The Glass Room (44 page)

Ondine was a water nymph, and therefore an immortal, who fell in love with the handsome, but mortal, Palemon. Although he was already betrothed to the noblewoman Berta, Palemon was prepared to sacrifice his marriage for the love of Ondine. There was, however, a catch. There is always a catch, in stories as in life. For when a nymph has a child by a mortal she has to sacrifice her immortality. Naturally Ondine was afraid of this, afraid of becoming pregnant and thereby losing her eternal youth and beauty. But Palemon reassured her. ‘My every waking breath shall be my pledge of love and faithfulness to you,’ he vowed. So the two lovers married and in due course Ondine had a child. At first Palemon was delighted. Now he had a son and heir, and also the most beautiful of wives. But with the birth of the child, Ondine began to change. She was a mother now as well as a lover, and the eternal youth of a nymph had vanished. She had become a mortal like any other woman, subject to age and decay.

One day Ondine discovered Palemon lying naked in the arms of his former fiancée. Thus betrayed, she fled back to the river to die of grief, but not before she had summoned her last bit of immortal magic: she woke Palemon and cried, ‘You vowed that your every waking breath would be a pledge of faithfulness. So be it. For as long as you are awake, you shall breathe; but should you ever fall asleep, your breathing shall cease.’

That is the curse of Ondine.

Tomáš knew this story because of the affliction that his patient suffered from; Zdenka knew it from the piano piece by Maurice Ravel. ‘Show me how you dance,’ Tomáš asked her early in their relationship, but at first she refused. That part of her life was behind her, she told him. Teaching dance was all she allowed herself (twice a week in the evenings she conducted classes there in the gymnasium). However he insisted and one day after she had finished work and the others in the clinic had gone home, she produced the gramophone that she used in her classes. The music she chose was the piece called ‘Ondine’, from Ravel’s suite for piano entitled
Gaspard de la Nuit
. ‘It’s what I danced for my final presentation at ballet school,’ she explained.

She placed the gramophone beside the onyx wall and plugged it in, then went to change. When she came back she was transformed. What had been a small, energetic nurse in white coat and trousers had metamorphosed into something mythic and magic — a barefoot, barelegged, gracile creature with white limbs and flowing seaweed hair. She was wearing a shift of translucent green silk and he could see the shadow of her body through the material almost as though he could see her soul inside her.

She curtseyed before him. The music began, a liquid trilling of notes, like water flowing over stones. If Tomáš had never quite believed in her being a nymph, at that moment he was convinced. Zdenka moved, flowed like weed in the stream, like reflections of sunlight on the surface of a pool. And the room in which she moved, the Glass Room with its transparent walls, its chromium pillars, its onyx wall, its pools of light, seemed a kind of tank in which the nymph was trapped. She darted this way and that as though trying to find a way out, but always she came back to the centre of the room, to the onyx wall and to the chair where Tomáš sat. He was entranced. He was also sexually aroused. And it was the moment when he fell in love with her.

Tomáš applauded when the music had trickled away to silence and she had completed her dance. The clapping of a single pair of hands inevitably sounds ironic, but there was no irony in Tomáš’s mind. What he had seen was one of the most wonderful visions of his life, a blend of abstract beauty and pure, feminine loveliness, something mythic and yet at the same time physical and real. Zdenka bowed before him, holding out her hands as though to display what little she possessed.

‘Come,’ he said. She stepped forward on bare, narrow feet and folded herself onto his lap like a cat. He could feel her body through the thin material of her dress — the corrugations of her ribs, the undulation of her spine, the small nodes of her breasts. ‘Can we make love?’ he whispered in her ear.

‘Of course not! How can we make love here? This is where I work.’

‘Then where can we go?’

She didn’t know. She wanted to make love to him as well, but they had nowhere to go. The housing shortage meant that he still lived in his parents’ house, while Zdenka had a room in the nurses’ hostel at the bottom of the hill. Men were not allowed in the women’s section. So they had nowhere that they could safely go and make the love that was even now spilling out of them. That was why, despite the fact that anyone might come in and catch them, the caretaker maybe, or one of Zdenka’s colleagues coming back to check on something, they made love there and then on the floor of the Glass Room.

Tomáš always referred to the gymnasium as the Glass Room. There is a language problem here. The word he used for room,
pokoj
, can also mean peace, tranquillity, quiet. So when he said ‘the glass room’ he was also saying ‘the glass tranquillity’. Thus does one language fail to make itself felt in another. He loved the Glass Tranquillity. The place appeared quite without reference to period or style — just a space of light and stillness where, when his work was over, he could be with Zdenka. Sometimes when she held her dance classes after work he would come and watch. The classes earned Zdenka extra money. The arrangement was quite irregular but some of the dancers were children of party officials so everyone turned a blind eye to the use of a state-owned building for a private enterprise. Tomáš would come down and find a seat in a corner of the room and watch the young girls going through their exercises and their routines. He enjoyed watching their efforts, sometimes ungainly, sometimes genuinely beautiful. It was a relief from always dealing with children who had been crippled by disease. He loved the sound of their chattering when they relaxed. They chattered like swallows, he thought.

After one of these classes, when the children had all gone, he persuaded Zdenka to dance naked for him. ‘I feel shy,’ she protested.

‘But that’s absurd. I see you naked every time we make love.’

‘That’s not the same.’

But still he insisted. And, he explained, the Glass Room, the Glass Tranquillity, demanded such openness and honesty. He opened the curtains so that the evening light shone in on her and the roofs of the city lay there as witness. ‘I want you to dance before the whole city. Before the city and the world.’ Of course this was purely symbolic. Even if they could see the house, no one could possibly have made out the naked figure moving behind the panes of the Glass Room. Nevertheless there was this feeling of total exposure, as though she was dancing naked on a stage before thousands of strangers. This excited Tomáš and intimidated Zdenka. She danced poorly at first, the motion of her pale body out of sympathy with the music, and then the dance took over and she underwent a sea change before Tomáš’s eyes. She became — the metamorphosis seemed real — a water creature, her limbs undulating in the flow of music, the sea grass of her hair tossed around as though by waves. Her breasts were medusas pulsating with the rhythms of the ocean, her limbs were tentacles, her eyes were pearls. When she finished she lay down before him as though cast up on a beach, cold and wet; and the flock of hair between her thighs was like a marine organism, an anemone, hiding in a crevice of the rocks, ready to open its mouth and engulf any creature that strayed near.

After that they made love more passionately than ever before, there and then on the floor of the Glass Room, in front of the sightless city and the sightless world.

‘Do you know this was a private house once,’ Zdenka tells him. Tomáš tries to silence her. He doesn’t want to hear.

‘It was even famous, in fact.’ She is putting away equipment that she has been using with one of the children, an exercise machine for strengthening the leg muscles. ‘There’s a woman who came round yesterday who told me about it. The Landauer family. You’ve heard of the Landauers. They used to make cars. Before the war.’

Tomáš owns a Trabant. The Trabant is the present. Landauers are the past, a mythic epoch of luxury and freedom, but the Trabant, small, noisy and with a poor performance, is the present. The future is beyond imagining.

‘So apparently this family were very, you know, artistic, and they had this house built by some famous German architect. He builds skyscrapers in America now. And this is the house he built for them. That’s what this woman told me.’

Tomáš finds it very disturbing that the Glass Room possesses a past, that it has not always been this sterile gymnasium, this fish tank in which Zdenka dances for him, this room of glass and quiet. Did a family really live here once? Were there children playing games — as opposed to the children who come now with their ruined bodies to do exercises that will never help them play games?

‘She’s interesting, this woman who told me. Part of some committee. Committee for Heritage or something.’

‘I don’t want to know.’

‘You must meet her.’

‘Why should I be interested in finding out about the past? The past is an illusion.’

Zdenka is not the only woman in Tomáš’s life. There is also a woman called Eve (she uses the English form Eve, rather than the Czech Eva or Iva) who is a journalist on a local newspaper.

It is much easier for Tomáš to see Eve than it is for Tomáš to see Zdenka, because Eve has her own apartment in the centre of the city. It is only one room and only has one bed, but that doesn’t matter to them because they make love quickly and without particular passion, Eve instructing Tomáš on what she wants him to do and Tomáš enjoying it in a rather detached way, as though it were a medical process of some kind, something that brings physical relief from a kind of pain. But all the time he is with Eve he feels guilt about Zdenka, his Ondine.

‘Would you mind if I had another lover?’ he enquired once, when he and Eve had just finished making love and were lying in each other’s arms, sharing a cigarette.

She shrugged. ‘Why do you ask?
Do
you?’

‘No. I just wondered.’

‘I wouldn’t mind at all. In fact I see Oddball occasionally.’ Oddball,
podivín
, was her nickname for her editor. It was quite a surprise for Tomáš to hear this. He had met Oddball a few times. He seemed middle-aged and rather unprepossessing.

‘You do?’

‘Once or twice a month, maybe. The poor fellow’s marriage is finished and he’s quite appealing and when he made a pass at me I thought, well why not? He’s very considerate, he’s never going to cause any trouble, and besides, it helps in my work.’

‘How does it help?’

‘He gives me the assignments I want, the stories that interest me. And when I go away on a job he always gets me the best hotel.’

As Tomáš had accompanied Eve on a number of these trips he realised that he was in some way compliant in this clandestine affair with Oddball. The thought amused him, and spurred him to confess: ‘Actually there
is
another woman.’

Eve took the cigarette from between his lips, drew on it and blew smoke towards the ceiling. ‘I assumed there was.’

‘She works in the hospital. A physiotherapist. And a dancer.’

‘I bet that makes her interesting in bed.’

He laughed. Eve was so much a woman of his type. There was none of the usual jealousy and envy, nothing underhand about her. Now that he knew about Oddball and she knew about Zdenka he felt even closer to her. Yet none of this affected Tomáš’s sense of guilt because the point was not so much whether Eve minded his having another woman, as whether Zdenka would mind. He didn’t dare ask Zdenka the question he had asked Eve because he already knew the answer — she would be destroyed. Like Ondine, she would die.

So why, Tomáš wonders, does he betray Zdenka? Perhaps, he reasons, because by risking the curse of Ondine he can inject some meaning into his life. It is the curse of not breathing that attracts him. Breathing is so fundamental to human life, as fundamental as the heart. The words involved in the act of breathing sound in his mind: inspiration, respiration, expiration. Birth, life and death. So Tomáš thinks of Zdenka as Ondine, with all the undulating beauty of the name, but above all he courts that dreadful curse, and fears it if Zdenka ever discovers his unfaithfulness with Eve.

In the Glass Room, Zdenka marshals the children with great skill. Having no child herself she seems to consider all her charges to be in some way her own children. She lives their moments of success, feels their moments of despair, provides the necessary impetus to pick themselves up and continue in the face of adversity.

‘You shouldn’t allow yourself to get so involved,’ Tomáš warns her. ‘In this business you must keep your distance. Otherwise you won’t be any use to them.’

But she cannot keep her distance. Each child’s tragedy is her own. Sometimes, after working with the children, she is in tears. But only ever when they have gone. Never does she allow them to see her upset. Tomáš, on the other hand, is never in tears. ‘My job is to try to mend,’ he says, ‘not to weep.’

One day he came to the gymnasium to find Zdenka in a state of great excitement. She had just been nominated to attend a conference in Paris on polio and its treatment. It was a large international gathering of experts from around the world and to be selected to go was a great honour.

‘But that was what
I
came to tell
you
,’ Tomáš said.

‘What do you mean?’

He waved a piece of paper. ‘
I
have been selected to attend a conference on poliomyelitis in Paris.’

She looked at him in amazement. ‘The same one?’

Her naivety amused him. She was brisk and energetic at her job, fragile and sylph-like in her dancing or in his arms, and credulous in her dealings with the world. She believed in progress. She thought the Party had the best interests of the people at heart. She thought that the future would exist and it would be better than the present; and that the past had existed and it was worse. She thought that there was meaning in life. And she thought that there might be two different poliomyelitis conferences at the same time in the same city. ‘I’m sure there’s only one,’ he insisted.