The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

floor beside the chaise longue, and strokes her hands across Liesel’s belly like a blind person trying to discover the shape and texture of something that she cannot see. Then something happens that seems so remarkable that they never talk of it afterwards: Hana leans forward and presses her lips against the warm swelling. The contact evokes in Liesel a vague and unnerving sense of sexual desire, focused not on Hana but on her own body, which is so foreign and so strange, so heavy with the future. She rests her hand on Hana’s head in something like benediction, or maybe to comfort her, that she is in this blessed gravid state and Hana is not. And then Hana’s hand slips inside the elastic of her drawers and cups the warm mound of her pubis.
    There is a moment of shock, a few seconds of a strange tableau in which the participants are uncertain of the role each is playing, before Liesel shifts her hips. ‘Hana,’ she says quietly, ‘please.’
    The hand slips away. Avoiding Liesel’s eyes, Hana gets to her feet. She searches for distraction. ‘The pendulum. We’ve forgotten the pendulum.’ She holds it out as though to demonstrate the hard metallic fact of it, something that can be felt and seen, against whatever it is that the two of them have just experienced, which was a slippery, ineffable emotion that was different for each but nonetheless powerful.
Schlüpfrig
. The ring spins round, catching the light in splashes of gold. Hana holds it still and for a moment the band of gold hovers motionless above Liesel’s everted navel. Then, hesitantly, it begins to turn. An air current? A shiver from Hana’s fingers?
    ‘Look!’
    ‘Shh!’
    ‘It’s turning. A circle. It’s turning a circle!’
    ‘It’s a girl.’ The turning is obvious now, incontrovertible, a description of a perfect female circle over the smooth and refulgent dome of Liesel’s belly.
    ‘A girl! Oh Hana, we’ll call her after you.’ And she sits up and hugs her friend as though everything is complete, their love consummated, the gestation over, the child delivered, the matter already decided.
     
Gestation
     
    ‘Look at what has just come from von Abt,’ Viktor announces one morning, finding Liesel in her room writing letters. Her belly is heavily swollen now. Sometimes the swelling makes her feel big and clumsy; at other times she feels almost translucent, as though the creature inside her can be seen through the wall of her abdomen, a fish swimming there in the ocean of its own amnion, an amphibian climbing out onto a tidal bank, a reptile raising its ugly head, a mammal couched in fur, an animal re-enacting its evolutionary development there in the primeval world of her womb.
    ‘See what he is proposing?’ He unfolds the architect’s plan on the floor beside her desk, a diazo print showing ghostly lines in dark blue on a pale blue background. Haus Landauer is written across the top left-hand corner. There are two perspective drawings, two floor plans, a front elevation and a street elevation: ruled lines as sharp as razor cuts, a mathematical precision that is beyond the natural. There are no straight lines in nature. Not even light travels in straight lines any longer, so it is said. That man Einstein.
    ‘See what he is suggesting? The house will be sort of hung from the first storey, here. Do you see? Downwards into the garden. The bedrooms and bathrooms on the entrance floor and then the living room below. Huge windows. Plate glass. I mean, the fellow hasn’t really bothered with walls. Just glass.’ His tone is one of amazement and excitement, as though he has just been the witness of a natural phenomenon that you see only once in a lifetime.
    Liesel turns to look, spreading her legs so she can lean forward. The plans show Euclidian perfection, as pure as an idea. There is not a curve in the whole proposal. Her own belly is a curve, something aquatic, oceanic, but not this design for a house. Not a curve in sight. She