Kaltenburg by Marcel Beyer

Author:Marcel Beyer [Beyer, Marcel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

IV

1

FRIDAY THE SIXTH of March. In the morning the news of Stalin’s death had been announced. In the evening I was due to visit the Hagemanns with Ludwig Kaltenburg. Arriving at dusk in Loschwitz, I found the Institute site unusually silent, and I encountered nobody except Herr Sikorski, Kaltenburg’s cameraman. When I asked him how people here had taken the news, especially the professor, Herr Sikorski just shrugged: it had been very quiet all day. Even the birds were less lively than usual. However, as for the professor, there was no knowing what he was thinking—he had retreated to the aquarium section that afternoon and not reappeared.

As I went down the stairs to the breeding and collecting tanks located in the rooms built on the side facing the slope, I felt a forlornness that I had never before experienced in this house. The walls seemed damp, my tread echoed on the stone steps, not a human voice anywhere, not an animal in sight. The cold light in the antechamber, the barrel vaulting over the aquariums placed close together, the quiet hum of countless circulation pumps.

The cheerlessness was not even dispelled by the sight of Ludwig Kaltenburg’s shock of white hair between the tanks. He was shuffling in rubber boots down the gangway at the other end of the room. Through a series of glass panels, the masses of water, his face was scarcely recognizable, blurred. As though Kaltenburg were walking across the seabed. Then it was gone, hidden by water milfoil, then flashing into sight again, dissolving in a whirl of air and water, finally regaining its shape, the clear eyes, the beard, the unruly hair.

On the worktop a bare reserve tank with a shoal of cichlids swimming in it. It appeared that Kaltenburg had spent the afternoon refurbishing the perch’s customary aquarium, trying out one new plant and one new arrangement after another until at last he was satisfied—that is, today the exercise had served him first and foremost as a distraction.

“Of course, I had to call the colleagues together and give a little speech,” he said, and, “Fräulein Holsterbach, you know, the dark Ph.D. student, was crying.”

I had no idea what was going through Kaltenburg’s mind. Together we put the cover back on the aquarium. He took a step back, rubbing his hands and surveying his creation. A truly beautiful world of water.

Slowly he cleared up the work area, took off his lab coat; he was wearing his black suit underneath, his black shoes stood ready polished on the cellar steps. We were moving toward the exit when he stopped in front of one aquarium and pointed out a male stickleback that was busy at the bottom of the tank. Kaltenburg’s finger moved up and down the pane of glass to show me something. The other fish hovered inquisitively behind the glass, following the finger to right and left, and only that particular stickleback took no interest in whether it was feeding time.

The professor tut-tutted, chewing on his lower lip.

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