Kaltenburg

by Marcel Beyer

  She missed the context in which Knut Sieverding made his remark, but she remembered all the more vividly the horrified faces of the studio guests she was just in time to catch as she came back into the living room, before the presenter turned with a nervous smile to the nature-film maker. Knut was so relaxed as he submitted to questioning, his wild boyish mop of hair contrasting with his deadly serious, almost pitying look as he nodded benignly, correcting inaccuracies on the presenter’s part but otherwise largely ignoring the interviewer. Knut Sieverding declined to tell anecdotes about celebrities, he confined himself to animals—with one exception: prompted by the name Kaltenburg, he spoke euphorically about his time at the Institute, about a wealth of important experiences, and constantly reiterated how grateful he still was for the chance to work with the professor. Then the presenter read out a Kaltenburg quotation from his cue card: “More fantastic than taking a box at the opera,” the professor had rhapsodized after seeing the first rushes of the woodpecker film.

  “And do you know how Knut Sieverding responded?” asked Katharina Fischer. “A strange comparison, he said, considering that the woodpecker film was the first wildlife film ever released without the benefit of stringed instruments.”

  It’s true. No music—the idea came to Knut and the professor one afternoon on the balcony at Loschwitz. The opposite of Hollywood. And as for the box at the opera: I can’t remember Ludwig Kaltenburg ever setting foot in an opera house, at least not to see an opera, and once when the three of us clambered around in the ruins of the Semper Opera House, that was to do with Knut’s idea of making an educational film on cave-nesting birds in the city.

  Kaltenburg may not have been able to show it openly, but he had reason to be grateful to Knut too. It was Knut who succeeded in luring Martin to Loschwitz. Another way to put it would be that Knut Sieverding smoothed the path to Kaltenburg for Martin, who had become curious but was still a bit recalcitrant—he told him he would learn far more about animals from him than at the zoo, nobody would be looking suspiciously over his shoulder while he was sketching, and anyway Knut could use some more help with his filming.

  “Were you really made to tell your friend all about Anastasia the chow dog?”

  “Martin wanted to know everything—he’d never seen a chow before.”

  “Everyone’s fascinated by that blue-black tongue.”

  “But I reckon he’s even more fascinated by the dog’s owner.”

  “If you really think he might benefit from my modest knowledge of dogs, then by all means bring him to the Institute sometime.”

  It’s possible that on that first visit both the professor and Martin were still somewhat self-conscious. We toured the site, Martin was amazed by the dog’s tongue, impressed by the aviaries, but when Knut left to go back to work, all three of us watched him as he departed, as though we had just lost our most important playmate. I was the one whose inspiration—if you can call it that—saved the day: why didn’t Martin sketch Taschotschek?

  Kaltenburg placed Martin with his back to the balcony door and Taschotschek in the middle of the table. Inquisitively the jackdaw surveyed the sheet of paper laid out, the tin box that hid charcoal and pencils, fixed its eye on the stranger who was blocking its exit. Martin talked to the bird, spoke to it reassuringly, and innocently began to draw. And Kaltenburg, sitting with me on the couch to one side, kept out of the way. He was much too thrilled to interfere, no doubt more excited by the encounter of man and creature being played out before his eyes than by the portrait. He followed the tentative hand of the artist, Taschotschek’s hesitant steps, his glance jumping from one to the other, weighing up the relative chances of Martin and the jackdaw. As though he had made a bet with himself about who would win: Martin, by managing to capture the bird on paper, or the jackdaw, by reducing its portraitist to despair.

  Taschotschek emerged victorious. Kaltenburg sat watching the scene calmly. You couldn’t tell by looking at him which party he had backed.

  Martin was to make many attempts to sketch Kaltenburg’s favorite jackdaw. He never succeeded; after its own fashion the bird always joined in enthusiastically, and the better it got to know Martin during the sittings, the better it was at taking the lead. It took Taschotschek only a few minutes to work out how to open the tin box. With almost equal speed Martin grasped what charcoal meant, a human hand clutching something shiny black—enough to infuriate any jackdaw. A few drops of blood, a ripped-up piece of paper.

  No, Martin would have had to draw Taschotschek from memory, and perhaps he actually did so in later years. It’s just that it wouldn’t necessarily occur to anyone that a line curving across a paper tablecloth was an image of a jackdaw, a jackdaw called Taschotschek capable of driving Martin Spengler mad for months on end when he was a young artist in Dresden.

  So, strictly speaking, it wasn’t Knut or me that Kaltenburg and Martin had to thank for their friendship, but a bird. Taschotschek’s willfulness. Taschotschek’s curiosity. At some point the drawing sessions became just a welcome chance for a chat in the presence of the jackdaw.

  In Archetypes of Fear there is a fairly long passage, which Frau Fischer clearly recollected too: Kaltenburg is speculating about the relationship between fear and hallucination. About the human capacity to escape out of hopeless situations into another world. “If I understand him correctly, it’s possible not only to alleviate feelings of fear and hopelessness, but to shut them out altogether by overlaying them with fantasy images,” she recollected, and, “Wasn’t it rumored that Kaltenburg was making use of findings by American military psychologists from the Vietnam War?”

  Ludwig Kaltenburg as a renegade whose reward was access to secret experiments for use in his own studies—that sounded quite ludicrous even at the time. People simply didn’t want to acknowledge where he acquired most of his observational material: here.

  One evening I had finished checking the aviaries and was going to say goodnight to the professor when I heard him talking to Martin in a low voice in the study, as if not to wake the animals that had retired for the night. Kaltenburg seemed surprised when I appeared in the doorway, I hesitated, he hesitated, I was about to retreat, but then he beckoned me into the room. On the table: Taschotschek, pattering about indecisively on a sheet of unmarked white paper. Knut was sitting on a stool, Martin on the couch.

  “So there I was, lying trapped under the wreckage of our plane after we had taken a hit in the northern Crimea and lost control of the machine.”

  Martin glanced across at me and moved over a little to make room for me. Kaltenburg had drawn up his cocktail-bar chair. I was in the picture straightaway.

  “I didn’t know that my copilot had been killed, that his remains lay scattered in the snow, flesh, bones, skin, and cloth. I wasn’t feeling any pain, I had no idea who or where I was, I wasn’t conscious of the frozen ground.”

  The bird regarded each of us in turn. Ruffled its feathers. Drew its third eyelid across its eyeball. Turned away.

  “I regained consciousness for a moment. As if someone had woken me up. And in fact I wasn’t alone, my skull, my limbs, my joints—somebody was checking my bones, looking for fractures, abrasions, flesh wounds. My mind was brought to bear on individual parts, my knee, my shoulder. But I wasn’t aware of anyone touching me. Then I drifted back into darkness.”

  A scratching, a gentle clattering sound, Martin had let Taschotschek have his empty tin box. The lid was opened, closed, opened, the box pulled from one end of the table to the other. Apparently the jackdaw regarded it as Martin’s job to keep it amused by hiding interesting objects such as colored pencils or erasers.

  “The next time I came around, I knew these were the eyes of Tatars. As though the Tatars had not simply observed the crash site timidly from afar but had examined me at close quarters, then run their hands over my body, then taken me along with them. I could smell it, smell their skin, this indescribably comforting aroma, with a slight trace of fish oil.”

  “And thi
s was all just in your imagination?”

  Professor Kaltenburg ignored the clatter now coming from the hallway; Taschotschek had dragged the tin box outside and was pecking at the hinges.

  “It must all have been in my mind. I only lay there for a few hours, then I was picked up by a search party. Can you imagine, my comrade Hans was almost pulverized. I think about it sometimes when I’m grinding earth colors in the mortar, when I’m mixing pigment. Doesn’t man consist of carbon too when the fluids have evaporated? It doesn’t take long to render down that little bit of protein. Pulverized, fragmented into the tiniest particles. Nothing left.”

  The jackdaw was now on the couch between us, looking up at me, eyeing Martin, and since nobody was paying it any attention, it plucked an old bus ticket out of his trouser pocket.

  “There’s a photo of me standing in full uniform in front of our wrecked plane. That time, that moment in time, is lost to me. It was somewhere near Freifeld, in that area. That much I can remember. But I’ve got no recollection at all of being photographed. If they had indeed pulled me out unconscious and half dead from the wreckage, I could hardly have stood up to pose for a photograph. So the picture must have been taken later. I had been patched up somehow, they put me in the jeep and drove me back to the crash site. But why? There were more important things. Getting back to health. The next sortie. Saving your own life. Maybe I insisted on it.”

  “You wanted a picture to take home with you. Wanted it to send to your parents.”

  “Probably, yes. But then my injuries can’t have been as bad as I remember: double fracture of the skull base, practically no skin left on my body, no hair. Everything full of splinters, hardly any nose left.”

  Martin stumbled over his words, went quiet, you could only hear his lips moving. At that moment Kaltenburg, Knut, and I were nothing but shadowy Tatars. The professor poured tea for us. Taschotschek hopped onto my lap.

  “Herr Spengler, or may I say Martin?” Kaltenburg hovered with teapot and teacup. “I should tell you that in principle I don’t like talking about the phenomena they call self-healing powers. Particularly where human beings are concerned, people often make it too easy for themselves. All the same, I’ve seen some unbelievable things in that field.”

  “But that photograph—if you take a good look at it: a scab-covered cut at most, my eyebrows perhaps. And I must have been thoroughly concussed, of course. Yet Hans had ceased to exist. What they could find of him was buried in the nearest village cemetery.”

  “No doubt.” Kaltenburg spoke as if he had already said too much.

  “No doubt”: any deeper insight into his own experience of illness and hallucination might have been destabilizing for the young man, with his Tatar memories.

  In the hallway Knut almost trod on the tin box. The lid was missing, I could see a pastry fork. By the hall stand the professor remarked, “Really interesting are the hallucinatory states that occur when self-healing powers are activated. There’s still practically no research into that. At any rate, I’ve never come across any convincing answers.”

  He accompanied us to the front door, quickly scanned the Institute grounds to left and right, nodded goodbye, and shut the door as we reached the garden gate. Knut set off for his garage. As Martin and I were walking down the hill, I looked back frequently—the dim light of a desk lamp filled the upstairs window that I knew so well, until Kaltenburg’s villa was out of sight.

  A few days later the professor took me aside; he was fascinated in equal measure by Martin and by his own shrewdness, as though surprised to discover new capabilities in himself at his age. Almost in a whisper, he told me, “I knew it would provoke a reaction in him sooner or later,” without clarifying whether the “it” in question was Martin’s acquaintance with Taschotschek or the long Stalin monologue. And Martin was to say to Klara at one point, “It’s possible that it was some such figure as Kaltenburg who spoon-fed me soup. I was always in and out of field hospitals, though it was before I was taken prisoner, and maybe Professor Kaltenburg wasn’t unique. Spoon-feeding soup, extraordinary. But I couldn’t swear it didn’t happen to me.”

  Time and again the two of them together—in the garden, in the kitchen, on country walks—analyzed Martin’s experience of crashing in the Crimea. Went over the tragic loss of his copilot, the Tatar eyes, the smell of fish oil, coming around in what must have been a tent, since Martin found an expanse of rough material stretched above his head. He had spent hours staring at the fabric in the dim light, not knowing where he was, who had brought him there, yet feeling not at all unsafe.

  Martin became more and more absorbed by this image, soon it hardly mattered to him that his spells in field hospitals occurred long after the professor was taken prisoner in Russia, and perhaps it was Kaltenburg’s story that inspired Martin to give that early drawing of his, in which I thought I recognized my nanny, the title “Russian Nurse.” The spoon-feeding, Kaltenburg’s fit of rage by an amputee’s bedside, Comrade Stalin’s coal-black stare—when Martin’s public performances in the sixties and seventies unnerved the public with their soft violence, I invariably recognized elements in them that reminded me of that evening. I think on one occasion he even incorporated the note tucked away in somebody’s cheek.

  8

  A SUNDAY IN DECEMBER. Ludwig Kaltenburg stood by the window in the winter light, we were in the zoological museum, in the workshop of the Ornithological Collection. It was my first visit to the building. I no longer saw the professor very often by himself.

  I couldn’t make out whether Kaltenburg was looking me in the eye or scrutinizing the half-finished bird skin lying on the table in front of me. He betrayed no sign of impatience, standing with arms folded, nodding.

  “Still looks a bit swollen.” Kaltenburg pinched the sparrow carefully. “But much better than your first effort this morning. There’s a world of difference.”

  I pulled the cotton wadding out of the skin again, rolling it between my palms.

  “But you don’t want to make it too hard either.”

  I started tweaking with the tweezers a clump at the front, then another, then one a bit higher, toward the tail. A bright wad, meant to reproduce the shape of a bird’s body. Looking at my handiwork, I realized that I no longer even knew how big the sparrow was before we removed its skin.

  “You won’t get anywhere that way, you’d better use some new wadding.”

  And then promptly: “Stop, not so much. You’ve got to decide in advance how much you need.”

  A few minutes later: “Perhaps you could sew it up now. Have you got the skull in? Just start sewing, then we’ll see what sort of customer emerges. And as I said, don’t make the seam too tight, otherwise the bird will burst open again.”

  I didn’t want to know how many sparrows Kaltenburg had brought along for me. “Even if you never learn to enjoy skinning, you’ve got to be able to do it in your sleep. You must develop skill and an accurate eye, otherwise you’re lost.”

  It’s not unlikely that he had me in for “extra coaching” because he found it embarrassing to talk about a student as a future acolyte when that student couldn’t even produce a well-formed sparrow skin. I was on my second attempt when Kaltenburg—by the window, arms folded—made a mistake. That is to say, he winced, and I knew he wished he hadn’t spoken.

  “And they’ve gone on the hunt in the Great Garden, in this weather.”

  “Who has?”

  “Our comrades from the Society for Sports and Technology.” Kaltenburg’s voice as he said “our comrades.”

  “And why on the hunt?”

  “Haven’t you heard? The Great Garden is closed to the public, the SST is shooting animals—threat of rabies.”

  “Foxes?”

  “Stray dogs, they said, cats, wild rabbits.”

  “In fact, everything in their sights?”

  “Magpies, crows, jays can all transmit rabies, of course.”

  “A regular slaughter?”

  Kalt
enburg came across to the table, leaning over as if to scrutinize my face.

  “I’m afraid so, yes.”

  I laid aside the half-skinned sparrow body. How could Professor Kaltenburg summon me on a Sunday to the zoological museum to calmly teach me the proper way to prepare a bird skin while at the same time in the Great Garden an army of lunatics was engaged in disguised target practice? There was no doubt that their victims would also include birds from Kaltenburg’s household, hand-reared creatures that frequented the Great Garden during daylight hours. As they did every morning, they had taken off all unsuspecting from Loschwitz to fly across the Elbe, while Kaltenburg was shaving, dressing, drinking his tea. Perhaps he had watched a flock of them circling one last time outside the window before the birds gradually disappeared down the valley, shapes, black dots mixed with white, isolated snowflakes, then becoming nothing more than a memory of movement in the air. Kaltenburg knew about the impending disaster, he should have used his influence, taken some action.

  Leaning on the table, he looked at me. “Do you know what happened at the beginning of the century when they started ringing birds at the Rossitten observation post, fully believing it would help protect them?”

  I wasn’t in the mood for guessing games. I didn’t even bother to shake my head. To take my mind off what I’d just heard, I picked up the scalpel and went on loosening more of the sparrow’s skin, as far as the neck, prior to pulling it away over the body. As more and more of the inside of the skin appeared, I sprinkled it repeatedly with the mixture of potato flour and plaster Kaltenburg provided that morning.