4
A LOW CLINKING SOUND, such as I’d heard countless times in Kaltenburg’s house when a jackdaw had quietly retreated and was investigating an object somewhere. I could hear a jackdaw beak in the distance pecking carefully away at a loose furniture fitting; I heard a screw falling to the floor, and knew that it wouldn’t be long before the brass fitting itself dropped to the parquet with a clatter. But it was only Katharina Fischer’s bracelet repeatedly touching the cutlery as the interpreter played with her napkin.
“Every time I see a jackdaw, I’m fascinated by its white eyes. You can’t help feeling the jackdaw is fixing you with a piercing stare, that it can see right through human beings.”
Or maybe what we see is the jackdaw asking itself whether we’re the ones who are trying to look right through it. Direct eye contact with a bird always has a certain suspense about it, something not quite decided, even if you are very familiar with each other.
“As though both parties are waiting for the next move.”
However, in Dresden, said Katharina Fischer, she didn’t often spot jackdaws. Last summer in the heat wave she had seen two thin crows and two jackdaws hopping around the statue of the Golden Horseman in the Neustadt marketplace, all pretty aimless, with wide-open beaks, you could see their dark red throats.
In Dresden these days you don’t find more than a handful of breeding pairs a year, jackdaws pulled out of the city a long time ago. It was already beginning to happen in Kaltenburg’s day, and that’s partly why his birds became so well known. And after they died it would probably have been difficult to build up a replacement colony. It’s possible that as a youngster I was aware of declining jackdaw numbers myself. But I wasn’t bothered while I was surrounded by Kaltenburg’s flock.
“That makes it sound as though you were actually living in the Institute.”
Almost. I didn’t sleep there, rarely had meals — but otherwise, I practically did live there. I went home just to eat and sleep, and later, as an adult, I was sometimes sorry how little attention I had paid to my foster family. The long summer nights in the allotment, visiting relations in the Erzgebirge mountains, our evenings around the kitchen table, with the parents helping each of us in turn with our studies: it feels as though all that time I was making the utmost effort not to imprint any of these images on my memory.
I think I’ve still got the binoculars my adoptive siblings gave me one birthday, and if I could remember the details of how they came by this good, solid model, I would be able to think of the story today as part of the gift. Not even my foster parents were let in on the binoculars plan, so they were as amazed as I was to hear the risks their children had run just to please their foster son. I remember we were sitting in the parlor, the best china, the tablecloth, there were meatballs in caper sauce, my favorite at the time, and the potatoes tasted wonderful. But it’s a shame I can’t remember anything about the acquisition of the binoculars except that it involved a school-bus driver, and the youngest child having to summon up all her courage to address him in Russian, while she sat behind her brother on his bike and he kept one foot on the ground and the other on the pedal, ready to scoot off with his little sister at a moment’s notice. They were laughing, acting out the various parts as they told the story, imitating the bus driver as though the whole thing were one big joke, although we all knew they had been pushing at the extreme limits of danger. After all, every kind of private contact with members of the Soviet forces was banned, not to mention barter deals, and the draconian punishments meted out to any soldier who transgressed were said to include up to a fortnight in a dark, cramped hole in the ground.
A happy, relaxed evening, one of the few I can picture. I just couldn’t bring myself to call my foster parents, to call strangers, “Mum” and “Dad,” I couldn’t get the words out. The parents would have liked me to call their children “my brother and sisters”—my mind would never accept the “my,” and to be honest I hated “brother and sisters” from the first day. For a long time Herta, Gerlinde, and Hans-Georg called me the “foundling,” and if we had a row they hissed “bastard” into my ear, their breath hot, when their parents were not around. But looking back, all this sounds unfair, my attitude to my foster family will have been skewed from the very beginning. When I think back to the birthday present, what trouble my new brother and sisters went to, their pleasure when, completely unsuspecting, I began to take the heavy object out of its newspaper wrapping…
I always imagined the binoculars had already served their purpose during the advance on Dresden, and as though traces of those events were left on the lenses, I liked to think that something of the landscapes and objects the Red Army officer had trained them on was still attached to the eyepieces. I saw him standing upright in an open jeep, his glance sweeping from a burning farmhouse on the left to a birch-tree copse on the right where German stragglers had still been holed up until a few days earlier. The landscape stretches toward the west over gentle hills, on the horizon a mob of tiny figures, refugees, deserters, Waffen SS perhaps. He keeps the binoculars glued to his eyes, gives the signal for the car to move forward again, and now the tank column following in the rear comes briefly into view.
It is through these binoculars that the officer looks along the Elbe valley, searching out a bridge over the river and finally spotting in the distance a blue-shimmering steel construction projecting above the ruins. And of course on his way into Dresden many a bird enters his field of vision, as they do mine now. During the day he observes the wild geese coming from the south as they break their journey to rest by a lake, and hardly a night passes when he doesn’t wake up thinking he hears their wings beating above his billet. Over the weeks the number of empty stork nests declines, at some point he stops counting the occupied ones and only counts nests that have been abandoned. And on one occasion the officer lingers near a group of rooks flocking around a dark, shapeless bundle on the ground, suspiciously at first, then driven closer by curiosity, until one leading rook is bold enough to start cautiously plucking at it. Horsehair perhaps, rotting straw, a bag full of charred papers, a lost eiderdown, from its size you might almost think it was a person.
I regularly went roaming with two friends from school, Klaus and Johann, war orphans like me. Johann was allowed to invite us home, and if he begged long enough his foster parents even let the three of us sleep over in the loft. With blankets, sandwiches, and tea, we climbed up the rickety ladder to camp from Saturday night to Sunday morning among the furniture and household bric-a-brac from the kaiser’s time. Candles were taboo.
Together we combed through the dead zones in the inner city, all children were drawn like magic to the rubble, and it was nothing special for us to explore these areas by day. The real challenge lay in finding your way about after dark, which was obviously strictly forbidden. Our parents didn’t like it at all when we clambered among ruins threatening to collapse at any time. This wilderness was frequented by some shady types, but we were out to prove our courage, convinced that grownups by contrast were scared at the very thought of the dead zones.