The Exiles Return (4 page)

The workshop was behind this little saleroom, where Kuno remembered the great event of electric light being installed: a wonderful improvement on the gas-burners by which his father and his two or three men used to work. But that was only after his grandfather’s death. Kuno also remembered his parents discussing it and deploring the old man’s stubbornness in opposing what he called new-fangled ideas. The warehouses where the raw skins were stored were even further back, in the courtyard, secured from the outside by heavily barred and padlocked doors. How vivid all this was in Adler’s semi-somnolent mind; it needed no effort of recollection, it was there, and he himself was there, or rather not himself, but the boy he had been, resurrected from the depths of his past. He was seeing with that boy’s eyes, oh, and smelling, too! The smell in the archway was of dust and urine. It wafted down the shaft of the stone staircase opposite the glass-panelled door of the shop, for the lavatories were on the landings of each floor and their doors were often left standing open, to the annoyance of his mother. But the smell in the shop was nicer, though quite sharp. It smelled of tanned leather and of the acid essences used in the dressing and preserving of skins.

S Kantorowicz needed no shop window. His wares were not for show. The quality and workmanship of his furs, imported mainly from Russia, were such that he dealt only with customers who understood, who expected and appreciated, perfection. The purchase of a fur coat or coat-lining of sable or sealskin, of a collar, stole or muff of beaver, ermine or astrakhan, was an important transaction involving absolute trust on both sides, vendor and buyer. No one knew better than Kantorowicz that the appearance of a fur can be most cunningly deceptive. But the quality of anything he sold was never questioned, nor was the solvency of his customer. Complaints were practically unknown. It was unusual to enquire about price when ordering. Such a question could cause eyebrows to be raised in surprise and probably go unanswered, as so much depended on the number of skins required in the making and the state of the market at the particular time; and the price eventually charged, possibly a year after delivery, would always be found very reasonable. Such were the standards and the self-respect of S Kantorowicz, and the respect accorded to him in all his dealings. And if it so happened – as it would from time to time, though very rarely – that some gentleman, or lady, though highly-titled, did not comply with his standards, they would find on a subsequent occasion that S Kantorowicz, to his great regret, found himself unable to supply the particular skin required, or indeed unable to accept any order at the present time, being booked up with orders for months ahead. The old man had even been known to advise a newly-arrived financial luminary, who wished to show off his mistress in a splendid ermine cape, to go elsewhere because he was too busy to take the order; in fact he had regarded the connection as undesirable.

*   *   *

Professor Adler slept. Gently rocked by the rhythmic movements of the train, he slept deeply and peacefully, as if he were lying on his boyhood bed in the little room next to his parents. When he awoke, daylight was filtering round the edges of the stiff cloth blind covering the window of his compartment. He pulled it up by the metal rod that held it stretched across the thick glass pane, sat himself on the edge of the bunk and looked out. The train had left the mountains behind. The countryside was flat, green and wooded. A road ran next to the railway track, a narrow road. Beyond it: fields, a copse of fir trees, then, in the distance, a cluster of houses and a church with a steeple crowned with a bulbous top like a Turkish turban. Adler smiled as he saw it: he was sorry he had missed the more spectacular sights in darkness and sleep, but there would be plenty of time for those – when? Next year, perhaps, or the year after? He would spend his holidays walking in the mountains, at an inn in a remote valley. It was years since he had walked. The prospect gave him a thrill of pleasure. He was coming home …

Now the houses were closer together, they grew taller and squarer, grey and drab, showing flat, featureless faces of ennui with the suburban way of life – neither town nor country. But here
was
a town. The train ran into a station: several platforms, a long low building opposite the window, and people on the platform, men in grey loden and green felt hats, women, too, in loden or other nondescript clothes. A sign hanging from the station roof read ‘St Pölten’. He hurriedly started to dress; he had not realised he was so close to his journey’s end. Only an hour to Vienna. It was when they stopped at St Pölten, on their return journey from the summer holidays, that his father always began to fidget, to urge his mother to pack up what was left of their picnic, to fold the papers and put away her book and whatever he himself had been playing with. Then he had to put on his coat and gloves and sit still, for ages it seemed, while his father got down the suitcases.

Now the little stations of Vienna’s outlying villages flashed by, most of them bearing long hyphenated names because they had to serve two or more small communities. Then the roofs of villas could be seen through the trees of their gardens. Suddenly there was a proliferation of tracks, and the upper storeys of town houses lining the street below glided by. Then the Western Station – or what used to be the Western Station. Formerly, there had been a long and high, cavernous, glazed-in hall into which the trains used to glide; it was old-fashioned, dingy, and yet somehow sumptuously dignified like the well-worn attire of a high-born elderly spinster who has clothed herself once and for all in her best and scorned to change her style. But now there was just – nothing: an open space where the bombed wreckage of the old station had been cleared away; stacks of building material, steel girders and concrete mixers for the new modern station under construction.

Adler experienced a violent sense of shock. It was his first actual contact with the fact to which he had hitherto not given much thought: that not everything would look the same – or be the same – as it had looked and been when he left it. I shall have to learn the lesson of the Western Station, he thought, and this phrase, repeated silently many times in the coming months, summed up and symbolised for him the situations and experiences he would be having to deal with in the course of his attempt at repatriation. Would the lessons be very hard? Had he been wise in undertaking to learn them? And he realised, to his surprise, that he could not foresee what their nature and significance was going to be.

The lesson was immediately reinforced when he crossed the platform into the open followed by his porter. It all looked so utterly different from what he remembered. Here was just an expanse of cobbled pavement and no traffic. The houses on the far side of the square, always rather nondescript – he didn’t remember them exactly, of course – had at least been solid and durable. Now – if indeed they were the same houses and not something that had been hidden behind the vanished facades – they looked like a row of decayed teeth, shabby, discoloured and intermittently broken down.

Three taxis were drawn up near the exit, old square cabs, high on their wheels, their drivers wearing shapeless cloth caps and one of them a German army uniform coat without buttons. Adler was staring around in bewilderment, trying to make sense of it all.

‘Where do you want to go? Will you take a taxi?’ his porter was asking him for the third time, very loudly now, because he had concluded that his charge did not understand German and must therefore be shouted at. So he pointed and gesticulated, and at the same time the nearest driver got out of his cab and opened the door.

Adler turned to the porter. ‘A hotel,’ he said tentatively, ‘I’m trying to think of a hotel.’

‘Have you got a reservation?’ the porter asked.

‘No, no I haven’t.’ That was something Adler had not thought about, not with any precision. He was going to look for somewhere to live, some rooms or a small flat. He had even wondered whether he might get his old apartment back again, and then discarded the idea because it would be too big for him to live in alone. But at first he would go to a hotel. Any hotel, there were so many – he just couldn’t, for the moment, remember any names of the more modest ones. Of course he wouldn’t go to one of the big luxury hotels.

But the porter was saying: ‘You won’t get in anywhere in the centre without a reservation. The big hotels are still reserved for the Occupation Powers, and all the others are fully booked up, that I know. No reservation,’ he said, turning to the taxi driver, throwing out one arm as he made this, what he considered preposterous, statement. The other only shrugged his shoulders, as if there was no more to be said.

‘There used to be a Hotel K— quite near here,’ Adler said, suddenly remembering a name he had heard in the distant past.

‘That was bombed,’ the porter answered laconically. ‘But wait! There’s the Hotel M—. The waiter there is a friend of mine – I might be able to get you a room. You won’t like it, though.’ He cast a doubtful look at Adler’s overcoat, his expensive-looking American shoes. ‘I could take your luggage there on a handcart, for a dollar,’ he added, his eyes lighting up hungrily.

Adler hastily extracted a dollar bill from his wallet. ‘Yes, please, take me there, certainly. I’m sure it will do until I find something else.’

‘All right, come with me, and I’ll see that you get a room – if you’ll give the waiter a dollar too.’

The taxi driver had got back into his cab and slammed the door.

Adler didn’t like the room. He didn’t like the hotel, if indeed the place could be called a hotel, and suspected that it might be something quite different. The ‘waiter’ seemed to be the only person in charge. The room was diminutive and almost entirely filled with a much-too-large bed. It smelt appalling. The porter had dumped the suitcases just inside the door and left. Adler threw open the dirty little window, but as it looked out on a nauseating courtyard, the smell only intensified.

A most depressing beginning, he thought, but it will have to do for tonight. He wished he’d thought of making a reservation. But how was he to know?

Then he went out. He walked down the Mariahilfstrasse, that long, wide commercial street where he had not come very often as it was not in his district: he neither worked nor lived in it, but had driven through many times on his way to the Western Station or to more distant outskirts. And as he walked along its pavements, it aroused in him that curious ambivalent sensation which one experiences in dreams, that of knowing where one is and not knowing, of recognition and non-recognition, of the comfortingly familiar and the frighteningly strange – the sensation of déjà vu: am I really myself, experiencing this, or has it all already happened a long time ago?

He turned left into the Stiftgasse where the great barracks stood, for no other reason than an urge to change direction, to seek the protection of a narrower street, because he felt an upsurge of nausea. For a few minutes he stood in a doorway, fighting it down. Then, gritting his teeth, he went on, turning right, turning left and right again, without looking at street names, without looking anywhere, sleepwalking as it were to reach the place where he would have to wake up and look and be sure.

Finally, there he was, on the Ring: the massive pile of the Natural History Museum on his right, the ramp of the Parliament building on his left, beyond it the spire of the Town Hall, and in front of him the railings of the Volksgarten and the Burgplatz. There he was, and there it all was; though the once tree-bordered footpaths across the roadway were stripped, treeless, only a few naked trunks still standing. Otherwise it was all there. And suddenly the dislocation of time which had been dizzying him with illusions and delusions snapped into focus, and he was real, everything was real, incontrovertible fact. He was
there.
Only the trees were not there, and this comparatively trivial sign of destruction, for which he had not been prepared, caused him incommensurate grief. Hurriedly he crossed the road, entered the park gates, sat down on a bench in a deserted avenue, and wept.

Three

A few days later, having found himself a tolerable room in a small
pension
, Adler went to call on the official at the Ministry of Education with whom he had corresponded about his return for the past six months. The exchange of letters had been dry, impersonal, official in style and tone, but in substance he had been assured that according to the law on reparation, anyone wishing to return would be reinstated in the same or equivalent position which he had held before, if it could be shown that he had been dismissed or forced to resign because of his political opinions or on the grounds of race or religion. The assurance had been adequate if not particularly encouraging. Adler had attributed the dryness to the impersonal formality of administrative language. He now glanced through his file, slipped it into his briefcase and set out for the Ministry.

The quiet little square, on which the broad, Baroque frontage of the palace which housed it looked down with ceremonious old-world dignity, was unscathed, as was the brown octagonal tower of the nearby Minorite Church. The cloudless sky showed wide stretches of blue, the sun shone kindly on the weathered stone, and a breath of spring floated on the air from the budding trees of the Volksgarten. Adler stood looking around, his heart lifted, and he felt that time, like himself, had for a moment stood still.

He had not thought of making an appointment. When he asked at the inquiry desk for the Sektionschef with whom he had been corresponding, this was of course the first question he had to answer, and when he said ‘no’, the clerk’s mouth and shoulders assumed an even less co-operative expression than they had had in the first place. However, he pushed a slip over to him to fill in with his name and the nature of his business, and having received it, he was prepared to sink back into indifference. Then Adler produced the last letter the Sektionschef had written to him, and this at least resulted in his being conducted as far as the Herr Sektionschef’s anteroom, where two other people were already waiting. This slight, foreseeable and avoidable incident at the inquiry desk had already had an unnerving effect on Adler’s self-confidence, and made him aggressively defensive. He glared with hostility at the two other unfortunates who had occupied the waiting room before him. But mercifully he was almost immediately to be disarmed. The paper on which he had just registered his presence had obviously been passed into the inner sanctum: within a very few minutes the door was opened by the Sektionschef himself who, bowing slightly to the two previous arrivals and begging them to excuse him, held out his hand to Adler and drew him into his office.