Kaltenburg (27 page)

We pulled back carefully. In the world outside there was penetrating spring sunshine. The following weeks would be entirely devoted to getting the hamster used to a spotlight in her underground world. No hamster before her had ever lived permanently under two-thousand-watt lighting.

The film about the hamster was just the beginning. Three or four big projects were carried out at Kaltenburg's Institute, aside from a whole series of shorter films that Knut made for schools, and after his Congo expedition, when he was in tremendous demand everywhere, he fled to Dresden to write the film commentary in peace. For several weeks he left his lodgings for only a few hours a day, sitting with the professor, letting himself be persuaded by Martin, Klara, and me to go on an outing—but he soon felt the pull of his manuscript again. Hardly anyone knew he was there, hardly anyone ever found out, he sat hunched over his desk for three weeks, crammed in between the bed and the corner bench, a pile of paper in front of him, he didn't need books or any other material, Knut had all his Congo footage in his head, thousands of meters of it. “The shadowy world of the jungle is hostile to filming,” he wrote in the nocturnal quiet of Oberloschwitz, and while he was waiting for the next sentence he could hear rhinoceros birds, spoonbills, marabous, saw himself surrounded by giant pangolins, okapis, aardvarks, gorillas, and cheetahs.

In this cramped garage, frequently dank and cold in winter, Knut and I often sat together, or in a trio with Klara, sometimes with Martin too. In the garage you could put a distance between yourself and the Institute without altogether cutting yourself off from it, and for a while after the Institute had closed down Knut was still allowed to go on living there whenever he came to Dresden. Until, citing their new car as an excuse, the house owners began to hum and haw, then ripped out the linoleum, burned the wall insulation, stowed the furniture under the awning in the backyard. Until they no longer wanted to know anything about the past Kaltenburg era. But they seem to have left the curtains in place.

K
ATHARINA FISCHER TOLD ME
that recently, coming home exhausted one evening from an assignment, she had turned on the TV and happened upon a group discussion in which, along with a number of lesser lights, Knut Sieverding was taking part. At first she had not taken much notice of the program, went into the kitchen to heat up some goulash, her husband was away on official business abroad, after a hard day she simply wanted to have a few human voices around her without having to translate their words into another language. The unctuous presenter, notorious for his powers of empathy, was doing his best to contain an aging actress who was holding forth in shrill tones about her boundless social commitment, for Katharina Fischer this was just background noise, until she heard a voice familiar from her childhood saying, “I don't give a damn what you call it. It's obvious to me we're going to get it in the neck.”

She missed the context in which Knut Sieverding made his remark, but she remembered all the more vividly the horrified faces of the studio guests she was just in time to catch as she came back into the living room, before the presenter turned with a nervous smile to the nature-film maker. Knut was so relaxed as he submitted to questioning, his wild boyish mop of hair contrasting with his deadly serious, almost pitying look as he nodded benignly, correcting inaccuracies on the presenter's part but otherwise largely ignoring the interviewer. Knut Sieverding declined to tell anecdotes about celebrities, he confined himself to animals—with one exception: prompted by the name Kaltenburg, he spoke euphorically about his time at the Institute, about a wealth of important experiences, and constantly reiterated how grateful he still was for the chance to work with the professor. Then the presenter read out a Kaltenburg quotation from his cue card: “More fantastic than taking a box at the opera,” the professor had rhapsodized after seeing the first rushes of the woodpecker film.

“And do you know how Knut Sieverding responded?” asked Katharina Fischer. “A strange comparison, he said, considering that the woodpecker film was the first wildlife film ever released without the benefit of stringed instruments.”

It's true. No music—the idea came to Knut and the professor one afternoon on the balcony at Loschwitz. The opposite of Hollywood. And as for the box at the opera: I can't remember Ludwig Kaltenburg ever setting foot in an opera house, at least not to see an opera, and once when the three of us clambered around in the ruins of the Semper Opera House, that was to do with Knut's idea of making an educational film on cave-nesting birds in the city.

Kaltenburg may not have been able to show it openly, but he had reason to be grateful to Knut too. It was Knut who succeeded in luring Martin to Loschwitz. Another way to put it would be that Knut Sieverding smoothed the path to Kaltenburg for Martin, who had become curious but was still a bit recalcitrant—he told him he would learn far more about animals from him than at the zoo, nobody would be looking suspiciously over his shoulder while he was sketching, and anyway Knut could use some more help with his filming.

“Were you really made to tell your friend all about Anastasia the chow dog?”

“Martin wanted to know everything—he'd never seen a chow before.”

“Everyone's fascinated by that blue-black tongue.”

“But I reckon he's even more fascinated by the dog's owner.”

“If you really think he might benefit from my modest knowledge of dogs, then by all means bring him to the Institute sometime.”

It's possible that on that first visit both the professor and Martin were still somewhat self-conscious. We toured the site, Martin was amazed by the dog's tongue, impressed by the aviaries, but when Knut left to go back to work, all three of us watched him as he departed, as though we had just lost our most important playmate. I was the one whose inspiration—if you can call it that—saved the day: why didn't Martin sketch Taschotschek?

Kaltenburg placed Martin with his back to the balcony door and Taschotschek in the middle of the table. Inquisitively the jackdaw surveyed the sheet of paper laid out, the tin box that hid charcoal and pencils, fixed its eye on the stranger who was blocking its exit. Martin talked to the bird, spoke to it reassuringly, and innocently began to draw. And Kaltenburg, sitting with me on the couch to one side, kept out of the way. He was much too thrilled to interfere, no doubt more excited by the encounter of man and creature being played out before his eyes than by the portrait. He followed the tentative hand of the artist, Taschotschek's hesitant steps, his glance jumping from one to the other, weighing up the relative chances of Martin and the jackdaw. As though he had made a bet with himself about who would win: Martin, by managing to capture the bird on paper, or the jackdaw, by reducing its portraitist to despair.

Taschotschek emerged victorious. Kaltenburg sat watching the scene calmly. You couldn't tell by looking at him which party he had backed.

Martin was to make many attempts to sketch Kaltenburg's favorite jackdaw. He never succeeded; after its own fashion the bird always joined in enthusiastically, and the better it got to know Martin during the sittings, the better it was at taking the lead. It took Taschotschek only a few minutes to work out how to open the tin box. With almost equal speed Martin grasped what charcoal meant, a human hand clutching something shiny black—enough to infuriate any jackdaw. A few drops of blood, a ripped-up piece of paper.

No, Martin would have had to draw Taschotschek from memory, and perhaps he actually did so in later years. It's just that it wouldn't necessarily occur to anyone that a line curving across a paper tablecloth was an image of a jackdaw, a jackdaw called Taschotschek capable of driving Martin Spengler mad for months on end when he was a young artist in Dresden.

So, strictly speaking, it wasn't Knut or me that Kaltenburg and Martin had to thank for their friendship, but a bird. Taschotschek's willfulness. Taschotschek's curiosity. At some point the drawing sessions became just a welcome chance for a chat in the presence of the jackdaw.

In
Archetypes of Fear
there is a fairly long passage, which Frau Fischer clearly recollected too: Kaltenburg is speculating about the relationship between fear and hallucination. About the human capacity to escape out of hopeless situations into another world. “If I understand him correctly, it's possible not only to alleviate feelings of fear and hopelessness, but to shut them out altogether by overlaying them with fantasy images,” she recollected, and, “Wasn't it rumored that Kaltenburg was making use of findings by American military psychologists from the Vietnam War?”

Ludwig Kaltenburg as a renegade whose reward was access to secret experiments for use in his own studies—that sounded quite ludicrous even at the time. People simply didn't want to acknowledge where he acquired most of his observational material: here.

One evening I had finished checking the aviaries and was going to say goodnight to the professor when I heard him talking to Martin in a low voice in the study, as if not to wake the animals that had retired for the night. Kaltenburg seemed surprised when I appeared in the doorway, I hesitated, he hesitated, I was about to retreat, but then he beckoned me into the room. On the table: Taschotschek, pattering about indecisively on a sheet of unmarked white paper. Knut was sitting on a stool, Martin on the couch.

“So there I was, lying trapped under the wreckage of our plane after we had taken a hit in the northern Crimea and lost control of the machine.”

Martin glanced across at me and moved over a little to make room for me. Kaltenburg had drawn up his cocktail-bar chair. I was in the picture straightaway.

“I didn't know that my copilot had been killed, that his remains lay scattered in the snow, flesh, bones, skin, and cloth. I wasn't feeling any pain, I had no idea who or where I was, I wasn't conscious of the frozen ground.”

The bird regarded each of us in turn. Ruffled its feathers. Drew its third eyelid across its eyeball. Turned away.

“I regained consciousness for a moment. As if someone had woken me up. And in fact I wasn't alone, my skull, my limbs, my joints—somebody was checking my bones, looking for fractures, abrasions, flesh wounds. My mind was brought to bear on individual parts, my knee, my shoulder. But I wasn't aware of anyone touching me. Then I drifted back into darkness.”

A scratching, a gentle clattering sound, Martin had let Taschotschek have his empty tin box. The lid was opened, closed, opened, the box pulled from one end of the table to the other. Apparently the jackdaw regarded it as Martin's job to keep it amused by hiding interesting objects such as colored pencils or erasers.

“The next time I came around, I knew these were the eyes of Tatars. As though the Tatars had not simply observed the crash site timidly from afar but had examined me at close quarters, then run their hands over my body, then taken me along with them. I could smell it, smell their skin, this indescribably comforting aroma, with a slight trace of fish oil.”

“And this was all just in your imagination?”

Professor Kaltenburg ignored the clatter now coming from the hallway; Taschotschek had dragged the tin box outside and was pecking at the hinges.

“It must all have been in my mind. I only lay there for a few hours, then I was picked up by a search party. Can you imagine, my comrade Hans was almost pulverized. I think about it sometimes when I'm grinding earth colors in the mortar, when I'm mixing pigment. Doesn't man consist of carbon too when the fluids have evaporated? It doesn't take long to render down that little bit of protein. Pulverized, fragmented into the tiniest particles. Nothing left.”

The jackdaw was now on the couch between us, looking up at me, eyeing Martin, and since nobody was paying it any attention, it plucked an old bus ticket out of his trouser pocket.

“There's a photo of me standing in full uniform in front of our wrecked plane. That time, that moment in time, is lost to me. It was somewhere near Freifeld, in that area. That much I can remember. But I've got no recollection at all of being photographed. If they had indeed pulled me out unconscious and half dead from the wreckage, I could hardly have stood up to pose for a photograph. So the picture must have been taken later. I had been patched up somehow, they put me in the jeep and drove me back to the crash site. But why? There were more important things. Getting back to health. The next sortie. Saving your own life. Maybe I insisted on it.”

“You wanted a picture to take home with you. Wanted it to send to your parents.”

“Probably, yes. But then my injuries can't have been as bad as I remember: double fracture of the skull base, practically no skin left on my body, no hair. Everything full of splinters, hardly any nose left.”

Martin stumbled over his words, went quiet, you could only hear his lips moving. At that moment Kaltenburg, Knut, and I were nothing but shadowy Tatars. The professor poured tea for us. Taschotschek hopped onto my lap.

“Herr Spengler, or may I say Martin?” Kaltenburg hovered with teapot and teacup. “I should tell you that in principle I don't like talking about the phenomena they call self-healing powers. Particularly where human beings are concerned, people often make it too easy for themselves. All the same, I've seen some unbelievable things in that field.”

“But that photograph—if you take a good look at it: a scab-covered cut at most, my eyebrows perhaps. And I must have been thoroughly concussed, of course. Yet Hans had ceased to exist. What they could find of him was buried in the nearest village cemetery.”

“No doubt.” Kaltenburg spoke as if he had already said too much.

“No doubt”: any deeper insight into his own experience of illness and hallucination might have been destabilizing for the young man, with his Tatar memories.

In the hallway Knut almost trod on the tin box. The lid was missing, I could see a pastry fork. By the hall stand the professor remarked, “Really interesting are the hallucinatory states that occur when self-healing powers are activated. There's still practically no research into that. At any rate, I've never come across any convincing answers.”