The professor was so inspired by the return of the art treasures that he sketched an outrageous vision of the future: what if the gallery in the Zwinger Palace was only the beginning? In the light of this unprecedented event, how big a step would it really be to follow through eventually with the missing contents of other collections? These were the reflections Kaltenburg mulled over on his solitary nocturnal walks through Oberloschwitz with Anastasia, who stayed close to her master. The black sky over Dresden, the dull pavement beneath Kaltenburg’s feet — perhaps one reason the professor knocked at Knut’s door on his way home was that he was afraid of losing himself in his wishful thinking.
The two of them talked, with Anastasia lying by the stove, about the holdings of the Dresden Zoological Collections missing since summer 1945, about the famous Steller’s sea cow and the great auk. Since being transported to the Soviet Union, they seemed to have been erased from memory, very few people ever mentioned them anymore. The name “great auk” could only be whispered, as if one were referring to someone banished and struck from the population register. As if it were not a case of a mounted specimen stored in a secret depository in Moscow, Leningrad, or Kiev, but a living giant bird languishing, despite all rumors to the contrary, in Vorkuta.
So Knut Sieverding knew long before I did where Kaltenburg’s hopes were tending in those days, what preoccupied him, and I can no longer say whether it was from Knut or from the professor that I first heard what was going on in his mind when he broke off from work and stared into space: he wasn’t dwelling on the activities of a woodpecker’s brood in its hollow, or the bloody battle between a ring-necked dove and a turtledove that he had carelessly placed in the same cage; his gaze was plumbing the depths of a secret depository where two custodians were arguing about whether or not to bring the meteorite from the Dresden collection out into the light of day.
“Was it a complete fantasy to hope these things would be returned, then?” asked Katharina Fischer as we walked toward Oberwachwitz, taking a path that Kaltenburg had often used with Anastasia.
Soon we would see, as the professor would have done, a little stand of pines, we would hear that high-pitched, even rush of wind in the trees, the wind that seems to be sweeping through a vast expanse of landscape wherever a few pines cluster together, and then the buildings of the former Soviet field hospital would appear between the treetops. As far as I recall, this is where, soon after his arrival and before the medical facility was transferred to the Garrisoned People’s Police, Kaltenburg had installed a huge aquarium.
There was indeed a glimmer of hope. And it’s possible that Ludwig Kaltenburg had advance knowledge of developments behind the scenes that the rest of us would have thought impossible. Certainly in those days people thought he was often dropping in on the Russian garrison, that he was on familiar terms with high-ranking Soviet officers.
“Dropping in on the garrison? Don’t make me laugh,” was his irritated reply when he heard of these suspicions. “It just shows you the limited mentality of people who’ve got nothing better to do than try and pin something on you.”
I can remember that the professor was standing in felt boots in the meadow behind the house, Knut next to him holding a camera.
“In and out of the garrison — and then I suppose I come sneaking out of the grocery store with pelmeni dumplings for my fish concealed under my overcoat? These people’s imaginations are as limited as their lives.”
It seemed to me that the pair of them exchanged a conspiratorial glance. We walked slowly down the narrow path by the house, Kaltenburg shuffling along beside us — it was obviously the first time he’d worn the boots — then he stopped, let the ducks examine the thick gray felt, and turned to me with an expectant air: “You may not believe it, but I only got back from Leningrad last night.”
Knut showed no surprise. I had no idea what the professor was driving at. Knut touched his sleeve, gently silencing him. “Perhaps we should go for a little spin?”
We ran into Krause in the driveway. Saturday morning, of course; Kaltenburg had forgotten. The chauffeur was cleaning the limousine as he did every Saturday, running the sponge over roof and windscreen, mudguards and hood, finishing by buffing up the chrome and the hubcaps, and not even allowing the jackdaws to disturb him as they inspected with their beaks every single screw redeemed from road grime and oil. As we passed him he didn’t seem to hear us, lost in his own world.
“Sometimes I feel really sorry for Herr Krause, with all the stories I tell him,” observed Kaltenburg as we rolled out into the road in his not quite so immaculately clean Opel. “When I think of him agonizing at night over his reports, not knowing what to write.”
He smiled, slipping his boot off the clutch, I think he was still in shock because he had nearly blurted out a secret in the presence of his chauffeur.
“Does Krause force himself to stick to the truth and report the liqueur chocolates that — as I told him — I kept on secretly feeding to an unknown squirrel, or does he permit himself the slight liberty of substituting the more plausible-sounding nut pralines? Whatever the poor devil opts for, he’s bound to sweat over it, and he loses sleep because he runs the risk of making himself ridiculous to his readers every time he reports. But let’s talk about more important matters — Leningrad.”
Kaltenburg took his hand off the gearstick and leaned back. “In the plane yesterday, I was so agitated, I just couldn’t sit still. When we landed I had to keep telling myself this was nothing special, just a normal official trip. Krause spotted me straightaway in the arrivals hall, and on the long trip back from Schönefeld to Dresden he tried to pump me a bit, just as I’d expected. It took all my strength to maintain a neutral expression as he kept on looking in the rear mirror.”
Now I was the one trying to catch Kaltenburg’s eye in the rear mirror. “What do you say, Herr Sieverding? Was I right?” he asked his front-seat passenger, with a nod to me at the same time. “We’re going to bring the missing treasures back to Dresden.”
“It won’t do to get our hopes up too high.” Knut answered as though caught up in preparations for a film project against the advice of the entire world of wildlife experts. “We’ll have to proceed very cautiously.”
“Of course we’re just carefully feeling our way at the moment, but I think our talks in Leningrad were a good first step,” countered the professor. “We’ve got a foot in the door, perhaps we can bring it off — even if it takes a while.”
This was where his command of Russian came in useful, his love of all things Russian, prone to attract suspicion as much as amusement. Kaltenburg had a plan: he could talk day in and day out, without a single reference to the collection, about the breathtaking landscape, the vast distances, he could go on about the fabulous treatment he had received as a POW. He would also, for example, expatiate on the manuscript he had produced in the POW camp near Moscow, which he had been allowed to take home with him unexamined, because a magnanimous officer had believed Kaltenburg’s assurance that it contained nothing political, only observations of animals. There was no stopping Ludwig Kaltenburg as he depicted the forthcoming negotiations and saw himself coming back from Leningrad with a great auk tucked under his arm: “I’ve been offered the chair of the secret zoological commission. That is to say, I’ll be taking it on when the individual commissions are set up.”