No. Nothing like that ever happened. Not even Professor Eberhard Matzke, who was undoubtedly involved in bringing the prize exhibits back from the Soviet Union in the 1970s, was able to boast of his great achievement, because the whole transaction took place in secret. In equal secrecy he would have relished his triumph, as a former subordinate of Kaltenburg’s at the Zoological Institute in Leipzig, Dr. Matzke the long-serving assistant, the permanent fixture in whom nobody had confidence — until, out of the blue, he began his meteoric rise, to Berlin, right to the top, overtaking Professor Kaltenburg.
“But you never discussed the ban on songbirds with him that evening?”
No.
“Later?” Katharina Fischer looked at me.
No, never.
“I could have sworn you and Kaltenburg had a long discussion about it at one point. There’s an obvious connection, anyway.”
Suddenly I understood what she meant. I had never thought of it. My father’s adopted birds.
Basically, declared Frau Fischer, the matter was clear. My father had taken in prohibited companion birds. She gave no weight to my objections: the advanced date, far too late for people to be looking for a new home for their pet birds, when those people themselves had disappeared from the city of Posen, transported to the camps. Perhaps, suggested the interpreter, the afternoon of the business with the swift wasn’t originally connected to birds being cared for in our house. It might be a matter of memory causing a telescoping of events. And like a child who sees himself as the center of the universe, in retrospect I was now arranging widely separated bird images in my mind on one plane. “You’re not concerned about the actual sequence of events,” maintained Katharina Fischer, “you’re only looking for similarities.”
Our injured blue-throat, I’m quite certain we picked it up while out for a walk.
“Think about the tame starling. Where am I ever going to find a tame starling in the wild that I can lure onto my shoulder and take it home with me?”
I don’t know.
“But of course that’s obvious to you, Herr Funk, as an ornithologist.”
And finally she asked me a question I had been expecting since we began our walk down to the valley. All afternoon. In fact, since our first meeting in the Ornithological Collection.
“Did you ever see anything in your childhood resembling what Klara saw? Did you ever see a neighbor being taken away before dawn?”
Klara had asked me the same question. No, I had never seen anything like that. And at the risk of sounding odd, almost crueclass="underline" today there is something I would be glad to have seen. Certainty, about one moment at least, when Maria left our house — did she leave my father, my mother, because she had been ordered to report at an assembly point? Did my parents go with her, despondent and silent, a little way into town? Or did my nanny disappear overnight because she wanted to forestall difficulties for our family? And yet it was also possible, even if not very probable, that with nothing at all to fear she had gone back to her parents, taken a new job, or indeed, as Martin once speculated, got married, and that she wanted to spare me a long and tearful parting scene. Whether Maria had disappeared at night or early in the morning, I must have been asleep.
“Didn’t you ever see them in their leather coats?” asked Klara. “Wasn’t there any house on your street in front of which the dark car stopped with its engine running?”
I can clearly remember the fine Sunday when she asked me that question, we had been to the races, had persisted in backing outsiders with poetic names and never picked a single winner, now we were making our way back to the station, through scrubland, allotment gardens. We were walking hand in hand, and I was telling her about the goldfinches I had begun observing in the early months after the war, in this area among others. Thistle territory, rubbish dumps, the embankment on the other side of the Wiener Strasse, I had followed the birds, often near Klara’s family’s house, thus escaping on hot afternoons from my siblings, who always wanted to go for a swim in a pond — I only went with them a few times. I am eternally grateful to my surrogate parents for letting me go bird-watching instead, even if their voices betrayed a concern that their foster child was in danger of turning into a loner.
“And then in the summer after the war, didn’t you see trains taking liberated prisoners home?”
When Klara looked back, for her the area was not populated by finches, she saw no parents feeding their young, didn’t hear the cracking of seedpods nor the clamor of chicks, saw no plumage markings, brown backs, red faces, or black wings with yellow bars. The children from her neighborhood used to play on the rail track that led to Prague; the two sisters would take a walk along the line as far as Reick, picking up any strange objects they found on the ballast bed. And Klara could still hear the hum of a train approaching from the main station, the vibrating of the tracks, the faint, reassuring alarm signal that in no way befitted the danger it announced.
One day Klara was dawdling on the sleepers when all the other children had already moved a safe distance away, she saw the engine, pulled up her socks, she was anticipating one of those never-varying freight trains, then the strap on her sandal broke. The next instant she was crouching in the grass barely a meter away from the line, looking up at the crowded cars, looking into foreign faces, hearing foreign languages, hearing nothing at all. The alternation of motion and stillness, noise and silence, was far too rapid for Klara to be able to say later whether the passengers’ mood had been cheerful or downcast, and the other children, who now came creeping up, didn’t know either. The cars trundled slowly past, in the direction of Prague, to Budapest, perhaps on to Bucharest and as far as the Black Sea. Nobody took any notice of the group of children in the grass, not even the watchful young Russian soldiers standing in the cars.
“Cattle cars?”
No, as far as I can remember, Klara made no mention of cattle cars. Open goods cars, their rusty walls eaten into by coal dust, with a long row of flat plank benches, that was how the trains looked then. But my mind went back to the cattle cars I had noticed on the embankment in Posen when I was crushing leaves between my fingers, when I was identifying, looking for, digging up plants with my father: “To the east, or have you forgotten your compass points?”
V
1
SIX WHITE SNOW GEESE were resting in the high grass on the bank near the landing stage; one of the birds, neck outstretched, was keeping watch over its surroundings, peering in all directions, while the others gazed steadily westward, downriver, into the sunset, the yellow and pink and light-blue sky above the city. The castle ferry had just left the jetty on the Pillnitz side, the diesel engine roaring, the little boat struggling against the Elbe current. The blackbird behind me was complaining. The sand martins still darting about.
In the past few weeks, whenever my evening walks have taken me as far as Kleinschachwitz, I have found myself recalling Katharina Fischer’s words and trying to clarify my thoughts about the birds we took in. All his life Ludwig Kaltenburg laid great emphasis on zoologists’ need to take a critical look at their earlier selves in order to correct past errors of judgment. But in the end, all I see each time is the injured blue-throat in its box in front of me while next door my father is arguing with the professor about sick birds, I can see our starling landing on Professor Kaltenburg’s shoulder during his first visit. The story was that my father had bought the starling from a bird seller in town, but he had never actually taken me with him to the breeder’s, either because I declined to go or because he had never been there himself but wanted to name someone he knew the great bird expert trusted.