by Marcel Beyer
That night, as I was wandering through the park, something hit me hard on the shoulder. Not a punch, not an animal pouncing on me from behind, nor a broken branch spinning through the air and splintering on the ground. The sound was both muffled and solid, and when the object touched the ground it rolled on for a bit. I picked it up, rather sticky, crumbly, its surface rough, I lifted it to eye level, a lump of tar perhaps, or just a cinder. I put my nose to it—but in a reflex reaction I hurled it as far away as I could. What I had smelled was burned flesh.
The next blow was to my head. I raced off. I tore around between the trees and craters and people in the clearing, and the longer I raced, the more desperate my situation seemed, these clumps were falling everywhere, and even when I thought I might catch my breath, at the exposed root of a massive oak or in the shadow of a freestanding wall, I could hear them hitting the ground all around me, getting nearer, closing in on me, these birds falling dead from the sky.
Woodpeckers that had escaped from their hole in a burning tree. A tawny owl on the hunt torn out of its normally stoic, deathlike calm by the outbreak of fire and the noise of the bombers, flapping wildly in an effort to put out the flames that had moved from its tail coverts to its secondary feathers. And wood pigeons which had shot up into the air when the din started, to fly toward the Elbe, and in those tremendous temperatures had been incinerated in midflight even at high altitudes. The many ducks, crowded together in the ice-free area of a pond, where they felt safe from all enemies: how could I tell a spoonbill from a teal, or a widgeon or a tufted duck, or a goldeneye or a pochard, since all were burned on the water at the same time?
Maybe some animals in the Great Garden were simply vaporized. Crows, of course, enormous flocks of rooks, hooded and carrion crows, roosting up in the trees. There may have been one or two bramblings among the birds. And waxwings, which, arriving from the north in the depths of winter, were unexpectedly roasted that night.
The entire stock of birds spending the night in the park appeared to have gone up in flames, one after another. I thought I could identify the remains of some species next morning despite their disfiguration, insofar as the heat had not reduced them to formless matter, to ashes, or to nothing at all. The migratory birds, it seems, had come to a considered decision to take off in the autumn, as if they wisely foresaw what was to happen here in February.
A singed mute swan with a featherless neck and bare wings, apparently no longer fully conscious, fell tottering onto its side as it tried to stand up, stayed there in a daze for a while, and then tried to get up again—it was then that I noticed it simply had no feet.
Flamingos too, if I remember rightly, I saw a row of bald, deep gray flamingos, which must have fled from the bombed-out zoo into the Great Garden. The firestorm must have burned off their gorgeous pink plumage, they were only just recognizable by their large bills, charred and slightly twisted. The burned-horn smell, bags of skin, like leather, but still keeping their shape, as though a shock process had drawn off all their body fluids, which is in fact what had happened. Mummified creatures, the flamingos required only embalming and binding with cloth to become bird mummies like the sacred ibises of ancient Egypt.
I ran. And I talked. I must have been talking aloud to myself while I walked next day, the fourteenth of February, through this city I didn’t know—and on that morning it would not have been recognized by its long-term inhabitants. The day before I had quietly followed my mother as she pointed out an architectural detail here, remembered an episode from her Dresden years there, and when we sat in the café in the afternoon I simply gazed with astonishment at the street scene as I was spooning up my cocoa. But now I was wandering through the streets talking loudly, and perhaps if I had kept my mouth shut I wouldn’t have been noticed and subsequently picked up, for on this Ash Wednesday there were countless people walking around Dresden, looking for relatives or for their own houses. I have no memory of the third air raid, at midday: did I follow the crowds to the Elbe meadows, did I try to shelter beyond the station? All I know is that everywhere I went it was burning, from dawn to sunset. Buildings were collapsing, the howling in the air, and yet aboveground an almost rural stillness spread through the city, no shouting or calling, people staring silently into the flames as if mesmerized by the crackling. It’s possible that by the noon air raid I had long since put the city behind me and was wandering through a suburb, in the direction of Heidenau: a lone figure who wouldn’t stop talking when spoken to or questioned. I don’t know what I was saying or who spoke to me, or what their questions or advice may have been—perhaps that’s why to this day I have no memory of the last hours of my parents’ lives, perhaps it was fully explained to me that same evening or soon after, and not a word of it sank in.
14
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO my mistrust? It had evaporated the moment Katharina Fischer stepped into the Zoological Collection. I told her how Ludwig Kaltenburg had warned me repeatedly, “Watch out for female interpreters, especially the young, pretty ones who are amenable to a private conversation outside official talks, even if it’s only a few words. Yes, they keep their eyes open, all the time, and they are better listeners than anybody else.”
I would put the birds I had lined up back in their glass cases later, and before I went home I would linger for a while in the windowless room with our native finches. Frau Fischer had collected her things, notebook and pencil; I handed her the Peterson, which she had nearly forgotten. The loaded backpack was slung over her shoulder, I locked the egg sets away.
“Have you followed your teacher’s advice, then?”
For forty years. Sometimes Professor Kaltenburg struck a confidential note, at other times he proclaimed his warning with burning intensity. And yet it was completely unnecessary, in my case at least. Unlike Kaltenburg, I have never led a delegation, and I’ve never been offered the services of an interpreter for my own personal use—after all, I’m no great authority, I’ve never been the guest of honor anywhere. And anyway, he wasn’t revealing any secrets to me. An interpreter had to be reliable, absolutely trustworthy, dedicated, attentive, and communicative. Everybody knew that.
“If everyone was in the picture and choosing their words carefully, was there also an unspoken agreement among colleagues not to be distracted by the finer points of ideology, as Ludwig Kaltenburg put it?”
Neither by the finer points nor by the crudeness. Naturally there are always people who don’t feel bound by agreements. But without international exchanges we and our subject would have gone under a long time ago. At this very moment, for example, as we stand in this normally quiet corridor, countless birds are traveling around the globe, no longer under their own wing power but in padded envelopes, while our specimens lie on desks in distant foreign institutes where colleagues are studying them intensively. Observing and collecting go on everywhere, all the time. No matter what the conditions, you might say that an ornithologist is someone committed, first and foremost, to the world of birds.
There was one more thing I wanted to show Katharina Fischer before she left. She followed me into the skin collection, which in contrast to the egg collection may initially have a sobering effect on the visitor: there are no old glass cases or wooden cabinets here, no mounted specimens and egg sets on black cotton wool. The rows of compact fitted pull-out cupboards give no clue to their contents. Close to the door, the first big worktable, there are others stretching right back to the end of the room. Your eyes search involuntarily for somewhere to rest in this space.
Frau Fischer viewed with interest what was lying at the front of the table: the latest arrival, which had come in the day before from the taxidermist, a young greenfinch sent by a private donor, its neck probably broken by a windowpane. Your eyes range over the yellow propoxur flakes used to control museum beetle, over the transparent bags used for freezing the birds, which are then taken one by one out of the deep freeze for treatment, and over the array of letters requesting loan items.
&nbs
p; There is a regular exchange, so that if a colleague indicates, however discreetly, that he is afraid he is about to go mad, then without any ifs or buts you will send him the assistance he needs. Especially as it often takes only a small gesture to help the endangered person, perhaps with a supply of bird rings. This was the request from a British ornithologist, interned in a POW camp in Bavaria, sent in 1944 to his colleague Reinhold in Berlin. In order to keep himself occupied and avoid his fellow prisoners’ dull activities, he had begun to observe the barn swallows in the camp. From morning till night he kept an eye on the nests the birds had built under the hut roofs, watched them as they brooded, as they reared their young, and he hit upon the idea of using this empty, open-ended time to do some research. But in order to find out which mating pairs used the same nest for their second brood as for the first, he had to ring the swallows.
“Reinhold sent him some bird rings?”
Yes, even though he was not very pleased with our wartime opponents, especially since they had dropped a high-explosive bomb on the songbird hall of his Natural History Museum.
The interpreter shook her head, as though emerging from a daydream back into the real world. Perhaps outsiders always need a little time, some quiet moments to get used to this unusual room, before you can show them some carefully chosen specimens. A bird skin—I had picked up the young greenfinch from the table—must feel good lying in your hand, when you see it you should really want to hold it. But however well the specimen is prepared, painstakingly stuffed with wadding, its feathers perfectly preserved and carefully dressed, the most important thing about it is the label. The species name, of course, date and place where found, the finder himself, data on size and sex, sometimes the taxidermist’s name and any toxic material used in the preparation—if these details are missing, then even the most superb skin ceases to be a research specimen and becomes a mere decorative object.
“So an individual bird not only supplies information about itself and its species but will also tell you something about the people who discovered, named, and prepared it, and possibly last saw it alive.”
The name of Gustav Kramer on a label will remind any ornithologist that this colleague discovered how birds navigate by a solar compass, and he will also be reminded that Kramer was killed in 1959 during a mountain tour in southern Italy trying to climb up to the nest of a pair of rock pigeons.
I led Frau Fischer to a pull-out cabinet and opened a drawer containing sections of our finch collection. The birds lay tightly packed, finches from Russia, finches from Italy. A rock sparrow from Kazakhstan, where our own thistle finch and their gray-head meet and intermingle. Our last large consignment of finches came from Görlitz, where the customs people had confiscated the birds on their way from Belarus to a Brussels restaurant. All those already dead on arrival at the German border were passed on to us. In a second drawer there were Saxon finches from the last one hundred and fifty years. The offspring of a linnet and a thistle finch, next to it a cross between a finch and a canary, such as breeders commonly used to produce.
“So when you look at bird skins you see people you know.”
Or used to know. Friends. I felt that more keenly than ever before during the preparations for the move from the city center out to the collection’s new building. During the few weeks I spent going through all the holdings, I examined skins that I hadn’t seen for years, and while I was packing up in one department after another I found that beside the systematic organization of the collection a completely different network of connections had developed. Birds I had first come across in a film by Knut Sieverding turned out to be in the same drawer as a species discovered by the aforementioned Reinhold—and it was Reinhold who had helped Knut to land his first big filming commission. Night herons, great tits, birds of paradise, magpies, starlings, a crow from Ludwig Kaltenburg’s Institute, lay next to a glassy-eyed crow collected by Christian Ludwig Brehm in 1810 and personally prepared by him: I found new interconnections everywhere.
And then, installing everything here in its new space, I noticed two bird skins which had lain peaceably side by side for more than half a century. One was a representative of a subspecies of reed bunting, unfortunately no longer officially recognized, on which someone—no doubt one of my predecessors—had bestowed the binomial second term kaltenburgi, in honor of Ludwig Kaltenburg. The other was an ordinary local reed bunting prepared by Eberhard Matzke, whom Kaltenburg would later stubbornly insist on seeing as his powerful adversary.
“I can imagine it sometimes feels a bit uncanny when you know the birds so well. Or is it the other way round—the more you know about them, the more familiar they become?”
I pushed the drawer back into the cabinet. Katharina Fischer still had to pick up her coat. If I had observed correctly, in the course of the afternoon the birds had become more familiar to her too, although we hadn’t done much more than bandy names around and keep our eyes carefully fixed on the row of finches as we did so. I asked her if she remembered the chaffinch sitting on a branch.
“Certainly.”
That chaffinch used to be Martin Spengler’s pet bird. That is to say, it lived in the room Martin used as a studio and where he slept, you couldn’t call it an apartment. One day the chaffinch simply dropped off its perch. Such a small organism can’t take too much turpentine in the atmosphere. It might now be numbered among the forgotten birds if Martin hadn’t bequeathed it to the collection.
As we were about to say our goodbyes, it occurred to Frau Fischer to ask me what had made me take a special interest in goldfinches. “Was it while you were a child in Posen?”
No, not until later, when both Posen and childhood were behind me. For me the goldfinch was associated with Dresden. There was a chaotic time lasting several months, or maybe it was only weeks, when I stayed in various places, and I could easily have finished up in an orphanage but for a family that was prepared to take an orphan along with their own three children. I never really felt at home there, though the parents tried hard. But I suppose by the age of eleven, or almost twelve, you’re too old to fit in with a new family. I soon began roaming about in the more deserted parts of the city, the mounds of rubble, the thistle-covered areas, it was the thistles that brought the goldfinches to Dresden.
She nodded, thanked me, shook my hand, and turned to go. The rain had stopped. Then she turned around again in the doorway to say, “If you’d like, I’ll phone and let you know how the job went.”
It was getting dark, I saw Katharina Fischer getting into her car, she gave me a last wave, her brake lights came on briefly, and the engine started. The car turned out of the car park into the drive, the red taillights disappeared, and while the glass door was slowly closing before me, I recalled how hard it was for me as a child to accept that what we called a sea swallow was not a swallow but a tern, and what we knew as an Alpine crow was not related to the crow family at all but was a kind of chough, and so on with a whole host of names—I just couldn’t get it into my head that birds are not attached to their names in the way we are attached to names, even when we know they’re misleading. No matter how well my parents explained it to me, they could name as many species as they liked, I simply refused to accept that the mountain finch didn’t live in the mountains, the oystercatcher did not live on oysters, and the plumage of the purple gallinule was not purple but indigo through and through. It certainly didn’t help when my parents persisted in telling me that my exciting discovery about the swift had been due to the fact that despite its Latin name it does have legs—I didn’t want to hear anything about swifts. Today I know all about the bastardized Latin and Greek, about the crude misunderstandings and twisted spellings, the hair-raising mistakes of translation and observation. All the same, I have never quite given up thinking that you have to get to know every single bird individually to learn anything about the unique characteristics of its kind.
III
1
IONCE KEPT JACKDAW specimens under my nose for si
x weeks. It must have been in the midsixties, and I’ve never forgotten the smell of jackdaw since. You won’t know what I mean unless you know their characteristic smell. Rather pungent. If you filter out the overriding smell of naphthalene, it smells like leather at first. Having pinned down this smell in turn, if you go on holding the specimen to your nose, it will feel more and more as though you have a powder on your tongue that just won’t mix with saliva. A hint of burned tar when you rub it between your fingers. But not of cold ash. No, cold ash would have upset me.
A Danish colleague had asked me to check out something for him in connection with our jackdaws, I think beak anomalies were his field, and he was following up some ideas arising from the work he had done on jackdaws in recent years. It was a favor, a routine investigation such as we often undertake for each other; you send a specimen for comparison to someplace on the other side of the world, and only if the colleague there notices any discrepancies do you make the trip yourself to look at the foreign bird specimens. To carry out this friendly act with the utmost conscientiousness will not have taken me long, since I knew our jackdaws so well, but then they lay—while the Danish specimen had long since been returned to its homeland—half the winter long on the desk in front of me. They were Ludwig Kaltenburg’s jackdaws.
I can see the jackdaws at play in the Dresden sky above the slopes of the Elbe valley, as though putting on a performance for me and Ludwig Kaltenburg, standing on the big balcony. And Kaltenburg, who must have watched this display countless times, who had surely never known a sunset over the city without the black dots wheeling in the evening sky above, was following their mock aerial battles, nosedives, and antics as if his protégés were showing off their skills purely for the visitor’s benefit. Soon he was completely absorbed in the sight of his jackdaw flock, which made its way home at dusk. It was as though he were seeing them for the first time.