Free Kaltenburg by Marcel Beyer Page A

with wood shavings: I never quite dared approach them, always kept a certain distance.
    â€œI’d love to take a close look at the bird.” By the time Professor Kaltenburg came to see us, Martin had long since left. Sometimes we still got postcards, from Erfurt at first, then from Königgrätz. He always addressed them to the family, never just to the professor of botany, and their contents were intended for all of us too, the words meant for the adults, his frequent sprinkling of little drawings aimed at the child. Then the greeting cards stopped, the last one—but I may be wrong about this—came from the Crimea, about the time when the peninsula was cut off and was being vacated, so probably in November 1943.
    I noticed the dust cloud from quite a distance, a motorbike was heading from town and racing at a crazy speed down our road. I rushed around the house, my father must be in his greenhouse at the back, my mother was lying down after lunch. “There he is,” I shouted from the doorway, “he’s here,” although I couldn’t see my father anywhere in the greenhouse. His head appeared at the side between the grasses, he wiped his hands on his trousers as he came toward me, and just as he was asking, “The professor?” we heard the motorbike in front of the house. Kaltenburg switched off the engine and heaved his NSU into our driveway; he was wearing leather gloves, a leather jacket, and dark glasses against the sun, which was very low in the sky at that time of day.
    My nanny stood at the kitchen window. Professor Kaltenburg pushed his glasses up onto his forehead, took off his gloves, waved toward the window, glanced around as though looking for my mother, then held out his hand to my father and laughed.
    â€œWhere’s our little patient, then?”
    I followed Kaltenburg and my father into the conservatory. It was almost as though the starling had been waiting for us, it was hopping around in a lively manner in its cage, and as soon as my father opened the little door it jumped onto Professor Kaltenburg’s hand and then straight onto his shoulder and then his head. Professor Kaltenburg wasn’t in the least taken aback, even when the young starling messed up his hair and started investigating the sunglasses, tugging at them until they finally fell to the ground, Kaltenburg laughed and talked to the creature. I stood to one side with my father, and later I realized that from that afternoon onward the memory of my father began to fade.
    Today I know so much more about Ludwig Kaltenburg’s life than I do about my own parents’. Admittedly, over the decades Kaltenburg frequently talked to me about himself, right up until his death, presenting particular episodes in varying lights—my parents were not granted that much time. But I think it started that afternoon when Kaltenburg first visited us. He was soon telling me how he had reared animals even as a child, how at that moment in Posen he didn’t have the company of a single living thing, how he nearly became director of a zoo, and how in America, where his father sent him to study, he had spent all his time going to the beach to collect marine specimens, since he didn’t understand a word of the lecturers’ English. Kaltenburg came from Austria, was a full professor in Königsberg, and spent some time in Posen. The places where my parents had lived—I can’t think of any apart from Posen, except for our stay in Dresden. Where did they grow up, where did they meet, where did my father study? Where did we live before we moved to Posen? Did they share a common past in Dresden? I knew nothing about any of it.
    In Posen they must have been regarded as outsiders, otherwise it’s hard to explain why I have so few pictures in my mind of my parents’ social life. I can’t remember any social occasions at home, it may be that my father really was rather isolated among his