Kaltenburg (8 page)

I knew Königsberg, that's where Knut came from.

“So what's he doing in our city?”

My mother hesitated for a moment. “Professor Kaltenburg is a zoologist who takes care of confused people in a big mental hospital here.”

“Confused?”

“Not just confused, of course—they're seriously ill.”

I could tell my mother was not happy with her answer. She reflected. Then she spotted something, and: “Give the lady your seat.”

I got up off the seat, a woman pushed past me as though I didn't exist, took my place without so much as a nod.

“And who was he talking about when he said he needed a nice pair of gloves for a lady?”

“His wife, of course—who did you think?”

I was standing in the gangway now, the tram was getting fuller all the time, my mother was holding on to me with one arm, the other was clasping the bags and boxes on her lap.

“Look, it's raining.” And: “We'll soon be home.”

But the words could not be wiped away. A zoologist who worked in a mental hospital. The smell of suede, and now the tram had stopped again, the damp steaming off the passengers' coats. Hadn't I watched a veterinary surgeon at work in a cowshed, the blood and the bellowing, the crude, bright instruments? I could see Professor Kaltenburg in a white coat, using his zoological expertise on the patients. The tram's electric contacts were sparking. Hadn't I watched badly injured people being carried on stretchers into courtyard entrances in the city, hadn't I seen bandaged heads, heard cries of pain and the “Quick, quick” of the ambulance men? Professor Kaltenburg in the posture of a falconer, his gaze turned upward and his arm outstretched: I can see him—was I already seeing him like this even then? Where does a child get such imaginings from?—in solid leather gloves, adjusting some medical apparatus whose thick cables run to a patient's bed.

I
'D LOVE TO TAKE
a close look at the bird.”

With this parting sentence outside the department store Professor Kaltenburg invited himself over to our house. My mother had told him about our starling, which, unusually for a starling, had refused to integrate into the family, did not seek company, didn't eat properly, and showed no sign whatsoever of the ability to talk, a point my father had used to make me keen on the bird.

This starling wasn't our first bird, and my father had taken them all to his heart, every single time. If you keep a careful lookout for nests, if you find helpless nestlings that have fallen to the ground and are either still just breathing or already completely dried up, if you cannot get enough of the sight of a bird nursery in late spring and the brood's first attempts at flight, sooner or later, like my father, you will bring birds into the house. It may be that he simply couldn't resist them, or maybe it was part of his plan to gradually accustom me to the presence of birds: soon we had our first fledglings in the conservatory, went collecting worms, gathering seeds in the greenhouse and using them for feed, and from then on, apart from the injured birds we took in, every spring we had orphaned youngsters to hand-rear with egg yolk, hemp seed, linseed, and poppy seed. Barley groats or bread rolls soaked in milk, groundsel and chickweed, lettuce. My father in the kitchen: “No, for this one I've got to mix some water in with the milk.”

I watched my father, and the birds, but I never fed them, never cleaned their cage, I didn't even whistle, let alone touch one of these creatures. The blind, croaking, featherless, wrinkled animals in a box lined with wood shavings: I never quite dared approach them, always kept a certain distance.

“I'd love to take a close look at the bird.” By the time Professor Kaltenburg came to see us, Martin had long since left. Sometimes we still got postcards, from Erfurt at first, then from Königgrätz. He always addressed them to the family, never just to the professor of botany, and their contents were intended for all of us too, the words meant for the adults, his frequent sprinkling of little drawings aimed at the child. Then the greeting cards stopped, the last one—but I may be wrong about this—came from the Crimea, about the time when the peninsula was cut off and was being vacated, so probably in November 1943.

I noticed the dust cloud from quite a distance, a motorbike was heading from town and racing at a crazy speed down our road. I rushed around the house, my father must be in his greenhouse at the back, my mother was lying down after lunch. “There he is,” I shouted from the doorway, “he's here,” although I couldn't see my father anywhere in the greenhouse. His head appeared at the side between the grasses, he wiped his hands on his trousers as he came toward me, and just as he was asking, “The professor?” we heard the motorbike in front of the house. Kaltenburg switched off the engine and heaved his NSU into our driveway; he was wearing leather gloves, a leather jacket, and dark glasses against the sun, which was very low in the sky at that time of day.

My nanny stood at the kitchen window. Professor Kaltenburg pushed his glasses up onto his forehead, took off his gloves, waved toward the window, glanced around as though looking for my mother, then held out his hand to my father and laughed.

“Where's our little patient, then?”

I followed Kaltenburg and my father into the conservatory. It was almost as though the starling had been waiting for us, it was hopping around in a lively manner in its cage, and as soon as my father opened the little door it jumped onto Professor Kaltenburg's hand and then straight onto his shoulder and then his head. Professor Kaltenburg wasn't in the least taken aback, even when the young starling messed up his hair and started investigating the sunglasses, tugging at them until they finally fell to the ground, Kaltenburg laughed and talked to the creature. I stood to one side with my father, and later I realized that from that afternoon onward the memory of my father began to fade.

Today I know so much more about Ludwig Kaltenburg's life than I do about my own parents'. Admittedly, over the decades Kaltenburg frequently talked to me about himself, right up until his death, presenting particular episodes in varying lights—my parents were not granted that much time. But I think it started that afternoon when Kaltenburg first visited us. He was soon telling me how he had reared animals even as a child, how at that moment in Posen he didn't have the company of a single living thing, how he nearly became director of a zoo, and how in America, where his father sent him to study, he had spent all his time going to the beach to collect marine specimens, since he didn't understand a word of the lecturers' English. Kaltenburg came from Austria, was a full professor in Königsberg, and spent some time in Posen. The places where my parents had lived—I can't think of any apart from Posen, except for our stay in Dresden. Where did they grow up, where did they meet, where did my father study? Where did we live before we moved to Posen? Did they share a common past in Dresden? I knew nothing about any of it.

In Posen they must have been regarded as outsiders, otherwise it's hard to explain why I have so few pictures in my mind of my parents' social life. I can't remember any social occasions at home, it may be that my father really was rather isolated among his colleagues. Perhaps that was why he put so much effort into cultivating Kaltenburg's friendship, just as Kaltenburg did into gaining his. Although they were both in their late thirties, I envisage my father as the younger man and Kaltenburg as the older of the two, no doubt because of later images, snow-white hair framing a tanned face radiating health.

“Is it really true,” I asked him, “that you took some live ducks with you to Königsberg, and all the other professors were amazed?”

“Yes, I did, by the crateful, and I lugged fish over there as well, and kept them in the institute.”

Professor Kaltenburg has become world-famous, but I have never yet discovered whether my father was a leading light in his subject, and in later years, to spare myself painful memories of him, I have never looked up my father's books or articles. As an adult, however, I have been comforted to hear from Knut, Martin, and others who attended his lectures at the University of Posen that he was a good teacher who inspired enthusiasm in his students for the plant world. And given the unspectacular nature of most botanical phenomena, that is no mean feat.

Kaltenburg inquired in detail about the feed we were giving the starling, about its care, my father answered obligingly, Kaltenburg nodded, Professor Kaltenburg shook his head, he asked whether my father had caught and reared the bird himself, no, he had bought it, Kaltenburg wanted to know who from, while the starling was continually looking for new places in the conservatory from which to fly at the professor, my father named the dealer, and Kaltenburg shrugged: “I know him well, of course, and I've got to say he's reliable enough.”

The two of them arranged that Kaltenburg should take care of the bird himself for a few days so that he could observe it. They looked at me as though my agreement mattered to them, I nodded, I didn't mind, I wasn't attached to the bird. Privately I hoped Professor Kaltenburg would succeed where my father hadn't, and teach it to talk.

Our guest didn't want any tea, at any rate not just yet, perhaps later, my mother would join us. But he would be interested in a tour of the greenhouse. He let my father show him his favorite plants; Kaltenburg kept giving him a sharp, or rather surprised, sidelong glance while my father immersed himself in his plant world. My father was attracted by the less conspicuous, often overlooked grasses, herbs, flowers, his interest wasn't sparked by the cultivated type, and ultimately not even by any that grew from seed sown by human hand. Then it was my father's turn to suddenly raise his head and take a sidelong look at Kaltenburg as the latter examined a plant which had recently been brought in. Two men, as it might have seemed to an observer, who were doing some cautious footwork around each other for the moment, as though unclear whether this was leading to a friendship or was just preparation for a fight.

Striped goosefoot and fat-hen, spreading orach, redroot amaranth, black nightshade, and smooth sow thistle: my father showed me them all on our walks, I can still recite them by heart, but soon I'll have forgotten them again. Oblong-leaf orach and flixweed or tansy mustard, wall rocket, prickly lettuce, Canadian horseweed: my father regularly audited the railway embankment not far from the house. “Look, we've never seen these tiny flowers before, and the panicle there.” He crawled around in the grass, carefully freeing the roots with a trowel. And up there on the embankment the slow-moving trains, made up of a few passenger cars and countless cattle wagons, in which the animals never stirred, where are they heading for? I asked my father.

“To the east—don't you know your compass points?”

I learned to distinguish white from black henbane, my father held up two stalks with hairy leaves and small flowers, “You must never, ever touch this plant, or that one, do you understand?” Whether it was black or white henbane, “I warn you—if I ever catch you with either of them,” the green, yellow, white, black flowers, my father warned me, but he never got as far as a threat.

What kind of mental picture was that? I wonder suddenly, flocks from beyond the Urals and from the plains to the west, the beautiful dusky plumage, here shimmering like freshly boiled pitch, there matte black like tar that has become brittle with cold, and then in places this fine ash-gray layer, like that on smoldering old wood that no breath of wind has touched for a long while.

Professor Kaltenburg took enough birdfeed with him for the next few days. We fussed over fastening the blanket-covered cage to the luggage rack of his motorbike. All three of us were waving: my father, my mother, and me.

When the starling came back to its familiar surroundings it seemed a different bird, so interested and alert as it investigated the plants, its sleeping quarters, the whole conservatory. But it never did learn to talk.

I
HAVE TO FORCE MYSELF
to recall the last clear visual memories I have of my father, as though I were afraid, as I was then, of meeting his eye. I stand there hanging my head—the stone floor of the hall, the wooden boards in the conservatory, the carpet in our drawing room—and I can no longer see my father's face. Shame? Certainly I lowered my eyes because I felt shame, I was ashamed because my father had been shamed. Pain too, for sure, because if you let pain happen to someone else, if you don't protect him and then don't even ease his pain afterward, you yourself feel hurt. But worse still was the betrayal. I didn't look my father in the eye because I had betrayed him, and knew that he knew it as well as I did.

I was hanging around in the conservatory with our tame starling. When can that have been? Kaltenburg's first visit took place in the late autumn of 1942, and from then on close contacts developed between the two of them. My father was going to meet Professor Kaltenburg in town after his lecture. No, Maria had better count him out for dinner, he had arranged to see Kaltenburg, who had promised to give him a copy of his latest article. “Most interesting as usual, what he's got to say about the differences between wild and domestic animals. But ‘interesting' is not the word—this essay will be epoch-making, no doubt about it. And then please remember that the professor is coming over for a meal on Friday.”

I have a feeling that Professor Kaltenburg even spent a Christmas with us. So it went on, for at least one winter. And then, in spring, or by the summer of 1943 at the latest, if not 1944, at home the name Kaltenburg was deleted from our vocabulary from one day to the next.

The bird sand crunched beneath my feet, I was leaning on the back of the armchair between the indoor palm and the rubber tree trying to keep quiet, moving my mouth silently as though still trying to teach our starling to talk. His cage, its door usually stood open, and in the corner the box with the injured blue-throat, and then all the equipment, feeding bowls and water bowls, pipettes, wooden rods, seed mixtures, accumulated over time to form an immense armory. The door of my father's study was ajar, the low voices of two men in the background, and by concentrating hard I could make out a sentence here or there, especially when Professor Kaltenburg was speaking.