In the war years Ulli and Klara lost sight of the hooded crow. After a second, then a third hooded crow had turned up one morning, the sisters couldn’t agree whether it was their favorite bird that was perched on the eaves opposite or the one close to the house, on the path to the stream — though they were able to rule the third bird out completely, the one on the street lamp, because of its noticeably spiky black breast feathers. Before they could decide, the birds left the Wasaplatz along with their uniformly coal-black comrades and joined the great, never-ending stream of birds over Strehlen.
Once Klara thought she had been woken up by the hooded crow calling, it was still dark, Ulli was talking in her sleep, it was much too early for the morning influx of crows. All the same, Klara went to the window to take a look. On the opposite side of the square stood a car with its engine running. No animals, no other signs of life. If the bird had been in the square, it would have trotted back and forth, now taking a few steps on the pavement, then disappearing behind a bare shrub. Inquisitive or fearful, spiteful or serene: the sisters could never agree how to interpret the hooded crow’s behavior whenever something untoward happened in the street, when people started brawling and cursing loudly, when a drunk was yelling or a child beginning to cry. It’s cowardly, said Ulli, it wants to stay out of harm’s way but not miss anything either. Intimidated, said Klara, it’s more afraid for the human beings than for itself. And the noise that Klara thought was a crow calling? Some banging. Voices. Now she could see that the black car was partially concealing an open front door, she saw the light in the rectangle, then the silhouettes. A neighbor in his pajamas, and two men in leather coats.
It would be hours yet before the first crows moved in over the Wasaplatz and settled in the big chestnut, the oak, the beech in front of the window, on the rooftop. Hours before they started eyeing the grass verge, the road, the pavement, looking for food and weighing up the passersby, as if nothing had happened between yesterday and this morning.
12
DID YOU KNOW they were not even allowed to keep pet animals?” asked Klara one evening as we sat in Knut’s garage. A late, rainy evening in autumn, I think it was the year I had hand-reared five fledglings for Knut’s film about the woodpecker. The curtains were drawn, I was sitting next to Klara on the bed. In the dim light the heavy Mongolian bedspread with the pattern of light and dark brown stripes looked like a wine-red, hilly landscape crossed by snow trails.
“No Sunday bike rides. No public transport. No telephone, no radio, and no tobacco products. No walks in the Great Garden. I knew about that kind of prohibition.”
Opposite us sat Knut, at his feet and on the desk were piles of firewood. Martin was right by the door on an angler’s chair. We sat there with our coats on. There was tea on the iron stove.
“But what a criminal idea, to forbid someone to keep a pet bird — did you know that? No waxbill, no tame robin, and no sparrow taken from the nest. Nothing.”
Martin leaned back cautiously against the door. “I did once hear about it, but I thought it was a malicious rumor.”
“I’d like to know how one can dream up a ban on songbirds. Who puts such an idea into words. And what happened to the birds.”
I offered: “They were taken away? Returned to the dealer?”
“Or abandoned in the wild.”
Knut poked around in the fire. “Given away.”
“To the neighbors, you mean?” Klara shook her head. “To people involved in the same madness?”
“Anyway, who would want to take on a pet bird like that?” Martin had peeled the bark from a birch log, he examined his dirty fingers, looked at me. When he couldn’t stand the silence he would coax us out of our thoughts and back to reality with his birdsong imitations, but this time he was silent. No little ringed plover, no whitethroat, no distant dialogue between two agitated male blackbirds putting their powers to the test in a frenzied struggle over territory — a single wrong note, and he would have reproduced the call of one of those very pet songbirds whose shapes we were imagining in the semidarkness.
There was a knock. Martin got up to open the garage door a crack, and Anastasia bounded in, greeting each of us in turn, shaking her thick, wet coat.
“Are we disturbing you?” Ludwig Kaltenburg ran his fingers through his wet hair, his coat sticking to him, the felt boots gone shades darker. “I walked straight into a puddle.”
Knut took the professor’s coat and offered him his seat by the fire so that he could warm his feet. “I don’t know why you have to walk the dog in the rain,” he said, half reproachful and half concerned.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Leningrad?”
Kaltenburg nodded, yes, he’d been waiting for weeks for information about the zoological commission.
“No news?”
“Silence from Leningrad.”
I can’t remember whether it was Martin or Klara who brought up Shostakovitch to distract the professor, distract ourselves from secret zoological commissions and the ban on songbirds, and soon our conversation turned to string orchestras, funeral music, film music. The rain was beating down on the garage roof. Knut skillfully steered Kaltenburg to a subject that had already been touched on in the summer, when the two of them had been chatting about integrity in wildlife films.
“Hear that? I could listen to it for hours.” Rain on a felted roof. The rustling in the trees.
“One of these days we should take the risk of using the soundtrack of a natural habitat as is, just chance it, and ignore this stupid fear that the viewer will think there’s something missing.”
“How right you are. Here we are showing life on the forest floor, and it sounds as though we’ve parked an entire symphony orchestra in the treetops.”
“You’ve got to have masses of violins playing all the time — which idiot introduced that law?”
“You’d think it was Stalin’s funeral, the way they play, all that sentimental fiddling has nothing to do with the poor forest dwellers.”
When the rain had eased and the professor was about to leave, all five of us were so taken with the idea that in our heads we could hear whole sequences of atmospheric noise, scratching sounds. Animal noises. Snuffling. Trampling. Birds calling in the distance.
“That would make a difference. We must try it,” Knut said.
“You’re wrong, Herr Sieverding — it would be a revolution,” Kaltenburg exclaimed on his way out.
But the silence from Leningrad was to last for many years.
The little stand of pines was now out of sight, no garage, no derelict land, no Institute villa, we had reached the slope again and were walking down toward the Loschwitz cemetery, the sun appeared briefly in the west under the clouds. I had already told Katharina Fischer that Kaltenburg’s hopes were not to be fulfilled while he lived in this town. The fact is this was Ludwig Kaltenburg’s first defeat in Dresden, even though he would never have used that term himself — he probably didn’t even know the word “defeat.”
What a scene that would have been — you can just hear the breathless tone of the eager radio announcer: Accompanied by a group of Soviet colleagues, Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg presents to the world the treasures of the Dresden Zoological Collections, carefully preserved from destruction in 1945, kept safe in the Soviet Union, and now, thanks to the infinite generosity of our friends, returned to the resurrected city of Dresden.