Kaltenburg Read Online Free PDF

“It’s all my fault, please leave her alone, she hasn’t done anything.” Perhaps I have never since then experienced such a powerful sense of injustice and torment, the young swift, my wet trousers, and the nanny I was fond of.
    I have a dim memory of lying in bed, I had been there for ages and should have been asleep, while my mother kept repeating the same phrases over and over to my father, scraps of sentences that reached me from their bedroom, though I couldn’t make much sense of them, things like “the poor thing,” and “with his bare hands,” and “our own son,” and then later, if I heard correctly through the half-open door, again and again, now almost in a whisper, as though she had no strength left, maybe because she was so disgusted: “The eyes.”
    What happened to the swift afterward, I can’t say. It’s possible it didn’t survive, that it expired after my father gently released it from its purgatory and ushered it toward the garden, though without touching it with his bare hands. Or it died, exhausted, toward evening on the soft, patterned carpet. Just as it is possible, although unlikely, that despite its experiences it had a long life before it, an airborne life which would bring it back for just a few weeks year after year to our latitude, to the neighborhood of dark curtains, cool drawing rooms, and cruel children, which, as though it had learned its lesson on that Sunday afternoon, it would take note of only from a great height, from a safe distance.
    I learned my lesson too, though without realizing as much straightaway. It took me until the next morning, when I emerged from an uneasy sleep and my stupefied condition, and went the way I had gone the day before out of my room, along the corridor, then down the broad staircase, into the kitchen, where I was given a drink of milk, and finally into the drawing room, to the site of my downfall. All traces of the struggle had been erased, not a mark on the carpet, the curtain hung as neatly as if no swift had ever become entangled in it. However, the discovery I had made the afternoon before but only grasped now when I glanced across the empty battlefield hinted that I was destined to be an ornithologist: I had seen the legs of the swift.
    To this day, there is a widespread notion that this is a bird that possesses neither legs nor claws; it spends most of its life in the air, and is said to lack such equipment. A bird that you hardly ever see close up, that impresses the viewer on the ground with its dexterous wing strokes and rapid flight, sometimes swooping low enough to make you instinctively duck, and lingering immediately afterward at a great height, an almost imperceptible dot that seems gradually to glide off into space. You never see a swift sitting on a branch, it never moves about on the ground. With such a creature it’s not surprising that ignorance shades over into superstition. People used to be convinced that swifts came straight from the moon.
    Abhorrent as the young swift was to me, something connected me with it, my enemy and comrade in fear on a long Sunday afternoon in the drawing room: I had wrested knowledge from it which it tried to keep hidden from humans. For the bird to have clung to the curtain material, it must have had the necessary claws. And when it lay on its back on the carpet, close to death, with wings outstretched and helplessly twitching, I saw with my own eyes, from close up, the short, admittedly rather wasted-looking, but certainly existing legs of the swift. Legs such as all birds have. That made it anything but the mysterious creature of fable endowed with marvelous powers.
    I raced from the drawing room across to the kitchen, where my breakfast was ready, shouting again and again, “The swift has got legs,” breathless, I wanted to go into all the details, but my nanny, pushing the plate of open bread rolls toward me when I finally sat