Kaltenburg

by Marcel Beyer

  My father the botanist, who was drawn back to botany again at the unforeseeable end of his life. Did he take us to the Great Garden because he knew the way from that morning, or because he looked to the protection of trees and fields and flowers, which always had a calming effect on him, or was it that he followed the crowds escaping from the flames in the inner city, hoping by some miracle to snatch his family from certain death?

  To this day I, the son who survived, have not made a single visit to the Heide cemetery to stand at one of the mass graves and conjure up an image of my parents. Instead, I go to the Great Garden, across the meadow on its western edge, and stand under an English oak for which Dresdeners have a special name: the Splinter Oak. It must be some three hundred years since somebody planted it in this spot, as a border marker, they say, the park hadn’t been conceived of then. If you come from the zoo side, you don’t notice anything: just a tall, gnarled tree with beautifully striated bark. But if you walk around the trunk, the skin of the tree seems suddenly to burst apart, revealing the bright, open, light wood, framed by thick, knobbly protrusions. Looking up, crooked branches, as though their growth had taken place against solid, tormenting air resistance, the broken places, and below the thick foliage of the crown a torn-open area, splintered, shattered, fissured. It takes a while to realize that the scarring across the entire trunk is uniform: this is where the bomb splinters are embedded in the bark, they’re still there. On that side the wood has taken on an unusual, lustrous brown hue. Dead wood lies on the ground, it powders when you kick it, rotten: for years a fungus has been spreading through the inside of the stricken tree, a late consequence of the bombing. It survived that night, but eventually it will be destroyed by the sulfur shelf mushroom. At the Splinter Oak I have a memory, my parents are standing there in front of me.

  3

  WHEN THE INTERPRETER asked what made me choose my specialty, she added that she supposed if your father was a botanist it was not unlikely that you would take to ornithology. It is true that from an early age I have had a certain conception of nature; the self-evident receptiveness of my parents to the world of living things was bound to rub off on their child. But I was not willing to claim that coming from such a home I was more or less bound to end up as a biologist, let alone set my heart on becoming a zoologist, least of all an ornithologist. I went through a phase in my childhood when I didn’t like these creatures at all. For a long time I was fonder of the cat that brought in the bird than I was of its present to me, laid at my feet with excitement and pride to claim my friendship.

  Mother and Father surmised that my aversion was due to an experience I can barely recall, though they often told me about it. It seems that once when I was alone in the house a young bird blundered into our drawing room, and I was infected with the panic of the young creature, which for some reason could not find its way through the open French window and into the garden. I wanted to get away from this agitated, flapping thing that made such awful noises, but just like the ruffled bird, instead of running out into the garden or simply opening the door to the entrance hall, where I would have been safe, I huddled in a corner. When I was eventually found between the stove and the sideboard, I must have been a picture of utter confusion; I don’t remember, but that’s how my parents described it to me.

  All I can recall is this unpredictable creature caught up in the dark curtains, I’m staring at the striped edge of the shiny rectangle of cloth, apparently stirring idly in the mild afternoon air, though in fact its motion results from the frantic movements of the young bird, which cannot shake the heavy material with commensurate force. Its claws gripping tightly, the bird climbs higher, and the next moment it is hidden in a fold, but I know it’s still there, the hem of the curtain silently brushes the parquet floor. Did it really enter the drawing room of its own accord, or did the cat bring it in? In my memory the bird more and more assumes the form of a swift—even while the ornithologist in me says that a swift would never fly through an open door into a house, and if it did its flight velocity would make it smash headfirst into a wall, and if it survived it would not be able to get off the floor to bury itself in the curtains.

  The next minute I was sitting completely dazed on the kitchen bench, hardly hearing my mother scolding the nanny, who had gone off to enjoy herself in the fields with an admirer, leaving me alone in the house, and who was now wiping my bare legs with a damp cloth. Yet it was all my fault. I had begged her to leave me playing in the drawing room after lunch and go for a walk by herself, I wouldn’t tell my parents, I had kept my promise on previous Sundays. Eventually I had a temper tantrum, thrashing around wildly but taking care not to hit my nanny; I may have been screaming too. No, before I got to the point of screaming she would give in, relieved on the one hand, on the other worried about going for a walk by herself, though both of us knew, without ever saying so, what “by herself” meant on a Sunday afternoon.

  I was left in peace, playing my solitary games in the cool room with its half-drawn curtains, while she had to worry about me, whether I would be up to any mischief, she didn’t know what I did when she was away, whereas I had some idea what her admirer would be up to with her in the distant meadow. So that, as I was later to realize when I was grown up myself, her worry about being with her lover would be combined with concern about neglecting a child.

  I had goose bumps, the cloth which had been pleasantly warm from the water and the warm hand running it over my legs got cold from one minute to the next in the unheated kitchen, the cool evening air. When my nanny came back from her outing I said nothing, didn’t answer any questions about why I was cowering in the dusk between the stove and the sideboard, why I was keeping my arms so tightly crossed, why I couldn’t put one foot in front of the other like a normal boy. She didn’t notice the dark stain on my trousers, didn’t notice the swift, which was still lying on the carpet with a wildly beating heart, as though paralyzed, the last time I saw it. I was able to keep everything back from my nanny, but not from my parents, who returned at dinnertime from a visit, and now I was sitting in nothing but my Sunday shirt on the kitchen bench with a wildly beating heart, I had wet my trousers out of sheer terror.

  I could hear the noise, but I didn’t comprehend a word that was being said, my blood was roaring so loudly in my ears. Silently my nanny let my mother’s reproaches and her unusually rough language wash over her, as she knelt in front of me she kept her eyes lowered, didn’t look at me, just as I would have given anything in the world not to meet her gaze, although I didn’t dare close my eyes and wish myself away from this scene, away from the tiled kitchen with its horrible echo, back in my quiet bedroom. My mouth was dry, I couldn’t even swallow, let alone confess my guilt, call out, “It’s all my fault, please leave her alone, she hasn’t done anything.” Perhaps I have never since then experienced such a powerful sense of injustice and torment, the young swift, my wet trousers, and the nanny I was fond of.

  I have a dim memory of lying in bed, I had been there for ages and should have been asleep, while my mother kept repeating the same phrases over and over to my father, scraps of sentences that reached me from their bedroom, though I couldn’t make much sense of them, things like “the poor thing,” and “with his bare hands,” and “our own son,” and then later, if I heard correctly through the half-open door, again and again, now almost in a whisper, as though she had no strength left, maybe because she was so disgusted: “The eyes.”

  What happened to the swift afterward, I can’t say. It’s possible it didn’t survive, that it expired after my father gently released it from its purgatory and ushered it toward the garden, though without touching it with his bare hands. Or it died, exhausted, toward evening on the soft, patterned carpet. Just as it is possible, although unlikely, that despite its experiences it had a long life before it, an airborne life which would bring it back for just a few weeks year after year to our latitude, to the neighborhood of dark curtains, cool drawing rooms, and cruel children, which, as
though it had learned its lesson on that Sunday afternoon, it would take note of only from a great height, from a safe distance.

  I learned my lesson too, though without realizing as much straightaway. It took me until the next morning, when I emerged from an uneasy sleep and my stupefied condition, and went the way I had gone the day before out of my room, along the corridor, then down the broad staircase, into the kitchen, where I was given a drink of milk, and finally into the drawing room, to the site of my downfall. All traces of the struggle had been erased, not a mark on the carpet, the curtain hung as neatly as if no swift had ever become entangled in it. However, the discovery I had made the afternoon before but only grasped now when I glanced across the empty battlefield hinted that I was destined to be an ornithologist: I had seen the legs of the swift.

  To this day, there is a widespread notion that this is a bird that possesses neither legs nor claws; it spends most of its life in the air, and is said to lack such equipment. A bird that you hardly ever see close up, that impresses the viewer on the ground with its dexterous wing strokes and rapid flight, sometimes swooping low enough to make you instinctively duck, and lingering immediately afterward at a great height, an almost imperceptible dot that seems gradually to glide off into space. You never see a swift sitting on a branch, it never moves about on the ground. With such a creature it’s not surprising that ignorance shades over into superstition. People used to be convinced that swifts came straight from the moon.

  Abhorrent as the young swift was to me, something connected me with it, my enemy and comrade in fear on a long Sunday afternoon in the drawing room: I had wrested knowledge from it which it tried to keep hidden from humans. For the bird to have clung to the curtain material, it must have had the necessary claws. And when it lay on its back on the carpet, close to death, with wings outstretched and helplessly twitching, I saw with my own eyes, from close up, the short, admittedly rather wasted-looking, but certainly existing legs of the swift. Legs such as all birds have. That made it anything but the mysterious creature of fable endowed with marvelous powers.

  I raced from the drawing room across to the kitchen, where my breakfast was ready, shouting again and again, “The swift has got legs,” breathless, I wanted to go into all the details, but my nanny, pushing the plate of open bread rolls toward me when I finally sat myself down on the kitchen bench, just shook her head sadly.

  Something was broken. I still have this vague feeling today, even though it has never become quite clear to me what happened. The look on my nanny’s face, her head moving gently from side to side, her bright, loose hair against the light, caressing her chin and cheeks. Was that the last breakfast Maria would ever serve me? She sat opposite me as though she knew something far more significant than my basic discovery about the swift, a terrible revelation hardly bearable even to an adult, let alone a child.

  Did I idolize Maria? As a small boy, yes, certainly. And it only struck me years later that her head-shaking might have had more to do with her lover than with her possible dismissal. But at the time the effect on me was, must have been, to make me connect my nanny’s secret knowledge with the incident of the swift the day before.

  On the one hand, I thought, I must try with all my might to work this creature out, and then I, who was to blame for her despair, would discover what was making my nanny so miserable on this morning, but on the other hand I couldn’t stand the idea of ever taking a close look at a stray young bird again. Because, but for the swift, this depressing breakfast scene would never have happened, I would never have had to sit helplessly opposite my nanny, unsure, torn this way and that, sad but a bit disappointed at the same time because she wasn’t interested in the admittedly puny legs of the swift.

  I chewed silently. My nanny said nothing. As if I had contributed to the extinction of the swift. As if the day before I had taken the decisive, irrevocable step of making this bird species disappear from the earth forever. As if I had the last living specimen on my conscience.

  4

  STRANGE YOU SHOULD ASK that particular question, I said to Frau Fischer, because I’ve always wondered about it myself: Didn’t I have any school friends of my own age with whom I could play in the fields after school and spend long Sunday afternoons? Friends from my early schooling? I can’t remember any.

  Over there on the edge of the forest, a herd of deer whose outlines you could only make out gradually after sunset in the field against the dark background: sometimes my father took me with him on his study outings. In the summer, when the evenings stayed light far too long for me to sleep, he came into my room to see if I was still awake and allowed me to get up and get dressed again. I was never a good sleeper.

  Possibly because I thought of these twilight walks as an extraordinary reward—even if I never knew what for, because they were always bestowed on me out of the blue and no doubt on a whim of my father’s—on these outings of ours I was always particularly obedient and keen to learn. I learned from my father how to move silently through the undergrowth and, instead of constantly talking, how to listen for the most distant sounds. Did he dislike going alone? Was it a ruse on his part, to do with his idea of education? If we set off late in the evening there obviously wasn’t much to see anymore, and so I learned to concentrate on faint impressions and seemingly trivial phenomena.

  We did not speak. He went ahead, gesturing toward a wallow or teeth marks on a birch tree. We crept to the edge of the wood and waited. Eventually, just as I had been promised at home while hastily throwing on my clothes, deer began to appear in the forest. The animals, I learned, talk to each other almost continuously; they often talk to us too, but we rarely notice what they’re saying, not realizing they mean us. The animals address themselves to us, from a distance, hidden in the leaves of the trees above us, from the thicket beside the path, they ask questions or they curse us, they are letting us know “I am aware of you.” But even to get anywhere near certain animals, to detect them in the first place, you have to know how to be silent; if you want to catch sight of them, these talking creatures, there’s one thing above all you mustn’t do: talk to them.

  As I say this, there is after all a shadow that passes across my mind, but not the face that goes with it. I had a friend of my own age in Posen, our neighbors’ son, I ran into him occasionally in the street. We weren’t particularly close friends. It could be that whenever I had anything to do with him, curiosity and repulsion balanced each other out; a certain amount of pity came into it too. Was he retarded? He seemed very awkward and clumsy to me, there wasn’t much you could do with him. He didn’t talk a lot, and when he did his speech was indistinct but very loud. Drawn-out sounds that he produced with an effort, trying to make complete words out of them. When I was with him I was a bit scared. But at home I mimicked him.

  He knew about our twilight excursions. He wanted to go with us. He begged his parents until they eventually let him. We didn’t have much to do with our neighbors, but I remember them asking my father in: Yes, he did sometimes take me out at night to the fields with him. And yes, the neighbors’ boy could come with us one evening. It’s hard to know whether his parents thought the boy was making it up, or maybe they wouldn’t believe my father until their own son reported back to them from one of these expeditions.

  On the evening in question the boy came over to us, but he was too shy to come into the house, he stayed by the door. And I had never seen him so excited. This poor creature, at other times practically unable to utter a word, could not stop talking. An annoying evening, as my father and I agreed afterward. We didn’t sight a single animal. They must all have retreated silently at the approach of the babbling youngster.

  Otherwise, nothing. No one else comes to mind. As though that first night in Dresden had wiped out a whole host of other images, as though the onslaught of those impressions alternating abruptly between extremes of brightness and darkness had driven out of my mind memories shaped in a more subtle light.

  “What about yo
ur grandparents?”

  I shook my head.

  “Uncles, aunts, cousins?”

  None of them either. Presumably my parents didn’t care much about keeping in touch with their relatives. Who knows, perhaps they were glad to escape from their family background by moving to Posen.

  “Well, can you remember your parents’ friends or acquaintances?”

  Only those I met again later as an adult. That could well have seemed rather unreal—being afraid that however hard you tried you might not recognize anything about a person, after a gap of ten, fifteen years. I did feel disoriented, helpless for a moment, but fortunately, before I had time to lose my equilibrium completely, the new faces brought back to me these people’s younger features, voices and movements that I was familiar with as a child.

  “In an earlier life,” as the interpreter put it.

  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.

  5

  THERE 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.”