by Marcel Beyer
Slowly his hands moved closer together as he described the landowners’ nocturnal meetings. “They didn’t want any trouble,” many of them were scared for the first time in their lives, “they had to come up with something,” there were shotguns around, and foreign forced laborers who could tell more stories than the farmers liked to think. “So they took their Poles and Ukrainians into the woods.”
He named the collective farms, the former estates, listed old names for us, among them there was a Hagemann. The table fell silent. The palms of his hands met. “And that was that.”
Klara’s maiden name—and what a relief it was to both of us that the name Funk was associated only with the ornithologist and his charming wife who had such refined manners, who could listen attentively and react almost without batting an eyelid to the farmers’ coarse tales.
I had paid the bill, helped Frau Fischer on with her coat, a little too heavy for the weather at the time, we were about to head for the taxi stand, on the ground floor the tables had already been laid for the next day, the waiter opened the door for us and said goodnight. The gravel crunched beneath our feet, the night air, the bridge ahead of us, the river to one side, the water shimmering on its way to the sea, and Frau Fischer said she would like to slip down to the riverfront once more for a moment, to take a look across at Loschwitz.
12
ARE YOU OUT of your mind?” This was always the prelude to one of Kaltenburg’s fits of rage—as I well knew, but so far none of his outbursts had been directed at me. “What do you mean, you’re not quite sure yet what to do with your life?”
I didn’t relish mumbling and stammering in front of the professor, so I looked at the floor in silence. He had not expected an answer. “What a disappointment. I’ve got to sit down.”
I wasn’t sure whether he was groping theatrically toward his armchair or whether he was genuinely overcome with a sudden weakness. “The biggest disappointment of my life. You don’t know what you want to do”—he adopted a droning voice, the voice of an annoying brat—“as if we’re playing in the sandpit and you’re asking me what you should be, a fireman or a train driver.”
He lowered himself heavily onto the cocktail-bar chair, sitting on the arm, leaning back as though he were going to slide to the floor. “How long have we known each other? How long? Tell me.”
“Ten years?”
Silence.
“Longer?”
“And after more than ten years you still don’t understand a thing? My God, what sort of amoeba have I picked out?”
He passed a hand across his brow, pure play-acting, and in the next instant his eye caught mine and held it, his gaze boring into my skull. “You’re going to study zoology, no question. You’ll be one of my disciples.”
He collapsed in the armchair, completely drained, shaking his head as though talking to himself, as though there were no point in addressing me, the amoeba. “Don’t know why you didn’t think of it yourself.”
And then, after another long pause—I was wondering whether to call the doctor or simply go home—he raised his eyes to me again in a typical Kaltenburg twist, almost affectionately, now was the moment for his long-planned surprise: “My boy, we have a study place for you.”
Ludwig Kaltenburg was in his element when he could pluck a surprise out of the hat, especially if no one knew what effort had gone into it. The professor was only really pleased with himself when he seemed to have been inspired by a sudden brain wave, a crazy idea, and in a flash had come up with an elegant solution to the toughest problem. You might suspect the struggles behind the scenes—but you couldn’t say so, because for a Professor Kaltenburg it was all child’s play.
I was supposed to fall upon his neck, to jump for joy. But I could neither move nor speak. The surprise had succeeded. Afterward, I hoped he would assume I had been struck dumb with delight. It looked as though Ludwig Kaltenburg was fulfilling wishes I didn’t even know I had.
When I look back on that afternoon, I am overcome with rueful feelings. I’m ashamed to think that I almost feel sorry for Kaltenburg. His outburst, his surprise, the staged attack of weakness—as though he were covering up a real state of weakness, as though contrary to appearances he had shown that he could be hurt, that he had in fact been hurt by me. The “greatest disappointment of my life”: just as I was previously unwilling to tell him about my foster family, so I had not confided in him about Klara. He wouldn’t have held it against me that I didn’t visit him so often, no longer came over to Loschwitz in a tearing hurry and left again soon afterward muttering some excuse—it didn’t take much imagination to work out that a date with a woman lay behind it. Kaltenburg was probably waiting for me to tell him about Klara. But I didn’t. He was offended. He was afraid I would slip away from him. And that is how, always willing to try anything that would turn the threat of defeat into a triumph, he came up with the idea of the study place.
Those clear, plain sentences of Kaltenburg’s that run through my life—they’ve always been a puzzle to me: his definite “It’s the boy I’m worried about” in the discussion with my father that I heard from the conservatory. His “I said you wouldn’t get rid of me so quickly” between two interviews outside the Loschwitz villa on a radiant afternoon. The sentence he tossed out to me which forbade contradiction, no, which belonged in a world where Kaltenburg simply couldn’t be contradicted: “You’ll be one of my disciples.” And at some point, arising out of his despair, half self-surrender, half challenge to me: “Then you’ll always remember me.”
Right into the eighties, in his late letters, there was a whole series of such sentences, and in situations where my courage threatened to fail me I muttered them to myself, hearing Kaltenburg’s voice, his confidence, his irrefutable phrasing. How clear and predetermined was the life—and, with the best of intentions, the life of others—he saw before him, stretching into the future: the world as created by Ludwig Kaltenburg. Whenever I couldn’t see any way forward I willed myself to take heart from his sentences, but as soon as I heard him speaking, the words had an uncanny ring to them, as though someone were trying to teach me to be afraid. Kaltenburg’s confidence has been alien to me throughout my life.
Had he in fact made a plan in the early forties, when he was in and out of my parents’ house, and had he, the falcon poised to swoop, spotted with his sharp eyes a creature down there on the ground that looked promising to him? Did it simply suit him that after the move to Dresden the youth seemed as attached to him as the child had previously been, did he feel, rather than plan, at that moment that he should take care of the war orphan who was wandering aimlessly through life, steer him, make something of him? It may be that he was at pains not to destroy my childhood image of the great Professor Kaltenburg, perhaps he himself needed to make a supreme effort to maintain it after what had happened to my parents. Naturally he always had a weakness for youth, he couldn’t help turning toward a youngster, supporting him, so long as he spotted in his eyes the least sign of a sharp mind. And once he had committed himself to someone, he wasn’t going to drop him again in a hurry.
It must have been clearer to him than to anybody that I did not have the makings of a world-class ornithologist. All the same, I was “his candidate.” I can remember that—though it was none of my doing—I even came out ahead of a school leaver of about my age who had more ability and stamina than I, was harder-working and brighter. But the less ambition I demonstrated to Kaltenburg, the more privileges I was granted, the easier everything was made for me.
In the grounds of the Institute I was the only one Kaltenburg addressed with the informal Du, while I stuck to the formal Sie for him. That alone made me stand out in his surroundings. I helped out here and there, I was around when needed, but it was always clear that I was free to come and go as I pleased. And the director of the Institute always had time for me. Scientists came to visit, old friends of Kaltenburg’s, they called each other Du. Young people, assistants, researchers starting out were call
ed Du at first, but at some point Kaltenburg moved without much fuss to the Sie form. With colleagues and people from politics or culture, it was Sie on both sides. Kaltenburg would call me over: “Can you [Du] give me a hand with the stickleback tank?” and I would say, “Do you [Sie] need rubber gloves?” That’s how it was during my time as a tenured member of staff at Loschwitz, and we kept it up after the Institute closed, right until the end, in our last letters.
I had been given the chance to study zoology with Professor Kaltenburg in Leipzig. He didn’t want any thanks, however, or at least he waved away the words I had scraped together when he was briefly called out of the room by a colleague. When Kaltenburg came back—“We must go down to the garden”—he seemed to have put the preceding scene out of his mind completely. “Yes, you’re welcome,” he growled, “what did you expect from me,” and, full of impatience because he might be missing some new observation, “Now, let’s go and take a look at the geese.”
All the same, I did not become a disciple of Kaltenburg’s. At least, if he could look back and survey my path from today’s standpoint, I don’t believe that he would want to describe me as “his disciple.” I would have had to share his views, at many stages of my life, and that was a situation which was often painful for me. Especially just before his death, when I had to look on from a distance at the kind of followers he had around him. Among them were some whose rather clumsy, not to say small-minded, efforts to defend their honored professor hardly improved matters when they fought back against public attacks with the blind fury of wounded epigones, only to attract even noisier criticism of the professor. Suspicions which Ludwig Kaltenburg, left to himself, would have defused with some calm words. It’s possible that, while not reproaching me, he was revealing a trace of his disappointment that I never became his disciple when his later letters referred to the “lickspittles” and “idiots” who surrounded him.
The interpreter followed my pointing hand, lights in the Weisser Hirsch district, lights in Loschwitz, the roads showed up as dotted lines running up the hillside, that’s where Ludwig Kaltenburg used to live, up there on the right. No, I wouldn’t have wanted to follow him to the West. Even assuming I hadn’t met Klara, hadn’t run into Martin again, I had long ceased to regard Dresden as a mere stopping-off point, a place where I got stuck for a while due to unfortunate circumstances. And it was the professor I had to thank for that.
The water swirled at our feet, we were only a few steps away from the place where countless ducks and swans gathered during the day expecting to be fed by walkers. Unfortunately, I couldn’t pick out the villa itself over there, perhaps it was unlit because it was now empty, or perhaps it was too long since I last stood here for me to be able to orient myself in the dark on the far side of the Elbe. You would have to come back in daylight or, better still, as Katharina Fischer suggested, drive over to Loschwitz and take a close look at the former Institute site.
Once he said, as we were standing on the balcony watching a handful of hooded crows mixing with the flock of jackdaws above the Elbe slopes, “It doesn’t matter to me in the least if people see me as an eccentric uncle figure who tells anecdotes that are sometimes amusing and sometimes completely incomprehensible but who is basically not quite right in the head. If strangers see my household and way of life here as weird, even dangerous, that just tells you more about them. It’s a risk I take, I know that. But if—God forbid—I ever in my life become predictable to others, if I ever finish up being predictable to myself, foreseeing today what observations I’ll be making tomorrow morning, then that will be the moment I die, that much is certain.”
On one hand, I believe I can clearly remember that this was one of our first conversations on the balcony, in the early fifties. But on the other, it sounds as though for some time the sky had already been closing in over Kaltenburg’s head, and that would place it somewhere in the second half of the decade. Perhaps I’m merging together several discussions, a series of critical utterances over the years in which he revealed some of his hidden worries. Hearing them at first with amazement—after all, Kaltenburg was a rising star in Dresden, people sought his company, and nobody would have dreamed of treating him with anything but the deepest respect—I came to realize as time passed, perhaps realized only after he had vanished from the city, what had been going on in Kaltenburg’s mind, the fears he had lived with from day one.
“And don’t forget”—he fixed me with a sharp gaze—“never forget that here”—his hand swept around, vaguely taking in the hillside—“in that house over there, or further down, wherever you look, things are going on all the time that are much crazier than you’ll ever find in my place. Sheer hidden abysses. Menacing things. Revolting things. Believe me. I have looked into some of these abysses. That’s why I don’t mind if they weigh me up. Let them take me for a fool, I couldn’t care less.”
On one occasion Ludwig Kaltenburg said to me, “I can get along perfectly well with a Professor Baron von Ardenne or a Field Marshal Paulus. They have seen a few abysses opening up at their feet during their lifetime too. It’s the petty-minded people who worry me.”
And one winter evening, as I was leaving: “One has to stay vulnerable.”
Sometimes, he said, he had people in the house who clearly thought him not entirely sane, although they would never admit it to his face. Not a single chair available for guests but any amount of space for his animals, the jackdaw colony in the loft, the basement reserved for the fish. A cockatoo had the run of all floors, and its infernal cawing echoed through the whole house whenever an unwelcome guest blocked its usual flight path up and down the stairs. Dogs strayed around in the rooms, which annoyed some people more than did the ducks sitting there on the carpet making a low gabbling noise when the resident tomcat strutted past as though only he and his master were present. And not forgetting the hamster. On the desk a pile of gnawed papers on which it had been working the previous night, but the animal itself was nowhere to be seen. “I force myself not to let on that for the past few weeks it has been residing in the kitchen.”
As Kaltenburg had established, there were precisely two groups of such visitors: those who—fear in their eyes, fear of the zoo, the professor—had to make such an effort to hide their horror that they could hardly bring themselves to utter a syllable, and the others, who compensated for their fear by becoming downright rude. Not that they made insulting remarks, it was the tone of voice they adopted: And what is the point of keeping animals, if one may ask?
“Do you know what I say then, casually and clearly as the occasion requires? I’m studying. Period. That’s all.”
Then you had to wait for them to come back at you, as you knew absolutely for certain they would. Some of them, who hadn’t understood a thing, did so immediately. Others swallowed a few times before they could manage to utter, What’s worth studying about sticklebacks or about this—meaning Taschotschek—this bird here? What’s so interesting about these animals? Then, acting absentminded, surprised: “About these animals? What animals? It’s you I’m studying.”
IV
1
FRIDAY THE SIXTH of March. In the morning the news of Stalin’s death had been announced. In the evening I was due to visit the Hagemanns with Ludwig Kaltenburg. Arriving at dusk in Loschwitz, I found the Institute site unusually silent, and I encountered nobody except Herr Sikorski, Kaltenburg’s cameraman. When I asked him how people here had taken the news, especially the professor, Herr Sikorski just shrugged: it had been very quiet all day. Even the birds were less lively than usual. However, as for the professor, there was no knowing what he was thinking—he had retreated to the aquarium section that afternoon and not reappeared.
As I went down the stairs to the breeding and collecting tanks located in the rooms built on the side facing the slope, I felt a forlornness that I had never before experienced in this house. The walls seemed damp, my tread echoed on the stone steps, not a human voice anywhere, not an animal in sight. The cold light
in the antechamber, the barrel vaulting over the aquariums placed close together, the quiet hum of countless circulation pumps.
The cheerlessness was not even dispelled by the sight of Ludwig Kaltenburg’s shock of white hair between the tanks. He was shuffling in rubber boots down the gangway at the other end of the room. Through a series of glass panels, the masses of water, his face was scarcely recognizable, blurred. As though Kaltenburg were walking across the seabed. Then it was gone, hidden by water milfoil, then flashing into sight again, dissolving in a whirl of air and water, finally regaining its shape, the clear eyes, the beard, the unruly hair.
On the worktop a bare reserve tank with a shoal of cichlids swimming in it. It appeared that Kaltenburg had spent the afternoon refurbishing the perch’s customary aquarium, trying out one new plant and one new arrangement after another until at last he was satisfied—that is, today the exercise had served him first and foremost as a distraction.
“Of course, I had to call the colleagues together and give a little speech,” he said, and, “Fräulein Holsterbach, you know, the dark Ph.D. student, was crying.”
I had no idea what was going through Kaltenburg’s mind. Together we put the cover back on the aquarium. He took a step back, rubbing his hands and surveying his creation. A truly beautiful world of water.