The Glass Room (52 page)

‘What a strange young man,’ Liesel says when he has gone.

‘How do you know he’s young?’

‘You can tell by the tone of voice. And the anger. Only the young are angry.’

‘So you’re not angry, Liesi?’

‘Me?’ She smiles, facing in the direction of the garden. ‘No, not at all. I’m happy.’

‘So am I.’ Hana takes her arm and leads her down the steps to the lawn. The sound of conversation, the architects and the museum people, the experts and the journalists and the politicians, is behind them.

‘Is it Zdenka?’ Liesel asks.

‘Zdenka, yes. How on earth did you know?’

Liesel smiles. ‘Is she very beautiful?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought so. And you’re happy?’

‘I haven’t been as happy for …’ Hana pauses. ‘Since you were here.’

‘That’s a long time ago.’ Tentatively they cross the lawn. ‘The silver birch?’ she asks, straining to hear it, the sea-sound of the breeze in its leaves.

‘Destroyed in the war. Laník’s bomb. Can you imagine, it missed the house by so little? They’ve planted another one. The idea is to return the garden and the house to exactly what it was.’

‘It can never be that.’

‘Of course not. But they want to recover the furniture, as many original pieces as possible. And use reproductions to fill the gaps.’

‘Maybe they’ll have waxworks of us to occupy it.’

Hana laughs. ‘What would we be doing, I wonder?’ They reach the bottom of the garden, and pause, facing up towards the house.

‘I wish I could see it,’ Liesel says. ‘It hasn’t changed, has it?’

‘Everything changes. Even buildings.’

Ottilie is on the terrace, calling them to come back. They want to take some photographs. The two women begin to make their way back up the slope towards the house. ‘And what about the Cuckoo?’ Hana asks. ‘You didn’t say in your letter. What about her?’

‘Katalin?’ Liesel remembers the little group as it was in those distant months before the betrayal of Munich but after other kinds of betrayal: she and Viktor, Ottilie and Martin, Katalin and Marika. ‘Isn’t it strange how people come into your life for a while and then vanish?’

‘She vanished?’

‘She was going to come with us to Cuba, she and her daughter. Do you remember her daughter? But they stayed behind. When we left France they stayed behind.’ She turns to Hana and feels that she can see her, there in the mists of memory. ‘It was better that way. Things work out for the best in the end, don’t they?’

‘Do they?’ Hana asks.

The house exists, fixed in time and space like a fossil. Repair work is done, badly. Some of the original furniture is collected from the Moravian Museum and returned to its approximate place in the building. The bathroom fitments are updated, and ruined; but the window panes of the Glass Room are removed and plate glass restored so that the space is finally returned to its full lucid splendour. People visit, small, uninterested groups from the fraternal soviet states — trade union groups and visiting dignitaries mainly — and later, occasional visitors from the outside world, adventurous tourists with a vague interest in architecture or architecture students with a compelling concern over the position of Rainer von Abt in the history of the modernist movement. Somewhere in all this, on a cold, wet day in March shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain, comes Marie Delmas. She is a small, nondescript woman, unnoticed by any of her fellow passengers on the train that brought her from Paris to Prague, or onwards from Prague to Mĕsto. For most of her adult life she has lived and worked as concierge in an apartment block in Paris, her world limited to the streets of her
quartier
in the twentieth, the church and the market and the park, and the cemetery where every Sunday she visits, amongst the crowded tombs of the celebrated, the grave of her husband. She has been drawn to this foreign adventure by one thing only, a simple coincidence, that one day in the public library on the rue Sorbier she leafed through a book on modern architecture and found herself looking at a photograph of her memory.

La Villa Landauer
, the caption said,
élévation sud
.

She sat at the library desk, shocked, remembering that view as one remembers a scene from a childhood dream, something with little context and no meaning, a place of memory and confusion and contentment, and seeing it now in a glossy print, a hard, fast thing — an object. For Madame Delmas has a secret, known only to herself. She has a childhood that goes back beyond the Sisters by whom she was brought up; it is another life, peopled by strange, half-apprehended figures and informed by a different language, some of which she still remembers. Her vocabulary may be limited, her syntax childish and undeveloped, but she speaks German. So when she arrives at Mĕsto railway station it is German she uses to ask someone where she can find a hotel for the night and in German that she asks for directions as she walks through the streets of the Old Town.

Mĕsto is only just emerging from the twilight of the Soviet era. It is shabby and run down, and cheap; even with her meagre savings, Marie Delmas can afford the Hotel U Jakuba, the James Hotel, which is the best the place has to offer; and the presence of a church nearby gives her some comfort. At home the Church is her prop and staff, her comfort when she feels alone, which is most of the time, because Madame Delmas has nothing and has had nothing. Few friends and no family, except for the husband whom she married when she was thirty-five and who died when she was forty-five, leaving her childless and penniless and with no more security than the job of concierge that gives her a roof over her head and a modest salary in her pocket. So she visits this church in the city of Mĕsto to recite a decade of the rosary and ask for blessing on her adventure, and to say a prayer for her husband and another prayer for the person she has prayed for every day of her life — her mother. Then she makes her way to the busstop in Malinovsky Square to catch the 77 bus that the receptionist at the hotel has told her will stop near the Villa Landauer.

The bus takes her to Drobného, a grand street, almost a boulevard, with two carriageways divided by a strip of muddy grass. It runs alongside a park and she is reminded of the park in her quarter back home, where she walks often and sits sometimes to feed the sparrows. No sparrows today in the cold of March in Mĕsto. The grass looks bruised after the onslaught of winter and there are still patches of snow on the ground. At the focus of the paths is a deserted bandstand, like an ornate cage for exotic birds; but the birds have long ago flown away and the season is not yet ready for their return.

Madame Delmas stands on the pavement looking round. No memory stirs. Occasional cars pass by, and grimy buses with their destination plates announcing unpronounceable areas in the northern suburbs of the city. Was she ever here? Is this whole adventure futile? On the other side of the boulevard there is a shallow crescent set back from the road. A few cars are parked there — Trabants, Wartburgs, the oft-repeated jokes of the Soviet era. Fine terrace houses loom over these vehicles like indignant observers from a more affluent past. They resemble some of the better buildings in her own
arrondissement
in Paris, like the one she herself runs and which she has left in the care of some temporary concierge with a distinctly Algerian cast to his face. But she didn’t cross half of Europe by train in order to be reminded of home. She came to reclaim a small fraction of her past. Behind the buildings is a hillside and to the left of the crescent there is a break in the terrace where a street of steps climbs the slope. The houses on either side are broken and grimy, like toys long abandoned in an attic. Schodová. That, the map in the guide book suggests, is where she must go.

Workmen smoke and watch as Marie Delmas climbs the steps. At the top she consults the map in the guide book again, and turns right onto černopolní, a quiet road running across the hillside. There are suburban villas, the houses of the bourgeoisie that prospered in the brief flowering of the First Republic, before disaster struck. Some of them have the date of construction on their façades: 1923, 1927, 1931. Madame Delmas has read the history. She knows the dates and public events; now, as she walks along the pavement, she waits to see if personal and private history will ambush her. Which it does, but quietly and modestly, for the building that appears on her right is smaller than in memory, reduced almost to the nondescript: a square garage whose doors (shut) come right up to the pavement, then a low fence with a gate and, beyond the fence, a wide esplanade of paving stones that glistens in the wet and gives the impression of a shallow pool. The building itself, as low-slung and anonymous as a sports pavilion, is reflected in the water as though it is standing on an inverted, blurred watercolour image of what is painted above it in hard-edged acrylic. And she knows that this is it. Warped, distorted, refracted by the prism of recollection, this is the place that lives in her memory. She was here.

She stands there in the drizzle wondering how to get in. The flat roof of the building forms a kind of porch between the main house and the annexe on the right and there are people moving around there, out of the rain, as though waiting for something to happen or someone to come.

Madame Delmas tries the gate and finds it locked. The figures under cover look her way. There is a conversation going on between two members of the group, looking her way and then going back to talking. Some kind of argument. She tries the gate again and searches for a bell push or something. She almost expects a button with a name plate alongside it.
Landauer
. But finding nothing she shakes the gate like a prisoner trying the bars of her cage.

‘Look, can you just wait there a moment?’ one of the figures calls. A lady. The voice is American, that strident, imperious tone that she hears at home in the cemetery mainly, looking for the tombs of the famous. ‘You do speak English, don’t you?’

No, she doesn’t speak English. Marie Delmas replies in French, and then, sensing incomprehension, repeats it in German. ‘I thought the house was open to the public on Wednesdays,’ she says, feeling foolish admitting it, as though she should have known better.

The reply comes back, unexpectedly matching her German: ‘We have a private visit, but I’ll see if you can join us. Just wait there a moment and I’ll see what I can do.’ The lady turns back to the figure beside her, a short fat man whom Madame Delmas recognises now as one of her kind, a member of the international freemasonry of caretakers and janitors. The two argue for a while and then the man comes over, scowling and muttering something in Czech, to unlock the gate and allow this interloper in.

‘You see, I’ve booked a private viewing,’ the
Américaine
explains as Madame Delmas joins her in the shelter of the roof. ‘Of course that’s fine by this fellow — he’s got his orders about that. But in his world if you have a private viewing you don’t just bring people in off the street. So there’s a problem which is no problem really, but there you are.’ The woman is expensive in her dress and her manner, a sharp confection of dyed blonde hair and tailored jacket, but incongruously wearing sneakers below her trousers. Her face is lined, the skin burnished by sun and the quick polish of cosmetic surgery. There is someone else with her, a young man in his thirties, hovering in the background with that embarrassed look of someone who suspects that he is being talked about but cannot understand what is being said. ‘This is my son. We flew into Vienna yesterday and drove up this morning. We’re waiting for someone else but it looks like he’s been delayed.’

Marie Delmas tries to register what the woman is saying. But she’s thinking, imagining, looking around her at the forecourt of the house that doesn’t look like a house at all, dredging up the past from that section of memory that seems to belong to another person, a person who was smaller than she is, so that now everything seems shrunken, as though it’s a model of what it once was, this stretch of pavement, that view between the two parts of the building — a blur of winter trees, rooftops, church spires piercing the cloud, the distant view of a fortress — and the curve of milky glass that hides the front door.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite understand …’

‘I’m afraid my German’s a bit rusty. Don’t find much use for it back home. But you’re in now, which is what matters.’

There’s another woman, a guide presumably, standing at the front door to the house. ‘Let’s get a move on, Milada,’ the
Américaine
says to her. ‘We can’t wait any longer, and for Christ’s sake, he knows his way here.’

Madame Delmas looks around trying to remember, trying to capture a glimpse out of the corner of the eye of memory. ‘I must thank you very much …’

‘Oh, don’t mention it. We visitors need all the help we can get in this place.’

Milada opens the door and leads the way in. They go through into the hallway and stand there bathed in the pale, amniotic light that comes through the panes of milk-white glass. Light without dimension, light that bears you up and floats you like a sea creature drifting with the tide. Marie remembers, but what she remembers is mood and moment, the subtle flexing of memory, not this literal place that Milada is describing in uncertain English out of which Marie can only pick occasional words, gleaming nuggets of comprehension:
Family
.
Nineteen and twenty-nine
.
Nineteen and thirty-eight
. Milada opens familiar doors to display unfamiliar spaces, empty of reference, empty of anything.
Rooms
.
Landauer
.
Lady
.
Bathroom
.

The bathroom is tall and white-tiled, lit from skylights, like a sluice room in a hospital ward. Marie remembers it. She remembers sound booming in the pipes and the scalding water and the steam rising. She remembers being there in the hot water and a young boy laughing at her.

They move down the corridor, which is narrow and awkward. The American woman is talking to her son in English, pointing things out and shaking her head in disapproval. In one of the rooms she says, in German, ‘Look at the state of the shutters. It’s such a shame.’ And Marie agrees, it is a shame. Who maintains the place now? Who owns it? Why doesn’t the caretaker see to things like this? The bedroom seems small and box-like, with rudimentary furnishings: a bedframe, wall shelving that might have been bought in a discount store and assembled by the handyman of the house.