Free The Glass Room by Simon Mawer Page B

Liesel’s and her friends’, but short enough to be a statement that she was a modern woman. A Slav, he fancied. There was no more than a smudge of rouge on her cheeks but her lips were a blood-red arabesque. Certainly she was pretty — a neat, precise prettiness — but she wasn’t in other respects remarkable. She might have been a maid out for a walk in the park, dressed up for her day off in a narrow knee-length skirt and a white blouse beneath her neat little jacket. There was a brooch pinned on the lapel, a lump of amber like a boiled sweet.
    She straightened up and blew smoke away. ‘Can I do anything for you then?’
    He hesitated. There in the park, with the Riesenrad, the Giant Wheel, looming over them, he considered what she had said, while she looked around at the crowd, as though to see if anything more interesting was in the offing. She drew on the cigarette in short, sharp snatches, as though she wasn’t really used to smoking. Maybe she was just about to move away. Maybe she had seen another possibility.
    ‘Yes, perhaps you can.’
    ‘All right, then. Where d’you want to go?’
    Why had he not merely dismissed her and gone on to the station to catch the afternoon train back to Mĕsto? Curiosity, certainly, and something more, some quality of youth that he saw in her and, incongruously enough, innocence. But many other things. Plain sexuality, of course. The mystery of the unknown. And intangible things: the set of her head, the precise curve of cheek and eyebrow, her gentleness of expression and the quiet amusement that he saw behind her anxious look. ‘What about a ride on the wheel?’
    She seemed startled. ‘That thing? You won’t get me up there.’
    ‘Are you afraid? Why are women always afraid of such things?’
    It was the mention of her gender that did it. He could see it in her expression. She had been about to shrug her shoulders and move on, but now she paused and regarded him carefully, head on one side. ‘That’s not true. Women aren’t afraid. We just have real fears to deal with, not the silly fears that men dream up.’ There was a quality to her answer that startled him, a sharp edge of intelligence that he had not expected.
    ‘Come on then. Prove it.’
    The idea seemed to amuse her. ‘All right.’
    They had to join a short queue. There were some families in front, and a young couple, and then it was their turn. The great wheel, its circumference rising two hundred feet above, wound round and presented a cabin to them, its door held open by the attendant. For a moment it appeared that the group following, two women with half a dozen children between them, might crowd in behind but at the last moment the attendant held them back. Viktor and the young woman stepped alone into the empty cabin.
    The box rocked gently, like a boat at the quayside. She tottered against him and there was that moment of unconsidered contact, his arms holding her, her hair against his face. She made a hasty apology and gripped the rail to look out of the window as the gondola shifted forwards and began to climb. ‘D’you know the last time I did this I was about ten years old?’
    ‘When was that?’
    ‘Fifteen years ago?’
    ‘You don’t look that old.’
    She smiled slyly. ‘And what about you?’
    The park was shrinking below them, the skyline unfolding. A distant view of hills. He thought of the view across Mĕsto from the new house; and he thought of Liesel. ‘It’s none of your business.’
    ‘Please yourself.’
    The cabin swayed gently in the breeze. Standing side by side, they looked at the view and seemed to consider their options. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
    ‘Kata. And yours?’
    ‘Viktor.’
    Should he have given a false name? Was Kata itself false? What was it really? Katarina, something like that? She was, she told him, Hungarian not Slav, although she came from Slovakia; but then there were many Hungarians living across the border in the new country, weren’t