Kaltenburg

1

FRIDAY THE SIXTH of March. In the morning the news of Stalin’s death had been announced. In the evening I was due to visit the Hagemanns with Ludwig Kaltenburg. Arriving at dusk in Loschwitz, I found the Institute site unusually silent, and I encountered nobody except Herr Sikorski, Kaltenburg’s cameraman. When I asked him how people here had taken the news, especially the professor, Herr Sikorski just shrugged: it had been very quiet all day. Even the birds were less lively than usual. However, as for the professor, there was no knowing what he was thinking — he had retreated to the aquarium section that afternoon and not reappeared.

As I went down the stairs to the breeding and collecting tanks located in the rooms built on the side facing the slope, I felt a forlornness that I had never before experienced in this house. The walls seemed damp, my tread echoed on the stone steps, not a human voice anywhere, not an animal in sight. The cold light in the antechamber, the barrel vaulting over the aquariums placed close together, the quiet hum of countless circulation pumps.

The cheerlessness was not even dispelled by the sight of Ludwig Kaltenburg’s shock of white hair between the tanks. He was shuffling in rubber boots down the gangway at the other end of the room. Through a series of glass panels, the masses of water, his face was scarcely recognizable, blurred. As though Kaltenburg were walking across the seabed. Then it was gone, hidden by water milfoil, then flashing into sight again, dissolving in a whirl of air and water, finally regaining its shape, the clear eyes, the beard, the unruly hair.

On the worktop a bare reserve tank with a shoal of cichlids swimming in it. It appeared that Kaltenburg had spent the afternoon refurbishing the perch’s customary aquarium, trying out one new plant and one new arrangement after another until at last he was satisfied — that is, today the exercise had served him first and foremost as a distraction.

“Of course, I had to call the colleagues together and give a little speech,” he said, and, “Fräulein Holsterbach, you know, the dark Ph.D. student, was crying.”

I had no idea what was going through Kaltenburg’s mind. Together we put the cover back on the aquarium. He took a step back, rubbing his hands and surveying his creation. A truly beautiful world of water.

Slowly he cleared up the work area, took off his lab coat; he was wearing his black suit underneath, his black shoes stood ready polished on the cellar steps. We were moving toward the exit when he stopped in front of one aquarium and pointed out a male stickleback that was busy at the bottom of the tank. Kaltenburg’s finger moved up and down the pane of glass to show me something. The other fish hovered inquisitively behind the glass, following the finger to right and left, and only that particular stickleback took no interest in whether it was feeding time.

The professor tut-tutted, chewing on his lower lip. “Too early,” he muttered, “it’s much too early, strange, the beginning of March is not the time.”

We were watching a male showing off its gala colors and building a nest, even though the spawning season had not yet begun. Its blue-green back, the red, glassy, almost transparent-looking flanks, the emerald-green eyes — Kaltenburg put his hand on my shoulder: “We should be on our way.”

It was the first time he had been invited to the Hagemanns’, and you could see from his reaction when I delivered the invitation that he felt truly honored. You might almost think, low-spirited as he now seemed to me, that he was worried Stalin might yet spoil his pleasure at the last moment.

On our way down into the quiet city a limousine drove toward us, laboriously negotiating the lanes up the hillside. Kaltenburg stopped to let it pass: “I know you can read my expression like a book. It’s true, I’ve been a bit concerned all day. Everybody would have understood if the Hagemanns’ reception had been canceled — but I would have regretted it, all the same.”

He had released the handbrake, changed into second gear again, concentrating on the narrow traffic lane. “Or do you think it would have been more fitting for me to send my regrets? Do you think the Hagemanns would prefer to spend this evening in their close family circle?”

I shook my head.

Kaltenburg smiled, looking ahead through the windscreen. “You’re right. You don’t just turn down an invitation to the Hagemanns’. Apart from that, I’m really keen to know what this friend of yours, Martin, is like. And above all, of course, I’m curious about the Hagemanns’ younger daughter, what’s her name again?”

“Klara.”

“You see a lot of each other, don’t you?” And as I didn’t reply: “Come on, what do you take your old Ludwig Kaltenburg for? I’m not blind, you know.”

It turned out to be a quiet evening; a number of guests had indeed called that afternoon to say they were not coming, others simply didn’t come. But I didn’t have the impression that Kaltenburg was disappointed by this, he chatted for a long time with an archaeologist couple, with Klara’s parents, with Ulli, with Klara herself. But Martin listened, silent as ever, to these conversations, his eyes riveted upon the professor. That evening, in this company, nobody would have dreamed of putting any pressure on Kaltenburg, nobody demanded that he should report on the Institute, nobody begged until the professor took his guests into the garden to wake the sleeping magpies and coax them down from the oak tree onto his shoulder.

On the sixth of March 1953 we sat up until well after midnight, just the four of us in the end, Professor Kaltenburg, Martin, Klara, and I. We were exhausted, we simply lacked the energy to break up the group, but we all knew we wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway.

“So he’s no longer alive, Comrade Stalin,” Kaltenburg quietly threw into the middle of a longish pause in the conversation. “It’s a good five years since I last saw him, an eternity. It never occurred to me then that this might be the last time we looked each other in the eye. In the end it didn’t do him any good to get rid of all his doctors in succession, his suspicion that they all wanted him dead and buried was completely unfounded. Comrade Stalin didn’t need anybody, didn’t need help, he managed everything himself, and so now he’s died by his own efforts. That was something he could do better than most, arrange for a death. Or was he helped? What say the rumors?”

He looked questioningly around the circle. Klara shook her head: “There was no mention on the radio of any outside intervention. Two strokes, so quickly one after the other. He didn’t regain consciousness after the brain hemorrhage. The second stroke the day before yesterday, which attacked his heart and respiratory system. Then by half past nine last night it was over.”

“With their usual lunacy, they’re probably blaming Beria, just wait, I can hear them sniveling, That snake Beria has killed our beloved little father.”

Kaltenburg waved away the cigarette smoke.

“I lived so long under Stalin’s watchful eye that his face is indelibly stamped on my memory. The bushy mustache. The coal-black eyes. It’s true that he has, no, had a more penetrating gaze than I’ve ever encountered in anyone else. You can’t really know what it felt like if you haven’t lived for years with the sensation of him staring down your neck, watching your every move.”

“Are you talking about your time in Chalturin as a POW?”

“Near Kirov, yes. I was running a ward with six hundred beds, all of them neuritis cases. What a place. It was the same later in Oritschi, then Dzoraget, Amalmy, Sevan, and Yerevan, the inevitable portraits of Stalin hanging on the walls. He wouldn’t take his eyes off me during my time in Armenia, and finally Krasnogorsk near Moscow — he followed me everywhere. And the funny thing was, that gaze of his brought us all closer together, POWs and Red Army soldiers, Germans and Russians, doctors and patients, because we all had him to live with.”

It was as though something had been dammed up in Kaltenburg during the day, no, over the years, that needed to break out in that late-night session. He looked down as he talked, gazing at the ashtray; after his first few sentences none of us dared raise a question. We all knew that portrait, but Ludwig Kaltenburg showed us Stalin as we had never seen him before.

“You’re giving a wounded man his medicine, and Comrade Stalin is watching to see you don’t hand out the wrong treatment by mistake to the poor devil lying there hardly able to move, or maybe give him the rations meant for the sad case in the next bed. You distribute vitamin C, and his stern gaze stops you from lacing it with a poisonous powder — well, you’re a doctor, so you would never dream of it anyway, but Comrade Stalin’s look gives you a bad conscience from the start. You search your soul, as well as you can when you’re permanently under surveillance, asking yourself, Have I done anything wrong, have I done my best at all times, haven’t I ever once toyed with the idea of sabotaging the hospital, sending the whole lot of them to their maker at a single stroke?

“And when you’ve done your work properly, your mind is at rest and you know that Comrade Stalin has reason to be satisfied with you, you even imagine that he is mildly lowering his eyelids, just for a split second, as though expressing his benevolence toward you. You know it’s a delusion, but you can’t help it. If you try to catch him out — don’t ever think of catching Comrade Stalin out — and turn around as fast as lightning to stare him directly in the face, his eyes are open as always, vigilant, for he knows that if he gives way to his goodness and lets you out of his sight even for a moment, you’ll think you can deceive him. A delusion, nothing else, just a picture on the wall that faces you every morning when you arrive in the ward.

“After a long day you fall into bed, but he doesn’t sleep. A day filled from the sun’s first ray to the last with screams, operations, a lot of blood and dying. He has watched every single fight for a human life, you could almost say he has lived through it. You’re finished, your eyes are closing, but he can’t afford to rest. He knows that now more than ever he has to watch over you.

“What sights Comrade Stalin has had to witness in his lifetime. And what, more rarely, has he been privileged to witness. I remember that on one occasion I entered into direct dialogue with him to ask his advice, eye to eye, with me at the far end of the ward, him on the wall at the front, and between us a patient who had gone on hunger strike after we amputated his leg. What, I asked, fixing my gaze on the portrait, would you do in my situation, what would Stalin do here and now when things are desperate, to change this emaciated patient’s life-threatening condition for the better?

“I didn’t spend long thinking about it — Comrade Stalin never needed much time to make his mind up either — but fell into an instant diabolical rage, I flailed around with my arms, stamped with both feet so that the floorboards trembled, the whole hut, I yelled and roared, spat, threw the crutches out into the aisle, and screamed directly into the face of the pathetic bundle of humanity in front of me — barely twenty years old and from Vienna like me — that I was going to make mincemeat of him. That did the trick. In short, all I had to do was behave like an ape, and the poor amputee let me spoon-feed him soup as though I were his father and he the sick child. After that I actually managed to feed the wounded man so well that he was fit to be released. It was this man who took my family the news that I was alive. He smuggled a note out of the camp — in his mouth. A dazzling success, and it was Comrade Stalin who helped me achieve it.

“He grew tired, he was bound to become tired, since he never once took his eyes off us. At the end, perhaps, opening his coal-black eyes wide again, in his last great struggle he looked around the room to register precisely every detail, every face, and since he must have sensed — Comrade Stalin sensed everything — that there wasn’t long to go, in his last minutes he wanted to gain a comprehensive picture of his surroundings and take it with him who knows where, the table, the chair, the telephone, the ceiling, then his friends around him, enemies, doctors, snakes, he wanted to look out of the window too, he made an effort — Comrade Stalin never spared any effort — summoning up all of his remaining strength to take in the rectangle of window, the light, the light, but his view was blocked. The heads of these hypocrites, these murderers would have to roll to fulfill Comrade Stalin’s last modest wish, to see the daylight in the window one last time, even if it had long since got dark out there, early March, half past nine in the evening. It may be that at the end his eyeballs popped out of his skull because he wanted to catch a last glimpse, and yet he probably saw no more than a diffuse, blinding brightness, before somebody in the circle of intimates, of traitors around his sickbed, deathbed, closed his eyes forever.

“His coal-black eyes held an oath of loyalty: Don’t worry, I am following you and your actions, wherever you go, I will follow you to the ends of the earth. And I, was I worthy of the endless vigilance and unconditional loyalty of Comrade Stalin? I received my discharge papers from the camp beneath his gaze, I packed my things under his gaze — turning away without taking my leave of that so-familiar face. As though from one moment to the next all the looks we had exchanged over the years had been forgotten. I turned toward the west without visualizing how the firm gaze was boring into the back of my head, scowling at first, as though he had not yet lost me, as though his knitted brows still had the power to make me turn back. Gradually his stare must have become angry, despairing, in the end melancholy, marked by deep sorrow, since I was traveling inexorably toward my homeland heedless of whether I would ever again see this man who had looked into my eyes night and day for four years. And now suddenly it’s over.”

Kaltenburg stretched, raising his arms above his head.

“Children, it’s very late, we’d better be going”—and he stood up from his chair as though he were leaving the field hospital block, as though taking off his white coat, to reveal the black suit once more.

But after he had dropped me off at home and I stood for a while in the dark street, I could see a doctor again, white coat flapping as he walks down the central aisle of the hospital barracks, turning his head to left and right and tossing a few words of German to one patient here, some Russian to another over there, he corrects himself with a laugh, the flock of nurses in his wake laugh with him. The aisle between the beds vanishes into the distance, but the doctor shows no sign of fatigue when he reaches the door, he has pronounced on cases, encouraged and exhorted, three hundred times. And he knows every single face.

He steps out into the cold, clear air. He breathes in deeply. On the horizon a thin haze covers the hills, the nurses stand there shivering and smoking. The Russian woman doctor at his side has offered him a cigarette, but he needs to breathe in the pure air, he must quickly erase all those patients’ faces from his mind’s eye before tackling the next ward.

2

A FINE FILM OF cloud had hung over the city since the morning, now it was beginning to drizzle. Katharina Fischer said, “Stalin’s death loosened Ludwig Kaltenburg’s tongue,” and her voice sounded as hushed in the silence that surrounded us as if Stalin had died only yesterday, as if nobody quite knew how to deal with his death, as if behind every window silent, tear-stained, dejected people sat around the radio waiting in case the solemn music that had been playing for the last twenty-four hours was suddenly interrupted by an announcer, audibly struggling to maintain his composure, bringing a newsflash: Moscow has just reported that the great Stalin is awake again.

The pavement glistened, a dry smell of dust mingled with the dampness. I was showing Katharina Fischer around Oberloschwitz, pointing out the houses, paths, gardens that were so familiar to me in Kaltenburg’s day that I felt connected to every paving stone, every gap in a fence. Not much of all that was left, whether because the old wooden fence was missing here, the pavement was gone there, or because, as I hadn’t been up here since 1990 or 1991, it wasn’t easy to locate the reference points in my memory.

“We can’t let our animals go hungry because of a death, however great the deceased may be,” said the professor in measured tones next morning. Later it was said among his colleagues — who knew nothing about our late-night session at the Hagemanns’, and were never to know — that his inner conflict was obvious, his deep emotional upset making it hard for him to answer the call of duty. Others were convinced that the reason Kaltenburg had been speaking more slowly than usual was that the vodka the night before hadn’t agreed with him. Many later remembered the sentences: “We must think of the animals, we owe it to him,” as the professor proceeded to the normal business of the day. Certain breeding programs could not go unsupervised even for an hour, hatching times were near, some of the duck flock was suffering at the time from a nasty rash — but the present occasion called for some colleagues to be released from their duties: who was going to take care of the black ribbon, the banners, and the large portrait above the entrance to the house? Kaltenburg advised against flower arrangements. However tastefully done, anything made with plant material would look absolutely pathetic in a very short time: “Animals have no piety, nothing we can do about it.”

Anoth er suggestion was received with an unappreciative shake of the head: someone suggested piping solemn music into the enclosures. No music. Who would answer for the possible negative effects, territorial battles, premature births, general lethargy, no, the risk was simply too great. Ludwig Kaltenburg had a lifelong aversion to funeral marches.

Eventually he even sent one or two colleagues home, either out of sympathy or because he detested their overemotional tendencies. The various jobs were allocated, and Kaltenburg withdrew to his study to write a newspaper article. He had promised to contribute a page entitled “Stalin, Friend of Animals,” but when I looked in on him later at teatime the sheet of scrap paper still bore only the title, and the article never got beyond the concept stage.

Yes, Stalin’s death did loosen the professor’s tongue, but it seems that with his long monologue about the coal-black eyes that chapter was closed for Kaltenburg. The Stalin portrait at the Institute villa, pictures of Stalin all over the city: Kaltenburg passed the portraits without looking up. Whatever nightmares his experiences in the camp may have caused him, and whatever mistrust Ludwig Kaltenburg had to live with at that time, after Stalin’s death he seemed liberated. In a single night he had freed himself from the vigilant eyes of Stalin. Furthermore, it was as if Kaltenburg knew that in the future a path would be open for him to return to the Soviet Union.

“A sigh of relief?” thought the interpreter, as we turned into the little street that led to the Institute.

But people would go on disappearing, and would go on being referred to only in hushed tones. A short breathing space, perhaps.

While the professor was talking at the Hagemanns’ about his encounters with Stalin, Martin did not look once at the black dot on the ceiling. Not that he had forgotten about it, certainly not. It was rather that under Kaltenburg’s influence he had managed to put the spot between chandelier and sunflower leaf out of his mind. Whether it was only a dried-up housefly or whether every word was audible in the room above: Martin could cope with the uncertainty.

The Institute villa itself was now screened on the street side by a high wall, it could not have been built very long before, the whitewashed surface showed no sign of weathering, and the footpath had been freshly laid too, no moss, not a blade of grass between the slabs. We walked up to the wide gray iron gate and had the feeling we were being caught on video cameras as we examined the polished brass plate, two names by the bell, only two: LORENZ and DR. LORENZ — it looked like an accommodation address, or at any rate not like the names of real residents.

“Do you think we should just ring?” asked Frau Fischer, reaching out, her index finger poised above the bell, then she hesitated, and I laid my hand on her forearm, “I’m not sure,” and looked at the circular pattern of perforations in the brass plate, I didn’t know if I could bear to listen to the crackling, the hissing, and the tinny voice that would issue from this crude showerhead: “No.”

Earlier there was just a garden gate here in a crooked fence, hardly waist height, who would have wanted to intrude on the grounds, who was there to escape from the Institute, and if you heard a distant, barely intelligible voice, you knew it was the professor calling his animals behind the house. “No, come on, we’d better leave it,” I said to Frau Fischer, and I had the impression that she understood me very well as she followed me across to the other side of the street, which might at least give us a view of the upper part of the villa.

“On the far left, the first-floor window — that was Ludwig Kaltenburg’s bedroom, the only room in the house I never went into, or rather I didn’t until the professor had left Dresden. The small window next to it is the bathroom. Then the archive and the library, then the staircase. But the important rooms were all on the side facing the slope — kitchen, study, the balcony, the jackdaws’ quarters in the loft.”

The Institute was constantly growing, it soon spread far beyond the villa, the summerhouse, and the tool sheds, taking in neighboring houses and above all plots of land for colleagues and animals. Huts for long-term guests. Barracks were built to house specialists along with their families, biologists, psychologists, scientific assistants, keepers to look after the birds, and the aquarium staff. Then there were the cleaning ladies, mechanics, carpenters, technicians, caretakers, administrators. The cook. The feed manager, ruler of three kitchen domains: for mammals, birds, fish. And the cameraman. Kaltenburg’s chauffeur, who was also in charge of the entire transport fleet. Almost a housing development.

Of course, you couldn’t compare this with the size gradually achieved by Manfred von Ardenne’s research establishment above Loschwitz, in Weisser Hirsch, where the number of employees and colleagues eventually reached four hundred — but even a tenth of that is a considerable figure, not counting the families of the researchers living on the premises.

Tense negotiations, applications, secret discussions, the group photos with politicians, with officials, with foreign academics — Kaltenburg often came home exhausted, especially when he had been to Berlin with his driver, Krause. He just wasn’t one of those people who make routine committee meetings more bearable by simply blocking out the speeches and reports and discussions, getting through the time of hollow words as though deaf, and speculating whether some influential man or other, this or that party official, might spare a few minutes for a friendly chat with them afterward. Though I must say that Kaltenburg never complained to me about the tiring sessions he sat through as if in a vacuum. In any case, if he felt like complaining, he would shun human company altogether and go off to be with his animals. No, not a hint of exhaustion, no doubts, or despair, in front of colleagues at the Institute, the professor radiated an energy that inspired everybody. And in return, the zest for the work that he saw around him gave strength back to Ludwig Kaltenburg, helped him through self-critical spells, helped him overcome occasional bouts of depression.

“Knowing the professor as I do now,” said Katharina Fischer, only to correct herself immediately, “I mean, knowing what you’ve told me about him, I’m puzzled by one thing: did he have any animals when he was a POW, or at least observe them?”

Ludwig Kaltenburg not surrounded by animals? Unthinkable. Probably there was a dog’s nose or a beak on his passport photo.

“How about on the night after Stalin’s death — did he really not mention a single animal?”

I didn’t realize that until years later: Martin, Klara, and I had witnessed the first long Kaltenburg monologue without any reference to the animal kingdom. Till all hours he talked about a human being as if he were talking about an animal.

People were in mourning, everywhere you could see eyes red from weeping — but Kaltenburg took his example from a man who knew no tears. When Archetypes of Fear appeared a decade later, Klara and I agreed that his work on the book had begun then, on the sixth of March 1953. Covertly — for Kaltenburg would surely not have formulated a plan by that time, in the years before his departure the most he would have done was to jot down a few cryptic, seemingly disparate notes. Nonetheless, the evening we four spent together was the occasion for a shift of perspective. Only a minimal change in the angle of vision at first, as if the professor had become aware of a gentle movement on the margin of his visual field, all the harder to ignore the longer he insisted he hadn’t noticed anything.

Gradually Kaltenburg was to turn toward a new area of observation. Our clandestine session in the Hagemanns’ house had brought him together with the first subject of his incipient researches, in fact the two had sat opposite each other for some hours. However, much to the professor’s regret, for the moment this future object of research showed no interest in submitting himself to observation. “The animals? It’s you I’m studying,” was what he claimed to have thrown at unwelcome visitors — later, there was no one the assertion fit better than Martin Spengler.

“Why not Klara Hagemann?”

He must have thought of Martin as an open challenge — a person who resisted being seen through by Kaltenburg. And Ludwig Kaltenburg had a masterly ability to coax people’s secrets out of them. Secrets they themselves were not aware of. Some were grateful to him: under his guidance they had plumbed depths into which they would never have ventured but for the professor. However, Kaltenburg didn’t want to hear about depths. Others felt betrayed: in his presence they had given away something that nobody had a right to know. But Kaltenburg did not believe in any case that you could successfully go on concealing something from the world. Whether depths or involuntary revelations, everybody agreed on one thing: basically the professor had done the talking, interrupted only by questions and comments that sounded to the listener in retrospect like incidental confessions. Kaltenburg’s gift for talking and observing — however, as far as Klara was concerned, I’m not sure to this day whether she was a challenge that defeated him or whether he never took on the challenge.

“And Klara’s impression of the professor? I think I would have felt a bit uneasy about this man after a first meeting like that.”

I don’t know if it was shyness or embarrassment, but she wouldn’t really say anything about him. It may be that she wasn’t sure whether it was admiration or contempt that Kaltenburg felt for Stalin, and it seemed to me that she had to reach a clear verdict on that before she could decide whether to admire or despise the professor. After all, Ludwig Kaltenburg never made any secret of his love for all things Russian. It went right back to his youth in Vienna, did not go cold in captivity, survived the move to Dresden, and perhaps only flourished properly after Stalin’s death. For a few months he even preferred to eat lying down when, at the end of an intensive working day, long after the usual big meeting of all the colleagues, he indulged in a late snack. “No, it’s not just a fad, it really is more comfortable when you’ve been on your feet all day”: the great Professor Kaltenburg stretched out on his sofa with a plate of fruit, with tea and bread and a leg of roast chicken. Perhaps he dreamed of Karelian birch furniture.

One of his favorite words was Durak, “Da, da, durak,” he would say when he couldn’t make sense of something he had observed in his ducks, “Yeah, yeah, stupid,” when he simply couldn’t make a coherent connection between two series of movements: these were his first words of Russian, taught him by a Red Army soldier to whom Kaltenburg surrendered after an inept attempt to escape at the front. Then there was his love for diminutives and terms of endearment acquired in the field hospital, where they were lavishly employed, and in general his choice of names for his charges. There was a Ludmilla, a Turka, an Igor, and I wondered whether lurking behind Taschotschek there wasn’t a Natalia, a Natasha.

As though she had found a reasonable compromise for the time being, Klara began to make little jibes at Kaltenburg, to which he always reacted with a smile, with a good-natured growl. In fact very few people were allowed to tease him, but Klara had not only spotted at first glance a weakness in Ludwig Kaltenburg, she had also found the right tone, she had the gift of being able to talk mockingly to him without making him feel he was being mocked.

When she said in sepulchral tones, “I think I can see Stalin’s coal-black eyes glowing,” the professor had to laugh, and from the looks he shot at me I realized he would let her get away with anything, because his weakness was none other than a weakness for Klara. If she had wanted to, she could have twisted Ludwig Kaltenburg round her little finger.

“He respected her.”

Enormously.

“Because he noticed she was studying him.”

And not only him, Professor Kaltenburg. He must have gathered at a stroke that at barely twenty she was ahead of him. Studying human beings came naturally to her, and at an age when he was still concentrating fully on his jackdaws, his ducks and small mammals, when as yet Ludwig Kaltenburg knew nothing at all about the faces of his patients in the field hospital or Josef Stalin’s gaze.

3

HE INVITED US — strangely enough — to a café. He came on foot down the hill in Loschwitz, whereas usually when meeting young ladies he preferred to present himself on his motorbike. He wasn’t wearing gloves. And of course the first thing Klara wanted to know was how he had come by the scratch on the back of his hand. Nothing important, nothing earth-shattering, just the kind of mishap that was a common occurrence when dealing with animals: Igor, the tame magpie, couldn’t stand Kaltenburg drumming impatiently with his fingertips on the tabletop during breakfast while reading his paper.

“Sudden rustling of paper — I’m familiar with that.”

“Aren’t magpies pretty dissolute birds, cowardly and devious?”

“That’s what everyone says. It’s just that they’re too intelligent for most people.”

It was the first time I had ever sat in a café with Ludwig Kaltenburg, his idea of a suitable place to take a young woman, a young woman whose admirer, whose future fiancé, you have known since childhood. To left and right of us elderly ladies and gentlemen having afternoon coffee, families, children behaving so politely that their parents must have promised them a second piece of cake if they would stop staring at the famous animal professor.

Klara asked him about the types of animal he had in his collection, all of which she knew from me, and carefully counted them off along with him as Kaltenburg strolled from room to room, peering into the stairwell, the loft, the basement: “Cichlids, or have I mentioned them?”

“They came first, when we were at the aquariums.”

“The goldfish, Fritz.”

She asked him why certain animals had names and others didn’t. I had already explained this to Klara on one of our first dates, it was the hand-reared specimens and those closely involved in research work that were given proper names. She wanted to hear it again from the professor, he didn’t mind, he enjoyed it, we hadn’t touched the cake on our plates.

Where in Germany do people eat tart and where do they eat “Torte,” what is the difference between bread and pastry, and exactly what dessert dishes do the Austrians include under the heading of “Mehlspeise”? We had never had such discussions before, but we sat in the café, all equally out of place, our polite behavior, our nice conversation, after a quarter of an hour of this we surely deserved at least an extra helping of whipped cream. We might have been ready to move on if Kaltenburg hadn’t jumped in with a story that was new even to me.

“If my parents are to be believed, I began life as a tumor.”

The painted eyebrows of the old ladies over there by the window shot up. Kaltenburg’s parents married late, nobody thought pregnancy was in the cards, in the first instance they may have been almost as shocked by this news as by the earlier misdiagnosis.

“Fortunately I wasn’t born prematurely, otherwise my father would have seen me as a questionable gift for the rest of his life.” The professor laughed. “I came into this world — and turned their lives completely upside down.”

His upbringing was all the more careful, his parents looking after their unexpected son as though they had a bad conscience about him, the father even accepted the son’s ambition to become a zoologist instead of continuing the line of eminent surgeons named Kaltenburg. He shook his head in bewilderment, but he didn’t object. So, for his sake, initially Ludwig Kaltenburg went into medicine.

Klara nodded appreciatively. “But he must be very proud of you today.”

“Even if he were still alive, he certainly wouldn’t be proud of a son who voluntarily moved to Dresden.”

“Your parents are no longer alive?”

“My father didn’t even find out that I had survived the war and been captured by the Russians.”

“The patient who hid the note in his mouth arrived too late.”

“Yes, he arrived too late.”

Klara ate the rest of her cake, the professor looked on.

“Shall I order some more coffee?” He lifted the lid of the pot as though inspecting it carefully to see whether a small mammal was nesting there.

“Animals are just messy, the old man used to say.”

“Messy? Nothing new for a surgeon, surely.”

Somebody at the next table cleared his throat, the ladies at the window put down their coffee cups.

“And was it a childhood dream to become a librarian?” The professor avoided addressing Klara directly, he didn’t know whether to say Du or Sie to her. “That’s certainly the way Hermann puts it, at any rate.”

She told the story of the family outing to Leipzig, Kaltenburg listened, Kaltenburg was moved, and Klara didn’t seem to know what to make of his emotion, over a slice of cake, with my Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg in a café.

We were all relieved to be standing outside again. The professor’s choice of a café was certainly a considered one — later he was to tell me, “On principle I never invite young women into this desolate-looking animal household.” But outside in the fresh air, free of the audience in the café which was impossible to ignore, the conversation between Ludwig Kaltenburg and Klara could have been steered in a different direction, just as it would have taken another course altogether if we had been invited to Kaltenburg’s villa. The professor quickly said goodbye, he had another appointment, much less pleasant, but such appointments were unavoidable, and then I saw him hurrying away, an unusual picture: Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg on foot on a paved road in the middle of the city.

“Was I too forward?”

“Forward? No, honestly, you weren’t. And anyway, you must have noticed yourself: the professor has a soft spot for self-confident young women.”

“Too well behaved?”

“All three of us were well behaved.”

“So I passed?” Klara didn’t wait for my answer. “All the same, I had the impression that the professor thought I was trying to keep something from him.”

“He would like to have gone on listening to you: the Hagemann family, your salon, your guests.”

“What could I do, with all those people around us?”

“He shouldn’t have taken us there if he was keen to hear Hagemann stories.”

“I’m going to tell my parents to invite him more often.”

And the professor did indeed become a regular visitor to the Hagemanns’. But he came too late, only after Stalin’s death. He had missed certain decisive years, conversations and guests on whom he could have sharpened his powers of observation. Yes, the people themselves would have opened up worlds to him which he was never to know.

Kaltenburg should have come to Dresden right after the war and been in touch with the family, he should not have had to wait for me to get to know Klara Hagemann and to bring him his first invitation to the Hagemanns’. Klara was ahead of the professor, and she would always be ahead of him: with the best will in the world, Ludwig Kaltenburg would never be able to make up for that gap of seven years.

Take a figure like Paul Merker, I said to the interpreter: that name does not figure at all in Kaltenburg’s world. A member of the Central Committee secretariat and of the SED Politburo who was removed from all his official positions in 1950, expelled from the Party, and banished to the provinces in Brandenburg — at most the professor would have remarked laconically, “Ideologists put nooses around each other’s necks.” And added portentously, “A side effect of every ideology.”

It all had a different ring in the Hagemann salon. I learned to distinguish between those functionaries who had gone underground in 1933 and those who owed their worldview to a determined course of reeducation as POWs. I learned that you shouldn’t confuse those returning from Moscow with returnees from Scandinavia, those coming back from Mexico with others coming out of the German camps. One was said to have betrayed several members of his resistance cell, another to have spent years in hiding on a smallholding, and a third was reputed to despise people who feared for their lives. Here was a former SA man, once a lanky type, an excellent horseman, whose eyes were now sunk deep in his fat face, and there a gaunt character with an agitated look, as though forever assessing which figure in the inner circle should be pushed out next. They might use the same language, shake hands, slap each other’s backs, even hug: for the Hagemanns this was simply the solidarity born of necessity, and that kind of solidarity is notoriously unpredictable.

“Now they’re putting nooses around each other’s necks”: it was this same Paul Merker who, aware of the death camps, was talking in 1942 of a “world pogrom,” and — as a number of the Hagemanns’ guests thought — in doing so incurring the distrust of his comrades in arms. After his return from exile he could easily have joined the ranks of antifascist veterans without another word about those whom the new jargon described merely as “the persecuted.” But mindful of the “world pogrom,” Merker urged — and he enjoyed great respect for this at the Hagemanns’—that reparations should be made to all survivors, regardless of whether they had been avowed Communists or had been forced to wear the Star of David on their chests.

On one occasion, when the conversation centered on a Berlin theater premiere, a woman suddenly asked, “Has anyone heard from Luckenwalde lately?” She looked keenly into each face in turn — Klara’s father shrugged his shoulders, other guests shook their heads, everybody had understood, nobody had any information, so there was nothing for it but to return to the previous topic. They focused on the stage design, moving on to what could be done with trompe l’oeil painting, I looked across at Martin and could have sworn that he had missed the intervening question. I had no idea what “Luckenwalde” stood for. I would have understood references to Moscow, or to Leningrad, or, on that Advent Sunday of 1952, to Prague, because not an evening passed at the Hagemanns’ without some discussion of the Prague show trial of Rudolf Slánský and his fellow conspirators, singled out by the authorities only after the most painstakingly detailed investigations.

But what lay behind Luckenwalde escaped me until later, when on my way to the toilet I saw someone going up to the woman in question, and noticed the change in her expression after she heard him say, “Luckenwalde is supposed to have been wiped off the map.”

After the last guests had left, I was helping the two sisters in the kitchen, Ulli washed, I dried the glasses, Klara put away the dishes. “Did you notice anything about Frau Koch? She looked so distracted as she was leaving.”

Ulli had noticed her husband slipping his arm under hers on the path to the garden gate. “She was quite unsteady on her legs.”

“Like an old woman.”

Herr and Frau Koch: for the Hagemann daughters they were “the English couple”—they had spent many years in London, and had hesitated to return to Germany, to settle in Dresden. The West was out of the question for Herr Koch. As for his wife, whether here or there, she didn’t want to be reminded of the time of the “world pogrom.”

“Maybe I misunderstood, or perhaps it has nothing to do with it, but somebody took Frau Koch aside and told her Luckenwalde had disappeared from the map.”

“Who said that?”

“I don’t know his name, that shy medic.”

“Domaschke,” Ulli helped me out.

“Luckenwalde?” Klara reflected. “Did you hear any more?”

“No, that’s all. It gave her quite a shock.”

“That means Merker has gone into hiding.”

“Do you mean Paul Merker, the Politburo member?”

Ulli handed me a clean glass. “Politburo, that’s all in the past.”

“Or they’ve arrested him.” Klara looked at her sister. “Because they need someone to go after.”

“They have him running a grill in Luckenwalde.”

Impatiently Klara took the polished wineglass out of my hand. “That’s neither here nor there at the moment. They’ve arrested him, haven’t they?”

“I’ll do the rest tomorrow morning.” Ulli put down the sponge and emptied the water from the sink.

“That’s what it means. It can’t mean anything else. They want to make an example of him.”

One sister was leaning against the kitchen cabinet. The other was looking at the floor. I didn’t know where to put the dish towel.

“If that’s true, Ulli, you know what will happen next?”

“Don’t scream. Yes, I do know.”

“If they put Merker in the dock and turn him into the great Zionist conspirator, then the Kochs will pack their bags. They’ll be off. We’ll never see them again.”

4

ULLI, QUICK, THERE are two real English people here.” Klara peered out into the hall, a couple stood there talking, the sentences flowing quickly, foreign and clear, Klara couldn’t understand a word. The cadence of their speech was what had struck her, a different cadence. Klara in her nightdress hid behind the slightly open door waiting for her parents to move away, her mother went to get glasses, her father had gone ahead into the drawing room, now Klara could take a look outside. The woman was adjusting her delicately patterned stole in front of the hall-stand mirror, the man was fishing a packet of cigarettes out of his coat pocket, perhaps they were talking about Herr Klein, the Super-Tenant, who had just gone upstairs. Klara didn’t even know whether her parents knew English, whether any of the regular guests would be able to converse with the couple.

“Come on, Ulli, or the English people won’t be there anymore,” hissed Klara in a stage whisper over her shoulder, but before her sister could get out of bed the woman had caught sight of Klara in the doorway, she laughed, suddenly she was speaking German: “No, my dear, we’re not real English people.”

Klara nodded. Went red. And shut the door. It was the first time in her life that she had seen émigrés.

She was still a bit embarrassed about having behaved like a small child, Klara confessed to me when we were discussing the new faces that had appeared in the Hagemann circle after the war. A little girl from Dresden who knew foreign countries, foreign languages only from books. At the time Klara even acquired a few words of English to make up for it, so that the following week she could greet the Kochs as though she had grown up in London herself, as the couple appreciatively agreed.

Ashamed she may have been, but she took a particular liking to her “English couple,” and for their part the Kochs never failed to look in on the girls before they went on into the drawing room to greet the other guests, the adults. Herr Koch would stand by the window while Frau Koch sat on the edge of Klara’s bed, only for a few minutes, and yet as the sisters drifted off to sleep there was a faint aroma of cigarette smoke and eau de cologne.

The Kochs alerted Klara to cadences. The mere memory of the sound of a foreign language out in the hall was enough later to make Klara aware when there was a cool atmosphere between guests, when someone was covering up insecurity or close to losing self-control, when the drawing room conversation took a turn nobody had anticipated.

One evening in the summer of 1948 she was at the door when the Kochs happened to arrive at the same time as a man Klara didn’t know. Clearly the Kochs didn’t know who the man was either, for as Klara took their hats and coats to the hall stand, she heard, “My name is Koch, and this is my wife.”

Looking for spare hangers for the coats damp from the light summer rain, she missed the new guest’s answer.

“Sorry, help me a bit here — the philologist, the philosopher?”

“The last living Proust translator, if you like.”

Was he offended? Was he just being modest? Was he joking at his own expense? Herr Hagemann appeared in the drawing room doorway, Frau Hagemann called Klara into the kitchen: “Could you take care of the rest, please?”

Ulli was slicing cucumber; Frau Hagemann took off her apron, washed her hands. “Who’s here?”

Klara shrugged and set about preparing the radishes. Flashing eyes, theatrical voice — but for that mincing walk, the man would have been a frightening phenomenon.

The next day she searched her parent’s bookshelves, in the French literature section she found two volumes with the titles Auf den Spuren der verlorenen Zeit (In Search of Lost Time): opening one at the title page, Der Weg zu Swann (Swann’s Way), she read the name RUDOLF SCHOTTLAENDER. She struggled with the book for two or three evenings but couldn’t get past the first fifty pages. There were passages that remained obscure to her, she came across oddities, expressions she didn’t understand, she could have asked her parents about them, perhaps even the translator himself, but then she was distracted by something else she wanted to read, and soon Proust disappeared under a pile of books on the dressing table: forgotten were the long scene where a lonely young boy falls asleep, the visit of a certain M. Swann, the “bioscope,” the “rooms in winter,” and, in parentheses, the sea swallow so elaborately busy building its nest.

A year later Schottlaender’s name came up again. By this time the sisters were allowed to sit up with the guests for half an hour after they arrived, but the strange man who translated that strange book into German had obviously not appeared again. “A difficult person”—that was all Frau Hagemann would say about it.

“Have you seen what they’re saying about Professor Schottlaender in the newspaper?” asked Herr Koch one light summer evening.

“Quite a problematical case.” Domaschke, the young internist, sprang to Klara’s mother’s aid, knowing she didn’t like making unkind remarks about guests. “If a university professor fails to march on the First of May, is he really obliged to justify himself in writing afterward?”

Herr Koch: “Naive.”

“What do you mean, naive?” His wife sounded irritated.

“I mean all he’s done is give them the material they wanted.”

“You might as well say ‘and played right into their hands’—but after all, they will have started collecting material long before yesterday.”

“Do you mean documents?” Domaschke didn’t dare ask directly. “Do you mean official papers from the past?”

“What do you think? If somebody like that was in a camp without being a political prisoner?”

“Now you’re exaggerating.” Herr Koch laid his hand on his wife’s forearm. “And anyway, Schottlaender was not in a camp.”

“Be that as it may, he had to think of his wife and little daughter. You would have done the same.”

“For me there would have been no question of going to West Berlin, though.”

Klara took up Swann’s Way again. The edition had appeared in 1926, and Rudolf Schottlaender was not yet fifty when Klara heard him calling himself “the last living Proust translator” while she was busy with damp summer coats and coat hangers at the other end of the hall. Had Herr and Frau Koch nodded silently to show they understood what he was talking about? Even if there was not much to connect them, as readers of detective stories, with Marcel Proust, they nodded when Schottlaender looked them in the eye as though subjecting them to examination: “It was only about eight years ago that we were still at full strength.”

Klara was soon reading about Gilberte, who was either frivolous or timorous, reading once more about Swann, a name she had known for a long time but that seemed to her now — as the most commonplace words seem to many people suffering from aphasia — like a new name. She read about acacia avenues, about a forest from which, wearing a sleek fur coat and with the lovely eyes of an animal, a hurrying woman emerges, only to vanish again in the next sentence without leaving a trace.

Having finished the book, Klara went to Herr Lindner’s bookstore to acquaint herself with the German that Walter Benjamin and Franz Hessel bestowed on Proust. For a quarter of a year she was carrying around with her the first two volumes of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, printed by Hegner in Hellerau. At Christmas 1951 Herr Lindner surprised Klara with a copy of Pleasures and Regrets. This would have given her the opportunity to compare Ernst Weiss’s language with that of the other translators, but what intrigued her above all was the third part of the novel. Every time there was a card from Lindner in the mail with the brief message “Fresh goods. Regards, Lindner,” she hoped he had found the longed-for volume, published by Piper.

Apart from Ulli, no one knew how Klara had come across this author, and no one would have been able to understand why they took turns reading each other a few pages before going to sleep, as though, if only they studied the same sentences often enough, they would find out something about their own relatives, about whom their parents would tell them nothing.

“That man Schottlaender was right,” Klara interrupted once when she had lost the thread while listening to a reflection on ladies’ hats.

Ulli looked up from the open page and blinked in the beam of the bedside lamp. “With his story about the dead translators?”

“Herr Lindner knew the dates of their deaths: the first one died in June 1940, the second in September, and the last in January, shortly after New Year.”

“Here?”

“In France.”

“All three of them?” Ulli leaned forward to make out the face of her sister in the darkness on the other side of the room. “June — wasn’t that when the Germans marched into Paris?”

“I think they committed suicide.”

“You’ll have to ask Herr Lindner again.”

“I’ll do that next week. Where were we?”

“The grandmother has a teacher with an illegitimate daughter.”

“I thought it was ladies’ hats? Go on, read.”

“No, that’s enough for tonight.”

Ulli put the book down, turned off the light. She was still looking across to Klara’s bed.

“Did the translators all know each other, do you think?”

“Do you mean was Schottlaender friendly with the others? I don’t think so.”

“I wonder what he was doing during that time?”

“We can ask the Kochs.”

“And none of them died of old age. Did he really tell you that?”

“I don’t remember. Let’s go to sleep now.”

The English couple could not agree. Herr Koch said Schottlaender had worked in an arms factory, but his wife thought she remembered him looking after an old lady. Moving between the hall stand and the drawing room, Frau Koch halted in her tracks: “Or was he translating for the criminal police?”

“I think you’re wide of the mark there. Schottlaender never did slave translation labor.”

When we got to know each other, Klara was still waiting for the continuation of her Proust. For months the main topic at the Hagemanns’ had been the sensational trial of Philipp Auerbach: nobody there could possibly condone the police turning the state-appointed representative of victims of Nazism into the victim of a car chase on the autobahn, as though foiling the last-minute escape attempt of some enemy agent. Nobody thought much of the charges that took Auerbach to court. And nobody could forgive the expert witness who said that the accused was incapable of distinguishing between delusion and reality. But opinions were divided about the verdict.

“The man is innocent,” said Herr Hagemann heatedly. “He was in the camps.”

His unconditional support for the accused — even his wife couldn’t quite fathom it. He would allow no room for doubt about the man. When he referred to a “show trial,” there was a sharp intake of breath from one of the guests.

“You’ve only got to look at the judge. The assistant judge. The state prosecutor.”

His daughters had never seen him so angry. “I know this type of person, I know them,” cried Herr Hagemann, and both Ulli and Klara were convinced he was on the point of divulging something about their own relatives, if Herr Koch hadn’t interrupted him: “Herr Hagemann, we all know this type of person, but some of us also know Herr Auerbach.”

Frau Koch got up, excused herself, left the room. Klara went after her. She knew that Frau Koch was not so much concerned about Auerbach’s character as she was disturbed because they were discussing a trial taking place in the West.

And then, a few days after the verdict in Munich, Philipp Auerbach took an overdose of sleeping pills. Frau Koch didn’t want to know whether he was buried according to Orthodox rites, didn’t want to know whether a rabbi was present when the scuffle broke out at the cemetery. Whether the police really had used batons on the angry mourners, whether a water cannon was deployed. She didn’t want to know. For a while it looked as though the Kochs would stay in Dresden. Until Merker disappeared from the scene.

5

AS I RECALL, THE domestic offices were on the other side of the street, directly opposite the Institute villa. Often when I left Kaltenburg, I dropped the dirty washing off at the laundry, I can see myself crossing the road with lab coats covered in green algae stains, with matted winter pullovers, but now I wonder whether I didn’t find a secret path, for the buildings that most resemble the former laundry and joiner’s workshop are situated two house numbers further down the road, half hidden behind a hedge.

“Did the Kochs go back to England?” asked Katharina Fischer as we left the Institute villa behind us.

For a while, it’s possible that they thought about doing so. Rudolf Slánský was executed, at the Hagemanns’ somebody expressed the fear that the Prague show trial would have repercussions here as well, and in fact the first house searches and arrests were soon under way in Dresden. It seemed that they were only waiting for the nod from Moscow to start uncovering a Zionist conspiracy, since they already held the ringleader, Paul Merker. In January, Stalin — they could always count on Comrade Stalin in Berlin — gave the signal: among the doctors in his entourage he had discovered agents working for an international organization, possibly even for Israel, who had designs on his life. Stalin gave full vent to this last delusion, accepting the confessions, satisfied to stack them up on the desk in front of him, there was no need for him to read a single one, after all he had often issued warnings about the Jews.

The first absences occurred in the Hagemanns’ drawing room. And the English couple no longer hesitated. They celebrated Stalin’s death in West Berlin: Charlottenburg.

Archetypes of Fear would have been a different book. Kaltenburg didn’t notice the gaps, I’m sure, until at least the first draft of his study. But you notice them when you’re reading the book: when he mentions “how people are crammed together into the most restricted spaces,” when he talks about “dehumanization”—you don’t quite expect a critique of living conditions in the modern city. At one point he mentions “heat death”—you can imagine the professor recoiling the moment he has committed this term to paper, you can see him reflecting, crossing out, looking for an alternative, until “heat death” comes to mean something about as innocuous as a warning against hothousing a child. Just when you think that Kaltenburg is finally beginning to face up to the gaps, writing how difficult it is to make someone understand “that a culture can be extinguished like a candle flame,” then you turn back a few pages and find that this chapter is devoted to a lengthy treatment of the war between the generations.

I remember how, in that same year, Klara once clashed with a representative of the Cultural Association. It was at a summer festival we were allowed to attend with Ludwig Kaltenburg. The effect on the professor must have been like watching the unfamiliar ritual of a newly discovered species. The two were discussing literature, initially it was hardly more than one of those conversations you have with a stranger in a large gathering. And Klara’s interlocutor was in no way an unfriendly sort, an elderly gentleman who looked as though he had lived through a great deal, even if he hadn’t achieved much of what he set out to do. Now he felt obliged to look to the future, and so for Klara’s benefit he lauded examples of the latest activist writing, naming names that are forgotten today, that were soon to be forgotten even at the time. Privately he may have been a Stendhal admirer, but whatever names Klara put forward, he dismissed the authors out of hand. Inwardly seething, he worked himself up to the point of praising the most dubious tractor-versifier, in his blind zeal he would even have betrayed his beloved Stendhal. Klara did not give way, she went for broke: Proust. A body of work, she maintained in a completely unwavering voice, that was practically without equal in our century.

Klara was being foolhardy, she knew that, but in such moments everything was eclipsed by her fearlessness, not even Vorkuta existed. It took her interlocutor a second or two to compose himself. A word like “debauchery” sprang to his lips. He suppressed it. What came out was “decadence.”

But whatever attack he launched against Proust, Klara had an answer to all his phrase-mongering, and of course she let slip that she had read a few hundred pages by that decadent, debauched author. The Cultural Association representative could have broken off the altercation, could have sought out different listeners. It was as plain to him as to anybody else who was following the exchange of blows that he was not going to convince this “defiant,” articulate “girl.” But he could not tear himself away. Something pinned him to the spot. Some voice he didn’t recognize was telling him to go on arguing with Klara. Finally, all he could do was exclaim, “We don’t need anyone like Proust. We don’t need any Proust here.”

Like all of Klara’s admirers, Kaltenburg was dazzled by her energy, grateful that this young woman had dared to banish Vorkuta for a while, as though she had the power to turn the place back into a blank spot on the map. Afterward, though, he asked me in all confidence, “Tell me, this Proust, is he really one of the greatest?”

He was aware of the years he had missed at the Hagemanns’, for sure. If he had been able to envisage those faces, recall those conversations when he began work on Archetypes of Fear, then there would be no uncertainty today about precisely what he meant by “atmosphere of death.” Perhaps after more than two decades Kaltenburg might simply have dropped this favorite phrase of his, might have replaced it in new editions of older works with another, clearly delineated term. Or he might, once and for all, have struggled through to a definition of the shadowy expression “atmosphere of death.” Whatever the painful experiences involved in such an undertaking, Kaltenburg would not have shrunk from it, would not have turned his head away.

“Are you really sure?”

He must have realized he had missed something.

“But are you certain that he would have seen things differently among the Hagemann circle? Would people like the Kochs, Rudolf Schottlaender, or Klara Hagemann have led him to revise his ideas?”

That’s what I would have wished for him, at any rate.

It had stopped drizzling. The narrow road ran gently up the hill, and Katharina Fischer was wondering whether, at his age, Ludwig Kaltenburg really would have welcomed a rethink.

“And after all, at that stage the Cold War tensions were gradually beginning to ease off.”

There wasn’t much to stop him, in fact — all he lacked was a lifetime ahead of him. If he had been a younger man or, as he once wrote, a “representative of a future generation,” he would have approached the phenomenon of fear from a completely different angle.

“Under pressure from younger colleagues?”

I think that’s unlikely. Nobody could have forced him to make discoveries.

So the “atmosphere of death” in his writings remained to the end a barely definable field that was the setting for a series of varied, insufficiently delimited phenomena. The “atmosphere of death” encompasses injured birds as much as countless field-hospital patients. According to Ludwig Kaltenburg, it includes in equal measure “the displaced,” “the homeless,” and “those ground down between ideologies.” And although the professor may gradually have become uncertain while working on his manuscript whether he was using the expression appropriately at any given point — in fact eventually he could not have said what he meant when he originally coined it — the “atmosphere of death” spread without distinction across slaughterhouses and flocks of dead jackdaws and military bands playing funeral marches alike, and had long since claimed a child wandering through the Great Garden during a night of bombardment.

But what use would a term like “world pogrom” have been to Ludwig Kaltenburg?

6

TO OUR RIGHT LAY some derelict land where for a while a few huts had stood, which, if I remember rightly, were torn down in the late fifties. Workrooms and dormitories, enclosures, and an infernal stench that pervaded the surrounding area when warm air crept up the hillside.

Ludwig Kaltenburg was very keen on a close bond between the researchers at his Institute. That’s not to say they all had to have the same outlook on the world, the world of animals included: far from it. But I won’t go into the experiments with hearing-impaired rhesus monkeys with which Etzel von Isisdorf began here.

“A hut full of rhesus monkeys?”

Yes. And even as a student at that time, when I was allowed to participate in the big evening meetings, I didn’t take in his daily reports. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. Perhaps that’s why the rhesus monkey section gradually developed into an institute within the Institute. Almost as soon as von Isisdorf accepted an appointment in the USA, the professor had the temporary housing demolished. After all, Kaltenburg argued, the neighbors — the non-animal-loving neighbors, that is — were already under almost inhuman pressure, without imposing that stench on them.

While Katharina Fischer walked silently at my side, I was trying to shake off some unbearable film images that had been running through my mind since I had brought up the name of Etzel von Isisdorf. A monkey’s empty eyes, the bared teeth, the broken impression the animal makes on the observer, the look of a terrible presentiment running through it as it turns inward to listen and hears nothing. Its lips tremble as if filmed in slow motion, although the sequence was shot at normal speed.

When we reached a crossing, the interpreter pointed to a corner building: “Did that belong to the Institute as well?”

Maybe. Although it’s quite a distance from the main Institute site. The numerous many-angled extensions, the clutter under the awning: at first I didn’t associate anything with this building, but then we turned off to the right, and there was the small window in the side wall of the garage, the wall was piled up with rain barrels and garden tools, I saw the curtains, and then I remembered: this was where Knut stayed when he had work to do in Loschwitz.

“In the house?”

No, in the garage.

“In that poky den?” Katharina Fischer couldn’t believe it.

Here again I read the nameplate next to the bell, it bore the same name as it had then, and once more I was loath to ring. Frau Fischer should have seen the garage before it was converted into a place for Knut to stay. The little window, the curtains — in reality I knew it wasn’t possible, but I had the feeling they were the same curtains as fifty years ago.

The garage was leased, that is to say it was used by the Institute, and in return Kaltenburg sent his workmen along. They fitted the garage out so that you could stay there overnight, put in a window, insulated the walls. Afterward they carried out repairs to the main building, and as I recall they even put in a sauna. A pretty high price to pay for the use of a drafty hut in which you couldn’t even have kept your coach horses with a good conscience. Kaltenburg thought wanting to live here was something of a fixation on Knut’s part, but then again, he had a soft spot for fixations, he was no stranger to them himself. Nonetheless, Knut couldn’t have cared that much about the garage, perhaps it was just that in the villa or one of the outbuildings he would have felt hemmed in, he enjoyed walking a few hundred meters after a long day’s work in the Institute grounds. The fresh night air over Loschwitz, not a soul around by then — the location and comfort of his lodgings were of secondary importance.

They put down linoleum, installed a bed that was much too wide, a bench, and a table; Knut was grateful for the accommodation. Except that, if it had been up to him, they would have made the window a bit larger. The workmen thought they were doing him a favor, the cold at night, the winter cold — whatever tales Knut had to tell about nights spent out in the open, nights on Lüneburg Heath as well as by the Black Sea, he was talking to workmen from Dresden, here we were in Loschwitz, and all they knew was that it can be bitterly cold at night in Loschwitz.

How proud Kaltenburg was to announce one morning that, in the intervals of a conference, he had persuaded Knut Sieverding to use the grounds of the Institute to make the hamster film he was planning. The open-air shooting had been completed, now filming was to proceed in an artificial hamster burrow. There were plenty of hamsters at the Institute, Knut would be able to take his pick from golden and black-bellied hamsters, tame animals gone feral and hand-reared wild animals. There was time, there was space, and all that Knut needed to bring with him was a few sacks of cement to build a proper hamster’s burrow in the garden.

“A pane of glass two meters square? We enjoy excellent relations with a first-class glazing firm, Herr Sieverding.”

There would probably have been enough cement at the Institute too. Knut asked no questions, however, but promised to take care of it. For all his pride at having engaged the aspiring young nature-film maker, Kaltenburg may have seen the requirement to supply cement as a little test of Knut’s serious intentions. But when a truck appeared outside the house and the professor watched Knut struggling with the cement sacks, hauling them off the loading platform and trundling them on the trolley into the garden, there was no doubt about it: with this man, Kaltenburg had made a good choice.

Knut Sieverding’s working methods were always a model of patience and attention to detail. He himself would have said that this was not exceptional in his line of work, since anyone who didn’t possess these qualities wouldn’t be making films in the first place but looking for some other kind of job. If I’d had the same attributes as Knut, it would have been hard for me then to decide whether to emulate him or the professor. Calm. Physical self-control. On good terms with sleep. And naturally his ingenuity in constructing blinds. The professor may have envied this ability in particular. When Kaltenburg worked with animals, it was always face-to-face. Film footage from the early days of the Institute shows him with ravens on his head, his forearm, and his knee, or on the Elbe shore with his young flock of jackdaws giving a demonstration of flying, or in the company of his ducks: the iridescent markings of the parent birds, the light, downy plumage of the chicks, and then a thick white shock of hair — a shot of a pond, taken almost at water-surface level, reeds swaying in the background. By contrast, in the countless open-air sequences Knut filmed in the course of a lifetime, not a single human being ever appears, although a specialist would know there must have been other people present because Knut often situated a number of cameras to capture an animal scene from a variety of perspectives.

He never appears in his own films, you don’t see him in a studio setting, or prowling around the landscape in search of a hidden breeding site. Knut may not have attached much significance to this, but it takes me back to his earliest bird shots, the period of his youthful excursions when, with camera and binoculars, he explored a small peninsula in the Frische Haff from early morning till sunset, for months on end, left completely to his own devices. There was no one there to photograph Kurt in the presence of birds, nervous as they were of human contact.

He invited inquisitive school friends to help him build a shelter; they laid a waterproof sheet across a framework of birch trunks, arranging twigs and grasses as camouflage, then squatting with Knut for two or three hours in his blind — increasingly restless, under an increasing strain as they peered into the landscape ahead, until they reached a point where they politely asked Knut for permission to leave him to it. He waited until they had left the breeding area, until even the lapwings felt safe, then carefully moved his observation post another half-meter closer to the nest.

Later he was surrounded by assistants, cameramen, and lighting specialists who could easily have helped him to make small appearances: Knut Sieverding lying in wait at dawn, Knut Sieverding pointing, Knut Sieverding surveying the mating ground, and here Knut Sieverding watching the ruffs at their ritual display. “What a waste of valuable film time”—that’s all he would have said. Even when his protagonist was a completely tame animal, he didn’t dare raise his voice above a whisper as he worked, staying motionless beside the camera, and sometimes for an instant you feel the stoat is looking offscreen for eye contact, the young woodpeckers are becoming impatient, because Knut Sieverding is not reacting to their pleading. His view was that the author should be out of shot, present only as a voice. As though he were still working under the conditions of his early days, or had derived from them something like a commitment to staying out of the picture.

I am one of those people privileged to have witnessed Knut in action, I have seen him in those moments where everything has to move very fast, where everyone is in place, where a scene is successful or goes even better than hoped for, when everybody feels like cheering but must hold back because animals can’t stand the sound of cheering. I have seen him full of self-doubt because of an unsatisfactory day’s work, bad weather, running out of time. I have retained even more powerful impressions from the preparatory phase of work on Knut’s full-length films, from those months partly filled with excited anticipation, in part characterized by depressing setbacks, when many a film project has collapsed because the director’s nerve has failed.

The way that Knut presented his plan for the hamster burrow to me, drawn on graph paper, in the tones of an engineer but with the air of someone rolling out a map of hidden treasure, and suddenly said, as though we had been discussing Kaltenburg all along, “You know how important you are to the professor,” then returned immediately to his design. Not “I’ve noticed” or “It’s obvious”: Knut said “You know,” as though he merely wanted to confirm that I had arrived unaided at an insight that had been in the offing for years.

“The last thing I want to do when I’m trying to film an encounter between animals is interfere,” he explained one day during the tedious business of training the stoat. I can see him sitting in the meadow, wearing an angler’s waistcoat as usual over his checked shirt, its pockets containing not hooks or worms but light meters, pencils, bits of film stock. Laughing, he let the stoat have the end of a flex. No, he wouldn’t interfere, but he did take the necessary precautions to prevent a fatal clash between his performers.

Then we crouched in the darkened tent in front of the camera-ready hamster set, together with Professor Kaltenburg and Herr Sikorski, the cameraman. For one last time Knut let his flashlight sweep along the passageway behind the pane of glass. From outside we could hear the sound of the mother hamster beginning a tentative exploration of her new quarters. The beam of light tracked down to the sleeping den, while the hamster was enjoying the pieces of carrot, wheat grains, and ears of rye that had been scattered over the miniature field. We saw the food storage chamber lit up, the escape tunnel, a side tunnel with bays — it was as though Knut were once more mentally rehearsing each individual scene he was planning to shoot. Now somebody was telling us that the hamster had discovered the entrance to the burrow, and Knut turned off the flashlight.

We pulled back carefully. In the world outside there was penetrating spring sunshine. The following weeks would be entirely devoted to getting the hamster used to a spotlight in her underground world. No hamster before her had ever lived permanently under two-thousand-watt lighting.

The film about the hamster was just the beginning. Three or four big projects were carried out at Kaltenburg’s Institute, aside from a whole series of shorter films that Knut made for schools, and after his Congo expedition, when he was in tremendous demand everywhere, he fled to Dresden to write the film commentary in peace. For several weeks he left his lodgings for only a few hours a day, sitting with the professor, letting himself be persuaded by Martin, Klara, and me to go on an outing — but he soon felt the pull of his manuscript again. Hardly anyone knew he was there, hardly anyone ever found out, he sat hunched over his desk for three weeks, crammed in between the bed and the corner bench, a pile of paper in front of him, he didn’t need books or any other material, Knut had all his Congo footage in his head, thousands of meters of it. “The shadowy world of the jungle is hostile to filming,” he wrote in the nocturnal quiet of Oberloschwitz, and while he was waiting for the next sentence he could hear rhinoceros birds, spoonbills, marabous, saw himself surrounded by giant pangolins, okapis, aardvarks, gorillas, and cheetahs.

In this cramped garage, frequently dank and cold in winter, Knut and I often sat together, or in a trio with Klara, sometimes with Martin too. In the garage you could put a distance between yourself and the Institute without altogether cutting yourself off from it, and for a while after the Institute had closed down Knut was still allowed to go on living there whenever he came to Dresden. Until, citing their new car as an excuse, the house owners began to hum and haw, then ripped out the linoleum, burned the wall insulation, stowed the furniture under the awning in the backyard. Until they no longer wanted to know anything about the past Kaltenburg era. But they seem to have left the curtains in place.

7

KATHARINA FISCHER TOLD ME that recently, coming home exhausted one evening from an assignment, she had turned on the TV and happened upon a group discussion in which, along with a number of lesser lights, Knut Sieverding was taking part. At first she had not taken much notice of the program, went into the kitchen to heat up some goulash, her husband was away on official business abroad, after a hard day she simply wanted to have a few human voices around her without having to translate their words into another language. The unctuous presenter, notorious for his powers of empathy, was doing his best to contain an aging actress who was holding forth in shrill tones about her boundless social commitment, for Katharina Fischer this was just background noise, until she heard a voice familiar from her childhood saying, “I don’t give a damn what you call it. It’s obvious to me we’re going to get it in the neck.”

She missed the context in which Knut Sieverding made his remark, but she remembered all the more vividly the horrified faces of the studio guests she was just in time to catch as she came back into the living room, before the presenter turned with a nervous smile to the nature-film maker. Knut was so relaxed as he submitted to questioning, his wild boyish mop of hair contrasting with his deadly serious, almost pitying look as he nodded benignly, correcting inaccuracies on the presenter’s part but otherwise largely ignoring the interviewer. Knut Sieverding declined to tell anecdotes about celebrities, he confined himself to animals — with one exception: prompted by the name Kaltenburg, he spoke euphorically about his time at the Institute, about a wealth of important experiences, and constantly reiterated how grateful he still was for the chance to work with the professor. Then the presenter read out a Kaltenburg quotation from his cue card: “More fantastic than taking a box at the opera,” the professor had rhapsodized after seeing the first rushes of the woodpecker film.

“And do you know how Knut Sieverding responded?” asked Katharina Fischer. “A strange comparison, he said, considering that the woodpecker film was the first wildlife film ever released without the benefit of stringed instruments.”

It’s true. No music — the idea came to Knut and the professor one afternoon on the balcony at Loschwitz. The opposite of Hollywood. And as for the box at the opera: I can’t remember Ludwig Kaltenburg ever setting foot in an opera house, at least not to see an opera, and once when the three of us clambered around in the ruins of the Semper Opera House, that was to do with Knut’s idea of making an educational film on cave-nesting birds in the city.

Kaltenburg may not have been able to show it openly, but he had reason to be grateful to Knut too. It was Knut who succeeded in luring Martin to Loschwitz. Another way to put it would be that Knut Sieverding smoothed the path to Kaltenburg for Martin, who had become curious but was still a bit recalcitrant — he told him he would learn far more about animals from him than at the zoo, nobody would be looking suspiciously over his shoulder while he was sketching, and anyway Knut could use some more help with his filming.

“Were you really made to tell your friend all about Anastasia the chow dog?”

“Martin wanted to know everything — he’d never seen a chow before.”

“Everyone’s fascinated by that blue-black tongue.”

“But I reckon he’s even more fascinated by the dog’s owner.”

“If you really think he might benefit from my modest knowledge of dogs, then by all means bring him to the Institute sometime.”

It’s possible that on that first visit both the professor and Martin were still somewhat self-conscious. We toured the site, Martin was amazed by the dog’s tongue, impressed by the aviaries, but when Knut left to go back to work, all three of us watched him as he departed, as though we had just lost our most important playmate. I was the one whose inspiration — if you can call it that — saved the day: why didn’t Martin sketch Taschotschek?

Kaltenburg placed Martin with his back to the balcony door and Taschotschek in the middle of the table. Inquisitively the jackdaw surveyed the sheet of paper laid out, the tin box that hid charcoal and pencils, fixed its eye on the stranger who was blocking its exit. Martin talked to the bird, spoke to it reassuringly, and innocently began to draw. And Kaltenburg, sitting with me on the couch to one side, kept out of the way. He was much too thrilled to interfere, no doubt more excited by the encounter of man and creature being played out before his eyes than by the portrait. He followed the tentative hand of the artist, Taschotschek’s hesitant steps, his glance jumping from one to the other, weighing up the relative chances of Martin and the jackdaw. As though he had made a bet with himself about who would win: Martin, by managing to capture the bird on paper, or the jackdaw, by reducing its portraitist to despair.

Taschotschek emerged victorious. Kaltenburg sat watching the scene calmly. You couldn’t tell by looking at him which party he had backed.

Martin was to make many attempts to sketch Kaltenburg’s favorite jackdaw. He never succeeded; after its own fashion the bird always joined in enthusiastically, and the better it got to know Martin during the sittings, the better it was at taking the lead. It took Taschotschek only a few minutes to work out how to open the tin box. With almost equal speed Martin grasped what charcoal meant, a human hand clutching something shiny black — enough to infuriate any jackdaw. A few drops of blood, a ripped-up piece of paper.

No, Martin would have had to draw Taschotschek from memory, and perhaps he actually did so in later years. It’s just that it wouldn’t necessarily occur to anyone that a line curving across a paper tablecloth was an image of a jackdaw, a jackdaw called Taschotschek capable of driving Martin Spengler mad for months on end when he was a young artist in Dresden.

So, strictly speaking, it wasn’t Knut or me that Kaltenburg and Martin had to thank for their friendship, but a bird. Taschotschek’s willfulness. Taschotschek’s curiosity. At some point the drawing sessions became just a welcome chance for a chat in the presence of the jackdaw.

In Archetypes of Fear there is a fairly long passage, which Frau Fischer clearly recollected too: Kaltenburg is speculating about the relationship between fear and hallucination. About the human capacity to escape out of hopeless situations into another world. “If I understand him correctly, it’s possible not only to alleviate feelings of fear and hopelessness, but to shut them out altogether by overlaying them with fantasy images,” she recollected, and, “Wasn’t it rumored that Kaltenburg was making use of findings by American military psychologists from the Vietnam War?”

Ludwig Kaltenburg as a renegade whose reward was access to secret experiments for use in his own studies — that sounded quite ludicrous even at the time. People simply didn’t want to acknowledge where he acquired most of his observational material: here.

One evening I had finished checking the aviaries and was going to say goodnight to the professor when I heard him talking to Martin in a low voice in the study, as if not to wake the animals that had retired for the night. Kaltenburg seemed surprised when I appeared in the doorway, I hesitated, he hesitated, I was about to retreat, but then he beckoned me into the room. On the table: Taschotschek, pattering about indecisively on a sheet of unmarked white paper. Knut was sitting on a stool, Martin on the couch.

“So there I was, lying trapped under the wreckage of our plane after we had taken a hit in the northern Crimea and lost control of the machine.”

Martin glanced across at me and moved over a little to make room for me. Kaltenburg had drawn up his cocktail-bar chair. I was in the picture straightaway.

“I didn’t know that my copilot had been killed, that his remains lay scattered in the snow, flesh, bones, skin, and cloth. I wasn’t feeling any pain, I had no idea who or where I was, I wasn’t conscious of the frozen ground.”

The bird regarded each of us in turn. Ruffled its feathers. Drew its third eyelid across its eyeball. Turned away.

“I regained consciousness for a moment. As if someone had woken me up. And in fact I wasn’t alone, my skull, my limbs, my joints — somebody was checking my bones, looking for fractures, abrasions, flesh wounds. My mind was brought to bear on individual parts, my knee, my shoulder. But I wasn’t aware of anyone touching me. Then I drifted back into darkness.”

A scratching, a gentle clattering sound, Martin had let Taschotschek have his empty tin box. The lid was opened, closed, opened, the box pulled from one end of the table to the other. Apparently the jackdaw regarded it as Martin’s job to keep it amused by hiding interesting objects such as colored pencils or erasers.

“The next time I came around, I knew these were the eyes of Tatars. As though the Tatars had not simply observed the crash site timidly from afar but had examined me at close quarters, then run their hands over my body, then taken me along with them. I could smell it, smell their skin, this indescribably comforting aroma, with a slight trace of fish oil.”

“And this was all just in your imagination?”

Professor Kaltenburg ignored the clatter now coming from the hallway; Taschotschek had dragged the tin box outside and was pecking at the hinges.

“It must all have been in my mind. I only lay there for a few hours, then I was picked up by a search party. Can you imagine, my comrade Hans was almost pulverized. I think about it sometimes when I’m grinding earth colors in the mortar, when I’m mixing pigment. Doesn’t man consist of carbon too when the fluids have evaporated? It doesn’t take long to render down that little bit of protein. Pulverized, fragmented into the tiniest particles. Nothing left.”

The jackdaw was now on the couch between us, looking up at me, eyeing Martin, and since nobody was paying it any attention, it plucked an old bus ticket out of his trouser pocket.

“There’s a photo of me standing in full uniform in front of our wrecked plane. That time, that moment in time, is lost to me. It was somewhere near Freifeld, in that area. That much I can remember. But I’ve got no recollection at all of being photographed. If they had indeed pulled me out unconscious and half dead from the wreckage, I could hardly have stood up to pose for a photograph. So the picture must have been taken later. I had been patched up somehow, they put me in the jeep and drove me back to the crash site. But why? There were more important things. Getting back to health. The next sortie. Saving your own life. Maybe I insisted on it.”

“You wanted a picture to take home with you. Wanted it to send to your parents.”

“Probably, yes. But then my injuries can’t have been as bad as I remember: double fracture of the skull base, practically no skin left on my body, no hair. Everything full of splinters, hardly any nose left.”

Martin stumbled over his words, went quiet, you could only hear his lips moving. At that moment Kaltenburg, Knut, and I were nothing but shadowy Tatars. The professor poured tea for us. Taschotschek hopped onto my lap.

“Herr Spengler, or may I say Martin?” Kaltenburg hovered with teapot and teacup. “I should tell you that in principle I don’t like talking about the phenomena they call self-healing powers. Particularly where human beings are concerned, people often make it too easy for themselves. All the same, I’ve seen some unbelievable things in that field.”

“But that photograph — if you take a good look at it: a scab-covered cut at most, my eyebrows perhaps. And I must have been thoroughly concussed, of course. Yet Hans had ceased to exist. What they could find of him was buried in the nearest village cemetery.”

“No doubt.” Kaltenburg spoke as if he had already said too much.

“No doubt”: any deeper insight into his own experience of illness and hallucination might have been destabilizing for the young man, with his Tatar memories.

In the hallway Knut almost trod on the tin box. The lid was missing, I could see a pastry fork. By the hall stand the professor remarked, “Really interesting are the hallucinatory states that occur when self-healing powers are activated. There’s still practically no research into that. At any rate, I’ve never come across any convincing answers.”

He accompanied us to the front door, quickly scanned the Institute grounds to left and right, nodded goodbye, and shut the door as we reached the garden gate. Knut set off for his garage. As Martin and I were walking down the hill, I looked back frequently — the dim light of a desk lamp filled the upstairs window that I knew so well, until Kaltenburg’s villa was out of sight.

A few days later the professor took me aside; he was fascinated in equal measure by Martin and by his own shrewdness, as though surprised to discover new capabilities in himself at his age. Almost in a whisper, he told me, “I knew it would provoke a reaction in him sooner or later,” without clarifying whether the “it” in question was Martin’s acquaintance with Taschotschek or the long Stalin monologue. And Martin was to say to Klara at one point, “It’s possible that it was some such figure as Kaltenburg who spoon-fed me soup. I was always in and out of field hospitals, though it was before I was taken prisoner, and maybe Professor Kaltenburg wasn’t unique. Spoon-feeding soup, extraordinary. But I couldn’t swear it didn’t happen to me.”

Time and again the two of them together — in the garden, in the kitchen, on country walks — analyzed Martin’s experience of crashing in the Crimea. Went over the tragic loss of his copilot, the Tatar eyes, the smell of fish oil, coming around in what must have been a tent, since Martin found an expanse of rough material stretched above his head. He had spent hours staring at the fabric in the dim light, not knowing where he was, who had brought him there, yet feeling not at all unsafe.

Martin became more and more absorbed by this image, soon it hardly mattered to him that his spells in field hospitals occurred long after the professor was taken prisoner in Russia, and perhaps it was Kaltenburg’s story that inspired Martin to give that early drawing of his, in which I thought I recognized my nanny, the title “Russian Nurse.” The spoon-feeding, Kaltenburg’s fit of rage by an amputee’s bedside, Comrade Stalin’s coal-black stare — when Martin’s public performances in the sixties and seventies unnerved the public with their soft violence, I invariably recognized elements in them that reminded me of that evening. I think on one occasion he even incorporated the note tucked away in somebody’s cheek.

8

A SUNDAY IN DECEMBER. Ludwig Kaltenburg stood by the window in the winter light, we were in the zoological museum, in the workshop of the Ornithological Collection. It was my first visit to the building. I no longer saw the professor very often by himself.

I couldn’t make out whether Kaltenburg was looking me in the eye or scrutinizing the half-finished bird skin lying on the table in front of me. He betrayed no sign of impatience, standing with arms folded, nodding.

“Still looks a bit swollen.” Kaltenburg pinched the sparrow carefully. “But much better than your first effort this morning. There’s a world of difference.”

I pulled the cotton wadding out of the skin again, rolling it between my palms.

“But you don’t want to make it too hard either.”

I started tweaking with the tweezers a clump at the front, then another, then one a bit higher, toward the tail. A bright wad, meant to reproduce the shape of a bird’s body. Looking at my handiwork, I realized that I no longer even knew how big the sparrow was before we removed its skin.

“You won’t get anywhere that way, you’d better use some new wadding.”

And then promptly: “Stop, not so much. You’ve got to decide in advance how much you need.”

A few minutes later: “Perhaps you could sew it up now. Have you got the skull in? Just start sewing, then we’ll see what sort of customer emerges. And as I said, don’t make the seam too tight, otherwise the bird will burst open again.”

I didn’t want to know how many sparrows Kaltenburg had brought along for me. “Even if you never learn to enjoy skinning, you’ve got to be able to do it in your sleep. You must develop skill and an accurate eye, otherwise you’re lost.”

It’s not unlikely that he had me in for “extra coaching” because he found it embarrassing to talk about a student as a future acolyte when that student couldn’t even produce a well-formed sparrow skin. I was on my second attempt when Kaltenburg — by the window, arms folded — made a mistake. That is to say, he winced, and I knew he wished he hadn’t spoken.

“And they’ve gone on the hunt in the Great Garden, in this weather.”

“Who has?”

“Our comrades from the Society for Sports and Technology.” Kaltenburg’s voice as he said “our comrades.”

“And why on the hunt?”

“Haven’t you heard? The Great Garden is closed to the public, the SST is shooting animals — threat of rabies.”

“Foxes?”

“Stray dogs, they said, cats, wild rabbits.”

“In fact, everything in their sights?”

“Magpies, crows, jays can all transmit rabies, of course.”

“A regular slaughter?”

Kaltenburg came across to the table, leaning over as if to scrutinize my face.

“I’m afraid so, yes.”

I laid aside the half-skinned sparrow body. How could Professor Kaltenburg summon me on a Sunday to the zoological museum to calmly teach me the proper way to prepare a bird skin while at the same time in the Great Garden an army of lunatics was engaged in disguised target practice? There was no doubt that their victims would also include birds from Kaltenburg’s household, hand-reared creatures that frequented the Great Garden during daylight hours. As they did every morning, they had taken off all unsuspecting from Loschwitz to fly across the Elbe, while Kaltenburg was shaving, dressing, drinking his tea. Perhaps he had watched a flock of them circling one last time outside the window before the birds gradually disappeared down the valley, shapes, black dots mixed with white, isolated snowflakes, then becoming nothing more than a memory of movement in the air. Kaltenburg knew about the impending disaster, he should have used his influence, taken some action.

Leaning on the table, he looked at me. “Do you know what happened at the beginning of the century when they started ringing birds at the Rossitten observation post, fully believing it would help protect them?”

I wasn’t in the mood for guessing games. I didn’t even bother to shake my head. To take my mind off what I’d just heard, I picked up the scalpel and went on loosening more of the sparrow’s skin, as far as the neck, prior to pulling it away over the body. As more and more of the inside of the skin appeared, I sprinkled it repeatedly with the mixture of potato flour and plaster Kaltenburg provided that morning.

“People went out shooting birds. They brought down massive numbers in the hope of bagging one from Rossitten.”

Carefully I bared the skull, pushing back the skin of the neck and slowly easing it over the cap of the skull. The skin had to be pulled over both rami of the lower jaw at once, and I had to make sure I didn’t sever the ear sacs. You could draw them out of the auditory canal with your fingers. No tugging at this point, it would be so easy to tear the skin. One squeeze of my clumsy thumbs could crush the skull to bits. I had to keep in mind the enormous power in my fingers when they enclosed a skull.

“How do you think I lose most animals? People are as keen on trophy hunting nowadays as they were then, and everybody has plenty of ringed birds by now. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know whether it’s naiveté or ill will. Their pride when they take people into their trophy room, especially if anybody asks them, Is that mount a Kaltenburg?”

The professor paced back and forth, pausing in front of a showcase displaying objects from all over the world — picture postcards, a wooden case with inlay work: a pattern of fish or something abstract. The caiman standing upright with a hat and cane, holding a small champagne glass.

I picked up the blade again and cut through the transparent skin around the eyes until the eyelids were separated from the dark eyeballs. Now for the brain. I made an incision diagonally toward the base of the skull, noting that the neck and tongue were released by the same cut. I lifted the brain out carefully, the eyeballs, taking trouble not to get any secretions or blood on the dead sparrow’s feathers. I sprinkled borax over the head and packed the eye cavities tightly with wadding.

Professor Kaltenburg stood by the periodical shelves, randomly pulling out one issue after another and leafing through them. Perhaps he was looking for his own name. I turned the head and neck skin back again with my index fingers, took the sparrow by the beak, and shook the neck feathers back into place. Kaltenburg was restless.

“Do you remember a man coming to the door and telling me he had run over one of my jackdaws? Well, the story simply didn’t add up at all. Turns up on an old bike talking about his car. He probably didn’t even have a driving license, let alone a car. Didn’t it ever strike you as odd? And how would a jackdaw finish up under his wheels? That alone might have set you thinking. I tell you, he got rattled on the way home and lost his nerve.”

I introduced the closed tweezers into the eye cavity and coaxed the head feathers back into place. Then the skin was painted with the toxic solution.

“They suddenly turn all humble and come crawling to me, holding out their blood-soaked bags. They’re looking for punishment, they want me to bawl them out. But I won’t give them the satisfaction, I thank them politely and let them go on their way. I could see at a glance, that dead jackdaw was full of lead shot.”

“Can’t these people be held to account?”

“Do you want me to shout it from the rooftops? Even the slowest would get the idea. And then we’d have a new popular sport, shooting Kaltenburg’s birds. The Institute would be closed within a month.”

“You’ve never told me about all this.”

“Naturally I don’t tell you everything. I don’t want you losing your confidence on account of such things.”

So much for the skinning. Now the bird had to be totally reconstructed. Kaltenburg left me working alone for a while, went wandering off through the rooms. When he came back, he seemed distracted: “If we ever go to Vienna together, remind me to show you the two sea eagles in their eerie that Crown Prince Rudolf shot nine days before he committed suicide in Mayerling.”

While Kaltenburg was telling me about Vienna, I grew calmer with every hand movement.

“And then if you go to the Natural History Museum in Bucharest sometime, you’ll be amazed. The dioramas alone: in the low lighting you have to look hard for the animals between the grasses and bushes.”

On his first visit there, standing in front of the display cases on the upper floor, Kaltenburg had almost burst into tears, “You know what that means with me”: the exuberant multiplicity of species, subspecies, varieties, although no one — neither a curator nor a bird — was using the display to show off. Despite the great wealth of information, a kind of restraint prevailed, you could almost say tact, which immediately told visitors that here they had pulled off the trick of preserving respect for nature while at the same time offering every possible detail an inquiring wildlife enthusiast could desire about birds, these shy creatures.

“I remember two birds in particular, you’ve guessed it, a couple of jackdaws, eastern jackdaws, male and female, the label said they had been collected not long before my visit in April 1950 by some enthusiastic soldiers on army land in Bucharest.”

Kaltenburg in front of the periodicals, completely lost in thought.

“Incidentally, don’t forget to take a quick look at the wall on the landing before you rush upstairs: there’s a niche there — you might say a display case — with two urns containing the ashes of the long-serving director of the museum — a student of Haeckel’s — Grigore Antipa, and his wife.”

The less fat a skin contains, the easier it is to preserve. By the afternoon I had managed to produce a sparrow skin that I was satisfied with. Kaltenburg was too.

“I said you could do it.”

Outside, it was rapidly getting dark. Conscientiously I wrote out the label, naming Kaltenburg as the collector, Funk as the taxidermist. The first bird skin I had contributed to the collection.

“They must be just about finished by now.”

Ludwig Kaltenburg looked at me inquiringly.

“In the Great Garden, I mean.”

It was no longer on his mind. “Are you still talking about the amateur marksmen?” And no, the hunt was due to last only until eleven that morning. “They’ll have gathered in their spoils ages ago. Imagine how much work will be coming the way of our curators and taxidermists when the SST comrades start logging in what they’ve bagged.”

9

IF THE INTERPRETER HADN’T asked me about the year the Ornithological Collection episode took place, I would never have realized that — although I can remember every word, Kaltenburg’s oddly changeable tone, the sparrow I skinned, and the gloom of a December day — I couldn’t remember whether it was 1955, or a year later, or 1957. It felt as though I had spent a day with Kaltenburg in a secluded room out of time. I have no date to attach to my feeling of helplessness to influence external events, let alone put a stop to the hunt in the Great Garden, for example by wandering all unsuspecting into the park for a stroll and thus forcing the shooting party to suspend their activities for a while at least.

It’s possible that I would have been arrested for disturbing the peace and interrogated, a refractory young man who, despite repeated warnings, had gained access to a prohibited area; it’s also possible that in the case of such a transgression I would have been threatened with consequences, declared insane, expelled from the university because I had insulted upright members of the Society for Sport and Technology. Perhaps the professor had wanted to protect me. Or he knew me better than I knew myself and thought it would be easier for me to bear my own impotence away from the scene than standing at the edge of the Great Garden, counting the shots, seeing the birds fall out of the trees in front of me, avoiding the eyes of the law enforcers.

A Sunday in December: to establish the exact date, all I would have had to do was consult our skin collection. Among countless specimens I would find a young male sparrow, with a delicate bluish sheen to its gray head and distinctly, almost cosmetically rimmed walnut-brown cheeks, whose label bore the professor’s name as well as mine. Or I might look among the corvids to identify birds shot that morning in the Great Garden. Then I would be able to put a date to Kaltenburg’s exclamation “I don’t want you losing confidence,” this anxious thought, expressed in an offhand sentence, which I couldn’t relate to anything in particular, and which, it seems to me, corresponds to the helplessness I felt that day. Ludwig Kaltenburg and I, spending a day out of time in the ornithology room, both depressed, both trying to look forward to the days, weeks, years that lay ahead of us.

I can at least say with some certainty, without further research, that our time together among the dead birds fell within the period when all the talk was about the return of the Dresden art treasures from secret Soviet collections. Amazed, almost stunned, and a little suspicious, we stood in front of the paintings in the Zwinger Gallery, expecting someone to speak up under cover of the dense mass of visitors and expose the exhibition as a nonevent, a collection of more or less skilled copies. In fact, among the circle of those to whom I talked about things that were not for the ears of strangers, it was Ludwig Kaltenburg who, without taking the precaution of sounding out art historians who knew something about the subject, was the only one not to harbor any doubt whatsoever about the authenticity of these newly liberated Rembrandts, Vermeers, and Raphaels. The professor firmly believed in the sincerity of the new, transformed Soviet Union, and he wouldn’t have been Ludwig Kaltenburg if he had been worried simply by finding he stood alone in his opinion.

The professor was so inspired by the return of the art treasures that he sketched an outrageous vision of the future: what if the gallery in the Zwinger Palace was only the beginning? In the light of this unprecedented event, how big a step would it really be to follow through eventually with the missing contents of other collections? These were the reflections Kaltenburg mulled over on his solitary nocturnal walks through Oberloschwitz with Anastasia, who stayed close to her master. The black sky over Dresden, the dull pavement beneath Kaltenburg’s feet — perhaps one reason the professor knocked at Knut’s door on his way home was that he was afraid of losing himself in his wishful thinking.

The two of them talked, with Anastasia lying by the stove, about the holdings of the Dresden Zoological Collections missing since summer 1945, about the famous Steller’s sea cow and the great auk. Since being transported to the Soviet Union, they seemed to have been erased from memory, very few people ever mentioned them anymore. The name “great auk” could only be whispered, as if one were referring to someone banished and struck from the population register. As if it were not a case of a mounted specimen stored in a secret depository in Moscow, Leningrad, or Kiev, but a living giant bird languishing, despite all rumors to the contrary, in Vorkuta.

So Knut Sieverding knew long before I did where Kaltenburg’s hopes were tending in those days, what preoccupied him, and I can no longer say whether it was from Knut or from the professor that I first heard what was going on in his mind when he broke off from work and stared into space: he wasn’t dwelling on the activities of a woodpecker’s brood in its hollow, or the bloody battle between a ring-necked dove and a turtledove that he had carelessly placed in the same cage; his gaze was plumbing the depths of a secret depository where two custodians were arguing about whether or not to bring the meteorite from the Dresden collection out into the light of day.

“Was it a complete fantasy to hope these things would be returned, then?” asked Katharina Fischer as we walked toward Oberwachwitz, taking a path that Kaltenburg had often used with Anastasia.

Soon we would see, as the professor would have done, a little stand of pines, we would hear that high-pitched, even rush of wind in the trees, the wind that seems to be sweeping through a vast expanse of landscape wherever a few pines cluster together, and then the buildings of the former Soviet field hospital would appear between the treetops. As far as I recall, this is where, soon after his arrival and before the medical facility was transferred to the Garrisoned People’s Police, Kaltenburg had installed a huge aquarium.

There was indeed a glimmer of hope. And it’s possible that Ludwig Kaltenburg had advance knowledge of developments behind the scenes that the rest of us would have thought impossible. Certainly in those days people thought he was often dropping in on the Russian garrison, that he was on familiar terms with high-ranking Soviet officers.

“Dropping in on the garrison? Don’t make me laugh,” was his irritated reply when he heard of these suspicions. “It just shows you the limited mentality of people who’ve got nothing better to do than try and pin something on you.”

I can remember that the professor was standing in felt boots in the meadow behind the house, Knut next to him holding a camera.

“In and out of the garrison — and then I suppose I come sneaking out of the grocery store with pelmeni dumplings for my fish concealed under my overcoat? These people’s imaginations are as limited as their lives.”

It seemed to me that the pair of them exchanged a conspiratorial glance. We walked slowly down the narrow path by the house, Kaltenburg shuffling along beside us — it was obviously the first time he’d worn the boots — then he stopped, let the ducks examine the thick gray felt, and turned to me with an expectant air: “You may not believe it, but I only got back from Leningrad last night.”

Knut showed no surprise. I had no idea what the professor was driving at. Knut touched his sleeve, gently silencing him. “Perhaps we should go for a little spin?”

We ran into Krause in the driveway. Saturday morning, of course; Kaltenburg had forgotten. The chauffeur was cleaning the limousine as he did every Saturday, running the sponge over roof and windscreen, mudguards and hood, finishing by buffing up the chrome and the hubcaps, and not even allowing the jackdaws to disturb him as they inspected with their beaks every single screw redeemed from road grime and oil. As we passed him he didn’t seem to hear us, lost in his own world.

“Sometimes I feel really sorry for Herr Krause, with all the stories I tell him,” observed Kaltenburg as we rolled out into the road in his not quite so immaculately clean Opel. “When I think of him agonizing at night over his reports, not knowing what to write.”

He smiled, slipping his boot off the clutch, I think he was still in shock because he had nearly blurted out a secret in the presence of his chauffeur.

“Does Krause force himself to stick to the truth and report the liqueur chocolates that — as I told him — I kept on secretly feeding to an unknown squirrel, or does he permit himself the slight liberty of substituting the more plausible-sounding nut pralines? Whatever the poor devil opts for, he’s bound to sweat over it, and he loses sleep because he runs the risk of making himself ridiculous to his readers every time he reports. But let’s talk about more important matters — Leningrad.”

Kaltenburg took his hand off the gearstick and leaned back. “In the plane yesterday, I was so agitated, I just couldn’t sit still. When we landed I had to keep telling myself this was nothing special, just a normal official trip. Krause spotted me straightaway in the arrivals hall, and on the long trip back from Schönefeld to Dresden he tried to pump me a bit, just as I’d expected. It took all my strength to maintain a neutral expression as he kept on looking in the rear mirror.”

Now I was the one trying to catch Kaltenburg’s eye in the rear mirror. “What do you say, Herr Sieverding? Was I right?” he asked his front-seat passenger, with a nod to me at the same time. “We’re going to bring the missing treasures back to Dresden.”

“It won’t do to get our hopes up too high.” Knut answered as though caught up in preparations for a film project against the advice of the entire world of wildlife experts. “We’ll have to proceed very cautiously.”

“Of course we’re just carefully feeling our way at the moment, but I think our talks in Leningrad were a good first step,” countered the professor. “We’ve got a foot in the door, perhaps we can bring it off — even if it takes a while.”

This was where his command of Russian came in useful, his love of all things Russian, prone to attract suspicion as much as amusement. Kaltenburg had a plan: he could talk day in and day out, without a single reference to the collection, about the breathtaking landscape, the vast distances, he could go on about the fabulous treatment he had received as a POW. He would also, for example, expatiate on the manuscript he had produced in the POW camp near Moscow, which he had been allowed to take home with him unexamined, because a magnanimous officer had believed Kaltenburg’s assurance that it contained nothing political, only observations of animals. There was no stopping Ludwig Kaltenburg as he depicted the forthcoming negotiations and saw himself coming back from Leningrad with a great auk tucked under his arm: “I’ve been offered the chair of the secret zoological commission. That is to say, I’ll be taking it on when the individual commissions are set up.”

I think we drove as far as Chemnitz and back on the autobahn that afternoon. Knut had now become far more than the experimental filmmaker who helped Kaltenburg gain insights into previously unknown areas of animal life, more than just a close friend of Martin Spengler’s who had brought the artist to Loschwitz and thereby provided the professor with early material for his Archetypes of Fear. During this trip it dawned on me: Knut Sieverding had now become Ludwig Kaltenburg’s closest adviser.

“You may be able to enter fearlessly into these negotiations, Professor, but you mustn’t let that make you think others are equally fearless, otherwise you might be in for a great disappointment.” Knut took a skeptical view of “magnanimous officers,” he had no vision of a cozily crackling open fire and an evening spent exchanging reminiscences of life as a POW. “They may well listen patiently while you rhapsodize about the Russian landscape, but the longer you go on extolling the virtues of bright birchwood forests, the clearer it will be to you that you’re banging your head against a brick wall.”

Perhaps Knut was the only realist among us. His voice carried weight, he could even persuade Ludwig Kaltenburg to modify his entrenched views. And so, under instruction from Knut, the professor adjusted to the prospect of bare, windowless rooms at the end of long corridors, hours of waiting until a door finally opens and a museum assistant emerges, silent, diffident, to unwrap a valuable display on the table before the professor. No trace of enthusiasm, no trace of collegial affability — and it was precisely this that Kaltenburg had to overcome, he must not take it personally. “It’s better to expect fear.”

Fear of showing irresponsible openness to the man from Dresden. The fear that he might find out about stored items of which even the museum director was not officially aware. The fear of inadvertently betraying by a word, a smile, or a nod details whose disclosure could cost you your head.

10

WHEN I CALL TO MIND Kaltenburg’s feverish look as he reported on his trip to Leningrad, I also see an angry, obstreperous child who had just learned that the family was planning to make a journey westward. I can see myself plucking at the tablecloth, “Dresden,” my parents had said, as though it were a magic word: “We can stop over in Dresden.” But what did they mean, “stop over,” so our real destination was further away? I started to cry, why wasn’t my nanny there to comfort me, where was Maria anyway, she had left the house, and we weren’t going to come back to this place again either, the garden, the fields, the long winter. Let them go without me. I would manage alone here in our house on the edge of Posen. My father shook his head, “Let’s drop it,” no one would promise me we would be away from home for just a week or two, “Let’s drop the subject,” and sure enough there was no further mention of the journey over the following few days.

I did not feel relieved. When my parents withdrew into the study, I sensed trouble. I didn’t understand what they were talking about or how serious the situation was, but I sat up next morning when they mentioned an enormous “meteorite from space,” a “Steller’s sea cow,” and the “great auk.” These really were magic words, and coming from my father’s mouth they sounded as if my mother had invented them and immediately passed them on to him so that he could savor their taste for himself. Perhaps my mother had found them the night before, in the study from which my parents had emerged — as I could see from the landing — for the first time in a long time without looking worried. I knew what an auk was, and a sea cow, but what would a great auk look like?

“As big as an Atlantic puffin?”

“Bigger.”

“Like a guillemot?”

“Bigger.”

“And where do great auks live?”

“They don’t live anywhere, not anymore.”

That’s all they would tell me: “You’ll see when we get to Dresden,” and “It’s a promise.”

They couldn’t have enticed me there with a Church of Our Lady, a castle, a Brühl Terrace, but the prospect of seeing a strange creature excited my curiosity. It was more than a ruse to make the journey more acceptable to me, I could see it in my mother’s downcast eyes when we stood in front of the bombed-out museum, feel it in her angry tone as we three were having our last lunch together. What did my mother know about the twelve crates of exhibits hidden in Weesenstein Castle since 1942? “Steller’s sea cow,” she whispered to my father across the table, “great auk,” the magic words had lost their power, could not summon up the creatures. And so it was, in that oppressed atmosphere, that I remained none the wiser about their appearance, didn’t dare ask, would have had to whisper as well, just as we went on whispering over the following decades.

My parents conferred in my father’s study, I listened at the door, there were the usual neatly addressed envelopes containing seed samples lying on the desk, my father was still working on his tests. I heard a rustling sound, my mother had picked up a packet of taiga grass seeds, she held a sample of a Siberian plant in her hand, either the two of them spoke in low voices or I preferred not to hear them, preferred to interpret a plan of escape as holiday planning.

For a good while my imagination had been gradually enlarging an Atlantic puffin or a razor-billed auk, in my mind the bird had taken on hitherto inconceivable dimensions, and I grouped a flock of great auks around the Steller’s sea cow, a massive, heavy animal with a shimmering gray and green hide, resting on its short front flippers. In fact I assumed that the sea cow would be a mounted specimen, although I was sure my parents had not deliberately set out to mislead me. In my mind’s eye flesh and muscle and skin spread themselves over the skeletal frame as though of their own accord. Perhaps I would have been disappointed if I really had got to see the animal in February 1945, and I can remember not being altogether able to believe it at first when a colleague later explained in passing that the Steller’s sea cow in our collection was just a skeleton, not quite complete.

11

IT WAS THE FIRST TIME Klara had heard of sea cows and great auks, she heard the names with slight incredulity, let me describe to her the appearance of these creatures, the cold, deserted areas that were their home. Nor did Klara know anything about the razor-billed auks and Atlantic puffins that had loomed large for whole nights at a time in the mind’s eye of a boy in distant Posen before the journey to Dresden. Until she met me there had been no strange seabirds in her life, not even in fantasy to help overcome fear of an uncertain future when lying in bed alone, unable to sleep. Nor had she ever been with her parents to the zoological museum, not that she could remember. When she was a child, she said, regretfully, she had no eye for bird life, for animal life in general.

There were a few she noticed, birds from the immediate neighborhood: she showed me the place on the roof where the redstart took up its post every evening to sing its dry, squeaky song. She was impressed by the bold blackbirds that build their open nests at eye level and seem to hope that their very vulnerability will dispose every enemy to treat them kindly. And she had always liked the great tits that flitted from one treetop to another in the Great Garden, picking off insects from leaves and bark. Their calls of surprise and delight, as though they were directing the girl down below toward a particular tasty find, letting her share their pleasure. In fact, for a long time she had believed it was the same individual bird that waited for her every Sunday in the Tiergartenstrasse to accompany her on her walk with her parents, until she realized that the tits stayed in touch by voice, they conversed with each other, and it was just that Klara could not distinguish one voice from another in the great conversation that ringed the whole park.

But her clearest memory was of the crows in the Wasaplatz, the flock that came back regularly in winter when the beech tree next to the house was leafless and the sisters could see across the square from their room. Perhaps the old spreading chestnut there had served as a landmark for countless generations of crows as they found their way between roosting and feeding places, perhaps a few birds had always detached themselves from the endless moving swarm of crows and landed on the bare branches to take a closer look at the Wasaplatz and search the ground for anything edible. But the first time Ulli and Klara noticed the crows was on a cold, dark morning in the winter before the war began.

Since the turn of the year Ulli had been suffering from a severe cough, which no doctor in Dresden knew how to treat. It came in waves, the attacks went on for a few nights and days, then she had some respite, but it seemed that it was not Ulli but the cough that was getting its strength together, ready to redouble its grip on her lungs, throat, and trachea. Even in the quiet intervals Ulli did not feel inclined to get up, whatever Klara suggested, and whatever lively dialogues she made up for the dolls to engage in on the bedspread — to Ulli it wasn’t cheerful conversation but squabbling, and she sent Klara out of the room.

The parents saw their five-year-old daughter coming down the stairs with shoulders drooping. No, Ulli didn’t want to play, she wanted to sleep. No, she didn’t even want tea. Listless, Klara sat down at the dining table and scribbled around in a coloring book with her crayon.

“Have you noticed — it’s snowing.”

“I know.”

“Would you like to go tobogganing with Dad in the Great Garden?”

“I’d rather stay here.”

Meanwhile Ulli had already missed six weeks of schoolwork, as her teacher informed them by letter. The girl was in danger of falling badly behind. Her parents didn’t read the letter out to her, they simply said, “Fräulein Weber wants you to know that the whole class can hardly wait for you to get better.”

The Hagemanns pulled out all the stops. Friends in Berlin fixed up an appointment at the Charité hospital there. An acquaintance was prepared to drive Frau Hagemann and Ulli to Berlin.

Klara woke up in her parents’ bedroom, alone. She ran to the window, scratched ice flowers from the glass: there was a car standing outside the house, two men were talking, their breath condensing, her father and the driver. There was no snow on the ground, you could see a few white patches around the Wasaplatz, with a bluish shimmer in the early-morning light. Klara got dressed as quickly as she could, and by the time she reached the foot of the stairs she was wide awake. Icy air seeped into the house through the swing doors, her father came in, his tired, dog-tired look. He hadn’t taken Klara into account, he was about to say something — she jumped in ahead of him: “Where is Ulli?”

Herr Hagemann pushed Klara into the kitchen, “Hush,” her mother was standing by the table in the fine dress kept specially for trips to Berlin: “Ulli is still in bed, she only settled down about two hours ago.”

Klara remembered the agitated footsteps yesterday, the voices from downstairs, until she had fallen asleep. The fire in the kitchen stove had been burning all night. While Klara put on her shoes, cap, scarf, and coat, her parents carried Ulli downstairs, and like Klara she was in her coat and scarf, but her parents had added an eiderdown to her winter gear. Ulli as if sleeping in bed, Ulli as if about to go on a morning trek. It didn’t fit together. Klara was scared.

“Could you hold the door open?”

Ulli began to cough, awake now. Then Klara heard the crows above the Wasaplatz. She saw crows on the ground, not far from the car. Ulli saw them too. For a moment, while the adults were talking, the two sisters were alone. Alone with the crows. Klara pointed at the sky, the silent procession of birds, they flew from the Elbe with steady, sluggish wingbeats, as if they hadn’t awakened yet, now and again they called to each other in muted tones. Klara pointed at the top of the chestnut tree, pointed to the birds by the frozen puddle, the birds had turned away from the leftover snow, were observing the two girls with interest, one sister standing with both feet on the ground, the other held up in the air by her father. Klara didn’t know whether she felt disturbed, whether she would like the crows to come closer, whether she should hold out her hand. But she knew that at this moment Ulli would not have been able to say either. Then Ulli was bedded down on the back seat, Frau Hagemann got in on the other side, Klara waved, the car vanished into Caspar David Friedrich Strasse.

“Come on, let’s go in,” said their father.

He had not noticed the crows. One of them had almost reached the front door with Klara. It would soon be light. Maybe crows will land in the Wasaplatz tomorrow too, thought Klara.

It was already dark when her mother and sister returned from Berlin. Ulli, who had been asleep on the back seat, was carried straight up to bed. The doctor had reassured Frau Hagemann that there was nothing to worry about, which was all Klara wanted to know, and all her mother wanted to tell her at supper. She nearly fell asleep at the table, and “Yes, we did have a bite to eat before we set off for home”; she said, “I’ll sit in the armchair for a moment”; she asked, “And you two? How did you get through the day?”

Herr Hagemann buttered another slice of bread for Klara, he put his finger to his lips, his wife had fallen asleep. Father and daughter cleared the table, and then for the first time in a long time Herr Hagemann slept through the night. No coughing fits, no footsteps on the tiled floor, no concerned voices in the hall. Next morning Klara heard her sister calling from their room: “There they are.”

From that day on, over several winters, the two of them observed the activity in the Wasaplatz. On one occasion very early in the morning an acquaintance of the Hagemanns’ rang the doorbell frantically, she had just left her husband. Whispering, sobbing, silence, the girls didn’t dare to venture out of their room, lay awake, until they heard the first subdued cries of the crows in the distance. Once a long military convoy crossed the Wasaplatz, the penetrating, endless drone of the engines made Ulli and Klara uneasy, they cowered by the windowsill, there wasn’t a soul around except for a few soldiers posted at the crossing to direct the traffic, which was practically nonexistent at that time of day. Truck after truck went past, but none of them announced the load under the tightly stretched canvas covers. A soldier on a motorbike stopped at the curb, dismounted, and lit a cigarette, his bored gaze ranging over the trucks, the square, the house fronts. Paused. Looked at the Hagemanns’ house. Took his binoculars out of their case. The girls held their breath. But it was only the crows, crows on the roof, which now swooped down, gained height again, and disappeared toward the northeast, as if the combination of binoculars and shouldered rifle had made them nervous.

Quite ordinary crows. No great auk for the sisters, no rare, long-extinct museum bird to stimulate their childish imaginations. Just these mundane birds that hardly anybody noticed, appearing on the Wasaplatz every morning from nowhere. It wasn’t easy to tell them apart, in a flock, and always on the move, but after a while the sisters thought they recognized a few birds in the crowd, half a dozen perhaps, representing something like an advance guard, always landing first and always staying longer. At the heart of the group was a hooded crow which soon became Ulli and Klara’s favorite. The way it strode through the grass looking for acorns and beechnuts, rooted among leaves at the curbside. The way it grew alert when someone passed by but had no intention of jumping out of the way to safety. Mistrustful, certainly. But also proud: Look at me strolling around the Wasaplatz.

In the war years Ulli and Klara lost sight of the hooded crow. After a second, then a third hooded crow had turned up one morning, the sisters couldn’t agree whether it was their favorite bird that was perched on the eaves opposite or the one close to the house, on the path to the stream — though they were able to rule the third bird out completely, the one on the street lamp, because of its noticeably spiky black breast feathers. Before they could decide, the birds left the Wasaplatz along with their uniformly coal-black comrades and joined the great, never-ending stream of birds over Strehlen.

Once Klara thought she had been woken up by the hooded crow calling, it was still dark, Ulli was talking in her sleep, it was much too early for the morning influx of crows. All the same, Klara went to the window to take a look. On the opposite side of the square stood a car with its engine running. No animals, no other signs of life. If the bird had been in the square, it would have trotted back and forth, now taking a few steps on the pavement, then disappearing behind a bare shrub. Inquisitive or fearful, spiteful or serene: the sisters could never agree how to interpret the hooded crow’s behavior whenever something untoward happened in the street, when people started brawling and cursing loudly, when a drunk was yelling or a child beginning to cry. It’s cowardly, said Ulli, it wants to stay out of harm’s way but not miss anything either. Intimidated, said Klara, it’s more afraid for the human beings than for itself. And the noise that Klara thought was a crow calling? Some banging. Voices. Now she could see that the black car was partially concealing an open front door, she saw the light in the rectangle, then the silhouettes. A neighbor in his pajamas, and two men in leather coats.

It would be hours yet before the first crows moved in over the Wasaplatz and settled in the big chestnut, the oak, the beech in front of the window, on the rooftop. Hours before they started eyeing the grass verge, the road, the pavement, looking for food and weighing up the passersby, as if nothing had happened between yesterday and this morning.

12

DID YOU KNOW they were not even allowed to keep pet animals?” asked Klara one evening as we sat in Knut’s garage. A late, rainy evening in autumn, I think it was the year I had hand-reared five fledglings for Knut’s film about the woodpecker. The curtains were drawn, I was sitting next to Klara on the bed. In the dim light the heavy Mongolian bedspread with the pattern of light and dark brown stripes looked like a wine-red, hilly landscape crossed by snow trails.

“No Sunday bike rides. No public transport. No telephone, no radio, and no tobacco products. No walks in the Great Garden. I knew about that kind of prohibition.”

Opposite us sat Knut, at his feet and on the desk were piles of firewood. Martin was right by the door on an angler’s chair. We sat there with our coats on. There was tea on the iron stove.

“But what a criminal idea, to forbid someone to keep a pet bird — did you know that? No waxbill, no tame robin, and no sparrow taken from the nest. Nothing.”

Martin leaned back cautiously against the door. “I did once hear about it, but I thought it was a malicious rumor.”

“I’d like to know how one can dream up a ban on songbirds. Who puts such an idea into words. And what happened to the birds.”

I offered: “They were taken away? Returned to the dealer?”

“Or abandoned in the wild.”

Knut poked around in the fire. “Given away.”

“To the neighbors, you mean?” Klara shook her head. “To people involved in the same madness?”

“Anyway, who would want to take on a pet bird like that?” Martin had peeled the bark from a birch log, he examined his dirty fingers, looked at me. When he couldn’t stand the silence he would coax us out of our thoughts and back to reality with his birdsong imitations, but this time he was silent. No little ringed plover, no whitethroat, no distant dialogue between two agitated male blackbirds putting their powers to the test in a frenzied struggle over territory — a single wrong note, and he would have reproduced the call of one of those very pet songbirds whose shapes we were imagining in the semidarkness.

There was a knock. Martin got up to open the garage door a crack, and Anastasia bounded in, greeting each of us in turn, shaking her thick, wet coat.

“Are we disturbing you?” Ludwig Kaltenburg ran his fingers through his wet hair, his coat sticking to him, the felt boots gone shades darker. “I walked straight into a puddle.”

Knut took the professor’s coat and offered him his seat by the fire so that he could warm his feet. “I don’t know why you have to walk the dog in the rain,” he said, half reproachful and half concerned.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Leningrad?”

Kaltenburg nodded, yes, he’d been waiting for weeks for information about the zoological commission.

“No news?”

“Silence from Leningrad.”

I can’t remember whether it was Martin or Klara who brought up Shostakovitch to distract the professor, distract ourselves from secret zoological commissions and the ban on songbirds, and soon our conversation turned to string orchestras, funeral music, film music. The rain was beating down on the garage roof. Knut skillfully steered Kaltenburg to a subject that had already been touched on in the summer, when the two of them had been chatting about integrity in wildlife films.

“Hear that? I could listen to it for hours.” Rain on a felted roof. The rustling in the trees.

“One of these days we should take the risk of using the soundtrack of a natural habitat as is, just chance it, and ignore this stupid fear that the viewer will think there’s something missing.”

“How right you are. Here we are showing life on the forest floor, and it sounds as though we’ve parked an entire symphony orchestra in the treetops.”

“You’ve got to have masses of violins playing all the time — which idiot introduced that law?”

“You’d think it was Stalin’s funeral, the way they play, all that sentimental fiddling has nothing to do with the poor forest dwellers.”

When the rain had eased and the professor was about to leave, all five of us were so taken with the idea that in our heads we could hear whole sequences of atmospheric noise, scratching sounds. Animal noises. Snuffling. Trampling. Birds calling in the distance.

“That would make a difference. We must try it,” Knut said.

“You’re wrong, Herr Sieverding — it would be a revolution,” Kaltenburg exclaimed on his way out.

But the silence from Leningrad was to last for many years.

The little stand of pines was now out of sight, no garage, no derelict land, no Institute villa, we had reached the slope again and were walking down toward the Loschwitz cemetery, the sun appeared briefly in the west under the clouds. I had already told Katharina Fischer that Kaltenburg’s hopes were not to be fulfilled while he lived in this town. The fact is this was Ludwig Kaltenburg’s first defeat in Dresden, even though he would never have used that term himself — he probably didn’t even know the word “defeat.”

What a scene that would have been — you can just hear the breathless tone of the eager radio announcer: Accompanied by a group of Soviet colleagues, Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg presents to the world the treasures of the Dresden Zoological Collections, carefully preserved from destruction in 1945, kept safe in the Soviet Union, and now, thanks to the infinite generosity of our friends, returned to the resurrected city of Dresden.

No. Nothing like that ever happened. Not even Professor Eberhard Matzke, who was undoubtedly involved in bringing the prize exhibits back from the Soviet Union in the 1970s, was able to boast of his great achievement, because the whole transaction took place in secret. In equal secrecy he would have relished his triumph, as a former subordinate of Kaltenburg’s at the Zoological Institute in Leipzig, Dr. Matzke the long-serving assistant, the permanent fixture in whom nobody had confidence — until, out of the blue, he began his meteoric rise, to Berlin, right to the top, overtaking Professor Kaltenburg.

“But you never discussed the ban on songbirds with him that evening?”

No.

“Later?” Katharina Fischer looked at me.

No, never.

“I could have sworn you and Kaltenburg had a long discussion about it at one point. There’s an obvious connection, anyway.”

Suddenly I understood what she meant. I had never thought of it. My father’s adopted birds.

Basically, declared Frau Fischer, the matter was clear. My father had taken in prohibited companion birds. She gave no weight to my objections: the advanced date, far too late for people to be looking for a new home for their pet birds, when those people themselves had disappeared from the city of Posen, transported to the camps. Perhaps, suggested the interpreter, the afternoon of the business with the swift wasn’t originally connected to birds being cared for in our house. It might be a matter of memory causing a telescoping of events. And like a child who sees himself as the center of the universe, in retrospect I was now arranging widely separated bird images in my mind on one plane. “You’re not concerned about the actual sequence of events,” maintained Katharina Fischer, “you’re only looking for similarities.”

Our injured blue-throat, I’m quite certain we picked it up while out for a walk.

“Think about the tame starling. Where am I ever going to find a tame starling in the wild that I can lure onto my shoulder and take it home with me?”

I don’t know.

“But of course that’s obvious to you, Herr Funk, as an ornithologist.”

And finally she asked me a question I had been expecting since we began our walk down to the valley. All afternoon. In fact, since our first meeting in the Ornithological Collection.

“Did you ever see anything in your childhood resembling what Klara saw? Did you ever see a neighbor being taken away before dawn?”

Klara had asked me the same question. No, I had never seen anything like that. And at the risk of sounding odd, almost cruel: today there is something I would be glad to have seen. Certainty, about one moment at least, when Maria left our house — did she leave my father, my mother, because she had been ordered to report at an assembly point? Did my parents go with her, despondent and silent, a little way into town? Or did my nanny disappear overnight because she wanted to forestall difficulties for our family? And yet it was also possible, even if not very probable, that with nothing at all to fear she had gone back to her parents, taken a new job, or indeed, as Martin once speculated, got married, and that she wanted to spare me a long and tearful parting scene. Whether Maria had disappeared at night or early in the morning, I must have been asleep.

“Didn’t you ever see them in their leather coats?” asked Klara. “Wasn’t there any house on your street in front of which the dark car stopped with its engine running?”

I can clearly remember the fine Sunday when she asked me that question, we had been to the races, had persisted in backing outsiders with poetic names and never picked a single winner, now we were making our way back to the station, through scrubland, allotment gardens. We were walking hand in hand, and I was telling her about the goldfinches I had begun observing in the early months after the war, in this area among others. Thistle territory, rubbish dumps, the embankment on the other side of the Wiener Strasse, I had followed the birds, often near Klara’s family’s house, thus escaping on hot afternoons from my siblings, who always wanted to go for a swim in a pond — I only went with them a few times. I am eternally grateful to my surrogate parents for letting me go bird-watching instead, even if their voices betrayed a concern that their foster child was in danger of turning into a loner.

“And then in the summer after the war, didn’t you see trains taking liberated prisoners home?”

When Klara looked back, for her the area was not populated by finches, she saw no parents feeding their young, didn’t hear the cracking of seedpods nor the clamor of chicks, saw no plumage markings, brown backs, red faces, or black wings with yellow bars. The children from her neighborhood used to play on the rail track that led to Prague; the two sisters would take a walk along the line as far as Reick, picking up any strange objects they found on the ballast bed. And Klara could still hear the hum of a train approaching from the main station, the vibrating of the tracks, the faint, reassuring alarm signal that in no way befitted the danger it announced.

One day Klara was dawdling on the sleepers when all the other children had already moved a safe distance away, she saw the engine, pulled up her socks, she was anticipating one of those never-varying freight trains, then the strap on her sandal broke. The next instant she was crouching in the grass barely a meter away from the line, looking up at the crowded cars, looking into foreign faces, hearing foreign languages, hearing nothing at all. The alternation of motion and stillness, noise and silence, was far too rapid for Klara to be able to say later whether the passengers’ mood had been cheerful or downcast, and the other children, who now came creeping up, didn’t know either. The cars trundled slowly past, in the direction of Prague, to Budapest, perhaps on to Bucharest and as far as the Black Sea. Nobody took any notice of the group of children in the grass, not even the watchful young Russian soldiers standing in the cars.

“Cattle cars?”

No, as far as I can remember, Klara made no mention of cattle cars. Open goods cars, their rusty walls eaten into by coal dust, with a long row of flat plank benches, that was how the trains looked then. But my mind went back to the cattle cars I had noticed on the embankment in Posen when I was crushing leaves between my fingers, when I was identifying, looking for, digging up plants with my father: “To the east, or have you forgotten your compass points?”