Kaltenburg (20 page)

That was his stubborn streak. His secret wish to restore the good name of the Hagemanns. So Klara's father tolerated it when his colleagues in the laboratory appreciatively called him a “real Hagemann” because in his presence the director of the firm, who was given to violent outbursts, was transformed into an understanding character who didn't mind asking the son of the cigarette factory owner for advice from time to time. He also put up with it when his name occasionally provoked some skeptical scrutiny.

Herr Hagemann knew what he was letting himself in for. He and his wife had spent sleepless nights going through the pros and cons together, but the final decision wasn't made until the landed-gentry relatives sent their first letter from the West. His aunt's childish handwriting seemed to Klara's father exactly suited to the “yoke” and “knout,” the “demons” and the “bloodsuckers” she was writing about, as though a defeated military commander had dictated his last testament to her in his madness. Herr Hagemann held his breath. As he read the last paragraph, he began to growl dangerously, Frau Hagemann was considering sending her daughters out of the room: their nephew was of course welcome at any time, they said, to escape to the bosom of the family together with his wife and daughters. He remembered staying with them near Meissen, even as a child he didn't trust his uncle, in fact he was afraid of him, like everybody else on the estate. The oppressive summer days were dominated by fear of running into this unpredictable being, the nephew mingled with the farm workers, went out to the fields with them, hung around in the stables—but the landowner had eyes everywhere. Put yourself in the hands of such people? Of your own free will? Never.

Then there were his good intentions. There was his drive to prove himself. And there was the indulgence toward his daughters, especially the younger one, who had inherited so much from him. You certainly didn't have to do everything they expected of you today, but he really couldn't see any reason to complain about the prospect of a peace demonstration. Klara had earmarked that time for the next volume of Balzac, she was complaining about the wasted hours. Her father shook his head, she needn't make a face like that, and then he felt sorry when she left the house looking miserable. The book was lying on the table. Herr Hagemann had acquired it as a young chemistry student in Berlin, had skipped his practicals, had read from cover to cover all the volumes of the cycle that had appeared in German, and felt quite lighthearted about it, as though he had managed to shake off a whole load of Hagemann obligations he had imposed upon himself.

“Then there was no further contact between the Hagemanns and the family in the West?” asked Frau Fischer.

Klara had never seen her western relatives. She wasn't allowed to receive so much as a parcel of books from the uncle.

“So there were some limits to his indulgence toward his younger daughter, then.”

I don't think the threat was ever made openly, but neither do I believe that any of the longed-for new books from the West ever got to Klara. Books she wasn't allowed to read—no, it was more to do with his fearful imaginings, her father trying to give concrete expression to his loathing of that branch of the family.

In the first summer of the war the parents took their two daughters on a trip to Leipzig, Klara had just started school, Ulli was two grades above her, their father was in the uniform he detested, he cherished every minute spent with his family. His “three women,” as he called them, gave him protection, and protection for him meant the illusion that he was a civilian. So he took his family to the zoo, took them for a coffee, and in the strange city even his daughters forgot for a while that their father was no longer living with them at home. And then—whether it was an idea that occurred to them over coffee or the parents had planned it as a way of rounding off the excursion—they tacked on a visit to the National Library. Ulli thought it a boring idea, even more books than at home, a whole building just for books. She began to whine, she had enough to do with her reading primer at school, here was a whole lifetime of books she would never master, and she saw malevolently grinning authors who enjoyed writing, filling page after page, book after book, and every time they put their difficult-to-read names to a title page they leaned back, stretched themselves at their desks, narrowed their eyes, and trained their sights on Ulli. They filled shelf upon shelf, room after room, while Ulli laboriously formed her letters one by one, wrestling with sentences, toiling away at her exercise books and yet bringing them home every time covered in red ink.

What did her little sister know of the abysses of reading and writing? Speechless, Klara stared at the imposing, shiny row of lettering on the facade. She stood speechless in the entrance hall and was speechless while being shown the catalog, the reference works, the loans desk. And everybody here was carrying books under their arm, all eager to start bending over the open white pages with the black signs, day and night. When you were reading, you no longer even wanted to sleep. Speechless, Klara let her mother drag her away to the train station, she still hadn't found her tongue when the train pulled into Dresden, at night in bed Ulli talked about the cocoa, talked about the animals, then worked out how many days of the holiday were left and fell asleep.

The Leipzig experience may have faded into the background in the following years; how could Klara know what a librarian was? But reading and writing came so much more naturally to her than to Ulli, no doubt as the younger sister she had an advantage: the younger ones sit quietly with their toys listening while the schoolchild at the table traces the lines of print with a forefinger; they listen to the way that words form into sentences, the parents' careful corrections, and two or three years later, when it's their turn to read aloud, it sounds as though they have taught themselves everything overnight. Klara did her homework without grumbling, then sat down with her parents' library to read her way patiently through the centuries. Soon she had a favorite bookseller in the city, Herr Lindner. He was the one who said one day, almost in passing, “I can't imagine Klara anywhere but a library.”

She was no longer the girl who confronted strange dachshund owners in the Great Garden, no longer incited her sister to rampage through the house making fun of political chanting, so loudly that the people upstairs could hear. She had learned in the meantime what it was to be a Hagemann, she knew that when she wanted to achieve a goal it was not enough to be more hardworking than the others, brighter, cleverer, if you didn't have the necessary instinct, the so-called ability to learn. It was definitely not easy to keep a tight rein on herself, how often she bit her tongue, how often she rolled her eyes when somebody came at her with “truth” and “historical necessity” when all she could see was stupidity. But she made the effort, kept her aim firmly in sight, had even forced herself during her training to read the collected works of Johannes R. Becher, minister of culture.

It even went so far that Klara was mistaken for an ardent admirer of the culture minister, and I can still clearly remember a distant relative reciting a few lines of Becher at our wedding to please Klara. There we stood in front of the assembled wedding guests, all eyes were on us, I can still feel Klara's moist hand in mine, how she flinched when she recognized the lines, how she held on to me tightly, as though she could not survive the solemn recitation of that harmless versifying without the man beside her.

“The relatives from the West weren't there.”

No, of course not.

“It sounds weird, this strict ban on contact simply because of bad childhood memories that Herr Hagemann was unable to put behind him.”

The parents kept it close to their chest. They wanted to foster Klara's and Ulli's belief in human goodness. But you're right, there must have been more to it.

Not all that long ago, sometime in the late nineties, we had been invited over by an old bird breeder in the Meissen region, Klara always got on well with him too. It was his ninetieth birthday, the whole village was sitting together on this sunny afternoon in the meadow behind the house, there were cakes, there was schnapps, and the more schnapps there was, the more talkative the farmers became. They were cursing the regional authority's livestock-disease insurance scheme, flies hovered around the half-eaten custard cakes, people were exchanging stories about animal diseases, the cream for the coffee clotted as it was stirred, and soon they were competing around the table to impress us townies with descriptions of worm-eaten sheep and suppurating cows' eyes. Typical butcher's-yard stories, a rough tradition, but this kind of thing never makes either me or Klara feel bad. Then the name Hagemann came up.

The oldest man at the table, who had so far sat quietly listening, looked around at everybody with his light-colored eyes, let his young neighbors know what he thought of their animal stories, cleared his throat, and began telling us about 1945. He had not been drinking. He pointed to the surrounding hamlets, hills, copses, the number of skeletons that were buried there, he wasn't just talking about illegally disposing of a few sheep or cows. “The Russians are over here”—the man brought his right hand down on the table—“and the Americans are here”—his left hand came down not far away. “Nobody knew which of them would arrive first, but everybody was certain of one thing, the great, decisive battle involving our secret armies was not going to take place on Saxon soil, if at all.”

Slowly his hands moved closer together as he described the landowners' nocturnal meetings. “They didn't want any trouble,” many of them were scared for the first time in their lives, “they had to come up with something,” there were shotguns around, and foreign forced laborers who could tell more stories than the farmers liked to think. “So they took their Poles and Ukrainians into the woods.”

He named the collective farms, the former estates, listed old names for us, among them there was a Hagemann. The table fell silent. The palms of his hands met. “And that was that.”

Klara's maiden name—and what a relief it was to both of us that the name Funk was associated only with the ornithologist and his charming wife who had such refined manners, who could listen attentively and react almost without batting an eyelid to the farmers' coarse tales.

I had paid the bill, helped Frau Fischer on with her coat, a little too heavy for the weather at the time, we were about to head for the taxi stand, on the ground floor the tables had already been laid for the next day, the waiter opened the door for us and said goodnight. The gravel crunched beneath our feet, the night air, the bridge ahead of us, the river to one side, the water shimmering on its way to the sea, and Frau Fischer said she would like to slip down to the riverfront once more for a moment, to take a look across at Loschwitz.

A
RE YOU OUT
of your mind?” This was always the prelude to one of Kaltenburg's fits of rage—as I well knew, but so far none of his outbursts had been directed at me. “What do you mean, you're not quite sure yet what to do with your life?”

I didn't relish mumbling and stammering in front of the professor, so I looked at the floor in silence. He had not expected an answer. “What a disappointment. I've got to sit down.”

I wasn't sure whether he was groping theatrically toward his armchair or whether he was genuinely overcome with a sudden weakness. “The biggest disappointment of my life. You don't know what you want to do”—he adopted a droning voice, the voice of an annoying brat—“as if we're playing in the sandpit and you're asking me what you should be, a fireman or a train driver.”

He lowered himself heavily onto the cocktail-bar chair, sitting on the arm, leaning back as though he were going to slide to the floor. “How long have we known each other? How long? Tell me.”

“Ten years?”

Silence.

“Longer?”

“And after more than ten years you still don't understand a thing? My God, what sort of amoeba have I picked out?”

He passed a hand across his brow, pure play-acting, and in the next instant his eye caught mine and held it, his gaze boring into my skull. “You're going to study zoology, no question. You'll be one of my disciples.”

He collapsed in the armchair, completely drained, shaking his head as though talking to himself, as though there were no point in addressing me, the amoeba. “Don't know why you didn't think of it yourself.”

And then, after another long pause—I was wondering whether to call the doctor or simply go home—he raised his eyes to me again in a typical Kaltenburg twist, almost affectionately, now was the moment for his long-planned surprise: “My boy, we have a study place for you.”

Ludwig Kaltenburg was in his element when he could pluck a surprise out of the hat, especially if no one knew what effort had gone into it. The professor was only really pleased with himself when he seemed to have been inspired by a sudden brain wave, a crazy idea, and in a flash had come up with an elegant solution to the toughest problem. You might suspect the struggles behind the scenes—but you couldn't say so, because for a Professor Kaltenburg it was all child's play.

I was supposed to fall upon his neck, to jump for joy. But I could neither move nor speak. The surprise had succeeded. Afterward, I hoped he would assume I had been struck dumb with delight. It looked as though Ludwig Kaltenburg was fulfilling wishes I didn't even know I had.

When I look back on that afternoon, I am overcome with rueful feelings. I'm ashamed to think that I almost feel sorry for Kaltenburg. His outburst, his surprise, the staged attack of weakness—as though he were covering up a real state of weakness, as though contrary to appearances he had shown that he could be hurt, that he had in fact been hurt by me. The “greatest disappointment of my life”: just as I was previously unwilling to tell him about my foster family, so I had not confided in him about Klara. He wouldn't have held it against me that I didn't visit him so often, no longer came over to Loschwitz in a tearing hurry and left again soon afterward muttering some excuse—it didn't take much imagination to work out that a date with a woman lay behind it. Kaltenburg was probably waiting for me to tell him about Klara. But I didn't. He was offended. He was afraid I would slip away from him. And that is how, always willing to try anything that would turn the threat of defeat into a triumph, he came up with the idea of the study place.