The Glass Room Read Online Free PDF

Crime”?’
    Viktor smiled. ‘Certainly I do.’
    ‘Well then, that is our manifesto. The Communists have theirs and we of the Modern Movement have ours. You ask me to design you a house? I will design you a house. But form without ornament is all I can give you.’ He looked round at the long colonnades of the Piazza, at a couple of children immersed in a fluttering cloud of pigeons and being photographed by a commercial photographer with a massive mahogany box camera. Beyond them were the ornate domes of the Basilica with its mosaics and prancing horses. He gestured towards the scene, as though somehow it had been laid on for his own purposes. ‘Here, in the most ornamental city in the whole world, I am offering you the very opposite.’
    And at his gesture things began to happen. At least that was the impression Liesel had: the café orchestra set off on a lugubrious traipse round the ‘Lament of the Hebrew Slaves’; the photographer bent his head beneath his black cape; and the children, focused through the lens of his machine, shrieked with laughter as though being captured in the box, being inverted and diminished, gave them a physical sensation like being tickled or being frightened. Viktor sipped champagne and considered von Abt’s drawings.
    ‘It all seems rather cold.’
    ‘Cold?’ For once von Abt appeared lost for words. ‘Cold! All my work, all my art is based on this.’ He took a pencil from an inner pocket and leaned forward to draw a line as sharp as a razor cut on the nearest sheet of paper. ‘This is the first work of art: the woman who lies down.’ He looked from Viktor to Liesel, holding her gaze for moment longer than seemed polite. Then he went back to the sheet of paper and drew another line, a vertical cutting at right angles through the horizontal. ‘And this. This is the man who penetrates her. The result is the rectangular cross that underpins all my art. What could be warmer than that?’
    Liesel took a cigarette and lit it, hoping it would distract her from von Abt’s look, hoping she would not blush beneath his gaze. ‘Yes, Herr von Abt seems a most uncold person. Don’t you agree, Viktor?’
     
Conception
     
    When the Landauer couple returned home they moved into a furnished villa in the Masaryk quarter of the city. Overlooking the river Svratka and the wooded hills beyond, this was a turreted, crenellated monster of a villa, the very antithesis of their plans for their own house. ‘How can I live and breathe in such surroundings?’ Viktor had exclaimed when they had first looked round the place. Yet it was in this rented fortress, among the ormolu lamps and velvet drapes, beneath ornate plastered ceilings and chandeliers of Murano glass, that they pursued their ideal of a modern house that would be adapted to the future rather than the past, to the openness of modern living rather than the secretive and stultified life of the previous century.
    The Glass Space.
    For the moment it was without form or substance, yet it existed, diffuse, diverse, in their minds and in the mind of Rainer von Abt. It existed in the manner that ideas and ideals, shifting and insubstantial, may exist. Space, light, glass; some spare furniture; windows looking out on a garden; a sweep of shining floor, travertine, perhaps; white and ivory and the gleam of chrome. The elements moved, evolved, transformed, metamorphosed in the way that they do in dreams, changing shape and form and yet, to the dreamer, remaining what they always were:
der Glasraum
,
der Glastraum
, a single letter change metamorphosing one into the other, the Glass Space becoming the Glass Dream, a dream that went with the spirit of the brand new country in which they found themselves, a state in which being Czech or German or Jew would not matter, in which democracy would prevail and art and science would combine to bring happiness to all people.
    Towards the end of summer Rainer von Abt came to inspect the site. How, Liesel