Kaltenburg (38 page)

And, after another pause: “I think it's getting light outside. A red stripe on the horizon.”

“At four in the morning? Not in London.”

“But that's what it feels like. If you hang on a minute, I'll go to the window and check.”

“You'd do better to lie down for a bit. Try to sleep. It's going to be a long day.”

And, like an echo on the line: “A long day.”

Then he said, “There are the gulls.”

“The Thames gulls circle all night?”

“They're perched on the windowsill outside, that's where they sleep.”

After these last exchanges we hung up. I did actually stay in the room long enough to see the first glimpse of light outside the window.
In another hour the sky over London will slowly take on color too,
I thought;
Ludwig Kaltenburg will get up, will go over his crowded list of appointments, will see in his mind's eye the names and faces he'll meet in the course of the morning.
Next to me on the table the telephone gradually emerged from the darkness, a gray box on a diffuse gray background. It was as though I had experienced the very last time a voice would be heard through that receiver.

While a flock of geese took off very low above the gravel shoreline, I told Katharina Fischer in conclusion that I never have looked for Matzke's bird skins, and when the collection moved to Klotzsche I avoided looking too closely at our gray-headed woodpeckers and night herons.

In the distance we heard a train, on the other side of the Elbe a guard dog barked, the bell of St. Mary's-by-the-Water was ringing out from Hosterwitz, it was ten o'clock, behind the Elbe Idyll we saw the empty bus disappearing into the deep-green avenue. It was getting cool, and damp, the air was beginning to smell of grass.

L
ATER, WHENEVER WE
were all together and thinking back to the fifties, which—since those were our formative years—we increasingly did as we got older, Klara sat quietly, not usually her style. When reminiscences were being exchanged, when we were helping each other out with names, dates, places, Klara fell silent. As we laughed, argued, interrupted each other, I could tell it was upsetting Klara, although nobody else noticed. She hardly seemed to be paying attention, she looked distant while all the others were listening, each outdoing the last with ever more precise details or more audacious stories; Klara held back, as if to stay out of some uncomfortable business.

And that was in spite of the fact that in our circles there was no danger that an evening might be spent conjuring up all the good old East German products, such as Leopek cream for sting relief, or the Fleischfrost range, or films like
Mazurka of Love.
Nobody talked about Savings Weeks or brought up early GDR slogans like “By the efforts of our hands” or worked in references to horses as “oat-motors”—accompanied by a silly wink—in connection with the rubble-clearing after the war. Klara was under no obligation to listen to “the Dresden reconstruction lion laughing,” let alone people tossing “The enemy is here among us” at her. All the same, she couldn't stand that sort of evening.

On one occasion, at a party in the house of some slight acquaintances, Klara simply retreated into the corridor for half an hour—the height of bad manners, in her own eyes—in order to escape from a conversation about the seventeenth of June 1953. With the best will in the world, she said later, she simply couldn't bring herself to go back into the room until the last guest had offloaded his memories of that date. She had stood the whole time within earshot, a few steps away from the door, slightly bemused, with her back to a bookcase, feeling a physical reluctance to breathe the memory-laden air in the drawing room.

Somebody recounted how he was just leaving the bakery on the Wasaplatz when he ran into a column of demonstrators coming from Niedersedlitz and stayed with them all the way to the city center, still clutching his bag of bread rolls; another claimed to have marched alongside the strike leader, Grothaus, while a third had memorized a speech to the strikers and recited whole passages from it. As one picture after another emerged, the event became more distinct in the minds of the participants, finally they could all remember meeting in the crowded Postplatz at midday. A moment of silence followed as each of them mentally reviewed the events, and Klara reappeared in the doorway. Nobody had noticed her leaving the room, nobody had missed her.

On the way home—the gathering had broken up soon afterward—I couldn't coax much more out of Klara than that she simply couldn't stand these stories, the poses the narrators struck, as if their memories could help them get a grip, whereas in reality, looking back could only be profoundly disturbing for us, make our present life fall apart.

“We've all got our nightmares, I don't need to be told that,” she declared, as if to close the subject, and “We all made mistakes, every one of us, and I certainly don't exclude myself.”

As soon as it was evident that the evening was going to descend into reminiscing, Klara would find some pretext for leaving without embarrassing her hosts: exhaustion after a full day, the long trip home, a cold coming on. If she felt too weak to come up with a suitable excuse, she signaled to me that we ought to be going, and I thought of something, citing an excursion, the need to be up before dawn for bird-watching; that was always an unobtrusive way to extract ourselves from the occasion.

If there was no way out, if Klara was asked point-blank what events she particularly associated with the fifties, she categorically insisted that she couldn't remember anything about that time except that the complete German translation of Proust had appeared. She sounded tired when she said it, not a trace of her pert manner, not a spark of provocation: “Just the Proust, nothing else.”

Nonetheless, the first time she said it she surprised me as much as the others in the group: despite the lack of sparkle in her eyes, I couldn't tell whether she was joking. A dry, wicked, dark joke, since I knew what memories were associated with the fifties for Klara, for Klara and me.

If anyone failed to grasp that the conversation was repugnant to her, Klara would describe to them in detail how the volumes with their sand-colored covers had reached her hands one by one. This one she had acquired on a visit to West Berlin, that one was lying on the table in the morning on her birthday, two others had emerged from a parcel Klara had thought contained tinned sausages. “The Proust,” that was her memory of the fifties, Klara only ever talked about “the Proust,” for her there was no
Captive,
no
Fugitive,
and no
Time Regained.

In case the company was not satisfied with this, she went so far as to state that above all it was the famous scene where the narrator washes his hands that had driven her on to read all of Proust, in fact it was the first detailed hand-washing scene in the novel that had initially given her access to this epoch-making work. The lukewarm water in the enamel bowl, whose temperature is checked once more by the grandmother—or is it the maid?—before the narrator is permitted to dip his delicate, waxlike fingers into it, the fragrance of the soap, the lather, the right hand embracing the left, and all the while the boy's long, wondering look out of the window, before he's called to the table.

The conversation was moving toward the period following Stalin's death, the secret speech, on to the doctors' plot, back to Slánský, and Klara recoiled, it wouldn't be long before they were looking to her to contribute a remark. She could feel their eyes resting on her, felt the challenge to initiate a diversionary maneuver, listened carefully until she found a key word, the right key word—afterward, nobody could have said how she managed to change the subject so elegantly.

After the first great hand-washing scene, Klara said, she had waited expectantly for any little scene featuring this everyday occurrence, however slight the reference, subordinate clauses, minor characters, one of those innumerable soirées, somebody leaving the company briefly to wash their hands—perhaps the whole secret of Proust lay in such fleeting moments, which the reader had to fill out for himself if he wanted to absorb them. Why, for example, Klara asked, does the painter, receiving an unexpected visit from the narrator, clean his hands with spit rather than turpentine before greeting his guest?

And what lies behind that scene where, after an evening in company, Swann leads Odette out to his coach to take a nocturnal drive through Paris—why is the coachman not on the spot at this moment, why don't we see him dutifully jumping down from his box to open the carriage door as soon as Swann and Odette appear in the street? There he is popping up behind the horses, embarrassed, muttering, his master doesn't even deign to glance at him, so the coachman redoubles his efforts to look keen. But Odette and Swann have eyes only for each other, the coachman keeps his hands hidden behind his back, once the pair have got in he acts as though he's reluctant to touch the door handle, and we, the readers, are the only ones to notice that in this scene Swann's coachman—for whatever reason—isn't wearing gloves when he shuts the carriage door from the outside. What was it that he put forward by way of excuse, we ask ourselves, wasn't it something about “opportunity to wash,” didn't he say “quickly” and “unfortunately” and “unsuccessfully”?

Wasn't it in this connection that a formulation had occurred that caused Klara to stumble, something like “just a bit of dirtiness,” hadn't Swann's coachman muttered “just a bit of dirtiness,” a phrase that must sound odd to any reader? Was Proust using servant language here, was he descending into a kind of argot? No, it seemed too mannered for that—so perhaps it was just a not very felicitous point in the translation? Nobody had an answer for Klara.

People recalled anxious nights by the radio, tanks in Budapest and grotesquely twisted bodies lying on the torn-up pavements, which handed Klara a key word, enabling her to avoid the question of whether she too—yes, we had—spent sleepless nights sitting by the radio. From the pavements of Budapest—or was it Prague?—she moved effortlessly on within a few sentences to the uneven pavement over which Proust's narrator once stumbled on his way to a reception. Wasn't he thinking at that very moment about when he'd last washed his hands, and whether he shouldn't take the precaution of visiting a toilet before meeting his hostess? A moment in the balance, with quiet restraint ushering in one of those lengthy reflections which leave our hero standing as though frozen in the flux of events, when he almost trips on a paving stone. His hands, his feet, his attention takes a leap, one kind of irritation overlays another, and soon we too are stumbling, straight into the famous description of an unbidden memory.

The talk now dwelled on events nearer home, the demolition of the ruins in Rampische Strasse in 1956, Professor Manfred von Ardenne and the Dresden Club he founded in spring 1957, later known as the Intelligentsia Club—Klara countered by recalling that brief moment, tucked away in an interpolated sentence, where you get the impression that, as if by a prearranged signal, just for two or three seconds the group of young ladies on the beach at Balbec bend down, with their backs to the promenade, to the viewer, as though—unseemly behavior in public—to feel seawater flowing over their hands for once in their lives. Everything is happening at a great distance, the gentle waves, spray, the salty smell, taste, the faint odor of starfish and marine life. Wishing to confirm this sight, you look down again at the receding waves, but the girls have already resumed their afternoon walk, as if nothing had happened. You can't even be sure the narrator observed the incident, so you're left alone with the question of how four such refined young ladies could simultaneously, no, how they could get their hands dirty in the first place, perhaps the sand, sticky sweets, perhaps they have been touching the skin of girls, of boys.

Klara could be sure that after such a description her listeners would follow her willingly, and so she went on to talk about the strange passage in Proust where the narrator secretly watches a stranger washing his hands. The scene takes place during the First World War, one of the few set in Paris during this period, at any minute the sirens could sound the alarm, there might be another air raid, but the narrator goes on lurking, peering through a half-open window into an unlit room on the other side of the courtyard, perhaps into a corridor, where a young man in a singlet appears, letting a door close behind him and yielding to the urge to hold his hands under the nearest tap. A rough stone sink, the kind normally used only for filling cleaning buckets, no hand towel, no soap, but the man in the undershirt clearly can't wait until he has found a toilet.

“There's something obscene about it,” Klara maintained, after yet another evening of anecdotes about their youth. “I can't bear it. Something obscene, and something desperate as well, this dogged determination dressed up as chat, as though by talking about the old days you can make yourself innocent.”

Klara couldn't stand the gravity of these tales, that's the only way I could explain it to myself. This gravity which gradually disappears the longer a story is turned this way and that, the more details are brought to light, so that in the end a whole quite funny complex of happenings seems to lie behind every tragic event. But because I know how she looks when she sits brooding for days on end at the kitchen table, Klara never needed to explain to me why she escaped into talking about her Proust wherever possible.

H
AVE YOU HEARD
the news?” Four months had elapsed since our chance meeting by Bird Island, we hadn't spoken to each other in the meantime, when to my surprise I heard the interpreter's voice on the telephone that afternoon, near and yet unfamiliar. After announcing herself with her full name, she immediately went on to talk about the news, which had just that minute ended with the weather forecast: “Did you know? Your friend Knut Sieverding has died. On Friday. His family announced his death today.”