“I’m sure you noticed it too?” Klara inquired.
“Yes, dreadful.” Professor Kaltenburg looked away into the distance.
It had rained a lot throughout the summer, overcast days, muddy holes all over the city. In the gray light the skin of the prisoners looked duller than ever, though they were very young, just a few of them seemed older. Beneath this dirty sky, however, that may have been a false impression, the hollow eyes, the pinched cheeks, their poor teeth. No, they must simply have been exhausted.
Kaltenburg listened again to Klara’s description of the prisoners’ truck. The inmates’ shirts and trousers, the way they hung loosely from their meager frames. Gray and white stripes. No, no trouser creases. Yes, rough linen. The moment when the driver braked because he got too close to the group in front: the way the prisoners lurched, holding on to each other, for a second you thought they were all going to lose their balance.
“What an awful sight,” said Kaltenburg.
Because you weren’t sure whether what you were seeing in their eyes was the shock of performers or the fear of camp inmates.
A father pointed with his furled umbrella to a spot far ahead at the crossroads, explaining something to the daughter who was sitting on his shoulders. A family festival. The onlookers waved and called out. A column of trekking refugees came along, with handcarts and baby carriages. At the beginning you could wave to the Saxon nobility, Augustus the Strong under a canopy. The shy young ladies-in-waiting grouped around a model of the Church of Our Lady waving back with their handkerchiefs, the magnificent clothes, the wigs, the powder and lipstick. Hour after hour the postwar rubble-clearing women, flag wavers, apprentice gardeners, fanfares, airplane builders, filed past. By this time you had nearly forgotten the steam locomotive, the horse-drawn tram, and the historic milk cart, along with the float bearing the inscription ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS, its crew sitting on their bench looking out searchingly from under their steel helmets. Still to come were a combine harvester, the Wartburg vehicle fleet, a car from the animated film studios surmounted by Pittiplatsch, the cartoon figure. One of the last displays of this parade to celebrate the 750th anniversary of Dresden was a huge model of the new brand of cigarette, Jubilar, carried right across the city on the bare legs of six girls.
“Of course it was easy to miss them in such a motley crew,” suggested the professor.
Yes, red flags. No, no sewn-on Stars of David. All the same, it was clear that the Jubilee Committee had not been able to make up their minds how to deal with the ex-prisoners. Perhaps the idea had been to have them celebrate their happy release by cheering and raising a fist. But the thin young men didn’t smile, their expression was subdued, as though exposure to all these stares was robbing them of their last ounce of strength. And hardly any of the onlookers dared to wave to these figures in their strikingly drab outfits, moving past in silence. You might almost have thought you were looking at real prisoners.
“Hermann was looking for you,” Klara remarked. “Maybe you were sitting in the VIP stand in Grunaer Strasse?”
Kaltenburg looked at me, then back at Klara. He hung his head. “I admit it, I wasn’t there. I dodged the jubilee parade.”
A free day — the prospect was just too tempting, especially as it looked as though the weather might be half decent. In the dawn light the professor quietly hauled his motorbike out of the garage, pushed the machine out onto the road and as far as the next corner. Jumped on, started the engine, and took off before the first of his neighbors could peer out between their curtains. He rode on to Bautzen, he said, the fresh morning air, insects on his goggles, then he turned off south of Weissenberg and, more slowly now, cruised through the villages, the hamlets. Maltitz, Mostitz, all those names, Lautitz, Mauschwitz, Meuselwitz, Krobnitz, and Dittmannsdorf, he’d hardly encountered a single soul.
Goldfinches among the linseed. For a while he had ridden along a path that led straight across the fields, following at a walking pace behind a flock of sparrows in the morning light that was examining a stretch of wheat, acre by acre. So by stages he topped one hill after another, always keeping the birds in view beside him, and at some point, although — being on a motorbike — the professor had no need to pedal, on reaching a loamy valley bottom he found himself out of breath. The tree sparrows took a bath. They disappeared. The lark was singing. Ludwig Kaltenburg was thirsty.
In the midday quiet, he arrived at Reichenbach. Deutsch Paulsdorf, Kemnitz, Russenhäuser. In Bernstadt auf dem Eigen he finally came across a pub, with the strange name The Earth’s Axis. He sat there for a long time over his beer, talking to the locals, giving advice, picking up information. An old farmer’s wife showed him her geese. He wasn’t known here. Kaltenburg in strange parts. He toyed with the idea of spending the night in Bernstadt. It wasn’t until late in the evening that he set off for home, without a headlight, the bulb was kaput. He suspected Krause, but he didn’t want the day spoiled right at the end by a minor character. He arrived in Loschwitz exactly in time for the morning feed.
5
THE WHOLE TIME, a scraggly rook with a bright greenish-shimmering breast had been patiently worrying away at an uprooted tree trunk. I recognized some fibrous tissue in its beak as it flew off to save its booty from a roving terrier. The rook was skimming away above the water even before the dog had noticed it, its breast feathers shone ever more brightly in the last of the sunlight over the Elbe, shone almost with a petrol-slick sheen.
Like me, the interpreter was watching the departing rook, and now the bird had disappeared on the Pillnitz side.
“Are there any photos of the truck?”
I’ve never seen any. And if it hadn’t stopped right in front of us, we might not have taken much notice of it. Klara and I, Ulli, Martin, Herr and Frau Hagemann, we were all awkwardly placed among the crowd, the parade came to a halt, perhaps somewhere further on a group had got out of sync, the driver hadn’t been paying attention, had to brake abruptly, the prisoner figures got a shock, they lurched, tried to steady themselves — and it was this sudden movement that gave us a shock in turn. We didn’t say anything, but as Herr Hagemann looked into his younger daughter’s eyes and nodded slowly, very slowly, as though only his damp raincoat collar was bothering him, he let it be understood that Klara’s parents too were queasy at the sight of such an image.
I don’t remember how the rest of that Sunday went. I mean, we probably sat together that evening at the Hagemanns’ discussing the Moscow revelations, reading out bits from the West German papers, just as we talked incessantly at that time about Stalin’s sudden fall from grace. It was some months later, maybe at about the time of the Soviet march on Budapest, when the Dresden festivities had long since passed into history, that Klara’s thoughts returned to the procession. It was only once Stalin’s burning gaze was finally extinguished that she got around to asking Professor Kaltenburg about the truck with the prisoners that summer.
On closer consideration, she said, these young people dressed up as camp inmates represented a slap in the face, a slap in the face for all those driven out of the country barely three and a half years earlier.
“And we still don’t know the whereabouts of many people who disappeared at that time. Are they still stuck in their prison cells? Being interrogated? Are they still being made to pay the price for the great show trial?”