Free Kaltenburg by Marcel Beyer

Professor?”
    â€œHe is a professor, only in Königsberg, not here in Posen—but you know that, don’t you remember, he was talking about Königsberg back there? And he’s not a botanist.”
    I knew Königsberg, that’s where Knut came from.
    â€œSo what’s he doing in our city?”
    My mother hesitated for a moment. “Professor Kaltenburg is a zoologist who takes care of confused people in a big mental hospital here.”
    â€œConfused?”
    â€œNot just confused, of course—they’re seriously ill.”
    I could tell my mother was not happy with her answer. She reflected. Then she spotted something, and: “Give the lady your seat.”
    I got up off the seat, a woman pushed past me as though I didn’t exist, took my place without so much as a nod.
    â€œAnd who was he talking about when he said he needed a nice pair of gloves for a lady?”
    â€œHis wife, of course—who did you think?”
    I was standing in the gangway now, the tram was getting fuller all the time, my mother was holding on to me with one arm, the other was clasping the bags and boxes on her lap.
    â€œLook, it’s raining.” And: “We’ll soon be home.”
    But the words could not be wiped away. A zoologist who worked in a mental hospital. The smell of suede, and now the tram had stopped again, the damp steaming off the passengers’ coats. Hadn’t I watched a veterinary surgeon at work in a cowshed, the blood and the bellowing, the crude, bright instruments? I could see Professor Kaltenburg in a white coat, using his zoological expertise on the patients. The tram’s electric contacts were sparking. Hadn’t I watched badly injured people being carried on stretchers into courtyard entrances in the city, hadn’t I seen bandaged heads, heard cries of pain and the “Quick, quick” of the ambulance men? Professor Kaltenburg in the posture of a falconer, his gaze turned upward and his arm outstretched: I can see him—was I already seeing him like this even then? Where does a child get such imaginings from?—in solid leather gloves, adjusting some medical apparatus whose thick cables run to a patient’s bed.

9
    I ’D LOVE TO TAKE a close look at the bird.”
    With this parting sentence outside the department store Professor Kaltenburg invited himself over to our house. My mother had told him about our starling, which, unusually for a starling, had refused to integrate into the family, did not seek company, didn’t eat properly, and showed no sign whatsoever of the ability to talk, a point my father had used to make me keen on the bird.
    This starling wasn’t our first bird, and my father had taken them all to his heart, every single time. If you keep a careful lookout for nests, if you find helpless nestlings that have fallen to the ground and are either still just breathing or already completely dried up, if you cannot get enough of the sight of a bird nursery in late spring and the brood’s first attempts at flight, sooner or later, like my father, you will bring birds into the house. It may be that he simply couldn’t resist them, or maybe it was part of his plan to gradually accustom me to the presence of birds: soon we had our first fledglings in the conservatory, went collecting worms, gathering seeds in the greenhouse and using them for feed, and from then on, apart from the injured birds we took in, every spring we had orphaned youngsters to hand-rear with egg yolk, hemp seed, linseed, and poppy seed. Barley groats or bread rolls soaked in milk, groundsel and chickweed, lettuce. My father in the kitchen: “No, for this one I’ve got to mix some water in with the milk.”
    I watched my father, and the birds, but I never fed them, never cleaned their cage, I didn’t even whistle, let alone touch one of these creatures. The blind, croaking, featherless, wrinkled animals in a box lined