Kaltenburg (32 page)

“Herr Funk?”

Katharina Fischer stopped next to me and got off her bike. “So it's you. I thought I recognized you from the ferry.”

She went on to say that she would like to go with me to the crows' roosting place, then declared how glad she was to have run into me, because my father's adopted birds had been on her mind ever since our conversation in Loschwitz. Apparently we had each wrestled independently with the question, reckoned we were beginning to get somewhere with it, started to have doubts, then discarded all our previous reflections. By the time my parents got to know the professor, there was no longer any occasion to ban songbirds, at least in Posen: the ghetto they named Litzmannstadt had long since been in existence.

All the same, just like me, Katharina Fischer had found herself caught up in the wish-fulfillment scenario of a secret collusion between my father and Professor Kaltenburg which saw them in a pet shop inspecting, at their special request, birds that came from private households. The previous owners, the dealer would explain, had moved away with no forwarding address. Finding the birds anxiously fluttering about in their cages as his neighbors' households were being broken up, he couldn't bring himself to wring the necks of the aging starling, or the goldfinch, or the yellowhammer that was on display in the window.

Two bird enthusiasts taking up the cause of pet birds made ownerless in the midst of the world pogrom: a wish-fulfillment fantasy, as Katharina Fischer herself must have known. The secret collusion never existed.

“Have you always stood by Kaltenburg?” the interpreter asked suddenly, after we had gone only a few steps.

I can never forget what I owe him. But for him I would never have made anything of my life, it's as simple as that.

“Then I suppose, all things considered, you could be called his most loyal student?”

I thought for a while. I realized that I too had reason to be glad I had met her that evening, otherwise I might never have said this out loud: I had never been so deeply disappointed by anybody as by Ludwig Kaltenburg.

Katharina Fischer shot me a shy sidelong glance, wanted to question me, held her peace.

You might think on the face of it that what really hurt me, what shook me to the core, looks like a simple oversight due to haste or a hazy memory. A mere trifle, a trivial detail that you eventually learn to ignore, especially as it's only a matter of a slight gap. An outsider wouldn't even notice this omission of barely eighteen months, because the professor retrospectively filled the gap with other events, other place, names, and characters. But however much I wanted to, I could never forgive him for this omission: Ludwig Kaltenburg deleted from his CV the period when we were both in Posen.

“As though you had never got to know him as a child?” she asked diffidently. “But why? Did you ever ask him?”

At the time when the famous zoologist appeared to have put our first encounters out of his mind as far as the public, his colleagues, the whole world were concerned, I no longer needed to ask. And Kaltenburg would no doubt once again have pointed at someone else, would have talked his way out of it—as he was wont to do by then—by assigning all responsibility to Professor Dr. Eberhard Matzke.

W
E'VE GOT TO ACT
as if we're strangers”—this was the strict rule for our dealings with each other at the Zoological Institute in Leipzig. We adhered to it all the more firmly because everybody knew how close we were, even if not everyone was aware of the particular liberties I enjoyed at Kaltenburg's Loschwitz Institute. Dresden was a long way off, and every time I made my weekly journey between the two cities I crossed an invisible line. I never worked out where that line ran, and as I looked up on the train from my lecture notes, my mind was on Klara and the past weekend, on Kaltenburg's animals, to which I had devoted the previous two days, I gazed at the last hills behind Dresden, the gray, then pale green, then brown, and finally snow-covered fields, the curve of the Elbe at Riesa, the unvarying plain in which the settlements gradually merged into a town—somewhere along the route, I noticed, I had turned abruptly into the Leipzig zoology student whose life I can now barely recall.

The number of occasions when Ludwig Kaltenburg drove me in his car could be counted on the fingers of one hand. That was nothing to complain about; on the contrary, our agreement may actually have worked to my advantage, since any remarks I did overhear referred not to any secret favoritism but to the professor's severity, from which I particularly suffered, according to my fellow students. They helped me out, lending me their notes and dropping me little messages. Nobody had any idea what a strain it was for Kaltenburg himself to play the stranger throughout the week, and how relieved we both were to meet again at the Saturday discussions in Loschwitz.

Once we were standing in a fairly large group in the corridor outside Kaltenburg's office, all wearing sturdy jackets and boots, ready to go on a field trip with the professor to observe passage migrants in the country around Leipzig. It was still early, but we knew the day would soon be drawing to a close. Casually Ludwig Kaltenburg inquired which goose it was that came in both a white and a dark variety, and as if by chance he glanced in my direction.
Anser fabalis
or
Anser albifrons,
or perhaps just
Anser anser
—I looked at the floor, looked at the roughly plastered, white-painted wall, couldn't gather my thoughts. Behind the professor somebody shook his head; it was Dr. Matzke, Kaltenburg's assistant, who came to my assistance by silently mouthing the words until I recognized them: “snow goose.”

“All right, then,” drawled the professor. “Let's go.”

We trotted down the corridor in the cold light, Matzke leading. I always suspected that he saw through the act Kaltenburg put on for his Leipzig colleagues, and that the professor's strict manner toward me simply got on Matzke's nerves.

Dr. Eberhard Matzke was part of the Zoological Institute; nobody could have imagined him anywhere else, he himself least of all, no doubt. This was where he had studied in the thirties, this is where he returned after the war. When they placed a Professor Kaltenburg over him, while he remained plain Dr. Matzke, he took it calmly: for Eberhard Matzke, a Leipziger born and bred, Ludwig Kaltenburg was nothing but a passing phenomenon.

He walked up and down between the microscope tables, slightly bent, helping with a dissection here, moving a slide into the light there. Under his lab coat he wore a cardigan, and in the evenings when he hung up his white coat I always expected to see a few straws sticking to the matted wool. As though Matzke kept animals in a hutch tucked away in a remote corner of the sprawling institute building, animals he had left that morning only because he felt that unless he was peering over our shoulders, we might not go on examining feather structures and sensory cells under the microscope. He went steadily about his duties, that is to say, he spent most of his time at my bench—the Herr Professor must have no reason to complain.

He couldn't understand why many students made such heavy going of these tasks, instead of dispatching them as fast as possible so they could get back into the much more attractive world of living animals. To spur us on as we worked, Matzke told us anecdotes about his encounters with animals, which he was convinced would open up vistas in our mind's eye while in reality we were still struggling with a paper-thin slice of dead tissue. How he had once rescued a golden eagle injured in a fight, how a favorite crow went missing and how he fished it out weeks later from a sedimentation tank—he repeated many of these stories every six months or so, but we enjoyed them all the same because Matzke's slight Saxon singsong and his warm, deep voice soothed us.

“My colleague Matzke should have a medal just for his ability to keep a crowd of students quiet,” opined Kaltenburg. We never found out what he thought of him as a zoologist. Possibly the professor would not have believed his “colleague Matzke”—merely an assistant to Kaltenburg—capable of filling a university chair of his own. But he did at least deserve a decoration: “Even if I have to pin it on him myself.”

Now and again Martin was allowed to go to Leipzig too: “Just don't go holding the lad back from serious study,” warned Kaltenburg, and, half in jest, “Just to make sure, I'll get my colleague Matzke to keep an eye on you.” But I was aware that the warning was aimed not at Martin but at me; I was supposed to follow Martin's example in paying keen attention to Matzke's words.

When Martin accompanied me to a laboratory session and Matzke interrupted his story with a long-drawn-out “Aha,” I knew that he had got as far as the glass case at the back. That was where Martin liked to sit, concentrating on the display-specimen martens and rabbits that languished there practically ignored. It was a sight I wouldn't have wanted to miss: the huge, heavy man looming over Martin, and the wiry figure on its folding stool almost disappearing behind a massive back. There was just a glimpse of the corner of the sketch pad, Matzke with arms outspread as though about to devour the stranger, you could visualize his wide-open mouth—but Martin showed no fear, and what came out was only another “Aha.”

He was sketching animals, afraid perhaps that if he departed too far from his models in place of Matzke's friendly “Aha,” he would get an unhappy shake of the head. At home he had been working for a long time with animal blood, with fat, with tea stains on packing paper, creating beings that few would have recognized at first sight as animals. But Martin himself shook his head when he surveyed his work, he trusted neither what he saw on paper before him nor the figures that had gradually begun to populate the world of his imagination.

I admit we didn't take Dr. Matzke entirely seriously, just as he probably didn't take us entirely seriously either. The heavy, loping gait, the cardigan that had long since lost its shape—and then suddenly, from one day to the next, there was no longer any Dr. Matzke at the Zoological Institute to supervise our small-bird dissections, giving himself a shock when he boomed, “It's a matter of principle here,” whereupon he always fell into a half-whispered tone that was meant to be enticing: “And anyway, working like this you'll get to know the bird from the inside out, it's showing itself to you as you'd never see it otherwise.”

Matzke turned his back on Leipzig. He had received an offer from Berlin that he couldn't refuse, especially since it held the prospect of a professorial title. At last he would become “colleague Matzke,” and a colleague of the famous Reinhold to boot. It was in fact Reinhold who had conveyed the news to us on a visit to Loschwitz. Kaltenburg didn't comment on Matzke's move, he played it down when people said he must surely have pulled strings to advance Dr. Matzke's career when it seemed to be over. And when I asked him once whether the man hadn't always been a bit in the way, he just smiled.

E
BERHARD MATZKE REMOVED
his cardigan. Gave his hair a side parting. Took over Kaltenburg's former doctoral student, Fräulein Holsterbach. Soon relinquished his Saxon singsong, adopted a clear, almost hard High German, and every time he dictated an article, he asked his assistant to make sure no regional expressions slipped in. By degrees, in his new surroundings Eberhard Matzke even shed the awkwardness that had easily identified him in Leipzig when you were hurrying toward the institute entrance in the morning and saw a distant figure dismounting from his bicycle in the early light. The wider his sphere of influence spread, the slimmer and nimbler he appeared, as though he had learned at every step to avoid an obstacle, even if the obstacle was invisible.

“He's doing well. The Natural History Museum is good for him, the university is good for him.” Kaltenburg lauded him when asked about the new man in Berlin. “I'm very pleased that colleague Matzke has found his feet.”

The professor had not the faintest idea what was happening under his nose. Perhaps he seriously thought that Matzke would be eternally grateful to him. But in the light of subsequent events, the impression given by Matzke's publications in the second half of the fifties is that he was truly out to demolish Kaltenburg by holding up one theory after another to cast doubt on it, to nullify it. Not that he mounted a frontal assault on the professor, that he never did, but it seems to me that he wasn't fully satisfied with any scientific paper he wrote, any ornithological field observation, even a newspaper article, unless it contained, if only tucked away in a subordinate clause somewhere, a covert little dig at Ludwig Kaltenburg's convictions.

One remark of his instantly made me so angry that I didn't dare show it to the professor. He could not possibly have seen it as anything other than deliberately offensive, an egregiously arrogant departure from the tone of what was otherwise a factual account, attesting to years of zoological research, concerning conflict arising under conditions of imprisonment. I had seen an offprint of the article lying on Kaltenburg's desk and noticed the inscription, “With collegial greetings,” in Eberhard Matzke's handwriting, which grew larger from year to year. It's surely no accident that I have such a clear memory of this little excursus—which I couldn't help hoping Kaltenburg had overlooked—for one thing because the author was dealing with the inhibition against biting among wolves, and for another because the offensive remarks touched upon one of Kaltenburg's most sacrosanct principles, frequently expressed to me: “To live is to observe.”

Matzke declared it was pure nonsense to maintain, as people had done right up to the present, that in a fight between wolves the weaker will openly expose its throat to the stronger in a gesture that inhibits the latter from biting it. He wrote that he did not know what original observation underpinned this assertion, but by now it had almost attained the status of an article of faith among experts, and in a strange turn of phrase he went on to say that from his own wide experience, at least, the inhibition against biting among canines was just wishful thinking on the part of gullible, peace-loving zoologists. At any rate, word had not yet got around among the parties concerned, he concluded smugly, exposing one of Kaltenburg's most cherished maxims to ridicule. I remember how my temples throbbed as I thought,
I hope the professor did no more than skim through the essay this morning, I hope the ducks distracted him from reading it, that while feeding the drakes he overlooked the tone of his “colleague Matzke” and the effrontery of his pronouncements.