The Exiles Return Read Online Free Page B

perhaps than I anticipated.
    The customs man followed. He glanced up at the suitcases. ‘Only your personal belongings? No tea or coffee?’
    ‘No tea or coffee,’ Adler repeated, and the man passed on, closing the door of the compartment.
    It was now quite dark. Adler pressed his face against the window. The mountains outside were so high and so near that there was nothing to see but blackness, with pinpoints of light here and there from the windows of some lonely house on the slopes, and one had to crane one’s neck to see the faint luminosity of the sky above the rocky summits. Adler put on the light and asked the attendant to make his bed while he stood in the corridor. He had forgotten to go through to the restaurant car for dinner, had ignored the summoning bell while obsessed with remembering the scenes he had left behind. He didn’t mind, he was not really hungry, but munched some chocolate: Swiss chocolate, which he had bought for old times’ sake.
    He went to bed and tried to make contact in his imagination with the country outside the little moving box of polished wood and upholstery in which he now lay stretched out. The province of Vorarlberg and, soon, the long tunnel of the Arlberg, and then Tyrol. Magical names! But he had not known them intimately and all he could visualise in his mind’s eye was a map, the map that had hung in the classroom of his first school. For a while his imagination concentrated on that map: the outline had been roughly diamond-shaped. The top point was the most clearly outlined, surmounting as it did an embedded square, upended on one corner – the Kingdom of Bohemia. The eastern end was rounded and shapeless, the southern uneven and jagged, and the whole surface was divided up into pieces of different shapes, sizes and colours like a patchwork.
    And he could remember the formula which described them: the kingdoms and lands represented in the parliament of the realm, the patrimony inherited or acquired as dowries in the course of centuries by the House of Habsburg. In the eastern half of the map, the largest, roundest monochrome expanse, embraced within two in-curving arms of a pincer, was the Kingdom of Hungary.
    Strange, he commented to himself, how these early memories persist and remain untouched by later experience. For he had hardly left his primary school when the Austro-Hungarian Empire had ceased to exist and that map had been rubbed out and redrawn with different contours. He knew this one, of course, but it had never made a visual impact on his mind; whereas the other map, obsolete before he had even started on his adult life, remained indelibly imprinted on his memory.

 
    Two
    He lay in his bed in the little box of a compartment, the shelf of the upper, unoccupied bunk over his head, his suit and overcoat swaying just within reach of his hand on a brass peg fixed to the varnished partition dividing his compartment from his neighbour’s. The train swayed rhythmically as the wheels hammered out their beat each time they crossed the narrow gap which separates one length of rail from the next. Only a faint blue light shone from a tiny bulb above the door, making the darkness itself discernible by its degree of deeper blackness and moving shadows of unrecognisable shapes.
    The picture of the old map, still showing dimly through drifting veils of wandering memories, conjured up the name of the small town in Moravia from which his father, as a young boy, had come to Vienna. He felt his father’s arm round his shoulder and heard him describe, as he had done so many times – and he had never tired of listening – how he had come on foot, drawn by that great and glittering magnet of a city, and how he had seen for the first time, from the distance, the pointed spire of St Stephen’s Cathedral. All roads in Vienna had been open then, and from all directions of the compass they had come, seeking their fortune – Czech and Pole and Croat, Magyar and Italian, and Jew of