Kaltenburg (15 page)

Whenever he noticed that I wasn't even up to feeding the animals, he would throw on his jacket and “Out we go, down to the Elbe,” or, if the weather wasn't good enough for a birding expedition, “I'll get the Opel out of the garage.”

Our outings in the car were called “induction by personal inspection.” I can remember the smell of calf leather in the little sports car, remember the way Kaltenburg sat next to me holding the wheel firmly with both hands, concentrating on the road. On the spare seat there was always a pile of books and brochures; I reached back with my left hand, read to the professor from the lives of famous ornithologists, while he chauffeured us to their birthplaces and homes, to the sites of their activity. Thus Kaltenburg once took me on a whole-day excursion down the Elbe to Köthen, to see the Ziebigk estate, Naumann's place. We drove to Renthendorf to see the Brehms' house. To Waldheim, where Maikammer was born. To Reichenbach in the Vogtland. To Waldenburg. I can hardly recall anything about the town of Greiz, but on the other hand I have the clearest memory of a portrait of the
pâtissier
Carl Ferdinand Oberländer, who became addicted to collecting native and exotic birds. His expression seems to betray grief and melancholy, the furrowed brow, around the eyes, the mouth: it won't be long before his passion drives him to ruin, he will have to sell his wonderful collection of mounts.

Once, in the most glorious weather, we roamed for a whole day through the landscape of Moritzburg with its many pools, we could have made countless sightings, but Kaltenburg was intent on one thing only, finding a particular pond where, as he said, Hans Steingruber had begun his career. He had been cycling past this spot on a day in March 1923 and had seen two coral-red beaks glowing on the water. Kaltenburg stomped through the reeds on the bank: “At that time he was your age,” and red-crested pochards had not been spotted for more than seventy years. Nobody was willing to believe Steingruber, even Reinhold in Berlin was skeptical when the young man came to see him. No,
Netta rufina
in Moritzburg, that must have been a faulty sighting, he was certain of it, Reinhold, the greatest ornithologist of our time.

In retrospect the outings could be seen simply as preparation for meeting live people. The “induction by personal inspection” continued in Loschwitz, costing the professor no effort at all, since authorities from all over the world found their way to him unbidden.

At the same time, Ludwig Kaltenburg could be quite prone to moods, that is to say, I saw him getting irritated above all when people thoughtlessly disturbed his most intimate moments together with animals. He seemed open to everyone, you could have got him out of bed at any time of night to share a sighting with him, yet he often reacted harshly to some annoyance if it came at the wrong moment—a new colleague who wasn't yet familiar with the aquarium wing, a roofer finally arriving to replace a row of shingles on the gable end of the summerhouse.

The first time Reinhold visited the Institute, Kaltenburg happened to be at a difficult point, trying to get birds to follow him, an exercise that stretched over several days because some young jackdaws of that generation were not always ready to fly behind him from room to room. He walked down the corridor, into the kitchen, out again, into his study—and forgot that Reinhold was expected.

I had been hanging around outside the house since early morning, curious to see this man who had inspired so many ornithologists. In the background there was a succession of noises: calls, stamping, flapping of wings. More calls. Silence. A contented murmuring. You could follow progress with the new brood in the garden sound by sound. Then the limousine drew up in the driveway. Krause walked around the car, quickly ran a sleeve over the mudguard, opened the rear door, and stood to attention looking into the middle distance: a wiry older gentleman emerged, to me he looked about eighty, although at the time Reinhold was only in his early sixties. I greeted the visitor and took him up to the first floor. Reinhold was far too astonished to be dismayed that his reception was not exactly friendly: “It's not half past twelve already, is it?” Kaltenburg's voice, sharp, because we were getting in his way between cloakroom and bedroom. “Didn't we say half past twelve?”

We ducked, a young bird flew along the corridor, Reinhold just shook his head, smiling, and let me show him around the grounds of the Institute. Whatever I was describing to him, he scrutinized the animals as though ascertaining the facts for himself, and every second I thought he was going to interrupt me: “Monk parrot, did you say? That's impossible. You probably weren't even born when the last monk parrots of the Loschwitz breeding colony left the city.”

Two hours later Ludwig Kaltenburg seemed like a different man, he was friendliness personified, was generous with flattering remarks to his guest, and even formally begged his pardon. But Reinhold wouldn't hear a word of it, saying he had known Kaltenburg far too long to be put out: “My dear Ludwig, I would have been more bothered if you had given me priority over your jackdaws.”

I experienced such outbreaks too, but Kaltenburg never felt that my presence disturbed him when communing with his animals.

One autumn afternoon—Kaltenburg's first autumn in Dresden—with terrible wind and rain, the villa was silent, and there was silence too as I stepped into the hall, all living creatures had retreated from the weather. Everything in the house was geared to a system that finely balanced the animals' requirements, nearly forty years' experience had gone into the appearance of rooms where the untrained eye would at first have seen nothing but pure chaos. In one room, for example, the furniture stood a little way away from the walls—behind it somewhere was the den of an animal which only Kaltenburg may ever have caught sight of. In another room incredible heaps of lumber, tables and chairs all mixed up, empty book covers—this had been the favorite room of a capuchin monkey long since departed for the zoo, and now the hamsters seemed to feel particularly comfortable in there. Next came a bare, sparse room, the opposite of the last one, in one corner a fine carpet of sand: this was where the timid quails liked to retire. Something Kaltenburg had learned early on about rooms used for nesting was that there should always be the same fixed distance in centimeters between fireplace and cupboard, and he had maintained this ever since a hamster had developed, unbeknown to anyone, a mountaineer's “back and footing” technique to climb to the top of a cupboard and make its nest out of old documents. No ceiling lights anywhere, but unlike the curtains, curtain rails had been left in place in every room; the finches had to have suitable roosting places, after all.

The handrails up the stairs—perches for exotic birds. The carpets and runners—less decoration than thread supplies for the ducks to fall back upon when nest-building. The curtains that originally hung in the drawing room—they never came back from the laundry. A fragile system designed to meet the needs of the animals as much as the human inhabitants—and yet it looked as though Kaltenburg took a secret delight in testing the capacity of the system to destruction, as though every time he introduced a new species of animal into the house he was expecting his so-far-proven system to collapse.

I stood in the study doorway, and no, it wasn't my father's room, there sat Ludwig Kaltenburg at his desk, in front of him a cup of tea, a pile of loaves, and an open newspaper. He didn't look up. Tearing off chunk after chunk from a white loaf, he held the pieces aloft next to him and let them drop. He wasn't disturbed by my arrival, and neither were the two dozen ducks, hardly a glance, just their quiet clucking as they waited patiently by the desk for the next bite of bread to come—they could count on it—from the hand of their master. I didn't try to tell myself the ducks knew me so well by then that I didn't bother them, it was just that they knew nothing could happen to them in Kaltenburg's presence. He murmured something, perhaps a reassuring sound from human to animal, and then his voice became clearer: “Did you shut the front door? That new Alsatian bitch has got to stay outside for a bit, she's terrifically jealous of the ducks.”

I nodded, Ludwig Kaltenburg didn't need to say any more, I took one of the white loaves from the desk and started pulling it to pieces for the birds' snack. Hardly a word was ever said in the Kaltenburg household about the bread supply, about provisions for the animals in general, just once I remember the professor telling a visitor, “I don't have the time or the energy to get involved with ration coupons.” And also, “It's autumn, my drakes are molting, that's when their feed needs to be especially good, every child knows that.”

Over time it became a set phrase. If Kaltenburg talked about molting drakes, then we knew he was pushing higher authority to make up some deficit or other, and sometimes, if he was in a good mood and fancied his chances, he even—“molting drakes”—tried renegotiating.

No, there were no samples of seeds from Leningrad on the desk, just a newspaper covered in breadcrumbs. Kaltenburg picked it up carefully by the edges, formed a chute, and to the joy of his molt-weakened drakes dropped the light flakes onto the carpet.

A
LTHOUGH HE MAINTAINED
that it wasn't necessary, I wasn't going to hear anything new, it was basically always the same, nothing could have stopped me accompanying the professor to his lectures. “You know I won't be offended if you've got something else on in the evening,” he always said, after I had told him, “I'll be there listening carefully as usual tomorrow evening.” It was almost a ritual between us: “I'm afraid it will be very crowded and you'll have to stand all the way through,” while the professor well knew he could count on my presence down there in the hall. “Don't inflict it on yourself,” a ritual, a game, it was up to Kaltenburg to bring it to a close: “If you'd rather go and see a movie, with your school friends perhaps, I'll understand,” to which I didn't reply, and so with an “If you insist on it,” he gave up trying to change my mind: “But don't say I didn't warn you.”

During that time I can't have missed a single one of his big lectures. I went with Ludwig Kaltenburg, but during the evening itself I didn't stay near him. We didn't stand together before proceedings began, afterward I went home without even saying goodbye to him, while at the front of the hall the professor was surrounded by his listeners. And I never wanted to be at the front, I sat somewhere in the middle, as though I were just another member of the audience. That was our silent agreement, so that he never saw me among the one, two, three hundred blurred faces.

The hall belonged to him the moment he began to speak, he knew that. All the same, I had to give Professor Kaltenburg my assessment of the audience, he could gauge the general atmosphere from the lectern, but what details had I noticed out there, someone next to me writing everything down from beginning to end, a young couple in the row in front of me getting bored at some point. I looked around, noting a slight cough on the left, and on the right a woman who never seemed to stop hunting for something in her handbag. There was no cause for concern, I sat in the crowd, and the crowd listened to Professor Kaltenburg. For me it was less a matter of paying attention to what he said than of being carried along by his voice, his Viennese cadences filling the room, his distinct articulation, for an hour and a half Kaltenburg addressed the Saxon silence, talking clearly and animatedly and calmly. I never knew him to lose track, as for instance by noticing just in time that the sentence construction he had embarked on could end up in a mess, and he never went in for the familiar sort of muttering all too familiar when people are reading off empty passages from the page, quite simply because such passages did not occur in any lecture by Ludwig Kaltenburg.

In public he renounced anything speculative, even though speculation was of course an important element of the Institute's work, Kaltenburg would not permit himself any “philosophizing,” as he called it. He confined himself strictly to the animal kingdom, and his Dresden audience was grateful for it, they found it refreshing that someone was talking purely about observations, solid information, irrefutable facts which no reasonable person could doubt. So in time a regular audience was built up, you recognized more and more faces, people nodded to one another, almost by silent agreement: this evening too will be reserved for the animals and the reality before our eyes.

You sensed how close the relationship between Professor Kaltenburg and his audience actually was in the following question-and-answer session. His answers were never simply polite, let alone brusque. At the end of the year parents always wanted to know what domestic animals were suitable as pets for their children, “No guinea pigs, please,” he always replied, most listeners already knew his reasons, but each time Kaltenburg patiently ran through them again.

“And that brings us to the area of unproven facts, not to say assertions that have turned out to be untenable.” You might think this would be enough to make the hall hold its breath, but no, the professor then rolled his eyes, almost sank to his knees at the lectern, people were laughing, Kaltenburg caught himself up again, playing the penitent, and said, “The chaffinch.”

If you were attending a Ludwig Kaltenburg lecture for the first time, you might then learn from the person sitting next to you that both the chaffinch question and the introductory joke were a standing feature of the evening. The professor had once strongly advised against acquiring a chaffinch, which would only remain a pleasant companion, earnestly singing its heart out, as long as its owner sat motionless in front of it. Otherwise, made extremely nervous by sudden movements, the bird would go on beating against the bars of its cage until its skull cracked.

The audience's rejection of this had been vociferous, one chaffinch owner after another spoke up, Kaltenburg must have observed a badly damaged specimen, or he himself had been going through an extremely neurotic patch. He was obliged to admit defeat, Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg had got it wrong, he didn't mind admitting as much. “I prefer talking about things we know for certain,” was what he had always said, so where chaffinches were concerned, he was happy to leave the field to long-term observers.