His words are emphatic, his deeds less so. In the decades that ensued, Carl Hagenbeck organized over fifty more exotic folk displays, built ethnic villages, continued to traffic in primitive peoples. Taking precautions: medical personnel perpetually on call, careful to vaccinate his savages and sign contracts stipulating wages, conditions, benefits. Not sure how much of a consolation it would be to Henri to learn that his death may have saved many others from around the world from suffering a similar fate, as conditions improved, at least somewhat.
Much of this story I pieced together in Hamburg, my first stop, where I spent most of my three days at the Hagenbeck Archive, an amazing collection. It’s housed in one of the buildings in the zoo itself—a lovely place, just as it must have been that day in 1907 when it opened to the public, changing zoological gardens forever. No bars, no cages, the animals in a setting that gave the illusion they were in their natural habitat, not free but at least less oppressed than when they had to pace back and forth on concrete day after day, night after night.
I had hoped to meet some of the Hagenbeck family members, who still run the business, direct descendants of Carl and his father Claus, the fishmonger, remember him?—but they were all away for some reason or other. Fortunately, there was Gunther, a diligent and obsequious librarian at the archive—hey, no need to be jealous. Of course, he took a fancy to me, why should that surprise you, of all people? And of course I took advantage of this discreet infatuation to milk him for all he was worth.
And he was worth quite a bit, information-wise, Fitzroy Foster. Not to worry—he didn’t milk me. All right, all right, no more vulgar jokes. So listen: on my last day there, I let him take me to lunch—not what it sounds like, just some bratwurst with scads of mustard at the zoo cafeteria.
He had a goodbye present for me. Carl’s niece, Thea Umlauff, was not only alive, but thanks to Gunther’s good offices, was ready to receive me that very afternoon at teatime.
I can see you shaking your head in disbelief. A niece of Carl Hagenbeck? She must be a hundred years old! Can’t possibly be alive! Well, she is exactly one hundred—frail, a bit loony and eccentric, with a wandering mind, but quite alive, thanks.
Thea’s father, Johann Umlauff, the owner of a bathhouse where he sold foreign curios, married Carl’s sister Christine. The family alliance allowed Umlauff to expand his venture into a full-fledged naturalist shop specializing in authentic artifacts delivered by Hagenbeck’s agents from overseas.
Not an endeavor that was impecunious. Many of the most important displays of aboriginal art in museums in Europe and the States were originally handled by Umlauff and people like him, so that by the time he died in 1889, the same year his youngest daughter Thea was born, he had formed a veritable empire.
All three of the Umlauff boys derived their living from the same enterprise. Gustav Jr. carried on the family business, mainly at the World Museum, crowded with aboriginal art. Another son, Heinrich Christian (yet another Heinrich), used those curios and weapons, skulls and instruments and clothes pilfered from the natives, to become a set designer, collaborating with Fritz Lang on many of his early-twentieth-century movies. But the one with the most influence turned out to be Johannes. He became a taxidermist, stuffing many of the animals that died at the nearby premises of his uncle Carl. It made economic sense. The beasts, even after their expiration date, continued to offer a pretty penny, living on as skin and claw and bones. Made into a spectacle from which they could never hope to escape. Like Henri in the Pierre Petit postcards.
Eventually the dead animals—gorillas, bears, antelopes, tigers—were grouped together in tableaux, with painted backgrounds, tufts of false grass, human mannequins—the whole package auctioned off to natural history museums.
We attended those exhibits, Fitz, when we were twelve, remember, at the Boston Museum on a school field trip?
Yes, I did remember. We had been so fascinated that we went back by ourselves, just the two of us. I had kept tapping on the glass wall, as if to awaken the animals, and Cam diverted the attention of the guard who was furious at me for disturbing the peace. What peace? Cam said. They’re not at peace, they’re not even dead, even that’s been taken from them, that’s what she argued at the age of twelve, my God, they’re just a silly illusion. And the man was flabbergasted, didn’t know how to respond, so by the time he turned to reprimand me I’d made my escape. How we laughed at our own impertinence, our youth and foolishness. But now, all these years later, Cam was not in the mood to laugh.
How were we to know, Fitz, that those stuffed animals came from the hand and skill of a nephew of the man ultimately responsible for your visitor’s life and death? How were we to know that ten years later I would be sitting in the Hamburg parlor of Johannes Umlauff ’s sister Thea sipping a strong brew of tea and listening to her recollection of her uncle Carl Hagenbeck, that he had a great sense of humor, that he was so kind to his animals, that he loved performances and drama and adventure.
It was only toward the end of our little séance that something unexpected came up. As I rose to go, she said: “You’re American, aren’t you? Gunther mentioned that, and your accent seemed, well, from the United States, that great land.”
I admitted that I was from America.
“They bombed our World Museum, you know. In 1943. Destroyed our collection, Blown to smithereens. My brother Gustav died soon after that. Of a broken heart. All those beautiful gorgeous objects, traveling the world to a safe haven—and then that madman Hitler turned us all into targets, even the animals. I resurrected the museum after the war with my niece Christa—she was born the same year our museum and shop were devastated, 1943, never met her father just as I never met mine, isn’t that strange? You must know her, Christa Umlauff, she immigrated to America once we sold the shop to Lore Kegel. You never ran into Christa in New York?”
I was trying to get away from the old lady—the next day I had to rise early to head for Nuremburg—but she wouldn’t let me go, motioned for me to sit down again.
“How about Margaretta?” she asked. “If you haven’t met Christa, well, then, maybe Margaretta? The daughter of my cousin Gisela. Oops, not supposed to mention her, not Gisela. Not after that naughtiness in Chicago. How old are you, miss?”
I told her twenty-two.
“Ah well, you couldn’t have met Margaretta. She died—in America, you know, where she was born, just like you. She died in—I can’t remember, but it was long ago. I was at her wedding, you know, in 1912, oops, not supposed to speak about that either.”
By now I was intrigued enough to sit down again. You know how I love gossip, Fitz. After so many atrocities and kidnappings, some good old-fashioned blather was just what I needed.
“Why not?”
“It’s a secret.”
“After all these years? If you tell me about your Margaretta, I’ll tell you about mine. I have a Margaretta in my family as well. My husband’s mother.”
“How old is she?”
“She died,” I said. “Almost two years ago. She was a bit over forty, I think.”
“So she can’t be my Margaretta.”
“No, she can’t. What about yours?”
She muttered to herself that her uncle Carl had sworn her to silence. But he’d been gone now for—she couldn’t remember, she strained—finally decided it had been seventy-six years ago, added something about the statute of limitations, that he wouldn’t mind.
I encouraged her. “If we don’t speak for the dead, who will?”
And thus it was, Fitzroy Foster, that she spun out a most implausible tale. This cousin, Gisela, had been the favorite daughter of her father Carl—vivacious, pleasant, pretty, and a whiz with animals, like everybody in that family. “We Umlauffs,” Thea explained, “were better at inanimate objects, whereas the Hagenbecks felt all creatures to be their friends, but none more than Gisela. Since she’d been a toddler, her mere presence calmed the beasts, charming the wildness and danger out of them with a look, a s
mile.”
So only natural that her father Carl should take sixteen-year-old Gisela to Chicago, where his grand circus act was opening at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition. Hagenbeck’s show was a sensation—tigers on a tricycle, bears tiptoeing across a tightrope, male and female slaves in a triumphal procession, hypnotized monkeys, parrots speaking myriad languages, Roman gladiators subjecting lions.
Enter Stephen Rice, hired by Hagenbeck for his Chicago show because he had trained hippos to dance to Arabian music at Barnum’s circus but perhaps more crucially because he was the nephew of a Brit, also an animal dealer, who had married Hagenbeck’s sister (what a family!). Delays in the building of a coliseum in time for the grand opening so worried Hagenbeck that he neglected to keep an eye on the dashing, daring Stephen. Or on his wayward daughter. One day, she and the young Mr. Rice simply disappeared. By the time Hagenbeck tracked the couple to New York, through the Pinkerton agency, Gisela was pregnant. And died at the end of 1893 while giving birth to a premature baby, Margaretta.
Carl forbade his daughter’s name to ever be mentioned. Erased as if she had never existed. So much so that Thea did not know she had a deceased older cousin called Gisela until a day in 1912, when her uncle Carl, suspecting he had not long to live, told her the whole lurid, scandalous tale. A revelation brought on by a letter from this unknown granddaughter Margaretta, begging somebody from the family to attend her wedding. Accompanied by a resplendent photo—there were the same immaculate eyes and succulent mouth and waterfall of hair that Gisela had transmitted, before dying, to her child.
“And so,” Thea said, “Uncle Carl, his weary heart melting at seeing his lost darling replicated so many years later—oh, the magic of photography!—proposed that I go to the wedding. The only member of the family available—and the only one, he said, he could trust to never tell this secret. Because his heart might be melting but his pride was still a cold, frozen, unrelenting piece of ice. He knew I was itching to elude the suffocating supervision of my three brothers and, through his friend Mr. Hornaday, he had obtained work for me at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. As a further incentive, he promised to provide a nice stipend in his will. All I had to do was cross the Atlantic, put in an inconspicuous appearance at the wedding, and send back news of his granddaughter—maybe a photo—offer a hint of reconciliation to an old man on the threshold of saying goodbye to this world. He could never forgive Stephen Rice for kidnapping his daughter, but Margaretta should know that her grandfather loved her.”
Kidnapped, I thought to myself. Well, well, well.
“That conversation,” Thea continued, her ancient eyes unable to discern the perverse glint in mine, “changed my life. I spent two intensely happy years in New York. Would still be there if war hadn’t broken out. It became prudent to return to Germany before America joined the hostilities. But I also brought back with me memories of a friend for life. Margaretta and I became so close that I was asked to be godmother to her son and we kept up a correspondence that only ceased the day she died.”
It was getting late. The tea had long since grown cold in the cups and outside the autumn sun of Hamburg was beginning to set. It had been a long day and ahead of me stretched an even longer couple of weeks. I had a question before I left.
“What about Carl Hagenbeck? Did he ever get to see or perhaps write to his granddaughter?”
Thea Umlauff shook her head. She’d informed him of the wedding, of course, without ever receiving an acknowledgment. And wasn’t surprised when her brother Heinrich sent a telegram notifying her that Uncle Carl had passed away—that was 1913, so, no, he had never really reconciled with that hidden side of the family, she ended up being the only link.
I thanked her and stood up. It was a sad story but one that I conjectured we would somehow savor together, back home. It didn’t occur to me that I’d write it down with such detail as part of my report. Sure, there was some twisted satisfaction derived from Hagenbeck being served some of his own medicine. He spends his life uprooting animals and sequestering humans and then someone comes along and uproots his family and sequesters his own daughter, carries her away so suddenly that he never sets eyes on her again. But I very much doubt that Carl Hagenbeck ever made the connection, associated his pain with the pain he had wreaked upon others. Perhaps he went so far as to realize that he had trained so many beasts to obey him but could not control the heart and heat and body of his favorite child, the one most like him. Would Henri have felt any vindication at such a reckoning?
It was not something to mention to the old lady. Why taint the image of her family when she was close to meeting them—and possibly Henri—in the other world. She could ask him personally, resolve our enigma for us. Oh how I wish I believed in the afterlife.
Despite my protests, she insisted on shuffling with me to the door. As we passed a mantelpiece cluttered with photos, she stopped.
“Wait, wait,” she said, and handed me the picture of a young woman in a wedding dress next to an unrecognizably younger Thea—almost three quarters of a century ago. “Margaretta,” Thea said. “Look how pretty we both were. She was so glad someone had come from Germany representing the family.”
“You did the right thing,” I said, because she obviously expected me to say something. I really wanted to get back to the hotel, a quick meal and then soak in a bath for a while and bed, heavenly bed, even without you, my love—and I also wanted, naturally, to let you know I was okay.
Thea Umlauff was in no hurry. She tarried by the photos, pointing out this dead person and that one and I had begun to lose patience, felt an impulse of rudeness starting to rise when she handed me one last picture.
A little girl. Early 1950s hair bobbed cutely. Staring straight at me. As if saying hello from the past. From the present. From the future when I will read these words with the emotion they deserve.
“Also Margaretta,” Thea said, noticing my interest. “Called that in honor of her grandmother. My friend managed to send me this photo of the child—and a few more before she passed away. Would you like to see them?”
There was no need. I could see this one and probably all the others Thea possessed, I could see those and so many more whenever I so desired. In one of your family albums, Fitzroy Foster. Because of course, of course, of course, it was your mother. The granddaughter of Carl Hagenbeck’s granddaughter.
So Hamburg revealed its secrets to me. Not just many of the specifics of how your visitor and his family had been taken from their island home, but how your family, your remote family, was responsible for that crime.
The reason Henri chose you to be possessed. You aren’t only the descendant of Pierre Petit, but also the sixth generation of Hagenbecks. Both of these lineages came together in you for the first time, an intersection that took more than a century to materialize, the genes of the man who snapped the photo and the genes of the man who gave the order to bring a living body to Europe to be stuffed in a photo.
You were, you are, unique, Herr, Monsieur, Mr. Fitzroy Foster.
I debated with myself back at the hotel, immersed in water so hot it seemed to scald me, whether to let you know right away. But as I dried the anatomy you love so much, touching with a towel the zones that come alive with your eyes and fingers, tongue and lips, I decided that this—and everything else I had yet to discover on the rest of the trip—should be told to you by me directly, both of us in the same room. He will need to make love after this revelation, I will not condemn him to loneliness when he learns of his ancestry, what the sex of others determined through the decades.
We’ve come quite a way from that fourteenth birthday of yours. Started out with a mere image, nothing more than a mysterious face, and now we’ve finally answered your question, “Why me?” But not yet mine, really: “Who is he?” We know who Carl Hagenbeck was, have reached across time and discovered the identity of Pierre Petit, your two ancestors, but Henri? We can’t even guess his real name, the story of his parents, let alone seven
generations back.
Nor what he wants.
Or maybe yes. He wasn’t famous like Carl Hagenbeck, he didn’t immortalize with his eyes the celebrities of his day as Petit did. Vanished from history, my love, like most of the billions of the dead of our world—never registered by memory and writing and imagery if chance had not set Jacobsen and Wahlen and Schweers and Virchow, and Darwin himself, on his path. If not for the full force of the German and French publics, hundreds of thousands—surely some of them were my ancestors, Fitz—of spectators demanding more natives to be enjoyed on weekend outings. Maybe what Henri wants is for someone—you and now me—to know what was done to him, tell his story. But I doubt it, Fitzroy Foster. We have paid our dues, of that I am convinced. But we still have work to do. I can’t wait, my love.
I took a deep breath.
That she could resurrect the past, bring my visitor’s chronicle back from the grave he shared with every last man who had put him there prematurely, oh that my love had been able to use her detecting skills as a scientist to track down this lost piece of history, oh that the mind that had accomplished that feat of memorialization should now be left without memory of a third of her own life, the years when she had kept me alive from afar, not even the recollection of our reencounter and marriage, the contrast between what she had done for Henri and was unable to do for herself—it was just too much.
I started to cry.
Quiet sobs, I controlled at least their violence—why disturb her with my pain? But sobs nonetheless, a lament for our shipwrecked, caged humanity, for her and me and also, despite my desolation, for our visitor, dying in that Zurich bed, infected and alone and forgotten, not even Lise by his side. His image, which I had insisted on banishing for these two years, was the last thing that loomed in front of me as I fell asleep as the New Year dawned, Camilla’s story of him and my twisted double link, my double helix link to him had brought those eyes of night back to me. And I greeted him as one would an old friend or a wandering prodigal, still silent, still mysterious, but we could celebrate that what haunted me was the photo snapped by Petit and not the sick one taken in München as he set out for the last legs of his journey, at least he was at the peak of his powers, I recognized the beauty of his dark eyes and the strength of his resistance, how he had persisted through a century to find me, the descendent of two of the men, among so many others, who had determined his destiny, I welcomed his face into my dreams as I never had before, I let him rock me to sleep.
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