The Hollow Bones

by Leah Kaminsky

  Ernst cocked the barrel, watching his guide through the sight of his gun.

  ‘You must learn how to perfect the technique of shooting a creature on the run. Aim ahead of it. Move the gun along the same arc that the bird is flying in. Only, have your birdshot already waiting there. Let it fly into its own death.’

  The rosefinch had stopped struggling, its tiny ribcage now still. Akeh bent down, placing it back onto the dirt. Unflinching, he walked straight towards his master. It wasn’t until he stood right in front of him that Ernst lowered his gun. Then, without uttering a word, Ernst handed it over to the guide. In that instant, a duck flew overhead, quacking loudly as it passed. Akeh took aim and fired. It dropped out of the sky and landed stone dead a few metres away from where they stood. He took aim again and shot a pigeon, a pheasant and, spinning around, fired four successive shots at the birdcage Ernst had tied to the tree a few minutes earlier. Ernst had wildly underestimated the man’s skill. Within a fortnight, Akeh shot five wild goats, a wild yak, 123 birds and three brown bears, adding to their growing collection. Soon, he would be ready for the ultimate prize – the shapi, a Tibetan sheep no Westerner had ever set eyes on. Ernst’s hopes were high.

  A few days later, a Tibetan boy appeared at their camp holding a parcel of food. He had been sent from the outpost of a Finnish missionary in Sikkim who had heard news that the German travellers’ provisions had started to dwindle. Ernst coveted his hunting specimens so much that he would only allow the men to shoot the occasional yak for meat. The boy also carried some news that Ernst was thrilled to hear. The mythical Tibetan blue sheep had been spotted, alive and roaming in the nearby mountains. Ernst scribbled in his diary that day:

  Now I am frantic and ecstatic. I am ablaze – as if a fire were burning inside me. ‘Shapi-shapi-shapi,’ I bellow like a bull, run up and down obsessively, call all the sahibs into my tent. I jump to my feet. I believe this fellow. Gentlemen, this will be the greatest scientific discovery of the expedition. Devil, devil! This is going to be a success for Germany.

  Hunting was like lovemaking for Ernst. His passion for the kill – the crazed arousal as he followed its beckoning call – was a cure for all his restlessness. He would feel insatiable ecstasy as he focused with quivering intensity on an animal he had stalked, the passage of time blurred beyond his rifle sight. He would watch silently as he felt his heart force the blood through his body.

  In Sikkim, Ernst shot every animal he came across, not wanting to risk losing an opportunity to bag yet another specimen he could pin down and examine for scientific knowledge. His fervour for collecting animals kept Mandoy, the local taxidermist, busy from dawn to dusk. Working in an open-air zoology laboratory, Mandoy’s job was to hide the deaths of these creatures under the point of a needle, stitching their eyes closed so the cruelty of their demise could not be seen.

  A fortnight after having already shot his fill of shapi – so many, in fact, that Mandoy couldn’t keep up with the skinning – Ernst sat in a cave one morning with Geer, his hunting companion, waiting for yet another sheep to appear. He read out loud from his well-worn copy of Faust: ‘Not I it was who whistled you from hell;/ A self-willed bird, you flew upon the lime.’

  Ernst yawned, stretching his arms. It had been a late night, fuelled by lewd jokes, and what had been left of their beer. Come morning, he had found himself inside his tent, sprawled out on top of his stretcher, completely naked, the palm of his hand covered with the stickiness of his own vulgar joy. His body had somehow kept its warmth overnight, despite the dip in temperature, but his brain felt frozen.

  Geer’s night had been rough, too, and the last thing he wanted to hear was dour poetry.

  ‘Can you give it a break, Ernst? I’ve got such a rotten headache.’

  ‘You heathen! How can you not appreciate the wisdom of Goethe?’

  ‘I prefer to read Der Stürmer, myself.’ He slapped his hand against his ear, squishing a flying beetle. He flicked it off and wiped his bloodied fingers on his shirt. ‘They’ve run some very interesting articles in the past. Did you read the one where they argued that, no matter how much we want to protect children, every little Jewish baby still grows up to be a Jew? It was fascinating.’

  Ignoring his companion, Ernst kept reading out loud: ‘Who holds the Devil, let him hold him well,/ He hardly will be caught a second time.’

  Geer lay down and rolled over to face the wall. ‘Oh, please! Don’t patronise me with your literary pretentiousness.’ He let out a salvo of loud farts.

  Ernst was about to land a punch on his colleague when they heard a rustling outside the cave. The men fell silent. Ernst cautiously crawled to the opening of the cave and peeked out. Unsure if it was out of sheer exhaustion or too much drink the night before, he thought he saw a spectre standing there. It had the body of a shapi, shaggy and sheep-like, with a blond mane and long horns curling around either side of its head. But it was much smaller than the others he had bagged, and almost entirely white. It ran off as soon as it spotted him. He could have brought it down right then and there, but it seemed to be beckoning him to follow, out into the depths of the wilderness.

  Leaving Geer and Akeh behind, he set off alone, trailing the animal for miles as it scrambled over rocks and through thorny thickets. In all his years of hunting, Ernst had never encountered an albino creature in the wild. Ernst became Captain Ahab in the chase; the white shapi had presented itself as the telos of the day. Catching this ghostly sheep would secure his fame and fortune for life.

  Eventually, the chase was not particularly arduous. He cornered the shapi in a copse of stunted bushes and all he had to do was shoot between its eyes. But crouched there, cocking his rifle, ready to pull the trigger, he noticed the ancient gaze in the animal’s pink eyes. In the course of any hunt, he engaged intimately and passionately with the beast he chased, testing all his instincts and cunning. So many animals had passed in front of his trusty rifle since he’d arrived in Sikkim, but none as majestic as this white ghost. Ernst crept forward, the breeze blowing in his face. Man and beast’s eyes were riveted together for just a moment, but in his hesitation to pull the trigger the animal was off again, kindling an even deeper lust in Ernst to catch it. This one was to be his.

  He raced across dry ground, searching for spoor, but it wasn’t until late afternoon that he found the shapi again. The hunter had to become the hunted, think the thoughts of prey and predator simultaneously. Ernst’s hands rested on his rifle. As though its body were made of stone, the shapi stood motionless, staring directly at him. It looked as if it had been waiting a lifetime for him to arrive, watching the inexorable approach of something beyond its realm. Ernst imagined worms gnawing deep within the carcass. And with one small movement of his finger, the shapi’s body reared up and slumped to the ground, clinging to the earth in its last convulsions, eyes filled with surprise. The shot rang out across the infinite sky, concentric rings of the hunter’s triumph widening across the plane. Like the coiling of a spring, time expanded and contracted as he waited for the moment his prey might be transfigured into eternal beauty, for all the world to see.

  This creature, its fur the colour of fresh snow, was destined to become much more than itself. In death, it would be transmogrified into a splendid temple for others to gaze upon lovingly. Once it was mounted, this superlative pale beast would look entirely worthy of a great hunter’s quest, its serene countenance hiding the animal’s terror of the chase.

  Ernst lifted the sheep with tenderness. His textbooks showed pictures of a wide taxonomy of creatures, but the image on the page, buried among dry descriptive words, never did justice to the reality of the living form. The animal in a book stared out at you, revealing itself boldly, like a model posing for a photographer. In the wild, though, it receded, constantly on the move, hiding deep in the folds of the forest, sinking back into the shadows of the landscape, or falling from the sky to disappear into the horizon.

  CHAPTER 24

  They marked time
in Gangtok while Ernst continued to try to find a way for them to gain permission to enter Tibet and advance towards Lhasa. He arranged a meeting one morning in August with a Sikkimese official and his private secretary, preparing elaborate gifts he had brought with him all the way from Germany.

  Whenever Ernst was gone, hunting or on official business, Bruno would use every opportunity to gather his anthropometric data. Dispensing oils and potions from several trunks that were filled with anything from pain-killers to treatment for venereal disease, he soon earnt his title of doctor-sahib, becoming a ‘medicine man’ among the locals and winning their trust. They lined up to see him. It was a craftily calculated move that ended up paying off, as he cajoled his subjects to allow him to take moulds of their faces.

  He followed a strict examination routine, no matter how much they giggled or winced. The first thing he needed to determine was their exact eye colour, using charts of many different hues. Bruno’s eyes were Himmelfarb, the colour of the sky on a perfect summer’s day, according to the official charts of Martin and Schultz. He also carried charts developed by Fischer and Saller to determine the exact shading of the hair, as well as the skin-colour chart of von Luschan.

  To Bruno’s mind, though, cranial measurements were the most important, and he meticulously listed the length, breadth and circumference of each person’s head, the height and width of their forehead and the distance between their eyes. This was followed by careful measurement of the breadth of cheekbones and lower jaw, and the depth of noses. Lastly, he checked the position of their noses, mouths and ears in relation to the rest of their face, looking for traces of Aryan blood left over from the dawn of mankind.

  He even bribed his own personal servant, a shy Nepalese Sherpa called Pasang, to allow him to practise mask-making skills on him. Using calipers, Bruno first measured the shape and thickness of Pasang’s lips, the length of his feet and hands, and even the length of his penis. He used a wooden protractor to gauge the angle of his nose.

  ‘Please!’ Bruno motioned for the Sherpa to sit down on a stool.

  Kaiser, the group’s interpreter, stood beside them, pouring hot water and acrid disinfectant into a ceramic bowl that rested on a tray. He opened a packet of Negocoll, crumbling up one of the blocks and sprinkling it into the mixture. It formed a gelatinous goo as he stirred.

  Bruno was disappointed he hadn’t been able to fashion a mask of Akeh instead. Ernst, in his usual obstinate fashion, had insisted on taking Akeh with him to his meeting with the official. He would have made a fine specimen, with his elongated facial features and a narrow, swanlike neck that certainly demonstrated Nordic remnants. Timid Pasang had been a last-minute replacement. As Pasang was Nepalese he was not the ideal subject, but there was no time to lose. Bruno had to make as many masks as he could during their stay in Gangtok.

  ‘Hold still now.’ Bruno smeared oil onto Pasang’s face before applying the ghastly paste, which would harden into a rubber mask.

  As work on the mask started, the Sherpa kept swaying to and fro. Kaiser explained that Bruno’s subject still felt unwell after a small avalanche earlier that week had sent a rock hurtling onto his head.

  The members of the Tibetan aristocracy who Bruno had seen in photos resembled those in Professor Günther’s book on Nordic German races. They were tall, with thin faces, high cheekbones and straight, glossy hair. Bruno had brought all the finest tools of his trade on the journey: spreading calipers, three steel tape measures, sliding compasses of different sizes and a somatometer, a gift from his teacher, the racial expert Theodor Mollison. Bruno’s mentor had taught him everything he knew, but the most important thing Bruno had learnt at the insistence of Mollison was to carefully record all his measurements in a notebook.

  Without warning, Pasang slumped over, mumbling something to himself. Kaiser eased him back onto the stool.

  ‘Stand him up!’

  ‘But he says he’s feeling dizzy, doctor-sahib.’

  ‘We are in the middle of an important task and I have no time for these kinds of histrionics. Tell him to control himself.’

  Kaiser placed his hand on his friend’s shoulder, as if to stop any challenge to Bruno, who had once cured Kaiser’s toothache with his ‘magic pincers’.

  Pasang moaned but Bruno continued with his work, the anthropologist scraping out more plaster from the bowl with his wooden spatula. His breath heavy with the stench of tobacco, he moulded the white paste around the tip of his victim’s nose, leaving a small hole for each nostril. Technically, he should have inserted two straws to ensure the man could breathe properly, but there was no time; the material was starting to dry and would soon become unmanageable. Just as he covered the eye sockets, save for two small slits, Pasang sneezed, jettisoning the fragile mask from his face. The mould launched into the air. Bruno and Kaiser reached out madly to try to grab it, but it flew past their hands, landing on the ground with a thud. They stared at their ruined handiwork, which lay sprawled in the dirt like one of Ernst’s wounded birds.

  Pasang tried to stand, strands of creamy white plaster hanging from his nose and chin. He yelled something and pointed towards the Khangchendzonga mountains. Bruno already knew a variation of what he was saying: that the spirits were angry, and the world was spinning with demons. He’d heard these premonitions a number of times since they’d arrived.

  Birds shrieked above them. With his pipe poised between his lips, Bruno pushed Pasang back down onto the stool.

  ‘Calm down, you imbecile!’

  Bruno cupped Pasang’s fine jaw with his big hand, firmly closing the Sherpa’s trembling lips. He started to reapply the plaster, working quickly to cover the small man’s high cheekbones and sunken eyes. Bruno blew on it to help it set, and this time Pasang was too frightened to move. Pressing his stopwatch, Bruno sat down to wait, puffing on his pipe through his thin lips. The Negocoll would take thirty minutes to dry completely, after which he would peel it off and pour Hominit into the mask. The result would be a perfect cast, an eerily lifelike portrait of the Sherpa. This moulding technique had become popular back home and was used by professors of anatomy to make models of deformed body organs, or of medical freaks such as two-headed foetuses. Casts were also made of criminals waiting on death row, showing the fine wrinkles of fear that lined their faces as they faced their demise. These human replicas fetched high prices among curators of Europe’s finest museums, as popular attractions in otherwise prosaic collections. Universities bought them, too, as teaching tools for students studying racial typology. Depending on how exotic or rare the subject, an individual mask might fetch up to thirty Reichsmark.

  Pasang had made strange grunting noises as the mould was reapplied, his hands balled into fists. The ghostly mask covered his entire face, his mouth locked shut so he was unable to talk. Bruno had again left tiny holes around his nostrils. The man’s bloodshot eyes were the only window to his fear, squinting through the plaster slits. Kaiser was the first to notice Pasang’s head begin to jerk, and Bruno was alerted shortly after by a gurgling noise. They turned to see the stool topple over, Pasang writhing on the dusty ground, his spine twisted into the shape of a question mark. A wet patch spread across his crotch as his body thrashed in rhythmic jerks. The mask began to crack open again and the Sherpa’s drooling face emerged like a baby bird breaking through its fragile eggshell.

  ‘Quickly, go and get help!’ Bruno shouted, shoving his fingers into Pasang’s mouth to stop him choking on the wet clay. ‘He’s having a seizure.’

  Kaiser watched as his friend’s eyes rolled back in their sockets, his face turning a dusky grey. He looked possessed by a demon. Kaiser rushed off, while Bruno waited until Pasang’s contorting body gradually turned limp.

  It was into the midst of this gruesome scene that Ernst returned to camp. Despite his best attempts at diplomacy and bribery, negotiations with the official had not gone as well as he had hoped. Already in a foul mood, Ernst took one look at the scene before him and exploded.


  ‘What the hell is going on here?’

  Bruno stood his ground, self-possessed and smiling with sinister cheeriness. ‘It’s no big deal.’

  ‘What was this pointless exercise for, Bruno? I told you not to start your stupid experiments for a reason, yet you went right ahead and defied my orders.’

  ‘Your orders?’ Bruno kicked the dirt. ‘My loyalty is not to sahib Ernst Schäfer, but to our Führer and Fatherland. In the end, these natives’ suffering will lead to our triumph.’

  ‘You are risking the future of this entire expedition with these shenanigans of yours. We need to keep the locals onside if we are to get into Tibet, you idiot.’

  ‘You seem to have gone a little soft lately, my friend. Might this come from years of hobnobbing with the Americans and British?’

  Ernst’s face turned crimson. Letting out a giant roar, he took a swing at his colleague. Bruno’s superior height worked to his advantage as he blocked his enraged friend with an outstretched arm.

  ‘You and I are kindred spirits, Ernst.’ Bruno grinned, holding the sturdy hunter at bay. ‘You chase animals, while I hunt people.’

  A week later, during one of Ernst’s brief hunting forays, a local official dressed in finest brocade and silk appeared at the German camp. Bruno tried to take advantage of the surprise visit, luring him into his tent in the hope of measuring the nobleman’s features, but Kaiser diplomatically intervened as he knew the official, who lived in Tibet, was a dignitary of the Sikkimese royal family.

  When Ernst rode back into camp, he hastily arranged an impressive impromptu reception for their honoured guest, strategically placing all their scientific equipment – cameras, binoculars, altimeters – at the entrance to his tent. Inside, he seated himself atop an inflated air mattress, in an attempt to look more imposing. He called for the servants to prepare fine delicacies, including German biscuits and hot tea. Ernst assembled elaborate gifts he had brought with him for occasions such as this: an HMV gramophone, some records, a set of fine china. He wanted to win the favour of this dignitary, so he might persuade him into influencing Tibetan officials to allow the expedition across the border into Tibet. It was fortunate that Bruno’s first impulse to measure the man had been stymied at the outset.