The snow geese were not to be put off by the noise on the water, they turned their heads, gabbling softly, the ferry had reached our side. Cyclists came toward us, then a group of walkers, no one had noticed the white birds in the grass. The ferryman stood on the empty landing stage lighting a cigarette. I turned back upstream to wait by Bird Island for the crows, for the gaggles that would appear from all points of the compass in the fading light, returning from their feeding grounds, cawing excitedly, squabbling inconclusively before they foregathered to roost in their accustomed trees and for a few hours darkness rendered them invisible.
My mind kept going back to Ludwig Kaltenburg, but each time the scenes in Posen were overlaid by a later image. The professor sitting on the edge of the bed, bending down to untie his shoelaces, and tugging the bedspread over with him. His silhouette, the cold morning light on his white hair, he hasn’t noticed me yet. Kaltenburg without his jackdaws. The slight creak of the bed, the swish of the bedspread, which leaves a narrow strip of bed linen uncovered, very bright, very fine, not made around here. A little clumsily, he undoes his right shoelace, looks up at me: “Oh, it’s you.”
No, I never entered the professor’s bedroom while he was living in Dresden. I never saw it until after he had left, and even then only because I had to look after the household animals, with which I was nearly as familiar as their vanished master. I kept them company, together we wandered through the deserted rooms. In the bedroom, I remember, there were touches of extravagance out of character with the rest of the Kaltenburg household. An almost full bottle of French aftershave left in the bathroom, an embroidered bedspread, behind the dressing table mirror a pressed cyclamen that had escaped the beaks of generations of birds.
Where the thicket was beginning to get darker, by the riverside path, one icterine warbler responded to another of its kind down among the willow bushes. I could hear whitethroats, magpies, a wood pigeon. Soon the blackbirds would take their places in the treetops to begin their evensong. I was surrounded by voices, and it almost sounded as if my name were being called.
“Herr Funk?”
Katharina Fischer stopped next to me and got off her bike. “So it’s you. I thought I recognized you from the ferry.”
She went on to say that she would like to go with me to the crows’ roosting place, then declared how glad she was to have run into me, because my father’s adopted birds had been on her mind ever since our conversation in Loschwitz. Apparently we had each wrestled independently with the question, reckoned we were beginning to get somewhere with it, started to have doubts, then discarded all our previous reflections. By the time my parents got to know the professor, there was no longer any occasion to ban songbirds, at least in Posen: the ghetto they named Litzmannstadt had long since been in existence.
All the same, just like me, Katharina Fischer had found herself caught up in the wish-fulfillment scenario of a secret collusion between my father and Professor Kaltenburg which saw them in a pet shop inspecting, at their special request, birds that came from private households. The previous owners, the dealer would explain, had moved away with no forwarding address. Finding the birds anxiously fluttering about in their cages as his neighbors’ households were being broken up, he couldn’t bring himself to wring the necks of the aging starling, or the goldfinch, or the yellowhammer that was on display in the window.
Two bird enthusiasts taking up the cause of pet birds made ownerless in the midst of the world pogrom: a wish-fulfillment fantasy, as Katharina Fischer herself must have known. The secret collusion never existed.
“Have you always stood by Kaltenburg?” the interpreter asked suddenly, after we had gone only a few steps.
I can never forget what I owe him. But for him I would never have made anything of my life, it’s as simple as that.
“Then I suppose, all things considered, you could be called his most loyal student?”
I thought for a while. I realized that I too had reason to be glad I had met her that evening, otherwise I might never have said this out loud: I had never been so deeply disappointed by anybody as by Ludwig Kaltenburg.
Katharina Fischer shot me a shy sidelong glance, wanted to question me, held her peace.
You might think on the face of it that what really hurt me, what shook me to the core, looks like a simple oversight due to haste or a hazy memory. A mere trifle, a trivial detail that you eventually learn to ignore, especially as it’s only a matter of a slight gap. An outsider wouldn’t even notice this omission of barely eighteen months, because the professor retrospectively filled the gap with other events, other place, names, and characters. But however much I wanted to, I could never forgive him for this omission: Ludwig Kaltenburg deleted from his CV the period when we were both in Posen.
“As though you had never got to know him as a child?” she asked diffidently. “But why? Did you ever ask him?”
At the time when the famous zoologist appeared to have put our first encounters out of his mind as far as the public, his colleagues, the whole world were concerned, I no longer needed to ask. And Kaltenburg would no doubt once again have pointed at someone else, would have talked his way out of it — as he was wont to do by then — by assigning all responsibility to Professor Dr. Eberhard Matzke.
2
WE’VE GOT TO ACT as if we’re strangers”—this was the strict rule for our dealings with each other at the Zoological Institute in Leipzig. We adhered to it all the more firmly because everybody knew how close we were, even if not everyone was aware of the particular liberties I enjoyed at Kaltenburg’s Loschwitz Institute. Dresden was a long way off, and every time I made my weekly journey between the two cities I crossed an invisible line. I never worked out where that line ran, and as I looked up on the train from my lecture notes, my mind was on Klara and the past weekend, on Kaltenburg’s animals, to which I had devoted the previous two days, I gazed at the last hills behind Dresden, the gray, then pale green, then brown, and finally snow-covered fields, the curve of the Elbe at Riesa, the unvarying plain in which the settlements gradually merged into a town — somewhere along the route, I noticed, I had turned abruptly into the Leipzig zoology student whose life I can now barely recall.
The number of occasions when Ludwig Kaltenburg drove me in his car could be counted on the fingers of one hand. That was nothing to complain about; on the contrary, our agreement may actually have worked to my advantage, since any remarks I did overhear referred not to any secret favoritism but to the professor’s severity, from which I particularly suffered, according to my fellow students. They helped me out, lending me their notes and dropping me little messages. Nobody had any idea what a strain it was for Kaltenburg himself to play the stranger throughout the week, and how relieved we both were to meet again at the Saturday discussions in Loschwitz.
Once we were standing in a fairly large group in the corridor outside Kaltenburg’s office, all wearing sturdy jackets and boots, ready to go on a field trip with the professor to observe passage migrants in the country around Leipzig. It was still early, but we knew the day would soon be drawing to a close. Casually Ludwig Kaltenburg inquired which goose it was that came in both a white and a dark variety, and as if by chance he glanced in my direction. Anser fabalis or Anser albifrons, or perhaps just Anser anser—I looked at the floor, looked at the roughly plastered, white-painted wall, couldn’t gather my thoughts. Behind the professor somebody shook his head; it was Dr. Matzke, Kaltenburg’s assistant, who came to my assistance by silently mouthing the words until I recognized them: “snow goose.”