by Marcel Beyer
The first school groups had arrived at the entrance. Martin said goodbye to the ladies at the ticket office, and then the zoo and our undisturbed morning were behind us.
“Did you know that for Maria—that I made some drawings of her? My private name for the work I did then is the ‘Posen Block,’ and if it’s ever exhibited anywhere you’ve got to remind me of that title, okay?”
Frau Fischer inquired whether the drawings still existed.
Certainly. They survived the Posen years, the war, Martin preserved them carefully in a number of portfolios, and somehow he even succeeded in smuggling them out intact to the West. Today they are among the most important works from that early period.
“As the ‘Posen Block’?” She had never heard of a body of work with that title.
No, in fact the “Posen Block” has never been exhibited as such. Memories of a nanny—but in the catalogue it’s called “Russian Nurse,” a restrained sketch on a tear-off drawing pad, the soft hair, the cap with a cross, only the eyes and nose are executed with a stronger pencil line. Another drawing: “Three by the Fire,” a very consciously chosen, vague title, two dark human figures contemplating an aureole, and on the left the contours of a bright figure with long hair, crouching, eyes downcast. The young woman, a suppressed fantasy perhaps, which recurs in the late work.
On the other hand, many of Martin’s student pieces stuck out like a sore thumb, it occurred to me, after I had asked Katharina Fischer if she would like some dessert, a coffee. In retrospect you can see in his student work the pressure he was under: sometimes he dutifully tries to please his teachers, at other times he is really untrue to his own hand, his own vision. Presumably he left most of it behind in Dresden, if he didn’t burn it. But I’ve kept all of Martin’s bison sketches.
9
IMPORTANT AS LUDWIG Kaltenburg was for me, it wasn’t from him that I first heard the name Hagemann, but from Martin Spengler. If I visualize him in his Dresden period, it’s not in group photos at the college, not among a circle of laughing students, not at a carnival party. Martin in Red Indian costume, Martin at a dance, Martin as a member of a bowling team—unthinkable. For me he belongs at the Hagemann family dining table, he belongs in their drawing room. I can see Martin in the little room behind the kitchen, a space crammed with books, painting equipment, drawing pads. A narrow bed, two stools, an old bureau: this accommodation had been fixed up for him by his favorite professor, a friend of the family and also the first patron of this independent-minded art student, whom outsiders usually considered taciturn. As far as I can recall, in Dresden Martin didn’t show his hyena drawings to anyone but this professor, the Hagemanns, and me.
The Hagemann family was pleased to have Martin in their house, it could easily have been different, as with the elderly couple and their middle-aged son who had been allocated quarters on the first floor. When they first moved in there was talk of having met previously, during the war, the man even announced his service rank as though that made him the new head of the household. But Herr Hagemann did not wish to be reminded of his former superior officers, least of all by one of those officers himself.
Contact was limited to the essentials, they said hello to each other when the Klein family crossed the hall with disapproving faces to disappear up the stairs to their domain. The daughters of the household soon dubbed the Kleins “the Super-Tenant family,” and eventually the parents caught themselves using this secret nickname themselves now and then. “The Super-Tenants again”—Herr Hagemann with pocket diary in hand—“I’ve got to get the cardboard laurels out of the cellar.” Whenever the opportunist veteran appeared on the stairs on the eve of some official anniversary celebration, commemoration, birthday, or death day, silently reminding Herr Hagemann to put the decorations out, it was all the head of the household could do not to warn him, “Herr Super-Tenant, you’re definitely going too far.”
If the Hagemanns were having a reception, Martin made himself scarce in a corner of the drawing room and didn’t budge all evening. The world of art and academia frequented the Hagemanns’, the company often including foreign visitors. Martin listened, he studied. Faces, hands, ashtrays, armchairs, shoes, curtains, the stucco rosette on the ceiling: wandering around the room, his gaze often fell upon a small dark spot, up there between the hook for the chandelier and a stucco sunflower leaf. A housefly stiffened in death, but Martin wouldn’t have been all that surprised if on closer inspection the empty exoskeleton had turned out to be a tiny hole. And he pictured to himself three people with wry faces upstairs crouching together under the kitchen table, with father, mother, and son silently fighting over whose turn it was to apply their ear to the hole punched through the linoleum.
Once the guests had all left and the family had gone to bed, Martin crept out of his room again back into the drawing room, enjoying the silence, sitting in the green armchair, Frau Hagemann’s favorite. In the darkness he looked at the walls.
“These walls are a world in themselves,” he said once. At the Hagemanns’, hyena art hung everywhere.
Every time I met Martin, he told me about the Hagemanns, and I soon felt I knew the family personally, as though I had enjoyed their company for years, the parents, the two daughters—Martin, who got on well with them from the beginning, passed on some of his intimacy to me. I particularly remember one of his stories, perhaps because I never found out whether Martin invented it for me in the telling, or because it took place in the Great Garden, or perhaps quite simply because Klara Hagemann was the central figure in it.
One day, during a Sunday walk in the park, without warning Klara left her family standing on the path. A figure in the distance, an unusual movement, had caught her eye, and before her parents or sister had time to notice that a man holding a dog lead was about to beat his animal with it, Klara had raced off. She ran straight across the field, screaming, a stream of words never heard before in this spot and probably never heard there again. The dachshund owner knew he was being accosted, looked around, couldn’t work out at first what was happening, had no idea what was coming at him, just saw a screaming girl in a Sunday dress. For a moment he forgot the existence of the scruffy, whimpering animal cowering in the grass at his feet—and lowered his arm. Klara Hagemann had been eleven or twelve. Straight after the war. Her parents’ hearts must have stood still.
Martin said, “She was still quite small at the time.”
Half of Dresden looked on as a girl in a white dress with knee-length socks and sandals delivered a telling-off to a dog owner, a total stranger. The Hagemanns had no idea where she could have acquired such language.
He said, “She’s quite different today.”
As though he had been present himself, Martin described to me how the father took a deep breath, took his first step into the field. Seen from the path, his walk, his shoulders, looked a little stiff. Once over there he looked the man in the eye, speaking two, three short sentences. They shook hands. Then Herr Hagemann and his daughter were back. He took off his hat, wiping his brow. He was sweating: “Not another word. We’re going for a coffee.”
The two girls ran on ahead. Ulli, the older sister, always one step behind Klara. His wife took his arm. Her expression said, Klara was right. He was powerless against it. Herr Hagemann had been looking forward to a peaceful family walk. But Klara was his daughter. He was the father of Klara Hagemann. A perfectly ordinary, mild Sunday afternoon in 1946 or 1947.
As can be imagined, I was pretty curious about this girl, or I should say this young woman, and was looking forward to being introduced to her by Martin. The trouble was, he knew me well enough to be aware that I was quite capable of wrecking a carefully planned arrangement at the last minute, I wouldn’t have cared a jot about embarrassing Martin, I simply wouldn’t have turned up at the rendezvous. He had no choice but to simply take me by surprise, and so he told me, as he packed up his things at the end of an afternoon together at the zoo, “By the way, I forgot to tell you—we’re going t
o see Klara.”
The further we walked down Tiergartenstrasse, the more agitated I felt. Martin remained cool. “She’ll be waiting for us”—he turned purposefully into the Great Garden—“She’s always overpunctual, you know.” He walked faster, pulled my sleeve, pointing at the ruins of the palace: “What did I tell you, the woman over there in the blue dress, do you recognize her?”
We shook hands, and Klara greeted me so politely that I almost expected a curtsy. But there was a spark in her green eyes that seemed to warn me not to go thinking her good manners were for my personal benefit. Martin pointed to his portfolio, then at me: “Hermann was with me in the zoo.”
“In the zoo?”
With raised eyebrows, Klara fixed her gaze on me with the air of someone who vaguely remembered going there a long time ago. At least I was in Martin’s company—obviously it wasn’t thought strange he should go to the zoo regularly, and he was much older than I. In fact, she insisted on assessing Martin’s new work before anything else, we found a place under the trees, and she hadn’t even ordered a drink before Martin was made to open his portfolio. “Mineral water or a soda—no, I’ll have water”; she didn’t mind, the drawings lay spread out on the table in front of us. Klara, who didn’t appear to be interested in animals, compared the hare with the graylag goose, pulled a series of eagle studies closer to her, the line on this page, the fine hatching over there, as though just breathed onto the paper, a bird in motion, and then—“Could you move that glass, please”—that line on the head of a resting bearded vulture.
“Tell me, do either of you know which house Kokoschka stayed in?” Martin pointed across at the palace pond. “Is that the one? The one in front, maybe? Or is it one of those that was bombed? I’m sure you can tell me, Klara.”
Klara shook her head, as though she knew exactly. I, on the other hand, didn’t even know the name Oskar Kokoschka, I was hearing about this painter for the first time, and especially about the life-sized doll he got someone to make in the image of the woman he idolized, an ugly, crude monster puppet which Kokoschka hoped would inspire him in Dresden.
“I have heard that the doll was found one morning soaked in red wine and with twisted limbs somewhere here in the garden. I’d love to know where, precisely.”
A policeman on his beat had thought at first that the limp figure with the dead face was a real female corpse, Martin went on talking, and I was grateful to Klara when she interrupted him in midsentence: “I hope you don’t mind, Martin, but I think that’ll do.”
We sauntered around the palace pond, to the Flutgraben—that is, I saw Klara strolling next to Martin, saw the toes of her shoes, yes, Klara was strolling through Dresden as though demonstrating how you should move in the distant future along the boulevard of an imaginary metropolis. Her ankles. Her dark, very slightly wavy hair.
“Martin has told me about your episode with the dachshund owner,” I dared to address her.
“Oh, that old story”—amused, I thought, or perhaps like someone tired of hearing the same anecdote repeated. And I wasn’t expecting that Klara, acting as though Martin were suddenly in the way, would drop back a step and smile across at me.
Martin suggested hiring a rowboat. Apparently the idea appealed to Klara too, he was inviting us to take a boat ride, I could see Klara and me sitting next to each other, Martin facing us on the oarsman’s seat. But when we got in, it was “No, no, Hermann, you’ve got to sit at the front.” We both looked questioningly at Martin, he shrugged his shoulders, “Enjoy the trip,” he pushed the boat off, “Water makes me nervous,” Martin stayed behind on the landing stage: “We’ll meet up again in an hour’s time, in safety, on dry land.”
Klara and I on Lake Carola. Martin followed us on the bank. That is to say, he had to keep stopping because my rowing was so bad that we hardly moved from the spot. I was on a collision course, all around us boats were gliding smoothly through the water, all of the strong young men oblivious of the labors of their upper body, their shoulders, their arms, their hands. The evenness of the oar movements was impressive, everything working like clockwork, each one of them enjoying a trip with their beloved could concentrate on taking a close look at those eyes, those lips, that nose.
I succeeded in steering our boat under the bridge without capsizing, the narrow part of the lake was behind us, for a while we were moving toward the fountain. And that was when Martin appeared again, Klara spotted him as we passed the restaurant, mixing with the families at the feeding place, Martin in a flurry of ducks, hopefully he wouldn’t think of waving.
Martin waved to us.
Hordes of children squatting on the bank looking for fish in the shallow water, children, half scared and half overconfident, holding out dry bread for the ducks to take, parents watching over their offspring—they would all turn instantly to look at the waving man in their midst, would follow his eyes across the lake, point to a boat, and have to laugh, the splashing water, somebody snatching hastily at the oars. But Klara didn’t turn a hair. I was rowing with my right arm, I wanted to bring the boat around, Klara was directing me. I was gripped by ambition, I was aiming at least to circumnavigate the little island with the swan’s nest. I no longer noticed the other boats. Once I had to push us off again from the bushes onshore. Once some twigs brushed Klara’s hair. And precisely when I was thinking with relief that Martin could no longer see us at this point, she said, “Made it.”
No, Klara wasn’t laughing. But as we moved more or less calmly between the island and the bank, and I didn’t even have any trouble maneuvering the boat a little so that Klara could get a better view of the white plumage over there in the bushes, I could have sworn that sitting facing me was an unknown lady I had heard laughing one November evening long ago. The woman in the fur coat wearing a peaked cap, the way she held her cigarette on the dark Elbe hillside, how she swept past me in the hall, and Klara in her blue dress, her hands holding on to the gunwale to get a good look at the island in Lake Carola: one and the same person, I could have sworn to it.
10
KLARA STOOD BAREFOOT in the doorway, in her blue summer dress which I knew from our boat outing in the Great Garden—the blue formed a very striking contrast to the green of Klara’s eyes. It could be the way the light was falling, I thought, evenly shining through the leaves of a big beech tree by the entrance. Klara watched me calmly as I approached, she might have seen me standing at the iron gate reading the nameplate, the Hagemann property, the path through their garden, the house where Klara and Martin live. I went up the steps to the entrance, the blue dress, the green eyes, Klara’s bare feet on the threshold, I really didn’t know where to look.
I had come to pick up Martin, it was all arranged—in my confusion I may not even have said hello.
“Oh, really? He’s not here. Perhaps he’ll be back soon. As far as I know, he was going down to the Elbe. You can go and look for him if you want.”
Even as she was saying this, quickly, decisively, as though to get rid of me, she stepped aside in the doorway. I followed her, we crossed a small anteroom, more a ventilation chamber, and Klara pushed open a swing door as if unaware that somebody was behind her. The wings of the door sprang back, I was just able to slip through.
“The door nearly caught me.”
“Oh dear, you poor thing.”
I assumed she was going to take me straight to Martin’s room, where I could wait for him, but she paused: “We used to play around with the swing door, Ulli and I, every evening after supper, we used to run back and forth in our nightgowns from the corridor to the vestibule and back. Our parents shouted that we shouldn’t romp around near the cold entrance, and we shrieked every time one of us had been hit on the head by the door. Out of breath, overexcited, faces flushed, just the state to be in when you’re meant to be going to bed.”
The “vestibule,” not “a ventilation chamber” or “a small anteroom”—for me the word is inextricably linked with that afternoon, when I heard it, from Klara,
for the first time.
“A lovely house, with this swing door.” And I must have also said something like “You’ve got lots of space.”
“Well, we’re not the only ones living here—but don’t worry, they’re not around.”
I don’t quite trust myself. Neither the surprised, stupid adolescent trotting along behind Klara in the hall nor my present self claiming to remember. Klara’s cool, almost rude behavior at the beginning, only to take a friendly interest in me scarcely two minutes later—it would sound more credible if Klara’s tone when I turned up unannounced at the door had been consistently polite, if rather distant. First careless, then slightly too pert, that’s not Klara—and did she really ask, “Are you scared of me?”
I don’t know to this day whether Martin’s absence was accidental, whether he had forgotten our arrangement or deliberately gone for a walk by himself. It’s also possible that he may have been in the house the whole time, having a midday nap or engrossed in his work, and Klara didn’t want to disturb him—one possible explanation why she didn’t take me to his room, no, to the “maid’s room,” as she called the room behind the kitchen.