Liesel's pregnancies

Liesel’s pregnancies accompany the creation of her family and the changing life of Landauer House. Her first pregnancy is newly known when architect Rainer von Abt presents his design: it gives his drawing of a future child an immediate personal meaning, and makes the house’s projected rooms and terrace part of a family future. Her second pregnancy takes place in the completed house, where Liesel’s changing body and Hana’s frustrated wish for a child expose sharply different experiences of intimacy and motherhood. Across both pregnancies, the novel makes domestic life inseparable from its material setting, while the later transformations of the Glass Room lend that setting a history far beyond the family’s original intentions.

The First Pregnancy and the House’s Future

When Rainer von Abt sketches the house, he draws an infant running along its terrace and presents the child as part of the future he sees for the family. Liesel and Viktor have not yet told their parents about the pregnancy: the news is only a few days old, and the baby is due in March. After Viktor confirms the news, von Abt congratulates them. Viktor jokes that Liesel deserves the credit, and the three share a moment of intimacy. Liesel responds by claiming a role in the project, asking to choose the interior fabrics, flooring, and furnishings. Her pregnancy thus enters the design conversation not as an abstract prospect but as a new, closely guarded fact around which shared knowledge and domestic plans gather.

The pregnancy becomes perceptible to Liesel through movement. At first she feels a tiny flutter beneath the table and tells Hana she can feel the baby inside her, comparing the sensation to a bubble bursting. Later, as the movement becomes visible, the narrative identifies the child as a girl. Liesel embraces Hana and says they will name her after her friend, momentarily speaking as if the child were already delivered and the future settled. This naming impulse joins pregnancy to the close friendship between the two women, even as it anticipates a family life still in progress.

As Liesel’s belly grows, the house plans take on a more concrete form. Viktor shows her von Abt’s proposal for Haus Landauer: bedrooms and bathrooms on the entrance level, the living room below, and large plate-glass windows in place of conventional walls. Liesel’s response marks a change between the spouses. Viktor had once been the one committed to modern design; now she insists that this is where she wants to live, with her daughter and husband. When Viktor asks how she knows the child is a girl, Liesel credits Hana’s pendulum divination, a claim he dismisses. The exchange brings together the pregnancy’s intimate, bodily knowledge and the couple’s differing reactions to Hana’s influence.

Two Pregnancies, Two Experiences of Motherhood

During Liesel’s second pregnancy, her friend Hana asks whether she really wants a baby. Liesel answers that she wants one sometimes, when she feels lonely. The exchange places her wish within a relationship marked by affection and frankness rather than treating motherhood as a simple, constant desire. In an intimate moment, Liesel feels the baby move; Hana reaches toward her, but Liesel clarifies that the movement is something she feels inside. Pregnancy is therefore shared conversationally, yet remains an embodied experience Hana cannot directly access.

In the completed house, Liesel’s second pregnancy is framed by light and space. She wears white and walks barefoot through the house, moving through it as its supported structure seems to float above the city. Hana envies Liesel’s home, saying that she herself is condemned to live in a museum because her husband, Oskar, will not move from its solid walls. Hana also discloses that she has been trying to conceive for a long time and has even tried to become pregnant by Miroslav Němec, without success. Liesel later recounts this to Viktor with amazement at Hana’s attempt to conceive by one man to please another. The juxtaposition does not make their experiences equivalent: Liesel’s pregnancy is an ongoing reality, while Hana’s desire remains unmet and entangled in her marriage and other relationships.

Viktor, in turn, sees Liesel’s pregnant body as transformed by the Glass Room. The pregnancy seems to lift her above the floor, and he imagines a movement from physical and erotic life toward something almost spiritual. The house mediates this perception: its design is intended to be literal and exact, yet in Viktor’s view the setting makes Liesel seem sublime. The contrast with his travel through a closed, dark train compartment reinforces how differently the two environments shape his perception. His vision is his own, not a neutral account of pregnancy; it reveals how the modern interior has become bound to his experience of Liesel and their shared domestic life.

Domestic Time and the House’s Later Uses

The pregnancies unfold alongside the house’s construction and occupation, but the two forms of growth move at different speeds. The baby’s development is marked by discrete milestones—grasping, focusing, smiling, recognizing Liesel and Viktor, raising herself on her hands, and laughing—while construction proceeds through steel beams, concrete, and the enclosure of space. Delays, material shortages, and disputes stretch over summer and autumn before the building’s shell is completed in winter. There is no ceremony for that completion, only apprehension as the family first sees a structure that looks like a warehouse. The parallel distinguishes organic development from construction without separating them: the child and the house grow together, but not in the same way or on the same timetable.

The Glass Room’s subsequent history changes the meaning of the domestic space associated with Liesel’s pregnancies. Under Nazi occupation, Landauer House is converted into a biometric research centre: its rooms become offices and laboratories, its dining area a photographic studio, and its onyx wall a setting for anthropometric equipment. Later, the building serves as a children’s gymnasium. Tomáš calls it the Glass Room, a name whose Czech word for room can also mean peace or tranquillity; for him, the state-owned space offers light and stillness, although it is used for treatment and other activities unlike the family life for which it was built. A later account identifies the house as a modernist architectural treasure, describes its 230-square-metre living room and glass walls, and debates its use as a gymnasium. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, repair work restores plate glass to the Glass Room, though other alterations and imperfect repairs remain. These changes place Liesel’s pregnancies within the house’s longer passage from family home to appropriated institution, public facility, and architectural heritage: the domestic future once imagined around a child survives in a building repeatedly assigned new purposes.