PEOPLE AUTOMATICALLY STEPPED ASIDE to let Martin Spengler pass, they didn’t dare make eye contact with him, and on the way out he saw nothing and nobody. They shied away from this stranger who had nearly upset the balance of Professor Kaltenburg’s lecture evening with a single, late, inconsiderate question. But even as a silent listener among the crowd he would have made people somewhat uneasy. Yes, maybe it was something I grasped at that moment as I chased him across the foyer, drawing attention to myself in the process: wherever Martin Spengler turned up in public he caused a certain annoyance, hard to explain but totally unrelated to whether he was trying to provoke people or not.
The way that Martin once nearly got into a fight with a gang of juveniles, the way that, insecure as he was, he felt challenged by a group of cheeky but fundamentally harmless kids marauding through the rubble landscape, who for their part felt threatened by Martin as they probably did by any adult who crossed an unseen territorial boundary: it must have been one of his earliest, most formative experiences in Dresden. I can see Martin getting out of the train with his portfolio under his arm, leaving the station and walking in the direction of the art academy. But when we met up again by chance, Martin had already been living in the city for quite a while, and perhaps my memory only places this story at the beginning of his stay in Dresden because I have always regarded it as symptomatic of his student years, not to say his whole life.
Martin was received in Dresden by the echo of children’s voices, it had to be children’s voices, even though from a distance there was something shrill and hateful about them such as you would only want to ascribe to an adult. At first he couldn’t make out any words in all the shouting, simply accepting it as a sign that the area was not completely devoid of life. There were no signposts, he had difficulty finding his way through the network of trampled paths and cleared stretches of road. Martin had an appointment, hugged the portfolio of drawings close to him, he had worked at it for a long time, constantly adding new pieces, taking out older ones, so that now it provided an overview of nearly eighteen months’ work.
Masses of masonry, dust, a shrub here and there. Not that such areas were unknown to him, but he knew them only from a bird’s-eye view, from his cockpit. You could just as well have told him he was traveling through the karst region north of the Mediterranean. Or far to the east. He had seen places, from above the Crimea, where Dresden stretched in every direction, to the horizon. As a fighter pilot Martin had been decorated several times over, but which sorties he got his medals for he could no longer say, there had been too many, and mostly he saw nothing below him but a postwar Dresden. The burn marks on his neck, from the chin to behind his left ear — if you mentioned his scar he would say, “That’s what they gave me the gold medal for, ‘wounded in combat.’”
No, none of it was that unfamiliar to Martin — it was just that he had missed his way some time ago in the empty city. Children were playing somewhere in the ruins, crawling through half-collapsed cellars, following the course of completely vanished rows of streets from one plot of ground to another, a subterranean network of paths to which no adult had access. Then they would resurface somewhere unexpected, lugging planks out of a cellar and using them to get to spaces you had so far seen only from an insuperable distance, glimpses into secret rooms, across a gaping chasm four stories deep. The children would be egging each other on, thought Martin, while they dragged their plunder with grim determination through the brick debris, or two rival gangs were preparing for a fight, or the excitement was all about some tremendous discovery, the children had found something in the ruins they’d never seen before, something strange to them — but what could be strange to them? — hence all the shouting.
At first Martin wanted to use the children’s voices to orient himself. Perhaps he had missed some sign in the landscape where he should have turned off, a particular heap of stones, a gorse bush with a distinctive shape, maybe he hadn’t taken in the details of the lengthy directions in the right order, had paid more attention to the tone of the friendly old lady on the train than to the information she gave him. Most of the journey had taken place in silence, actually quite a pleasant silence, he felt, even though he wondered now and again whether he, the stranger, was the reason for the reticence of his fellow travelers, who all seemed to be natives. No, it wasn’t his fault, Martin realized as the valley narrowed on either side of the track, the Elbe slopes closing in on the train windows, for as the end of the journey clearly approached, the first quiet conversations started up. More and more voices joined in, he heard mention of people’s jobs, place-names, surnames, even a first name, an address. He was relieved, satisfied that during the journey it had been simple consideration for others, a matter of leaving them in peace. You read, you dozed, you lost yourself in daydreams, but now, just before arriving, there was no fear of bothering anyone if you began a conversation.
It was at Weinböhla that the lady spoke to him, gesturing toward his portfolio, and when he began to explain something about drawings, the art academy, his application to study there, the lady nodded as though she had known all along. Her husband had been an artist too, a man obsessed by his art. Precisely in the darkest years he had been driven by an almost frightening compulsion, producing hundreds of drawings, even though there wasn’t the slightest prospect of ever showing them in public. On the contrary, nobody could be allowed to see the pictures, and as her husband finished one sheet after another, it was her job to hide them. She had found more and more new hiding places, in the loft between two hideous old farmhouse dressers, behind the wall cladding in the summerhouse, under all the clutter in the tool shed. In a way she had admired her husband, whose work obsession prevented him from looking either forward or back, but she also felt powerless, close to despair as she sewed sketchpads into pillows or wrapped half a dozen pictures in packing paper and laid them along the shelves in the larder like ordinary lining. A few days later the wrapping paper had been torn away, the scraps covered in manic yet almost microscopically fine pencil strokes. Another headache. Her husband couldn’t remember anything.
Before Martin could ask his name and whether his work was on display in the art gallery today, whether he was still working at the same furious pace, she said, “All burned.”
With that, the subject was closed. “All burned”: paintings, drawings, and sketches, or the artist himself together with his concealed work — Martin did not dare ask. The lady composed herself, returned to the art academy, and began to describe the easiest way to get there. It would have been better if he had asked her to draw him a sketch map on his portfolio case, because as she spoke — now fully turned toward her interlocutor — in well-formed, clearly structured sentences about things which did not affect her emotionally, Martin soon had ears for nothing but her way of talking.
They crossed the Elbe, the lady made him calmly repeat all the details, corrected him, went over it again, the train drew into the central station, and as they parted Martin had only a hazy notion of the city’s topography, but he had learned his first lesson about Dresden: people here set great store by a cultivated command of High German. “We’re supposed to get off the train at the front”—such prompting would have sounded far too direct, an uncouth way of addressing someone, especially if you had only just met them. In Dresden you had to say, “It might be preferable to alight by the door at the front end of the train,” and you certainly couldn’t have a brusque “We’re getting out…,” let alone “We gotta get off up there.”
Even before he set foot on Dresden soil, he had already learned a new word, almost a foreign word — not a dialect expression, far from it. It was something that went beyond good High German when the lady unselfconsciously wove into her sentences a refined form of the German subjunctive, wöllte, and thereby showed Martin what it was to speak Highest German. Admittedly, he was taken aback at first, he had never heard wöllte before, but it seemed so familiar to people here that he assumed the children were taught it in the first year of elementary school. He must catch up quickly, Martin resolved, as he helped his kind traveling companion with her cases and took the most polite leave of her on the platform.