though from a distance on every floor going down, the display stands, people, the noises, but here on the stairs, our footsteps echoing, we were no longer affected by all that activity. My mind was already fixed on the tram stop, the journey home, our kitchen, and my nanny when, just as we had almost reached the exit, there was Professor Kaltenburg coming toward us, a university colleague of my fatherâs.
We had to say hello to him. My mother stopped on the landing, and he too, who had been purposefully striding up the stairs as though he wanted to get to the menswear department as quickly as possible, didnât just raise his hat in passing, he halted, held out his hand to my mother, stroked my head. and smiled, saying âWhat a surpriseâ and âMy dear ladyâ and âWell, my boy?â I was pulled in different directions, I already saw myself back in our drawing room, why couldnât Professor Kaltenburg go home with us? I thought, but the two of them had already begunâa child picks this up after the first few sentencesâa longish conversation in the bare, windowless staircase. Of course it had not escaped me that Kaltenburg was attracted to my mother, but then he was attached to my father too, and to me. While he was paying my mother compliments, he was looking at me: âAnd if you donât mind my asking such a prying question, what nice things have you been buying, then?â
She didnât show him my underwear, thank goodness, but my mother carefully took the cap, which the professor loudly admired, out of her bag, and when the gloves emerged from their tissue paper, he had an idea. He wanted to give a lady a pair of leather gloves for Christmas, could my mother spare a minute to advise him on his choice?
There heâd been, rushing upstairs, and now he had turned right around and we were going back to the beginning of our store journey, to the ground floor, from which we had long since escaped, and once more the saleslady was taking out one pair of gloves after another.
Why, I asked myself later, did this Professor Kaltenburg not use the escalator like everybody else to go upstairs in a department store? Yet another mystery about this man. Professor Kaltenburg, the first man I ever saw wearing sunglasses, Professor Kaltenburg, who came to see us on his motorbike, Professor Kaltenburg, about whom I would continue to unearth new secrets, Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg, who has had such a decisive influence on my life. He kept his secrets until the end, from using the stairs where there was an escalator to expressing radical, albeit mystifying, self-criticism in his last letters, which reached me from distant Vienna at the end of the eighties.
His keen glance, the laughter lines around his eyes. His movements, quick and exact when it came to precise actions, but at other times awkward, unsteady, seemingly given to chance fluctuations, as though his body were performing grotesque contortions without its ownerâs knowledge. Ludwig Kaltenburg, a falcon poised to swoop, wishing it were one of those gentle birds of passage moving steadily along in a great flock.
Now he was picking up a pair of dark tan gloves as though they were exactly what heâd been looking for all along. And then with a laugh he was pushing them back into the pile. Then he was glancing sidelong at my mother while she was pointing out the quality of the leather and solid seams of an expensive pair.
âYouâve got to run your hand over them carefully, here, turn the glove inside out.â
I was afraid weâd never get home for supper. In the artificial light of the store it looked to me as though the day outside had ended long before. The suede leather. The animal smell. I could hardly stand the smell there.
âNo, you must have got something wrong, Professor Kaltenburg is not a colleague of your fatherâs at the university.â
âBut isnât he called
We had to say hello to him. My mother stopped on the landing, and he too, who had been purposefully striding up the stairs as though he wanted to get to the menswear department as quickly as possible, didnât just raise his hat in passing, he halted, held out his hand to my mother, stroked my head. and smiled, saying âWhat a surpriseâ and âMy dear ladyâ and âWell, my boy?â I was pulled in different directions, I already saw myself back in our drawing room, why couldnât Professor Kaltenburg go home with us? I thought, but the two of them had already begunâa child picks this up after the first few sentencesâa longish conversation in the bare, windowless staircase. Of course it had not escaped me that Kaltenburg was attracted to my mother, but then he was attached to my father too, and to me. While he was paying my mother compliments, he was looking at me: âAnd if you donât mind my asking such a prying question, what nice things have you been buying, then?â
She didnât show him my underwear, thank goodness, but my mother carefully took the cap, which the professor loudly admired, out of her bag, and when the gloves emerged from their tissue paper, he had an idea. He wanted to give a lady a pair of leather gloves for Christmas, could my mother spare a minute to advise him on his choice?
There heâd been, rushing upstairs, and now he had turned right around and we were going back to the beginning of our store journey, to the ground floor, from which we had long since escaped, and once more the saleslady was taking out one pair of gloves after another.
Why, I asked myself later, did this Professor Kaltenburg not use the escalator like everybody else to go upstairs in a department store? Yet another mystery about this man. Professor Kaltenburg, the first man I ever saw wearing sunglasses, Professor Kaltenburg, who came to see us on his motorbike, Professor Kaltenburg, about whom I would continue to unearth new secrets, Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg, who has had such a decisive influence on my life. He kept his secrets until the end, from using the stairs where there was an escalator to expressing radical, albeit mystifying, self-criticism in his last letters, which reached me from distant Vienna at the end of the eighties.
His keen glance, the laughter lines around his eyes. His movements, quick and exact when it came to precise actions, but at other times awkward, unsteady, seemingly given to chance fluctuations, as though his body were performing grotesque contortions without its ownerâs knowledge. Ludwig Kaltenburg, a falcon poised to swoop, wishing it were one of those gentle birds of passage moving steadily along in a great flock.
Now he was picking up a pair of dark tan gloves as though they were exactly what heâd been looking for all along. And then with a laugh he was pushing them back into the pile. Then he was glancing sidelong at my mother while she was pointing out the quality of the leather and solid seams of an expensive pair.
âYouâve got to run your hand over them carefully, here, turn the glove inside out.â
I was afraid weâd never get home for supper. In the artificial light of the store it looked to me as though the day outside had ended long before. The suede leather. The animal smell. I could hardly stand the smell there.
âNo, you must have got something wrong, Professor Kaltenburg is not a colleague of your fatherâs at the university.â
âBut isnât he called
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