Kaltenburg (13 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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