Read Online The Glass Room by Simon Mawer - Free Book Online

strokes, written into von Abt’s mind, transferred onto sheets of paper then revised, reconsidered, discussed for the slightest detail, and now drawn out in the bold horizontals and verticals of reddened steel, a three-dimensional maze raised into the misty air. In the past houses have grown organically, like plants, from the ground upwards. But this house is different: it grows from the frame outwards, like an idea developing into a work of art from the central core of inspiration out into the material fact of realisation. Cement mixers churn and vomit. Men tramp back and forth with hods over their shoulders. Ladders stand as sharp diagonals to the rectilinear skeleton of the frame.
    The site foreman unfolds a diazo print and gestures upwards towards the top floor where a workman balances across a girder as easily as a child walking along the kerb of a pavement. ‘You want decent load-bearing walls,’ he says, ‘give the thing some stability.’
    ‘I want nothing of the kind,’ von Abt replies with remarkable good humour. ‘Stability is the last thing I want. This house must float in light. It must shimmer and shine. It must not be stable!’
    The man sniffs. ‘It looks more like a machine than a house.’
    ‘That’s what it is, a machine for living in.’
    The foreman shakes his head at the idea of such a machine. He wants four walls around him, made of stone. None of this steel-girder frame nonsense. If that is for anything it is for office blocks — they are putting up a building like that on Jánská at this very moment, but it is going to be a department store, for God’s sake, not a private house.
    ‘Le Corbusier,’ von Abt says.
    ‘Eh?’
    ‘What I said is not original. I cannot take the credit. Le Corbusier got there first.
La machine à habiter
.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘French.’
    ‘Who needs French? It’s bad enough having to deal with German and Czech. You know we had a fight the other day? On the site, right here. Something about politics, a Czech speaker and a German speaker and the stupid thing was, the Czech was called Mlynář and the German was called Müller.’
    ‘Mlynarsch?’
    The foreman laughs at von Abt’s attempt at the pronunciation. ‘It means “miller”. The bastards each had the same name. I slung both of them out on their ears, I did. Well, you can’t have that sort of thing getting in the way of work, can you? Not when things are looking as bad as they are at the moment.’
    There is a call from up above, from the top of the staircase of planks that has been built down from street level. The two men look up. There, against the sky, is the silhouette of a woman.
    ‘Frau Liesel?’ von Abt calls. ‘Is it Frau Liesel Landauer?’ He struggles across the planks and clambers up the uneven staircase to her level. The encounter is a cautious one. When they had first met she was a girl becoming a woman; now she is a woman become a mother. The fulcrum of her life has shifted.
    ‘I must congratulate you on your great achievement,’ von Abt says, bowing over her hand.
    ‘You must come and see her,’ she tells him.
    ‘I’d love to.’
    ‘She’s beautiful, beautiful. Perfect …’ Perfect what? What feature shall she choose? ‘Fingers, hands. You cannot imagine how perfect. Fingerprints, miniature nails, all perfect.’ She holds out her own as though they might help explain. ‘She sleeps and eats and sometimes looks at you but you don’t know what she is seeing quite. She frowns, as though you aren’t coming up to her standards, but you don’t know what those standards are so you always feel inadequate.’ Liesel laughs. She has been warned that some mothers feel depressed after giving birth, but she feels only exultation. ‘But I’m here to see the house. How is it going? How long will it be? I want to bring Ottilie here.’
    They stand on the edge, looking down on the frame. Somewhere down there, defined within the cage of steel, is her house — the rooms,