THE MENU LAY OPEN in front of us, but we hadn’t ordered yet. Katharina Fischer was looking out of the window, her expression almost suggesting that it was her own memory that was filling with Ludwig Kaltenburg’s jackdaws, because of the images I had shown her one by one.
She had told me on the telephone about her assignment, about a long, no doubt tiring day, which she assured me she had got through all right, despite minor irritations. No, unfortunately, the local bird life wasn’t mentioned at all, and the stern head of protocol intervened immediately when she tried to raise the topic of this winter’s waxwing invasion with the English visitor during a short break. All the same, our meeting was not without results, for it made her go back to Kaltenburg’s works, those battered volumes, full of underlinings and coffee stains, which she had studied intensively in her later years at school, and which at some stage had disappeared into a banana crate to finish up in various cellars every time she moved.
The minute she glanced through the books after so many years, Katharina Fischer noticed that for some reason she had put an exclamation mark after every mention of a place-name. Prague and Paris, where Kaltenburg had said his piece about the events of 1968, not without sharply attacking the Soviet Union as well as the students. Then Königsberg, a place with which Frau Fischer had as little connection in her youth as with the town where she now lived. Moscow, Paris, Florida, London, Rotterdam—when the interpreter asked me if I’d noticed that the professor never at any point mentioned Posen in his writings, I decided to ask her out to dinner, a simple “certainly” or “of course” over the telephone would not do. She accepted without hesitation, and we agreed to book a table in this restaurant on the bank of the Elbe at Blasewitz.
The river, the meadows, the slopes on the other side, on our right the Loschwitz Bridge—in her mind’s eye she was following Kaltenburg as he raced over the bridge on his motorbike. His leather biker’s gear, his white mane, and the way the rider bends over the handlebars; it can only be Kaltenburg, even if the steel supports of the bridge cause a rapidly alternating pattern of light and dark stripes to flit across the figure, so that you begin to wonder whether it isn’t a phantom your eyes are following, while the professor has long since reached the other bank, is taking the bend, disappearing between the houses on the Körnerplatz.
We debated back and forth on what to call it: a homecoming, an escape, the end of a long farewell, which had basically started with Kaltenburg’s arrival? A long farewell which coincided with my leaving school, my studies under the professor, and a few important years as a colleague at his Institute. I supplied him with material for a series of studies, researched pair bonds in the common raven, carried out observations on same-species killing among various types of animal, so that Kaltenburg was able to build up a comprehensive picture of this aberrant behavior. I was allowed to take part in the big research project on night herons, although that was never completed, more’s the pity, because Kaltenburg never again returned to this bird, which, far from yielding its secrets after years of observation, actually became more puzzling.
My own research involved the early months of life in the great tit, and it also took me all over the country to find out more about chimney jackdaws. Looking back, though, I must say that I don’t see either of these projects as valid in terms of detail, and neither do I find the ideas I had then about the house sparrow’s capacity for mimicry convincing today.
No, I replied to Katharina Fischer, go with Ludwig Kaltenburg to Vienna? I would never have wanted to join him, quite apart from the fact that it wasn’t an option. For one thing I saw it as my duty to look after the animals in the Institute—although that wasn’t ever discussed—now that its head was no longer available. For another, my parents-in-law would have been heartbroken if their daughter had decamped to the West. And I wouldn’t have gone anywhere without my wife. When I was lucky enough to find my place at the Ornithological Collection, I don’t mind admitting that I felt something like freedom. No, to Vienna, Ludwig Kaltenburg had to go back to Vienna alone.
A bit farther upriver, beyond the bridge which blocks the view, somewhere on the hillside the red taillight of a motorbike will have lit up, Kaltenburg turning into the narrow path, dimly lit by a few gas lamps, which led to his villa. The waiter hovered, he wanted to take our order, and no, no motorcyclist on the bridge, no jackdaws above the hillside, the sun had set, Frau Fischer tore herself away from the view outside, I had been watching her reflection in the windowpane.