by Marcel Beyer
We had hardly sat down in the drawing room when Klara remembered that she had a book for me: “A present from my parents, and because Martin told me you were interested in swallows, I thought it might be something for you.”
Not swallows—swifts: did I call that out to Klara as she left the room to fetch the book, or did I manage to suppress such a redundant correction? You think you never see the world so clearly as in such situations, and then you have to concede that out of sheer excitement you had eyes neither for yourself nor for the person opposite.
Klara handed me a hardback volume. I opened it at the title page and was shocked to see a familiar name: LUDWIG KALTENBURG. Shocked, because I had never heard of the book, according to the title a guide to living with animals.
“I know him.”
“You’ve read the book already?”
“No, not a word of it. I’m just surprised. Because I know the author.”
“Another book by him?”
“No, that’s not it. I had no idea that he wrote books like this. I’ve known Professor Kaltenburg forever, since I was a child, but he didn’t write popular handbooks then, only academic works.”
“Oh, academic works, I get it.”
I was on the point of surrendering. Klara didn’t miss a thing, she picked up the slightest alteration in my voice as well as the deceptive casualness of a throwaway sentence, sensed a touch of arrogance as well as the little lie that had preceded it. She didn’t let go.
“You know Professor Kaltenburg personally? I don’t believe you.”
As though suddenly sorry for her brisk tone, she asked, “Would you like a glass of cordial? You could browse through the book until I get back.”
I felt as though Ludwig Kaltenburg had let me down. When I asked him about his manual the next time we met, he brushed aside this “little effort,” as he called it, with a shrug. A straight money-spinner, Kaltenburg’s financial worries in the early postwar years, no prospect of a suitable post, all the animals that needed feeding every day. When he was writing it he had also been driven by a certain anger, he was maddened by the countless bad animal books on the market, he said, wanted to sweep away all that sentimental, hypocritical garbage: no more cute little noses, no more round, astonished, sleepy eyes, or should one say bedroom eyes, and no more cuddly creatures that were nothing but humans in plush costumes. Nobody would have believed at the time that Kaltenburg’s book—which, incidentally, was followed by a number of sequels—would be such a notable success. He would never have dreamed that his collection of experiences with animals would reach such wide circles, even including Dresden society. He was still writing occasional little articles of that kind, he said, newspaper editors pestered him for them, obviously readers couldn’t get enough of unadulterated animal-watching. For him they were relaxation exercises, in the evenings when he didn’t have the concentration for serious work he would sit down and compose, with a light touch, for an hour at most, until the last feed. “And you’ve known all the stories for years, you heard them from my own lips. But of course I’ll give you a copy, you know I really love you to read every word I’ve written.”
When Klara came back from the kitchen, I talked to her about her parents. She said they were certainly kindhearted people who refused to let anybody destroy their belief in human goodness. I was holding my glass, Klara emptied hers in one go—but as children she and her sister had sometimes suffered for this belief. The pressure to be good despite all the challenges.
“A child can’t keep something like that in mind day and night. Once Ulli and I raced through the house shouting nonstop some phrase we were making fun of, I can’t remember what it was, some political chant perhaps.”
She sat down next to me on the sofa, hugging her knees.
“Suddenly my father grabbed me fiercely by the arm, he came shooting out from nowhere, pulled me under the stairs, and hissed, You know perfectly well the kind of people we’ve had foisted on us upstairs. His eyes staring, his lips trembling, and before he let go of me he whispered one word: VORKUTA. That night we could hardly get to sleep, although of course our father’s hint about Siberia was lost on us. Vorkuta to me meant the bruises on my arm that I covered up with a long-sleeved blouse.”
The fine hairs on her arm. Klara stroked her left foot.
“If you know Professor Kaltenburg so well, you must have been to his Institute in Loschwitz?”
Naturally—the door to his Institute, and even to his private quarters, was open to me day and night. But what kind of an impression would it have made if I had blurted out everything I knew about Kaltenburg? I knew every corner of his villa, I knew the man’s every emotion—a pale young man basking in the light of his fame. So I steered a course through Kaltenburg’s world as well as I could without sounding boastful, I took a back seat, telling her that what impressed me about Kaltenburg when I was a child was the way he had with gloves. Often he carried several pairs around with him, the thick calf gloves for the motorbike, the finer ones for the car, the mittens made of thick felt for a walk in the woods, the “torn ones,” as he called them, a favorite old patched pair he wore in early autumn down by the Elbe and sometimes in the evening, on his way down into the city, then his buckskin ones for unavoidable social occasions, which he took off to greet people.
Klara asked me that afternoon, “You want to be famous too, don’t you?” And when I came up with no answer she added, “Or at least notorious.”
The sun, which had moved around the house, was now shining through the big veranda windows straight into the drawing room. Our empty glasses on the table. The carpet. My dusty shoes. After a while Klara said, “By the way, I enjoyed our time on Lake Carola.”
“It was the first time I’d ever sat in a rowboat.”
“That was obvious. But I loved the way you simply ignored people when they started laughing at us.”
She blinked, jumped up, and said something that I didn’t quite catch, something like “This isn’t getting anywhere.” In two steps she had reached the window and begun to close the heavy curtain. First the left half, dark and heavy as a fur coat I had once followed with my eyes. Klara reached for the right half, carefully guiding the hem behind an indoor palm with her foot. I followed her movements, followed the strip of light as it got narrower. The dark hair on the back of the head of a strange woman. The bright chink had disappeared, and for an instant I was blind. Then I saw Klara’s face, right in front of mine.
11
THE LAST PLEASURE BOAT had glided past sometime before, we could count only about two dozen dinner jackets and evening dresses under the festive lanterns, down below the band was playing for two or three couples self-consciously dancing, most passengers stood together in little groups on deck to take in the evening air over the Elbe one last time before the trip ended. Not a sound to be heard. It had gone quiet here in the restaurant as well, the steps creaked, the waiter came up to serve our coffee, took the empty dessert plates away. Frau Fischer lit a cigarette.
I had tried to describe my excitement when, at the end of my first afternoon in the Hagemanns’ house, I had asked if I could take her to the cinema. And how Klara, no doubt just as excited, answered with a decisive nod of the head and a firm “Friday.” As though it had been settled long ago: from now on she would be going to the cinema only with this boy called Hermann Funk.
My excitement then, a few weeks later, when I had my first invitation from the Hagemanns. I knew the drawing room from my afternoon with Klara, I knew the receptions at the house from Martin’s description, but all the same I can barely remember the evening itself. I can’t even recall Klara there, that’s how excited I must have been. Fortunately, at the time I wasn’t aware that there was a good deal more associated with the name Hagemann than Martin had conveyed to me on our outings. Yes, if my parents had been Dresdeners and I had grown up in the city, I would have known about the family name, would probably have heard it mentioned at home when I was a child.
Amon
g their extended family there was a line of academics, there were landowners, the car-business Hagemanns, Klara’s grandfather had been a cigarette manufacturer. Older gentlemen in their circle still praised the quality of certain brands, the Turkish Mixture, the Pure Virginia, and when they shook Herr Hagemann’s hand they did so solemnly, with dignity, as though they were still expressing their condolences decades after the firm had gone bankrupt and Grandfather had been consigned to the attic. Klara’s father felt uncomfortable in such situations—granted, there were such things as family virtues, hard work, conscientiousness, and an artistic vein, but Herr Hagemann did not possess an estate, nor did he run a factory. It’s possible that his choice of chemistry at the university was meant to give him something of an outsider profile in the family, he had gone to Berlin, had met his future wife in the laboratory, toyed with the idea of going abroad, but then come back to Dresden with his young family after all. Perhaps he would have preferred to live where the name meant nothing, but all the same: if you were introduced to Klara’s father, exchanged a few words with him, perhaps got to know him a little better, you soon sensed that Herr Hagemann felt an obligation to his family name, especially as all the rest of the Hagemann clan had been decamping to the West one by one since the war.
That was his stubborn streak. His secret wish to restore the good name of the Hagemanns. So Klara’s father tolerated it when his colleagues in the laboratory appreciatively called him a “real Hagemann” because in his presence the director of the firm, who was given to violent outbursts, was transformed into an understanding character who didn’t mind asking the son of the cigarette factory owner for advice from time to time. He also put up with it when his name occasionally provoked some skeptical scrutiny.
Herr Hagemann knew what he was letting himself in for. He and his wife had spent sleepless nights going through the pros and cons together, but the final decision wasn’t made until the landed-gentry relatives sent their first letter from the West. His aunt’s childish handwriting seemed to Klara’s father exactly suited to the “yoke” and “knout,” the “demons” and the “bloodsuckers” she was writing about, as though a defeated military commander had dictated his last testament to her in his madness. Herr Hagemann held his breath. As he read the last paragraph, he began to growl dangerously, Frau Hagemann was considering sending her daughters out of the room: their nephew was of course welcome at any time, they said, to escape to the bosom of the family together with his wife and daughters. He remembered staying with them near Meissen, even as a child he didn’t trust his uncle, in fact he was afraid of him, like everybody else on the estate. The oppressive summer days were dominated by fear of running into this unpredictable being, the nephew mingled with the farm workers, went out to the fields with them, hung around in the stables—but the landowner had eyes everywhere. Put yourself in the hands of such people? Of your own free will? Never.
Then there were his good intentions. There was his drive to prove himself. And there was the indulgence toward his daughters, especially the younger one, who had inherited so much from him. You certainly didn’t have to do everything they expected of you today, but he really couldn’t see any reason to complain about the prospect of a peace demonstration. Klara had earmarked that time for the next volume of Balzac, she was complaining about the wasted hours. Her father shook his head, she needn’t make a face like that, and then he felt sorry when she left the house looking miserable. The book was lying on the table. Herr Hagemann had acquired it as a young chemistry student in Berlin, had skipped his practicals, had read from cover to cover all the volumes of the cycle that had appeared in German, and felt quite lighthearted about it, as though he had managed to shake off a whole load of Hagemann obligations he had imposed upon himself.
“Then there was no further contact between the Hagemanns and the family in the West?” asked Frau Fischer.
Klara had never seen her western relatives. She wasn’t allowed to receive so much as a parcel of books from the uncle.
“So there were some limits to his indulgence toward his younger daughter, then.”
I don’t think the threat was ever made openly, but neither do I believe that any of the longed-for new books from the West ever got to Klara. Books she wasn’t allowed to read—no, it was more to do with his fearful imaginings, her father trying to give concrete expression to his loathing of that branch of the family.
In the first summer of the war the parents took their two daughters on a trip to Leipzig, Klara had just started school, Ulli was two grades above her, their father was in the uniform he detested, he cherished every minute spent with his family. His “three women,” as he called them, gave him protection, and protection for him meant the illusion that he was a civilian. So he took his family to the zoo, took them for a coffee, and in the strange city even his daughters forgot for a while that their father was no longer living with them at home. And then—whether it was an idea that occurred to them over coffee or the parents had planned it as a way of rounding off the excursion—they tacked on a visit to the National Library. Ulli thought it a boring idea, even more books than at home, a whole building just for books. She began to whine, she had enough to do with her reading primer at school, here was a whole lifetime of books she would never master, and she saw malevolently grinning authors who enjoyed writing, filling page after page, book after book, and every time they put their difficult-to-read names to a title page they leaned back, stretched themselves at their desks, narrowed their eyes, and trained their sights on Ulli. They filled shelf upon shelf, room after room, while Ulli laboriously formed her letters one by one, wrestling with sentences, toiling away at her exercise books and yet bringing them home every time covered in red ink.
What did her little sister know of the abysses of reading and writing? Speechless, Klara stared at the imposing, shiny row of lettering on the facade. She stood speechless in the entrance hall and was speechless while being shown the catalog, the reference works, the loans desk. And everybody here was carrying books under their arm, all eager to start bending over the open white pages with the black signs, day and night. When you were reading, you no longer even wanted to sleep. Speechless, Klara let her mother drag her away to the train station, she still hadn’t found her tongue when the train pulled into Dresden, at night in bed Ulli talked about the cocoa, talked about the animals, then worked out how many days of the holiday were left and fell asleep.
The Leipzig experience may have faded into the background in the following years; how could Klara know what a librarian was? But reading and writing came so much more naturally to her than to Ulli, no doubt as the younger sister she had an advantage: the younger ones sit quietly with their toys listening while the schoolchild at the table traces the lines of print with a forefinger; they listen to the way that words form into sentences, the parents’ careful corrections, and two or three years later, when it’s their turn to read aloud, it sounds as though they have taught themselves everything overnight. Klara did her homework without grumbling, then sat down with her parents’ library to read her way patiently through the centuries. Soon she had a favorite bookseller in the city, Herr Lindner. He was the one who said one day, almost in passing, “I can’t imagine Klara anywhere but a library.”
She was no longer the girl who confronted strange dachshund owners in the Great Garden, no longer incited her sister to rampage through the house making fun of political chanting, so loudly that the people upstairs could hear. She had learned in the meantime what it was to be a Hagemann, she knew that when she wanted to achieve a goal it was not enough to be more hardworking than the others, brighter, cleverer, if you didn’t have the necessary instinct, the so-called ability to learn. It was definitely not easy to keep a tight rein on herself, how often she bit her tongue, how often she rolled her eyes when somebody came at her with “truth” and “historical necessity” when all she could see was stupidity. But she made the effort, kept her aim firmly in sight, had even forced herself during her tra
ining to read the collected works of Johannes R. Becher, minister of culture.
It even went so far that Klara was mistaken for an ardent admirer of the culture minister, and I can still clearly remember a distant relative reciting a few lines of Becher at our wedding to please Klara. There we stood in front of the assembled wedding guests, all eyes were on us, I can still feel Klara’s moist hand in mine, how she flinched when she recognized the lines, how she held on to me tightly, as though she could not survive the solemn recitation of that harmless versifying without the man beside her.
“The relatives from the West weren’t there.”
No, of course not.
“It sounds weird, this strict ban on contact simply because of bad childhood memories that Herr Hagemann was unable to put behind him.”
The parents kept it close to their chest. They wanted to foster Klara’s and Ulli’s belief in human goodness. But you’re right, there must have been more to it.
Not all that long ago, sometime in the late nineties, we had been invited over by an old bird breeder in the Meissen region, Klara always got on well with him too. It was his ninetieth birthday, the whole village was sitting together on this sunny afternoon in the meadow behind the house, there were cakes, there was schnapps, and the more schnapps there was, the more talkative the farmers became. They were cursing the regional authority’s livestock-disease insurance scheme, flies hovered around the half-eaten custard cakes, people were exchanging stories about animal diseases, the cream for the coffee clotted as it was stirred, and soon they were competing around the table to impress us townies with descriptions of worm-eaten sheep and suppurating cows’ eyes. Typical butcher’s-yard stories, a rough tradition, but this kind of thing never makes either me or Klara feel bad. Then the name Hagemann came up.
The oldest man at the table, who had so far sat quietly listening, looked around at everybody with his light-colored eyes, let his young neighbors know what he thought of their animal stories, cleared his throat, and began telling us about 1945. He had not been drinking. He pointed to the surrounding hamlets, hills, copses, the number of skeletons that were buried there, he wasn’t just talking about illegally disposing of a few sheep or cows. “The Russians are over here”—the man brought his right hand down on the table—“and the Americans are here”—his left hand came down not far away. “Nobody knew which of them would arrive first, but everybody was certain of one thing, the great, decisive battle involving our secret armies was not going to take place on Saxon soil, if at all.”