Kaltenburg (24 page)

Where in Germany do people eat tart and where do they eat
“Torte,”
what is the difference between bread and pastry, and exactly what dessert dishes do the Austrians include under the heading of
“Mehlspeise”
? We had never had such discussions before, but we sat in the café, all equally out of place, our polite behavior, our nice conversation, after a quarter of an hour of this we surely deserved at least an extra helping of whipped cream. We might have been ready to move on if Kaltenburg hadn't jumped in with a story that was new even to me.

“If my parents are to be believed, I began life as a tumor.”

The painted eyebrows of the old ladies over there by the window shot up. Kaltenburg's parents married late, nobody thought pregnancy was in the cards, in the first instance they may have been almost as shocked by this news as by the earlier misdiagnosis.

“Fortunately I wasn't born prematurely, otherwise my father would have seen me as a questionable gift for the rest of his life.” The professor laughed. “I came into this world—and turned their lives completely upside down.”

His upbringing was all the more careful, his parents looking after their unexpected son as though they had a bad conscience about him, the father even accepted the son's ambition to become a zoologist instead of continuing the line of eminent surgeons named Kaltenburg. He shook his head in bewilderment, but he didn't object. So, for his sake, initially Ludwig Kaltenburg went into medicine.

Klara nodded appreciatively. “But he must be very proud of you today.”

“Even if he were still alive, he certainly wouldn't be proud of a son who voluntarily moved to Dresden.”

“Your parents are no longer alive?”

“My father didn't even find out that I had survived the war and been captured by the Russians.”

“The patient who hid the note in his mouth arrived too late.”

“Yes, he arrived too late.”

Klara ate the rest of her cake, the professor looked on.

“Shall I order some more coffee?” He lifted the lid of the pot as though inspecting it carefully to see whether a small mammal was nesting there.

“Animals are just messy, the old man used to say.”

“Messy? Nothing new for a surgeon, surely.”

Somebody at the next table cleared his throat, the ladies at the window put down their coffee cups.

“And was it a childhood dream to become a librarian?” The professor avoided addressing Klara directly, he didn't know whether to say
Du
or
Sie
to her. “That's certainly the way Hermann puts it, at any rate.”

She told the story of the family outing to Leipzig, Kaltenburg listened, Kaltenburg was moved, and Klara didn't seem to know what to make of his emotion, over a slice of cake, with my Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg in a café.

We were all relieved to be standing outside again. The professor's choice of a café was certainly a considered one—later he was to tell me, “On principle I never invite young women into this desolate-looking animal household.” But outside in the fresh air, free of the audience in the café which was impossible to ignore, the conversation between Ludwig Kaltenburg and Klara could have been steered in a different direction, just as it would have taken another course altogether if we had been invited to Kaltenburg's villa. The professor quickly said goodbye, he had another appointment, much less pleasant, but such appointments were unavoidable, and then I saw him hurrying away, an unusual picture: Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg on foot on a paved road in the middle of the city.

“Was I too forward?”

“Forward? No, honestly, you weren't. And anyway, you must have noticed yourself: the professor has a soft spot for self-confident young women.”

“Too well behaved?”

“All three of us were well behaved.”

“So I passed?” Klara didn't wait for my answer. “All the same, I had the impression that the professor thought I was trying to keep something from him.”

“He would like to have gone on listening to you: the Hagemann family, your salon, your guests.”

“What could I do, with all those people around us?”

“He shouldn't have taken us there if he was keen to hear Hagemann stories.”

“I'm going to tell my parents to invite him more often.”

And the professor did indeed become a regular visitor to the Hagemanns'. But he came too late, only after Stalin's death. He had missed certain decisive years, conversations and guests on whom he could have sharpened his powers of observation. Yes, the people themselves would have opened up worlds to him which he was never to know.

Kaltenburg should have come to Dresden right after the war and been in touch with the family, he should not have had to wait for me to get to know Klara Hagemann and to bring him his first invitation to the Hagemanns'. Klara was ahead of the professor, and she would always be ahead of him: with the best will in the world, Ludwig Kaltenburg would never be able to make up for that gap of seven years.

Take a figure like Paul Merker, I said to the interpreter: that name does not figure at all in Kaltenburg's world. A member of the Central Committee secretariat and of the SED Politburo who was removed from all his official positions in 1950, expelled from the Party, and banished to the provinces in Brandenburg—at most the professor would have remarked laconically, “Ideologists put nooses around each other's necks.” And added portentously, “A side effect of every ideology.”

It all had a different ring in the Hagemann salon. I learned to distinguish between those functionaries who had gone underground in 1933 and those who owed their worldview to a determined course of reeducation as POWs. I learned that you shouldn't confuse those returning from Moscow with returnees from Scandinavia, those coming back from Mexico with others coming out of the German camps. One was said to have betrayed several members of his resistance cell, another to have spent years in hiding on a smallholding, and a third was reputed to despise people who feared for their lives. Here was a former SA man, once a lanky type, an excellent horseman, whose eyes were now sunk deep in his fat face, and there a gaunt character with an agitated look, as though forever assessing which figure in the inner circle should be pushed out next. They might use the same language, shake hands, slap each other's backs, even hug: for the Hagemanns this was simply the solidarity born of necessity, and that kind of solidarity is notoriously unpredictable.

“Now they're putting nooses around each other's necks”: it was this same Paul Merker who, aware of the death camps, was talking in 1942 of a “world pogrom,” and—as a number of the Hagemanns' guests thought—in doing so incurring the distrust of his comrades in arms. After his return from exile he could easily have joined the ranks of antifascist veterans without another word about those whom the new jargon described merely as “the persecuted.” But mindful of the “world pogrom,” Merker urged—and he enjoyed great respect for this at the Hagemanns'—that reparations should be made to all survivors, regardless of whether they had been avowed Communists or had been forced to wear the Star of David on their chests.

On one occasion, when the conversation centered on a Berlin theater premiere, a woman suddenly asked, “Has anyone heard from Luckenwalde lately?” She looked keenly into each face in turn—Klara's father shrugged his shoulders, other guests shook their heads, everybody had understood, nobody had any information, so there was nothing for it but to return to the previous topic. They focused on the stage design, moving on to what could be done with trompe l'oeil painting, I looked across at Martin and could have sworn that he had missed the intervening question. I had no idea what “Luckenwalde” stood for. I would have understood references to Moscow, or to Leningrad, or, on that Advent Sunday of 1952, to Prague, because not an evening passed at the Hagemanns' without some discussion of the Prague show trial of Rudolf Slánský and his fellow conspirators, singled out by the authorities only after the most painstakingly detailed investigations.

But what lay behind Luckenwalde escaped me until later, when on my way to the toilet I saw someone going up to the woman in question, and noticed the change in her expression after she heard him say, “Luckenwalde is supposed to have been wiped off the map.”

After the last guests had left, I was helping the two sisters in the kitchen, Ulli washed, I dried the glasses, Klara put away the dishes. “Did you notice anything about Frau Koch? She looked so distracted as she was leaving.”

Ulli had noticed her husband slipping his arm under hers on the path to the garden gate. “She was quite unsteady on her legs.”

“Like an old woman.”

Herr and Frau Koch: for the Hagemann daughters they were “the English couple”—they had spent many years in London, and had hesitated to return to Germany, to settle in Dresden. The West was out of the question for Herr Koch. As for his wife, whether here or there, she didn't want to be reminded of the time of the “world pogrom.”

“Maybe I misunderstood, or perhaps it has nothing to do with it, but somebody took Frau Koch aside and told her Luckenwalde had disappeared from the map.”

“Who said that?”

“I don't know his name, that shy medic.”

“Domaschke,” Ulli helped me out.

“Luckenwalde?” Klara reflected. “Did you hear any more?”

“No, that's all. It gave her quite a shock.”

“That means Merker has gone into hiding.”

“Do you mean Paul Merker, the Politburo member?”

Ulli handed me a clean glass. “Politburo, that's all in the past.”

“Or they've arrested him.” Klara looked at her sister. “Because they need someone to go after.”

“They have him running a grill in Luckenwalde.”

Impatiently Klara took the polished wineglass out of my hand. “That's neither here nor there at the moment. They've arrested him, haven't they?”

“I'll do the rest tomorrow morning.” Ulli put down the sponge and emptied the water from the sink.

“That's what it means. It can't mean anything else. They want to make an example of him.”

One sister was leaning against the kitchen cabinet. The other was looking at the floor. I didn't know where to put the dish towel.

“If that's true, Ulli, you know what will happen next?”

“Don't scream. Yes, I do know.”

“If they put Merker in the dock and turn him into the great Zionist conspirator, then the Kochs will pack their bags. They'll be off. We'll never see them again.”

U
LLI, QUICK, THERE
are two real English people here.” Klara peered out into the hall, a couple stood there talking, the sentences flowing quickly, foreign and clear, Klara couldn't understand a word. The cadence of their speech was what had struck her, a different cadence. Klara in her nightdress hid behind the slightly open door waiting for her parents to move away, her mother went to get glasses, her father had gone ahead into the drawing room, now Klara could take a look outside. The woman was adjusting her delicately patterned stole in front of the hall-stand mirror, the man was fishing a packet of cigarettes out of his coat pocket, perhaps they were talking about Herr Klein, the Super-Tenant, who had just gone upstairs. Klara didn't even know whether her parents knew English, whether any of the regular guests would be able to converse with the couple.

“Come on, Ulli, or the English people won't be there anymore,” hissed Klara in a stage whisper over her shoulder, but before her sister could get out of bed the woman had caught sight of Klara in the doorway, she laughed, suddenly she was speaking German: “No, my dear, we're not real English people.”

Klara nodded. Went red. And shut the door. It was the first time in her life that she had seen émigrés.

She was still a bit embarrassed about having behaved like a small child, Klara confessed to me when we were discussing the new faces that had appeared in the Hagemann circle after the war. A little girl from Dresden who knew foreign countries, foreign languages only from books. At the time Klara even acquired a few words of English to make up for it, so that the following week she could greet the Kochs as though she had grown up in London herself, as the couple appreciatively agreed.

Ashamed she may have been, but she took a particular liking to her “English couple,” and for their part the Kochs never failed to look in on the girls before they went on into the drawing room to greet the other guests, the adults. Herr Koch would stand by the window while Frau Koch sat on the edge of Klara's bed, only for a few minutes, and yet as the sisters drifted off to sleep there was a faint aroma of cigarette smoke and eau de cologne.

The Kochs alerted Klara to cadences. The mere memory of the sound of a foreign language out in the hall was enough later to make Klara aware when there was a cool atmosphere between guests, when someone was covering up insecurity or close to losing self-control, when the drawing room conversation took a turn nobody had anticipated.

One evening in the summer of 1948 she was at the door when the Kochs happened to arrive at the same time as a man Klara didn't know. Clearly the Kochs didn't know who the man was either, for as Klara took their hats and coats to the hall stand, she heard, “My name is Koch, and this is my wife.”

Looking for spare hangers for the coats damp from the light summer rain, she missed the new guest's answer.

“Sorry, help me a bit here—the philologist, the philosopher?”

“The last living Proust translator, if you like.”

Was he offended? Was he just being modest? Was he joking at his own expense? Herr Hagemann appeared in the drawing room doorway, Frau Hagemann called Klara into the kitchen: “Could you take care of the rest, please?”

Ulli was slicing cucumber; Frau Hagemann took off her apron, washed her hands. “Who's here?”