And wistfulness, because we knew we couldn’t accompany each other into the other’s world. For a companion is surprised at phenomena which in terms of that world are accepted as self-evident, asks questions where they ought not to be asked, tries to engage the other person in conversation when they should be doing nothing but observing. If, on the other hand, you take on the task of guiding your loved one through this world, you’ll find yourself concentrating more on your partner than on the things around, you’ll want to point out details to them that they ought to be discovering for themselves, and you’ll reveal connections which you yourself will begin to doubt again as soon as you put names to them.
Slight disturbances. First misunderstandings. Everything needs to be explained. At some point the mystery will begin to retreat step by step from your inner world, and with its retreat the need to explore this world decreases. Soon you start to enter it only as a matter of habit. But we couldn’t have borne such emptiness, such loss, whether alone or together. So we resigned ourselves to the fact that the other person seemed submerged for days, weeks even, in his or her own world, barely accessible, as if he or she would never surface again. That was our pact. That’s how we protected each other. That’s what held us together.
We spent hour after hour at the kitchen table, Klara immersed in her Proust, I in my ornithological writings, surrounded by a succession of members of Parisian high society and representatives of all the bird families scattered across the globe. It is conceivable that over the years some of the individuals populating these inner spaces might have met, despite their differing origins and nature, on the edges of our world, far out there, without our being able to witness their encounters. I believed in such encounters when Klara said she was surprised by the transformation of the blondschopf, the “fair-head” she knew from Schottlaender’s version, into the Goldspatz, the little golden sparrow in the new German translation. Together we reflected on whether there was some real bird lurking behind the original expression in the French, perhaps a yellowhammer, a citril finch, or maybe a canary — and it struck me that Klara may have come across the Goldspatz on the very same evening that I was preoccupied with the earliest form of canary, Serinus canaria, the wild canary, and its distribution. But she had not interrupted me, the two birds did no more than recognize each other from a distance, and a little later, when Klara was observing a young woman going on a journey with her “young linnets,” the Goldspatz and the wild canary were no longer acquainted with each other.
The same thing happened to Klara when she couldn’t help thinking about the “pitch-black jay feathers” on the narrator’s head which he smoothes down, which refuse to lie flat, and which he has a young maidservant admire, while I was telling her how many subspecies of jay there are, each distinguished by the most subtle characteristics. And Albertine’s laugh, which sometimes sounds like little cries and at other times resembles the cooing of pigeons — it’s possible that when I tried to reconstruct how, independently of each other, Columba junoniae and Columba bollii conquered the Canary Islands and made them their living space, that rather indecorous female laugh accompanied me.
Indeed, it seemed from time to time that the paths of related people and animals were crossing in our kitchen knowing nothing about each other. The figure of Moreau, for example, whom Klara suspected of harboring a secret of some sort, and whom she held on to for far too long, though he is granted only one brief appearance in the novel, could have been a distant cousin or the late uncle of the ornithologist of the same name, when we sat together at the table reading and the kitchen beyond the lamplight lay in darkness, where nothing moved except shadows. There between the door and the sink a certain Monsieur A. J. Moreau handed the opera-loving narrator his ticket for a gala evening, while Reginald E. Moreau, without noticing the two figures frozen in a strange attitude, crossed the room as he followed the red-breasted flycatcher, the greenish warbler, and the arctic warbler en route from distant Asia toward the west, across Siberia, northern Russia, and Finland as far as Sweden, where no memory remained of their origins in India or Malaysia.
On our trip to Vienna, when we visited the Natural History Museum and were at last standing in front of the twin eagles that Ludwig Kaltenburg had always wanted to show me, I experienced — and so did Klara, as she later confessed — an almost indescribable moment in which I couldn’t have said whether everything around me was slipping out of kilter or whether for the first time in ages I was filling my lungs with air right down to their finest artery branches. And we both felt that these mounted sea eagles, these sad-looking birds of prey with their drooping wings and bowed necks, were imbued with something. Was it a threat, a dark premonition, an unrealizable hope from a long-gone past? We found it hard to be more precise about our impression.
It no longer even seemed necessary to put a name to what we were leaving behind by the time we moved out of Room XXX into the stairwell and it dawned on Klara that the Crown Prince Rudolf whom Professor Kaltenburg had obviously mentioned often, judging by how frequently I talked to Klara about him, must be the same figure that she had known for nearly forty years as Archduke Rudolf, without ever connecting the two. The melancholy heir to the throne, passionately interested in bird life, who died in dubious circumstances on January 30, 1889, and who used to argue with his friend Alfred Edmund Brehm, on their deer-stalking expeditions in the marshy woods by the Danube at Draueck, about whether the Steinadler and the Goldadler are two different types of golden eagle or just different colorations of the same species: Rudolf is twice mentioned in passages of Proust that are chronologically far apart.
6
THE INTERPRETER ALREADY had her coat on when she announced she was now determined to read Proust’s novel, about which, after a few failed attempts to tackle him, she was as ignorant as I was. And she knew in advance that when she was reading him she would always think back to our conversations over the past six months. Mind you, I warned her, as far as the hand-washing scenes were concerned, she shouldn’t expect too much — they don’t exist. If Katharina Fischer really does pick up her Proust and not put it down until she reaches the final sentences, she will find that at no point in the novel does a character close a window, say “Good morning,” or wash his hands. Klara had already revealed as much to me during our first boating trip in the Great Garden.
“Not once?”
Not once.
The interpreter laughed. We shook hands, she got into her car, I watched her go until the taillights disappeared around the corner. I cleared up. At exactly the moment, by the clock, when Klara must have been getting on the train in Berlin.
I can see myself again on an early mid-November morning sitting alone in an unheated carriage smelling of yesterday’s cigarette smoke in a train standing at one of the outlying platforms of the Dresden main station. Feverish, still in my coat after being torn from a deep sleep, still barely conscious, I had left the house early and was now waiting endlessly for the train to set off for Berlin, on my way to an appointment about which I remember nothing except my half-sleep-drugged, half-impatient waiting while the sun rose over the city.
From the Ostragehege district dark spots are moving through the dawn light, the crows have left their roosting places and landed on a builder’s crane, whose arm stretches far out across the roof of the main concourse. They’re casting an early-morning eye over the inner city, more birds are constantly arriving, joining their fellows on the latticework of girders, they inspect the Wiener Platz and Petersburger Strasse, Fritz Löffler Strasse, Budapester, Strehlener and Prager Strasse, before work begins on the building site below. The crane operator doesn’t disturb them as he climbs up the tower and into his cabin, shutting the door behind him. A circular saw swings on the suspension cable in the morning wind.