Kaltenburg

by Marcel Beyer

  The handrails up the stairs—perches for exotic birds. The carpets and runners—less decoration than thread supplies for the ducks to fall back upon when nest-building. The curtains that originally hung in the drawing room—they never came back from the laundry. A fragile system designed to meet the needs of the animals as much as the human inhabitants—and yet it looked as though Kaltenburg took a secret delight in testing the capacity of the system to destruction, as though every time he introduced a new species of animal into the house he was expecting his so-far-proven system to collapse.

  I stood in the study doorway, and no, it wasn’t my father’s room, there sat Ludwig Kaltenburg at his desk, in front of him a cup of tea, a pile of loaves, and an open newspaper. He didn’t look up. Tearing off chunk after chunk from a white loaf, he held the pieces aloft next to him and let them drop. He wasn’t disturbed by my arrival, and neither were the two dozen ducks, hardly a glance, just their quiet clucking as they waited patiently by the desk for the next bite of bread to come—they could count on it—from the hand of their master. I didn’t try to tell myself the ducks knew me so well by then that I didn’t bother them, it was just that they knew nothing could happen to them in Kaltenburg’s presence. He murmured something, perhaps a reassuring sound from human to animal, and then his voice became clearer: “Did you shut the front door? That new Alsatian bitch has got to stay outside for a bit, she’s terrifically jealous of the ducks.”

  I nodded, Ludwig Kaltenburg didn’t need to say any more, I took one of the white loaves from the desk and started pulling it to pieces for the birds’ snack. Hardly a word was ever said in the Kaltenburg household about the bread supply, about provisions for the animals in general, just once I remember the professor telling a visitor, “I don’t have the time or the energy to get involved with ration coupons.” And also, “It’s autumn, my drakes are molting, that’s when their feed needs to be especially good, every child knows that.”

  Over time it became a set phrase. If Kaltenburg talked about molting drakes, then we knew he was pushing higher authority to make up some deficit or other, and sometimes, if he was in a good mood and fancied his chances, he even—“molting drakes”—tried renegotiating.

  No, there were no samples of seeds from Leningrad on the desk, just a newspaper covered in breadcrumbs. Kaltenburg picked it up carefully by the edges, formed a chute, and to the joy of his molt-weakened drakes dropped the light flakes onto the carpet.

  6

  ALTHOUGH HE MAINTAINED that it wasn’t necessary, I wasn’t going to hear anything new, it was basically always the same, nothing could have stopped me accompanying the professor to his lectures. “You know I won’t be offended if you’ve got something else on in the evening,” he always said, after I had told him, “I’ll be there listening carefully as usual tomorrow evening.” It was almost a ritual between us: “I’m afraid it will be very crowded and you’ll have to stand all the way through,” while the professor well knew he could count on my presence down there in the hall. “Don’t inflict it on yourself,” a ritual, a game, it was up to Kaltenburg to bring it to a close: “If you’d rather go and see a movie, with your school friends perhaps, I’ll understand,” to which I didn’t reply, and so with an “If you insist on it,” he gave up trying to change my mind: “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  During that time I can’t have missed a single one of his big lectures. I went with Ludwig Kaltenburg, but during the evening itself I didn’t stay near him. We didn’t stand together before proceedings began, afterward I went home without even saying goodbye to him, while at the front of the hall the professor was surrounded by his listeners. And I never wanted to be at the front, I sat somewhere in the middle, as though I were just another member of the audience. That was our silent agreement, so that he never saw me among the one, two, three hundred blurred faces.

  The hall belonged to him the moment he began to speak, he knew that. All the same, I had to give Professor Kaltenburg my assessment of the audience, he could gauge the general atmosphere from the lectern, but what details had I noticed out there, someone next to me writing everything down from beginning to end, a young couple in the row in front of me getting bored at some point. I looked around, noting a slight cough on the left, and on the right a woman who never seemed to stop hunting for something in her handbag. There was no cause for concern, I sat in the crowd, and the crowd listened to Professor Kaltenburg. For me it was less a matter of paying attention to what he said than of being carried along by his voice, his Viennese cadences filling the room, his distinct articulation, for an hour and a half Kaltenburg addressed the Saxon silence, talking clearly and animatedly and calmly. I never knew him to lose track, as for instance by noticing just in time that the sentence construction he had embarked on could end up in a mess, and he never went in for the familiar sort of muttering all too familiar when people are reading off empty passages from the page, quite simply because such passages did not occur in any lecture by Ludwig Kaltenburg.

  In public he renounced anything speculative, even though speculation was of course an important element of the Institute’s work, Kaltenburg would not permit himself any “philosophizing,” as he called it. He confined himself strictly to the animal kingdom, and his Dresden audience was grateful for it, they found it refreshing that someone was talking purely about observations, solid information, irrefutable facts which no reasonable person could doubt. So in time a regular audience was built up, you recognized more and more faces, people nodded to one another, almost by silent agreement: this evening too will be reserved for the animals and the reality before our eyes.

  You sensed how close the relationship between Professor Kaltenburg and his audience actually was in the following question-and-answer session. His answers were never simply polite, let alone brusque. At the end of the year parents always wanted to know what domestic animals were suitable as pets for their children, “No guinea pigs, please,” he always replied, most listeners already knew his reasons, but each time Kaltenburg patiently ran through them again.

  “And that brings us to the area of unproven facts, not to say assertions that have turned out to be untenable.” You might think this would be enough to make the hall hold its breath, but no, the professor then rolled his eyes, almost sank to his knees at the lectern, people were laughing, Kaltenburg caught himself up again, playing the penitent, and said, “The chaffinch.”

  If you were attending a Ludwig Kaltenburg lecture for the first time, you might then learn from the person sitting next to you that both the chaffinch question and the introductory joke were a standing feature of the evening. The professor had once strongly advised against acquiring a chaffinch, which would only remain a pleasant companion, earnestly singing its heart out, as long as its owner sat motionless in front of it. Otherwise, made extremely nervous by sudden movements, the bird would go on beating against the bars of its cage until its skull cracked.

  The audience’s rejection of this had been vociferous, one chaffinch owner after another spoke up, Kaltenburg must have observed a badly damaged specimen, or he himself had been going through an extremely neurotic patch. He was obliged to admit defeat, Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg had got it wrong, he didn’t mind admitting as much. “I prefer talking about things we know for certain,” was what he had always said, so where chaffinches were concerned, he was happy to leave the field to long-term observers.

  One evening when the professor was about to dismiss his audience, somebody surprised us by coming up with yet another question. Kaltenburg had glanced along the rows for the last time, had embarked on his usual closing speech: he hoped that for today our questions had been answered, if not exhaustively, since there were unfortunately all too few questions about the animal kingdom that could be answered exhaustively—Ludwig Kaltenburg’s discreet hint that he himself was exhausted, that the audience should save its open questions for the next lecture session, please. Among the regular listeners there was nobody who failed to take the
hint, nobody who would dream of interrupting Kaltenburg at this point. People had fished out their bags from under their seats, they had their coats over their arms, waiting to applaud again at the end. “In the coming weeks we will all discover new things about the animals around us, and new questions will come up,” all that was left now was his “Many thanks once more for listening to me for so long and so patiently” and “I hope you have a pleasant journey home”—two sentences between which Kaltenburg always left a short pause, to savor the attentive silence in the hall for a moment.

  “Herr Professor, if you don’t mind”—somebody had stood up in one of the back rows, I could hear people muttering, Hey, that’s not fair, you can see the professor is tired, anybody asking a question now must be a newcomer, someone ignorant of the rules. “Herr Professor, if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask a brief question,” and the tone suggested that the speaker was somebody who would not recognize the rules after twenty lecture evenings with the professor, who would never respect them. People were turning round, trying to see this person, only a few noticed how Kaltenburg had raised his eyebrows, as though wondering what was in store for him now.

  “If I think of a chick being nursed under its mother’s wing, for example—what part of that behavior is acquired, and what is innate, what is due to experience? In short, does an adult bird know that it was taken under its mother’s wing when it was young?”

  A trick question? Was someone trying to lead him on? Had they planted an agent provocateur on him at last? The professor knew all the tricky types, they too were part of the regular audience. Those who always asked the same question regardless of the lecture topic. Those who always knew better than the lecturer and couldn’t wait to pick him up on some trivial detail. And the one who produced an uncontrollable torrent of language that never led to a question mark. We all knew them, but this questioner did not immediately fit into any known category. Was the professor racking his memory for a face that corresponded to that of this unknown young man, was he looking around the hall for me, as though I might help him out at this juncture? I could see he was playing for time, which he did initially by explaining to the audience the unfamiliar German verb the young man had used, hudern, for when a chick is taken under its mother’s wing.

  Hudern: the expression was far from unfamiliar to me. I learned very early on what it meant, and I know who taught it to me. Who helped me with my drawing when I really wanted a picture of the mother hen who strayed into our garden with her brood of chicks one afternoon. Who did most of the work when all I had done was dash a few yellow circles down on paper to represent the young birds. I didn’t have to turn around to see that lean figure before me, the taut skin that looked as though it had been stretched over the skull by hand, the high cheekbones, the peculiarly round eyes, whose effect was intensified by what seemed to be a complete absence of eyelashes. And yes, I could have told Ludwig Kaltenburg who the unknown listener was. Someone who had grown up on a farm in the Rhineland, watching from an early age how the hens nursed chicks under their wings, how they spread their wings over their offspring to protect them from rain, cold, strong sunlight. I recognized him instantly from his voice, his intonation. Nothing Saxon about it. A stranger. After you had been listening to Ludwig Kaltenburg for an hour and a half, carried along by his mellifluent Viennese accent, your hearing was sharpened, as though the eardrums had been cleansed of all sorts of guttural, hissing, and oral cavity noises. The question about chicks being nursed had been put by a Rhinelander, in a softly flowing High German, but you sensed he could just as easily have been speaking Platt, the Low German dialect of the lower Rhine, the language he grew up with.

  Kaltenburg had left the question of nursing chicks far behind, moving on from chickens to the duck family, then touching on spotted nutcrackers, ravens, and nightingales, talking—in grossly simplified terms, as he admitted—about “stupid” and “clever” animals. Possibly still not sure whether he was being set up, he was keen to reach terra firma quickly. He was in the process of building his Dresden jackdaw colony, this was a time when he often thought back to Vienna and his first flock, long since dispersed—for him it was an easy move from here to the topic of tradition-building in the animal kingdom.

  A young jackdaw, attached to older birds, would follow the same flyway as its forebears, and this knowledge, if you wanted to call it that, would be passed on to its own young. The sequence of route-training stayed the same from generation to generation, not based on some kind of insight but simply out of tradition. “My tomcat used to hunt regularly in a particular bit of the garden”—the professor leaned forward, resting on his elbows—“and the birds learned to avoid his hunting ground. Years after he died the young jackdaws were still doing the same, keeping the memory of an old cat alive.”

  With regard to memory itself—Kaltenburg’s glance now took in the audience as a whole, whereas before he had been concentrating on the stranger—or, to be more precise, with regard to feats of memory in the narrowest sense, there were significant differences between the species, sometimes in fact between one individual animal and another. Just as there were between human beings, which was why he thought it wrong to see humans and animals as poles apart when it came to the ability to remember.

  With this change of direction the professor had finally managed to put an end to the eerie mood in the hall, there was even some laughter here and there, a laugh of relief, the mixture of disquiet and paralysis was dissolved at a blow. It was true that there should not have been any mention of humans, that was the pact between Kaltenburg and his public, but in this particular situation the professor had no choice. There had never been such an atmosphere at a lecture, oppressed silence, uncertainty, doubt, anxiety, the whole evening could easily have been poisoned retrospectively. Ludwig Kaltenburg too looked relieved now: he would never have forgiven himself if he’d had to watch his listeners slope off home hanging their heads. The tension drained from his face, he bowed, the first few people were getting up to leave.

  There was no time to lose. I pushed my way along the row to get to the central aisle, the dense crowd: Martin nowhere to be seen. I squeezed through as far as the door: nobody even remotely resembling him. I slipped between an old couple into the foyer: Martin must have altered. But there he was: moving purposefully toward the exit, he was just lighting a cigarette.

  7

  PEOPLE AUTOMATICALLY STEPPED ASIDE to let Martin Spengler pass, they didn’t dare make eye contact with him, and on the way out he saw nothing and nobody. They shied away from this stranger who had nearly upset the balance of Professor Kaltenburg’s lecture evening with a single, late, inconsiderate question. But even as a silent listener among the crowd he would have made people somewhat uneasy. Yes, maybe it was something I grasped at that moment as I chased him across the foyer, drawing attention to myself in the process: wherever Martin Spengler turned up in public he caused a certain annoyance, hard to explain but totally unrelated to whether he was trying to provoke people or not.

  The way that Martin once nearly got into a fight with a gang of juveniles, the way that, insecure as he was, he felt challenged by a group of cheeky but fundamentally harmless kids marauding through the rubble landscape, who for their part felt threatened by Martin as they probably did by any adult who crossed an unseen territorial boundary: it must have been one of his earliest, most formative experiences in Dresden. I can see Martin getting out of the train with his portfolio under his arm, leaving the station and walking in the direction of the art academy. But when we met up again by chance, Martin had already been living in the city for quite a while, and perhaps my memory only places this story at the beginning of his stay in Dresden because I have always regarded it as symptomatic of his student years, not to say his whole life.

  Martin was received in Dresden by the echo of children’s voices, it had to be children’s voices, even though from a distance there was something shrill and hateful about them such as you would only want to ascribe to
an adult. At first he couldn’t make out any words in all the shouting, simply accepting it as a sign that the area was not completely devoid of life. There were no signposts, he had difficulty finding his way through the network of trampled paths and cleared stretches of road. Martin had an appointment, hugged the portfolio of drawings close to him, he had worked at it for a long time, constantly adding new pieces, taking out older ones, so that now it provided an overview of nearly eighteen months’ work.

  Masses of masonry, dust, a shrub here and there. Not that such areas were unknown to him, but he knew them only from a bird’s-eye view, from his cockpit. You could just as well have told him he was traveling through the karst region north of the Mediterranean. Or far to the east. He had seen places, from above the Crimea, where Dresden stretched in every direction, to the horizon. As a fighter pilot Martin had been decorated several times over, but which sorties he got his medals for he could no longer say, there had been too many, and mostly he saw nothing below him but a postwar Dresden. The burn marks on his neck, from the chin to behind his left ear—if you mentioned his scar he would say, “That’s what they gave me the gold medal for, ‘wounded in combat.’”