Kaltenburg (28 page)

He accompanied us to the front door, quickly scanned the Institute grounds to left and right, nodded goodbye, and shut the door as we reached the garden gate. Knut set off for his garage. As Martin and I were walking down the hill, I looked back frequently—the dim light of a desk lamp filled the upstairs window that I knew so well, until Kaltenburg's villa was out of sight.

A few days later the professor took me aside; he was fascinated in equal measure by Martin and by his own shrewdness, as though surprised to discover new capabilities in himself at his age. Almost in a whisper, he told me, “I knew it would provoke a reaction in him sooner or later,” without clarifying whether the “it” in question was Martin's acquaintance with Taschotschek or the long Stalin monologue. And Martin was to say to Klara at one point, “It's possible that it was some such figure as Kaltenburg who spoon-fed me soup. I was always in and out of field hospitals, though it was before I was taken prisoner, and maybe Professor Kaltenburg wasn't unique. Spoon-feeding soup, extraordinary. But I couldn't swear it didn't happen to me.”

Time and again the two of them together—in the garden, in the kitchen, on country walks—analyzed Martin's experience of crashing in the Crimea. Went over the tragic loss of his copilot, the Tatar eyes, the smell of fish oil, coming around in what must have been a tent, since Martin found an expanse of rough material stretched above his head. He had spent hours staring at the fabric in the dim light, not knowing where he was, who had brought him there, yet feeling not at all unsafe.

Martin became more and more absorbed by this image, soon it hardly mattered to him that his spells in field hospitals occurred long after the professor was taken prisoner in Russia, and perhaps it was Kaltenburg's story that inspired Martin to give that early drawing of his, in which I thought I recognized my nanny, the title “Russian Nurse.” The spoon-feeding, Kaltenburg's fit of rage by an amputee's bedside, Comrade Stalin's coal-black stare—when Martin's public performances in the sixties and seventies unnerved the public with their soft violence, I invariably recognized elements in them that reminded me of that evening. I think on one occasion he even incorporated the note tucked away in somebody's cheek.

A
SUNDAY IN DECEMBER
. Ludwig Kaltenburg stood by the window in the winter light, we were in the zoological museum, in the workshop of the Ornithological Collection. It was my first visit to the building. I no longer saw the professor very often by himself.

I couldn't make out whether Kaltenburg was looking me in the eye or scrutinizing the half-finished bird skin lying on the table in front of me. He betrayed no sign of impatience, standing with arms folded, nodding.

“Still looks a bit swollen.” Kaltenburg pinched the sparrow carefully. “But much better than your first effort this morning. There's a world of difference.”

I pulled the cotton wadding out of the skin again, rolling it between my palms.

“But you don't want to make it too hard either.”

I started tweaking with the tweezers a clump at the front, then another, then one a bit higher, toward the tail. A bright wad, meant to reproduce the shape of a bird's body. Looking at my handiwork, I realized that I no longer even knew how big the sparrow was before we removed its skin.

“You won't get anywhere that way, you'd better use some new wadding.”

And then promptly: “Stop, not so much. You've got to decide in advance how much you need.”

A few minutes later: “Perhaps you could sew it up now. Have you got the skull in? Just start sewing, then we'll see what sort of customer emerges. And as I said, don't make the seam too tight, otherwise the bird will burst open again.”

I didn't want to know how many sparrows Kaltenburg had brought along for me. “Even if you never learn to enjoy skinning, you've got to be able to do it in your sleep. You must develop skill and an accurate eye, otherwise you're lost.”

It's not unlikely that he had me in for “extra coaching” because he found it embarrassing to talk about a student as a future acolyte when that student couldn't even produce a well-formed sparrow skin. I was on my second attempt when Kaltenburg—by the window, arms folded—made a mistake. That is to say, he winced, and I knew he wished he hadn't spoken.

“And they've gone on the hunt in the Great Garden, in this weather.”

“Who has?”

“Our comrades from the Society for Sports and Technology.” Kaltenburg's voice as he said “our comrades.”

“And why on the hunt?”

“Haven't you heard? The Great Garden is closed to the public, the SST is shooting animals—threat of rabies.”

“Foxes?”

“Stray dogs, they said, cats, wild rabbits.”

“In fact, everything in their sights?”

“Magpies, crows, jays can all transmit rabies, of course.”

“A regular slaughter?”

Kaltenburg came across to the table, leaning over as if to scrutinize my face.

“I'm afraid so, yes.”

I laid aside the half-skinned sparrow body. How could Professor Kaltenburg summon me on a Sunday to the zoological museum to calmly teach me the proper way to prepare a bird skin while at the same time in the Great Garden an army of lunatics was engaged in disguised target practice? There was no doubt that their victims would also include birds from Kaltenburg's household, hand-reared creatures that frequented the Great Garden during daylight hours. As they did every morning, they had taken off all unsuspecting from Loschwitz to fly across the Elbe, while Kaltenburg was shaving, dressing, drinking his tea. Perhaps he had watched a flock of them circling one last time outside the window before the birds gradually disappeared down the valley, shapes, black dots mixed with white, isolated snowflakes, then becoming nothing more than a memory of movement in the air. Kaltenburg knew about the impending disaster, he should have used his influence, taken some action.

Leaning on the table, he looked at me. “Do you know what happened at the beginning of the century when they started ringing birds at the Rossitten observation post, fully believing it would help protect them?”

I wasn't in the mood for guessing games. I didn't even bother to shake my head. To take my mind off what I'd just heard, I picked up the scalpel and went on loosening more of the sparrow's skin, as far as the neck, prior to pulling it away over the body. As more and more of the inside of the skin appeared, I sprinkled it repeatedly with the mixture of potato flour and plaster Kaltenburg provided that morning.

“People went out shooting birds. They brought down massive numbers in the hope of bagging one from Rossitten.”

Carefully I bared the skull, pushing back the skin of the neck and slowly easing it over the cap of the skull. The skin had to be pulled over both rami of the lower jaw at once, and I had to make sure I didn't sever the ear sacs. You could draw them out of the auditory canal with your fingers. No tugging at this point, it would be so easy to tear the skin. One squeeze of my clumsy thumbs could crush the skull to bits. I had to keep in mind the enormous power in my fingers when they enclosed a skull.

“How do you think I lose most animals? People are as keen on trophy hunting nowadays as they were then, and everybody has plenty of ringed birds by now. I don't suppose I'll ever know whether it's naiveté or ill will. Their pride when they take people into their trophy room, especially if anybody asks them, Is that mount a Kaltenburg?”

The professor paced back and forth, pausing in front of a showcase displaying objects from all over the world—picture postcards, a wooden case with inlay work: a pattern of fish or something abstract. The caiman standing upright with a hat and cane, holding a small champagne glass.

I picked up the blade again and cut through the transparent skin around the eyes until the eyelids were separated from the dark eyeballs. Now for the brain. I made an incision diagonally toward the base of the skull, noting that the neck and tongue were released by the same cut. I lifted the brain out carefully, the eyeballs, taking trouble not to get any secretions or blood on the dead sparrow's feathers. I sprinkled borax over the head and packed the eye cavities tightly with wadding.

Professor Kaltenburg stood by the periodical shelves, randomly pulling out one issue after another and leafing through them. Perhaps he was looking for his own name. I turned the head and neck skin back again with my index fingers, took the sparrow by the beak, and shook the neck feathers back into place. Kaltenburg was restless.

“Do you remember a man coming to the door and telling me he had run over one of my jackdaws? Well, the story simply didn't add up at all. Turns up on an old bike talking about his car. He probably didn't even have a driving license, let alone a car. Didn't it ever strike you as odd? And how would a jackdaw finish up under his wheels? That alone might have set you thinking. I tell you, he got rattled on the way home and lost his nerve.”

I introduced the closed tweezers into the eye cavity and coaxed the head feathers back into place. Then the skin was painted with the toxic solution.

“They suddenly turn all humble and come crawling to me, holding out their blood-soaked bags. They're looking for punishment, they want me to bawl them out. But I won't give them the satisfaction, I thank them politely and let them go on their way. I could see at a glance, that dead jackdaw was full of lead shot.”

“Can't these people be held to account?”

“Do you want me to shout it from the rooftops? Even the slowest would get the idea. And then we'd have a new popular sport, shooting Kaltenburg's birds. The Institute would be closed within a month.”

“You've never told me about all this.”

“Naturally I don't tell you everything. I don't want you losing your confidence on account of such things.”

So much for the skinning. Now the bird had to be totally reconstructed. Kaltenburg left me working alone for a while, went wandering off through the rooms. When he came back, he seemed distracted: “If we ever go to Vienna together, remind me to show you the two sea eagles in their eerie that Crown Prince Rudolf shot nine days before he committed suicide in Mayerling.”

While Kaltenburg was telling me about Vienna, I grew calmer with every hand movement.

“And then if you go to the Natural History Museum in Bucharest sometime, you'll be amazed. The dioramas alone: in the low lighting you have to look hard for the animals between the grasses and bushes.”

On his first visit there, standing in front of the display cases on the upper floor, Kaltenburg had almost burst into tears, “You know what that means with me”: the exuberant multiplicity of species, subspecies, varieties, although no one—neither a curator nor a bird—was using the display to show off. Despite the great wealth of information, a kind of restraint prevailed, you could almost say tact, which immediately told visitors that here they had pulled off the trick of preserving respect for nature while at the same time offering every possible detail an inquiring wildlife enthusiast could desire about birds, these shy creatures.

“I remember two birds in particular, you've guessed it, a couple of jackdaws, eastern jackdaws, male and female, the label said they had been collected not long before my visit in April 1950 by some enthusiastic soldiers on army land in Bucharest.”

Kaltenburg in front of the periodicals, completely lost in thought.

“Incidentally, don't forget to take a quick look at the wall on the landing before you rush upstairs: there's a niche there—you might say a display case—with two urns containing the ashes of the long-serving director of the museum—a student of Haeckel's—Grigore Antipa, and his wife.”

The less fat a skin contains, the easier it is to preserve. By the afternoon I had managed to produce a sparrow skin that I was satisfied with. Kaltenburg was too.

“I said you could do it.”

Outside, it was rapidly getting dark. Conscientiously I wrote out the label, naming Kaltenburg as the collector, Funk as the taxidermist. The first bird skin I had contributed to the collection.

“They must be just about finished by now.”

Ludwig Kaltenburg looked at me inquiringly.

“In the Great Garden, I mean.”

It was no longer on his mind. “Are you still talking about the amateur marksmen?” And no, the hunt was due to last only until eleven that morning. “They'll have gathered in their spoils ages ago. Imagine how much work will be coming the way of our curators and taxidermists when the SST comrades start logging in what they've bagged.”

I
F THE INTERPRETER HADN'T
asked me about the year the Ornithological Collection episode took place, I would never have realized that—although I can remember every word, Kaltenburg's oddly changeable tone, the sparrow I skinned, and the gloom of a December day—I couldn't remember whether it was 1955, or a year later, or 1957. It felt as though I had spent a day with Kaltenburg in a secluded room out of time. I have no date to attach to my feeling of helplessness to influence external events, let alone put a stop to the hunt in the Great Garden, for example by wandering all unsuspecting into the park for a stroll and thus forcing the shooting party to suspend their activities for a while at least.

It's possible that I would have been arrested for disturbing the peace and interrogated, a refractory young man who, despite repeated warnings, had gained access to a prohibited area; it's also possible that in the case of such a transgression I would have been threatened with consequences, declared insane, expelled from the university because I had insulted upright members of the Society for Sport and Technology. Perhaps the professor had wanted to protect me. Or he knew me better than I knew myself and thought it would be easier for me to bear my own impotence away from the scene than standing at the edge of the Great Garden, counting the shots, seeing the birds fall out of the trees in front of me, avoiding the eyes of the law enforcers.