Every morning I had to shake off this kind of sentimentality, had to convince myself: you don’t know this bird, it’s no more familiar to you than any of the other bird skins that have accumulated in these drawers over the course of a century. If I wanted to study her impartially, I couldn’t let familiarity lead me to premature conclusions — once I was on the point of sending my Danish colleague a second letter, saying I’d made a mistake, for I had now spotted a clear anomaly in the beak of this jackdaw skin which I had just prepared myself, simply in order to bring him back from Copenhagen to Dresden and introduce Taschotschek to him. I would have made myself a laughingstock. A good thing pet names don’t appear on the labels of such tame birds. No, Taschotschek was no example of a subspecies, I had to keep telling myself, These skins you’ve been poring over with such tenacity for weeks without knowing the point of doing so — you’ll only get to know them step by step, learning about each one individually and very slowly, their plumage, their beaks, their smell. It was only later, much later, in the eighties, that some research came out of it on the feather formation of common jackdaws and Daurian jackdaws.
I even deluded myself that Taschotschek’s skin smelled slightly of Kaltenburg. Once, late one afternoon when the fog around the building refused to lift, it was traces of his aftershave, and later, as darkness was coming on, Kaltenburg’s breath. I shut my eyes, brought the birds at random up to my nose: yes, every time it was Taschotschek I held in my hand. And yet all the skins had of course been disinfected — it was a delusion, Tschok, Taschok, Taschotschek, I couldn’t get away from this notion, had to break off work for a day.
And then my hands when I went home in the evening. I felt I was spreading an atmosphere of jackdaw around me. I wore gloves, put my hands in my coat pockets, but all the same I wondered — in the tram, people must be noticing that here was someone who spent his days sorting out dead jackdaws on his desk, and not only that, they must be noticing that this man knew Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg in his Dresden years like nobody else.
How proud the whole neighborhood had been at first when they heard that Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg, the great authority, might be moving to Loschwitz. They triumphed over the celebrity district of Weisser Hirsch, over the villa quarter of Blasewitz, and above all they triumphed over Leipzig, where Kaltenburg held his professorial chair. In the morning at the baker’s they murmured, “Have you heard?” In the afternoons on the Elbe meadows it was, “Yes, he’ll fit in well here.” And in the evening, among intimates, “Who would want to settle in Leipzig anyway?”
That must have been in the spring of 1951—or had the first inkling reached the city as early as the winter? Twelve years later many a resident was glad to see the back of Kaltenburg, as though a curse had been lifted from the slopes of Loschwitz. They told the whole world, that is to say Blasewitz and Weisser Hirsch, how relieved they were that he had finally gone, “that troublemaker,” “eccentric,” “and so arrogant”—they had found it hard to forgive him his steadily growing reputation on the international stage.
No, Ludwig Kaltenburg did not mourn for any animal that died — for him it represented the certainty of getting to know more animals. But he took the death of his jackdaws quite hard. One evening he got home just before dark; he had rushed away after breaking off one of those interminable meetings that lead nowhere, tore along by the Elbe, over the bridge, and could see even from a distance: there were no black dots whirling in the air waiting for him. He rode through an utterly serene sunset, light blue and red and glowing, a disaster. Panicked, Kaltenburg raced up the narrow alleyways, pedestrians jumped out of the way of his motorbike, Kaltenburg changed gear, he didn’t brake, he scraped a wall, finally turned into the entrance — and saw the first birds lying on the grass.
He sent for me to come over that same evening. A small heap of dead jackdaws lay on the ground. Kaltenburg could hardly stand, couldn’t make it back up the ladder, I climbed onto the roof and scooped two young jackdaws out of the guttering. Over the next few days we combed through the plots of land stretching down to the river, and except for one or two birds we did manage to find all the dead jackdaws.
During the last few weeks of his time in Dresden I barely recognized Kaltenburg. Then, from one day to the next, he disappeared. I don’t think anyone knew about his plans except me.
“And never forget to poison your bird finds carefully.” That was what Kaltenburg told me once. Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg, who showed me how to prepare a skin. He favored a solution of sodium arsenite, and if you didn’t have a poison license you should use borax and naphthalene. “Always make sure you poison your skins carefully.” I have never found out how Kaltenburg’s jackdaws actually died. Hardly had he left Dresden before rumors started circulating in the city, many of them harmless, many just plain stupid, today I can only remember the most wicked of them: Kaltenburg was said to have put out poison for his birds himself, in order to make his departure more dramatic.
With a dead bird in each hand I stood there on the balcony, Kaltenburg sat despondently in the gloom of his study, I couldn’t bring myself to approach him carrying the two lifeless bundles of feathers. I thought I would look around for a box, but in Kaltenburg’s household there was no box that wasn’t occupied by a live animal. I was considering stuffing the jackdaws under my sweater, but then I heard his toneless voice, he didn’t look up: “Just come in. It makes no difference now.”
I suggested burying the birds in the garden. For a long time there was no response. Then Kaltenburg shook his head. “You can take them. Take them away and make good skins out of them. They’ll remind you of our time together in this city when I’m gone.”
2
THE MENU LAY OPEN in front of us, but we hadn’t ordered yet. Katharina Fischer was looking out of the window, her expression almost suggesting that it was her own memory that was filling with Ludwig Kaltenburg’s jackdaws, because of the images I had shown her one by one.
She had told me on the telephone about her assignment, about a long, no doubt tiring day, which she assured me she had got through all right, despite minor irritations. No, unfortunately, the local bird life wasn’t mentioned at all, and the stern head of protocol intervened immediately when she tried to raise the topic of this winter’s waxwing invasion with the English visitor during a short break. All the same, our meeting was not without results, for it made her go back to Kaltenburg’s works, those battered volumes, full of underlinings and coffee stains, which she had studied intensively in her later years at school, and which at some stage had disappeared into a banana crate to finish up in various cellars every time she moved.
The minute she glanced through the books after so many years, Katharina Fischer noticed that for some reason she had put an exclamation mark after every mention of a place-name. Prague and Paris, where Kaltenburg had said his piece about the events of 1968, not without sharply attacking the Soviet Union as well as the students. Then Königsberg, a place with which Frau Fischer had as little connection in her youth as with the town where she now lived. Moscow, Paris, Florida, London, Rotterdam — when the interpreter asked me if I’d noticed that the professor never at any point mentioned Posen in his writings, I decided to ask her out to dinner, a simple “certainly” or “of course” over the telephone would not do. She accepted without hesitation, and we agreed to book a table in this restaurant on the bank of the Elbe at Blasewitz.