Kaltenburg (41 page)

There's nothing to report about my appointment with Eberhard Matzke. He didn't even offer me a seat. He laid the envelope aside without thanking me. He just muttered, “Funk, Funk—and you say I supervised your microscope work?” as though he couldn't remember a thing. I was idiotic enough to mention his bike, his cardigan, Martin Spengler in the practical lab, I wanted to smooth the path for him, and all the while I had no idea that I was looking into the face of an SS man.

I spent only about ten minutes in his office, and I still recall how surprised I was not to run into any of the museum assistants, either in the corridor or on the stairs. When Kaltenburg's limousine arrived at the Tierpark, I had been walking up and down the path for more than an hour. Krause switched the heater on.

“Did he quiz you?” the interpreter wanted to know.

He wouldn't have been Krause if he hadn't. But you had to get used to his way of questioning. He dispensed with question marks. We chatted about the weather: “Yes, it gets pretty cool after sunset,” he nodded, offered me a cigarette, an S-Bahn train passed by, I sat at the back of the limousine and let myself be driven to Dresden. We discussed Kaltenburg's attitude to vodka, vodka was always said to harden you against the cold, but the professor was strictly opposed to the usual practice of giving zoo animals alcohol with their drinking water in winter. “I reckon he's right there,” said Krause, glancing at the rear mirror, “Think of that nasty business last year,” after drinking several bottles of vodka an elephant in the Moscow zoo had torn a radiator from the wall and turned on its keeper.

Thanks to Kaltenburg's careful planning I was well prepared for this bait. I praised Krause's driving, remarked yet again how well the heating worked in the car, and asked him a personal question: which did he prefer, vodka or mulled wine? “Mulled wine, the way my wife makes it,” he answered promptly—and that was the end of a cunningly contrived attempt to find out something about what he thought had been my stay of several hours in the Tierpark.

We tore along in the outside lane of the dark autobahn. “Pull yourself together,” I said to myself. “Don't tell him anything about Kaltenburg, don't tell him anything about your visit to Matzke.” Then it went quiet. Krause was concentrating on the road, nothing out there but night, I was feeling drowsy.

“Did you drop off to sleep?” asked Frau Fischer. “Not a bad way of avoiding the chauffeur's probing.”

Perhaps I actually did fall asleep. No more steady hum from the engine, no rumbling as we drove over the joints between the slabs in the road. I heard Ludwig Kaltenburg's jackdaws calling quietly. I sat stretched out on the back seat, my hands resting on the upholstery, I blinked up at the roof of the car and heard in turn the various gradations of jackdaw calls, depending on whether the birds were in a mood to fly off or felt the urge to head homeward. I opened my eyes again and looked out at the landscape. There was no landscape. The jackdaws went on calling. I looked around in the car, the rear shelf, the floor beneath my feet, the armrests, then somebody said, “Mating calls are really quite easy to imitate.”

Krause was making jackdaw noises. Or was it the professor I was hearing? Yes, the chauffeur wasn't so much imitating jackdaws as imitating Ludwig Kaltenburg's jackdaw calls. In the rear mirror I saw Krause nodding. He was obviously pleased to be able to continue our conversation over the last fifty kilometers. Of course you could sometimes see when the professor was worried or a particular person was bothering him—he, Krause, could tell that not from his expression, nor from any bad-tempered tone of voice, but simply from the fact that the professor was spending even more time with his fish than usual. He had never in his life met anyone like Professor Kaltenburg, although he had got to know quite a few famous zoologists over the years. He started listing names, I could see who he was going to name next—so far he had never yet seen Professor Doktor Eberhard Matzke in Loschwitz. “Follow Kaltenburg's example and wear a neutral expression,” I said to myself. “Pull yourself together, for goodness' sake, you've got to distract him, do what Ludwig Kaltenburg does, talk about animals.”

I told Krause about the jackdaws. But this may have been exactly the wrong move.

“And now you're asking yourself whether that was the wrong move,” said Katharina Fischer at the same moment that the thought occurred to me.

It was possible that I had put an idea into his head.

“Even if we assume that this man was responsible for poisoning the jackdaws, people like that arrive at such notions sooner or later without any outside help, and you shouldn't reproach yourself,” the interpreter protested. “Whether he was just nursing the desire for revenge because he thought Kaltenburg despised him, or whether he was brooding over his reports, disappointed that the professor wouldn't indulge in any disparaging remarks about the regime or the closing of the border which Krause could have passed on to curry favor for himself—seen in a sober light,” she declared, “that has nothing to do with you.”

It was to keep Krause at a distance that I told him about the jackdaws. “Yes, they love cherries,” he said, “I know that.”

Even better: redcurrants.

“Really?”

Hadn't he ever watched that game involving the little shed butting onto the villa, a game whose attractions nobody could quite make out but which seemed to give Kaltenburg as much pleasure as it gave his jackdaws? “I must admit, I don't often go there, that raven is always hanging about.” But the raven wasn't interested in slipping into the shed. The jackdaws, by contrast, were always intensely curious about what might be hidden in this lean-to. But Ludwig Kaltenburg couldn't bear to see them coming out disappointed each time because there was nothing new for them to find, so several times a day around harvest time he hid redcurrants among the clutter.

I can't remember now, did Krause seem surprised, or did he make out that it was coming back to him that he himself had once observed this odd form of bonding between man and bird? We would have talked at some length about other things; for example, Krause was far more interested, or so it seemed to me at the time, in the function of the yellow spot that magpies have on their third eyelid than in the question of currants, black or red. In any case, as far as the chauffeur was concerned, what the professor did with his animals in order to study their behavior was totally suspect, and the goings-on at the tool shed must simply have confirmed his opinion. Nonetheless, talking to Katharina Fischer now, it was above all this particular story about the jackdaws that sprang to mind.

I was tired when Krause dropped me off at home, and I was—I admit—just a little proud: not a syllable about Matzke and the peace offer. Kaltenburg was waiting with Klara in the kitchen, as we had arranged—in Loschwitz, they might have wondered what was so important about my trip to Berlin that it kept us talking late into the night. Unfortunately, I didn't have much to tell Kaltenburg. It's possible that at the time I was still convinced matters would come out right in the end, but I think Klara could see that my meeting with Eberhard Matzke had not exactly turned out well. The professor enjoyed his dinner, he said, “Difficult, difficult,” and “We shall see,” looking at me across the table with a look that you reserve for an ally. There was no mention of the jackdaws that evening, or redcurrants, or least of all Kaltenburg's driver.

F
INALLY, ON THE WAY
to collect her coat, we passed the Proust once again, and casting a last glance at the volumes, Katharina Fischer inquired whether I wasn't a little hurt when Klara maintained that all she could remember when she thought of the fifties—our early days together—was the newly translated, complete
À la Recherche.

No, Klara certainly didn't want to forget our early years, didn't think of them as having no value in her memory. What there was, though, unforeseeably, time and again throughout the decades, was fits of jealousy, mixed with wistfulness, which Klara would have experienced as much as I did—not jealousy of a person, but of a world which belongs exclusively to the other, an inner world in which they move alone, can only move alone, and to which at times they devote themselves with the kind of dedication, of patience, which their partner too might well love to possess at that moment. Therein lay the pang, that was the Proust, and that's another reason why I never touched him.

And wistfulness, because we knew we couldn't accompany each other into the other's world. For a companion is surprised at phenomena which in terms of that world are accepted as self-evident, asks questions where they ought not to be asked, tries to engage the other person in conversation when they should be doing nothing but observing. If, on the other hand, you take on the task of guiding your loved one through this world, you'll find yourself concentrating more on your partner than on the things around, you'll want to point out details to them that they ought to be discovering for themselves, and you'll reveal connections which you yourself will begin to doubt again as soon as you put names to them.

Slight disturbances. First misunderstandings. Everything needs to be explained. At some point the mystery will begin to retreat step by step from your inner world, and with its retreat the need to explore this world decreases. Soon you start to enter it only as a matter of habit. But we couldn't have borne such emptiness, such loss, whether alone or together. So we resigned ourselves to the fact that the other person seemed submerged for days, weeks even, in his or her own world, barely accessible, as if he or she would never surface again. That was our pact. That's how we protected each other. That's what held us together.

We spent hour after hour at the kitchen table, Klara immersed in her Proust, I in my ornithological writings, surrounded by a succession of members of Parisian high society and representatives of all the bird families scattered across the globe. It is conceivable that over the years some of the individuals populating these inner spaces might have met, despite their differing origins and nature, on the edges of our world, far out there, without our being able to witness their encounters. I believed in such encounters when Klara said she was surprised by the transformation of the
blondschopf,
the “fair-head” she knew from Schottlaender's version, into the
Goldspatz,
the little golden sparrow in the new German translation. Together we reflected on whether there was some real bird lurking behind the original expression in the French, perhaps a yellowhammer, a citril finch, or maybe a canary—and it struck me that Klara may have come across the
Goldspatz
on the very same evening that I was preoccupied with the earliest form of canary,
Serinus canaria,
the wild canary, and its distribution. But she had not interrupted me, the two birds did no more than recognize each other from a distance, and a little later, when Klara was observing a young woman going on a journey with her “young linnets,” the
Goldspatz
and the wild canary were no longer acquainted with each other.

The same thing happened to Klara when she couldn't help thinking about the “pitch-black jay feathers” on the narrator's head which he smoothes down, which refuse to lie flat, and which he has a young maidservant admire, while I was telling her how many subspecies of jay there are, each distinguished by the most subtle characteristics. And Albertine's laugh, which sometimes sounds like little cries and at other times resembles the cooing of pigeons—it's possible that when I tried to reconstruct how, independently of each other,
Columba junoniae
and
Columba bollii
conquered the Canary Islands and made them their living space, that rather indecorous female laugh accompanied me.

Indeed, it seemed from time to time that the paths of related people and animals were crossing in our kitchen knowing nothing about each other. The figure of Moreau, for example, whom Klara suspected of harboring a secret of some sort, and whom she held on to for far too long, though he is granted only one brief appearance in the novel, could have been a distant cousin or the late uncle of the ornithologist of the same name, when we sat together at the table reading and the kitchen beyond the lamplight lay in darkness, where nothing moved except shadows. There between the door and the sink a certain Monsieur A. J. Moreau handed the opera-loving narrator his ticket for a gala evening, while Reginald E. Moreau, without noticing the two figures frozen in a strange attitude, crossed the room as he followed the red-breasted flycatcher, the greenish warbler, and the arctic warbler en route from distant Asia toward the west, across Siberia, northern Russia, and Finland as far as Sweden, where no memory remained of their origins in India or Malaysia.

On our trip to Vienna, when we visited the Natural History Museum and were at last standing in front of the twin eagles that Ludwig Kaltenburg had always wanted to show me, I experienced—and so did Klara, as she later confessed—an almost indescribable moment in which I couldn't have said whether everything around me was slipping out of kilter or whether for the first time in ages I was filling my lungs with air right down to their finest artery branches. And we both felt that these mounted sea eagles, these sad-looking birds of prey with their drooping wings and bowed necks, were imbued with something. Was it a threat, a dark premonition, an unrealizable hope from a long-gone past? We found it hard to be more precise about our impression.

It no longer even seemed necessary to put a name to what we were leaving behind by the time we moved out of Room XXX into the stairwell and it dawned on Klara that the Crown Prince Rudolf whom Professor Kaltenburg had obviously mentioned often, judging by how frequently I talked to Klara about him, must be the same figure that she had known for nearly forty years as Archduke Rudolf, without ever connecting the two. The melancholy heir to the throne, passionately interested in bird life, who died in dubious circumstances on January 30, 1889, and who used to argue with his friend Alfred Edmund Brehm, on their deer-stalking expeditions in the marshy woods by the Danube at Draueck, about whether the
Steinadler
and the
Goldadler
are two different types of golden eagle or just different colorations of the same species: Rudolf is twice mentioned in passages of Proust that are chronologically far apart.