The Exiles Return (7 page)

Krieger took Adler by the elbow and propelled him down the length of the laboratory, casually pointing to the various pieces of equipment on the way. ‘The best German make – an instrument of absolute precision – we only got it last year, we were lucky, it was stored in a shelter just before the factory was bombed. But we are still without some very necessary apparatus – no hope of it at present, so we have to improvise.’ Dr Krieger spoke in the same way as he moved – in short jerks. Adler looked and nodded and said nothing.

At the end of the room, encompassing the last window, a glazed partition, projecting a short way from the wall towards the middle, screened off a space into a semblance of semi-privacy. One could see it had been newly erected: the wooden base, of plain deal, was unpainted, and the glass panels freshly set. The cubicle was furnished with a sink, a writing table and chair, a rack of glass receptacles, and a steel filing cabinet. On the table there was a microscope, at which Adler glanced dubiously. He raised his eyebrows inquiringly. Krieger answered his silence. ‘A little place of your own, Herr Professor, the best I could manage – to keep your notes and records. For all practical purposes, it’s the general laboratory. I work there myself. Here is my own room –’ and he opened the door from which he had emerged earlier: ‘I have a few instruments – they are at your disposal, of course. And a reference library. There is electricity laid on here, for your use, and a gas-burner. You must tell me what you require, though many things one would like to have are unobtainable. Always the same old story: lack of money.’

As Adler still just stood there, nodding acquiescence, Krieger suddenly gave vent to his feelings of suppressed annoyance. ‘What are you going to do here, Professor Adler? What are your intentions?’ Why didn’t the man
say
something, show some appreciation for the preparations made for him! He didn’t need him, he didn’t want him, he would be difficult to fit in, but he had done his best, or rather, he had done what had been required of him, and Adler ought to acknowledge it. So he repeated his question: ‘What do you expect to
do
?’

At last Adler answered: ‘My share of the routine work, Herr Doktor. I suppose there is enough to go round. Tests, analyses, cultures, the ancillary jobs required by the hospital. That is what is expected of me, isn’t it? I shall only try to make myself useful. Later perhaps … but we shall see.’ He broke off. ‘I’ll start tomorrow, if that is convenient. Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Doktor.’ He walked down the long room to the door and went out. Heads turned silently to follow his progress. He felt their eyes on his back, but he did not turn round. He was glad everything had been so matter-of-fact, for he knew he was over-excited. A dose of indifference was what he prescribed for himself; but that, for the moment, was not to be.

At the bottom of the wide stone staircase the caretaker of the building, a little old man in loose trousers and a well-worn serge jacket, stood looking up at him. Short white hair, a brown wrinkled face and what had once been a trim military moustache framed a pair of very blue eyes that were now smiling under a film of tears. And the mouth under its stubbly moustache was smiling too. The whole bent figure was turned upwards, the head raised, the shoulders lifted by an inner elation shining through the aged body and the shabby clothes. Recognition was instantaneous and mutual. Adler ran down the last steps with hands outstretched, clasping the old man’s hand with both his own.

‘Grasboeck, you are still here! How are you? How good to find you again!’

‘Oh, Herr Professor, so you have come back, you have come back!’

They could exchange nothing but exclamations, well-worn phrases, just to express, however haltingly, feelings too deep for words.

‘It’s been a long time – we have both grown older – but I knew you immediately – and I was so happy when I heard you were coming back to us.’ And again and again: ‘Such long years – such terrible years!’ And they shook hands once more. Adler patted the old man on the shoulder and Grasboeck seemed to want to do a service for Adler – carry his briefcase, perhaps – but Adler had none with him, so they stood there brimming with goodwill for each other and at a loss what to do. The old man recovered himself first, stepped backwards and murmured something about having to sweep the courtyard. Adler hesitated. The impulse rose within him to say: Let’s go out and have a glass of wine together, but of course Grasboeck would not be able to leave his work in the middle of the morning.

Then he remembered: Grasboeck had had a little boy who sometimes sat in his cubicle doing his homework or playing around the courtyard.

‘Your son, Grasboeck, what happened to your son?’

‘He was killed at the front, Herr Professor, having to fight on the
wrong
side – on the
wrong
side.’

Six

Theophil Kanakis knew what he was looking for and he was convinced he would find it; although, when he made his first trip to Vienna very soon after the end of the war and a couple of years before Adler had decided on his attempt at repatriation, he had for a moment had his doubts. When he saw what the desultory bombing by over-zealous Americans on the verge of victory, and the vindictive shelling by desperate Germans in the throes of defeat, had done to the face of the city – the gaps in the familiar streets, the heaps of rubble where some well-remembered building had stood – he had, at first, felt that the prospect was not very promising. It was not that he grieved very deeply about the destruction he saw. It was, he thought, not really very widespread nor very severe. In fact, compared with other European cities, with London and Rotterdam, with Berlin or Munich, Vienna had escaped with minor injuries: perhaps there was not much more fortuitous destruction there than what New York was perennially and deliberately suffering in the continual process of being pulled down in order to be rebuilt. That was a most laudable and extremely profitable process of which he thoroughly approved, for it had made him, and was still making him, a very rich man.

What made him apprehensive on this, his first return to Vienna, was not so much the destruction that he saw, but the fear of what the rebuilding – which was bound to take place sooner or later – was going to do to the character of the city. It might do a great deal of damage. And it might obliterate, if the bombing had not already done so, that very piece of property he was looking for. At this stage it was very difficult to foresee.

It was equally difficult to foresee, in the present condition of shock, bereavement and poverty, whether life in the old place would ever be the same again. If not, there was no point in continuing his quest. He must take his chance; but that he had always done, with almost incredible success, exercising his intuitive gift for investment in real estate, buying derelict buildings or promising sites for development. However, that had not been his purpose in coming to Vienna. He had not come to make money but to spend it; not to get rich, for he was already very rich indeed and, as wealth breeds wealth, getting richer all the time. Besides, what scope was there for making money,
his
kind of money, in poor little Austria? No, he had come, though this was not the time to let it be known, simply to enjoy himself.

What he was looking for was, to start with, a very vague memory, or perhaps only a figment of his imagination. Somewhere, he believed, behind the flat-faced dwelling houses of nineteenth century construction, with their street-level shopfronts and their multiple flats on the three or four landings above them, somewhere, hidden behind these squalid habitations of shopkeepers, tradesmen and clerks, he would find a small
hôtel particulier
, a pavilion of graceful eighteenth century proportions, built perhaps by some nobleman for his mistress amidst what had been at that time gardens and orchards outside the city walls. A little
palais
, the Viennese would call it; that being the designation for any private house of some elegance. Now it would only be accessible through one or more courtyards belonging to the tall utilitarian buildings which had, for many decades now, been interposed between it and the wide suburban street with its noisy pavements and clanging tramcars. A lime tree and a few little lilac bushes had possibly survived when the surrounding area was urbanised, together with a small plot of ground which might still be termed a garden. Derelict, with boarded-up windows, or used as storage, it would have fallen into ever-greater disrepair, until it would require far more money than anyone could afford for rehabilitating a house so awkwardly and inconveniently situated.

This was the house Kanakis had created in his imagination and which he believed could still be found. He racked his memory for the faint recollection of something he might have seen, or possibly only heard of, on which his fantasy had built his dream house. So clearly did he see it in his mind’s eye that he felt sure he could never have seen it in actual fact without remembering where, nor could he locate it anywhere on the map. It must have been hearsay, he concluded, something someone had once mentioned in his hearing when he was a child. But he was certain that, if it still existed, it was in one of the ‘inner suburbs’ which, for generations, had no longer been suburbs in the real sense, but an integral part of the town which had grown and was still growing far out beyond them in every direction. They lay between the concentric circles of the Ringstrasse, which encircled the Inner City, still called ‘
the
City’, as the heart of London still enjoys the exclusive privilege of that name – where the medieval battlements had been – and the ‘belt’, an irregular sequence of broad streets, a ring road which, like the rings of a tree, marked the second stage of the town’s expanding growth.

Kanakis asked the hall porter for the special directory of professions and trades and carried it up to his room. He had not, like Adler, arrived in Vienna without making provision for his comfort. The town’s most luxurious hotel was reserved for the staff of the American Occupation Forces and their advisers; and Kanakis, although not in uniform, had been able to secure a room there on the strength of the local knowledge he would be able to place at the disposal of the military administration. Once installed, he took the least possible notice of the busy, and often bewildered, officers, and they took none at all of him.

Leafing through the directory, Kanakis ran his finger down the list of house and estate agents, and a name caught his eye as if it had been printed in larger type than all the others on the page. Dr Franz Traumüller – not an extraordinary name in Vienna, but not a very common one either. The address of the office in one of the old narrow streets in the Inner City was a good one, promising a firm of reputable standing accustomed to dealing with exceptional properties. And ‘Doktor’ Traumüller indeed! The man was a university graduate, a trained lawyer – not so usual among house agents. Kanakis appreciated the name, the address and the qualification. He was sure he could not be mistaken: this could not be a mere coincidence. Franz Traumüller had been the name of the man who had been his father’s bailiff, in charge of the care and the administration of the several large houses in which part of the fortune of the elder Kanakis had been invested. A descendant of the small and distinguished community of Greeks whose wealth had helped to finance Vienna’s expansion and development from a small town constrained within its ancient walls into a splendid imperial city, his father had inherited three imposing apartment houses in the most elegant section of the Ringstrasse, in one of which his family occupied the whole of the vast first floor.

These houses, as well as a few others in the ‘suburbs’ – crowded hives of human dwellings – had been in the care, and under the supervision, of the said Franz Traumüller. He it was who collected the rents, attended to the repairs, listened to the tenants’ complaints, and dealt with them only after scrupulous investigation on behalf of the landlord. He evicted the unsatisfactory and leased, as far as possible, only to the trustworthy. But he was a fair and just man, as the elder Kanakis insisted that he should be, and if he shielded his employer from all unpleasantness, he was also charged to see to it that no slur of exploitation should ever be attached to his name. Two or three times a year at stated intervals, or in a special emergency when the landlord had to be consulted personally, he came to report to Kanakis’s father, who received him in his study at the far end of the suite of drawing rooms, and who was very polite to him, but a little distant and condescending.

Theophil Kanakis remembered, when he was a boy, that his father always found these visits a nuisance. He never took any detailed interest in the houses and only kept a shrewd, but distant, eye on them, as he did on his other investments. So when the butler announced the ‘Herr Haus-Administrator’, he used to rise with a sigh from his newspaper or his book and tell the butler curtly ‘in the study’ – to which Herr Traumüller would be conducted through the dining room and pantry, not through the drawing rooms. Theophil had heard his father call the man ‘Traumüller’, whereas
he
said ‘Herr von Kanakis’. And when he himself had once met him in the hall as he was leaving, he had said ‘good day, young sir’, to which he had answered ‘good day, Herr Traumüller’, and had stood by embarrassed while Traumüller struggled into his overcoat, into which the butler did not help him as he helped his father or any other of his visitors, and saw him take his hat off the hall table, which was not held out to him, though the butler did open the door – the front door leading to the main staircase, not the back one. Herr Traumüller was, after all, not a tradesman.

And now: Dr Franz Traumüller, estate agent – properties bought and sold and administered – expert valuations. This must surely be the Herr Administrator’s son, probably about the same age as himself, a man of professional standing, with a university education. Kanakis himself boasted no letters in front of or after his name. He had wasted no time on academic studies; just a short business course after leaving school (and that had been pretty useless, he mused – either you had
got
it or you hadn’t – business acumen, he meant) and then, when his father died and he himself had barely come of age, he took himself off to America
with
all his fortune.