“Well, run off and wash your hands”: my father didn’t know what else to say.
Martin Spengler, the younger of the two, could hardly have been any older than my nanny, the other one was called Knut Sieverding, I turned the soap over in my hands under the tap, that name is harder to remember, Knut is the older one, but both of them are much younger than my parents, I was still twisting the soap over, but holding on to it with slippery fingers, I don’t want to forget those names, Spengler and Sieverding, Knut laughs, and Martin polishes boots, but both of them make the same clatter with their boots on the stone floor, how cold the water gets when you let it run, the tall, thin, quiet man is called Martin, the shorter one with the untidy hair is Knut.
“Are you coming down? Time to eat.”
My nanny was knocking at the bathroom door.
A splash of gravy had cut through the green border. I didn’t have any gristle or stringy bits. Although there were visitors, I was still allowed to mash the potatoes on the plate with my fork. Knut was the one sitting opposite me, Martin the one to his left. My father had announced he was inviting students from his lecture for the evening, and now two men in uniform were sitting at the table with us. They came out from the town, we lived a long way out, the wood behind the railway embankment, fields all around, and I wasn’t sure that our road didn’t quite quickly turn into a track, an overgrown path that petered out somewhere in the fields. I never went that far. We didn’t have many neighbors, in summer the green growth was so dense that you’d hardly suspect the nearest house was there. At the back, toward the stream, my father’s greenhouse, I used to hide down there in the bushes. From the terrace side you could walk into the drawing room, on the floor above my parents’ bedroom to the left, mine to the right. I knew every corner of our house, and there were many dark corners that nobody went to but me. What happened the week before had long since been forgotten. Today I was allowed to have dinner with the grownups. Maria took the meat around again, winking at me without anyone seeing. She smiled. Then she smiled at Martin.
“Hermann, are you listening?”
My father looked across at me from his place at the head of the table, then at Knut. He had laid his cutlery down on the edge of the plate. Maria was holding the serving platter up in the air, with both hands. What had Knut — Herr Sieverding — asked me, my mind went blank, I tried to imagine what he might have asked me, there were no potatoes steaming on anybody’s plate by now, I couldn’t think of anything.
“No, it did have legs, I saw for myself. The swift, I mean.”
“But he’s asking what class you’re in,” murmured my mother in my ear.
By this time I couldn’t say a word.
“Oh, well,” broke in Martin, who cleaned the boots. “School isn’t important at all, not that interesting, don’t you agree? Unless you’re very lucky, you hardly learn a thing, at least nothing important, nothing about animals, plants, or cameras, for example. Things that interest a bright boy, paper and pencils and everything you need to take a good photo. I bet you’ll have a hard time finding a biology teacher who is aware that swifts have legs.”
“But the bird is called Apus apus,” said Knut, “and its footless condition is mentioned in its name, twice in fact, as though to confirm it or to indicate that there is nothing else to know about it, that it’s distinguished by nothing except its lack of feet.”
“You see, I’m sure you didn’t learn that at school.”
“No, you’re right. I only just managed to scrape through my leaving exams. Instead of studying, I used to go off all on my own looking at wildlife, and when I passed my exams my parents were so relieved, they bought me the movie camera I had been coveting so that I could film animals. Yet it was my love of observing animals that made so much trouble for me at school.”
It was getting dark outside. My nanny was in the kitchen preparing dessert and coffee. My mother had laid her hand on my knee. Everyone had forgotten how embarrassed I’d been about Knut’s question.
“Nobody would know now that you weren’t a model pupil,” said my father, “if you don’t mind my saying so. Getting invited at twenty-one to Berlin for the anniversary of the German Ornithological Society — I thought you would have been top of the class, Herr Sieverding.”
“Not a bit of it. I was too busy observing the bird world. And I couldn’t have made the film I showed in Berlin about snipe in the Königsberg area if my parents hadn’t given me the camera.”
“You’re a real professional when it comes to birds,” said Martin, nudging Knut with his elbow. “Tell us again about the first lecture you gave, back home in Königsberg.”
“God, I was so nervous. What I knew was the remote world of birds out on the Courland Spit, and here I was about to give a presentation on it, using my own photo material, in the lecture theater of the Zoological Institute. My hands were sweating. My parents were there. Seasoned ornithologists were there. Fortunately my lecture went off very smoothly, there was even an article in the Königsberg Daily News, the first one about my work: ‘Camera Reveals Family Secrets.’ Of course, I’ve got to say there were also some critics, who had expected something completely different. I simply wanted to show the world as it was, whereas they wanted me to explain the world to them, a bit like a grandmother explaining the world to her grandchild.”
“As if showing anything were that easy.”
Knut and my father laughed. Martin took a drink of water. Now that I had been paying attention again for quite a while, something dawned on me beyond all the stories about school, birds, and filming: it was entirely for my sake that my parents had invited these two men, Knut and Martin, with their pleasant voices and black leather boots.
6
THE WAY I SEE IT today is that my parents were worried about me after the incident of the swift. Obviously they noticed how slow I was to get over my confusion, how I was becoming more withdrawn as the week wore on, preferring to spend my time alone in my room and answering encouraging questions with a scarcely audible yes or no, or showing no reaction at all. Since they connected my depression with the swift, though not with my equally depressed nanny — who was punished by being ignored for a few days — my parents made a plan: with guidance, I was to learn about the world of birds through direct, intensive contact.
What seems to me in retrospect so endearing, my parents worrying that their only child’s not very significant encounter with a young swift might have serious repercussions in his later life, at the time aroused contradictory emotions in the child concerned. On the one hand, I was proud to be the center of attention, even more than usual the world seemed to revolve around me, they had even invited young ornithologists to dinner just because of me. But on the other hand, I also felt betrayed, because plans had been hatched behind my back to rescue a creature who was being kept just as much in the dark as if he were a small animal.