the measuring callipers, the desks and chair — and speaking thoughtfully, as though trying to work things out for herself. Is she perhaps a Jew? The thought brings a shiver of revulsion to him, that what he has done with her might have been with a Jew. But the measurements deny it. She’s a Slav, a typical, emotional, unstable Slav lurching from one thing to another, her mind as varied as the storm outside.

‘They’ve been forbidden everything, haven’t they?’ she says. ‘The Jews, I mean. They can’t use shops during normal hours. They can’t travel on the trams. They can’t go into a café or a hotel, they can’t even enter a public park. They can’t own a pet or a telephone. They can’t hold down a decent job. They have to wear a label as though they have the plague or something. And now they are being rounded up and deported. Surely you know something about it. Surely all this’ — she gestures at the whole room, the apparatus, the devices — ‘means that you know what is going on.’

He picks up some files, taps them into order and puts them in one of the drawers. He feels anger towards her, anger for her insistent interrogation, for her knowledge of him, for having allowed her to look into the depths of his past. He slams the filing cabinet closed and turns. ‘It’s a plague in our midst affecting everyone. For God’s sake, it has affected my own family. You know that. And now every mile we advance into Russia more and more of these people come under our control. We cannot just stand back and do nothing. We have to find a solution.’

‘And the solution is to persecute them?’

‘To isolate them, yes. Why are you so concerned?’

She looks him straight in the eye. ‘Because my husband is a Jew.’

He looks around the room, the Glass Room, at the beauty and the balance of it, at the rationality. Then back at her. She’s laughing at him. It’s the laughter that’s disturbing. Like the laughter of an idiot.

‘Does it disgust you, the thought of sharing me with a Jew? The idea that there’s been a Jew prick inside the cunt you like to suck so much?’

‘You’d better go,’ he says. ‘You’d better leave at once.’ But she’s staring at him, her face taut as though braced against the gale that is blowing. ‘There’s something else,’ she says. ‘To do with your damned miscegenation. Something else that you should know about.’

‘What? What else is there?’ She’s mad or drunk, or perhaps she’s under the influence of some other drug. He has heard about it, women of her kind taking things. Morphine, playing with morphine, the morphine that is needed in the front line to deal with genuine pain, being used by them to treat their own imagined pain. How he can get rid of her, get her out of this place to somewhere where it doesn’t matter, the hotel where they have always met, that anonymous room with the subdued lighting and the trams clanging outside the windows, not this place of cool and objective measurement? Should he call the guard? But that would only lead to complications, problems, questions. ‘Look, just wait for me to clear these things away and we can go. I won’t be more than a few minutes.’

But she stands there before him without moving. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she says.

Behind her, beyond the windows, the trees are throwing caution to the wind. The panes shudder. The whole room seems to be a soundbox for the gale, a chamber that resonates with outside forces. Where has the wind come from? All the way from the Atlantic ocean, right across France and Switzerland and the Alps, ignoring borders and territories, wars and occupations, ignoring everything to do with humans.

‘You are
what
?’

She nods. ‘You heard what I said. I’ve had the test done. The rabbit test. I got the result yesterday, and it’s positive. I’m pregnant.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘Because the child is yours.’

‘Mine? What about your Jew husband? Why should it be mine?’

‘It’s not his, believe me. I told you, he’s much older than me. We have a different relationship.’

‘And the other men you’ve been with?’

‘There are no other men, dear Hauptsturmführer. There is only you and it’s your child.’

‘And you want me to give you money to get rid of it? Is that the idea?’

‘Well, you shouldn’t have much compunction about that, should you? Killing babies is in your nature.’

That is when he hits her. The blow, a heavy slap across the side of her face, is sudden and shocking, surprising him as much as her. She gives a gasp of outrage and pain and backs away from him, but he reaches out and grabs her by the wrist, pulling her towards him. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Let me go!’ she cries, struggling in his grip.

‘What do you mean, killing babies is in my nature?’

‘Werner, let me go!’ She calls him by his first name. Always it has been Stahl or his rank, or something mocking like Doctor Mabuse; but now it’s Werner. ‘Werner, you’re hurting! Werner!’

But he holds her tight, drawing her closer, wondering if he can smell alcohol on her breath, wondering if she is lying or if all this is true. She turns her head away. There’s a weal across her cheek and a swelling in her upper lip and a trace of blood from where one of her teeth has cut the inside of her mouth. ‘You’re drunk. I can smell it on your breath. You’re drunk and you’re lying.’

‘That’s not true. I swear. The child is yours.’ She tries to drag her arm down but he doesn’t let go so she drops to the floor like a child trying to pull away. She’s sitting on the floor at his feet, her legs splayed. He can see the tops of her stockings and the whiteness of her thighs, that marbled flesh whose texture and scent he knows.

‘You’re trying to blackmail me.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Yes you are. You’re trying to blackmail me with your half-breed child.’

‘I’m not, I swear I’m not. I wanted to discuss it with you. I wanted to see what we could do about it. Now let me go.’ She puts her hand to her mouth and brings it away with a smear of blood and saliva. ‘You’ve hurt me.’

‘It’s nothing.’ He releases her wrist but still stands over her, wondering about the foetus that may or may not be swimming in the salty amniotic ocean of her uterus. The thought excites him, that is what is so strange. That he has impregnated her. His tainted seed, those millions of swimming cells, half of them carrying the gene that killed Erika, meeting this woman’s own Slavic egg. Maybe his seed is only good for someone like her, an
Untermensch
. A slut.

He reaches down to pull her to her feet but she backs away like a hit bitch, cowering in front of him. He follows her as she moves across the floor towards the windows. Something is rising inside him like gorge, a compulsion born of disgust and delight. She’s powerless there on the floor, trapped against the glass. No longer is she the sharp and sarcastic woman who knows how to sell herself and, worse, knows what he wants. Suddenly she’s a victim, unsteady and unclean. He reaches down and grabs her knees. She thrashes her legs, trying to twist out of his grip but he holds on, laughing at the sight of her caught like a mammal in a gin trap.

‘Let me go,’ she cries. The demand carries no weight. He twists her legs and turns her over, surprised at how light she is, how easily he can move her this way and that. Her face is pressed against the window and her hands are spread out on the glass and he takes her by the scruff of the neck to hold her steady. With his other hand he lifts her skirt and pulls her knickers down, and suddenly she is naked, humbled, the pale globes of her buttocks there in front of him.

‘Werner,’ she cries, ‘what are you going to do?’

It’s an interesting question. What is he going to do? What does this creature, to whom he has opened up the secrets of his own life, merit? What does this
Mensch
, who claims to be carrying his own child, deserve? He kneels down and unbuttons his trousers, then spreads her buttocks apart so that she is open to his gaze, the dark valley, the tight mouth of her anus, the dark fold of her shame. What does she deserve?

‘Werner, please,’ she says. ‘Someone might come.’

But no one might come. The doors are all locked, the staff dismissed, the Glass Room silent and reserved, observing impassively whatever might happen. Rain dashes against the other side of the glass, running in rivulets down the reflection of his own face floating above her. He holds the head of his penis against her and presses in.

It’s a sudden thing, the resistance breached and a void beyond, the dark void of her humiliation. Everything is over in a moment. She gives a cry of outrage and pain and he knows an instant of irrational ecstasy more intense than anything before. And then it’s over and she is crouching against the windows, pulling at her clothes and trying to restore some semblance of decency. The swelling of her lip is as thick as a finger. ‘You hurt me,’ she says, her words dulled by the bruise.

‘You’ll be all right.’

He reaches out to take her hand and pull her to her feet, no longer feeling anger towards her, or even fear. It’s the variance of emotion that is so disturbing. He even feels pity, that emotion that you must learn to expunge when working with animals, when chloroforming or skinning them. Or when taking your child to Hartheim Castle. He reaches out to touch her swollen lip. She’s still cowed, frightened of him, flinching when he moves. And now he sees her clearly for what she is — a degenerate Slav, a beautiful but alien creature cast up on the shore of the Aryan world, a thing of unknown provenance and uncertain nature, tainted by her genes and the manner of her life. Behind her the glass has changed, lost all its transparency, closed off the world so that it only reflects the interior, the two of them standing there like figures on a stage. And there on the glass are the prints of her hands, the fingers spread like the petals of two flowers, and a smear of blood.