Kaltenburg

by Marcel Beyer

  I always imagined the binoculars had already served their purpose during the advance on Dresden, and as though traces of those events were left on the lenses, I liked to think that something of the landscapes and objects the Red Army officer had trained them on was still attached to the eyepieces. I saw him standing upright in an open jeep, his glance sweeping from a burning farmhouse on the left to a birch-tree copse on the right where German stragglers had still been holed up until a few days earlier. The landscape stretches toward the west over gentle hills, on the horizon a mob of tiny figures, refugees, deserters, Waffen SS perhaps. He keeps the binoculars glued to his eyes, gives the signal for the car to move forward again, and now the tank column following in the rear comes briefly into view.

  It is through these binoculars that the officer looks along the Elbe valley, searching out a bridge over the river and finally spotting in the distance a blue-shimmering steel construction projecting above the ruins. And of course on his way into Dresden many a bird enters his field of vision, as they do mine now. During the day he observes the wild geese coming from the south as they break their journey to rest by a lake, and hardly a night passes when he doesn’t wake up thinking he hears their wings beating above his billet. Over the weeks the number of empty stork nests declines, at some point he stops counting the occupied ones and only counts nests that have been abandoned. And on one occasion the officer lingers near a group of rooks flocking around a dark, shapeless bundle on the ground, suspiciously at first, then driven closer by curiosity, until one leading rook is bold enough to start cautiously plucking at it. Horsehair perhaps, rotting straw, a bag full of charred papers, a lost eiderdown, from its size you might almost think it was a person.

  I regularly went roaming with two friends from school, Klaus and Johann, war orphans like me. Johann was allowed to invite us home, and if he begged long enough his foster parents even let the three of us sleep over in the loft. With blankets, sandwiches, and tea, we climbed up the rickety ladder to camp from Saturday night to Sunday morning among the furniture and household bric-a-brac from the kaiser’s time. Candles were taboo.

  Together we combed through the dead zones in the inner city, all children were drawn like magic to the rubble, and it was nothing special for us to explore these areas by day. The real challenge lay in finding your way about after dark, which was obviously strictly forbidden. Our parents didn’t like it at all when we clambered among ruins threatening to collapse at any time. This wilderness was frequented by some shady types, but we were out to prove our courage, convinced that grownups by contrast were scared at the very thought of the dead zones.

  After all, for a long time people believed there were still countless victims of the night of February thirteenth buried in the cellars, but when a body turned up from time to time, it was definitely of more recent date. A man with his hands tied behind his back, shot in the back of the head at close range—that kind of thing was automatically put down to feuding between black-market gangs, and on the quiet there was also talk of old scores being settled. Once the body of a young woman was found in the bushes, with eyes rolled back and strangulation marks on her neck. “Prostitute”—we didn’t know the word at all, “unfaithful fiancée” was the current expression—and “streetwalker,” a term we had picked up from an adult conversation, meant just as little to us as we wondered why the young woman had put on nice clothes and makeup before she was murdered.

  We brought home the material for our stories from the deserted inner city, hauling back trophies, a brittle leather strap, a pottery shard, a fork, adding new items from the world out there to our collection in the loft.

  No, the zones didn’t seem dead to us then. I wandered about on my own too, my binoculars round my neck, I got to know more about wheatears and crested larks, tawny pippets and little ringed plovers, sparrow hawks and linnets—or should I say I got to know them all over again. As for identifying plants, however, I have never got back to the standard of the embankment behind our house. Flixweed, tansy mustard, prickly lettuce, redroot amaranth—I hadn’t forgotten the names, and anyway we learned in school how to distinguish the three levels of ruderal plants: parsley fern, horse thistle, and henbane ought to have meant something to me. But when I scanned the terrain with my binoculars, all they showed me were leaves, blossoms, and herbs, more or less varied in shape and color, and nothing caught my attention until it was held by a yellow wing stripe, a red head marking, a white cheek, the ivory-colored beak of a goldfinch.

  There is a kind of counterpart to my memory of the goldfinches in the thistle patches: a November evening during the Korean crisis, when we were all waiting for World War III to break out. I can remember a torchlight procession in which all schools took part, youth urging the world to make peace, intimidated youth, “free youth points the way,” and I was part of this movement, like my classmates, among whom I queued to receive my torch at the assembly point. Silently we moved off, not a fun weekend activity, bravely and stiffly we marched down the Strasse der Befreiung to the Platz der Einheit, the leaders of the procession had reached Bautzner Strasse long before and were already moving up the Elbe slopes heading for the Palace of Pioneers.

  I can see us now turning into the broad open ground, the sea of light beneath the trees. The chairman of the regional Peace Committee gave his speech, then we stepped forward, one school class after another, until we reached the hillside, where we rammed our torches into the earth—or did war orphans take precedence, was I one of the first to stick my torch into the frosty soil? I know that I immediately took a step backward, leaving my classmates behind me, I stood to one side. It seems to me that by that time I no longer had much in common with Klaus, with Johann.

  Neither did I have the slightest inclination to meet up all that soon with Herta, Gerlinde, and Hans-Georg, presumably they were in the hall, there were more speeches, or perhaps the seriousness and intensity of the evening had long since given way to dancing. I wandered for a while through the park, up the hillside, looking down into the valley. Nothing much more than a smooth black surface where you could make out isolated pinpoints of light. It was easy to imagine that these signs of life too must soon be extinguished, as though a harsh wind were sweeping across this desolate landscape, and sooner or later those last inhabitants still clinging on would be forced to give in, as the wind drove them before it to the edge of the great darkness.

  Not far from me someone lit his cigarette from a torch. He belonged to a group that stood on the meadow, a little apart, almost as though they wanted to demonstrate to the other participants that although present, they had nothing to do with the actual ceremony. The six of them stood in a circle, young men smoking, a few years older than me. One of them, towering above the others, was wearing a peaked cap, all of them were casually dressed, except for—and I had only just noticed her—a woman, her back to me, lit up by torchlight, wearing a black velvet cap. Wrapped in a long fur coat, a well-preserved garment which had been brought safely through the war, and which made a lady of her. Was she the oldest in the group? Voices. Who was speaking? The young men’s eyes, like mine, were on the woman. I was the only one who couldn’t see her face, only this collar, her cap, her shape in the coat. There was silence. The tall one in the peaked cap raised his head, I had been spotted. And as I avoided his gaze, turned away, I heard a laugh.

  It was still ringing in my ears as I entered the hall to look for my new siblings, it was high time we set off for home. Hans-Georg with his angular physique, a hint of his future coarseness around the eyes. Gerlinde with her German plaits. Herta, the oldest, crazy about dancing, but to her regret not very good at it. I was going to stand by the edge of the floor and just watch the dancing figures as quietly as possible, when in the corner of my eye I spotted a flowing movement: the heavy fur coat was gliding through the crowd.

  A Russian aristocrat, whose family had gone over to the right side at the last moment. No, that kind of good fortune didn’t happen. A delegate from the nation
al Peace Committee of a fraternal country. Someone recruited very young by partisans in the Baltic, perhaps. But I still hadn’t caught a glimpse of the lady’s face, she passed me too quickly. On her head was the peaked cap the tall character had been wearing earlier, a bit too big, so that it fell over her left ear. So I’d got it wrong out there, it wasn’t a black velvet cap that had been gleaming in the semidarkness but her dark hair. The unknown woman disappeared among the crowd at the other end of the room, the corridor opened up by the dancers closed behind her. I turned toward the exit, it was clear that my new siblings had already left the place.

  During the long walk home, it didn’t bother me that the three of them might have hatched a plot, intentionally disappearing in order to tell their parents that I had left the parade ground without permission, that I had hidden from them. It didn’t matter whether I was the one who got the beating, or Hans-Georg for not having kept the crew together. I wasn’t even scared that they might be lurking in the bushes somewhere along the route to give me a proper fright by leaping out in front of me with a fiendish yell, with mock-Russian gibberish.

  An open, untroubled, inappropriate laugh, which even after it faded away still dominated everything, the circle of grim young men, the meadow and the hillside, the whole ceremony together with its stupid music. The danger of war and our will to peace. The dark past, the dark future, and the present November night in the open air, which hinted at a harsh winter to come, with lingering frost and snow. I didn’t know the color of her eyes, I hadn’t spoken to her, but this unknown woman’s laugh accompanied me as I fell asleep.

  5

  I WOULD NEVER HAVE told Ludwig Kaltenburg about my troubles at home, adolescent problems, it would have been too embarrassing. No, perhaps it wasn’t even that—when I was in the Institute foster parents didn’t exist, nor siblings to plague me, and in the evenings I always went home feeling stronger. Not a word, yet Kaltenburg must have sensed the strain I was under when I came to him for an hour in the late afternoon, sometimes out of breath, lacking concentration, eyes restless, like someone who has escaped his tormentors and found refuge. Kaltenburg would not have shut me out, I know, he would have listened patiently, but since I didn’t talk he chose not to mention my agitation. Instead, I had hardly got my jacket off when he took me to the hamster corner: “Look what he got from the bookshelf last night—a couple of pages of Kant.”

  Or he would send me, as though I had let my duties slide, into the feed kitchen: “Don’t bother hanging up your jacket. The fruit, have you forgotten? They’ve been expecting you all afternoon.”

  He watched as I leapt down the steps—but no longer running away. For when I jumped over the wheelbarrow by the side of the path, avoided the gardener’s lad, brushed along the hedge, headed straight toward the dozing dogs as though I’d taken leave of my senses, a feeling of calm came over me. The wooden lattice construction devised by the feed manager for keeping sunflower heads dry. The mealworm incubator. As soon as I started picking out the rotten strawberries, as soon as I saw the bucket of apples in front of me for cutting up into beak-sized chunks, yes, as soon as I dipped into the cherries, I had regained my Loschwitz breathing rhythm.

  They’ve been expecting you—this “they” encompassed the long-term inmates as well the fluctuating chance visitors. Animals with whose impulses the professor was intimately acquainted. Animals which had only recently aroused his curiosity. Animals that needed to be studied carefully in the future. Some fresh ones to be researched and others that couldn’t be. And the “they” included Ludwig Kaltenburg, included me too.

  Whenever he noticed that I wasn’t even up to feeding the animals, he would throw on his jacket and “Out we go, down to the Elbe,” or, if the weather wasn’t good enough for a birding expedition, “I’ll get the Opel out of the garage.”

  Our outings in the car were called “induction by personal inspection.” I can remember the smell of calf leather in the little sports car, remember the way Kaltenburg sat next to me holding the wheel firmly with both hands, concentrating on the road. On the spare seat there was always a pile of books and brochures; I reached back with my left hand, read to the professor from the lives of famous ornithologists, while he chauffeured us to their birthplaces and homes, to the sites of their activity. Thus Kaltenburg once took me on a whole-day excursion down the Elbe to Köthen, to see the Ziebigk estate, Naumann’s place. We drove to Renthendorf to see the Brehms’ house. To Waldheim, where Maikammer was born. To Reichenbach in the Vogtland. To Waldenburg. I can hardly recall anything about the town of Greiz, but on the other hand I have the clearest memory of a portrait of the pâtissier Carl Ferdinand Oberländer, who became addicted to collecting native and exotic birds. His expression seems to betray grief and melancholy, the furrowed brow, around the eyes, the mouth: it won’t be long before his passion drives him to ruin, he will have to sell his wonderful collection of mounts.

  Once, in the most glorious weather, we roamed for a whole day through the landscape of Moritzburg with its many pools, we could have made countless sightings, but Kaltenburg was intent on one thing only, finding a particular pond where, as he said, Hans Steingruber had begun his career. He had been cycling past this spot on a day in March 1923 and had seen two coral-red beaks glowing on the water. Kaltenburg stomped through the reeds on the bank: “At that time he was your age,” and red-crested pochards had not been spotted for more than seventy years. Nobody was willing to believe Steingruber, even Reinhold in Berlin was skeptical when the young man came to see him. No, Netta rufina in Moritzburg, that must have been a faulty sighting, he was certain of it, Reinhold, the greatest ornithologist of our time.

  In retrospect the outings could be seen simply as preparation for meeting live people. The “induction by personal inspection” continued in Loschwitz, costing the professor no effort at all, since authorities from all over the world found their way to him unbidden.

  At the same time, Ludwig Kaltenburg could be quite prone to moods, that is to say, I saw him getting irritated above all when people thoughtlessly disturbed his most intimate moments together with animals. He seemed open to everyone, you could have got him out of bed at any time of night to share a sighting with him, yet he often reacted harshly to some annoyance if it came at the wrong moment—a new colleague who wasn’t yet familiar with the aquarium wing, a roofer finally arriving to replace a row of shingles on the gable end of the summerhouse.

  The first time Reinhold visited the Institute, Kaltenburg happened to be at a difficult point, trying to get birds to follow him, an exercise that stretched over several days because some young jackdaws of that generation were not always ready to fly behind him from room to room. He walked down the corridor, into the kitchen, out again, into his study—and forgot that Reinhold was expected.

  I had been hanging around outside the house since early morning, curious to see this man who had inspired so many ornithologists. In the background there was a succession of noises: calls, stamping, flapping of wings. More calls. Silence. A contented murmuring. You could follow progress with the new brood in the garden sound by sound. Then the limousine drew up in the driveway. Krause walked around the car, quickly ran a sleeve over the mudguard, opened the rear door, and stood to attention looking into the middle distance: a wiry older gentleman emerged, to me he looked about eighty, although at the time Reinhold was only in his early sixties. I greeted the visitor and took him up to the first floor. Reinhold was far too astonished to be dismayed that his reception was not exactly friendly: “It’s not half past twelve already, is it?” Kaltenburg’s voice, sharp, because we were getting in his way between cloakroom and bedroom. “Didn’t we say half past twelve?”

  We ducked, a young bird flew along the corridor, Reinhold just shook his head, smiling, and let me show him around the grounds of the Institute. Whatever I was describing to him, he scrutinized the animals as though ascertaining the facts for himself, and every second I thought he was going to interrupt me: “Monk parrot,
did you say? That’s impossible. You probably weren’t even born when the last monk parrots of the Loschwitz breeding colony left the city.”

  Two hours later Ludwig Kaltenburg seemed like a different man, he was friendliness personified, was generous with flattering remarks to his guest, and even formally begged his pardon. But Reinhold wouldn’t hear a word of it, saying he had known Kaltenburg far too long to be put out: “My dear Ludwig, I would have been more bothered if you had given me priority over your jackdaws.”

  I experienced such outbreaks too, but Kaltenburg never felt that my presence disturbed him when communing with his animals.

  One autumn afternoon—Kaltenburg’s first autumn in Dresden—with terrible wind and rain, the villa was silent, and there was silence too as I stepped into the hall, all living creatures had retreated from the weather. Everything in the house was geared to a system that finely balanced the animals’ requirements, nearly forty years’ experience had gone into the appearance of rooms where the untrained eye would at first have seen nothing but pure chaos. In one room, for example, the furniture stood a little way away from the walls—behind it somewhere was the den of an animal which only Kaltenburg may ever have caught sight of. In another room incredible heaps of lumber, tables and chairs all mixed up, empty book covers—this had been the favorite room of a capuchin monkey long since departed for the zoo, and now the hamsters seemed to feel particularly comfortable in there. Next came a bare, sparse room, the opposite of the last one, in one corner a fine carpet of sand: this was where the timid quails liked to retire. Something Kaltenburg had learned early on about rooms used for nesting was that there should always be the same fixed distance in centimeters between fireplace and cupboard, and he had maintained this ever since a hamster had developed, unbeknown to anyone, a mountaineer’s “back and footing” technique to climb to the top of a cupboard and make its nest out of old documents. No ceiling lights anywhere, but unlike the curtains, curtain rails had been left in place in every room; the finches had to have suitable roosting places, after all.