Kaltenburg

1

SIX WHITE SNOW GEESE were resting in the high grass on the bank near the landing stage; one of the birds, neck outstretched, was keeping watch over its surroundings, peering in all directions, while the others gazed steadily westward, downriver, into the sunset, the yellow and pink and light-blue sky above the city. The castle ferry had just left the jetty on the Pillnitz side, the diesel engine roaring, the little boat struggling against the Elbe current. The blackbird behind me was complaining. The sand martins still darting about.

In the past few weeks, whenever my evening walks have taken me as far as Kleinschachwitz, I have found myself recalling Katharina Fischer’s words and trying to clarify my thoughts about the birds we took in. All his life Ludwig Kaltenburg laid great emphasis on zoologists’ need to take a critical look at their earlier selves in order to correct past errors of judgment. But in the end, all I see each time is the injured blue-throat in its box in front of me while next door my father is arguing with the professor about sick birds, I can see our starling landing on Professor Kaltenburg’s shoulder during his first visit. The story was that my father had bought the starling from a bird seller in town, but he had never actually taken me with him to the breeder’s, either because I declined to go or because he had never been there himself but wanted to name someone he knew the great bird expert trusted.

The snow geese were not to be put off by the noise on the water, they turned their heads, gabbling softly, the ferry had reached our side. Cyclists came toward us, then a group of walkers, no one had noticed the white birds in the grass. The ferryman stood on the empty landing stage lighting a cigarette. I turned back upstream to wait by Bird Island for the crows, for the gaggles that would appear from all points of the compass in the fading light, returning from their feeding grounds, cawing excitedly, squabbling inconclusively before they foregathered to roost in their accustomed trees and for a few hours darkness rendered them invisible.

My mind kept going back to Ludwig Kaltenburg, but each time the scenes in Posen were overlaid by a later image. The professor sitting on the edge of the bed, bending down to untie his shoelaces, and tugging the bedspread over with him. His silhouette, the cold morning light on his white hair, he hasn’t noticed me yet. Kaltenburg without his jackdaws. The slight creak of the bed, the swish of the bedspread, which leaves a narrow strip of bed linen uncovered, very bright, very fine, not made around here. A little clumsily, he undoes his right shoelace, looks up at me: “Oh, it’s you.”

No, I never entered the professor’s bedroom while he was living in Dresden. I never saw it until after he had left, and even then only because I had to look after the household animals, with which I was nearly as familiar as their vanished master. I kept them company, together we wandered through the deserted rooms. In the bedroom, I remember, there were touches of extravagance out of character with the rest of the Kaltenburg household. An almost full bottle of French aftershave left in the bathroom, an embroidered bedspread, behind the dressing table mirror a pressed cyclamen that had escaped the beaks of generations of birds.

Where the thicket was beginning to get darker, by the riverside path, one icterine warbler responded to another of its kind down among the willow bushes. I could hear whitethroats, magpies, a wood pigeon. Soon the blackbirds would take their places in the treetops to begin their evensong. I was surrounded by voices, and it almost sounded as if my name were being called.

“Herr Funk?”

Katharina Fischer stopped next to me and got off her bike. “So it’s you. I thought I recognized you from the ferry.”

She went on to say that she would like to go with me to the crows’ roosting place, then declared how glad she was to have run into me, because my father’s adopted birds had been on her mind ever since our conversation in Loschwitz. Apparently we had each wrestled independently with the question, reckoned we were beginning to get somewhere with it, started to have doubts, then discarded all our previous reflections. By the time my parents got to know the professor, there was no longer any occasion to ban songbirds, at least in Posen: the ghetto they named Litzmannstadt had long since been in existence.

All the same, just like me, Katharina Fischer had found herself caught up in the wish-fulfillment scenario of a secret collusion between my father and Professor Kaltenburg which saw them in a pet shop inspecting, at their special request, birds that came from private households. The previous owners, the dealer would explain, had moved away with no forwarding address. Finding the birds anxiously fluttering about in their cages as his neighbors’ households were being broken up, he couldn’t bring himself to wring the necks of the aging starling, or the goldfinch, or the yellowhammer that was on display in the window.

Two bird enthusiasts taking up the cause of pet birds made ownerless in the midst of the world pogrom: a wish-fulfillment fantasy, as Katharina Fischer herself must have known. The secret collusion never existed.

“Have you always stood by Kaltenburg?” the interpreter asked suddenly, after we had gone only a few steps.

I can never forget what I owe him. But for him I would never have made anything of my life, it’s as simple as that.

“Then I suppose, all things considered, you could be called his most loyal student?”

I thought for a while. I realized that I too had reason to be glad I had met her that evening, otherwise I might never have said this out loud: I had never been so deeply disappointed by anybody as by Ludwig Kaltenburg.

Katharina Fischer shot me a shy sidelong glance, wanted to question me, held her peace.

You might think on the face of it that what really hurt me, what shook me to the core, looks like a simple oversight due to haste or a hazy memory. A mere trifle, a trivial detail that you eventually learn to ignore, especially as it’s only a matter of a slight gap. An outsider wouldn’t even notice this omission of barely eighteen months, because the professor retrospectively filled the gap with other events, other place, names, and characters. But however much I wanted to, I could never forgive him for this omission: Ludwig Kaltenburg deleted from his CV the period when we were both in Posen.

“As though you had never got to know him as a child?” she asked diffidently. “But why? Did you ever ask him?”

At the time when the famous zoologist appeared to have put our first encounters out of his mind as far as the public, his colleagues, the whole world were concerned, I no longer needed to ask. And Kaltenburg would no doubt once again have pointed at someone else, would have talked his way out of it — as he was wont to do by then — by assigning all responsibility to Professor Dr. Eberhard Matzke.

2

WE’VE GOT TO ACT as if we’re strangers”—this was the strict rule for our dealings with each other at the Zoological Institute in Leipzig. We adhered to it all the more firmly because everybody knew how close we were, even if not everyone was aware of the particular liberties I enjoyed at Kaltenburg’s Loschwitz Institute. Dresden was a long way off, and every time I made my weekly journey between the two cities I crossed an invisible line. I never worked out where that line ran, and as I looked up on the train from my lecture notes, my mind was on Klara and the past weekend, on Kaltenburg’s animals, to which I had devoted the previous two days, I gazed at the last hills behind Dresden, the gray, then pale green, then brown, and finally snow-covered fields, the curve of the Elbe at Riesa, the unvarying plain in which the settlements gradually merged into a town — somewhere along the route, I noticed, I had turned abruptly into the Leipzig zoology student whose life I can now barely recall.

The number of occasions when Ludwig Kaltenburg drove me in his car could be counted on the fingers of one hand. That was nothing to complain about; on the contrary, our agreement may actually have worked to my advantage, since any remarks I did overhear referred not to any secret favoritism but to the professor’s severity, from which I particularly suffered, according to my fellow students. They helped me out, lending me their notes and dropping me little messages. Nobody had any idea what a strain it was for Kaltenburg himself to play the stranger throughout the week, and how relieved we both were to meet again at the Saturday discussions in Loschwitz.

Once we were standing in a fairly large group in the corridor outside Kaltenburg’s office, all wearing sturdy jackets and boots, ready to go on a field trip with the professor to observe passage migrants in the country around Leipzig. It was still early, but we knew the day would soon be drawing to a close. Casually Ludwig Kaltenburg inquired which goose it was that came in both a white and a dark variety, and as if by chance he glanced in my direction. Anser fabalis or Anser albifrons, or perhaps just Anser anser—I looked at the floor, looked at the roughly plastered, white-painted wall, couldn’t gather my thoughts. Behind the professor somebody shook his head; it was Dr. Matzke, Kaltenburg’s assistant, who came to my assistance by silently mouthing the words until I recognized them: “snow goose.”

“All right, then,” drawled the professor. “Let’s go.”

We trotted down the corridor in the cold light, Matzke leading. I always suspected that he saw through the act Kaltenburg put on for his Leipzig colleagues, and that the professor’s strict manner toward me simply got on Matzke’s nerves.

Dr. Eberhard Matzke was part of the Zoological Institute; nobody could have imagined him anywhere else, he himself least of all, no doubt. This was where he had studied in the thirties, this is where he returned after the war. When they placed a Professor Kaltenburg over him, while he remained plain Dr. Matzke, he took it calmly: for Eberhard Matzke, a Leipziger born and bred, Ludwig Kaltenburg was nothing but a passing phenomenon.

He walked up and down between the microscope tables, slightly bent, helping with a dissection here, moving a slide into the light there. Under his lab coat he wore a cardigan, and in the evenings when he hung up his white coat I always expected to see a few straws sticking to the matted wool. As though Matzke kept animals in a hutch tucked away in a remote corner of the sprawling institute building, animals he had left that morning only because he felt that unless he was peering over our shoulders, we might not go on examining feather structures and sensory cells under the microscope. He went steadily about his duties, that is to say, he spent most of his time at my bench — the Herr Professor must have no reason to complain.

He couldn’t understand why many students made such heavy going of these tasks, instead of dispatching them as fast as possible so they could get back into the much more attractive world of living animals. To spur us on as we worked, Matzke told us anecdotes about his encounters with animals, which he was convinced would open up vistas in our mind’s eye while in reality we were still struggling with a paper-thin slice of dead tissue. How he had once rescued a golden eagle injured in a fight, how a favorite crow went missing and how he fished it out weeks later from a sedimentation tank — he repeated many of these stories every six months or so, but we enjoyed them all the same because Matzke’s slight Saxon singsong and his warm, deep voice soothed us.

“My colleague Matzke should have a medal just for his ability to keep a crowd of students quiet,” opined Kaltenburg. We never found out what he thought of him as a zoologist. Possibly the professor would not have believed his “colleague Matzke”—merely an assistant to Kaltenburg — capable of filling a university chair of his own. But he did at least deserve a decoration: “Even if I have to pin it on him myself.”

Now and again Martin was allowed to go to Leipzig too: “Just don’t go holding the lad back from serious study,” warned Kaltenburg, and, half in jest, “Just to make sure, I’ll get my colleague Matzke to keep an eye on you.” But I was aware that the warning was aimed not at Martin but at me; I was supposed to follow Martin’s example in paying keen attention to Matzke’s words.

When Martin accompanied me to a laboratory session and Matzke interrupted his story with a long-drawn-out “Aha,” I knew that he had got as far as the glass case at the back. That was where Martin liked to sit, concentrating on the display-specimen martens and rabbits that languished there practically ignored. It was a sight I wouldn’t have wanted to miss: the huge, heavy man looming over Martin, and the wiry figure on its folding stool almost disappearing behind a massive back. There was just a glimpse of the corner of the sketch pad, Matzke with arms outspread as though about to devour the stranger, you could visualize his wide-open mouth — but Martin showed no fear, and what came out was only another “Aha.”

He was sketching animals, afraid perhaps that if he departed too far from his models in place of Matzke’s friendly “Aha,” he would get an unhappy shake of the head. At home he had been working for a long time with animal blood, with fat, with tea stains on packing paper, creating beings that few would have recognized at first sight as animals. But Martin himself shook his head when he surveyed his work, he trusted neither what he saw on paper before him nor the figures that had gradually begun to populate the world of his imagination.

I admit we didn’t take Dr. Matzke entirely seriously, just as he probably didn’t take us entirely seriously either. The heavy, loping gait, the cardigan that had long since lost its shape — and then suddenly, from one day to the next, there was no longer any Dr. Matzke at the Zoological Institute to supervise our small-bird dissections, giving himself a shock when he boomed, “It’s a matter of principle here,” whereupon he always fell into a half-whispered tone that was meant to be enticing: “And anyway, working like this you’ll get to know the bird from the inside out, it’s showing itself to you as you’d never see it otherwise.”

Matzke turned his back on Leipzig. He had received an offer from Berlin that he couldn’t refuse, especially since it held the prospect of a professorial title. At last he would become “colleague Matzke,” and a colleague of the famous Reinhold to boot. It was in fact Reinhold who had conveyed the news to us on a visit to Loschwitz. Kaltenburg didn’t comment on Matzke’s move, he played it down when people said he must surely have pulled strings to advance Dr. Matzke’s career when it seemed to be over. And when I asked him once whether the man hadn’t always been a bit in the way, he just smiled.

3

EBERHARD MATZKE REMOVED his cardigan. Gave his hair a side parting. Took over Kaltenburg’s former doctoral student, Fräulein Holsterbach. Soon relinquished his Saxon singsong, adopted a clear, almost hard High German, and every time he dictated an article, he asked his assistant to make sure no regional expressions slipped in. By degrees, in his new surroundings Eberhard Matzke even shed the awkwardness that had easily identified him in Leipzig when you were hurrying toward the institute entrance in the morning and saw a distant figure dismounting from his bicycle in the early light. The wider his sphere of influence spread, the slimmer and nimbler he appeared, as though he had learned at every step to avoid an obstacle, even if the obstacle was invisible.

“He’s doing well. The Natural History Museum is good for him, the university is good for him.” Kaltenburg lauded him when asked about the new man in Berlin. “I’m very pleased that colleague Matzke has found his feet.”

The professor had not the faintest idea what was happening under his nose. Perhaps he seriously thought that Matzke would be eternally grateful to him. But in the light of subsequent events, the impression given by Matzke’s publications in the second half of the fifties is that he was truly out to demolish Kaltenburg by holding up one theory after another to cast doubt on it, to nullify it. Not that he mounted a frontal assault on the professor, that he never did, but it seems to me that he wasn’t fully satisfied with any scientific paper he wrote, any ornithological field observation, even a newspaper article, unless it contained, if only tucked away in a subordinate clause somewhere, a covert little dig at Ludwig Kaltenburg’s convictions.

One remark of his instantly made me so angry that I didn’t dare show it to the professor. He could not possibly have seen it as anything other than deliberately offensive, an egregiously arrogant departure from the tone of what was otherwise a factual account, attesting to years of zoological research, concerning conflict arising under conditions of imprisonment. I had seen an offprint of the article lying on Kaltenburg’s desk and noticed the inscription, “With collegial greetings,” in Eberhard Matzke’s handwriting, which grew larger from year to year. It’s surely no accident that I have such a clear memory of this little excursus — which I couldn’t help hoping Kaltenburg had overlooked — for one thing because the author was dealing with the inhibition against biting among wolves, and for another because the offensive remarks touched upon one of Kaltenburg’s most sacrosanct principles, frequently expressed to me: “To live is to observe.”

Matzke declared it was pure nonsense to maintain, as people had done right up to the present, that in a fight between wolves the weaker will openly expose its throat to the stronger in a gesture that inhibits the latter from biting it. He wrote that he did not know what original observation underpinned this assertion, but by now it had almost attained the status of an article of faith among experts, and in a strange turn of phrase he went on to say that from his own wide experience, at least, the inhibition against biting among canines was just wishful thinking on the part of gullible, peace-loving zoologists. At any rate, word had not yet got around among the parties concerned, he concluded smugly, exposing one of Kaltenburg’s most cherished maxims to ridicule. I remember how my temples throbbed as I thought, I hope the professor did no more than skim through the essay this morning, I hope the ducks distracted him from reading it, that while feeding the drakes he overlooked the tone of his “colleague Matzke” and the effrontery of his pronouncements.

A committee was restructured — Matzke took over the chair, although Kaltenburg had done much preliminary spadework behind the scenes. There was a post to be filled — by Matzke’s candidate. A congress in the Soviet Union — the deputation consisted entirely of Matzke’s people. Kaltenburg shook his head; the man was rather overreaching himself, after having failed for so many years in Leipzig to make any real impact — but we, hearing the disappointing news during the morning meeting, looked at the professor and could see he was thinking of Leningrad.

Somebody once claimed to have heard that Ludwig Kaltenburg stomped up and down behind his closed study door shouting repeatedly, “The Party, the Party.” To this day I regard this as an invention, some assistant wanting to impress his colleagues, and in any case everybody knew that Eberhard Matzke was not a member of the Party. No, on the contrary, Kaltenburg took every opportunity to warn against jumping to conclusions, took on the role of self-assured intermediary. When the first German students of zoology graduated in the Soviet Union, everyone was afraid that their return would mean our subject would soon be dominated by Party loyalists — but Kaltenburg praised these intrepid young people, stressing the quality of Russian zoology, and “After all, gentlemen, we’re all ornithologists together.”

He was convinced that even Professor Matzke would calm down eventually. Reinhold in Berlin, getting to know his new colleague at close quarters, thought otherwise, but Reinhold, the grand old man, had often been fearful of his successors, especially when they were keen to strike out in new directions. Reinhold’s visits to Dresden became more frequent, he still had relations in his home city, but it looked as though he was visiting his family mainly so that he could also call in at Loschwitz. The phone rang. “Ah, my dear Professor”—Kaltenburg looked across at me—“it goes without saying that you’re welcome at any time”; Kaltenburg was making sure he showed the proper respect that, according to Reinhold, was lacking in Matzke; “I’ll send my driver,” Kaltenburg was nodding in the semidarkness next to the hall stand, yes, Krause still knew the address.

He tried to cheer Reinhold up, to take his mind off things. One day, as the limousine drew up outside the villa, he told Krause to keep the engine running, greeted Reinhold through the open passenger window, pushed me onto the rear seat, and followed me in: “We’re going to Strehlen.”

The professor made Krause stop at Tiergartenstrasse, he invited us to take a little stroll through the Great Garden, for one thing ideas came most easily when you were walking, he said, and for another I knew that he didn’t want anyone overhearing his discussion with Reinhold. They must find an additional sphere of activity for “the young man”—Matzke was all of seven years younger than Kaltenburg. No, not a posting abroad, far away where you couldn’t keep an eye on him, but a newly created framework that would satisfy his desire to be the first to break new ground for once in his life. Naturally, it must be a framework within which Eberhard Matzke was kept under careful control. A great undertaking, with a great new title to match for the Herr Professor Doktor — and all, be it noted, under the constant supervision of a worldly-wise international expert, a legendary figure among ornithologists: Reinhold himself.

We walked around Lake Carola, in less than twenty minutes a plan had been hatched, and we went back to the road. The chauffeur got out of the car, held the door open, but Kaltenburg signaled to him that we were going to walk on a bit further, pointing in the direction of the embankment.

“No need to worry. I’ll explore the mood among the colleagues, take soundings in the Academy of Sciences and find out what can be done there. You’ll see, everybody will support you.”

And now it comes back to me clearly, it was the year of Hungary, we had reached the Wasaplatz, I can see the black limousine, Krause driving along beside us at a walking pace as we turned into August Bebel Strasse. Reinhold waving his stick, Kaltenburg gesticulating wildly, as soon as we had set off downhill from the Institute the two had started a debate on the history of ornithology. By now they were on to Georg Marcgraf and Carl Illiger, dropping names like Bernstein, Kuhl, and Boie, not one of them survived into old age, consumption, tropical fever, my eyes were fixed on the barrack gates at the other end of the street. Every step we took was being watched from there, we were moving around the edge of the military security zone, I wouldn’t like to know what went on behind those walls at that time, nor what measures might have been taken if Ludwig Kaltenburg had not stopped suddenly and pointed to one of the fairly unremarkable villas: “This is where he grew up.”

We were standing in front of the house where Reinhold spent his childhood and youth. I think he was genuinely quite moved, Reinhold in his loose linen suit under a light coat, up there in that attic room was where he had spent his afternoons with grass snakes and lizards he had caught, here in a large enclosure alongside the stable was where the cross-bred offspring of goldfinches and redpolls had first seen the light of day. And as a boy he too used to observe the crows on the Wasaplatz. Ludwig Kaltenburg’s surprise for him had succeeded completely. But for my part I was taken right back to the days of our excursions, how long ago was that, all that “induction by personal inspection,” only a few years, I was still a boy, collecting signatures for world peace, didn’t even know that one day I would be working with Kaltenburg at the Institute, wasn’t even sure I wanted to stay in Dresden, didn’t even know Klara Hagemann yet, while she was living only a few hundred meters from this spot.

4

IN JUNE 1956 a truck drove through Dresden carrying prisoners liberated from the camps. People crowded the pavements, law enforcement officers kept the road clear. In order to give as many townspeople as possible the chance to study these figures, the open truck transported its cargo at walking pace through the city along the following route: from Dr. Kurt Fischer Platz down the Königsbrücker Strasse to the Platz der Einheit. From Bautzner Strasse into Hoyerswerdaer Strasse. Across the Einheitsbrücke to Güntzplatz. From Güntzstrasse, a right turn into Grunaer Strasse. The truck followed Thälmannstrasse as far as the Postplatz, the procession ending at the Theaterplatz.

“I’m sure you noticed it too?” Klara inquired.

“Yes, dreadful.” Professor Kaltenburg looked away into the distance.

It had rained a lot throughout the summer, overcast days, muddy holes all over the city. In the gray light the skin of the prisoners looked duller than ever, though they were very young, just a few of them seemed older. Beneath this dirty sky, however, that may have been a false impression, the hollow eyes, the pinched cheeks, their poor teeth. No, they must simply have been exhausted.

Kaltenburg listened again to Klara’s description of the prisoners’ truck. The inmates’ shirts and trousers, the way they hung loosely from their meager frames. Gray and white stripes. No, no trouser creases. Yes, rough linen. The moment when the driver braked because he got too close to the group in front: the way the prisoners lurched, holding on to each other, for a second you thought they were all going to lose their balance.

“What an awful sight,” said Kaltenburg.

Because you weren’t sure whether what you were seeing in their eyes was the shock of performers or the fear of camp inmates.

A father pointed with his furled umbrella to a spot far ahead at the crossroads, explaining something to the daughter who was sitting on his shoulders. A family festival. The onlookers waved and called out. A column of trekking refugees came along, with handcarts and baby carriages. At the beginning you could wave to the Saxon nobility, Augustus the Strong under a canopy. The shy young ladies-in-waiting grouped around a model of the Church of Our Lady waving back with their handkerchiefs, the magnificent clothes, the wigs, the powder and lipstick. Hour after hour the postwar rubble-clearing women, flag wavers, apprentice gardeners, fanfares, airplane builders, filed past. By this time you had nearly forgotten the steam locomotive, the horse-drawn tram, and the historic milk cart, along with the float bearing the inscription ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS, its crew sitting on their bench looking out searchingly from under their steel helmets. Still to come were a combine harvester, the Wartburg vehicle fleet, a car from the animated film studios surmounted by Pittiplatsch, the cartoon figure. One of the last displays of this parade to celebrate the 750th anniversary of Dresden was a huge model of the new brand of cigarette, Jubilar, carried right across the city on the bare legs of six girls.

“Of course it was easy to miss them in such a motley crew,” suggested the professor.

Yes, red flags. No, no sewn-on Stars of David. All the same, it was clear that the Jubilee Committee had not been able to make up their minds how to deal with the ex-prisoners. Perhaps the idea had been to have them celebrate their happy release by cheering and raising a fist. But the thin young men didn’t smile, their expression was subdued, as though exposure to all these stares was robbing them of their last ounce of strength. And hardly any of the onlookers dared to wave to these figures in their strikingly drab outfits, moving past in silence. You might almost have thought you were looking at real prisoners.

“Hermann was looking for you,” Klara remarked. “Maybe you were sitting in the VIP stand in Grunaer Strasse?”

Kaltenburg looked at me, then back at Klara. He hung his head. “I admit it, I wasn’t there. I dodged the jubilee parade.”

A free day — the prospect was just too tempting, especially as it looked as though the weather might be half decent. In the dawn light the professor quietly hauled his motorbike out of the garage, pushed the machine out onto the road and as far as the next corner. Jumped on, started the engine, and took off before the first of his neighbors could peer out between their curtains. He rode on to Bautzen, he said, the fresh morning air, insects on his goggles, then he turned off south of Weissenberg and, more slowly now, cruised through the villages, the hamlets. Maltitz, Mostitz, all those names, Lautitz, Mauschwitz, Meuselwitz, Krobnitz, and Dittmannsdorf, he’d hardly encountered a single soul.

Goldfinches among the linseed. For a while he had ridden along a path that led straight across the fields, following at a walking pace behind a flock of sparrows in the morning light that was examining a stretch of wheat, acre by acre. So by stages he topped one hill after another, always keeping the birds in view beside him, and at some point, although — being on a motorbike — the professor had no need to pedal, on reaching a loamy valley bottom he found himself out of breath. The tree sparrows took a bath. They disappeared. The lark was singing. Ludwig Kaltenburg was thirsty.

In the midday quiet, he arrived at Reichenbach. Deutsch Paulsdorf, Kemnitz, Russenhäuser. In Bernstadt auf dem Eigen he finally came across a pub, with the strange name The Earth’s Axis. He sat there for a long time over his beer, talking to the locals, giving advice, picking up information. An old farmer’s wife showed him her geese. He wasn’t known here. Kaltenburg in strange parts. He toyed with the idea of spending the night in Bernstadt. It wasn’t until late in the evening that he set off for home, without a headlight, the bulb was kaput. He suspected Krause, but he didn’t want the day spoiled right at the end by a minor character. He arrived in Loschwitz exactly in time for the morning feed.

5

THE WHOLE TIME, a scraggly rook with a bright greenish-shimmering breast had been patiently worrying away at an uprooted tree trunk. I recognized some fibrous tissue in its beak as it flew off to save its booty from a roving terrier. The rook was skimming away above the water even before the dog had noticed it, its breast feathers shone ever more brightly in the last of the sunlight over the Elbe, shone almost with a petrol-slick sheen.

Like me, the interpreter was watching the departing rook, and now the bird had disappeared on the Pillnitz side.

“Are there any photos of the truck?”

I’ve never seen any. And if it hadn’t stopped right in front of us, we might not have taken much notice of it. Klara and I, Ulli, Martin, Herr and Frau Hagemann, we were all awkwardly placed among the crowd, the parade came to a halt, perhaps somewhere further on a group had got out of sync, the driver hadn’t been paying attention, had to brake abruptly, the prisoner figures got a shock, they lurched, tried to steady themselves — and it was this sudden movement that gave us a shock in turn. We didn’t say anything, but as Herr Hagemann looked into his younger daughter’s eyes and nodded slowly, very slowly, as though only his damp raincoat collar was bothering him, he let it be understood that Klara’s parents too were queasy at the sight of such an image.

I don’t remember how the rest of that Sunday went. I mean, we probably sat together that evening at the Hagemanns’ discussing the Moscow revelations, reading out bits from the West German papers, just as we talked incessantly at that time about Stalin’s sudden fall from grace. It was some months later, maybe at about the time of the Soviet march on Budapest, when the Dresden festivities had long since passed into history, that Klara’s thoughts returned to the procession. It was only once Stalin’s burning gaze was finally extinguished that she got around to asking Professor Kaltenburg about the truck with the prisoners that summer.

On closer consideration, she said, these young people dressed up as camp inmates represented a slap in the face, a slap in the face for all those driven out of the country barely three and a half years earlier.

“And we still don’t know the whereabouts of many people who disappeared at that time. Are they still stuck in their prison cells? Being interrogated? Are they still being made to pay the price for the great show trial?”

“Fear,” murmured Kaltenburg.

“Fear?”

“I suspect fear behind it, in an unpredictable, highly dangerous form.”

“But here they are, parading liberated prisoners before us, the ones that came back, they’re showing us survivors at the very moment they have surmounted their fear of death. They’re triumphant. And then you think of the Kochs.”

“Not that fear, Klara, that’s not what I mean,” said Ludwig Kaltenburg. “We’re dealing here with the kind of fear you use to intimidate others.”

Kaltenburg was thinking a lot at that time about his relationship with animals, one evening I even heard him wondering out loud whether it wasn’t time for a fundamental reconsideration of the relationship between man and animal. He got Martin to show him the drawings he had made at the back of the laboratory in Leipzig, when Matzke had leaned over him as if to devour the artist along with his drawing pad and folding stool. Although at first sight the professor didn’t recognize either marten or rabbit, he was resolved to fathom Martin’s concept of the animal, he wanted to reconstruct how you could approach animals without the analytical eye of a scientist.

I believe that at some point Martin, who had gradually come to have confidence in Kaltenburg, even brought to Loschwitz the studies that had evolved from his hyena series, the last works based on his zoo sketches: not portraits at this stage, but a rough pattern of black and rust-brown marks, although you could make out individual backs, flanks, and legs among them. However, the viewer couldn’t tell what limb belonged to which animal. Here and there a muzzle appeared, and then a pair of round ears — nothing but a compact block of piebald, quivering fur.

It was a while before the professor could grasp Martin’s approach, accept his way of seeing: “So what you do is you make yourself acquainted with the hyena.”

“Acquainted? I wouldn’t call it that. The more I studied the hyena, the more I doubted anyone’s ability to become acquainted with it.”

“You give your impression of it. No, hold on.” Ludwig Kaltenburg corrected himself. “By making it practically disappear, you’ve captured one of its traits: a hyena seems to know, like the rest of its kind, that it can make itself virtually invisible.”

They exchanged ideas about color perception. They spent hours in front of the Old Masters, wondering about the source of the songbirds depicted in great still-life paintings: Kaltenburg was convinced they were fresh provender intended for that day’s table, while Martin thought that from one composition to the next painters would make use of the same particularly well-drawn specimens. They also discussed at length the remarkable shyness that affects young crows practically overnight if the person they relate to is not careful to maintain continuous contact with the nestlings.

“You go away for three days, and by the time you get back the whole brood is lost to you, no further use for observational purposes.”

Martin’s way of framing questions and formulating his own theories impressed Kaltenburg so much at the time that — how often could he say this of anyone? — he noted with respect that he had actually learned something from their conversation about shyness in crows.

It was the high point of the Loschwitz Institute. I would be hard-pressed to name all the research projects that were going on in that phase of its life, the feed kitchen was a hive of activity at all times. Martin was lending me a hand, helping with the drawings for my study of titmice, Etzel von Isisdorf was devoting himself to his rhesus monkeys, Knut was squatting in his garage working on film commentaries after a year of roaming through the Congo with a camera. Reinhold regularly sat in the garden with the professor, negotiations with the Academy of Sciences over the new research establishment were progressing — and Kaltenburg was not only fulfilling his many duties, but for about a month he entertained the idea of writing a book in his old age about the representation of animals in contemporary art. He was buoyed up by boundless energy and enthusiasm, he would like to have started collecting material straightaway, why hadn’t he thought right at the beginning of noting down the key points of his conversations with Martin?

And then Ludwig Kaltenburg lost his head. One day it was all over. The professor banned Martin Spengler from the Institute grounds. Whether he specifically barred him from the house, whether he drove him away or just left him standing, I couldn’t say, because I wasn’t present at the crucial moment.

“Surely you don’t mean it.”

“Hermann, don’t annoy me even more, can’t you see I’m beside myself.”

“Martin was equally beside himself.”

“That man may be a thoroughly good person, but he shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near animals.”

“You’ve got to speak to him.”

“Enough.”

6

NOT ONLY THE PERSON of Martin but his very name was taboo in Loschwitz from then on. Unfortunately, you sense all too precisely when a name must not be uttered, a subject must not be mentioned, so that you can’t blithely ignore the prohibition: I never found the courage to break the taboo. Professor Kaltenburg, I noticed, gave me a look if I so much as thought of Martin in his presence. Fits of irritability: he sent me out of the room to perform tasks that could just as easily have been carried out by an animal keeper, the cleaning lady, or his driver, Krause. Or, as quick as lightning, he came up with a theory that he knew would have me enthralled.

Later, in letters — sometimes containing acute analyses of Martin’s work — or in interviews when asked about his early acquaintance with the now famous Martin Spengler, Ludwig Kaltenburg readily talked about their time together in Loschwitz, not holding back — he could laugh about it now — from saying that this man had made him furious.

He recalled how he had hit the roof when Martin appeared at the Institute wrapped in a loden coat. All he needed was the knee breeches and a chamois tuft stuck in a little hat to look like a Bavarian hunter. I believe to this day that Martin meant it when he said he thought he was appearing as a herdsman; never in his wildest dreams would it have occurred to him that he was dressed as a huntsman.

I asked him later whether he had ever wondered why it was that nobody at the Institute wore green loden, be it a jacket, a coat, or just a hat, even though he must know how many loden-lovers there were among animal lovers? No, he hadn’t noticed. Yes, he could see that now — it was probably a matter of fashion, pure chance, maybe? No, absolutely not. The catalog of commandments, rules of conduct, and — not to put too fine a point on it — laws established at the Institute under Kaltenburg’s regime actually did include a ban on loden, albeit an unspoken one. Now Martin had found out at first hand why this was so.

I was on my way to fetch some straw, I was doing a favor for a Romanian guest who had come to Loschwitz to study dwarf pigs, I had just opened the door to the garage where bales of straw and replacement panes of glass were kept next to the limousine, when I heard the sound of the northern raven, one of Kaltenburg’s oldest animals. I hadn’t reckoned on Martin being at the Institute that day, and I was expecting to witness a confrontation between animals as I moved cautiously past the bushes to the corner, quietly, so that the raven wouldn’t notice me. Instead of a weasel or a cockerel or some other animal the raven might have picked a fight with, I saw Martin standing there with his back to me, and quite near me the big black bird that had the man in the green coat in its sights: unawares, he was holding an outdoor broom, no doubt with a view to making himself useful by sweeping the narrow path that ran behind the Institute.

A long, elegantly cut loden coat with staghorn buttons sufficed to upset, if not Kaltenburg directly, then certainly the tame raven and consequently its old friend the professor. “I’m sorry, we can’t have this anymore,” he said — you might have thought it was the animals that made the laws at the Institute—“There’s nothing I can do about it.” Ludwig Kaltenburg’s hands were tied, he claimed, his animals had simply entrusted him with the responsibility of enforcing the unalterable rules.

Of course, I could distinguish between the raven’s combative note or other harmless noises and its attacking cry, but Martin couldn’t. And of course I also knew that a raven always launches its attack from behind, because it believes it has achieved a victory, or at least the best precondition for a victory, if it can land on its victim’s back. I don’t know whether it was too late, but I failed to alert Martin or to distract the bird. The raven hopped sideways, its head down, toward the loden-clad man, its wings spread in order to take off quickly if its opponent should turn around suddenly. But it didn’t occur to Martin to do so, he wasn’t aware of the situation. Animal cries, birds calling, you heard them everywhere, and part of the attraction of Loschwitz for Martin was surely the opportunity to immerse himself in a restless world of animal noises.

And of course I knew that the raven was allergic to the sight of anyone resembling a huntsman, even from a distance. The robust dark-green material, and then for good measure — the ill-fated combination of two characteristics — a broom: Martin jerked, felt the claws in his neck, fell to his knees, turned around, shook off his assailant, and saw the creature crouching on the ground with wings still spread. Involuntarily Martin had brought the broom up to head height, his eyes dilated with fear, his neck bleeding, he kept his gaze fixed on the bird. Martin was in a state of shock, but the raven gave him no time to recover, it tried to get past the huntsman figure with the leveled gun in order to attack again. Martin didn’t understand, whirled around, coattails flying. By the time I had regained my presence of mind and warned Martin that it was far from over, the raven mounted its third attack.

I shouted, “Throw the broom away, take the coat off,” but it was no use, the more fervently I urged him on, the less self-control he had. Martin waved the broom handle wildly, hit the raven on the wing, the raven struck at his temple, pulling his hair out, then hacked at the back of Martin’s hand.

I shouted, “Hand in front of your eyes,” but Martin did exactly the opposite, he put his hands behind his back, making the broomstick describe a wild arc, which took the raven with it and hurled it quite some distance toward the garage. No sooner had the bird pulled itself together than it launched the next attack. Suddenly Kaltenburg was standing between the two opponents. I don’t know how he got there so quickly, presumably my shouting and the hoarse croaking of his raven had alerted him.

I heard the broom handle splintering across Kaltenburg’s knee, followed by more wood splintering. Kaltenburg didn’t utter a sound as he threw the broken bits into the shrubbery, grabbed the bewildered Martin by the upper arm, and dragged him behind the house. Then I heard him roaring: “Coat,” I heard, “lab coat,” as if this “coat” and “lab coat” were the most crucial words in the language.

The raven flew a little way, up into the oak tree, it took some time to calm down. It preened itself, putting its feathers in order, looking down into the bushes as though it still couldn’t quite believe that the broom handle rested there smashed to pieces. At some point it stopped croaking, squatted silently, and surveyed the strip of grass below, casting an eye over a battlefield from which it had emerged victorious, or as leader of an invincible army, albeit one consisting only of a single foot soldier.

I didn’t see Kaltenburg again for about an hour. In the meantime I had delivered straw to the dwarf pigs. The professor was still agitated.

“So careless,” he burst out. “He could have lost an eye.”

I thought he meant Martin.

“Martin?” he snapped back. “Martin could have broken his wing.”

I wanted to know where Martin was, but that name had already ceased to exist.

“The raven lost primary feathers,” he said, “and as for your friend, I never want to see him on these premises again.”

7

EVEN LUDWIG KALTENBURG can sometimes misjudge people.”

No one could persuade the professor to lift the ban. We certainly wouldn’t have dared to raise the topic at the usual morning meeting, but I know that many members of the Institute tried to change Kaltenburg’s mind. Admittedly, Martin Spengler had been a nuisance occasionally, pushing his way into an observational setup, for example, or asking questions about what was going on in front of his very eyes rather than relying on his own observation. And hadn’t the professor always said that anyone bothered by him should personally take steps to shake him off? But by now everybody regarded the outcast entirely as an asset to the Loschwitz Institute and was not inclined to be judgmental about those moments when Martin had been insensitive in his dealings with animals, or, as Kaltenburg once put it rather bluntly, he had assaulted an animal.

The scientists, keepers, craftsmen, even the feed manager — they all sprang to Martin’s defense, although they took good care to avoid touching on the delicate subject of the friendship between the two of them. They left that part to Knut and me. Needless to say, we had no intention of giving in, always thinking of new arguments, and I was almost locked in combat with Ludwig Kaltenburg. I talked about the deep understanding of animals that had inspired Martin. Certainly he didn’t see them with the same eyes as the professor, but Kaltenburg must concede that it was precisely this difference that had first aroused his interest in Martin.

“But how is he supposed to gain what you call a deep understanding of animals without observing them closely? That’s a complete contradiction,” Kaltenburg objected.

Martin simply did not possess with the same research drive as a trained zoologist, he didn’t observe in order to establish functional relations, he let impressions work on him.

“Do you know what? I’ve long suspected that your friend finds animals — how shall I put it — cute. No trace of deeper understanding there.”

But didn’t he think there was a certain innocence in that, an attempt to approach the animal without reservation?

“Innocence, without reservation — when I hear that language, I just see red. He’s spent too much time reading Brehm’s Life of Animals.”

Knut tried to calm the professor down by admitting that Martin might well have unclear notions of the borderline between animal and human, and when Martin philosophized about “communicating” and an “exchange with the animal,” Knut was as skeptical as Ludwig Kaltenburg.

“When he imitates the call of the blackcock, he imagines himself slipping into a blackcock’s skin and feathers. When he sits in a cage with a weasel, he sees himself as a weasel. But who better than you to put him right about these notions, Herr Professor?”

Kaltenburg hesitated for a moment, reflected — but no, he had made up his mind.

“You can say I’m limited, you can call me quirky if you like, I can live with that. But any kind of cutesiness makes me furious, even as a kid I hated people using that coochy-coo voice to me.”

If he had ever found animals cute, if, as a so-called nice child, he had been drawn to animals because they were nice like him, he would never have become a researcher, he said. Animals are not cute critters, and a child is the last person to be interested in niceness: on the contrary, it was precisely the dignity of animals, their serious attitude to the world, even when at play, that aroused the child’s interest.

“That’s what attracted me to animals — there’s no way an animal can do anything else, it’s bound to take you seriously, even if you’re a creature who can’t yet walk, can’t speak, can’t even eat properly yet, and come crawling across the field in a diaper.”

Dispirited, we made our way to the garage, where Martin was waiting for us. No, we hadn’t got anywhere. The professor had digressed into basic principles. And yes, once again he had been careful not to refer to Martin by name. I took Martin one of the young chaffinches we had brought up together in Loschwitz. That was the most I could do.

“I suppose he left Dresden very soon after that?” asked Katharina Fischer.

Meanwhile the crows had made their way to the upper end of the island, far fewer birds than in winter, and yet their noisy competition for roosting spots dominated our whole area.

I couldn’t say now how much time elapsed between the two events. When did Knut make his stork film? It must have been 1959. During filming, a photograph was taken that has often been reproduced over time, and if I remember rightly, I was the one who took it, in Mecklenburg, far from Loschwitz and Kaltenburg’s Institute. But not with my camera, which is why, as far as I know, it never bears any attribution. The camera must have been Knut’s, or Martin’s — though I never saw Martin holding a camera. Three men are standing in front of a fence. Grassland scenery. Rough wooden posts with barbed wire stretched between them. Wheat beyond the fence, almost ripe for harvesting. You can see, from left to right, Martin, Knut, and, with his back to the camera, Herr Sikorski, bending down, preoccupied. The photographer has made an effort to include a nest you can make out in the background on the roof of a farmhouse, while Martin is smoking a cigarette and talking. Though his hands are casually thrust into his pockets, Knut looks as if he is being pulled in two directions at once — he is lending an ear to Martin and looking into the lens; I have caught him in a rare moment of impatience.

One of the last shots before Martin left for the West. And I can remember, as if it were yesterday, what it was he was so eager to get across. Knut couldn’t wait to get back to work; the stork on its nest looked settled enough, but it could easily decide to take off at any moment. Knut was incapable of concentrating on what his friend was saying, but I recall every word: Martin was talking about Ludwig Kaltenburg.

After what was basically an inexplicable breach, he had gone through all the phases that might conceivably follow such a vehement rejection, had ignored the professor, derided him, rebelled against him. He may have sensed that he would never be free of Kaltenburg’s influence. Martin disappeared. Nothing was heard of him for years. It wasn’t until the mid-sixties, when I was idly leafing through a few catalogs and picture books one day, that I was struck — because of his slight squint — by a snapshot of a stranger. He was looking past the camera, you couldn’t help but stare at that face, as if to attract the subject’s attention. The black hat, the white shirt with short sleeves, a shadow in the background, dark shapes, silhouettes, several people, obviously. That wasn’t Martin Spengler.

Today I know that the picture shows Martin during a stage appearance shortly after he had tipped a packet of laundry detergent into an open grand piano. It was taken on July 20, 1964, precisely twenty years after the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in his Wolf’s Lair, and at first sight there is something Führer-like about Martin, with his right arm raised. His expression wavers between trance and wild resolution; it looks as if he’s grown a little mustache, but then you realize it has nothing to do with hair. Coagulating blood. Martin is bleeding. Blood is trickling over his lips and down his chin. A few minutes earlier a student had smashed his nose.

That wasn’t him. And then I did recognize him, after all. Martin in the setting of his large, disturbing art performances which regularly caused public uproar, and he himself took fright at the reactions he had provoked. The point at which other people lose control and blindly hit out, he would fall into a strange state somewhere between rigid self-control and self-absorption. I can see Martin standing on a stage with a bleeding nose, outwardly attentive but inwardly listening: a portrait which, in its very theatricality — the posture, the raised arm, the hand presenting an object — has more impact than the many later pictures in which, though apparently oblivious of the camera, he acts out the role of being photographed.

Did the two of them ever meet again in the West? Not that I ever heard. And I think it’s unlikely. All the same, throughout their lives they seem to have moved along parallel lines, and as I corresponded with both of them I kept coming across mysterious coincidences. At the beginning of the seventies, for instance, when the professor began actively to promote the cause of wildlife conservation, he wrote to me one day that he had read out a manifesto in the Munich Hofbräuhaus beer hall, and because of the turmoil in the hall, he had stood on the table to make himself heard — and then I noted the date of the event, a day in July, the twentieth, eight years after Martin’s broken-nose appearance.

8

BETWEEN THE BANK and Bird Island the flow of the Elbe was much reduced, just a rivulet here and there. The gravel bed was exposed, by stepping from one patch of shingle to another you could easily get across, but we turned back. Bats had replaced the sand martins. In a bare, dead tree on the island bank a night heron sat motionless, watching the unruffled surface of the water below.

After what she had heard from me, said Katharina Fischer, she was slowly beginning to see Martin Spengler’s appearances from a different angle. She had always found the artist slightly repellent, a person who allowed nobody and nothing to share the limelight with him, who ruthlessly made himself the center of attention on the stage or in a discussion group. Images of a murmuring, gesticulating Martin Spengler standing his ground for hours on end had unnerved her rather than attracted her to Martin’s world.

“He behaved as if to prove to his audience how easy it is to ignore people. But now I’m suddenly wondering whether people played any part at all in Martin Spengler’s performances.”

And yet in his countless statements about art, man is central. Martin never missed a chance to propagate his vision of mankind, which I’ve never really grasped.

“Of course. Nonetheless, I have the feeling that he was chiefly concerned to move with the patience of an animal observer, as though in his mind he was always communicating with animals.”

Then Martin had let it be known, if only indirectly, that he understood the professor’s objections. That he accepted them. That he held nothing against him. On the contrary. A quiet echo. An overture.

“Messages directed at Ludwig Kaltenburg.”

No, Martin Spengler did not regard animals as “cute” or “nice.” That assessment was a crude error on Kaltenburg’s part. Since Martin’s banishment from the Institute there hasn’t been a year when I haven’t wondered whether the professor was right to get so deeply involved in the wrangling over the Berlin Research Center, whether he would ever have chosen Eberhard Matzke to be his archenemy, whether in fact he might not have spent the rest of his life in Dresden, if he had been a little more clear-sighted at that time. In Martin he would have had some support to counteract his forays into “zoological politics,” as Kaltenburg called it. A book about animal representation in art — it could be that in a weak moment he was afraid such a peripheral work might adversely affect his reputation, or that he heard his colleagues whispering, “Professor Kaltenburg’s reaching the age when you take up a hobby,” or “His great research days are behind him, he’s gone off poaching in other fields.” Which was exactly what he did later, and the further he ventured into sociology, anthropology, and history, the more damage he did to his reputation.

As a child I saw my father turning his back on Kaltenburg from one day to the next; in my mid-twenties, I saw the professor repudiating Martin. Both events affected me deeply, neither seemed to me inevitable. An outsider could do nothing but look on impotently. As a result I could never bring myself to break with Ludwig Kaltenburg, though there were times when I didn’t want to know anything about him.

The night heron had left its perch. I picked it out again in the reeds on the bank, reflected in the water. Its head lowered, it was on the lookout for fish, its beak gliding to and fro above the smooth, seemingly impenetrable surface. It looked up as we passed. You might almost have thought it wanted to hear what Katharina Fischer had to say.

“At least he didn’t regard Martin Spengler as his archenemy.”

Knowledgeable as he was about animals, Kaltenburg was unable to see that he himself was fixated on a displacement object. In any case, I’m very cautious when it comes to the subject of Matzke as Kaltenburg’s opponent. Perhaps it was Knut — I regret to say — who first put the idea into the professor’s head that Matzke was out to get him. Not deliberately, certainly not, I’m not reproaching him, it could just as easily have been me.

“A sideswipe?” asked an astonished Kaltenburg one day, when Knut was expressing his annoyance at an article of Eberhard Matzke’s. “I can’t believe it.”

“After all, it’s not the first time we’ve read this kind of thing, Herr Professor. Don’t you remember the brazen words that man dared to utter about the inhibition against biting among canines? Since then it’s been one malicious comment after another.”

Knut Sieverding, the only realist among us. It was beyond his powers of imagination to foresee the phantasms his matter-of-fact observations might possibly unleash.

“Malicious comments? Colleague Matzke? Aimed at me? But we always got on extremely well.”

Knut wanted to proceed carefully, wanted to save Kaltenburg from a defeat, or rather from yet another “small setback” after the professor’s failed efforts to bring the missing exhibits back to the Zoological Collections. In Berlin’s new Zoological Research Center, Reinhold held the office of director, Matzke becoming his deputy with responsibility for day-to-day business, making it possible for Reinhold to concentrate fully on the kind of large-scale research that had, at least in part, preoccupied him for more than thirty years. We were all convinced that, thanks to Reinhold’s newfound freedom, the long-anticipated monograph on avian plumage would now finally come to fruition.

Kaltenburg’s plan had worked. Eberhard Matzke, meanwhile, was clearly on a different track. He did not want to be deputy director. What resulted was the Matzke rebellion, as the colleagues called it, not without a certain irony, since everyone knew that Dr. Eberhard Matzke lacked the nerve for a Matzke revolution. Perhaps Matzke had not expected the Saxon zoologists to rally around Reinhold, perhaps he had pictured them joining forces with him to drive Reinhold out. A Leipziger, a Dresdener — but for Ludwig Kaltenburg’s involvement, you could have seen the Matzke rebellion as a purely Saxon affair which happened to be played out on the big stage of Berlin.

“Somebody’s got to make him see sense,” was the professor’s conclusion. “Who else but me could attempt it under the circumstances?”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“Misunderstandings are always better tackled man-to-man.”

“Misunderstandings are a different matter, Herr Professor. We’re past the stage of misunderstandings. Matzke and Reinhold, the whole setup behind them — the battle lines have been drawn.”

“That’s just why we need skilled diplomacy, we need to come up with an offer of peace that colleague Matzke, who is prone to bouts of confusion, can accept without losing face.”

“I strongly advise you against approaching Matzke in this situation. And with all due respect, I am not convinced that you are the right man for such a mission.”

I could see it was a considerable effort for Knut to talk to Kaltenburg about past failings, about Matzke plodding, shoulders miserably hunched, down the Institute corridor under the eyes of the staff, about students in the lab excitedly putting aside their work as soon as Kaltenburg appeared in the doorway, and about the tense silence in the professor’s lecture when Matzke took too long to fetch a new stick of chalk for the blackboard.

“But I always helped him where I could.”

“I don’t deny that. But has it ever occurred to you that Eberhard Matzke has never come to the Institute? Have you ever invited him to Loschwitz? You have people coming and going all the time, with zoologists of all nationalities staying here, and if any up-and-coming young researcher — even a child interested in wildlife — shows the slightest hint of promise, the Institute’s doors are open to him.”

Kaltenburg growled.

“Have you ever wondered what all this activity looks like to Eberhard Matzke from a distance?”

“I must admit I haven’t.”

Both were exhausted. Knut paced up and down the room. Professor Kaltenburg sat back in his cocktail-bar chair with arms dangling over the sides.

“Hermann, could you make us some tea?”

As I was on my way to the kitchen, Kaltenburg sat bolt upright.

“Somebody’s got to do something.”

“Not you.”

9

WE FOLLOWED THE ANIMALS’ example and kept out of the sun. I think it was a hot August afternoon when I was informed that I had to renounce my membership in the German Ornithological Society. I wasn’t the only one, we were all required to renounce membership in a Western organization. The animals dozed. We were agitated, we were restless.

Maybe this did start out as a crass joke doing the rounds of the Institute, though in those August days we were in no mood for joking — there was no escape from the enervating heat, whether we lay under the trees, retreated into the aquarium wing, or sat behind closed shutters and tried not to move if we could help it.

“Next thing they’ll be making us quit the German Ornithological Society.”

Professor Kaltenburg, wearing shorts, confused for a moment: “What are you talking about? Reinhold is sitting there isolated in West Berlin, and you’re wasting your time with that nonsense?”

One of the caretakers was trying all day to get hold of his family, with no success; his wife and children had gone ahead of him on holiday. Colleagues canceled impending trips to the West. Conversely, no prospect of a visit from Knut Sieverding. He never made the long-planned documentary about house sparrows. Troubled, Krause washed the car. Or did he come back in the evening from a trip to Berlin and report at first hand the events that had been unfolding on the streets? No. In any case, we wouldn’t have trusted his account.

All at once, the long-running dispute between Reinhold and Matzke was over. Professor Doktor Eberhard Matzke had displayed a frightening degree of ambition, against Reinhold’s will he had been made director of the research center, but he still wasn’t satisfied. He didn’t shrink from using uncouth language to his colleagues to cast doubts on Reinhold’s abilities, he blackened his name in the highest quarters, and above all, he declared, there was no place in East Berlin for an ornithologist who lived in West Berlin. It was as if colleague Matzke’s complaints and grievances had gained a hearing at some point, for Reinhold’s bird collection and library were now placed at Matzke’s disposal — the hated eminence no longer able to put a spoke in his wheel.

And then I can see Ludwig Kaltenburg sitting bent over on the wooden bench in his kitchen, his shoelaces dangling in the air for a moment. Gripping the heavy, leather-soled shoe by the heel, he pulls it off with a heave. He sits up again and grunts, “Oh, it’s you.” Kaltenburg points at the shoe, and as if apologizing, he says, “I went out to get milk.”

His beard, his hair, the bench, the tiled floor, are all bathed in the clear light of a mild day. The shopping bag with the bottles of milk is there; I notice the color of Kaltenburg’s socks, like mincemeat that’s been exposed to air for too long.

I force myself to look elsewhere, the art print on the kitchen wall, the linen cloth on the table, I make the embarrassed old man disappear.

I only vaguely recollect his sending me to Matzke in late 1961 or early 1962 with a peace offer. “Don’t forget to have a good shave, you know colleague Matzke can’t stand to see a badly shaven man of a morning.”

Eberhard Matzke no longer knew me. There was no reply to the peace offer. It will have been around then that the professor finally understood that this wasn’t about Reinhold at all. It was he, Ludwig Kaltenburg, that Matzke had had in his sights all along. From that moment on things went downhill with Kaltenburg.

The jackdaw skins lie spread out before me, a uniform blackish gray shimmer covers the work surface once the sun goes down. Yes, I skinned Taschotschek. I have preserved it and its fellows very carefully, and in Klotzsche too Kaltenburg’s jackdaws will be kept in a safe place.

10

THE JAYS ARE GONE,” he wrote in his first animal handbook. “The geese have moved away, to who knows where. Of all my free-flying birds, there remain only the jackdaws.” Now they too were gone.

One morning Klara said at breakfast, “The professor is beyond saving.”

I left my coffee, put my jacket on. Klara looked at me, she knew where I was going. It was as though Ludwig Kaltenburg had taught us all to sense the slightest change in the condition of certain life forms from miles away.

Half an hour later I turned into the familiar street, out of breath though I hadn’t been running. I stopped outside the villa. On the stones of the path leading to the house I saw drops, not rain and not animal droppings, a trail. Right up to the garden gate, as well as on the footpath behind me, I had followed the trail for some while without registering it. At every step I observed these small circles, frayed at the edges, dark, a watery substance, they would soon evaporate. The door was open, it was always open, there was no doorbell — Kaltenburg said, early on, “You know how it is here, people continually calling in wanting something from me. If we had a doorbell, my nocturnals would never get any rest.”

On the linoleum of the stairs up to the first floor, the marks changed color. White drops on a red background. Step by step I followed the milky trail up to the study. Kaltenburg’s socks. An embarrassed smile.

“Oh, it’s you.”

Kaltenburg sat hunched on the edge of the sofa. He used to eat on it lying back; at night, Martin would sometimes sit there too, as I did countless times. Kaltenburg was struggling with his shoelaces. As though it explained everything, as though on this morning the whole world could be summed up in a single sentence, he said, “I went out to get milk.”

His bare hand brushed across the suede leather, the other shoe was standing on the parquet floor in a shiny little puddle. Then it struck me that Ludwig Kaltenburg was wearing socks with holes in them. He raised his head, smiled sheepishly: “I went out to get milk and didn’t notice.”

He seemed not to know what he wanted to do with the milk. Like a self-conscious young boy. No, to be honest, he looked at me like an old man who has realized that his powers are slipping away.

“The milk was dripping on my shoe, and I didn’t notice,” he said.

The bag sat in a pool of milk, I took the bottles out carefully, no, there was no broken glass, but one bottletop was ripped off. On the way back from the shop Kaltenburg had spilled almost a liter of milk.

“I’ll wipe it up,” he said, now sounding like a child wanting to undo a mistake.

I found a bucket in the broom closet, the scrubbing brush, a cloth, fetched water. I started at the foot of the stairs. The same silence as on that evening when we had gathered up the dead jackdaws. Kaltenburg had called for me because no one else was available. He had to wait for nearly an hour in a state of uncertainty until I arrived. It was during that night that Klara first said to me, “You won’t be able to save Ludwig Kaltenburg.”

His clear look as he talked about the abysses, “There, there, and there,” the light spring breeze in his hair, the first sunshine of the year on his weather-beaten face. And yet Ludwig Kaltenburg never really wanted to see that he was surrounded by monsters. Later, people would say that he had gradually isolated himself, that the seal had been set on the end of his time in Dresden long before, but he had been remarkably good at concealing this from himself and the world.

I wiped the milk from the parquet, a trickle running under the desk, the rugs would need cleaning — no, no great store was set by clean carpets in the Kaltenburg household. But with all this milk, there would have to be new carpets.

“Remind me to let you have a key before you go, Hermann.”

They took their time, they studied him. And didn’t Kaltenburg himself always insist on patient observation? First of all they wanted to acquire an all-round understanding of the subject, sooner or later his weak spots would be exposed, inadvertently he would tell you himself how to throw someone like Ludwig Kaltenburg off balance. It couldn’t be done in a hurry — a man like Kaltenburg was able to withstand a great deal, he would fight for his corner, not yield easily. They could have deprived Kaltenburg of his university chair, prohibited him from researching and publishing — he would just have laughed: “Ban me from research? I only have to see to be doing research. You’ve only got to keep your eyes open, how can anyone stop me doing that?”

Was his gaze fixed on the cleaning cloth, or was he simply staring into space? He sat there motionless, only his toes moving. I wouldn’t have expected the holes in his socks. When I had wrung out the rag and washed my hands, I caught myself secretly scrutinizing Kaltenburg as I returned to the room: Had he combed his hair today? Was his collar clean?

“A key, yes, I won’t forget.”

He said, “Actually, I’ve always preferred the country.”

I knew that for the past few weeks he’d been working on a lecture to be given at a conference in Oslo or Helsinki. And if he insisted on giving me a key to the villa, I also knew that he would not be coming back from this trip.

At that moment there wasn’t the slightest doubt. Kaltenburg had dropped many hints, possibly lost on everyone but me. Kaltenburg’s fear. The animals sensed you were going to leave them, you moved differently, you approached the animals in a different way, you didn’t smell the same: there was no need for luggage in the corridor. It was to be the only time in his life that he would move his household without a single animal.

Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg perched on the edge of the sofa, without looking up he lifted some paper from the desk, scrunched it up, and stuffed his right shoe with it. I almost thought I heard him muttering, “Da, da, durak.”

I took stock, reaching for the wadding. I ran my fingers over the pleasantly warm, dark jackdaw feathers. Effortlessly, I filled the skin.

11

THERE WAS STILL a pale orange and blue glow in the sky over the city, a pair of cranes were winging their way up the Elbe, giving voice as they flew, and when we sat down at one of the empty tables outside a long-since-closed snack bar called the Elbe Idyll, Frau Fischer asked what had become of Ludwig Kaltenburg’s other animals.

The northern raven disappeared for good soon after its old friend. Some of the exotics went to dealers, some to the zoo, which also took the rare duck species. For some years I didn’t dare venture anywhere near the waterfowl ponds, because the older birds were absolutely not to be dissuaded from following me as far as the tram stop. The sulfur-crested cockatoo got away from me one day when I managed to corner it in Kaltenburg’s bedroom — it was clearly so disgusted that it wanted nothing more to do with me and went off to look for a new feeding station. Later, it was often spotted by people who were out walking in the Great Garden, and regularly visited the afternoon feeding sessions at the zoo. Taking up its position on a branch or on the large uprooted tree stump which also served the heron as a lookout post, the cockatoo squatted there, less on account of hunger, perhaps, than because it enjoyed the familiar company of the mandarin ducks and pochards, the red-breasted and bar-headed geese, of every kind of strange bird, in fact, whether they were cormorants, sacred ibises, or flamingos.

Like other birds, however, it will have succumbed to the long, hard winter of 1962–63, when the swans were solidly frozen in on the Elbe and the tits were picking at any fresh putty in window frames, attracted by the smell of linseed oil, which was becoming weaker by the day. One day a group of young field ornithologists who spent some years mapping the Great Garden came across a single primary feather in the snow and noted, “Vestige of an escaped bird,” then went on, “Obviously brought into the area by visitors,” and then, in view of the white parts of the feather, which had a yellow sheen in the winter sunshine, added, “Sulfur-crested cockatoo,” followed by a question mark. Because of severe frost damage, among other things, a positive identification would have been impossible.

A few former assistants took over the dogs. The resident tomcat was unwilling to leave his familiar territory, the neighbors went on putting food out for him until the end of the decade. We released Kaltenburg’s sticklebacks into the wild and distributed the tropical fish among various aquariums around the city: commercial firms, schools, the sanatorium in Wachwitz.

The hamsters? I can’t remember the details of what happened to them. Anyway, I believe two fundamentally different types of hamster must be distinguished in Kaltenburg’s life. When he talked about hamsters in the plural, he did actually have in mind the nocturnal animals who kept him company when everybody else was asleep. But when he talked about a hamster, singular, it was just as well not to form too concrete an image of this creature that constantly chewed paper and helped itself to important documents and private letters to build its nest; it wasn’t to be taken literally. If the minutes of a meeting had disappeared, let alone unanswered mail from friends, there would soon be a reference to the infamous hamster. And so in time I gathered that “the hamster” in the singular was simply another way of talking about papers that were, unfortunately, nowhere to be found.

Most of the Institute buildings were put to new uses, and I gather there was some idea of turning the villa into a guesthouse. But then it deteriorated bit by bit, the grounds became overgrown, quite a few animals may even have come back to live in this new wilderness. Long after its dissolution, Kaltenburg continued to be very interested in his former Institute, sending me back there time and again to keep him informed. I sent dismal reports to him in Vienna, but he reacted enthusiastically—“Good, excellent”; he was content to know that the Institute he had built up had not fallen into the hands of Matzke.

I wrote to him, “Now the rain has started to come in through your study ceiling.”

He replied, “Very good, go on reporting back.”

It wasn’t until the mid-nineties that the villa was renovated, that is to say, completely rebuilt from the ground up — the crumbling floorboards, the dry rot in the walls of the aquarium wing. The present occupants probably have no idea what sort of place they’ve moved into, they can’t begin to suspect all the things that came to light during the restoration work. Including perhaps a nest made out of scraps of paper, of Kantian paragraphs, and containing little mummified hamsters — it comes to me now that when I was clearing out the villa several adult hamsters fell prey to the buzzard, but as I couldn’t find their nest, their last litter must have perished.

Kaltenburg triumphed — in his letters, at any rate. A dubious triumph. It’s true that Eberhard Matzke did not succeed in extending his influence as far as Loschwitz, but then again, if he had done so, it might well have been precisely the right outcome: at least the Institute would have been saved, even if it would no doubt have been run along different lines from Kaltenburg’s. Until I managed to find a berth in the Ornithological Collection, it wasn’t a pleasant time for me, having to see staff layoffs taking effect and difficulties arising with the supply of animal feed. Not long after Kaltenburg left, my days in Loschwitz were numbered too, I found myself responsible for disposing of one familiar creature after another. Dead rooms, a dead garden — the whole Elbe hillside seemed to me bereft.

Meanwhile, near Vienna, Kaltenburg had long since begun to collect new animals around him, in the following years he was to build up colonies far bigger than his Loschwitz flocks.

However many species and specimens Kaltenburg may have surrounded himself with in the West, I’m afraid his Dresden experience always remained on his mind. I see his increasing turn to human beings as a reaction to a painful loss. In fact, perhaps Kaltenburg was driven to turn his attention to human beings because he sensed he would never again be able to give full and unconditional commitment to any animal, having once left his animal household in the lurch. That is my reading of his first book written in the West, his first extensive study of human beings, Archetypes of Fear.

Katharina Fischer said that, particularly from reading Kaltenburg’s polemic, The Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse, she felt she could see the way the author was gradually losing the ground from under his feet. It was as though he were waiting the whole time for someone to hold him in check while he raged ever more blindly. A rage from which no well-meaning assistant, no devoted follower, no human being, could have freed him, because it was directed at human beings themselves. Only an animal might have had that power, observing him from within its own world, with no comprehension of this noisy man who swept everything aside and foresaw a dismal future.

And then the author made a serious mistake, which would soon lead to his pamphlet being popularly known, not as The Five Horseman of the Apocalypse, but simply as Kaltenburg’s Gas Chamber Book. Frau Fischer had heavily underlined the relevant passage in her copy, and to this day I too could repeat it by heart. And yet it’s only a matter of an exaggerated formulation, in retrospect just a stupid thing, one of those peculiar turns of phrase used in the hope of surreptitiously erasing some dark chapter in one’s past but succeeding only in arousing the reader’s suspicions. But for Kaltenburg’s indignant comment that nowadays you could hardly talk about the differing value of different people without being accused of wanting to build new gas chambers, and but for the stubborn way he stood by his utterance afterward, it might never have come to light that, long before his return to the West, even long before Stalin’s death, he had turned his attention to human beings.

In one of his last letters he assured me that he hadn’t actually written the infamous gas chamber sentence himself but that a zealous follower of his had inserted it at a late editorial stage. He wouldn’t name him, just as he had given nothing away in the previous twenty-five years, he had taken all the unpleasantness upon himself and had protected the anonymity of his assistant’s handwriting. “It’s a bitter irony,” he wrote at the end of January 1986, after Martin’s death, “that in the end we both suffered the same fate. When I think how difficult it was for me at that time to fend off your friend’s admiration — only to realize now that both he and I gathered more and more acolytes around us, but, sadly, not independent-minded followers.”

He was forced to cast his mind back to his earlier researches. He would have done anything in the world to avoid returning to them. No animal obstructed his view of his own past. Kaltenburg lost the ground from under his feet. Just as I came close to losing the ground under my feet. His early engagement with human beings fell within his Posen phase. He will not have given my father the relevant essays to read. And if on the tram home my mother responded evasively, almost nervously to my questions about Professor Kaltenburg, then it was simply because he himself had nothing very clear to say about his activities in the military hospital in Posen, which remain obscure to this day.

12

MATZKE.” PERHAPS ONE reason why that long, indeed grotesquely long phone call in November 1973 between Dresden and London has stayed so fresh in my mind is that for the first two or three minutes after I picked up the receiver, which seemed to me like an eternity, I couldn’t match the voice at the other end to the caller’s name.

“Matzke. Can you hear me? Is there someone else on the line?” It was Ludwig Kaltenburg.

A London conference had been organized to mark his seventieth birthday. Zoologists from all over the world were gathering in recognition of the life and work of their celebrated colleague. People were only waiting for the greatest prize of all, from Stockholm. But it is surely not wrong to see in the London conference a reaction to the scandal that, beginning with the Apocalypse book, had rapidly become a scandal surrounding the person of Ludwig Kaltenburg himself. By this time there was also a rumor circulating to the effect that after the annexation of Austria by the Reich, the professor had immediately applied for membership in the Party, banned till then in Austria. There was no mention of it in the curriculum vitae he had put together himself especially for the conference.

“Professor Doktor Eberhard Matzke. Those mudslingers. And all the papers, even the serious ones, have reproduced this nonsense spread by East Berlin. But do you know what I did today?”

“Went to see the ravens in the Tower?”

“That was later in the morning. Straight after breakfast I was already giving a TV interview saying once and for all what I think of these mudslingers who make me out to be a Party member. As though I didn’t know what’s behind it. Who started this rumor. Only Professor Doktor Matzke can be that persistent. With the camera running I said that if that’s what the public wants, I can give them a cast-iron guarantee that I was never in the Nazi Party.”

It was getting on for midnight, I was lying in bed reading when the telephone rang. And I’ve got to say I wasn’t feeling particularly well disposed toward Ludwig Kaltenburg. I knew he was going to call, but I might not have got up to answer if Knut hadn’t been working hard on me for some months beforehand: “I’ve told the professor many times that he can call on you, he knows how important he is to you, but he’s shy about calling you, the attacks on him have made him quite timid.” I had written back in a noncommittal manner. Knut’s next letter included Kaltenburg’s CV. “He’s scared that even his closest friends might turn away from him, I’ve tried to make it clear to him that he needn’t fear anything of the kind, especially from you, on the contrary.” Knut knew where to put pressure on me, I felt duty-bound, perhaps less toward Kaltenburg than to him, Knut Sieverding.

“Can you hear me?”

“Sorry?”

“I’m going to prove it to them, colleague Matzke and his henchmen, give them cast-iron proof.”

Kaltenburg had lied. In his CV he had reduced his stay in Posen to a few months by claiming that in the summer of 1942 he was already a prisoner of war in Russia. But it wasn’t until the autumn or early winter of that year that my mother and I ran into him while out buying gloves in town. “I can give you a cast-iron guarantee”—the formulation suddenly seemed familiar to me, like a half-remembered sentence from childhood that you heard through an open door without being able to make sense of it. I lost concentration for a moment, accidentally made a noise, the tame starling was rustling in the rubber tree, I hadn’t understood the question, my father was speaking too quietly. In the background, Kaltenburg was working himself up into a fury—“Party, Party, I was never a Party man”—I didn’t need a Matzke to tell me that the professor was lying. “Didn’t share their worldview,” I heard him clamoring, my father had asked him the same question, to which we were now awaiting an answer. I heard “ugly campaign” and grasped that Kaltenburg had used the same words at that time to deny his Party membership, just as his CV was now suppressing information about our shared time in Posen, as though I were the one who was lying whenever I recalled childhood memories, as though I were just making things up.

I couldn’t raise it with him. He would have given me some convoluted explanation, about how Matzke was forcing him to make some awful moves in his public life just at the moment, we would have to wait for things to quiet down, and no, of course he hadn’t forgotten our earlier meetings, or his acquaintance with my highly esteemed and respected parents. I didn’t want to ask Kaltenburg. But he must have noticed that his phone tirades were falling on thin air, and suddenly he was quite crestfallen.

“And I was stupid enough to help this man.”

“So you were involved in the rise of Matzke after all.”

“Berlin? I had nothing to do with that. Earlier, I mean, much earlier. When he was collecting birds under the most adverse conditions.”

“You knew Eberhard Matzke before you came to Leipzig?”

“Oh, yes. That is, I may not have met him personally. But I gave him my support. We knew each other by name. Nineteen forty-two, it must have been.”

“He was in the army then — did you make sure he could continue his ornithological studies? Like Knut Sieverding in Crete?”

“Pretty much. No. Worse. Much worse. Matzke was in the camps. A terrible time. The awful nervous strain. He complained, as you can imagine.”

“He appealed to you?”

“Not then. Initially he thought he could sort things out for himself, in fact he seriously believed they would grant him an interview with the commandant. Amazing what people’s minds can dream up when they’re stuck in a hopeless situation. Of course, nothing came of his appointment with the commandant. But Matzke was tenacious. Who knows whether he patiently devised a different tactic or whether he bribed the right person at the right time, whether he went on bended knee to beg or whether eventually they just saw him as a weirdo — but at some point he received a special permit, complete with name, date, official stamp, everything in order, which must have looked odd when the text said something like ‘This is to confirm that Eberhard Matzke may observe birds.’”

“But people always say that birds avoided the camps, there was no bird life in the camps.”

“Quite right. The smoke. They couldn’t stand the smoke. So he had to be able to get out of the camp. He actually got permission to leave the camp for hours at a time. The guards at the gate soon got to know the bird-watcher, they exchanged greetings, perhaps even a few words when they were checking on what Matzke had shot that day.”

“He went out with a gun?”

“Of course he did. Was he supposed to catch the birds with his hands?”

“Did he have to pass them on to the kitchen?”

“I don’t know. But he did prepare the most interesting specimens.”

“And what happened to those?”

“As far as I recall, he once indicated that he’d managed to preserve everything he collected until the fall of 1942. Perhaps he brought the whole collection back with him to Leipzig at the end of the war.”

“So he stopped collecting in the fall of 1942?”

“Stopped? Matzke? No, he’s an ornithologist. He was posted.”

“Posted?”

“What a struggle that was. We ornithologists on the outside wrote pleading letters, drew up petitions, racked our brains, tried everything we could — I spent sleepless nights thinking of this young man, frightened he would go crazy. But our efforts paid off in the end. Matzke was sent to some dump of a place on the Baltic.”

“A dump? But there was a camp there?”

“Of course not. That was the point. His nerves were shattered when he left the camp guards. He needed to gain some distance. Matzke spent the rest of the war guarding a secret installation on the coast. In other words, he was allowed to walk up and down the beach, ample opportunity for him to observe his beloved waders. Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“Since you asked about the birds — I’m wondering now whether Matzke lost track of them in all the confusion at the end of the war. Or did he donate them to Vienna? No, sorry, I’m getting mixed up there, he described his night herons and gray-headed woodpeckers in the newsletter of the Vienna Natural History Museum. But listen, are you sure the skins aren’t at your place? I seem to remember he handed them over to the Dresden collection, as a noble gesture because they had lost their holdings in the war. Why don’t you have a look? You know, night herons and gray-headed woodpeckers above all, take a look at their labels.”

I didn’t know what to say. Kaltenburg reflected.

“Sooner or later they’ll be on to Matzke.”

And, after another pause: “I think it’s getting light outside. A red stripe on the horizon.”

“At four in the morning? Not in London.”

“But that’s what it feels like. If you hang on a minute, I’ll go to the window and check.”

“You’d do better to lie down for a bit. Try to sleep. It’s going to be a long day.”

And, like an echo on the line: “A long day.”

Then he said, “There are the gulls.”

“The Thames gulls circle all night?”

“They’re perched on the windowsill outside, that’s where they sleep.”

After these last exchanges we hung up. I did actually stay in the room long enough to see the first glimpse of light outside the window. In another hour the sky over London will slowly take on color too, I thought; Ludwig Kaltenburg will get up, will go over his crowded list of appointments, will see in his mind’s eye the names and faces he’ll meet in the course of the morning. Next to me on the table the telephone gradually emerged from the darkness, a gray box on a diffuse gray background. It was as though I had experienced the very last time a voice would be heard through that receiver.

While a flock of geese took off very low above the gravel shoreline, I told Katharina Fischer in conclusion that I never have looked for Matzke’s bird skins, and when the collection moved to Klotzsche I avoided looking too closely at our gray-headed woodpeckers and night herons.

In the distance we heard a train, on the other side of the Elbe a guard dog barked, the bell of St. Mary’s-by-the-Water was ringing out from Hosterwitz, it was ten o’clock, behind the Elbe Idyll we saw the empty bus disappearing into the deep-green avenue. It was getting cool, and damp, the air was beginning to smell of grass.