The Exiles Return Read Online Free PDF Page A

course, to mix and feed and enrich this German city, which through them became unique and truly imperial. Some had been sucked down into the morass of its lower depths, but those who were hardworking and thrifty, like himself, had made their way and become citizens, imparting and receiving that very special flavour and dye of being Viennese which was different from anything else in the world. Something, his father used to say, which you cannot lose.
    In his mind’s eye Adler saw his father’s house, or rather his grandfather’s, an old dark house in a narrow street in the very centre of the city, in the shadow of St Stephen’s Cathedral. His maternal grandfather, S Kantorowicz, importer and wholesale dealer in furs, third generation of his name and trade, of solid and impeccable reputation, lived and worked there. To him his father, Simon Adler, had succeeded in being apprenticed, had become his most trusted journeyman and, there being no son, had in due course married the daughter. There was the high, arched doorway through which Kuno had passed a thousand times to and from school. It led from the street under a vaulted and paved passage into the courtyard into which the sun only shone in summer, and then only at noon. On the right was the stone staircase leading to the upper floors and the living quarters, on the left the entrance to the shop. The door to the shop had glass panels that rattled whenever the door was opened or closed. There was no shop window on the outside, nothing but a small brass plate, ‘S Kantorowicz – Furrier’, fixed to the wall just outside the left-hand wing of the great and ponderous dark brown nail-studded door of the main entrance to the house.
    Mostly this door was folded back during the daytime; but when it was closed, a small door, cut into the thickness of the right-hand panel, with its own latch, keyhole and bolts, could give admittance to the archway and courtyard beyond. It was rather dark under that archway at the best of times, and the shop – having no access to daylight other than the glass panels of its door – always had a gaslight burning on a brass bracket fixed on the opposite wall. So inconspicuous was the notice given to would-be customers that no one who did not know where to find S Kantorowicz, Furrier, would be likely to discover him. He was not out to attract the casual passer-by. Nor was there anything to beguile the uninitiated in the little gaslit room inside the glass-panelled door, for it contained nothing but a dark brown painted counter which ran from wall to wall across the room, and the stuffed head of a seal mounted on the wall opposite the gas-burner, while a stuffed baum marten climbing up a twisted barren branch on a stand was the only adornment on the counter.
    The workshop was behind this little saleroom, where Kuno remembered the great event of electric light being installed: a wonderful improvement on the gas-burners by which his father and his two or three men used to work. But that was only after his grandfather’s death. Kuno also remembered his parents discussing it and deploring the old man’s stubbornness in opposing what he called new-fangled ideas. The warehouses where the raw skins were stored were even further back, in the courtyard, secured from the outside by heavily barred and padlocked doors. How vivid all this was in Adler’s semi-somnolent mind; it needed no effort of recollection, it was there, and he himself was there, or rather not himself, but the boy he had been, resurrected from the depths of his past. He was seeing with that boy’s eyes, oh, and smelling, too! The smell in the archway was of dust and urine. It wafted down the shaft of the stone staircase opposite the glass-panelled door of the shop, for the lavatories were on the landings of each floor and their doors were often left standing open, to the annoyance of his mother. But the smell in the shop was nicer, though quite sharp. It smelled of tanned leather and of