Kaltenburg (3 page)

T
HAT NIGHT IN
the Great Garden it was only for an instant that my parents flashed through my mind and then, strangely, they vanished from my thoughts, just as they themselves later vanished for good; they were never found. They must have been killed, but against all reason I have often played with the idea that they survived but believed me to be dead, they wouldn't give up, and the authorities could not shake them off until, in a fit of the most extreme brutality perhaps, they went so far as to show them the body of a young boy disfigured by the flames, and since they could do nothing and nobody would help them, after a few weeks they moved on. I know that I have always clung to this notion whenever I recall the elderly man and woman squatting right next to me on the grass. They might have been my parents. And in the darkness I simply didn't recognize them. Two figures, aging from one instant to the next, with burns on their faces: I had never seen anything like it. How would I know my own living parents from so many dead? After all, when I first saw myself again in a mirror, this face bore no resemblance to the one I knew from photos and memory.

What have you let yourself in for, you poor girl? I blurted out at one point, and as soon as I said it I could have bitten off my tongue—what a job the interpreter had taken on, trying to learn by heart the whole of the local birdlife here in March, of all months. If the foreign guest had only put off his visit until the winter or even until high summer, if only he had waited just a few weeks, but as it was she would have to take into account all the overwintering species, the breeding birds together with the summer visitors, because not all of the former had left yet, and not all of the latter had yet arrived.

“So then you got stuck in Dresden?”

You could put it that way, I got stuck here, although after leaving Posen we were only passing through Dresden. As far as I can recall, my father, who was a botanist, met some colleagues, and my mother showed me around the city where she had lived for a while before I was born, perhaps the happiest time of her short life. I thought I sensed that as we strolled through the old town together, if you believe an eleven-year-old could sense such a thing. I think we retraced her steps as a young girl, and she never used the new names, she persisted with Theaterplatz, Augustus-Strasse, Jüdenhof, and Frauenstrasse, whenever we stopped for her to tell me something, in the bright, mild weather, a kind of false spring surrounding us that February. In the afternoon we would sit in a café and watch the life around us, Wildsruffer Strasse, Scheffelstrasse, Webergasse, they all still existed then, the city was full of people, and I tried to make eye contact with this or that refugee girl, or an older, limping man, even if I never forgot what my family had drummed into me—although our family had nothing at all to fear—once when we were safe from observation: never look an SS man full in the face.

For me it was—I know this sounds strange—a proper holiday, although a little incident took place of which I was ashamed, and as an adult, truth to tell, went on being ashamed for many years. Coming from the Theaterplatz, it must have been in the morning, we walked past the House of Assembly, and then we were taking the steps up to the Brühl Terrace when I came across a sign:
JEWS NOT ADMITTED
. And, yes, children find it hard to suppress cruel impulses, children sometimes behave like maniacs, but all the same there's no excuse, I don't know what came over me: I stopped and was gripped by a feeling of triumph, halfway to the top I looked up, then again at the notice, and strutted—I wasn't walking now, I was strutting—up the remaining steps, we're allowed onto the Brühl Terrace, we're not Jews. At the top I turned around, saw the Court Church, Augustus Bridge, the Italian Village below, and then my mother, who had reached the landing. She stopped too. I can remember it as though it were yesterday, I looked into her suddenly narrowed eyes, and I could sense that, at the end of her sleeve in the heavy winter coat, her hand was twitching: my mother, who had never hit me in her life, came close to slapping my face in broad daylight.

So my nanny really did not travel with us after all, the white Sunday shirt with dark stains, a young boy on the kitchen bench seat, utterly dazed. Perhaps my parents fired her that very evening.

On that Shrove Tuesday my mother even wanted to take me to the zoological museum, which she had often visited in her Dresden days, but when we turned from the Postplatz into Ostra-Allee we could see immediately that the building was no longer there, it had been flattened in an air raid the previous October. My mother obviously knew nothing about that, just as I could not know then that I was standing in front of the ruins of an institution which I myself would work in, many years later.

At lunch my father was still with us. We were sitting at a first-floor window somewhere looking down on a large square, so we had probably turned into the Old Market, the sunshine was pouring in, almost blindingly, and we three had a window table to ourselves. The light was strange, pallid; the mashed potatoes on my plate were steaming, as though the sun's rays were heating them. I also had peas and a ground-meat “German beefsteak,” no doubt eked out with a large quantity of breadcrumbs, which I had taken a bite out of and then left. Beefsteak. I had only just learned this word for “meatball,” at home we said
Frikadelle,
the new word seemed strange to me: when I found it on the menu I had thought it both promising and off-putting, and if I decided to risk it when we ordered our food, it was not so much because of an appetite for meatballs but because I wanted to see, and taste, whether my father's explanation was right, or whether—despite its related appearance and similar taste—there was something quite different about a “beefsteak.” No, it wasn't the same thing, even if my parents did insist, almost despairingly, that it was just a different name.

Until the food arrived, my mother left her wonderful dark otter-skin cap lying on the table. As always, my mother seemed very elegant to me, she attracted attention, but on this day in this restaurant there were also black looks coming from other tables, my father noticed it.

“Please, can't you put your otter cap away?”

But she behaved as though she had seen nothing, heard nothing, and tugged at his tie, which was always crooked, improving the knot, examining the collar, and looking into my father's face. He turned away and grimaced, but she knew he liked it, just as he liked her putting on her jewelry, the pearl earrings, the bracelet, and the little chain necklace; we weren't refugees, we were people out for a meal in the metropolis, and the woman opposite him was his wife, and it didn't matter what other diners made of her outfit. She in a simple dress, with her shoulder-length hair elegantly cut, and he in clothes undecided between a visit to the big city and a country ramble, with his rough mittens which embarrassed me a bit when I saw other gentlemen with their buckskin gloves placed neatly at the edge of the table. My mother ran her fingers through his always unkempt mop of hair, that's the kind of thing they played at in my presence. I looked down at the square, I looked into the sun, the food arrived, I put the otter cap on the windowsill.

My father ate his stuffed cabbage with great gusto. I don't know what he had been doing that morning, the meeting with his botanist colleagues wasn't due until the afternoon. I paid no further attention to my parents' conversation until my mother suddenly dropped her voice. Now, I thought, she's telling him what happened at the Brühl Terrace, but she made no mention of the incident at all, she was talking about the zoological museum.

“It's a shame, I couldn't show him anything, no great auk and no ‘World of Beetles.' The museum is closed. No, not one of its closing days. The museum is no longer standing.”

My father shook his head, the air raid last autumn, utterly deplorable, but my mother wouldn't leave it at that.

“Now you see what they're capable of, so something good has come out of our canceled museum visit after all.”

Not a word about who she meant by “they,” whether my mother blamed the Allies for this destruction or perhaps those who had rejected the precaution of evacuating the exhibits, because they liked to think that a city like Dresden was immune.

My mother turned to me, and almost seemed to be enjoying a certain satisfaction: “You see, people are capable of anything, you'll remember this day for the rest of your life.”

She turned out to be right. I thought of her words again in the years after Stalin's death, I was well past my twenties and learned that the collection had definitely not been completely destroyed after all, the most precious items were still in their secret depository. It made me think of my parents, and I caught myself thinking,
Your parents didn't have a clue,
while it seemed to me that I was old enough by then, that we were all old enough at last to find out at least half the truth, even if only from a hushed aside. The great auk: the last British specimen of this bird variety was caught in 1840, the very last Icelandic breeding pair on the third of June 1844—I could recite the dates like a schoolboy when I was approaching fifty and saw our Dresden great auk for the first time. I had already lived far longer than my parents did, but I could still hear their words, and to this day the great auk is inseparably linked with the memory of our last family lunch together.

“Are you sure you don't want any more of the
Frikadelle?
”

I shook my head, the mashed potatoes and peas were more than enough for me, and so my father, who had been eyeing my plate throughout, fell upon the German beefsteak. It was when they came to pay that my parents began to whisper to each other, we were already getting our coats on and they still hadn't settled the question: he, who publicly ate unfinished rissoles from other people's plates, and she, who left her otter cap lying openly on the fine tablecloth without caring what anyone thought—these two grownups who were my parents, sophisticated people as I thought, who were my guides through the big city, were unsure how much to tip, whether it was even the thing to do in a good restaurant like this, in Dresden. I had never seen my parents like this, positively nervous, and it was only once we were back down in the Old Market that they regained their self-confidence.

My father, who will have seen the Botanical Garden on the northern side of the Great Garden in prime condition, early in the afternoon of the thirteenth of February, with its beds and plots and neatly winding paths. My father, who was apparently going to meet colleagues there, who was expected. My father among a group of botanists, all alive, all still healthy, their faces perhaps already beginning to show optimism as they talked quietly about the summer ahead. By that evening, reunited with his family, my father would be back in the Great Garden, in the spacious park, soon to be strewn with craters, uprooted shrubs, shattered trees, and the many dead, to whom he himself was going to belong.

My father the botanist, who was drawn back to botany again at the unforeseeable end of his life. Did he take us to the Great Garden because he knew the way from that morning, or because he looked to the protection of trees and fields and flowers, which always had a calming effect on him, or was it that he followed the crowds escaping from the flames in the inner city, hoping by some miracle to snatch his family from certain death?

To this day I, the son who survived, have not made a single visit to the Heide cemetery to stand at one of the mass graves and conjure up an image of my parents. Instead, I go to the Great Garden, across the meadow on its western edge, and stand under an English oak for which Dresdeners have a special name: the Splinter Oak. It must be some three hundred years since somebody planted it in this spot, as a border marker, they say, the park hadn't been conceived of then. If you come from the zoo side, you don't notice anything: just a tall, gnarled tree with beautifully striated bark. But if you walk around the trunk, the skin of the tree seems suddenly to burst apart, revealing the bright, open, light wood, framed by thick, knobbly protrusions. Looking up, crooked branches, as though their growth had taken place against solid, tormenting air resistance, the broken places, and below the thick foliage of the crown a torn-open area, splintered, shattered, fissured. It takes a while to realize that the scarring across the entire trunk is uniform: this is where the bomb splinters are embedded in the bark, they're still there. On that side the wood has taken on an unusual, lustrous brown hue. Dead wood lies on the ground, it powders when you kick it, rotten: for years a fungus has been spreading through the inside of the stricken tree, a late consequence of the bombing. It survived that night, but eventually it will be destroyed by the sulfur shelf mushroom. At the Splinter Oak I have a memory, my parents are standing there in front of me.

W
H
EN THE INTERPRETER
asked what made me choose my specialty, she added that she supposed if your father was a botanist it was not unlikely that you would take to ornithology. It is true that from an early age I have had a certain conception of nature; the self-evident receptiveness of my parents to the world of living things was bound to rub off on their child. But I was not willing to claim that coming from such a home I was more or less bound to end up as a biologist, let alone set my heart on becoming a zoologist, least of all an ornithologist. I went through a phase in my childhood when I didn't like these creatures at all. For a long time I was fonder of the cat that brought in the bird than I was of its present to me, laid at my feet with excitement and pride to claim my friendship.

Mother and Father surmised that my aversion was due to an experience I can barely recall, though they often told me about it. It seems that once when I was alone in the house a young bird blundered into our drawing room, and I was infected with the panic of the young creature, which for some reason could not find its way through the open French window and into the garden. I wanted to get away from this agitated, flapping thing that made such awful noises, but just like the ruffled bird, instead of running out into the garden or simply opening the door to the entrance hall, where I would have been safe, I huddled in a corner. When I was eventually found between the stove and the sideboard, I must have been a picture of utter confusion; I don't remember, but that's how my parents described it to me.