Kaltenburg (36 page)

Kaltenburg growled.

“Have you ever wondered what all this activity looks like to Eberhard Matzke from a distance?”

“I must admit I haven't.”

Both were exhausted. Knut paced up and down the room. Professor Kaltenburg sat back in his cocktail-bar chair with arms dangling over the sides.

“Hermann, could you make us some tea?”

As I was on my way to the kitchen, Kaltenburg sat bolt upright.

“Somebody's got to do something.”

“Not you.”

W
E FOLLOWED THE ANIMALS'
example and kept out of the sun. I think it was a hot August afternoon when I was informed that I had to renounce my membership in the German Ornithological Society. I wasn't the only one, we were all required to renounce membership in a Western organization. The animals dozed. We were agitated, we were restless.

Maybe this did start out as a crass joke doing the rounds of the Institute, though in those August days we were in no mood for joking—there was no escape from the enervating heat, whether we lay under the trees, retreated into the aquarium wing, or sat behind closed shutters and tried not to move if we could help it.

“Next thing they'll be making us quit the German Ornithological Society.”

Professor Kaltenburg, wearing shorts, confused for a moment: “What are you talking about? Reinhold is sitting there isolated in West Berlin, and you're wasting your time with that nonsense?”

One of the caretakers was trying all day to get hold of his family, with no success; his wife and children had gone ahead of him on holiday. Colleagues canceled impending trips to the West. Conversely, no prospect of a visit from Knut Sieverding. He never made the long-planned documentary about house sparrows. Troubled, Krause washed the car. Or did he come back in the evening from a trip to Berlin and report at first hand the events that had been unfolding on the streets? No. In any case, we wouldn't have trusted his account.

All at once, the long-running dispute between Reinhold and Matzke was over. Professor Doktor Eberhard Matzke had displayed a frightening degree of ambition, against Reinhold's will he had been made director of the research center, but he still wasn't satisfied. He didn't shrink from using uncouth language to his colleagues to cast doubts on Reinhold's abilities, he blackened his name in the highest quarters, and above all, he declared, there was no place in East Berlin for an ornithologist who lived in West Berlin. It was as if colleague Matzke's complaints and grievances had gained a hearing at some point, for Reinhold's bird collection and library were now placed at Matzke's disposal—the hated eminence no longer able to put a spoke in his wheel.

And then I can see Ludwig Kaltenburg sitting bent over on the wooden bench in his kitchen, his shoelaces dangling in the air for a moment. Gripping the heavy, leather-soled shoe by the heel, he pulls it off with a heave. He sits up again and grunts, “Oh, it's you.” Kaltenburg points at the shoe, and as if apologizing, he says, “I went out to get milk.”

His beard, his hair, the bench, the tiled floor, are all bathed in the clear light of a mild day. The shopping bag with the bottles of milk is there; I notice the color of Kaltenburg's socks, like mincemeat that's been exposed to air for too long.

I force myself to look elsewhere, the art print on the kitchen wall, the linen cloth on the table, I make the embarrassed old man disappear.

I only vaguely recollect his sending me to Matzke in late 1961 or early 1962 with a peace offer. “Don't forget to have a good shave, you know colleague Matzke can't stand to see a badly shaven man of a morning.”

Eberhard Matzke no longer knew me. There was no reply to the peace offer. It will have been around then that the professor finally understood that this wasn't about Reinhold at all. It was he, Ludwig Kaltenburg, that Matzke had had in his sights all along. From that moment on things went downhill with Kaltenburg.

The jackdaw skins lie spread out before me, a uniform blackish gray shimmer covers the work surface once the sun goes down. Yes, I skinned Taschotschek. I have preserved it and its fellows very carefully, and in Klotzsche too Kaltenburg's jackdaws will be kept in a safe place.

T
HE JAYS ARE GONE
,” he wrote in his first animal handbook. “The geese have moved away, to who knows where. Of all my free-flying birds, there remain only the jackdaws.” Now they too were gone.

One morning Klara said at breakfast, “The professor is beyond saving.”

I left my coffee, put my jacket on. Klara looked at me, she knew where I was going. It was as though Ludwig Kaltenburg had taught us all to sense the slightest change in the condition of certain life forms from miles away.

Half an hour later I turned into the familiar street, out of breath though I hadn't been running. I stopped outside the villa. On the stones of the path leading to the house I saw drops, not rain and not animal droppings, a trail. Right up to the garden gate, as well as on the footpath behind me, I had followed the trail for some while without registering it. At every step I observed these small circles, frayed at the edges, dark, a watery substance, they would soon evaporate. The door was open, it was always open, there was no doorbell—Kaltenburg said, early on, “You know how it is here, people continually calling in wanting something from me. If we had a doorbell, my nocturnals would never get any rest.”

On the linoleum of the stairs up to the first floor, the marks changed color. White drops on a red background. Step by step I followed the milky trail up to the study. Kaltenburg's socks. An embarrassed smile.

“Oh, it's you.”

Kaltenburg sat hunched on the edge of the sofa. He used to eat on it lying back; at night, Martin would sometimes sit there too, as I did countless times. Kaltenburg was struggling with his shoelaces. As though it explained everything, as though on this morning the whole world could be summed up in a single sentence, he said, “I went out to get milk.”

His bare hand brushed across the suede leather, the other shoe was standing on the parquet floor in a shiny little puddle. Then it struck me that Ludwig Kaltenburg was wearing socks with holes in them. He raised his head, smiled sheepishly: “I went out to get milk and didn't notice.”

He seemed not to know what he wanted to do with the milk. Like a self-conscious young boy. No, to be honest, he looked at me like an old man who has realized that his powers are slipping away.

“The milk was dripping on my shoe, and I didn't notice,” he said.

The bag sat in a pool of milk, I took the bottles out carefully, no, there was no broken glass, but one bottletop was ripped off. On the way back from the shop Kaltenburg had spilled almost a liter of milk.

“I'll wipe it up,” he said, now sounding like a child wanting to undo a mistake.

I found a bucket in the broom closet, the scrubbing brush, a cloth, fetched water. I started at the foot of the stairs. The same silence as on that evening when we had gathered up the dead jackdaws. Kaltenburg had called for me because no one else was available. He had to wait for nearly an hour in a state of uncertainty until I arrived. It was during that night that Klara first said to me, “You won't be able to save Ludwig Kaltenburg.”

His clear look as he talked about the abysses, “There, there, and there,” the light spring breeze in his hair, the first sunshine of the year on his weather-beaten face. And yet Ludwig Kaltenburg never really wanted to see that he was surrounded by monsters. Later, people would say that he had gradually isolated himself, that the seal had been set on the end of his time in Dresden long before, but he had been remarkably good at concealing this from himself and the world.

I wiped the milk from the parquet, a trickle running under the desk, the rugs would need cleaning—no, no great store was set by clean carpets in the Kaltenburg household. But with all this milk, there would have to be new carpets.

“Remind me to let you have a key before you go, Hermann.”

They took their time, they studied him. And didn't Kaltenburg himself always insist on patient observation? First of all they wanted to acquire an all-round understanding of the subject, sooner or later his weak spots would be exposed, inadvertently he would tell you himself how to throw someone like Ludwig Kaltenburg off balance. It couldn't be done in a hurry—a man like Kaltenburg was able to withstand a great deal, he would fight for his corner, not yield easily. They could have deprived Kaltenburg of his university chair, prohibited him from researching and publishing—he would just have laughed: “Ban me from research? I only have to see to be doing research. You've only got to keep your eyes open, how can anyone stop me doing that?”

Was his gaze fixed on the cleaning cloth, or was he simply staring into space? He sat there motionless, only his toes moving. I wouldn't have expected the holes in his socks. When I had wrung out the rag and washed my hands, I caught myself secretly scrutinizing Kaltenburg as I returned to the room: Had he combed his hair today? Was his collar clean?

“A key, yes, I won't forget.”

He said, “Actually, I've always preferred the country.”

I knew that for the past few weeks he'd been working on a lecture to be given at a conference in Oslo or Helsinki. And if he insisted on giving me a key to the villa, I also knew that he would not be coming back from this trip.

At that moment there wasn't the slightest doubt. Kaltenburg had dropped many hints, possibly lost on everyone but me. Kaltenburg's fear. The animals sensed you were going to leave them, you moved differently, you approached the animals in a different way, you didn't smell the same: there was no need for luggage in the corridor. It was to be the only time in his life that he would move his household without a single animal.

Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg perched on the edge of the sofa, without looking up he lifted some paper from the desk, scrunched it up, and stuffed his right shoe with it. I almost thought I heard him muttering,
“Da, da, durak.”

I took stock, reaching for the wadding. I ran my fingers over the pleasantly warm, dark jackdaw feathers. Effortlessly, I filled the skin.

T
HERE WAS STILL
a pale orange and blue glow in the sky over the city, a pair of cranes were winging their way up the Elbe, giving voice as they flew, and when we sat down at one of the empty tables outside a long-since-closed snack bar called the Elbe Idyll, Frau Fischer asked what had become of Ludwig Kaltenburg's other animals.

The northern raven disappeared for good soon after its old friend. Some of the exotics went to dealers, some to the zoo, which also took the rare duck species. For some years I didn't dare venture anywhere near the waterfowl ponds, because the older birds were absolutely not to be dissuaded from following me as far as the tram stop. The sulfur-crested cockatoo got away from me one day when I managed to corner it in Kaltenburg's bedroom—it was clearly so disgusted that it wanted nothing more to do with me and went off to look for a new feeding station. Later, it was often spotted by people who were out walking in the Great Garden, and regularly visited the afternoon feeding sessions at the zoo. Taking up its position on a branch or on the large uprooted tree stump which also served the heron as a lookout post, the cockatoo squatted there, less on account of hunger, perhaps, than because it enjoyed the familiar company of the mandarin ducks and pochards, the red-breasted and bar-headed geese, of every kind of strange bird, in fact, whether they were cormorants, sacred ibises, or flamingos.

Like other birds, however, it will have succumbed to the long, hard winter of 1962–63, when the swans were solidly frozen in on the Elbe and the tits were picking at any fresh putty in window frames, attracted by the smell of linseed oil, which was becoming weaker by the day. One day a group of young field ornithologists who spent some years mapping the Great Garden came across a single primary feather in the snow and noted, “Vestige of an escaped bird,” then went on, “Obviously brought into the area by visitors,” and then, in view of the white parts of the feather, which had a yellow sheen in the winter sunshine, added, “Sulfur-crested cockatoo,” followed by a question mark. Because of severe frost damage, among other things, a positive identification would have been impossible.

A few former assistants took over the dogs. The resident tomcat was unwilling to leave his familiar territory, the neighbors went on putting food out for him until the end of the decade. We released Kaltenburg's sticklebacks into the wild and distributed the tropical fish among various aquariums around the city: commercial firms, schools, the sanatorium in Wachwitz.

The hamsters? I can't remember the details of what happened to them. Anyway, I believe two fundamentally different types of hamster must be distinguished in Kaltenburg's life. When he talked about hamsters in the plural, he did actually have in mind the nocturnal animals who kept him company when everybody else was asleep. But when he talked about a hamster, singular, it was just as well not to form too concrete an image of this creature that constantly chewed paper and helped itself to important documents and private letters to build its nest; it wasn't to be taken literally. If the minutes of a meeting had disappeared, let alone unanswered mail from friends, there would soon be a reference to the infamous hamster. And so in time I gathered that “the hamster” in the singular was simply another way of talking about papers that were, unfortunately, nowhere to be found.

Most of the Institute buildings were put to new uses, and I gather there was some idea of turning the villa into a guesthouse. But then it deteriorated bit by bit, the grounds became overgrown, quite a few animals may even have come back to live in this new wilderness. Long after its dissolution, Kaltenburg continued to be very interested in his former Institute, sending me back there time and again to keep him informed. I sent dismal reports to him in Vienna, but he reacted enthusiastically—“Good, excellent”; he was content to know that the Institute he had built up had not fallen into the hands of Matzke.