The Glass Room (41 page)

Viktor teaches Martin to play chess. Ottilie, golden-limbed from the sun, finds animals in the garden, in the carefree manner of young children forgetting all about her friend Marika. Liesel reads. Somewhere in the villa she has discovered a cache of paperback thrillers in English — Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler — and she works her way through them with the aid of a dictionary. ‘You’ll end up speaking like a gangster,’ Viktor warns her. He comes to her room and asks if he can spend the night with her. She lets him, but they have forgotten the moves, the things that they do and the things that they don’t do. She knows that he is thinking of Katalin.

Storms flicker on the horizon or slam into the coast to deliver rain in torrents. Everywhere grows dank with water. In the worst downpour the roof gives up and a wet patch appears in one corner of her room so that a bucket has to be placed beneath it to catch the drips. The sonorous rhythmic sound of falling water underpins the night. Then the sun and the heat, the shriek of insects in the vegetation and the sound of music blaring from some radio in a room nearby, the strange syncopations of the Latin world, maracas rattling, guitars strumming, and voices wailing about love and loss.

The Landauer House lies empty. It is impractical for housing, although under wartime conditions housing is at a premium, and there is a move to have it demolished. Reprieve comes in the shape of draughtsmen from Messerschmitt AG. Messer schmitt have moved some of their facilities to the local airfield in order to put them as far away as possible from Allied bombing. They test new types there, in particular a fighter with a new kind of propulsion system, a shark of a machine that breathes itself along instead of thrashing at the air with propellers. Turbo, they call it. All summer the strange, elemental sound of this aircraft is heard in the skies above the city, rumbling like distant thunder, or coming nearer with a noise that seems to rupture the very air that sustains it. While draughtsmen pore over their drawing boards, fiddling with details of the aircraft’s undercarriage and engine cowlings, the windows of the Glass Room shudder with the aircraft’s passage overhead.

Then that project is over and those temporary interlopers collect up their equipment and load it into a truck and the house lies empty once more.

They pose for a photograph on the veranda in front of the French windows and the purple bougainvillea: two cane chairs for Viktor and Liesel, with Martin sitting cross-legged on the ground between his parents and Ottilie on the right beside Liesel. The camera, a Leica equipped with a clockwork timer, is mounted on a tripod in front of them. The timing mechanism gives the camera a personality all of its own: it buzzes for their attention.

‘Smile,’ Viktor tells them, and they smile self-consciously while Ottilie says, ‘You can’t smile on demand,’ and the camera snaps at them in the manner of an ill-tempered instructor saying ‘I told you so.’

Viktor gets up to reset the machine. ‘One more. And this time we must try to keep still and look natural.’

‘Looking natural’s not natural,’ Ottilie insists. Martin laughs. The camera begins to buzz and Viktor settles back in his chair. ‘Now,’ he says.

What the camera sees, what it preserves for posterity, is Viktor in a lightweight suit and a panama hat against the sun and Liesel wearing a floral frock and a straw hat that fails to shade her eyes. She has espadrilles on her feet. She looks rather thoughtful, as though she is considering her position here. The children wear broad-brimmed straw hats, Mexican style. Ottilie watches the camera and tries not to giggle, but Martin is looking to one side, following the sudden dart of a lizard across the floor of the veranda.

‘There we are,’ Viktor says when the ordeal is over and he is unscrewing the camera from the tripod, ‘the last souvenir of our tropical paradise.’

Outside the villa the car is waiting to take them to the port, to the flying boat that will carry them to the promised land, to the future.

A house without people has no dimensions. It just
is
. An enclosed space, a box. Wind rattles round the shutters of the building. Rain falls on the terrace and batters against the walls. Snow falls and stays and melts. Water, the death of all structures, the destroyer of mountains, the solvent of the caverns and caves of the Moravský Kras to the north of the city, insinuates itself into the walls. It freezes and expands, melts and contracts, levering apart the material. Paint and concrete flake away. Tiles loosen. Steel is brushed with autumnal rust. Dust settles in the cold spaces and draughts whisper round the wainscot like the hints of what has happened there and, perhaps, may happen again. People walking along Blackfield Road glance indifferently at the long, low form of the building. Some of them wonder what has happened to the owners. Switzerland, people say; others say, Britain; some, the United States. But they don’t really care because there is little opportunity to care about anything these days other than the basic worries of survival. Where is the next meal coming from? How will this coat survive another winter? How can these shoes, already wooden-soled, already sewn and patched, survive another walk? When will the war come to an end?

The great plate-glass windows of the Glass Room shake and shudder in the gales. During one storm, suddenly and with a sharp crack that no one hears, the pane at the furthest end near the conservatory is fractured right across, creating a diagonal line of reflection like a cataract in a cornea.

Laník and his sister occupy part of the house like epiphytes living on a tree, not integral to the place but depending on it for shelter. Sometimes they wander round the main room, the Glass Room, just to check. Occasionally they go through the upper floor and see that shutters are closed and doors are fast. But they live in their own world on the edge of the building, in the two rooms at the back of the garage and in the kitchens where the sister cooks and they eat together, and in the basement. The basement is a warren, a subterranean complex, like something you might discover in the Punkva Caves north of the city. It is the antithesis of the Glass Room. There all is space and light, but in the basement the ceilings are low and the doors narrow. There are dozens of rooms, one leading off from the other, going back underneath the front terrace almost as far as the street: laundry rooms, storage rooms, the boiler room with the boiler that drives the heating system of the house and the compressor that runs the air cooling. The place hums and grunts in the darkness like the engine room of a ship. As you move around you have to duck your head beneath conduits carrying electricity cables and pipes carrying water. There are water tanks and fuel tanks, and, against the front wall, the electric motors that raise and lower the windows of the Glass Room directly above, and the twin bays into which the glass panes descend. In this underground maze Laník has his stores. ‘We’ve got to think of the future,’ he tells his sister. ‘We’ve got to think what we can do when it’s all over.’

‘What do you mean by that? It’ll be just like it was, won’t it? They’ll come back and we’ll be here and it’ll all be like it was.’

‘Don’t be a daft cow. I’ve told you, they’re never coming back. For the moment this place is ours and we’ve got to make the most of it. Nothing is ever going to be the same again.’

His sister is heavy and dull, a peasant woman transposed to the city with all her peasant certainties. It was those peasant certainties that, despite the insistence of uncles and aunts, led her to bring up her younger brother when their parents died within two years of each other. ‘I’ll manage him,’ she told them, and that is what she did. She still feels that maternal devotion, but now it is mixed with something else: pride. He’s a clever one, is her brother. He’ll go places. ‘So what do you propose to do?’

He taps the side of his nose. ‘Propose to do? I’m already doing it, aren’t I? Building up a little nest egg, that’s what. Laying in stock for the future. Accumulating a bit of capital.’

‘What do you mean by capital?’

‘I mean stuff, that’s what I mean. Stuff.’

Stuff,
vĕci
, conjures up everything that one might want. Food, blankets, paraffin, cigarettes, brandy, beer, chocolate, all the things that matter in life and that have become unobtainable. Stuff is riches. You hoard during a time of plenty and you sell during a time of dearth. That’s the way.

The war seems to stretch backwards into memory and forwards into the unknown future. Maybe it will go on for ever. The inhabitants of Mĕsto scratch an existence as best they can, living off potatoes and turnips and beets, things grubbed out of the earth and tasting of the earth. They have been thrown back to the ways and means of their stone-age ancestors, hunched forms that scavenge for food, a whole city of hunter-gatherers. German troops appear and disappear, moving eastwards, always moving east. What comes back are the defeated and the damaged, human wreckage being cleared out to make space.

At U Dobrého Vojáka, The Good Soldier, the pub at the bottom of the hill past the children’s hospital, Laník hears the news: the Red Army is coming. There’s a small group of men — mainly workers at the armament factory down by the river — who gather there when they come off the morning shift. News and rumour battle for attention. The Red Army is coming. But when? How far away are they? Geographical terms mean little: Carpathia, Ukraine, Belorussia, the Don, the Caucasus, Moldava. How vast the distances and the areas, how huge the numbers — of tanks, of aircraft, of soldiers and civilians, of the dead and the dying. The Russians are coming, the apocalypse is coming, but when? The men congregate round Novotný, who treats every advance of the Soviet army as a personal triumph. He talks of Operation Bagration and can even show a map of the Soviet front line swelling out towards them like a bladder filled with red paint that threatens to burst across the whole of central Europe. The Great Patriotic War he calls it.

Back at the house, Laník muses on this conversation. He may look forward to the coming of the Soviets but he harbours no illusions about them. The onyx wall clearly has value and he doesn’t want it stolen. So, finally, he carries out Viktor Landauer’s parting instructions, to cover the wall up behind a partition of wood and plaster. Quite what he might do with the wall once the war is over isn’t certain. Ashtrays, maybe. Hundreds, maybe thousands of ashtrays.

November. A cold November morning with snow smeared into the corners of the streets and a heavy fog hanging over the buildings, turning the alleys back a century, making every pedestrian a ghost, every vehicle a monster, every building a castle keep. It deadens sound and restricts movement. It carries the cold inside the clothing of every inhabitant, in through the doorways and windows, into the houses with their meagre fires and their spare rations.

In the early morning an air raid siren gives out its call for the dead. People feel their way through the fog to the shelters and the basements. They huddle like souls in purgatory, muttering prayers or imprecations until the all clear sounds. Another false alarm. Cautiously they re-emerge from the shelters and go about their business, the eternal queuing for food, the eternal labour in the factories. The city seems to be at the very bottom of the world, invisible, starved, anaemic.

And then bombs begin to fall. They drop through the fog from nowhere without warning, without the sound of aero engines, without an alarm, without any sign at all. At the very first detonation people think of a gas explosion — sabotage perhaps. But then the explosions continue, trampling over the city like some cosmic child stamping on a nest of ants. They scream fury. If God exists he is a petulant brat. Roads are torn up, paving stones are hurled around, buildings are swept into rubble — churches, houses, shops, part of the railway station. Shrapnel rattles across the tarmac. Dust and smoke combine with the fog to make a denser kind of obscurity. And one bomb falls towards the Landauer House where Laník and his sister are cowering deep in the basement, where she is praying, reciting the litany of the saints, the rosary, anything that will give her an edge on survival; and where he is yelling at her to shut the hell up. Neither of them hear their particular bomb falling, for it is dropping towards them faster than the sound it makes. But they hear the explosion, feel the explosion, absorb the explosion into the very marrow of their bones. The building rattles to its roots. Plaster and cement crack. The plate-glass windows, those walls of frozen liquid with which Rainer von Abt (currently designing the main building of MIST, the Michigan Institute for Science and Technology) created the Glass Room, flex and burst.

As the flying debris settles, brother and sister release each other from their mutual and instinctive embrace. ‘Fucking hell, that was close,’ Laník mutters. His ears are humming, as though a piece of electrical equipment is being run just near. His sister is weeping. ‘You should be laughing,’ he tells her. ‘You should be happy that we’re still alive.’

Cautiously he goes to the door of the basement and looks out into the fog. A fractionally different parabola and everything might have been different. The bomb might have hit the upstairs terrace. It might have plunged through the ferroconcrete and through the white space of the Glass Room, down into the basement. Five hundred pounds of high explosive might have blown the whole perfect construction to pieces together with Laník and his sister. Instead the bomb has fallen into the garden, deep into the wet earth. Where there should be the skeletal frame of the silver birch there is only the edge of a muddy crater from which rises smoke and steam and the sulphurous stench of the underworld.

His sister comes to stand beside him. ‘We were bloody lucky,’ he tells her.

She looks at him and shakes her head. ‘I can’t hear,’ she says, her voice unnaturally loud. She shakes her head again as though she might shake the problem away. ‘There’s just this noise. Like a train. I can’t hear nothing.’

Later in the day Laník ventures further out. He climbs the steps to the terrace and peers inside the house. Scimitars of glass are scattered across the floor. In places the linoleum is torn. The partition hiding the onyx wall is peppered with dirt. Over the next few days he fixes canvas tarpaulins where the windows were. No longer a place of light, now the Glass Room is shrouded in the gloom of dusk. Sunlight, when it comes, cuts through the gaps between the tarpaulins like blades of glass. In the pub they say it was the Americans, the capitalist war machine wreaking random destruction on the working people of Mĕsto, but who knows? Just bombs. Random.