Or he would send me, as though I had let my duties slide, into the feed kitchen: “Don’t bother hanging up your jacket. The fruit, have you forgotten? They’ve been expecting you all afternoon.”
He watched as I leapt down the steps — but no longer running away. For when I jumped over the wheelbarrow by the side of the path, avoided the gardener’s lad, brushed along the hedge, headed straight toward the dozing dogs as though I’d taken leave of my senses, a feeling of calm came over me. The wooden lattice construction devised by the feed manager for keeping sunflower heads dry. The mealworm incubator. As soon as I started picking out the rotten strawberries, as soon as I saw the bucket of apples in front of me for cutting up into beak-sized chunks, yes, as soon as I dipped into the cherries, I had regained my Loschwitz breathing rhythm.
They’ve been expecting you — this “they” encompassed the long-term inmates as well the fluctuating chance visitors. Animals with whose impulses the professor was intimately acquainted. Animals which had only recently aroused his curiosity. Animals that needed to be studied carefully in the future. Some fresh ones to be researched and others that couldn’t be. And the “they” included Ludwig Kaltenburg, included me too.
Whenever he noticed that I wasn’t even up to feeding the animals, he would throw on his jacket and “Out we go, down to the Elbe,” or, if the weather wasn’t good enough for a birding expedition, “I’ll get the Opel out of the garage.”
Our outings in the car were called “induction by personal inspection.” I can remember the smell of calf leather in the little sports car, remember the way Kaltenburg sat next to me holding the wheel firmly with both hands, concentrating on the road. On the spare seat there was always a pile of books and brochures; I reached back with my left hand, read to the professor from the lives of famous ornithologists, while he chauffeured us to their birthplaces and homes, to the sites of their activity. Thus Kaltenburg once took me on a whole-day excursion down the Elbe to Köthen, to see the Ziebigk estate, Naumann’s place. We drove to Renthendorf to see the Brehms’ house. To Waldheim, where Maikammer was born. To Reichenbach in the Vogtland. To Waldenburg. I can hardly recall anything about the town of Greiz, but on the other hand I have the clearest memory of a portrait of the pâtissier Carl Ferdinand Oberländer, who became addicted to collecting native and exotic birds. His expression seems to betray grief and melancholy, the furrowed brow, around the eyes, the mouth: it won’t be long before his passion drives him to ruin, he will have to sell his wonderful collection of mounts.
Once, in the most glorious weather, we roamed for a whole day through the landscape of Moritzburg with its many pools, we could have made countless sightings, but Kaltenburg was intent on one thing only, finding a particular pond where, as he said, Hans Steingruber had begun his career. He had been cycling past this spot on a day in March 1923 and had seen two coral-red beaks glowing on the water. Kaltenburg stomped through the reeds on the bank: “At that time he was your age,” and red-crested pochards had not been spotted for more than seventy years. Nobody was willing to believe Steingruber, even Reinhold in Berlin was skeptical when the young man came to see him. No, Netta rufina in Moritzburg, that must have been a faulty sighting, he was certain of it, Reinhold, the greatest ornithologist of our time.
In retrospect the outings could be seen simply as preparation for meeting live people. The “induction by personal inspection” continued in Loschwitz, costing the professor no effort at all, since authorities from all over the world found their way to him unbidden.
At the same time, Ludwig Kaltenburg could be quite prone to moods, that is to say, I saw him getting irritated above all when people thoughtlessly disturbed his most intimate moments together with animals. He seemed open to everyone, you could have got him out of bed at any time of night to share a sighting with him, yet he often reacted harshly to some annoyance if it came at the wrong moment — a new colleague who wasn’t yet familiar with the aquarium wing, a roofer finally arriving to replace a row of shingles on the gable end of the summerhouse.
The first time Reinhold visited the Institute, Kaltenburg happened to be at a difficult point, trying to get birds to follow him, an exercise that stretched over several days because some young jackdaws of that generation were not always ready to fly behind him from room to room. He walked down the corridor, into the kitchen, out again, into his study — and forgot that Reinhold was expected.
I had been hanging around outside the house since early morning, curious to see this man who had inspired so many ornithologists. In the background there was a succession of noises: calls, stamping, flapping of wings. More calls. Silence. A contented murmuring. You could follow progress with the new brood in the garden sound by sound. Then the limousine drew up in the driveway. Krause walked around the car, quickly ran a sleeve over the mudguard, opened the rear door, and stood to attention looking into the middle distance: a wiry older gentleman emerged, to me he looked about eighty, although at the time Reinhold was only in his early sixties. I greeted the visitor and took him up to the first floor. Reinhold was far too astonished to be dismayed that his reception was not exactly friendly: “It’s not half past twelve already, is it?” Kaltenburg’s voice, sharp, because we were getting in his way between cloakroom and bedroom. “Didn’t we say half past twelve?”
We ducked, a young bird flew along the corridor, Reinhold just shook his head, smiling, and let me show him around the grounds of the Institute. Whatever I was describing to him, he scrutinized the animals as though ascertaining the facts for himself, and every second I thought he was going to interrupt me: “Monk parrot, did you say? That’s impossible. You probably weren’t even born when the last monk parrots of the Loschwitz breeding colony left the city.”
Two hours later Ludwig Kaltenburg seemed like a different man, he was friendliness personified, was generous with flattering remarks to his guest, and even formally begged his pardon. But Reinhold wouldn’t hear a word of it, saying he had known Kaltenburg far too long to be put out: “My dear Ludwig, I would have been more bothered if you had given me priority over your jackdaws.”
I experienced such outbreaks too, but Kaltenburg never felt that my presence disturbed him when communing with his animals.
One autumn afternoon — Kaltenburg’s first autumn in Dresden — with terrible wind and rain, the villa was silent, and there was silence too as I stepped into the hall, all living creatures had retreated from the weather. Everything in the house was geared to a system that finely balanced the animals’ requirements, nearly forty years’ experience had gone into the appearance of rooms where the untrained eye would at first have seen nothing but pure chaos. In one room, for example, the furniture stood a little way away from the walls — behind it somewhere was the den of an animal which only Kaltenburg may ever have caught sight of. In another room incredible heaps of lumber, tables and chairs all mixed up, empty book covers — this had been the favorite room of a capuchin monkey long since departed for the zoo, and now the hamsters seemed to feel particularly comfortable in there. Next came a bare, sparse room, the opposite of the last one, in one corner a fine carpet of sand: this was where the timid quails liked to retire. Something Kaltenburg had learned early on about rooms used for nesting was that there should always be the same fixed distance in centimeters between fireplace and cupboard, and he had maintained this ever since a hamster had developed, unbeknown to anyone, a mountaineer’s “back and footing” technique to climb to the top of a cupboard and make its nest out of old documents. No ceiling lights anywhere, but unlike the curtains, curtain rails had been left in place in every room; the finches had to have suitable roosting places, after all.