And then I can see Ludwig Kaltenburg sitting bent over on the wooden bench in his kitchen, his shoelaces dangling in the air for a moment. Gripping the heavy, leather-soled shoe by the heel, he pulls it off with a heave. He sits up again and grunts, “Oh, it’s you.” Kaltenburg points at the shoe, and as if apologizing, he says, “I went out to get milk.”
His beard, his hair, the bench, the tiled floor, are all bathed in the clear light of a mild day. The shopping bag with the bottles of milk is there; I notice the color of Kaltenburg’s socks, like mincemeat that’s been exposed to air for too long.
I force myself to look elsewhere, the art print on the kitchen wall, the linen cloth on the table, I make the embarrassed old man disappear.
I only vaguely recollect his sending me to Matzke in late 1961 or early 1962 with a peace offer. “Don’t forget to have a good shave, you know colleague Matzke can’t stand to see a badly shaven man of a morning.”
Eberhard Matzke no longer knew me. There was no reply to the peace offer. It will have been around then that the professor finally understood that this wasn’t about Reinhold at all. It was he, Ludwig Kaltenburg, that Matzke had had in his sights all along. From that moment on things went downhill with Kaltenburg.
The jackdaw skins lie spread out before me, a uniform blackish gray shimmer covers the work surface once the sun goes down. Yes, I skinned Taschotschek. I have preserved it and its fellows very carefully, and in Klotzsche too Kaltenburg’s jackdaws will be kept in a safe place.
10
THE JAYS ARE GONE,” he wrote in his first animal handbook. “The geese have moved away, to who knows where. Of all my free-flying birds, there remain only the jackdaws.” Now they too were gone.
One morning Klara said at breakfast, “The professor is beyond saving.”
I left my coffee, put my jacket on. Klara looked at me, she knew where I was going. It was as though Ludwig Kaltenburg had taught us all to sense the slightest change in the condition of certain life forms from miles away.
Half an hour later I turned into the familiar street, out of breath though I hadn’t been running. I stopped outside the villa. On the stones of the path leading to the house I saw drops, not rain and not animal droppings, a trail. Right up to the garden gate, as well as on the footpath behind me, I had followed the trail for some while without registering it. At every step I observed these small circles, frayed at the edges, dark, a watery substance, they would soon evaporate. The door was open, it was always open, there was no doorbell — Kaltenburg said, early on, “You know how it is here, people continually calling in wanting something from me. If we had a doorbell, my nocturnals would never get any rest.”
On the linoleum of the stairs up to the first floor, the marks changed color. White drops on a red background. Step by step I followed the milky trail up to the study. Kaltenburg’s socks. An embarrassed smile.
“Oh, it’s you.”
Kaltenburg sat hunched on the edge of the sofa. He used to eat on it lying back; at night, Martin would sometimes sit there too, as I did countless times. Kaltenburg was struggling with his shoelaces. As though it explained everything, as though on this morning the whole world could be summed up in a single sentence, he said, “I went out to get milk.”
His bare hand brushed across the suede leather, the other shoe was standing on the parquet floor in a shiny little puddle. Then it struck me that Ludwig Kaltenburg was wearing socks with holes in them. He raised his head, smiled sheepishly: “I went out to get milk and didn’t notice.”
He seemed not to know what he wanted to do with the milk. Like a self-conscious young boy. No, to be honest, he looked at me like an old man who has realized that his powers are slipping away.
“The milk was dripping on my shoe, and I didn’t notice,” he said.
The bag sat in a pool of milk, I took the bottles out carefully, no, there was no broken glass, but one bottletop was ripped off. On the way back from the shop Kaltenburg had spilled almost a liter of milk.
“I’ll wipe it up,” he said, now sounding like a child wanting to undo a mistake.
I found a bucket in the broom closet, the scrubbing brush, a cloth, fetched water. I started at the foot of the stairs. The same silence as on that evening when we had gathered up the dead jackdaws. Kaltenburg had called for me because no one else was available. He had to wait for nearly an hour in a state of uncertainty until I arrived. It was during that night that Klara first said to me, “You won’t be able to save Ludwig Kaltenburg.”
His clear look as he talked about the abysses, “There, there, and there,” the light spring breeze in his hair, the first sunshine of the year on his weather-beaten face. And yet Ludwig Kaltenburg never really wanted to see that he was surrounded by monsters. Later, people would say that he had gradually isolated himself, that the seal had been set on the end of his time in Dresden long before, but he had been remarkably good at concealing this from himself and the world.
I wiped the milk from the parquet, a trickle running under the desk, the rugs would need cleaning — no, no great store was set by clean carpets in the Kaltenburg household. But with all this milk, there would have to be new carpets.
“Remind me to let you have a key before you go, Hermann.”
They took their time, they studied him. And didn’t Kaltenburg himself always insist on patient observation? First of all they wanted to acquire an all-round understanding of the subject, sooner or later his weak spots would be exposed, inadvertently he would tell you himself how to throw someone like Ludwig Kaltenburg off balance. It couldn’t be done in a hurry — a man like Kaltenburg was able to withstand a great deal, he would fight for his corner, not yield easily. They could have deprived Kaltenburg of his university chair, prohibited him from researching and publishing — he would just have laughed: “Ban me from research? I only have to see to be doing research. You’ve only got to keep your eyes open, how can anyone stop me doing that?”
Was his gaze fixed on the cleaning cloth, or was he simply staring into space? He sat there motionless, only his toes moving. I wouldn’t have expected the holes in his socks. When I had wrung out the rag and washed my hands, I caught myself secretly scrutinizing Kaltenburg as I returned to the room: Had he combed his hair today? Was his collar clean?
“A key, yes, I won’t forget.”
He said, “Actually, I’ve always preferred the country.”
I knew that for the past few weeks he’d been working on a lecture to be given at a conference in Oslo or Helsinki. And if he insisted on giving me a key to the villa, I also knew that he would not be coming back from this trip.
At that moment there wasn’t the slightest doubt. Kaltenburg had dropped many hints, possibly lost on everyone but me. Kaltenburg’s fear. The animals sensed you were going to leave them, you moved differently, you approached the animals in a different way, you didn’t smell the same: there was no need for luggage in the corridor. It was to be the only time in his life that he would move his household without a single animal.
Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg perched on the edge of the sofa, without looking up he lifted some paper from the desk, scrunched it up, and stuffed his right shoe with it. I almost thought I heard him muttering, “Da, da, durak.”
I took stock, reaching for the wadding. I ran my fingers over the pleasantly warm, dark jackdaw feathers. Effortlessly, I filled the skin.
11