The Glass Room (32 page)

The children started shouting, the girls ganging up on Martin. Liesel called out to them, ‘You mustn’t fight. If you fight you’ll have to come in and there’ll be no more swimming.’

‘It’s Ottilie,’ Martin insisted, standing defiantly in the water between the two girls. ‘She says I can’t swim but I can.’

‘He’s only pretending,’ Marika said. ‘He’s putting his hands on the bottom.’

‘Maminko, can we take him further out so he can’t reach? Then we’ll see.’

‘No you can’t, Ottilie. Of course you can’t. You must stay in your depth.’ She turned back to Katalin, kneeling there on the grass, with her hair plastered against the smooth oval of her skull and her cheeks white with cold and her blue eyes the colour of ice. For a moment she looked like the young girl who had run away to the big city and cut all ties with her family. Liesel wrapped the towel round her and rubbed her shoulders. ‘Do you want to go back home or something? Is that it?’

‘It’s not that.’

‘What is it then? Look, you should get out of that costume or you’ll get cold. Let me hold the towel for you.’

Katalin hesitated. And then, as Liesel took hold of the towel, she pulled her costume down to her knees. ‘There,’ she said, and for a moment she was naked between Liesel’s outstretched arms. Liesel looked at the curve of her hips and the hang of her breasts, the dome of her belly and the delta of dark hair that nested there between plump and childish thighs. Her skin was marbled with blue. ‘You mustn’t catch cold,’ she said, wrapping her in the towel and hugging her tight. For a moment she felt the cold touch of Katalin’s hair against her cheek, and something else moving beneath the surface of her maternal concern, a sleek shark of desire.

‘Martin’s swimming!’ Ottilie cried out. ‘He’s really swimming. Maminko, come and look. We’ve taught him how to swim.’

‘Well done,’ she called, letting Katalin go. ‘Five more minutes and then you must come out.’

Katalin sat back on her heels. ‘Is it true what Herr Viktor says? That we will go to America?’

‘Have you discussed this with him?’

The young woman looked embarrassed. It was part of the tacit agreement between them that nothing was ever mentioned, no reference was ever made, however oblique. ‘He said something.’

‘It seems he has decided that Europe’s finished and the only hope is America. You know what he’s like.’ And that was an admission too, that Katalin might possess knowledge of Viktor that was equal to her own. Things were shifting on this summer day of sun and wind, with the sailing boats crossing to and fro and the children splashing in the shallows.

Katalin hitched her towel over her breasts and stood up. ‘I never thought that this would happen. I mean, I thought we would wait here for a while and then it would all be over. I never thought we might be going to the other side of the world.’

‘Would you rather stay here?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t have any choice, do I? I can’t stay here on my own.’

Far out towards the distant shore there were sailing boats, triangles of white and red passing and repassing. And beyond those the houses along the opposite shoreline, and then the hills, dark with trees. ‘Then that makes it easy.’

‘And you? Do you want me to come?’

Liesel looked away. ‘Of course I do. Now let’s get the children in and the things cleared up. It’s almost lunchtime.’

She arrives at the house exactly on time. Someone from reception brings her to his office and when he looks up from his work there she is standing in the doorway, wearing a grey suit with wide shoulders and a short sharp skirt, looking like the kind of model that you might find in a fashion magazine. Her hat is a neat grey pillbox, set at an angle on her head.

He’s not used to this. He is used to the milk and honey girls of the farming community where he grew up, or the earnest plainness of the women — many with a hint of Jew about them — that he encountered in the university world. And Hedda, whom he loved and who loved him in return until that love was murdered by circumstance. But never this elegance and urbanity. He rises from his chair and comes round the desk to take her hand and raise it towards his lips.

‘
Küss die Hand, gnädige Frau
,’ he says.

She looks round, her expression difficult to read. Regret, perhaps. A hint of sadness. ‘This room used to be the guest room. I spent the night here sometimes, can you imagine? There was a painting on the wall just there, an abstract by František Kupka. Do you know Kupka? Bright, pastel colours.’

He doesn’t know Kupka. He knows little of abstract painting. All he knows is that now where she points above his head there is a tinted photograph of the Führer gazing towards an unseen horizon. ‘So you knew the family well.’

‘Very well. Liesel Landauer was my greatest friend.’ She turns away and looks out of the window across the deserted terrace. Her face is broader than he recalls from that meeting in the café, her zygomata wider and more accentuated. ‘The children used to play out there. Dolls, cars, that kind of thing.’

‘How many children were there?’

‘Two. A boy and a girl.’

‘And is Frau Landauer a Jew like her husband?’

She smiles warily. ‘She is a German, my dear Hauptsturmführer. As beautifully, sleekly Germanic as yourself.’

‘Then the children are
Mischlinge
.’

‘They were wonderful. They
are
wonderful.’

‘Miscegenation is not a wonderful thing. It is a terrible curse on our species. Hybrids between the races are unfit.’

‘Ottilie and Martin aren’t unfit. They are normal, healthy children.’

He shrugged her assertion away. ‘We are gathering evidence to prove it. We are striving to find what characteristics define each human race so that the purity of the races may be preserved.’

‘And which race do I belong to?’

‘You?’ He considers the question seriously. Perhaps it was intended as a joke but that does not concern him. What concerns him is scientific truth. He reaches out and takes her chin to turn her head this way and that so that he can see all the angles and curves. ‘Of course you are fairly characteristic of the western Slav racial sub-group. But I would have to make a more detailed assessment to be certain of details. Eye colour and hair colour are obvious enough. And at a guess I’d say that your zygomatic arch is strongly Slav.’

‘I didn’t even know I possessed a zygomatic arch.’

‘Of course you do. Everyone does. The orbit to zygomatic arch ratio is a measure that I developed when I was at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Munich. It has considerable correlative potency.’

‘Potency, indeed! Doesn’t it repel you that I am Slav?’

‘Certainly not. I am a scientist and I must be objective. Objectively Slavs may be people of great talent and great …’ he pauses ‘… beauty.’

‘Are you trying to flatter me?’

‘I am merely saying what is true. So, let us go downstairs and see the work, shall we? As I suggested, maybe you can become one of our subjects. I must warn you that you will have to undress. For the photographic record.’

‘Undress?’ The mockery is there, in her smile and in her manner, as though somehow she is above all this. ‘Is undressing the cost of a dinner? You
are
taking me to dinner, aren’t you? Wasn’t that the agreement?’

‘Dinner wouldn’t be a cost, it would be a pleasure. And the photography is for scientific purposes only. If we were to publish any of the pictures the eyes would of course be blacked out so that you would not be recognisable.’

‘And what about private use?’

‘How do you mean, private use? The researchers—’

‘I mean
you
, Herr Hauptsturmführer.’

She is difficult to read. Usually he can assess people immediately. Usually they surrender to the demands of medicine, motivated perhaps by something close to anxiety, like patients who have been told they have a fatal disease and who submit to treatment unthinkingly, placing themselves in the hands of the medical profession without thought. But this woman is different, distrustful and sardonic. And intelligent. ‘I am a researcher like the others. Let me assure you of my absolute discretion.’

‘I’m not sure that discretion is what I am looking for,’ she replies.

They make their way downstairs into the measuring room. At the entrance she stands still for a moment, evidently amazed by the transformation that has taken place. People bustle around her. Three women are waiting at the stadiometer. Another couple are performing tests at a table. There is that atmosphere of focus and discovery, the sensation that the borders of knowledge are being moved back.

‘I don’t know what Liesel Landauer would make of it all,’ the Hanáková woman remarks. ‘The only thing she would recognise is the piano.’

‘Does it seem out of place?’

‘It is the only thing that is
in
place. Is it just for show or does someone play?’

‘I was at the Munich conservatory before I felt the call of science. I still try to keep my hand in.’

She looks at him in surprise. ‘You must play for me some time, Herr Hauptsturmführer.’

One of the workers, the milk-white girl called Elfriede Lange, hands her a form to complete and, when that is done, directs her to one of the changing cubicles, from which she emerges wearing a green gown and looking somehow smaller and defenceless, stripped of artifice. ‘I feel like a lamb going to the slaughter,’ she remarks as Elfriede prepares to take her blood.

‘It’s just a prick,’ Stahl assures her. ‘There will be a mild discomfort, nothing more.’

‘But I’m not used to discomfort of any kind.’ Yet when the needle jabs she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move, doesn’t register anything at all, just watches Stahl as blood grows like a bead of ruby on the tip of her finger. Elfriede manoeuvres her hand over the row of sample tubes, then adds test solutions and holds each tube of clouded red against the light, watching for coagulation. ‘AB,’ she announces. ‘MP negative.’

‘What does this show, Herr Hauptsturmführer? Whether I am
Mensch
or not?’

Der Mensch
— human being;
das Mensch
— slut. Which does she intend? They usher her on to the stadiometer to have her height measured, then onto the scales for her weight, then into the dentist’s chair to have her legs and arms measured. Stahl takes on this task himself, bending the callipers towards her, touching her heel and knee; knee and iliac crest. Close to her he gets a faint drift of her scent. If only, he thinks, it were possible to measure smells. Surely there would be a means of classification: a Jew smell, a Slav smell, a Teutonic smell. This woman’s smell, only partly disguised by some Parisian perfume, makes him imagine the steppe in summer, the miles and miles of wheat fields, the scent of hay, the scent of crushed grass. Coumarin. Vanilla. And something darker underneath.

‘Am I in good shape?’

‘Fine shape,’ he says. ‘A most beautiful shape. Now the cranial measure ments.’ Her eyes follow him as he moves above her, touching her temple to place the jaws of the callipers exactly. Her smile reveals even, perfect teeth. There is a faint warmth from her breath. He turns the callipers to measure from the frontal to the occipital, then crown to chin. Then the length of her nose and its width across the base. Then the orbit, with the jaws of the callipers coming close to the egg white of her eye and the staring blue jewel of her iris. ‘Just keep quite still.’

She blinks. ‘How did you get into this kind of research?’ she asks him.

He measures the curve of her cheek, the zygomatic arch. Her hairline comes down into a distinct widow’s peak. He notes this on her form. ‘I used to work on birds,’ he tells her. ‘Capturing and measuring tern on the Baltic coast. There are five species all of the same genus,
Sterna
, and I was interested in the problem of hybridisation.’

‘And what did you do with your poor captives when you had finished with them?’

He smiles at her concern. ‘Most we released, but some specimens we chloroformed and skinned. You need to preserve the evidence, you see, for the future.’

There are moles: one on her left cheek, another just inside the right-hand wing of her nose. He notes the finely sculptured ears, their lower margin curving directly into her neck without any lobe. Then skin colour, the flesh of the inside of her arm compared with a von Luschan colour chart.

‘Then I transferred to Ernst Rüdin’s team at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography in Munich, specialising in human hybridisation; and then I began this task.’

He turns to her eyes, to match them with the samples that sit like a row of boiled eggs in a tray. His eyes go from one to the other, from the real things to the simulacra, before lighting on the colour of his choice. He writes on the form and then closes the file. The real eyes follow his movements. Her gaze is disquieting. ‘And will you release me back into the wild when you have finished with me, Herr Hauptsturmführer? Or will you chloroform me and skin me?’

‘I do not think you are captive, Frau Hanáková.’

‘Oh, but I am. I am captive, the whole damned country is captive. The question is, will we ever be set free again? Or will we all be chloroformed and skinned?’

Elfriede Lange looks shocked. Stahl laughs.

‘There is no question of anything like that,’ he says. ‘We’ve finished here. Now just the photographs.’

‘Ah, the photographs. Do you watch?’

‘Not if you don’t wish me to. If they wish, subjects may request only people of the same sex. But I must emphasise that I am a scientist.’

‘So is Doctor Mabuse.’

‘I can assure you that I am no criminal genius.’

‘That’s what he would say.’

They cross over to the photographic area. Stahl holds the curtains aside for her to go through, then pulls them firmly closed and ties the tapes behind him. Within the enclosure the air is warm and bright. In her green gown she stands at the focus of this semicircular space and looks around, apparently unconcerned at the lights and the photographer examining her in the viewfinder of his Rolleiflex. ‘This is where we used to dine. There used to be a circular dining table right here.’ There is a hint of accusation in her tone, as though he might have been responsible for some kind of vandalism.