The river, the meadows, the slopes on the other side, on our right the Loschwitz Bridge — in her mind’s eye she was following Kaltenburg as he raced over the bridge on his motorbike. His leather biker’s gear, his white mane, and the way the rider bends over the handlebars; it can only be Kaltenburg, even if the steel supports of the bridge cause a rapidly alternating pattern of light and dark stripes to flit across the figure, so that you begin to wonder whether it isn’t a phantom your eyes are following, while the professor has long since reached the other bank, is taking the bend, disappearing between the houses on the Körnerplatz.
We debated back and forth on what to call it: a homecoming, an escape, the end of a long farewell, which had basically started with Kaltenburg’s arrival? A long farewell which coincided with my leaving school, my studies under the professor, and a few important years as a colleague at his Institute. I supplied him with material for a series of studies, researched pair bonds in the common raven, carried out observations on same-species killing among various types of animal, so that Kaltenburg was able to build up a comprehensive picture of this aberrant behavior. I was allowed to take part in the big research project on night herons, although that was never completed, more’s the pity, because Kaltenburg never again returned to this bird, which, far from yielding its secrets after years of observation, actually became more puzzling.
My own research involved the early months of life in the great tit, and it also took me all over the country to find out more about chimney jackdaws. Looking back, though, I must say that I don’t see either of these projects as valid in terms of detail, and neither do I find the ideas I had then about the house sparrow’s capacity for mimicry convincing today.
No, I replied to Katharina Fischer, go with Ludwig Kaltenburg to Vienna? I would never have wanted to join him, quite apart from the fact that it wasn’t an option. For one thing I saw it as my duty to look after the animals in the Institute — although that wasn’t ever discussed — now that its head was no longer available. For another, my parents-in-law would have been heartbroken if their daughter had decamped to the West. And I wouldn’t have gone anywhere without my wife. When I was lucky enough to find my place at the Ornithological Collection, I don’t mind admitting that I felt something like freedom. No, to Vienna, Ludwig Kaltenburg had to go back to Vienna alone.
A bit farther upriver, beyond the bridge which blocks the view, somewhere on the hillside the red taillight of a motorbike will have lit up, Kaltenburg turning into the narrow path, dimly lit by a few gas lamps, which led to his villa. The waiter hovered, he wanted to take our order, and no, no motorcyclist on the bridge, no jackdaws above the hillside, the sun had set, Frau Fischer tore herself away from the view outside, I had been watching her reflection in the windowpane.
3
WHENEVER I ENTERED Ludwig Kaltenburg’s study, I was stepping into my father’s room. More precisely: my father’s room as it would have been if he were still alive. A few details may actually have corresponded: the position of the desk in the middle of the room, the small, uncomfortable cocktail-bar chair with worn arms, selected on a whim for use as a desk chair and then missing from the drawing room, the rickety dark-wood bookshelves behind. If you stood in the doorway looking toward the window, this picture, shifted diagonally slightly to the right, was in the middle of your view. But if you sat at the desk, you saw the passage to an adjacent room, to where our conservatory was. The arrangement of the broad desktop: the leather writing mat, an open reference book on the left, an ashtray on the right, but between them, in no discernible order, dog-eared lecture notes, walnut shells, pencils, a pile of blank writing paper, and on it a portable typewriter.
Entering Kaltenburg’s study, for a split second I even saw my father’s mail lying there, soft, padded, firmly sealed envelopes, with the address on them in a script which told you that the sender found writing Cyrillic letters easier than writing Latin ones. Little packets of seeds from Leningrad. I had to remind myself: in his day, your father would hardly have received botanical samples from the Soviet Union, what you were looking at was the present-day desk of a man rooted in the distant past. Still more than the corresponding details, however, it was the atmosphere of this study which created for a moment the illusion of a Posen room in a far-off world, above all in winter, in the late afternoons. The way my father sat there without noticing me, underneath the desk lamp, or rather in shadow, shining hair, only his hands in the pool of light and a white sheet of paper and plant samples he had been studying closely since midday.
Kaltenburg’s study did not possess a ceiling light, any more than my father’s did: this fact may account for the familiarity of the room. The professor immediately had the ceiling lights dismantled in every room when he moved into the villa, or perhaps one should say, when Kaltenburg’s animals commandeered it. Enormous chandeliers, finest blown-glass work left behind by the previous owner — Kaltenburg gave them all away without the least remorse.
The neighbors’ amazement when a whole lighting shop was gradually spread out on the lawn by the entrance, and Kaltenburg—“Come on, come on over, choose what you want”—beckoned to the inquisitive folk who had thought they were out of sight behind the bushes. Their sidelong peeks at their new neighbor as they took a closer look at the goods, and Kaltenburg went on encouraging people to lug home some of the “loot,” as he called it: “Here, these belong together, so do me a favor and take this decorative piece as well.”
Eventually they all left with their booty tucked under their arms, bowing to the professor, thanked him sincerely, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, said many thanks, taking care not to stumble as they walked away backward, thanked him profusely — but Kaltenburg brushed all this aside: “What’s the point of me having chandeliers in the house? The animals would just use them as staging posts on their way from one cupboard to another, to stay out of my reach when I wanted something from them, or do gymnastics on the lamps. Then every few days one of these great lumps would come crashing down. That would be a shame. And dangerous, as well.”
My father’s room: I could never quite shake off the impression, in fact it would become all the stronger later on, when Ludwig Kaltenburg had left Dresden and I was roaming through the deserted house, taking care of the remaining animals. For if anything could have released me from that notion, it was Kaltenburg himself, a figure who was out of place if it was my father’s study I was standing in. Kaltenburg always brought me back to reality.
I remember Kaltenburg saying when he arrived in Dresden and we met up again, “You see, my boy, I told you early on you’d never get rid of me.”
A sentence that was lost at first in the excitement of the day. After Kaltenburg had given away his chandeliers, was there an announcement of a welcoming visit by VIPs, or did the professor read out a call for peace on the grass behind the house? I seem to remember there were reporters in the grounds, I can hear the clicking of cameras, see Ludwig Kaltenburg answering questions on the steps, then in the aquarium wing, still empty at the time. I brought him a glass of water, a photographer was packing up his equipment — and in the midst of it all Kaltenburg turned quickly to me and remarked, as though we were alone, “I said you wouldn’t get rid of me in a hurry.”
And then he was gone again, I stood holding the empty glass, a woman journalist from Moscow had beckoned the professor over to the garden gate, the interpreter explained they wanted another picture, in front of the transport containers this time. It was then that Kaltenburg, hurrying obligingly down the steps, began to show the first signs of exhaustion. Normally ultra-polite to young women and always donning the protective armor of joviality for public appearances, he growled in an undertone to the female interpreter, “By the transport containers, I got that. My Russian isn’t nearly as bad as you might think.”