Kaltenburg

1

WHERE WERE THE old man’s urges I was supposed to succumb to, where was the rush of hot blood, where, I wondered, was the sheer panic, combined with the shrewd look of appraisal? And where was the masterful air of the older man that I ought to have been projecting in the presence of a woman who was only half my age but who had nonetheless shown an interest in me, even if it was only in my talk? I was privately surprised to find in my behavior no sign of that ridiculous capering, crowing, and chest-puffing, not the slightest trace of the courtship display that my younger self would have anticipated from a gray-haired gentleman like me.

Now and again I almost long to be one of those men I have often observed doing what’s expected of them at their age. I would make a show of fussing around in my pocket to produce a fresh white handkerchief with which to continually mop my brow, and it would not occur to this young woman before me to be in the least surprised, even though it was only the end of March and not at all warm. At most she would ask sympathetically whether she could fetch me a glass of water, and whether we should take a short break, which could only mean that she would allow me some privileged access to her life that is never granted to men of her own age. By inclining my head I could indicate that something of the kind she was suggesting would be very acceptable, while I patted my neck with the damp handkerchief, imagining it was her young woman’s hand dabbing the beads of sweat from my skin, not my own.

Years ago I used to pity my young contemporaries constantly showing off their Latin and Greek, even murmuring words like “omnibus” as though imparting some arcane knowledge to the lady beside them. But while those young fogeys may have become wise old gentlemen, silently observing a few blades of grass day in and day out, or fatuously enjoying misquoting their dubious classical jokes, today I’m the one who is flaunting my Latin for this young interpreter: Carduelis carduelis, I say slowly, so that she can write it down; her list is gradually filling up. Carduelis chloris, I say, and Carduelis spinus.

The names of birds: goldfinch, greenfinch, and siskin. “What on earth do you want to learn bird names for?” I had asked when she rang and told me that she had to prepare for a high-ranking visitor from the English-speaking world who was interested not only, as protocol demanded, in informing himself about economic developments since 1990, but — as a seasoned nature-lover — in discussing the local flora and fauna with a few of his hosts. It wasn’t the names that worried her, she could easily learn them by heart, but she couldn’t visualize the birds. She asked if, to put her mind at rest, I could spare a couple of hours to go through the English, German, and Latin names of the mounted specimens on display.

The collection I used to work in was formerly located in the old town but is now housed at a new site: it was there that we arranged to meet. The old building had a view across to the castle ruins. Tourists came to admire the mural, the Procession of the Dukes, and in summer voices drifted up from the street to my room, Russian babble, Swedish babble, then the unvarying harder tones of the tour guide. And in the evenings I used to stand on the banks of the Elbe to watch the gulls flocking above the Court Church. Here in the new building I have been given a little room in the corridor where the offices are. I still come nearly every week. I’m drawn to the mounts. One of my colleagues had directed Frau Fischer to me. “And don’t forget,” I managed to call down the phone before she rang off, “you’ll have to go out to Klotzsche, the Zoological Collections aren’t in the former House of Assembly anymore.”

I met Katharina Fischer at the top of the stairs. We turned from the open corridor into the collection area, through the glass door from daylight to artificial light, past the notice NO FOOD IN THE COLLECTION ROOMS, PLEASE. Silence. The whitewashed walls, the heavy iron doors, the composition floor under our feet, were evenly lit by the fluorescent strip lights. The double door next to the sign saying DRY VERTEBRATES was lemon yellow, canary yellow, and easily wide enough to allow the bulk of a mounted adult elephant to be wheeled into the collection, although nowadays the room behind the door contains mainly animals you would have no trouble carrying in your jacket pocket. I’ll never get used to this building, won’t have to, the move at the end of 1998 coincided with my leave-taking from the Ornithological Collection.

The increasingly oppressive cramped quarters in the House of Assembly, the smell of carcasses and alcohol and toxins, by turns sweetish and then acrid, that penetrated our rooms from the taxidermy workshops, depending on weather conditions, the damp, the musty walls topped by a temporary roof, the floods during heavy, prolonged rain. Dangers that threatened to ruin our specimens and eventually our health as well, and even the DDT that we personally sprinkled for years over the open drawers: all of this is so closely associated with my work in the collection that I would be hard-pressed to recognize anything in this new space if it weren’t for the old familiar animals.

“You weren’t born in Dresden, were you?” Frau Fischer inquired cautiously soon after we met. Usually it took her only three sentences at most to tell by their accents where people came from, she said, but in my case she still couldn’t make up her mind. “I couldn’t even guess at the general direction,” she admitted as she took her pens and notebook out of her backpack and cast a first glance at the birds I had got ready.

It’s true, I’m not from here, and it was only by accident, or rather because of the state of affairs at the time, that I came to Dresden early in 1945, when I was eleven: my parents had decided to leave the city of Posen and head west. Even before that we must have moved around a lot; I never had a chance to pick up a regional twang at home, let alone a dialect. I think they may even have taken care to choose a nanny for me who spoke clear High German.

I have a mental image of myself in my best Sunday shirt sitting on the bench in our kitchen, and my nanny wiping my bare legs with a damp washcloth. Could my parents have taken the nanny along on the move to Dresden?

Long-term memory, short-term memory. The interpreter had asked for a half-hour break during which she would like to be distracted, in order to test whether all the names she now had in her short-term memory really were lodged in her long-term memory. She wanted me to examine her afterward to find out, but meanwhile in this half-hour break she preferred not to stay around the mounted animals, perhaps because she needed to match the word with the object purely in her mind’s eye, or because after a while she had become uncomfortable in the presence of the birds: they perch on their branches as though they’ve just landed, as though they’re going to take off again at any moment, and if people are not used to them they’re afraid of scaring them away with a nervous movement. So we had exchanged the windowless room with its egg sets and mounted specimens for my office, which gave me a chance to smoke a cigarette and offer Katharina Fischer a coffee.

She scanned the bookcase; there was a small pile of volumes from our library, I’d been using them over the past few weeks, and next to them my little reference library. The interpreter quickly took in the Journal of Ornithology, The Bird Observer, next to Grzimek’s Animal Life and Wassmann’s Encyclopedia of Ornithology. By comparison, in this light the hardback dictionaries on the top shelf look older than they are, German and Russian, German and English, editions from before and after reunification, slightly scuffed, darkened with age, as though I hadn’t touched them for years. Archetypes of Fear is absent from the bookcase.

No, on that night when we arrived in this city, which was in the process of turning into a sea of rubble no longer warranting the name of “city,” my nanny was not with me as, wrapped in a blanket, I lay on the grass in the Great Garden. People all around, the whole park full of people, squatting in the darkness, walking to and fro, talking quietly, looking up at the sky without a word, and all of them strangers. Huddled next to me were an old couple; in the bright glow the man’s face was lit up as though by candlelight. The rims of his eyes, the furrows around his mouth, and the stubble of his beard turning red, then yellowish, white, then dark gray as the clouds passed over the treetops. The woman was wearing a good but no longer new coat, a broad shawl over her upper body, I can’t remember, was she wearing a cap, a hat, her head was resting on the man’s shoulder. Exhausted, in the open air, on a February night, they had nodded off. A noise like nothing ever heard before drove the two of them out of my mind.

We sat for quite a while facing the birds I had lined up — that’s to say she sat, I soon got up again to stand behind the table and point out to her the crucial differences. Working from left to right, as seen from her perspective, I gave her the German names for the chaffinch, the brambling, the linnet, the twite, the mealy redpoll, let’s leave out the Arctic redpoll, it can be annoyingly hard to identify with any certainty, but go on to the serin, bullfinch or hawfinch, though the four stonebirds can be omitted despite their lovely pink plumage, then the scarlet grosbeak, the great rosefinch, the pine grosbeak — enormous compared to the others — the crossbill, the Scottish crossbill, the parrot crossbill, and finally the Carduelis finches, the siskin, the greenfinch, and the goldfinch, also known as the thistle finch.

While I walked along the line, she began to draw up a list, the English names first; she had acquired an English bird book and was leafing through her Peterson’s Field Guide, the section on finches. But watch out, I broke in, that you don’t mix up the goldfinch with the German Goldfink, which is a brambling in English, or, worse still, group it with the snowfinch, which isn’t a finch at all but a sparrow, just as the scarlet rosefinch is not a Rosenfink in German; the German for that is Karmingimpel, and only the Swedes call the scarlet rosefinch a Rosenfink.

Maybe I was overtaxing her a little at the start, but I had known straightaway that any interpreter who prepares so thoroughly for a conversation that may never take place, no, in all probability never will take place in the way she anticipates, must on no account be undertaxed. The Peterson Frau Fischer is using is a work I seldom consult: although its structure is conventional, I have always found it a bit awkward to use, because the illustrations, descriptions, and maps are each collected into separate sections of their own. I placed the Svensson/Mullarney/Zetterström next to it; descriptions on the left, on the right birds drawn against the light, silhouettes in a low-lying mist, and Katharina Fischer realized at first glance that it is all about recognizing the birds in their natural environment, not indoors.

To really complicate matters — so began my sentence when I felt she had spent slightly too long poring over the bird books — be careful not to confuse “sparrow” with “sparrow.” Depending on who you’re talking to, British or American, it means either a true sparrow or our German Ammer, one of the New World buntings, which you’ll see over here only once in a lifetime as an accidental that has drifted across the Atlantic. So what we call an Ammer, the British call simply a bunting: easy to remember.

I was afraid my remarks might have confused the interpreter so thoroughly by now that she might be wishing she had never taken on the job. So I thought I would gradually begin to simplify the business, first of all by eliminating certain finches that never appear locally and that were therefore, I hoped, unlikely to crop up in the conversation when Frau Fischer’s assignment required her to start moving birds around between languages. I removed a few examples from the table: the two-barred crossbill, the Sinai rosefinch, the evening grosbeak, the white-wing grosbeak, the red-fronted serin, the Syrian serin, the Corsican finch, the citril finch, the twite, and the beautiful blue chaffinch vanished from our sight, and as Katharina Fischer found, the whole arrangement now seemed much more manageable.

I can see myself sitting there in my white shirt, the beam of light from the kitchen lamp doesn’t reach me, my nanny shades me from it, the shirt is crumpled, and if I were under the light you might be able to make out dark stains on the material: mud, colored crayon, dried blood. Maria. She can’t yet have been twenty years old.

2

THAT NIGHT IN the Great Garden it was only for an instant that my parents flashed through my mind and then, strangely, they vanished from my thoughts, just as they themselves later vanished for good; they were never found. They must have been killed, but against all reason I have often played with the idea that they survived but believed me to be dead, they wouldn’t give up, and the authorities could not shake them off until, in a fit of the most extreme brutality perhaps, they went so far as to show them the body of a young boy disfigured by the flames, and since they could do nothing and nobody would help them, after a few weeks they moved on. I know that I have always clung to this notion whenever I recall the elderly man and woman squatting right next to me on the grass. They might have been my parents. And in the darkness I simply didn’t recognize them. Two figures, aging from one instant to the next, with burns on their faces: I had never seen anything like it. How would I know my own living parents from so many dead? After all, when I first saw myself again in a mirror, this face bore no resemblance to the one I knew from photos and memory.

What have you let yourself in for, you poor girl? I blurted out at one point, and as soon as I said it I could have bitten off my tongue — what a job the interpreter had taken on, trying to learn by heart the whole of the local birdlife here in March, of all months. If the foreign guest had only put off his visit until the winter or even until high summer, if only he had waited just a few weeks, but as it was she would have to take into account all the overwintering species, the breeding birds together with the summer visitors, because not all of the former had left yet, and not all of the latter had yet arrived.

“So then you got stuck in Dresden?”

You could put it that way, I got stuck here, although after leaving Posen we were only passing through Dresden. As far as I can recall, my father, who was a botanist, met some colleagues, and my mother showed me around the city where she had lived for a while before I was born, perhaps the happiest time of her short life. I thought I sensed that as we strolled through the old town together, if you believe an eleven-year-old could sense such a thing. I think we retraced her steps as a young girl, and she never used the new names, she persisted with Theaterplatz, Augustus-Strasse, Jüdenhof, and Frauenstrasse, whenever we stopped for her to tell me something, in the bright, mild weather, a kind of false spring surrounding us that February. In the afternoon we would sit in a café and watch the life around us, Wildsruffer Strasse, Scheffelstrasse, Webergasse, they all still existed then, the city was full of people, and I tried to make eye contact with this or that refugee girl, or an older, limping man, even if I never forgot what my family had drummed into me — although our family had nothing at all to fear — once when we were safe from observation: never look an SS man full in the face.

For me it was — I know this sounds strange — a proper holiday, although a little incident took place of which I was ashamed, and as an adult, truth to tell, went on being ashamed for many years. Coming from the Theaterplatz, it must have been in the morning, we walked past the House of Assembly, and then we were taking the steps up to the Brühl Terrace when I came across a sign: JEWS NOT ADMITTED. And, yes, children find it hard to suppress cruel impulses, children sometimes behave like maniacs, but all the same there’s no excuse, I don’t know what came over me: I stopped and was gripped by a feeling of triumph, halfway to the top I looked up, then again at the notice, and strutted — I wasn’t walking now, I was strutting — up the remaining steps, we’re allowed onto the Brühl Terrace, we’re not Jews. At the top I turned around, saw the Court Church, Augustus Bridge, the Italian Village below, and then my mother, who had reached the landing. She stopped too. I can remember it as though it were yesterday, I looked into her suddenly narrowed eyes, and I could sense that, at the end of her sleeve in the heavy winter coat, her hand was twitching: my mother, who had never hit me in her life, came close to slapping my face in broad daylight.

So my nanny really did not travel with us after all, the white Sunday shirt with dark stains, a young boy on the kitchen bench seat, utterly dazed. Perhaps my parents fired her that very evening.

On that Shrove Tuesday my mother even wanted to take me to the zoological museum, which she had often visited in her Dresden days, but when we turned from the Postplatz into Ostra-Allee we could see immediately that the building was no longer there, it had been flattened in an air raid the previous October. My mother obviously knew nothing about that, just as I could not know then that I was standing in front of the ruins of an institution which I myself would work in, many years later.

At lunch my father was still with us. We were sitting at a first-floor window somewhere looking down on a large square, so we had probably turned into the Old Market, the sunshine was pouring in, almost blindingly, and we three had a window table to ourselves. The light was strange, pallid; the mashed potatoes on my plate were steaming, as though the sun’s rays were heating them. I also had peas and a ground-meat “German beefsteak,” no doubt eked out with a large quantity of breadcrumbs, which I had taken a bite out of and then left. Beefsteak. I had only just learned this word for “meatball,” at home we said Frikadelle, the new word seemed strange to me: when I found it on the menu I had thought it both promising and off-putting, and if I decided to risk it when we ordered our food, it was not so much because of an appetite for meatballs but because I wanted to see, and taste, whether my father’s explanation was right, or whether — despite its related appearance and similar taste — there was something quite different about a “beefsteak.” No, it wasn’t the same thing, even if my parents did insist, almost despairingly, that it was just a different name.

Until the food arrived, my mother left her wonderful dark otter-skin cap lying on the table. As always, my mother seemed very elegant to me, she attracted attention, but on this day in this restaurant there were also black looks coming from other tables, my father noticed it.

“Please, can’t you put your otter cap away?”

But she behaved as though she had seen nothing, heard nothing, and tugged at his tie, which was always crooked, improving the knot, examining the collar, and looking into my father’s face. He turned away and grimaced, but she knew he liked it, just as he liked her putting on her jewelry, the pearl earrings, the bracelet, and the little chain necklace; we weren’t refugees, we were people out for a meal in the metropolis, and the woman opposite him was his wife, and it didn’t matter what other diners made of her outfit. She in a simple dress, with her shoulder-length hair elegantly cut, and he in clothes undecided between a visit to the big city and a country ramble, with his rough mittens which embarrassed me a bit when I saw other gentlemen with their buckskin gloves placed neatly at the edge of the table. My mother ran her fingers through his always unkempt mop of hair, that’s the kind of thing they played at in my presence. I looked down at the square, I looked into the sun, the food arrived, I put the otter cap on the windowsill.

My father ate his stuffed cabbage with great gusto. I don’t know what he had been doing that morning, the meeting with his botanist colleagues wasn’t due until the afternoon. I paid no further attention to my parents’ conversation until my mother suddenly dropped her voice. Now, I thought, she’s telling him what happened at the Brühl Terrace, but she made no mention of the incident at all, she was talking about the zoological museum.

“It’s a shame, I couldn’t show him anything, no great auk and no ‘World of Beetles.’ The museum is closed. No, not one of its closing days. The museum is no longer standing.”

My father shook his head, the air raid last autumn, utterly deplorable, but my mother wouldn’t leave it at that.

“Now you see what they’re capable of, so something good has come out of our canceled museum visit after all.”

Not a word about who she meant by “they,” whether my mother blamed the Allies for this destruction or perhaps those who had rejected the precaution of evacuating the exhibits, because they liked to think that a city like Dresden was immune.

My mother turned to me, and almost seemed to be enjoying a certain satisfaction: “You see, people are capable of anything, you’ll remember this day for the rest of your life.”

She turned out to be right. I thought of her words again in the years after Stalin’s death, I was well past my twenties and learned that the collection had definitely not been completely destroyed after all, the most precious items were still in their secret depository. It made me think of my parents, and I caught myself thinking, Your parents didn’t have a clue, while it seemed to me that I was old enough by then, that we were all old enough at last to find out at least half the truth, even if only from a hushed aside. The great auk: the last British specimen of this bird variety was caught in 1840, the very last Icelandic breeding pair on the third of June 1844—I could recite the dates like a schoolboy when I was approaching fifty and saw our Dresden great auk for the first time. I had already lived far longer than my parents did, but I could still hear their words, and to this day the great auk is inseparably linked with the memory of our last family lunch together.

“Are you sure you don’t want any more of the Frikadelle?”

I shook my head, the mashed potatoes and peas were more than enough for me, and so my father, who had been eyeing my plate throughout, fell upon the German beefsteak. It was when they came to pay that my parents began to whisper to each other, we were already getting our coats on and they still hadn’t settled the question: he, who publicly ate unfinished rissoles from other people’s plates, and she, who left her otter cap lying openly on the fine tablecloth without caring what anyone thought — these two grownups who were my parents, sophisticated people as I thought, who were my guides through the big city, were unsure how much to tip, whether it was even the thing to do in a good restaurant like this, in Dresden. I had never seen my parents like this, positively nervous, and it was only once we were back down in the Old Market that they regained their self-confidence.

My father, who will have seen the Botanical Garden on the northern side of the Great Garden in prime condition, early in the afternoon of the thirteenth of February, with its beds and plots and neatly winding paths. My father, who was apparently going to meet colleagues there, who was expected. My father among a group of botanists, all alive, all still healthy, their faces perhaps already beginning to show optimism as they talked quietly about the summer ahead. By that evening, reunited with his family, my father would be back in the Great Garden, in the spacious park, soon to be strewn with craters, uprooted shrubs, shattered trees, and the many dead, to whom he himself was going to belong.

My father the botanist, who was drawn back to botany again at the unforeseeable end of his life. Did he take us to the Great Garden because he knew the way from that morning, or because he looked to the protection of trees and fields and flowers, which always had a calming effect on him, or was it that he followed the crowds escaping from the flames in the inner city, hoping by some miracle to snatch his family from certain death?

To this day I, the son who survived, have not made a single visit to the Heide cemetery to stand at one of the mass graves and conjure up an image of my parents. Instead, I go to the Great Garden, across the meadow on its western edge, and stand under an English oak for which Dresdeners have a special name: the Splinter Oak. It must be some three hundred years since somebody planted it in this spot, as a border marker, they say, the park hadn’t been conceived of then. If you come from the zoo side, you don’t notice anything: just a tall, gnarled tree with beautifully striated bark. But if you walk around the trunk, the skin of the tree seems suddenly to burst apart, revealing the bright, open, light wood, framed by thick, knobbly protrusions. Looking up, crooked branches, as though their growth had taken place against solid, tormenting air resistance, the broken places, and below the thick foliage of the crown a torn-open area, splintered, shattered, fissured. It takes a while to realize that the scarring across the entire trunk is uniform: this is where the bomb splinters are embedded in the bark, they’re still there. On that side the wood has taken on an unusual, lustrous brown hue. Dead wood lies on the ground, it powders when you kick it, rotten: for years a fungus has been spreading through the inside of the stricken tree, a late consequence of the bombing. It survived that night, but eventually it will be destroyed by the sulfur shelf mushroom. At the Splinter Oak I have a memory, my parents are standing there in front of me.

3

WHEN THE INTERPRETER asked what made me choose my specialty, she added that she supposed if your father was a botanist it was not unlikely that you would take to ornithology. It is true that from an early age I have had a certain conception of nature; the self-evident receptiveness of my parents to the world of living things was bound to rub off on their child. But I was not willing to claim that coming from such a home I was more or less bound to end up as a biologist, let alone set my heart on becoming a zoologist, least of all an ornithologist. I went through a phase in my childhood when I didn’t like these creatures at all. For a long time I was fonder of the cat that brought in the bird than I was of its present to me, laid at my feet with excitement and pride to claim my friendship.

Mother and Father surmised that my aversion was due to an experience I can barely recall, though they often told me about it. It seems that once when I was alone in the house a young bird blundered into our drawing room, and I was infected with the panic of the young creature, which for some reason could not find its way through the open French window and into the garden. I wanted to get away from this agitated, flapping thing that made such awful noises, but just like the ruffled bird, instead of running out into the garden or simply opening the door to the entrance hall, where I would have been safe, I huddled in a corner. When I was eventually found between the stove and the sideboard, I must have been a picture of utter confusion; I don’t remember, but that’s how my parents described it to me.

All I can recall is this unpredictable creature caught up in the dark curtains, I’m staring at the striped edge of the shiny rectangle of cloth, apparently stirring idly in the mild afternoon air, though in fact its motion results from the frantic movements of the young bird, which cannot shake the heavy material with commensurate force. Its claws gripping tightly, the bird climbs higher, and the next moment it is hidden in a fold, but I know it’s still there, the hem of the curtain silently brushes the parquet floor. Did it really enter the drawing room of its own accord, or did the cat bring it in? In my memory the bird more and more assumes the form of a swift — even while the ornithologist in me says that a swift would never fly through an open door into a house, and if it did its flight velocity would make it smash headfirst into a wall, and if it survived it would not be able to get off the floor to bury itself in the curtains.

The next minute I was sitting completely dazed on the kitchen bench, hardly hearing my mother scolding the nanny, who had gone off to enjoy herself in the fields with an admirer, leaving me alone in the house, and who was now wiping my bare legs with a damp cloth. Yet it was all my fault. I had begged her to leave me playing in the drawing room after lunch and go for a walk by herself, I wouldn’t tell my parents, I had kept my promise on previous Sundays. Eventually I had a temper tantrum, thrashing around wildly but taking care not to hit my nanny; I may have been screaming too. No, before I got to the point of screaming she would give in, relieved on the one hand, on the other worried about going for a walk by herself, though both of us knew, without ever saying so, what “by herself” meant on a Sunday afternoon.

I was left in peace, playing my solitary games in the cool room with its half-drawn curtains, while she had to worry about me, whether I would be up to any mischief, she didn’t know what I did when she was away, whereas I had some idea what her admirer would be up to with her in the distant meadow. So that, as I was later to realize when I was grown up myself, her worry about being with her lover would be combined with concern about neglecting a child.

I had goose bumps, the cloth which had been pleasantly warm from the water and the warm hand running it over my legs got cold from one minute to the next in the unheated kitchen, the cool evening air. When my nanny came back from her outing I said nothing, didn’t answer any questions about why I was cowering in the dusk between the stove and the sideboard, why I was keeping my arms so tightly crossed, why I couldn’t put one foot in front of the other like a normal boy. She didn’t notice the dark stain on my trousers, didn’t notice the swift, which was still lying on the carpet with a wildly beating heart, as though paralyzed, the last time I saw it. I was able to keep everything back from my nanny, but not from my parents, who returned at dinnertime from a visit, and now I was sitting in nothing but my Sunday shirt on the kitchen bench with a wildly beating heart, I had wet my trousers out of sheer terror.

I could hear the noise, but I didn’t comprehend a word that was being said, my blood was roaring so loudly in my ears. Silently my nanny let my mother’s reproaches and her unusually rough language wash over her, as she knelt in front of me she kept her eyes lowered, didn’t look at me, just as I would have given anything in the world not to meet her gaze, although I didn’t dare close my eyes and wish myself away from this scene, away from the tiled kitchen with its horrible echo, back in my quiet bedroom. My mouth was dry, I couldn’t even swallow, let alone confess my guilt, call out, “It’s all my fault, please leave her alone, she hasn’t done anything.” Perhaps I have never since then experienced such a powerful sense of injustice and torment, the young swift, my wet trousers, and the nanny I was fond of.

I have a dim memory of lying in bed, I had been there for ages and should have been asleep, while my mother kept repeating the same phrases over and over to my father, scraps of sentences that reached me from their bedroom, though I couldn’t make much sense of them, things like “the poor thing,” and “with his bare hands,” and “our own son,” and then later, if I heard correctly through the half-open door, again and again, now almost in a whisper, as though she had no strength left, maybe because she was so disgusted: “The eyes.”

What happened to the swift afterward, I can’t say. It’s possible it didn’t survive, that it expired after my father gently released it from its purgatory and ushered it toward the garden, though without touching it with his bare hands. Or it died, exhausted, toward evening on the soft, patterned carpet. Just as it is possible, although unlikely, that despite its experiences it had a long life before it, an airborne life which would bring it back for just a few weeks year after year to our latitude, to the neighborhood of dark curtains, cool drawing rooms, and cruel children, which, as though it had learned its lesson on that Sunday afternoon, it would take note of only from a great height, from a safe distance.

I learned my lesson too, though without realizing as much straightaway. It took me until the next morning, when I emerged from an uneasy sleep and my stupefied condition, and went the way I had gone the day before out of my room, along the corridor, then down the broad staircase, into the kitchen, where I was given a drink of milk, and finally into the drawing room, to the site of my downfall. All traces of the struggle had been erased, not a mark on the carpet, the curtain hung as neatly as if no swift had ever become entangled in it. However, the discovery I had made the afternoon before but only grasped now when I glanced across the empty battlefield hinted that I was destined to be an ornithologist: I had seen the legs of the swift.

To this day, there is a widespread notion that this is a bird that possesses neither legs nor claws; it spends most of its life in the air, and is said to lack such equipment. A bird that you hardly ever see close up, that impresses the viewer on the ground with its dexterous wing strokes and rapid flight, sometimes swooping low enough to make you instinctively duck, and lingering immediately afterward at a great height, an almost imperceptible dot that seems gradually to glide off into space. You never see a swift sitting on a branch, it never moves about on the ground. With such a creature it’s not surprising that ignorance shades over into superstition. People used to be convinced that swifts came straight from the moon.

Abhorrent as the young swift was to me, something connected me with it, my enemy and comrade in fear on a long Sunday afternoon in the drawing room: I had wrested knowledge from it which it tried to keep hidden from humans. For the bird to have clung to the curtain material, it must have had the necessary claws. And when it lay on its back on the carpet, close to death, with wings outstretched and helplessly twitching, I saw with my own eyes, from close up, the short, admittedly rather wasted-looking, but certainly existing legs of the swift. Legs such as all birds have. That made it anything but the mysterious creature of fable endowed with marvelous powers.

I raced from the drawing room across to the kitchen, where my breakfast was ready, shouting again and again, “The swift has got legs,” breathless, I wanted to go into all the details, but my nanny, pushing the plate of open bread rolls toward me when I finally sat myself down on the kitchen bench, just shook her head sadly.

Something was broken. I still have this vague feeling today, even though it has never become quite clear to me what happened. The look on my nanny’s face, her head moving gently from side to side, her bright, loose hair against the light, caressing her chin and cheeks. Was that the last breakfast Maria would ever serve me? She sat opposite me as though she knew something far more significant than my basic discovery about the swift, a terrible revelation hardly bearable even to an adult, let alone a child.

Did I idolize Maria? As a small boy, yes, certainly. And it only struck me years later that her head-shaking might have had more to do with her lover than with her possible dismissal. But at the time the effect on me was, must have been, to make me connect my nanny’s secret knowledge with the incident of the swift the day before.

On the one hand, I thought, I must try with all my might to work this creature out, and then I, who was to blame for her despair, would discover what was making my nanny so miserable on this morning, but on the other hand I couldn’t stand the idea of ever taking a close look at a stray young bird again. Because, but for the swift, this depressing breakfast scene would never have happened, I would never have had to sit helplessly opposite my nanny, unsure, torn this way and that, sad but a bit disappointed at the same time because she wasn’t interested in the admittedly puny legs of the swift.

I chewed silently. My nanny said nothing. As if I had contributed to the extinction of the swift. As if the day before I had taken the decisive, irrevocable step of making this bird species disappear from the earth forever. As if I had the last living specimen on my conscience.

4

STRANGE YOU SHOULD ASK that particular question, I said to Frau Fischer, because I’ve always wondered about it myself: Didn’t I have any school friends of my own age with whom I could play in the fields after school and spend long Sunday afternoons? Friends from my early schooling? I can’t remember any.

Over there on the edge of the forest, a herd of deer whose outlines you could only make out gradually after sunset in the field against the dark background: sometimes my father took me with him on his study outings. In the summer, when the evenings stayed light far too long for me to sleep, he came into my room to see if I was still awake and allowed me to get up and get dressed again. I was never a good sleeper.

Possibly because I thought of these twilight walks as an extraordinary reward — even if I never knew what for, because they were always bestowed on me out of the blue and no doubt on a whim of my father’s — on these outings of ours I was always particularly obedient and keen to learn. I learned from my father how to move silently through the undergrowth and, instead of constantly talking, how to listen for the most distant sounds. Did he dislike going alone? Was it a ruse on his part, to do with his idea of education? If we set off late in the evening there obviously wasn’t much to see anymore, and so I learned to concentrate on faint impressions and seemingly trivial phenomena.

We did not speak. He went ahead, gesturing toward a wallow or teeth marks on a birch tree. We crept to the edge of the wood and waited. Eventually, just as I had been promised at home while hastily throwing on my clothes, deer began to appear in the forest. The animals, I learned, talk to each other almost continuously; they often talk to us too, but we rarely notice what they’re saying, not realizing they mean us. The animals address themselves to us, from a distance, hidden in the leaves of the trees above us, from the thicket beside the path, they ask questions or they curse us, they are letting us know “I am aware of you.” But even to get anywhere near certain animals, to detect them in the first place, you have to know how to be silent; if you want to catch sight of them, these talking creatures, there’s one thing above all you mustn’t do: talk to them.

As I say this, there is after all a shadow that passes across my mind, but not the face that goes with it. I had a friend of my own age in Posen, our neighbors’ son, I ran into him occasionally in the street. We weren’t particularly close friends. It could be that whenever I had anything to do with him, curiosity and repulsion balanced each other out; a certain amount of pity came into it too. Was he retarded? He seemed very awkward and clumsy to me, there wasn’t much you could do with him. He didn’t talk a lot, and when he did his speech was indistinct but very loud. Drawn-out sounds that he produced with an effort, trying to make complete words out of them. When I was with him I was a bit scared. But at home I mimicked him.

He knew about our twilight excursions. He wanted to go with us. He begged his parents until they eventually let him. We didn’t have much to do with our neighbors, but I remember them asking my father in: Yes, he did sometimes take me out at night to the fields with him. And yes, the neighbors’ boy could come with us one evening. It’s hard to know whether his parents thought the boy was making it up, or maybe they wouldn’t believe my father until their own son reported back to them from one of these expeditions.

On the evening in question the boy came over to us, but he was too shy to come into the house, he stayed by the door. And I had never seen him so excited. This poor creature, at other times practically unable to utter a word, could not stop talking. An annoying evening, as my father and I agreed afterward. We didn’t sight a single animal. They must all have retreated silently at the approach of the babbling youngster.

Otherwise, nothing. No one else comes to mind. As though that first night in Dresden had wiped out a whole host of other images, as though the onslaught of those impressions alternating abruptly between extremes of brightness and darkness had driven out of my mind memories shaped in a more subtle light.

“What about your grandparents?”

I shook my head.

“Uncles, aunts, cousins?”

None of them either. Presumably my parents didn’t care much about keeping in touch with their relatives. Who knows, perhaps they were glad to escape from their family background by moving to Posen.

“Well, can you remember your parents’ friends or acquaintances?”

Only those I met again later as an adult. That could well have seemed rather unreal — being afraid that however hard you tried you might not recognize anything about a person, after a gap of ten, fifteen years. I did feel disoriented, helpless for a moment, but fortunately, before I had time to lose my equilibrium completely, the new faces brought back to me these people’s younger features, voices and movements that I was familiar with as a child.

“In an earlier life,” as the interpreter put it.

In an earlier life, you could say that. But knowing myself as an adult to be surrounded by these figures meant that I had preserved something from that life.

5

THERE WERE TWO MEN in uniform in the house. I clung to my nanny’s wrist, to her forearm, even if only with my eyes, since at that moment I couldn’t literally hold on to her because she was balancing a platter of meat in one hand and holding fork and spoon in the other while she served two slices of roast meat per person onto five large, ivory-colored plates of our best Sunday china, plates with a lime-leaf green border, a tendril that began nowhere and ended nowhere, though I was always trying to find its starting point nonetheless. Then, still holding the fork, Maria gave everyone some gravy, without dripping any of it, calmly but deftly, always leaning in over their left shoulders. She had begun with the guests, then served my parents, the steaming roast beef hanging for a moment in midair next to faces, ears, almost in front of people’s eyes, but no one noticed it, it didn’t bother anyone, everyone around the festively laid table went on talking, apart from me, to whom my nanny came last. I was hoping that, as she usually did, she would have saved a particularly good slice for me, totally free of the gristle which you would chew in vain and wouldn’t be able to swallow but which you couldn’t put back on your plate in front of guests, so that you would have to park it in the back of your cheek until the meal was over and you could get to the toilet. Then Maria lifted the lid of the potato dish and my father spoke into the rising cloud of steam: “Please help yourselves, gentlemen.”

There were two men in uniform in the house, and I was allowed to address them familiarly as Du. Earlier, when they arrived, I heard my parents greeting them at the door. I was sitting on the rug in my room, wanting to finish my game; light, friendly voices reached me, and then my mother was calling me down to say hello to Herr Spengler and Herr Sieverding. When I saw them in the hallway, there was some chat about our house, my mother was stroking my head, I was shaking hands with the guests, it was their boots I noticed first, clattering on the stone floor like nothing we had ever heard in our house before. I still didn’t know what to make of it, two uniformed men whose voices didn’t match their boots at all, they came up to just below their knees, so highly polished you could practically see your face in them. I stared at the boots, the grownups’ eyes were also drawn to the soft, black, gleaming boot tops, and one of the men began to laugh: “That’s not my doing, you’ll have to congratulate Martin here for that, he’s got the knack of losing himself for a whole afternoon in boot cleaning.”

“Well, run off and wash your hands”: my father didn’t know what else to say.

Martin Spengler, the younger of the two, could hardly have been any older than my nanny, the other one was called Knut Sieverding, I turned the soap over in my hands under the tap, that name is harder to remember, Knut is the older one, but both of them are much younger than my parents, I was still twisting the soap over, but holding on to it with slippery fingers, I don’t want to forget those names, Spengler and Sieverding, Knut laughs, and Martin polishes boots, but both of them make the same clatter with their boots on the stone floor, how cold the water gets when you let it run, the tall, thin, quiet man is called Martin, the shorter one with the untidy hair is Knut.

“Are you coming down? Time to eat.”

My nanny was knocking at the bathroom door.

A splash of gravy had cut through the green border. I didn’t have any gristle or stringy bits. Although there were visitors, I was still allowed to mash the potatoes on the plate with my fork. Knut was the one sitting opposite me, Martin the one to his left. My father had announced he was inviting students from his lecture for the evening, and now two men in uniform were sitting at the table with us. They came out from the town, we lived a long way out, the wood behind the railway embankment, fields all around, and I wasn’t sure that our road didn’t quite quickly turn into a track, an overgrown path that petered out somewhere in the fields. I never went that far. We didn’t have many neighbors, in summer the green growth was so dense that you’d hardly suspect the nearest house was there. At the back, toward the stream, my father’s greenhouse, I used to hide down there in the bushes. From the terrace side you could walk into the drawing room, on the floor above my parents’ bedroom to the left, mine to the right. I knew every corner of our house, and there were many dark corners that nobody went to but me. What happened the week before had long since been forgotten. Today I was allowed to have dinner with the grownups. Maria took the meat around again, winking at me without anyone seeing. She smiled. Then she smiled at Martin.

“Hermann, are you listening?”

My father looked across at me from his place at the head of the table, then at Knut. He had laid his cutlery down on the edge of the plate. Maria was holding the serving platter up in the air, with both hands. What had Knut — Herr Sieverding — asked me, my mind went blank, I tried to imagine what he might have asked me, there were no potatoes steaming on anybody’s plate by now, I couldn’t think of anything.

“No, it did have legs, I saw for myself. The swift, I mean.”

“But he’s asking what class you’re in,” murmured my mother in my ear.

By this time I couldn’t say a word.

“Oh, well,” broke in Martin, who cleaned the boots. “School isn’t important at all, not that interesting, don’t you agree? Unless you’re very lucky, you hardly learn a thing, at least nothing important, nothing about animals, plants, or cameras, for example. Things that interest a bright boy, paper and pencils and everything you need to take a good photo. I bet you’ll have a hard time finding a biology teacher who is aware that swifts have legs.”

“But the bird is called Apus apus,” said Knut, “and its footless condition is mentioned in its name, twice in fact, as though to confirm it or to indicate that there is nothing else to know about it, that it’s distinguished by nothing except its lack of feet.”

“You see, I’m sure you didn’t learn that at school.”

“No, you’re right. I only just managed to scrape through my leaving exams. Instead of studying, I used to go off all on my own looking at wildlife, and when I passed my exams my parents were so relieved, they bought me the movie camera I had been coveting so that I could film animals. Yet it was my love of observing animals that made so much trouble for me at school.”

It was getting dark outside. My nanny was in the kitchen preparing dessert and coffee. My mother had laid her hand on my knee. Everyone had forgotten how embarrassed I’d been about Knut’s question.

“Nobody would know now that you weren’t a model pupil,” said my father, “if you don’t mind my saying so. Getting invited at twenty-one to Berlin for the anniversary of the German Ornithological Society — I thought you would have been top of the class, Herr Sieverding.”

“Not a bit of it. I was too busy observing the bird world. And I couldn’t have made the film I showed in Berlin about snipe in the Königsberg area if my parents hadn’t given me the camera.”

“You’re a real professional when it comes to birds,” said Martin, nudging Knut with his elbow. “Tell us again about the first lecture you gave, back home in Königsberg.”

“God, I was so nervous. What I knew was the remote world of birds out on the Courland Spit, and here I was about to give a presentation on it, using my own photo material, in the lecture theater of the Zoological Institute. My hands were sweating. My parents were there. Seasoned ornithologists were there. Fortunately my lecture went off very smoothly, there was even an article in the Königsberg Daily News, the first one about my work: ‘Camera Reveals Family Secrets.’ Of course, I’ve got to say there were also some critics, who had expected something completely different. I simply wanted to show the world as it was, whereas they wanted me to explain the world to them, a bit like a grandmother explaining the world to her grandchild.”

“As if showing anything were that easy.”

Knut and my father laughed. Martin took a drink of water. Now that I had been paying attention again for quite a while, something dawned on me beyond all the stories about school, birds, and filming: it was entirely for my sake that my parents had invited these two men, Knut and Martin, with their pleasant voices and black leather boots.

6

THE WAY I SEE IT today is that my parents were worried about me after the incident of the swift. Obviously they noticed how slow I was to get over my confusion, how I was becoming more withdrawn as the week wore on, preferring to spend my time alone in my room and answering encouraging questions with a scarcely audible yes or no, or showing no reaction at all. Since they connected my depression with the swift, though not with my equally depressed nanny — who was punished by being ignored for a few days — my parents made a plan: with guidance, I was to learn about the world of birds through direct, intensive contact.

What seems to me in retrospect so endearing, my parents worrying that their only child’s not very significant encounter with a young swift might have serious repercussions in his later life, at the time aroused contradictory emotions in the child concerned. On the one hand, I was proud to be the center of attention, even more than usual the world seemed to revolve around me, they had even invited young ornithologists to dinner just because of me. But on the other hand, I also felt betrayed, because plans had been hatched behind my back to rescue a creature who was being kept just as much in the dark as if he were a small animal.

It is no doubt a matter for dispute whether my parents were being particularly progressive for their time or, on the contrary, old-fashioned and exceptionally strict: the conclusions they drew from the incident to help me conquer my bird phobia expanded step by step into a large-scale program of education. Knut and Martin suited their purposes right from the beginning.

My father had noticed them in his lectures for different, in fact opposing, reasons, which in itself says something about the friendship of the two young men, four years apart in age. Martin, the younger one, the boot cleaner, behaved badly, not to say rudely, one morning in an upper tier of the auditorium during an “Introduction to the Foundations of Botany” lecture. My father was obliged to ask him to be quiet, because as he was taking notes he was frantically shuffling his papers, and even groaned aloud at one point when my father came to cell structure. After the lecture, as my father was to tell my mother with forced jocularity, perhaps with a trace of bitterness, it wasn’t the disruptive student who came down to the podium to apologize, as you might have expected, but his friend Knut, the older one, who begged with exquisite politeness not for understanding, but for forgiveness, while Martin remained unmoved, brazenly lolling about up there on his bench and following with lowered gaze as Knut, on his behalf, repeatedly bowed his head to my father down there by the blackboard.

It transpired that both were in the Luftwaffe training school here in Posen, and Knut was a regular student of biology and zoology besides. Martin only occasionally accompanied Knut, his immediate superior, to the university. Martin, a lad who was not quite of this world and who tried to overlay his insecurities with a rough manner, a questing spirit, dreamy, you might say; others would call him impudent. Knut by contrast steadier, altogether more mature, he knew exactly what he wanted and was a good influence on his younger companion, a bit like an older brother.

Knut came out to show us his bird photos from the Courland Spit. He brought his camera with him, Martin and he allowed me to take them on secret paths through the woods, I showed them where we found deer.

“Up there — can you see it? A woodpecker.”

“Green or spotted?” I could hear it, but I couldn’t make it out yet.

“Now he’s moved off to the other tree.”

There on the ground was some sticky stuff, a ball of feathers, Knut poked around in it with his stick: “That’s where a long-eared owl has eaten a small songbird and spat out the remains.” He looked at me inquiringly.

“That’s what you call a pellet.”

And Martin: “Now I wouldn’t have known that.”

Sometimes Martin came to see me by himself. Soon the pilot, who wanted to become a pediatrician after the war, was a regular visitor to our place, even when my parents were not at home.

A gust of warm wind stirred up dust from the road, for a moment I couldn’t see anything. Somebody was coughing. Then Martin emerged from the dust cloud, his hands covering his mouth, nose, and eyes. As soon as he recognized me he waved. How dusty his boots were. Despite the sunshine, Knut had stayed behind to prepare for the next day’s classes. We had this afternoon to ourselves. But first Martin needed a big glass of cool tap water from the kitchen, to quench his terrible thirst. Maria was standing by the table peeling vegetables, and as soon as she saw who had come in with me she wiped her hands on her apron and beamed. If anybody else came into the kitchen with dirty shoes, she would go crazy. Martin had struck up an understanding with Maria immediately, in fact I sometimes thought there was a closeness between them, as though they hadn’t just met at dinner the other evening, when they could only exchange a few polite words in any case since Maria was serving the food. It almost seemed to me as if they had known each other for some time.

With Martin I spent whole afternoons in the countryside. He said he found the city too oppressive, not because of the streets and houses but because of all the people. We took nothing with us to the fields except a sketchpad and pencils. We just drew what happened to be in front of us: panicles, lumps of clay, beetles. Martin was utterly calm as he watched my efforts, his sleepy, then suddenly alert glance. He commented on this or that pencil mark, the strength, depth, darkness of the line, he saw the way the color covered the background, followed the direction of a movement, a turn or stroke as it tended out beyond the edge of the paper. A hare didn’t have to be a thing with long ears, if the seemingly shapeless collection of lines on the page squatted or leapt like a hare. He never minded that I drew a hare when he asked me to draw a bird.

I took my first snapshots, with Knut’s camera: in the garden, my parents with friends, an early summer’s evening, everybody looking up at me from the table, in the corner on the right you could see part of the greenhouse. Knut, half hidden in the grass while we waited for partridges. Martin, a snap I took of him on the road a long way from our house, and no, it didn’t peter out in a narrow track between the fields, it led, quite recently paved with granite, to the next village. In the sky in the background were dots, migratory birds, geese, you could tell by the formation.

So autumn came. And one event from that time particularly stands out for me, even though the central feature itself escapes my memory. Somebody — Martin? my mother? — at some point suggested that Knut should show us his film about the snipe which had been mentioned at our dinner together. To begin with it was no more than a persistently recurring notion, but how could you carry out such a bold venture, you’d need a hall to show it in, then there would be the problem of a suitable projector, and anyway, Knut was here with the Luftwaffe and as a student, he didn’t have the film ready to hand.

Gradually, though, everybody became quite carried away by the idea. If necessary you could rig up a makeshift projection room here in the house, the drawing room with its heavy curtains would do quite well. Once the others showed they were really serious about it, then of course Knut would gladly make sure we obtained the film. Martin would ask around about a projector, but without attracting attention. I had never seen my parents so feverish. However, they insisted I should not go around talking about it. They didn’t like their son trying to impress the neighboring children by boasting about family matters. Martin had found a suitable projector, which he could borrow for a day. My parents kept reminding me of my promise. Knut dropped in to tell us that somebody would soon be traveling to Königsberg and would visit Knut’s parents to collect the film and bring it safely back to Posen. I couldn’t wait for the weekend, I would no longer have to restrain myself.

The night before the great occasion I hardly slept; my parents were very excited too, I could hear footsteps on the stairs until very late, and voices coming from the kitchen through the open door. But the only thing I can remember about the snipe film itself is one word: “Rossitten,” and that didn’t even come from the film, which was silent. “Rossitten”: Knut used it in his commentary, describing the ornithological station up north in East Prussia.

The next morning I was woken by the preparations: on the ground floor chairs were being dragged to and fro across the parquet, my nanny was taking out a large bed sheet from the linen cupboard in the corridor to iron for use as a screen. I could hear the curtains being opened and closed again a few times, then my father went shouting through the house that we needed dark blankets. Our drawing room was being got ready for the screening. The stove and sideboard had disappeared behind the improvised screen. My father stood on a ladder pushing woolen blankets down between the window frame and the curtain rail.

In my pajamas I sat down at the little table that had been pushed back against the wall for the screening. I could hear my nanny in the distance, my breakfast was waiting for me in the kitchen.

Why don’t I remember anything about the snipe film? I think I was rather disappointed that Knut did not feature in his own film. My expectations had been pitched too high, how could it be otherwise, but apart from that my expectations were completely wrong from the start. Don’t ask me how a child of six or seven who has never been to the cinema and never seen a film arrives at his fixed idea of a film, not open to doubt and impervious to adult comment, as though he had already seen all the films in the world. If you had asked me what to expect from this film, I would have replied without hesitation: obviously it would show Knut moving through his home landscape looking for birds. You would also see Knut with a bird on his arm. And Knut watching a dark swarm, pulsating in the air, as it slowly disappeared over the coast into the sunset.

The film had been loaded onto the projector. My father turned out the light and joined us in our semicircle. My mother on the left, with me next to her. Over there my nanny and Martin. The projector clattered, the screen went black, there were just little hairs fluttering brightly at the edges. A short leader strip, and yes, to confirm what I had expected, there it was: KNUT SIEVERDING, his name in large capitals. There was no soundtrack, Knut delivered the commentary standing beside the projector. I don’t know when it first occurred to me that his name was like that of a variety of snipe, Calidris canutus, the knot, known in German as a Knutt.

Reeds swaying in the wind. A wide sky dominated by shining masses of clouds. Then back to ground level — reflections in water, spikes of grass — there was something moving. Knut was about to appear in the picture. I waited. There they were, the snipe, then the landscape again, sky, clouds, grass, I heard Knut’s voice explaining everything precisely, in real life, here in our drawing room. But Knut had yet to appear in the film. I was so impatient that I didn’t take a proper look at the birds.

Considering how many wildlife films I have seen since, as an adult, including films by Knut himself, and how inspiring I have found them, often far more so than those with a human cast, I’m still surprised by how little I gained from seeing my first wildlife film, in fact the first film I had ever seen in my life.

The screen had reverted to a brilliant blinding white, our motionless figures could be made out in the darkness, still looking toward the screen, as though comparing the image left on the retina with what we had just seen. But the film was finished. The reel turned a few more times, and then it was empty, the celluloid strip tapping against the sprocket, a regular, quiet clicking, like a clock measuring an infinite expanse of time, and apart from that nothing moved. Three more revolutions, three more disturbing clicks, and the projector lamp went out, the whirring gradually died away, then ceased altogether. Somebody switched on the chandelier lights and somebody cleared his throat, we viewers were clapping, Knut took a bow. He stood right next to me, but I hadn’t seen him in his film.

7

OUTSIDE, A SPRING SHOWER, the sky had blackened, it looked as though there might be a storm. The world beyond the window was deep blue: the approaching cloud front, in the distance the wall enclosing the grounds, where the gateway gave onto a long concrete drive that led right up to the building. On the left by the entrance the tall beeches, in summer the foliage is so dense that it looks like a forest, and on our right, behind the old storehouse, the birches on the gentle slope: all covered with a blue shimmer. Big puddles had quickly formed in the mud, the arc lamps in the car park were already lit.

We had been discussing Martin’s work, exhibited in all the big public galleries, the drawings with their characteristic combination of roughness and fragility. We talked about Martin’s room installations, partly manic and partly pedantic in their effect, composed of everyday objects and sculptures which only a few art lovers were prepared to see as sculptures. Long rows of shelves, preserving jars, boxes, with stains on the floor where a dark, sticky-looking liquid had been spilled: as though someone had broken into a zoological collection.

Traveling with her parents, she had regularly been taken to exhibitions, Frau Fischer told me, and whenever they planned a trip she could always count on spending at least one long day among contemporary works of art. At that time she had always felt uncomfortable in Martin’s rooms, not to say intimidated by things. The material was enveloped in a dangerous stillness, at once dead and alive. Whether it was just a sponge, or a piece of sacking, or a completely ordinary old pair of tailor’s scissors, it would never have occurred to her to touch these objects.

“Soon I didn’t want to travel any distance at all during the holidays, and I swore that when I was older I would never go abroad. Then I became an interpreter.”

Our empty coffee cups, the half-full ashtray. If we had been sitting in a ground-floor room, in the bluish half-light, we could have seen the steam rising from the grass, seeming to do battle with the falling raindrops. They were huddling out there, protected by the leaves, hunched, feathers puffed up, without a sound, waiting for the cloudburst to end.

“Didn’t Knut Sieverding make a film about a hamster too?” asked Katharina Fischer, recalling a winter morning when the first-years were led by their teacher into the biology lab, full of anticipation but also a bit unsure; from their primary school years they were used to being read a story on the last day before the Christmas holidays. Here in the high school the class teacher busied herself with a video player, muttering to herself, and not until the cassette had been pushed home did the pupils in the back rows quiet down like the rest.

“There was one scene that sent shivers down our spines.”

A stoat crawls into a hamster’s burrow, and Katharina Fischer remembered as though it were yesterday how tense she felt watching the intruder, because she knew the nest contained a litter of young. The stoat moves in further and further. The mother hamster clearly notices changes taking place somewhere in the intricate system of runs, perhaps the soles of her feet have picked up vibrations from the ground, or she may have sensed unusual air movements through her whiskers, or maybe it’s simply the smell of the stoat — the hamster’s head jerks up, she stops for a moment, as though she has to arrange these irritating sense perceptions into a picture. She turns, runs up along the tunnel, and suddenly the hamster and the stoat confront each other face-to-face.

Yes, she had seen Knut’s film.

“Our teacher, in the semidarkness next to the screen, completely unmoved.”

Not a coldhearted person, surely.

“No, but in that situation it just disturbed us even more, the stoat attacking a young family of hamsters, and the teacher not even flinching.”

She knew the outcome of the confrontation.

In the end the stoat withdraws from the burrow. The whole class was relieved. Such death-defying courage. All the same, the image came back to Katharina Fischer for a long time afterward, the puffed-out cheeks of the mother hamster, the sharp teeth, the little claws.

“What would Knut Sieverding have done if the defense had failed, if the stoat had got to the helpless young hamsters in their nest?”

Knut Sieverding would never have imposed that on children. A dead mother hamster and an unprotected nest, never.

“Did he look for a particularly tough hamster?”

It took him weeks to train the stoat to go so far and no further into the hamsters’ burrow, stop, and turn back after a while. The scene was planned down to the last detail, you could say it was staged, and it didn’t matter to the stoat whether a mother hamster turned up to drive it off or not.

Frau Fischer nodded absently. “A tame stoat meets a tame hamster.”

Meanwhile, far more than the intended half-hour had elapsed, we ought to be getting back to the birds. The rain was becoming heavier all the time. Anything that had not found its way into Frau Fischer’s long-term memory would have to be revised.

I unlocked the door to the egg collection again, the big yellow iron door, which I always think opens only against a certain resistance, as though higher air pressure prevails in the room behind it. As soon as the door shut behind us we could no longer hear the drumming of the rain, what pressed upon our ears now, subdued, a fine carpet of sound, was the steady noise of the recirculated air.

The walls are lined all around with display cases, you are looking into glass birds’ eyes everywhere, but the shining buttons are no more than crude indicators of the location of the sense of sight in life, uniform dark points instead of the infinitely varied, subtly shaded colors of the iris. In the short space of our walk back to work we passed countless specimens whose eyes seemed to follow us attentively right into the small square left clear for table and chairs. Here were birds of paradise in a thousand variations, the color combinations, the form of the plumage, the pose, and there house sparrows, whose varieties reveal themselves only to the patient observer: every single bird has been carefully treated to create a lifelike impression. Even a habitual visitor can occasionally succumb to the illusion that he is surrounded here not by mounted specimens but by silent observers: I sometimes experience this when I stand lost in thought at a display cabinet and discover with a shock a bird that has fallen from its base.

We sat down again at the wooden table, on two angles of a corner, close together; Frau Fischer sketched a finch in her notebook, then flipped back to the beginning of the book and looked at me, concentrating completely on the matter in hand. This I took to be my signal to stand up. I positioned myself behind the table, my thumb in the English bird book, and examined the interpreter as you would a schoolchild. We moved briskly through the Turdidae family, we touched on warblers, chats, redstarts, and thrushes, Frau Fischer had retained everything very well, I presented her with the English names and then the Latin ones, and she reeled off both German and English equivalents as though she had always known them. Just as quickly, we put titmice and sparrows behind us and came back to the finches, where we had started.

I laid a gentle finger on the gray head of a bird slightly smaller than a sparrow, with a crimson forehead and breast, its back cinnamon-colored. The answer came without hesitation: the Bluthänfling, the linnet, Latin Carduelis cannabina or — very confusingly — also Acanthis cannabina. She made a note, “unusual white edges to primary feathers,” and drew an arrow from it pointing to her linnet sketch.

The teacher posed the questions, the pupil answered, but after a while a third voice intruded into our dialogue: “If we ever go to Vienna together, you must remind me to show you the crown prince’s last eagles.”

The voice of my teacher, Ludwig Kaltenburg. He taught me to observe mounted birds as you would live creatures.

If you’re ever in Vienna, I said to Frau Fischer, you must go to the Natural History Museum and take a look at the two sea eagles that Crown Prince Rudolf of Habsburg shot a few days before his suicide. It would be hard to find such strange mounted specimens anywhere — the pose, the expression, the plumage — and remember, the taxidermist will have had not just two dead birds on the table before him as he went to work but another death on his mind, and so the two eagles, not to say the one double-headed eagle of the Habsburg emblem, became in his hands two birds with drooping feathers, bowed down with grief as though they knew on the day they were hunted that the man who ended their lives would soon take his own. They are anything but proud heraldic beasts, and perhaps that’s why the little explanatory tablet was added, otherwise such taxidermy might have been regarded in 1889 as an insult to the Crown. They’re beautiful, these two eagles from the Orth region, the wide, marshy Danube meadows, they’re far more beautiful than many a superb, lavishly spruced-up eagle specimen.

“Your teacher — was that the same Ludwig Kaltenburg who wrote The Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse?” asked Katharina Fischer.

Yes.

“The author of A Duck’s Life?”

The very same.

“Didn’t he write Archetypes of Fear too? And Studies of Young Jackdaws?”

As a young academic he made a name for himself with his work on jackdaws.

I shouldn’t have mentioned Ludwig Kaltenburg, not at that point, because now the interpreter was no longer so focused, constantly mixing up goldfinch and goldhammer, thistle finch and yellowhammer, despite the mounts in front of her. Nor could she get the names for Carduelis chloris, the greenfinch, to stick in her mind. Either she couldn’t connect one name with the other or one of the names did not match the bird.

“The goldfinch — isn’t that this bird here with the bright yellow head and yellow belly?”

No, that’s the yellowhammer, Emberiza citrinella. Citrinella, lemon-colored, that ought to be easy to remember. The goldfinch is what we call the Stieglitz. The ending of its German name betrays its Slav origins. It’s onomatopoeic, supposedly, and no doubt that’s why it eventually managed to establish itself on equal terms alongside the old Germanic name Distelfink, thistle finch. A bird translated, you might say.

But this still wasn’t enough to imprint the goldfinch on the interpreter’s long-term memory, her gaze seemed to be held by the cardboard boxes on top of the cupboard, DAMAGED NESTS, NO LABEL, NEST STANDS, perhaps she was avoiding looking at me. The goldfinch, strikingly colorful with a red face against its black-and-white head, brown body, the rump again white, the tail and wings — they have a yellow band, hence the “gold”—are black.

We had begun by discussing the fact that my voice had never taken on a local timbre, despite the sixty years I had spent in Dresden. Certain everyday expressions, of course, one or two constructions, and unconsciously, especially when I’m tired, a slight slurring of my speech. But for me Saxon has remained a foreign tongue. Sometimes I secretly envy people who are at home in a recognizable dialect or even just a regional inflection, I’ve always listened carefully, acquiring a tone here, a touch of red, a few words there, which in time ran together to form a yellow band, and I’ve mixed them all into my total speech picture, my parents’ white High German, the darker coloration of my surroundings here. You could say someone like me has a goldfinch accent, with a bit of local color picked up in every quarter.

“So I’d have to think of you as a goldfinch.”

I asked the interpreter to point out the thistle finch on the desk for me.

“This colorful one,” she said and drew a circle around her drawing of a goldfinch.

“And Ludwig Kaltenburg was your teacher? Of course, it’s easy to forget that he taught zoology in Leipzig for years. Because he was an Austrian, I always think of him as someone whose whole life was bound up with Vienna. His famous Dresden Institute. When did he leave the GDR?”

Shortly after the Wall went up. Although I’m not quite sure that Ludwig Kaltenburg ever really was in the GDR, or whether he insisted that he lived in Dresden and simply made a few excursions from here to the GDR.

“But he left for political reasons, didn’t he?”

He would have shrugged that off. “I don’t understand the finer points of ideology. I’m a zoologist. Everybody contributes in his own way.” And if his interlocutors should happen to shake their heads or put their finger to their lips or even look at him askance, Kaltenburg was always ready with a disarming smile, adding, “As a zoologist, however, I know that there can be no going back to conditions that have already been overcome.” He would have invoked Darwin, talked about “difficult struggles” and “victory over the counterrevolution,” he would have recalled the Dresden zoologist Adolf Bernhard Meyer, a passionate advocate of the theory of evolution, and finally, with expressions like “historical necessity” and “not by chance” and “in this time and place,” he would have returned to his own specialization without having blotted his copybook.

Yes, there were political reasons. Or else Ludwig Kaltenburg left out of desperation.

“You got to know him as a student, in Dresden?”

It was a renewed acquaintance. Early fifties. My parents already knew Kaltenburg. If we hadn’t had a shared background, he would hardly have noticed me: one of the many young people strolling along the Elbe and looking up at the Institute site in Oberloschwitz where the great Ludwig Kaltenburg lived with his animals. A not particularly gifted student in a full lecture hall whose name needed to be spelled out to you again at exam time.

8

POSEN MUST HAVE BEEN a strange city in my childhood. It would never have occurred to me that I was in Poland, I never heard anybody speaking Polish on the streets, Polish was prohibited in public, and I never heard the language at home either, there were Viennese, Königsberg, and Rhineland accents, but not a single word of Polish. All the roads had German names, and even the castle that you approached via Sankt-Martin-Strasse was naturally a German building. I don’t know why my parents insisted on taking this route when we went into town, past that monstrous edifice, somewhere between giant prison and baronial keep. Over that short stretch of road I became completely silent and kept my head down, the distance across the square with its pond and Bismarck statue seemed to me endless, and when we went that way I fixed my eyes on the projecting, square castle tower at the end, a stone box that was always surrounded by scaffolding, just as the castle always seemed to be undergoing building work and renovation and modification, as though it were a medieval structure that had gradually fallen into disrepair through time and war and weather, perhaps in danger of collapse, certainly always under threat, while it in turn seemed to be threatening me: the walls might not be about to fall down, but two sinister bailiffs were going to leap out from the gateway, seize the nearest passerby, and drag him off to their dungeon. A dark, prehistoric fortress, and yet the castle was hardly more than thirty years old.

Everybody knew this was where the local Gauleiter was settling in, for my parents that would have been a reason to avoid this route, I don’t know whether it was defiance or some compulsion that made them take me past the castle every time, grim, withdrawn, it had to be done. You didn’t have to be a child to be mystified by the immense deliveries of sandstone, marble, and granite to the site. Once, I remember, we were stopped, a workman was blocking the footpath, but my father wouldn’t give in, no one was going to prevent him from picking his way, hand in hand with his son, between the massive building blocks. There was almost a row, I think, we stopped, or maybe my father couldn’t find a way through the stone blocks: that was when I discovered, in a polished slab of marble, my first embedded sea snail.

What a contrast to the world of the shopping arcades, how differently they greeted me, with their comfortable temperature in summer or winter, the light, the voices, where I couldn’t get lost. The space was covered by a glass roof, and pigeons sat up there on the girders. I was in town with my mother, and while she was flitting between shops, soon going back to the first place she had tried, unable to decide in her search for a winter hat between rabbit, otter, and fox, I was allowed to play in the arcade: half in the open, half indoors, the daylight made the pigeons’ necks shimmer as the birds swooped down from above, just over the heads of the grownups, and then flew noisily with their rather clumsy-looking flight action out onto the street.

I had time to look at everything. For a long time I crouched in front of a young beagle waiting for its mistress to return, after I had established from a safe distance that its lead was firmly tied to the ring and there wasn’t too much slack in it. I knew my mother’s shopping wasn’t going to be a quick business, she had been at the furrier’s, and now she had disappeared into the haberdasher’s. I wished I could defer for as long as possible the moment when I heard my name being called, right through the arcade, people turning around to look at me, salesladies coming to their doorways to see who was missing, I would thread my way through to the familiar voice, and then as usual we would finally go over to the department store, which supplied the things we really needed.

She had chosen the otter skin. At long last my mother had also found herself a new pair of suede gloves. The climax of the department store afternoon was when we took the escalator up to the fourth floor, from one department to another, every time I looked down I felt butterflies in my stomach. Finally we had selected my warm winter underwear, they were predicting a hard winter. I wanted to go home, at last we were walking down the stairs, the last stretch, the way out, now nothing could pull us back into the showrooms that you could only see as though from a distance on every floor going down, the display stands, people, the noises, but here on the stairs, our footsteps echoing, we were no longer affected by all that activity. My mind was already fixed on the tram stop, the journey home, our kitchen, and my nanny when, just as we had almost reached the exit, there was Professor Kaltenburg coming toward us, a university colleague of my father’s.

We had to say hello to him. My mother stopped on the landing, and he too, who had been purposefully striding up the stairs as though he wanted to get to the menswear department as quickly as possible, didn’t just raise his hat in passing, he halted, held out his hand to my mother, stroked my head. and smiled, saying “What a surprise” and “My dear lady” and “Well, my boy?” I was pulled in different directions, I already saw myself back in our drawing room, why couldn’t Professor Kaltenburg go home with us? I thought, but the two of them had already begun — a child picks this up after the first few sentences — a longish conversation in the bare, windowless staircase. Of course it had not escaped me that Kaltenburg was attracted to my mother, but then he was attached to my father too, and to me. While he was paying my mother compliments, he was looking at me: “And if you don’t mind my asking such a prying question, what nice things have you been buying, then?”

She didn’t show him my underwear, thank goodness, but my mother carefully took the cap, which the professor loudly admired, out of her bag, and when the gloves emerged from their tissue paper, he had an idea. He wanted to give a lady a pair of leather gloves for Christmas, could my mother spare a minute to advise him on his choice?

There he’d been, rushing upstairs, and now he had turned right around and we were going back to the beginning of our store journey, to the ground floor, from which we had long since escaped, and once more the saleslady was taking out one pair of gloves after another.

Why, I asked myself later, did this Professor Kaltenburg not use the escalator like everybody else to go upstairs in a department store? Yet another mystery about this man. Professor Kaltenburg, the first man I ever saw wearing sunglasses, Professor Kaltenburg, who came to see us on his motorbike, Professor Kaltenburg, about whom I would continue to unearth new secrets, Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg, who has had such a decisive influence on my life. He kept his secrets until the end, from using the stairs where there was an escalator to expressing radical, albeit mystifying, self-criticism in his last letters, which reached me from distant Vienna at the end of the eighties.

His keen glance, the laughter lines around his eyes. His movements, quick and exact when it came to precise actions, but at other times awkward, unsteady, seemingly given to chance fluctuations, as though his body were performing grotesque contortions without its owner’s knowledge. Ludwig Kaltenburg, a falcon poised to swoop, wishing it were one of those gentle birds of passage moving steadily along in a great flock.

Now he was picking up a pair of dark tan gloves as though they were exactly what he’d been looking for all along. And then with a laugh he was pushing them back into the pile. Then he was glancing sidelong at my mother while she was pointing out the quality of the leather and solid seams of an expensive pair.

“You’ve got to run your hand over them carefully, here, turn the glove inside out.”

I was afraid we’d never get home for supper. In the artificial light of the store it looked to me as though the day outside had ended long before. The suede leather. The animal smell. I could hardly stand the smell there.

“No, you must have got something wrong, Professor Kaltenburg is not a colleague of your father’s at the university.”

“But isn’t he called Professor?”

“He is a professor, only in Königsberg, not here in Posen — but you know that, don’t you remember, he was talking about Königsberg back there? And he’s not a botanist.”

I knew Königsberg, that’s where Knut came from.

“So what’s he doing in our city?”

My mother hesitated for a moment. “Professor Kaltenburg is a zoologist who takes care of confused people in a big mental hospital here.”

“Confused?”

“Not just confused, of course — they’re seriously ill.”

I could tell my mother was not happy with her answer. She reflected. Then she spotted something, and: “Give the lady your seat.”

I got up off the seat, a woman pushed past me as though I didn’t exist, took my place without so much as a nod.

“And who was he talking about when he said he needed a nice pair of gloves for a lady?”

“His wife, of course — who did you think?”

I was standing in the gangway now, the tram was getting fuller all the time, my mother was holding on to me with one arm, the other was clasping the bags and boxes on her lap.

“Look, it’s raining.” And: “We’ll soon be home.”

But the words could not be wiped away. A zoologist who worked in a mental hospital. The smell of suede, and now the tram had stopped again, the damp steaming off the passengers’ coats. Hadn’t I watched a veterinary surgeon at work in a cowshed, the blood and the bellowing, the crude, bright instruments? I could see Professor Kaltenburg in a white coat, using his zoological expertise on the patients. The tram’s electric contacts were sparking. Hadn’t I watched badly injured people being carried on stretchers into courtyard entrances in the city, hadn’t I seen bandaged heads, heard cries of pain and the “Quick, quick” of the ambulance men? Professor Kaltenburg in the posture of a falconer, his gaze turned upward and his arm outstretched: I can see him — was I already seeing him like this even then? Where does a child get such imaginings from? — in solid leather gloves, adjusting some medical apparatus whose thick cables run to a patient’s bed.

9

I’D LOVE TO TAKE a close look at the bird.”

With this parting sentence outside the department store Professor Kaltenburg invited himself over to our house. My mother had told him about our starling, which, unusually for a starling, had refused to integrate into the family, did not seek company, didn’t eat properly, and showed no sign whatsoever of the ability to talk, a point my father had used to make me keen on the bird.

This starling wasn’t our first bird, and my father had taken them all to his heart, every single time. If you keep a careful lookout for nests, if you find helpless nestlings that have fallen to the ground and are either still just breathing or already completely dried up, if you cannot get enough of the sight of a bird nursery in late spring and the brood’s first attempts at flight, sooner or later, like my father, you will bring birds into the house. It may be that he simply couldn’t resist them, or maybe it was part of his plan to gradually accustom me to the presence of birds: soon we had our first fledglings in the conservatory, went collecting worms, gathering seeds in the greenhouse and using them for feed, and from then on, apart from the injured birds we took in, every spring we had orphaned youngsters to hand-rear with egg yolk, hemp seed, linseed, and poppy seed. Barley groats or bread rolls soaked in milk, groundsel and chickweed, lettuce. My father in the kitchen: “No, for this one I’ve got to mix some water in with the milk.”

I watched my father, and the birds, but I never fed them, never cleaned their cage, I didn’t even whistle, let alone touch one of these creatures. The blind, croaking, featherless, wrinkled animals in a box lined with wood shavings: I never quite dared approach them, always kept a certain distance.

“I’d love to take a close look at the bird.” By the time Professor Kaltenburg came to see us, Martin had long since left. Sometimes we still got postcards, from Erfurt at first, then from Königgrätz. He always addressed them to the family, never just to the professor of botany, and their contents were intended for all of us too, the words meant for the adults, his frequent sprinkling of little drawings aimed at the child. Then the greeting cards stopped, the last one — but I may be wrong about this — came from the Crimea, about the time when the peninsula was cut off and was being vacated, so probably in November 1943.

I noticed the dust cloud from quite a distance, a motorbike was heading from town and racing at a crazy speed down our road. I rushed around the house, my father must be in his greenhouse at the back, my mother was lying down after lunch. “There he is,” I shouted from the doorway, “he’s here,” although I couldn’t see my father anywhere in the greenhouse. His head appeared at the side between the grasses, he wiped his hands on his trousers as he came toward me, and just as he was asking, “The professor?” we heard the motorbike in front of the house. Kaltenburg switched off the engine and heaved his NSU into our driveway; he was wearing leather gloves, a leather jacket, and dark glasses against the sun, which was very low in the sky at that time of day.

My nanny stood at the kitchen window. Professor Kaltenburg pushed his glasses up onto his forehead, took off his gloves, waved toward the window, glanced around as though looking for my mother, then held out his hand to my father and laughed.

“Where’s our little patient, then?”

I followed Kaltenburg and my father into the conservatory. It was almost as though the starling had been waiting for us, it was hopping around in a lively manner in its cage, and as soon as my father opened the little door it jumped onto Professor Kaltenburg’s hand and then straight onto his shoulder and then his head. Professor Kaltenburg wasn’t in the least taken aback, even when the young starling messed up his hair and started investigating the sunglasses, tugging at them until they finally fell to the ground, Kaltenburg laughed and talked to the creature. I stood to one side with my father, and later I realized that from that afternoon onward the memory of my father began to fade.

Today I know so much more about Ludwig Kaltenburg’s life than I do about my own parents’. Admittedly, over the decades Kaltenburg frequently talked to me about himself, right up until his death, presenting particular episodes in varying lights — my parents were not granted that much time. But I think it started that afternoon when Kaltenburg first visited us. He was soon telling me how he had reared animals even as a child, how at that moment in Posen he didn’t have the company of a single living thing, how he nearly became director of a zoo, and how in America, where his father sent him to study, he had spent all his time going to the beach to collect marine specimens, since he didn’t understand a word of the lecturers’ English. Kaltenburg came from Austria, was a full professor in Königsberg, and spent some time in Posen. The places where my parents had lived — I can’t think of any apart from Posen, except for our stay in Dresden. Where did they grow up, where did they meet, where did my father study? Where did we live before we moved to Posen? Did they share a common past in Dresden? I knew nothing about any of it.

In Posen they must have been regarded as outsiders, otherwise it’s hard to explain why I have so few pictures in my mind of my parents’ social life. I can’t remember any social occasions at home, it may be that my father really was rather isolated among his colleagues. Perhaps that was why he put so much effort into cultivating Kaltenburg’s friendship, just as Kaltenburg did into gaining his. Although they were both in their late thirties, I envisage my father as the younger man and Kaltenburg as the older of the two, no doubt because of later images, snow-white hair framing a tanned face radiating health.

“Is it really true,” I asked him, “that you took some live ducks with you to Königsberg, and all the other professors were amazed?”

“Yes, I did, by the crateful, and I lugged fish over there as well, and kept them in the institute.”

Professor Kaltenburg has become world-famous, but I have never yet discovered whether my father was a leading light in his subject, and in later years, to spare myself painful memories of him, I have never looked up my father’s books or articles. As an adult, however, I have been comforted to hear from Knut, Martin, and others who attended his lectures at the University of Posen that he was a good teacher who inspired enthusiasm in his students for the plant world. And given the unspectacular nature of most botanical phenomena, that is no mean feat.

Kaltenburg inquired in detail about the feed we were giving the starling, about its care, my father answered obligingly, Kaltenburg nodded, Professor Kaltenburg shook his head, he asked whether my father had caught and reared the bird himself, no, he had bought it, Kaltenburg wanted to know who from, while the starling was continually looking for new places in the conservatory from which to fly at the professor, my father named the dealer, and Kaltenburg shrugged: “I know him well, of course, and I’ve got to say he’s reliable enough.”

The two of them arranged that Kaltenburg should take care of the bird himself for a few days so that he could observe it. They looked at me as though my agreement mattered to them, I nodded, I didn’t mind, I wasn’t attached to the bird. Privately I hoped Professor Kaltenburg would succeed where my father hadn’t, and teach it to talk.

Our guest didn’t want any tea, at any rate not just yet, perhaps later, my mother would join us. But he would be interested in a tour of the greenhouse. He let my father show him his favorite plants; Kaltenburg kept giving him a sharp, or rather surprised, sidelong glance while my father immersed himself in his plant world. My father was attracted by the less conspicuous, often overlooked grasses, herbs, flowers, his interest wasn’t sparked by the cultivated type, and ultimately not even by any that grew from seed sown by human hand. Then it was my father’s turn to suddenly raise his head and take a sidelong look at Kaltenburg as the latter examined a plant which had recently been brought in. Two men, as it might have seemed to an observer, who were doing some cautious footwork around each other for the moment, as though unclear whether this was leading to a friendship or was just preparation for a fight.

Striped goosefoot and fat-hen, spreading orach, redroot amaranth, black nightshade, and smooth sow thistle: my father showed me them all on our walks, I can still recite them by heart, but soon I’ll have forgotten them again. Oblong-leaf orach and flixweed or tansy mustard, wall rocket, prickly lettuce, Canadian horseweed: my father regularly audited the railway embankment not far from the house. “Look, we’ve never seen these tiny flowers before, and the panicle there.” He crawled around in the grass, carefully freeing the roots with a trowel. And up there on the embankment the slow-moving trains, made up of a few passenger cars and countless cattle wagons, in which the animals never stirred, where are they heading for? I asked my father.

“To the east — don’t you know your compass points?”

I learned to distinguish white from black henbane, my father held up two stalks with hairy leaves and small flowers, “You must never, ever touch this plant, or that one, do you understand?” Whether it was black or white henbane, “I warn you — if I ever catch you with either of them,” the green, yellow, white, black flowers, my father warned me, but he never got as far as a threat.

What kind of mental picture was that? I wonder suddenly, flocks from beyond the Urals and from the plains to the west, the beautiful dusky plumage, here shimmering like freshly boiled pitch, there matte black like tar that has become brittle with cold, and then in places this fine ash-gray layer, like that on smoldering old wood that no breath of wind has touched for a long while.

Professor Kaltenburg took enough birdfeed with him for the next few days. We fussed over fastening the blanket-covered cage to the luggage rack of his motorbike. All three of us were waving: my father, my mother, and me.

When the starling came back to its familiar surroundings it seemed a different bird, so interested and alert as it investigated the plants, its sleeping quarters, the whole conservatory. But it never did learn to talk.

10

I HAVE TO FORCE MYSELF to recall the last clear visual memories I have of my father, as though I were afraid, as I was then, of meeting his eye. I stand there hanging my head — the stone floor of the hall, the wooden boards in the conservatory, the carpet in our drawing room — and I can no longer see my father’s face. Shame? Certainly I lowered my eyes because I felt shame, I was ashamed because my father had been shamed. Pain too, for sure, because if you let pain happen to someone else, if you don’t protect him and then don’t even ease his pain afterward, you yourself feel hurt. But worse still was the betrayal. I didn’t look my father in the eye because I had betrayed him, and knew that he knew it as well as I did.

I was hanging around in the conservatory with our tame starling. When can that have been? Kaltenburg’s first visit took place in the late autumn of 1942, and from then on close contacts developed between the two of them. My father was going to meet Professor Kaltenburg in town after his lecture. No, Maria had better count him out for dinner, he had arranged to see Kaltenburg, who had promised to give him a copy of his latest article. “Most interesting as usual, what he’s got to say about the differences between wild and domestic animals. But ‘interesting’ is not the word — this essay will be epoch-making, no doubt about it. And then please remember that the professor is coming over for a meal on Friday.”

I have a feeling that Professor Kaltenburg even spent a Christmas with us. So it went on, for at least one winter. And then, in spring, or by the summer of 1943 at the latest, if not 1944, at home the name Kaltenburg was deleted from our vocabulary from one day to the next.

The bird sand crunched beneath my feet, I was leaning on the back of the armchair between the indoor palm and the rubber tree trying to keep quiet, moving my mouth silently as though still trying to teach our starling to talk. His cage, its door usually stood open, and in the corner the box with the injured blue-throat, and then all the equipment, feeding bowls and water bowls, pipettes, wooden rods, seed mixtures, accumulated over time to form an immense armory. The door of my father’s study was ajar, the low voices of two men in the background, and by concentrating hard I could make out a sentence here or there, especially when Professor Kaltenburg was speaking.

“I can give you a cast-iron guarantee.”

The starling — didn’t we ever give it a name? — was pecking around in the pot of the rubber tree, it wasn’t particularly interested in me, it never landed on my head as it did with the professor.

“In that case, I feel reassured.”

My father, more quietly, speaking as though he and Kaltenburg were not sitting in the same room. I was still trying to guess what they were talking about, all the while ready to make out that I was busy with our starling, in case anyone came in.

“As far as the other matter is concerned, well, we’ve talked about that often enough.”

They laughed. Then my father was obviously waiting for Kaltenburg to go on.

“The blue-throat.”

“Yes?”

Did the starling really have to poke around in the dry rubber-tree leaves at that precise moment? I was powerless, because if I shooed it away I would be discovered. I reached out for it very slowly, I still didn’t know whether I was actually going to take hold of the bird, but then it fluttered away, into the palm tree. My father and Professor Kaltenburg were now talking more loudly.

“You know my opinion, and I’m sticking to it.”

“Please, that’s ridiculous, just because of a blue-throat with a broken wing.”

Up to that point their talk had seemed half joking, but now I wasn’t so sure. Somebody walked restlessly up and down, was it my father, was it Kaltenburg, somebody lit a cigarette, somebody closed the window.

“Yes, it’s harmful to take on injured animals, I don’t mean for the animal, but for your boy.”

“Kindness to the creature is harmful? Just tell me, where’s the harm in arousing a child’s sympathy for the suffering of a living being?”

My father’s voice faltered. Kaltenburg, on the other hand — it seemed that the more agitated his interlocutor became, the calmer he was.

“You want to help, but you can’t. An animal that has no chance of surviving in the wild won’t do so under your well-meaning but misguided care either.”

“But all the same, it’s absurd to talk about an atmosphere of death.”

“An atmosphere of death”: that was the first and only time I ever heard my father use that phrase. It was a Kaltenburg expression. My father did his best to sound as though he were putting it in quotation marks, a dubious construction that could have come only from an Austrian. He imitated a Viennese accent, trying to wound Kaltenburg, to silence him. But Kaltenburg was not so easily hurt; indeed, Professor Kaltenburg found it easy to ignore such attacks.

“Tell me straight out, and then I’ll forever hold my peace: has there really been a single occasion when you succeeded in rescuing a sick or injured animal, have any of these birds ever survived, have you managed to return any of them to the wild?”

My nanny was calling me. Otherwise it was quiet. Kaltenburg was genial, he was waiting, he was in no hurry, my father should take his time before answering. He wasn’t interested in scoring a point in this contest between two grown men, what he cared about was “the boy,” me. I could see him sitting at my father’s desk, his hands resting on the leather writing mat, to his left an open botanical reference book, an ashtray on the right. Kaltenburg leaned back while my father, a guest in his own room, searched for an answer.

For a long time, neither man spoke. Kaltenburg stood firm. The atmosphere of death, he insisted, would affect me, might determine my relationship with the world.

My father was no longer walking up and down. Then he said, almost inaudibly, “No.”

Maria was calling. I found it hard to take my eyes off the blue-throat in its box. Eventually I was being called from the kitchen for the third time, I turned away. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I gradually began to grasp what Kaltenburg, who refused to be put off by my father that afternoon, meant by “atmosphere of death”: he told me about his time as a POW, or the thoughts he had about Dresden in his darker hours, and how he had always shrunk from certain people, certain places, as though scared of being exposed to a pathogen for which there was no effective remedy. When I was listening from the other room that day, “atmosphere of death” simply hovered in the air as a mere phrase with which I associated as little as I did with those opening sentences I had heard through the open door, Kaltenburg’s friendly words: “I can give you a cast-iron guarantee,” and my father’s reply: “In that case, I feel reassured.”

Is this the atmosphere of death? I wondered in bed that night, because Professor Kaltenburg did not stay as planned, my father spent the evening in his study, he came out briefly to eat. The two men had parted with a handshake but without saying a word — did that mean we had been plunged into a permanent atmosphere of death? I had to keep reminding myself that this was all over nothing but a sick blue-throat, but nonetheless after Kaltenburg’s departure something weighed heavily on the house.

My mother looked in on me. She too was agitated, I could tell by the way she fiddled with her blouse as she sat on the edge of my bed trying to explain the argument to me: “We know we’re not running a veterinary practice. But the professor has no right to interfere in your education, that’s our job, you are our child. How do we know what other views Professor Kaltenburg holds that might influence a young boy — a boy who is basically a stranger to him — without the parents ever finding out about it? But this outburst of Kaltenburg’s probably has nothing to do with birds or with you, he’s simply overwrought. No, this awful animal business isn’t important — which makes the rift between your father and Professor Kaltenburg all the more tragic.”

An image of crows, I can’t quite place it, flickers briefly in my memory: at first you see a single scout, loudly croaking in all directions, and the next minute the sky blackens. Enormous flocks from Siberia. Flocks from the Elbe region. Rooks, hooded crows, carrion crows, they join forces in winter.

The way he pulled on his helmet, got on his motorbike, disappeared over the horizon: as if Kaltenburg — who had wistfully stroked my hair just one last time — was leaving us to our fate, as if all his efforts to persuade had been in vain, and we would never see him again. But I wanted to see Professor Kaltenburg again. I haggled with myself — if I nodded at the professor’s words, even if I could barely comprehend them, did it mean that I was betraying my parents? Did I have to declare myself either for my father and mother or for Kaltenburg?

A blue-throat with a broken wing: if I’d had my way, we would have put the bird out in the garden, Professor Kaltenburg would come back without hesitation, the friendship would be renewed, and this depressing day forgotten.

Siberian crows love being swept along on the first flurries of a snowstorm, their wings spread out on the wind as black as briquettes, the snowflakes dancing around their plumage. And there’s something glowing, a red glow, a bluish glow, as well as a soft brown. A jay that memorized the whereabouts of its food caches in its sleep.

Ludwig Kaltenburg was to initiate me into the laws of the animal world, show me what they could do and where their limits were, where we humans make unreasonable demands on animals and are disappointed when they don’t live up to our expectations. Why is it that children turn so willingly to such minor players as Professor Kaltenburg and are prepared to forgive them everything? Since he was competing with the professor, my father had not the least chance of prevailing with his own son.

It wasn’t until three decades later that I discovered the real cause of the break between Kaltenburg and my father. I wasn’t trying to find out, it simply hit me in the face one day, I couldn’t avoid it, and to this day it gives me a stab of pain to the heart whenever I think how late the discovery came, too late for me to apologize to my long-dead father and take his side.

11

WHERE DID I FIRST SEE that image of crows? In its density, its darkness, a flock of uniformly black rooks, among them a few hooded crows, I could easily make them out by their gray markings. And now the gray patches were wheeling away, drawing the black ones with them, the cloud lurched to one side and out of the picture.

“They said on the radio that Paris has been liberated.”

My father tapped the cigarette ash on the side of his cup. It sizzled in the cold tea. Astonished, he raised his eyes from his newspaper and pushed the cup aside. “Not a word about these things outside this house, remember, not to your friends, not at school,” he said to me, as though he’d given too much away.

I can still see the way my mother laughed, though I can’t remember why, I can see her freshly starched white blouse. Was it the same one she wore for Kaltenburg’s last visit? Irritated, my father folded the newspaper.

“What an unbearably stupid rag.”

And my mother, getting a clean cup from the cupboard: “Oh come on, don’t take it so much to heart.”

By then it was a long time since we’d had any visitors. Professor Kaltenburg was on active service, from what we’d heard Knut must be in Crete, and we had no idea where Martin was. My father lit another cigarette, glanced out at the garden, suddenly the room was filled with bright sunshine, the stove, the edge of the armchair, and the triangle on the carpet, my father narrowed his eyes as though hatching a plan.

There they sat with their son in the drawing room, this ill-matched couple, my parents. My mother, with hair pinned up, was brushing at the cloth on the small table as though there were crumbs to sweep away. She was always drawn to the city, and at first she may not have been altogether keen on this house at the edge of the fields. “But just think of the child,” my father will have said, and she had given way, her husband needed to be close to nature, in the concrete desert among so many people he would wither away, and it wasn’t that far to the tram terminus, to the stores, cafés, and arcades. Building work on the castle had stopped some time before.

Another event comes to mind — when was it, on the same day he mentioned Paris, did it follow Professor Kaltenburg’s disappearance, and was there some connection between the two things?

Of course, at that time my father had to work on useful plants. Cereal yields needed to be increased. There was a feverish race on to replace petroleum with vegetable oils. New medicines were required for the wounded. But his private greenhouse was his own domain, for a long time my father had succeeded in fending off all claims on it. His wild grasses he owed to the wind, to the animals, and to travelers who unwittingly brought back seeds from all over the world, on their shoes, on their sleeves. And the specially heated corner for exotics — I can remember the times when I was allowed to put my hand into the glass casing, very still, warm — and my father was scared that even a grownup like Professor Kaltenburg might be careless enough to break off a bloom.

Yet now, in the wake of the intensive educational measures introduced for his son’s benefit, the botanist had become passionate about bird life. Which, as one can well imagine, created considerable problems, since birds do not just perch picturesquely on branches and savor the amenities offered by plants, rather in the manner of museum visitors; they are also inclined to feed on this attractive display. All the same, my father continued to bring birds into the house, and never once complained as, in the course of time, they devoured everything. It even seemed to me that he actually encouraged the birds to help themselves to the rarest specimens in the botanical inventory, and derived immense pleasure — verging on insanity, as I now think — from seeing whether a native bird enjoyed the flavor of a foreign flower. But perhaps he was pleased because, like any other child, I took a boundless delight in this destruction, not, as some people would imagine, out of childish brutality, but because of a child’s certainty that this world, which for adults is solid and fixed, is continuously changing. When I think what our conservatory looked like toward the end…

Presumably at some point, from one day to the next, my father was forced to replace the collection he had painstakingly assembled in the greenhouse over the years. That’s how I see it today. A moment which must have represented a great defeat for him. To me it was a riotous plant-feast. Perhaps that helped my father take his mind off the despair.

Early in the evening he came to fetch me from the kitchen, where I was sitting as my mother and nanny were planning the coming week. He put a finger to his lips, I was supposed to slip out of the kitchen unobtrusively — yet everybody except me was surely in the know about what was going on. I followed him into the conservatory, which scarcely warranted its name of “winter garden,” since by then it contained hardly any green plants, just bare, half-chewed stems with a few isolated dried-out leaves languishing in their pots. My father told me to entice the tame bird we had reared out of its cage, which always stood open. Was it the nameless starling? Or another bird, a blackbird? I can’t remember. Walking through the garden, my father held the bird carefully, only releasing it when we had reached the greenhouse and the door was shut behind us.

Apparently everything had been planned well in advance, my father had made a space by clearing away pots and tools and had brought in garden chairs. Hour after hour, until it got dark, we watched the bird setting about the plants, rooting around in the garden mold, plucking the fresh shoots, and pecking fiercely at the juicy leaves until they were an indefinable green mass, more like chopped spinach. We sat watching as though spellbound, made friendly bets on which plant the bird would move on to next, trying to outdo each other in estimating how much damage an individual plant would suffer.

I woke up in the middle of the night. From the garden came a regular scraping noise, interrupted by a longish pause. I didn’t get up, didn’t go to the window, I didn’t even open my eyes. I knew: my father was sweeping up the plant debris next to the greenhouse. The next day all the beds were freshly laid out with castor-oil plants.

12

IT WAS VERY EARLY in the morning, not yet light. I listened. Nobody in the house seemed to be awake. Ice on my window, not a glimpse of the world outside. But if I was the only one awake, then I was alone, because it meant my nanny wasn’t up yet either, and she always got up before us and lit the oven. I left the bedroom in my pajamas, no light in the corridor, and as I was placing one bare foot in front of the other on the stairs, half hesitant and half impatient, a word came to my mind. I didn’t know what it meant, I didn’t know where I’d heard it, but I could hear it being spoken quietly in my nanny’s voice: “Jerzyk.”

Slowly, with the word echoing in my ears, slowly I opened the kitchen door: my nanny was sitting at the table under the lamp, her cardigan around her shoulders, she looked across at me: “Why are you so surprised? Still asleep? Aren’t you going to say good morning? Or has something happened?”

I shook my head and went to the stove, where she laid out my clothes every morning. This must be a scene from the winter before we left Posen. So my nanny can’t have been fired after all.

Maria. I don’t have as many memories of my nanny as I should. And this is the last of them. Besides, they are rather hazy, shot through with doubts, nor have they gained in clarity with age. I have no idea what became of her. Maria’s arms were soft, and I was always surprised just how soft such slender arms could be. I can remember her scent, I would recognize it anywhere today. As if she ate fruit whose aroma permeated her skin and filled the air. Her hair — I remember Maria having very fine hair, I can see every strand of it above her small ears, how it hugged her head, combed back and pinned down. But its color — my memory ranges between brunette and black. As if memory depended on the angle of the light. Maria’s hair in the late afternoon when she was urging me to do my homework. When I was allowed to play out in the garden until dark. Maria’s hair when she put me to bed. The way it shone in the early morning over the stove with the glow from the iron hotplate.

I got dressed, Maria made cocoa, shoved a log into the range fire, it was almost ten to seven by the big kitchen clock. I stood at the cold window in trousers and pullover, snow was falling. It would soon be light, the snow on the ground had a violet shimmer, as if illuminated from inside. I could no longer hear the half-sung Polish word, the voice had stopped perhaps when Maria spoke to me from her place at the table as I came in. Soon the roof of the house next door would be indistinguishable from the sky, and the snow a deep blue expanse. It would rapidly turn light blue like the coverlet on a child’s crib, and under a blue-gray sky it would finally take on a white coloration. Then the day’s first Siberian crows would let the wind carry them in the gentle snowfall.

“Come on, your cocoa is ready.”

I turned round. Only then did I notice the suitcases in the corner by the kitchen bench.

13

JERZYK. THE SWIFT. My first Polish word, as I realized years later, talking to a Polish colleague. Maria must have uttered it on the evening of my confrontation with the swift in the drawing room, while I sat huddled on the kitchen bench bewildered by what was happening to me. That childhood experience had changed me, no doubt about that, but I’m sure I would have regarded it as no more than an isolated incident but for another bird encounter shortly after we arrived in Dresden. Once again my parents were absent, and this time they probably never found out about it. Although, it now occurs to me, they might have experienced the same thing at the same time, if they were alive.

I am talking about the birds I saw that night in the Great Garden. In the darkness I couldn’t be at all sure it was birds, which made these objects, these things, these clumps all the more sinister. I didn’t understand what they were until the sun had come up, pale sun, hidden behind black, gray-black clouds of smoke that covered the horizon and towered high into the sky.

That night, as I was wandering through the park, something hit me hard on the shoulder. Not a punch, not an animal pouncing on me from behind, nor a broken branch spinning through the air and splintering on the ground. The sound was both muffled and solid, and when the object touched the ground it rolled on for a bit. I picked it up, rather sticky, crumbly, its surface rough, I lifted it to eye level, a lump of tar perhaps, or just a cinder. I put my nose to it — but in a reflex reaction I hurled it as far away as I could. What I had smelled was burned flesh.

The next blow was to my head. I raced off. I tore around between the trees and craters and people in the clearing, and the longer I raced, the more desperate my situation seemed, these clumps were falling everywhere, and even when I thought I might catch my breath, at the exposed root of a massive oak or in the shadow of a freestanding wall, I could hear them hitting the ground all around me, getting nearer, closing in on me, these birds falling dead from the sky.

Woodpeckers that had escaped from their hole in a burning tree. A tawny owl on the hunt torn out of its normally stoic, deathlike calm by the outbreak of fire and the noise of the bombers, flapping wildly in an effort to put out the flames that had moved from its tail coverts to its secondary feathers. And wood pigeons which had shot up into the air when the din started, to fly toward the Elbe, and in those tremendous temperatures had been incinerated in midflight even at high altitudes. The many ducks, crowded together in the ice-free area of a pond, where they felt safe from all enemies: how could I tell a spoonbill from a teal, or a widgeon or a tufted duck, or a goldeneye or a pochard, since all were burned on the water at the same time?

Maybe some animals in the Great Garden were simply vaporized. Crows, of course, enormous flocks of rooks, hooded and carrion crows, roosting up in the trees. There may have been one or two bramblings among the birds. And waxwings, which, arriving from the north in the depths of winter, were unexpectedly roasted that night.

The entire stock of birds spending the night in the park appeared to have gone up in flames, one after another. I thought I could identify the remains of some species next morning despite their disfiguration, insofar as the heat had not reduced them to formless matter, to ashes, or to nothing at all. The migratory birds, it seems, had come to a considered decision to take off in the autumn, as if they wisely foresaw what was to happen here in February.

A singed mute swan with a featherless neck and bare wings, apparently no longer fully conscious, fell tottering onto its side as it tried to stand up, stayed there in a daze for a while, and then tried to get up again — it was then that I noticed it simply had no feet.

Flamingos too, if I remember rightly, I saw a row of bald, deep gray flamingos, which must have fled from the bombed-out zoo into the Great Garden. The firestorm must have burned off their gorgeous pink plumage, they were only just recognizable by their large bills, charred and slightly twisted. The burned-horn smell, bags of skin, like leather, but still keeping their shape, as though a shock process had drawn off all their body fluids, which is in fact what had happened. Mummified creatures, the flamingos required only embalming and binding with cloth to become bird mummies like the sacred ibises of ancient Egypt.

I ran. And I talked. I must have been talking aloud to myself while I walked next day, the fourteenth of February, through this city I didn’t know — and on that morning it would not have been recognized by its long-term inhabitants. The day before I had quietly followed my mother as she pointed out an architectural detail here, remembered an episode from her Dresden years there, and when we sat in the café in the afternoon I simply gazed with astonishment at the street scene as I was spooning up my cocoa. But now I was wandering through the streets talking loudly, and perhaps if I had kept my mouth shut I wouldn’t have been noticed and subsequently picked up, for on this Ash Wednesday there were countless people walking around Dresden, looking for relatives or for their own houses. I have no memory of the third air raid, at midday: did I follow the crowds to the Elbe meadows, did I try to shelter beyond the station? All I know is that everywhere I went it was burning, from dawn to sunset. Buildings were collapsing, the howling in the air, and yet aboveground an almost rural stillness spread through the city, no shouting or calling, people staring silently into the flames as if mesmerized by the crackling. It’s possible that by the noon air raid I had long since put the city behind me and was wandering through a suburb, in the direction of Heidenau: a lone figure who wouldn’t stop talking when spoken to or questioned. I don’t know what I was saying or who spoke to me, or what their questions or advice may have been — perhaps that’s why to this day I have no memory of the last hours of my parents’ lives, perhaps it was fully explained to me that same evening or soon after, and not a word of it sank in.

14

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO my mistrust? It had evaporated the moment Katharina Fischer stepped into the Zoological Collection. I told her how Ludwig Kaltenburg had warned me repeatedly, “Watch out for female interpreters, especially the young, pretty ones who are amenable to a private conversation outside official talks, even if it’s only a few words. Yes, they keep their eyes open, all the time, and they are better listeners than anybody else.”

I would put the birds I had lined up back in their glass cases later, and before I went home I would linger for a while in the windowless room with our native finches. Frau Fischer had collected her things, notebook and pencil; I handed her the Peterson, which she had nearly forgotten. The loaded backpack was slung over her shoulder, I locked the egg sets away.

“Have you followed your teacher’s advice, then?”

For forty years. Sometimes Professor Kaltenburg struck a confidential note, at other times he proclaimed his warning with burning intensity. And yet it was completely unnecessary, in my case at least. Unlike Kaltenburg, I have never led a delegation, and I’ve never been offered the services of an interpreter for my own personal use — after all, I’m no great authority, I’ve never been the guest of honor anywhere. And anyway, he wasn’t revealing any secrets to me. An interpreter had to be reliable, absolutely trustworthy, dedicated, attentive, and communicative. Everybody knew that.

“If everyone was in the picture and choosing their words carefully, was there also an unspoken agreement among colleagues not to be distracted by the finer points of ideology, as Ludwig Kaltenburg put it?”

Neither by the finer points nor by the crudeness. Naturally there are always people who don’t feel bound by agreements. But without international exchanges we and our subject would have gone under a long time ago. At this very moment, for example, as we stand in this normally quiet corridor, countless birds are traveling around the globe, no longer under their own wing power but in padded envelopes, while our specimens lie on desks in distant foreign institutes where colleagues are studying them intensively. Observing and collecting go on everywhere, all the time. No matter what the conditions, you might say that an ornithologist is someone committed, first and foremost, to the world of birds.

There was one more thing I wanted to show Katharina Fischer before she left. She followed me into the skin collection, which in contrast to the egg collection may initially have a sobering effect on the visitor: there are no old glass cases or wooden cabinets here, no mounted specimens and egg sets on black cotton wool. The rows of compact fitted pull-out cupboards give no clue to their contents. Close to the door, the first big worktable, there are others stretching right back to the end of the room. Your eyes search involuntarily for somewhere to rest in this space.

Frau Fischer viewed with interest what was lying at the front of the table: the latest arrival, which had come in the day before from the taxidermist, a young greenfinch sent by a private donor, its neck probably broken by a windowpane. Your eyes range over the yellow propoxur flakes used to control museum beetle, over the transparent bags used for freezing the birds, which are then taken one by one out of the deep freeze for treatment, and over the array of letters requesting loan items.

There is a regular exchange, so that if a colleague indicates, however discreetly, that he is afraid he is about to go mad, then without any ifs or buts you will send him the assistance he needs. Especially as it often takes only a small gesture to help the endangered person, perhaps with a supply of bird rings. This was the request from a British ornithologist, interned in a POW camp in Bavaria, sent in 1944 to his colleague Reinhold in Berlin. In order to keep himself occupied and avoid his fellow prisoners’ dull activities, he had begun to observe the barn swallows in the camp. From morning till night he kept an eye on the nests the birds had built under the hut roofs, watched them as they brooded, as they reared their young, and he hit upon the idea of using this empty, open-ended time to do some research. But in order to find out which mating pairs used the same nest for their second brood as for the first, he had to ring the swallows.

“Reinhold sent him some bird rings?”

Yes, even though he was not very pleased with our wartime opponents, especially since they had dropped a high-explosive bomb on the songbird hall of his Natural History Museum.

The interpreter shook her head, as though emerging from a daydream back into the real world. Perhaps outsiders always need a little time, some quiet moments to get used to this unusual room, before you can show them some carefully chosen specimens. A bird skin — I had picked up the young greenfinch from the table — must feel good lying in your hand, when you see it you should really want to hold it. But however well the specimen is prepared, painstakingly stuffed with wadding, its feathers perfectly preserved and carefully dressed, the most important thing about it is the label. The species name, of course, date and place where found, the finder himself, data on size and sex, sometimes the taxidermist’s name and any toxic material used in the preparation — if these details are missing, then even the most superb skin ceases to be a research specimen and becomes a mere decorative object.

“So an individual bird not only supplies information about itself and its species but will also tell you something about the people who discovered, named, and prepared it, and possibly last saw it alive.”

The name of Gustav Kramer on a label will remind any ornithologist that this colleague discovered how birds navigate by a solar compass, and he will also be reminded that Kramer was killed in 1959 during a mountain tour in southern Italy trying to climb up to the nest of a pair of rock pigeons.

I led Frau Fischer to a pull-out cabinet and opened a drawer containing sections of our finch collection. The birds lay tightly packed, finches from Russia, finches from Italy. A rock sparrow from Kazakhstan, where our own thistle finch and their gray-head meet and intermingle. Our last large consignment of finches came from Görlitz, where the customs people had confiscated the birds on their way from Belarus to a Brussels restaurant. All those already dead on arrival at the German border were passed on to us. In a second drawer there were Saxon finches from the last one hundred and fifty years. The offspring of a linnet and a thistle finch, next to it a cross between a finch and a canary, such as breeders commonly used to produce.

“So when you look at bird skins you see people you know.”

Or used to know. Friends. I felt that more keenly than ever before during the preparations for the move from the city center out to the collection’s new building. During the few weeks I spent going through all the holdings, I examined skins that I hadn’t seen for years, and while I was packing up in one department after another I found that beside the systematic organization of the collection a completely different network of connections had developed. Birds I had first come across in a film by Knut Sieverding turned out to be in the same drawer as a species discovered by the aforementioned Reinhold — and it was Reinhold who had helped Knut to land his first big filming commission. Night herons, great tits, birds of paradise, magpies, starlings, a crow from Ludwig Kaltenburg’s Institute, lay next to a glassy-eyed crow collected by Christian Ludwig Brehm in 1810 and personally prepared by him: I found new interconnections everywhere.

And then, installing everything here in its new space, I noticed two bird skins which had lain peaceably side by side for more than half a century. One was a representative of a subspecies of reed bunting, unfortunately no longer officially recognized, on which someone — no doubt one of my predecessors — had bestowed the binomial second term kaltenburgi, in honor of Ludwig Kaltenburg. The other was an ordinary local reed bunting prepared by Eberhard Matzke, whom Kaltenburg would later stubbornly insist on seeing as his powerful adversary.

“I can imagine it sometimes feels a bit uncanny when you know the birds so well. Or is it the other way round — the more you know about them, the more familiar they become?”

I pushed the drawer back into the cabinet. Katharina Fischer still had to pick up her coat. If I had observed correctly, in the course of the afternoon the birds had become more familiar to her too, although we hadn’t done much more than bandy names around and keep our eyes carefully fixed on the row of finches as we did so. I asked her if she remembered the chaffinch sitting on a branch.

“Certainly.”

That chaffinch used to be Martin Spengler’s pet bird. That is to say, it lived in the room Martin used as a studio and where he slept, you couldn’t call it an apartment. One day the chaffinch simply dropped off its perch. Such a small organism can’t take too much turpentine in the atmosphere. It might now be numbered among the forgotten birds if Martin hadn’t bequeathed it to the collection.

As we were about to say our goodbyes, it occurred to Frau Fischer to ask me what had made me take a special interest in goldfinches. “Was it while you were a child in Posen?”

No, not until later, when both Posen and childhood were behind me. For me the goldfinch was associated with Dresden. There was a chaotic time lasting several months, or maybe it was only weeks, when I stayed in various places, and I could easily have finished up in an orphanage but for a family that was prepared to take an orphan along with their own three children. I never really felt at home there, though the parents tried hard. But I suppose by the age of eleven, or almost twelve, you’re too old to fit in with a new family. I soon began roaming about in the more deserted parts of the city, the mounds of rubble, the thistle-covered areas, it was the thistles that brought the goldfinches to Dresden.

She nodded, thanked me, shook my hand, and turned to go. The rain had stopped. Then she turned around again in the doorway to say, “If you’d like, I’ll phone and let you know how the job went.”

It was getting dark, I saw Katharina Fischer getting into her car, she gave me a last wave, her brake lights came on briefly, and the engine started. The car turned out of the car park into the drive, the red taillights disappeared, and while the glass door was slowly closing before me, I recalled how hard it was for me as a child to accept that what we called a sea swallow was not a swallow but a tern, and what we knew as an Alpine crow was not related to the crow family at all but was a kind of chough, and so on with a whole host of names — I just couldn’t get it into my head that birds are not attached to their names in the way we are attached to names, even when we know they’re misleading. No matter how well my parents explained it to me, they could name as many species as they liked, I simply refused to accept that the mountain finch didn’t live in the mountains, the oystercatcher did not live on oysters, and the plumage of the purple gallinule was not purple but indigo through and through. It certainly didn’t help when my parents persisted in telling me that my exciting discovery about the swift had been due to the fact that despite its Latin name it does have legs — I didn’t want to hear anything about swifts. Today I know all about the bastardized Latin and Greek, about the crude misunderstandings and twisted spellings, the hair-raising mistakes of translation and observation. All the same, I have never quite given up thinking that you have to get to know every single bird individually to learn anything about the unique characteristics of its kind.