Kaltenburg

by Marcel Beyer

  I never saw Kaltenburg so concerned about any of his other animals as he was about the jackdaws. I remember him giving me a protracted explanation of why they needed bringing in every evening. Protracted, not because Kaltenburg expressed himself in complicated sentences or because his language wasn’t vivid—there was no one who could describe something as clearly as Professor Kaltenburg. No, protracted because while talking to me he was on the roof waving his arms about to call the jackdaws in. I was holding the ladder, just watching his feet on the top rung, and trying to work out which way Kaltenburg would be flinging his upper body next. He stretched up, gesticulating, started to wobble, and at the same time turned toward me as I gripped the ladder tightly down below.

  A jackdaw has no innate fear of natural predators, it has to learn from its parents the likely form in which mortal danger will appear. But most of Kaltenburg’s jackdaws had been used to people since the day they were hatched, to a human being who had no fear of cats or birds of prey, so if the professor did not want to lose them, he had no choice but to lure his birds back to the cage for the night. It took one or two hours every night—up to a point the creatures would willingly follow him into the room, but then they would take off again, playing with their flightless comrade, trying to draw him up to the roof ridge, until Kaltenburg finally had them all safe inside.

  You can’t get the smell of these birds off your fingers. You can spend several minutes washing your hands, soap and disinfectant and sand, you can scrub your fingertips until they bleed: it’s no use, the slightest trace develops into a tremendous olfactory memory. You mustn’t touch a live jackdaw when its fellows are nearby—they invariably see it as an attack. How often had one of Kaltenburg’s birds hacked at the back of his hand just because he had gently picked up another jackdaw, which resolutely refused to be led into the cage? And here was I, bending over the dead jackdaws, pushing them around on the desk, with unpecked hands to which their smell was clinging.

  Every morning I arrived very early at the collection, setting to work with numb fingers, and every time I had the feeling that the jackdaw skins in their protective feather coats had retained some of the warmth of my hands overnight. While the winter cold seeped slowly out of my limbs, the space gradually turned into a jackdaw room. I postponed the work in hand. Let a colleague go to the bird dealer instead of me. My article on the migratory movements and distribution of the thistle finch was supposed to be submitted by January. I withdrew. There was no space on my desk for finch specimens. When the sun shone on my back at midday, I was enveloped in a jackdaw cloud.

  The skins included Taschotschek, a descendant of Tschok, Kaltenburg’s very first jackdaw. Naturally I was familiar with all of his jackdaws, I could tell them apart by their faces, though the specimens now had no eyes. Taschotschek was a special case, however, there were more memories connected with her than with any other bird of her species.

  I once asked Kaltenburg whether he somehow felt bereaved by the death of a creature he had studied for a lifetime, having perhaps hand-reared it. No, not bereavement. But nostalgia, yes, that was something he felt, like every healthy person. He often thought back to his first meeting with Tschok, in a damp and dark dealer’s shop in Vienna that he used to visit as a young man. There was a disheveled, shy young bird sitting in a corner at the back somewhere, the dealer thought it hardly worth bringing it out, but Kaltenburg saw its beak, its eyes, and had to have this jackdaw straightaway. The dealer virtually made him a present of it. It was through Tschok that he had started observing birds closely. His experiences with this bird had opened up a new world for him. He owed his first major contribution to ornithology to Tschok. A close, decisive bond, no doubt about it. But all the same: never sadness.

  Did he wish his first jackdaw were still alive? That would be flying in the face of nature. And if he had the choice of going back to the time when he had Tschok around him day and night—no, he wouldn’t dream of it, he wouldn’t swap the present for the interwar years. In a certain sense Tschok wasn’t dead anyway, he survived in his descendants, to his surprise he had discovered Tschok’s characteristics in every brood. That was why he had given the young bird who most resembled Tschok the name of Taschok, and called the most similar among its descendants Taschotschek, which was followed by a second Tschok—and so on from one generation to another.

  My knowledge of the live Taschotschek distorted my view of its skin, which was now a softly stuffed, feathered display specimen like the others. When I was classifying them into groups I was inclined to start with Taschotschek, to look upon her as the holotype of a subspecies yet to be discovered. I pushed the others aside, until only Taschotschek lay on the desk in front of me, and then one by one I added others, relatives of Tachotschek, descendants, but also jackdaws who had found their way to this flock as if by accident and had stayed on.

  For Taschotschek attracted other jackdaws. It was almost as if she were recruiting new birds for Kaltenburg, as if she knew how pleased he would be by the increase in his jackdaw flock, and how important it was to him to keep its size constant. Because, naturally, there were losses all the time, two young jackdaws paired off and left, many birds disappeared without trace, simply failed to return in the evening—a careless flight maneuver, a hunter; the other birds couldn’t tell Kaltenburg what had happened.

  The neighbors must have thought him insane, a man who crept around on the roof in his old sports jacket every evening at sunset to gather in birds and put them to bed. Ludwig Kaltenburg was soon so well known in the city that people brought him dead jackdaws. On one occasion someone came to the door, full of remorse, stammering out a confession: he had run over a bird, and he wondered whether—and here he opened a stained bundle—it was one of the Herr Professor’s jackdaws.

  In this sack of feathers with legs and beak I saw the movements of the living Taschotschek, saw her look and her behavior that had so often made us laugh, Kaltenburg and me. I saw her jumping onto Ludwig Kaltenburg’s shoulder and tugging nervously at his hair if there was a visitor she was doubtful about. Kaltenburg could be a gambler too, he was mindful of limits but sometimes exceeded them. Taschotschek wouldn’t have minded if Kaltenburg had followed his jackdaw flock up into a stormy sky to participate in their breakneck aerial maneuvers; in other words she trusted his capability within her own sphere but sometimes seemed a bit skeptical about him as a judge of human character. If someone seemed to the jackdaw to be threatening, and if Kaltenburg moved too close to that person, or the conversation took on a tone that sounded dangerous to her, she didn’t hold back as she normally did, at first observing strangers in complete silence, then gradually making contact with them. If there was someone present whom she thought of as the enemy of her friend, she would fly out of the room, perch on the rooftop, and make a racket until Kaltenburg had no choice but to break off the conversation, leaving the dumbfounded visitor alone for a while, and appear on the ladder outside.

  This was something I witnessed several times, and in a few cases it occurred to me later that Taschotschek had not been wrong. At one time, when we had just returned from an excursion on which the jackdaws had accompanied us for quite a distance, a man appeared—unannounced—who insisted on talking to Kaltenburg. I didn’t know him, Kaltenburg treated him like a stranger too, yet something about this man interested Kaltenburg. Taschotschek scuttled about uneasily on the tabletop, went over to the sugar bowl, seemed to want to block Kaltenburg’s view of his uninvited guest, spread her wings and got one of them in the tea—and Ludwig Kaltenburg, who normally never lost his composure over an animal, reacted irritably, brushing Taschotschek roughly away onto the back of the armchair.

  Suddenly she didn’t just look worried—as far as you can say that of a bird—she looked terrified. And she took off, out through the balcony door, which stood slightly ajar all year round, trying with her wing-flapping motions to entice Kaltenburg out onto the roof. She instantly struck up her usual noise. Kaltenburg went on ignoring the jackdaw’
s din, until eventually he turned to me: “Could you go and see what’s got into her again?”

  I climbed up the ladder, Taschotschek refused to calm down for me, wouldn’t let me touch her, and as I stood up there, with the old city beneath me in the afternoon light and the agitated jackdaw flapping under my nose, I regretted leaving the room: what was Kaltenburg discussing with his visitor, whom I took to be a stranger, what risk might he be letting himself in for? No, Kaltenburg wasn’t the type to let himself in for anything. But why was he so keen on talking undisturbed to his visitor, and why did he want not only his favorite jackdaw out of the way but me too? It’s possible that this bird really had more than once helped him out of a difficult situation, and but for Taschotschek it is possible that Kaltenburg would have had to leave Dresden much sooner.

  Every morning I had to shake off this kind of sentimentality, had to convince myself: you don’t know this bird, it’s no more familiar to you than any of the other bird skins that have accumulated in these drawers over the course of a century. If I wanted to study her impartially, I couldn’t let familiarity lead me to premature conclusions—once I was on the point of sending my Danish colleague a second letter, saying I’d made a mistake, for I had now spotted a clear anomaly in the beak of this jackdaw skin which I had just prepared myself, simply in order to bring him back from Copenhagen to Dresden and introduce Taschotschek to him. I would have made myself a laughingstock. A good thing pet names don’t appear on the labels of such tame birds. No, Taschotschek was no example of a subspecies, I had to keep telling myself, These skins you’ve been poring over with such tenacity for weeks without knowing the point of doing so—you’ll only get to know them step by step, learning about each one individually and very slowly, their plumage, their beaks, their smell. It was only later, much later, in the eighties, that some research came out of it on the feather formation of common jackdaws and Daurian jackdaws.

  I even deluded myself that Taschotschek’s skin smelled slightly of Kaltenburg. Once, late one afternoon when the fog around the building refused to lift, it was traces of his aftershave, and later, as darkness was coming on, Kaltenburg’s breath. I shut my eyes, brought the birds at random up to my nose: yes, every time it was Taschotschek I held in my hand. And yet all the skins had of course been disinfected—it was a delusion, Tschok, Taschok, Taschotschek, I couldn’t get away from this notion, had to break off work for a day.

  And then my hands when I went home in the evening. I felt I was spreading an atmosphere of jackdaw around me. I wore gloves, put my hands in my coat pockets, but all the same I wondered—in the tram, people must be noticing that here was someone who spent his days sorting out dead jackdaws on his desk, and not only that, they must be noticing that this man knew Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg in his Dresden years like nobody else.

  How proud the whole neighborhood had been at first when they heard that Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg, the great authority, might be moving to Loschwitz. They triumphed over the celebrity district of Weisser Hirsch, over the villa quarter of Blasewitz, and above all they triumphed over Leipzig, where Kaltenburg held his professorial chair. In the morning at the baker’s they murmured, “Have you heard?” In the afternoons on the Elbe meadows it was, “Yes, he’ll fit in well here.” And in the evening, among intimates, “Who would want to settle in Leipzig anyway?”

  That must have been in the spring of 1951—or had the first inkling reached the city as early as the winter? Twelve years later many a resident was glad to see the back of Kaltenburg, as though a curse had been lifted from the slopes of Loschwitz. They told the whole world, that is to say Blasewitz and Weisser Hirsch, how relieved they were that he had finally gone, “that troublemaker,” “eccentric,” “and so arrogant”—they had found it hard to forgive him his steadily growing reputation on the international stage.

  No, Ludwig Kaltenburg did not mourn for any animal that died—for him it represented the certainty of getting to know more animals. But he took the death of his jackdaws quite hard. One evening he got home just before dark; he had rushed away after breaking off one of those interminable meetings that lead nowhere, tore along by the Elbe, over the bridge, and could see even from a distance: there were no black dots whirling in the air waiting for him. He rode through an utterly serene sunset, light blue and red and glowing, a disaster. Panicked, Kaltenburg raced up the narrow alleyways, pedestrians jumped out of the way of his motorbike, Kaltenburg changed gear, he didn’t brake, he scraped a wall, finally turned into the entrance—and saw the first birds lying on the grass.

  He sent for me to come over that same evening. A small heap of dead jackdaws lay on the ground. Kaltenburg could hardly stand, couldn’t make it back up the ladder, I climbed onto the roof and scooped two young jackdaws out of the guttering. Over the next few days we combed through the plots of land stretching down to the river, and except for one or two birds we did manage to find all the dead jackdaws.

  During the last few weeks of his time in Dresden I barely recognized Kaltenburg. Then, from one day to the next, he disappeared. I don’t think anyone knew about his plans except me.

  “And never forget to poison your bird finds carefully.” That was what Kaltenburg told me once. Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg, who showed me how to prepare a skin. He favored a solution of sodium arsenite, and if you didn’t have a poison license you should use borax and naphthalene. “Always make sure you poison your skins carefully.” I have never found out how Kaltenburg’s jackdaws actually died. Hardly had he left Dresden before rumors started circulating in the city, many of them harmless, many just plain stupid, today I can only remember the most wicked of them: Kaltenburg was said to have put out poison for his birds himself, in order to make his departure more dramatic.

  With a dead bird in each hand I stood there on the balcony, Kaltenburg sat despondently in the gloom of his study, I couldn’t bring myself to approach him carrying the two lifeless bundles of feathers. I thought I would look around for a box, but in Kaltenburg’s household there was no box that wasn’t occupied by a live animal. I was considering stuffing the jackdaws under my sweater, but then I heard his toneless voice, he didn’t look up: “Just come in. It makes no difference now.”

  I suggested burying the birds in the garden. For a long time there was no response. Then Kaltenburg shook his head. “You can take them. Take them away and make good skins out of them. They’ll remind you of our time together in this city when I’m gone.”

  2

  THE MENU LAY OPEN in front of us, but we hadn’t ordered yet. Katharina Fischer was looking out of the window, her expression almost suggesting that it was her own memory that was filling with Ludwig Kaltenburg’s jackdaws, because of the images I had shown her one by one.

  She had told me on the telephone about her assignment, about a long, no doubt tiring day, which she assured me she had got through all right, despite minor irritations. No, unfortunately, the local bird life wasn’t mentioned at all, and the stern head of protocol intervened immediately when she tried to raise the topic of this winter’s waxwing invasion with the English visitor during a short break. All the same, our meeting was not without results, for it made her go back to Kaltenburg’s works, those battered volumes, full of underlinings and coffee stains, which she had studied intensively in her later years at school, and which at some stage had disappeared into a banana crate to finish up in various cellars every time she moved.

  The minute she glanced through the books after so many years, Katharina Fischer noticed that for some reason she had put an exclamation mark after every mention of a place-name. Prague and Paris, where Kaltenburg had said his piece about the events of 1968, not without sharply attacking the Soviet Union as well as the students. Then Königsberg, a place with which Frau Fischer had as little connection in her youth as with the town where she now lived. Moscow, Paris, Florida, London, Rotterdam—when the interpreter asked me if I’d noticed that the professor never at any point mentioned Posen in his writings, I decided to as
k her out to dinner, a simple “certainly” or “of course” over the telephone would not do. She accepted without hesitation, and we agreed to book a table in this restaurant on the bank of the Elbe at Blasewitz.

  The river, the meadows, the slopes on the other side, on our right the Loschwitz Bridge—in her mind’s eye she was following Kaltenburg as he raced over the bridge on his motorbike. His leather biker’s gear, his white mane, and the way the rider bends over the handlebars; it can only be Kaltenburg, even if the steel supports of the bridge cause a rapidly alternating pattern of light and dark stripes to flit across the figure, so that you begin to wonder whether it isn’t a phantom your eyes are following, while the professor has long since reached the other bank, is taking the bend, disappearing between the houses on the Körnerplatz.

  We debated back and forth on what to call it: a homecoming, an escape, the end of a long farewell, which had basically started with Kaltenburg’s arrival? A long farewell which coincided with my leaving school, my studies under the professor, and a few important years as a colleague at his Institute. I supplied him with material for a series of studies, researched pair bonds in the common raven, carried out observations on same-species killing among various types of animal, so that Kaltenburg was able to build up a comprehensive picture of this aberrant behavior. I was allowed to take part in the big research project on night herons, although that was never completed, more’s the pity, because Kaltenburg never again returned to this bird, which, far from yielding its secrets after years of observation, actually became more puzzling.