“Did he quiz you?” the interpreter wanted to know.
He wouldn’t have been Krause if he hadn’t. But you had to get used to his way of questioning. He dispensed with question marks. We chatted about the weather: “Yes, it gets pretty cool after sunset,” he nodded, offered me a cigarette, an S-Bahn train passed by, I sat at the back of the limousine and let myself be driven to Dresden. We discussed Kaltenburg’s attitude to vodka, vodka was always said to harden you against the cold, but the professor was strictly opposed to the usual practice of giving zoo animals alcohol with their drinking water in winter. “I reckon he’s right there,” said Krause, glancing at the rear mirror, “Think of that nasty business last year,” after drinking several bottles of vodka an elephant in the Moscow zoo had torn a radiator from the wall and turned on its keeper.
Thanks to Kaltenburg’s careful planning I was well prepared for this bait. I praised Krause’s driving, remarked yet again how well the heating worked in the car, and asked him a personal question: which did he prefer, vodka or mulled wine? “Mulled wine, the way my wife makes it,” he answered promptly — and that was the end of a cunningly contrived attempt to find out something about what he thought had been my stay of several hours in the Tierpark.
We tore along in the outside lane of the dark autobahn. “Pull yourself together,” I said to myself. “Don’t tell him anything about Kaltenburg, don’t tell him anything about your visit to Matzke.” Then it went quiet. Krause was concentrating on the road, nothing out there but night, I was feeling drowsy.
“Did you drop off to sleep?” asked Frau Fischer. “Not a bad way of avoiding the chauffeur’s probing.”
Perhaps I actually did fall asleep. No more steady hum from the engine, no rumbling as we drove over the joints between the slabs in the road. I heard Ludwig Kaltenburg’s jackdaws calling quietly. I sat stretched out on the back seat, my hands resting on the upholstery, I blinked up at the roof of the car and heard in turn the various gradations of jackdaw calls, depending on whether the birds were in a mood to fly off or felt the urge to head homeward. I opened my eyes again and looked out at the landscape. There was no landscape. The jackdaws went on calling. I looked around in the car, the rear shelf, the floor beneath my feet, the armrests, then somebody said, “Mating calls are really quite easy to imitate.”
Krause was making jackdaw noises. Or was it the professor I was hearing? Yes, the chauffeur wasn’t so much imitating jackdaws as imitating Ludwig Kaltenburg’s jackdaw calls. In the rear mirror I saw Krause nodding. He was obviously pleased to be able to continue our conversation over the last fifty kilometers. Of course you could sometimes see when the professor was worried or a particular person was bothering him — he, Krause, could tell that not from his expression, nor from any bad-tempered tone of voice, but simply from the fact that the professor was spending even more time with his fish than usual. He had never in his life met anyone like Professor Kaltenburg, although he had got to know quite a few famous zoologists over the years. He started listing names, I could see who he was going to name next — so far he had never yet seen Professor Doktor Eberhard Matzke in Loschwitz. “Follow Kaltenburg’s example and wear a neutral expression,” I said to myself. “Pull yourself together, for goodness’ sake, you’ve got to distract him, do what Ludwig Kaltenburg does, talk about animals.”
I told Krause about the jackdaws. But this may have been exactly the wrong move.
“And now you’re asking yourself whether that was the wrong move,” said Katharina Fischer at the same moment that the thought occurred to me.
It was possible that I had put an idea into his head.
“Even if we assume that this man was responsible for poisoning the jackdaws, people like that arrive at such notions sooner or later without any outside help, and you shouldn’t reproach yourself,” the interpreter protested. “Whether he was just nursing the desire for revenge because he thought Kaltenburg despised him, or whether he was brooding over his reports, disappointed that the professor wouldn’t indulge in any disparaging remarks about the regime or the closing of the border which Krause could have passed on to curry favor for himself — seen in a sober light,” she declared, “that has nothing to do with you.”
It was to keep Krause at a distance that I told him about the jackdaws. “Yes, they love cherries,” he said, “I know that.”
Even better: redcurrants.
“Really?”
Hadn’t he ever watched that game involving the little shed butting onto the villa, a game whose attractions nobody could quite make out but which seemed to give Kaltenburg as much pleasure as it gave his jackdaws? “I must admit, I don’t often go there, that raven is always hanging about.” But the raven wasn’t interested in slipping into the shed. The jackdaws, by contrast, were always intensely curious about what might be hidden in this lean-to. But Ludwig Kaltenburg couldn’t bear to see them coming out disappointed each time because there was nothing new for them to find, so several times a day around harvest time he hid redcurrants among the clutter.
I can’t remember now, did Krause seem surprised, or did he make out that it was coming back to him that he himself had once observed this odd form of bonding between man and bird? We would have talked at some length about other things; for example, Krause was far more interested, or so it seemed to me at the time, in the function of the yellow spot that magpies have on their third eyelid than in the question of currants, black or red. In any case, as far as the chauffeur was concerned, what the professor did with his animals in order to study their behavior was totally suspect, and the goings-on at the tool shed must simply have confirmed his opinion. Nonetheless, talking to Katharina Fischer now, it was above all this particular story about the jackdaws that sprang to mind.
I was tired when Krause dropped me off at home, and I was — I admit — just a little proud: not a syllable about Matzke and the peace offer. Kaltenburg was waiting with Klara in the kitchen, as we had arranged — in Loschwitz, they might have wondered what was so important about my trip to Berlin that it kept us talking late into the night. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much to tell Kaltenburg. It’s possible that at the time I was still convinced matters would come out right in the end, but I think Klara could see that my meeting with Eberhard Matzke had not exactly turned out well. The professor enjoyed his dinner, he said, “Difficult, difficult,” and “We shall see,” looking at me across the table with a look that you reserve for an ally. There was no mention of the jackdaws that evening, or redcurrants, or least of all Kaltenburg’s driver.
5
FINALLY, ON THE WAY to collect her coat, we passed the Proust once again, and casting a last glance at the volumes, Katharina Fischer inquired whether I wasn’t a little hurt when Klara maintained that all she could remember when she thought of the fifties — our early days together — was the newly translated, complete À la Recherche.
No, Klara certainly didn’t want to forget our early years, didn’t think of them as having no value in her memory. What there was, though, unforeseeably, time and again throughout the decades, was fits of jealousy, mixed with wistfulness, which Klara would have experienced as much as I did — not jealousy of a person, but of a world which belongs exclusively to the other, an inner world in which they move alone, can only move alone, and to which at times they devote themselves with the kind of dedication, of patience, which their partner too might well love to possess at that moment. Therein lay the pang, that was the Proust, and that’s another reason why I never touched him.