Kaltenburg

by Marcel Beyer

  “You weren’t born in Dresden, were you?” Frau Fischer inquired cautiously soon after we met. Usually it took her only three sentences at most to tell by their accents where people came from, she said, but in my case she still couldn’t make up her mind. “I couldn’t even guess at the general direction,” she admitted as she took her pens and notebook out of her backpack and cast a first glance at the birds I had got ready.

  It’s true, I’m not from here, and it was only by accident, or rather because of the state of affairs at the time, that I came to Dresden early in 1945, when I was eleven: my parents had decided to leave the city of Posen and head west. Even before that we must have moved around a lot; I never had a chance to pick up a regional twang at home, let alone a dialect. I think they may even have taken care to choose a nanny for me who spoke clear High German.

  I have a mental image of myself in my best Sunday shirt sitting on the bench in our kitchen, and my nanny wiping my bare legs with a damp washcloth. Could my parents have taken the nanny along on the move to Dresden?

  Long-term memory, short-term memory. The interpreter had asked for a half-hour break during which she would like to be distracted, in order to test whether all the names she now had in her short-term memory really were lodged in her long-term memory. She wanted me to examine her afterward to find out, but meanwhile in this half-hour break she preferred not to stay around the mounted animals, perhaps because she needed to match the word with the object purely in her mind’s eye, or because after a while she had become uncomfortable in the presence of the birds: they perch on their branches as though they’ve just landed, as though they’re going to take off again at any moment, and if people are not used to them they’re afraid of scaring them away with a nervous movement. So we had exchanged the windowless room with its egg sets and mounted specimens for my office, which gave me a chance to smoke a cigarette and offer Katharina Fischer a coffee.

  She scanned the bookcase; there was a small pile of volumes from our library, I’d been using them over the past few weeks, and next to them my little reference library. The interpreter quickly took in the Journal of Ornithology, The Bird Observer, next to Grzimek’s Animal Life and Wassmann’s Encyclopedia of Ornithology. By comparison, in this light the hardback dictionaries on the top shelf look older than they are, German and Russian, German and English, editions from before and after reunification, slightly scuffed, darkened with age, as though I hadn’t touched them for years. Archetypes of Fear is absent from the bookcase.

  No, on that night when we arrived in this city, which was in the process of turning into a sea of rubble no longer warranting the name of “city,” my nanny was not with me as, wrapped in a blanket, I lay on the grass in the Great Garden. People all around, the whole park full of people, squatting in the darkness, walking to and fro, talking quietly, looking up at the sky without a word, and all of them strangers. Huddled next to me were an old couple; in the bright glow the man’s face was lit up as though by candlelight. The rims of his eyes, the furrows around his mouth, and the stubble of his beard turning red, then yellowish, white, then dark gray as the clouds passed over the treetops. The woman was wearing a good but no longer new coat, a broad shawl over her upper body, I can’t remember, was she wearing a cap, a hat, her head was resting on the man’s shoulder. Exhausted, in the open air, on a February night, they had nodded off. A noise like nothing ever heard before drove the two of them out of my mind.

  We sat for quite a while facing the birds I had lined up—that’s to say she sat, I soon got up again to stand behind the table and point out to her the crucial differences. Working from left to right, as seen from her perspective, I gave her the German names for the chaffinch, the brambling, the linnet, the twite, the mealy redpoll, let’s leave out the Arctic redpoll, it can be annoyingly hard to identify with any certainty, but go on to the serin, bullfinch or hawfinch, though the four stonebirds can be omitted despite their lovely pink plumage, then the scarlet grosbeak, the great rosefinch, the pine grosbeak—enormous compared to the others—the crossbill, the Scottish crossbill, the parrot crossbill, and finally the Carduelis finches, the siskin, the greenfinch, and the goldfinch, also known as the thistle finch.

  While I walked along the line, she began to draw up a list, the English names first; she had acquired an English bird book and was leafing through her Peterson’s Field Guide, the section on finches. But watch out, I broke in, that you don’t mix up the goldfinch with the German Goldfink, which is a brambling in English, or, worse still, group it with the snowfinch, which isn’t a finch at all but a sparrow, just as the scarlet rosefinch is not a Rosenfink in German; the German for that is Karmingimpel, and only the Swedes call the scarlet rosefinch a Rosenfink.

  Maybe I was overtaxing her a little at the start, but I had known straightaway that any interpreter who prepares so thoroughly for a conversation that may never take place, no, in all probability never will take place in the way she anticipates, must on no account be undertaxed. The Peterson Frau Fischer is using is a work I seldom consult: although its structure is conventional, I have always found it a bit awkward to use, because the illustrations, descriptions, and maps are each collected into separate sections of their own. I placed the Svensson/Mullarney/Zetterström next to it; descriptions on the left, on the right birds drawn against the light, silhouettes in a low-lying mist, and Katharina Fischer realized at first glance that it is all about recognizing the birds in their natural environment, not indoors.

  To really complicate matters—so began my sentence when I felt she had spent slightly too long poring over the bird books—be careful not to confuse “sparrow” with “sparrow.” Depending on who you’re talking to, British or American, it means either a true sparrow or our German Ammer, one of the New World buntings, which you’ll see over here only once in a lifetime as an accidental that has drifted across the Atlantic. So what we call an Ammer, the British call simply a bunting: easy to remember.

  I was afraid my remarks might have confused the interpreter so thoroughly by now that she might be wishing she had never taken on the job. So I thought I would gradually begin to simplify the business, first of all by eliminating certain finches that never appear locally and that were therefore, I hoped, unlikely to crop up in the conversation when Frau Fischer’s assignment required her to start moving birds around between languages. I removed a few examples from the table: the two-barred crossbill, the Sinai rosefinch, the evening grosbeak, the white-wing grosbeak, the red-fronted serin, the Syrian serin, the Corsican finch, the citril finch, the twite, and the beautiful blue chaffinch vanished from our sight, and as Katharina Fischer found, the whole arrangement now seemed much more manageable.

  I can see myself sitting there in my white shirt, the beam of light from the kitchen lamp doesn’t reach me, my nanny shades me from it, the shirt is crumpled, and if I were under the light you might be able to make out dark stains on the material: mud, colored crayon, dried blood. Maria. She can’t yet have been twenty years old.

  2

  THAT NIGHT IN the Great Garden it was only for an instant that my parents flashed through my mind and then, strangely, they vanished from my thoughts, just as they themselves later vanished for good; they were never found. They must have been killed, but against all reason I have often played with the idea that they survived but believed me to be dead, they wouldn’t give up, and the authorities could not shake them off until, in a fit of the most extreme brutality perhaps, they went so far as to show them the body of a young boy disfigured by the flames, and since they could do nothing and nobody would help them, after a few weeks they moved on. I know that I have always clung to this notion whenever I recall the elderly man and woman squatting right next to me on the grass. They might have been my parents. And in the darkness I simply didn’t recognize them. Two figures, aging from one instant to the next, with burns on their faces: I had never seen anything like it. How would I know my own living parents from so many dead? After all, when I first saw myself a
gain in a mirror, this face bore no resemblance to the one I knew from photos and memory.

  What have you let yourself in for, you poor girl? I blurted out at one point, and as soon as I said it I could have bitten off my tongue—what a job the interpreter had taken on, trying to learn by heart the whole of the local birdlife here in March, of all months. If the foreign guest had only put off his visit until the winter or even until high summer, if only he had waited just a few weeks, but as it was she would have to take into account all the overwintering species, the breeding birds together with the summer visitors, because not all of the former had left yet, and not all of the latter had yet arrived.

  “So then you got stuck in Dresden?”

  You could put it that way, I got stuck here, although after leaving Posen we were only passing through Dresden. As far as I can recall, my father, who was a botanist, met some colleagues, and my mother showed me around the city where she had lived for a while before I was born, perhaps the happiest time of her short life. I thought I sensed that as we strolled through the old town together, if you believe an eleven-year-old could sense such a thing. I think we retraced her steps as a young girl, and she never used the new names, she persisted with Theaterplatz, Augustus-Strasse, Jüdenhof, and Frauenstrasse, whenever we stopped for her to tell me something, in the bright, mild weather, a kind of false spring surrounding us that February. In the afternoon we would sit in a café and watch the life around us, Wildsruffer Strasse, Scheffelstrasse, Webergasse, they all still existed then, the city was full of people, and I tried to make eye contact with this or that refugee girl, or an older, limping man, even if I never forgot what my family had drummed into me—although our family had nothing at all to fear—once when we were safe from observation: never look an SS man full in the face.

  For me it was—I know this sounds strange—a proper holiday, although a little incident took place of which I was ashamed, and as an adult, truth to tell, went on being ashamed for many years. Coming from the Theaterplatz, it must have been in the morning, we walked past the House of Assembly, and then we were taking the steps up to the Brühl Terrace when I came across a sign: JEWS NOT ADMITTED. And, yes, children find it hard to suppress cruel impulses, children sometimes behave like maniacs, but all the same there’s no excuse, I don’t know what came over me: I stopped and was gripped by a feeling of triumph, halfway to the top I looked up, then again at the notice, and strutted—I wasn’t walking now, I was strutting—up the remaining steps, we’re allowed onto the Brühl Terrace, we’re not Jews. At the top I turned around, saw the Court Church, Augustus Bridge, the Italian Village below, and then my mother, who had reached the landing. She stopped too. I can remember it as though it were yesterday, I looked into her suddenly narrowed eyes, and I could sense that, at the end of her sleeve in the heavy winter coat, her hand was twitching: my mother, who had never hit me in her life, came close to slapping my face in broad daylight.

  So my nanny really did not travel with us after all, the white Sunday shirt with dark stains, a young boy on the kitchen bench seat, utterly dazed. Perhaps my parents fired her that very evening.

  On that Shrove Tuesday my mother even wanted to take me to the zoological museum, which she had often visited in her Dresden days, but when we turned from the Postplatz into Ostra-Allee we could see immediately that the building was no longer there, it had been flattened in an air raid the previous October. My mother obviously knew nothing about that, just as I could not know then that I was standing in front of the ruins of an institution which I myself would work in, many years later.

  At lunch my father was still with us. We were sitting at a first-floor window somewhere looking down on a large square, so we had probably turned into the Old Market, the sunshine was pouring in, almost blindingly, and we three had a window table to ourselves. The light was strange, pallid; the mashed potatoes on my plate were steaming, as though the sun’s rays were heating them. I also had peas and a ground-meat “German beefsteak,” no doubt eked out with a large quantity of breadcrumbs, which I had taken a bite out of and then left. Beefsteak. I had only just learned this word for “meatball,” at home we said Frikadelle, the new word seemed strange to me: when I found it on the menu I had thought it both promising and off-putting, and if I decided to risk it when we ordered our food, it was not so much because of an appetite for meatballs but because I wanted to see, and taste, whether my father’s explanation was right, or whether—despite its related appearance and similar taste—there was something quite different about a “beefsteak.” No, it wasn’t the same thing, even if my parents did insist, almost despairingly, that it was just a different name.

  Until the food arrived, my mother left her wonderful dark otter-skin cap lying on the table. As always, my mother seemed very elegant to me, she attracted attention, but on this day in this restaurant there were also black looks coming from other tables, my father noticed it.

  “Please, can’t you put your otter cap away?”

  But she behaved as though she had seen nothing, heard nothing, and tugged at his tie, which was always crooked, improving the knot, examining the collar, and looking into my father’s face. He turned away and grimaced, but she knew he liked it, just as he liked her putting on her jewelry, the pearl earrings, the bracelet, and the little chain necklace; we weren’t refugees, we were people out for a meal in the metropolis, and the woman opposite him was his wife, and it didn’t matter what other diners made of her outfit. She in a simple dress, with her shoulder-length hair elegantly cut, and he in clothes undecided between a visit to the big city and a country ramble, with his rough mittens which embarrassed me a bit when I saw other gentlemen with their buckskin gloves placed neatly at the edge of the table. My mother ran her fingers through his always unkempt mop of hair, that’s the kind of thing they played at in my presence. I looked down at the square, I looked into the sun, the food arrived, I put the otter cap on the windowsill.

  My father ate his stuffed cabbage with great gusto. I don’t know what he had been doing that morning, the meeting with his botanist colleagues wasn’t due until the afternoon. I paid no further attention to my parents’ conversation until my mother suddenly dropped her voice. Now, I thought, she’s telling him what happened at the Brühl Terrace, but she made no mention of the incident at all, she was talking about the zoological museum.

  “It’s a shame, I couldn’t show him anything, no great auk and no ‘World of Beetles.’ The museum is closed. No, not one of its closing days. The museum is no longer standing.”

  My father shook his head, the air raid last autumn, utterly deplorable, but my mother wouldn’t leave it at that.

  “Now you see what they’re capable of, so something good has come out of our canceled museum visit after all.”

  Not a word about who she meant by “they,” whether my mother blamed the Allies for this destruction or perhaps those who had rejected the precaution of evacuating the exhibits, because they liked to think that a city like Dresden was immune.

  My mother turned to me, and almost seemed to be enjoying a certain satisfaction: “You see, people are capable of anything, you’ll remember this day for the rest of your life.”

  She turned out to be right. I thought of her words again in the years after Stalin’s death, I was well past my twenties and learned that the collection had definitely not been completely destroyed after all, the most precious items were still in their secret depository. It made me think of my parents, and I caught myself thinking, Your parents didn’t have a clue, while it seemed to me that I was old enough by then, that we were all old enough at last to find out at least half the truth, even if only from a hushed aside. The great auk: the last British specimen of this bird variety was caught in 1840, the very last Icelandic breeding pair on the third of June 1844—I could recite the dates like a schoolboy when I was approaching fifty and saw our Dresden great auk for the first time. I had already lived far longer than my parents did, but I could still hear their words, and to this
day the great auk is inseparably linked with the memory of our last family lunch together.

  “Are you sure you don’t want any more of the Frikadelle?”

  I shook my head, the mashed potatoes and peas were more than enough for me, and so my father, who had been eyeing my plate throughout, fell upon the German beefsteak. It was when they came to pay that my parents began to whisper to each other, we were already getting our coats on and they still hadn’t settled the question: he, who publicly ate unfinished rissoles from other people’s plates, and she, who left her otter cap lying openly on the fine tablecloth without caring what anyone thought—these two grownups who were my parents, sophisticated people as I thought, who were my guides through the big city, were unsure how much to tip, whether it was even the thing to do in a good restaurant like this, in Dresden. I had never seen my parents like this, positively nervous, and it was only once we were back down in the Old Market that they regained their self-confidence.

  My father, who will have seen the Botanical Garden on the northern side of the Great Garden in prime condition, early in the afternoon of the thirteenth of February, with its beds and plots and neatly winding paths. My father, who was apparently going to meet colleagues there, who was expected. My father among a group of botanists, all alive, all still healthy, their faces perhaps already beginning to show optimism as they talked quietly about the summer ahead. By that evening, reunited with his family, my father would be back in the Great Garden, in the spacious park, soon to be strewn with craters, uprooted shrubs, shattered trees, and the many dead, to whom he himself was going to belong.