Then we crouched in the darkened tent in front of the camera-ready hamster set, together with Professor Kaltenburg and Herr Sikorski, the cameraman. For one last time Knut let his flashlight sweep along the passageway behind the pane of glass. From outside we could hear the sound of the mother hamster beginning a tentative exploration of her new quarters. The beam of light tracked down to the sleeping den, while the hamster was enjoying the pieces of carrot, wheat grains, and ears of rye that had been scattered over the miniature field. We saw the food storage chamber lit up, the escape tunnel, a side tunnel with bays — it was as though Knut were once more mentally rehearsing each individual scene he was planning to shoot. Now somebody was telling us that the hamster had discovered the entrance to the burrow, and Knut turned off the flashlight.
We pulled back carefully. In the world outside there was penetrating spring sunshine. The following weeks would be entirely devoted to getting the hamster used to a spotlight in her underground world. No hamster before her had ever lived permanently under two-thousand-watt lighting.
The film about the hamster was just the beginning. Three or four big projects were carried out at Kaltenburg’s Institute, aside from a whole series of shorter films that Knut made for schools, and after his Congo expedition, when he was in tremendous demand everywhere, he fled to Dresden to write the film commentary in peace. For several weeks he left his lodgings for only a few hours a day, sitting with the professor, letting himself be persuaded by Martin, Klara, and me to go on an outing — but he soon felt the pull of his manuscript again. Hardly anyone knew he was there, hardly anyone ever found out, he sat hunched over his desk for three weeks, crammed in between the bed and the corner bench, a pile of paper in front of him, he didn’t need books or any other material, Knut had all his Congo footage in his head, thousands of meters of it. “The shadowy world of the jungle is hostile to filming,” he wrote in the nocturnal quiet of Oberloschwitz, and while he was waiting for the next sentence he could hear rhinoceros birds, spoonbills, marabous, saw himself surrounded by giant pangolins, okapis, aardvarks, gorillas, and cheetahs.
In this cramped garage, frequently dank and cold in winter, Knut and I often sat together, or in a trio with Klara, sometimes with Martin too. In the garage you could put a distance between yourself and the Institute without altogether cutting yourself off from it, and for a while after the Institute had closed down Knut was still allowed to go on living there whenever he came to Dresden. Until, citing their new car as an excuse, the house owners began to hum and haw, then ripped out the linoleum, burned the wall insulation, stowed the furniture under the awning in the backyard. Until they no longer wanted to know anything about the past Kaltenburg era. But they seem to have left the curtains in place.
7
KATHARINA FISCHER TOLD ME that recently, coming home exhausted one evening from an assignment, she had turned on the TV and happened upon a group discussion in which, along with a number of lesser lights, Knut Sieverding was taking part. At first she had not taken much notice of the program, went into the kitchen to heat up some goulash, her husband was away on official business abroad, after a hard day she simply wanted to have a few human voices around her without having to translate their words into another language. The unctuous presenter, notorious for his powers of empathy, was doing his best to contain an aging actress who was holding forth in shrill tones about her boundless social commitment, for Katharina Fischer this was just background noise, until she heard a voice familiar from her childhood saying, “I don’t give a damn what you call it. It’s obvious to me we’re going to get it in the neck.”
She missed the context in which Knut Sieverding made his remark, but she remembered all the more vividly the horrified faces of the studio guests she was just in time to catch as she came back into the living room, before the presenter turned with a nervous smile to the nature-film maker. Knut was so relaxed as he submitted to questioning, his wild boyish mop of hair contrasting with his deadly serious, almost pitying look as he nodded benignly, correcting inaccuracies on the presenter’s part but otherwise largely ignoring the interviewer. Knut Sieverding declined to tell anecdotes about celebrities, he confined himself to animals — with one exception: prompted by the name Kaltenburg, he spoke euphorically about his time at the Institute, about a wealth of important experiences, and constantly reiterated how grateful he still was for the chance to work with the professor. Then the presenter read out a Kaltenburg quotation from his cue card: “More fantastic than taking a box at the opera,” the professor had rhapsodized after seeing the first rushes of the woodpecker film.
“And do you know how Knut Sieverding responded?” asked Katharina Fischer. “A strange comparison, he said, considering that the woodpecker film was the first wildlife film ever released without the benefit of stringed instruments.”
It’s true. No music — the idea came to Knut and the professor one afternoon on the balcony at Loschwitz. The opposite of Hollywood. And as for the box at the opera: I can’t remember Ludwig Kaltenburg ever setting foot in an opera house, at least not to see an opera, and once when the three of us clambered around in the ruins of the Semper Opera House, that was to do with Knut’s idea of making an educational film on cave-nesting birds in the city.
Kaltenburg may not have been able to show it openly, but he had reason to be grateful to Knut too. It was Knut who succeeded in luring Martin to Loschwitz. Another way to put it would be that Knut Sieverding smoothed the path to Kaltenburg for Martin, who had become curious but was still a bit recalcitrant — he told him he would learn far more about animals from him than at the zoo, nobody would be looking suspiciously over his shoulder while he was sketching, and anyway Knut could use some more help with his filming.
“Were you really made to tell your friend all about Anastasia the chow dog?”
“Martin wanted to know everything — he’d never seen a chow before.”
“Everyone’s fascinated by that blue-black tongue.”
“But I reckon he’s even more fascinated by the dog’s owner.”
“If you really think he might benefit from my modest knowledge of dogs, then by all means bring him to the Institute sometime.”
It’s possible that on that first visit both the professor and Martin were still somewhat self-conscious. We toured the site, Martin was amazed by the dog’s tongue, impressed by the aviaries, but when Knut left to go back to work, all three of us watched him as he departed, as though we had just lost our most important playmate. I was the one whose inspiration — if you can call it that — saved the day: why didn’t Martin sketch Taschotschek?
Kaltenburg placed Martin with his back to the balcony door and Taschotschek in the middle of the table. Inquisitively the jackdaw surveyed the sheet of paper laid out, the tin box that hid charcoal and pencils, fixed its eye on the stranger who was blocking its exit. Martin talked to the bird, spoke to it reassuringly, and innocently began to draw. And Kaltenburg, sitting with me on the couch to one side, kept out of the way. He was much too thrilled to interfere, no doubt more excited by the encounter of man and creature being played out before his eyes than by the portrait. He followed the tentative hand of the artist, Taschotschek’s hesitant steps, his glance jumping from one to the other, weighing up the relative chances of Martin and the jackdaw. As though he had made a bet with himself about who would win: Martin, by managing to capture the bird on paper, or the jackdaw, by reducing its portraitist to despair.