The Exiles Return (18 page)

‘The answer to that is very simple, Dr Krieger. I came home. I am an Austrian. I belong here.’

‘Do you? And you didn’t like America? You were not happy there?’

‘I didn’t say anything about America, I only mean that I didn’t like being in exile. I prefer to live at home.’

‘And do you feel at home – now? When I see you working so much on your own, so aloof, avoiding contact, as much as possible, with the others, but especially with me, I wonder whether you are not more of an exile here than you were over there. Of course you make one exception – which I find significant. Fräulein Grein.’

‘Fräulein Grein?’

‘She is the only one of the Institute’s personnel who is openly hostile to me, who avoids me as much as she dares, who is scarcely polite. She was here years before I was appointed, and I’d find it very difficult to have her removed, much as I should wish to do so. And she is the only person to whom you have attached yourself, with whom you make a team. That is not a pleasant situation for me and does not make for a profitable collaboration between us.’

Adler was genuinely surprised. He lifted himself off the table and went and stood by the window. It was quite dark outside now. Through the glass partition the assistants and technicians in their white coats, the girls in their white overalls, looked pallid and greenish in the hard diffused light of the neon tubes, as they bent over some delicate operation or moved from one place to another. Their voices, if they were speaking to one another, were inaudible. It struck Adler that the silent gleaming laboratory seemed to be suspended in the darkness of space. In New York, he thought, there would have been walls of light all around, across the street, across the courtyard, over the neighbouring roofs. Here the houses opposite had closed their eyes and in doing so had, paradoxically, made themselves invisible. The two feeble yellow globules of the street lamps down below never penetrated the surrounding haze.

Then Adler turned back to face his interlocutor. ‘To tell you the truth, Dr Krieger, I don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘Oh, come now, my dear colleague. Fräulein Grein must have gossiped to you about me?’

‘Fräulein Grein has never gossiped about you or anyone else. We have hardly exchanged any words at all, and the few we have spoken have been concerned only with our work. She is the last person one might suspect of gossiping, she is so reserved, so reticent.’

‘She certainly is so with me, but with you I should have thought it would be otherwise.’

‘And why should you think that?’

‘Well, she might expect some sympathy from you. She might expect you to listen to whatever tales she thinks fit to tell about me, slanderous tales, without any vestige of truth in them, but damaging nevertheless, and disruptive of good relations between us.’

‘I still don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘That is difficult for me to believe, especially in view of your – to put it mildly – unfriendly attitude towards me. Do you mean to tell me that she – or perhaps it was someone else? – has not told you that I have been accused of what our enemies have been pleased to call “war crimes”, medical war crimes in my case, and that I have had to defend myself before a tribunal? But if that is what you have been told, you must also have been told that I was acquitted – acquitted and vindicated.

‘If you insist,’ Krieger continued, ‘that Fräulein Grein hasn’t told you anything about me, then I will tell you myself. Because I want you to know. You have undoubtedly heard of the “Doktor’s Tribunal”, the so-called court of law set up by our enemies after the war in order to prosecute medical men, more-or-less eminent ones, for alleged “crimes” against the inmates of certain institutions. The proceedings were based on the denunciations of a motley crowd of people who described themselves as “victims”. I was among the accused – and I was acquitted.’ Dr Krieger raised his voice a little as he repeated, ‘I was acquitted, officially, judicially found innocent by judges who were certainly not prejudiced in my favour. I can show you the transcript of the judgment if you wish.’

‘Ah,’ said Adler, ‘now I understand what the Sektionschef meant when he told me of your appointment here. He said you had been thoroughly investigated. You were employed in what you so euphemistically call “certain institutions”. Concentration camps, I suppose.’

‘As I’ve just told you, I was completely exonerated. Nothing I did, no experiments I undertook, no tests I carried out, no treatments I applied were found to be contrary to the interests of science, to the pursuit of pure knowledge. So I was acquitted. What more can you want?’

‘You are telling me something I did not know,’ replied Adler. ‘No one has talked to me about you, or about what you did or did not do. I am hearing it for the first time from your own lips, Dr Krieger. You say you were acquitted: I assume you would not be the Director of this Institute if you had not been. That is sufficient for me. I see no reason why I should make any further inquiries about you or your activities, whatever they were. I can only repeat that neither Fräulein Grein nor any one else has said anything slanderous about you in my presence. And I also don’t know why you should especially suspect Fräulein Grein, nor why you accuse me of what you term unfriendliness towards you. This is not a pleasant or profitable conversation, Dr Krieger. I suggest that we break it off, I don’t understand why you started it in the first place.’

‘Because, Herr Dr Adler, Herr Professor I should say – I want to clear the air. And I want to make some basic principles clear. You call yourself a scientist, Dr Adler? And what is a scientist? A man who devotes himself to science – that is, to knowledge. That is an overriding aim: we strive to know. That is all that matters. You are not a Christian, I presume? Neither am I. You do not adhere to any dogmatic religion, neither do I. So we neither of us have any prejudices which inhibit our pursuit of knowledge. Now let me tell you that I was working during recent years in surroundings, in circumstances, which were ideally favourable to the gaining of pure scientific knowledge. My colleagues and I had the opportunity of carrying out experiments, testing and researching with the only biological material that can yield convincing results in the field of medical science: not with rats and mice and rabbits – but with live human subjects. Some of my colleagues, I won’t deny it, sometimes overstepped the limits of what was strictly necessary to achieve an objective result. I was careful never to do so, and as I have said, no fault could be found with me. I have no regrets, except that in the foreseeable future such opportunities will probably not be available again.’

Krieger went on: ‘Of course you have prejudices. That is natural in your case. Although I ought to point out that a true scientist should have no prejudices, but should approach every field of investigation without preconceptions. But we are all more or less conditioned by our traditions and environments. I have myself admitted to humanitarian considerations which in my case have saved me from unpleasant consequences. I was acquitted. But I can tell you for your comfort that our material – I mean my colleagues’ material – were not Jews. They were Gypsies.’

‘And you say this to comfort me! Good God! Material! Living men and women, whoever they were!’

‘Well, I suppose I should not have told you! I was carried away. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry. It is a satisfaction to me to have met at least one self-confessed, unrepentant Nazi. There must be many of them. Where have they got to? They all seem to have disappeared. One goes about amongst people, wondering. It is so harassing to have to suspect, looking for signs, listening for unpremeditated, revealing remarks, and perhaps being unfair to people whom one may have wrongly suspected. So I am pleased to have met one openly, face-to-face. I can only thank you for being so frank. I can also understand now why you asked me why I came back. I am one of those, Dr Krieger, whom you didn’t get rid of.’

Sixteen

The summer waned, it was October and Marie-Theres had been at Wald for nearly four months – was it not time that she went home to America? Had not the purpose of her having been sent abroad been accomplished? Valery and Peter discussed the problem – it was still the same one, namely what was their daughter to do? Valery did not feel they were any nearer a solution. And Marie-Theres herself was reluctant to return. She wrote that Hanni was going to Vienna, she had a new job, she was going to be secretary to the Director of the Gallery of Modern Art, she was going back to live with their aunt, Baroness Josephine Simovic, the Countess Lensveldt’s and Valery’s eldest sister. Couldn’t Resi go there too? She was anxious to see for herself the city her mother used to talk about so much, sometimes with nostalgia, dwelling on the old streets, the old houses, the palaces, the churches, and then in a sudden change of mood, with bitterness for the sentimentality which the mere mention of its name seemed to evoke. Marie-Theres, in her letters, begged to be allowed to go and find out for herself.

So now she was there, sharing with Hanni the one spare bedroom in her Aunt Fini’s flat in the seedier part of the third district. The street and the house were shabby, but the third district was a good address and not very far from the area which housed the Embassies and many important private houses. The Baroness Josephine Simovic, née Princess Altmannsdorf, was the widow of a General in the one-time Imperial Army. She had lost her husband between the two wars and now had to live on her tiny widow’s pension, so that Hanni’s small contribution to the housekeeping budget, and Peter Larsen’s ample provision for his daughter, eschewed by Count Lensveldt on his country estate, was gratefully accepted.

Aunt Fini was a very different person from Aunt Franzi, and when Marie-Theres first saw her she was filled with misgivings. Where Aunt Franzi was all expansive warmth, tall and broad in her person and wearing comfortable, colourful if somewhat faded linen dresses, country-style woollen skirts with large pockets and green or brown silk blouses, Aunt Fini was thin and one would have called her erect rather than tall. She always wore black, mourning for her husband even after all those years, just a touch of white at the neck and a black velvet ribbon round her throat. She also wore a long chain of jet beads with a tiny silver cross at the end. Her face was very pale and deeply-lined, her lips bloodless, her white hands veined with blue. To Marie-Theres, who had never seen an old lady who
looked
like an old lady, she was a daunting figure indeed, but she smiled at her young niece and her voice was soft as she welcomed her to Vienna and to her home. This was also something the girl had never seen before: such a lot of furniture, so many overstuffed chairs, and so many small tables covered with unrecognisable small ornaments and faded photographs in heavy frames, the tall window that might have let in light had it not been for the long velvet curtains framing the intricate lace ones.

But the bedroom she was to share with Hanni was more austere. Two brass bedsteads, the same kind of chest of drawers with jug and basin as she had had at Wald, and a courtyard outside, although without tree or fountain, just naked paving stones and the back view of the neighbouring houses. Was this Vienna? Marie-Theres endured a few hours of panic. Oh no, oh no, she felt, this is terrible, I had much better have gone home. I can’t possibly stay here. But then there was tea in the cluttered drawing room where the curtains were drawn and the lamps were lit under their funny green shades, there were beautiful thin tea cups and painted plates and a delicious cake. And it was reassuring not to see any sign of the distress she felt on Hanni’s face: she was chattering away to her aunt about events at Wald and laughing as she always did, and the severe aunt herself seemed nothing like as forbidding as she had at first appeared, but kindly and full of interest in what she was being told. So gradually Marie-Theres’s panic subsided and she was able to answer Aunt Fini’s questions about herself, and how her mother was, and even to laugh with Hanni about her own surprise at these, to her, strange surroundings.

When, later that evening, they retired to bed, Hanni was full of sympathy for the shock to her cousin’s feelings in encountering her severe-looking aunt and the apparent discomfort of their bedroom. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ she assured her, ‘and we’re very lucky to have somewhere to stay in Vienna at all, it’s almost impossible to find a room, so much has been destroyed. Anyway, we won’t be here for long, I hope I shall be able to get married in the spring, and who knows what’s in store for you? Perhaps you’ll get engaged, or you can always go home if you don’t like it here. Meanwhile, you can go out and see the town and meet people: Georg has found just the thing to keep you occupied.’ And she went on to tell her cousin about a course of lectures and guided tours which had been laid on for young foreigners who, for one reason or another, happened to be in Vienna – chiefly the families of the military or civil members of the missions of the occupying powers stationed there. At the Foreign Office Georg had found out all about this, he had even had a hand in setting it up. Resi would be able to learn something about Austria’s history and history of art, and be taken sightseeing, and as she would be one of those who understood the language, she could also be taken to the theatre. ‘And,’ said Hanni, ‘you will meet young Americans, French and British and you will be sure to make friends.’

‘I don’t make friends,’ Marie-Theres whispered, rather sullenly, under her breath. ‘And it sounds very much like school all over again.’ But Hanni had already turned over and gone to sleep and so Marie-Theres did too.

*   *   *

It was, indeed, very much like school all over again. The next day Hanni had taken her to the University by tram, shown her where to get on and off, had helped her to register and find her way up wide shallow staircases and steep winding ones hidden away in corners, along broad corridors and through narrow passageways to the lecture room where the courses were being given. There was a small gathering of students, the lecture had already begun, and the lecturer was speaking voluble and fluent, but strongly accented, English. Hanni, not wishing to interrupt, had pushed her in through the door, whispering that she would fetch her this first day to go home for lunch, and left her. All heads had turned towards her as she came in, so she quickly sat down in the nearest empty place in order to hide her embarrassment. What the talk was about she did not take in.