As a child I saw my father turning his back on Kaltenburg from one day to the next; in my mid-twenties, I saw the professor repudiating Martin. Both events affected me deeply, neither seemed to me inevitable. An outsider could do nothing but look on impotently. As a result I could never bring myself to break with Ludwig Kaltenburg, though there were times when I didn’t want to know anything about him.
The night heron had left its perch. I picked it out again in the reeds on the bank, reflected in the water. Its head lowered, it was on the lookout for fish, its beak gliding to and fro above the smooth, seemingly impenetrable surface. It looked up as we passed. You might almost have thought it wanted to hear what Katharina Fischer had to say.
“At least he didn’t regard Martin Spengler as his archenemy.”
Knowledgeable as he was about animals, Kaltenburg was unable to see that he himself was fixated on a displacement object. In any case, I’m very cautious when it comes to the subject of Matzke as Kaltenburg’s opponent. Perhaps it was Knut — I regret to say — who first put the idea into the professor’s head that Matzke was out to get him. Not deliberately, certainly not, I’m not reproaching him, it could just as easily have been me.
“A sideswipe?” asked an astonished Kaltenburg one day, when Knut was expressing his annoyance at an article of Eberhard Matzke’s. “I can’t believe it.”
“After all, it’s not the first time we’ve read this kind of thing, Herr Professor. Don’t you remember the brazen words that man dared to utter about the inhibition against biting among canines? Since then it’s been one malicious comment after another.”
Knut Sieverding, the only realist among us. It was beyond his powers of imagination to foresee the phantasms his matter-of-fact observations might possibly unleash.
“Malicious comments? Colleague Matzke? Aimed at me? But we always got on extremely well.”
Knut wanted to proceed carefully, wanted to save Kaltenburg from a defeat, or rather from yet another “small setback” after the professor’s failed efforts to bring the missing exhibits back to the Zoological Collections. In Berlin’s new Zoological Research Center, Reinhold held the office of director, Matzke becoming his deputy with responsibility for day-to-day business, making it possible for Reinhold to concentrate fully on the kind of large-scale research that had, at least in part, preoccupied him for more than thirty years. We were all convinced that, thanks to Reinhold’s newfound freedom, the long-anticipated monograph on avian plumage would now finally come to fruition.
Kaltenburg’s plan had worked. Eberhard Matzke, meanwhile, was clearly on a different track. He did not want to be deputy director. What resulted was the Matzke rebellion, as the colleagues called it, not without a certain irony, since everyone knew that Dr. Eberhard Matzke lacked the nerve for a Matzke revolution. Perhaps Matzke had not expected the Saxon zoologists to rally around Reinhold, perhaps he had pictured them joining forces with him to drive Reinhold out. A Leipziger, a Dresdener — but for Ludwig Kaltenburg’s involvement, you could have seen the Matzke rebellion as a purely Saxon affair which happened to be played out on the big stage of Berlin.
“Somebody’s got to make him see sense,” was the professor’s conclusion. “Who else but me could attempt it under the circumstances?”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Misunderstandings are always better tackled man-to-man.”
“Misunderstandings are a different matter, Herr Professor. We’re past the stage of misunderstandings. Matzke and Reinhold, the whole setup behind them — the battle lines have been drawn.”
“That’s just why we need skilled diplomacy, we need to come up with an offer of peace that colleague Matzke, who is prone to bouts of confusion, can accept without losing face.”
“I strongly advise you against approaching Matzke in this situation. And with all due respect, I am not convinced that you are the right man for such a mission.”
I could see it was a considerable effort for Knut to talk to Kaltenburg about past failings, about Matzke plodding, shoulders miserably hunched, down the Institute corridor under the eyes of the staff, about students in the lab excitedly putting aside their work as soon as Kaltenburg appeared in the doorway, and about the tense silence in the professor’s lecture when Matzke took too long to fetch a new stick of chalk for the blackboard.
“But I always helped him where I could.”
“I don’t deny that. But has it ever occurred to you that Eberhard Matzke has never come to the Institute? Have you ever invited him to Loschwitz? You have people coming and going all the time, with zoologists of all nationalities staying here, and if any up-and-coming young researcher — even a child interested in wildlife — shows the slightest hint of promise, the Institute’s doors are open to him.”
Kaltenburg growled.
“Have you ever wondered what all this activity looks like to Eberhard Matzke from a distance?”
“I must admit I haven’t.”
Both were exhausted. Knut paced up and down the room. Professor Kaltenburg sat back in his cocktail-bar chair with arms dangling over the sides.
“Hermann, could you make us some tea?”
As I was on my way to the kitchen, Kaltenburg sat bolt upright.
“Somebody’s got to do something.”
“Not you.”
9
WE FOLLOWED THE ANIMALS’ example and kept out of the sun. I think it was a hot August afternoon when I was informed that I had to renounce my membership in the German Ornithological Society. I wasn’t the only one, we were all required to renounce membership in a Western organization. The animals dozed. We were agitated, we were restless.
Maybe this did start out as a crass joke doing the rounds of the Institute, though in those August days we were in no mood for joking — there was no escape from the enervating heat, whether we lay under the trees, retreated into the aquarium wing, or sat behind closed shutters and tried not to move if we could help it.
“Next thing they’ll be making us quit the German Ornithological Society.”
Professor Kaltenburg, wearing shorts, confused for a moment: “What are you talking about? Reinhold is sitting there isolated in West Berlin, and you’re wasting your time with that nonsense?”
One of the caretakers was trying all day to get hold of his family, with no success; his wife and children had gone ahead of him on holiday. Colleagues canceled impending trips to the West. Conversely, no prospect of a visit from Knut Sieverding. He never made the long-planned documentary about house sparrows. Troubled, Krause washed the car. Or did he come back in the evening from a trip to Berlin and report at first hand the events that had been unfolding on the streets? No. In any case, we wouldn’t have trusted his account.
All at once, the long-running dispute between Reinhold and Matzke was over. Professor Doktor Eberhard Matzke had displayed a frightening degree of ambition, against Reinhold’s will he had been made director of the research center, but he still wasn’t satisfied. He didn’t shrink from using uncouth language to his colleagues to cast doubts on Reinhold’s abilities, he blackened his name in the highest quarters, and above all, he declared, there was no place in East Berlin for an ornithologist who lived in West Berlin. It was as if colleague Matzke’s complaints and grievances had gained a hearing at some point, for Reinhold’s bird collection and library were now placed at Matzke’s disposal — the hated eminence no longer able to put a spoke in his wheel.