Kaltenburg (5 page)

In an earlier life, you could say that. But knowing myself as an adult to be surrounded by these figures meant that I had preserved something from that life.

T
H
ERE WERE TWO
MEN
in uniform in the house. I clung to my nanny's
wrist, to her forearm, even if only with my eyes, since at that moment I couldn't literally hold on to her because she was balancing a platter of meat in one hand and holding fork and spoon in the other while she served two slices of roast meat per person onto five large, ivory-colored plates of our best Sunday china, plates with a lime-leaf green border, a tendril that began nowhere and ended nowhere, though I was always trying to find its starting point nonetheless. Then, still holding the fork, Maria gave everyone some gravy, without dripping any of it, calmly but deftly, always leaning in over their left shoulders. She had begun with the guests, then served my parents, the steaming roast beef hanging for a moment in midair next to faces, ears, almost in front of people's eyes, but no one noticed it, it didn't bother anyone, everyone around the festively laid table went on talking, apart from me, to whom my nanny came last. I was hoping that, as she usually did, she would have saved a particularly good slice for me, totally free of the gristle which you would chew in vain and wouldn't be able to swallow but which you couldn't put back on your plate in front of guests, so that you would have to park it in the back of your cheek until the meal was over and you could get to the toilet. Then Maria lifted the lid of the potato dish and my father spoke into the rising cloud of steam: “Please help yourselves, gentlemen.”

There were two men in uniform in the house, and I was allowed to address them familiarly as
Du.
Earlier, when they arrived, I heard my parents greeting them at the door. I was sitting on the rug in my room, wanting to finish my game; light, friendly voices reached me, and then my mother was calling me down to say hello to Herr Spengler and Herr Sieverding. When I saw them in the hallway, there was some chat about our house, my mother was stroking my head, I was shaking hands with the guests, it was their boots I noticed first, clattering on the stone floor like nothing we had ever heard in our house before. I still didn't know what to make of it, two uniformed men whose voices didn't match their boots at all, they came up to just below their knees, so highly polished you could practically see your face in them. I stared at the boots, the grownups' eyes were also drawn to the soft, black, gleaming boot tops, and one of the men began to laugh: “That's not my doing, you'll have to congratulate Martin here for that, he's got the knack of losing himself for a whole afternoon in boot cleaning.”

“Well, run off and wash your hands”: my father didn't know what else to say.

Martin Spengler, the younger of the two, could hardly have been any older than my nanny, the other one was called Knut Sieverding, I turned the soap over in my hands under the tap, that name is harder to remember, Knut is the older one, but both of them are much younger than my parents, I was still twisting the soap over, but holding on to it with slippery fingers, I don't want to forget those names, Spengler and Sieverding, Knut laughs, and Martin polishes boots, but both of them make the same clatter with their boots on the stone floor, how cold the water gets when you let it run, the tall, thin, quiet man is called Martin, the shorter one with the untidy hair is Knut.

“Are you coming down? Time to eat.”

My nanny was knocking at the bathroom door.

A splash of gravy had cut through the green border. I didn't have any gristle or stringy bits. Although there were visitors, I was still allowed to mash the potatoes on the plate with my fork. Knut was the one sitting opposite me, Martin the one to his left. My father had announced he was inviting students from his lecture for the evening, and now two men in uniform were sitting at the table with us. They came out from the town, we lived a long way out, the wood behind the railway embankment, fields all around, and I wasn't sure that our road didn't quite quickly turn into a track, an overgrown path that petered out somewhere in the fields. I never went that far. We didn't have many neighbors, in summer the green growth was so dense that you'd hardly suspect the nearest house was there. At the back, toward the stream, my father's greenhouse, I used to hide down there in the bushes. From the terrace side you could walk into the drawing room, on the floor above my parents' bedroom to the left, mine to the right. I knew every corner of our house, and there were many dark corners that nobody went to but me. What happened the week before had long since been forgotten. Today I was allowed to have dinner with the grownups. Maria took the meat around again, winking at me without anyone seeing. She smiled. Then she smiled at Martin.

“Hermann, are you listening?”

My father looked across at me from his place at the head of the table, then at Knut. He had laid his cutlery down on the edge of the plate. Maria was holding the serving platter up in the air, with both hands. What had Knut—Herr Sieverding—asked me, my mind went blank, I tried to imagine what he might have asked me, there were no potatoes steaming on anybody's plate by now, I couldn't think of anything.

“No, it did have legs, I saw for myself. The swift, I mean.”

“But he's asking what class you're in,” murmured my mother in my ear.

By this time I couldn't say a word.

“Oh, well,” broke in Martin, who cleaned the boots. “School isn't important at all, not that interesting, don't you agree? Unless you're very lucky, you hardly learn a thing, at least nothing important, nothing about animals, plants, or cameras, for example. Things that interest a bright boy, paper and pencils and everything you need to take a good photo. I bet you'll have a hard time finding a biology teacher who is aware that swifts have legs.”

“But the bird is called
Apus apus,
” said Knut, “and its footless condition is mentioned in its name, twice in fact, as though to confirm it or to indicate that there is nothing else to know about it, that it's distinguished by nothing except its lack of feet.”

“You see, I'm sure you didn't learn that at school.”

“No, you're right. I only just managed to scrape through my leaving exams. Instead of studying, I used to go off all on my own looking at wildlife, and when I passed my exams my parents were so relieved, they bought me the movie camera I had been coveting so that I could film animals. Yet it was my love of observing animals that made so much trouble for me at school.”

It was getting dark outside. My nanny was in the kitchen preparing dessert and coffee. My mother had laid her hand on my knee. Everyone had forgotten how embarrassed I'd been about Knut's question.

“Nobody would know now that you weren't a model pupil,” said my father, “if you don't mind my saying so. Getting invited at twenty-one to Berlin for the anniversary of the German Ornithological Society—I thought you would have been top of the class, Herr Sieverding.”

“Not a bit of it. I was too busy observing the bird world. And I couldn't have made the film I showed in Berlin about snipe in the Königsberg area if my parents hadn't given me the camera.”

“You're a real professional when it comes to birds,” said Martin, nudging Knut with his elbow. “Tell us again about the first lecture you gave, back home in Königsberg.”

“God, I was so nervous. What I knew was the remote world of birds out on the Courland Spit, and here I was about to give a presentation on it, using my own photo material, in the lecture theater of the Zoological Institute. My hands were sweating. My parents were there. Seasoned ornithologists were there. Fortunately my lecture went off very smoothly, there was even an article in the
Königsberg Daily News,
the first one about my work: ‘Camera Reveals Family Secrets.' Of course, I've got to say there were also some critics, who had expected something completely different. I simply wanted to show the world as it was, whereas they wanted me to explain the world to them, a bit like a grandmother explaining the world to her grandchild.”

“As if showing anything were that easy.”

Knut and my father laughed. Martin took a drink of water. Now that I had been paying attention again for quite a while, something dawned on me beyond all the stories about school, birds, and filming: it was entirely for my sake that my parents had invited these two men, Knut and Martin, with their pleasant voices and black leather boots.

T
HE
WAY I
SEE IT
today is that my parents were worried about me after the incident of the swift. Obviously they noticed how slow I was to get over my confusion, how I was becoming more withdrawn as the week wore on, preferring to spend my time alone in my room and answering encouraging questions with a scarcely audible yes or no, or showing no reaction at all. Since they connected my depression with the swift, though not with my equally depressed nanny—who was punished by being ignored for a few days—my parents made a plan: with guidance, I was to learn about the world of birds through direct, intensive contact.

What seems to me in retrospect so endearing, my parents worrying that their only child's not very significant encounter with a young swift might have serious repercussions in his later life, at the time aroused contradictory emotions in the child concerned. On the one hand, I was proud to be the center of attention, even more than usual the world seemed to revolve around me, they had even invited young ornithologists to dinner just because of me. But on the other hand, I also felt betrayed, because plans had been hatched behind my back to rescue a creature who was being kept just as much in the dark as if he were a small animal.

It is no doubt a matter for dispute whether my parents were being particularly progressive for their time or, on the contrary, old-fashioned and exceptionally strict: the conclusions they drew from the incident to help me conquer my bird phobia expanded step by step into a large-scale program of education. Knut and Martin suited their purposes right from the beginning.

My father had noticed them in his lectures for different, in fact opposing, reasons, which in itself says something about the friendship of the two young men, four years apart in age. Martin, the younger one, the boot cleaner, behaved badly, not to say rudely, one morning in an upper tier of the auditorium during an “Introduction to the Foundations of Botany” lecture. My father was obliged to ask him to be quiet, because as he was taking notes he was frantically shuffling his papers, and even groaned aloud at one point when my father came to cell structure. After the lecture, as my father was to tell my mother with forced jocularity, perhaps with a trace of bitterness, it wasn't the disruptive student who came down to the podium to apologize, as you might have expected, but his friend Knut, the older one, who begged with exquisite politeness not for understanding, but for forgiveness, while Martin remained unmoved, brazenly lolling about up there on his bench and following with lowered gaze as Knut, on his behalf, repeatedly bowed his head to my father down there by the blackboard.

It transpired that both were in the Luftwaffe training school here in Posen, and Knut was a regular student of biology and zoology besides. Martin only occasionally accompanied Knut, his immediate superior, to the university. Martin, a lad who was not quite of this world and who tried to overlay his insecurities with a rough manner, a questing spirit, dreamy, you might say; others would call him impudent. Knut by contrast steadier, altogether more mature, he knew exactly what he wanted and was a good influence on his younger companion, a bit like an older brother.

Knut came out to show us his bird photos from the Courland Spit. He brought his camera with him, Martin and he allowed me to take them on secret paths through the woods, I showed them where we found deer.

“Up there—can you see it? A woodpecker.”

“Green or spotted?” I could hear it, but I couldn't make it out yet.

“Now he's moved off to the other tree.”

There on the ground was some sticky stuff, a ball of feathers, Knut poked around in it with his stick: “That's where a long-eared owl has eaten a small songbird and spat out the remains.” He looked at me inquiringly.

“That's what you call a pellet.”

And Martin: “Now I wouldn't have known that.”

Sometimes Martin came to see me by himself. Soon the pilot, who wanted to become a pediatrician after the war, was a regular visitor to our place, even when my parents were not at home.

A gust of warm wind stirred up dust from the road, for a moment I couldn't see anything. Somebody was coughing. Then Martin emerged from the dust cloud, his hands covering his mouth, nose, and eyes. As soon as he recognized me he waved. How dusty his boots were. Despite the sunshine, Knut had stayed behind to prepare for the next day's classes. We had this afternoon to ourselves. But first Martin needed a big glass of cool tap water from the kitchen, to quench his terrible thirst. Maria was standing by the table peeling vegetables, and as soon as she saw who had come in with me she wiped her hands on her apron and beamed. If anybody else came into the kitchen with dirty shoes, she would go crazy. Martin had struck up an understanding with Maria immediately, in fact I sometimes thought there was a closeness between them, as though they hadn't just met at dinner the other evening, when they could only exchange a few polite words in any case since Maria was serving the food. It almost seemed to me as if they had known each other for some time.

With Martin I spent whole afternoons in the countryside. He said he found the city too oppressive, not because of the streets and houses but because of all the people. We took nothing with us to the fields except a sketchpad and pencils. We just drew what happened to be in front of us: panicles, lumps of clay, beetles. Martin was utterly calm as he watched my efforts, his sleepy, then suddenly alert glance. He commented on this or that pencil mark, the strength, depth, darkness of the line, he saw the way the color covered the background, followed the direction of a movement, a turn or stroke as it tended out beyond the edge of the paper. A hare didn't have to be a thing with long ears, if the seemingly shapeless collection of lines on the page squatted or leapt like a hare. He never minded that I drew a hare when he asked me to draw a bird.