Kaltenburg (31 page)

“I'd like to know how one can dream up a ban on songbirds. Who puts such an idea into words. And what happened to the birds.”

I offered: “They were taken away? Returned to the dealer?”

“Or abandoned in the wild.”

Knut poked around in the fire. “Given away.”

“To the neighbors, you mean?” Klara shook her head. “To people involved in the same madness?”

“Anyway, who would want to take on a pet bird like that?” Martin had peeled the bark from a birch log, he examined his dirty fingers, looked at me. When he couldn't stand the silence he would coax us out of our thoughts and back to reality with his birdsong imitations, but this time he was silent. No little ringed plover, no whitethroat, no distant dialogue between two agitated male blackbirds putting their powers to the test in a frenzied struggle over territory—a single wrong note, and he would have reproduced the call of one of those very pet songbirds whose shapes we were imagining in the semidarkness.

There was a knock. Martin got up to open the garage door a crack, and Anastasia bounded in, greeting each of us in turn, shaking her thick, wet coat.

“Are we disturbing you?” Ludwig Kaltenburg ran his fingers through his wet hair, his coat sticking to him, the felt boots gone shades darker. “I walked straight into a puddle.”

Knut took the professor's coat and offered him his seat by the fire so that he could warm his feet. “I don't know why you have to walk the dog in the rain,” he said, half reproachful and half concerned.

“I couldn't sleep.”

“Leningrad?”

Kaltenburg nodded, yes, he'd been waiting for weeks for information about the zoological commission.

“No news?”

“Silence from Leningrad.”

I can't remember whether it was Martin or Klara who brought up Shostakovitch to distract the professor, distract ourselves from secret zoological commissions and the ban on songbirds, and soon our conversation turned to string orchestras, funeral music, film music. The rain was beating down on the garage roof. Knut skillfully steered Kaltenburg to a subject that had already been touched on in the summer, when the two of them had been chatting about integrity in wildlife films.

“Hear that? I could listen to it for hours.” Rain on a felted roof. The rustling in the trees.

“One of these days we should take the risk of using the soundtrack of a natural habitat as is, just chance it, and ignore this stupid fear that the viewer will think there's something missing.”

“How right you are. Here we are showing life on the forest floor, and it sounds as though we've parked an entire symphony orchestra in the treetops.”

“You've got to have masses of violins playing all the time—which idiot introduced that law?”

“You'd think it was Stalin's funeral, the way they play, all that sentimental fiddling has nothing to do with the poor forest dwellers.”

When the rain had eased and the professor was about to leave, all five of us were so taken with the idea that in our heads we could hear whole sequences of atmospheric noise, scratching sounds. Animal noises. Snuffling. Trampling. Birds calling in the distance.

“That would make a difference. We must try it,” Knut said.

“You're wrong, Herr Sieverding—it would be a revolution,” Kaltenburg exclaimed on his way out.

But the silence from Leningrad was to last for many years.

The little stand of pines was now out of sight, no garage, no derelict land, no Institute villa, we had reached the slope again and were walking down toward the Loschwitz cemetery, the sun appeared briefly in the west under the clouds. I had already told Katharina Fischer that Kaltenburg's hopes were not to be fulfilled while he lived in this town. The fact is this was Ludwig Kaltenburg's first defeat in Dresden, even though he would never have used that term himself—he probably didn't even know the word “defeat.”

What a scene that would have been—you can just hear the breathless tone of the eager radio announcer: Accompanied by a group of Soviet colleagues, Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg presents to the world the treasures of the Dresden Zoological Collections, carefully preserved from destruction in 1945, kept safe in the Soviet Union, and now, thanks to the infinite generosity of our friends, returned to the resurrected city of Dresden.

No. Nothing like that ever happened. Not even Professor Eberhard Matzke, who was undoubtedly involved in bringing the prize exhibits back from the Soviet Union in the 1970s, was able to boast of his great achievement, because the whole transaction took place in secret. In equal secrecy he would have relished his triumph, as a former subordinate of Kaltenburg's at the Zoological Institute in Leipzig, Dr. Matzke the long-serving assistant, the permanent fixture in whom nobody had confidence—until, out of the blue, he began his meteoric rise, to Berlin, right to the top, overtaking Professor Kaltenburg.

“But you never discussed the ban on songbirds with him that evening?”

No.

“Later?” Katharina Fischer looked at me.

No, never.

“I could have sworn you and Kaltenburg had a long discussion about it at one point. There's an obvious connection, anyway.”

Suddenly I understood what she meant. I had never thought of it. My father's adopted birds.

Basically, declared Frau Fischer, the matter was clear. My father had taken in prohibited companion birds. She gave no weight to my objections: the advanced date, far too late for people to be looking for a new home for their pet birds, when those people themselves had disappeared from the city of Posen, transported to the camps. Perhaps, suggested the interpreter, the afternoon of the business with the swift wasn't originally connected to birds being cared for in our house. It might be a matter of memory causing a telescoping of events. And like a child who sees himself as the center of the universe, in retrospect I was now arranging widely separated bird images in my mind on one plane. “You're not concerned about the actual sequence of events,” maintained Katharina Fischer, “you're only looking for similarities.”

Our injured blue-throat, I'm quite certain we picked it up while out for a walk.

“Think about the tame starling. Where am I ever going to find a tame starling in the wild that I can lure onto my shoulder and take it home with me?”

I don't know.

“But of course that's obvious to you, Herr Funk, as an ornithologist.”

And finally she asked me a question I had been expecting since we began our walk down to the valley. All afternoon. In fact, since our first meeting in the Ornithological Collection.

“Did you ever see anything in your childhood resembling what Klara saw? Did you ever see a neighbor being taken away before dawn?”

Klara had asked me the same question. No, I had never seen anything like that. And at the risk of sounding odd, almost cruel: today there is something I would be glad to have seen. Certainty, about one moment at least, when Maria left our house—did she leave my father, my mother, because she had been ordered to report at an assembly point? Did my parents go with her, despondent and silent, a little way into town? Or did my nanny disappear overnight because she wanted to forestall difficulties for our family? And yet it was also possible, even if not very probable, that with nothing at all to fear she had gone back to her parents, taken a new job, or indeed, as Martin once speculated, got married, and that she wanted to spare me a long and tearful parting scene. Whether Maria had disappeared at night or early in the morning, I must have been asleep.

“Didn't you ever see them in their leather coats?” asked Klara. “Wasn't there any house on your street in front of which the dark car stopped with its engine running?”

I can clearly remember the fine Sunday when she asked me that question, we had been to the races, had persisted in backing outsiders with poetic names and never picked a single winner, now we were making our way back to the station, through scrubland, allotment gardens. We were walking hand in hand, and I was telling her about the goldfinches I had begun observing in the early months after the war, in this area among others. Thistle territory, rubbish dumps, the embankment on the other side of the Wiener Strasse, I had followed the birds, often near Klara's family's house, thus escaping on hot afternoons from my siblings, who always wanted to go for a swim in a pond—I only went with them a few times. I am eternally grateful to my surrogate parents for letting me go bird-watching instead, even if their voices betrayed a concern that their foster child was in danger of turning into a loner.

“And then in the summer after the war, didn't you see trains taking liberated prisoners home?”

When Klara looked back, for her the area was not populated by finches, she saw no parents feeding their young, didn't hear the cracking of seedpods nor the clamor of chicks, saw no plumage markings, brown backs, red faces, or black wings with yellow bars. The children from her neighborhood used to play on the rail track that led to Prague; the two sisters would take a walk along the line as far as Reick, picking up any strange objects they found on the ballast bed. And Klara could still hear the hum of a train approaching from the main station, the vibrating of the tracks, the faint, reassuring alarm signal that in no way befitted the danger it announced.

One day Klara was dawdling on the sleepers when all the other children had already moved a safe distance away, she saw the engine, pulled up her socks, she was anticipating one of those never-varying freight trains, then the strap on her sandal broke. The next instant she was crouching in the grass barely a meter away from the line, looking up at the crowded cars, looking into foreign faces, hearing foreign languages, hearing nothing at all. The alternation of motion and stillness, noise and silence, was far too rapid for Klara to be able to say later whether the passengers' mood had been cheerful or downcast, and the other children, who now came creeping up, didn't know either. The cars trundled slowly past, in the direction of Prague, to Budapest, perhaps on to Bucharest and as far as the Black Sea. Nobody took any notice of the group of children in the grass, not even the watchful young Russian soldiers standing in the cars.

“Cattle cars?”

No, as far as I can remember, Klara made no mention of cattle cars. Open goods cars, their rusty walls eaten into by coal dust, with a long row of flat plank benches, that was how the trains looked then. But my mind went back to the cattle cars I had noticed on the embankment in Posen when I was crushing leaves between my fingers, when I was identifying, looking for, digging up plants with my father: “To the east, or have you forgotten your compass points?”

S
IX WHITE SNOW GEESE
were resting in the high grass on the bank near the landing stage; one of the birds, neck outstretched, was keeping watch over its surroundings, peering in all directions, while the others gazed steadily westward, downriver, into the sunset, the yellow and pink and light-blue sky above the city. The castle ferry had just left the jetty on the Pillnitz side, the diesel engine roaring, the little boat struggling against the Elbe current. The blackbird behind me was complaining. The sand martins still darting about.

In the past few weeks, whenever my evening walks have taken me as far as Kleinschachwitz, I have found myself recalling Katharina Fischer's words and trying to clarify my thoughts about the birds we took in. All his life Ludwig Kaltenburg laid great emphasis on zoologists' need to take a critical look at their earlier selves in order to correct past errors of judgment. But in the end, all I see each time is the injured blue-throat in its box in front of me while next door my father is arguing with the professor about sick birds, I can see our starling landing on Professor Kaltenburg's shoulder during his first visit. The story was that my father had bought the starling from a bird seller in town, but he had never actually taken me with him to the breeder's, either because I declined to go or because he had never been there himself but wanted to name someone he knew the great bird expert trusted.

The snow geese were not to be put off by the noise on the water, they turned their heads, gabbling softly, the ferry had reached our side. Cyclists came toward us, then a group of walkers, no one had noticed the white birds in the grass. The ferryman stood on the empty landing stage lighting a cigarette. I turned back upstream to wait by Bird Island for the crows, for the gaggles that would appear from all points of the compass in the fading light, returning from their feeding grounds, cawing excitedly, squabbling inconclusively before they foregathered to roost in their accustomed trees and for a few hours darkness rendered them invisible.

My mind kept going back to Ludwig Kaltenburg, but each time the scenes in Posen were overlaid by a later image. The professor sitting on the edge of the bed, bending down to untie his shoelaces, and tugging the bedspread over with him. His silhouette, the cold morning light on his white hair, he hasn't noticed me yet. Kaltenburg without his jackdaws. The slight creak of the bed, the swish of the bedspread, which leaves a narrow strip of bed linen uncovered, very bright, very fine, not made around here. A little clumsily, he undoes his right shoelace, looks up at me: “Oh, it's you.”

No, I never entered the professor's bedroom while he was living in Dresden. I never saw it until after he had left, and even then only because I had to look after the household animals, with which I was nearly as familiar as their vanished master. I kept them company, together we wandered through the deserted rooms. In the bedroom, I remember, there were touches of extravagance out of character with the rest of the Kaltenburg household. An almost full bottle of French aftershave left in the bathroom, an embroidered bedspread, behind the dressing table mirror a pressed cyclamen that had escaped the beaks of generations of birds.

Where the thicket was beginning to get darker, by the riverside path, one icterine warbler responded to another of its kind down among the willow bushes. I could hear whitethroats, magpies, a wood pigeon. Soon the blackbirds would take their places in the treetops to begin their evensong. I was surrounded by voices, and it almost sounded as if my name were being called.