I have a feeling that Professor Kaltenburg even spent a Christmas with us. So it went on, for at least one winter. And then, in spring, or by the summer of 1943 at the latest, if not 1944, at home the name Kaltenburg was deleted from our vocabulary from one day to the next.
The bird sand crunched beneath my feet, I was leaning on the back of the armchair between the indoor palm and the rubber tree trying to keep quiet, moving my mouth silently as though still trying to teach our starling to talk. His cage, its door usually stood open, and in the corner the box with the injured blue-throat, and then all the equipment, feeding bowls and water bowls, pipettes, wooden rods, seed mixtures, accumulated over time to form an immense armory. The door of my father’s study was ajar, the low voices of two men in the background, and by concentrating hard I could make out a sentence here or there, especially when Professor Kaltenburg was speaking.
“I can give you a cast-iron guarantee.”
The starling — didn’t we ever give it a name? — was pecking around in the pot of the rubber tree, it wasn’t particularly interested in me, it never landed on my head as it did with the professor.
“In that case, I feel reassured.”
My father, more quietly, speaking as though he and Kaltenburg were not sitting in the same room. I was still trying to guess what they were talking about, all the while ready to make out that I was busy with our starling, in case anyone came in.
“As far as the other matter is concerned, well, we’ve talked about that often enough.”
They laughed. Then my father was obviously waiting for Kaltenburg to go on.
“The blue-throat.”
“Yes?”
Did the starling really have to poke around in the dry rubber-tree leaves at that precise moment? I was powerless, because if I shooed it away I would be discovered. I reached out for it very slowly, I still didn’t know whether I was actually going to take hold of the bird, but then it fluttered away, into the palm tree. My father and Professor Kaltenburg were now talking more loudly.
“You know my opinion, and I’m sticking to it.”
“Please, that’s ridiculous, just because of a blue-throat with a broken wing.”
Up to that point their talk had seemed half joking, but now I wasn’t so sure. Somebody walked restlessly up and down, was it my father, was it Kaltenburg, somebody lit a cigarette, somebody closed the window.
“Yes, it’s harmful to take on injured animals, I don’t mean for the animal, but for your boy.”
“Kindness to the creature is harmful? Just tell me, where’s the harm in arousing a child’s sympathy for the suffering of a living being?”
My father’s voice faltered. Kaltenburg, on the other hand — it seemed that the more agitated his interlocutor became, the calmer he was.
“You want to help, but you can’t. An animal that has no chance of surviving in the wild won’t do so under your well-meaning but misguided care either.”
“But all the same, it’s absurd to talk about an atmosphere of death.”
“An atmosphere of death”: that was the first and only time I ever heard my father use that phrase. It was a Kaltenburg expression. My father did his best to sound as though he were putting it in quotation marks, a dubious construction that could have come only from an Austrian. He imitated a Viennese accent, trying to wound Kaltenburg, to silence him. But Kaltenburg was not so easily hurt; indeed, Professor Kaltenburg found it easy to ignore such attacks.
“Tell me straight out, and then I’ll forever hold my peace: has there really been a single occasion when you succeeded in rescuing a sick or injured animal, have any of these birds ever survived, have you managed to return any of them to the wild?”
My nanny was calling me. Otherwise it was quiet. Kaltenburg was genial, he was waiting, he was in no hurry, my father should take his time before answering. He wasn’t interested in scoring a point in this contest between two grown men, what he cared about was “the boy,” me. I could see him sitting at my father’s desk, his hands resting on the leather writing mat, to his left an open botanical reference book, an ashtray on the right. Kaltenburg leaned back while my father, a guest in his own room, searched for an answer.
For a long time, neither man spoke. Kaltenburg stood firm. The atmosphere of death, he insisted, would affect me, might determine my relationship with the world.
My father was no longer walking up and down. Then he said, almost inaudibly, “No.”
Maria was calling. I found it hard to take my eyes off the blue-throat in its box. Eventually I was being called from the kitchen for the third time, I turned away. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I gradually began to grasp what Kaltenburg, who refused to be put off by my father that afternoon, meant by “atmosphere of death”: he told me about his time as a POW, or the thoughts he had about Dresden in his darker hours, and how he had always shrunk from certain people, certain places, as though scared of being exposed to a pathogen for which there was no effective remedy. When I was listening from the other room that day, “atmosphere of death” simply hovered in the air as a mere phrase with which I associated as little as I did with those opening sentences I had heard through the open door, Kaltenburg’s friendly words: “I can give you a cast-iron guarantee,” and my father’s reply: “In that case, I feel reassured.”
Is this the atmosphere of death? I wondered in bed that night, because Professor Kaltenburg did not stay as planned, my father spent the evening in his study, he came out briefly to eat. The two men had parted with a handshake but without saying a word — did that mean we had been plunged into a permanent atmosphere of death? I had to keep reminding myself that this was all over nothing but a sick blue-throat, but nonetheless after Kaltenburg’s departure something weighed heavily on the house.
My mother looked in on me. She too was agitated, I could tell by the way she fiddled with her blouse as she sat on the edge of my bed trying to explain the argument to me: “We know we’re not running a veterinary practice. But the professor has no right to interfere in your education, that’s our job, you are our child. How do we know what other views Professor Kaltenburg holds that might influence a young boy — a boy who is basically a stranger to him — without the parents ever finding out about it? But this outburst of Kaltenburg’s probably has nothing to do with birds or with you, he’s simply overwrought. No, this awful animal business isn’t important — which makes the rift between your father and Professor Kaltenburg all the more tragic.”
An image of crows, I can’t quite place it, flickers briefly in my memory: at first you see a single scout, loudly croaking in all directions, and the next minute the sky blackens. Enormous flocks from Siberia. Flocks from the Elbe region. Rooks, hooded crows, carrion crows, they join forces in winter.
The way he pulled on his helmet, got on his motorbike, disappeared over the horizon: as if Kaltenburg — who had wistfully stroked my hair just one last time — was leaving us to our fate, as if all his efforts to persuade had been in vain, and we would never see him again. But I wanted to see Professor Kaltenburg again. I haggled with myself — if I nodded at the professor’s words, even if I could barely comprehend them, did it mean that I was betraying my parents? Did I have to declare myself either for my father and mother or for Kaltenburg?
A blue-throat with a broken wing: if I’d had my way, we would have put the bird out in the garden, Professor Kaltenburg would come back without hesitation, the friendship would be renewed, and this depressing day forgotten.
Siberian crows love being swept along on the first flurries of a snowstorm, their wings spread out on the wind as black as briquettes, the snowflakes dancing around their plumage. And there’s something glowing, a red glow, a bluish glow, as well as a soft brown. A jay that memorized the whereabouts of its food caches in its sleep.