The Exiles Return (5 page)

‘My dear Herr Professor, it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. How are you? When did you arrive? Do please sit down,’ and he pulled forward a chair for his visitor while himself retiring behind his wide, paper-strewn desk. ‘I only wish you had given me notice of your intended visit. I should have had more leisure. As you saw, people are always waiting – so many interviews – so much business! But come, now you are here, let us talk as much as possible. We can get down to details another time. I have sent for your file, they will bring it in a moment.’

Words poured from his lips, soothing, ingratiating, while Adler, the light from the tall windows in his eyes, scarcely said anything and felt slightly dazed. The man opposite him was at least ten years younger than himself, fair, smooth-faced, groomed to perfection, and beaming with urbanity. He had a soft Austrian voice and his diction, perfectly cultured, seemed to caress the roundness of his vowels and the resonance of his consonants, as if consciously to distinguish his speech from the crisp, clipped enunciation used by ‘foreigners’ – that is North Germans. He belonged to a new generation and a new elite, very self-assured and conscious of its merits and responsibilities. He made Adler feel old, a relic, almost a stranger, and out of place in this city where he had been born and had lived for years before this blond young man had opened his eyes.

‘I am delighted you have decided to come back to us, Herr Professor,’ the speech continued. ‘We can use all the brains, all the learning, all the experience our countrymen are able to contribute. We cannot afford to waste any of it. Such a valuable personality as yourself – let me assure you that we appreciate your return.’

Poor old fellow, he thought privately, contemplating Adler’s greying hair, he does look rather pathetic. Still, we are legally bound to make reparation and I fully accept that it is our moral duty to do so.

‘I could not have come back,’ Adler said dryly, interrupting the flow of rhetoric, ‘if I were not legally entitled to reinstatement.’

‘Of course, of course, reinstatement or reparation – to the best of our ability, to the very limit that our means permit us. We are a poor country, a small country, we have suffered much destruction –’ A clerk knocked at a side door, came in, and laid a file on the Sektionschef’s desk.

‘Ah, thank you, thank you. Yes, this is the file. We will go through it together later, and see what can be done – I mean, what you wish to do. That must, above all things, be taken into account. But now, there are people waiting whom I have promised to see.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I am already a little unpunctual. But never mind that. The main thing is that you have come back to us and that I have made your acquaintance.’ He picked up a pencil. ‘Where can I get in touch with you?’ Pencil poised, he looked at Adler expectantly. But Adler, lips compressed, was staring at the floor. The Sektionschef put down the pencil and, bending forward with his hands on the arms of his chair in a gesture of rising: ‘Herr Professor!’ he called.

Adler looked up. ‘Herr Sektionschef, I’m sorry to delay you. But I can’t leave you like this. I want to
know.
I
must
know…’ His voice sounded louder than he had meant it to be. ‘I
must
know where I stand. I want to know what my situation is to be.’

‘Of course, Herr Professor – that is exactly what we shall have to discuss. I realise that you must be anxious. But you, too, must realise –’ He sat back again in his chair. ‘You must understand, a problem like this cannot be settled in five minutes. There are difficulties, unavoidable difficulties, on both sides, on yours as well as on ours. I can put them in just two words: fifteen years. Think of them, Herr Professor. Fifteen years is a long time. We cannot wipe out fifteen years, pretend that they did not exist. A great deal has happened during those fifteen years – so much has changed. Even without all those extraordinary – and deplorable – circumstances, those most regrettable events, things do change, naturally and legitimately, in fifteen years. People grow older, young men reach maturity…’

Will he dare to tell me I am too old, try to pension me off? Adler wondered. Aloud, he said: ‘I realise I am not as young as I used to be. But I’m scarcely fifty – a long way from the age limit if there is one in the profession of a scientist, which I doubt. And I have not lain fallow during your fifteen years. I have continued to work all the time. I am entirely up-to-date, both in information and technique.’

Why am I trying to justify myself, he thought with bitterness. I have a right to be reinstated. I am not asking for a favour.

The Sektionschef sighed and crossed his legs. His appointments would have to wait. He could not break off the interview. There must be no abruptness. The Professor must be handled gently, very gently.

‘Of course, Herr Professor, we know that. We know that you have been working in the laboratory of one of the great American hospitals. It’s all in my file. You are most certainly in touch with all the latest developments in your field. American research institutions are so lavishly endowed, so wonderfully well-equipped. I’m afraid we are very poor here, by comparison, and that you are making a great sacrifice in giving up all those facilities.’

‘Oh, I am quite prepared to find that my laboratory’ – the Sektionschef winced a little at the word ‘my’ – ‘that my laboratory will not be as up-to-date, as streamlined, to use the American expression, as the one I have left behind. At least, for the time being. But the Institute was well up to standard when I left – fifteen years ago, as you stress – and I imagine, with all the work that had to be done during the war, it cannot have been allowed to become derelict. After all, the Germans were here, weren’t they? And the Germans are nothing if not efficient. They would not have neglected a research institution when even the extermination camps, to judge by what has recently come to light, were organised with such scientific perfection.’

‘Alas, Herr Professor, alas!’

‘I’m sorry,’ Adler continued, ‘I did not intend to touch on that terrible subject. This is neither the time nor the place to speak of it, and I hope that I shall not be called upon to discuss it again. I have made up my mind not to enquire too closely into anything that happened while I was away, or into anybody’s recent past, or I could not have come back at all. But to return to my laboratory. I shall work to the best of my ability with the installations that are available, and actually my research is not as dependent on a lot of costly apparatus as it is in some other branches. I am quite prepared to improvise. It stimulates the imagination. To tell you the truth, I have found it somewhat oppressive to be governed by the necessary co-ordination of a large team working on a project which I did not, personally, consider promising – and to be dictated to, as one sometimes is, by one’s own tools.

‘But there, I apologise, Herr Sektionschef, you cannot be interested in the mechanics of my subject and I must not take up more of your time than is absolutely necessary. All I wanted to say, as regards the laboratory conditions which you touched on, is that one element of the admittedly complex motives which induced me to return was the hope of being more independent, more able to follow my own ideas and my own methods – for what they are worth.’ Adler felt much happier having delivered himself of this declaration, and looked it. But the Sektionschef did not. However, he decided that as he could not dismiss the Professor at this stage of the proceedings, he had better deal with his case completely, and settle it.

‘I see, I see, Herr Professor,’ he said. ‘And you have my profound respect. The way you put it, the sacrifice you are making is less than I had feared. That is a great relief to my mind. But the other sacrifice, the material one, will, I’m afraid, be heavier.’

‘You mean the financial one, I presume.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, of course I know that the scale of remuneration here cannot compare with the American.’

‘There is that, also. Now let me see. You were, I believe, when you left…’ – the Sektionschef leafed through the file before him, more to make his statement really authoritative than to inform himself of what he knew already – ‘you were an Assistant at the Institute.’

‘First Assistant,’ Adler interrupted, ‘I should have been Head of it in due course.’

‘Ah, but the “due course” was interrupted, was it not? Through no fault of your own, I hasten to add, but you did choose to leave a little early. I mean, you resigned before you could be dismissed – and you left the country.’

‘I should probably not be alive today if I had not done so.’

‘Very probably. You were wise to act as you did, no one could blame you. But it creates a little difficulty by the letter of the law. You acted, so to speak, of your own free will, you were not actually
forced
to leave – you anticipated.’

‘But for Heaven’s sake, Herr Sektionschef, what difference does it make?’

‘We are prepared to overlook the difference, to interpret according to the spirit, not the letter of the law – which killeth.’

‘A little joke, Herr Sektionschef? Rather a grim one.’

The Sektionschef bit his lip. ‘I apologise.’ (How difficult all this is – things will slip out, one can’t be too careful.) ‘And your title of Professor was – a titular, not a substantive one.’

‘Yes. So there is another Head of Department now? I suppose that was inevitable.’

‘Dr Krieger is in charge of the Institute at the moment. He has not yet been formally confirmed as Head of Department. The medical faculty is partly in the process of reorganisation, as are the others. Some people have left, others are coming back. Dr Krieger is Austrian, but he spent the war years in Germany. As you know, after ’38 there was a common citizenship, and these things have not been finally sorted out. All sorts of questions still have to be disentangled and investigated. Not everything has been cleared up. But Dr Krieger’s case has been very thoroughly gone into and he is perfectly in the clear. A very able man indeed, as you will find when you meet him. I hope you will be able to co-operate fruitfully with him – and he with you. I’m sure that with good will on both sides, and the disinterested devotion to science which you both share –’

‘So I shall, again, be an Assistant!’

‘If you wish to call yourself that. You see, you will have been reinstated. But you will also be able to work quite independently, on your own projects. And your Professorship entitles you to lecture and to have pupils if any wish to enrol with you. Of course, you will be calling on the Dean of the Faculty before you start work, and discussing such matters with him. And I’ll see to it that as soon as possible you receive an official document confirming your appointment and your emoluments. I beg you not to be disappointed. We are a very poor country and, unfortunately, not in a position to be lavish. We know that your merits are far in excess of the remuneration we are able to offer. And now you must really excuse me. Goodbye, Herr Professor, goodbye.’

He rose and opened the door for Adler, then held out his hand to the next caller. ‘I am so very sorry to have kept you waiting…’ Adler heard, before the door closed behind him and he was left to go out once more into the quiet little square overlooked by the brown octagonal tower of the old Minorite Church standing peacefully in the spring sunshine, to the square in which it had seemed to him that time stood still.

Four

Back to where he had been before! That was what restitution – what reinstatement – meant. But what one had felt to be right, to be commensurate, to be full of promise for the future, when one was still in one’s thirties, did not look the same in one’s fifties. Time had not stood still. What, he asked himself, had he expected? The Ministry had been scrupulous, the Sektionschef had been friendly. They had put him back where he had left off. That was what they had been obliged to do. What had he hoped for? That he would be welcomed with open arms, as if they had been waiting for him for fifteen years; as if they had been longing for him to return, enriched by experience, by accumulated knowledge, by a deeper understanding, a more mature judgment? He felt that now he was fit to be in a position of authority and responsibility, to have younger men working under him. But that was not how they saw it. He had been away too long and he was out of the running. As he had left, others had moved in and had moved up.

Slowly he retraced his steps to the small but decent
pension
in a quiet street where he had succeeded in finding a room. He was a little sadder, a little more disillusioned than he had been a few hours earlier. Not as shocked as he had been the day of his arrival, when his first, almost irresistible, impulse had been to flee. But then he had remembered what would await him if he gave up: his wife who would gloat over his disappointment and taunt him with it, and almost certainly the refusal to give him back his position at the hospital, since he had resigned it: he knew he might have held it for a few years longer, but there had already been murmurs that he was too old. And that meant that he would be entirely dependent on his wife’s earnings. He would have to live on the proceeds of – corsets, on money extracted from the humiliation of rich middle-aged women. He would rather face anything than that.

So he sat down to write a letter to Melanie in which he told her of his safe arrival and that he had been courteously received at the Ministry; he had been reinstated, as was his due, in his job at the Institute, and was looking forward to starting work there shortly. He told her that Vienna had been only slightly damaged, but that everyday life was still rather difficult, weighing every word carefully so as to achieve the impression he wished to convey: that he himself was satisfied that things were no worse than he expected, but that she had been right to stay in New York. He re-read his letter and was pleased with it. So pleased was he that it would convince Melanie all was well with him, that he had almost succeeded in convincing himself, and experienced a fresh upsurge of hope and determination as he sealed it.

The next few days he spent walking about the city, once more getting the feel of the streets he knew so well but had half forgotten, trying to remember what certain houses had looked like before they had been reduced to rubble, what shops were missing – and gradually despair receded and merged into acceptance. Recognition slowly overcame estrangement, as one at first hesitatingly and then confidently recognises an old friend – however altered by the ravages of sickness and of time; and in the end one comes to cherish the enduring personality even more deeply because it has survived these changes which are at last felt to be of no account. On these solitary walks Adler found himself growing new tendrils of love for his old disfigured Vienna, and the conviction that he had been right to come took hold of him more and more strongly.