Kaltenburg

1

LATER, WHENEVER WE were all together and thinking back to the fifties, which — since those were our formative years — we increasingly did as we got older, Klara sat quietly, not usually her style. When reminiscences were being exchanged, when we were helping each other out with names, dates, places, Klara fell silent. As we laughed, argued, interrupted each other, I could tell it was upsetting Klara, although nobody else noticed. She hardly seemed to be paying attention, she looked distant while all the others were listening, each outdoing the last with ever more precise details or more audacious stories; Klara held back, as if to stay out of some uncomfortable business.

And that was in spite of the fact that in our circles there was no danger that an evening might be spent conjuring up all the good old East German products, such as Leopek cream for sting relief, or the Fleischfrost range, or films like Mazurka of Love. Nobody talked about Savings Weeks or brought up early GDR slogans like “By the efforts of our hands” or worked in references to horses as “oat-motors”—accompanied by a silly wink — in connection with the rubble-clearing after the war. Klara was under no obligation to listen to “the Dresden reconstruction lion laughing,” let alone people tossing “The enemy is here among us” at her. All the same, she couldn’t stand that sort of evening.

On one occasion, at a party in the house of some slight acquaintances, Klara simply retreated into the corridor for half an hour — the height of bad manners, in her own eyes — in order to escape from a conversation about the seventeenth of June 1953. With the best will in the world, she said later, she simply couldn’t bring herself to go back into the room until the last guest had offloaded his memories of that date. She had stood the whole time within earshot, a few steps away from the door, slightly bemused, with her back to a bookcase, feeling a physical reluctance to breathe the memory-laden air in the drawing room.

Somebody recounted how he was just leaving the bakery on the Wasaplatz when he ran into a column of demonstrators coming from Niedersedlitz and stayed with them all the way to the city center, still clutching his bag of bread rolls; another claimed to have marched alongside the strike leader, Grothaus, while a third had memorized a speech to the strikers and recited whole passages from it. As one picture after another emerged, the event became more distinct in the minds of the participants, finally they could all remember meeting in the crowded Postplatz at midday. A moment of silence followed as each of them mentally reviewed the events, and Klara reappeared in the doorway. Nobody had noticed her leaving the room, nobody had missed her.

On the way home — the gathering had broken up soon afterward — I couldn’t coax much more out of Klara than that she simply couldn’t stand these stories, the poses the narrators struck, as if their memories could help them get a grip, whereas in reality, looking back could only be profoundly disturbing for us, make our present life fall apart.

“We’ve all got our nightmares, I don’t need to be told that,” she declared, as if to close the subject, and “We all made mistakes, every one of us, and I certainly don’t exclude myself.”

As soon as it was evident that the evening was going to descend into reminiscing, Klara would find some pretext for leaving without embarrassing her hosts: exhaustion after a full day, the long trip home, a cold coming on. If she felt too weak to come up with a suitable excuse, she signaled to me that we ought to be going, and I thought of something, citing an excursion, the need to be up before dawn for bird-watching; that was always an unobtrusive way to extract ourselves from the occasion.

If there was no way out, if Klara was asked point-blank what events she particularly associated with the fifties, she categorically insisted that she couldn’t remember anything about that time except that the complete German translation of Proust had appeared. She sounded tired when she said it, not a trace of her pert manner, not a spark of provocation: “Just the Proust, nothing else.”

Nonetheless, the first time she said it she surprised me as much as the others in the group: despite the lack of sparkle in her eyes, I couldn’t tell whether she was joking. A dry, wicked, dark joke, since I knew what memories were associated with the fifties for Klara, for Klara and me.

If anyone failed to grasp that the conversation was repugnant to her, Klara would describe to them in detail how the volumes with their sand-colored covers had reached her hands one by one. This one she had acquired on a visit to West Berlin, that one was lying on the table in the morning on her birthday, two others had emerged from a parcel Klara had thought contained tinned sausages. “The Proust,” that was her memory of the fifties, Klara only ever talked about “the Proust,” for her there was no Captive, no Fugitive, and no Time Regained.

In case the company was not satisfied with this, she went so far as to state that above all it was the famous scene where the narrator washes his hands that had driven her on to read all of Proust, in fact it was the first detailed hand-washing scene in the novel that had initially given her access to this epoch-making work. The lukewarm water in the enamel bowl, whose temperature is checked once more by the grandmother — or is it the maid? — before the narrator is permitted to dip his delicate, waxlike fingers into it, the fragrance of the soap, the lather, the right hand embracing the left, and all the while the boy’s long, wondering look out of the window, before he’s called to the table.

The conversation was moving toward the period following Stalin’s death, the secret speech, on to the doctors’ plot, back to Slánský, and Klara recoiled, it wouldn’t be long before they were looking to her to contribute a remark. She could feel their eyes resting on her, felt the challenge to initiate a diversionary maneuver, listened carefully until she found a key word, the right key word — afterward, nobody could have said how she managed to change the subject so elegantly.

After the first great hand-washing scene, Klara said, she had waited expectantly for any little scene featuring this everyday occurrence, however slight the reference, subordinate clauses, minor characters, one of those innumerable soirées, somebody leaving the company briefly to wash their hands — perhaps the whole secret of Proust lay in such fleeting moments, which the reader had to fill out for himself if he wanted to absorb them. Why, for example, Klara asked, does the painter, receiving an unexpected visit from the narrator, clean his hands with spit rather than turpentine before greeting his guest?

And what lies behind that scene where, after an evening in company, Swann leads Odette out to his coach to take a nocturnal drive through Paris — why is the coachman not on the spot at this moment, why don’t we see him dutifully jumping down from his box to open the carriage door as soon as Swann and Odette appear in the street? There he is popping up behind the horses, embarrassed, muttering, his master doesn’t even deign to glance at him, so the coachman redoubles his efforts to look keen. But Odette and Swann have eyes only for each other, the coachman keeps his hands hidden behind his back, once the pair have got in he acts as though he’s reluctant to touch the door handle, and we, the readers, are the only ones to notice that in this scene Swann’s coachman — for whatever reason — isn’t wearing gloves when he shuts the carriage door from the outside. What was it that he put forward by way of excuse, we ask ourselves, wasn’t it something about “opportunity to wash,” didn’t he say “quickly” and “unfortunately” and “unsuccessfully”?

Wasn’t it in this connection that a formulation had occurred that caused Klara to stumble, something like “just a bit of dirtiness,” hadn’t Swann’s coachman muttered “just a bit of dirtiness,” a phrase that must sound odd to any reader? Was Proust using servant language here, was he descending into a kind of argot? No, it seemed too mannered for that — so perhaps it was just a not very felicitous point in the translation? Nobody had an answer for Klara.

People recalled anxious nights by the radio, tanks in Budapest and grotesquely twisted bodies lying on the torn-up pavements, which handed Klara a key word, enabling her to avoid the question of whether she too — yes, we had — spent sleepless nights sitting by the radio. From the pavements of Budapest — or was it Prague? — she moved effortlessly on within a few sentences to the uneven pavement over which Proust’s narrator once stumbled on his way to a reception. Wasn’t he thinking at that very moment about when he’d last washed his hands, and whether he shouldn’t take the precaution of visiting a toilet before meeting his hostess? A moment in the balance, with quiet restraint ushering in one of those lengthy reflections which leave our hero standing as though frozen in the flux of events, when he almost trips on a paving stone. His hands, his feet, his attention takes a leap, one kind of irritation overlays another, and soon we too are stumbling, straight into the famous description of an unbidden memory.

The talk now dwelled on events nearer home, the demolition of the ruins in Rampische Strasse in 1956, Professor Manfred von Ardenne and the Dresden Club he founded in spring 1957, later known as the Intelligentsia Club — Klara countered by recalling that brief moment, tucked away in an interpolated sentence, where you get the impression that, as if by a prearranged signal, just for two or three seconds the group of young ladies on the beach at Balbec bend down, with their backs to the promenade, to the viewer, as though — unseemly behavior in public — to feel seawater flowing over their hands for once in their lives. Everything is happening at a great distance, the gentle waves, spray, the salty smell, taste, the faint odor of starfish and marine life. Wishing to confirm this sight, you look down again at the receding waves, but the girls have already resumed their afternoon walk, as if nothing had happened. You can’t even be sure the narrator observed the incident, so you’re left alone with the question of how four such refined young ladies could simultaneously, no, how they could get their hands dirty in the first place, perhaps the sand, sticky sweets, perhaps they have been touching the skin of girls, of boys.

Klara could be sure that after such a description her listeners would follow her willingly, and so she went on to talk about the strange passage in Proust where the narrator secretly watches a stranger washing his hands. The scene takes place during the First World War, one of the few set in Paris during this period, at any minute the sirens could sound the alarm, there might be another air raid, but the narrator goes on lurking, peering through a half-open window into an unlit room on the other side of the courtyard, perhaps into a corridor, where a young man in a singlet appears, letting a door close behind him and yielding to the urge to hold his hands under the nearest tap. A rough stone sink, the kind normally used only for filling cleaning buckets, no hand towel, no soap, but the man in the undershirt clearly can’t wait until he has found a toilet.

“There’s something obscene about it,” Klara maintained, after yet another evening of anecdotes about their youth. “I can’t bear it. Something obscene, and something desperate as well, this dogged determination dressed up as chat, as though by talking about the old days you can make yourself innocent.”

Klara couldn’t stand the gravity of these tales, that’s the only way I could explain it to myself. This gravity which gradually disappears the longer a story is turned this way and that, the more details are brought to light, so that in the end a whole quite funny complex of happenings seems to lie behind every tragic event. But because I know how she looks when she sits brooding for days on end at the kitchen table, Klara never needed to explain to me why she escaped into talking about her Proust wherever possible.

2

HAVE YOU HEARD the news?” Four months had elapsed since our chance meeting by Bird Island, we hadn’t spoken to each other in the meantime, when to my surprise I heard the interpreter’s voice on the telephone that afternoon, near and yet unfamiliar. After announcing herself with her full name, she immediately went on to talk about the news, which had just that minute ended with the weather forecast: “Did you know? Your friend Knut Sieverding has died. On Friday. His family announced his death today.”

My instant reaction was a great sadness that in the intervening years I’d had only sporadic contact with Knut, we had kept in touch for the most part only by exchanging Christmas cards, after maintaining a lively correspondence until the end of the eighties, and often visiting each other once the border was open. Now I didn’t even know whether he had died suddenly or after a long, difficult illness, and Katharina Fischer couldn’t enlighten me either.

Klara and I at the Sieverdings in southern Germany, we were coming back from Vienna, I had been to see Ludwig Kaltenburg’s house, where jackdaws were nesting in the chimney, two years after the professor’s death. The birds approached me as trustingly as if they were distant relatives of the Dresden flock. I bolted. We took the next train to Munich. Knut met us at the station. On one of the mild spring evenings that followed, as we sat on the terrace late into the night, I was strangely moved by a photograph showing Knut and the professor on the occasion of an awards ceremony. The diploma is on display, floating in midair against the dark background, the two men are looking at each other and laughing. And yet the viewer is held by a gaze, the fixed stare of a gorilla that appeared to be thrusting itself into the foreground between the two portrait sitters. A stuffed ape, with glass eyes and open jaws, the dark coat, the shine around its nostrils — it makes you think that a memory of Knut Sieverding’s year in the Congo, now in the distant past, had materialized as the negative was being developed.

Knut and I in the Lausitz brown-coal area, Knut and I on the former border strip — but while I was telling the interpreter about our last excursions, a thought was hammering away in my head: “You know nothing about Knut Sieverding in later years, there’s a gap of nearly fifteen years.” I asked Frau Fischer whether she was busy that afternoon, if she’d like to come over for coffee. Then I phoned Klara, who was spending the weekend with friends in Berlin, and told her the news.

In the following two hours I paced up and down the kitchen, fed the sparrows, the titmice, looked out the window at the oak that was shedding ever more leaves, cleared up the desk in my study, couldn’t get it sorted out, let my distracted glance range over the books. Proust had been standing here in the bookcase for almost half a century without my ever touching him. Actually, sometimes when Klara was away I had carefully picked out one of the volumes, opened it, and read a few pages, hurriedly, keeping an ear open as if indulging in a forbidden pleasure, as if I had broken through a protective cordon thrown around the shelf reserved for Proust. I felt like an interloper, I was spying on Klara when I opened at a page that had a bookmark in it, and when I read a passage she had underlined or put an exclamation mark by, I was reading something that was none of my business.

Perhaps Klara would have liked me to read the book, to join in with her enthusiasm for Proust, which had been there since we first met. But to me the novel seemed sacrosanct, Proust was entirely Klara’s thing, and it never occurred to me to read him in order to share him with her. Perhaps that was a mistake. But maybe it was enough for her that when she made certain remarks — half to herself, half to me — while reading passages in the early volumes that I believed I could tell who she was reminded of, who she saw sitting in her parents’ drawing room, who was exchanging a few words in English by the hall stand — people I myself had got to know at the Hagemanns’ but knew even better from Klara’s stories.

Likewise, watching her reading, over time I thought that I could tell which incidents from our life together were passing through her mind’s eye, inevitably and even against Klara’s will when — on holidays, perhaps, or in the short days around the turn of the year — she took the Proust volumes down from their shelf, determined to lose herself in the prose. At such moments, when Klara glanced up from the flow of printed lines, distraught, as if a dangerous insect had distracted her, I vanished as well, I was no longer sitting opposite her at the kitchen table, no longer lying next to her on the beach, but saw myself, without having read more than a few sentences of Proust, being taken back to scenes both of us would prefer to have forgotten long ago.

So it was that I found myself sitting once more, wedged between Klara and Knut at a pub table, in a noisy, smoke-filled hostelry, opposite us Martin and Ulrike, who for some time had no longer wished to be called Ulli. Was it the same day that Knut, after weeks of fevered work, had put the last touches to his Congo commentary and read the text out to us after lunch at the Institute? We hoped to persuade the professor to go with us into town that evening, but he declined: “That’s not a pub, not a cozy tavern you’re trying to lure me into, it’s a dive.” He just wouldn’t listen. “You go, all you young people,” he said, laughing. “You know I’m an old man.” Was that the last time Ludwig Kaltenburg and Martin parted on friendly terms? It’s possible that my memory has seamlessly fused together a whole series of scenes that are separated by many months or even years, it’s possible that the very act of remembering precludes leaving any breathing spaces, and memory only conforms to reality where there is no chance of evading scenes of bewilderment and helplessness.

Klara talked about the young Soviet soldiers in the square that she could see every day from her place in the library. Sometimes one of them would wave when sweeping the parade ground, mending a machine, or standing by the garages and shuffling from one foot to the other, as though, by way of punishment, this child with the pale, narrow face had been banished to the furthest point of the barrack square. But Knut and Martin were feeling too high-spirited to follow such reflections, and all Ulrike could think of saying was, “Let’s not talk about work, please, not today.”

“You’re right.” Klara shook her head and smiled at her sister. She turned to Knut: “In your film, will you be telling the story about how the aardvark tricked you?”

Her hand felt for mine under the table. It was as though she could foresee that this evening was not going to end well.

At some point a couple we didn’t know joined us at our table, with an apologetic gesture, there were no other seats free. They were our age, the woman was wearing a pale-colored suit, not particularly well cut, the man a washed-out shirt and a carelessly knotted, prewar tie. Two people, you think, who had lost their way in the dark and come in here at random, at any rate it didn’t look as though they got out much. When a glass of beer was placed in front of them, they were startled. When there was a racket over by the bar, they turned around timidly and followed with widening eyes the two rough types who had just agreed to go outside to “discuss the matter further,” as they say in these parts, meaning a fistfight.

They were no less amazed to hear us talking about tree pangolins and rhinoceros birds, they must have thought these were fictional animals, and for them the story of Knut turning up unshaven and unwashed after weeks in the tropical rainforest and walking into the lobby of a luxury hotel must have taken place in a part of the world not yet marked on the atlas.

“I know that man,” muttered Klara next to me. Knut had finally turned to the strangers, no, they didn’t usually go to the cinema to see wildlife films, no, they didn’t know what an okapi was, the man asked politely whether he could stand us a drink, and Klara thought, I know that man from somewhere.

Nobody could hear her but me, not Martin, not Ulrike, not the strangers, but just as Knut was about to embark on another anecdote about the Congo, she broke in.

“Excuse me, but didn’t you play the part of a prisoner?”

“A prisoner?”

“Yes, you were there on the truck in the jubilee parade, I remember clearly. As a camp inmate.”

“I didn’t play a camp inmate.”

“Now you’re lying.”

Klara hardly raised her voice, her tone was not accusing, more disappointed, the man was reading Klara’s lips, and then I remembered too, there was a rather plump young man that we noticed at the time, he didn’t dare raise his arm because his jacket was stretched too tight across his shoulders, while the other characters’ prison garb hung loosely about their frames. Yes, I recognized the well-nourished camp inmate, he tried to vindicate himself, said something about “allocated,” he said “duty,” as if he wanted to avoid the term “compulsion.”

“Hermann, I want to leave.”

All at once she was exhausted. There were some things, she said, that simply weren’t right, it didn’t take courage, all you needed was a bit of backbone, and anyway he knew himself how many jubilee participants failed to present themselves at the assembly point, even though they had been told it was their duty to do so. No, I heard him saying, he really wasn’t brave, we were already on our way out, Knut was chasing after us, “Klara, just hang on,” then we stood in the summer night on the pavement, the strangers, Ulrike, Martin, with Knut trying to mediate between the two of them. The man couldn’t take in what had happened. “No, I’ve never been brave,” he repeated, it was the first time I’d heard anyone say such a thing. Klara nodded distractedly, put a hand out, apologized. But for what? She herself had no idea.

On the way home she apologized again, she had ruined everybody’s evening, Knut reassured her, “It’s okay, really,” Martin shrugged his shoulders, “It can happen to anybody,” the two of them consulted, maybe we could drive out for a picnic in the country the following weekend.

I don’t think we actually went on that outing, at least I have no mental picture of the five of us rambling through “Saxon Switzerland,” each with a rucksack on our back. Perhaps Klara or perhaps Ulrike was not very keen on the idea, yes, I reflected as I heard the doorbell ring, perhaps it was the same evening when, after a long silence, Ulrike turned to Klara, as though the moment had come at last to address a sentence to her sister that had been going around in her head for many years: “I don’t understand you anymore.”

There was another ring, and only then did I grasp that the interpreter was waiting at the door. I heard somebody take a deep breath to free himself from the net of images, I left Martin standing there on the pavement as well as Knut, who was looking at the two sisters with a troubled expression, and lost sight of Ulrike too, just as we literally lost sight of her at some point, when she turned away from her family and started a new life with her husband in the north, without spelling out her motives for taking this step, either to her parents or to Klara. It may be that she wanted to move out from Klara’s shadow, or maybe she simply realized one day that the time when she and her sister played together on the swing doors in their nightdresses lay far back in the past.

3

I TOOK KATHARINA FISCHER’S coat, showed her the living room, the kitchen, the view out onto the street, the view over the garden, led her along the book-lined hall to my study. On the desk I had placed a small, well-thumbed book, the cover had a design of white feathers with sand-colored, brown, and blue stripes, from the top edge a stain ran down as far as the title — a cocoa spill? I don’t remember. Colored plates showing native songbirds and their nests, I opened the cover and let Frau Fischer read the inscription: “A book about your small friends, from your parents Christmas 1937.”

She spent a long time studying the illustrations of egg clutches, twigs and wool interlaced, moss, drawn with a fine feel for the play of light and shade, creating an almost three-dimensional effect. I helped her to decipher the names written in old German script, “The Bullfinch,” “The Goldfinch,” “The Siskin,” “The Yellowhammer,” “The Chaffinch,” all perched there on twigs by their nests looking as though they had just preened themselves carefully, as though they had inspected every single feather on their bodies and rearranged each one especially before posing for the drawing. Whether the effect was what the illustrator intended or was the result of the uniform darkening of the paper, the interpreter remarked that all the birds struck her as being both alert and shy; she was particularly impressed by the blackbird, poised over the open nest with feathers slightly spread and tail fanned out, as though it had spotted the observer at that precise moment.

We talked about the relationship between the phases in which blackbirds are seen and heard everywhere and those during which they lead a secret life, we talked about diurnal and nocturnal animals, trust and timidity. About how one of the great tits here on the balcony, having turned up one afternoon in early August and without hesitation landed on my outstretched hand to take the proffered sunflower seed, had declined to accept any more feed for the last few days. The way that, from the edge of the balcony, as if it felt sorry, as if it were as surprised by its own fear as I was, it eyed this person who had suddenly become a stranger to it. If I hadn’t known that great tits become tame again in the spells of freezing cold weather, then perhaps this familiar young bird might have struck me as weird.

“And you really haven’t ever found out how Ludwig Kaltenburg’s jackdaws died?”

As a matter of fact this question came up early on in the conversation, in fact with her very first words of greeting the interpreter started to draw me — or actually both of us — into an inquiry. Although initially it wasn’t about the jackdaws at all. When I brought the coffee back to the study, where Frau Fischer had settled down on the couch that was once part of the inventory of the Loschwitz Institute villa, she inquired again about Knut, about Martin, about the period of silence between Kaltenburg and me.

In those six or eight years during which I never wrote the professor a single line, never telephoned him, would have done anything in the world to avoid meeting him — to do so would have been impossible anyway — it was Knut Sieverding who regularly supplied me with news of Ludwig Kaltenburg. The duck colony at the new zoological station had now grown to about four hundred birds. The research projects were dragging on. Environmental protection was becoming more and more central to his activities, big photos in all the papers, the previous day the professor had even appeared on the TV news because he had taken part in a sit-down blockade, old Ludwig Kaltenburg with a beaming face in the midst of young eco-activists, his attitude to the power of the state as stubborn as ever. Appearances. Speeches. Interviews. Once again the professor had used the opportunity to demonstrate his negotiating skills by extracting from the Austrian federal chancellor, in a personal discussion, a promise to help save the Danube water meadows. Knut once sent a postcard from Madagascar: “I can’t help thinking what it would be like if you and the professor could be here to admire the amazing diversity of wildlife with me.”

And one day, as I was engrossed in studying our gray-headed goldfinches, Martin Spengler suddenly turned up on the doorstep as if from nowhere, leaned across the table, and said, “Reminds me of a piece I was once planning for Venice.”

That must have been in 1980. Martin, who was already world-famous by that time, bowed and introduced himself with a strange, Dutch-sounding name. He had come from Amsterdam, the sole male participant in a tourist group which, after an intensive sightseeing itinerary, was now enjoying a coffee break, allowing Martin ostensibly to take a stroll along the Elbe while actually visiting me in the Ornithological Collection. He wanted to see everything, every drawer containing skins, the nests, the mounts, wanted to meet my colleagues, was astonished by the pigeon’s nest behind the toilet, admired the snapping turtles in their aquarium in the corridor. Nothing was beneath his notice, no detail was lost on him, the tinned milk, the chipped Meissen cups, the coating of a tabletop, the curtain at a little window overlooking the courtyard, the smell in the stairwell — Martin soaked up these impressions as if it were high time he revised his idea of art.

Just as it’s difficult to identify a bird when you see it in surroundings where you wouldn’t expect it, so it didn’t occur to any of my colleagues, nor to his traveling companions, nor to the tour guide, nor to the border officials, to suspect that the old friend unexpectedly calling on me was the famous Martin Spengler, although his clothes, his figure, and his posture differed in no way from his usual appearance. He hadn’t even bothered to disguise himself by growing a beard or wearing glasses, he knew he could get by perfectly well as an art-minded tourist among other art-minded tourists.

The art historians, on the other hand, wonder to this day why Martin Spengler’s late work bears so many obvious traces of local life in this area. Noting the dull, earthy, and industrial colors, the biological references, the worn but almost lovingly assembled functional objects of his later installations, they have interpreted them as imaginary extensions of 1950s perceptions into the present, but so far nobody has thought of looking at the register of the Dresden Interhotel, the Newa, for a supposed Dutchman signing in under a pseudonym.

He stayed for about two hours, which seemed like a whole long day to me, we said not a word about complicated travel arrangements or nerve-racking border checks, not a word about the worrying condition of the building, the ruins around us, or the miserable appearance of the city in general. We were completely wrapped up in the world of the collection’s holdings, every drawer revealed new natural marvels, the blue jays, the shore larks, the blood-red, white-spotted parts of the strawberry finches, and under Martin’s thorough scrutiny, alert to every shade of gray and brown, even the close-packed rows of house sparrows, whose live counterparts were regarding us from the windowsill, radiated a glow that few people ever notice.

“These faces — every sparrow here has an individual face,” cried Martin, he exclaimed, “What I’d really like to do is take the whole case and set it up in a gallery.”

It was also thanks to Martin that I started writing to Ludwig Kaltenburg again. When I showed Martin the great auk among the exhibits recently returned from the Soviet Union, he stood speechless before the bird, reverent, overwhelmed, stunned, torn this way and that between the different eras. Finally he stepped up closer, viewing the great auk from all sides, stammering, “He must have been pleased,” and again, respectfully, “It must have given him enormous pleasure to hear about this,” and although I knew what he meant, I wasn’t quite sure whether his respectful tone related to the great auk or to Professor Kaltenburg.

That same evening I took an envelope, addressed it to Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg, Vienna, Austria, and placed in it a carefully folded sheet of paper on which I had written nothing but “The great auks are back.”

I was glad at the time I had taken this step, and I’m even gladder now. Otherwise I would never have heard about the doubts the professor had to struggle with in his final years, nor about the worries he probably did not care to divulge to anyone around him. Many things never went beyond the letters, letters to a very distant country, letters to somebody who had never become a disciple of the great Ludwig Kaltenburg.

“I’m sure you’ll let me have a detailed description soon,” he replied. “Meanwhile, it’s reassuring to hear that all the exhibits are clearly back in place, insofar as they survived the war unscathed, and weren’t scattered all over the landscape by disappointed looters in the first days of peace. And don’t ask me how I am. You know I’ll always make an effort to appear cheerful for your sake.”

I respected his wish, and so it was only through incidental remarks in the course of our correspondence that I managed to piece together some idea of the professor’s physical condition. For example, when I asked him whether he still loved to spend his days in the open air as he had always done, he wrote back that those long walks in the country, where his animals had always kept him company, were now a thing of the past for good and all. For more than two years he had been confined to a wheelchair and mostly stayed indoors, or in the garden if the weather was fine. The less mobile you were, the more sensitive you became to the temperature. Storms, rain, and blizzards — he saw them now only from the terrace window.

“I have started getting rid of old documents,” he wrote, “but don’t worry, I have no intention of discarding incriminating material, as you might assume, what matters to me is completing my public break with ideas which I supported for many years without being aware of the madness that underlay them.

“Everybody wants to protect me,” he wrote. “But when I listen to my protectors it often gives me the creeps, as though I were surrounded by people who doggedly insist there’s no conclusive proof of evolution. Even the noise, the noise they create, you know, that’s a betrayal in itself.”

My father had always been wonderful to argue with, wrote Kaltenburg, without my raising the subject. “Your father was never a National Socialist — any more than I was — he had no connection with those people and refused to have any truck with them. Hence the misunderstanding, our quarrel, if you like, when I joined the Party without sharing its convictions. No, I certainly never appeared at your place wearing a Party button in my lapel, your parents would have shunned me a lot sooner if I had. It’s always puzzled me how he eventually found out. Somebody must have reported it to him, some malicious person to whom our friendship was a thorn in the side. He had a hard time with his university colleagues, in fact he once confided to me that he was afraid they would stop at nothing to get rid of him.”

When I cautiously followed this up with a question, he responded, “Your parents were deliberately frozen out. I was very sharply attacked at the time for persisting in visiting you. As a small boy you won’t have noticed the depressed mood in your family. Your house seemed desolate, and I almost think that was why your parents acquired their first birds. Yes, they did it for you, though not for the reason you’ve always assumed. No, an atmosphere of death — I wouldn’t call it that today.”

Certainly, he wrote in a letter at Christmas 1988, sooner or later, like him, I would become aware that at an early point in my life, almost too early to identify, I had involuntarily begun to discriminate in terms of human and animal encounters. “Your early confrontation with a bird, for example, in whose company you spent an afternoon in your drawing room, will be strictly separated in your memory from the following events, the entry of your nanny or your parents on the scene.” Every zoologist, maintained Kaltenburg, had a similar story to tell. True, our mentors also stood out in our mind’s eye, the figures under whose direction we channeled and refined our animal observations, but such a mentor came into the picture only as a secondary step, when his attention was attracted by a young person absorbed in the world of animals.

Perhaps you could even say that at first every child makes a sharp distinction, animals here, human beings there, two worlds that are interwoven in a mysterious way that the child hardly recognizes as yet, as though there were openings somewhere through which you could slip from one to the other. Except that most people, especially those who confuse retrospective self-observation with the transfiguration of their own youth, can later not remember the time when they regarded people and animals equally with a mixture of curiosity and anxiety, as though it was very far from decided in which of the two spheres you would eventually make your own life.

You could even observe this phenomenon in animals, Ludwig Kaltenburg had discovered: “The jackdaw which courts its human friend at lunchtime, trying to stuff mealworm mash into his ears, and then flies off with its friends, the hooded crows.”

I had expected Kaltenburg to return to the subject of his Dresden jackdaw colony, I knew it preoccupied him as much as ever, I heard from the people around him that he brought it up more and more often, but it was never mentioned in his letters to me. When he did describe to me the distinctive behavior of his favorite jackdaw, Taschotschek, for me it was a sign: the professor did not have long to live.

4

DID THEY EVER find out how the professor’s jackdaws were poisoned?” she asked at this point. “And by whom?” Not for certain. There’s been plenty of speculation over the years, of course, there have been suspects — Eberhard Matzke, no less, personally ordered them to be killed, so thought the professor when he was already in the West and wanted to believe in a conspiracy aimed at getting rid not just of Reinhold but of him too. In his less dark hours he was inclined to see it as a mere oversight: stupidly, his jackdaw flock had fallen victim to an illegal pest-control operation carried out by some collective farm organization.

“Is it difficult to poison a jackdaw, then?”

Not at all, and it’s happening all the time. The odd bird had already unaccountably disappeared in previous years, after all. In the nineteenth century the farmers put out poisoned voles to deal with the crow problem, the corvids were regarded as nothing but pests, and jackdaws mingling with the great flocks of foraging crows were affected too. In Kaltenburg’s day, when bird poisoning was on the increase again, there’s no doubt they had begun large-scale experimentation in secret to develop plant protection through poisoned grain crops.

“Poisoned grain?”

Grain that had been contaminated with an agent called Hora. At the end of October 1964, for example, it was openly planted near Fürstenwalde along with drilled winter wheat. Right up until the following March dead birds were being collected from the area, though in fact very few of them were jackdaws or crows. The majority, over a hundred specimens, were skylarks that had no doubt been looking for food in the fields as the thaw began.

“Large-scale anti-crow measures — sounds terrible.” Katharina Fischer shook her head. “And surely that sort of thing was prohibited?”

It might never have been discovered if ornithologists on their routine rounds had not come across an unusually high number of dead birds. Late in February 1984, at a crow roosting place by the former gravel pit near Ichtershausen, forty-five jackdaws and eighty-five rooks were found. Subsequent investigations showed that the Rudisleben plant production collective had illegally soaked wheat and corn in the plant protectant Dimethoate and scattered the grain across the freshly plowed fields, which eventually led to the death of over a thousand birds.

“So poisoning operations took place mainly in winter?”

Yes.

“And yet according to your account, Kaltenburg’s jackdaws died in late summer?”

That’s true. And at that time of year you don’t see massive raids by crows. What always matters is protecting the winter sowing.

“Therefore, if I’ve got it right, we can’t be looking at either plant protectants or any other way of treating grain? Perhaps you’ve got to approach the question from a different angle altogether, and consider who had close contact with Kaltenburg’s jackdaws.”

Too many to allow the circle to be gradually narrowed down. Countless people. Workers at the Institute. Visitors. Neighbors. And strangers never seen by anybody but the jackdaws themselves.

“Is it conceivable that the jackdaws were poisoned by a stranger?”

It’s possible they were. Jackdaws are pretty inquisitive birds, after all, willing to engage with new people and new situations — but I’m not quite convinced. I’m assuming that Ludwig Kaltenburg’s jackdaws were duped by somebody who was around them every day.

“So we can rule out Eberhard Matzke, then.”

After all that man has hatched up, I’d be the last person to want to defend him. But by that point he had long since achieved all his aims; he had cut Reinhold out and had succeeded in deeply humiliating Kaltenburg as well by harshly rejecting the peace offer from Dresden, that is to say, by behaving as though the offer never existed. When I think what care Ludwig Kaltenburg took over planning for the peace negotiations, how important he thought it was to consider every possible reaction on Matzke’s part. In fact he didn’t even want to divulge precisely what his offer consisted of, he thought it essential that nobody should know the substance of the forthcoming talks, this was a matter between him and Eberhard Matzke above all. No doubt he still had Knut’s objections ringing in his ears when he decided not to go to Berlin himself — but none of his precautions did any good in the end.

He handed me a pile of documents. “Krause will drive you, and he’s going to drop you off at the Tierpark, all right? I promised to send over a bundle of papers, that’s this large envelope here, don’t get it mixed up with the smaller envelope you’re going to give to colleague Matzke in the afternoon. You know everybody there at the zoo, go straight to the boss, I’ve told them you’re coming, pass on our greetings, get the business over as quickly as possible without seeming impolite. Then make your own way to the Invalidenstrasse. Don’t worry about Krause lurking around, he won’t wait for you — when we’re in Berlin he always goes to see his sister, he gets well fed there and he can shoot his mouth off about how he’s treated in Dresden. He’ll pick you up again at the Tierpark at five o’clock on the dot.”

There’s nothing to report about my appointment with Eberhard Matzke. He didn’t even offer me a seat. He laid the envelope aside without thanking me. He just muttered, “Funk, Funk — and you say I supervised your microscope work?” as though he couldn’t remember a thing. I was idiotic enough to mention his bike, his cardigan, Martin Spengler in the practical lab, I wanted to smooth the path for him, and all the while I had no idea that I was looking into the face of an SS man.

I spent only about ten minutes in his office, and I still recall how surprised I was not to run into any of the museum assistants, either in the corridor or on the stairs. When Kaltenburg’s limousine arrived at the Tierpark, I had been walking up and down the path for more than an hour. Krause switched the heater on.

“Did he quiz you?” the interpreter wanted to know.

He wouldn’t have been Krause if he hadn’t. But you had to get used to his way of questioning. He dispensed with question marks. We chatted about the weather: “Yes, it gets pretty cool after sunset,” he nodded, offered me a cigarette, an S-Bahn train passed by, I sat at the back of the limousine and let myself be driven to Dresden. We discussed Kaltenburg’s attitude to vodka, vodka was always said to harden you against the cold, but the professor was strictly opposed to the usual practice of giving zoo animals alcohol with their drinking water in winter. “I reckon he’s right there,” said Krause, glancing at the rear mirror, “Think of that nasty business last year,” after drinking several bottles of vodka an elephant in the Moscow zoo had torn a radiator from the wall and turned on its keeper.

Thanks to Kaltenburg’s careful planning I was well prepared for this bait. I praised Krause’s driving, remarked yet again how well the heating worked in the car, and asked him a personal question: which did he prefer, vodka or mulled wine? “Mulled wine, the way my wife makes it,” he answered promptly — and that was the end of a cunningly contrived attempt to find out something about what he thought had been my stay of several hours in the Tierpark.

We tore along in the outside lane of the dark autobahn. “Pull yourself together,” I said to myself. “Don’t tell him anything about Kaltenburg, don’t tell him anything about your visit to Matzke.” Then it went quiet. Krause was concentrating on the road, nothing out there but night, I was feeling drowsy.

“Did you drop off to sleep?” asked Frau Fischer. “Not a bad way of avoiding the chauffeur’s probing.”

Perhaps I actually did fall asleep. No more steady hum from the engine, no rumbling as we drove over the joints between the slabs in the road. I heard Ludwig Kaltenburg’s jackdaws calling quietly. I sat stretched out on the back seat, my hands resting on the upholstery, I blinked up at the roof of the car and heard in turn the various gradations of jackdaw calls, depending on whether the birds were in a mood to fly off or felt the urge to head homeward. I opened my eyes again and looked out at the landscape. There was no landscape. The jackdaws went on calling. I looked around in the car, the rear shelf, the floor beneath my feet, the armrests, then somebody said, “Mating calls are really quite easy to imitate.”

Krause was making jackdaw noises. Or was it the professor I was hearing? Yes, the chauffeur wasn’t so much imitating jackdaws as imitating Ludwig Kaltenburg’s jackdaw calls. In the rear mirror I saw Krause nodding. He was obviously pleased to be able to continue our conversation over the last fifty kilometers. Of course you could sometimes see when the professor was worried or a particular person was bothering him — he, Krause, could tell that not from his expression, nor from any bad-tempered tone of voice, but simply from the fact that the professor was spending even more time with his fish than usual. He had never in his life met anyone like Professor Kaltenburg, although he had got to know quite a few famous zoologists over the years. He started listing names, I could see who he was going to name next — so far he had never yet seen Professor Doktor Eberhard Matzke in Loschwitz. “Follow Kaltenburg’s example and wear a neutral expression,” I said to myself. “Pull yourself together, for goodness’ sake, you’ve got to distract him, do what Ludwig Kaltenburg does, talk about animals.”

I told Krause about the jackdaws. But this may have been exactly the wrong move.

“And now you’re asking yourself whether that was the wrong move,” said Katharina Fischer at the same moment that the thought occurred to me.

It was possible that I had put an idea into his head.

“Even if we assume that this man was responsible for poisoning the jackdaws, people like that arrive at such notions sooner or later without any outside help, and you shouldn’t reproach yourself,” the interpreter protested. “Whether he was just nursing the desire for revenge because he thought Kaltenburg despised him, or whether he was brooding over his reports, disappointed that the professor wouldn’t indulge in any disparaging remarks about the regime or the closing of the border which Krause could have passed on to curry favor for himself — seen in a sober light,” she declared, “that has nothing to do with you.”

It was to keep Krause at a distance that I told him about the jackdaws. “Yes, they love cherries,” he said, “I know that.”

Even better: redcurrants.

“Really?”

Hadn’t he ever watched that game involving the little shed butting onto the villa, a game whose attractions nobody could quite make out but which seemed to give Kaltenburg as much pleasure as it gave his jackdaws? “I must admit, I don’t often go there, that raven is always hanging about.” But the raven wasn’t interested in slipping into the shed. The jackdaws, by contrast, were always intensely curious about what might be hidden in this lean-to. But Ludwig Kaltenburg couldn’t bear to see them coming out disappointed each time because there was nothing new for them to find, so several times a day around harvest time he hid redcurrants among the clutter.

I can’t remember now, did Krause seem surprised, or did he make out that it was coming back to him that he himself had once observed this odd form of bonding between man and bird? We would have talked at some length about other things; for example, Krause was far more interested, or so it seemed to me at the time, in the function of the yellow spot that magpies have on their third eyelid than in the question of currants, black or red. In any case, as far as the chauffeur was concerned, what the professor did with his animals in order to study their behavior was totally suspect, and the goings-on at the tool shed must simply have confirmed his opinion. Nonetheless, talking to Katharina Fischer now, it was above all this particular story about the jackdaws that sprang to mind.

I was tired when Krause dropped me off at home, and I was — I admit — just a little proud: not a syllable about Matzke and the peace offer. Kaltenburg was waiting with Klara in the kitchen, as we had arranged — in Loschwitz, they might have wondered what was so important about my trip to Berlin that it kept us talking late into the night. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much to tell Kaltenburg. It’s possible that at the time I was still convinced matters would come out right in the end, but I think Klara could see that my meeting with Eberhard Matzke had not exactly turned out well. The professor enjoyed his dinner, he said, “Difficult, difficult,” and “We shall see,” looking at me across the table with a look that you reserve for an ally. There was no mention of the jackdaws that evening, or redcurrants, or least of all Kaltenburg’s driver.

5

FINALLY, ON THE WAY to collect her coat, we passed the Proust once again, and casting a last glance at the volumes, Katharina Fischer inquired whether I wasn’t a little hurt when Klara maintained that all she could remember when she thought of the fifties — our early days together — was the newly translated, complete À la Recherche.

No, Klara certainly didn’t want to forget our early years, didn’t think of them as having no value in her memory. What there was, though, unforeseeably, time and again throughout the decades, was fits of jealousy, mixed with wistfulness, which Klara would have experienced as much as I did — not jealousy of a person, but of a world which belongs exclusively to the other, an inner world in which they move alone, can only move alone, and to which at times they devote themselves with the kind of dedication, of patience, which their partner too might well love to possess at that moment. Therein lay the pang, that was the Proust, and that’s another reason why I never touched him.

And wistfulness, because we knew we couldn’t accompany each other into the other’s world. For a companion is surprised at phenomena which in terms of that world are accepted as self-evident, asks questions where they ought not to be asked, tries to engage the other person in conversation when they should be doing nothing but observing. If, on the other hand, you take on the task of guiding your loved one through this world, you’ll find yourself concentrating more on your partner than on the things around, you’ll want to point out details to them that they ought to be discovering for themselves, and you’ll reveal connections which you yourself will begin to doubt again as soon as you put names to them.

Slight disturbances. First misunderstandings. Everything needs to be explained. At some point the mystery will begin to retreat step by step from your inner world, and with its retreat the need to explore this world decreases. Soon you start to enter it only as a matter of habit. But we couldn’t have borne such emptiness, such loss, whether alone or together. So we resigned ourselves to the fact that the other person seemed submerged for days, weeks even, in his or her own world, barely accessible, as if he or she would never surface again. That was our pact. That’s how we protected each other. That’s what held us together.

We spent hour after hour at the kitchen table, Klara immersed in her Proust, I in my ornithological writings, surrounded by a succession of members of Parisian high society and representatives of all the bird families scattered across the globe. It is conceivable that over the years some of the individuals populating these inner spaces might have met, despite their differing origins and nature, on the edges of our world, far out there, without our being able to witness their encounters. I believed in such encounters when Klara said she was surprised by the transformation of the blondschopf, the “fair-head” she knew from Schottlaender’s version, into the Goldspatz, the little golden sparrow in the new German translation. Together we reflected on whether there was some real bird lurking behind the original expression in the French, perhaps a yellowhammer, a citril finch, or maybe a canary — and it struck me that Klara may have come across the Goldspatz on the very same evening that I was preoccupied with the earliest form of canary, Serinus canaria, the wild canary, and its distribution. But she had not interrupted me, the two birds did no more than recognize each other from a distance, and a little later, when Klara was observing a young woman going on a journey with her “young linnets,” the Goldspatz and the wild canary were no longer acquainted with each other.

The same thing happened to Klara when she couldn’t help thinking about the “pitch-black jay feathers” on the narrator’s head which he smoothes down, which refuse to lie flat, and which he has a young maidservant admire, while I was telling her how many subspecies of jay there are, each distinguished by the most subtle characteristics. And Albertine’s laugh, which sometimes sounds like little cries and at other times resembles the cooing of pigeons — it’s possible that when I tried to reconstruct how, independently of each other, Columba junoniae and Columba bollii conquered the Canary Islands and made them their living space, that rather indecorous female laugh accompanied me.

Indeed, it seemed from time to time that the paths of related people and animals were crossing in our kitchen knowing nothing about each other. The figure of Moreau, for example, whom Klara suspected of harboring a secret of some sort, and whom she held on to for far too long, though he is granted only one brief appearance in the novel, could have been a distant cousin or the late uncle of the ornithologist of the same name, when we sat together at the table reading and the kitchen beyond the lamplight lay in darkness, where nothing moved except shadows. There between the door and the sink a certain Monsieur A. J. Moreau handed the opera-loving narrator his ticket for a gala evening, while Reginald E. Moreau, without noticing the two figures frozen in a strange attitude, crossed the room as he followed the red-breasted flycatcher, the greenish warbler, and the arctic warbler en route from distant Asia toward the west, across Siberia, northern Russia, and Finland as far as Sweden, where no memory remained of their origins in India or Malaysia.

On our trip to Vienna, when we visited the Natural History Museum and were at last standing in front of the twin eagles that Ludwig Kaltenburg had always wanted to show me, I experienced — and so did Klara, as she later confessed — an almost indescribable moment in which I couldn’t have said whether everything around me was slipping out of kilter or whether for the first time in ages I was filling my lungs with air right down to their finest artery branches. And we both felt that these mounted sea eagles, these sad-looking birds of prey with their drooping wings and bowed necks, were imbued with something. Was it a threat, a dark premonition, an unrealizable hope from a long-gone past? We found it hard to be more precise about our impression.

It no longer even seemed necessary to put a name to what we were leaving behind by the time we moved out of Room XXX into the stairwell and it dawned on Klara that the Crown Prince Rudolf whom Professor Kaltenburg had obviously mentioned often, judging by how frequently I talked to Klara about him, must be the same figure that she had known for nearly forty years as Archduke Rudolf, without ever connecting the two. The melancholy heir to the throne, passionately interested in bird life, who died in dubious circumstances on January 30, 1889, and who used to argue with his friend Alfred Edmund Brehm, on their deer-stalking expeditions in the marshy woods by the Danube at Draueck, about whether the Steinadler and the Goldadler are two different types of golden eagle or just different colorations of the same species: Rudolf is twice mentioned in passages of Proust that are chronologically far apart.

6

THE INTERPRETER ALREADY had her coat on when she announced she was now determined to read Proust’s novel, about which, after a few failed attempts to tackle him, she was as ignorant as I was. And she knew in advance that when she was reading him she would always think back to our conversations over the past six months. Mind you, I warned her, as far as the hand-washing scenes were concerned, she shouldn’t expect too much — they don’t exist. If Katharina Fischer really does pick up her Proust and not put it down until she reaches the final sentences, she will find that at no point in the novel does a character close a window, say “Good morning,” or wash his hands. Klara had already revealed as much to me during our first boating trip in the Great Garden.

“Not once?”

Not once.

The interpreter laughed. We shook hands, she got into her car, I watched her go until the taillights disappeared around the corner. I cleared up. At exactly the moment, by the clock, when Klara must have been getting on the train in Berlin.

I can see myself again on an early mid-November morning sitting alone in an unheated carriage smelling of yesterday’s cigarette smoke in a train standing at one of the outlying platforms of the Dresden main station. Feverish, still in my coat after being torn from a deep sleep, still barely conscious, I had left the house early and was now waiting endlessly for the train to set off for Berlin, on my way to an appointment about which I remember nothing except my half-sleep-drugged, half-impatient waiting while the sun rose over the city.

From the Ostragehege district dark spots are moving through the dawn light, the crows have left their roosting places and landed on a builder’s crane, whose arm stretches far out across the roof of the main concourse. They’re casting an early-morning eye over the inner city, more birds are constantly arriving, joining their fellows on the latticework of girders, they inspect the Wiener Platz and Petersburger Strasse, Fritz Löffler Strasse, Budapester, Strehlener and Prager Strasse, before work begins on the building site below. The crane operator doesn’t disturb them as he climbs up the tower and into his cabin, shutting the door behind him. A circular saw swings on the suspension cable in the morning wind.

Not until the arm of the crane slowly sweeps to one side do the crows take to the air. I follow their flight across the roof of the station, the platforms, the November-dulled green of the park. The continuous breaking away from the formation, the little pursuits, the way individual crows drop out, wheel around, looking to slot in again, as though each morning they had to reassert that the skills they were practicing yesterday until the hour of sunset have not been lost overnight, as if they could shake off sleep only through their play.

Now a crow is heading toward the imposing building on the other side of the embankment, fluttering as it nears the dark stripe of crows marking off the clear composition of the facade, with its large windows, against the sky. At the instant the crow settles on the parapet, the black line is torn apart at one point, the bird’s close-packed fellows become agitated, and I can hear somebody calling out, “We’re not in Dresden here,” I can hear Ludwig Kaltenburg, laughing: “We’re in Moscow, can’t you see?”

There stands the professor on the roof of the Institute for Transport Studies, bending his knees, leaning over, spreading his arms, he begins to run, slowly straightening up and croaking at the same time. Most of the crows observe this performance without moving, just here and there a bird is infected by Kaltenburg’s flying motions and follows him, as though to humor him. The crows commandeered the building shortly after it was completed, the city pest-control people didn’t know what to do about it, even the Society for Sport and Technology turned out to be helpless, Kaltenburg was called in, offering to try to tempt the birds away from the building.

He’s not going to pull it off. He makes another round of the roof, but he can’t disperse them, the first crows are already returning inquisitively from the station, Kaltenburg is attracting the birds. He could see it as a defeat, but he regards it as a triumph, his last carefree winter in the city—“They’re simply familiar with this architecture”—his breath clouding in front of his face—“and why would you want to chase them away when you know they come from the Soviet Union? We should welcome them every year, our feathered friends, and joyfully allow them whatever space they want.”

I have opened the window. Soon a taxi will pull up in front of the house, Klara will get out carrying her small suitcase, glance upward, and spot me up here. The air smells like snow.

With sluggish wingbeats a single crow moves through the light flurry of snowflakes.

They come from Siberia, from the Urals, the Baltic, and with the approaching cold once more this year they will gather in the Elbe valley. Hundreds of rooks, along with carrion crows, hooded crows, jackdaws, will form huge clouds of birds that will pulsate above us, fray at the edges, then reform as patches of black.