The Exiles Return (24 page)

All this ran through his mind as he let himself into the building by a side door. The front door was locked and the staircase in darkness; he switched on the light which would give him two minutes to reach the landing before it automatically went out again. The door to the laboratory was also locked – from the inside it seemed. His hand shook so much that he had to press the light switch again before he discovered that his key would not go in. He knocked on the door, then, in his impatience, hit it with his fist. He heard steps coming towards him and the door was opened cautiously. A figure in a white coat stood there. It was not Dr Krieger, it was Fräulein Grein. She stood stock still as she recognised him, and opened the door wider while uttering something between a gasp and a laugh.

‘Herr Professor! What a fright you gave me! I thought it might be a burglar and I should be hit over the head.’

‘Fräulein Grein! Whatever are you doing here at this time of night? And how did you get in?’

‘I didn’t get in, I stayed. One can always get out. There are keys on the inside. And it isn’t really late, is it? Only about ten o’clock. In fact, I was just going.’

‘But what were you doing?’

‘To tell you the truth, Herr Professor, I was copying your notes. I have a folder of them here, in longhand. With a little patience I have managed, in time, to decipher your handwriting. Although I notice that even you yourself cannot always remember what you have put down in a hurry. I hope you will forgive me.’

‘Forgive you! I am most grateful. But why, why do you do this work, and in the evening?’

‘I find it very interesting. But now I will say good night.’

Nina Grein took off her white overall and collected the few odds and ends of her belongings – a small plastic box into which she folded the crumpled wax paper which had wrapped the buttered roll and slice of ham she had brought for her supper – and went to rinse her hands at the sink. ‘I’ll leave the light, as I expect you want to do some work yourself, and I won’t lock up. You have your own keys, of course.’ She turned to go, walking carefully between the overflowing tables, the light at her back.

‘Fräulein Grein.’

She turned again, the light now shining full on her face. He looked at her. He had seen her every day for months, but now he was seeing her for the first time. She was smiling, the smile was in her eyes more than on her lips, she had beautiful eyes like living topazes, alight with an inner fire which imparted to her whole face a spiritual illumination that was almost breathtaking. So he looked at her – for seconds, for timeless seconds.

‘Was there something you wanted to say, Herr Professor?’

‘Yes. How are you going to get home?’

‘I shall walk. I always do. It’s a beautiful night and I haven’t very far to go. I like walking at night, there are street lamps now and there’s nothing to be afraid of. This isn’t the Russian zone.’

‘May I come with you? I, too, like walking at night.’

They locked up and went downstairs together, then out into the silent street. A street lamp threw their shadows in front of them, then there was darkness, until another light shone in their faces and threw their shadows behind them. They did not look at each other, but kept their eyes on the uneven pavement. Without touching, their bodies moved together and their footfalls on the paving stones beat the same rhythm. In the surrounding silence each of them, both used to the emptiness and solitude of the night, realised that they were no longer alone; when they came to the corner where the side street joined the main thoroughfare, and the arc lights diffused a pale all-over visibility, they stood for a moment looking at each other, and hesitantly, they smiled.

They continued on their way, down the broad street in the direction of the Inner City. As they passed by the gardens laid out in front of the Votive Church, that rather artificial neo-gothic building erected in thanksgiving for the escape of the old emperor from an attempt on his life, the heavy scent of lilac from the bushes in the gardens wafted across to them on the night air. They crossed the Ringstrasse into the Inner City. It was Nina who walked purposefully, Adler accompanied her unquestioningly, although he wondered where she lived.

They first went along a broad street and then a narrow one flanked by imposing old buildings, and here, in front of one of them, she stopped and, opening her bag, began searching for her key. All the time the two of them had been silent. While Nina was feeling in her bag, Adler looked up at the great front door and the large escutcheon above it, shadowy in the faint light of the stars. He had never seen it before, but in a flash the coincidence fused into recognition: The Palais Grein-Lauterbach. Fräulein Grein had found her key and was about to insert it in the lock.

‘I have managed to get a little coffee – would you like…’ she said, but could not finish the sentence, spoken slowly and with diffidence, for an elderly man came running towards them from the opposite direction. He was waving his arm, his hand held a key.

‘
Küss die Hand
, Princess, I’ll open up, I’ll open up. Please forgive me. I just went round to the coffee house, they told me there were some American cigarettes.’ He had opened the door, pulled a packet out of his pocket and turned to Adler. ‘Perhaps the gentleman would like a few, to take home with him, with your permission Princess,
Küss die Hand.
’ Adler made a negative gesture, Nina went through the door, the porter was about to follow.

‘Where can I see you?’ he called to her.

‘Tomorrow, early morning, the Heldenplatz,’ she answered, and the porter closed the door.

Twenty-one

Heldenplatz, the Square of the Heroes, early morning – the words stayed in Adler’s mind all night. He had caught the final tram car out to the ‘Cottage’: the so-called ‘blue one’ because it showed a blue light at the rear of the last carriage as a warning to would-be passengers that it was the last to run that evening. Sleep had lain very lightly on his eyes that night, instead of a blanketing oblivion, an almost diaphanous veil through which he could still see the luminous eyes of ‘Fräulein’ Grein, Princess Nina Grein, and hear her voice: tomorrow, early morning, Heldenplatz.

He was there at six. He did not expect her to come so early, though for him it had been a long way and for her it would be a very short walk. But he wanted to look at the place where they would meet. Not that he hadn’t seen it before many times in his pre-exile days, and he must have passed that way on his reminiscing rambles since his return. Nor had he ever gone there deliberately: it held no early memories for him. And yet it was a lovely square, one of the largest and most tranquil in the heart of a noisy city. On his left was the grey facade of the old Imperial Palace with its double row of windows, on the right the railings of tall iron bars topped with gilded arrowheads separating it from the thoroughfare beyond. Opposite, but at a distance, lay the wide semi-circular wingspan of the ‘new’ Palace, designed to show off majesty in its most sumptuous attire. But the majesty of the old Emperor had refused to inhabit it and the young Emperor, ascending the throne in wartime and abdicating almost immediately afterwards, had never had a chance to live there. And so for many years it had remained something of an artificial construction that had never come to life, a stage backdrop whose florid pomposity older people were prepared to overlook because they didn’t take it quite seriously.

The Square of the Heroes: the two over-lifesize equestrian statues on high pedestals are what give it its name, two great military commanders on rearing horses with flowing manes and tails in the Baroque style, one carrying Prince Eugene of Savoy and the other the Archduke Charles, brother of the first Emperor Francis who, in one victorious battle, had stemmed for a while Napoleon’s advance on Vienna. They seemed to have sprung from the glowing pages of school history books, visible embodiments of
Dei Gesta per Austriacos
which are such a necessary ingredient of national consciousness. And yet, with all their panache, there is so little boastfulness in this square. What first meets the eye and impresses the mind are the broad avenues of chestnut trees lining it on three sides, chestnut trees that bear a profusion of red candles in the spring. They give the square its peaceful, almost countrified look; they are conducive to slow perambulation and quiet contemplation. It is so spread out and open to the sky that roofs and church spires can only be seen in the far distance, leaving room for clouds to pile up overhead on stormy days and for the winds to sweep in from the limitless plains in the east. So the Square of the Heroes is not very heroic, in spite of the dashing figures of the two great soldiers that were intended to dominate it; instead of which they blend with the predominantly horizontal line of the treetops and the clouds drifting to the far horizon.

It was wonderfully quiet here in the early morning light and the air was sweet. Adler walked for a while, then sat down on a bench looking towards the Ballhaus, the Foreign Office, from which direction Nina would come. Nina Grein: she had been an assistant to him for the past year, she had been so helpful but so discreet, so retiring, so unassuming, that he had scarcely noticed her. Just a girl in a white coat. Just a cleaner, Dr Krieger had called her. But she had been copying his notes, in longhand, in a folder. He had seen the folder in a drawer but had not bothered to look inside it. A cleaner could never have deciphered those scrawls, made sense of the chemical formulae, the Greek terms he had been using. Why had he been so blind, why had he not seen through the disguise? ‘Kiss your hand, Princess’ the porter of the Palais Grein-Lauterbach had said. Would he had not said it at that moment – she had been about to ask him to come in. Never mind – she was coming to meet him now – not a laboratory assistant, not a ‘cleaner’, but in every sense a princess. The revealing transformation had occurred – now everything was quite different.

She came, and he kissed her hand. She was not embarrassed by his gesture. It was obvious to them both that he must do so, since he now knew who she was. Then they walked side by side under the chestnut trees, up and down, slowly and without touching. She asked him about himself, about his exile, his life over there and his return. For the first time the seal was broken and he was able to talk to someone who really wanted to know – about Melanie, his Americanised daughters, their early struggles, his wife’s success, and his own lack of it – his inability to acclimatise, his increasing loneliness. He praised his family, he blamed only himself, and the more self-deprecatingly he spoke, the greater the feeling of comfort and relief that welled up in him in response to the disbelief he sensed in his companion. She did not sentimentalise or console, in fact she spoke very little, but in the presence of her listening, much that had been twisted and cramped within him began to untangle and relax.

When, after an hour, they parted to make their separate ways to the Institute, Adler had unburdened himself of only a fraction of what he had wanted to say, and Nina had told him nothing of her own life, much as he wanted to know about her and what had brought her to accept the menial job she was performing. It would not be wise for them to speak privately to each other at the Institute, even after hours, so they agreed to meet again in the early mornings when the square would always be deserted. Mothers and nursemaids with their prams and toddlers would not invade it until much later, and the stream of men with briefcases and of typists taking a short cut into the city would not start until after they left. Of course they were not entirely alone. One or two isolated figures also walked along the leaf-sheltered avenues, enjoying the freshness of the morning before going to their shops or offices. On one or two mornings during the latter part of the week Adler noticed, out of the corner of his eye, a priest reading his breviary on the other side of the square. That was nothing unusual, and so engrossed were they in conversation that he made no comment. Nina had not even seen him.

*   *   *

It was not many days later when, one evening, Father Jahoda knocked on her door. The Palais Grein-Lauterbach was at that time entirely occupied by various government offices, or rather not entirely since a few rooms in what had been the attics had been given back to the heirs of its former owners. Lorenzo Grein refused to inhabit them as being too inaccessible and uncomfortable, but Nina lived her frugal, undemanding life there, climbing the five flights of stairs past the sumptuous apartments of her childhood. Father Jahoda had climbed them tonight and was slightly out of breath.

Twenty-two

Nina went to the door and opened it. ‘Come in, Father, come in. How very kind of you – climbing all those stairs.’ Father Jahoda was out of breath: after six o’clock, when the offices shut, the lift didn’t work any more and in any case it would have stopped short of the attic floor. Father Jahoda came in and looked round. The low-ceilinged room was in semi-darkness as the deep-set windows overlooked the courtyard; although outside the spring evening still lingered with a tender caressing light. Coming in from the street the room seemed even darker to Father Jahoda as he glanced to the right and left of the door looking for a light switch.

‘I’m so glad you have come, your Reverence,’ Nina said, ‘I want to talk to you. Please sit down. If you don’t mind I won’t turn on the light – not just yet.’ Father Jahoda crossed the room and pulled an armchair round so that it faced away from the window. His eyes soon adapted to the gloaming. He wanted to see as much as he could of Nina’s face but she was sitting down opposite him, her head bent forward, resting her chin on her hand and looking at the floor.

‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that I have been here twice before at this hour, when I expected you would have been back from the Institute, but fortunately Habietinek told me that you were out, or I might have climbed the stairs for nothing.’ She murmured something about being sorry. ‘And now you say you want to speak to me. But you know where you can find me, my child, where I am always ready to listen to you, to counsel you – in the confessional. Yet for more than a month now you have not come. Neither have you come, in consequence, to the Altar to receive the Holy Sacrament, not having prepared yourself, by an act of contrition, to receive the Body of Our Lord. Oh, I know you have been to St Michael’s several times in the early mornings and have knelt at the Altar of the Virgin. Perhaps you didn’t know I was there, although you could have found out if you had asked. Private prayer is a good and beautiful thing, my child, but without spiritual guidance it loses much of its value – it can even lead to aberration. I also know that you have not just been in the church in the early mornings. The gardens close by are not always entirely deserted at that hour.’