Kaltenburg

1

IONCE KEPT JACKDAW specimens under my nose for six weeks. It must have been in the midsixties, and I’ve never forgotten the smell of jackdaw since. You won’t know what I mean unless you know their characteristic smell. Rather pungent. If you filter out the overriding smell of naphthalene, it smells like leather at first. Having pinned down this smell in turn, if you go on holding the specimen to your nose, it will feel more and more as though you have a powder on your tongue that just won’t mix with saliva. A hint of burned tar when you rub it between your fingers. But not of cold ash. No, cold ash would have upset me.

A Danish colleague had asked me to check out something for him in connection with our jackdaws, I think beak anomalies were his field, and he was following up some ideas arising from the work he had done on jackdaws in recent years. It was a favor, a routine investigation such as we often undertake for each other; you send a specimen for comparison to someplace on the other side of the world, and only if the colleague there notices any discrepancies do you make the trip yourself to look at the foreign bird specimens. To carry out this friendly act with the utmost conscientiousness will not have taken me long, since I knew our jackdaws so well, but then they lay — while the Danish specimen had long since been returned to its homeland — half the winter long on the desk in front of me. They were Ludwig Kaltenburg’s jackdaws.

I can see the jackdaws at play in the Dresden sky above the slopes of the Elbe valley, as though putting on a performance for me and Ludwig Kaltenburg, standing on the big balcony. And Kaltenburg, who must have watched this display countless times, who had surely never known a sunset over the city without the black dots wheeling in the evening sky above, was following their mock aerial battles, nosedives, and antics as if his protégés were showing off their skills purely for the visitor’s benefit. Soon he was completely absorbed in the sight of his jackdaw flock, which made its way home at dusk. It was as though he were seeing them for the first time.

I never saw Kaltenburg so concerned about any of his other animals as he was about the jackdaws. I remember him giving me a protracted explanation of why they needed bringing in every evening. Protracted, not because Kaltenburg expressed himself in complicated sentences or because his language wasn’t vivid — there was no one who could describe something as clearly as Professor Kaltenburg. No, protracted because while talking to me he was on the roof waving his arms about to call the jackdaws in. I was holding the ladder, just watching his feet on the top rung, and trying to work out which way Kaltenburg would be flinging his upper body next. He stretched up, gesticulating, started to wobble, and at the same time turned toward me as I gripped the ladder tightly down below.

A jackdaw has no innate fear of natural predators, it has to learn from its parents the likely form in which mortal danger will appear. But most of Kaltenburg’s jackdaws had been used to people since the day they were hatched, to a human being who had no fear of cats or birds of prey, so if the professor did not want to lose them, he had no choice but to lure his birds back to the cage for the night. It took one or two hours every night — up to a point the creatures would willingly follow him into the room, but then they would take off again, playing with their flightless comrade, trying to draw him up to the roof ridge, until Kaltenburg finally had them all safe inside.

You can’t get the smell of these birds off your fingers. You can spend several minutes washing your hands, soap and disinfectant and sand, you can scrub your fingertips until they bleed: it’s no use, the slightest trace develops into a tremendous olfactory memory. You mustn’t touch a live jackdaw when its fellows are nearby — they invariably see it as an attack. How often had one of Kaltenburg’s birds hacked at the back of his hand just because he had gently picked up another jackdaw, which resolutely refused to be led into the cage? And here was I, bending over the dead jackdaws, pushing them around on the desk, with unpecked hands to which their smell was clinging.

Every morning I arrived very early at the collection, setting to work with numb fingers, and every time I had the feeling that the jackdaw skins in their protective feather coats had retained some of the warmth of my hands overnight. While the winter cold seeped slowly out of my limbs, the space gradually turned into a jackdaw room. I postponed the work in hand. Let a colleague go to the bird dealer instead of me. My article on the migratory movements and distribution of the thistle finch was supposed to be submitted by January. I withdrew. There was no space on my desk for finch specimens. When the sun shone on my back at midday, I was enveloped in a jackdaw cloud.

The skins included Taschotschek, a descendant of Tschok, Kaltenburg’s very first jackdaw. Naturally I was familiar with all of his jackdaws, I could tell them apart by their faces, though the specimens now had no eyes. Taschotschek was a special case, however, there were more memories connected with her than with any other bird of her species.

I once asked Kaltenburg whether he somehow felt bereaved by the death of a creature he had studied for a lifetime, having perhaps hand-reared it. No, not bereavement. But nostalgia, yes, that was something he felt, like every healthy person. He often thought back to his first meeting with Tschok, in a damp and dark dealer’s shop in Vienna that he used to visit as a young man. There was a disheveled, shy young bird sitting in a corner at the back somewhere, the dealer thought it hardly worth bringing it out, but Kaltenburg saw its beak, its eyes, and had to have this jackdaw straightaway. The dealer virtually made him a present of it. It was through Tschok that he had started observing birds closely. His experiences with this bird had opened up a new world for him. He owed his first major contribution to ornithology to Tschok. A close, decisive bond, no doubt about it. But all the same: never sadness.

Did he wish his first jackdaw were still alive? That would be flying in the face of nature. And if he had the choice of going back to the time when he had Tschok around him day and night — no, he wouldn’t dream of it, he wouldn’t swap the present for the interwar years. In a certain sense Tschok wasn’t dead anyway, he survived in his descendants, to his surprise he had discovered Tschok’s characteristics in every brood. That was why he had given the young bird who most resembled Tschok the name of Taschok, and called the most similar among its descendants Taschotschek, which was followed by a second Tschok — and so on from one generation to another.

My knowledge of the live Taschotschek distorted my view of its skin, which was now a softly stuffed, feathered display specimen like the others. When I was classifying them into groups I was inclined to start with Taschotschek, to look upon her as the holotype of a subspecies yet to be discovered. I pushed the others aside, until only Taschotschek lay on the desk in front of me, and then one by one I added others, relatives of Tachotschek, descendants, but also jackdaws who had found their way to this flock as if by accident and had stayed on.

For Taschotschek attracted other jackdaws. It was almost as if she were recruiting new birds for Kaltenburg, as if she knew how pleased he would be by the increase in his jackdaw flock, and how important it was to him to keep its size constant. Because, naturally, there were losses all the time, two young jackdaws paired off and left, many birds disappeared without trace, simply failed to return in the evening — a careless flight maneuver, a hunter; the other birds couldn’t tell Kaltenburg what had happened.

The neighbors must have thought him insane, a man who crept around on the roof in his old sports jacket every evening at sunset to gather in birds and put them to bed. Ludwig Kaltenburg was soon so well known in the city that people brought him dead jackdaws. On one occasion someone came to the door, full of remorse, stammering out a confession: he had run over a bird, and he wondered whether — and here he opened a stained bundle — it was one of the Herr Professor’s jackdaws.

In this sack of feathers with legs and beak I saw the movements of the living Taschotschek, saw her look and her behavior that had so often made us laugh, Kaltenburg and me. I saw her jumping onto Ludwig Kaltenburg’s shoulder and tugging nervously at his hair if there was a visitor she was doubtful about. Kaltenburg could be a gambler too, he was mindful of limits but sometimes exceeded them. Taschotschek wouldn’t have minded if Kaltenburg had followed his jackdaw flock up into a stormy sky to participate in their breakneck aerial maneuvers; in other words she trusted his capability within her own sphere but sometimes seemed a bit skeptical about him as a judge of human character. If someone seemed to the jackdaw to be threatening, and if Kaltenburg moved too close to that person, or the conversation took on a tone that sounded dangerous to her, she didn’t hold back as she normally did, at first observing strangers in complete silence, then gradually making contact with them. If there was someone present whom she thought of as the enemy of her friend, she would fly out of the room, perch on the rooftop, and make a racket until Kaltenburg had no choice but to break off the conversation, leaving the dumbfounded visitor alone for a while, and appear on the ladder outside.

This was something I witnessed several times, and in a few cases it occurred to me later that Taschotschek had not been wrong. At one time, when we had just returned from an excursion on which the jackdaws had accompanied us for quite a distance, a man appeared — unannounced — who insisted on talking to Kaltenburg. I didn’t know him, Kaltenburg treated him like a stranger too, yet something about this man interested Kaltenburg. Taschotschek scuttled about uneasily on the tabletop, went over to the sugar bowl, seemed to want to block Kaltenburg’s view of his uninvited guest, spread her wings and got one of them in the tea — and Ludwig Kaltenburg, who normally never lost his composure over an animal, reacted irritably, brushing Taschotschek roughly away onto the back of the armchair.

Suddenly she didn’t just look worried — as far as you can say that of a bird — she looked terrified. And she took off, out through the balcony door, which stood slightly ajar all year round, trying with her wing-flapping motions to entice Kaltenburg out onto the roof. She instantly struck up her usual noise. Kaltenburg went on ignoring the jackdaw’s din, until eventually he turned to me: “Could you go and see what’s got into her again?”

I climbed up the ladder, Taschotschek refused to calm down for me, wouldn’t let me touch her, and as I stood up there, with the old city beneath me in the afternoon light and the agitated jackdaw flapping under my nose, I regretted leaving the room: what was Kaltenburg discussing with his visitor, whom I took to be a stranger, what risk might he be letting himself in for? No, Kaltenburg wasn’t the type to let himself in for anything. But why was he so keen on talking undisturbed to his visitor, and why did he want not only his favorite jackdaw out of the way but me too? It’s possible that this bird really had more than once helped him out of a difficult situation, and but for Taschotschek it is possible that Kaltenburg would have had to leave Dresden much sooner.

Every morning I had to shake off this kind of sentimentality, had to convince myself: you don’t know this bird, it’s no more familiar to you than any of the other bird skins that have accumulated in these drawers over the course of a century. If I wanted to study her impartially, I couldn’t let familiarity lead me to premature conclusions — once I was on the point of sending my Danish colleague a second letter, saying I’d made a mistake, for I had now spotted a clear anomaly in the beak of this jackdaw skin which I had just prepared myself, simply in order to bring him back from Copenhagen to Dresden and introduce Taschotschek to him. I would have made myself a laughingstock. A good thing pet names don’t appear on the labels of such tame birds. No, Taschotschek was no example of a subspecies, I had to keep telling myself, These skins you’ve been poring over with such tenacity for weeks without knowing the point of doing so — you’ll only get to know them step by step, learning about each one individually and very slowly, their plumage, their beaks, their smell. It was only later, much later, in the eighties, that some research came out of it on the feather formation of common jackdaws and Daurian jackdaws.

I even deluded myself that Taschotschek’s skin smelled slightly of Kaltenburg. Once, late one afternoon when the fog around the building refused to lift, it was traces of his aftershave, and later, as darkness was coming on, Kaltenburg’s breath. I shut my eyes, brought the birds at random up to my nose: yes, every time it was Taschotschek I held in my hand. And yet all the skins had of course been disinfected — it was a delusion, Tschok, Taschok, Taschotschek, I couldn’t get away from this notion, had to break off work for a day.

And then my hands when I went home in the evening. I felt I was spreading an atmosphere of jackdaw around me. I wore gloves, put my hands in my coat pockets, but all the same I wondered — in the tram, people must be noticing that here was someone who spent his days sorting out dead jackdaws on his desk, and not only that, they must be noticing that this man knew Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg in his Dresden years like nobody else.

How proud the whole neighborhood had been at first when they heard that Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg, the great authority, might be moving to Loschwitz. They triumphed over the celebrity district of Weisser Hirsch, over the villa quarter of Blasewitz, and above all they triumphed over Leipzig, where Kaltenburg held his professorial chair. In the morning at the baker’s they murmured, “Have you heard?” In the afternoons on the Elbe meadows it was, “Yes, he’ll fit in well here.” And in the evening, among intimates, “Who would want to settle in Leipzig anyway?”

That must have been in the spring of 1951—or had the first inkling reached the city as early as the winter? Twelve years later many a resident was glad to see the back of Kaltenburg, as though a curse had been lifted from the slopes of Loschwitz. They told the whole world, that is to say Blasewitz and Weisser Hirsch, how relieved they were that he had finally gone, “that troublemaker,” “eccentric,” “and so arrogant”—they had found it hard to forgive him his steadily growing reputation on the international stage.

No, Ludwig Kaltenburg did not mourn for any animal that died — for him it represented the certainty of getting to know more animals. But he took the death of his jackdaws quite hard. One evening he got home just before dark; he had rushed away after breaking off one of those interminable meetings that lead nowhere, tore along by the Elbe, over the bridge, and could see even from a distance: there were no black dots whirling in the air waiting for him. He rode through an utterly serene sunset, light blue and red and glowing, a disaster. Panicked, Kaltenburg raced up the narrow alleyways, pedestrians jumped out of the way of his motorbike, Kaltenburg changed gear, he didn’t brake, he scraped a wall, finally turned into the entrance — and saw the first birds lying on the grass.

He sent for me to come over that same evening. A small heap of dead jackdaws lay on the ground. Kaltenburg could hardly stand, couldn’t make it back up the ladder, I climbed onto the roof and scooped two young jackdaws out of the guttering. Over the next few days we combed through the plots of land stretching down to the river, and except for one or two birds we did manage to find all the dead jackdaws.

During the last few weeks of his time in Dresden I barely recognized Kaltenburg. Then, from one day to the next, he disappeared. I don’t think anyone knew about his plans except me.

“And never forget to poison your bird finds carefully.” That was what Kaltenburg told me once. Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg, who showed me how to prepare a skin. He favored a solution of sodium arsenite, and if you didn’t have a poison license you should use borax and naphthalene. “Always make sure you poison your skins carefully.” I have never found out how Kaltenburg’s jackdaws actually died. Hardly had he left Dresden before rumors started circulating in the city, many of them harmless, many just plain stupid, today I can only remember the most wicked of them: Kaltenburg was said to have put out poison for his birds himself, in order to make his departure more dramatic.

With a dead bird in each hand I stood there on the balcony, Kaltenburg sat despondently in the gloom of his study, I couldn’t bring myself to approach him carrying the two lifeless bundles of feathers. I thought I would look around for a box, but in Kaltenburg’s household there was no box that wasn’t occupied by a live animal. I was considering stuffing the jackdaws under my sweater, but then I heard his toneless voice, he didn’t look up: “Just come in. It makes no difference now.”

I suggested burying the birds in the garden. For a long time there was no response. Then Kaltenburg shook his head. “You can take them. Take them away and make good skins out of them. They’ll remind you of our time together in this city when I’m gone.”

2

THE MENU LAY OPEN in front of us, but we hadn’t ordered yet. Katharina Fischer was looking out of the window, her expression almost suggesting that it was her own memory that was filling with Ludwig Kaltenburg’s jackdaws, because of the images I had shown her one by one.

She had told me on the telephone about her assignment, about a long, no doubt tiring day, which she assured me she had got through all right, despite minor irritations. No, unfortunately, the local bird life wasn’t mentioned at all, and the stern head of protocol intervened immediately when she tried to raise the topic of this winter’s waxwing invasion with the English visitor during a short break. All the same, our meeting was not without results, for it made her go back to Kaltenburg’s works, those battered volumes, full of underlinings and coffee stains, which she had studied intensively in her later years at school, and which at some stage had disappeared into a banana crate to finish up in various cellars every time she moved.

The minute she glanced through the books after so many years, Katharina Fischer noticed that for some reason she had put an exclamation mark after every mention of a place-name. Prague and Paris, where Kaltenburg had said his piece about the events of 1968, not without sharply attacking the Soviet Union as well as the students. Then Königsberg, a place with which Frau Fischer had as little connection in her youth as with the town where she now lived. Moscow, Paris, Florida, London, Rotterdam — when the interpreter asked me if I’d noticed that the professor never at any point mentioned Posen in his writings, I decided to ask her out to dinner, a simple “certainly” or “of course” over the telephone would not do. She accepted without hesitation, and we agreed to book a table in this restaurant on the bank of the Elbe at Blasewitz.

The river, the meadows, the slopes on the other side, on our right the Loschwitz Bridge — in her mind’s eye she was following Kaltenburg as he raced over the bridge on his motorbike. His leather biker’s gear, his white mane, and the way the rider bends over the handlebars; it can only be Kaltenburg, even if the steel supports of the bridge cause a rapidly alternating pattern of light and dark stripes to flit across the figure, so that you begin to wonder whether it isn’t a phantom your eyes are following, while the professor has long since reached the other bank, is taking the bend, disappearing between the houses on the Körnerplatz.

We debated back and forth on what to call it: a homecoming, an escape, the end of a long farewell, which had basically started with Kaltenburg’s arrival? A long farewell which coincided with my leaving school, my studies under the professor, and a few important years as a colleague at his Institute. I supplied him with material for a series of studies, researched pair bonds in the common raven, carried out observations on same-species killing among various types of animal, so that Kaltenburg was able to build up a comprehensive picture of this aberrant behavior. I was allowed to take part in the big research project on night herons, although that was never completed, more’s the pity, because Kaltenburg never again returned to this bird, which, far from yielding its secrets after years of observation, actually became more puzzling.

My own research involved the early months of life in the great tit, and it also took me all over the country to find out more about chimney jackdaws. Looking back, though, I must say that I don’t see either of these projects as valid in terms of detail, and neither do I find the ideas I had then about the house sparrow’s capacity for mimicry convincing today.

No, I replied to Katharina Fischer, go with Ludwig Kaltenburg to Vienna? I would never have wanted to join him, quite apart from the fact that it wasn’t an option. For one thing I saw it as my duty to look after the animals in the Institute — although that wasn’t ever discussed — now that its head was no longer available. For another, my parents-in-law would have been heartbroken if their daughter had decamped to the West. And I wouldn’t have gone anywhere without my wife. When I was lucky enough to find my place at the Ornithological Collection, I don’t mind admitting that I felt something like freedom. No, to Vienna, Ludwig Kaltenburg had to go back to Vienna alone.

A bit farther upriver, beyond the bridge which blocks the view, somewhere on the hillside the red taillight of a motorbike will have lit up, Kaltenburg turning into the narrow path, dimly lit by a few gas lamps, which led to his villa. The waiter hovered, he wanted to take our order, and no, no motorcyclist on the bridge, no jackdaws above the hillside, the sun had set, Frau Fischer tore herself away from the view outside, I had been watching her reflection in the windowpane.

3

WHENEVER I ENTERED Ludwig Kaltenburg’s study, I was stepping into my father’s room. More precisely: my father’s room as it would have been if he were still alive. A few details may actually have corresponded: the position of the desk in the middle of the room, the small, uncomfortable cocktail-bar chair with worn arms, selected on a whim for use as a desk chair and then missing from the drawing room, the rickety dark-wood bookshelves behind. If you stood in the doorway looking toward the window, this picture, shifted diagonally slightly to the right, was in the middle of your view. But if you sat at the desk, you saw the passage to an adjacent room, to where our conservatory was. The arrangement of the broad desktop: the leather writing mat, an open reference book on the left, an ashtray on the right, but between them, in no discernible order, dog-eared lecture notes, walnut shells, pencils, a pile of blank writing paper, and on it a portable typewriter.

Entering Kaltenburg’s study, for a split second I even saw my father’s mail lying there, soft, padded, firmly sealed envelopes, with the address on them in a script which told you that the sender found writing Cyrillic letters easier than writing Latin ones. Little packets of seeds from Leningrad. I had to remind myself: in his day, your father would hardly have received botanical samples from the Soviet Union, what you were looking at was the present-day desk of a man rooted in the distant past. Still more than the corresponding details, however, it was the atmosphere of this study which created for a moment the illusion of a Posen room in a far-off world, above all in winter, in the late afternoons. The way my father sat there without noticing me, underneath the desk lamp, or rather in shadow, shining hair, only his hands in the pool of light and a white sheet of paper and plant samples he had been studying closely since midday.

Kaltenburg’s study did not possess a ceiling light, any more than my father’s did: this fact may account for the familiarity of the room. The professor immediately had the ceiling lights dismantled in every room when he moved into the villa, or perhaps one should say, when Kaltenburg’s animals commandeered it. Enormous chandeliers, finest blown-glass work left behind by the previous owner — Kaltenburg gave them all away without the least remorse.

The neighbors’ amazement when a whole lighting shop was gradually spread out on the lawn by the entrance, and Kaltenburg—“Come on, come on over, choose what you want”—beckoned to the inquisitive folk who had thought they were out of sight behind the bushes. Their sidelong peeks at their new neighbor as they took a closer look at the goods, and Kaltenburg went on encouraging people to lug home some of the “loot,” as he called it: “Here, these belong together, so do me a favor and take this decorative piece as well.”

Eventually they all left with their booty tucked under their arms, bowing to the professor, thanked him sincerely, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, said many thanks, taking care not to stumble as they walked away backward, thanked him profusely — but Kaltenburg brushed all this aside: “What’s the point of me having chandeliers in the house? The animals would just use them as staging posts on their way from one cupboard to another, to stay out of my reach when I wanted something from them, or do gymnastics on the lamps. Then every few days one of these great lumps would come crashing down. That would be a shame. And dangerous, as well.”

My father’s room: I could never quite shake off the impression, in fact it would become all the stronger later on, when Ludwig Kaltenburg had left Dresden and I was roaming through the deserted house, taking care of the remaining animals. For if anything could have released me from that notion, it was Kaltenburg himself, a figure who was out of place if it was my father’s study I was standing in. Kaltenburg always brought me back to reality.

I remember Kaltenburg saying when he arrived in Dresden and we met up again, “You see, my boy, I told you early on you’d never get rid of me.”

A sentence that was lost at first in the excitement of the day. After Kaltenburg had given away his chandeliers, was there an announcement of a welcoming visit by VIPs, or did the professor read out a call for peace on the grass behind the house? I seem to remember there were reporters in the grounds, I can hear the clicking of cameras, see Ludwig Kaltenburg answering questions on the steps, then in the aquarium wing, still empty at the time. I brought him a glass of water, a photographer was packing up his equipment — and in the midst of it all Kaltenburg turned quickly to me and remarked, as though we were alone, “I said you wouldn’t get rid of me in a hurry.”

And then he was gone again, I stood holding the empty glass, a woman journalist from Moscow had beckoned the professor over to the garden gate, the interpreter explained they wanted another picture, in front of the transport containers this time. It was then that Kaltenburg, hurrying obligingly down the steps, began to show the first signs of exhaustion. Normally ultra-polite to young women and always donning the protective armor of joviality for public appearances, he growled in an undertone to the female interpreter, “By the transport containers, I got that. My Russian isn’t nearly as bad as you might think.”

He was to make up for his slip later, admitting his gaffe and inviting the interpreter out to dinner. They had both been a bit stressed, he was truly sorry, and the interpreter was to fall for his charm. Her name was Karin, he told me afterward, a really great girl, a great woman rather, and I think he even named an animal after her later.

But at what point during the Posen years did Kaltenburg tell me, as a boy, that I would find it hard to shake him off? The question was running through my head that night as I fell asleep, and during the following days, and I could not come up with an answer. Over the years the sentence has often come back to me, and even if Kaltenburg did utter it that afternoon purely on a passing whim, he turned out to be right.

Ludwig Kaltenburg was trying to clear a path for himself to an open transport container. He trod warily and yet firmly, ducks scattering and fluttering, a terrible clucking and commotion, the ducks’ instinct was to take flight, finding strangers everywhere irritated them, and they kept returning to their master’s feet so that he could hardly move: I can remember the occasion now, it was the day that Kaltenburg’s flock of ducks arrived in Loschwitz. For that time it was a spectacular relocation which excited interest right across Europe. “Three Hundred Ducks Find a New Home in Dresden,” in Vienna it even triggered a debate in Parliament, and the press headline “Big Loss for Austria.”

Almost all the birds had survived the journey unharmed, and only a small part of the population subsequently went missing, a superb achievement. Kaltenburg basked in his success. He had accepted a chair in Leipzig, he had been headhunted by them while Vienna and Graz were still making up their minds, and Kaltenburg was undoubtedly attracted to university teaching, since he loved passing on his knowledge to younger people. In spite of the painful rejection by his homeland, it must surely have given him satisfaction to see that in his — celebrated — case, Austria had lost out through internal obstruction and petty wrangling. But what clinched it in the end was that along with the professorship at Leipzig, Kaltenburg managed to negotiate his own institute in Dresden, he was promised all the support he needed, whether material or moral, and at the highest level.

As a child I once asked Kaltenburg incredulously whether it was true that he had taken live ducks with him to Königsberg — for me as a ten-year-old that was as unimaginable as it clearly was for Kaltenburg’s colleagues at the time. And now here I was witnessing at close quarters a far bigger duck relocation, and even giving a helping hand where I could, bringing the professor a glass of water, shepherding a stray flock back out of the roadway onto Kaltenburg’s estate, or rescuing a terrified drake, found cowering on the veranda steps as though paralyzed, from the midst of a crowd of humans. In the evening, when the whole show was over, reporters and inquisitive locals having dispersed, I heated some water, took a bucket and scrubbing brush out to the front of the house, and as the sun set cleaned up the garden path, the driveway, and the stretch of road outside the villa. The dark green patches, in fact a whole trail of dark green: out of sheer agitation three hundred ducks had repeatedly emptied their bowels, and without noticing it the visitors had spread the muck everywhere.

Ludwig Kaltenburg had made a brilliant debut, the newspapers carried pictures of a beaming man in knee breeches, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up, the top buttons open. Kaltenburg crouching among the ducks, Kaltenburg explaining something to the spellbound woman journalist from Moscow, Kaltenburg surrounded by Loschwitz children, showing them the right way to hold a duck: a soothing and refreshing sight for all readers’ eyes, which — especially when such momentous occasions were being documented — were used to seeing the same old crew of stiff, aging gentlemen in gray suits, with gray faces, gray smiles, all waxworks molded out of melted candle stumps.

Then one morning a brand-new black SIS limousine arrived outside the house, and the accompanying letter had every appearance of being written by Walter Ulbricht himself, who intended this showpiece from the Stalin Works as a welcome present. But according to the Dresden city council a new homeland went together with a new hometown, so a few days later Walter Weidauer brought the professor an equally brand-new, equally black motorbike, the AWO 425, which Kaltenburg had long coveted. Whether through miscalculation or because the press had not been properly coordinated — at any rate, somehow neither gift resonated with the public to anything like the same extent as the duck relocation shortly before. Later, among friends, Kaltenburg happily recounted how three hundred simple, unsuspecting ducks had upstaged the representatives from Dresden and Berlin.

Nor did I once see him driving the Soviet limousine himself, he could never warm to the somber road cruiser, perhaps because the gift package from Berlin included a driver. “Krause is such a nice quiet man,” I can hear the professor saying, “I don’t really know what I’ve got against him.”

The car was used only for official business, above all when the professor had to go to Berlin. In Dresden outside the motorbike season you only ever saw him driving around in his little Opel. If anybody mentioned the limousine, he would nod eagerly: true, it was a beautiful car, if a little unwieldy. It was hard to negotiate the narrow alleys of Loschwitz in it, particularly with such a crazy driver as himself at the wheel.

That was the Kaltenburg the Dresdeners got to know, and instantly love. It was in his nature to make every appearance in society a little entrance onto the public stage, whether it was simply changing his gloves at the front door or taking his splendid chow dog along with him or, in later years, demonstrating at a garden party how a shrill birdcall would bring his jackdaw flock over—“You don’t believe my birds will do what I tell them?”—from the other side of the Elbe. A certain mysterious charge seemed to build up before every appearance, people waited, anticipated, talking about Kaltenburg’s motorbike trick, the trick with the sunglasses or his gloves. Would he speak about the Institute, would he put on animal stunts? Kaltenburg rejected this. “You can’t call it a stunt,” he said, “it’s just natural behavior.”

Not many people recognize that a lot of energy goes into little performances like this within the private sphere, and most do not want to know about it. There is always a price to pay for being a lively personality; Kaltenburg needed a retreat, his “household,” as he called the villa with all its animals. He could spend whole days in the meadow, you thought, He’s not moving, he must be asleep, while in fact he was engrossed in observing wildlife. A few ducks had settled around him, on the cellar steps a raven was noisily belaboring a closed box, behind the house the blue-and-yellow macaw was having a fight with the washing line, the dogs raced yapping through the garden. “Life means observing,” said Kaltenburg, and you should seek the company of animals.

Much of his life was spent alone with animals, it was a basic need for him, and just as others eventually feel uneasy without human company and are drawn to it in the street, in the theater, simply to be among people, Kaltenburg could never be away from his animals for more than a few hours without becoming restless. It may be that he had got so many of them to imprint on him from his earliest days onward in order to make sure he never lacked their company, and it may be that the reason he performed his jackdaw trick so willingly was that the birds who amazed guests by circling over his head allowed him to escape in spirit, if not physically, from the tedium of a summer reception. The guests thought it a miracle, but the professor knew that his jackdaws were calling him, always calling: “Come with us.”

4

A LOW CLINKING SOUND, such as I’d heard countless times in Kaltenburg’s house when a jackdaw had quietly retreated and was investigating an object somewhere. I could hear a jackdaw beak in the distance pecking carefully away at a loose furniture fitting; I heard a screw falling to the floor, and knew that it wouldn’t be long before the brass fitting itself dropped to the parquet with a clatter. But it was only Katharina Fischer’s bracelet repeatedly touching the cutlery as the interpreter played with her napkin.

“Every time I see a jackdaw, I’m fascinated by its white eyes. You can’t help feeling the jackdaw is fixing you with a piercing stare, that it can see right through human beings.”

Or maybe what we see is the jackdaw asking itself whether we’re the ones who are trying to look right through it. Direct eye contact with a bird always has a certain suspense about it, something not quite decided, even if you are very familiar with each other.

“As though both parties are waiting for the next move.”

However, in Dresden, said Katharina Fischer, she didn’t often spot jackdaws. Last summer in the heat wave she had seen two thin crows and two jackdaws hopping around the statue of the Golden Horseman in the Neustadt marketplace, all pretty aimless, with wide-open beaks, you could see their dark red throats.

In Dresden these days you don’t find more than a handful of breeding pairs a year, jackdaws pulled out of the city a long time ago. It was already beginning to happen in Kaltenburg’s day, and that’s partly why his birds became so well known. And after they died it would probably have been difficult to build up a replacement colony. It’s possible that as a youngster I was aware of declining jackdaw numbers myself. But I wasn’t bothered while I was surrounded by Kaltenburg’s flock.

“That makes it sound as though you were actually living in the Institute.”

Almost. I didn’t sleep there, rarely had meals — but otherwise, I practically did live there. I went home just to eat and sleep, and later, as an adult, I was sometimes sorry how little attention I had paid to my foster family. The long summer nights in the allotment, visiting relations in the Erzgebirge mountains, our evenings around the kitchen table, with the parents helping each of us in turn with our studies: it feels as though all that time I was making the utmost effort not to imprint any of these images on my memory.

I think I’ve still got the binoculars my adoptive siblings gave me one birthday, and if I could remember the details of how they came by this good, solid model, I would be able to think of the story today as part of the gift. Not even my foster parents were let in on the binoculars plan, so they were as amazed as I was to hear the risks their children had run just to please their foster son. I remember we were sitting in the parlor, the best china, the tablecloth, there were meatballs in caper sauce, my favorite at the time, and the potatoes tasted wonderful. But it’s a shame I can’t remember anything about the acquisition of the binoculars except that it involved a school-bus driver, and the youngest child having to summon up all her courage to address him in Russian, while she sat behind her brother on his bike and he kept one foot on the ground and the other on the pedal, ready to scoot off with his little sister at a moment’s notice. They were laughing, acting out the various parts as they told the story, imitating the bus driver as though the whole thing were one big joke, although we all knew they had been pushing at the extreme limits of danger. After all, every kind of private contact with members of the Soviet forces was banned, not to mention barter deals, and the draconian punishments meted out to any soldier who transgressed were said to include up to a fortnight in a dark, cramped hole in the ground.

A happy, relaxed evening, one of the few I can picture. I just couldn’t bring myself to call my foster parents, to call strangers, “Mum” and “Dad,” I couldn’t get the words out. The parents would have liked me to call their children “my brother and sisters”—my mind would never accept the “my,” and to be honest I hated “brother and sisters” from the first day. For a long time Herta, Gerlinde, and Hans-Georg called me the “foundling,” and if we had a row they hissed “bastard” into my ear, their breath hot, when their parents were not around. But looking back, all this sounds unfair, my attitude to my foster family will have been skewed from the very beginning. When I think back to the birthday present, what trouble my new brother and sisters went to, their pleasure when, completely unsuspecting, I began to take the heavy object out of its newspaper wrapping…

I always imagined the binoculars had already served their purpose during the advance on Dresden, and as though traces of those events were left on the lenses, I liked to think that something of the landscapes and objects the Red Army officer had trained them on was still attached to the eyepieces. I saw him standing upright in an open jeep, his glance sweeping from a burning farmhouse on the left to a birch-tree copse on the right where German stragglers had still been holed up until a few days earlier. The landscape stretches toward the west over gentle hills, on the horizon a mob of tiny figures, refugees, deserters, Waffen SS perhaps. He keeps the binoculars glued to his eyes, gives the signal for the car to move forward again, and now the tank column following in the rear comes briefly into view.

It is through these binoculars that the officer looks along the Elbe valley, searching out a bridge over the river and finally spotting in the distance a blue-shimmering steel construction projecting above the ruins. And of course on his way into Dresden many a bird enters his field of vision, as they do mine now. During the day he observes the wild geese coming from the south as they break their journey to rest by a lake, and hardly a night passes when he doesn’t wake up thinking he hears their wings beating above his billet. Over the weeks the number of empty stork nests declines, at some point he stops counting the occupied ones and only counts nests that have been abandoned. And on one occasion the officer lingers near a group of rooks flocking around a dark, shapeless bundle on the ground, suspiciously at first, then driven closer by curiosity, until one leading rook is bold enough to start cautiously plucking at it. Horsehair perhaps, rotting straw, a bag full of charred papers, a lost eiderdown, from its size you might almost think it was a person.

I regularly went roaming with two friends from school, Klaus and Johann, war orphans like me. Johann was allowed to invite us home, and if he begged long enough his foster parents even let the three of us sleep over in the loft. With blankets, sandwiches, and tea, we climbed up the rickety ladder to camp from Saturday night to Sunday morning among the furniture and household bric-a-brac from the kaiser’s time. Candles were taboo.

Together we combed through the dead zones in the inner city, all children were drawn like magic to the rubble, and it was nothing special for us to explore these areas by day. The real challenge lay in finding your way about after dark, which was obviously strictly forbidden. Our parents didn’t like it at all when we clambered among ruins threatening to collapse at any time. This wilderness was frequented by some shady types, but we were out to prove our courage, convinced that grownups by contrast were scared at the very thought of the dead zones.

After all, for a long time people believed there were still countless victims of the night of February thirteenth buried in the cellars, but when a body turned up from time to time, it was definitely of more recent date. A man with his hands tied behind his back, shot in the back of the head at close range — that kind of thing was automatically put down to feuding between black-market gangs, and on the quiet there was also talk of old scores being settled. Once the body of a young woman was found in the bushes, with eyes rolled back and strangulation marks on her neck. “Prostitute”—we didn’t know the word at all, “unfaithful fiancée” was the current expression — and “streetwalker,” a term we had picked up from an adult conversation, meant just as little to us as we wondered why the young woman had put on nice clothes and makeup before she was murdered.

We brought home the material for our stories from the deserted inner city, hauling back trophies, a brittle leather strap, a pottery shard, a fork, adding new items from the world out there to our collection in the loft.

No, the zones didn’t seem dead to us then. I wandered about on my own too, my binoculars round my neck, I got to know more about wheatears and crested larks, tawny pippets and little ringed plovers, sparrow hawks and linnets — or should I say I got to know them all over again. As for identifying plants, however, I have never got back to the standard of the embankment behind our house. Flixweed, tansy mustard, prickly lettuce, redroot amaranth — I hadn’t forgotten the names, and anyway we learned in school how to distinguish the three levels of ruderal plants: parsley fern, horse thistle, and henbane ought to have meant something to me. But when I scanned the terrain with my binoculars, all they showed me were leaves, blossoms, and herbs, more or less varied in shape and color, and nothing caught my attention until it was held by a yellow wing stripe, a red head marking, a white cheek, the ivory-colored beak of a goldfinch.

There is a kind of counterpart to my memory of the goldfinches in the thistle patches: a November evening during the Korean crisis, when we were all waiting for World War III to break out. I can remember a torchlight procession in which all schools took part, youth urging the world to make peace, intimidated youth, “free youth points the way,” and I was part of this movement, like my classmates, among whom I queued to receive my torch at the assembly point. Silently we moved off, not a fun weekend activity, bravely and stiffly we marched down the Strasse der Befreiung to the Platz der Einheit, the leaders of the procession had reached Bautzner Strasse long before and were already moving up the Elbe slopes heading for the Palace of Pioneers.

I can see us now turning into the broad open ground, the sea of light beneath the trees. The chairman of the regional Peace Committee gave his speech, then we stepped forward, one school class after another, until we reached the hillside, where we rammed our torches into the earth — or did war orphans take precedence, was I one of the first to stick my torch into the frosty soil? I know that I immediately took a step backward, leaving my classmates behind me, I stood to one side. It seems to me that by that time I no longer had much in common with Klaus, with Johann.

Neither did I have the slightest inclination to meet up all that soon with Herta, Gerlinde, and Hans-Georg, presumably they were in the hall, there were more speeches, or perhaps the seriousness and intensity of the evening had long since given way to dancing. I wandered for a while through the park, up the hillside, looking down into the valley. Nothing much more than a smooth black surface where you could make out isolated pinpoints of light. It was easy to imagine that these signs of life too must soon be extinguished, as though a harsh wind were sweeping across this desolate landscape, and sooner or later those last inhabitants still clinging on would be forced to give in, as the wind drove them before it to the edge of the great darkness.

Not far from me someone lit his cigarette from a torch. He belonged to a group that stood on the meadow, a little apart, almost as though they wanted to demonstrate to the other participants that although present, they had nothing to do with the actual ceremony. The six of them stood in a circle, young men smoking, a few years older than me. One of them, towering above the others, was wearing a peaked cap, all of them were casually dressed, except for — and I had only just noticed her — a woman, her back to me, lit up by torchlight, wearing a black velvet cap. Wrapped in a long fur coat, a well-preserved garment which had been brought safely through the war, and which made a lady of her. Was she the oldest in the group? Voices. Who was speaking? The young men’s eyes, like mine, were on the woman. I was the only one who couldn’t see her face, only this collar, her cap, her shape in the coat. There was silence. The tall one in the peaked cap raised his head, I had been spotted. And as I avoided his gaze, turned away, I heard a laugh.

It was still ringing in my ears as I entered the hall to look for my new siblings, it was high time we set off for home. Hans-Georg with his angular physique, a hint of his future coarseness around the eyes. Gerlinde with her German plaits. Herta, the oldest, crazy about dancing, but to her regret not very good at it. I was going to stand by the edge of the floor and just watch the dancing figures as quietly as possible, when in the corner of my eye I spotted a flowing movement: the heavy fur coat was gliding through the crowd.

A Russian aristocrat, whose family had gone over to the right side at the last moment. No, that kind of good fortune didn’t happen. A delegate from the national Peace Committee of a fraternal country. Someone recruited very young by partisans in the Baltic, perhaps. But I still hadn’t caught a glimpse of the lady’s face, she passed me too quickly. On her head was the peaked cap the tall character had been wearing earlier, a bit too big, so that it fell over her left ear. So I’d got it wrong out there, it wasn’t a black velvet cap that had been gleaming in the semidarkness but her dark hair. The unknown woman disappeared among the crowd at the other end of the room, the corridor opened up by the dancers closed behind her. I turned toward the exit, it was clear that my new siblings had already left the place.

During the long walk home, it didn’t bother me that the three of them might have hatched a plot, intentionally disappearing in order to tell their parents that I had left the parade ground without permission, that I had hidden from them. It didn’t matter whether I was the one who got the beating, or Hans-Georg for not having kept the crew together. I wasn’t even scared that they might be lurking in the bushes somewhere along the route to give me a proper fright by leaping out in front of me with a fiendish yell, with mock-Russian gibberish.

An open, untroubled, inappropriate laugh, which even after it faded away still dominated everything, the circle of grim young men, the meadow and the hillside, the whole ceremony together with its stupid music. The danger of war and our will to peace. The dark past, the dark future, and the present November night in the open air, which hinted at a harsh winter to come, with lingering frost and snow. I didn’t know the color of her eyes, I hadn’t spoken to her, but this unknown woman’s laugh accompanied me as I fell asleep.

5

I WOULD NEVER HAVE told Ludwig Kaltenburg about my troubles at home, adolescent problems, it would have been too embarrassing. No, perhaps it wasn’t even that — when I was in the Institute foster parents didn’t exist, nor siblings to plague me, and in the evenings I always went home feeling stronger. Not a word, yet Kaltenburg must have sensed the strain I was under when I came to him for an hour in the late afternoon, sometimes out of breath, lacking concentration, eyes restless, like someone who has escaped his tormentors and found refuge. Kaltenburg would not have shut me out, I know, he would have listened patiently, but since I didn’t talk he chose not to mention my agitation. Instead, I had hardly got my jacket off when he took me to the hamster corner: “Look what he got from the bookshelf last night — a couple of pages of Kant.”

Or he would send me, as though I had let my duties slide, into the feed kitchen: “Don’t bother hanging up your jacket. The fruit, have you forgotten? They’ve been expecting you all afternoon.”

He watched as I leapt down the steps — but no longer running away. For when I jumped over the wheelbarrow by the side of the path, avoided the gardener’s lad, brushed along the hedge, headed straight toward the dozing dogs as though I’d taken leave of my senses, a feeling of calm came over me. The wooden lattice construction devised by the feed manager for keeping sunflower heads dry. The mealworm incubator. As soon as I started picking out the rotten strawberries, as soon as I saw the bucket of apples in front of me for cutting up into beak-sized chunks, yes, as soon as I dipped into the cherries, I had regained my Loschwitz breathing rhythm.

They’ve been expecting you — this “they” encompassed the long-term inmates as well the fluctuating chance visitors. Animals with whose impulses the professor was intimately acquainted. Animals which had only recently aroused his curiosity. Animals that needed to be studied carefully in the future. Some fresh ones to be researched and others that couldn’t be. And the “they” included Ludwig Kaltenburg, included me too.

Whenever he noticed that I wasn’t even up to feeding the animals, he would throw on his jacket and “Out we go, down to the Elbe,” or, if the weather wasn’t good enough for a birding expedition, “I’ll get the Opel out of the garage.”

Our outings in the car were called “induction by personal inspection.” I can remember the smell of calf leather in the little sports car, remember the way Kaltenburg sat next to me holding the wheel firmly with both hands, concentrating on the road. On the spare seat there was always a pile of books and brochures; I reached back with my left hand, read to the professor from the lives of famous ornithologists, while he chauffeured us to their birthplaces and homes, to the sites of their activity. Thus Kaltenburg once took me on a whole-day excursion down the Elbe to Köthen, to see the Ziebigk estate, Naumann’s place. We drove to Renthendorf to see the Brehms’ house. To Waldheim, where Maikammer was born. To Reichenbach in the Vogtland. To Waldenburg. I can hardly recall anything about the town of Greiz, but on the other hand I have the clearest memory of a portrait of the pâtissier Carl Ferdinand Oberländer, who became addicted to collecting native and exotic birds. His expression seems to betray grief and melancholy, the furrowed brow, around the eyes, the mouth: it won’t be long before his passion drives him to ruin, he will have to sell his wonderful collection of mounts.

Once, in the most glorious weather, we roamed for a whole day through the landscape of Moritzburg with its many pools, we could have made countless sightings, but Kaltenburg was intent on one thing only, finding a particular pond where, as he said, Hans Steingruber had begun his career. He had been cycling past this spot on a day in March 1923 and had seen two coral-red beaks glowing on the water. Kaltenburg stomped through the reeds on the bank: “At that time he was your age,” and red-crested pochards had not been spotted for more than seventy years. Nobody was willing to believe Steingruber, even Reinhold in Berlin was skeptical when the young man came to see him. No, Netta rufina in Moritzburg, that must have been a faulty sighting, he was certain of it, Reinhold, the greatest ornithologist of our time.

In retrospect the outings could be seen simply as preparation for meeting live people. The “induction by personal inspection” continued in Loschwitz, costing the professor no effort at all, since authorities from all over the world found their way to him unbidden.

At the same time, Ludwig Kaltenburg could be quite prone to moods, that is to say, I saw him getting irritated above all when people thoughtlessly disturbed his most intimate moments together with animals. He seemed open to everyone, you could have got him out of bed at any time of night to share a sighting with him, yet he often reacted harshly to some annoyance if it came at the wrong moment — a new colleague who wasn’t yet familiar with the aquarium wing, a roofer finally arriving to replace a row of shingles on the gable end of the summerhouse.

The first time Reinhold visited the Institute, Kaltenburg happened to be at a difficult point, trying to get birds to follow him, an exercise that stretched over several days because some young jackdaws of that generation were not always ready to fly behind him from room to room. He walked down the corridor, into the kitchen, out again, into his study — and forgot that Reinhold was expected.

I had been hanging around outside the house since early morning, curious to see this man who had inspired so many ornithologists. In the background there was a succession of noises: calls, stamping, flapping of wings. More calls. Silence. A contented murmuring. You could follow progress with the new brood in the garden sound by sound. Then the limousine drew up in the driveway. Krause walked around the car, quickly ran a sleeve over the mudguard, opened the rear door, and stood to attention looking into the middle distance: a wiry older gentleman emerged, to me he looked about eighty, although at the time Reinhold was only in his early sixties. I greeted the visitor and took him up to the first floor. Reinhold was far too astonished to be dismayed that his reception was not exactly friendly: “It’s not half past twelve already, is it?” Kaltenburg’s voice, sharp, because we were getting in his way between cloakroom and bedroom. “Didn’t we say half past twelve?”

We ducked, a young bird flew along the corridor, Reinhold just shook his head, smiling, and let me show him around the grounds of the Institute. Whatever I was describing to him, he scrutinized the animals as though ascertaining the facts for himself, and every second I thought he was going to interrupt me: “Monk parrot, did you say? That’s impossible. You probably weren’t even born when the last monk parrots of the Loschwitz breeding colony left the city.”

Two hours later Ludwig Kaltenburg seemed like a different man, he was friendliness personified, was generous with flattering remarks to his guest, and even formally begged his pardon. But Reinhold wouldn’t hear a word of it, saying he had known Kaltenburg far too long to be put out: “My dear Ludwig, I would have been more bothered if you had given me priority over your jackdaws.”

I experienced such outbreaks too, but Kaltenburg never felt that my presence disturbed him when communing with his animals.

One autumn afternoon — Kaltenburg’s first autumn in Dresden — with terrible wind and rain, the villa was silent, and there was silence too as I stepped into the hall, all living creatures had retreated from the weather. Everything in the house was geared to a system that finely balanced the animals’ requirements, nearly forty years’ experience had gone into the appearance of rooms where the untrained eye would at first have seen nothing but pure chaos. In one room, for example, the furniture stood a little way away from the walls — behind it somewhere was the den of an animal which only Kaltenburg may ever have caught sight of. In another room incredible heaps of lumber, tables and chairs all mixed up, empty book covers — this had been the favorite room of a capuchin monkey long since departed for the zoo, and now the hamsters seemed to feel particularly comfortable in there. Next came a bare, sparse room, the opposite of the last one, in one corner a fine carpet of sand: this was where the timid quails liked to retire. Something Kaltenburg had learned early on about rooms used for nesting was that there should always be the same fixed distance in centimeters between fireplace and cupboard, and he had maintained this ever since a hamster had developed, unbeknown to anyone, a mountaineer’s “back and footing” technique to climb to the top of a cupboard and make its nest out of old documents. No ceiling lights anywhere, but unlike the curtains, curtain rails had been left in place in every room; the finches had to have suitable roosting places, after all.

The handrails up the stairs — perches for exotic birds. The carpets and runners — less decoration than thread supplies for the ducks to fall back upon when nest-building. The curtains that originally hung in the drawing room — they never came back from the laundry. A fragile system designed to meet the needs of the animals as much as the human inhabitants — and yet it looked as though Kaltenburg took a secret delight in testing the capacity of the system to destruction, as though every time he introduced a new species of animal into the house he was expecting his so-far-proven system to collapse.

I stood in the study doorway, and no, it wasn’t my father’s room, there sat Ludwig Kaltenburg at his desk, in front of him a cup of tea, a pile of loaves, and an open newspaper. He didn’t look up. Tearing off chunk after chunk from a white loaf, he held the pieces aloft next to him and let them drop. He wasn’t disturbed by my arrival, and neither were the two dozen ducks, hardly a glance, just their quiet clucking as they waited patiently by the desk for the next bite of bread to come — they could count on it — from the hand of their master. I didn’t try to tell myself the ducks knew me so well by then that I didn’t bother them, it was just that they knew nothing could happen to them in Kaltenburg’s presence. He murmured something, perhaps a reassuring sound from human to animal, and then his voice became clearer: “Did you shut the front door? That new Alsatian bitch has got to stay outside for a bit, she’s terrifically jealous of the ducks.”

I nodded, Ludwig Kaltenburg didn’t need to say any more, I took one of the white loaves from the desk and started pulling it to pieces for the birds’ snack. Hardly a word was ever said in the Kaltenburg household about the bread supply, about provisions for the animals in general, just once I remember the professor telling a visitor, “I don’t have the time or the energy to get involved with ration coupons.” And also, “It’s autumn, my drakes are molting, that’s when their feed needs to be especially good, every child knows that.”

Over time it became a set phrase. If Kaltenburg talked about molting drakes, then we knew he was pushing higher authority to make up some deficit or other, and sometimes, if he was in a good mood and fancied his chances, he even—“molting drakes”—tried renegotiating.

No, there were no samples of seeds from Leningrad on the desk, just a newspaper covered in breadcrumbs. Kaltenburg picked it up carefully by the edges, formed a chute, and to the joy of his molt-weakened drakes dropped the light flakes onto the carpet.

6

ALTHOUGH HE MAINTAINED that it wasn’t necessary, I wasn’t going to hear anything new, it was basically always the same, nothing could have stopped me accompanying the professor to his lectures. “You know I won’t be offended if you’ve got something else on in the evening,” he always said, after I had told him, “I’ll be there listening carefully as usual tomorrow evening.” It was almost a ritual between us: “I’m afraid it will be very crowded and you’ll have to stand all the way through,” while the professor well knew he could count on my presence down there in the hall. “Don’t inflict it on yourself,” a ritual, a game, it was up to Kaltenburg to bring it to a close: “If you’d rather go and see a movie, with your school friends perhaps, I’ll understand,” to which I didn’t reply, and so with an “If you insist on it,” he gave up trying to change my mind: “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

During that time I can’t have missed a single one of his big lectures. I went with Ludwig Kaltenburg, but during the evening itself I didn’t stay near him. We didn’t stand together before proceedings began, afterward I went home without even saying goodbye to him, while at the front of the hall the professor was surrounded by his listeners. And I never wanted to be at the front, I sat somewhere in the middle, as though I were just another member of the audience. That was our silent agreement, so that he never saw me among the one, two, three hundred blurred faces.

The hall belonged to him the moment he began to speak, he knew that. All the same, I had to give Professor Kaltenburg my assessment of the audience, he could gauge the general atmosphere from the lectern, but what details had I noticed out there, someone next to me writing everything down from beginning to end, a young couple in the row in front of me getting bored at some point. I looked around, noting a slight cough on the left, and on the right a woman who never seemed to stop hunting for something in her handbag. There was no cause for concern, I sat in the crowd, and the crowd listened to Professor Kaltenburg. For me it was less a matter of paying attention to what he said than of being carried along by his voice, his Viennese cadences filling the room, his distinct articulation, for an hour and a half Kaltenburg addressed the Saxon silence, talking clearly and animatedly and calmly. I never knew him to lose track, as for instance by noticing just in time that the sentence construction he had embarked on could end up in a mess, and he never went in for the familiar sort of muttering all too familiar when people are reading off empty passages from the page, quite simply because such passages did not occur in any lecture by Ludwig Kaltenburg.

In public he renounced anything speculative, even though speculation was of course an important element of the Institute’s work, Kaltenburg would not permit himself any “philosophizing,” as he called it. He confined himself strictly to the animal kingdom, and his Dresden audience was grateful for it, they found it refreshing that someone was talking purely about observations, solid information, irrefutable facts which no reasonable person could doubt. So in time a regular audience was built up, you recognized more and more faces, people nodded to one another, almost by silent agreement: this evening too will be reserved for the animals and the reality before our eyes.

You sensed how close the relationship between Professor Kaltenburg and his audience actually was in the following question-and-answer session. His answers were never simply polite, let alone brusque. At the end of the year parents always wanted to know what domestic animals were suitable as pets for their children, “No guinea pigs, please,” he always replied, most listeners already knew his reasons, but each time Kaltenburg patiently ran through them again.

“And that brings us to the area of unproven facts, not to say assertions that have turned out to be untenable.” You might think this would be enough to make the hall hold its breath, but no, the professor then rolled his eyes, almost sank to his knees at the lectern, people were laughing, Kaltenburg caught himself up again, playing the penitent, and said, “The chaffinch.”

If you were attending a Ludwig Kaltenburg lecture for the first time, you might then learn from the person sitting next to you that both the chaffinch question and the introductory joke were a standing feature of the evening. The professor had once strongly advised against acquiring a chaffinch, which would only remain a pleasant companion, earnestly singing its heart out, as long as its owner sat motionless in front of it. Otherwise, made extremely nervous by sudden movements, the bird would go on beating against the bars of its cage until its skull cracked.

The audience’s rejection of this had been vociferous, one chaffinch owner after another spoke up, Kaltenburg must have observed a badly damaged specimen, or he himself had been going through an extremely neurotic patch. He was obliged to admit defeat, Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg had got it wrong, he didn’t mind admitting as much. “I prefer talking about things we know for certain,” was what he had always said, so where chaffinches were concerned, he was happy to leave the field to long-term observers.

One evening when the professor was about to dismiss his audience, somebody surprised us by coming up with yet another question. Kaltenburg had glanced along the rows for the last time, had embarked on his usual closing speech: he hoped that for today our questions had been answered, if not exhaustively, since there were unfortunately all too few questions about the animal kingdom that could be answered exhaustively — Ludwig Kaltenburg’s discreet hint that he himself was exhausted, that the audience should save its open questions for the next lecture session, please. Among the regular listeners there was nobody who failed to take the hint, nobody who would dream of interrupting Kaltenburg at this point. People had fished out their bags from under their seats, they had their coats over their arms, waiting to applaud again at the end. “In the coming weeks we will all discover new things about the animals around us, and new questions will come up,” all that was left now was his “Many thanks once more for listening to me for so long and so patiently” and “I hope you have a pleasant journey home”—two sentences between which Kaltenburg always left a short pause, to savor the attentive silence in the hall for a moment.

“Herr Professor, if you don’t mind”—somebody had stood up in one of the back rows, I could hear people muttering, Hey, that’s not fair, you can see the professor is tired, anybody asking a question now must be a newcomer, someone ignorant of the rules. “Herr Professor, if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask a brief question,” and the tone suggested that the speaker was somebody who would not recognize the rules after twenty lecture evenings with the professor, who would never respect them. People were turning round, trying to see this person, only a few noticed how Kaltenburg had raised his eyebrows, as though wondering what was in store for him now.

“If I think of a chick being nursed under its mother’s wing, for example — what part of that behavior is acquired, and what is innate, what is due to experience? In short, does an adult bird know that it was taken under its mother’s wing when it was young?”

A trick question? Was someone trying to lead him on? Had they planted an agent provocateur on him at last? The professor knew all the tricky types, they too were part of the regular audience. Those who always asked the same question regardless of the lecture topic. Those who always knew better than the lecturer and couldn’t wait to pick him up on some trivial detail. And the one who produced an uncontrollable torrent of language that never led to a question mark. We all knew them, but this questioner did not immediately fit into any known category. Was the professor racking his memory for a face that corresponded to that of this unknown young man, was he looking around the hall for me, as though I might help him out at this juncture? I could see he was playing for time, which he did initially by explaining to the audience the unfamiliar German verb the young man had used, hudern, for when a chick is taken under its mother’s wing.

Hudern: the expression was far from unfamiliar to me. I learned very early on what it meant, and I know who taught it to me. Who helped me with my drawing when I really wanted a picture of the mother hen who strayed into our garden with her brood of chicks one afternoon. Who did most of the work when all I had done was dash a few yellow circles down on paper to represent the young birds. I didn’t have to turn around to see that lean figure before me, the taut skin that looked as though it had been stretched over the skull by hand, the high cheekbones, the peculiarly round eyes, whose effect was intensified by what seemed to be a complete absence of eyelashes. And yes, I could have told Ludwig Kaltenburg who the unknown listener was. Someone who had grown up on a farm in the Rhineland, watching from an early age how the hens nursed chicks under their wings, how they spread their wings over their offspring to protect them from rain, cold, strong sunlight. I recognized him instantly from his voice, his intonation. Nothing Saxon about it. A stranger. After you had been listening to Ludwig Kaltenburg for an hour and a half, carried along by his mellifluent Viennese accent, your hearing was sharpened, as though the eardrums had been cleansed of all sorts of guttural, hissing, and oral cavity noises. The question about chicks being nursed had been put by a Rhinelander, in a softly flowing High German, but you sensed he could just as easily have been speaking Platt, the Low German dialect of the lower Rhine, the language he grew up with.

Kaltenburg had left the question of nursing chicks far behind, moving on from chickens to the duck family, then touching on spotted nutcrackers, ravens, and nightingales, talking — in grossly simplified terms, as he admitted — about “stupid” and “clever” animals. Possibly still not sure whether he was being set up, he was keen to reach terra firma quickly. He was in the process of building his Dresden jackdaw colony, this was a time when he often thought back to Vienna and his first flock, long since dispersed — for him it was an easy move from here to the topic of tradition-building in the animal kingdom.

A young jackdaw, attached to older birds, would follow the same flyway as its forebears, and this knowledge, if you wanted to call it that, would be passed on to its own young. The sequence of route-training stayed the same from generation to generation, not based on some kind of insight but simply out of tradition. “My tomcat used to hunt regularly in a particular bit of the garden”—the professor leaned forward, resting on his elbows—“and the birds learned to avoid his hunting ground. Years after he died the young jackdaws were still doing the same, keeping the memory of an old cat alive.”

With regard to memory itself — Kaltenburg’s glance now took in the audience as a whole, whereas before he had been concentrating on the stranger — or, to be more precise, with regard to feats of memory in the narrowest sense, there were significant differences between the species, sometimes in fact between one individual animal and another. Just as there were between human beings, which was why he thought it wrong to see humans and animals as poles apart when it came to the ability to remember.

With this change of direction the professor had finally managed to put an end to the eerie mood in the hall, there was even some laughter here and there, a laugh of relief, the mixture of disquiet and paralysis was dissolved at a blow. It was true that there should not have been any mention of humans, that was the pact between Kaltenburg and his public, but in this particular situation the professor had no choice. There had never been such an atmosphere at a lecture, oppressed silence, uncertainty, doubt, anxiety, the whole evening could easily have been poisoned retrospectively. Ludwig Kaltenburg too looked relieved now: he would never have forgiven himself if he’d had to watch his listeners slope off home hanging their heads. The tension drained from his face, he bowed, the first few people were getting up to leave.

There was no time to lose. I pushed my way along the row to get to the central aisle, the dense crowd: Martin nowhere to be seen. I squeezed through as far as the door: nobody even remotely resembling him. I slipped between an old couple into the foyer: Martin must have altered. But there he was: moving purposefully toward the exit, he was just lighting a cigarette.

7

PEOPLE AUTOMATICALLY STEPPED ASIDE to let Martin Spengler pass, they didn’t dare make eye contact with him, and on the way out he saw nothing and nobody. They shied away from this stranger who had nearly upset the balance of Professor Kaltenburg’s lecture evening with a single, late, inconsiderate question. But even as a silent listener among the crowd he would have made people somewhat uneasy. Yes, maybe it was something I grasped at that moment as I chased him across the foyer, drawing attention to myself in the process: wherever Martin Spengler turned up in public he caused a certain annoyance, hard to explain but totally unrelated to whether he was trying to provoke people or not.

The way that Martin once nearly got into a fight with a gang of juveniles, the way that, insecure as he was, he felt challenged by a group of cheeky but fundamentally harmless kids marauding through the rubble landscape, who for their part felt threatened by Martin as they probably did by any adult who crossed an unseen territorial boundary: it must have been one of his earliest, most formative experiences in Dresden. I can see Martin getting out of the train with his portfolio under his arm, leaving the station and walking in the direction of the art academy. But when we met up again by chance, Martin had already been living in the city for quite a while, and perhaps my memory only places this story at the beginning of his stay in Dresden because I have always regarded it as symptomatic of his student years, not to say his whole life.

Martin was received in Dresden by the echo of children’s voices, it had to be children’s voices, even though from a distance there was something shrill and hateful about them such as you would only want to ascribe to an adult. At first he couldn’t make out any words in all the shouting, simply accepting it as a sign that the area was not completely devoid of life. There were no signposts, he had difficulty finding his way through the network of trampled paths and cleared stretches of road. Martin had an appointment, hugged the portfolio of drawings close to him, he had worked at it for a long time, constantly adding new pieces, taking out older ones, so that now it provided an overview of nearly eighteen months’ work.

Masses of masonry, dust, a shrub here and there. Not that such areas were unknown to him, but he knew them only from a bird’s-eye view, from his cockpit. You could just as well have told him he was traveling through the karst region north of the Mediterranean. Or far to the east. He had seen places, from above the Crimea, where Dresden stretched in every direction, to the horizon. As a fighter pilot Martin had been decorated several times over, but which sorties he got his medals for he could no longer say, there had been too many, and mostly he saw nothing below him but a postwar Dresden. The burn marks on his neck, from the chin to behind his left ear — if you mentioned his scar he would say, “That’s what they gave me the gold medal for, ‘wounded in combat.’”

No, none of it was that unfamiliar to Martin — it was just that he had missed his way some time ago in the empty city. Children were playing somewhere in the ruins, crawling through half-collapsed cellars, following the course of completely vanished rows of streets from one plot of ground to another, a subterranean network of paths to which no adult had access. Then they would resurface somewhere unexpected, lugging planks out of a cellar and using them to get to spaces you had so far seen only from an insuperable distance, glimpses into secret rooms, across a gaping chasm four stories deep. The children would be egging each other on, thought Martin, while they dragged their plunder with grim determination through the brick debris, or two rival gangs were preparing for a fight, or the excitement was all about some tremendous discovery, the children had found something in the ruins they’d never seen before, something strange to them — but what could be strange to them? — hence all the shouting.

At first Martin wanted to use the children’s voices to orient himself. Perhaps he had missed some sign in the landscape where he should have turned off, a particular heap of stones, a gorse bush with a distinctive shape, maybe he hadn’t taken in the details of the lengthy directions in the right order, had paid more attention to the tone of the friendly old lady on the train than to the information she gave him. Most of the journey had taken place in silence, actually quite a pleasant silence, he felt, even though he wondered now and again whether he, the stranger, was the reason for the reticence of his fellow travelers, who all seemed to be natives. No, it wasn’t his fault, Martin realized as the valley narrowed on either side of the track, the Elbe slopes closing in on the train windows, for as the end of the journey clearly approached, the first quiet conversations started up. More and more voices joined in, he heard mention of people’s jobs, place-names, surnames, even a first name, an address. He was relieved, satisfied that during the journey it had been simple consideration for others, a matter of leaving them in peace. You read, you dozed, you lost yourself in daydreams, but now, just before arriving, there was no fear of bothering anyone if you began a conversation.

It was at Weinböhla that the lady spoke to him, gesturing toward his portfolio, and when he began to explain something about drawings, the art academy, his application to study there, the lady nodded as though she had known all along. Her husband had been an artist too, a man obsessed by his art. Precisely in the darkest years he had been driven by an almost frightening compulsion, producing hundreds of drawings, even though there wasn’t the slightest prospect of ever showing them in public. On the contrary, nobody could be allowed to see the pictures, and as her husband finished one sheet after another, it was her job to hide them. She had found more and more new hiding places, in the loft between two hideous old farmhouse dressers, behind the wall cladding in the summerhouse, under all the clutter in the tool shed. In a way she had admired her husband, whose work obsession prevented him from looking either forward or back, but she also felt powerless, close to despair as she sewed sketchpads into pillows or wrapped half a dozen pictures in packing paper and laid them along the shelves in the larder like ordinary lining. A few days later the wrapping paper had been torn away, the scraps covered in manic yet almost microscopically fine pencil strokes. Another headache. Her husband couldn’t remember anything.

Before Martin could ask his name and whether his work was on display in the art gallery today, whether he was still working at the same furious pace, she said, “All burned.”

With that, the subject was closed. “All burned”: paintings, drawings, and sketches, or the artist himself together with his concealed work — Martin did not dare ask. The lady composed herself, returned to the art academy, and began to describe the easiest way to get there. It would have been better if he had asked her to draw him a sketch map on his portfolio case, because as she spoke — now fully turned toward her interlocutor — in well-formed, clearly structured sentences about things which did not affect her emotionally, Martin soon had ears for nothing but her way of talking.

They crossed the Elbe, the lady made him calmly repeat all the details, corrected him, went over it again, the train drew into the central station, and as they parted Martin had only a hazy notion of the city’s topography, but he had learned his first lesson about Dresden: people here set great store by a cultivated command of High German. “We’re supposed to get off the train at the front”—such prompting would have sounded far too direct, an uncouth way of addressing someone, especially if you had only just met them. In Dresden you had to say, “It might be preferable to alight by the door at the front end of the train,” and you certainly couldn’t have a brusque “We’re getting out…,” let alone “We gotta get off up there.”

Even before he set foot on Dresden soil, he had already learned a new word, almost a foreign word — not a dialect expression, far from it. It was something that went beyond good High German when the lady unselfconsciously wove into her sentences a refined form of the German subjunctive, wöllte, and thereby showed Martin what it was to speak Highest German. Admittedly, he was taken aback at first, he had never heard wöllte before, but it seemed so familiar to people here that he assumed the children were taught it in the first year of elementary school. He must catch up quickly, Martin resolved, as he helped his kind traveling companion with her cases and took the most polite leave of her on the platform.

While still in the station he witnessed a mother admonishing her child to “stay here, please.” Even when a wayward child was threatening to disappear into the passing crowd and one felt one’s face reddening with anger, one still used the proper imperative, albeit with a sharper edge. Even the harassed mother over there struggling with her luggage would not let herself go in public with a coarse, rustic “Hey!” Here they had internalized Luther, talking like a book at all times, as Martin realized at once.

When he arrived he knew practically nothing about the forms and the depths of the local language. After a period of disenchantment, while Martin tried to ward off any taint of dialect by employing a harshly correct High German, his growing curiosity led him to become more accustomed to it, and he gradually acquired a command of Saxon, though without ever accepting it completely. In particular, he learned to imitate its Chemnitz variety, in fact he eventually picked up an almost perfect Chemnitz accent, perhaps partly because it could not have been much further from Martin’s native inflections. There was not the slightest melodic affinity between the two dialects, so that he didn’t have to develop a feeling for fluent, for right and wrong transitions.

Now, however, Martin was lost, confronted by paths branching off between two mountains of rubble, he should have paid more attention to the directions. Die Ohren (the ears) — as he wasn’t far now from the scene of the action, a sound was beginning to emerge that resembled these words, if anything; the chorus drifted across the empty lots, breaking on the hollow facades. Soon he thought he could make out another syllable, something formed with an aus (out), the shouting children were to his left, raus, saus, or Haus, at the next crossroads perhaps he would find out what lay behind this Ohren aus (ears out).

Later he could not have said what he caught sight of first, after he had taken the turning: the dozen or so boys and girls perched high above him, excitedly leaning out of the window spaces in a ruined building, poor creatures with scarred knees and mended clothes, shrieking their heads off. Strangely enough, it was more difficult to hear them now, were they suffering from mumps, could it be that the children had lost their teeth?

Or was it the man ahead of him he saw first, down below in the alley, about a hundred meters away, he must have taken a secret path over the wasteland, through what had been backyards, and emerged from a passageway onto the open street without noticing Martin’s appearance at the corner of the house? From behind, it was difficult to guess his age, between thirty and forty, Martin would have said. Dark suit, no coat, no hat. Nothing else striking about him. It was hard to imagine what he was doing in such a place carrying his briefcase — perhaps he was just someone who had finished work early and was taking his usual shortcut from office to home.

Martin shuddered at the thought that he might have ended up in a similar job and had to walk day in, day out through the ruins of some small German town or other. There would be monotonous work waiting for him in the surveyor’s office, insufferable colleagues, at home his young family would be expecting him, at some point the children would leave home, otherwise things would stay the same for the rest of his life. Not that Martin had achieved much in the last few years. But at least he wasn’t carrying a briefcase, he was carrying a portfolio full of his own drawings through the city.

The children were targeting the man from city hall, of that there was no doubt, perhaps they had followed him the whole way. There was nothing for it now, the man would have to pass the screaming crowd of children. He straightened his back. Slowed down. Hesitated. Stopped. Bent down and reached for a stone. The children were so busy shouting at him that they didn’t grasp what was going on. No, this rabble simply had no fear. Drawing himself back for the throw, he turned around quickly, saw Martin behind him, dropped the stone. And finally Martin understood: Ohren didn’t come into it, it wasn’t Ohren the kids were thinking of, they were shouting in Saxon dialect, “Oochen aus, Oochen aus” (eyes out).

The young man in the dark suit, hatless and coatless, was wearing an eyepatch. With only one eye, his tormentors would have calculated, he wasn’t likely to hit anybody, the stone would have been propelled with force but not aimed properly, and would have bounced back off the facade somewhere.

“Eyes out, eyes out”—the man with the eyepatch reached the next crossing, the one after that, soon he had disappeared. Martin had not moved from the spot, his portfolio under his arm, now he wished he had called out to the man ahead of him, stopped him and asked the way, involved him in a conversation. There was no point in turning back, the children would be quicker than he, knew the area well. It was quiet now, they were waiting for him to get nearer. What would they shout at him, what flaw would they hit upon, would it be the scar, his posture, his whole figure, his long arms clutching the portfolio with his drawings, his cheekbones, his shoulders, his walk, his hairline, would they discover something else altogether that nobody had yet noticed? Martin knew how sharp and merciless children’s eyesight could be.

Suddenly he felt like emulating the one-eyed man. That is to say, he was conscious that he was already looking around for a really big stone, as sharp-edged as possible, it had to be weighty and solid, mustn’t easily crumble. No rotten piece of rubble. A good throwing rock. And Martin had no intention of meekly putting the stone down again if somebody suddenly turned up in the street. He meant it seriously. He wouldn’t be able to defend himself against the children’s superior numbers, he would go down under a hail of stones, but one of the gang at least would have reason to remember this day for some time to come.

As soon as he was two or three houses away, they started up their chorus as if at a word of command. Martin walked on swiftly, straight ahead, not looking up, not hearing a thing. Then the indistinct carpet of sound again. Then half-intelligible words again. He had left the gang behind him, reached the next street corner. The children were hollering, “Oochen aus, Oochen aus,” as they had been the whole time, as they had perhaps the whole year through, a monotonous battle cry, but good enough at any rate to intimidate random passersby, and the eyepatch was nothing but an unlucky coincidence.

Martin slowed down, the children hadn’t meant him personally, nor the one-eyed man, he had survived his second lesson about Dresden. He looked at his shoes — dust; his trouser legs — dust; sandstone and mortar had combined to form a fine layer. Now he could feel his shoulders, could feel his neck again. He was gripping the portfolio tightly in his left hand, his right hand was empty.

8

WE WERE SITTING IN our damp clothes in a small shelter upstream by the Elbe when Martin described his arrival in Dresden to me. The rain fell steadily in front of us, we had been careless enough to run into a storm that had been threatening to break for ages, not a soul in sight anywhere apart from us, but we had both been drawn by the sulfur yellow sky. We sat on the narrow bench together, the storm had passed overhead toward the city, and I remember exactly how we flinched when our clammy sleeves touched, how Martin constantly edged away from me, as though while he was narrating he could see me only from a certain distance. Then we left the shelter. Martin had fallen silent. The fields were steaming.

Katharina Fischer had laid her knife and fork across her plate, folded her napkin. That atmosphere Martin was surrounded by — the same as in his space installations. While customers at nearby tables continued their conversations about the day’s events and their holiday plans, the interpreter was lost in thought for a while. “It may be that today I would hardly feel the latent aggression that used to make me recoil when I walked into a space set up by Martin Spengler. What do you think? Was he aiming to convert tension into harmony?”

It was hard for me be the judge of that, since from childhood I had known extremely harmonious moments in his company. I can’t remember exactly whether he had already taken to visiting the hyenas, I couldn’t even say whether the hyenas were already back in the zoo during his student days. But Martin went to the zoo a lot, right from the beginning. Cloven-hoofed animals. Wild cats. The aviaries. I can see him outside an animal enclosure, bent over his drawing pad, working on into the sunset. Soon the zoo would be closing for visitors, Martin enjoyed the remaining time right down to the last minute, hardly seeming to look up as the animal on the other side, the black bear, observed him curiously.

I sat next to him for many hours, absorbing what was taking shape on Martin’s page. I especially loved going with him in the mornings, he had permission to start drawing early when the animals were being attended to, it was all intimacy and pleasurable expectation, none of the bustle the day would inevitably bring, no school groups, no families, no bunches of high-spirited art students who regarded animal studies as nothing but a boring exercise.

It was on a morning like this that I brought up the subject of Ludwig Kaltenburg’s lecture. When Martin reacted evasively, I thought I detected a note of regret at having confronted the professor bluntly.

“No, no, that’s not quite right,” he corrected me, in the same friendly tone in which he had addressed Kaltenburg. “I don’t feel guilty about disturbing the professor’s peace of mind. On the contrary.”

He had been completely indifferent to the topic of the lecture. The lecturer himself, however — Martin had come across the announcement in the newspaper, that is to say, he probably wouldn’t have taken any notice of it if the name had not vaguely jogged his memory. He flipped back through the pages, the large capitals: “Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg Lectures,” Martin stared at the words, there could be no mistake, not even a chance identity of names, and the professor didn’t have a doppelgänger, for sure — this was the man, all right. Martin had suffered sleepless nights because of him. Met him? No, he had never met Kaltenburg. He only knew the name. He knew it from the evenly flowing handwriting of a botanist, my father’s writing. From letters he had read in another life on the edge of dusty airstrips.

“To be honest, I sat in the audience all evening with one fixed purpose: to entice the great Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg out of his shell. And to do it just before the end, when nobody — least of all the professor — would be expecting a wild, unusual question.”

Martin concentrated on a female bison which stood feeding not far away, looking over at us from time to time. On the page he had drawn broad charcoal lines, which he began calmly rubbing.

“You remember your nanny, of course? I sometimes wonder what became of her. She was about my age, perhaps a year or eighteen months younger. When I went to Posen I was still obsessed by the idea of becoming a pediatrician, she was looking after you, there were things for us to discuss. We strolled through the fields, just as you and I did. She even persuaded me to go for walks in the town. Our Sunday afternoons. I was never sure whether your nanny told you about it, she denied it, but I suspected you knew. She couldn’t have hidden anything from you.”

The animal turned away, Martin tore the portrait he had begun off the pad, it consisted of not much more than a bison’s chest in isolation. A quick glance — and he sketched a bison’s flank.

“I hope you don’t mind me telling you this now. She was fond of you, I’m sure you know that. Though you must have been a difficult boy at times. Perhaps that’s just what she liked about you. At one time there must have been a situation where you got her into a lot of trouble, or so it seemed to me, but I could never for the life of me get her to say anything about what you did wrong. She stood firmly by you. Do you remember her name? Your parents called her Maria, but maybe that wasn’t her real name at all. I’d love to know whether she’s still alive. Where. And what she’s doing. Married with children, that’s what I would wish for her. I always had the feeling that your parents kept a protective eye on her. Did you notice anything? I don’t mean anything about her, but the way people treated her. Why am I asking you this, you were only seven or eight, what could you know? But we can’t ask your parents now. Did she go with you to Dresden?”

Flanks by themselves, parts of the chest, the beginnings of an ear — the keeper was coming around now, making one last check on the enclosure, our time was running out. With hurried strokes and without a further glance at the animals, Martin produced a piece of shaggy hide.

“I was jealous when I found out from your parents’ letters that Professor Kaltenburg was in and out of your place for a while, then stayed away after an unpleasant scene. For me it was obvious he had made approaches to Maria. She rejects him, there’s a big commotion, your parents come out on her side and break off all contact with the professor. I found my own scenario so convincing that I was on the point of literally taking off to come and see you. Where was I at that time, Croatia maybe, Apulia, in the Ukraine. I had no idea how I would manage it. Just clear off with the plane. Desert. The enormous distance almost made me lose my mind. So one morning out of a clear blue sky a plane lands on the dusty road in front of your house. You have been sitting drinking cocoa. The noise. Maria joins you at the window. You see me climbing out of the cockpit. A professor who is barely forty, a fanatical motorcyclist to boot, that kind of man can be dangerous. It was only then that I found out I was really keen on your nanny. And you can’t imagine how intensely I loathed Herr Professor Kaltenburg.”

The first school groups had arrived at the entrance. Martin said goodbye to the ladies at the ticket office, and then the zoo and our undisturbed morning were behind us.

“Did you know that for Maria — that I made some drawings of her? My private name for the work I did then is the ‘Posen Block,’ and if it’s ever exhibited anywhere you’ve got to remind me of that title, okay?”

Frau Fischer inquired whether the drawings still existed.

Certainly. They survived the Posen years, the war, Martin preserved them carefully in a number of portfolios, and somehow he even succeeded in smuggling them out intact to the West. Today they are among the most important works from that early period.

“As the ‘Posen Block’?” She had never heard of a body of work with that title.

No, in fact the “Posen Block” has never been exhibited as such. Memories of a nanny — but in the catalogue it’s called “Russian Nurse,” a restrained sketch on a tear-off drawing pad, the soft hair, the cap with a cross, only the eyes and nose are executed with a stronger pencil line. Another drawing: “Three by the Fire,” a very consciously chosen, vague title, two dark human figures contemplating an aureole, and on the left the contours of a bright figure with long hair, crouching, eyes downcast. The young woman, a suppressed fantasy perhaps, which recurs in the late work.

On the other hand, many of Martin’s student pieces stuck out like a sore thumb, it occurred to me, after I had asked Katharina Fischer if she would like some dessert, a coffee. In retrospect you can see in his student work the pressure he was under: sometimes he dutifully tries to please his teachers, at other times he is really untrue to his own hand, his own vision. Presumably he left most of it behind in Dresden, if he didn’t burn it. But I’ve kept all of Martin’s bison sketches.

9

IMPORTANT AS LUDWIG Kaltenburg was for me, it wasn’t from him that I first heard the name Hagemann, but from Martin Spengler. If I visualize him in his Dresden period, it’s not in group photos at the college, not among a circle of laughing students, not at a carnival party. Martin in Red Indian costume, Martin at a dance, Martin as a member of a bowling team — unthinkable. For me he belongs at the Hagemann family dining table, he belongs in their drawing room. I can see Martin in the little room behind the kitchen, a space crammed with books, painting equipment, drawing pads. A narrow bed, two stools, an old bureau: this accommodation had been fixed up for him by his favorite professor, a friend of the family and also the first patron of this independent-minded art student, whom outsiders usually considered taciturn. As far as I can recall, in Dresden Martin didn’t show his hyena drawings to anyone but this professor, the Hagemanns, and me.

The Hagemann family was pleased to have Martin in their house, it could easily have been different, as with the elderly couple and their middle-aged son who had been allocated quarters on the first floor. When they first moved in there was talk of having met previously, during the war, the man even announced his service rank as though that made him the new head of the household. But Herr Hagemann did not wish to be reminded of his former superior officers, least of all by one of those officers himself.

Contact was limited to the essentials, they said hello to each other when the Klein family crossed the hall with disapproving faces to disappear up the stairs to their domain. The daughters of the household soon dubbed the Kleins “the Super-Tenant family,” and eventually the parents caught themselves using this secret nickname themselves now and then. “The Super-Tenants again”—Herr Hagemann with pocket diary in hand—“I’ve got to get the cardboard laurels out of the cellar.” Whenever the opportunist veteran appeared on the stairs on the eve of some official anniversary celebration, commemoration, birthday, or death day, silently reminding Herr Hagemann to put the decorations out, it was all the head of the household could do not to warn him, “Herr Super-Tenant, you’re definitely going too far.”

If the Hagemanns were having a reception, Martin made himself scarce in a corner of the drawing room and didn’t budge all evening. The world of art and academia frequented the Hagemanns’, the company often including foreign visitors. Martin listened, he studied. Faces, hands, ashtrays, armchairs, shoes, curtains, the stucco rosette on the ceiling: wandering around the room, his gaze often fell upon a small dark spot, up there between the hook for the chandelier and a stucco sunflower leaf. A housefly stiffened in death, but Martin wouldn’t have been all that surprised if on closer inspection the empty exoskeleton had turned out to be a tiny hole. And he pictured to himself three people with wry faces upstairs crouching together under the kitchen table, with father, mother, and son silently fighting over whose turn it was to apply their ear to the hole punched through the linoleum.

Once the guests had all left and the family had gone to bed, Martin crept out of his room again back into the drawing room, enjoying the silence, sitting in the green armchair, Frau Hagemann’s favorite. In the darkness he looked at the walls.

“These walls are a world in themselves,” he said once. At the Hagemanns’, hyena art hung everywhere.

Every time I met Martin, he told me about the Hagemanns, and I soon felt I knew the family personally, as though I had enjoyed their company for years, the parents, the two daughters — Martin, who got on well with them from the beginning, passed on some of his intimacy to me. I particularly remember one of his stories, perhaps because I never found out whether Martin invented it for me in the telling, or because it took place in the Great Garden, or perhaps quite simply because Klara Hagemann was the central figure in it.

One day, during a Sunday walk in the park, without warning Klara left her family standing on the path. A figure in the distance, an unusual movement, had caught her eye, and before her parents or sister had time to notice that a man holding a dog lead was about to beat his animal with it, Klara had raced off. She ran straight across the field, screaming, a stream of words never heard before in this spot and probably never heard there again. The dachshund owner knew he was being accosted, looked around, couldn’t work out at first what was happening, had no idea what was coming at him, just saw a screaming girl in a Sunday dress. For a moment he forgot the existence of the scruffy, whimpering animal cowering in the grass at his feet — and lowered his arm. Klara Hagemann had been eleven or twelve. Straight after the war. Her parents’ hearts must have stood still.

Martin said, “She was still quite small at the time.”

Half of Dresden looked on as a girl in a white dress with knee-length socks and sandals delivered a telling-off to a dog owner, a total stranger. The Hagemanns had no idea where she could have acquired such language.

He said, “She’s quite different today.”

As though he had been present himself, Martin described to me how the father took a deep breath, took his first step into the field. Seen from the path, his walk, his shoulders, looked a little stiff. Once over there he looked the man in the eye, speaking two, three short sentences. They shook hands. Then Herr Hagemann and his daughter were back. He took off his hat, wiping his brow. He was sweating: “Not another word. We’re going for a coffee.”

The two girls ran on ahead. Ulli, the older sister, always one step behind Klara. His wife took his arm. Her expression said, Klara was right. He was powerless against it. Herr Hagemann had been looking forward to a peaceful family walk. But Klara was his daughter. He was the father of Klara Hagemann. A perfectly ordinary, mild Sunday afternoon in 1946 or 1947.

As can be imagined, I was pretty curious about this girl, or I should say this young woman, and was looking forward to being introduced to her by Martin. The trouble was, he knew me well enough to be aware that I was quite capable of wrecking a carefully planned arrangement at the last minute, I wouldn’t have cared a jot about embarrassing Martin, I simply wouldn’t have turned up at the rendezvous. He had no choice but to simply take me by surprise, and so he told me, as he packed up his things at the end of an afternoon together at the zoo, “By the way, I forgot to tell you — we’re going to see Klara.”

The further we walked down Tiergartenstrasse, the more agitated I felt. Martin remained cool. “She’ll be waiting for us”—he turned purposefully into the Great Garden—“She’s always overpunctual, you know.” He walked faster, pulled my sleeve, pointing at the ruins of the palace: “What did I tell you, the woman over there in the blue dress, do you recognize her?”

We shook hands, and Klara greeted me so politely that I almost expected a curtsy. But there was a spark in her green eyes that seemed to warn me not to go thinking her good manners were for my personal benefit. Martin pointed to his portfolio, then at me: “Hermann was with me in the zoo.”

“In the zoo?”

With raised eyebrows, Klara fixed her gaze on me with the air of someone who vaguely remembered going there a long time ago. At least I was in Martin’s company — obviously it wasn’t thought strange he should go to the zoo regularly, and he was much older than I. In fact, she insisted on assessing Martin’s new work before anything else, we found a place under the trees, and she hadn’t even ordered a drink before Martin was made to open his portfolio. “Mineral water or a soda — no, I’ll have water”; she didn’t mind, the drawings lay spread out on the table in front of us. Klara, who didn’t appear to be interested in animals, compared the hare with the graylag goose, pulled a series of eagle studies closer to her, the line on this page, the fine hatching over there, as though just breathed onto the paper, a bird in motion, and then—“Could you move that glass, please”—that line on the head of a resting bearded vulture.

“Tell me, do either of you know which house Kokoschka stayed in?” Martin pointed across at the palace pond. “Is that the one? The one in front, maybe? Or is it one of those that was bombed? I’m sure you can tell me, Klara.”

Klara shook her head, as though she knew exactly. I, on the other hand, didn’t even know the name Oskar Kokoschka, I was hearing about this painter for the first time, and especially about the life-sized doll he got someone to make in the image of the woman he idolized, an ugly, crude monster puppet which Kokoschka hoped would inspire him in Dresden.

“I have heard that the doll was found one morning soaked in red wine and with twisted limbs somewhere here in the garden. I’d love to know where, precisely.”

A policeman on his beat had thought at first that the limp figure with the dead face was a real female corpse, Martin went on talking, and I was grateful to Klara when she interrupted him in midsentence: “I hope you don’t mind, Martin, but I think that’ll do.”

We sauntered around the palace pond, to the Flutgraben — that is, I saw Klara strolling next to Martin, saw the toes of her shoes, yes, Klara was strolling through Dresden as though demonstrating how you should move in the distant future along the boulevard of an imaginary metropolis. Her ankles. Her dark, very slightly wavy hair.

“Martin has told me about your episode with the dachshund owner,” I dared to address her.

“Oh, that old story”—amused, I thought, or perhaps like someone tired of hearing the same anecdote repeated. And I wasn’t expecting that Klara, acting as though Martin were suddenly in the way, would drop back a step and smile across at me.

Martin suggested hiring a rowboat. Apparently the idea appealed to Klara too, he was inviting us to take a boat ride, I could see Klara and me sitting next to each other, Martin facing us on the oarsman’s seat. But when we got in, it was “No, no, Hermann, you’ve got to sit at the front.” We both looked questioningly at Martin, he shrugged his shoulders, “Enjoy the trip,” he pushed the boat off, “Water makes me nervous,” Martin stayed behind on the landing stage: “We’ll meet up again in an hour’s time, in safety, on dry land.”

Klara and I on Lake Carola. Martin followed us on the bank. That is to say, he had to keep stopping because my rowing was so bad that we hardly moved from the spot. I was on a collision course, all around us boats were gliding smoothly through the water, all of the strong young men oblivious of the labors of their upper body, their shoulders, their arms, their hands. The evenness of the oar movements was impressive, everything working like clockwork, each one of them enjoying a trip with their beloved could concentrate on taking a close look at those eyes, those lips, that nose.

I succeeded in steering our boat under the bridge without capsizing, the narrow part of the lake was behind us, for a while we were moving toward the fountain. And that was when Martin appeared again, Klara spotted him as we passed the restaurant, mixing with the families at the feeding place, Martin in a flurry of ducks, hopefully he wouldn’t think of waving.

Martin waved to us.

Hordes of children squatting on the bank looking for fish in the shallow water, children, half scared and half overconfident, holding out dry bread for the ducks to take, parents watching over their offspring — they would all turn instantly to look at the waving man in their midst, would follow his eyes across the lake, point to a boat, and have to laugh, the splashing water, somebody snatching hastily at the oars. But Klara didn’t turn a hair. I was rowing with my right arm, I wanted to bring the boat around, Klara was directing me. I was gripped by ambition, I was aiming at least to circumnavigate the little island with the swan’s nest. I no longer noticed the other boats. Once I had to push us off again from the bushes onshore. Once some twigs brushed Klara’s hair. And precisely when I was thinking with relief that Martin could no longer see us at this point, she said, “Made it.”

No, Klara wasn’t laughing. But as we moved more or less calmly between the island and the bank, and I didn’t even have any trouble maneuvering the boat a little so that Klara could get a better view of the white plumage over there in the bushes, I could have sworn that sitting facing me was an unknown lady I had heard laughing one November evening long ago. The woman in the fur coat wearing a peaked cap, the way she held her cigarette on the dark Elbe hillside, how she swept past me in the hall, and Klara in her blue dress, her hands holding on to the gunwale to get a good look at the island in Lake Carola: one and the same person, I could have sworn to it.

10

KLARA STOOD BAREFOOT in the doorway, in her blue summer dress which I knew from our boat outing in the Great Garden — the blue formed a very striking contrast to the green of Klara’s eyes. It could be the way the light was falling, I thought, evenly shining through the leaves of a big beech tree by the entrance. Klara watched me calmly as I approached, she might have seen me standing at the iron gate reading the nameplate, the Hagemann property, the path through their garden, the house where Klara and Martin live. I went up the steps to the entrance, the blue dress, the green eyes, Klara’s bare feet on the threshold, I really didn’t know where to look.

I had come to pick up Martin, it was all arranged — in my confusion I may not even have said hello.

“Oh, really? He’s not here. Perhaps he’ll be back soon. As far as I know, he was going down to the Elbe. You can go and look for him if you want.”

Even as she was saying this, quickly, decisively, as though to get rid of me, she stepped aside in the doorway. I followed her, we crossed a small anteroom, more a ventilation chamber, and Klara pushed open a swing door as if unaware that somebody was behind her. The wings of the door sprang back, I was just able to slip through.

“The door nearly caught me.”

“Oh dear, you poor thing.”

I assumed she was going to take me straight to Martin’s room, where I could wait for him, but she paused: “We used to play around with the swing door, Ulli and I, every evening after supper, we used to run back and forth in our nightgowns from the corridor to the vestibule and back. Our parents shouted that we shouldn’t romp around near the cold entrance, and we shrieked every time one of us had been hit on the head by the door. Out of breath, overexcited, faces flushed, just the state to be in when you’re meant to be going to bed.”

The “vestibule,” not “a ventilation chamber” or “a small anteroom”—for me the word is inextricably linked with that afternoon, when I heard it, from Klara, for the first time.

“A lovely house, with this swing door.” And I must have also said something like “You’ve got lots of space.”

“Well, we’re not the only ones living here — but don’t worry, they’re not around.”

I don’t quite trust myself. Neither the surprised, stupid adolescent trotting along behind Klara in the hall nor my present self claiming to remember. Klara’s cool, almost rude behavior at the beginning, only to take a friendly interest in me scarcely two minutes later — it would sound more credible if Klara’s tone when I turned up unannounced at the door had been consistently polite, if rather distant. First careless, then slightly too pert, that’s not Klara — and did she really ask, “Are you scared of me?”

I don’t know to this day whether Martin’s absence was accidental, whether he had forgotten our arrangement or deliberately gone for a walk by himself. It’s also possible that he may have been in the house the whole time, having a midday nap or engrossed in his work, and Klara didn’t want to disturb him — one possible explanation why she didn’t take me to his room, no, to the “maid’s room,” as she called the room behind the kitchen.

We had hardly sat down in the drawing room when Klara remembered that she had a book for me: “A present from my parents, and because Martin told me you were interested in swallows, I thought it might be something for you.”

Not swallows — swifts: did I call that out to Klara as she left the room to fetch the book, or did I manage to suppress such a redundant correction? You think you never see the world so clearly as in such situations, and then you have to concede that out of sheer excitement you had eyes neither for yourself nor for the person opposite.

Klara handed me a hardback volume. I opened it at the title page and was shocked to see a familiar name: LUDWIG KALTENBURG. Shocked, because I had never heard of the book, according to the title a guide to living with animals.

“I know him.”

“You’ve read the book already?”

“No, not a word of it. I’m just surprised. Because I know the author.”

“Another book by him?”

“No, that’s not it. I had no idea that he wrote books like this. I’ve known Professor Kaltenburg forever, since I was a child, but he didn’t write popular handbooks then, only academic works.”

“Oh, academic works, I get it.”

I was on the point of surrendering. Klara didn’t miss a thing, she picked up the slightest alteration in my voice as well as the deceptive casualness of a throwaway sentence, sensed a touch of arrogance as well as the little lie that had preceded it. She didn’t let go.

“You know Professor Kaltenburg personally? I don’t believe you.”

As though suddenly sorry for her brisk tone, she asked, “Would you like a glass of cordial? You could browse through the book until I get back.”

I felt as though Ludwig Kaltenburg had let me down. When I asked him about his manual the next time we met, he brushed aside this “little effort,” as he called it, with a shrug. A straight money-spinner, Kaltenburg’s financial worries in the early postwar years, no prospect of a suitable post, all the animals that needed feeding every day. When he was writing it he had also been driven by a certain anger, he was maddened by the countless bad animal books on the market, he said, wanted to sweep away all that sentimental, hypocritical garbage: no more cute little noses, no more round, astonished, sleepy eyes, or should one say bedroom eyes, and no more cuddly creatures that were nothing but humans in plush costumes. Nobody would have believed at the time that Kaltenburg’s book — which, incidentally, was followed by a number of sequels — would be such a notable success. He would never have dreamed that his collection of experiences with animals would reach such wide circles, even including Dresden society. He was still writing occasional little articles of that kind, he said, newspaper editors pestered him for them, obviously readers couldn’t get enough of unadulterated animal-watching. For him they were relaxation exercises, in the evenings when he didn’t have the concentration for serious work he would sit down and compose, with a light touch, for an hour at most, until the last feed. “And you’ve known all the stories for years, you heard them from my own lips. But of course I’ll give you a copy, you know I really love you to read every word I’ve written.”

When Klara came back from the kitchen, I talked to her about her parents. She said they were certainly kindhearted people who refused to let anybody destroy their belief in human goodness. I was holding my glass, Klara emptied hers in one go — but as children she and her sister had sometimes suffered for this belief. The pressure to be good despite all the challenges.

“A child can’t keep something like that in mind day and night. Once Ulli and I raced through the house shouting nonstop some phrase we were making fun of, I can’t remember what it was, some political chant perhaps.”

She sat down next to me on the sofa, hugging her knees.

“Suddenly my father grabbed me fiercely by the arm, he came shooting out from nowhere, pulled me under the stairs, and hissed, You know perfectly well the kind of people we’ve had foisted on us upstairs. His eyes staring, his lips trembling, and before he let go of me he whispered one word: VORKUTA. That night we could hardly get to sleep, although of course our father’s hint about Siberia was lost on us. Vorkuta to me meant the bruises on my arm that I covered up with a long-sleeved blouse.”

The fine hairs on her arm. Klara stroked her left foot.

“If you know Professor Kaltenburg so well, you must have been to his Institute in Loschwitz?”

Naturally — the door to his Institute, and even to his private quarters, was open to me day and night. But what kind of an impression would it have made if I had blurted out everything I knew about Kaltenburg? I knew every corner of his villa, I knew the man’s every emotion — a pale young man basking in the light of his fame. So I steered a course through Kaltenburg’s world as well as I could without sounding boastful, I took a back seat, telling her that what impressed me about Kaltenburg when I was a child was the way he had with gloves. Often he carried several pairs around with him, the thick calf gloves for the motorbike, the finer ones for the car, the mittens made of thick felt for a walk in the woods, the “torn ones,” as he called them, a favorite old patched pair he wore in early autumn down by the Elbe and sometimes in the evening, on his way down into the city, then his buckskin ones for unavoidable social occasions, which he took off to greet people.

Klara asked me that afternoon, “You want to be famous too, don’t you?” And when I came up with no answer she added, “Or at least notorious.”

The sun, which had moved around the house, was now shining through the big veranda windows straight into the drawing room. Our empty glasses on the table. The carpet. My dusty shoes. After a while Klara said, “By the way, I enjoyed our time on Lake Carola.”

“It was the first time I’d ever sat in a rowboat.”

“That was obvious. But I loved the way you simply ignored people when they started laughing at us.”

She blinked, jumped up, and said something that I didn’t quite catch, something like “This isn’t getting anywhere.” In two steps she had reached the window and begun to close the heavy curtain. First the left half, dark and heavy as a fur coat I had once followed with my eyes. Klara reached for the right half, carefully guiding the hem behind an indoor palm with her foot. I followed her movements, followed the strip of light as it got narrower. The dark hair on the back of the head of a strange woman. The bright chink had disappeared, and for an instant I was blind. Then I saw Klara’s face, right in front of mine.

11

THE LAST PLEASURE BOAT had glided past sometime before, we could count only about two dozen dinner jackets and evening dresses under the festive lanterns, down below the band was playing for two or three couples self-consciously dancing, most passengers stood together in little groups on deck to take in the evening air over the Elbe one last time before the trip ended. Not a sound to be heard. It had gone quiet here in the restaurant as well, the steps creaked, the waiter came up to serve our coffee, took the empty dessert plates away. Frau Fischer lit a cigarette.

I had tried to describe my excitement when, at the end of my first afternoon in the Hagemanns’ house, I had asked if I could take her to the cinema. And how Klara, no doubt just as excited, answered with a decisive nod of the head and a firm “Friday.” As though it had been settled long ago: from now on she would be going to the cinema only with this boy called Hermann Funk.

My excitement then, a few weeks later, when I had my first invitation from the Hagemanns. I knew the drawing room from my afternoon with Klara, I knew the receptions at the house from Martin’s description, but all the same I can barely remember the evening itself. I can’t even recall Klara there, that’s how excited I must have been. Fortunately, at the time I wasn’t aware that there was a good deal more associated with the name Hagemann than Martin had conveyed to me on our outings. Yes, if my parents had been Dresdeners and I had grown up in the city, I would have known about the family name, would probably have heard it mentioned at home when I was a child.

Among their extended family there was a line of academics, there were landowners, the car-business Hagemanns, Klara’s grandfather had been a cigarette manufacturer. Older gentlemen in their circle still praised the quality of certain brands, the Turkish Mixture, the Pure Virginia, and when they shook Herr Hagemann’s hand they did so solemnly, with dignity, as though they were still expressing their condolences decades after the firm had gone bankrupt and Grandfather had been consigned to the attic. Klara’s father felt uncomfortable in such situations — granted, there were such things as family virtues, hard work, conscientiousness, and an artistic vein, but Herr Hagemann did not possess an estate, nor did he run a factory. It’s possible that his choice of chemistry at the university was meant to give him something of an outsider profile in the family, he had gone to Berlin, had met his future wife in the laboratory, toyed with the idea of going abroad, but then come back to Dresden with his young family after all. Perhaps he would have preferred to live where the name meant nothing, but all the same: if you were introduced to Klara’s father, exchanged a few words with him, perhaps got to know him a little better, you soon sensed that Herr Hagemann felt an obligation to his family name, especially as all the rest of the Hagemann clan had been decamping to the West one by one since the war.

That was his stubborn streak. His secret wish to restore the good name of the Hagemanns. So Klara’s father tolerated it when his colleagues in the laboratory appreciatively called him a “real Hagemann” because in his presence the director of the firm, who was given to violent outbursts, was transformed into an understanding character who didn’t mind asking the son of the cigarette factory owner for advice from time to time. He also put up with it when his name occasionally provoked some skeptical scrutiny.

Herr Hagemann knew what he was letting himself in for. He and his wife had spent sleepless nights going through the pros and cons together, but the final decision wasn’t made until the landed-gentry relatives sent their first letter from the West. His aunt’s childish handwriting seemed to Klara’s father exactly suited to the “yoke” and “knout,” the “demons” and the “bloodsuckers” she was writing about, as though a defeated military commander had dictated his last testament to her in his madness. Herr Hagemann held his breath. As he read the last paragraph, he began to growl dangerously, Frau Hagemann was considering sending her daughters out of the room: their nephew was of course welcome at any time, they said, to escape to the bosom of the family together with his wife and daughters. He remembered staying with them near Meissen, even as a child he didn’t trust his uncle, in fact he was afraid of him, like everybody else on the estate. The oppressive summer days were dominated by fear of running into this unpredictable being, the nephew mingled with the farm workers, went out to the fields with them, hung around in the stables — but the landowner had eyes everywhere. Put yourself in the hands of such people? Of your own free will? Never.

Then there were his good intentions. There was his drive to prove himself. And there was the indulgence toward his daughters, especially the younger one, who had inherited so much from him. You certainly didn’t have to do everything they expected of you today, but he really couldn’t see any reason to complain about the prospect of a peace demonstration. Klara had earmarked that time for the next volume of Balzac, she was complaining about the wasted hours. Her father shook his head, she needn’t make a face like that, and then he felt sorry when she left the house looking miserable. The book was lying on the table. Herr Hagemann had acquired it as a young chemistry student in Berlin, had skipped his practicals, had read from cover to cover all the volumes of the cycle that had appeared in German, and felt quite lighthearted about it, as though he had managed to shake off a whole load of Hagemann obligations he had imposed upon himself.

“Then there was no further contact between the Hagemanns and the family in the West?” asked Frau Fischer.

Klara had never seen her western relatives. She wasn’t allowed to receive so much as a parcel of books from the uncle.

“So there were some limits to his indulgence toward his younger daughter, then.”

I don’t think the threat was ever made openly, but neither do I believe that any of the longed-for new books from the West ever got to Klara. Books she wasn’t allowed to read — no, it was more to do with his fearful imaginings, her father trying to give concrete expression to his loathing of that branch of the family.

In the first summer of the war the parents took their two daughters on a trip to Leipzig, Klara had just started school, Ulli was two grades above her, their father was in the uniform he detested, he cherished every minute spent with his family. His “three women,” as he called them, gave him protection, and protection for him meant the illusion that he was a civilian. So he took his family to the zoo, took them for a coffee, and in the strange city even his daughters forgot for a while that their father was no longer living with them at home. And then — whether it was an idea that occurred to them over coffee or the parents had planned it as a way of rounding off the excursion — they tacked on a visit to the National Library. Ulli thought it a boring idea, even more books than at home, a whole building just for books. She began to whine, she had enough to do with her reading primer at school, here was a whole lifetime of books she would never master, and she saw malevolently grinning authors who enjoyed writing, filling page after page, book after book, and every time they put their difficult-to-read names to a title page they leaned back, stretched themselves at their desks, narrowed their eyes, and trained their sights on Ulli. They filled shelf upon shelf, room after room, while Ulli laboriously formed her letters one by one, wrestling with sentences, toiling away at her exercise books and yet bringing them home every time covered in red ink.

What did her little sister know of the abysses of reading and writing? Speechless, Klara stared at the imposing, shiny row of lettering on the facade. She stood speechless in the entrance hall and was speechless while being shown the catalog, the reference works, the loans desk. And everybody here was carrying books under their arm, all eager to start bending over the open white pages with the black signs, day and night. When you were reading, you no longer even wanted to sleep. Speechless, Klara let her mother drag her away to the train station, she still hadn’t found her tongue when the train pulled into Dresden, at night in bed Ulli talked about the cocoa, talked about the animals, then worked out how many days of the holiday were left and fell asleep.

The Leipzig experience may have faded into the background in the following years; how could Klara know what a librarian was? But reading and writing came so much more naturally to her than to Ulli, no doubt as the younger sister she had an advantage: the younger ones sit quietly with their toys listening while the schoolchild at the table traces the lines of print with a forefinger; they listen to the way that words form into sentences, the parents’ careful corrections, and two or three years later, when it’s their turn to read aloud, it sounds as though they have taught themselves everything overnight. Klara did her homework without grumbling, then sat down with her parents’ library to read her way patiently through the centuries. Soon she had a favorite bookseller in the city, Herr Lindner. He was the one who said one day, almost in passing, “I can’t imagine Klara anywhere but a library.”

She was no longer the girl who confronted strange dachshund owners in the Great Garden, no longer incited her sister to rampage through the house making fun of political chanting, so loudly that the people upstairs could hear. She had learned in the meantime what it was to be a Hagemann, she knew that when she wanted to achieve a goal it was not enough to be more hardworking than the others, brighter, cleverer, if you didn’t have the necessary instinct, the so-called ability to learn. It was definitely not easy to keep a tight rein on herself, how often she bit her tongue, how often she rolled her eyes when somebody came at her with “truth” and “historical necessity” when all she could see was stupidity. But she made the effort, kept her aim firmly in sight, had even forced herself during her training to read the collected works of Johannes R. Becher, minister of culture.

It even went so far that Klara was mistaken for an ardent admirer of the culture minister, and I can still clearly remember a distant relative reciting a few lines of Becher at our wedding to please Klara. There we stood in front of the assembled wedding guests, all eyes were on us, I can still feel Klara’s moist hand in mine, how she flinched when she recognized the lines, how she held on to me tightly, as though she could not survive the solemn recitation of that harmless versifying without the man beside her.

“The relatives from the West weren’t there.”

No, of course not.

“It sounds weird, this strict ban on contact simply because of bad childhood memories that Herr Hagemann was unable to put behind him.”

The parents kept it close to their chest. They wanted to foster Klara’s and Ulli’s belief in human goodness. But you’re right, there must have been more to it.

Not all that long ago, sometime in the late nineties, we had been invited over by an old bird breeder in the Meissen region, Klara always got on well with him too. It was his ninetieth birthday, the whole village was sitting together on this sunny afternoon in the meadow behind the house, there were cakes, there was schnapps, and the more schnapps there was, the more talkative the farmers became. They were cursing the regional authority’s livestock-disease insurance scheme, flies hovered around the half-eaten custard cakes, people were exchanging stories about animal diseases, the cream for the coffee clotted as it was stirred, and soon they were competing around the table to impress us townies with descriptions of worm-eaten sheep and suppurating cows’ eyes. Typical butcher’s-yard stories, a rough tradition, but this kind of thing never makes either me or Klara feel bad. Then the name Hagemann came up.

The oldest man at the table, who had so far sat quietly listening, looked around at everybody with his light-colored eyes, let his young neighbors know what he thought of their animal stories, cleared his throat, and began telling us about 1945. He had not been drinking. He pointed to the surrounding hamlets, hills, copses, the number of skeletons that were buried there, he wasn’t just talking about illegally disposing of a few sheep or cows. “The Russians are over here”—the man brought his right hand down on the table—“and the Americans are here”—his left hand came down not far away. “Nobody knew which of them would arrive first, but everybody was certain of one thing, the great, decisive battle involving our secret armies was not going to take place on Saxon soil, if at all.”

Slowly his hands moved closer together as he described the landowners’ nocturnal meetings. “They didn’t want any trouble,” many of them were scared for the first time in their lives, “they had to come up with something,” there were shotguns around, and foreign forced laborers who could tell more stories than the farmers liked to think. “So they took their Poles and Ukrainians into the woods.”

He named the collective farms, the former estates, listed old names for us, among them there was a Hagemann. The table fell silent. The palms of his hands met. “And that was that.”

Klara’s maiden name — and what a relief it was to both of us that the name Funk was associated only with the ornithologist and his charming wife who had such refined manners, who could listen attentively and react almost without batting an eyelid to the farmers’ coarse tales.

I had paid the bill, helped Frau Fischer on with her coat, a little too heavy for the weather at the time, we were about to head for the taxi stand, on the ground floor the tables had already been laid for the next day, the waiter opened the door for us and said goodnight. The gravel crunched beneath our feet, the night air, the bridge ahead of us, the river to one side, the water shimmering on its way to the sea, and Frau Fischer said she would like to slip down to the riverfront once more for a moment, to take a look across at Loschwitz.

12

ARE YOU OUT of your mind?” This was always the prelude to one of Kaltenburg’s fits of rage — as I well knew, but so far none of his outbursts had been directed at me. “What do you mean, you’re not quite sure yet what to do with your life?”

I didn’t relish mumbling and stammering in front of the professor, so I looked at the floor in silence. He had not expected an answer. “What a disappointment. I’ve got to sit down.”

I wasn’t sure whether he was groping theatrically toward his armchair or whether he was genuinely overcome with a sudden weakness. “The biggest disappointment of my life. You don’t know what you want to do”—he adopted a droning voice, the voice of an annoying brat—“as if we’re playing in the sandpit and you’re asking me what you should be, a fireman or a train driver.”

He lowered himself heavily onto the cocktail-bar chair, sitting on the arm, leaning back as though he were going to slide to the floor. “How long have we known each other? How long? Tell me.”

“Ten years?”

Silence.

“Longer?”

“And after more than ten years you still don’t understand a thing? My God, what sort of amoeba have I picked out?”

He passed a hand across his brow, pure play-acting, and in the next instant his eye caught mine and held it, his gaze boring into my skull. “You’re going to study zoology, no question. You’ll be one of my disciples.”

He collapsed in the armchair, completely drained, shaking his head as though talking to himself, as though there were no point in addressing me, the amoeba. “Don’t know why you didn’t think of it yourself.”

And then, after another long pause — I was wondering whether to call the doctor or simply go home — he raised his eyes to me again in a typical Kaltenburg twist, almost affectionately, now was the moment for his long-planned surprise: “My boy, we have a study place for you.”

Ludwig Kaltenburg was in his element when he could pluck a surprise out of the hat, especially if no one knew what effort had gone into it. The professor was only really pleased with himself when he seemed to have been inspired by a sudden brain wave, a crazy idea, and in a flash had come up with an elegant solution to the toughest problem. You might suspect the struggles behind the scenes — but you couldn’t say so, because for a Professor Kaltenburg it was all child’s play.

I was supposed to fall upon his neck, to jump for joy. But I could neither move nor speak. The surprise had succeeded. Afterward, I hoped he would assume I had been struck dumb with delight. It looked as though Ludwig Kaltenburg was fulfilling wishes I didn’t even know I had.

When I look back on that afternoon, I am overcome with rueful feelings. I’m ashamed to think that I almost feel sorry for Kaltenburg. His outburst, his surprise, the staged attack of weakness — as though he were covering up a real state of weakness, as though contrary to appearances he had shown that he could be hurt, that he had in fact been hurt by me. The “greatest disappointment of my life”: just as I was previously unwilling to tell him about my foster family, so I had not confided in him about Klara. He wouldn’t have held it against me that I didn’t visit him so often, no longer came over to Loschwitz in a tearing hurry and left again soon afterward muttering some excuse — it didn’t take much imagination to work out that a date with a woman lay behind it. Kaltenburg was probably waiting for me to tell him about Klara. But I didn’t. He was offended. He was afraid I would slip away from him. And that is how, always willing to try anything that would turn the threat of defeat into a triumph, he came up with the idea of the study place.

Those clear, plain sentences of Kaltenburg’s that run through my life — they’ve always been a puzzle to me: his definite “It’s the boy I’m worried about” in the discussion with my father that I heard from the conservatory. His “I said you wouldn’t get rid of me so quickly” between two interviews outside the Loschwitz villa on a radiant afternoon. The sentence he tossed out to me which forbade contradiction, no, which belonged in a world where Kaltenburg simply couldn’t be contradicted: “You’ll be one of my disciples.” And at some point, arising out of his despair, half self-surrender, half challenge to me: “Then you’ll always remember me.”

Right into the eighties, in his late letters, there was a whole series of such sentences, and in situations where my courage threatened to fail me I muttered them to myself, hearing Kaltenburg’s voice, his confidence, his irrefutable phrasing. How clear and predetermined was the life — and, with the best of intentions, the life of others — he saw before him, stretching into the future: the world as created by Ludwig Kaltenburg. Whenever I couldn’t see any way forward I willed myself to take heart from his sentences, but as soon as I heard him speaking, the words had an uncanny ring to them, as though someone were trying to teach me to be afraid. Kaltenburg’s confidence has been alien to me throughout my life.

Had he in fact made a plan in the early forties, when he was in and out of my parents’ house, and had he, the falcon poised to swoop, spotted with his sharp eyes a creature down there on the ground that looked promising to him? Did it simply suit him that after the move to Dresden the youth seemed as attached to him as the child had previously been, did he feel, rather than plan, at that moment that he should take care of the war orphan who was wandering aimlessly through life, steer him, make something of him? It may be that he was at pains not to destroy my childhood image of the great Professor Kaltenburg, perhaps he himself needed to make a supreme effort to maintain it after what had happened to my parents. Naturally he always had a weakness for youth, he couldn’t help turning toward a youngster, supporting him, so long as he spotted in his eyes the least sign of a sharp mind. And once he had committed himself to someone, he wasn’t going to drop him again in a hurry.

It must have been clearer to him than to anybody that I did not have the makings of a world-class ornithologist. All the same, I was “his candidate.” I can remember that — though it was none of my doing — I even came out ahead of a school leaver of about my age who had more ability and stamina than I, was harder-working and brighter. But the less ambition I demonstrated to Kaltenburg, the more privileges I was granted, the easier everything was made for me.

In the grounds of the Institute I was the only one Kaltenburg addressed with the informal Du, while I stuck to the formal Sie for him. That alone made me stand out in his surroundings. I helped out here and there, I was around when needed, but it was always clear that I was free to come and go as I pleased. And the director of the Institute always had time for me. Scientists came to visit, old friends of Kaltenburg’s, they called each other Du. Young people, assistants, researchers starting out were called Du at first, but at some point Kaltenburg moved without much fuss to the Sie form. With colleagues and people from politics or culture, it was Sie on both sides. Kaltenburg would call me over: “Can you [Du] give me a hand with the stickleback tank?” and I would say, “Do you [Sie] need rubber gloves?” That’s how it was during my time as a tenured member of staff at Loschwitz, and we kept it up after the Institute closed, right until the end, in our last letters.

I had been given the chance to study zoology with Professor Kaltenburg in Leipzig. He didn’t want any thanks, however, or at least he waved away the words I had scraped together when he was briefly called out of the room by a colleague. When Kaltenburg came back—“We must go down to the garden”—he seemed to have put the preceding scene out of his mind completely. “Yes, you’re welcome,” he growled, “what did you expect from me,” and, full of impatience because he might be missing some new observation, “Now, let’s go and take a look at the geese.”

All the same, I did not become a disciple of Kaltenburg’s. At least, if he could look back and survey my path from today’s standpoint, I don’t believe that he would want to describe me as “his disciple.” I would have had to share his views, at many stages of my life, and that was a situation which was often painful for me. Especially just before his death, when I had to look on from a distance at the kind of followers he had around him. Among them were some whose rather clumsy, not to say small-minded, efforts to defend their honored professor hardly improved matters when they fought back against public attacks with the blind fury of wounded epigones, only to attract even noisier criticism of the professor. Suspicions which Ludwig Kaltenburg, left to himself, would have defused with some calm words. It’s possible that, while not reproaching me, he was revealing a trace of his disappointment that I never became his disciple when his later letters referred to the “lickspittles” and “idiots” who surrounded him.

The interpreter followed my pointing hand, lights in the Weisser Hirsch district, lights in Loschwitz, the roads showed up as dotted lines running up the hillside, that’s where Ludwig Kaltenburg used to live, up there on the right. No, I wouldn’t have wanted to follow him to the West. Even assuming I hadn’t met Klara, hadn’t run into Martin again, I had long ceased to regard Dresden as a mere stopping-off point, a place where I got stuck for a while due to unfortunate circumstances. And it was the professor I had to thank for that.

The water swirled at our feet, we were only a few steps away from the place where countless ducks and swans gathered during the day expecting to be fed by walkers. Unfortunately, I couldn’t pick out the villa itself over there, perhaps it was unlit because it was now empty, or perhaps it was too long since I last stood here for me to be able to orient myself in the dark on the far side of the Elbe. You would have to come back in daylight or, better still, as Katharina Fischer suggested, drive over to Loschwitz and take a close look at the former Institute site.

Once he said, as we were standing on the balcony watching a handful of hooded crows mixing with the flock of jackdaws above the Elbe slopes, “It doesn’t matter to me in the least if people see me as an eccentric uncle figure who tells anecdotes that are sometimes amusing and sometimes completely incomprehensible but who is basically not quite right in the head. If strangers see my household and way of life here as weird, even dangerous, that just tells you more about them. It’s a risk I take, I know that. But if — God forbid — I ever in my life become predictable to others, if I ever finish up being predictable to myself, foreseeing today what observations I’ll be making tomorrow morning, then that will be the moment I die, that much is certain.”

On one hand, I believe I can clearly remember that this was one of our first conversations on the balcony, in the early fifties. But on the other, it sounds as though for some time the sky had already been closing in over Kaltenburg’s head, and that would place it somewhere in the second half of the decade. Perhaps I’m merging together several discussions, a series of critical utterances over the years in which he revealed some of his hidden worries. Hearing them at first with amazement — after all, Kaltenburg was a rising star in Dresden, people sought his company, and nobody would have dreamed of treating him with anything but the deepest respect — I came to realize as time passed, perhaps realized only after he had vanished from the city, what had been going on in Kaltenburg’s mind, the fears he had lived with from day one.

“And don’t forget”—he fixed me with a sharp gaze—“never forget that here”—his hand swept around, vaguely taking in the hillside—“in that house over there, or further down, wherever you look, things are going on all the time that are much crazier than you’ll ever find in my place. Sheer hidden abysses. Menacing things. Revolting things. Believe me. I have looked into some of these abysses. That’s why I don’t mind if they weigh me up. Let them take me for a fool, I couldn’t care less.”

On one occasion Ludwig Kaltenburg said to me, “I can get along perfectly well with a Professor Baron von Ardenne or a Field Marshal Paulus. They have seen a few abysses opening up at their feet during their lifetime too. It’s the petty-minded people who worry me.”

And one winter evening, as I was leaving: “One has to stay vulnerable.”

Sometimes, he said, he had people in the house who clearly thought him not entirely sane, although they would never admit it to his face. Not a single chair available for guests but any amount of space for his animals, the jackdaw colony in the loft, the basement reserved for the fish. A cockatoo had the run of all floors, and its infernal cawing echoed through the whole house whenever an unwelcome guest blocked its usual flight path up and down the stairs. Dogs strayed around in the rooms, which annoyed some people more than did the ducks sitting there on the carpet making a low gabbling noise when the resident tomcat strutted past as though only he and his master were present. And not forgetting the hamster. On the desk a pile of gnawed papers on which it had been working the previous night, but the animal itself was nowhere to be seen. “I force myself not to let on that for the past few weeks it has been residing in the kitchen.”

As Kaltenburg had established, there were precisely two groups of such visitors: those who — fear in their eyes, fear of the zoo, the professor — had to make such an effort to hide their horror that they could hardly bring themselves to utter a syllable, and the others, who compensated for their fear by becoming downright rude. Not that they made insulting remarks, it was the tone of voice they adopted: And what is the point of keeping animals, if one may ask?

“Do you know what I say then, casually and clearly as the occasion requires? I’m studying. Period. That’s all.”

Then you had to wait for them to come back at you, as you knew absolutely for certain they would. Some of them, who hadn’t understood a thing, did so immediately. Others swallowed a few times before they could manage to utter, What’s worth studying about sticklebacks or about this—meaning Taschotschek—this bird here? What’s so interesting about these animals? Then, acting absentminded, surprised: “About these animals? What animals? It’s you I’m studying.”