Kaltenburg (6 page)

I took my first snapshots, with Knut's camera: in the garden, my parents with friends, an early summer's evening, everybody looking up at me from the table, in the corner on the right you could see part of the greenhouse. Knut, half hidden in the grass while we waited for partridges. Martin, a snap I took of him on the road a long way from our house, and no, it didn't peter out in a narrow track between the fields, it led, quite recently paved with granite, to the next village. In the sky in the background were dots, migratory birds, geese, you could tell by the formation.

So autumn came. And one event from that time particularly stands out for me, even though the central feature itself escapes my memory. Somebody—Martin? my mother?—at some point suggested that Knut should show us his film about the snipe which had been mentioned at our dinner together. To begin with it was no more than a persistently recurring notion, but how could you carry out such a bold venture, you'd need a hall to show it in, then there would be the problem of a suitable projector, and anyway, Knut was here with the Luftwaffe and as a student, he didn't have the film ready to hand.

Gradually, though, everybody became quite carried away by the idea. If necessary you could rig up a makeshift projection room here in the house, the drawing room with its heavy curtains would do quite well. Once the others showed they were really serious about it, then of course Knut would gladly make sure we obtained the film. Martin would ask around about a projector, but without attracting attention. I had never seen my parents so feverish. However, they insisted I should not go around talking about it. They didn't like their son trying to impress the neighboring children by boasting about family matters. Martin had found a suitable projector, which he could borrow for a day. My parents kept reminding me of my promise. Knut dropped in to tell us that somebody would soon be traveling to Königsberg and would visit Knut's parents to collect the film and bring it safely back to Posen. I couldn't wait for the weekend, I would no longer have to restrain myself.

The night before the great occasion I hardly slept; my parents were very excited too, I could hear footsteps on the stairs until very late, and voices coming from the kitchen through the open door. But the only thing I can remember about the snipe film itself is one word: “Rossitten,” and that didn't even come from the film, which was silent. “Rossitten”: Knut used it in his commentary, describing the ornithological station up north in East Prussia.

The next morning I was woken by the preparations: on the ground floor chairs were being dragged to and fro across the parquet, my nanny was taking out a large bed sheet from the linen cupboard in the corridor to iron for use as a screen. I could hear the curtains being opened and closed again a few times, then my father went shouting through the house that we needed dark blankets. Our drawing room was being got ready for the screening. The stove and sideboard had disappeared behind the improvised screen. My father stood on a ladder pushing woolen blankets down between the window frame and the curtain rail.

In my pajamas I sat down at the little table that had been pushed back against the wall for the screening. I could hear my nanny in the distance, my breakfast was waiting for me in the kitchen.

Why don't I remember anything about the snipe film? I think I was rather disappointed that Knut did not feature in his own film. My expectations had been pitched too high, how could it be otherwise, but apart from that my expectations were completely wrong from the start. Don't ask me how a child of six or seven who has never been to the cinema and never seen a film arrives at his fixed idea of a film, not open to doubt and impervious to adult comment, as though he had already seen all the films in the world. If you had asked me what to expect from this film, I would have replied without hesitation: obviously it would show Knut moving through his home landscape looking for birds. You would also see Knut with a bird on his arm. And Knut watching a dark swarm, pulsating in the air, as it slowly disappeared over the coast into the sunset.

The film had been loaded onto the projector. My father turned out the light and joined us in our semicircle. My mother on the left, with me next to her. Over there my nanny and Martin. The projector clattered, the screen went black, there were just little hairs fluttering brightly at the edges. A short leader strip, and yes, to confirm what I had expected, there it was: KNUT SIEVERDING, his name in large capitals. There was no soundtrack, Knut delivered the commentary standing beside the projector. I don't know when it first occurred to me that his name was like that of a variety of snipe,
Calidris canutus,
the knot, known in German as a
Knutt.

Reeds swaying in the wind. A wide sky dominated by shining masses of clouds. Then back to ground level—reflections in water, spikes of grass—there was something moving. Knut was about to appear in the picture. I waited. There they were, the snipe, then the landscape again, sky, clouds, grass, I heard Knut's voice explaining everything precisely, in real life, here in our drawing room. But Knut had yet to appear in the film. I was so impatient that I didn't take a proper look at the birds.

Considering how many wildlife films I have seen since, as an adult, including films by Knut himself, and how inspiring I have found them, often far more so than those with a human cast, I'm still surprised by how little I gained from seeing my first wildlife film, in fact the first film I had ever seen in my life.

The screen had reverted to a brilliant blinding white, our motionless figures could be made out in the darkness, still looking toward the screen, as though comparing the image left on the retina with what we had just seen. But the film was finished. The reel turned a few more times, and then it was empty, the celluloid strip tapping against the sprocket, a regular, quiet clicking, like a clock measuring an infinite expanse of time, and apart from that nothing moved. Three more revolutions, three more disturbing clicks, and the projector lamp went out, the whirring gradually died away, then ceased altogether. Somebody switched on the chandelier lights and somebody cleared his throat, we viewers were clapping, Knut took a bow. He stood right next to me, but I hadn't seen him in his film.

O
U
TSIDE, A SPRING SHOWER
, the sky had blackened, it looked as though there might be a storm. The world beyond the window was deep blue: the approaching cloud front, in the distance the wall enclosing the grounds, where the gateway gave onto a long concrete drive that led right up to the building. On the left by the entrance the tall beeches, in summer the foliage is so dense that it looks like a forest, and on our right, behind the old storehouse, the birches on the gentle slope: all covered with a blue shimmer. Big puddles had quickly formed in the mud, the arc lamps in the car park were already lit.

We had been discussing Martin's work, exhibited in all the big public galleries, the drawings with their characteristic combination of roughness and fragility. We talked about Martin's room installations, partly manic and partly pedantic in their effect, composed of everyday objects and sculptures which only a few art lovers were prepared to see as sculptures. Long rows of shelves, preserving jars, boxes, with stains on the floor where a dark, sticky-looking liquid had been spilled: as though someone had broken into a zoological collection.

Traveling with her parents, she had regularly been taken to exhibitions, Frau Fischer told me, and whenever they planned a trip she could always count on spending at least one long day among contemporary works of art. At that time she had always felt uncomfortable in Martin's rooms, not to say intimidated by things. The material was enveloped in a dangerous stillness, at once dead and alive. Whether it was just a sponge, or a piece of sacking, or a completely ordinary old pair of tailor's scissors, it would never have occurred to her to touch these objects.

“Soon I didn't want to travel any distance at all during the holidays, and I swore that when I was older I would never go abroad. Then I became an interpreter.”

Our empty coffee cups, the half-f ashtray. If we had been sitting in a ground-floor room, in the bluish half-light, we could have seen the steam rising from the grass, seeming to do battle with the falling raindrops. They were huddling out there, protected by the leaves, hunched, feathers puffed up, without a sound, waiting for the cloudburst to end.

“Didn't Knut Sieverding make a film about a hamster too?” asked Katharina Fischer, recalling a winter morning when the first-years were led by their teacher into the biology lab, full of anticipation but also a bit unsure; from their primary school years they were used to being read a story on the last day before the Christmas holidays. Here in the high school the class teacher busied herself with a video player, muttering to herself, and not until the cassette had been pushed home did the pupils in the back rows quiet down like the rest.

“There was one scene that sent shivers down our spines.”

A stoat crawls into a hamster's burrow, and Katharina Fischer remembered as though it were yesterday how tense she felt watching the intruder, because she knew the nest contained a litter of young. The stoat moves in further and further. The mother hamster clearly notices changes taking place somewhere in the intricate system of runs, perhaps the soles of her feet have picked up vibrations from the ground, or she may have sensed unusual air movements through her whiskers, or maybe it's simply the smell of the stoat—the hamster's head jerks up, she stops for a moment, as though she has to arrange these irritating sense perceptions into a picture. She turns, runs up along the tunnel, and suddenly the hamster and the stoat confront each other face-to-face.

Yes, she had seen Knut's film.

“Our teacher, in the semidarkness next to the screen, completely unmoved.”

Not a coldhearted person, surely.

“No, but in that situation it just disturbed us even more, the stoat attacking a young family of hamsters, and the teacher not even flinching.”

She knew the outcome of the confrontation.

In the end the stoat withdraws from the burrow. The whole class was relieved. Such death-defying courage. All the same, the image came back to Katharina Fischer for a long time afterward, the puffed-out cheeks of the mother hamster, the sharp teeth, the little claws.

“What would Knut Sieverding have done if the defense had failed, if the stoat had got to the helpless young hamsters in their nest?”

Knut Sieverding would never have imposed that on children. A dead mother hamster and an unprotected nest, never.

“Did he look for a particularly tough hamster?”

It took him weeks to train the stoat to go so far and no further into the hamsters' burrow, stop, and turn back after a while. The scene was planned down to the last detail, you could say it was staged, and it didn't matter to the stoat whether a mother hamster turned up to drive it off or not.

Frau Fischer nodded absently. “A tame stoat meets a tame hamster.”

Meanwhile, far more than the intended half-hour had elapsed, we ought to be getting back to the birds. The rain was becoming heavier all the time. Anything that had not found its way into Frau Fischer's long-term memory would have to be revised.

I unlocked the door to the egg collection again, the big yellow iron door, which I always think opens only against a certain resistance, as though higher air pressure prevails in the room behind it. As soon as the door shut behind us we could no longer hear the drumming of the rain, what pressed upon our ears now, subdued, a fine carpet of sound, was the steady noise of the recirculated air.

The walls are lined all around with display cases, you are looking into glass birds' eyes everywhere, but the shining buttons are no more than crude indicators of the location of the sense of sight in life, uniform dark points instead of the infinitely varied, subtly shaded colors of the iris. In the short space of our walk back to work we passed countless specimens whose eyes seemed to follow us attentively right into the small square left clear for table and chairs. Here were birds of paradise in a thousand variations, the color combinations, the form of the plumage, the pose, and there house sparrows, whose varieties reveal themselves only to the patient observer: every single bird has been carefully treated to create a lifelike impression. Even a habitual visitor can occasionally succumb to the illusion that he is surrounded here not by mounted specimens but by silent observers: I sometimes experience this when I stand lost in thought at a display cabinet and discover with a shock a bird that has fallen from its base.

We sat down again at the wooden table, on two angles of a corner, close together; Frau Fischer sketched a finch in her notebook, then flipped back to the beginning of the book and looked at me, concentrating completely on the matter in hand. This I took to be my signal to stand up. I positioned myself behind the table, my thumb in the English bird book, and examined the interpreter as you would a schoolchild. We moved briskly through the Turdidae family, we touched on warblers, chats, redstarts, and thrushes, Frau Fischer had retained everything very well, I presented her with the English names and then the Latin ones, and she reeled off both German and English equivalents as though she had always known them. Just as quickly, we put titmice and sparrows behind us and came back to the finches, where we had started.

I laid a gentle finger on the gray head of a bird slightly smaller than a sparrow, with a crimson forehead and breast, its back cinnamon-colored. The answer came without hesitation: the
Bluthänfling,
the linnet, Latin
Carduelis cannabina
or—very confusingly—also
Acanthis cannabina.
She made a note, “unusual white edges to primary feathers,” and drew an arrow from it pointing to her linnet sketch.

The teacher posed the questions, the pupil answered, but after a while a third voice intruded into our dialogue: “If we ever go to Vienna together, you must remind me to show you the crown prince's last eagles.”