The Glass Room (38 page)

‘Come,’ he says, suddenly sorry for her. ‘You can wash a bit and then you’ll have to go.’

She’s shaking, touching her lip and shivering like someone with a fever. ‘You hurt me.’

‘You’ll be all right.’

‘Why didn’t you ask? Why did you have to hit me? If you’d asked I’d have let you do it.’

‘It doesn’t matter. It’s over now.’ And he feels in control of her. No longer her victim. There’s something almost loveable about her, something small and fearful. He takes her to the bathroom and splashes water on the bruised lip. And then bends and kisses it, feeling its heat, tasting the metallic flavour of her blood.

‘There’s a curfew on,’ she says, turning her head away. ‘I can’t get home by myself. You’ll have to take me.’

‘I’ll take you. Don’t worry, I’ll take you.’

They leave the house and hurry through the rain past the guard box. In the car she fumbles with cigarettes, striking three or four matches before she gets one to light, her hand still shaking. She smokes it awkwardly, on the opposite side of the mouth from where he hit her. ‘What about the baby?’ she asks.

He drives by the thin pencils of headlight that are all that the regulations allow. Tramlines run like nerves along their route. There are few vehicles on the blackened streets, only an army truck grinding past, its gears grating as it turns a corner, its engine revving like a blasphemy in the cold wet evening. ‘Were you telling the truth?’

‘Of course I was telling the truth.’

At the end of Franz-Josef-Strasse is a roadblock where callow youths who have yet to be moved to the Eastern Front flag the car down. They shine a torch in Stahl’s eyes and up and down the form of Hana Hanáková in the seat beside him. ‘Papers,’ they say, snapping their fingers in the torchlight. Hana looks straight ahead, ignoring them, not trying to hide her bruised face.

‘Are you all right, madam?’ a voice asks. But when they see Stahl’s identity card with the twin Sig runes and the eagle bearing the
Hakenkreuz
in its talons, they douse the light and salute sharply and pull the barrier aside to allow the car on its way. They drive on into the old city, Staré Mĕsto, the Altstadt, across tramlines and over cobbles, past church and convent and the slope of the Krautmarkt, Cabbage Market Square, where the stalls are shuttered and closed.

At the head of the square is a ponderous block of a building with columns on its façade. ‘You can stop here,’ she tells him. Slivers of light leak out of blacked-out windows. Cobblestones glisten in what light there is from the sky. A shadow hurrying away down an alleyway is a curfew-breaker scurrying to safety.

‘I want to keep the baby,’ she says, sitting there without moving.

Does he believe any of this, or is it all a charade to get more money from him? ‘Then keep it. It’s yours. Keep it.’

‘But I’ll need help. We have no money, you know that. I told you, my husband’s a Jew. They’ve frozen all his bank accounts, everything.’

‘And you want me to pay for it? How do I even know there is a baby, never mind whether it is mine or not?’

‘Because I don’t lie.’

‘How do I know that?’

‘Because,’ she says, sounding like a child holding on to an argument that it knows is nonsense. Then she shrugs. ‘You’ll have to trust me.’

He laughs. ‘How much do you expect? What do you expect? An open cheque?’

She doesn’t know. She knows everything but she doesn’t know this. He finds some notes in his pocket and hands them to her. ‘That’s all I’ve got for now,’ he says.

She glances at the money and then stuffs it in her coat pocket and climbs out into the damp, cold evening.

‘I’m sorry,’ he calls after her, but exactly what he is apologising for isn’t clear.

She turns and looks back into the car. It astonishes him how things can change, how she has changed from the woman who first picked him up in the café, the woman who knew things that he had barely imagined, into this fragile creature begging for money. ‘I want the baby, Werner,’ she says. ‘It’s the only future I have.’

She read the letter for the fourth or fifth time. Times without counting. Sixth? Seventh? Remembering her own pregnancy and Hana’s attentions, her closeness, the wonder of it all, and that time they had divined Ottilie’s gender, successfully, with the pendulum. And Hana kneeling there as though at an altar, her hands on the swelling of her belly, and her small gasp of amazement. And now this.

I thought I couldn’t have children. The doctor said so. Barren. It’s a terrible word isn’t it? But now I know I’m not. The terrible thing is, I want the baby, Liesi. I want him or her or whatever it is
.

There was a knock on the door. Hastily, she folded the letter away and called out, ‘
Hereinkommen
!’ and turned to find one of the porters there in the doorway. ‘I’ve come for the luggage, Madame. Monsieur said to tell you that the cars are ready.’

Her suitcases stood ready in the middle of the carpet. Her other things, the trunks and the packing cases, all of them marked Not Wanted on Voyage, had already gone ahead. ‘I’m coming,’ she said. ‘Tell them I’m coming.’

What could she do? Hana was there, on the far side of whatever divide it was that separated them, and she was about to go even further away. A rail journey across the continent. She would see the ocean for the very first time. She would cross the ocean to another world.

Turning back to the writing desk she picked up her pen. There was no time to write anything more than a postcard. The photograph showed the hotel itself bedecked with awnings and flags like an ocean liner. There was barely space on the other side to write anything.

Darling Hana,
We’re going at last. I’ve received your number 19. Goodness knows, I want to be with you but I cannot. I’ve only time to write this and pray that things work out. Go ahead with what you want, please go ahead. I’ll write as soon as I am able. Bilbao, maybe.

She signed off and hurried downstairs. Outside on the forecourt there were two motor cars drawn up, two Citroëns piled high with luggage and people, Katalin with two of the children in the rear car, Ottilie in the front one and Viktor waiting impatiently by the door. ‘Where have you been? We’ve got a train to catch.’

‘I was just writing a card. I must leave it at the desk.’

‘For God’s sake get in and let’s go. We can post it at the station.’

Geneva station was a great noisy rattling drum of a place. Trains seethed at the platforms, venting steam from their joints and snorting like vast dormant dragons. There was the smell of carbon and sulphur in the air. It stung the eyes and the back of the throat and seemed to penetrate whatever clothes you wore. The plates on each carriage of their train said SNCF and people were already leaning out of the windows of the third-class compartments, calling and waving. Others on the platform passed suitcases up through the windows. There was the sound of panic in the air, passengers arguing with officials, papers being scrutinised, tickets being examined, passports and visas being waved like weapons.

Viktor led the way, pushing through the crowds, followed by a porter and a trolley piled high with suitcases. Liesel remembered the station in Mĕsto, when they had met Rainer off the Vienna train, when he came to survey the site for the new house. And now the house was no longer theirs and Rainer was in America and Europe was dying beneath the burden of war, and Hana was pregnant, and she was hurrying after Viktor towards escape.

‘The next carriage,’ he called, turning to let his flock catch up. ‘For God’s sake get a move on!’

They clambered on board, one of the porters going ahead with the luggage. ‘Will we have a bed?’ Martin asked as they edged along the corridor.

‘Of course we’ll have a bed,’ Ottilie told him. ‘How else will we sleep?’

Other compartments were full, people standing in the corridor, people talking, people arguing. Someone had found his place already taken and a row flared up in German and French, two people fighting over the same exiguous sleeping space. Mercifully their own compartment was empty, six bunks folded down, their cases dumped on the floor. ‘Not quite what we’re used to,’ Viktor said as they crowded in. But then nothing was what they were used to. War and exile wasn’t what they were used to. The attendant took their papers — tickets, passports, transit visas for
l’État Français
, entry visas for
el Estado Español
— and apologised that there was no restaurant car on the train. He shrugged helplessly. No wagons-lit, no restaurant car, but what could you expect? Things were not what they used to be.

‘Will we all be in here together?’ Ottilie asked.

‘Of course we will. This is how you travel on trains if there aren’t any sleeping-cars.’

‘I want to go on the top,’ Martin said. ‘It’s just like camping, isn’t it, Tatínku?’

Katalin was organising the children. Ottilie would take the other top bunk. She wasn’t afraid of falling. Viktor and Liesel would have the two bottom bunks. Katalin would sleep above Liesel — the alternative was too embarrassing to contemplate — and Marika would be above Viktor.

Liesel sat on the bottom bunk and looked out of the window at the grimy station. Doors banged and whistles blew. The engine bellowed, an explosion of steam, and slowly, like the hands of a clock moving, the train began to slide forward. ‘We’re going,’ she said. ‘Finally we are really going.’

‘Will we sleep?’ Marika asked. ‘Mummy, will we be able to sleep?’

‘Not if you don’t all quieten down.’

French border guards were coming down the corridor and sliding open doors. They flicked their fingers insolently. ‘Documents!’ they called. ‘Passports, visas.’

And Liesel suddenly remembered that she hadn’t posted the card to Hana. The train was sliding through the shunting yards, rocking sideways as it went over points, trundling towards the border and she still had the postcard in her bag.

‘Too late now,’ Viktor said.

‘Won’t we stop at the border?’

He indicated the police pushing along the corridor,
gendarmes
wearing their absurd kepis. ‘This
is
the border. You’ll have to post it in Bayonne or somewhere.’

‘But it’s got Swiss stamps.’ It seemed to worry her, the matter of stamps.

‘We can get stamps in Bayonne. Or in Spain. We can always get stamps.’

The carriage swayed and rocked. Officials stood at the open door and examined their documents, the passports, the tickets. Finally they handed them back and moved on to the next compartment. There were houses passing by and neat, Swiss fields. Then a glimpse of the river, the Rhône, on their left. She was in tears. They were going. Lyon, Montpellier, Toulouse, Bayonne and Biarritz; and then Spain and Bilbao where they would board the ship. They were going for ever.

‘But how will it ever get to her? How will it ever reach her?’

Mĕsto was slipping away behind them, far behind them. The Ocean lay beyond. And America. She was in tears, holding the postcard and weeping. ‘It’ll never get to her,’ she said through her tears. ‘She’ll never know.’

He ponders the problem, standing in the Glass Room while the measuring goes on around him: Slavs, Germans, Jews all going through the mill. Getting Jews isn’t easy these days. The teams have to scour the streets during the two hours in the afternoon during which Jews are permitted to shop, but how can you find enough people when they skulk in doorways and scurry along streets, keeping close to the wall and looking out for official vehicles?

Elfriede Lange approaches him, blushing prettily. ‘We have a group coming from Trebitsch this afternoon, sir.’

‘A group?’

‘Of Jews. And there are a few from the Old Town coming down now.’

The landscape outside is calm after the storm of last night, a landscape of placid trees and lawn, of rooftops and church spires and the distant block of the Špilas fortress. He ponders the problem of the Jews. If only they possessed some clear characteristic, some marker like the wide nose and thick lips of the Negroids or the epicanthal fold of the Mongoloids. Then it would be easy. For a moment his eyes focus closer, not on the distant view but on the window pane itself: down there at the level of his knees, as though etched into the glass, are the prints of two hands, narrow female hands, fingers splayed, and a streak of rust brown. You can see them only if the angle of the light is right, but they are there nevertheless. They recall the decorations in one of those palaeolithic caves discovered in Spain, the imprint of a human hand pressed in pigment on the wall. But these two hands are momentary and evanescent, witnesses of a moment that has not lasted. They will go with the wipe of a cloth. He calls one of the staff over and points out the problem — ‘Have it cleaned’ — and the woman cancels the prints with one stroke.

A short while later the Jews are shown in. There are two men, and a woman with a four-year-old boy. They look around the place as though trusting nothing. It is in the Jewish nature to be suspicious, but can you measure suspicion? The woman keeps complaining that she must telephone her husband, she must let her husband know; and one of the men protests about this act of detention being against the law, being tantamount to kidnapping, in fact. He is well into his sixties and smartly dressed in stiff-collared shirt and rather threadbare suit; the kind of man who might once have worn a flower in his buttonhole but now has only the yellow star as a decoration. Stahl strolls over to the desk as they are filling in the forms. This particular man is writing with a fountain pen that is clearly a personal favourite. He has an old-fashioned, elegant hand, the kind that used to be drummed into children in the old days before the Great War.
Oskar Hanák
, he writes.

A small shock of recognition. Is it just a coincidence of names? Stahl asks, ‘Do you know this building?’ and the man looks up, startled to be addressed in this manner. Go there, sit there, do this, people are saying to him, and then this officer who looks to be in charge strolls over and asks a civilised question.