Klara couldn’t stand the gravity of these tales, that’s the only way I could explain it to myself. This gravity which gradually disappears the longer a story is turned this way and that, the more details are brought to light, so that in the end a whole quite funny complex of happenings seems to lie behind every tragic event. But because I know how she looks when she sits brooding for days on end at the kitchen table, Klara never needed to explain to me why she escaped into talking about her Proust wherever possible.
2
HAVE YOU HEARD the news?” Four months had elapsed since our chance meeting by Bird Island, we hadn’t spoken to each other in the meantime, when to my surprise I heard the interpreter’s voice on the telephone that afternoon, near and yet unfamiliar. After announcing herself with her full name, she immediately went on to talk about the news, which had just that minute ended with the weather forecast: “Did you know? Your friend Knut Sieverding has died. On Friday. His family announced his death today.”
My instant reaction was a great sadness that in the intervening years I’d had only sporadic contact with Knut, we had kept in touch for the most part only by exchanging Christmas cards, after maintaining a lively correspondence until the end of the eighties, and often visiting each other once the border was open. Now I didn’t even know whether he had died suddenly or after a long, difficult illness, and Katharina Fischer couldn’t enlighten me either.
Klara and I at the Sieverdings in southern Germany, we were coming back from Vienna, I had been to see Ludwig Kaltenburg’s house, where jackdaws were nesting in the chimney, two years after the professor’s death. The birds approached me as trustingly as if they were distant relatives of the Dresden flock. I bolted. We took the next train to Munich. Knut met us at the station. On one of the mild spring evenings that followed, as we sat on the terrace late into the night, I was strangely moved by a photograph showing Knut and the professor on the occasion of an awards ceremony. The diploma is on display, floating in midair against the dark background, the two men are looking at each other and laughing. And yet the viewer is held by a gaze, the fixed stare of a gorilla that appeared to be thrusting itself into the foreground between the two portrait sitters. A stuffed ape, with glass eyes and open jaws, the dark coat, the shine around its nostrils — it makes you think that a memory of Knut Sieverding’s year in the Congo, now in the distant past, had materialized as the negative was being developed.
Knut and I in the Lausitz brown-coal area, Knut and I on the former border strip — but while I was telling the interpreter about our last excursions, a thought was hammering away in my head: “You know nothing about Knut Sieverding in later years, there’s a gap of nearly fifteen years.” I asked Frau Fischer whether she was busy that afternoon, if she’d like to come over for coffee. Then I phoned Klara, who was spending the weekend with friends in Berlin, and told her the news.
In the following two hours I paced up and down the kitchen, fed the sparrows, the titmice, looked out the window at the oak that was shedding ever more leaves, cleared up the desk in my study, couldn’t get it sorted out, let my distracted glance range over the books. Proust had been standing here in the bookcase for almost half a century without my ever touching him. Actually, sometimes when Klara was away I had carefully picked out one of the volumes, opened it, and read a few pages, hurriedly, keeping an ear open as if indulging in a forbidden pleasure, as if I had broken through a protective cordon thrown around the shelf reserved for Proust. I felt like an interloper, I was spying on Klara when I opened at a page that had a bookmark in it, and when I read a passage she had underlined or put an exclamation mark by, I was reading something that was none of my business.
Perhaps Klara would have liked me to read the book, to join in with her enthusiasm for Proust, which had been there since we first met. But to me the novel seemed sacrosanct, Proust was entirely Klara’s thing, and it never occurred to me to read him in order to share him with her. Perhaps that was a mistake. But maybe it was enough for her that when she made certain remarks — half to herself, half to me — while reading passages in the early volumes that I believed I could tell who she was reminded of, who she saw sitting in her parents’ drawing room, who was exchanging a few words in English by the hall stand — people I myself had got to know at the Hagemanns’ but knew even better from Klara’s stories.
Likewise, watching her reading, over time I thought that I could tell which incidents from our life together were passing through her mind’s eye, inevitably and even against Klara’s will when — on holidays, perhaps, or in the short days around the turn of the year — she took the Proust volumes down from their shelf, determined to lose herself in the prose. At such moments, when Klara glanced up from the flow of printed lines, distraught, as if a dangerous insect had distracted her, I vanished as well, I was no longer sitting opposite her at the kitchen table, no longer lying next to her on the beach, but saw myself, without having read more than a few sentences of Proust, being taken back to scenes both of us would prefer to have forgotten long ago.
So it was that I found myself sitting once more, wedged between Klara and Knut at a pub table, in a noisy, smoke-filled hostelry, opposite us Martin and Ulrike, who for some time had no longer wished to be called Ulli. Was it the same day that Knut, after weeks of fevered work, had put the last touches to his Congo commentary and read the text out to us after lunch at the Institute? We hoped to persuade the professor to go with us into town that evening, but he declined: “That’s not a pub, not a cozy tavern you’re trying to lure me into, it’s a dive.” He just wouldn’t listen. “You go, all you young people,” he said, laughing. “You know I’m an old man.” Was that the last time Ludwig Kaltenburg and Martin parted on friendly terms? It’s possible that my memory has seamlessly fused together a whole series of scenes that are separated by many months or even years, it’s possible that the very act of remembering precludes leaving any breathing spaces, and memory only conforms to reality where there is no chance of evading scenes of bewilderment and helplessness.
Klara talked about the young Soviet soldiers in the square that she could see every day from her place in the library. Sometimes one of them would wave when sweeping the parade ground, mending a machine, or standing by the garages and shuffling from one foot to the other, as though, by way of punishment, this child with the pale, narrow face had been banished to the furthest point of the barrack square. But Knut and Martin were feeling too high-spirited to follow such reflections, and all Ulrike could think of saying was, “Let’s not talk about work, please, not today.”
“You’re right.” Klara shook her head and smiled at her sister. She turned to Knut: “In your film, will you be telling the story about how the aardvark tricked you?”
Her hand felt for mine under the table. It was as though she could foresee that this evening was not going to end well.
At some point a couple we didn’t know joined us at our table, with an apologetic gesture, there were no other seats free. They were our age, the woman was wearing a pale-colored suit, not particularly well cut, the man a washed-out shirt and a carelessly knotted, prewar tie. Two people, you think, who had lost their way in the dark and come in here at random, at any rate it didn’t look as though they got out much. When a glass of beer was placed in front of them, they were startled. When there was a racket over by the bar, they turned around timidly and followed with widening eyes the two rough types who had just agreed to go outside to “discuss the matter further,” as they say in these parts, meaning a fistfight.