The Glass Room by Simon Mawer Page B

Didn’t I tell you? Astonishing really. With a pendulum.’
    ‘Don’t be ridiculous. That woman’s a menace.’
    ‘Did you know she’s having an affair with Nĕmec? She says he plays her like a piano.’
    ‘How disgusting.’ He looks outraged. She has noticed that ever since her pregnancy began he treats her with a kind of remote sterility, as though she were some kind of virginal mother about to give birth to the Messiah or something. ‘Don’t be so prudish, Viktor.’
    ‘I’m not prudish. You know I’m not prudish. I just don’t want my wife descending to Hana Hanáková’s kind of vulgarity.’
    Winter came with snow, sometimes a blizzard, at other times just faint white moths floating down through the cold air. In the garden at the back of their rented house it gathered in the shadows of the plants and survived there even when the daytime temperature rose above zero. The grass took on a bruised, dead look while the hills on the far side of the river lay like corpses beneath their winding sheets. Nature seemed suspended in this icy season, but still things grew — the child in Liesel’s womb, the house in Rainer von Abt’s mind. The one convolute, involute, curved and complex — there are no straight lines in nature — the other simple and linear.
    In March, when the ground thawed and the whole world turned to mud, the site for the new house was prepared. A mechanical excavator was hired for the task, a machine that gouged and churned the soil until the top of the hillside resembled the scarred and crevassed landscape of the Tagliamento during the war. From the lip of the street the land was cut away, a step down into the lower stratum of soil which was rust-coloured and as hard as rock. The ramp leading down was clad with planks to stabilise it. ‘All this for a private house,’ muttered the site foreman. ‘Anyone’d think we was building a factory.’
    Then they sank the foundations — the piles that would support the frame — and laid the concrete base. Excavators chugged and spluttered in the dank air. Cement mixers churned. The site spread like a lesion on the forehead of the hill. Once the foundations had been completed and the concrete piles driven down into the hard-pan, the frame of the house had to be erected. The steel pillars came from Germany, from the firm of Gossen in Berlin. The joists were I-beams, but the vertical supports were constructed of four angle-beams riveted back to back to make pillars with a cruciform cross-section. The hammering of the riveters and the clangour of steel cut through the tranquillity of Blackfield Road. Never, probably never in the whole world, had a private house been constructed in this manner.
    In April, while the frame grew, the baby was born. They had decided on the modern way, in a clinic run by Doctor živan Jelínek, a physician who had learned the Twilight Sleep technique under the tutelage of Gustav Gauss in Freiburg. It was Hana who had first mooted the idea. ‘Tell me what’s wrong with a little touch of morphia, darling?’ she had asked. So the pain of delivery was blown away by morphine, and any memory of the whole event excised from her mind by scopolamine, a drug culled from henbane and deadly nightshade that kills, among other things, memory; and into this chemical amnesia Ottilie was born.
     
Construction
     
    Rainer von Abt at the building site: it is a late April day with a thin and miserable rain falling. Mud is still the chief feature of the place, mud like a curse clinging to your legs and trying to drag you down into the pit. Von Abt stands in muddied brogue shoes on a plank walkway. Dressed as he is in a dark grey suit and a black overcoat, and wearing a pale grey homburg hat, it would be easy to mistake him for the owner. By his side, in rubber boots, stands the site foreman, muddied, dishevelled and harassed. At the moment there is no concrete form to the construction they are looking at. It is no more than a sketch in bold