The Glass Room (29 page)

‘What is it? Oh God, not a death?’

He made a small sound that may have been a sign of disapproval, may have been a deprecating laugh. ‘Not exactly a death.’ He passed her the letter. ‘It seems we no longer own the house.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’ She peered at the sheet. Without her glasses the words were no more than a blur.

‘Procházka informs us that it has been confiscated by the government. Taken from us, expropriated, whatever you want to call it. Stolen.’

‘Why?’

‘
Why
?’ He looked at Liesel in astonishment. ‘Because I am a Jew, Liesel.’

‘And they’ve
taken
it? But it’s not theirs to take. It’s ours. We built it, we own it. It’s yours and mine, and Ottilie’s and Martin’s when we go.’

‘Where are you going?’ Martin asked.

‘Nowhere, darling.’

‘What’s happened to the house?’ Ottilie’s tone was sharply admonishing, the tone of her mother when she was telling the children off.

It wasn’t often that Viktor addressed the children at breakfast but he turned to her and explained. ‘I’m afraid it isn’t ours any longer, Ottilie. Now it’s theirs, the property of the so-called Protectorate. The decree has been signed in the name of the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia himself.’

‘Is that Hitler?’

‘No it’s not Hitler, but it is Hitler’s representative.’

The girl was angry. ‘But it’s our house. It’s ours!’

‘Otti,’ Katalin said quietly, ‘you mustn’t shout.’

‘Isn’t there any redress?’ Liesel asked.

‘Redress?’ Viktor laughed. ‘How quaint. Of course there’s no redress, Liesel. These people write the laws to suit themselves.’

‘What will they do with it?’

‘God knows. Pull it down probably.’

‘
Pull it down
?’

It was only at the suggestion that the house might actually be demolished that Liesel finally broke down and wept, not only for the beautiful house on the hillside in Mĕsto, but for her lost life and her lost love and because of the whole world of exile in which reality is elsewhere and the life you live seems to be something happening to someone else, a dream world that hesitates on the edge of nightmare. The children had never seen their mother weep. They watched in astonishment at this display of emotion, while at the head of the table Viktor looked impatient and helpless, as though she had done something silly but he didn’t know how to explain the right way to do things. It was Katalin who got up from her chair and came round the table and put her arms around her shoulders to comfort her.

Stahl calls for the car to stop.

‘I’ll get out here and walk,’ he tells the driver. ‘You go on and wait for me.’

He climbs out and lets the car pull away up the hill ahead. You aren’t advised to do this, to appear alone on the streets in uniform, but on this quiet road with no one about and the sun beating on the asphalt he is prepared to dispense with caution for a moment. Walking is what he likes — hiking in the Kaisergebirge or walking along the dunes of Usedom island on the Baltic coast — and he has had all too little opportunity to stretch his legs in recent weeks. He strides up the hill enthusiastically. The road climbs. It is hot in the sunshine. There are trees and birdsong, the mundane things of suburban life. Houses hiding behind carefully trimmed vegetation. A dog barking in some garden nearby. The road reaches the brow of the hill and widens out and there it is, on the left-hand side with the view of the city beyond it — the Landauer House.

Startling, the reality, although he knew what to expect from those photographs and plans that he saw in an architectural journal some years ago: a long, low, almost featureless pavilion, somewhere that you might store sports equipment or furniture. A kind of stylish anonymity. The architect’s name was Abt, he knows that as well. There is a story going round that Speer tried to persuade Abt to work with the Party on their new vision, their new aesthetic, but seeing this example of his work one wonders what the point would have been. The Party’s vision is one of triumph and grandeur, not this kind of understatement. What happened to the man? Detention, probably. It isn’t worth being lukewarm towards the regime. He who is not for me is against me, that is the watchword.

By the time he reaches the gate the driver is already inside the fence and arguing with someone. ‘Is there a problem?’ Stahl asks.

The man turns and salutes. ‘Herr Hauptsturmführer, this fellow refuses to open to us. He says it’s council property. I’m not sure if he really understands what’s going on.’

Stahl smiles. He looks round at the houses across the street. They seem deserted, indifferent to his presence there in the forecourt of the Landauer House. Does a curtain twitch? He turns back to the problem at hand. The custodian is a surly looking Slav with the typical broad features of the race, the wide nose and blue eyes. Young. Couldn’t be more than thirty. Not unintelligent. The Slavs aren’t unintelligent of course, just emotionally unstable, liable to great heights and great depths. That is what science tells one. Look at Tchaikovsky. Look at Dostoyevsky.

‘He understands all right.’ He smiles pacifically at the fellow and tries to cajole him into acceptance of what is a fait accompli. ‘Now come on my man, we don’t want a silly argument, do we? Everything is above board. Legal.’ He enunciates the word precisely, in case it is not understood.
Rechtlich
. ‘We are possessing the property for purposes to do with the war effort. It’s all written here in black and white.’ He points to the foot of the document that the driver is trying to push into the man’s hand. The requisition order — transfer of ownership from the Municipality of Mĕsto — is in German but there cannot be any doubt in the man’s mind, can there? The former owners were German speakers so he must know the language well enough. ‘Signed by the Secretary of State of the Reich Protectorate. See? Stamps, signature — Karl Hermann Frank — everything. My name’s Stahl, by the way. Hauptsturmführer Stahl. And yours is Laník, I believe. Isn’t that right? Look,
Pane
Laník, why don’t you just show me round — as a visitor, if you like — while you think things over?’ It is important to understand how to treat these people. What is the point in coming over all arrogant when all that is needed is a bit of persuasion? ‘I mean, we’re going to get inside one way or the other, aren’t we? So why not make it peaceably?’

Laník sniffs, looking from the officer to the driver and back.

Finally he shrugs and leads the way across the pavement towards the building. Stahl follows. The custodian opens the door and stands aside. Nodding approval, Stahl steps in and finds himself in a vestibule like the waiting room to a medical studio, all sterile white and gleaming chrome and dark wood panelling. Appropriate for what is planned for the place. The floor is pale limestone of some kind. There’s a table where a dentist might have put a pile of magazines, copies of
Illustrierter Beobachter
and
Frauen-Warte
, that kind of thing. A stairwell on the left leads down to the floor below.

‘The rooms?’

Laník opens doors in the panelling. It’s almost a conjuring trick, mere flat panelling — one expects a cupboard — opening to display entire rooms. The rooms are bare, stripped of furnishings, except that one of them still has a bedframe and a set of fitted bookshelves. There are two bathrooms, tiled in white. One of them, a children’s bathroom presumably, has a row of small rubber mats on the floor depicting a family of ducks advancing towards the bath from the door: mother and father duck and a trail of four ducklings.

‘Where are the original owners?’ Stahl asks.

‘Away.’

‘I can see they are away. Where have they gone?’

Laník shrugs. ‘Abroad.’

‘And you’re not going to say where?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You have no contact?’

‘No.’

Stahl contemplates the Slav thoughtfully. ‘They were Jews, weren’t they?’

Again, that shrug. It borders, just borders on the insolent. That is the mood of the whole, damned country: indifference bordering on the insolent. The universal shrug. For the most part the Germans are enthusiastic enough, of course, like converts to a new religion. It’s the Slavs that are the problem. He looks into the man’s eyes and wonders what is there behind them. They are Aryan blue, but it is well known that the inheritance of eye colour is not an infallible guide. ‘Are
you
a Jew?’

‘I’m a Catholic.’

‘That means nothing.’

‘I don’t like Jews,’ Laník offers.

‘Neither does that. Didn’t you like your employers?’

‘They were all right.’

‘Ah. Bad Jews in general, good Jews in particular, is that it? The usual story. Show me downstairs.’

They go down, Laník leading the way. Twelve steps down to the turn, then a further nine, and a door opens onto the living room. Laník stands aside and lets him go through first.

Glänzend
! Even more impressive than the photographs: a great open space of a place, almost the entire floor area of the whole building. Open plan. Stahl likes that. Ideal for a laboratory. Clean and bright, with those huge glass windows shedding the cold light of reason into the place. None of your Bohemian
Gemütlichkeit
, thank God. He finds it difficult, when the future beckons, to applaud the Party’s obsession with the past, all that mystical folk-lorish stuff.

‘What happened to the furniture?’

‘It went.’

‘All of it? I’ve seen photographs. Good modern stuff.’

‘All of it except the piano.’

‘A pity.’ He walks round the room like someone looking to rent a property, running his finger along a surface, tapping the wooden panelling, touching with his palm the cool stone of the partition that crosses the room and divides part of the space in two. What stone is it? Alabaster or something. The tortuous veining resembles the contour lines of some remote countryside, twisted hills and sudden, surprising gorges. ‘Remarkable, this.’

‘It was chosen by
Paní
Landauer herself.’

‘Where did it come from?’

‘Africa, they say. I don’t know.’

He lifts the lid of the piano that stands there in the shadow of the partition. ‘A Bösendorfer. Who played?’

‘
Paní
Landauer, a bit. But they used to have recitals sometimes. Public, like. For charity and stuff.’

‘Patrons of the arts, were they?’ He sits at the instrument and plays some notes, listening to the sounds with a practised ear. ‘It needs tuning.’

‘
Paní
Landauer used to see to that.’

Then Stahl begins to play, picking out the main theme of Smetana’s
Moldau
. The trills, the flurries, lap around the Glass Room. ‘Do you recognise it?’

Laník shrugs.

‘It’s one of your Slavic composers. Smetana. “
Ma Vlast
” or “
Mein Vaterland
”. Which should it be?’

‘I don’t know anything about that. I’m not political.’

Stahl shuts the lid of the piano and stands up. ‘Everyone’s political these days, Laník. Being non-political is a political act.’ He walks round the stone partition into the sitting area where the glass windows look out over the sloping lawn and across the rooftops of the city. There’s the Špilas fortress in the distance.

‘Where she is now, your
Paní
Landauer?’

‘I told you, I don’t know.’

Stahl laughs. ‘Why are you so suspicious of me, Laník? I’m not concerned with tracking her down or anything. Scientific research, that’s what I’m here for. Anthropology. Biometrics. The measurement of man. You, Herr Laník. We’ll measure you. And tell you whether you are a Jew.’

The next day lorries draw up outside the Landauer House and men begin to unload — chairs, shelving, desks, filing cabinets. A wooden guard hut is assembled inside the gate and two soldiers erect a notice, a metal sign capped with a wreathed
Hakenkreuz
:

Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt
Forschungsstätte für Biologie
Biometrik Abteilung

Neighbours peer through lace curtains at the work going on. A group of children gathers at one of the barricades and is chased away. Meanwhile the two houses directly across the road are requisitioned, one of them as a staff hostel. There is work to be done, bedrooms to be set up, kitchens to be equipped. No-entry signs abound.

A week later the scientific staff arrive, a dozen of them, three women and nine men, all of them young, all of them in civilian clothes, the women plainly dressed, their hair gathered back severely from their faces emphasising their good bone structure, the men wearing jackets or suits, with their hair cut military short. They stop first at the hostel and settle in, then they cross the road to the Landauer House.

There is uncertain laughter as they look round their new workplace. It is like the start of term, the same nervousness, the same exploring of new acquaintances. ‘What a place!’ one of them exclaims. ‘Just like a clinic.’

‘Is this a Jew house?’ another asks.