They were no less amazed to hear us talking about tree pangolins and rhinoceros birds, they must have thought these were fictional animals, and for them the story of Knut turning up unshaven and unwashed after weeks in the tropical rainforest and walking into the lobby of a luxury hotel must have taken place in a part of the world not yet marked on the atlas.
“I know that man,” muttered Klara next to me. Knut had finally turned to the strangers, no, they didn’t usually go to the cinema to see wildlife films, no, they didn’t know what an okapi was, the man asked politely whether he could stand us a drink, and Klara thought, I know that man from somewhere.
Nobody could hear her but me, not Martin, not Ulrike, not the strangers, but just as Knut was about to embark on another anecdote about the Congo, she broke in.
“Excuse me, but didn’t you play the part of a prisoner?”
“A prisoner?”
“Yes, you were there on the truck in the jubilee parade, I remember clearly. As a camp inmate.”
“I didn’t play a camp inmate.”
“Now you’re lying.”
Klara hardly raised her voice, her tone was not accusing, more disappointed, the man was reading Klara’s lips, and then I remembered too, there was a rather plump young man that we noticed at the time, he didn’t dare raise his arm because his jacket was stretched too tight across his shoulders, while the other characters’ prison garb hung loosely about their frames. Yes, I recognized the well-nourished camp inmate, he tried to vindicate himself, said something about “allocated,” he said “duty,” as if he wanted to avoid the term “compulsion.”
“Hermann, I want to leave.”
All at once she was exhausted. There were some things, she said, that simply weren’t right, it didn’t take courage, all you needed was a bit of backbone, and anyway he knew himself how many jubilee participants failed to present themselves at the assembly point, even though they had been told it was their duty to do so. No, I heard him saying, he really wasn’t brave, we were already on our way out, Knut was chasing after us, “Klara, just hang on,” then we stood in the summer night on the pavement, the strangers, Ulrike, Martin, with Knut trying to mediate between the two of them. The man couldn’t take in what had happened. “No, I’ve never been brave,” he repeated, it was the first time I’d heard anyone say such a thing. Klara nodded distractedly, put a hand out, apologized. But for what? She herself had no idea.
On the way home she apologized again, she had ruined everybody’s evening, Knut reassured her, “It’s okay, really,” Martin shrugged his shoulders, “It can happen to anybody,” the two of them consulted, maybe we could drive out for a picnic in the country the following weekend.
I don’t think we actually went on that outing, at least I have no mental picture of the five of us rambling through “Saxon Switzerland,” each with a rucksack on our back. Perhaps Klara or perhaps Ulrike was not very keen on the idea, yes, I reflected as I heard the doorbell ring, perhaps it was the same evening when, after a long silence, Ulrike turned to Klara, as though the moment had come at last to address a sentence to her sister that had been going around in her head for many years: “I don’t understand you anymore.”
There was another ring, and only then did I grasp that the interpreter was waiting at the door. I heard somebody take a deep breath to free himself from the net of images, I left Martin standing there on the pavement as well as Knut, who was looking at the two sisters with a troubled expression, and lost sight of Ulrike too, just as we literally lost sight of her at some point, when she turned away from her family and started a new life with her husband in the north, without spelling out her motives for taking this step, either to her parents or to Klara. It may be that she wanted to move out from Klara’s shadow, or maybe she simply realized one day that the time when she and her sister played together on the swing doors in their nightdresses lay far back in the past.
3
I TOOK KATHARINA FISCHER’S coat, showed her the living room, the kitchen, the view out onto the street, the view over the garden, led her along the book-lined hall to my study. On the desk I had placed a small, well-thumbed book, the cover had a design of white feathers with sand-colored, brown, and blue stripes, from the top edge a stain ran down as far as the title — a cocoa spill? I don’t remember. Colored plates showing native songbirds and their nests, I opened the cover and let Frau Fischer read the inscription: “A book about your small friends, from your parents Christmas 1937.”
She spent a long time studying the illustrations of egg clutches, twigs and wool interlaced, moss, drawn with a fine feel for the play of light and shade, creating an almost three-dimensional effect. I helped her to decipher the names written in old German script, “The Bullfinch,” “The Goldfinch,” “The Siskin,” “The Yellowhammer,” “The Chaffinch,” all perched there on twigs by their nests looking as though they had just preened themselves carefully, as though they had inspected every single feather on their bodies and rearranged each one especially before posing for the drawing. Whether the effect was what the illustrator intended or was the result of the uniform darkening of the paper, the interpreter remarked that all the birds struck her as being both alert and shy; she was particularly impressed by the blackbird, poised over the open nest with feathers slightly spread and tail fanned out, as though it had spotted the observer at that precise moment.
We talked about the relationship between the phases in which blackbirds are seen and heard everywhere and those during which they lead a secret life, we talked about diurnal and nocturnal animals, trust and timidity. About how one of the great tits here on the balcony, having turned up one afternoon in early August and without hesitation landed on my outstretched hand to take the proffered sunflower seed, had declined to accept any more feed for the last few days. The way that, from the edge of the balcony, as if it felt sorry, as if it were as surprised by its own fear as I was, it eyed this person who had suddenly become a stranger to it. If I hadn’t known that great tits become tame again in the spells of freezing cold weather, then perhaps this familiar young bird might have struck me as weird.
“And you really haven’t ever found out how Ludwig Kaltenburg’s jackdaws died?”
As a matter of fact this question came up early on in the conversation, in fact with her very first words of greeting the interpreter started to draw me — or actually both of us — into an inquiry. Although initially it wasn’t about the jackdaws at all. When I brought the coffee back to the study, where Frau Fischer had settled down on the couch that was once part of the inventory of the Loschwitz Institute villa, she inquired again about Knut, about Martin, about the period of silence between Kaltenburg and me.
In those six or eight years during which I never wrote the professor a single line, never telephoned him, would have done anything in the world to avoid meeting him — to do so would have been impossible anyway — it was Knut Sieverding who regularly supplied me with news of Ludwig Kaltenburg. The duck colony at the new zoological station had now grown to about four hundred birds. The research projects were dragging on. Environmental protection was becoming more and more central to his activities, big photos in all the papers, the previous day the professor had even appeared on the TV news because he had taken part in a sit-down blockade, old Ludwig Kaltenburg with a beaming face in the midst of young eco-activists, his attitude to the power of the state as stubborn as ever. Appearances. Speeches. Interviews. Once again the professor had used the opportunity to demonstrate his negotiating skills by extracting from the Austrian federal chancellor, in a personal discussion, a promise to help save the Danube water meadows. Knut once sent a postcard from Madagascar: “I can’t help thinking what it would be like if you and the professor could be here to admire the amazing diversity of wildlife with me.”