The water swirled at our feet, we were only a few steps away from the place where countless ducks and swans gathered during the day expecting to be fed by walkers. Unfortunately, I couldn’t pick out the villa itself over there, perhaps it was unlit because it was now empty, or perhaps it was too long since I last stood here for me to be able to orient myself in the dark on the far side of the Elbe. You would have to come back in daylight or, better still, as Katharina Fischer suggested, drive over to Loschwitz and take a close look at the former Institute site.
Once he said, as we were standing on the balcony watching a handful of hooded crows mixing with the flock of jackdaws above the Elbe slopes, “It doesn’t matter to me in the least if people see me as an eccentric uncle figure who tells anecdotes that are sometimes amusing and sometimes completely incomprehensible but who is basically not quite right in the head. If strangers see my household and way of life here as weird, even dangerous, that just tells you more about them. It’s a risk I take, I know that. But if — God forbid — I ever in my life become predictable to others, if I ever finish up being predictable to myself, foreseeing today what observations I’ll be making tomorrow morning, then that will be the moment I die, that much is certain.”
On one hand, I believe I can clearly remember that this was one of our first conversations on the balcony, in the early fifties. But on the other, it sounds as though for some time the sky had already been closing in over Kaltenburg’s head, and that would place it somewhere in the second half of the decade. Perhaps I’m merging together several discussions, a series of critical utterances over the years in which he revealed some of his hidden worries. Hearing them at first with amazement — after all, Kaltenburg was a rising star in Dresden, people sought his company, and nobody would have dreamed of treating him with anything but the deepest respect — I came to realize as time passed, perhaps realized only after he had vanished from the city, what had been going on in Kaltenburg’s mind, the fears he had lived with from day one.
“And don’t forget”—he fixed me with a sharp gaze—“never forget that here”—his hand swept around, vaguely taking in the hillside—“in that house over there, or further down, wherever you look, things are going on all the time that are much crazier than you’ll ever find in my place. Sheer hidden abysses. Menacing things. Revolting things. Believe me. I have looked into some of these abysses. That’s why I don’t mind if they weigh me up. Let them take me for a fool, I couldn’t care less.”
On one occasion Ludwig Kaltenburg said to me, “I can get along perfectly well with a Professor Baron von Ardenne or a Field Marshal Paulus. They have seen a few abysses opening up at their feet during their lifetime too. It’s the petty-minded people who worry me.”
And one winter evening, as I was leaving: “One has to stay vulnerable.”
Sometimes, he said, he had people in the house who clearly thought him not entirely sane, although they would never admit it to his face. Not a single chair available for guests but any amount of space for his animals, the jackdaw colony in the loft, the basement reserved for the fish. A cockatoo had the run of all floors, and its infernal cawing echoed through the whole house whenever an unwelcome guest blocked its usual flight path up and down the stairs. Dogs strayed around in the rooms, which annoyed some people more than did the ducks sitting there on the carpet making a low gabbling noise when the resident tomcat strutted past as though only he and his master were present. And not forgetting the hamster. On the desk a pile of gnawed papers on which it had been working the previous night, but the animal itself was nowhere to be seen. “I force myself not to let on that for the past few weeks it has been residing in the kitchen.”
As Kaltenburg had established, there were precisely two groups of such visitors: those who — fear in their eyes, fear of the zoo, the professor — had to make such an effort to hide their horror that they could hardly bring themselves to utter a syllable, and the others, who compensated for their fear by becoming downright rude. Not that they made insulting remarks, it was the tone of voice they adopted: And what is the point of keeping animals, if one may ask?
“Do you know what I say then, casually and clearly as the occasion requires? I’m studying. Period. That’s all.”
Then you had to wait for them to come back at you, as you knew absolutely for certain they would. Some of them, who hadn’t understood a thing, did so immediately. Others swallowed a few times before they could manage to utter, What’s worth studying about sticklebacks or about this—meaning Taschotschek—this bird here? What’s so interesting about these animals? Then, acting absentminded, surprised: “About these animals? What animals? It’s you I’m studying.”
IV
1
FRIDAY THE SIXTH of March. In the morning the news of Stalin’s death had been announced. In the evening I was due to visit the Hagemanns with Ludwig Kaltenburg. Arriving at dusk in Loschwitz, I found the Institute site unusually silent, and I encountered nobody except Herr Sikorski, Kaltenburg’s cameraman. When I asked him how people here had taken the news, especially the professor, Herr Sikorski just shrugged: it had been very quiet all day. Even the birds were less lively than usual. However, as for the professor, there was no knowing what he was thinking — he had retreated to the aquarium section that afternoon and not reappeared.
As I went down the stairs to the breeding and collecting tanks located in the rooms built on the side facing the slope, I felt a forlornness that I had never before experienced in this house. The walls seemed damp, my tread echoed on the stone steps, not a human voice anywhere, not an animal in sight. The cold light in the antechamber, the barrel vaulting over the aquariums placed close together, the quiet hum of countless circulation pumps.
The cheerlessness was not even dispelled by the sight of Ludwig Kaltenburg’s shock of white hair between the tanks. He was shuffling in rubber boots down the gangway at the other end of the room. Through a series of glass panels, the masses of water, his face was scarcely recognizable, blurred. As though Kaltenburg were walking across the seabed. Then it was gone, hidden by water milfoil, then flashing into sight again, dissolving in a whirl of air and water, finally regaining its shape, the clear eyes, the beard, the unruly hair.
On the worktop a bare reserve tank with a shoal of cichlids swimming in it. It appeared that Kaltenburg had spent the afternoon refurbishing the perch’s customary aquarium, trying out one new plant and one new arrangement after another until at last he was satisfied — that is, today the exercise had served him first and foremost as a distraction.
“Of course, I had to call the colleagues together and give a little speech,” he said, and, “Fräulein Holsterbach, you know, the dark Ph.D. student, was crying.”
I had no idea what was going through Kaltenburg’s mind. Together we put the cover back on the aquarium. He took a step back, rubbing his hands and surveying his creation. A truly beautiful world of water.
Slowly he cleared up the work area, took off his lab coat; he was wearing his black suit underneath, his black shoes stood ready polished on the cellar steps. We were moving toward the exit when he stopped in front of one aquarium and pointed out a male stickleback that was busy at the bottom of the tank. Kaltenburg’s finger moved up and down the pane of glass to show me something. The other fish hovered inquisitively behind the glass, following the finger to right and left, and only that particular stickleback took no interest in whether it was feeding time.