The Glass Room (45 page)

‘Then what a wonderful coincidence that we’ve both been selected.’

That was another mark of her naivety: she assumed that their both being selected was purely fortuitous, but in fact it had all been arranged by Tomáš. His own attendance was almost automatic: he was the leading expert in polio at the hospital and as two doctors would be going it was inevitable that the Head of Paediatrics would want to take him along. Albert Sabin, an American of Polish origin, would be talking about his trials of an oral vaccine against polio. This was a live vaccine, which promised to be more effective in developing immunity in the subject than the Salk vaccine. But a live vaccine also brings the danger of inducing a real infection in some children. It was a matter of balance: of balancing the many protected lives against a few that might be destroyed. That was what particularly interested Tomáš. How do you make such judgements?

‘There’s quite a lot about physiotherapy on the programme as well,’ the professor added thoughtfully when they were discussing the conference. He turned over the pages of typescript that he had received from the organisers.

‘Physiotherapy is very important,’ Tomáš agreed.

‘Perhaps someone from the Physiotherapy Department ought to go?’

That was Tomáš’s opportunity to suggest that a certain Zdenka Vondráková, being responsible for most of the remedial work with the polio patients, might be an appropriate delegate. He smiled as he told the professor this. It was a knowing smile, which made the situation clear without mentioning anything specific.

‘That sounds a good idea,’ the professor agreed. ‘She’s a Party member, isn’t she? That’ll be a help in getting an exit permit for her.’

Tomáš never told Zdenka that he had made her attendance at the conference possible. He preferred to preserve her belief in the wonderful, fortuitous coincidence of existence, the miracle of contingency.

The trip to Paris was Zdenka’s first time out of the country and only the second time that Tomáš had been to the West (the other time was to Vienna when it was still a divided city and he was in the army). They found the city bright and colourful, whereas their home town and their country seemed dull and monochrome. The hotel was magnificent. ‘Each room has its own bathroom. And there’s free soap and toothpaste,’ Zdenka cried, as though bathrooms, soap and toothpaste were the height of capitalist luxury. They also discovered that it was easy for Zdenka to move her things into Tomáš’s room where there was a double bed of gargantuan proportions. And thus they had their five days of almost marital cohabitation, the strange experience of making love in a bed, and of falling asleep in one another’s arms and waking the next morning to find the other still there, creased and warm with sleep. Zdenka was small and fragile and she seemed even smaller and more fragile in that large bed, so light that she seemed to float above Tomáš as he lay on his back, so slender that he feared she might break apart as he lay on top of her. And yet, despite her lightness, he felt almost smothered by her presence, and longed to be back with her in the Glass Tranquillity where they could make love like casual acquaintances, without the awful ties of obligation.

‘I hope you are going to marry that girl,’ the professor remarked on the third day of the conference, when they were sitting in one of the lecture rooms waiting for a talk to begin. ‘She seems a lovely young thing.’

Tomáš agreed that she was a lovely young thing — ‘a
rusalka
,’ he said, while thinking to himself, an ondine — but he didn’t say anything about marriage. Marriage was the future and these five days with Zdenka — Zdenka naked at the basin in their shared bathroom, Zdenka emerging from the shower with her hair like waterweed down her back and across her face, Zdenka still wet from the shower climbing into his arms and letting herself be carried to the bed, where they made love — were the present.

When they got back from Paris Zdenka almost wept. ‘We could have stayed,’ she said. ‘We could have found work easily. They want doctors and physiotherapists. We could have stayed and found work and been together in freedom.’

‘What has happened to your admiration of the Party?’ Tomáš asked.

‘I’m not thinking of the Party, I’m thinking of us.’

But the five days in Paris have become the past, and for Tomáš the past does not exist. There is only now, this pinnacle of time, the eternal present, this moment in what he calls the Glass Room, the Glass Tranquillity, with this cigarette and this view over the city.

He turns from the window. The last of the children has struggled up the stairs with the help of its mother and the place is empty but for him and Zdenka. ‘What is going to happen to us now?’ she asks.

‘Now?’

‘Yes, now.’

How can he talk about
now
when now is all that there is? You cannot talk about something except by contrast with other things. You cannot paint something unless it is different from its surroundings. The Russian painter Malevich attempted it, and what did he get? A white canvas with a white square on it. ‘Now we are going to make love,’ he says. ‘That’s what we do isn’t it, when we are here? This is the perfect place to make love. It has no points of reference, no memories, no illusions. It just is.’ He looks round the bare space, the chromium pillars, the white walls and cream floor, the curve of wooden panels that closes off the area they use for individual treatment, and the strange wall of patterned stone which is the only irregularity in the place. And as he looks Zdenka begins to weep.

Tomáš is confused by her weeping. He goes to comfort her but she throws him off. ‘You’re so cold,’ she accuses him. ‘In Paris you were warm and loving, but here you’re so cold. And I want the warm and loving you, not this awful cold one.’ And then she stops, and, having turned her head away from him, suddenly looks at him directly. ‘There’s another woman, isn’t there? You keep me in this state of uncertainty because you’ve got another woman.’

Tomáš smiles. ‘Don’t be absurd.’

‘Why is it absurd? In Paris you had only me and you were as loving as a man can be. Here you are distant and cold, so it must mean you don’t have only me. There must be another woman.’

He laughs. ‘That’s woman’s logic.’ He reaches out and takes her hand and draws her to him. For a moment she is soft and supple in his arms. Then she pulls away.

‘No,’ she says. ‘No!’

It is the first time they have ever had an argument. Tomáš doesn’t wish to take part but it seems that he has no choice. The argument is about their future and when Tomáš says that there is no future Zdenka merely gets more angry. ‘Of course there’s a future. There’s a future in which I should become a mother and you a father. There’s a future in which we should get our names on the housing list and make a home. There’s a future in which we grow old together. But none of that seems likely, does it? Not with you the way you are!’

Despite his protests, she continues. She has been thinking this over, ever since they got back from Paris, perhaps even before they went to Paris. Her idea is that they need a break from one another. They should be apart for a while, get things in perspective, wait and see what both of them want. Thus, soon after the delights of Paris, here in the cool light of the Glass Room, they seem to be slipping apart. It is all unbelievable to Tomáš. This is not the way he should lose Ondine, not with a banal discussion about commitments and obligations, not without that terrifying curse.

Over the days things change a little. They talk to each other on the phone, exchange words in a meeting at the hospital, and finally meet up for a drink. The present is losing the malign influence of the past and Paris is slowly becoming nothing more than a memory. They talk about it as though it is a piece of fantasy with little grounding in real life. They even recall different things, Tomáš remembering a visit to the Panthéon that Zdenka denies happened, Zdenka a market on the Île de la Cité where there was a stall selling animals, an incident which Tomáš denies. She insists. There were tropical fish, caged birds, mice, even a sleek and self-sufficient rat; but he cannot recall the place. They laugh about their different memories of these events, but for him all this is symptomatic of what he believes, that memory and imagination are the same thing. He has need to imagine the Panthéon, the temple to no gods whatsoever; Zdenka has need to recall brilliantly coloured fish swimming round and round in a tank.

‘I’ve got a story to do in your part of the world,’ Eve tells Tomáš one evening.

‘In židenice?’ He assumes she must be referring to the area where his parents’ house is, but that is such a dreary and uninteresting part of the city that he cannot imagine what the story might be.

‘No, the hospital. Actually the Department of Physio therapy.’ She says it deliberately, aware of the significance of what she is saying. ‘I wonder whether I will meet your dancer.’

Tomáš has told Eve all about Zdenka, everything except her name. He has told her about the dancing and about their making love there on the floor of the Glass Room, and about the trip to Paris and what has happened since. Is that a betrayal of Zdenka? But it seems to Tomáš that confession to Eve, for whom he has feelings of companionship that are quite unlike the intense feelings of a lover, is not betrayal in any real sense. His relationship with Eve has all the intimacy of that between a doctor and a patient, where anything may be said and all will be held secret.

‘How will you know if you do meet her?’ There are, after all, a number of young women who work in the department, five, to be exact, along with three men.

‘Oh, I’ll know your little dancer all right.’

Tomáš suddenly has a desire to see the two of them together, to see his Ondine and his Berta talking to one another, the one all-knowing, the other ignorant. ‘Maybe I’ll be there. Maybe I’ll show you round. If it’s about the physiotherapy department you ought to have one of the doctors on hand.’

‘That’s up to you. But it’s not about the department as such — it’s about the building.’

‘The building?’

‘It’s a most important house in architectural terms. Didn’t you know that? The Landauer House. There are people who want to restore it, turn it into some kind of museum. The State Committee for Architectural Heritage or something. Haven’t you heard? Well, we’re going to do a piece on it.’

‘I’ve heard something about it, but who cares what it was in the past? Now it’s a gymnasium for the physiotherapy department. That’s what it’s for. It’s valuable as a gymnasium but it’s impossible as a house and worthless as a museum. Museums are just like churches, they’re memorials to something that’s finished — the past or religion. Either is pure fantasy.’

‘You ought to join the Party with views like that.’

‘You know I couldn’t join the Party. The Party believes in history.’

It seems absurd that they should argue about something so abstruse, so arcane and obscure as Party doctrine, but they do, Eve claiming that the Party believes in exactly Tomáš’s kind of history, a fantasy history, a history of imagination and forgetting, and Tomáš exclaiming that she is wrong, that the Party really thinks that it is right, that history is, for the true believer, a kind of scientific laboratory in which the laws of dialectical materialism are worked out. The difference between this argument with Eve and his argument with Zdenka is that this one ends in laughter, and the two of them taking off their clothes and getting into Eve’s narrow bed; whereas the argument with Zdenka remains at the very core of their separation.

For Zdenka the Glass Room is a place of dreams, a cool box where you can project your fantasies and sit and watch them. When she was a child her mother used to laugh at her, call her a dreamer, tell her she always had her head in the clouds and the trouble with having your head in the clouds was that you can’t see where to put your feet. Later, when Zdenka became a promising dancer at the ballet school in Olomouc, her mother would say that a dancer with her head in the clouds was all right as long as she didn’t fall off the stage. One day Zdenka did precisely that — she fell off the stage and broke her ankle. The break was complex and it took some months to heal, more months still to return to something like normal. But never again could she go on points. Dancing was still possible, of course, the modern dance of her heroine Isadora Duncan or Martha Graham, but her ambition, her dream of going to Prague and perhaps from there to the Soviet Union, to dance with the Bolshoi or the Kirov, was at an end. So Zdenka shrugged her shoulders (narrow, fragile, sculptured like an anatomy model) and changed the direction of her life. She abandoned the dream of dancing and took a course in physiotherapy and dreamed of helping crippled children to regain their mobility.

Dreams are like memories. Zdenka remembers Paris. She remembers walking down the Champs-Élysées and turning into the avenue Montaigne. Tomáš knew who Montaigne was — the first truly modern writer, he told Zdenka; a sceptic and a humanist — but had never heard of Isadora Duncan. Zdenka knew that Isadora Duncan was memorialised in bas-relief on the façade of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, but had no idea that a writer called Montaigne ever existed. So she recalls that moment for standing opposite the theatre and seeing the image of her heroine up on the façade, whereas Tomáš recalls the moment for the lecture that he delivered on Montaigne’s scepticism, his doubting of history and advocacy of imagination.

Zdenka dreams of Paris. Her dreams are more than mere sightseeing. They are also dreams of an ideal world in which she and Tomáš might live in intimacy and harmony for the remainder of their lives.

‘I had a wonderful time in Paris,’ she tells the woman from the Committee for Architectural Heritage, who has come once again to look round the building. The last time the woman came she was unable to see the gymnasium because there was a callisthenics class going on and without a proper authorisation from the hospital authorities entry was not possible. But this time there is no class and the woman has brought with her all the authorisation that one could wish for.