Of course, I could distinguish between the raven’s combative note or other harmless noises and its attacking cry, but Martin couldn’t. And of course I also knew that a raven always launches its attack from behind, because it believes it has achieved a victory, or at least the best precondition for a victory, if it can land on its victim’s back. I don’t know whether it was too late, but I failed to alert Martin or to distract the bird. The raven hopped sideways, its head down, toward the loden-clad man, its wings spread in order to take off quickly if its opponent should turn around suddenly. But it didn’t occur to Martin to do so, he wasn’t aware of the situation. Animal cries, birds calling, you heard them everywhere, and part of the attraction of Loschwitz for Martin was surely the opportunity to immerse himself in a restless world of animal noises.
And of course I knew that the raven was allergic to the sight of anyone resembling a huntsman, even from a distance. The robust dark-green material, and then for good measure — the ill-fated combination of two characteristics — a broom: Martin jerked, felt the claws in his neck, fell to his knees, turned around, shook off his assailant, and saw the creature crouching on the ground with wings still spread. Involuntarily Martin had brought the broom up to head height, his eyes dilated with fear, his neck bleeding, he kept his gaze fixed on the bird. Martin was in a state of shock, but the raven gave him no time to recover, it tried to get past the huntsman figure with the leveled gun in order to attack again. Martin didn’t understand, whirled around, coattails flying. By the time I had regained my presence of mind and warned Martin that it was far from over, the raven mounted its third attack.
I shouted, “Throw the broom away, take the coat off,” but it was no use, the more fervently I urged him on, the less self-control he had. Martin waved the broom handle wildly, hit the raven on the wing, the raven struck at his temple, pulling his hair out, then hacked at the back of Martin’s hand.
I shouted, “Hand in front of your eyes,” but Martin did exactly the opposite, he put his hands behind his back, making the broomstick describe a wild arc, which took the raven with it and hurled it quite some distance toward the garage. No sooner had the bird pulled itself together than it launched the next attack. Suddenly Kaltenburg was standing between the two opponents. I don’t know how he got there so quickly, presumably my shouting and the hoarse croaking of his raven had alerted him.
I heard the broom handle splintering across Kaltenburg’s knee, followed by more wood splintering. Kaltenburg didn’t utter a sound as he threw the broken bits into the shrubbery, grabbed the bewildered Martin by the upper arm, and dragged him behind the house. Then I heard him roaring: “Coat,” I heard, “lab coat,” as if this “coat” and “lab coat” were the most crucial words in the language.
The raven flew a little way, up into the oak tree, it took some time to calm down. It preened itself, putting its feathers in order, looking down into the bushes as though it still couldn’t quite believe that the broom handle rested there smashed to pieces. At some point it stopped croaking, squatted silently, and surveyed the strip of grass below, casting an eye over a battlefield from which it had emerged victorious, or as leader of an invincible army, albeit one consisting only of a single foot soldier.
I didn’t see Kaltenburg again for about an hour. In the meantime I had delivered straw to the dwarf pigs. The professor was still agitated.
“So careless,” he burst out. “He could have lost an eye.”
I thought he meant Martin.
“Martin?” he snapped back. “Martin could have broken his wing.”
I wanted to know where Martin was, but that name had already ceased to exist.
“The raven lost primary feathers,” he said, “and as for your friend, I never want to see him on these premises again.”
7
EVEN LUDWIG KALTENBURG can sometimes misjudge people.”
No one could persuade the professor to lift the ban. We certainly wouldn’t have dared to raise the topic at the usual morning meeting, but I know that many members of the Institute tried to change Kaltenburg’s mind. Admittedly, Martin Spengler had been a nuisance occasionally, pushing his way into an observational setup, for example, or asking questions about what was going on in front of his very eyes rather than relying on his own observation. And hadn’t the professor always said that anyone bothered by him should personally take steps to shake him off? But by now everybody regarded the outcast entirely as an asset to the Loschwitz Institute and was not inclined to be judgmental about those moments when Martin had been insensitive in his dealings with animals, or, as Kaltenburg once put it rather bluntly, he had assaulted an animal.
The scientists, keepers, craftsmen, even the feed manager — they all sprang to Martin’s defense, although they took good care to avoid touching on the delicate subject of the friendship between the two of them. They left that part to Knut and me. Needless to say, we had no intention of giving in, always thinking of new arguments, and I was almost locked in combat with Ludwig Kaltenburg. I talked about the deep understanding of animals that had inspired Martin. Certainly he didn’t see them with the same eyes as the professor, but Kaltenburg must concede that it was precisely this difference that had first aroused his interest in Martin.
“But how is he supposed to gain what you call a deep understanding of animals without observing them closely? That’s a complete contradiction,” Kaltenburg objected.
Martin simply did not possess with the same research drive as a trained zoologist, he didn’t observe in order to establish functional relations, he let impressions work on him.
“Do you know what? I’ve long suspected that your friend finds animals — how shall I put it — cute. No trace of deeper understanding there.”
But didn’t he think there was a certain innocence in that, an attempt to approach the animal without reservation?
“Innocence, without reservation — when I hear that language, I just see red. He’s spent too much time reading Brehm’s Life of Animals.”
Knut tried to calm the professor down by admitting that Martin might well have unclear notions of the borderline between animal and human, and when Martin philosophized about “communicating” and an “exchange with the animal,” Knut was as skeptical as Ludwig Kaltenburg.
“When he imitates the call of the blackcock, he imagines himself slipping into a blackcock’s skin and feathers. When he sits in a cage with a weasel, he sees himself as a weasel. But who better than you to put him right about these notions, Herr Professor?”
Kaltenburg hesitated for a moment, reflected — but no, he had made up his mind.
“You can say I’m limited, you can call me quirky if you like, I can live with that. But any kind of cutesiness makes me furious, even as a kid I hated people using that coochy-coo voice to me.”
If he had ever found animals cute, if, as a so-called nice child, he had been drawn to animals because they were nice like him, he would never have become a researcher, he said. Animals are not cute critters, and a child is the last person to be interested in niceness: on the contrary, it was precisely the dignity of animals, their serious attitude to the world, even when at play, that aroused the child’s interest.