Kaltenburg Read Online Free PDF Page B

myself down on the kitchen bench, just shook her head sadly.
    Something was broken. I still have this vague feeling today, even though it has never become quite clear to me what happened. The look on my nanny’s face, her head moving gently from side to side, her bright, loose hair against the light, caressing her chin and cheeks. Was that the last breakfast Maria would ever serve me? She sat opposite me as though she knew something far more significant than my basic discovery about the swift, a terrible revelation hardly bearable even to an adult, let alone a child.
    Did I idolize Maria? As a small boy, yes, certainly. And it only struck me years later that her head-shaking might have had more to do with her lover than with her possible dismissal. But at the time the effect on me was, must have been, to make me connect my nanny’s secret knowledge with the incident of the swift the day before.
    On the one hand, I thought, I must try with all my might to work this creature out, and then I, who was to blame for her despair, would discover what was making my nanny so miserable on this morning, but on the other hand I couldn’t stand the idea of ever taking a close look at a stray young bird again. Because, but for the swift, this depressing breakfast scene would never have happened, I would never have had to sit helplessly opposite my nanny, unsure, torn this way and that, sad but a bit disappointed at the same time because she wasn’t interested in the admittedly puny legs of the swift.
    I chewed silently. My nanny said nothing. As if I had contributed to the extinction of the swift. As if the day before I had taken the decisive, irrevocable step of making this bird species disappear from the earth forever. As if I had the last living specimen on my conscience.

4
    S T RANGE YOU SHOULD ASK that particular question, I said to Frau Fischer, because I’ve always wondered about it myself: Didn’t I have any school friends of my own age with whom I could play in the fields after school and spend long Sunday afternoons? Friends from my early schooling? I can’t remember any.
    Over there on the edge of the forest, a herd of deer whose outlines you could only make out gradually after sunset in the field against the dark background: sometimes my father took me with him on his study outings. In the summer, when the evenings stayed light far too long for me to sleep, he came into my room to see if I was still awake and allowed me to get up and get dressed again. I was never a good sleeper.
    Possibly because I thought of these twilight walks as an extraordinary reward—even if I never knew what for, because they were always bestowed on me out of the blue and no doubt on a whim of my father’s—on these outings of ours I was always particularly obedient and keen to learn. I learned from my father how to move silently through the undergrowth and, instead of constantly talking, how to listen for the most distant sounds. Did he dislike going alone? Was it a ruse on his part, to do with his idea of education? If we set off late in the evening there obviously wasn’t much to see anymore, and so I learned to concentrate on faint impressions and seemingly trivial phenomena.
    We did not speak. He went ahead, gesturing toward a wallow or teeth marks on a birch tree. We crept to the edge of the wood and waited. Eventually, just as I had been promised at home while hastily throwing on my clothes, deer began to appear in the forest. The animals, I learned, talk to each other almost continuously; they often talk to us too, but we rarely notice what they’re saying, not realizing they mean us. The animals address themselves to us, from a distance, hidden in the leaves of the trees above us, from the thicket beside the path, they ask questions or they curse us, they are letting us know “I am aware of you.” But even to get anywhere near certain animals, to detect them in the first place, you have to