The Exiles Return (23 page)

‘It is not I who am introducing extraneous criteria, but your friend here,’ said Helbling, gathering up the sheets and passing them across the table to Kanakis, who had reached out his hand for them. ‘His intention was not artistic but simply sexual, and as such aesthetically uninteresting. I wonder what Herr von Kanakis thinks of them.’ He shifted in his chair, turned to his neighbour, and resumed the conversation they had been having prior to the incident with the drawings, thus deliberately dismissing them as not worth further discussion.

But if the incident was closed for Dr Helbling – and indeed the desire to show the drawings to him had only been a pretext – they still had to produce their effect – if in fact they did produce any – on Kanakis and possibly on Marie-Theres. That was what Bimbo was waiting for, and the imp in him was all agog to see what it would be. A little pulse thrilled in his temples and, unconsciously, he squeezed Marie-Theres’s hand; in response to this she closed her eyes for a moment in bliss. Meanwhile, Kanakis was quickly leafing through the sheaf of drawings without saying a word. Suddenly the woman sitting next to him, who was looking at them over his shoulder, started to laugh, a high-pitched, almost hysterical laugh out of her throat, which caused the other women to grimace in the way one does at the sound of a knife screeching on a plate. No one said anything, but they all, as if by common consent, reached for their glasses and drank or picked up a sandwich, and everybody’s eyes, except Helbling’s, converged on Marie-Theres. And Marie-Theres, who had opened her eyes again as if awakened by the concerted gaze directed at her, blushed. She blushed because of the way everyone was looking at her expectantly, expecting her to blush. It was this concerted stare that induced the blood to suffuse her cheeks, not the drawings Bimbo had shown her before he passed them over to Dr Helbling. It is doubtful whether they had made any particular impression on her at all. To her they were just ugly, but her eyes were not sufficiently schooled to comprehend what she saw. She had glanced at them with indifference, and if the blood now rushed to her face it was because she thought that everyone had noticed how Bimbo had held her hand and how she had responded to his caress.

Kanakis rose abruptly from the low divan on which he had been sitting, so abruptly that he knocked over some glasses on the table in front of him, spilling what was left of the wine in some of them and causing two to fall and splinter on the floor. He was very angry. His sudden movement had caused a minor accident, but his impulse was to sweep everything, glasses, plates, ashtrays, off the table, and only the utmost effort at self-control, set jaw and tightened muscles, prevented him from doing just that. But he succeeded in mastering himself. Everyone was getting up, chairs were being pushed back, the women clutched their dresses to save them from being stained, the men brought out their handkerchiefs to mop up the trickles of wine.

Kanakis said: ‘Get a cloth or something, Bimbo. I expect Hansi will have gone to bed,’ and Bimbo said, ‘I’m going.’ Then Kanakis, having regained his composure, said, ‘I’m sorry, my friends, please sit down again. Don’t let me break up the party. But Marie-Theres looks tired. I am going to take her home. I’ll be back in quarter of an hour.’ He went out into the hall and came in again with Marie-Theres’s coat. ‘Come, my dear, I am going to drive you myself.’

But everyone else seemed ready to leave as well.

‘It’s getting late.’

‘Tomorrow is another day.’

‘Sorry about those beautiful glasses.’

‘Oh never mind them – since you seem ready to leave, Dr Helbling, I can give you and your wife a lift, we are going in your direction.’

Distances are short in Vienna. The Helblings chatted cheerfully in the back of the car for the few minutes it took to reach their house, while Marie-Theres sat silently next to Kanakis. He glanced at her anxiously from time to time, but she seemed unperturbed. Then he stood beside her, shining a torch while she searched for her key and fitted it into the lock of the front door. Before she went in he put his hand lightly on her arm. ‘Marie-Theres…’

‘Yes?’

He felt he ought to say something to her, make some kind of apology, but it was too late for that and there was no time for any lengthy explanation now, outside the door, in the dark street.

‘Yes?’ she said again, expectantly.

He was moved by the calm purity of her lifted profile, so like that of a Filippo Lippi Madonna. But all he said was the conventional, ‘please remember me to your aunt and don’t forget, next time, if your cousin is not coming with you, to ring up so that I can send the car. You really must not go out alone at night, even in a taxi.’

‘Thank you so very much, Mr Kanakis, you are very kind. Good night.’

‘Good night, Marie-Theres.’

Getting back into his car when the heavy door had closed behind her, the sense of the outrage Bimbo had committed surged up again in his mind and his anger was rekindled. How had he dared to bring those drawings to his house and to display them publicly to his guests – to exhibit them in his house, in his presence, before Marie-Theres? Of course his wish to have Dr Helbling’s opinion had been nothing but a pretext. He had intended – and perpetrated – a calculated affront to him, Kanakis, and had hoped to create a scandal. In that he had very nearly succeeded. If Dr Helbling had not been so matter of fact, if Marie-Theres – strange child – had not been so self-possessed, it was only himself who had almost played into the boy’s hands. Such intolerable impertinence! The boy was both a guttersnipe and a princeling who believed in his superiority, who thought he could allow himself any kind of insult. He remembered how Bimbo had been watching him, waiting for his reaction. The whole scene now unrolled itself in his mind like a replay in slow motion of a film sequence. He heard Helbling’s ‘distasteful’, his neighbour’s hysterical laugh, saw Marie-Theres blush. His hands gripped the steering wheel, he found himself racing much too fast along silent suburban streets far out from his own house. He slowed down and turned. At last he drew up in the little side street next to the wall of his small back garden. He let himself in through the narrow, half-hidden door. The house was in total darkness.

He went in through the kitchen and from there into the hall. Here he switched on the lights. The black and white marble floor gleamed. The delicate wrought-iron banisters curved gracefully up to the landing above. Then he went into the long drawing room. It was in the same soft half light in which he had left it. But there was no one there except Bimbo. He was collecting the glasses onto a tray, rearranging the cushions, picking up scraps that had fallen on the floor. He straightened up nonchalantly as Kanakis appeared in the doorway.

‘Hullo, Theophil, you’ve been a long time. They all decided to leave, oh, about ten minutes ago. I thought I’d better wait for you, and meanwhile I’ve been tidying up. Hansi can do the rest in the morning – if it isn’t morning already.’

Bimbo was just chattering for the sake of something to say because Kanakis was standing stock still and rigid, and he could see that his hands, which hung down at his sides, were so tightly clenched into fists that the knuckles shone white.

‘Half-past one,’ he went on, trying to divert Kanakis’s attention to the white and gold Louis XV clock that stood on a console between two windows. In the evening silence it ticked away for half a minute. Then Kanakis came into the room, unclenching his fists but swinging his arms. He was going to slap the boy’s face, and that was going to be the end of Bimbo as far as he was concerned. Bimbo saw what was coming and stood up to meet him. When Kanakis was within arm’s length he looked up at him coyly from under his long lashes, with a smile on his half-open lips. And Kanakis did not strike. Instead he let his hands fall on the boy’s shoulders, gripping them violently, and drew him close. Then he bent down and kissed him full on the mouth. It was all done very quickly. For a moment Bimbo accepted, then he twisted himself away and walked to the door. Quietly, he spoke. ‘Don’t forget the auction at the saleroom tomorrow morning. I’ve left the catalogue in the hall and marked the items that might interest you. I’ll meet you in the vestibule. Good night.’ He closed the door gently, turned out the lights in the hall and was gone. Kanakis heard the glass door, then the outer door click into place.

Twenty

Professor Adler had finished his solitary supper: sliced cold sausage, potato salad, a pickled cucumber, brown bread and butter and a bottle of beer. Most evenings his landlady cooked him something hot and left it in the oven for him to come and fetch from her kitchen if he came home late. But Frau Ziegler had gone away to stay with her daughter for a few days and Adler was alone in the flat. Having rolled up his napkin and put it in its carved wooden ring, he sat by the open window looking out into the night. The flat was on the third and top floor of a large house that, before the war, had been the home of one family – kitchen and laundry room in the basement, drawing rooms and dining room downstairs, bedrooms above them, and servants’ quarters at the top. It had, like most of the other ‘villas’ in the ‘Cottage’ district, been converted into flats. These designations – villa and cottage – were examples of the unashamed misuse of foreign words dear to the hearts of the Viennese and applied to their own purposes because of the associations they conjured up in their minds. Thus the ‘Cottage’, because of the cosy rural picture it evoked, was the name given to a fairly extensive garden suburb, or rather to an area of intersecting roads lined with trees and consisting entirely of private houses of various styles surrounded by gardens, the so-called ‘villas’. These houses were neither country houses nor town houses, but had something of the nature of both, for the garden suburb had long since become engulfed in the town, and the houses, or rather their owners, had been forced to turn their family homes into multiple habitations.

On the top floor of one of these once sumptuous villas, Professor Adler had at last been able to rent a couple of small rooms, sub-let to him by the widow of an army officer who, with the help of an intermittent cleaner, was supposed to keep them tidy for him. If her efforts were not always successful, it was not entirely due to the fact that she had not been brought up to ‘do housework’, as she was wont to reply to the Professor if he ever remonstrated with her about the dust on his chest of drawers or the fluff on his carpet. The rooms were small, having originally been maids’ bedrooms, and though the Professor’s personal possessions were meagre, he had already acquired stacks of books and reams of paper in files and folders, just as he had at the Institute. Worst of all were the loose leaves covered with his spindly writing, and since these were never to be touched or moved, there was really very little point in ‘doing’ the rooms, as so much of them must not, on any account, be ‘done’.

But although the rooms were small and the climb up the narrow stairs – the back stairs, of course, leading to the onetime servants’ quarters – steep and tiring, everything outside their windows was sheer delight. These windows were just above the treetops, so their luxuriant greenness could be enjoyed without their shutting out the light; instead they reflected and softened it so that it was never glaring. They feasted the ears as well as the eyes with their rustling leaves and the sounds of the birds nesting under their spreading branches, and in the spring the dawn chorus which woke Adler in his cubbyhole of a bedroom did much to wash away the many years spent among fumes and dust and traffic. Best of all was the air that came wafting straight down from the western hills, from the Vienna woods, and over the vineyards and gardens on their slopes, bearing the fragrance of lime, chestnut blossom and may but chiefly of that most nostalgic of Viennese scents, the ubiquitous lilac.

For it was May, and an evening in May, and the sunset had faded out of the sky, the stars were coming out, and every breath one drew was infused with scent. The Professor sat by his window and felt that he could neither work nor sleep. It does seem ridiculous to feel as I do, at my age, he thought. This year I shall be fifty, and here I am, sitting at my window on a night in May as I used to do as a boy, breathing the scent of lime and lilac and feeling myself languish in an overpowering and aimless desire, the desire of the young man for love. He remembered it all so well. Oh, the solitude of youth, the solitude of the elderly and disenchanted! He got up abruptly to break the spell, closed the window, felt for his keys in his pocket and, seizing his hat from a peg in the tiny hall, ran down the stairs and out of the house. It was only a hundred yards down the dark leafy avenue to the tram stop, and there was the tram clanging on its way, blue sparks bristling from the overhead wires. The Professor jumped onto the rear platform, paid for his ticket and lit a cigarette. It was just an ordinary evening.

He would go back to the Institute and have another look at some cultures he had begun in his own private corner of the laboratory. These last few days had been crowded with routine jobs, he had barely had time to glance at the array of tubes and slides which he kept in the glass-fronted cupboard for his own research. For some time he had had an idea at the back of his mind, this had never really come into focus, there was probably nothing in it anyway, but tonight, at his window, during that strangely heightened activity of his mind, there had come something like inspiration – was it a real insight or a delusion, was it worth pursuing or would it have to be abandoned? He was going to find out.

He left the tram at the stop nearest the Institute and turned into the side street. There were no shops here, most of the houses were dark, a few windows showed a dim light between half-drawn curtains. Walking along the pavement opposite the Institute, he looked up at the dark facade. There was a light on in one of the laboratory windows. It was the window at the end where he did his own private work. He felt a rush of blood to his head, a sudden pounding of his heart in his chest. Was it possible? Had Dr Krieger come back at night to try and discover what he was doing? He would have had to force open the glass-fronted cabinet. But he probably had a second set of keys. What instinct had prompted him, to return at ten o’clock on that particular night to discover what was going on? Or had this happened before? He tried to remember whether he had ever noticed anything being disturbed.