Kaltenburg

by Marcel Beyer

  “Can you hear me?”

  “Sorry?”

  “I’m going to prove it to them, colleague Matzke and his henchmen, give them cast-iron proof.”

  Kaltenburg had lied. In his CV he had reduced his stay in Posen to a few months by claiming that in the summer of 1942 he was already a prisoner of war in Russia. But it wasn’t until the autumn or early winter of that year that my mother and I ran into him while out buying gloves in town. “I can give you a cast-iron guarantee”—the formulation suddenly seemed familiar to me, like a half-remembered sentence from childhood that you heard through an open door without being able to make sense of it. I lost concentration for a moment, accidentally made a noise, the tame starling was rustling in the rubber tree, I hadn’t understood the question, my father was speaking too quietly. In the background, Kaltenburg was working himself up into a fury—“Party, Party, I was never a Party man”—I didn’t need a Matzke to tell me that the professor was lying. “Didn’t share their worldview,” I heard him clamoring, my father had asked him the same question, to which we were now awaiting an answer. I heard “ugly campaign” and grasped that Kaltenburg had used the same words at that time to deny his Party membership, just as his CV was now suppressing information about our shared time in Posen, as though I were the one who was lying whenever I recalled childhood memories, as though I were just making things up.

  I couldn’t raise it with him. He would have given me some convoluted explanation, about how Matzke was forcing him to make some awful moves in his public life just at the moment, we would have to wait for things to quiet down, and no, of course he hadn’t forgotten our earlier meetings, or his acquaintance with my highly esteemed and respected parents. I didn’t want to ask Kaltenburg. But he must have noticed that his phone tirades were falling on thin air, and suddenly he was quite crestfallen.

  “And I was stupid enough to help this man.”

  “So you were involved in the rise of Matzke after all.”

  “Berlin? I had nothing to do with that. Earlier, I mean, much earlier. When he was collecting birds under the most adverse conditions.”

  “You knew Eberhard Matzke before you came to Leipzig?”

  “Oh, yes. That is, I may not have met him personally. But I gave him my support. We knew each other by name. Nineteen forty-two, it must have been.”

  “He was in the army then—did you make sure he could continue his ornithological studies? Like Knut Sieverding in Crete?”

  “Pretty much. No. Worse. Much worse. Matzke was in the camps. A terrible time. The awful nervous strain. He complained, as you can imagine.”

  “He appealed to you?”

  “Not then. Initially he thought he could sort things out for himself, in fact he seriously believed they would grant him an interview with the commandant. Amazing what people’s minds can dream up when they’re stuck in a hopeless situation. Of course, nothing came of his appointment with the commandant. But Matzke was tenacious. Who knows whether he patiently devised a different tactic or whether he bribed the right person at the right time, whether he went on bended knee to beg or whether eventually they just saw him as a weirdo—but at some point he received a special permit, complete with name, date, official stamp, everything in order, which must have looked odd when the text said something like ‘This is to confirm that Eberhard Matzke may observe birds.’”

  “But people always say that birds avoided the camps, there was no bird life in the camps.”

  “Quite right. The smoke. They couldn’t stand the smoke. So he had to be able to get out of the camp. He actually got permission to leave the camp for hours at a time. The guards at the gate soon got to know the bird-watcher, they exchanged greetings, perhaps even a few words when they were checking on what Matzke had shot that day.”

  “He went out with a gun?”

  “Of course he did. Was he supposed to catch the birds with his hands?”

  “Did he have to pass them on to the kitchen?”

  “I don’t know. But he did prepare the most interesting specimens.”

  “And what happened to those?”

  “As far as I recall, he once indicated that he’d managed to preserve everything he collected until the fall of 1942. Perhaps he brought the whole collection back with him to Leipzig at the end of the war.”

  “So he stopped collecting in the fall of 1942?”

  “Stopped? Matzke? No, he’s an ornithologist. He was posted.”

  “Posted?”

  “What a struggle that was. We ornithologists on the outside wrote pleading letters, drew up petitions, racked our brains, tried everything we could—I spent sleepless nights thinking of this young man, frightened he would go crazy. But our efforts paid off in the end. Matzke was sent to some dump of a place on the Baltic.”

  “A dump? But there was a camp there?”

  “Of course not. That was the point. His nerves were shattered when he left the camp guards. He needed to gain some distance. Matzke spent the rest of the war guarding a secret installation on the coast. In other words, he was allowed to walk up and down the beach, ample opportunity for him to observe his beloved waders. Are you still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Since you asked about the birds—I’m wondering now whether Matzke lost track of them in all the confusion at the end of the war. Or did he donate them to Vienna? No, sorry, I’m getting mixed up there, he described his night herons and gray-headed woodpeckers in the newsletter of the Vienna Natural History Museum. But listen, are you sure the skins aren’t at your place? I seem to remember he handed them over to the Dresden collection, as a noble gesture because they had lost their holdings in the war. Why don’t you have a look? You know, night herons and gray-headed woodpeckers above all, take a look at their labels.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Kaltenburg reflected.

  “Sooner or later they’ll be on to Matzke.”

  And, after another pause: “I think it’s getting light outside. A red stripe on the horizon.”

  “At four in the morning? Not in London.”

  “But that’s what it feels like. If you hang on a minute, I’ll go to the window and check.”

  “You’d do better to lie down for a bit. Try to sleep. It’s going to be a long day.”

  And, like an echo on the line: “A long day.”

  Then he said, “There are the gulls.”

  “The Thames gulls circle all night?”

  “They’re perched on the windowsill outside, that’s where they sleep.”

  After these last exchanges we hung up. I did actually stay in the room long enough to see the first glimpse of light outside the window. In another hour the sky over London will slowly take on color too, I thought; Ludwig Kaltenburg will get up, will go over his crowded list of appointments, will see in his mind’s eye the names and faces he’ll meet in the course of the morning. Next to me on the table the telephone gradually emerged from the darkness, a gray box on a diffuse gray background. It was as though I had experienced the very last time a voice would be heard through that receiver.

  While a flock of geese took off very low above the gravel shoreline, I told Katharina Fischer in conclusion that I never have looked for Matzke’s bird skins, and when the collection moved to Klotzsche I avoided looking too closely at our gray-headed woodpeckers and night herons.

  In the distance we heard a train, on the other side of the Elbe a guard dog barked, the bell of St. Mary’s-by-the-Water was ringing out from Hosterwitz, it was ten o’clock, behind the Elbe Idyll we saw the empty bus disappearing into the deep-green avenue. It was getting cool, and damp, the air was beginning to smell of grass.

  VI

  1

  LATER, WHENEVER WE were all together and thinking back to the fifties, which—since those were our formative years—we increasingly did as we got older, Klara sat quietly, not usually her style. When reminiscences were being exchanged, when we were helping each other out with names, dates, places, Klara fell silent. As we
laughed, argued, interrupted each other, I could tell it was upsetting Klara, although nobody else noticed. She hardly seemed to be paying attention, she looked distant while all the others were listening, each outdoing the last with ever more precise details or more audacious stories; Klara held back, as if to stay out of some uncomfortable business.

  And that was in spite of the fact that in our circles there was no danger that an evening might be spent conjuring up all the good old East German products, such as Leopek cream for sting relief, or the Fleischfrost range, or films like Mazurka of Love. Nobody talked about Savings Weeks or brought up early GDR slogans like “By the efforts of our hands” or worked in references to horses as “oat-motors”—accompanied by a silly wink—in connection with the rubble-clearing after the war. Klara was under no obligation to listen to “the Dresden reconstruction lion laughing,” let alone people tossing “The enemy is here among us” at her. All the same, she couldn’t stand that sort of evening.

  On one occasion, at a party in the house of some slight acquaintances, Klara simply retreated into the corridor for half an hour—the height of bad manners, in her own eyes—in order to escape from a conversation about the seventeenth of June 1953. With the best will in the world, she said later, she simply couldn’t bring herself to go back into the room until the last guest had offloaded his memories of that date. She had stood the whole time within earshot, a few steps away from the door, slightly bemused, with her back to a bookcase, feeling a physical reluctance to breathe the memory-laden air in the drawing room.

  Somebody recounted how he was just leaving the bakery on the Wasaplatz when he ran into a column of demonstrators coming from Niedersedlitz and stayed with them all the way to the city center, still clutching his bag of bread rolls; another claimed to have marched alongside the strike leader, Grothaus, while a third had memorized a speech to the strikers and recited whole passages from it. As one picture after another emerged, the event became more distinct in the minds of the participants, finally they could all remember meeting in the crowded Postplatz at midday. A moment of silence followed as each of them mentally reviewed the events, and Klara reappeared in the doorway. Nobody had noticed her leaving the room, nobody had missed her.

  On the way home—the gathering had broken up soon afterward—I couldn’t coax much more out of Klara than that she simply couldn’t stand these stories, the poses the narrators struck, as if their memories could help them get a grip, whereas in reality, looking back could only be profoundly disturbing for us, make our present life fall apart.

  “We’ve all got our nightmares, I don’t need to be told that,” she declared, as if to close the subject, and “We all made mistakes, every one of us, and I certainly don’t exclude myself.”

  As soon as it was evident that the evening was going to descend into reminiscing, Klara would find some pretext for leaving without embarrassing her hosts: exhaustion after a full day, the long trip home, a cold coming on. If she felt too weak to come up with a suitable excuse, she signaled to me that we ought to be going, and I thought of something, citing an excursion, the need to be up before dawn for bird-watching; that was always an unobtrusive way to extract ourselves from the occasion.

  If there was no way out, if Klara was asked point-blank what events she particularly associated with the fifties, she categorically insisted that she couldn’t remember anything about that time except that the complete German translation of Proust had appeared. She sounded tired when she said it, not a trace of her pert manner, not a spark of provocation: “Just the Proust, nothing else.”

  Nonetheless, the first time she said it she surprised me as much as the others in the group: despite the lack of sparkle in her eyes, I couldn’t tell whether she was joking. A dry, wicked, dark joke, since I knew what memories were associated with the fifties for Klara, for Klara and me.

  If anyone failed to grasp that the conversation was repugnant to her, Klara would describe to them in detail how the volumes with their sand-colored covers had reached her hands one by one. This one she had acquired on a visit to West Berlin, that one was lying on the table in the morning on her birthday, two others had emerged from a parcel Klara had thought contained tinned sausages. “The Proust,” that was her memory of the fifties, Klara only ever talked about “the Proust,” for her there was no Captive, no Fugitive, and no Time Regained.

  In case the company was not satisfied with this, she went so far as to state that above all it was the famous scene where the narrator washes his hands that had driven her on to read all of Proust, in fact it was the first detailed hand-washing scene in the novel that had initially given her access to this epoch-making work. The lukewarm water in the enamel bowl, whose temperature is checked once more by the grandmother—or is it the maid?—before the narrator is permitted to dip his delicate, waxlike fingers into it, the fragrance of the soap, the lather, the right hand embracing the left, and all the while the boy’s long, wondering look out of the window, before he’s called to the table.

  The conversation was moving toward the period following Stalin’s death, the secret speech, on to the doctors’ plot, back to Slánský, and Klara recoiled, it wouldn’t be long before they were looking to her to contribute a remark. She could feel their eyes resting on her, felt the challenge to initiate a diversionary maneuver, listened carefully until she found a key word, the right key word—afterward, nobody could have said how she managed to change the subject so elegantly.

  After the first great hand-washing scene, Klara said, she had waited expectantly for any little scene featuring this everyday occurrence, however slight the reference, subordinate clauses, minor characters, one of those innumerable soirées, somebody leaving the company briefly to wash their hands—perhaps the whole secret of Proust lay in such fleeting moments, which the reader had to fill out for himself if he wanted to absorb them. Why, for example, Klara asked, does the painter, receiving an unexpected visit from the narrator, clean his hands with spit rather than turpentine before greeting his guest?

  And what lies behind that scene where, after an evening in company, Swann leads Odette out to his coach to take a nocturnal drive through Paris—why is the coachman not on the spot at this moment, why don’t we see him dutifully jumping down from his box to open the carriage door as soon as Swann and Odette appear in the street? There he is popping up behind the horses, embarrassed, muttering, his master doesn’t even deign to glance at him, so the coachman redoubles his efforts to look keen. But Odette and Swann have eyes only for each other, the coachman keeps his hands hidden behind his back, once the pair have got in he acts as though he’s reluctant to touch the door handle, and we, the readers, are the only ones to notice that in this scene Swann’s coachman—for whatever reason—isn’t wearing gloves when he shuts the carriage door from the outside. What was it that he put forward by way of excuse, we ask ourselves, wasn’t it something about “opportunity to wash,” didn’t he say “quickly” and “unfortunately” and “unsuccessfully”?

  Wasn’t it in this connection that a formulation had occurred that caused Klara to stumble, something like “just a bit of dirtiness,” hadn’t Swann’s coachman muttered “just a bit of dirtiness,” a phrase that must sound odd to any reader? Was Proust using servant language here, was he descending into a kind of argot? No, it seemed too mannered for that—so perhaps it was just a not very felicitous point in the translation? Nobody had an answer for Klara.

  People recalled anxious nights by the radio, tanks in Budapest and grotesquely twisted bodies lying on the torn-up pavements, which handed Klara a key word, enabling her to avoid the question of whether she too—yes, we had—spent sleepless nights sitting by the radio. From the pavements of Budapest—or was it Prague?—she moved effortlessly on within a few sentences to the uneven pavement over which Proust’s narrator once stumbled on his way to a reception. Wasn’t he thinking at that very moment about when he’d last washed his hands, and whether he shouldn’t take the precaution of visiting a toilet
before meeting his hostess? A moment in the balance, with quiet restraint ushering in one of those lengthy reflections which leave our hero standing as though frozen in the flux of events, when he almost trips on a paving stone. His hands, his feet, his attention takes a leap, one kind of irritation overlays another, and soon we too are stumbling, straight into the famous description of an unbidden memory.

  The talk now dwelled on events nearer home, the demolition of the ruins in Rampische Strasse in 1956, Professor Manfred von Ardenne and the Dresden Club he founded in spring 1957, later known as the Intelligentsia Club—Klara countered by recalling that brief moment, tucked away in an interpolated sentence, where you get the impression that, as if by a prearranged signal, just for two or three seconds the group of young ladies on the beach at Balbec bend down, with their backs to the promenade, to the viewer, as though—unseemly behavior in public—to feel seawater flowing over their hands for once in their lives. Everything is happening at a great distance, the gentle waves, spray, the salty smell, taste, the faint odor of starfish and marine life. Wishing to confirm this sight, you look down again at the receding waves, but the girls have already resumed their afternoon walk, as if nothing had happened. You can’t even be sure the narrator observed the incident, so you’re left alone with the question of how four such refined young ladies could simultaneously, no, how they could get their hands dirty in the first place, perhaps the sand, sticky sweets, perhaps they have been touching the skin of girls, of boys.