Kaltenburg (16 page)

One evening when the professor was about to dismiss his audience, somebody surprised us by coming up with yet another question. Kaltenburg had glanced along the rows for the last time, had embarked on his usual closing speech: he hoped that for today our questions had been answered, if not exhaustively, since there were unfortunately all too few questions about the animal kingdom that could be answered exhaustively—Ludwig Kaltenburg's discreet hint that he himself was exhausted, that the audience should save its open questions for the next lecture session, please. Among the regular listeners there was nobody who failed to take the hint, nobody who would dream of interrupting Kaltenburg at this point. People had fished out their bags from under their seats, they had their coats over their arms, waiting to applaud again at the end. “In the coming weeks we will all discover new things about the animals around us, and new questions will come up,” all that was left now was his “Many thanks once more for listening to me for so long and so patiently” and “I hope you have a pleasant journey home”—two sentences between which Kaltenburg always left a short pause, to savor the attentive silence in the hall for a moment.

“Herr Professor, if you don't mind”—somebody had stood up in one of the back rows, I could hear people muttering, Hey, that's not fair, you can see the professor is tired, anybody asking a question now must be a newcomer, someone ignorant of the rules. “Herr Professor, if you don't mind, I'd like to ask a brief question,” and the tone suggested that the speaker was somebody who would not recognize the rules after twenty lecture evenings with the professor, who would never respect them. People were turning round, trying to see this person, only a few noticed how Kaltenburg had raised his eyebrows, as though wondering what was in store for him now.

“If I think of a chick being nursed under its mother's wing, for example—what part of that behavior is acquired, and what is innate, what is due to experience? In short, does an adult bird know that it was taken under its mother's wing when it was young?”

A trick question? Was someone trying to lead him on? Had they planted an agent provocateur on him at last? The professor knew all the tricky types, they too were part of the regular audience. Those who always asked the same question regardless of the lecture topic. Those who always knew better than the lecturer and couldn't wait to pick him up on some trivial detail. And the one who produced an uncontrollable torrent of language that never led to a question mark. We all knew them, but this questioner did not immediately fit into any known category. Was the professor racking his memory for a face that corresponded to that of this unknown young man, was he looking around the hall for me, as though I might help him out at this juncture? I could see he was playing for time, which he did initially by explaining to the audience the unfamiliar German verb the young man had used,
hudern,
for when a chick is taken under its mother's wing.

Hudern:
the expression was far from unfamiliar to me. I learned very early on what it meant, and I know who taught it to me. Who helped me with my drawing when I really wanted a picture of the mother hen who strayed into our garden with her brood of chicks one afternoon. Who did most of the work when all I had done was dash a few yellow circles down on paper to represent the young birds. I didn't have to turn around to see that lean figure before me, the taut skin that looked as though it had been stretched over the skull by hand, the high cheekbones, the peculiarly round eyes, whose effect was intensified by what seemed to be a complete absence of eyelashes. And yes, I could have told Ludwig Kaltenburg who the unknown listener was. Someone who had grown up on a farm in the Rhineland, watching from an early age how the hens nursed chicks under their wings, how they spread their wings over their offspring to protect them from rain, cold, strong sunlight. I recognized him instantly from his voice, his intonation. Nothing Saxon about it. A stranger. After you had been listening to Ludwig Kaltenburg for an hour and a half, carried along by his mellifluent Viennese accent, your hearing was sharpened, as though the eardrums had been cleansed of all sorts of guttural, hissing, and oral cavity noises. The question about chicks being nursed had been put by a Rhinelander, in a softly flowing High German, but you sensed he could just as easily have been speaking
Platt,
the Low German dialect of the lower Rhine, the language he grew up with.

Kaltenburg had left the question of nursing chicks far behind, moving on from chickens to the duck family, then touching on spotted nutcrackers, ravens, and nightingales, talking—in grossly simplified terms, as he admitted—about “stupid” and “clever” animals. Possibly still not sure whether he was being set up, he was keen to reach terra firma quickly. He was in the process of building his Dresden jackdaw colony, this was a time when he often thought back to Vienna and his first flock, long since dispersed—for him it was an easy move from here to the topic of tradition-building in the animal kingdom.

A young jackdaw, attached to older birds, would follow the same flyway as its forebears, and this knowledge, if you wanted to call it that, would be passed on to its own young. The sequence of route-training stayed the same from generation to generation, not based on some kind of insight but simply out of tradition. “My tomcat used to hunt regularly in a particular bit of the garden”—the professor leaned forward, resting on his elbows—“and the birds learned to avoid his hunting ground. Years after he died the young jackdaws were still doing the same, keeping the memory of an old cat alive.”

With regard to memory itself—Kaltenburg's glance now took in the audience as a whole, whereas before he had been concentrating on the stranger—or, to be more precise, with regard to feats of memory in the narrowest sense, there were significant differences between the species, sometimes in fact between one individual animal and another. Just as there were between human beings, which was why he thought it wrong to see humans and animals as poles apart when it came to the ability to remember.

With this change of direction the professor had finally managed to put an end to the eerie mood in the hall, there was even some laughter here and there, a laugh of relief, the mixture of disquiet and paralysis was dissolved at a blow. It was true that there should not have been any mention of humans, that was the pact between Kaltenburg and his public, but in this particular situation the professor had no choice. There had never been such an atmosphere at a lecture, oppressed silence, uncertainty, doubt, anxiety, the whole evening could easily have been poisoned retrospectively. Ludwig Kaltenburg too looked relieved now: he would never have forgiven himself if he'd had to watch his listeners slope off home hanging their heads. The tension drained from his face, he bowed, the first few people were getting up to leave.

There was no time to lose. I pushed my way along the row to get to the central aisle, the dense crowd: Martin nowhere to be seen. I squeezed through as far as the door: nobody even remotely resembling him. I slipped between an old couple into the foyer: Martin must have altered. But there he was: moving purposefully toward the exit, he was just lighting a cigarette.

P
EOPLE AUTOMATICALLY STEPPED ASIDE
to let Martin Spengler pass, they didn't dare make eye contact with him, and on the way out he saw nothing and nobody. They shied away from this stranger who had nearly upset the balance of Professor Kaltenburg's lecture evening with a single, late, inconsiderate question. But even as a silent listener among the crowd he would have made people somewhat uneasy. Yes, maybe it was something I grasped at that moment as I chased him across the foyer, drawing attention to myself in the process: wherever Martin Spengler turned up in public he caused a certain annoyance, hard to explain but totally unrelated to whether he was trying to provoke people or not.

The way that Martin once nearly got into a fight with a gang of juveniles, the way that, insecure as he was, he felt challenged by a group of cheeky but fundamentally harmless kids marauding through the rubble landscape, who for their part felt threatened by Martin as they probably did by any adult who crossed an unseen territorial boundary: it must have been one of his earliest, most formative experiences in Dresden. I can see Martin getting out of the train with his portfolio under his arm, leaving the station and walking in the direction of the art academy. But when we met up again by chance, Martin had already been living in the city for quite a while, and perhaps my memory only places this story at the beginning of his stay in Dresden because I have always regarded it as symptomatic of his student years, not to say his whole life.

Martin was received in Dresden by the echo of children's voices, it had to be children's voices, even though from a distance there was something shrill and hateful about them such as you would only want to ascribe to an adult. At first he couldn't make out any words in all the shouting, simply accepting it as a sign that the area was not completely devoid of life. There were no signposts, he had difficulty finding his way through the network of trampled paths and cleared stretches of road. Martin had an appointment, hugged the portfolio of drawings close to him, he had worked at it for a long time, constantly adding new pieces, taking out older ones, so that now it provided an overview of nearly eighteen months' work.

Masses of masonry, dust, a shrub here and there. Not that such areas were unknown to him, but he knew them only from a bird's-eye view, from his cockpit. You could just as well have told him he was traveling through the karst region north of the Mediterranean. Or far to the east. He had seen places, from above the Crimea, where Dresden stretched in every direction, to the horizon. As a fighter pilot Martin had been decorated several times over, but which sorties he got his medals for he could no longer say, there had been too many, and mostly he saw nothing below him but a postwar Dresden. The burn marks on his neck, from the chin to behind his left ear—if you mentioned his scar he would say, “That's what they gave me the gold medal for, ‘wounded in combat.'”

No, none of it was that unfamiliar to Martin—it was just that he had missed his way some time ago in the empty city. Children were playing somewhere in the ruins, crawling through half-collapsed cellars, following the course of completely vanished rows of streets from one plot of ground to another, a subterranean network of paths to which no adult had access. Then they would resurface somewhere unexpected, lugging planks out of a cellar and using them to get to spaces you had so far seen only from an insuperable distance, glimpses into secret rooms, across a gaping chasm four stories deep. The children would be egging each other on, thought Martin, while they dragged their plunder with grim determination through the brick debris, or two rival gangs were preparing for a fight, or the excitement was all about some tremendous discovery, the children had found something in the ruins they'd never seen before, something strange to them—but what could be strange to them?—hence all the shouting.

At first Martin wanted to use the children's voices to orient himself. Perhaps he had missed some sign in the landscape where he should have turned off, a particular heap of stones, a gorse bush with a distinctive shape, maybe he hadn't taken in the details of the lengthy directions in the right order, had paid more attention to the tone of the friendly old lady on the train than to the information she gave him. Most of the journey had taken place in silence, actually quite a pleasant silence, he felt, even though he wondered now and again whether he, the stranger, was the reason for the reticence of his fellow travelers, who all seemed to be natives. No, it wasn't his fault, Martin realized as the valley narrowed on either side of the track, the Elbe slopes closing in on the train windows, for as the end of the journey clearly approached, the first quiet conversations started up. More and more voices joined in, he heard mention of people's jobs, place-names, surnames, even a first name, an address. He was relieved, satisfied that during the journey it had been simple consideration for others, a matter of leaving them in peace. You read, you dozed, you lost yourself in daydreams, but now, just before arriving, there was no fear of bothering anyone if you began a conversation.

It was at Weinböhla that the lady spoke to him, gesturing toward his portfolio, and when he began to explain something about drawings, the art academy, his application to study there, the lady nodded as though she had known all along. Her husband had been an artist too, a man obsessed by his art. Precisely in the darkest years he had been driven by an almost frightening compulsion, producing hundreds of drawings, even though there wasn't the slightest prospect of ever showing them in public. On the contrary, nobody could be allowed to see the pictures, and as her husband finished one sheet after another, it was her job to hide them. She had found more and more new hiding places, in the loft between two hideous old farmhouse dressers, behind the wall cladding in the summerhouse, under all the clutter in the tool shed. In a way she had admired her husband, whose work obsession prevented him from looking either forward or back, but she also felt powerless, close to despair as she sewed sketchpads into pillows or wrapped half a dozen pictures in packing paper and laid them along the shelves in the larder like ordinary lining. A few days later the wrapping paper had been torn away, the scraps covered in manic yet almost microscopically fine pencil strokes. Another headache. Her husband couldn't remember anything.

Before Martin could ask his name and whether his work was on display in the art gallery today, whether he was still working at the same furious pace, she said, “All burned.”

With that, the subject was closed. “All burned”: paintings, drawings, and sketches, or the artist himself together with his concealed work—Martin did not dare ask. The lady composed herself, returned to the art academy, and began to describe the easiest way to get there. It would have been better if he had asked her to draw him a sketch map on his portfolio case, because as she spoke—now fully turned toward her interlocutor—in well-formed, clearly structured sentences about things which did not affect her emotionally, Martin soon had ears for nothing but her way of talking.