Kaltenburg (19 page)

Martin waved to us.

Hordes of children squatting on the bank looking for fish in the shallow water, children, half scared and half overconfident, holding out dry bread for the ducks to take, parents watching over their offspring—they would all turn instantly to look at the waving man in their midst, would follow his eyes across the lake, point to a boat, and have to laugh, the splashing water, somebody snatching hastily at the oars. But Klara didn't turn a hair. I was rowing with my right arm, I wanted to bring the boat around, Klara was directing me. I was gripped by ambition, I was aiming at least to circumnavigate the little island with the swan's nest. I no longer noticed the other boats. Once I had to push us off again from the bushes onshore. Once some twigs brushed Klara's hair. And precisely when I was thinking with relief that Martin could no longer see us at this point, she said, “Made it.”

No, Klara wasn't laughing. But as we moved more or less calmly between the island and the bank, and I didn't even have any trouble maneuvering the boat a little so that Klara could get a better view of the white plumage over there in the bushes, I could have sworn that sitting facing me was an unknown lady I had heard laughing one November evening long ago. The woman in the fur coat wearing a peaked cap, the way she held her cigarette on the dark Elbe hillside, how she swept past me in the hall, and Klara in her blue dress, her hands holding on to the gunwale to get a good look at the island in Lake Carola: one and the same person, I could have sworn to it.

K
LARA STOOD BAREFOOT
in the doorway, in her blue summer dress which I knew from our boat outing in the Great Garden—the blue formed a very striking contrast to the green of Klara's eyes. It could be the way the light was falling, I thought, evenly shining through the leaves of a big beech tree by the entrance. Klara watched me calmly as I approached, she might have seen me standing at the iron gate reading the nameplate, the Hagemann property, the path through their garden, the house where Klara and Martin live. I went up the steps to the entrance, the blue dress, the green eyes, Klara's bare feet on the threshold, I really didn't know where to look.

I had come to pick up Martin, it was all arranged—in my confusion I may not even have said hello.

“Oh, really? He's not here. Perhaps he'll be back soon. As far as I know, he was going down to the Elbe. You can go and look for him if you want.”

Even as she was saying this, quickly, decisively, as though to get rid of me, she stepped aside in the doorway. I followed her, we crossed a small anteroom, more a ventilation chamber, and Klara pushed open a swing door as if unaware that somebody was behind her. The wings of the door sprang back, I was just able to slip through.

“The door nearly caught me.”

“Oh dear, you poor thing.”

I assumed she was going to take me straight to Martin's room, where I could wait for him, but she paused: “We used to play around with the swing door, Ulli and I, every evening after supper, we used to run back and forth in our nightgowns from the corridor to the vestibule and back. Our parents shouted that we shouldn't romp around near the cold entrance, and we shrieked every time one of us had been hit on the head by the door. Out of breath, overexcited, faces flushed, just the state to be in when you're meant to be going to bed.”

The “vestibule,” not “a ventilation chamber” or “a small anteroom”—for me the word is inextricably linked with that afternoon, when I heard it, from Klara, for the first time.

“A lovely house, with this swing door.” And I must have also said something like “You've got lots of space.”

“Well, we're not the only ones living here—but don't worry, they're not around.”

I don't quite trust myself. Neither the surprised, stupid adolescent trotting along behind Klara in the hall nor my present self claiming to remember. Klara's cool, almost rude behavior at the beginning, only to take a friendly interest in me scarcely two minutes later—it would sound more credible if Klara's tone when I turned up unannounced at the door had been consistently polite, if rather distant. First careless, then slightly too pert, that's not Klara—and did she really ask, “Are you scared of me?”

I don't know to this day whether Martin's absence was accidental, whether he had forgotten our arrangement or deliberately gone for a walk by himself. It's also possible that he may have been in the house the whole time, having a midday nap or engrossed in his work, and Klara didn't want to disturb him—one possible explanation why she didn't take me to his room, no, to the “maid's room,” as she called the room behind the kitchen.

We had hardly sat down in the drawing room when Klara remembered that she had a book for me: “A present from my parents, and because Martin told me you were interested in swallows, I thought it might be something for you.”

Not swallows—swifts: did I call that out to Klara as she left the room to fetch the book, or did I manage to suppress such a redundant correction? You think you never see the world so clearly as in such situations, and then you have to concede that out of sheer excitement you had eyes neither for yourself nor for the person opposite.

Klara handed me a hardback volume. I opened it at the title page and was shocked to see a familiar name:
LUDWIG KALTENBURG
. Shocked, because I had never heard of the book, according to the title a guide to living with animals.

“I know him.”

“You've read the book already?”

“No, not a word of it. I'm just surprised. Because I know the author.”

“Another book by him?”

“No, that's not it. I had no idea that he wrote books like this. I've known Professor Kaltenburg forever, since I was a child, but he didn't write popular handbooks then, only academic works.”

“Oh, academic works, I get it.”

I was on the point of surrendering. Klara didn't miss a thing, she picked up the slightest alteration in my voice as well as the deceptive casualness of a throwaway sentence, sensed a touch of arrogance as well as the little lie that had preceded it. She didn't let go.

“You know Professor Kaltenburg personally? I don't believe you.”

As though suddenly sorry for her brisk tone, she asked, “Would you like a glass of cordial? You could browse through the book until I get back.”

I felt as though Ludwig Kaltenburg had let me down. When I asked him about his manual the next time we met, he brushed aside this “little effort,” as he called it, with a shrug. A straight money-spinner, Kaltenburg's financial worries in the early postwar years, no prospect of a suitable post, all the animals that needed feeding every day. When he was writing it he had also been driven by a certain anger, he was maddened by the countless bad animal books on the market, he said, wanted to sweep away all that sentimental, hypocritical garbage: no more cute little noses, no more round, astonished, sleepy eyes, or should one say bedroom eyes, and no more cuddly creatures that were nothing but humans in plush costumes. Nobody would have believed at the time that Kaltenburg's book—which, incidentally, was followed by a number of sequels—would be such a notable success. He would never have dreamed that his collection of experiences with animals would reach such wide circles, even including Dresden society. He was still writing occasional little articles of that kind, he said, newspaper editors pestered him for them, obviously readers couldn't get enough of unadulterated animal-watching. For him they were relaxation exercises, in the evenings when he didn't have the concentration for serious work he would sit down and compose, with a light touch, for an hour at most, until the last feed. “And you've known all the stories for years, you heard them from my own lips. But of course I'll give you a copy, you know I really love you to read every word I've written.”

When Klara came back from the kitchen, I talked to her about her parents. She said they were certainly kindhearted people who refused to let anybody destroy their belief in human goodness. I was holding my glass, Klara emptied hers in one go—but as children she and her sister had sometimes suffered for this belief. The pressure to be good despite all the challenges.

“A child can't keep something like that in mind day and night. Once Ulli and I raced through the house shouting nonstop some phrase we were making fun of, I can't remember what it was, some political chant perhaps.”

She sat down next to me on the sofa, hugging her knees.

“Suddenly my father grabbed me fiercely by the arm, he came shooting out from nowhere, pulled me under the stairs, and hissed,
You know perfectly well the kind of people we've had foisted on us upstairs.
His eyes staring, his lips trembling, and before he let go of me he whispered one word:
VORKUTA.
That night we could hardly get to sleep, although of course our father's hint about Siberia was lost on us. Vorkuta to me meant the bruises on my arm that I covered up with a long-sleeved blouse.”

The fine hairs on her arm. Klara stroked her left foot.

“If you know Professor Kaltenburg so well, you must have been to his Institute in Loschwitz?”

Naturally—the door to his Institute, and even to his private quarters, was open to me day and night. But what kind of an impression would it have made if I had blurted out everything I knew about Kaltenburg? I knew every corner of his villa, I knew the man's every emotion—a pale young man basking in the light of his fame. So I steered a course through Kaltenburg's world as well as I could without sounding boastful, I took a back seat, telling her that what impressed me about Kaltenburg when I was a child was the way he had with gloves. Often he carried several pairs around with him, the thick calf gloves for the motorbike, the finer ones for the car, the mittens made of thick felt for a walk in the woods, the “torn ones,” as he called them, a favorite old patched pair he wore in early autumn down by the Elbe and sometimes in the evening, on his way down into the city, then his buckskin ones for unavoidable social occasions, which he took off to greet people.

Klara asked me that afternoon, “You want to be famous too, don't you?” And when I came up with no answer she added, “Or at least notorious.”

The sun, which had moved around the house, was now shining through the big veranda windows straight into the drawing room. Our empty glasses on the table. The carpet. My dusty shoes. After a while Klara said, “By the way, I enjoyed our time on Lake Carola.”

“It was the first time I'd ever sat in a rowboat.”

“That was obvious. But I loved the way you simply ignored people when they started laughing at us.”

She blinked, jumped up, and said something that I didn't quite catch, something like “This isn't getting anywhere.” In two steps she had reached the window and begun to close the heavy curtain. First the left half, dark and heavy as a fur coat I had once followed with my eyes. Klara reached for the right half, carefully guiding the hem behind an indoor palm with her foot. I followed her movements, followed the strip of light as it got narrower. The dark hair on the back of the head of a strange woman. The bright chink had disappeared, and for an instant I was blind. Then I saw Klara's face, right in front of mine.

T
HE LAST PLEASURE BOAT
had glided past sometime before, we could count only about two dozen dinner jackets and evening dresses under the festive lanterns, down below the band was playing for two or three couples self-consciously dancing, most passengers stood together in little groups on deck to take in the evening air over the Elbe one last time before the trip ended. Not a sound to be heard. It had gone quiet here in the restaurant as well, the steps creaked, the waiter came up to serve our coffee, took the empty dessert plates away. Frau Fischer lit a cigarette.

I had tried to describe my excitement when, at the end of my first afternoon in the Hagemanns' house, I had asked if I could take her to the cinema. And how Klara, no doubt just as excited, answered with a decisive nod of the head and a firm “Friday.” As though it had been settled long ago: from now on she would be going to the cinema only with this boy called Hermann Funk.

My excitement then, a few weeks later, when I had my first invitation from the Hagemanns. I knew the drawing room from my afternoon with Klara, I knew the receptions at the house from Martin's description, but all the same I can barely remember the evening itself. I can't even recall Klara there, that's how excited I must have been. Fortunately, at the time I wasn't aware that there was a good deal more associated with the name Hagemann than Martin had conveyed to me on our outings. Yes, if my parents had been Dresdeners and I had grown up in the city, I would have known about the family name, would probably have heard it mentioned at home when I was a child.

Among their extended family there was a line of academics, there were landowners, the car-business Hagemanns, Klara's grandfather had been a cigarette manufacturer. Older gentlemen in their circle still praised the quality of certain brands, the Turkish Mixture, the Pure Virginia, and when they shook Herr Hagemann's hand they did so solemnly, with dignity, as though they were still expressing their condolences decades after the firm had gone bankrupt and Grandfather had been consigned to the attic. Klara's father felt uncomfortable in such situations—granted, there were such things as family virtues, hard work, conscientiousness, and an artistic vein, but Herr Hagemann did not possess an estate, nor did he run a factory. It's possible that his choice of chemistry at the university was meant to give him something of an outsider profile in the family, he had gone to Berlin, had met his future wife in the laboratory, toyed with the idea of going abroad, but then come back to Dresden with his young family after all. Perhaps he would have preferred to live where the name meant nothing, but all the same: if you were introduced to Klara's father, exchanged a few words with him, perhaps got to know him a little better, you soon sensed that Herr Hagemann felt an obligation to his family name, especially as all the rest of the Hagemann clan had been decamping to the West one by one since the war.