The Exiles Return Read Online Free Page A

must, she had shouted at him, and find yourself some silly smirking hussy, younger than I am, prettier than me, the woman who has slaved for years to keep the home together and to bring up your children – some soft, sensuous creature to rekindle your waning appetite – but I’ll make sure you never marry her, not while I’m alive you won’t, the slut!
    Well, that was that. It had all been very undignified, sordid, and perfectly ridiculous. The thought of renewing his love life had never entered his mind.
    The train was slowing down. Professor Adler shook himself out of his obsessive reminiscing and saw once more what was actually before his eyes. Buchs. He went into the corridor and pulled down the window to look out. In the old days the train used to stand here endlessly for customs formalities. He remembered a holiday he had spent with his parents in Lucerne as a small boy. What a long journey it had been, and how bored and impatient he had felt standing in this dull little station, with nothing to look at except the boxes of red geraniums in the stationmaster’s windows. He leaned out and craned his neck to see whether there were any there now, but his carriage was standing rather far down the line and dusk was falling. He couldn’t make out anything. It did not occur to him that only a short while ago he had been hesitating whether or not to leave the train here before it crossed the frontier. Then, suddenly, before he had had time to remember this, the train moved on. It had stopped for barely five minutes.
    In a few moments they had crossed the little river and were approaching the mountains. And just as suddenly and unaccountably a wave of some unidentifiable emotion swept through Kuno Adler. Apprehension? But of what? It felt like a physical sickness, a mental darkness. He was not an automaton now: he was an animal, tense, wary, charged with feeling, stripped of reason. He heard steps coming down the narrow passage, and a voice next door: ‘Austrian passport control!’ The words were repeated a minute later at the entrance to his own compartment.
    While putting his hand in his breast-pocket to extract his passport, he looked at the man in the doorway. A young man, smooth face under the round peaked uniform cap, a small straight nose, a rather delicate mouth with red lips under a thin pencil moustache. Grey eyes, smiling. A good-looking fellow. But it was the voice, the intonation that hit a nerve somewhere in Kuno Adler’s throat; no, below the throat, where breath and nourishment plunge into the depths of the body, a non-conscious, ungovernable nerve, in the solar plexus probably. It was the quality of that voice, of that accent, soft and yet rough, ingratiating and slightly vulgar, sensible to the ear as a certain kind of stone is to the touch – the soap-stone that is coarse-grained and spongy and slightly oily on the surface – an Austrian voice. ‘Austrian passport control!’
    Kuno Adler handed over his passport, his American passport, with a sense of defiance, as if challenging him to question its authenticity. The man leafed through it, looked at the photograph and at Adler himself for what seemed an intolerably long time, probably twenty seconds, cocking his head to look at him from all angles. All right, all right! Adler thought, of course he can see that I am a Jew, a refugee. What of it?
    ‘Coming back?’ the man asked, closing the passport and handing it to him.
    Adler had meant to answer any questions in English. But somehow he couldn’t. ‘Ja,’ he replied, and in the same soft German, ‘I’m coming back.’
    ‘Good luck!’ the man said and smiled as he backed out of the door.
    What did he mean by that? Was it ironic? Was it a warning? It hadn’t seemed that way, it had just sounded friendly. I must watch myself, Adler thought, not to be so over-sensitive, so suspicious – though not to be gullible either – feel my way carefully. It’s not going to be easy, more difficult