Taschotschek emerged victorious. Kaltenburg sat watching the scene calmly. You couldn’t tell by looking at him which party he had backed.
Martin was to make many attempts to sketch Kaltenburg’s favorite jackdaw. He never succeeded; after its own fashion the bird always joined in enthusiastically, and the better it got to know Martin during the sittings, the better it was at taking the lead. It took Taschotschek only a few minutes to work out how to open the tin box. With almost equal speed Martin grasped what charcoal meant, a human hand clutching something shiny black — enough to infuriate any jackdaw. A few drops of blood, a ripped-up piece of paper.
No, Martin would have had to draw Taschotschek from memory, and perhaps he actually did so in later years. It’s just that it wouldn’t necessarily occur to anyone that a line curving across a paper tablecloth was an image of a jackdaw, a jackdaw called Taschotschek capable of driving Martin Spengler mad for months on end when he was a young artist in Dresden.
So, strictly speaking, it wasn’t Knut or me that Kaltenburg and Martin had to thank for their friendship, but a bird. Taschotschek’s willfulness. Taschotschek’s curiosity. At some point the drawing sessions became just a welcome chance for a chat in the presence of the jackdaw.
In Archetypes of Fear there is a fairly long passage, which Frau Fischer clearly recollected too: Kaltenburg is speculating about the relationship between fear and hallucination. About the human capacity to escape out of hopeless situations into another world. “If I understand him correctly, it’s possible not only to alleviate feelings of fear and hopelessness, but to shut them out altogether by overlaying them with fantasy images,” she recollected, and, “Wasn’t it rumored that Kaltenburg was making use of findings by American military psychologists from the Vietnam War?”
Ludwig Kaltenburg as a renegade whose reward was access to secret experiments for use in his own studies — that sounded quite ludicrous even at the time. People simply didn’t want to acknowledge where he acquired most of his observational materiaclass="underline" here.
One evening I had finished checking the aviaries and was going to say goodnight to the professor when I heard him talking to Martin in a low voice in the study, as if not to wake the animals that had retired for the night. Kaltenburg seemed surprised when I appeared in the doorway, I hesitated, he hesitated, I was about to retreat, but then he beckoned me into the room. On the table: Taschotschek, pattering about indecisively on a sheet of unmarked white paper. Knut was sitting on a stool, Martin on the couch.
“So there I was, lying trapped under the wreckage of our plane after we had taken a hit in the northern Crimea and lost control of the machine.”
Martin glanced across at me and moved over a little to make room for me. Kaltenburg had drawn up his cocktail-bar chair. I was in the picture straightaway.
“I didn’t know that my copilot had been killed, that his remains lay scattered in the snow, flesh, bones, skin, and cloth. I wasn’t feeling any pain, I had no idea who or where I was, I wasn’t conscious of the frozen ground.”
The bird regarded each of us in turn. Ruffled its feathers. Drew its third eyelid across its eyeball. Turned away.
“I regained consciousness for a moment. As if someone had woken me up. And in fact I wasn’t alone, my skull, my limbs, my joints — somebody was checking my bones, looking for fractures, abrasions, flesh wounds. My mind was brought to bear on individual parts, my knee, my shoulder. But I wasn’t aware of anyone touching me. Then I drifted back into darkness.”
A scratching, a gentle clattering sound, Martin had let Taschotschek have his empty tin box. The lid was opened, closed, opened, the box pulled from one end of the table to the other. Apparently the jackdaw regarded it as Martin’s job to keep it amused by hiding interesting objects such as colored pencils or erasers.
“The next time I came around, I knew these were the eyes of Tatars. As though the Tatars had not simply observed the crash site timidly from afar but had examined me at close quarters, then run their hands over my body, then taken me along with them. I could smell it, smell their skin, this indescribably comforting aroma, with a slight trace of fish oil.”
“And this was all just in your imagination?”
Professor Kaltenburg ignored the clatter now coming from the hallway; Taschotschek had dragged the tin box outside and was pecking at the hinges.
“It must all have been in my mind. I only lay there for a few hours, then I was picked up by a search party. Can you imagine, my comrade Hans was almost pulverized. I think about it sometimes when I’m grinding earth colors in the mortar, when I’m mixing pigment. Doesn’t man consist of carbon too when the fluids have evaporated? It doesn’t take long to render down that little bit of protein. Pulverized, fragmented into the tiniest particles. Nothing left.”
The jackdaw was now on the couch between us, looking up at me, eyeing Martin, and since nobody was paying it any attention, it plucked an old bus ticket out of his trouser pocket.
“There’s a photo of me standing in full uniform in front of our wrecked plane. That time, that moment in time, is lost to me. It was somewhere near Freifeld, in that area. That much I can remember. But I’ve got no recollection at all of being photographed. If they had indeed pulled me out unconscious and half dead from the wreckage, I could hardly have stood up to pose for a photograph. So the picture must have been taken later. I had been patched up somehow, they put me in the jeep and drove me back to the crash site. But why? There were more important things. Getting back to health. The next sortie. Saving your own life. Maybe I insisted on it.”
“You wanted a picture to take home with you. Wanted it to send to your parents.”
“Probably, yes. But then my injuries can’t have been as bad as I remember: double fracture of the skull base, practically no skin left on my body, no hair. Everything full of splinters, hardly any nose left.”
Martin stumbled over his words, went quiet, you could only hear his lips moving. At that moment Kaltenburg, Knut, and I were nothing but shadowy Tatars. The professor poured tea for us. Taschotschek hopped onto my lap.
“Herr Spengler, or may I say Martin?” Kaltenburg hovered with teapot and teacup. “I should tell you that in principle I don’t like talking about the phenomena they call self-healing powers. Particularly where human beings are concerned, people often make it too easy for themselves. All the same, I’ve seen some unbelievable things in that field.”
“But that photograph — if you take a good look at it: a scab-covered cut at most, my eyebrows perhaps. And I must have been thoroughly concussed, of course. Yet Hans had ceased to exist. What they could find of him was buried in the nearest village cemetery.”
“No doubt.” Kaltenburg spoke as if he had already said too much.
“No doubt”: any deeper insight into his own experience of illness and hallucination might have been destabilizing for the young man, with his Tatar memories.
In the hallway Knut almost trod on the tin box. The lid was missing, I could see a pastry fork. By the hall stand the professor remarked, “Really interesting are the hallucinatory states that occur when self-healing powers are activated. There’s still practically no research into that. At any rate, I’ve never come across any convincing answers.”
He accompanied us to the front door, quickly scanned the Institute grounds to left and right, nodded goodbye, and shut the door as we reached the garden gate. Knut set off for his garage. As Martin and I were walking down the hill, I looked back frequently — the dim light of a desk lamp filled the upstairs window that I knew so well, until Kaltenburg’s villa was out of sight.