The Exiles Return (3 page)

For a long time he had hardly noticed anything, wrapped up as he was in his work, unchanging in his personal habits. It was when Melanie had suggested buying an apartment in one of the new luxurious blocks of flats under construction – when he, taken by surprise, had in all innocence protested that they surely couldn’t afford it – that his eyes had been decisively, brutally, opened. His mind flinched from the scene. Melanie had rounded on him with real venom. Of course they could afford it, no thanks to him. She didn’t believe he hadn’t known how much she was earning. Did he think they had been living these last years on his derisory salary? Had he ever made the slightest effort to get it increased? Perhaps he had, and been ashamed to admit that he had been refused? She must assume that he wasn’t worth more. In this country, she had said, a failure is a failure and a success is a success and there’s a good reason for both. You’ve only yourself to thank or to blame. He could thank his lucky stars that he was her husband and the father of her daughters, or he might still be poring over his notebooks in that evil-smelling tenement where they had started off.

That was not true. When he had got his appointment at the hospital, they had moved into a perfectly respectable apartment, small but adequate. In an unfashionable district of course. He didn’t care about that, and hadn’t thought that she did. Then she had begun to expand her business and her contribution to their income had been very welcome, especially as it helped to educate the little girls. But now? The girls were grown up and sided entirely with their mother. They were smart, business-like, in love with money, and intent on having a good time. They had jobs, they had boyfriends. One worked in a department store, the other for a travel agent. They no longer spoke any German, although he was sure they understood it – they could not fail to do so, since he and Melanie still used it at home. He himself, he suspected, had never got rid of his Viennese accent when speaking English, but Melanie had deliberately cultivated an American voice and intonation. By sheer exaggeration she had succeeded in obliterating all vocal trace of her origin, except to the most discerning ear. To this day, he hardly recognised her speaking voice if he heard her on the telephone or in the next room.

And yet, when he had told her that he was going back to Austria, she had denounced him as if she were being threatened with the loss of her sole support and protection. There had been scene after scene. Why was he deserting her? Had she not been a good wife to him – faithful, loyal and hard-working? What did he reproach her with that he wanted to leave her, to break up their marriage after more than twenty years?

At first he had argued that he had no desire to desert her, all he wanted was to go home. Would she not come with him? Or promise to follow him as soon as he had reestablished himself? This suggestion had infuriated her even more. That did not surprise him.

Remembering it all as he sat looking out of the window at the meadows and the apple trees and the cows, the neat villages and scattered farmsteads, he admitted that the proposal had been disingenuous. She would never give up the life she had embraced with so much zest, her financial success and her independence. He had not really wanted her to come. She would be miserable if she had to live in Vienna again. He was not sure if he wasn’t going to be miserable himself. He couldn’t know what it was going to be like, how he was going to fit in. Melanie was sure that he was going to be totally disillusioned. Perhaps she was right. Yet the urge to go had been irresistible, and he had then suggested that she divorce him, and had made this proposal in good faith. But it had made her even more angry, if that were possible, than his offer to take her with him. She had a horror of divorce, the very idea incensed her. It appeared that under all the veneer of her emancipation, in spite of all the examples she saw around her, the old atavistic principles of her faith and tradition remained deeply ingrained. She was his wife. She was not going to be cast off – as she felt she would be – even if it was she herself who did the casting. And then she had indulged herself in ludicrous accusations. Go then, go if you must, she had shouted at him, and find yourself some silly smirking hussy, younger than I am, prettier than me, the woman who has slaved for years to keep the home together and to bring up your children – some soft, sensuous creature to rekindle your waning appetite – but I’ll make sure you never marry her, not while I’m alive you won’t, the slut!

Well, that was that. It had all been very undignified, sordid, and perfectly ridiculous. The thought of renewing his love life had never entered his mind.

The train was slowing down. Professor Adler shook himself out of his obsessive reminiscing and saw once more what was actually before his eyes. Buchs. He went into the corridor and pulled down the window to look out. In the old days the train used to stand here endlessly for customs formalities. He remembered a holiday he had spent with his parents in Lucerne as a small boy. What a long journey it had been, and how bored and impatient he had felt standing in this dull little station, with nothing to look at except the boxes of red geraniums in the stationmaster’s windows. He leaned out and craned his neck to see whether there were any there now, but his carriage was standing rather far down the line and dusk was falling. He couldn’t make out anything. It did not occur to him that only a short while ago he had been hesitating whether or not to leave the train here before it crossed the frontier. Then, suddenly, before he had had time to remember this, the train moved on. It had stopped for barely five minutes.

In a few moments they had crossed the little river and were approaching the mountains. And just as suddenly and unaccountably a wave of some unidentifiable emotion swept through Kuno Adler. Apprehension? But of what? It felt like a physical sickness, a mental darkness. He was not an automaton now: he was an animal, tense, wary, charged with feeling, stripped of reason. He heard steps coming down the narrow passage, and a voice next door: ‘Austrian passport control!’ The words were repeated a minute later at the entrance to his own compartment.

While putting his hand in his breast-pocket to extract his passport, he looked at the man in the doorway. A young man, smooth face under the round peaked uniform cap, a small straight nose, a rather delicate mouth with red lips under a thin pencil moustache. Grey eyes, smiling. A good-looking fellow. But it was the voice, the intonation that hit a nerve somewhere in Kuno Adler’s throat; no, below the throat, where breath and nourishment plunge into the depths of the body, a non-conscious, ungovernable nerve, in the solar plexus probably. It was the quality of that voice, of that accent, soft and yet rough, ingratiating and slightly vulgar, sensible to the ear as a certain kind of stone is to the touch – the soap-stone that is coarse-grained and spongy and slightly oily on the surface – an Austrian voice. ‘Austrian passport control!’

Kuno Adler handed over his passport, his American passport, with a sense of defiance, as if challenging him to question its authenticity. The man leafed through it, looked at the photograph and at Adler himself for what seemed an intolerably long time, probably twenty seconds, cocking his head to look at him from all angles. All right, all right! Adler thought, of course he can see that I am a Jew, a refugee. What of it?

‘Coming back?’ the man asked, closing the passport and handing it to him.

Adler had meant to answer any questions in English. But somehow he couldn’t.
‘Ja,’
he replied, and in the same soft German, ‘I’m coming back.’

‘Good luck!’ the man said and smiled as he backed out of the door.

What did he mean by that? Was it ironic? Was it a warning? It hadn’t seemed that way, it had just sounded friendly. I must watch myself, Adler thought, not to be so over-sensitive, so suspicious – though not to be gullible either – feel my way carefully. It’s not going to be easy, more difficult perhaps than I anticipated.

The customs man followed. He glanced up at the suitcases. ‘Only your personal belongings? No tea or coffee?’

‘No tea or coffee,’ Adler repeated, and the man passed on, closing the door of the compartment.

It was now quite dark. Adler pressed his face against the window. The mountains outside were so high and so near that there was nothing to see but blackness, with pinpoints of light here and there from the windows of some lonely house on the slopes, and one had to crane one’s neck to see the faint luminosity of the sky above the rocky summits. Adler put on the light and asked the attendant to make his bed while he stood in the corridor. He had forgotten to go through to the restaurant car for dinner, had ignored the summoning bell while obsessed with remembering the scenes he had left behind. He didn’t mind, he was not really hungry, but munched some chocolate: Swiss chocolate, which he had bought for old times’ sake.

He went to bed and tried to make contact in his imagination with the country outside the little moving box of polished wood and upholstery in which he now lay stretched out. The province of Vorarlberg and, soon, the long tunnel of the Arlberg, and then Tyrol. Magical names! But he had not known them intimately and all he could visualise in his mind’s eye was a map, the map that had hung in the classroom of his first school. For a while his imagination concentrated on that map: the outline had been roughly diamond-shaped. The top point was the most clearly outlined, surmounting as it did an embedded square, upended on one corner – the Kingdom of Bohemia. The eastern end was rounded and shapeless, the southern uneven and jagged, and the whole surface was divided up into pieces of different shapes, sizes and colours like a patchwork.

And he could remember the formula which described them: the kingdoms and lands represented in the parliament of the realm, the patrimony inherited or acquired as dowries in the course of centuries by the House of Habsburg. In the eastern half of the map, the largest, roundest monochrome expanse, embraced within two in-curving arms of a pincer, was the Kingdom of Hungary.

Strange, he commented to himself, how these early memories persist and remain untouched by later experience. For he had hardly left his primary school when the Austro-Hungarian Empire had ceased to exist and that map had been rubbed out and redrawn with different contours. He knew this one, of course, but it had never made a visual impact on his mind; whereas the other map, obsolete before he had even started on his adult life, remained indelibly imprinted on his memory.

Two

He lay in his bed in the little box of a compartment, the shelf of the upper, unoccupied bunk over his head, his suit and overcoat swaying just within reach of his hand on a brass peg fixed to the varnished partition dividing his compartment from his neighbour’s. The train swayed rhythmically as the wheels hammered out their beat each time they crossed the narrow gap which separates one length of rail from the next. Only a faint blue light shone from a tiny bulb above the door, making the darkness itself discernible by its degree of deeper blackness and moving shadows of unrecognisable shapes.

The picture of the old map, still showing dimly through drifting veils of wandering memories, conjured up the name of the small town in Moravia from which his father, as a young boy, had come to Vienna. He felt his father’s arm round his shoulder and heard him describe, as he had done so many times – and he had never tired of listening – how he had come on foot, drawn by that great and glittering magnet of a city, and how he had seen for the first time, from the distance, the pointed spire of St Stephen’s Cathedral. All roads in Vienna had been open then, and from all directions of the compass they had come, seeking their fortune – Czech and Pole and Croat, Magyar and Italian, and Jew of course, to mix and feed and enrich this German city, which through them became unique and truly imperial. Some had been sucked down into the morass of its lower depths, but those who were hardworking and thrifty, like himself, had made their way and become citizens, imparting and receiving that very special flavour and dye of being Viennese which was different from anything else in the world. Something, his father used to say, which you cannot lose.

In his mind’s eye Adler saw his father’s house, or rather his grandfather’s, an old dark house in a narrow street in the very centre of the city, in the shadow of St Stephen’s Cathedral. His maternal grandfather, S Kantorowicz, importer and wholesale dealer in furs, third generation of his name and trade, of solid and impeccable reputation, lived and worked there. To him his father, Simon Adler, had succeeded in being apprenticed, had become his most trusted journeyman and, there being no son, had in due course married the daughter. There was the high, arched doorway through which Kuno had passed a thousand times to and from school. It led from the street under a vaulted and paved passage into the courtyard into which the sun only shone in summer, and then only at noon. On the right was the stone staircase leading to the upper floors and the living quarters, on the left the entrance to the shop. The door to the shop had glass panels that rattled whenever the door was opened or closed. There was no shop window on the outside, nothing but a small brass plate, ‘S Kantorowicz – Furrier’, fixed to the wall just outside the left-hand wing of the great and ponderous dark brown nail-studded door of the main entrance to the house.

Mostly this door was folded back during the daytime; but when it was closed, a small door, cut into the thickness of the right-hand panel, with its own latch, keyhole and bolts, could give admittance to the archway and courtyard beyond. It was rather dark under that archway at the best of times, and the shop – having no access to daylight other than the glass panels of its door – always had a gaslight burning on a brass bracket fixed on the opposite wall. So inconspicuous was the notice given to would-be customers that no one who did not know where to find S Kantorowicz, Furrier, would be likely to discover him. He was not out to attract the casual passer-by. Nor was there anything to beguile the uninitiated in the little gaslit room inside the glass-panelled door, for it contained nothing but a dark brown painted counter which ran from wall to wall across the room, and the stuffed head of a seal mounted on the wall opposite the gas-burner, while a stuffed baum marten climbing up a twisted barren branch on a stand was the only adornment on the counter.