One evening when the professor was about to dismiss his audience, somebody surprised us by coming up with yet another question. Kaltenburg had glanced along the rows for the last time, had embarked on his usual closing speech: he hoped that for today our questions had been answered, if not exhaustively, since there were unfortunately all too few questions about the animal kingdom that could be answered exhaustively — Ludwig Kaltenburg’s discreet hint that he himself was exhausted, that the audience should save its open questions for the next lecture session, please. Among the regular listeners there was nobody who failed to take the hint, nobody who would dream of interrupting Kaltenburg at this point. People had fished out their bags from under their seats, they had their coats over their arms, waiting to applaud again at the end. “In the coming weeks we will all discover new things about the animals around us, and new questions will come up,” all that was left now was his “Many thanks once more for listening to me for so long and so patiently” and “I hope you have a pleasant journey home”—two sentences between which Kaltenburg always left a short pause, to savor the attentive silence in the hall for a moment.
“Herr Professor, if you don’t mind”—somebody had stood up in one of the back rows, I could hear people muttering, Hey, that’s not fair, you can see the professor is tired, anybody asking a question now must be a newcomer, someone ignorant of the rules. “Herr Professor, if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask a brief question,” and the tone suggested that the speaker was somebody who would not recognize the rules after twenty lecture evenings with the professor, who would never respect them. People were turning round, trying to see this person, only a few noticed how Kaltenburg had raised his eyebrows, as though wondering what was in store for him now.
“If I think of a chick being nursed under its mother’s wing, for example — what part of that behavior is acquired, and what is innate, what is due to experience? In short, does an adult bird know that it was taken under its mother’s wing when it was young?”
A trick question? Was someone trying to lead him on? Had they planted an agent provocateur on him at last? The professor knew all the tricky types, they too were part of the regular audience. Those who always asked the same question regardless of the lecture topic. Those who always knew better than the lecturer and couldn’t wait to pick him up on some trivial detail. And the one who produced an uncontrollable torrent of language that never led to a question mark. We all knew them, but this questioner did not immediately fit into any known category. Was the professor racking his memory for a face that corresponded to that of this unknown young man, was he looking around the hall for me, as though I might help him out at this juncture? I could see he was playing for time, which he did initially by explaining to the audience the unfamiliar German verb the young man had used, hudern, for when a chick is taken under its mother’s wing.
Hudern: the expression was far from unfamiliar to me. I learned very early on what it meant, and I know who taught it to me. Who helped me with my drawing when I really wanted a picture of the mother hen who strayed into our garden with her brood of chicks one afternoon. Who did most of the work when all I had done was dash a few yellow circles down on paper to represent the young birds. I didn’t have to turn around to see that lean figure before me, the taut skin that looked as though it had been stretched over the skull by hand, the high cheekbones, the peculiarly round eyes, whose effect was intensified by what seemed to be a complete absence of eyelashes. And yes, I could have told Ludwig Kaltenburg who the unknown listener was. Someone who had grown up on a farm in the Rhineland, watching from an early age how the hens nursed chicks under their wings, how they spread their wings over their offspring to protect them from rain, cold, strong sunlight. I recognized him instantly from his voice, his intonation. Nothing Saxon about it. A stranger. After you had been listening to Ludwig Kaltenburg for an hour and a half, carried along by his mellifluent Viennese accent, your hearing was sharpened, as though the eardrums had been cleansed of all sorts of guttural, hissing, and oral cavity noises. The question about chicks being nursed had been put by a Rhinelander, in a softly flowing High German, but you sensed he could just as easily have been speaking Platt, the Low German dialect of the lower Rhine, the language he grew up with.
Kaltenburg had left the question of nursing chicks far behind, moving on from chickens to the duck family, then touching on spotted nutcrackers, ravens, and nightingales, talking — in grossly simplified terms, as he admitted — about “stupid” and “clever” animals. Possibly still not sure whether he was being set up, he was keen to reach terra firma quickly. He was in the process of building his Dresden jackdaw colony, this was a time when he often thought back to Vienna and his first flock, long since dispersed — for him it was an easy move from here to the topic of tradition-building in the animal kingdom.
A young jackdaw, attached to older birds, would follow the same flyway as its forebears, and this knowledge, if you wanted to call it that, would be passed on to its own young. The sequence of route-training stayed the same from generation to generation, not based on some kind of insight but simply out of tradition. “My tomcat used to hunt regularly in a particular bit of the garden”—the professor leaned forward, resting on his elbows—“and the birds learned to avoid his hunting ground. Years after he died the young jackdaws were still doing the same, keeping the memory of an old cat alive.”
With regard to memory itself — Kaltenburg’s glance now took in the audience as a whole, whereas before he had been concentrating on the stranger — or, to be more precise, with regard to feats of memory in the narrowest sense, there were significant differences between the species, sometimes in fact between one individual animal and another. Just as there were between human beings, which was why he thought it wrong to see humans and animals as poles apart when it came to the ability to remember.
With this change of direction the professor had finally managed to put an end to the eerie mood in the hall, there was even some laughter here and there, a laugh of relief, the mixture of disquiet and paralysis was dissolved at a blow. It was true that there should not have been any mention of humans, that was the pact between Kaltenburg and his public, but in this particular situation the professor had no choice. There had never been such an atmosphere at a lecture, oppressed silence, uncertainty, doubt, anxiety, the whole evening could easily have been poisoned retrospectively. Ludwig Kaltenburg too looked relieved now: he would never have forgiven himself if he’d had to watch his listeners slope off home hanging their heads. The tension drained from his face, he bowed, the first few people were getting up to leave.
There was no time to lose. I pushed my way along the row to get to the central aisle, the dense crowd: Martin nowhere to be seen. I squeezed through as far as the door: nobody even remotely resembling him. I slipped between an old couple into the foyer: Martin must have altered. But there he was: moving purposefully toward the exit, he was just lighting a cigarette.
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