The Leipzig experience may have faded into the background in the following years; how could Klara know what a librarian was? But reading and writing came so much more naturally to her than to Ulli, no doubt as the younger sister she had an advantage: the younger ones sit quietly with their toys listening while the schoolchild at the table traces the lines of print with a forefinger; they listen to the way that words form into sentences, the parents’ careful corrections, and two or three years later, when it’s their turn to read aloud, it sounds as though they have taught themselves everything overnight. Klara did her homework without grumbling, then sat down with her parents’ library to read her way patiently through the centuries. Soon she had a favorite bookseller in the city, Herr Lindner. He was the one who said one day, almost in passing, “I can’t imagine Klara anywhere but a library.”
She was no longer the girl who confronted strange dachshund owners in the Great Garden, no longer incited her sister to rampage through the house making fun of political chanting, so loudly that the people upstairs could hear. She had learned in the meantime what it was to be a Hagemann, she knew that when she wanted to achieve a goal it was not enough to be more hardworking than the others, brighter, cleverer, if you didn’t have the necessary instinct, the so-called ability to learn. It was definitely not easy to keep a tight rein on herself, how often she bit her tongue, how often she rolled her eyes when somebody came at her with “truth” and “historical necessity” when all she could see was stupidity. But she made the effort, kept her aim firmly in sight, had even forced herself during her training to read the collected works of Johannes R. Becher, minister of culture.
It even went so far that Klara was mistaken for an ardent admirer of the culture minister, and I can still clearly remember a distant relative reciting a few lines of Becher at our wedding to please Klara. There we stood in front of the assembled wedding guests, all eyes were on us, I can still feel Klara’s moist hand in mine, how she flinched when she recognized the lines, how she held on to me tightly, as though she could not survive the solemn recitation of that harmless versifying without the man beside her.
“The relatives from the West weren’t there.”
No, of course not.
“It sounds weird, this strict ban on contact simply because of bad childhood memories that Herr Hagemann was unable to put behind him.”
The parents kept it close to their chest. They wanted to foster Klara’s and Ulli’s belief in human goodness. But you’re right, there must have been more to it.
Not all that long ago, sometime in the late nineties, we had been invited over by an old bird breeder in the Meissen region, Klara always got on well with him too. It was his ninetieth birthday, the whole village was sitting together on this sunny afternoon in the meadow behind the house, there were cakes, there was schnapps, and the more schnapps there was, the more talkative the farmers became. They were cursing the regional authority’s livestock-disease insurance scheme, flies hovered around the half-eaten custard cakes, people were exchanging stories about animal diseases, the cream for the coffee clotted as it was stirred, and soon they were competing around the table to impress us townies with descriptions of worm-eaten sheep and suppurating cows’ eyes. Typical butcher’s-yard stories, a rough tradition, but this kind of thing never makes either me or Klara feel bad. Then the name Hagemann came up.
The oldest man at the table, who had so far sat quietly listening, looked around at everybody with his light-colored eyes, let his young neighbors know what he thought of their animal stories, cleared his throat, and began telling us about 1945. He had not been drinking. He pointed to the surrounding hamlets, hills, copses, the number of skeletons that were buried there, he wasn’t just talking about illegally disposing of a few sheep or cows. “The Russians are over here”—the man brought his right hand down on the table—“and the Americans are here”—his left hand came down not far away. “Nobody knew which of them would arrive first, but everybody was certain of one thing, the great, decisive battle involving our secret armies was not going to take place on Saxon soil, if at all.”
Slowly his hands moved closer together as he described the landowners’ nocturnal meetings. “They didn’t want any trouble,” many of them were scared for the first time in their lives, “they had to come up with something,” there were shotguns around, and foreign forced laborers who could tell more stories than the farmers liked to think. “So they took their Poles and Ukrainians into the woods.”
He named the collective farms, the former estates, listed old names for us, among them there was a Hagemann. The table fell silent. The palms of his hands met. “And that was that.”
Klara’s maiden name — and what a relief it was to both of us that the name Funk was associated only with the ornithologist and his charming wife who had such refined manners, who could listen attentively and react almost without batting an eyelid to the farmers’ coarse tales.
I had paid the bill, helped Frau Fischer on with her coat, a little too heavy for the weather at the time, we were about to head for the taxi stand, on the ground floor the tables had already been laid for the next day, the waiter opened the door for us and said goodnight. The gravel crunched beneath our feet, the night air, the bridge ahead of us, the river to one side, the water shimmering on its way to the sea, and Frau Fischer said she would like to slip down to the riverfront once more for a moment, to take a look across at Loschwitz.
12
ARE YOU OUT of your mind?” This was always the prelude to one of Kaltenburg’s fits of rage — as I well knew, but so far none of his outbursts had been directed at me. “What do you mean, you’re not quite sure yet what to do with your life?”
I didn’t relish mumbling and stammering in front of the professor, so I looked at the floor in silence. He had not expected an answer. “What a disappointment. I’ve got to sit down.”
I wasn’t sure whether he was groping theatrically toward his armchair or whether he was genuinely overcome with a sudden weakness. “The biggest disappointment of my life. You don’t know what you want to do”—he adopted a droning voice, the voice of an annoying brat—“as if we’re playing in the sandpit and you’re asking me what you should be, a fireman or a train driver.”
He lowered himself heavily onto the cocktail-bar chair, sitting on the arm, leaning back as though he were going to slide to the floor. “How long have we known each other? How long? Tell me.”
“Ten years?”
Silence.
“Longer?”
“And after more than ten years you still don’t understand a thing? My God, what sort of amoeba have I picked out?”
He passed a hand across his brow, pure play-acting, and in the next instant his eye caught mine and held it, his gaze boring into my skull. “You’re going to study zoology, no question. You’ll be one of my disciples.”
He collapsed in the armchair, completely drained, shaking his head as though talking to himself, as though there were no point in addressing me, the amoeba. “Don’t know why you didn’t think of it yourself.”
And then, after another long pause — I was wondering whether to call the doctor or simply go home — he raised his eyes to me again in a typical Kaltenburg twist, almost affectionately, now was the moment for his long-planned surprise: “My boy, we have a study place for you.”