Kaltenburg (10 page)

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

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

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

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

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

“Come on, your cocoa is ready.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Reinhold sent him some bird rings?”

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

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