Today I know so much more about Ludwig Kaltenburg’s life than I do about my own parents’. Admittedly, over the decades Kaltenburg frequently talked to me about himself, right up until his death, presenting particular episodes in varying lights — my parents were not granted that much time. But I think it started that afternoon when Kaltenburg first visited us. He was soon telling me how he had reared animals even as a child, how at that moment in Posen he didn’t have the company of a single living thing, how he nearly became director of a zoo, and how in America, where his father sent him to study, he had spent all his time going to the beach to collect marine specimens, since he didn’t understand a word of the lecturers’ English. Kaltenburg came from Austria, was a full professor in Königsberg, and spent some time in Posen. The places where my parents had lived — I can’t think of any apart from Posen, except for our stay in Dresden. Where did they grow up, where did they meet, where did my father study? Where did we live before we moved to Posen? Did they share a common past in Dresden? I knew nothing about any of it.
In Posen they must have been regarded as outsiders, otherwise it’s hard to explain why I have so few pictures in my mind of my parents’ social life. I can’t remember any social occasions at home, it may be that my father really was rather isolated among his colleagues. Perhaps that was why he put so much effort into cultivating Kaltenburg’s friendship, just as Kaltenburg did into gaining his. Although they were both in their late thirties, I envisage my father as the younger man and Kaltenburg as the older of the two, no doubt because of later images, snow-white hair framing a tanned face radiating health.
“Is it really true,” I asked him, “that you took some live ducks with you to Königsberg, and all the other professors were amazed?”
“Yes, I did, by the crateful, and I lugged fish over there as well, and kept them in the institute.”
Professor Kaltenburg has become world-famous, but I have never yet discovered whether my father was a leading light in his subject, and in later years, to spare myself painful memories of him, I have never looked up my father’s books or articles. As an adult, however, I have been comforted to hear from Knut, Martin, and others who attended his lectures at the University of Posen that he was a good teacher who inspired enthusiasm in his students for the plant world. And given the unspectacular nature of most botanical phenomena, that is no mean feat.
Kaltenburg inquired in detail about the feed we were giving the starling, about its care, my father answered obligingly, Kaltenburg nodded, Professor Kaltenburg shook his head, he asked whether my father had caught and reared the bird himself, no, he had bought it, Kaltenburg wanted to know who from, while the starling was continually looking for new places in the conservatory from which to fly at the professor, my father named the dealer, and Kaltenburg shrugged: “I know him well, of course, and I’ve got to say he’s reliable enough.”
The two of them arranged that Kaltenburg should take care of the bird himself for a few days so that he could observe it. They looked at me as though my agreement mattered to them, I nodded, I didn’t mind, I wasn’t attached to the bird. Privately I hoped Professor Kaltenburg would succeed where my father hadn’t, and teach it to talk.
Our guest didn’t want any tea, at any rate not just yet, perhaps later, my mother would join us. But he would be interested in a tour of the greenhouse. He let my father show him his favorite plants; Kaltenburg kept giving him a sharp, or rather surprised, sidelong glance while my father immersed himself in his plant world. My father was attracted by the less conspicuous, often overlooked grasses, herbs, flowers, his interest wasn’t sparked by the cultivated type, and ultimately not even by any that grew from seed sown by human hand. Then it was my father’s turn to suddenly raise his head and take a sidelong look at Kaltenburg as the latter examined a plant which had recently been brought in. Two men, as it might have seemed to an observer, who were doing some cautious footwork around each other for the moment, as though unclear whether this was leading to a friendship or was just preparation for a fight.
Striped goosefoot and fat-hen, spreading orach, redroot amaranth, black nightshade, and smooth sow thistle: my father showed me them all on our walks, I can still recite them by heart, but soon I’ll have forgotten them again. Oblong-leaf orach and flixweed or tansy mustard, wall rocket, prickly lettuce, Canadian horseweed: my father regularly audited the railway embankment not far from the house. “Look, we’ve never seen these tiny flowers before, and the panicle there.” He crawled around in the grass, carefully freeing the roots with a trowel. And up there on the embankment the slow-moving trains, made up of a few passenger cars and countless cattle wagons, in which the animals never stirred, where are they heading for? I asked my father.
“To the east — don’t you know your compass points?”
I learned to distinguish white from black henbane, my father held up two stalks with hairy leaves and small flowers, “You must never, ever touch this plant, or that one, do you understand?” Whether it was black or white henbane, “I warn you — if I ever catch you with either of them,” the green, yellow, white, black flowers, my father warned me, but he never got as far as a threat.
What kind of mental picture was that? I wonder suddenly, flocks from beyond the Urals and from the plains to the west, the beautiful dusky plumage, here shimmering like freshly boiled pitch, there matte black like tar that has become brittle with cold, and then in places this fine ash-gray layer, like that on smoldering old wood that no breath of wind has touched for a long while.
Professor Kaltenburg took enough birdfeed with him for the next few days. We fussed over fastening the blanket-covered cage to the luggage rack of his motorbike. All three of us were waving: my father, my mother, and me.
When the starling came back to its familiar surroundings it seemed a different bird, so interested and alert as it investigated the plants, its sleeping quarters, the whole conservatory. But it never did learn to talk.
10
I HAVE TO FORCE MYSELF to recall the last clear visual memories I have of my father, as though I were afraid, as I was then, of meeting his eye. I stand there hanging my head — the stone floor of the hall, the wooden boards in the conservatory, the carpet in our drawing room — and I can no longer see my father’s face. Shame? Certainly I lowered my eyes because I felt shame, I was ashamed because my father had been shamed. Pain too, for sure, because if you let pain happen to someone else, if you don’t protect him and then don’t even ease his pain afterward, you yourself feel hurt. But worse still was the betrayal. I didn’t look my father in the eye because I had betrayed him, and knew that he knew it as well as I did.
I was hanging around in the conservatory with our tame starling. When can that have been? Kaltenburg’s first visit took place in the late autumn of 1942, and from then on close contacts developed between the two of them. My father was going to meet Professor Kaltenburg in town after his lecture. No, Maria had better count him out for dinner, he had arranged to see Kaltenburg, who had promised to give him a copy of his latest article. “Most interesting as usual, what he’s got to say about the differences between wild and domestic animals. But ‘interesting’ is not the word — this essay will be epoch-making, no doubt about it. And then please remember that the professor is coming over for a meal on Friday.”