The Glass Room by Simon Mawer Page B

surprise, von Abt had agreed. So she and Viktor travelled up to Prague to make the purchase and the sculpture now stood on a plinth beside the onyx wall and looked over her left shoulder at whoever might be in the chairs in the sitting area.
    ‘It is beautiful,’ Liesel said to Viktor, speaking of the sculpture, and the room itself, and of the whole house. ‘Perfect.’
    That was it: perfection. Perfection of proportion, of illumination, of mood and manner. Beauty made manifest.
     
Housewarming
     
    Viktor and Liesel hold a house-warming party. What started out as an informal gathering becomes like the opening of an art exhibition, made worse because the man himself is there — Rainer von Abt. He flies in from Berlin and is fetched from the airfield by the driver. The guests are delighted by this manifestation of the modern age, this architect who descends from the sky for something as ephemeral as a party. Liesel greets him as he steps out of the car. ‘Everyone,’ she warns him as she leads him inside and down the stairs, ‘everyone has been dying to meet you.’
    And there they all are, as hostess and architect enter the Glass Room: the intelligentsia of Mĕsto, the musicians and composers, the artists and the architects, the critics and the writers, the businessmen and the industrialists, all of them waiting for the great man’s appearance, along with journalists and a photographer from the society page of one of the local newspapers. The architects Fuchs and Wiesener are there, each full of grudging praise for von Abt’s work; and Filla the cubist who finds echoes of van Doesburg in the plain geometry of the house; and the composer Václav Kaprál with his pretty daughter Vítĕzslava. Von Abt bows his head over female hands, and shakes manly ones, and pronounces himself delighted with everything but especially delighted with this wonderful house that he has brought to fruition. ‘A work of art like this,’ he tells one of the journalists, ‘demands that the life lived in it be a work of art as well. I am certain that Viktor Landauer and his beautiful wife will do the place justice.’
    Viktor makes a little speech. He welcomes the guests, first in Czech and then in German, and calls for applause for the architect, and when the clapping has died away he talks about André Breton’s new novel,
Nadja
, which one of the guests — he nods at Hana Hanáková — has lent him. ‘In this novel the author wrote something like this,’ he tells them, and cleverly, although he claims to have prepared nothing, he has the whole passage by heart: ‘“I shall live in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where the words
who I am
will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond.”’ People laugh at this wittily appropriate quotation. Have they read Breton? If not, they pretend they have. ‘Well, this glass house says who Liesel and I are,’ Viktor tells them, taking her hand. ‘In our wonderful glass house you can see everything. And in this spirit of openness, with no advance notice and no rehearsal, Maestro Nĕmec has agreed to play for us.’
    An expectant hush falls as Nĕmec takes his seat at the piano. ‘I believe,’ he says, ‘that this instrument has never yet been played before an audience.’ There is a call for him to speak up, those at the back cannot hear. He raises his voice a fraction. ‘It gives me much pleasure to caress’ — he touches the Bösendorfer with expert fingers — ‘such an untried maiden in the midst of this beautiful and, until today, virginal glass house.’
    There is more laughter, more applause and then the maestro begins to play — hesitantly at first as though he is unsure of the instrument and is listening for its voice, but then with growing assurance and a faint nod of approval — a piece by Leoš