Kaltenburg Read Online Free PDF Page A

eventually found between the stove and the sideboard, I must have been a picture of utter confusion; I don’t remember, but that’s how my parents described it to me.
    All I can recall is this unpredictable creature caught up in the dark curtains, I’m staring at the striped edge of the shiny rectangle of cloth, apparently stirring idly in the mild afternoon air, though in fact its motion results from the frantic movements of the young bird, which cannot shake the heavy material with commensurate force. Its claws gripping tightly, the bird climbs higher, and the next moment it is hidden in a fold, but I know it’s still there, the hem of the curtain silently brushes the parquet floor. Did it really enter the drawing room of its own accord, or did the cat bring it in? In my memory the bird more and more assumes the form of a swift—even while the ornithologist in me says that a swift would never fly through an open door into a house, and if it did its flight velocity would make it smash headfirst into a wall, and if it survived it would not be able to get off the floor to bury itself in the curtains.
    The next minute I was sitting completely dazed on the kitchen bench, hardly hearing my mother scolding the nanny, who had gone off to enjoy herself in the fields with an admirer, leaving me alone in the house, and who was now wiping my bare legs with a damp cloth. Yet it was all my fault. I had begged her to leave me playing in the drawing room after lunch and go for a walk by herself, I wouldn’t tell my parents, I had kept my promise on previous Sundays. Eventually I had a temper tantrum, thrashing around wildly but taking care not to hit my nanny; I may have been screaming too. No, before I got to the point of screaming she would give in, relieved on the one hand, on the other worried about going for a walk by herself, though both of us knew, without ever saying so, what “by herself” meant on a Sunday afternoon.
    I was left in peace, playing my solitary games in the cool room with its half-drawn curtains, while she had to worry about me, whether I would be up to any mischief, she didn’t know what I did when she was away, whereas I had some idea what her admirer would be up to with her in the distant meadow. So that, as I was later to realize when I was grown up myself, her worry about being with her lover would be combined with concern about neglecting a child.
    I had goose bumps, the cloth which had been pleasantly warm from the water and the warm hand running it over my legs got cold from one minute to the next in the unheated kitchen, the cool evening air. When my nanny came back from her outing I said nothing, didn’t answer any questions about why I was cowering in the dusk between the stove and the sideboard, why I was keeping my arms so tightly crossed, why I couldn’t put one foot in front of the other like a normal boy. She didn’t notice the dark stain on my trousers, didn’t notice the swift, which was still lying on the carpet with a wildly beating heart, as though paralyzed, the last time I saw it. I was able to keep everything back from my nanny, but not from my parents, who returned at dinnertime from a visit, and now I was sitting in nothing but my Sunday shirt on the kitchen bench with a wildly beating heart, I had wet my trousers out of sheer terror.
    I could hear the noise, but I didn’t comprehend a word that was being said, my blood was roaring so loudly in my ears. Silently my nanny let my mother’s reproaches and her unusually rough language wash over her, as she knelt in front of me she kept her eyes lowered, didn’t look at me, just as I would have given anything in the world not to meet her gaze, although I didn’t dare close my eyes and wish myself away from this scene, away from the tiled kitchen with its horrible echo, back in my quiet bedroom. My mouth was dry, I couldn’t even swallow, let alone confess my guilt, call out,