by Marcel Beyer
“People went out shooting birds. They brought down massive numbers in the hope of bagging one from Rossitten.”
Carefully I bared the skull, pushing back the skin of the neck and slowly easing it over the cap of the skull. The skin had to be pulled over both rami of the lower jaw at once, and I had to make sure I didn’t sever the ear sacs. You could draw them out of the auditory canal with your fingers. No tugging at this point, it would be so easy to tear the skin. One squeeze of my clumsy thumbs could crush the skull to bits. I had to keep in mind the enormous power in my fingers when they enclosed a skull.
“How do you think I lose most animals? People are as keen on trophy hunting nowadays as they were then, and everybody has plenty of ringed birds by now. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know whether it’s naiveté or ill will. Their pride when they take people into their trophy room, especially if anybody asks them, Is that mount a Kaltenburg?”
The professor paced back and forth, pausing in front of a showcase displaying objects from all over the world—picture postcards, a wooden case with inlay work: a pattern of fish or something abstract. The caiman standing upright with a hat and cane, holding a small champagne glass.
I picked up the blade again and cut through the transparent skin around the eyes until the eyelids were separated from the dark eyeballs. Now for the brain. I made an incision diagonally toward the base of the skull, noting that the neck and tongue were released by the same cut. I lifted the brain out carefully, the eyeballs, taking trouble not to get any secretions or blood on the dead sparrow’s feathers. I sprinkled borax over the head and packed the eye cavities tightly with wadding.
Professor Kaltenburg stood by the periodical shelves, randomly pulling out one issue after another and leafing through them. Perhaps he was looking for his own name. I turned the head and neck skin back again with my index fingers, took the sparrow by the beak, and shook the neck feathers back into place. Kaltenburg was restless.
“Do you remember a man coming to the door and telling me he had run over one of my jackdaws? Well, the story simply didn’t add up at all. Turns up on an old bike talking about his car. He probably didn’t even have a driving license, let alone a car. Didn’t it ever strike you as odd? And how would a jackdaw finish up under his wheels? That alone might have set you thinking. I tell you, he got rattled on the way home and lost his nerve.”
I introduced the closed tweezers into the eye cavity and coaxed the head feathers back into place. Then the skin was painted with the toxic solution.
“They suddenly turn all humble and come crawling to me, holding out their blood-soaked bags. They’re looking for punishment, they want me to bawl them out. But I won’t give them the satisfaction, I thank them politely and let them go on their way. I could see at a glance, that dead jackdaw was full of lead shot.”
“Can’t these people be held to account?”
“Do you want me to shout it from the rooftops? Even the slowest would get the idea. And then we’d have a new popular sport, shooting Kaltenburg’s birds. The Institute would be closed within a month.”
“You’ve never told me about all this.”
“Naturally I don’t tell you everything. I don’t want you losing your confidence on account of such things.”
So much for the skinning. Now the bird had to be totally reconstructed. Kaltenburg left me working alone for a while, went wandering off through the rooms. When he came back, he seemed distracted: “If we ever go to Vienna together, remind me to show you the two sea eagles in their eerie that Crown Prince Rudolf shot nine days before he committed suicide in Mayerling.”
While Kaltenburg was telling me about Vienna, I grew calmer with every hand movement.
“And then if you go to the Natural History Museum in Bucharest sometime, you’ll be amazed. The dioramas alone: in the low lighting you have to look hard for the animals between the grasses and bushes.”
On his first visit there, standing in front of the display cases on the upper floor, Kaltenburg had almost burst into tears, “You know what that means with me”: the exuberant multiplicity of species, subspecies, varieties, although no one—neither a curator nor a bird—was using the display to show off. Despite the great wealth of information, a kind of restraint prevailed, you could almost say tact, which immediately told visitors that here they had pulled off the trick of preserving respect for nature while at the same time offering every possible detail an inquiring wildlife enthusiast could desire about birds, these shy creatures.
“I remember two birds in particular, you’ve guessed it, a couple of jackdaws, eastern jackdaws, male and female, the label said they had been collected not long before my visit in April 1950 by some enthusiastic soldiers on army land in Bucharest.”
Kaltenburg in front of the periodicals, completely lost in thought.
“Incidentally, don’t forget to take a quick look at the wall on the landing before you rush upstairs: there’s a niche there—you might say a display case—with two urns containing the ashes of the long-serving director of the museum—a student of Haeckel’s—Grigore Antipa, and his wife.”
The less fat a skin contains, the easier it is to preserve. By the afternoon I had managed to produce a sparrow skin that I was satisfied with. Kaltenburg was too.
“I said you could do it.”
Outside, it was rapidly getting dark. Conscientiously I wrote out the label, naming Kaltenburg as the collector, Funk as the taxidermist. The first bird skin I had contributed to the collection.
“They must be just about finished by now.”
Ludwig Kaltenburg looked at me inquiringly.
“In the Great Garden, I mean.”
It was no longer on his mind. “Are you still talking about the amateur marksmen?” And no, the hunt was due to last only until eleven that morning. “They’ll have gathered in their spoils ages ago. Imagine how much work will be coming the way of our curators and taxidermists when the SST comrades start logging in what they’ve bagged.”
9
IF THE INTERPRETER HADN’T asked me about the year the Ornithological Collection episode took place, I would never have realized that—although I can remember every word, Kaltenburg’s oddly changeable tone, the sparrow I skinned, and the gloom of a December day—I couldn’t remember whether it was 1955, or a year later, or 1957. It felt as though I had spent a day with Kaltenburg in a secluded room out of time. I have no date to attach to my feeling of helplessness to influence external events, let alone put a stop to the hunt in the Great Garden, for example by wandering all unsuspecting into the park for a stroll and thus forcing the shooting party to suspend their activities for a while at least.
It’s possible that I would have been arrested for disturbing the peace and interrogated, a refractory young man who, despite repeated warnings, had gained access to a prohibited area; it’s also possible that in the case of such a transgression I would have been threatened with consequences, declared insane, expelled from the university because I had insulted upright members of the Society for Sport and Technology. Perhaps the professor had wanted to protect me. Or he knew me better than I knew myself and thought it would be easier for me to bear my own impotence away from the scene than standing at the edge of the Great Garden, counting the shots, seeing the birds fall out of the trees in front of me, avoiding the eyes of the law enforcers.
A Sunday in December: to establish the exact date, all I would have had to do was consult our skin collection. Among countless specimens I would find a young male sparrow, with a delicate bluish sheen to its gray head and distinctly, almost cosmetically rimmed walnut-brown cheeks, whose label bore the professor’s name as well as mine. Or I might look among the corvids to identify birds shot that morning in the Great Garden. Then I would be able to put a date to Kaltenburg’s exclamation “I don’t want you losing confidence,” this anxious thought, expressed in an offhand sentence, which I couldn’t relate to anything in particular, and which, it seems to me, corresponds to the helplessness I fe
lt that day. Ludwig Kaltenburg and I, spending a day out of time in the ornithology room, both depressed, both trying to look forward to the days, weeks, years that lay ahead of us.
I can at least say with some certainty, without further research, that our time together among the dead birds fell within the period when all the talk was about the return of the Dresden art treasures from secret Soviet collections. Amazed, almost stunned, and a little suspicious, we stood in front of the paintings in the Zwinger Gallery, expecting someone to speak up under cover of the dense mass of visitors and expose the exhibition as a nonevent, a collection of more or less skilled copies. In fact, among the circle of those to whom I talked about things that were not for the ears of strangers, it was Ludwig Kaltenburg who, without taking the precaution of sounding out art historians who knew something about the subject, was the only one not to harbor any doubt whatsoever about the authenticity of these newly liberated Rembrandts, Vermeers, and Raphaels. The professor firmly believed in the sincerity of the new, transformed Soviet Union, and he wouldn’t have been Ludwig Kaltenburg if he had been worried simply by finding he stood alone in his opinion.
The professor was so inspired by the return of the art treasures that he sketched an outrageous vision of the future: what if the gallery in the Zwinger Palace was only the beginning? In the light of this unprecedented event, how big a step would it really be to follow through eventually with the missing contents of other collections? These were the reflections Kaltenburg mulled over on his solitary nocturnal walks through Oberloschwitz with Anastasia, who stayed close to her master. The black sky over Dresden, the dull pavement beneath Kaltenburg’s feet—perhaps one reason the professor knocked at Knut’s door on his way home was that he was afraid of losing himself in his wishful thinking.
The two of them talked, with Anastasia lying by the stove, about the holdings of the Dresden Zoological Collections missing since summer 1945, about the famous Steller’s sea cow and the great auk. Since being transported to the Soviet Union, they seemed to have been erased from memory, very few people ever mentioned them anymore. The name “great auk” could only be whispered, as if one were referring to someone banished and struck from the population register. As if it were not a case of a mounted specimen stored in a secret depository in Moscow, Leningrad, or Kiev, but a living giant bird languishing, despite all rumors to the contrary, in Vorkuta.
So Knut Sieverding knew long before I did where Kaltenburg’s hopes were tending in those days, what preoccupied him, and I can no longer say whether it was from Knut or from the professor that I first heard what was going on in his mind when he broke off from work and stared into space: he wasn’t dwelling on the activities of a woodpecker’s brood in its hollow, or the bloody battle between a ring-necked dove and a turtledove that he had carelessly placed in the same cage; his gaze was plumbing the depths of a secret depository where two custodians were arguing about whether or not to bring the meteorite from the Dresden collection out into the light of day.
“Was it a complete fantasy to hope these things would be returned, then?” asked Katharina Fischer as we walked toward Oberwachwitz, taking a path that Kaltenburg had often used with Anastasia.
Soon we would see, as the professor would have done, a little stand of pines, we would hear that high-pitched, even rush of wind in the trees, the wind that seems to be sweeping through a vast expanse of landscape wherever a few pines cluster together, and then the buildings of the former Soviet field hospital would appear between the treetops. As far as I recall, this is where, soon after his arrival and before the medical facility was transferred to the Garrisoned People’s Police, Kaltenburg had installed a huge aquarium.
There was indeed a glimmer of hope. And it’s possible that Ludwig Kaltenburg had advance knowledge of developments behind the scenes that the rest of us would have thought impossible. Certainly in those days people thought he was often dropping in on the Russian garrison, that he was on familiar terms with high-ranking Soviet officers.
“Dropping in on the garrison? Don’t make me laugh,” was his irritated reply when he heard of these suspicions. “It just shows you the limited mentality of people who’ve got nothing better to do than try and pin something on you.”
I can remember that the professor was standing in felt boots in the meadow behind the house, Knut next to him holding a camera.
“In and out of the garrison—and then I suppose I come sneaking out of the grocery store with pelmeni dumplings for my fish concealed under my overcoat? These people’s imaginations are as limited as their lives.”
It seemed to me that the pair of them exchanged a conspiratorial glance. We walked slowly down the narrow path by the house, Kaltenburg shuffling along beside us—it was obviously the first time he’d worn the boots—then he stopped, let the ducks examine the thick gray felt, and turned to me with an expectant air: “You may not believe it, but I only got back from Leningrad last night.”
Knut showed no surprise. I had no idea what the professor was driving at. Knut touched his sleeve, gently silencing him. “Perhaps we should go for a little spin?”
We ran into Krause in the driveway. Saturday morning, of course; Kaltenburg had forgotten. The chauffeur was cleaning the limousine as he did every Saturday, running the sponge over roof and windscreen, mudguards and hood, finishing by buffing up the chrome and the hubcaps, and not even allowing the jackdaws to disturb him as they inspected with their beaks every single screw redeemed from road grime and oil. As we passed him he didn’t seem to hear us, lost in his own world.
“Sometimes I feel really sorry for Herr Krause, with all the stories I tell him,” observed Kaltenburg as we rolled out into the road in his not quite so immaculately clean Opel. “When I think of him agonizing at night over his reports, not knowing what to write.”
He smiled, slipping his boot off the clutch, I think he was still in shock because he had nearly blurted out a secret in the presence of his chauffeur.
“Does Krause force himself to stick to the truth and report the liqueur chocolates that—as I told him—I kept on secretly feeding to an unknown squirrel, or does he permit himself the slight liberty of substituting the more plausible-sounding nut pralines? Whatever the poor devil opts for, he’s bound to sweat over it, and he loses sleep because he runs the risk of making himself ridiculous to his readers every time he reports. But let’s talk about more important matters—Leningrad.”
Kaltenburg took his hand off the gearstick and leaned back. “In the plane yesterday, I was so agitated, I just couldn’t sit still. When we landed I had to keep telling myself this was nothing special, just a normal official trip. Krause spotted me straightaway in the arrivals hall, and on the long trip back from Schönefeld to Dresden he tried to pump me a bit, just as I’d expected. It took all my strength to maintain a neutral expression as he kept on looking in the rear mirror.”
Now I was the one trying to catch Kaltenburg’s eye in the rear mirror. “What do you say, Herr Sieverding? Was I right?” he asked his front-seat passenger, with a nod to me at the same time. “We’re going to bring the missing treasures back to Dresden.”
“It won’t do to get our hopes up too high.” Knut answered as though caught up in preparations for a film project against the advice of the entire world of wildlife experts. “We’ll have to proceed very cautiously.”
“Of course we’re just carefully feeling our way at the moment, but I think our talks in Leningrad were a good first step,” countered the professor. “We’ve got a foot in the door, perhaps we can bring it off—even if it takes a while.”
This was where his command of Russian came in useful, his love of all things Russian, prone to attract suspicion as much as amusement. Kaltenburg had a plan: he could talk day in and day out, without a single reference to the collection, about the breathtaking landscape, the vast distances, he could go on about the fabulous treatment he had received as a POW. He would also, for example, expatiate on the manuscript he had produced in the POW
camp near Moscow, which he had been allowed to take home with him unexamined, because a magnanimous officer had believed Kaltenburg’s assurance that it contained nothing political, only observations of animals. There was no stopping Ludwig Kaltenburg as he depicted the forthcoming negotiations and saw himself coming back from Leningrad with a great auk tucked under his arm: “I’ve been offered the chair of the secret zoological commission. That is to say, I’ll be taking it on when the individual commissions are set up.”
I think we drove as far as Chemnitz and back on the autobahn that afternoon. Knut had now become far more than the experimental filmmaker who helped Kaltenburg gain insights into previously unknown areas of animal life, more than just a close friend of Martin Spengler’s who had brought the artist to Loschwitz and thereby provided the professor with early material for his Archetypes of Fear. During this trip it dawned on me: Knut Sieverding had now become Ludwig Kaltenburg’s closest adviser.
“You may be able to enter fearlessly into these negotiations, Professor, but you mustn’t let that make you think others are equally fearless, otherwise you might be in for a great disappointment.” Knut took a skeptical view of “magnanimous officers,” he had no vision of a cozily crackling open fire and an evening spent exchanging reminiscences of life as a POW. “They may well listen patiently while you rhapsodize about the Russian landscape, but the longer you go on extolling the virtues of bright birchwood forests, the clearer it will be to you that you’re banging your head against a brick wall.”
Perhaps Knut was the only realist among us. His voice carried weight, he could even persuade Ludwig Kaltenburg to modify his entrenched views. And so, under instruction from Knut, the professor adjusted to the prospect of bare, windowless rooms at the end of long corridors, hours of waiting until a door finally opens and a museum assistant emerges, silent, diffident, to unwrap a valuable display on the table before the professor. No trace of enthusiasm, no trace of collegial affability—and it was precisely this that Kaltenburg had to overcome, he must not take it personally. “It’s better to expect fear.”