The Dinosaur Feather

by S. J. Gazan

  They were in a café in Odense and had just bought a luxurious dressing gown as a birthday present for Cecilie. They were having coffee before going to Brænderup where Cecilie was cooking dinner.

  Anna gave her father a furious look.

  “Do you want me to start with the birds and the bees, or how much do you know already?”

  “I didn’t think you and Thomas were getting along very well.”

  “It’s better now.”

  “How long have you two known each other?”

  “Almost five months.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Have you forgotten how old I am?”

  “Twenty-five?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “And how many years of your degree do you have left?”

  “Three years.”

  “Why do you want to keep the baby?” he asked for the second time. “The last time I saw you, you wanted to break up with Thomas because he… how did you put it?… only cared about himself. You weren’t sure you could cope with that. And he was working all the time. Have you forgotten that?”

  “You don’t like him.”

  “I don’t know him very well.”

  “But what you do know, you don’t like.”

  Jens sighed. “I do like him, Anna. He’s all right.”

  A pause followed. Anna gritted her teeth. Her legs were itching, and she had to make a real effort not to scream out loud. Suddenly Jens hugged her.

  “Congratulations,” he mumbled into her hair. “Congratulations, sweetheart. I’m sorry.”

  Afterward they had made a beeline for a baby supply store and bought a dark blue stroller for Jens’s grandchild. A dark blue parasol was included, and Anna twirled it while Jens paid. The stroller was a display model and slightly faded on one side, but there was a waiting list to get a brand new one. And Jens didn’t want to wait, no sir. He said “my grandchild” ten times at least, while they were in the store. The cashier glanced furtively at Anna’s stomach, which was as flat as a pancake. Anna giggled.

  When they came back to Cecilie, the aroma of roast lamb filled the whole house. Cecilie was standing on the kitchen table hanging a paper chain along the window. Jens rolled the stroller into the kitchen.

  “What’s that?” Cecilie said.

  “What do you think it is?”

  “A stroller.”

  “Bingo!”

  “I’m menopausal,” Cecilie said, and spat out the pins she had been holding in the corner of her mouth.

  Anna started to laugh, and Jens did a round with the pram in the kitchen as he called out to Cecilie:

  “Get down, Granny, roll your walker to the fridge and give me your best bottle of champagne. From now on I want to be known as ‘honored Granddad.’”

  It wasn’t until then that it hit her. Cecilie dove off like a rock star and hugged Anna. Half an hour later, when they were sitting at the kitchen table and the champagne bottle was empty—Anna hadn’t had any, and Jens and Cecilie were in high spirits—Cecilie suddenly said:

  “Who’s the father?”

  Anna felt movement under the table and knew Jens had tried to kick Cecilie. Anna looked from one to the other.

  “You’ll be the death of me, the pair of you,” she sighed and went up to her old room to watch TV.

  The next morning when Anna got up, Jens and Cecilie were looking up something on the Internet.

  “I’m moving to Copenhagen,” Cecilie announced. Jens carried on searching while Cecilie got up to toast some bread for Anna.

  “You just sit down,” she said and put butter, milk, and cheese on the table, as well as her homemade jam and a cucumber. She made a fresh pot of tea and poured Anna a cup. When she had set down the teapot on the table, she looked at Anna and said, “I’m sorry I asked you who the father was. Of course it’s Thomas. I was just under the impression that things between you two weren’t good. That it was only a question of time before…”

  “Well, you were wrong,” Anna interrupted her.

  Cecilie smiled a fleeting smile.

  “I like him very much,” she said, with emphasis.

  The truth was that things between Anna and Thomas were a total nightmare. They had known each other only five months, and they didn’t live together. Obviously, they would live together now that they were having a baby.

  It had started with a chance meeting in a bar in Vesterbro. He was way out of her league, she thought, when she spotted him by the window to the courtyard where he stood with his arms folded, feet at ten to two, with a very straight back and a cigarette in a clenched fist. His T-shirt was rather tight, but it was probably hard to resist the temptation to dress like that when you had a great body, which he did.

  Smug, Anna had thought. Thomas was a doctor at Hvidovre Hospital, he was currently training in his specialty, and he was in his mid-thirties. His hair was short, almost white; his skin was fine and freckled, and his eyes were very intense. He left at ten to two; just like his feet, Anna thought, as she watched him exit the bar.

  He called her two days later. She had told him her name, and he had found her on the Internet. Dinner? Okay. From then on, they were dating.

  It had gone wrong almost immediately. Anna still couldn’t understand exactly how it had happened, but the fact was that she had never been so miserable in all her life, and how this was linked directly to her being madly in love got lost in the drama. Or it did at the time. Thomas loved her, he told her so. But she didn’t believe it. You’re a bit paranoid, he laughed. Anna, however, loved him to distraction. The more he kept her at arm’s length, the more she loved him. She didn’t have a clue what was going on. She didn’t know if they were a couple, if he loved her (he said he did), or if he didn’t (he behaved that way). He would arrive several hours late, or fail to show up altogether without a phone call of explanation. She didn’t know if they had a future together; she didn’t know where he was, why he said the things he said, why sometimes she was allowed to go out with him and his friends and other times not: “Why would you want to do that, sweetheart?” She could offer no reply. She just wanted to go.

  Thomas told her to calm down. “Don’t ruin it, it’s fine as it is,” he would say. She tried, but it didn’t work. Thomas had only met Anna’s parents a few times, and none of the occasions had been a success. Anna had never met Thomas’s parents. In the spring Thomas wanted a two-week break; “I love you Anna, never doubt that, I just can’t have this pressure all the time,” he had said and looked irritably at her. In fact, he had been so exhausted after an all-night argument, which Anna had started, that he nearly gave a patient the wrong medication. During their two weeks apart, Anna did a pregnancy test.

  “Looks like we’re having a baby,” he said and smiled when they met up again. Anna stared at him.

  “Are you pleased?”

  “I would have chosen a different time,” he said.

  They moved in together shortly before Lily was born. That was nearly three years ago.

  The Natural History Museum was an upward extension of the Institute of Biology, and it towered like a decorated ferry over the surrounding buildings. The top two floors of the museum were open to the public. The rest of the building consisted of laboratories and offices symmetrically arranged around a fireproof core where collections of insects, mollusks and vertebrates had been gathered, identified and preserved by Danish scientists for hundreds of years. The Vertebrate Collection on the third floor housed a vast amount of vertebrates; downstairs were two invertebrate departments with mollusks, and furthest down was the whale basement, which included the mounted skeleton of an adult baleen whale.

  Anna’s external supervisor was Dr. Tybjerg. He was a vertebrate morphologist who specialized in the evolution of cynodont birds. He was Professor Helland’s polar opposite. He had brown, thinning hair, dark eyes, a small nimble body, and he wore pebble glasses at work that made Anna smile because he looked like a parody of himself. Dr. Tybjerg was shy and very earnest. He
never canceled their meetings, and he always arrived well prepared, bringing with him any books he had mentioned at their previous meeting or a photocopy of an article he had promised her. His speech was staccato. He added impressive amounts of sugar to his strong black tea. To begin with he had found it hard to look her in the eye and had clammed up like an oyster on the few occasions Anna had asked him personal questions.

  Dr. Tybjerg was the first person to take Anna to the Vertebrate Collection.

  “You can’t learn about bones from books,” he said, as they walked down the corridor to the collection. “And you must never,” he added, giving Anna a stern look, “draw any conclusions about bones from drawings or photographs—never!”

  Dr. Tybjerg unlocked the door and disappeared down aisles of cupboards. Anna stopped, overwhelmed by the unfamiliar smell of preserved animals, before venturing further inside. It was neither dark nor light. It was like a drug-addict-proof bathroom: you could see enough to find the toilet paper, but not a vein in your arm.

  The Vertebrate Collection consisted of a large room divided by display cases with glass doors behind which stuffed animals were exhibited and cabinets with drawers containing boxes and cases in varying sizes, in which the boiled and cleaned bones were stored. Dr. Tybjerg marched down the aisles with familiar ease and stopped halfway.

  “This is where the birds are kept,” he said, cheerfully.

  The air-conditioning was making a strange noise, and there was an awful smell. Anna peered into the cabinets with their rows of birds, neatly lined up. Ostriches, a dodo skull, and tiny sparrows of every kind. Dr. Tybjerg moved down an aisle to the left and disappeared around the corner.

  “This is a sacred place,” he said from somewhere in the twilight, and Anna could hear him rattling doors. She walked close to one of the display cabinets, pressed her nose against the glass, and tried to make out in the gloom what kind of bird was on the other side. It was large and brown, with a plump tail feather. Its wings had been spread out, as if the bird had been about to take off or land when it died, and Anna spotted a stuffed mouse that had been placed in its beak for illustration. Its wing span was six feet, at least, and the bird made all the others in the cabinet look like a flock of frightened chickens.

  “A golden eagle,” Dr. Tybjerg said. Anna nearly jumped out of her skin. He had gone around the cupboards and come up behind her without her noticing. He held two long wooden boxes under his arm. She reached out her hand to support herself against a cabinet.

  “Don’t touch the glass in the door,” he warned. “It’s genuine crystal. You’ll break it.”

  “Does it have to be so dark in here?” Anna asked.

  “Come on,” he said, ignoring her question. Anna followed him. Back in the corridor she realized her legs were shaking.

  “Now, let’s take a look at this,” Dr. Tybjerg said, as he settled down at a table by a window. “This is a Rhea Americana.” Carefully, he lifted a bird skull out of the box.

  “It’s a secondarily flightless bird and so has a skeleton that is quite like that of predatory dinosaurs, in that it has an unkeeled sternum. This makes it a good skeleton to practice on,” he explained, “because when it comes to flying birds, everything is welded together. The bones of secondarily flightless birds, however, are somewhat reminiscent of those of primitive birds. Now, let’s go through it together.”

  Anna made herself comfortable and watched Dr. Tybjerg take out the bones from the box and spread them out on the table. A build-your-own-bird kit. He started pairing them up and Anna watched, fascinated. She had no idea where anything went, but she liked the gentle movements of his hands.

  They remained at the window for nearly two hours. Dr. Tybjerg asked Anna to reconstruct the skeleton after having demonstrated it to her a couple of times. She had to be familiar with the many reductions and adaptations of the bird skeleton in order to appreciate the dispute that would be the subject of her dissertation, Dr. Tybjerg stressed. A group of expert ornithologists led by the well-known scientist, Clive Freeman—had Anna heard of him?—still refused to accept that birds were present-day dinosaurs. Anna nodded. Clive Freeman was professor of paleoornithology at the department of Bird Evolution, Paleobiology, and Systematics at the University of British Columbia, and he had published several major and respected works on birds.

  “He is a very good ornithologist,” Dr. Tybjerg emphasized. “He really knows his stuff. And if you’re to have the slightest hope of demolishing his argument, you need to be conversant with those areas of avian anatomy and physiology to which Freeman constantly refers, and on which he bases his totally absurd claim that birds aren’t dinosaurs.”

  Dr. Tybjerg stared into the distance. Professor Freeman and his team had no scientific grounds on which to base their argument, he went on, as fossils and recognized systems of taxonomy confirmed the close relationship between birds and dinosaurs.

  “And yet they persist.” Dr. Tybjerg fixed Anna’s gaze, and his eyes narrowed. “Why?”

  Anna sat with the coracoids and tried to figure out which one would fit into the sternum.

  Dr. Tybjerg seemed to approve of her choice by passing her a scapula. As he gave her the bone, he looked at her urgently and prompted, “Two hundred and eighty-six apomorphies.”

  “Sorry?”

  “They dismiss two hundred and eight-six apomorphies.”

  Anna gulped. Now what was an apomorphy again? Tybjerg twirled a small, sharp bone between his fingers.

  “You need to review all of their arguments and all of ours,” he said. “Pair them up and go through them. Once and for all. Together we will wipe the floor with him.” Coming from Tybjerg, this expression sounded odd. Anna looked out at the University Park.

  “We’ll publish a small book,” he added. “A manifesto of some kind. The ultimate proof.” He stared triumphantly toward the ceiling.

  Anna had gotten up to leave when Dr. Tybjerg suddenly said, “By the way…” and tossed a key across the table. It seemed as if it had slipped out of his sleeve. Anna caught it and, without looking at her, Dr. Tybjerg said:

  “I did not just give you a master key.”

  Anna quickly pocketed the key and said: “No, you certainly didn’t.”

  Dr. Tybjerg had entrusted her with a key that was normally forbidden to students. Now every door was open to her.

  Anna’s curiosity was rekindled as she left the museum. She asked Johannes about Tybjerg.

  “A lot of people don’t like him,” was his immediate reaction.

  “Why?” Anna was genuinely surprised. Johannes suddenly looked as if he was having second thoughts.

  “I don’t want to be seen as a tattler,” he said, eventually.

  “For God’s sake, Johannes, give me a break,” Anna exclaimed.

  He thought it over. “Okay,” he said. “But I’ll make it brief. Word has it Tybjerg is an insanely gifted scientist. He was hired by the museum to keep track of their collections when he was still a schoolboy. He’s supposed to have a photographic memory, but he’s socially inept and really quite unpopular. For years Tybjerg and Helland have been some sort of team…” He wrinkled his nose. “When he was younger, he taught undergraduates. In fact, he used to teach me. But there were complaints.”

  “Why?”

  “He can’t teach,” Johannes declared.

  “That’s weird,” she said. “I’ve just spent all afternoon with him, and I thought he explained things really well.”

  “Not to a classroom full of students. He gets nervous and he drones on as if he were reading aloud from some long, convoluted text he knows by heart. I think he’s a bit nuts, I mean, seriously. They only keep him on because he knows everything there is to know about the Vertebrate Collection. More than anyone in the whole world. It’s like hiring someone with autism to look after a vast record collection. He knows where everything is and what it’s called. But they would never offer him tenure. To be employed by the University of Copenhagen, you have to be able to
teach.” He paused before he added: “Dr. Tybjerg is weirder than most.”

  Anna rested her head on her keyboard.

  “Lucky me, or what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One of my supervisors is useless and the other one is a weirdo.”

  “Don’t start all that again,” Johannes said. “We’ve already been there. Helland’s all right.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Yes, and I would rather you didn’t.”

  To begin with, every word and every scientific argument in the controversy about the origin of birds was watertight and unassailable. Anna accepted that, as her starting point, she probably had to take Helland’s and Tybjerg’s positions at face value in order to even begin to understand the vast network of scientific implications; later she could form her own opinion. However, she honestly couldn’t see why Helland and Tybjerg were right and Freeman, according to them, was wrong.

  “Birds are present-day dinosaurs,” she wrote on a sheet of paper, followed by: “Birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs.” Then she drew two heads, which bore some resemblance to Tybjerg and Helland, on the paper and pinned it up on the wall. She took another sheet, drew another head—supposed to be Freeman’s—and wrote on it: “Birds are not present-day dinosaurs,” followed by: “Modern birds and extinct dinosaurs are sister groups and solely related to each other via their common ancestor…” Who was that again? She looked it up and added “Archosaur” to the paper and stuck it on the wall.

  “‘An archosaur is a diapsid reptile,’” she mimicked her textbook, and shut her eyes irritably. Now what does diapsid mean? She looked it up. It meant that the skull had two holes in each temporal fenestra. As opposed to synapsids and anapsids which had…. She chewed her lip. What exactly was a temporal fenestra? She looked it up. The opening at the rear of the skull for the extension and the attachment of the jaw muscles; a distinction was made between the infratemporal and the supratemporal fenestra, and what were they again? Anna looked them up.

  The days passed in a blur, and she could feel her frustration escalate. She was writing a dissertation, not some trivial essay. The whole point was that she would contribute something new, not merely summarize a well-known controversy by repeating existing material. She tried to explain to Cecilie that it had taken her three days to read four pages, and Cecilie stared at her as though she had fallen from the sky. But it was true. Every word was alien, and every time she looked up one word, more terms followed and eventually she had looked up so many terms in so many books and followed so many references that she could no longer remember what she had initially struggled with. There was never a one-word explanation; every term described nature’s most intricate processes, whose terminology she had learned as an undergraduate, but she could barely remember it these days, so she was forced to look that up as well. After one month, her frustration had evolved into actual fear. Was she plain stupid? The bottom line was she grasped so little of the controversy—which clearly enraged both Tybjerg and Helland—that it was embarrassing.