Kaltenburg

by Marcel Beyer

  I can’t remember now, did Krause seem surprised, or did he make out that it was coming back to him that he himself had once observed this odd form of bonding between man and bird? We would have talked at some length about other things; for example, Krause was far more interested, or so it seemed to me at the time, in the function of the yellow spot that magpies have on their third eyelid than in the question of currants, black or red. In any case, as far as the chauffeur was concerned, what the professor did with his animals in order to study their behavior was totally suspect, and the goings-on at the tool shed must simply have confirmed his opinion. Nonetheless, talking to Katharina Fischer now, it was above all this particular story about the jackdaws that sprang to mind.

  I was tired when Krause dropped me off at home, and I was—I admit—just a little proud: not a syllable about Matzke and the peace offer. Kaltenburg was waiting with Klara in the kitchen, as we had arranged—in Loschwitz, they might have wondered what was so important about my trip to Berlin that it kept us talking late into the night. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much to tell Kaltenburg. It’s possible that at the time I was still convinced matters would come out right in the end, but I think Klara could see that my meeting with Eberhard Matzke had not exactly turned out well. The professor enjoyed his dinner, he said, “Difficult, difficult,” and “We shall see,” looking at me across the table with a look that you reserve for an ally. There was no mention of the jackdaws that evening, or redcurrants, or least of all Kaltenburg’s driver.

  5

  FINALLY, ON THE WAY to collect her coat, we passed the Proust once again, and casting a last glance at the volumes, Katharina Fischer inquired whether I wasn’t a little hurt when Klara maintained that all she could remember when she thought of the fifties—our early days together—was the newly translated, complete À la Recherche.

  No, Klara certainly didn’t want to forget our early years, didn’t think of them as having no value in her memory. What there was, though, unforeseeably, time and again throughout the decades, was fits of jealousy, mixed with wistfulness, which Klara would have experienced as much as I did—not jealousy of a person, but of a world which belongs exclusively to the other, an inner world in which they move alone, can only move alone, and to which at times they devote themselves with the kind of dedication, of patience, which their partner too might well love to possess at that moment. Therein lay the pang, that was the Proust, and that’s another reason why I never touched him.

  And wistfulness, because we knew we couldn’t accompany each other into the other’s world. For a companion is surprised at phenomena which in terms of that world are accepted as self-evident, asks questions where they ought not to be asked, tries to engage the other person in conversation when they should be doing nothing but observing. If, on the other hand, you take on the task of guiding your loved one through this world, you’ll find yourself concentrating more on your partner than on the things around, you’ll want to point out details to them that they ought to be discovering for themselves, and you’ll reveal connections which you yourself will begin to doubt again as soon as you put names to them.

  Slight disturbances. First misunderstandings. Everything needs to be explained. At some point the mystery will begin to retreat step by step from your inner world, and with its retreat the need to explore this world decreases. Soon you start to enter it only as a matter of habit. But we couldn’t have borne such emptiness, such loss, whether alone or together. So we resigned ourselves to the fact that the other person seemed submerged for days, weeks even, in his or her own world, barely accessible, as if he or she would never surface again. That was our pact. That’s how we protected each other. That’s what held us together.

  We spent hour after hour at the kitchen table, Klara immersed in her Proust, I in my ornithological writings, surrounded by a succession of members of Parisian high society and representatives of all the bird families scattered across the globe. It is conceivable that over the years some of the individuals populating these inner spaces might have met, despite their differing origins and nature, on the edges of our world, far out there, without our being able to witness their encounters. I believed in such encounters when Klara said she was surprised by the transformation of the blondschopf, the “fair-head” she knew from Schottlaender’s version, into the Goldspatz, the little golden sparrow in the new German translation. Together we reflected on whether there was some real bird lurking behind the original expression in the French, perhaps a yellowhammer, a citril finch, or maybe a canary—and it struck me that Klara may have come across the Goldspatz on the very same evening that I was preoccupied with the earliest form of canary, Serinus canaria, the wild canary, and its distribution. But she had not interrupted me, the two birds did no more than recognize each other from a distance, and a little later, when Klara was observing a young woman going on a journey with her “young linnets,” the Goldspatz and the wild canary were no longer acquainted with each other.

  The same thing happened to Klara when she couldn’t help thinking about the “pitch-black jay feathers” on the narrator’s head which he smoothes down, which refuse to lie flat, and which he has a young maidservant admire, while I was telling her how many subspecies of jay there are, each distinguished by the most subtle characteristics. And Albertine’s laugh, which sometimes sounds like little cries and at other times resembles the cooing of pigeons—it’s possible that when I tried to reconstruct how, independently of each other, Columba junoniae and Columba bollii conquered the Canary Islands and made them their living space, that rather indecorous female laugh accompanied me.

  Indeed, it seemed from time to time that the paths of related people and animals were crossing in our kitchen knowing nothing about each other. The figure of Moreau, for example, whom Klara suspected of harboring a secret of some sort, and whom she held on to for far too long, though he is granted only one brief appearance in the novel, could have been a distant cousin or the late uncle of the ornithologist of the same name, when we sat together at the table reading and the kitchen beyond the lamplight lay in darkness, where nothing moved except shadows. There between the door and the sink a certain Monsieur A. J. Moreau handed the opera-loving narrator his ticket for a gala evening, while Reginald E. Moreau, without noticing the two figures frozen in a strange attitude, crossed the room as he followed the red-breasted flycatcher, the greenish warbler, and the arctic warbler en route from distant Asia toward the west, across Siberia, northern Russia, and Finland as far as Sweden, where no memory remained of their origins in India or Malaysia.

  On our trip to Vienna, when we visited the Natural History Museum and were at last standing in front of the twin eagles that Ludwig Kaltenburg had always wanted to show me, I experienced—and so did Klara, as she later confessed—an almost indescribable moment in which I couldn’t have said whether everything around me was slipping out of kilter or whether for the first time in ages I was filling my lungs with air right down to their finest artery branches. And we both felt that these mounted sea eagles, these sad-looking birds of prey with their drooping wings and bowed necks, were imbued with something. Was it a threat, a dark premonition, an unrealizable hope from a long-gone past? We found it hard to be more precise about our impression.

  It no longer even seemed necessary to put a name to what we were leaving behind by the time we moved out of Room XXX into the stairwell and it dawned on Klara that the Crown Prince Rudolf whom Professor Kaltenburg had obviously mentioned often, judging by how frequently I talked to Klara about him, must be the same figure that she had known for nearly forty years as Archduke Rudolf, without ever connecting the two. The melancholy heir to the throne, passionately interested in bird life, who died in dubious circumstances on January 30, 1889, and who used to argue with his friend Alfred Edmund Brehm, on their deer-stalking expeditions in the marshy woods by the Danube at Draueck, about whether the Steinadler and the Goldadler are two different types of golden eagle or just different colorations of the same species
: Rudolf is twice mentioned in passages of Proust that are chronologically far apart.

  6

  THE INTERPRETER ALREADY had her coat on when she announced she was now determined to read Proust’s novel, about which, after a few failed attempts to tackle him, she was as ignorant as I was. And she knew in advance that when she was reading him she would always think back to our conversations over the past six months. Mind you, I warned her, as far as the hand-washing scenes were concerned, she shouldn’t expect too much—they don’t exist. If Katharina Fischer really does pick up her Proust and not put it down until she reaches the final sentences, she will find that at no point in the novel does a character close a window, say “Good morning,” or wash his hands. Klara had already revealed as much to me during our first boating trip in the Great Garden.

  “Not once?”

  Not once.

  The interpreter laughed. We shook hands, she got into her car, I watched her go until the taillights disappeared around the corner. I cleared up. At exactly the moment, by the clock, when Klara must have been getting on the train in Berlin.

  I can see myself again on an early mid-November morning sitting alone in an unheated carriage smelling of yesterday’s cigarette smoke in a train standing at one of the outlying platforms of the Dresden main station. Feverish, still in my coat after being torn from a deep sleep, still barely conscious, I had left the house early and was now waiting endlessly for the train to set off for Berlin, on my way to an appointment about which I remember nothing except my half-sleep-drugged, half-impatient waiting while the sun rose over the city.

  From the Ostragehege district dark spots are moving through the dawn light, the crows have left their roosting places and landed on a builder’s crane, whose arm stretches far out across the roof of the main concourse. They’re casting an early-morning eye over the inner city, more birds are constantly arriving, joining their fellows on the latticework of girders, they inspect the Wiener Platz and Petersburger Strasse, Fritz Löffler Strasse, Budapester, Strehlener and Prager Strasse, before work begins on the building site below. The crane operator doesn’t disturb them as he climbs up the tower and into his cabin, shutting the door behind him. A circular saw swings on the suspension cable in the morning wind.

  Not until the arm of the crane slowly sweeps to one side do the crows take to the air. I follow their flight across the roof of the station, the platforms, the November-dulled green of the park. The continuous breaking away from the formation, the little pursuits, the way individual crows drop out, wheel around, looking to slot in again, as though each morning they had to reassert that the skills they were practicing yesterday until the hour of sunset have not been lost overnight, as if they could shake off sleep only through their play.

  Now a crow is heading toward the imposing building on the other side of the embankment, fluttering as it nears the dark stripe of crows marking off the clear composition of the facade, with its large windows, against the sky. At the instant the crow settles on the parapet, the black line is torn apart at one point, the bird’s close-packed fellows become agitated, and I can hear somebody calling out, “We’re not in Dresden here,” I can hear Ludwig Kaltenburg, laughing: “We’re in Moscow, can’t you see?”

  There stands the professor on the roof of the Institute for Transport Studies, bending his knees, leaning over, spreading his arms, he begins to run, slowly straightening up and croaking at the same time. Most of the crows observe this performance without moving, just here and there a bird is infected by Kaltenburg’s flying motions and follows him, as though to humor him. The crows commandeered the building shortly after it was completed, the city pest-control people didn’t know what to do about it, even the Society for Sport and Technology turned out to be helpless, Kaltenburg was called in, offering to try to tempt the birds away from the building.

  He’s not going to pull it off. He makes another round of the roof, but he can’t disperse them, the first crows are already returning inquisitively from the station, Kaltenburg is attracting the birds. He could see it as a defeat, but he regards it as a triumph, his last carefree winter in the city—“They’re simply familiar with this architecture”—his breath clouding in front of his face—“and why would you want to chase them away when you know they come from the Soviet Union? We should welcome them every year, our feathered friends, and joyfully allow them whatever space they want.”

  I have opened the window. Soon a taxi will pull up in front of the house, Klara will get out carrying her small suitcase, glance upward, and spot me up here. The air smells like snow.

  With sluggish wingbeats a single crow moves through the light flurry of snowflakes.

  They come from Siberia, from the Urals, the Baltic, and with the approaching cold once more this year they will gather in the Elbe valley. Hundreds of rooks, along with carrion crows, hooded crows, jackdaws, will form huge clouds of birds that will pulsate above us, fray at the edges, then reform as patches of black.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks are due to the following bodies for supporting my work on this novel: the Fund for German Literature (Deutscher Literaturfonds), the Saxon Ministry for Art and Science, the Leuk Castle Foundation (Stiftung Schloß Leuk), and the Municipality of Leuk, Canton Valais.

  Among the many people who have shared their knowledge, observations, and memories with me over the years, there are two in particular whom I wish to thank: Renate Glück, for a conversation continued since 1996 about a Dresden I could never have discovered without her; and Dr. Siegfried Eck, custodian until his death in September 2005 of the Ornithological Collection at the Museum of Zoology, State Natural History Collections Dresden, who awakened my interest in ornithology.