A few days later the professor took me aside; he was fascinated in equal measure by Martin and by his own shrewdness, as though surprised to discover new capabilities in himself at his age. Almost in a whisper, he told me, “I knew it would provoke a reaction in him sooner or later,” without clarifying whether the “it” in question was Martin’s acquaintance with Taschotschek or the long Stalin monologue. And Martin was to say to Klara at one point, “It’s possible that it was some such figure as Kaltenburg who spoon-fed me soup. I was always in and out of field hospitals, though it was before I was taken prisoner, and maybe Professor Kaltenburg wasn’t unique. Spoon-feeding soup, extraordinary. But I couldn’t swear it didn’t happen to me.”
Time and again the two of them together — in the garden, in the kitchen, on country walks — analyzed Martin’s experience of crashing in the Crimea. Went over the tragic loss of his copilot, the Tatar eyes, the smell of fish oil, coming around in what must have been a tent, since Martin found an expanse of rough material stretched above his head. He had spent hours staring at the fabric in the dim light, not knowing where he was, who had brought him there, yet feeling not at all unsafe.
Martin became more and more absorbed by this image, soon it hardly mattered to him that his spells in field hospitals occurred long after the professor was taken prisoner in Russia, and perhaps it was Kaltenburg’s story that inspired Martin to give that early drawing of his, in which I thought I recognized my nanny, the title “Russian Nurse.” The spoon-feeding, Kaltenburg’s fit of rage by an amputee’s bedside, Comrade Stalin’s coal-black stare — when Martin’s public performances in the sixties and seventies unnerved the public with their soft violence, I invariably recognized elements in them that reminded me of that evening. I think on one occasion he even incorporated the note tucked away in somebody’s cheek.
8
A SUNDAY IN DECEMBER. Ludwig Kaltenburg stood by the window in the winter light, we were in the zoological museum, in the workshop of the Ornithological Collection. It was my first visit to the building. I no longer saw the professor very often by himself.
I couldn’t make out whether Kaltenburg was looking me in the eye or scrutinizing the half-finished bird skin lying on the table in front of me. He betrayed no sign of impatience, standing with arms folded, nodding.
“Still looks a bit swollen.” Kaltenburg pinched the sparrow carefully. “But much better than your first effort this morning. There’s a world of difference.”
I pulled the cotton wadding out of the skin again, rolling it between my palms.
“But you don’t want to make it too hard either.”
I started tweaking with the tweezers a clump at the front, then another, then one a bit higher, toward the tail. A bright wad, meant to reproduce the shape of a bird’s body. Looking at my handiwork, I realized that I no longer even knew how big the sparrow was before we removed its skin.
“You won’t get anywhere that way, you’d better use some new wadding.”
And then promptly: “Stop, not so much. You’ve got to decide in advance how much you need.”
A few minutes later: “Perhaps you could sew it up now. Have you got the skull in? Just start sewing, then we’ll see what sort of customer emerges. And as I said, don’t make the seam too tight, otherwise the bird will burst open again.”
I didn’t want to know how many sparrows Kaltenburg had brought along for me. “Even if you never learn to enjoy skinning, you’ve got to be able to do it in your sleep. You must develop skill and an accurate eye, otherwise you’re lost.”
It’s not unlikely that he had me in for “extra coaching” because he found it embarrassing to talk about a student as a future acolyte when that student couldn’t even produce a well-formed sparrow skin. I was on my second attempt when Kaltenburg — by the window, arms folded — made a mistake. That is to say, he winced, and I knew he wished he hadn’t spoken.
“And they’ve gone on the hunt in the Great Garden, in this weather.”
“Who has?”
“Our comrades from the Society for Sports and Technology.” Kaltenburg’s voice as he said “our comrades.”
“And why on the hunt?”
“Haven’t you heard? The Great Garden is closed to the public, the SST is shooting animals — threat of rabies.”
“Foxes?”
“Stray dogs, they said, cats, wild rabbits.”
“In fact, everything in their sights?”
“Magpies, crows, jays can all transmit rabies, of course.”
“A regular slaughter?”
Kaltenburg came across to the table, leaning over as if to scrutinize my face.
“I’m afraid so, yes.”
I laid aside the half-skinned sparrow body. How could Professor Kaltenburg summon me on a Sunday to the zoological museum to calmly teach me the proper way to prepare a bird skin while at the same time in the Great Garden an army of lunatics was engaged in disguised target practice? There was no doubt that their victims would also include birds from Kaltenburg’s household, hand-reared creatures that frequented the Great Garden during daylight hours. As they did every morning, they had taken off all unsuspecting from Loschwitz to fly across the Elbe, while Kaltenburg was shaving, dressing, drinking his tea. Perhaps he had watched a flock of them circling one last time outside the window before the birds gradually disappeared down the valley, shapes, black dots mixed with white, isolated snowflakes, then becoming nothing more than a memory of movement in the air. Kaltenburg knew about the impending disaster, he should have used his influence, taken some action.
Leaning on the table, he looked at me. “Do you know what happened at the beginning of the century when they started ringing birds at the Rossitten observation post, fully believing it would help protect them?”
I wasn’t in the mood for guessing games. I didn’t even bother to shake my head. To take my mind off what I’d just heard, I picked up the scalpel and went on loosening more of the sparrow’s skin, as far as the neck, prior to pulling it away over the body. As more and more of the inside of the skin appeared, I sprinkled it repeatedly with the mixture of potato flour and plaster Kaltenburg provided that morning.
“People went out shooting birds. They brought down massive numbers in the hope of bagging one from Rossitten.”
Carefully I bared the skull, pushing back the skin of the neck and slowly easing it over the cap of the skull. The skin had to be pulled over both rami of the lower jaw at once, and I had to make sure I didn’t sever the ear sacs. You could draw them out of the auditory canal with your fingers. No tugging at this point, it would be so easy to tear the skin. One squeeze of my clumsy thumbs could crush the skull to bits. I had to keep in mind the enormous power in my fingers when they enclosed a skull.
“How do you think I lose most animals? People are as keen on trophy hunting nowadays as they were then, and everybody has plenty of ringed birds by now. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know whether it’s naiveté or ill will. Their pride when they take people into their trophy room, especially if anybody asks them, Is that mount a Kaltenburg?”
The professor paced back and forth, pausing in front of a showcase displaying objects from all over the world — picture postcards, a wooden case with inlay work: a pattern of fish or something abstract. The caiman standing upright with a hat and cane, holding a small champagne glass.