The Glass Room (2 page)

They left the city immediately after the wedding and drove to Vienna, to the Sacher Hotel, where the manager met them on the steps. Minions scurried round to the back of their car for suitcases. There was much bowing and scraping, much bestowing of compliments. They were
gnädiger Herr
,
gnädige Frau
, and were to make themselves completely at home. It was the first time that Liesel had heard herself addressed like that,
gnädige Frau Landauer
, tied for life in one way or another to this man at her side, who seemed, for that moment when he was acknowledging the welcome, no longer her beloved Viktor but a stranger, someone she had encountered only a short while before and now saw as calm and detached and somehow admirable. This was how he would be at the factory, she guessed; how he would be with the workers’ delegations, with the foremen and the managers. A kind of detached graciousness, as though dealing with a tiresome but respected relative.

The suite they were shown to was elaborate and ornate, the walls silk and the plaster mouldings gilt, the sort of thing Viktor loathed. ‘It is exactly the kind of nonsense that we need to throw off, all this romanticism, all this … this
clinging to the past
. This is everything our new house will not be!’

Liesel laughed at him. When he got onto the subject of the new house he spoke with exclamation marks — that was how she put it to herself. She could picture them punctuating the air, small pulses of energy. Often talked about, this new house did not yet have shape or form. It merely existed as an abstract, written with capitals and punctuated by exclamation marks: The New House! Liesel’s parents had given them a plot of land on which to build, and that was to be Wenzel’s wedding present to his daughter and son-in-law: a house of their own. ‘Something good and solid,’ the old man had said, while his future son-in-law had smiled. ‘
Good
, yes, but
solid
? No! We don’t want a house that looks like a fortress, all turrets and towers and Gothic windows, nor one that looks like a church. Good God, we’re living in the twentieth century, not the fourteenth. The world is moving on.’

And once the porters and the maid had left them alone in their suite in the Sacher Hotel the world certainly did move on, for Viktor went up to Liesel and carefully removed her spectacles, and then the silk jacket she was wearing, and then the dress she had on under that. Removal of her spectacles had rendered the world around her a mellow haze of colour, as though she had been plunged into a foggy day. ‘What are you doing, Viktor?’ she asked, rather nervously. Standing there in her underwear, in the fog, she felt defenceless.

‘My darling Eliška, what do you think I am doing?’ Viktor replied.

So it was that, rather to her surprise — she had expected to wait until evening — they made love for the first time at four o’clock in the afternoon, on a heavy Biedermeier bed, with the light flooding in through the tall windows and their clothes strewn on the carpet. The experience was curiously dispiriting but it was, she supposed, rather a modern thing to do.

The plan was to spend two days in Vienna, before setting off south. They were to motor through Austria to northern Italy. Alone. Viktor had resisted all pleas that they take a driver, or send a maid or a valet ahead on the train. What happens if you have a breakdown? people had asked. Which only brought laughter. ‘We will be driving a Landauer, won’t we? Don’t they have the greatest reliability of all the cars of Europe? Isn’t that the boast on all our advertisements? And’ — the final blow this — ‘don’t
I
make them?’

So they drove alone, in a Landauer 80 cabriolet, the very latest in the range of cars produced by Landauerovy Závody (formerly Landauer Autofabrik), a touring convertible that advertised itself as the Mount of Princes despite the fact that princes and Kaisers had been cast aside with the ending of the Great War. The car was painted cream and powered by a V8 engine that delivered, as Viktor was proud of explaining, the power of eighty horses. They drove through Carinthia and crossed the mountains into Italy near Villach, where he had been stationed during the war. There was much waiting around at the customs house while Viktor argued over whether he should pay an import duty on the car, and much frustration when he had to change to the left-hand side of the road to proceed. And then they were out of the Teutonic world and into the Latin, and the sun was brighter and the breeze softer and there was a quality to the light that Liesel had never seen before — as though it was denser than the same thing north of the Alps. ‘“
Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühn
?”’ Viktor quoted. Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom? And Liesel continued the poem, and then they completed it together so that they laughed delightedly at their unity of mind and body.

The only small blight on their happiness during this journey was a self-imposed one: after Udine they made a short detour to the war cemetery on the Tagliamento river, and after searching among the graves found a cement tablet with Benno’s name on it. His body was not there of course, but muddled up with his comrades in the ossuary nearby. Thinking of her own happiness, a happiness that Benno had not lived to witness, Liesel wept. Viktor, who by one of those coincidences of fate had been the last person from home to see her brother alive, put his arm round her shoulder and hugged her to him. ‘He is surely with you in spirit,’ he said, which she knew to be a great concession to sentiment on his part, for he believed in nothing like the spirit and certainly not the continuation of the spirit after death. Then he kissed her on the cheek and told her she was the most wonderful woman in the world and she laughed and said, no she wasn’t. But still the thought pleased her that he might at least consider that possibility, and by the time they had climbed back into the car and driven on, happiness and light-heartedness had been restored.

In Venice they stayed at the Royal Danieli. For three days they were on their own — visiting churches and palaces, exploring the
calle
and the canals, with Viktor snapping pictures of Liesel with his sleek new Leica — but on the third evening they were invited by an acquaintance of Viktor to a party in an ancient palazzo on the Canal Grande. Beneath faded frescoes by pupils of Tiepolo, ancient Venetian nobility mixed uneasily with young men and women of sleek and dangerous good looks. One of these creatures trapped Liesel in a window seat and, in English as broken as her own, extolled the virtues of Fascism and the merits of modernity. ‘One day all this will be swept away.’ He sounded like a parody of what Viktor said when he was in one of his political moods. Sweep everything away! Out with the old, in with the new! But Liesel realised with some amazement that this Italian was referring to the whole city, and more than the city: the whole country in fact, this treasure house of art and history. Anything that wasn’t a product of the twentieth century, in fact.

‘That’s absurd.’

He shrugged, as though her opinion meant nothing. ‘For example, the Grand Canal drained and turned into a motor road. That is the future.’

‘Then the future is peopled with barbarians.’

‘Are you suggesting that I am a barbarian,
signora
?’

‘I’m suggesting that you sound very like one.’

It was then that someone interrupted them, a voice speaking English with a German accent, but speaking it far better than either she or the Italian. ‘Is this person filling your head with nonsense about how wonderful Il Duce is, and how the forces of modernity are being unleashed by Italian Fascism?’

She looked round. He was smoking, holding two glasses of champagne in one hand and his cigarette in the other. He seemed older than the Italian, as old as Viktor maybe, with the look of a boxer in the early part of his career, before he has begun to suffer much damage — a bluntness to his nose, a heaviness to his brow. Putting his cigarette between his lips he held out one of the glasses towards Liesel. ‘Have a sip of French tradition. Even the Fascists will not be able to improve on it.’

There was a swift juggling of champagne flutes. Curiously the Italian was no longer there. The newcomer raised Liesel’s hand to within a few millimetres of his lips. ‘My name is Rainer, I’m afraid. Someone has to be …’

‘Someone has to be? You mean, someone in your family? It is another tradition?’

The man made a disparaging face. His hair was parted in the middle and rather long; as though, despite the well-cut suit, he wished to convey a certain bohemian look. ‘It was a joke. American style.’

‘But you are not American.’

‘I practise at their humour. One day that is all there will be to laugh at.’ He sipped and looked at Liesel thoughtfully. He was shorter than her by two or three inches and his eyes had an unashamed frankness about them. He examined her quite openly: her mouth (red, quaintly curved, she knew), her bosom (rather flat, she feared), her hands (rather long and strong for a woman). Had he been standing a few paces back she imagined he would have examined the line of her hips (broad) and her ankles (she was proud of her ankles). Perhaps he had already done all this before his approach. Somehow — why should she be concerned? — she wished that she was not wearing her spectacles. ‘And whose company do I have the pleasure of keeping?’ he asked.

‘Liesel Landauer’s.’

Eyebrows rose. ‘Landauer? You are Jewish then?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Apostate?’

‘My husband’s family—’

He drew on his cigarette and blew a thin stream of smoke towards the painted ceiling. ‘Ah, I see. You are
Frau
Landauer and you have trapped a Hebrew into renouncing his religion for love’s sake.’

She wasn’t sure if she quite liked this conversation, the word Hebrew pronounced with just a hint of contempt. ‘My husband’s family are Jewish, but they are not observant.’

‘And the beautiful Frau Liesel Landauer and her fortunate husband are from …?’

‘We are Czechish. These are our’ — she hesitated, the English word escaping her — ‘our
Flitterwochen
?’

‘Honeymoon, they say. Czechish? You are not
that
Landauer, are you? Motor cars?’

‘Well, yes—’

The man’s face lit up. There was something comic about his expression, a sudden childish delight painted over mock seriousness. ‘I used to
own
a Landauer. A Model 50 — what they called the Torpedo. Unfortunately I aimed it at a bus and sank it.’

She laughed. ‘The bus or the Torpedo?’

‘Both, actually.’ He raised his glass. ‘To all Landauers, and those who ride them.’ They drank, although Liesel wasn’t quite sure about the toast. Landauer cars or Landauer people? And was there something vaguely suggestive about the word ‘ride’ which surely meant riding a horse as well as a vehicle? Shouldn’t it be ride
in
them? But her English (they were still speaking English) was not good enough to be certain, and thankfully, just when she felt a warmth in her face and the insidious discomfort of perspiration beneath her arms, Viktor appeared beside her and the conversation slipped into German. There were formal introductions, a sharp shaking of hands, a bowing, and the faintest clicking of the stranger’s heels. ‘Herr Landauer,’ he said, smiling in that knowing way he had, ‘may I congratulate you on your wonderful motor cars? And your wonderful wife.’

It might have come to nothing, a mere curiosity, a passing acquaintance, like drivers of Landauer cars who meet on the open road and acknowledge each other’s passing presence with a comradely wave. But they agreed to meet again. Rainer von Abt had something to show them. He smiled mysteriously when they asked, but declined to explain. ‘A special treat for the two honeymooners.’ He would meet them at the landing stage outside their hotel at nine o’clock the next morning.

The next day was one of beaten silver, like the plate you could buy in the shops near the Rialto bridge — the shimmering silver of the water turning this way and that to catch the light and fracture it in a thousand different directions. Above that the sleek zinc of a high layer of cloud and between the two, like a layer of decorative enamel, the buildings of the city — pink and gold and ochre and orange. At the appointed time von Abt arrived in the stern of a water taxi. He was dressed in white — white flannels, white linen jacket — and looked as though he might be headed for a tennis game. ‘
Buon giorno
!’ he exclaimed. He handed Liesel and Viktor down into the boat while giving commands to the pilot in what seemed to be expert Italian. The engine bubbled and spluttered and edged the boat — all gleaming wood and brass — out into the stream. ‘
Avanti
!’ their host cried, and they turned and headed out into the basin of St Mark’s, the narrow hull sliding past mooring posts and rocking gondolas and evading the stuttering
vaporetti
like a sheep dog running past cows. There was a sensation of floating in light, of being gently buoyed up by the breeze and the luminescence of the water. Liesel felt the wind of their motion flatten her dress against her.

‘No wonder the great colourists came from here,’ von Abt observed, noticing her expression of delight. ‘Imagine spending your whole life bathed in light like this. If you were bathed in ultra-violet all that time, you’d come out black like a nigger. Here you come out white and pure, with colour in your heart.’

Viktor put his arm around her waist, as though defending her against such poetic thoughts. ‘Where are we going, von Abt?’ he called above the engine noise.

‘My secret! But like all secrets in Venice, it cannot be kept for long.’

The boat headed along the great curve of the Riva degli Schiavoni, away from the pink confection of the Doge’s Palace and towards the red-brick buildings of the Arsenale. It slowed and finally moored at a public garden beside the mouth of a small canal. Von Abt climbed ashore and led the way into the gardens as though there was no time to be lost, while Viktor and Liesel strolled after him, holding hands and laughing at the absurd adventure and at the urgent enthusiasm of this strange man with the boxer’s face and the poet’s vision of the city. ‘A homosexual,’ Viktor whispered in her ear.