“He went out with a gun?”
“Of course he did. Was he supposed to catch the birds with his hands?”
“Did he have to pass them on to the kitchen?”
“I don’t know. But he did prepare the most interesting specimens.”
“And what happened to those?”
“As far as I recall, he once indicated that he’d managed to preserve everything he collected until the fall of 1942. Perhaps he brought the whole collection back with him to Leipzig at the end of the war.”
“So he stopped collecting in the fall of 1942?”
“Stopped? Matzke? No, he’s an ornithologist. He was posted.”
“Posted?”
“What a struggle that was. We ornithologists on the outside wrote pleading letters, drew up petitions, racked our brains, tried everything we could — I spent sleepless nights thinking of this young man, frightened he would go crazy. But our efforts paid off in the end. Matzke was sent to some dump of a place on the Baltic.”
“A dump? But there was a camp there?”
“Of course not. That was the point. His nerves were shattered when he left the camp guards. He needed to gain some distance. Matzke spent the rest of the war guarding a secret installation on the coast. In other words, he was allowed to walk up and down the beach, ample opportunity for him to observe his beloved waders. Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“Since you asked about the birds — I’m wondering now whether Matzke lost track of them in all the confusion at the end of the war. Or did he donate them to Vienna? No, sorry, I’m getting mixed up there, he described his night herons and gray-headed woodpeckers in the newsletter of the Vienna Natural History Museum. But listen, are you sure the skins aren’t at your place? I seem to remember he handed them over to the Dresden collection, as a noble gesture because they had lost their holdings in the war. Why don’t you have a look? You know, night herons and gray-headed woodpeckers above all, take a look at their labels.”
I didn’t know what to say. Kaltenburg reflected.
“Sooner or later they’ll be on to Matzke.”
And, after another pause: “I think it’s getting light outside. A red stripe on the horizon.”
“At four in the morning? Not in London.”
“But that’s what it feels like. If you hang on a minute, I’ll go to the window and check.”
“You’d do better to lie down for a bit. Try to sleep. It’s going to be a long day.”
And, like an echo on the line: “A long day.”
Then he said, “There are the gulls.”
“The Thames gulls circle all night?”
“They’re perched on the windowsill outside, that’s where they sleep.”
After these last exchanges we hung up. I did actually stay in the room long enough to see the first glimpse of light outside the window. In another hour the sky over London will slowly take on color too, I thought; Ludwig Kaltenburg will get up, will go over his crowded list of appointments, will see in his mind’s eye the names and faces he’ll meet in the course of the morning. Next to me on the table the telephone gradually emerged from the darkness, a gray box on a diffuse gray background. It was as though I had experienced the very last time a voice would be heard through that receiver.
While a flock of geese took off very low above the gravel shoreline, I told Katharina Fischer in conclusion that I never have looked for Matzke’s bird skins, and when the collection moved to Klotzsche I avoided looking too closely at our gray-headed woodpeckers and night herons.
In the distance we heard a train, on the other side of the Elbe a guard dog barked, the bell of St. Mary’s-by-the-Water was ringing out from Hosterwitz, it was ten o’clock, behind the Elbe Idyll we saw the empty bus disappearing into the deep-green avenue. It was getting cool, and damp, the air was beginning to smell of grass.
VI
1
LATER, WHENEVER WE were all together and thinking back to the fifties, which — since those were our formative years — we increasingly did as we got older, Klara sat quietly, not usually her style. When reminiscences were being exchanged, when we were helping each other out with names, dates, places, Klara fell silent. As we laughed, argued, interrupted each other, I could tell it was upsetting Klara, although nobody else noticed. She hardly seemed to be paying attention, she looked distant while all the others were listening, each outdoing the last with ever more precise details or more audacious stories; Klara held back, as if to stay out of some uncomfortable business.
And that was in spite of the fact that in our circles there was no danger that an evening might be spent conjuring up all the good old East German products, such as Leopek cream for sting relief, or the Fleischfrost range, or films like Mazurka of Love. Nobody talked about Savings Weeks or brought up early GDR slogans like “By the efforts of our hands” or worked in references to horses as “oat-motors”—accompanied by a silly wink — in connection with the rubble-clearing after the war. Klara was under no obligation to listen to “the Dresden reconstruction lion laughing,” let alone people tossing “The enemy is here among us” at her. All the same, she couldn’t stand that sort of evening.
On one occasion, at a party in the house of some slight acquaintances, Klara simply retreated into the corridor for half an hour — the height of bad manners, in her own eyes — in order to escape from a conversation about the seventeenth of June 1953. With the best will in the world, she said later, she simply couldn’t bring herself to go back into the room until the last guest had offloaded his memories of that date. She had stood the whole time within earshot, a few steps away from the door, slightly bemused, with her back to a bookcase, feeling a physical reluctance to breathe the memory-laden air in the drawing room.
Somebody recounted how he was just leaving the bakery on the Wasaplatz when he ran into a column of demonstrators coming from Niedersedlitz and stayed with them all the way to the city center, still clutching his bag of bread rolls; another claimed to have marched alongside the strike leader, Grothaus, while a third had memorized a speech to the strikers and recited whole passages from it. As one picture after another emerged, the event became more distinct in the minds of the participants, finally they could all remember meeting in the crowded Postplatz at midday. A moment of silence followed as each of them mentally reviewed the events, and Klara reappeared in the doorway. Nobody had noticed her leaving the room, nobody had missed her.
On the way home — the gathering had broken up soon afterward — I couldn’t coax much more out of Klara than that she simply couldn’t stand these stories, the poses the narrators struck, as if their memories could help them get a grip, whereas in reality, looking back could only be profoundly disturbing for us, make our present life fall apart.
“We’ve all got our nightmares, I don’t need to be told that,” she declared, as if to close the subject, and “We all made mistakes, every one of us, and I certainly don’t exclude myself.”
As soon as it was evident that the evening was going to descend into reminiscing, Klara would find some pretext for leaving without embarrassing her hosts: exhaustion after a full day, the long trip home, a cold coming on. If she felt too weak to come up with a suitable excuse, she signaled to me that we ought to be going, and I thought of something, citing an excursion, the need to be up before dawn for bird-watching; that was always an unobtrusive way to extract ourselves from the occasion.