The Exiles Return Read Online Free PDF Page B

father got down the suitcases.
    Now the little stations of Vienna’s outlying villages flashed by, most of them bearing long hyphenated names because they had to serve two or more small communities. Then the roofs of villas could be seen through the trees of their gardens. Suddenly there was a proliferation of tracks, and the upper storeys of town houses lining the street below glided by. Then the Western Station – or what used to be the Western Station. Formerly, there had been a long and high, cavernous, glazed-in hall into which the trains used to glide; it was old-fashioned, dingy, and yet somehow sumptuously dignified like the well-worn attire of a high-born elderly spinster who has clothed herself once and for all in her best and scorned to change her style. But now there was just – nothing: an open space where the bombed wreckage of the old station had been cleared away; stacks of building material, steel girders and concrete mixers for the new modern station under construction.
    Adler experienced a violent sense of shock. It was his first actual contact with the fact to which he had hitherto not given much thought: that not everything would look the same – or be the same – as it had looked and been when he left it. I shall have to learn the lesson of the Western Station, he thought, and this phrase, repeated silently many times in the coming months, summed up and symbolised for him the situations and experiences he would be having to deal with in the course of his attempt at repatriation. Would the lessons be very hard? Had he been wise in undertaking to learn them? And he realised, to his surprise, that he could not foresee what their nature and significance was going to be.
    The lesson was immediately reinforced when he crossed the platform into the open followed by his porter. It all looked so utterly different from what he remembered. Here was just an expanse of cobbled pavement and no traffic. The houses on the far side of the square, always rather nondescript – he didn’t remember them exactly, of course – had at least been solid and durable. Now – if indeed they were the same houses and not something that had been hidden behind the vanished facades – they looked like a row of decayed teeth, shabby, discoloured and intermittently broken down.
    Three taxis were drawn up near the exit, old square cabs, high on their wheels, their drivers wearing shapeless cloth caps and one of them a German army uniform coat without buttons. Adler was staring around in bewilderment, trying to make sense of it all.
    ‘Where do you want to go? Will you take a taxi?’ his porter was asking him for the third time, very loudly now, because he had concluded that his charge did not understand German and must therefore be shouted at. So he pointed and gesticulated, and at the same time the nearest driver got out of his cab and opened the door.
    Adler turned to the porter. ‘A hotel,’ he said tentatively, ‘I’m trying to think of a hotel.’
    ‘Have you got a reservation?’ the porter asked.
    ‘No, no I haven’t.’ That was something Adler had not thought about, not with any precision. He was going to look for somewhere to live, some rooms or a small flat. He had even wondered whether he might get his old apartment back again, and then discarded the idea because it would be too big for him to live in alone. But at first he would go to a hotel. Any hotel, there were so many – he just couldn’t, for the moment, remember any names of the more modest ones. Of course he wouldn’t go to one of the big luxury hotels.
    But the porter was saying: ‘You won’t get in anywhere in the centre without a reservation. The big hotels are still reserved for the Occupation Powers, and all the others are fully booked up, that I know. No reservation,’ he said, turning to the taxi driver, throwing out one arm as he made this, what he considered preposterous, statement. The other only shrugged his shoulders, as if there was