Kaltenburg

by Marcel Beyer

  No, none of it was that unfamiliar to Martin—it was just that he had missed his way some time ago in the empty city. Children were playing somewhere in the ruins, crawling through half-collapsed cellars, following the course of completely vanished rows of streets from one plot of ground to another, a subterranean network of paths to which no adult had access. Then they would resurface somewhere unexpected, lugging planks out of a cellar and using them to get to spaces you had so far seen only from an insuperable distance, glimpses into secret rooms, across a gaping chasm four stories deep. The children would be egging each other on, thought Martin, while they dragged their plunder with grim determination through the brick debris, or two rival gangs were preparing for a fight, or the excitement was all about some tremendous discovery, the children had found something in the ruins they’d never seen before, something strange to them—but what could be strange to them?—hence all the shouting.

  At first Martin wanted to use the children’s voices to orient himself. Perhaps he had missed some sign in the landscape where he should have turned off, a particular heap of stones, a gorse bush with a distinctive shape, maybe he hadn’t taken in the details of the lengthy directions in the right order, had paid more attention to the tone of the friendly old lady on the train than to the information she gave him. Most of the journey had taken place in silence, actually quite a pleasant silence, he felt, even though he wondered now and again whether he, the stranger, was the reason for the reticence of his fellow travelers, who all seemed to be natives. No, it wasn’t his fault, Martin realized as the valley narrowed on either side of the track, the Elbe slopes closing in on the train windows, for as the end of the journey clearly approached, the first quiet conversations started up. More and more voices joined in, he heard mention of people’s jobs, place-names, surnames, even a first name, an address. He was relieved, satisfied that during the journey it had been simple consideration for others, a matter of leaving them in peace. You read, you dozed, you lost yourself in daydreams, but now, just before arriving, there was no fear of bothering anyone if you began a conversation.

  It was at Weinböhla that the lady spoke to him, gesturing toward his portfolio, and when he began to explain something about drawings, the art academy, his application to study there, the lady nodded as though she had known all along. Her husband had been an artist too, a man obsessed by his art. Precisely in the darkest years he had been driven by an almost frightening compulsion, producing hundreds of drawings, even though there wasn’t the slightest prospect of ever showing them in public. On the contrary, nobody could be allowed to see the pictures, and as her husband finished one sheet after another, it was her job to hide them. She had found more and more new hiding places, in the loft between two hideous old farmhouse dressers, behind the wall cladding in the summerhouse, under all the clutter in the tool shed. In a way she had admired her husband, whose work obsession prevented him from looking either forward or back, but she also felt powerless, close to despair as she sewed sketchpads into pillows or wrapped half a dozen pictures in packing paper and laid them along the shelves in the larder like ordinary lining. A few days later the wrapping paper had been torn away, the scraps covered in manic yet almost microscopically fine pencil strokes. Another headache. Her husband couldn’t remember anything.

  Before Martin could ask his name and whether his work was on display in the art gallery today, whether he was still working at the same furious pace, she said, “All burned.”

  With that, the subject was closed. “All burned”: paintings, drawings, and sketches, or the artist himself together with his concealed work—Martin did not dare ask. The lady composed herself, returned to the art academy, and began to describe the easiest way to get there. It would have been better if he had asked her to draw him a sketch map on his portfolio case, because as she spoke—now fully turned toward her interlocutor—in well-formed, clearly structured sentences about things which did not affect her emotionally, Martin soon had ears for nothing but her way of talking.

  They crossed the Elbe, the lady made him calmly repeat all the details, corrected him, went over it again, the train drew into the central station, and as they parted Martin had only a hazy notion of the city’s topography, but he had learned his first lesson about Dresden: people here set great store by a cultivated command of High German. “We’re supposed to get off the train at the front”—such prompting would have sounded far too direct, an uncouth way of addressing someone, especially if you had only just met them. In Dresden you had to say, “It might be preferable to alight by the door at the front end of the train,” and you certainly couldn’t have a brusque “We’re getting out . . . ,” let alone “We gotta get off up there.”

  Even before he set foot on Dresden soil, he had already learned a new word, almost a foreign word—not a dialect expression, far from it. It was something that went beyond good High German when the lady unselfconsciously wove into her sentences a refined form of the German subjunctive, wöllte, and thereby showed Martin what it was to speak Highest German. Admittedly, he was taken aback at first, he had never heard wöllte before, but it seemed so familiar to people here that he assumed the children were taught it in the first year of elementary school. He must catch up quickly, Martin resolved, as he helped his kind traveling companion with her cases and took the most polite leave of her on the platform.

  While still in the station he witnessed a mother admonishing her child to “stay here, please.” Even when a wayward child was threatening to disappear into the passing crowd and one felt one’s face reddening with anger, one still used the proper imperative, albeit with a sharper edge. Even the harassed mother over there struggling with her luggage would not let herself go in public with a coarse, rustic “Hey!” Here they had internalized Luther, talking like a book at all times, as Martin realized at once.

  When he arrived he knew practically nothing about the forms and the depths of the local language. After a period of disenchantment, while Martin tried to ward off any taint of dialect by employing a harshly correct High German, his growing curiosity led him to become more accustomed to it, and he gradually acquired a command of Saxon, though without ever accepting it completely. In particular, he learned to imitate its Chemnitz variety, in fact he eventually picked up an almost perfect Chemnitz accent, perhaps partly because it could not have been much further from Martin’s native inflections. There was not the slightest melodic affinity between the two dialects, so that he didn’t have to develop a feeling for fluent, for right and wrong transitions.

  Now, however, Martin was lost, confronted by paths branching off between two mountains of rubble, he should have paid more attention to the directions. Die Ohren (the ears)—as he wasn’t far now from the scene of the action, a sound was beginning to emerge that resembled these words, if anything; the chorus drifted across the empty lots, breaking on the hollow facades. Soon he thought he could make out another syllable, something formed with an aus (out), the shouting children were to his left, raus, saus, or Haus, at the next crossroads perhaps he would find out what lay behind this Ohren aus (ears out).

  Later he could not have said what he caught sight of first, after he had taken the turning: the dozen or so boys and girls perched high above him, excitedly leaning out of the window spaces in a ruined building, poor creatures with scarred knees and mended clothes, shrieking their heads off. Strangely enough, it was more difficult to hear them now, were they suffering from mumps, could it be that the children had lost their teeth?

  Or was it the man ahead of him he saw first, down below in the alley, about a hundred meters away, he must have taken a secret path over the wasteland, through what had been backyards, and emerged from a passageway onto the open street without noticing Martin’s appearance at the corner of the house? From behind, it was difficult to guess his age, between thirty and forty, Martin would have said. Dark suit, no coat, no hat. Nothing else striking about him. It was hard to imagine what he was doing in such a place carrying his brie
fcase—perhaps he was just someone who had finished work early and was taking his usual shortcut from office to home.

  Martin shuddered at the thought that he might have ended up in a similar job and had to walk day in, day out through the ruins of some small German town or other. There would be monotonous work waiting for him in the surveyor’s office, insufferable colleagues, at home his young family would be expecting him, at some point the children would leave home, otherwise things would stay the same for the rest of his life. Not that Martin had achieved much in the last few years. But at least he wasn’t carrying a briefcase, he was carrying a portfolio full of his own drawings through the city.

  The children were targeting the man from city hall, of that there was no doubt, perhaps they had followed him the whole way. There was nothing for it now, the man would have to pass the screaming crowd of children. He straightened his back. Slowed down. Hesitated. Stopped. Bent down and reached for a stone. The children were so busy shouting at him that they didn’t grasp what was going on. No, this rabble simply had no fear. Drawing himself back for the throw, he turned around quickly, saw Martin behind him, dropped the stone. And finally Martin understood: Ohren didn’t come into it, it wasn’t Ohren the kids were thinking of, they were shouting in Saxon dialect, “Oochen aus, Oochen aus” (eyes out).

  The young man in the dark suit, hatless and coatless, was wearing an eyepatch. With only one eye, his tormentors would have calculated, he wasn’t likely to hit anybody, the stone would have been propelled with force but not aimed properly, and would have bounced back off the facade somewhere.

  “Eyes out, eyes out”—the man with the eyepatch reached the next crossing, the one after that, soon he had disappeared. Martin had not moved from the spot, his portfolio under his arm, now he wished he had called out to the man ahead of him, stopped him and asked the way, involved him in a conversation. There was no point in turning back, the children would be quicker than he, knew the area well. It was quiet now, they were waiting for him to get nearer. What would they shout at him, what flaw would they hit upon, would it be the scar, his posture, his whole figure, his long arms clutching the portfolio with his drawings, his cheekbones, his shoulders, his walk, his hairline, would they discover something else altogether that nobody had yet noticed? Martin knew how sharp and merciless children’s eyesight could be.

  Suddenly he felt like emulating the one-eyed man. That is to say, he was conscious that he was already looking around for a really big stone, as sharp-edged as possible, it had to be weighty and solid, mustn’t easily crumble. No rotten piece of rubble. A good throwing rock. And Martin had no intention of meekly putting the stone down again if somebody suddenly turned up in the street. He meant it seriously. He wouldn’t be able to defend himself against the children’s superior numbers, he would go down under a hail of stones, but one of the gang at least would have reason to remember this day for some time to come.

  As soon as he was two or three houses away, they started up their chorus as if at a word of command. Martin walked on swiftly, straight ahead, not looking up, not hearing a thing. Then the indistinct carpet of sound again. Then half-intelligible words again. He had left the gang behind him, reached the next street corner. The children were hollering, “Oochen aus, Oochen aus,” as they had been the whole time, as they had perhaps the whole year through, a monotonous battle cry, but good enough at any rate to intimidate random passersby, and the eyepatch was nothing but an unlucky coincidence.

  Martin slowed down, the children hadn’t meant him personally, nor the one-eyed man, he had survived his second lesson about Dresden. He looked at his shoes—dust; his trouser legs—dust; sandstone and mortar had combined to form a fine layer. Now he could feel his shoulders, could feel his neck again. He was gripping the portfolio tightly in his left hand, his right hand was empty.

  8

  WE WERE SITTING IN our damp clothes in a small shelter upstream by the Elbe when Martin described his arrival in Dresden to me. The rain fell steadily in front of us, we had been careless enough to run into a storm that had been threatening to break for ages, not a soul in sight anywhere apart from us, but we had both been drawn by the sulfur yellow sky. We sat on the narrow bench together, the storm had passed overhead toward the city, and I remember exactly how we flinched when our clammy sleeves touched, how Martin constantly edged away from me, as though while he was narrating he could see me only from a certain distance. Then we left the shelter. Martin had fallen silent. The fields were steaming.

  Katharina Fischer had laid her knife and fork across her plate, folded her napkin. That atmosphere Martin was surrounded by—the same as in his space installations. While customers at nearby tables continued their conversations about the day’s events and their holiday plans, the interpreter was lost in thought for a while. “It may be that today I would hardly feel the latent aggression that used to make me recoil when I walked into a space set up by Martin Spengler. What do you think? Was he aiming to convert tension into harmony?”

  It was hard for me be the judge of that, since from childhood I had known extremely harmonious moments in his company. I can’t remember exactly whether he had already taken to visiting the hyenas, I couldn’t even say whether the hyenas were already back in the zoo during his student days. But Martin went to the zoo a lot, right from the beginning. Cloven-hoofed animals. Wild cats. The aviaries. I can see him outside an animal enclosure, bent over his drawing pad, working on into the sunset. Soon the zoo would be closing for visitors, Martin enjoyed the remaining time right down to the last minute, hardly seeming to look up as the animal on the other side, the black bear, observed him curiously.

  I sat next to him for many hours, absorbing what was taking shape on Martin’s page. I especially loved going with him in the mornings, he had permission to start drawing early when the animals were being attended to, it was all intimacy and pleasurable expectation, none of the bustle the day would inevitably bring, no school groups, no families, no bunches of high-spirited art students who regarded animal studies as nothing but a boring exercise.

  It was on a morning like this that I brought up the subject of Ludwig Kaltenburg’s lecture. When Martin reacted evasively, I thought I detected a note of regret at having confronted the professor bluntly.

  “No, no, that’s not quite right,” he corrected me, in the same friendly tone in which he had addressed Kaltenburg. “I don’t feel guilty about disturbing the professor’s peace of mind. On the contrary.”

  He had been completely indifferent to the topic of the lecture. The lecturer himself, however—Martin had come across the announcement in the newspaper, that is to say, he probably wouldn’t have taken any notice of it if the name had not vaguely jogged his memory. He flipped back through the pages, the large capitals: “Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg Lectures,” Martin stared at the words, there could be no mistake, not even a chance identity of names, and the professor didn’t have a doppelgänger, for sure—this was the man, all right. Martin had suffered sleepless nights because of him. Met him? No, he had never met Kaltenburg. He only knew the name. He knew it from the evenly flowing handwriting of a botanist, my father’s writing. From letters he had read in another life on the edge of dusty airstrips.

  “To be honest, I sat in the audience all evening with one fixed purpose: to entice the great Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg out of his shell. And to do it just before the end, when nobody—least of all the professor—would be expecting a wild, unusual question.”

  Martin concentrated on a female bison which stood feeding not far away, looking over at us from time to time. On the page he had drawn broad charcoal lines, which he began calmly rubbing.

  “You remember your nanny, of course? I sometimes wonder what became of her. She was about my age, perhaps a year or eighteen months younger. When I went to Posen I was still obsessed by the idea of becoming a pediatrician, she was looking after you, there were things for us to discuss. We strolled through the fields, just as you and I did. She even pers
uaded me to go for walks in the town. Our Sunday afternoons. I was never sure whether your nanny told you about it, she denied it, but I suspected you knew. She couldn’t have hidden anything from you.”

  The animal turned away, Martin tore the portrait he had begun off the pad, it consisted of not much more than a bison’s chest in isolation. A quick glance—and he sketched a bison’s flank.

  “I hope you don’t mind me telling you this now. She was fond of you, I’m sure you know that. Though you must have been a difficult boy at times. Perhaps that’s just what she liked about you. At one time there must have been a situation where you got her into a lot of trouble, or so it seemed to me, but I could never for the life of me get her to say anything about what you did wrong. She stood firmly by you. Do you remember her name? Your parents called her Maria, but maybe that wasn’t her real name at all. I’d love to know whether she’s still alive. Where. And what she’s doing. Married with children, that’s what I would wish for her. I always had the feeling that your parents kept a protective eye on her. Did you notice anything? I don’t mean anything about her, but the way people treated her. Why am I asking you this, you were only seven or eight, what could you know? But we can’t ask your parents now. Did she go with you to Dresden?”

  Flanks by themselves, parts of the chest, the beginnings of an ear—the keeper was coming around now, making one last check on the enclosure, our time was running out. With hurried strokes and without a further glance at the animals, Martin produced a piece of shaggy hide.

  “I was jealous when I found out from your parents’ letters that Professor Kaltenburg was in and out of your place for a while, then stayed away after an unpleasant scene. For me it was obvious he had made approaches to Maria. She rejects him, there’s a big commotion, your parents come out on her side and break off all contact with the professor. I found my own scenario so convincing that I was on the point of literally taking off to come and see you. Where was I at that time, Croatia maybe, Apulia, in the Ukraine. I had no idea how I would manage it. Just clear off with the plane. Desert. The enormous distance almost made me lose my mind. So one morning out of a clear blue sky a plane lands on the dusty road in front of your house. You have been sitting drinking cocoa. The noise. Maria joins you at the window. You see me climbing out of the cockpit. A professor who is barely forty, a fanatical motorcyclist to boot, that kind of man can be dangerous. It was only then that I found out I was really keen on your nanny. And you can’t imagine how intensely I loathed Herr Professor Kaltenburg.”