Why, I asked myself later, did this Professor Kaltenburg not use the escalator like everybody else to go upstairs in a department store? Yet another mystery about this man. Professor Kaltenburg, the first man I ever saw wearing sunglasses, Professor Kaltenburg, who came to see us on his motorbike, Professor Kaltenburg, about whom I would continue to unearth new secrets, Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg, who has had such a decisive influence on my life. He kept his secrets until the end, from using the stairs where there was an escalator to expressing radical, albeit mystifying, self-criticism in his last letters, which reached me from distant Vienna at the end of the eighties.
His keen glance, the laughter lines around his eyes. His movements, quick and exact when it came to precise actions, but at other times awkward, unsteady, seemingly given to chance fluctuations, as though his body were performing grotesque contortions without its owner’s knowledge. Ludwig Kaltenburg, a falcon poised to swoop, wishing it were one of those gentle birds of passage moving steadily along in a great flock.
Now he was picking up a pair of dark tan gloves as though they were exactly what he’d been looking for all along. And then with a laugh he was pushing them back into the pile. Then he was glancing sidelong at my mother while she was pointing out the quality of the leather and solid seams of an expensive pair.
“You’ve got to run your hand over them carefully, here, turn the glove inside out.”
I was afraid we’d never get home for supper. In the artificial light of the store it looked to me as though the day outside had ended long before. The suede leather. The animal smell. I could hardly stand the smell there.
“No, you must have got something wrong, Professor Kaltenburg is not a colleague of your father’s at the university.”
“But isn’t he called Professor?”
“He is a professor, only in Königsberg, not here in Posen — but you know that, don’t you remember, he was talking about Königsberg back there? And he’s not a botanist.”
I knew Königsberg, that’s where Knut came from.
“So what’s he doing in our city?”
My mother hesitated for a moment. “Professor Kaltenburg is a zoologist who takes care of confused people in a big mental hospital here.”
“Confused?”
“Not just confused, of course — they’re seriously ill.”
I could tell my mother was not happy with her answer. She reflected. Then she spotted something, and: “Give the lady your seat.”
I got up off the seat, a woman pushed past me as though I didn’t exist, took my place without so much as a nod.
“And who was he talking about when he said he needed a nice pair of gloves for a lady?”
“His wife, of course — who did you think?”
I was standing in the gangway now, the tram was getting fuller all the time, my mother was holding on to me with one arm, the other was clasping the bags and boxes on her lap.
“Look, it’s raining.” And: “We’ll soon be home.”
But the words could not be wiped away. A zoologist who worked in a mental hospital. The smell of suede, and now the tram had stopped again, the damp steaming off the passengers’ coats. Hadn’t I watched a veterinary surgeon at work in a cowshed, the blood and the bellowing, the crude, bright instruments? I could see Professor Kaltenburg in a white coat, using his zoological expertise on the patients. The tram’s electric contacts were sparking. Hadn’t I watched badly injured people being carried on stretchers into courtyard entrances in the city, hadn’t I seen bandaged heads, heard cries of pain and the “Quick, quick” of the ambulance men? Professor Kaltenburg in the posture of a falconer, his gaze turned upward and his arm outstretched: I can see him — was I already seeing him like this even then? Where does a child get such imaginings from? — in solid leather gloves, adjusting some medical apparatus whose thick cables run to a patient’s bed.
9
I’D LOVE TO TAKE a close look at the bird.”
With this parting sentence outside the department store Professor Kaltenburg invited himself over to our house. My mother had told him about our starling, which, unusually for a starling, had refused to integrate into the family, did not seek company, didn’t eat properly, and showed no sign whatsoever of the ability to talk, a point my father had used to make me keen on the bird.
This starling wasn’t our first bird, and my father had taken them all to his heart, every single time. If you keep a careful lookout for nests, if you find helpless nestlings that have fallen to the ground and are either still just breathing or already completely dried up, if you cannot get enough of the sight of a bird nursery in late spring and the brood’s first attempts at flight, sooner or later, like my father, you will bring birds into the house. It may be that he simply couldn’t resist them, or maybe it was part of his plan to gradually accustom me to the presence of birds: soon we had our first fledglings in the conservatory, went collecting worms, gathering seeds in the greenhouse and using them for feed, and from then on, apart from the injured birds we took in, every spring we had orphaned youngsters to hand-rear with egg yolk, hemp seed, linseed, and poppy seed. Barley groats or bread rolls soaked in milk, groundsel and chickweed, lettuce. My father in the kitchen: “No, for this one I’ve got to mix some water in with the milk.”
I watched my father, and the birds, but I never fed them, never cleaned their cage, I didn’t even whistle, let alone touch one of these creatures. The blind, croaking, featherless, wrinkled animals in a box lined with wood shavings: I never quite dared approach them, always kept a certain distance.
“I’d love to take a close look at the bird.” By the time Professor Kaltenburg came to see us, Martin had long since left. Sometimes we still got postcards, from Erfurt at first, then from Königgrätz. He always addressed them to the family, never just to the professor of botany, and their contents were intended for all of us too, the words meant for the adults, his frequent sprinkling of little drawings aimed at the child. Then the greeting cards stopped, the last one — but I may be wrong about this — came from the Crimea, about the time when the peninsula was cut off and was being vacated, so probably in November 1943.
I noticed the dust cloud from quite a distance, a motorbike was heading from town and racing at a crazy speed down our road. I rushed around the house, my father must be in his greenhouse at the back, my mother was lying down after lunch. “There he is,” I shouted from the doorway, “he’s here,” although I couldn’t see my father anywhere in the greenhouse. His head appeared at the side between the grasses, he wiped his hands on his trousers as he came toward me, and just as he was asking, “The professor?” we heard the motorbike in front of the house. Kaltenburg switched off the engine and heaved his NSU into our driveway; he was wearing leather gloves, a leather jacket, and dark glasses against the sun, which was very low in the sky at that time of day.
My nanny stood at the kitchen window. Professor Kaltenburg pushed his glasses up onto his forehead, took off his gloves, waved toward the window, glanced around as though looking for my mother, then held out his hand to my father and laughed.
“Where’s our little patient, then?”
I followed Kaltenburg and my father into the conservatory. It was almost as though the starling had been waiting for us, it was hopping around in a lively manner in its cage, and as soon as my father opened the little door it jumped onto Professor Kaltenburg’s hand and then straight onto his shoulder and then his head. Professor Kaltenburg wasn’t in the least taken aback, even when the young starling messed up his hair and started investigating the sunglasses, tugging at them until they finally fell to the ground, Kaltenburg laughed and talked to the creature. I stood to one side with my father, and later I realized that from that afternoon onward the memory of my father began to fade.