“All right, then,” drawled the professor. “Let’s go.”
We trotted down the corridor in the cold light, Matzke leading. I always suspected that he saw through the act Kaltenburg put on for his Leipzig colleagues, and that the professor’s strict manner toward me simply got on Matzke’s nerves.
Dr. Eberhard Matzke was part of the Zoological Institute; nobody could have imagined him anywhere else, he himself least of all, no doubt. This was where he had studied in the thirties, this is where he returned after the war. When they placed a Professor Kaltenburg over him, while he remained plain Dr. Matzke, he took it calmly: for Eberhard Matzke, a Leipziger born and bred, Ludwig Kaltenburg was nothing but a passing phenomenon.
He walked up and down between the microscope tables, slightly bent, helping with a dissection here, moving a slide into the light there. Under his lab coat he wore a cardigan, and in the evenings when he hung up his white coat I always expected to see a few straws sticking to the matted wool. As though Matzke kept animals in a hutch tucked away in a remote corner of the sprawling institute building, animals he had left that morning only because he felt that unless he was peering over our shoulders, we might not go on examining feather structures and sensory cells under the microscope. He went steadily about his duties, that is to say, he spent most of his time at my bench — the Herr Professor must have no reason to complain.
He couldn’t understand why many students made such heavy going of these tasks, instead of dispatching them as fast as possible so they could get back into the much more attractive world of living animals. To spur us on as we worked, Matzke told us anecdotes about his encounters with animals, which he was convinced would open up vistas in our mind’s eye while in reality we were still struggling with a paper-thin slice of dead tissue. How he had once rescued a golden eagle injured in a fight, how a favorite crow went missing and how he fished it out weeks later from a sedimentation tank — he repeated many of these stories every six months or so, but we enjoyed them all the same because Matzke’s slight Saxon singsong and his warm, deep voice soothed us.
“My colleague Matzke should have a medal just for his ability to keep a crowd of students quiet,” opined Kaltenburg. We never found out what he thought of him as a zoologist. Possibly the professor would not have believed his “colleague Matzke”—merely an assistant to Kaltenburg — capable of filling a university chair of his own. But he did at least deserve a decoration: “Even if I have to pin it on him myself.”
Now and again Martin was allowed to go to Leipzig too: “Just don’t go holding the lad back from serious study,” warned Kaltenburg, and, half in jest, “Just to make sure, I’ll get my colleague Matzke to keep an eye on you.” But I was aware that the warning was aimed not at Martin but at me; I was supposed to follow Martin’s example in paying keen attention to Matzke’s words.
When Martin accompanied me to a laboratory session and Matzke interrupted his story with a long-drawn-out “Aha,” I knew that he had got as far as the glass case at the back. That was where Martin liked to sit, concentrating on the display-specimen martens and rabbits that languished there practically ignored. It was a sight I wouldn’t have wanted to miss: the huge, heavy man looming over Martin, and the wiry figure on its folding stool almost disappearing behind a massive back. There was just a glimpse of the corner of the sketch pad, Matzke with arms outspread as though about to devour the stranger, you could visualize his wide-open mouth — but Martin showed no fear, and what came out was only another “Aha.”
He was sketching animals, afraid perhaps that if he departed too far from his models in place of Matzke’s friendly “Aha,” he would get an unhappy shake of the head. At home he had been working for a long time with animal blood, with fat, with tea stains on packing paper, creating beings that few would have recognized at first sight as animals. But Martin himself shook his head when he surveyed his work, he trusted neither what he saw on paper before him nor the figures that had gradually begun to populate the world of his imagination.
I admit we didn’t take Dr. Matzke entirely seriously, just as he probably didn’t take us entirely seriously either. The heavy, loping gait, the cardigan that had long since lost its shape — and then suddenly, from one day to the next, there was no longer any Dr. Matzke at the Zoological Institute to supervise our small-bird dissections, giving himself a shock when he boomed, “It’s a matter of principle here,” whereupon he always fell into a half-whispered tone that was meant to be enticing: “And anyway, working like this you’ll get to know the bird from the inside out, it’s showing itself to you as you’d never see it otherwise.”
Matzke turned his back on Leipzig. He had received an offer from Berlin that he couldn’t refuse, especially since it held the prospect of a professorial title. At last he would become “colleague Matzke,” and a colleague of the famous Reinhold to boot. It was in fact Reinhold who had conveyed the news to us on a visit to Loschwitz. Kaltenburg didn’t comment on Matzke’s move, he played it down when people said he must surely have pulled strings to advance Dr. Matzke’s career when it seemed to be over. And when I asked him once whether the man hadn’t always been a bit in the way, he just smiled.
3
EBERHARD MATZKE REMOVED his cardigan. Gave his hair a side parting. Took over Kaltenburg’s former doctoral student, Fräulein Holsterbach. Soon relinquished his Saxon singsong, adopted a clear, almost hard High German, and every time he dictated an article, he asked his assistant to make sure no regional expressions slipped in. By degrees, in his new surroundings Eberhard Matzke even shed the awkwardness that had easily identified him in Leipzig when you were hurrying toward the institute entrance in the morning and saw a distant figure dismounting from his bicycle in the early light. The wider his sphere of influence spread, the slimmer and nimbler he appeared, as though he had learned at every step to avoid an obstacle, even if the obstacle was invisible.
“He’s doing well. The Natural History Museum is good for him, the university is good for him.” Kaltenburg lauded him when asked about the new man in Berlin. “I’m very pleased that colleague Matzke has found his feet.”
The professor had not the faintest idea what was happening under his nose. Perhaps he seriously thought that Matzke would be eternally grateful to him. But in the light of subsequent events, the impression given by Matzke’s publications in the second half of the fifties is that he was truly out to demolish Kaltenburg by holding up one theory after another to cast doubt on it, to nullify it. Not that he mounted a frontal assault on the professor, that he never did, but it seems to me that he wasn’t fully satisfied with any scientific paper he wrote, any ornithological field observation, even a newspaper article, unless it contained, if only tucked away in a subordinate clause somewhere, a covert little dig at Ludwig Kaltenburg’s convictions.
One remark of his instantly made me so angry that I didn’t dare show it to the professor. He could not possibly have seen it as anything other than deliberately offensive, an egregiously arrogant departure from the tone of what was otherwise a factual account, attesting to years of zoological research, concerning conflict arising under conditions of imprisonment. I had seen an offprint of the article lying on Kaltenburg’s desk and noticed the inscription, “With collegial greetings,” in Eberhard Matzke’s handwriting, which grew larger from year to year. It’s surely no accident that I have such a clear memory of this little excursus — which I couldn’t help hoping Kaltenburg had overlooked — for one thing because the author was dealing with the inhibition against biting among wolves, and for another because the offensive remarks touched upon one of Kaltenburg’s most sacrosanct principles, frequently expressed to me: “To live is to observe.”