Kaltenburg (7 page)

The voice of my teacher, Ludwig Kaltenburg. He taught me to observe mounted birds as you would live creatures.

If you're ever in Vienna, I said to Frau Fischer, you must go to the Natural History Museum and take a look at the two sea eagles that Crown Prince Rudolf of Habsburg shot a few days before his suicide. It would be hard to find such strange mounted specimens anywhere—the pose, the expression, the plumage—and remember, the taxidermist will have had not just two dead birds on the table before him as he went to work but another death on his mind, and so the two eagles, not to say the one double-headed eagle of the Habsburg emblem, became in his hands two birds with drooping feathers, bowed down with grief as though they knew on the day they were hunted that the man who ended their lives would soon take his own. They are anything but proud heraldic beasts, and perhaps that's why the little explanatory tablet was added, otherwise such taxidermy might have been regarded in 1889 as an insult to the Crown. They're beautiful, these two eagles from the Orth region, the wide, marshy Danube meadows, they're far more beautiful than many a superb, lavishly spruced-up eagle specimen.

“Your teacher—was that the same Ludwig Kaltenburg who wrote
The Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse?
” asked Katharina Fischer.

Yes.

“The author of
A Duck's Life?
”

The very same.

“Didn't he write
Archetypes of Fear
too? And
Studies of Young Jackdaws?
”

As a young academic he made a name for himself with his work on jackdaws.

I shouldn't have mentioned Ludwig Kaltenburg, not at that point, because now the interpreter was no longer so focused, constantly mixing up goldfinch and goldhammer, thistle finch and yellowhammer, despite the mounts in front of her. Nor could she get the names for
Carduelis chloris,
the greenfinch, to stick in her mind. Either she couldn't connect one name with the other or one of the names did not match the bird.

“The goldfinch—isn't that this bird here with the bright yellow head and yellow belly?”

No, that's the yellowhammer,
Emberiza citrinella. Citrinella,
lemon-colored, that ought to be easy to remember. The goldfinch is what we call the
Stieglitz.
The ending of its German name betrays its Slav origins. It's onomatopoeic, supposedly, and no doubt that's why it eventually managed to establish itself on equal terms alongside the old Germanic name
Distelfink,
thistle finch. A bird translated, you might say.

But this still wasn't enough to imprint the goldfinch on the interpreter's long-term memory, her gaze seemed to be held by the cardboard boxes on top of the cupboard,
DAMAGED NESTS, NO LABEL, NEST STANDS
, perhaps she was avoiding looking at me. The goldfinch, strikingly colorful with a red face against its black-and-white head, brown body, the rump again white, the tail and wings—they have a yellow band, hence the “gold”—are black.

We had begun by discussing the fact that my voice had never taken on a local timbre, despite the sixty years I had spent in Dresden. Certain everyday expressions, of course, one or two constructions, and unconsciously, especially when I'm tired, a slight slurring of my speech. But for me Saxon has remained a foreign tongue. Sometimes I secretly envy people who are at home in a recognizable dialect or even just a regional inflection, I've always listened carefully, acquiring a tone here, a touch of red, a few words there, which in time ran together to form a yellow band, and I've mixed them all into my total speech picture, my parents' white High German, the darker coloration of my surroundings here. You could say someone like me has a goldfinch accent, with a bit of local color picked up in every quarter.

“So I'd have to think of you as a goldfinch.”

I asked the interpreter to point out the thistle finch on the desk for me.

“This colorful one,” she said and drew a circle around her drawing of a goldfinch.

“And Ludwig Kaltenburg was your teacher? Of course, it's easy to forget that he taught zoology in Leipzig for years. Because he was an Austrian, I always think of him as someone whose whole life was bound up with Vienna. His famous Dresden Institute. When did he leave the GDR?”

Shortly after the Wall went up. Although I'm not quite sure that Ludwig Kaltenburg ever really was in the GDR, or whether he insisted that he lived in Dresden and simply made a few excursions from here to the GDR.

“But he left for political reasons, didn't he?”

He would have shrugged that off. “I don't understand the finer points of ideology. I'm a zoologist. Everybody contributes in his own way.” And if his interlocutors should happen to shake their heads or put their finger to their lips or even look at him askance, Kaltenburg was always ready with a disarming smile, adding, “As a zoologist, however, I know that there can be no going back to conditions that have already been overcome.” He would have invoked Darwin, talked about “difficult struggles” and “victory over the counterrevolution,” he would have recalled the Dresden zoologist Adolf Bernhard Meyer, a passionate advocate of the theory of evolution, and finally, with expressions like “historical necessity” and “not by chance” and “in this time and place,” he would have returned to his own specialization without having blotted his copybook.

Yes, there were political reasons. Or else Ludwig Kaltenburg left out of desperation.

“You got to know him as a student, in Dresden?”

It was a renewed acquaintance. Early fifties. My parents already knew Kaltenburg. If we hadn't had a shared background, he would hardly have noticed me: one of the many young people strolling along the Elbe and looking up at the Institute site in Oberloschwitz where the great Ludwig Kaltenburg lived with his animals. A not particularly gifted student in a full lecture hall whose name needed to be spelled out to you again at exam time.

P
O
SEN MUST HAVE
BEEN
a strange city in my childhood. It would never have occurred to me that I was in Poland, I never heard anybody speaking Polish on the streets, Polish was prohibited in public, and I never heard the language at home either, there were Viennese, Königsberg, and Rhineland accents, but not a single word of Polish. All the roads had German names, and even the castle that you approached via Sankt-Martin-Strasse was naturally a German building. I don't know why my parents insisted on taking this route when we went into town, past that monstrous edifice, somewhere between giant prison and baronial keep. Over that short stretch of road I became completely silent and kept my head down, the distance across the square with its pond and Bismarck statue seemed to me endless, and when we went that way I fixed my eyes on the projecting, square castle tower at the end, a stone box that was always surrounded by scaffolding, just as the castle always seemed to be undergoing building work and renovation and modification, as though it were a medieval structure that had gradually fallen into disrepair through time and war and weather, perhaps in danger of collapse, certainly always under threat, while it in turn seemed to be threatening me: the walls might not be about to fall down, but two sinister bailiffs were going to leap out from the gateway, seize the nearest passerby, and drag him off to their dungeon. A dark, prehistoric fortress, and yet the castle was hardly more than thirty years old.

Everybody knew this was where the local Gauleiter was settling in, for my parents that would have been a reason to avoid this route, I don't know whether it was defiance or some compulsion that made them take me past the castle every time, grim, withdrawn, it had to be done. You didn't have to be a child to be mystified by the immense deliveries of sandstone, marble, and granite to the site. Once, I remember, we were stopped, a workman was blocking the footpath, but my father wouldn't give in, no one was going to prevent him from picking his way, hand in hand with his son, between the massive building blocks. There was almost a row, I think, we stopped, or maybe my father couldn't find a way through the stone blocks: that was when I discovered, in a polished slab of marble, my first embedded sea snail.

What a contrast to the world of the shopping arcades, how differently they greeted me, with their comfortable temperature in summer or winter, the light, the voices, where I couldn't get lost. The space was covered by a glass roof, and pigeons sat up there on the girders. I was in town with my mother, and while she was flitting between shops, soon going back to the first place she had tried, unable to decide in her search for a winter hat between rabbit, otter, and fox, I was allowed to play in the arcade: half in the open, half indoors, the daylight made the pigeons' necks shimmer as the birds swooped down from above, just over the heads of the grownups, and then flew noisily with their rather clumsy-looking flight action out onto the street.

I had time to look at everything. For a long time I crouched in front of a young beagle waiting for its mistress to return, after I had established from a safe distance that its lead was firmly tied to the ring and there wasn't too much slack in it. I knew my mother's shopping wasn't going to be a quick business, she had been at the furrier's, and now she had disappeared into the haberdasher's. I wished I could defer for as long as possible the moment when I heard my name being called, right through the arcade, people turning around to look at me, salesladies coming to their doorways to see who was missing, I would thread my way through to the familiar voice, and then as usual we would finally go over to the department store, which supplied the things we really needed.

She had chosen the otter skin. At long last my mother had also found herself a new pair of suede gloves. The climax of the department store afternoon was when we took the escalator up to the fourth floor, from one department to another, every time I looked down I felt butterflies in my stomach. Finally we had selected my warm winter underwear, they were predicting a hard winter. I wanted to go home, at last we were walking down the stairs, the last stretch, the way out, now nothing could pull us back into the showrooms that you could only see as though from a distance on every floor going down, the display stands, people, the noises, but here on the stairs, our footsteps echoing, we were no longer affected by all that activity. My mind was already fixed on the tram stop, the journey home, our kitchen, and my nanny when, just as we had almost reached the exit, there was Professor Kaltenburg coming toward us, a university colleague of my father's.

We had to say hello to him. My mother stopped on the landing, and he too, who had been purposefully striding up the stairs as though he wanted to get to the menswear department as quickly as possible, didn't just raise his hat in passing, he halted, held out his hand to my mother, stroked my head. and smiled, saying “What a surprise” and “My dear lady” and “Well, my boy?” I was pulled in different directions, I already saw myself back in our drawing room, why couldn't Professor Kaltenburg go home with us? I thought, but the two of them had already begun—a child picks this up after the first few sentences—a longish conversation in the bare, windowless staircase. Of course it had not escaped me that Kaltenburg was attracted to my mother, but then he was attached to my father too, and to me. While he was paying my mother compliments, he was looking at me: “And if you don't mind my asking such a prying question, what nice things have you been buying, then?”

She didn't show him my underwear, thank goodness, but my mother carefully took the cap, which the professor loudly admired, out of her bag, and when the gloves emerged from their tissue paper, he had an idea. He wanted to give a lady a pair of leather gloves for Christmas, could my mother spare a minute to advise him on his choice?

There he'd been, rushing upstairs, and now he had turned right around and we were going back to the beginning of our store journey, to the ground floor, from which we had long since escaped, and once more the saleslady was taking out one pair of gloves after another.

Why, I asked myself later, did this Professor Kaltenburg not use the escalator like everybody else to go upstairs in a department store? Yet another mystery about this man. Professor Kaltenburg, the first man I ever saw wearing sunglasses, Professor Kaltenburg, who came to see us on his motorbike, Professor Kaltenburg, about whom I would continue to unearth new secrets, Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg, who has had such a decisive influence on my life. He kept his secrets until the end, from using the stairs where there was an escalator to expressing radical, albeit mystifying, self-criticism in his last letters, which reached me from distant Vienna at the end of the eighties.

His keen glance, the laughter lines around his eyes. His movements, quick and exact when it came to precise actions, but at other times awkward, unsteady, seemingly given to chance fluctuations, as though his body were performing grotesque contortions without its owner's knowledge. Ludwig Kaltenburg, a falcon poised to swoop, wishing it were one of those gentle birds of passage moving steadily along in a great flock.

Now he was picking up a pair of dark tan gloves as though they were exactly what he'd been looking for all along. And then with a laugh he was pushing them back into the pile. Then he was glancing sidelong at my mother while she was pointing out the quality of the leather and solid seams of an expensive pair.

“You've got to run your hand over them carefully, here, turn the glove inside out.”

I was afraid we'd never get home for supper. In the artificial light of the store it looked to me as though the day outside had ended long before. The suede leather. The animal smell. I could hardly stand the smell there.

“No, you must have got something wrong, Professor Kaltenburg is not a colleague of your father's at the university.”

“But isn't he called Professor?”

“He is a professor, only in Königsberg, not here in Posen—but you know that, don't you remember, he was talking about Königsberg back there? And he's not a botanist.”