Kaltenburg (39 page)

My instant reaction was a great sadness that in the intervening years I'd had only sporadic contact with Knut, we had kept in touch for the most part only by exchanging Christmas cards, after maintaining a lively correspondence until the end of the eighties, and often visiting each other once the border was open. Now I didn't even know whether he had died suddenly or after a long, difficult illness, and Katharina Fischer couldn't enlighten me either.

Klara and I at the Sieverdings in southern Germany, we were coming back from Vienna, I had been to see Ludwig Kaltenburg's house, where jackdaws were nesting in the chimney, two years after the professor's death. The birds approached me as trustingly as if they were distant relatives of the Dresden flock. I bolted. We took the next train to Munich. Knut met us at the station. On one of the mild spring evenings that followed, as we sat on the terrace late into the night, I was strangely moved by a photograph showing Knut and the professor on the occasion of an awards ceremony. The diploma is on display, floating in midair against the dark background, the two men are looking at each other and laughing. And yet the viewer is held by a gaze, the fixed stare of a gorilla that appeared to be thrusting itself into the foreground between the two portrait sitters. A stuffed ape, with glass eyes and open jaws, the dark coat, the shine around its nostrils—it makes you think that a memory of Knut Sieverding's year in the Congo, now in the distant past, had materialized as the negative was being developed.

Knut and I in the Lausitz brown-coal area, Knut and I on the former border strip—but while I was telling the interpreter about our last excursions, a thought was hammering away in my head: “You know nothing about Knut Sieverding in later years, there's a gap of nearly fifteen years.” I asked Frau Fischer whether she was busy that afternoon, if she'd like to come over for coffee. Then I phoned Klara, who was spending the weekend with friends in Berlin, and told her the news.

In the following two hours I paced up and down the kitchen, fed the sparrows, the titmice, looked out the window at the oak that was shedding ever more leaves, cleared up the desk in my study, couldn't get it sorted out, let my distracted glance range over the books. Proust had been standing here in the bookcase for almost half a century without my ever touching him. Actually, sometimes when Klara was away I had carefully picked out one of the volumes, opened it, and read a few pages, hurriedly, keeping an ear open as if indulging in a forbidden pleasure, as if I had broken through a protective cordon thrown around the shelf reserved for Proust. I felt like an interloper, I was spying on Klara when I opened at a page that had a bookmark in it, and when I read a passage she had underlined or put an exclamation mark by, I was reading something that was none of my business.

Perhaps Klara would have liked me to read the book, to join in with her enthusiasm for Proust, which had been there since we first met. But to me the novel seemed sacrosanct, Proust was entirely Klara's thing, and it never occurred to me to read him in order to share him with her. Perhaps that was a mistake. But maybe it was enough for her that when she made certain remarks—half to herself, half to me—while reading passages in the early volumes that I believed I could tell who she was reminded of, who she saw sitting in her parents' drawing room, who was exchanging a few words in English by the hall stand—people I myself had got to know at the Hagemanns' but knew even better from Klara's stories.

Likewise, watching her reading, over time I thought that I could tell which incidents from our life together were passing through her mind's eye, inevitably and even against Klara's will when—on holidays, perhaps, or in the short days around the turn of the year—she took the Proust volumes down from their shelf, determined to lose herself in the prose. At such moments, when Klara glanced up from the flow of printed lines, distraught, as if a dangerous insect had distracted her, I vanished as well, I was no longer sitting opposite her at the kitchen table, no longer lying next to her on the beach, but saw myself, without having read more than a few sentences of Proust, being taken back to scenes both of us would prefer to have forgotten long ago.

So it was that I found myself sitting once more, wedged between Klara and Knut at a pub table, in a noisy, smoke-filled hostelry, opposite us Martin and Ulrike, who for some time had no longer wished to be called Ulli. Was it the same day that Knut, after weeks of fevered work, had put the last touches to his Congo commentary and read the text out to us after lunch at the Institute? We hoped to persuade the professor to go with us into town that evening, but he declined: “That's not a pub, not a cozy tavern you're trying to lure me into, it's a dive.” He just wouldn't listen. “You go, all you young people,” he said, laughing. “You know I'm an old man.” Was that the last time Ludwig Kaltenburg and Martin parted on friendly terms? It's possible that my memory has seamlessly fused together a whole series of scenes that are separated by many months or even years, it's possible that the very act of remembering precludes leaving any breathing spaces, and memory only conforms to reality where there is no chance of evading scenes of bewilderment and helplessness.

Klara talked about the young Soviet soldiers in the square that she could see every day from her place in the library. Sometimes one of them would wave when sweeping the parade ground, mending a machine, or standing by the garages and shuffling from one foot to the other, as though, by way of punishment, this child with the pale, narrow face had been banished to the furthest point of the barrack square. But Knut and Martin were feeling too high-spirited to follow such reflections, and all Ulrike could think of saying was, “Let's not talk about work, please, not today.”

“You're right.” Klara shook her head and smiled at her sister. She turned to Knut: “In your film, will you be telling the story about how the aardvark tricked you?”

Her hand felt for mine under the table. It was as though she could foresee that this evening was not going to end well.

At some point a couple we didn't know joined us at our table, with an apologetic gesture, there were no other seats free. They were our age, the woman was wearing a pale-colored suit, not particularly well cut, the man a washed-out shirt and a carelessly knotted, prewar tie. Two people, you think, who had lost their way in the dark and come in here at random, at any rate it didn't look as though they got out much. When a glass of beer was placed in front of them, they were startled. When there was a racket over by the bar, they turned around timidly and followed with widening eyes the two rough types who had just agreed to go outside to “discuss the matter further,” as they say in these parts, meaning a fistfight.

They were no less amazed to hear us talking about tree pangolins and rhinoceros birds, they must have thought these were fictional animals, and for them the story of Knut turning up unshaven and unwashed after weeks in the tropical rainforest and walking into the lobby of a luxury hotel must have taken place in a part of the world not yet marked on the atlas.

“I know that man,” muttered Klara next to me. Knut had finally turned to the strangers, no, they didn't usually go to the cinema to see wildlife films, no, they didn't know what an okapi was, the man asked politely whether he could stand us a drink, and Klara thought,
I know that man from somewhere.

Nobody could hear her but me, not Martin, not Ulrike, not the strangers, but just as Knut was about to embark on another anecdote about the Congo, she broke in.

“Excuse me, but didn't you play the part of a prisoner?”

“A prisoner?”

“Yes, you were there on the truck in the jubilee parade, I remember clearly. As a camp inmate.”

“I didn't play a camp inmate.”

“Now you're lying.”

Klara hardly raised her voice, her tone was not accusing, more disappointed, the man was reading Klara's lips, and then I remembered too, there was a rather plump young man that we noticed at the time, he didn't dare raise his arm because his jacket was stretched too tight across his shoulders, while the other characters' prison garb hung loosely about their frames. Yes, I recognized the well-nourished camp inmate, he tried to vindicate himself, said something about “allocated,” he said “duty,” as if he wanted to avoid the term “compulsion.”

“Hermann, I want to leave.”

All at once she was exhausted. There were some things, she said, that simply weren't right, it didn't take courage, all you needed was a bit of backbone, and anyway he knew himself how many jubilee participants failed to present themselves at the assembly point, even though they had been told it was their duty to do so. No, I heard him saying, he really wasn't brave, we were already on our way out, Knut was chasing after us, “Klara, just hang on,” then we stood in the summer night on the pavement, the strangers, Ulrike, Martin, with Knut trying to mediate between the two of them. The man couldn't take in what had happened. “No, I've never been brave,” he repeated, it was the first time I'd heard anyone say such a thing. Klara nodded distractedly, put a hand out, apologized. But for what? She herself had no idea.

On the way home she apologized again, she had ruined everybody's evening, Knut reassured her, “It's okay, really,” Martin shrugged his shoulders, “It can happen to anybody,” the two of them consulted, maybe we could drive out for a picnic in the country the following weekend.

I don't think we actually went on that outing, at least I have no mental picture of the five of us rambling through “Saxon Switzerland,” each with a rucksack on our back. Perhaps Klara or perhaps Ulrike was not very keen on the idea, yes, I reflected as I heard the doorbell ring, perhaps it was the same evening when, after a long silence, Ulrike turned to Klara, as though the moment had come at last to address a sentence to her sister that had been going around in her head for many years: “I don't understand you anymore.”

There was another ring, and only then did I grasp that the interpreter was waiting at the door. I heard somebody take a deep breath to free himself from the net of images, I left Martin standing there on the pavement as well as Knut, who was looking at the two sisters with a troubled expression, and lost sight of Ulrike too, just as we literally lost sight of her at some point, when she turned away from her family and started a new life with her husband in the north, without spelling out her motives for taking this step, either to her parents or to Klara. It may be that she wanted to move out from Klara's shadow, or maybe she simply realized one day that the time when she and her sister played together on the swing doors in their nightdresses lay far back in the past.

I
TOOK KATHARINA FISCHER'S
coat, showed her the living room, the kitchen, the view out onto the street, the view over the garden, led her along the book-lined hall to my study. On the desk I had placed a small, well-thumbed book, the cover had a design of white feathers with sand-colored, brown, and blue stripes, from the top edge a stain ran down as far as the title—a cocoa spill? I don't remember. Colored plates showing native songbirds and their nests, I opened the cover and let Frau Fischer read the inscription: “A book about your small friends, from your parents Christmas 1937.”

She spent a long time studying the illustrations of egg clutches, twigs and wool interlaced, moss, drawn with a fine feel for the play of light and shade, creating an almost three-dimensional effect. I helped her to decipher the names written in old German script, “The Bullfinch,” “The Goldfinch,” “The Siskin,” “The Yellowhammer,” “The Chaffinch,” all perched there on twigs by their nests looking as though they had just preened themselves carefully, as though they had inspected every single feather on their bodies and rearranged each one especially before posing for the drawing. Whether the effect was what the illustrator intended or was the result of the uniform darkening of the paper, the interpreter remarked that all the birds struck her as being both alert and shy; she was particularly impressed by the blackbird, poised over the open nest with feathers slightly spread and tail fanned out, as though it had spotted the observer at that precise moment.

We talked about the relationship between the phases in which blackbirds are seen and heard everywhere and those during which they lead a secret life, we talked about diurnal and nocturnal animals, trust and timidity. About how one of the great tits here on the balcony, having turned up one afternoon in early August and without hesitation landed on my outstretched hand to take the proffered sunflower seed, had declined to accept any more feed for the last few days. The way that, from the edge of the balcony, as if it felt sorry, as if it were as surprised by its own fear as I was, it eyed this person who had suddenly become a stranger to it. If I hadn't known that great tits become tame again in the spells of freezing cold weather, then perhaps this familiar young bird might have struck me as weird.

“And you really haven't ever found out how Ludwig Kaltenburg's jackdaws died?”

As a matter of fact this question came up early on in the conversation, in fact with her very first words of greeting the interpreter started to draw me—or actually both of us—into an inquiry. Although initially it wasn't about the jackdaws at all. When I brought the coffee back to the study, where Frau Fischer had settled down on the couch that was once part of the inventory of the Loschwitz Institute villa, she inquired again about Knut, about Martin, about the period of silence between Kaltenburg and me.

In those six or eight years during which I never wrote the professor a single line, never telephoned him, would have done anything in the world to avoid meeting him—to do so would have been impossible anyway—it was Knut Sieverding who regularly supplied me with news of Ludwig Kaltenburg. The duck colony at the new zoological station had now grown to about four hundred birds. The research projects were dragging on. Environmental protection was becoming more and more central to his activities, big photos in all the papers, the previous day the professor had even appeared on the TV news because he had taken part in a sit-down blockade, old Ludwig Kaltenburg with a beaming face in the midst of young eco-activists, his attitude to the power of the state as stubborn as ever. Appearances. Speeches. Interviews. Once again the professor had used the opportunity to demonstrate his negotiating skills by extracting from the Austrian federal chancellor, in a personal discussion, a promise to help save the Danube water meadows. Knut once sent a postcard from Madagascar: “I can't help thinking what it would be like if you and the professor could be here to admire the amazing diversity of wildlife with me.”