The Glass Room by Simon Mawer Read Free Book Online

alive.’
    But Liesel knew the code: ‘decorative’ was not good. Ornament was Crime. ‘Mother, the Monarchy was moribund long before Herr Klimt painted you. It just took a long time dying.’
    ‘It was socialism that killed it,’ her mother retorted. ‘Had the Socialists not killed it, it would still be there. And now we are left living in a state dreamed up by foreigners.’
    There was an awkward pause. At the head of the table, her father smiled enigmatically from behind his moustaches. ‘The war is what killed the Monarchy,’ Liesel insisted. ‘The war killed the Monarchy just as it killed Benno. Stupid old men thinking that they might play around with fighting just as they did throughout the last century. And they found out that they couldn’t, that war kills people, ruins lives and destroys countries. But now perhaps we can build a new one, if they’ll let us. Socialism
builds
things.’
    The silence deepened, became cavernous. Her mother looked appalled. Socialism? The idea seemed outrageous. Not only outrageous but dangerous.
    ‘So how do you find Socialist Vienna, Herr von Abt?’ Liesel’s father asked. ‘My daughter clearly admires it.’
    Even von Abt seemed at a loss for words. He who could always discover a retort or a bon mot, needed to scratch around for something to say. ‘The Socialists have tried to do something. Their building projects are exceptional … The Karl-Marx-Hof …’
    It was Nĕmec’s wife who unwittingly saved the situation. She knew how
she
found Vienna. She found Vienna full of shops and cafés, a positive plethora — she used the word
Überfülle
, her lips enveloping the vowels as they might a strudel — of things that didn’t seem socialist at all. Wasn’t socialism to do with bringing everything down to the lowest? Well Vienna raised things up to the highest. ‘Prague has nothing to compare,’ she complained, ‘and so I am
forced
to go to Vienna. And then they try and charge me duty at the border.’
    The discomfiting moment, the daughter lecturing the mother, the mention of the dead Benno and the cursed socialism, seemed to have passed. But it left its mark on the evening, like an embarrassing blemish that everyone notices but no one remarks on. Except Rainer von Abt. ‘If you decide to storm the barricades, I will surely follow,’ he murmured to Liesel as they followed her parents to the drawing room to listen to Nĕmec play.
    She had to suppress her laughter. ‘I’m afraid that you’ll leave Viktor behind.’
    The guests settled into a semicircle of chairs, with the Bösendorfer at the focus. They talked in hushed tones, as though in church. Nĕmec sat at the keyboard and played something by his mentor Leoš Janáček, a piano suite of mournful tone whose notes meandered through the room, occasionally dying away to silence, occasionally hammering on the startled audience’s ears. Liesel’s mother listened with a stern concentration that was a rebuke to anyone less attentive than she. In the pause between movements, von Abt leaned over to Liesel and breathed in her ear, ‘Why are Czechs always so mournful?’
    ‘They have,’ she whispered back, ‘a great deal to be mournful about.’
    ‘I’m not surprised, with music like this.’
    There was a terrible moment when laughter threatened to bubble up out of control. Viktor caught her eye and frowned. The pianist swayed back and forth, rumbling out deep and sorrowful arpeggios. Von Abt compressed his lips thoughtfully and gazed at the ornate plasterwork of the ceiling, while the giggles rose in Liesel’s throat until she feared she might choke.
    ‘I thought you behaved disgracefully this evening,’ Viktor said when they were undressing for bed.
    ‘What on earth do you mean?’
    ‘Giggling like a schoolgirl with that fellow von Abt.’
    ‘Don’t be absurd, Viktor. We were laughing. We find the same things funny.’
    ‘You were behaving like children.’
    ‘Don’t be such a prig!’
    The little