The Exiles Return (6 page)

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He decided to call on a few people he had known, and he went into a telephone box. There they were in the telephone directory, as they had been before. The numbers had changed – there seemed to be a different code – but the addresses were the same. That was comforting. None of them were intimate friends. He had hardly had any really intimiate friends amongst those who had stayed behind except one, an art historian whom he had known since they were boys together at the
Gymnasium.

‘Hello, this is Kuno Adler – yes, Adler – back from America. Is that you, Hermann?’ And then the delight, the throat-catching emotion of hearing the answer: ‘Kuno! Is it really you? How splendid! So you’re back? That’s really good news. You must come and see us, you and your wife. Oh, your wife is not with you? Well, I’m sure she was right to stay in New York until you see how things are shaping here.’

‘It’s good to hear your voice, Hermann. When can I see you?’

‘Just a moment, I must look at my diary. Now let me see. Not this week, I’m afraid. I have a meeting tomorrow evening, and then I have to go to Linz to identify some pictures. What about next Sunday? Will you be free in the evening? Then come to supper if you can – just a little cold supper, Sunday evening. Oh good! You’ll have such a lot to tell me. So long, Kuno.’

Sunday evening – and this was Tuesday! Fifteen years absence – so what did five more days matter? And he himself, had he not been in Vienna for more than a week without ringing up Hermann? Of course Hermann was busy. He was listed as the Director of the Contemporary Art Gallery, so it was natural that he should have a long list of engagements. He had not been waiting so impatiently for his old friend Adler’s return that he would feel the urge to see him that very same day, or at the very latest tomorrow. And yet Adler felt that that was what Hermann should have said, what he had hoped he would say. Now, the spark had gone out of his pleasure. He thought that by Sunday he would not really care to go and have supper with the Helblings, that he would probably ring up and make an excuse for not going.

When he had put down the receiver he stared for a while at the telephone directory. The other two men whom he had wanted to call were doctors. One with whom he had worked in the General Hospital was now, according to the entry in the directory, Director of one of the big clinics. He decided not to ring him up. The other was a gynaecologist, although the link between him and Adler had not been medicine but music. They used to play chamber music together, and Dr Stolz had been the viola to Adler’s second violin. The first violin had emigrated and the cellist, Adler knew, had died in a concentration camp. Stolz had been the only gentile member of the quartet, but he had mixed so freely and intimately with the others that he could surely never have been anti-Semitic? But now Adler could not be sure. What if he had, after all, been a Nazi? If he had felt obliged to become a party member because he had had so many Jewish friends? Or that he needed to be one for the sake of his practice? Adler felt that he could not bear another rebuff on the telephone; for Hermann’s five-day postponement of their meeting had almost been a rebuff. He felt that his attempt to reestablish social contacts had not been a success, forgetting that out of the three calls he had intended to make, he had in fact only made one, and it had resulted in an invitation to supper!

On the Sunday Adler decided that, having accepted the invitation, he would after all go and see his old friend. A maid in a black dress, a little white apron and a white starched cap opened the door of the flat. It struck him as strange and old-worldly that there
was
a maid – a kind of luxury he had forgotten – but it gave him confidence too. He exchanged a few friendly words with her as she took his coat and hat, and his voice must have been heard in the living room, for the door opened and Hermann Helbling came out to greet him.

‘Kuno, my old friend, how good it is to see you! Come in, come in, let’s have a look at you!’

And for a moment the two men stood gazing at each other not knowing what to say. Helbling’s reddish beard was powdered with grey; Adler’s black hair had receded from the temples and was streaked with silver.

‘You have put on weight!’

‘You hardly look a day older!’

‘Oh come now, that’s not true!’

‘Look at him, Ilse, he has hardly changed at all!’

Ilse Helbling had come into the room and shook hands with Adler. ‘Hermann’s right, it’s extraordinary how unchanged you are! He tells me you have left Melanie over there. And your girls? They must be quite grown up. Not married, are they?’

‘No, no. Not married yet, though Hilde probably will be very soon.’

And so on, still standing in the middle of the room, speaking a little too emphatically, a little too distinctly, as if reciting a conversation out of a phrase book, until Hermann said: ‘Well, let’s sit down,’ and Ilse said: ‘It’s hardly worth it, I’m sure supper is ready – just a Sunday evening cold snack, Herr Professor, or,’ with a little laugh, ‘may I still call you Kuno? Anyway, let’s go into the dining room, Mizi will just be putting some hot soup on the table.’

Eating and drinking, they all relaxed and became easier. There was a white cloth on the round table. A lamp with a silk shade hung low over its centre, making the silver cutlery gleam. Their faces were in shadow. Hermann and Ilse talked. They did all the talking. What dreadful years these had been. No one who had not been through them could have any idea. The first years of the war had not been too bad, although even when victories were being blared every day over the radio they had never believed the Germans would win; not after it became obvious the invasion of England had failed. They had always listened to the BBC: it had been dangerous to do so, but they had listened all the same. The end had been terrible: the bombing, the destruction! ‘So unnecessary, wasn’t it Hermann? The Germans were finished anyway – so why did the Americans have to bomb Vienna? And destroy the Opera House – the
Opera House
, I ask you! I really think they often don’t know what they are doing, your new compatriots, Kuno. Then the Russian invasion, that of course was far, far worse. The looting that went on, harmless people being shot in the street, and all the women being raped –’

‘Good Lord, did that happen to
you
, Ilse?’

‘No, I was lucky. But scores of people I know suffered. Naturally one
knows
that the Russians are barbarians and expects the worst, while the Americans –’

‘They are not my compatriots,’ Adler managed to interject, ‘except
pro forma.
I am Austrian, the same as you are. Nevertheless, we all have reason to be deeply grateful to the Americans, very deeply grateful, in spite of the bombing.’

Hermann tried to deflect his wife’s recriminations. ‘You are quite right. America is our only hope for the future, the only counterpoise against the Soviets. Without their presence, their support, we should never be able to regain our independence, or to maintain it. However, let’s not get involved in politics at our first reunion. Isn’t it good to have Kuno here with us again? Come, let’s toast your return!’

They took their wine glasses back into the living room, and settled down in armchairs to drink and smoke. Helbling uncorked another bottle.

‘One thing the Germans have done for us – they have improved our vineyards. What do you think of this Gumpoldskirchner, Kuno?’

‘Excellent, I was wondering what it was.’ Adler drank half his glass, then studied the label. He felt warmed and comforted. Hermann Helbling really was the old friend he had believed him to be. This was the kind of welcome he had hoped for. Now, he thought, I shall be able to tell them what these years they’ve been talking about have meant to me, give them the other side of the picture. And he wondered whether he should, on this first evening, speak about his estrangement from his wife, or say anything about his reception by the Sektionschef at the Ministry. There was so much, so much he wanted to talk about, such a weight of loneliness and repression on his heart as he had never acknowledged even to himself, until this moment when the prospect of some measure of alleviation seemed at hand. A blessed prospect, and he did not want to hurry. He sat smoking in silence, looking with intense pleasure round the book-lined room, the shaded lamp, the thick curtains drawn against the ill-lit mournfulness of the street outside. And so, wrapped in contemplation, and nursing his anticipation, he was too slow to seize the initiative. It eluded him – eluded him for the rest of the evening. Perhaps if he had been alone with Hermann he might still have begun to speak; and Hermann would have listened, encouraging him with a benevolent look in his kindly blue eyes and a smile half-smothered by the prickly gingery beard of a Teutonic warrior. But Adler didn’t get the chance to be alone with him, or even to break the flow of conversation. Ilse was far too voluble, and she made no move to leave the two old friends alone.

As the evening drew on, the initial nagging doubt stirred again at the back of Adler’s mind. Perhaps Hermann himself had said to his wife: don’t leave us, I don’t want to get involved in too many confidences. We don’t know what Kuno’s state of mind may be. He was always rather touchy, inclined to have grievances. He probably has some quite serious ones now which we might find very embarrassing. And he obviously wasn’t happy in America or he wouldn’t have come back. I doubt whether he is going to be happy here. These returning émigrés all have illusions. So let’s just accept him and be nice to him, and leave it at that. Had Hermann, for these reasons, deliberately encouraged his wife, or was Ilse behaving spontaneously in recounting this long string of macabre incidents of the Russian occupation of Vienna – some gruesome, some quite comical – which they and their friends had experienced? At any rate, he did not interrupt her, and she herself was obviously enjoying her chance of telling them to an audience who had not heard them before. And so the evening passed quickly, in an atmosphere of physical comfort, deliberately fostered and gratefully accepted, with the tacit understanding that there had been tragedies and searing experiences in
all
their lives that could not be forgotten, but which they had survived and cauterised sufficiently to be able to sit together in a quiet room, drinking a companionable glass of excellent wine.

It was nearly midnight when Adler rose to take his leave, and make his way back to the little
pension
through the sparsely-lit, almost deserted streets. The trams had long ceased running and few people cared to be out at night in these outlying districts. He took with him the warmth and comfort of the wine and the cheerful words at parting: ‘Such a pleasure to have seen you again! Let us know if we can be of any assistance. You must come again soon.’ His nerves and senses felt soothed and relaxed; but as his euphoria began fading in the night air, his mind was already arguing that the Helblings, for all their friendliness, had really taken no interest in him at all.

Five

His return to the Institute was undramatic, except for one small and irrelevant incident which he had not foreseen. He had waited until he received the official notification of his appointment, which came by post without any covering letter; that somehow disappointed him and induced him to defer, for the time being, his intended call on the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine. He would meet dryness with dryness. If all ceremony was to be omitted, he would also refrain from ceremony; so he did not write to announce his coming, but allowed a couple of days to pass in order not to be thought in a hurry. And then, one morning, he walked into the building which housed the Institute, wrapping himself in a protective indifference as if fifteen years and all that had happened in them had not interrupted the daily routine of his coming and going. But out of the corner of his eye, so to speak, and pretending to himself not to notice, he took in both the sameness and the changes that confronted him. More shabbiness, some modernisation. The hallway was the same – and the smell – that most evocative, most nostalgic of the senses, a very special smell of bricks and lingering disinfectant. Upstairs, and along a corridor, his steps sounded on the flagstones as they had always sounded, and the name of the Institute above the heavy double doors was the same. He pushed one open.

The room he entered was greatly altered, much better installed, modernised, improved, as he could not help admitting, not by American standards, but in comparison with what he remembered. The old apparatus, which he would now have called obsolete junk, was gone. The present installation was compact and streamlined. There was more room to move about. It still looked, at first glance, rather meagrely equipped compared with the big American laboratories he had come from, but that rather appealed to him. He stood on the threshold and smiled. There were several men and women in white coats busy in different parts of the long room, and they all turned their heads and looked round at him curiously as he stood there hesitating over whom to address.

Then, from a door at the side which he did not remember being there, another man in a white coat appeared and came forward with small staccato steps, holding out his hand. ‘My name is Krieger,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to see you, Professor Adler. Please come in.’ They shook hands. Dr Krieger introduced his staff, the young doctors and technicians. The women were laboratory assistants. Adler shook hands with them in turn, only glancing at their faces, barely taking in their names. His attention was fixed on Dr Krieger, the man who had taken his place. He was short and thick-set, he had very little neck and a mottled face. It looked as if the skin had been drawn too tight over its surface, so that the flesh, with its muscles and blood vessels, showed through. The eyes were hidden behind thick-lensed spectacles and his hair was cropped very close. Whether it was reddish or greyish, one couldn’t tell. He is not much younger than myself, decided Adler, whose own abundant black hair lay in waves across his skull without his attempting to conceal its rich sprinkling of silver.