Kaltenburg (2 page)

A case in point is the episode in Dresden in February 1945, when a horde of monkeys escaped from the bombed-out zoo and a “well-known acquaintance” or, as we are told elsewhere, a “student” of Kaltenburg's claims to have had the chance to observe behavior extremely unusual in animals, and lasting several hours. The witness, still a child at the time, says that all through the night when Dresden was reduced to rubble and ashes, he was wandering about in the town's biggest park looking for his parents, and that by the next morning he was still in the same state of literal disintegration, that is to say, bereft of any sense of self. At the edge of the Great Garden he stopped near a group of distraught people with whom half a dozen chimpanzees or orangutans or rhesus monkeys had mingled—Kaltenburg's witness could not recall the exact composition of the group.

Eyes on the ground, the survivors search for familiar faces. At some point the chimpanzees too begin to scrutinize the features of the motionless figures; you might almost imagine they are looking for guidance from the eyes of the living and the dead in turn. In fact the observer thinks he notices something like relief among the animals when the humans rouse themselves from their torpor, collect the bodies strewn everywhere, and lay them out in some sort of order on an undamaged grass verge. The chimpanzees know nothing about identifying lost relatives, nothing about lining up the dead on the grass, nothing about how you take a corpse by the shoulders and feet to carry it across to its own kind. And yet one ape after another joins in this work, as Kaltenburg reports, without saying who described this scene for him. I did.

W
HERE WERE THE
old man's urges I was supposed to succumb to, where was the rush of hot blood, where, I wondered, was the sheer panic, combined with the shrewd look of appraisal? And where was the masterful air of the older man that I ought to have been projecting in the presence of a woman who was only half my age but who had nonetheless shown an interest in me, even if it was only in my talk? I was privately surprised to find in my behavior no sign of that ridiculous capering, crowing, and chest-puffing, not the slightest trace of the courtship display that my younger self would have anticipated from a gray-haired gentleman like me.

Now and again I almost long to be one of those men I have often observed doing what's expected of them at their age. I would make a show of fussing around in my pocket to produce a fresh white handkerchief with which to continually mop my brow, and it would not occur to this young woman before me to be in the least surprised, even though it was only the end of March and not at all warm. At most she would ask sympathetically whether she could fetch me a glass of water, and whether we should take a short break, which could only mean that she would allow me some privileged access to her life that is never granted to men of her own age. By inclining my head I could indicate that something of the kind she was suggesting would be very acceptable, while I patted my neck with the damp handkerchief, imagining it was her young woman's hand dabbing the beads of sweat from my skin, not my own.

Years ago I used to pity my young contemporaries constantly showing off their Latin and Greek, even murmuring words like “omnibus” as though imparting some arcane knowledge to the lady beside them. But while those young fogeys may have become wise old gentlemen, silently observing a few blades of grass day in and day out, or fatuously enjoying misquoting their dubious classical jokes, today I'm the one who is flaunting my Latin for this young interpreter:
Carduelis carduelis,
I say slowly, so that she can write it down; her list is gradually filling up.
Carduelis chloris,
I say, and
Carduelis spinus.

The names of birds: goldfinch, greenfinch, and siskin. “What on earth do you want to learn bird names for?” I had asked when she rang and told me that she had to prepare for a high-ranking visitor from the English-speaking world who was interested not only, as protocol demanded, in informing himself about economic developments since 1990, but—as a seasoned nature-lover—in discussing the local flora and fauna with a few of his hosts. It wasn't the names that worried her, she could easily learn them by heart, but she couldn't visualize the birds. She asked if, to put her mind at rest, I could spare a couple of hours to go through the English, German, and Latin names of the mounted specimens on display.

The collection I used to work in was formerly located in the old town but is now housed at a new site: it was there that we arranged to meet. The old building had a view across to the castle ruins. Tourists came to admire the mural, the
Procession of the Dukes,
and in summer voices drifted up from the street to my room, Russian babble, Swedish babble, then the unvarying harder tones of the tour guide. And in the evenings I used to stand on the banks of the Elbe to watch the gulls flocking above the Court Church. Here in the new building I have been given a little room in the corridor where the offices are. I still come nearly every week. I'm drawn to the mounts. One of my colleagues had directed Frau Fischer to me. “And don't forget,” I managed to call down the phone before she rang off, “you'll have to go out to Klotzsche, the Zoological Collections aren't in the former House of Assembly anymore.”

I met Katharina Fischer at the top of the stairs. We turned from the open corridor into the collection area, through the glass door from daylight to artificial light, past the notice
NO FOOD IN THE COLLECTION ROOMS, PLEASE
. Silence. The whitewashed walls, the heavy iron doors, the composition floor under our feet, were evenly lit by the fluorescent strip lights. The double door next to the sign saying
DRY VERTEBRATES
was lemon yellow, canary yellow, and easily wide enough to allow the bulk of a mounted adult elephant to be wheeled into the collection, although nowadays the room behind the door contains mainly animals you would have no trouble carrying in your jacket pocket. I'll never get used to this building, won't have to, the move at the end of 1998 coincided with my leave-taking from the Ornithological Collection.

The increasingly oppressive cramped quarters in the House of Assembly, the smell of carcasses and alcohol and toxins, by turns sweetish and then acrid, that penetrated our rooms from the taxidermy workshops, depending on weather conditions, the damp, the musty walls topped by a temporary roof, the floods during heavy, prolonged rain. Dangers that threatened to ruin our specimens and eventually our health as well, and even the DDT that we personally sprinkled for years over the open drawers: all of this is so closely associated with my work in the collection that I would be hard-pressed to recognize anything in this new space if it weren't for the old familiar animals.

“You weren't born in Dresden, were you?” Frau Fischer inquired cautiously soon after we met. Usually it took her only three sentences at most to tell by their accents where people came from, she said, but in my case she still couldn't make up her mind. “I couldn't even guess at the general direction,” she admitted as she took her pens and notebook out of her backpack and cast a first glance at the birds I had got ready.

It's true, I'm not from here, and it was only by accident, or rather because of the state of affairs at the time, that I came to Dresden early in 1945, when I was eleven: my parents had decided to leave the city of Posen and head west. Even before that we must have moved around a lot; I never had a chance to pick up a regional twang at home, let alone a dialect. I think they may even have taken care to choose a nanny for me who spoke clear High German.

I have a mental image of myself in my best Sunday shirt sitting on the bench in our kitchen, and my nanny wiping my bare legs with a damp washcloth. Could my parents have taken the nanny along on the move to Dresden?

Long-term memory, short-term memory. The interpreter had asked for a half-hour break during which she would like to be distracted, in order to test whether all the names she now had in her short-term memory really were lodged in her long-term memory. She wanted me to examine her afterward to find out, but meanwhile in this half-hour break she preferred not to stay around the mounted animals, perhaps because she needed to match the word with the object purely in her mind's eye, or because after a while she had become uncomfortable in the presence of the birds: they perch on their branches as though they've just landed, as though they're going to take off again at any moment, and if people are not used to them they're afraid of scaring them away with a nervous movement. So we had exchanged the windowless room with its egg sets and mounted specimens for my office, which gave me a chance to smoke a cigarette and offer Katharina Fischer a coffee.

She scanned the bookcase; there was a small pile of volumes from our library, I'd been using them over the past few weeks, and next to them my little reference library. The interpreter quickly took in the
Journal of Ornithology,
The Bird Observer,
next to
Grzimek's Animal Life
and
Wassmann's Encyclopedia of Ornithology.
By comparison, in this light the hardback dictionaries on the top shelf look older than they are, German and Russian, German and English, editions from before and after reunification, slightly scuffed, darkened with age, as though I hadn't touched them for years.
Archetypes of Fear
is absent from the bookcase.

No, on that night when we arrived in this city, which was in the process of turning into a sea of rubble no longer warranting the name of “city,” my nanny was not with me as, wrapped in a blanket, I lay on the grass in the Great Garden. People all around, the whole park full of people, squatting in the darkness, walking to and fro, talking quietly, looking up at the sky without a word, and all of them strangers. Huddled next to me were an old couple; in the bright glow the man's face was lit up as though by candlelight. The rims of his eyes, the furrows around his mouth, and the stubble of his beard turning red, then yellowish, white, then dark gray as the clouds passed over the treetops. The woman was wearing a good but no longer new coat, a broad shawl over her upper body, I can't remember, was she wearing a cap, a hat, her head was resting on the man's shoulder. Exhausted, in the open air, on a February night, they had nodded off. A noise like nothing ever heard before drove the two of them out of my mind.

We sat for quite a while facing the birds I had lined up—that's to say she sat, I soon got up again to stand behind the table and point out to her the crucial differences. Working from left to right, as seen from her perspective, I gave her the German names for the chaffinch, the brambling, the linnet, the twite, the mealy redpoll, let's leave out the Arctic redpoll, it can be annoyingly hard to identify with any certainty, but go on to the serin, bullfinch or hawfinch, though the four stonebirds can be omitted despite their lovely pink plumage, then the scarlet grosbeak, the great rosefinch, the pine grosbeak—enormous compared to the others—the crossbill, the Scottish crossbill, the parrot crossbill, and finally the
Carduelis
finches, the siskin, the greenfinch, and the goldfinch, also known as the thistle finch.

While I walked along the line, she began to draw up a list, the English names first; she had acquired an English bird book and was leafing through her
Peterson's Field Guide,
the section on finches. But watch out, I broke in, that you don't mix up the goldfinch with the German
Goldfink,
which is a brambling in English, or, worse still, group it with the snowfinch, which isn't a finch at all but a sparrow, just as the scarlet rosefinch is not a
Rosenfink
in German; the German for that is
Karmingimpel,
and only the Swedes call the scarlet rosefinch a
Rosenfink.

Maybe I was overtaxing her a little at the start, but I had known straightaway that any interpreter who prepares so thoroughly for a conversation that may never take place, no, in all probability never will take place in the way she anticipates, must on no account be undertaxed. The
Peterson
Frau Fischer is using is a work I seldom consult: although its structure is conventional, I have always found it a bit awkward to use, because the illustrations, descriptions, and maps are each collected into separate sections of their own. I placed the Svensson/Mullarney/Zetterström next to it; descriptions on the left, on the right birds drawn against the light, silhouettes in a low-lying mist, and Katharina Fischer realized at first glance that it is all about recognizing the birds in their natural environment, not indoors.

To really complicate matters—so began my sentence when I felt she had spent slightly too long poring over the bird books—be careful not to confuse “sparrow” with “sparrow.” Depending on who you're talking to, British or American, it means either a true sparrow or our German
Ammer,
one of the New World buntings, which you'll see over here only once in a lifetime as an accidental that has drifted across the Atlantic. So what we call an
Ammer,
the British call simply a bunting: easy to remember.

I was afraid my remarks might have confused the interpreter so thoroughly by now that she might be wishing she had never taken on the job. So I thought I would gradually begin to simplify the business, first of all by eliminating certain finches that never appear locally and that were therefore, I hoped, unlikely to crop up in the conversation when Frau Fischer's assignment required her to start moving birds around between languages. I removed a few examples from the table: the two-barred crossbill, the Sinai rosefinch, the evening grosbeak, the white-wing grosbeak, the red-fronted serin, the Syrian serin, the Corsican finch, the citril finch, the twite, and the beautiful blue chaffinch vanished from our sight, and as Katharina Fischer found, the whole arrangement now seemed much more manageable.

I can see myself sitting there in my white shirt, the beam of light from the kitchen lamp doesn't reach me, my nanny shades me from it, the shirt is crumpled, and if I were under the light you might be able to make out dark stains on the material: mud, colored crayon, dried blood. Maria. She can't yet have been twenty years old.