The handrails up the stairs — perches for exotic birds. The carpets and runners — less decoration than thread supplies for the ducks to fall back upon when nest-building. The curtains that originally hung in the drawing room — they never came back from the laundry. A fragile system designed to meet the needs of the animals as much as the human inhabitants — and yet it looked as though Kaltenburg took a secret delight in testing the capacity of the system to destruction, as though every time he introduced a new species of animal into the house he was expecting his so-far-proven system to collapse.
I stood in the study doorway, and no, it wasn’t my father’s room, there sat Ludwig Kaltenburg at his desk, in front of him a cup of tea, a pile of loaves, and an open newspaper. He didn’t look up. Tearing off chunk after chunk from a white loaf, he held the pieces aloft next to him and let them drop. He wasn’t disturbed by my arrival, and neither were the two dozen ducks, hardly a glance, just their quiet clucking as they waited patiently by the desk for the next bite of bread to come — they could count on it — from the hand of their master. I didn’t try to tell myself the ducks knew me so well by then that I didn’t bother them, it was just that they knew nothing could happen to them in Kaltenburg’s presence. He murmured something, perhaps a reassuring sound from human to animal, and then his voice became clearer: “Did you shut the front door? That new Alsatian bitch has got to stay outside for a bit, she’s terrifically jealous of the ducks.”
I nodded, Ludwig Kaltenburg didn’t need to say any more, I took one of the white loaves from the desk and started pulling it to pieces for the birds’ snack. Hardly a word was ever said in the Kaltenburg household about the bread supply, about provisions for the animals in general, just once I remember the professor telling a visitor, “I don’t have the time or the energy to get involved with ration coupons.” And also, “It’s autumn, my drakes are molting, that’s when their feed needs to be especially good, every child knows that.”
Over time it became a set phrase. If Kaltenburg talked about molting drakes, then we knew he was pushing higher authority to make up some deficit or other, and sometimes, if he was in a good mood and fancied his chances, he even—“molting drakes”—tried renegotiating.
No, there were no samples of seeds from Leningrad on the desk, just a newspaper covered in breadcrumbs. Kaltenburg picked it up carefully by the edges, formed a chute, and to the joy of his molt-weakened drakes dropped the light flakes onto the carpet.
6
ALTHOUGH HE MAINTAINED that it wasn’t necessary, I wasn’t going to hear anything new, it was basically always the same, nothing could have stopped me accompanying the professor to his lectures. “You know I won’t be offended if you’ve got something else on in the evening,” he always said, after I had told him, “I’ll be there listening carefully as usual tomorrow evening.” It was almost a ritual between us: “I’m afraid it will be very crowded and you’ll have to stand all the way through,” while the professor well knew he could count on my presence down there in the hall. “Don’t inflict it on yourself,” a ritual, a game, it was up to Kaltenburg to bring it to a close: “If you’d rather go and see a movie, with your school friends perhaps, I’ll understand,” to which I didn’t reply, and so with an “If you insist on it,” he gave up trying to change my mind: “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
During that time I can’t have missed a single one of his big lectures. I went with Ludwig Kaltenburg, but during the evening itself I didn’t stay near him. We didn’t stand together before proceedings began, afterward I went home without even saying goodbye to him, while at the front of the hall the professor was surrounded by his listeners. And I never wanted to be at the front, I sat somewhere in the middle, as though I were just another member of the audience. That was our silent agreement, so that he never saw me among the one, two, three hundred blurred faces.
The hall belonged to him the moment he began to speak, he knew that. All the same, I had to give Professor Kaltenburg my assessment of the audience, he could gauge the general atmosphere from the lectern, but what details had I noticed out there, someone next to me writing everything down from beginning to end, a young couple in the row in front of me getting bored at some point. I looked around, noting a slight cough on the left, and on the right a woman who never seemed to stop hunting for something in her handbag. There was no cause for concern, I sat in the crowd, and the crowd listened to Professor Kaltenburg. For me it was less a matter of paying attention to what he said than of being carried along by his voice, his Viennese cadences filling the room, his distinct articulation, for an hour and a half Kaltenburg addressed the Saxon silence, talking clearly and animatedly and calmly. I never knew him to lose track, as for instance by noticing just in time that the sentence construction he had embarked on could end up in a mess, and he never went in for the familiar sort of muttering all too familiar when people are reading off empty passages from the page, quite simply because such passages did not occur in any lecture by Ludwig Kaltenburg.
In public he renounced anything speculative, even though speculation was of course an important element of the Institute’s work, Kaltenburg would not permit himself any “philosophizing,” as he called it. He confined himself strictly to the animal kingdom, and his Dresden audience was grateful for it, they found it refreshing that someone was talking purely about observations, solid information, irrefutable facts which no reasonable person could doubt. So in time a regular audience was built up, you recognized more and more faces, people nodded to one another, almost by silent agreement: this evening too will be reserved for the animals and the reality before our eyes.
You sensed how close the relationship between Professor Kaltenburg and his audience actually was in the following question-and-answer session. His answers were never simply polite, let alone brusque. At the end of the year parents always wanted to know what domestic animals were suitable as pets for their children, “No guinea pigs, please,” he always replied, most listeners already knew his reasons, but each time Kaltenburg patiently ran through them again.
“And that brings us to the area of unproven facts, not to say assertions that have turned out to be untenable.” You might think this would be enough to make the hall hold its breath, but no, the professor then rolled his eyes, almost sank to his knees at the lectern, people were laughing, Kaltenburg caught himself up again, playing the penitent, and said, “The chaffinch.”
If you were attending a Ludwig Kaltenburg lecture for the first time, you might then learn from the person sitting next to you that both the chaffinch question and the introductory joke were a standing feature of the evening. The professor had once strongly advised against acquiring a chaffinch, which would only remain a pleasant companion, earnestly singing its heart out, as long as its owner sat motionless in front of it. Otherwise, made extremely nervous by sudden movements, the bird would go on beating against the bars of its cage until its skull cracked.
The audience’s rejection of this had been vociferous, one chaffinch owner after another spoke up, Kaltenburg must have observed a badly damaged specimen, or he himself had been going through an extremely neurotic patch. He was obliged to admit defeat, Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg had got it wrong, he didn’t mind admitting as much. “I prefer talking about things we know for certain,” was what he had always said, so where chaffinches were concerned, he was happy to leave the field to long-term observers.