On the other hand, many of Martin’s student pieces stuck out like a sore thumb, it occurred to me, after I had asked Katharina Fischer if she would like some dessert, a coffee. In retrospect you can see in his student work the pressure he was under: sometimes he dutifully tries to please his teachers, at other times he is really untrue to his own hand, his own vision. Presumably he left most of it behind in Dresden, if he didn’t burn it. But I’ve kept all of Martin’s bison sketches.
9
IMPORTANT AS LUDWIG Kaltenburg was for me, it wasn’t from him that I first heard the name Hagemann, but from Martin Spengler. If I visualize him in his Dresden period, it’s not in group photos at the college, not among a circle of laughing students, not at a carnival party. Martin in Red Indian costume, Martin at a dance, Martin as a member of a bowling team — unthinkable. For me he belongs at the Hagemann family dining table, he belongs in their drawing room. I can see Martin in the little room behind the kitchen, a space crammed with books, painting equipment, drawing pads. A narrow bed, two stools, an old bureau: this accommodation had been fixed up for him by his favorite professor, a friend of the family and also the first patron of this independent-minded art student, whom outsiders usually considered taciturn. As far as I can recall, in Dresden Martin didn’t show his hyena drawings to anyone but this professor, the Hagemanns, and me.
The Hagemann family was pleased to have Martin in their house, it could easily have been different, as with the elderly couple and their middle-aged son who had been allocated quarters on the first floor. When they first moved in there was talk of having met previously, during the war, the man even announced his service rank as though that made him the new head of the household. But Herr Hagemann did not wish to be reminded of his former superior officers, least of all by one of those officers himself.
Contact was limited to the essentials, they said hello to each other when the Klein family crossed the hall with disapproving faces to disappear up the stairs to their domain. The daughters of the household soon dubbed the Kleins “the Super-Tenant family,” and eventually the parents caught themselves using this secret nickname themselves now and then. “The Super-Tenants again”—Herr Hagemann with pocket diary in hand—“I’ve got to get the cardboard laurels out of the cellar.” Whenever the opportunist veteran appeared on the stairs on the eve of some official anniversary celebration, commemoration, birthday, or death day, silently reminding Herr Hagemann to put the decorations out, it was all the head of the household could do not to warn him, “Herr Super-Tenant, you’re definitely going too far.”
If the Hagemanns were having a reception, Martin made himself scarce in a corner of the drawing room and didn’t budge all evening. The world of art and academia frequented the Hagemanns’, the company often including foreign visitors. Martin listened, he studied. Faces, hands, ashtrays, armchairs, shoes, curtains, the stucco rosette on the ceiling: wandering around the room, his gaze often fell upon a small dark spot, up there between the hook for the chandelier and a stucco sunflower leaf. A housefly stiffened in death, but Martin wouldn’t have been all that surprised if on closer inspection the empty exoskeleton had turned out to be a tiny hole. And he pictured to himself three people with wry faces upstairs crouching together under the kitchen table, with father, mother, and son silently fighting over whose turn it was to apply their ear to the hole punched through the linoleum.
Once the guests had all left and the family had gone to bed, Martin crept out of his room again back into the drawing room, enjoying the silence, sitting in the green armchair, Frau Hagemann’s favorite. In the darkness he looked at the walls.
“These walls are a world in themselves,” he said once. At the Hagemanns’, hyena art hung everywhere.
Every time I met Martin, he told me about the Hagemanns, and I soon felt I knew the family personally, as though I had enjoyed their company for years, the parents, the two daughters — Martin, who got on well with them from the beginning, passed on some of his intimacy to me. I particularly remember one of his stories, perhaps because I never found out whether Martin invented it for me in the telling, or because it took place in the Great Garden, or perhaps quite simply because Klara Hagemann was the central figure in it.
One day, during a Sunday walk in the park, without warning Klara left her family standing on the path. A figure in the distance, an unusual movement, had caught her eye, and before her parents or sister had time to notice that a man holding a dog lead was about to beat his animal with it, Klara had raced off. She ran straight across the field, screaming, a stream of words never heard before in this spot and probably never heard there again. The dachshund owner knew he was being accosted, looked around, couldn’t work out at first what was happening, had no idea what was coming at him, just saw a screaming girl in a Sunday dress. For a moment he forgot the existence of the scruffy, whimpering animal cowering in the grass at his feet — and lowered his arm. Klara Hagemann had been eleven or twelve. Straight after the war. Her parents’ hearts must have stood still.
Martin said, “She was still quite small at the time.”
Half of Dresden looked on as a girl in a white dress with knee-length socks and sandals delivered a telling-off to a dog owner, a total stranger. The Hagemanns had no idea where she could have acquired such language.
He said, “She’s quite different today.”
As though he had been present himself, Martin described to me how the father took a deep breath, took his first step into the field. Seen from the path, his walk, his shoulders, looked a little stiff. Once over there he looked the man in the eye, speaking two, three short sentences. They shook hands. Then Herr Hagemann and his daughter were back. He took off his hat, wiping his brow. He was sweating: “Not another word. We’re going for a coffee.”
The two girls ran on ahead. Ulli, the older sister, always one step behind Klara. His wife took his arm. Her expression said, Klara was right. He was powerless against it. Herr Hagemann had been looking forward to a peaceful family walk. But Klara was his daughter. He was the father of Klara Hagemann. A perfectly ordinary, mild Sunday afternoon in 1946 or 1947.
As can be imagined, I was pretty curious about this girl, or I should say this young woman, and was looking forward to being introduced to her by Martin. The trouble was, he knew me well enough to be aware that I was quite capable of wrecking a carefully planned arrangement at the last minute, I wouldn’t have cared a jot about embarrassing Martin, I simply wouldn’t have turned up at the rendezvous. He had no choice but to simply take me by surprise, and so he told me, as he packed up his things at the end of an afternoon together at the zoo, “By the way, I forgot to tell you — we’re going to see Klara.”
The further we walked down Tiergartenstrasse, the more agitated I felt. Martin remained cool. “She’ll be waiting for us”—he turned purposefully into the Great Garden—“She’s always overpunctual, you know.” He walked faster, pulled my sleeve, pointing at the ruins of the palace: “What did I tell you, the woman over there in the blue dress, do you recognize her?”
We shook hands, and Klara greeted me so politely that I almost expected a curtsy. But there was a spark in her green eyes that seemed to warn me not to go thinking her good manners were for my personal benefit. Martin pointed to his portfolio, then at me: “Hermann was with me in the zoo.”