by Marcel Beyer
The bird sand crunched beneath my feet, I was leaning on the back of the armchair between the indoor palm and the rubber tree trying to keep quiet, moving my mouth silently as though still trying to teach our starling to talk. His cage, its door usually stood open, and in the corner the box with the injured blue-throat, and then all the equipment, feeding bowls and water bowls, pipettes, wooden rods, seed mixtures, accumulated over time to form an immense armory. The door of my father’s study was ajar, the low voices of two men in the background, and by concentrating hard I could make out a sentence here or there, especially when Professor Kaltenburg was speaking.
“I can give you a cast-iron guarantee.”
The starling—didn’t we ever give it a name?—was pecking around in the pot of the rubber tree, it wasn’t particularly interested in me, it never landed on my head as it did with the professor.
“In that case, I feel reassured.”
My father, more quietly, speaking as though he and Kaltenburg were not sitting in the same room. I was still trying to guess what they were talking about, all the while ready to make out that I was busy with our starling, in case anyone came in.
“As far as the other matter is concerned, well, we’ve talked about that often enough.”
They laughed. Then my father was obviously waiting for Kaltenburg to go on.
“The blue-throat.”
“Yes?”
Did the starling really have to poke around in the dry rubber-tree leaves at that precise moment? I was powerless, because if I shooed it away I would be discovered. I reached out for it very slowly, I still didn’t know whether I was actually going to take hold of the bird, but then it fluttered away, into the palm tree. My father and Professor Kaltenburg were now talking more loudly.
“You know my opinion, and I’m sticking to it.”
“Please, that’s ridiculous, just because of a blue-throat with a broken wing.”
Up to that point their talk had seemed half joking, but now I wasn’t so sure. Somebody walked restlessly up and down, was it my father, was it Kaltenburg, somebody lit a cigarette, somebody closed the window.
“Yes, it’s harmful to take on injured animals, I don’t mean for the animal, but for your boy.”
“Kindness to the creature is harmful? Just tell me, where’s the harm in arousing a child’s sympathy for the suffering of a living being?”
My father’s voice faltered. Kaltenburg, on the other hand—it seemed that the more agitated his interlocutor became, the calmer he was.
“You want to help, but you can’t. An animal that has no chance of surviving in the wild won’t do so under your well-meaning but misguided care either.”
“But all the same, it’s absurd to talk about an atmosphere of death.”
“An atmosphere of death”: that was the first and only time I ever heard my father use that phrase. It was a Kaltenburg expression. My father did his best to sound as though he were putting it in quotation marks, a dubious construction that could have come only from an Austrian. He imitated a Viennese accent, trying to wound Kaltenburg, to silence him. But Kaltenburg was not so easily hurt; indeed, Professor Kaltenburg found it easy to ignore such attacks.
“Tell me straight out, and then I’ll forever hold my peace: has there really been a single occasion when you succeeded in rescuing a sick or injured animal, have any of these birds ever survived, have you managed to return any of them to the wild?”
My nanny was calling me. Otherwise it was quiet. Kaltenburg was genial, he was waiting, he was in no hurry, my father should take his time before answering. He wasn’t interested in scoring a point in this contest between two grown men, what he cared about was “the boy,” me. I could see him sitting at my father’s desk, his hands resting on the leather writing mat, to his left an open botanical reference book, an ashtray on the right. Kaltenburg leaned back while my father, a guest in his own room, searched for an answer.
For a long time, neither man spoke. Kaltenburg stood firm. The atmosphere of death, he insisted, would affect me, might determine my relationship with the world.
My father was no longer walking up and down. Then he said, almost inaudibly, “No.”
Maria was calling. I found it hard to take my eyes off the blue-throat in its box. Eventually I was being called from the kitchen for the third time, I turned away. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I gradually began to grasp what Kaltenburg, who refused to be put off by my father that afternoon, meant by “atmosphere of death”: he told me about his time as a POW, or the thoughts he had about Dresden in his darker hours, and how he had always shrunk from certain people, certain places, as though scared of being exposed to a pathogen for which there was no effective remedy. When I was listening from the other room that day, “atmosphere of death” simply hovered in the air as a mere phrase with which I associated as little as I did with those opening sentences I had heard through the open door, Kaltenburg’s friendly words: “I can give you a cast-iron guarantee,” and my father’s reply: “In that case, I feel reassured.”
Is this the atmosphere of death? I wondered in bed that night, because Professor Kaltenburg did not stay as planned, my father spent the evening in his study, he came out briefly to eat. The two men had parted with a handshake but without saying a word—did that mean we had been plunged into a permanent atmosphere of death? I had to keep reminding myself that this was all over nothing but a sick blue-throat, but nonetheless after Kaltenburg’s departure something weighed heavily on the house.
My mother looked in on me. She too was agitated, I could tell by the way she fiddled with her blouse as she sat on the edge of my bed trying to explain the argument to me: “We know we’re not running a veterinary practice. But the professor has no right to interfere in your education, that’s our job, you are our child. How do we know what other views Professor Kaltenburg holds that might influence a young boy—a boy who is basically a stranger to him—without the parents ever finding out about it? But this outburst of Kaltenburg’s probably has nothing to do with birds or with you, he’s simply overwrought. No, this awful animal business isn’t important—which makes the rift between your father and Professor Kaltenburg all the more tragic.”
An image of crows, I can’t quite place it, flickers briefly in my memory: at first you see a single scout, loudly croaking in all directions, and the next minute the sky blackens. Enormous flocks from Siberia. Flocks from the Elbe region. Rooks, hooded crows, carrion crows, they join forces in winter.
The way he pulled on his helmet, got on his motorbike, disappeared over the horizon: as if Kaltenburg—who had wistfully stroked my hair just one last time—was leaving us to our fate, as if all his efforts to persuade had been in vain, and we would never see him again. But I wanted to see Professor Kaltenburg again. I haggled with myself—if I nodded at the professor’s words, even if I could barely comprehend them, did it mean that I was betraying my parents? Did I have to declare myself either for my father and mother or for Kaltenburg?
A blue-throat with a broken wing: if I’d had my way, we would have put the bird out in the garden, Professor Kaltenburg would come back without hesitation, the friendship would be renewed, and this depressing day forgotten.
Siberian crows love being swept along on the first flurries of a snowstorm, their wings spread out on the wind as black as briquettes, the snowflakes dancing around their plumage. And there’s something glowing, a red glow, a bluish glow, as well as a soft brown. A jay that memorized the whereabouts of its food caches in its sleep.
Ludwig Kaltenburg was to initiate me into the laws of the animal world, show me what they could do and where their limits were, where we humans make unreasonable demands on animals and are disappointed when they don’t live up to our expectations. Why is it that children turn so willingly to such minor players as Professor Kaltenburg and are prepared to forgive them everything? Since he was competing with the professor, my father had not the least chance of prevailing with his own son.
It wasn’t unt
il three decades later that I discovered the real cause of the break between Kaltenburg and my father. I wasn’t trying to find out, it simply hit me in the face one day, I couldn’t avoid it, and to this day it gives me a stab of pain to the heart whenever I think how late the discovery came, too late for me to apologize to my long-dead father and take his side.
11
WHERE DID I FIRST SEE that image of crows? In its density, its darkness, a flock of uniformly black rooks, among them a few hooded crows, I could easily make them out by their gray markings. And now the gray patches were wheeling away, drawing the black ones with them, the cloud lurched to one side and out of the picture.
“They said on the radio that Paris has been liberated.”
My father tapped the cigarette ash on the side of his cup. It sizzled in the cold tea. Astonished, he raised his eyes from his newspaper and pushed the cup aside. “Not a word about these things outside this house, remember, not to your friends, not at school,” he said to me, as though he’d given too much away.
I can still see the way my mother laughed, though I can’t remember why, I can see her freshly starched white blouse. Was it the same one she wore for Kaltenburg’s last visit? Irritated, my father folded the newspaper.
“What an unbearably stupid rag.”
And my mother, getting a clean cup from the cupboard: “Oh come on, don’t take it so much to heart.”
By then it was a long time since we’d had any visitors. Professor Kaltenburg was on active service, from what we’d heard Knut must be in Crete, and we had no idea where Martin was. My father lit another cigarette, glanced out at the garden, suddenly the room was filled with bright sunshine, the stove, the edge of the armchair, and the triangle on the carpet, my father narrowed his eyes as though hatching a plan.
There they sat with their son in the drawing room, this ill-matched couple, my parents. My mother, with hair pinned up, was brushing at the cloth on the small table as though there were crumbs to sweep away. She was always drawn to the city, and at first she may not have been altogether keen on this house at the edge of the fields. “But just think of the child,” my father will have said, and she had given way, her husband needed to be close to nature, in the concrete desert among so many people he would wither away, and it wasn’t that far to the tram terminus, to the stores, cafés, and arcades. Building work on the castle had stopped some time before.
Another event comes to mind—when was it, on the same day he mentioned Paris, did it follow Professor Kaltenburg’s disappearance, and was there some connection between the two things?
Of course, at that time my father had to work on useful plants. Cereal yields needed to be increased. There was a feverish race on to replace petroleum with vegetable oils. New medicines were required for the wounded. But his private greenhouse was his own domain, for a long time my father had succeeded in fending off all claims on it. His wild grasses he owed to the wind, to the animals, and to travelers who unwittingly brought back seeds from all over the world, on their shoes, on their sleeves. And the specially heated corner for exotics—I can remember the times when I was allowed to put my hand into the glass casing, very still, warm—and my father was scared that even a grownup like Professor Kaltenburg might be careless enough to break off a bloom.
Yet now, in the wake of the intensive educational measures introduced for his son’s benefit, the botanist had become passionate about bird life. Which, as one can well imagine, created considerable problems, since birds do not just perch picturesquely on branches and savor the amenities offered by plants, rather in the manner of museum visitors; they are also inclined to feed on this attractive display. All the same, my father continued to bring birds into the house, and never once complained as, in the course of time, they devoured everything. It even seemed to me that he actually encouraged the birds to help themselves to the rarest specimens in the botanical inventory, and derived immense pleasure—verging on insanity, as I now think—from seeing whether a native bird enjoyed the flavor of a foreign flower. But perhaps he was pleased because, like any other child, I took a boundless delight in this destruction, not, as some people would imagine, out of childish brutality, but because of a child’s certainty that this world, which for adults is solid and fixed, is continuously changing. When I think what our conservatory looked like toward the end . . .
Presumably at some point, from one day to the next, my father was forced to replace the collection he had painstakingly assembled in the greenhouse over the years. That’s how I see it today. A moment which must have represented a great defeat for him. To me it was a riotous plant-feast. Perhaps that helped my father take his mind off the despair.
Early in the evening he came to fetch me from the kitchen, where I was sitting as my mother and nanny were planning the coming week. He put a finger to his lips, I was supposed to slip out of the kitchen unobtrusively—yet everybody except me was surely in the know about what was going on. I followed him into the conservatory, which scarcely warranted its name of “winter garden,” since by then it contained hardly any green plants, just bare, half-chewed stems with a few isolated dried-out leaves languishing in their pots. My father told me to entice the tame bird we had reared out of its cage, which always stood open. Was it the nameless starling? Or another bird, a blackbird? I can’t remember. Walking through the garden, my father held the bird carefully, only releasing it when we had reached the greenhouse and the door was shut behind us.
Apparently everything had been planned well in advance, my father had made a space by clearing away pots and tools and had brought in garden chairs. Hour after hour, until it got dark, we watched the bird setting about the plants, rooting around in the garden mold, plucking the fresh shoots, and pecking fiercely at the juicy leaves until they were an indefinable green mass, more like chopped spinach. We sat watching as though spellbound, made friendly bets on which plant the bird would move on to next, trying to outdo each other in estimating how much damage an individual plant would suffer.
I woke up in the middle of the night. From the garden came a regular scraping noise, interrupted by a longish pause. I didn’t get up, didn’t go to the window, I didn’t even open my eyes. I knew: my father was sweeping up the plant debris next to the greenhouse. The next day all the beds were freshly laid out with castor-oil plants.
12
IT WAS VERY EARLY in the morning, not yet light. I listened. Nobody in the house seemed to be awake. Ice on my window, not a glimpse of the world outside. But if I was the only one awake, then I was alone, because it meant my nanny wasn’t up yet either, and she always got up before us and lit the oven. I left the bedroom in my pajamas, no light in the corridor, and as I was placing one bare foot in front of the other on the stairs, half hesitant and half impatient, a word came to my mind. I didn’t know what it meant, I didn’t know where I’d heard it, but I could hear it being spoken quietly in my nanny’s voice: “Jerzyk.”
Slowly, with the word echoing in my ears, slowly I opened the kitchen door: my nanny was sitting at the table under the lamp, her cardigan around her shoulders, she looked across at me: “Why are you so surprised? Still asleep? Aren’t you going to say good morning? Or has something happened?”
I shook my head and went to the stove, where she laid out my clothes every morning. This must be a scene from the winter before we left Posen. So my nanny can’t have been fired after all.
Maria. I don’t have as many memories of my nanny as I should. And this is the last of them. Besides, they are rather hazy, shot through with doubts, nor have they gained in clarity with age. I have no idea what became of her. Maria’s arms were soft, and I was always surprised just how soft such slender arms could be. I can remember her scent, I would recognize it anywhere today. As if she ate fruit whose aroma permeated her skin and filled the air. Her hair—I remember Maria having very fine hair, I can see every strand of it above her small ears, how it hugged her head, combed back and pinned down. But its color—my memory ranges between brun
ette and black. As if memory depended on the angle of the light. Maria’s hair in the late afternoon when she was urging me to do my homework. When I was allowed to play out in the garden until dark. Maria’s hair when she put me to bed. The way it shone in the early morning over the stove with the glow from the iron hotplate.
I got dressed, Maria made cocoa, shoved a log into the range fire, it was almost ten to seven by the big kitchen clock. I stood at the cold window in trousers and pullover, snow was falling. It would soon be light, the snow on the ground had a violet shimmer, as if illuminated from inside. I could no longer hear the half-sung Polish word, the voice had stopped perhaps when Maria spoke to me from her place at the table as I came in. Soon the roof of the house next door would be indistinguishable from the sky, and the snow a deep blue expanse. It would rapidly turn light blue like the coverlet on a child’s crib, and under a blue-gray sky it would finally take on a white coloration. Then the day’s first Siberian crows would let the wind carry them in the gentle snowfall.
“Come on, your cocoa is ready.”
I turned round. Only then did I notice the suitcases in the corner by the kitchen bench.
13
JERZYK. THE SWIFT. My first Polish word, as I realized years later, talking to a Polish colleague. Maria must have uttered it on the evening of my confrontation with the swift in the drawing room, while I sat huddled on the kitchen bench bewildered by what was happening to me. That childhood experience had changed me, no doubt about that, but I’m sure I would have regarded it as no more than an isolated incident but for another bird encounter shortly after we arrived in Dresden. Once again my parents were absent, and this time they probably never found out about it. Although, it now occurs to me, they might have experienced the same thing at the same time, if they were alive.
I am talking about the birds I saw that night in the Great Garden. In the darkness I couldn’t be at all sure it was birds, which made these objects, these things, these clumps all the more sinister. I didn’t understand what they were until the sun had come up, pale sun, hidden behind black, gray-black clouds of smoke that covered the horizon and towered high into the sky.