Kaltenburg (22 page)

It was the first time he had been invited to the Hagemanns', and you could see from his reaction when I delivered the invitation that he felt truly honored. You might almost think, low-spirited as he now seemed to me, that he was worried Stalin might yet spoil his pleasure at the last moment.

On our way down into the quiet city a limousine drove toward us, laboriously negotiating the lanes up the hillside. Kaltenburg stopped to let it pass: “I know you can read my expression like a book. It's true, I've been a bit concerned all day. Everybody would have understood if the Hagemanns' reception had been canceled—but I would have regretted it, all the same.”

He had released the handbrake, changed into second gear again, concentrating on the narrow traffic lane. “Or do you think it would have been more fitting for me to send my regrets? Do you think the Hagemanns would prefer to spend this evening in their close family circle?”

I shook my head.

Kaltenburg smiled, looking ahead through the windscreen. “You're right. You don't just turn down an invitation to the Hagemanns'. Apart from that, I'm really keen to know what this friend of yours, Martin, is like. And above all, of course, I'm curious about the Hagemanns' younger daughter, what's her name again?”

“Klara.”

“You see a lot of each other, don't you?” And as I didn't reply: “Come on, what do you take your old Ludwig Kaltenburg for? I'm not blind, you know.”

It turned out to be a quiet evening; a number of guests had indeed called that afternoon to say they were not coming, others simply didn't come. But I didn't have the impression that Kaltenburg was disappointed by this, he chatted for a long time with an archaeologist couple, with Klara's parents, with Ulli, with Klara herself. But Martin listened, silent as ever, to these conversations, his eyes riveted upon the professor. That evening, in this company, nobody would have dreamed of putting any pressure on Kaltenburg, nobody demanded that he should report on the Institute, nobody begged until the professor took his guests into the garden to wake the sleeping magpies and coax them down from the oak tree onto his shoulder.

On the sixth of March 1953 we sat up until well after midnight, just the four of us in the end, Professor Kaltenburg, Martin, Klara, and I. We were exhausted, we simply lacked the energy to break up the group, but we all knew we wouldn't be able to sleep anyway.

“So he's no longer alive, Comrade Stalin,” Kaltenburg quietly threw into the middle of a longish pause in the conversation. “It's a good five years since I last saw him, an eternity. It never occurred to me then that this might be the last time we looked each other in the eye. In the end it didn't do him any good to get rid of all his doctors in succession, his suspicion that they all wanted him dead and buried was completely unfounded. Comrade Stalin didn't need anybody, didn't need help, he managed everything himself, and so now he's died by his own efforts. That was something he could do better than most, arrange for a death. Or was he helped? What say the rumors?”

He looked questioningly around the circle. Klara shook her head: “There was no mention on the radio of any outside intervention. Two strokes, so quickly one after the other. He didn't regain consciousness after the brain hemorrhage. The second stroke the day before yesterday, which attacked his heart and respiratory system. Then by half past nine last night it was over.”

“With their usual lunacy, they're probably blaming Beria, just wait, I can hear them sniveling, That snake Beria has killed our beloved little father.”

Kaltenburg waved away the cigarette smoke.

“I lived so long under Stalin's watchful eye that his face is indelibly stamped on my memory. The bushy mustache. The coal-black eyes. It's true that he has, no, had a more penetrating gaze than I've ever encountered in anyone else. You can't really know what it felt like if you haven't lived for years with the sensation of him staring down your neck, watching your every move.”

“Are you talking about your time in Chalturin as a POW?”

“Near Kirov, yes. I was running a ward with six hundred beds, all of them neuritis cases. What a place. It was the same later in Oritschi, then Dzoraget, Amalmy, Sevan, and Yerevan, the inevitable portraits of Stalin hanging on the walls. He wouldn't take his eyes off me during my time in Armenia, and finally Krasnogorsk near Moscow—he followed me everywhere. And the funny thing was, that gaze of his brought us all closer together, POWs and Red Army soldiers, Germans and Russians, doctors and patients, because we all had him to live with.”

It was as though something had been dammed up in Kaltenburg during the day, no, over the years, that needed to break out in that late-night session. He looked down as he talked, gazing at the ashtray; after his first few sentences none of us dared raise a question. We all knew that portrait, but Ludwig Kaltenburg showed us Stalin as we had never seen him before.

“You're giving a wounded man his medicine, and Comrade Stalin is watching to see you don't hand out the wrong treatment by mistake to the poor devil lying there hardly able to move, or maybe give him the rations meant for the sad case in the next bed. You distribute vitamin C, and his stern gaze stops you from lacing it with a poisonous powder—well, you're a doctor, so you would never dream of it anyway, but Comrade Stalin's look gives you a bad conscience from the start. You search your soul, as well as you can when you're permanently under surveillance, asking yourself,
Have I done anything wrong, have I done my best at all times, haven't I ever once toyed with the idea of sabotaging the hospital, sending the whole lot of them to their maker at a single stroke?

“And when you've done your work properly, your mind is at rest and you know that Comrade Stalin has reason to be satisfied with you, you even imagine that he is mildly lowering his eyelids, just for a split second, as though expressing his benevolence toward you. You know it's a delusion, but you can't help it. If you try to catch him out—don't ever think of catching Comrade Stalin out—and turn around as fast as lightning to stare him directly in the face, his eyes are open as always, vigilant, for he knows that if he gives way to his goodness and lets you out of his sight even for a moment, you'll think you can deceive him. A delusion, nothing else, just a picture on the wall that faces you every morning when you arrive in the ward.

“After a long day you fall into bed, but he doesn't sleep. A day filled from the sun's first ray to the last with screams, operations, a lot of blood and dying. He has watched every single fight for a human life, you could almost say he has lived through it. You're finished, your eyes are closing, but he can't afford to rest. He knows that now more than ever he has to watch over you.

“What sights Comrade Stalin has had to witness in his lifetime. And what, more rarely, has he been privileged to witness. I remember that on one occasion I entered into direct dialogue with him to ask his advice, eye to eye, with me at the far end of the ward, him on the wall at the front, and between us a patient who had gone on hunger strike after we amputated his leg. What, I asked, fixing my gaze on the portrait, would you do in my situation, what would Stalin do here and now when things are desperate, to change this emaciated patient's life-threatening condition for the better?

“I didn't spend long thinking about it—Comrade Stalin never needed much time to make his mind up either—but fell into an instant diabolical rage, I flailed around with my arms, stamped with both feet so that the floorboards trembled, the whole hut, I yelled and roared, spat, threw the crutches out into the aisle, and screamed directly into the face of the pathetic bundle of humanity in front of me—barely twenty years old and from Vienna like me—that I was going to make mincemeat of him. That did the trick. In short, all I had to do was behave like an ape, and the poor amputee let me spoon-feed him soup as though I were his father and he the sick child. After that I actually managed to feed the wounded man so well that he was fit to be released. It was this man who took my family the news that I was alive. He smuggled a note out of the camp—in his mouth. A dazzling success, and it was Comrade Stalin who helped me achieve it.

“He grew tired, he was bound to become tired, since he never once took his eyes off us. At the end, perhaps, opening his coal-black eyes wide again, in his last great struggle he looked around the room to register precisely every detail, every face, and since he must have sensed—Comrade Stalin sensed everything—that there wasn't long to go, in his last minutes he wanted to gain a comprehensive picture of his surroundings and take it with him who knows where, the table, the chair, the telephone, the ceiling, then his friends around him, enemies, doctors, snakes, he wanted to look out of the window too, he made an effort—Comrade Stalin never spared any effort—summoning up all of his remaining strength to take in the rectangle of window, the light, the light, but his view was blocked. The heads of these hypocrites, these murderers would have to roll to fulfill Comrade Stalin's last modest wish, to see the daylight in the window one last time, even if it had long since got dark out there, early March, half past nine in the evening. It may be that at the end his eyeballs popped out of his skull because he wanted to catch a last glimpse, and yet he probably saw no more than a diffuse, blinding brightness, before somebody in the circle of intimates, of traitors around his sickbed, deathbed, closed his eyes forever.

“His coal-black eyes held an oath of loyalty: Don't worry, I am following you and your actions, wherever you go, I will follow you to the ends of the earth. And I, was I worthy of the endless vigilance and unconditional loyalty of Comrade Stalin? I received my discharge papers from the camp beneath his gaze, I packed my things under his gaze—turning away without taking my leave of that so-familiar face. As though from one moment to the next all the looks we had exchanged over the years had been forgotten. I turned toward the west without visualizing how the firm gaze was boring into the back of my head, scowling at first, as though he had not yet lost me, as though his knitted brows still had the power to make me turn back. Gradually his stare must have become angry, despairing, in the end melancholy, marked by deep sorrow, since I was traveling inexorably toward my homeland heedless of whether I would ever again see this man who had looked into my eyes night and day for four years. And now suddenly it's over.”

Kaltenburg stretched, raising his arms above his head.

“Children, it's very late, we'd better be going”—and he stood up from his chair as though he were leaving the field hospital block, as though taking off his white coat, to reveal the black suit once more.

But after he had dropped me off at home and I stood for a while in the dark street, I could see a doctor again, white coat flapping as he walks down the central aisle of the hospital barracks, turning his head to left and right and tossing a few words of German to one patient here, some Russian to another over there, he corrects himself with a laugh, the flock of nurses in his wake laugh with him. The aisle between the beds vanishes into the distance, but the doctor shows no sign of fatigue when he reaches the door, he has pronounced on cases, encouraged and exhorted, three hundred times. And he knows every single face.

He steps out into the cold, clear air. He breathes in deeply. On the horizon a thin haze covers the hills, the nurses stand there shivering and smoking. The Russian woman doctor at his side has offered him a cigarette, but he needs to breathe in the pure air, he must quickly erase all those patients' faces from his mind's eye before tackling the next ward.

A
FINE FILM OF
cloud had hung over the city since the morning, now it was beginning to drizzle. Katharina Fischer said, “Stalin's death loosened Ludwig Kaltenburg's tongue,” and her voice sounded as hushed in the silence that surrounded us as if Stalin had died only yesterday, as if nobody quite knew how to deal with his death, as if behind every window silent, tear-stained, dejected people sat around the radio waiting in case the solemn music that had been playing for the last twenty-four hours was suddenly interrupted by an announcer, audibly struggling to maintain his composure, bringing a newsflash: Moscow has just reported that the great Stalin is awake again.

The pavement glistened, a dry smell of dust mingled with the dampness. I was showing Katharina Fischer around Oberloschwitz, pointing out the houses, paths, gardens that were so familiar to me in Kaltenburg's day that I felt connected to every paving stone, every gap in a fence. Not much of all that was left, whether because the old wooden fence was missing here, the pavement was gone there, or because, as I hadn't been up here since 1990 or 1991, it wasn't easy to locate the reference points in my memory.

“We can't let our animals go hungry because of a death, however great the deceased may be,” said the professor in measured tones next morning. Later it was said among his colleagues—who knew nothing about our late-night session at the Hagemanns', and were never to know—that his inner conflict was obvious, his deep emotional upset making it hard for him to answer the call of duty. Others were convinced that the reason Kaltenburg had been speaking more slowly than usual was that the vodka the night before hadn't agreed with him. Many later remembered the sentences: “We must think of the animals, we owe it to him,” as the professor proceeded to the normal business of the day. Certain breeding programs could not go unsupervised even for an hour, hatching times were near, some of the duck flock was suffering at the time from a nasty rash—but the present occasion called for some colleagues to be released from their duties: who was going to take care of the black ribbon, the banners, and the large portrait above the entrance to the house? Kaltenburg advised against flower arrangements. However tastefully done, anything made with plant material would look absolutely pathetic in a very short time: “Animals have no piety, nothing we can do about it.”