“And Klara’s impression of the professor? I think I would have felt a bit uneasy about this man after a first meeting like that.”
I don’t know if it was shyness or embarrassment, but she wouldn’t really say anything about him. It may be that she wasn’t sure whether it was admiration or contempt that Kaltenburg felt for Stalin, and it seemed to me that she had to reach a clear verdict on that before she could decide whether to admire or despise the professor. After all, Ludwig Kaltenburg never made any secret of his love for all things Russian. It went right back to his youth in Vienna, did not go cold in captivity, survived the move to Dresden, and perhaps only flourished properly after Stalin’s death. For a few months he even preferred to eat lying down when, at the end of an intensive working day, long after the usual big meeting of all the colleagues, he indulged in a late snack. “No, it’s not just a fad, it really is more comfortable when you’ve been on your feet all day”: the great Professor Kaltenburg stretched out on his sofa with a plate of fruit, with tea and bread and a leg of roast chicken. Perhaps he dreamed of Karelian birch furniture.
One of his favorite words was Durak, “Da, da, durak,” he would say when he couldn’t make sense of something he had observed in his ducks, “Yeah, yeah, stupid,” when he simply couldn’t make a coherent connection between two series of movements: these were his first words of Russian, taught him by a Red Army soldier to whom Kaltenburg surrendered after an inept attempt to escape at the front. Then there was his love for diminutives and terms of endearment acquired in the field hospital, where they were lavishly employed, and in general his choice of names for his charges. There was a Ludmilla, a Turka, an Igor, and I wondered whether lurking behind Taschotschek there wasn’t a Natalia, a Natasha.
As though she had found a reasonable compromise for the time being, Klara began to make little jibes at Kaltenburg, to which he always reacted with a smile, with a good-natured growl. In fact very few people were allowed to tease him, but Klara had not only spotted at first glance a weakness in Ludwig Kaltenburg, she had also found the right tone, she had the gift of being able to talk mockingly to him without making him feel he was being mocked.
When she said in sepulchral tones, “I think I can see Stalin’s coal-black eyes glowing,” the professor had to laugh, and from the looks he shot at me I realized he would let her get away with anything, because his weakness was none other than a weakness for Klara. If she had wanted to, she could have twisted Ludwig Kaltenburg round her little finger.
“He respected her.”
Enormously.
“Because he noticed she was studying him.”
And not only him, Professor Kaltenburg. He must have gathered at a stroke that at barely twenty she was ahead of him. Studying human beings came naturally to her, and at an age when he was still concentrating fully on his jackdaws, his ducks and small mammals, when as yet Ludwig Kaltenburg knew nothing at all about the faces of his patients in the field hospital or Josef Stalin’s gaze.
3
HE INVITED US — strangely enough — to a café. He came on foot down the hill in Loschwitz, whereas usually when meeting young ladies he preferred to present himself on his motorbike. He wasn’t wearing gloves. And of course the first thing Klara wanted to know was how he had come by the scratch on the back of his hand. Nothing important, nothing earth-shattering, just the kind of mishap that was a common occurrence when dealing with animals: Igor, the tame magpie, couldn’t stand Kaltenburg drumming impatiently with his fingertips on the tabletop during breakfast while reading his paper.
“Sudden rustling of paper — I’m familiar with that.”
“Aren’t magpies pretty dissolute birds, cowardly and devious?”
“That’s what everyone says. It’s just that they’re too intelligent for most people.”
It was the first time I had ever sat in a café with Ludwig Kaltenburg, his idea of a suitable place to take a young woman, a young woman whose admirer, whose future fiancé, you have known since childhood. To left and right of us elderly ladies and gentlemen having afternoon coffee, families, children behaving so politely that their parents must have promised them a second piece of cake if they would stop staring at the famous animal professor.
Klara asked him about the types of animal he had in his collection, all of which she knew from me, and carefully counted them off along with him as Kaltenburg strolled from room to room, peering into the stairwell, the loft, the basement: “Cichlids, or have I mentioned them?”
“They came first, when we were at the aquariums.”
“The goldfish, Fritz.”
She asked him why certain animals had names and others didn’t. I had already explained this to Klara on one of our first dates, it was the hand-reared specimens and those closely involved in research work that were given proper names. She wanted to hear it again from the professor, he didn’t mind, he enjoyed it, we hadn’t touched the cake on our plates.
Where in Germany do people eat tart and where do they eat “Torte,” what is the difference between bread and pastry, and exactly what dessert dishes do the Austrians include under the heading of “Mehlspeise”? We had never had such discussions before, but we sat in the café, all equally out of place, our polite behavior, our nice conversation, after a quarter of an hour of this we surely deserved at least an extra helping of whipped cream. We might have been ready to move on if Kaltenburg hadn’t jumped in with a story that was new even to me.
“If my parents are to be believed, I began life as a tumor.”
The painted eyebrows of the old ladies over there by the window shot up. Kaltenburg’s parents married late, nobody thought pregnancy was in the cards, in the first instance they may have been almost as shocked by this news as by the earlier misdiagnosis.
“Fortunately I wasn’t born prematurely, otherwise my father would have seen me as a questionable gift for the rest of his life.” The professor laughed. “I came into this world — and turned their lives completely upside down.”
His upbringing was all the more careful, his parents looking after their unexpected son as though they had a bad conscience about him, the father even accepted the son’s ambition to become a zoologist instead of continuing the line of eminent surgeons named Kaltenburg. He shook his head in bewilderment, but he didn’t object. So, for his sake, initially Ludwig Kaltenburg went into medicine.
Klara nodded appreciatively. “But he must be very proud of you today.”
“Even if he were still alive, he certainly wouldn’t be proud of a son who voluntarily moved to Dresden.”
“Your parents are no longer alive?”
“My father didn’t even find out that I had survived the war and been captured by the Russians.”
“The patient who hid the note in his mouth arrived too late.”
“Yes, he arrived too late.”
Klara ate the rest of her cake, the professor looked on.
“Shall I order some more coffee?” He lifted the lid of the pot as though inspecting it carefully to see whether a small mammal was nesting there.
“Animals are just messy, the old man used to say.”