An Inventory of Losses

by Judith Schalansky

  † The bones in question were initially kept in Quedlinburg Castle, but were later handed out piecemeal to anyone interested.

  A more than three-meter-tall plastic replica of the unicorn skeleton, on permanent loan from the local municipal savings bank, can be seen today in the Museum of Natural History in Madgeburg.

  Years ago I spent some time in the mountains. Tired out from a lengthy endeavor, I decided to spend a few weeks staying in a deserted Alpine hamlet in a chalet that an acquaintance had invited me to use. I was toying with the idea, which I had thought original at the time, of writing a guide to monsters, those beasts that, despite having sprung mostly from human imagination, still, as I had once blithely asserted when pitching this book project, in spite of all denials of their existence, populated the world just as surely as all the varieties of real-life fauna, meaning that, as I suggested to the group of potential financial backers, it was possible not only to research but also to categorize their nature, their physical features, their ancestral habitats and individual behavior. Dragons should not be slain but dissected, I added rather pathetically, and without giving any great thought to my target group, or the size or format of my book, I signed a contract and caught the next night train heading south.

  I arrived around midday at the railway station of a little medieval town. It was mid-April, the air still chilly, the sun feeble, the connecting bus journey seemingly interminable, and the footpath from the last bus stop up to the hamlet stony and steep, just as I had imagined the walk to a retreat would be. I remember, as I followed the twists and turns of the bridle path across a rugged expanse of scree, being amused by the thought that I, who as a child had been rather anxious and afraid, especially, of horror films and of being alone, now, in self-imposed isolation, wanted to concern myself with, of all things, the often terrifying monsters born of human imagination. That my climb was so slow and arduous was mainly due, however, to the huge number of books I had packed.

  It was not until darkness was beginning to fall that the black and white houses scattered over the mountainside came into view behind a rocky slope. All around was silence. Only the power lines carried by the pylons buzzed above me. I found the key in the agreed hiding place, entered the modest but spacious upstairs living room with its broad larchwood paneling, fetched firewood from the side of the chalet, stacked it next to the stove, lit the fire, brewed myself some tea, and made up my bed. It was not long before darkness descended over the mountainside and over my new home, and my sleep on that first night—if my memory serves me well—was deep and dreamless.

  When I awoke the next morning, the sky through the roof light looked like a pallid pulp, and it took me a moment to remember where on earth I was. Outside, rising above the shaded, densely wooded valley were jagged, snowcapped summits which, not for lack of trying, I was unable to match up with the names on a map I had found lying ready on the kitchen table. Perhaps it was due to having grown up by the sea, which knows neither elevations nor depressions and remains shapeless even during stormy weather, I thought, as an area of dark hatching indicating a trench projecting laterally into the broad valley basin caught my eye.

  I put on my parka, stepped into my walking boots and went out, straight into the wood. Bluetits chirruped, a ring ouzel whistled, lingering patches of snow glistened in hollows, and the trunks of quite a few of the trees were enveloped in a neon-green fluorescent weave of tiny spiky armlike branches, which further corroborated my observation that even completely artificial-looking organisms occur in nature. It came away easily from the bark and felt like moss in my coat pocket. After half an hour I came to a ravine gaping like a jagged wound in the mountainside. A narrow wooden footbridge of barely a hand’s breadth spanned the damp shadowy abyss.

  I made an about turn, and the sun had just risen over the eastern ridge when I arrived back at the hamlet. The air was still chilly. I could see my breath, which, along with the smoke from my chalet chimney, was the only sign of human life far and wide. The two dozen houses stood there mute, their living quarters of dark timber set on stone bases, their roof ridges facing the valley, with blank windows and closed shutters, and the door of the chapel on the edge of the village would not open either. In front of it stood a water trough hewn from a boulder. The water was ice-cold.

  The first week passed without notable incident: I got up at eight o’clock each day, went for a long walk to the ravine and back before breakfast, and on my return, as if I had done it every day of my life, I threw two or three logs on the fire, brewed coffee, boiled myself an egg, sat down at the round kitchen table, and read. I had the place to myself and had stocked up with supplies in the first few days to spare myself the walk to the grocery store in the village lower down the valley for a time. I had plenty of wood, as well as books and a document folder full of photocopied psychoanalytical, medical history, cryptozoological and other fantastical research literature, and it pleased me to think that, in the event of the kind of disaster that I fantasized about in recurring daydreams, at least there would be enough combustible fuel to last me a while.

  And so I immersed myself in my studies and quickly filled a whole notebook with details of the diverse features of the monsters and mythical beasts, as well as the legends surrounding them and the functions each of these creatures performed in the teeming cosmos of fear. I admit I was a little disappointed. The similarities were all too obvious: each new story soon turned out to be an amalgamation of old familiar set pieces, and each figure an unsurprising hybrid of the imaginary and the true to life. In short, there was not exactly an abundance of species, indeed real life was considerably more eccentric than fiction. So all the stories of monstrous beings testified to little more than the dogged persistence of repeated narrative patterns and motifs: the phoenix that is consumed by flames every five hundred years only to rise from its own ashes, the self-important sphinx with its riddles, the deadly gaze of Medusa, of the catoblepas, of the basilisk. All the varieties of dragon, which are always slain in the end, their membranous wings, their breath that befouls the air, their hunger for gold, the inevitable bloodbath. Even fabulous creatures from foreign cultures failed to deliver the variety I had hoped for. It always basically boiled down to the same: a woman’s innocence had to be protected or sacrificed, a man’s bravery proved, the wild tamed, the unfamiliar conquered, and the past overcome. What I particularly disliked about these accounts were the hints at deeper meaning, the grandiose air of the incredible, their inevitable allusion to some calamity either impending or having occurred in the dim and distant past. More wearying still were the conclusions drawn by researchers eager to see these beasts as nothing but a misunderstood reality. For them there was no mystery whatsoever. The dogheaded people, the cynocephalics, were merely a group of marauding baboons, the phoenix a flamingo blurred by the dazzle of the morning sun, the bishop fish of the historical pamphlets simply stray monk seals, and the unicorn a misinterpreted rhinoceros or an oryx antelope in profile. But, to my disappointment, I was nowhere able to find a convincing answer to the most obvious question of why dragons bore such a striking resemblance to dinosaurs.

  Nevertheless, I persisted with my plan and attempted an initial categorization of the monsters, only to come rapidly to the conclusion that my provisional system was no more useful or curious than, say, the classification of Swiss dragons drawn up by a Zurich naturalist in the early eighteenth century. And so I learned that the griffin originated from Hyperborea or India and the enormous roc from Arabia, that Chinese dragons possessed five, Korean four, and Japanese three toes, that basilisks liked to live in damp well shafts, and that the thorny tentacles of the South American flesh-eating plant, the Ya-te-veo, caused fatal ulcers, and I agonized over whether the scarlet Mongolian death worm, olgoi-khorkhoi, belonged with the cryptids, a group in any case only loosely defined, or alternatively with the snakelike beings, yet was unable to register any noticeable advance in my understanding or gain any sense of satisfact
ion whatsoever.

  No wonder, then, that one day I decided to invent some better monsters of my own, possibly a whole world complete with its own cosmology, a veritable Olympus, and, as so often when I find I am getting nowhere with my writing, I turned to painting. However, the very first creature that I sketched one afternoon using a handful of watercolors I had brought with me looked more cute than terrifying, despite its scaly, bilious-green skin, the leathery webbing of its clawed feet, and its runny, bloodshot eyes. Seldom have I felt so incapable, so empty and dull-headed. There was no denying that evolution was vastly more inventive than the human mind. What were the monstrous octopuses of seafaring legend compared to the giant squid’s quest for a female—which was so interminable that, as he roamed the lightless ocean depths, he would unceremoniously squirt his seed under the skin of every fellow member of his species he encountered without first checking its gender? What were the crooked claws of the harpies of Greek antiquity compared to the hideous faces of the hook-nosed birds of prey of the same name, the agonizing death of the nine-headed hydra decapitated by Heracles compared to the potential immortality of the freshwater Hydra polyp, or the dragon of myths and fairy tales hysterically guarding its treasure compared to the sublime indifference of the giant lizards dozing on the rocks of the Galapagos Islands?

  I interrupted my reading more and more frequently, stared into the embers, fingered the little nest of lichen with its sulfurous glow, painted my name in various scripts on the back of the photocopied articles on monstrosities, which I had put to one side soon after I had arrived. From time to time I would read snippets from an anthology of legends of Upper Valais I had found in a drawer of the bedside cabinet so that the wandering souls of godless servants and child murderers described therein would distract me from the monsters, I would cut my fingernails or comb my hair until the strong dark hairs lay like bookmarks in the folds of the books, look at the screen of my mobile telephone, even though there was virtually never any reception, and out of the window at the opposite side of the valley, just as if I were expecting someone or something.

  Then, on the twelfth or thirteenth night, I dreamed of a bathtub full of snakes with short stout bodies that actually reminded me more of monitor lizards with their legs amputated. The strangest thing about them was that each one had a girl’s head with a youthful, rosy face and blonde hair braided into long plaits. I tried speaking to them but they remained mute, and instead took off into the air and flew around the room. Their facial expressions were the only sign that they had feelings like me. When I woke up, I found myself thinking of Baku, a Japanese monster with an elephant’s head, a bull’s tail, and the paws of a tiger that fed mostly on human nightmares, and wondered whether it would have liked the taste of mine.

  I decided to take a day’s break from my research and spend some time among people. The sky was overcast, and the clouds hung above the forest in loose gray plumes. The colors were pale, but for that very reason everything seemed surreally clear: the stretch of paved road, the cracks in the asphalt, and a bright red mark at the edge of the road surface which might equally well have represented a serpent or a question mark gone wrong. I knew that a double-headed snake was not in itself a sign. Only the walker who encountered it turned it into one. The steeper the terrain, the shorter and quicker my steps became in an effort to compensate for the downward gradient. In the distance, a few sheep clung to the mountainside. Animals evidently coped better than humans with steep inclines and could simply live their lives on sloping ground. A temporary state that was as normal for them as level ground was for me. The slope was littered with jutting boulders looking as if they had been scattered over the landscape in deliberately random fashion, their windward side covered in moss. Hard to believe that all this had simply come about rather than having been carefully designed. Had come into being unaided and then been tamed. Although the unpredictability remained. Nature deserved credit for much more than God. All the same, I was touched by the notion that He had actually hidden the fossils of animals that had never existed in the Earth’s crust just to fool us. What a lot of work for such a crude joke. For a moment I wished it were true.

  As time went by I started to sweat, though it was not warm enough to be out and about in just a jumper. The hardest part was finding a rhythm for the descent, converting gravity into momentum. Behind a hill, the mist was clearing. Below me the steppe-like slopes and lower still, laid out before me and suddenly remarkably close, the light-green valley plain, the floor of what was once a sea. The realms of possibility were a fertile breeding ground, even if it was fairly unlikely that there were vertebrates thousands of years old living in labyrinthine caves inside the Earth in fear or even hope of being discovered. Might dragons in fact be faded reflections of past experiences, vestiges of ancient times? Why shouldn’t memories push for their own survival, preservation, and propagation in the same way that organisms do? After all, virtually nothing was more formidable, probably, than the power of images, of the once seen. I was reminded of the incredible tales of fair-skinned women who bore black-skinned or shaggy-haired children after looking at images of St. Maurice or John the Baptist at the time of conception. But if that were the way of things, what kind of creatures would populate the world? How far back could memories be traced? Beyond a certain point, everything disappeared into the fog. The ouroboros, the world serpent, bit its own tail.

  The customary yellow signpost stood at the place where the paths forked. I was impressed by its presence, its minutely detailed information, its single-mindedness. Some things were indeed perfectly clear, perfectly unambiguous. My head was full of phrases and sayings. What was that lovely one again? A path is made by walking on it. Just let go. How many times had I heard that and immediately tensed up? You could think all you liked, but it didn’t alter how you felt. Your whole body a fist that could only be prised open with brute force. Everything in hand, yet not that elusive heartbeat. The old you-just-have-to-believe-it. Painted slips of paper under the Christmas tree. Ultimately, the demystification of the world was the biggest fairy tale of all. A child’s magical thinking more powerful than any statistic, any empirical value. A counting rhyme suddenly came true, a crack in the pavement held unspeakable horrors, and anyone who stepped on it was irretrievably lost. Against myth you could only lose. True, miracles weren’t out of the question, but they couldn’t be taken for granted. Cause and effect were easily confused. What was desire, what was will, what merely a bodily function? Let go or hold tight? Become a vessel. Give up calculating, acknowledge something bigger than existence. Something like mercy. Something like humility. One long humiliation.

  Finally, the terrain began to level out. The path now led past terraced fields and a meadow. In it stood a single cow with prominent horns, its nostrils pink and damp, a shaggy coat, not an eye to be seen, nothing but reddish-brown matted hair. The hum of electricity. A few cherry trees, the scabby bark shimmering like verdigris. And then a sense of surprise, after all, when from behind the barn I caught the glint of the gray-blue roofs of the village, a settlement perched midway between valley floor and mountaintop, where the air was thin and the pasture green. The footpath joined a road. The pavement glistened as if after rain. The place looked abandoned. There was not even a cat to be seen. The buildings were huddled so closely together that you could have jumped from roof to roof. Dwellings alternated with barns, stables, and garages. In between them narrow alleys and flights of stone steps barely wider than the length of a forearm, and as dark as if they were leading straight into the bowels of the mountains, into the deeper layers of time.

  From somewhere I became aware of a kind of rasping, then a dull thud, a clatter, followed by a sudden groan. It seemed to have come from the lower ground floor of a chalet. The wood of the door was old and silvery gray. A crack at knee height, just large enough to look through. I peered in. Pitch black inside. It was a while before I could make anything out. A shapeless lump in the straw, its surface slim
y, a whitish, festering film streaked with blood. Whatever it was, it was still alive. Its pulse irregular, in its final throes, the beginning of the end. A growth: whether benign or malignant you only find out after the procedure. The doctor’s words unequivocal: physiologically everything’s tiptop. Physiologically. The body was always right. The lump of flesh in front of me twitched like an organ exposed in an operation. I thought of the faded, often indefinable organic matter on show in museum display cases. Preserved in formaldehyde, classified, a jumble in which the abnormal was hard to distinguish from the typical. What mattered was that it was eye-catching. The music and lighting had to be right. The rest was down to the imagination. The eye alone was stupid. The lump convulsed again, moved or was moved. A bubble appeared, full of blood. It wobbled, slid to the ground. The bundle began to wriggle, as if tied up. A battle scene. A wounded animal. All of a sudden a black mouth that descended, small pointed yellow teeth, an outstretched tongue that licked off the slime in rhythmic movements and swallowed it. A hoof that nudged the lump until it moved again, took shape, a body, individual limbs stretched out—thin, spindly black and white legs pointing crookedly upwards, a short tail, a head, the back of it flat, the face completely black. A single eye. Only now did I notice the foul smell. The odor of dirty wool, of sheep droppings, of congealed blood. I felt sick. I drew my head back. Felt a stabbing pain in my knee that only eased after a few steps. Down the deserted main street to the whitewashed church, its tall pointed spire like a screwdriver bit. The square in front with its bus stop, the mailbox, a red hydrant, it all looked as innocuous as a fresh crime scene in the newspaper, on the page with all the bad news, the one headed “Miscellaneous,” “Panorama,” or “From Around the World.” Crimes that suddenly had a twofold presence in the world—as deed and thought. One person’s desire, the other’s fear. Every boundary only there to be overstepped.