Kaltenburg (18 page)

“I was jealous when I found out from your parents' letters that Professor Kaltenburg was in and out of your place for a while, then stayed away after an unpleasant scene. For me it was obvious he had made approaches to Maria. She rejects him, there's a big commotion, your parents come out on her side and break off all contact with the professor. I found my own scenario so convincing that I was on the point of literally taking off to come and see you. Where was I at that time, Croatia maybe, Apulia, in the Ukraine. I had no idea how I would manage it. Just clear off with the plane. Desert. The enormous distance almost made me lose my mind. So one morning out of a clear blue sky a plane lands on the dusty road in front of your house. You have been sitting drinking cocoa. The noise. Maria joins you at the window. You see me climbing out of the cockpit. A professor who is barely forty, a fanatical motorcyclist to boot, that kind of man can be dangerous. It was only then that I found out I was really keen on your nanny. And you can't imagine how intensely I loathed Herr Professor Kaltenburg.”

The first school groups had arrived at the entrance. Martin said goodbye to the ladies at the ticket office, and then the zoo and our undisturbed morning were behind us.

“Did you know that for Maria—that I made some drawings of her? My private name for the work I did then is the ‘Posen Block,' and if it's ever exhibited anywhere you've got to remind me of that title, okay?”

Frau Fischer inquired whether the drawings still existed.

Certainly. They survived the Posen years, the war, Martin preserved them carefully in a number of portfolios, and somehow he even succeeded in smuggling them out intact to the West. Today they are among the most important works from that early period.

“As the ‘Posen Block'?” She had never heard of a body of work with that title.

No, in fact the “Posen Block” has never been exhibited as such. Memories of a nanny—but in the catalogue it's called “Russian Nurse,” a restrained sketch on a tear-off drawing pad, the soft hair, the cap with a cross, only the eyes and nose are executed with a stronger pencil line. Another drawing: “Three by the Fire,” a very consciously chosen, vague title, two dark human figures contemplating an aureole, and on the left the contours of a bright figure with long hair, crouching, eyes downcast. The young woman, a suppressed fantasy perhaps, which recurs in the late work.

On the other hand, many of Martin's student pieces stuck out like a sore thumb, it occurred to me, after I had asked Katharina Fischer if she would like some dessert, a coffee. In retrospect you can see in his student work the pressure he was under: sometimes he dutifully tries to please his teachers, at other times he is really untrue to his own hand, his own vision. Presumably he left most of it behind in Dresden, if he didn't burn it. But I've kept all of Martin's bison sketches.

I
MPORTANT AS LUDWIG
Kaltenburg was for me, it wasn't from him that I first heard the name Hagemann, but from Martin Spengler. If I visualize him in his Dresden period, it's not in group photos at the college, not among a circle of laughing students, not at a carnival party. Martin in Red Indian costume, Martin at a dance, Martin as a member of a bowling team—unthinkable. For me he belongs at the Hagemann family dining table, he belongs in their drawing room. I can see Martin in the little room behind the kitchen, a space crammed with books, painting equipment, drawing pads. A narrow bed, two stools, an old bureau: this accommodation had been fixed up for him by his favorite professor, a friend of the family and also the first patron of this independent-minded art student, whom outsiders usually considered taciturn. As far as I can recall, in Dresden Martin didn't show his hyena drawings to anyone but this professor, the Hagemanns, and me.

The Hagemann family was pleased to have Martin in their house, it could easily have been different, as with the elderly couple and their middle-aged son who had been allocated quarters on the first floor. When they first moved in there was talk of having met previously, during the war, the man even announced his service rank as though that made him the new head of the household. But Herr Hagemann did not wish to be reminded of his former superior officers, least of all by one of those officers himself.

Contact was limited to the essentials, they said hello to each other when the Klein family crossed the hall with disapproving faces to disappear up the stairs to their domain. The daughters of the household soon dubbed the Kleins “the Super-Tenant family,” and eventually the parents caught themselves using this secret nickname themselves now and then. “The Super-Tenants again”—Herr Hagemann with pocket diary in hand—“I've got to get the cardboard laurels out of the cellar.” Whenever the opportunist veteran appeared on the stairs on the eve of some official anniversary celebration, commemoration, birthday, or death day, silently reminding Herr Hagemann to put the decorations out, it was all the head of the household could do not to warn him, “Herr Super-Tenant, you're definitely going too far.”

If the Hagemanns were having a reception, Martin made himself scarce in a corner of the drawing room and didn't budge all evening. The world of art and academia frequented the Hagemanns', the company often including foreign visitors. Martin listened, he studied. Faces, hands, ashtrays, armchairs, shoes, curtains, the stucco rosette on the ceiling: wandering around the room, his gaze often fell upon a small dark spot, up there between the hook for the chandelier and a stucco sunflower leaf. A housefly stiffened in death, but Martin wouldn't have been all that surprised if on closer inspection the empty exoskeleton had turned out to be a tiny hole. And he pictured to himself three people with wry faces upstairs crouching together under the kitchen table, with father, mother, and son silently fighting over whose turn it was to apply their ear to the hole punched through the linoleum.

Once the guests had all left and the family had gone to bed, Martin crept out of his room again back into the drawing room, enjoying the silence, sitting in the green armchair, Frau Hagemann's favorite. In the darkness he looked at the walls.

“These walls are a world in themselves,” he said once. At the Hagemanns', hyena art hung everywhere.

Every time I met Martin, he told me about the Hagemanns, and I soon felt I knew the family personally, as though I had enjoyed their company for years, the parents, the two daughters—Martin, who got on well with them from the beginning, passed on some of his intimacy to me. I particularly remember one of his stories, perhaps because I never found out whether Martin invented it for me in the telling, or because it took place in the Great Garden, or perhaps quite simply because Klara Hagemann was the central figure in it.

One day, during a Sunday walk in the park, without warning Klara left her family standing on the path. A figure in the distance, an unusual movement, had caught her eye, and before her parents or sister had time to notice that a man holding a dog lead was about to beat his animal with it, Klara had raced off. She ran straight across the field, screaming, a stream of words never heard before in this spot and probably never heard there again. The dachshund owner knew he was being accosted, looked around, couldn't work out at first what was happening, had no idea what was coming at him, just saw a screaming girl in a Sunday dress. For a moment he forgot the existence of the scruffy, whimpering animal cowering in the grass at his feet—and lowered his arm. Klara Hagemann had been eleven or twelve. Straight after the war. Her parents' hearts must have stood still.

Martin said, “She was still quite small at the time.”

Half of Dresden looked on as a girl in a white dress with knee-length socks and sandals delivered a telling-off to a dog owner, a total stranger. The Hagemanns had no idea where she could have acquired such language.

He said, “She's quite different today.”

As though he had been present himself, Martin described to me how the father took a deep breath, took his first step into the field. Seen from the path, his walk, his shoulders, looked a little stiff. Once over there he looked the man in the eye, speaking two, three short sentences. They shook hands. Then Herr Hagemann and his daughter were back. He took off his hat, wiping his brow. He was sweating: “Not another word. We're going for a coffee.”

The two girls ran on ahead. Ulli, the older sister, always one step behind Klara. His wife took his arm. Her expression said,
Klara was right.
He was powerless against it. Herr Hagemann had been looking forward to a peaceful family walk. But Klara was his daughter. He was the father of Klara Hagemann. A perfectly ordinary, mild Sunday afternoon in 1946 or 1947.

As can be imagined, I was pretty curious about this girl, or I should say this young woman, and was looking forward to being introduced to her by Martin. The trouble was, he knew me well enough to be aware that I was quite capable of wrecking a carefully planned arrangement at the last minute, I wouldn't have cared a jot about embarrassing Martin, I simply wouldn't have turned up at the rendezvous. He had no choice but to simply take me by surprise, and so he told me, as he packed up his things at the end of an afternoon together at the zoo, “By the way, I forgot to tell you—we're going to see Klara.”

The further we walked down Tiergartenstrasse, the more agitated I felt. Martin remained cool. “She'll be waiting for us”—he turned purposefully into the Great Garden—“She's always overpunctual, you know.” He walked faster, pulled my sleeve, pointing at the ruins of the palace: “What did I tell you, the woman over there in the blue dress, do you recognize her?”

We shook hands, and Klara greeted me so politely that I almost expected a curtsy. But there was a spark in her green eyes that seemed to warn me not to go thinking her good manners were for my personal benefit. Martin pointed to his portfolio, then at me: “Hermann was with me in the zoo.”

“In the zoo?”

With raised eyebrows, Klara fixed her gaze on me with the air of someone who vaguely remembered going there a long time ago. At least I was in Martin's company—obviously it wasn't thought strange he should go to the zoo regularly, and he was much older than I. In fact, she insisted on assessing Martin's new work before anything else, we found a place under the trees, and she hadn't even ordered a drink before Martin was made to open his portfolio. “Mineral water or a soda—no, I'll have water”; she didn't mind, the drawings lay spread out on the table in front of us. Klara, who didn't appear to be interested in animals, compared the hare with the graylag goose, pulled a series of eagle studies closer to her, the line on this page, the fine hatching over there, as though just breathed onto the paper, a bird in motion, and then—“Could you move that glass, please”—that line on the head of a resting bearded vulture.

“Tell me, do either of you know which house Kokoschka stayed in?” Martin pointed across at the palace pond. “Is that the one? The one in front, maybe? Or is it one of those that was bombed? I'm sure you can tell me, Klara.”

Klara shook her head, as though she knew exactly. I, on the other hand, didn't even know the name Oskar Kokoschka, I was hearing about this painter for the first time, and especially about the life-sized doll he got someone to make in the image of the woman he idolized, an ugly, crude monster puppet which Kokoschka hoped would inspire him in Dresden.

“I have heard that the doll was found one morning soaked in red wine and with twisted limbs somewhere here in the garden. I'd love to know where, precisely.”

A policeman on his beat had thought at first that the limp figure with the dead face was a real female corpse, Martin went on talking, and I was grateful to Klara when she interrupted him in midsentence: “I hope you don't mind, Martin, but I think that'll do.”

We sauntered around the palace pond, to the Flutgraben—that is, I saw Klara strolling next to Martin, saw the toes of her shoes, yes, Klara was strolling through Dresden as though demonstrating how you should move in the distant future along the boulevard of an imaginary metropolis. Her ankles. Her dark, very slightly wavy hair.

“Martin has told me about your episode with the dachshund owner,” I dared to address her.

“Oh, that old story”—amused, I thought, or perhaps like someone tired of hearing the same anecdote repeated. And I wasn't expecting that Klara, acting as though Martin were suddenly in the way, would drop back a step and smile across at me.

Martin suggested hiring a rowboat. Apparently the idea appealed to Klara too, he was inviting us to take a boat ride, I could see Klara and me sitting next to each other, Martin facing us on the oarsman's seat. But when we got in, it was “No, no, Hermann, you've got to sit at the front.” We both looked questioningly at Martin, he shrugged his shoulders, “Enjoy the trip,” he pushed the boat off, “Water makes me nervous,” Martin stayed behind on the landing stage: “We'll meet up again in an hour's time, in safety, on dry land.”

Klara and I on Lake Carola. Martin followed us on the bank. That is to say, he had to keep stopping because my rowing was so bad that we hardly moved from the spot. I was on a collision course, all around us boats were gliding smoothly through the water, all of the strong young men oblivious of the labors of their upper body, their shoulders, their arms, their hands. The evenness of the oar movements was impressive, everything working like clockwork, each one of them enjoying a trip with their beloved could concentrate on taking a close look at those eyes, those lips, that nose.

I succeeded in steering our boat under the bridge without capsizing, the narrow part of the lake was behind us, for a while we were moving toward the fountain. And that was when Martin appeared again, Klara spotted him as we passed the restaurant, mixing with the families at the feeding place, Martin in a flurry of ducks, hopefully he wouldn't think of waving.