“Well, we’re not the only ones living here — but don’t worry, they’re not around.”
I don’t quite trust myself. Neither the surprised, stupid adolescent trotting along behind Klara in the hall nor my present self claiming to remember. Klara’s cool, almost rude behavior at the beginning, only to take a friendly interest in me scarcely two minutes later — it would sound more credible if Klara’s tone when I turned up unannounced at the door had been consistently polite, if rather distant. First careless, then slightly too pert, that’s not Klara — and did she really ask, “Are you scared of me?”
I don’t know to this day whether Martin’s absence was accidental, whether he had forgotten our arrangement or deliberately gone for a walk by himself. It’s also possible that he may have been in the house the whole time, having a midday nap or engrossed in his work, and Klara didn’t want to disturb him — one possible explanation why she didn’t take me to his room, no, to the “maid’s room,” as she called the room behind the kitchen.
We had hardly sat down in the drawing room when Klara remembered that she had a book for me: “A present from my parents, and because Martin told me you were interested in swallows, I thought it might be something for you.”
Not swallows — swifts: did I call that out to Klara as she left the room to fetch the book, or did I manage to suppress such a redundant correction? You think you never see the world so clearly as in such situations, and then you have to concede that out of sheer excitement you had eyes neither for yourself nor for the person opposite.
Klara handed me a hardback volume. I opened it at the title page and was shocked to see a familiar name: LUDWIG KALTENBURG. Shocked, because I had never heard of the book, according to the title a guide to living with animals.
“I know him.”
“You’ve read the book already?”
“No, not a word of it. I’m just surprised. Because I know the author.”
“Another book by him?”
“No, that’s not it. I had no idea that he wrote books like this. I’ve known Professor Kaltenburg forever, since I was a child, but he didn’t write popular handbooks then, only academic works.”
“Oh, academic works, I get it.”
I was on the point of surrendering. Klara didn’t miss a thing, she picked up the slightest alteration in my voice as well as the deceptive casualness of a throwaway sentence, sensed a touch of arrogance as well as the little lie that had preceded it. She didn’t let go.
“You know Professor Kaltenburg personally? I don’t believe you.”
As though suddenly sorry for her brisk tone, she asked, “Would you like a glass of cordial? You could browse through the book until I get back.”
I felt as though Ludwig Kaltenburg had let me down. When I asked him about his manual the next time we met, he brushed aside this “little effort,” as he called it, with a shrug. A straight money-spinner, Kaltenburg’s financial worries in the early postwar years, no prospect of a suitable post, all the animals that needed feeding every day. When he was writing it he had also been driven by a certain anger, he was maddened by the countless bad animal books on the market, he said, wanted to sweep away all that sentimental, hypocritical garbage: no more cute little noses, no more round, astonished, sleepy eyes, or should one say bedroom eyes, and no more cuddly creatures that were nothing but humans in plush costumes. Nobody would have believed at the time that Kaltenburg’s book — which, incidentally, was followed by a number of sequels — would be such a notable success. He would never have dreamed that his collection of experiences with animals would reach such wide circles, even including Dresden society. He was still writing occasional little articles of that kind, he said, newspaper editors pestered him for them, obviously readers couldn’t get enough of unadulterated animal-watching. For him they were relaxation exercises, in the evenings when he didn’t have the concentration for serious work he would sit down and compose, with a light touch, for an hour at most, until the last feed. “And you’ve known all the stories for years, you heard them from my own lips. But of course I’ll give you a copy, you know I really love you to read every word I’ve written.”
When Klara came back from the kitchen, I talked to her about her parents. She said they were certainly kindhearted people who refused to let anybody destroy their belief in human goodness. I was holding my glass, Klara emptied hers in one go — but as children she and her sister had sometimes suffered for this belief. The pressure to be good despite all the challenges.
“A child can’t keep something like that in mind day and night. Once Ulli and I raced through the house shouting nonstop some phrase we were making fun of, I can’t remember what it was, some political chant perhaps.”
She sat down next to me on the sofa, hugging her knees.
“Suddenly my father grabbed me fiercely by the arm, he came shooting out from nowhere, pulled me under the stairs, and hissed, You know perfectly well the kind of people we’ve had foisted on us upstairs. His eyes staring, his lips trembling, and before he let go of me he whispered one word: VORKUTA. That night we could hardly get to sleep, although of course our father’s hint about Siberia was lost on us. Vorkuta to me meant the bruises on my arm that I covered up with a long-sleeved blouse.”
The fine hairs on her arm. Klara stroked her left foot.
“If you know Professor Kaltenburg so well, you must have been to his Institute in Loschwitz?”
Naturally — the door to his Institute, and even to his private quarters, was open to me day and night. But what kind of an impression would it have made if I had blurted out everything I knew about Kaltenburg? I knew every corner of his villa, I knew the man’s every emotion — a pale young man basking in the light of his fame. So I steered a course through Kaltenburg’s world as well as I could without sounding boastful, I took a back seat, telling her that what impressed me about Kaltenburg when I was a child was the way he had with gloves. Often he carried several pairs around with him, the thick calf gloves for the motorbike, the finer ones for the car, the mittens made of thick felt for a walk in the woods, the “torn ones,” as he called them, a favorite old patched pair he wore in early autumn down by the Elbe and sometimes in the evening, on his way down into the city, then his buckskin ones for unavoidable social occasions, which he took off to greet people.
Klara asked me that afternoon, “You want to be famous too, don’t you?” And when I came up with no answer she added, “Or at least notorious.”
The sun, which had moved around the house, was now shining through the big veranda windows straight into the drawing room. Our empty glasses on the table. The carpet. My dusty shoes. After a while Klara said, “By the way, I enjoyed our time on Lake Carola.”
“It was the first time I’d ever sat in a rowboat.”
“That was obvious. But I loved the way you simply ignored people when they started laughing at us.”
She blinked, jumped up, and said something that I didn’t quite catch, something like “This isn’t getting anywhere.” In two steps she had reached the window and begun to close the heavy curtain. First the left half, dark and heavy as a fur coat I had once followed with my eyes. Klara reached for the right half, carefully guiding the hem behind an indoor palm with her foot. I followed her movements, followed the strip of light as it got narrower. The dark hair on the back of the head of a strange woman. The bright chink had disappeared, and for an instant I was blind. Then I saw Klara’s face, right in front of mine.
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