“Did he look for a particularly tough hamster?”
It took him weeks to train the stoat to go so far and no further into the hamsters’ burrow, stop, and turn back after a while. The scene was planned down to the last detail, you could say it was staged, and it didn’t matter to the stoat whether a mother hamster turned up to drive it off or not.
Frau Fischer nodded absently. “A tame stoat meets a tame hamster.”
Meanwhile, far more than the intended half-hour had elapsed, we ought to be getting back to the birds. The rain was becoming heavier all the time. Anything that had not found its way into Frau Fischer’s long-term memory would have to be revised.
I unlocked the door to the egg collection again, the big yellow iron door, which I always think opens only against a certain resistance, as though higher air pressure prevails in the room behind it. As soon as the door shut behind us we could no longer hear the drumming of the rain, what pressed upon our ears now, subdued, a fine carpet of sound, was the steady noise of the recirculated air.
The walls are lined all around with display cases, you are looking into glass birds’ eyes everywhere, but the shining buttons are no more than crude indicators of the location of the sense of sight in life, uniform dark points instead of the infinitely varied, subtly shaded colors of the iris. In the short space of our walk back to work we passed countless specimens whose eyes seemed to follow us attentively right into the small square left clear for table and chairs. Here were birds of paradise in a thousand variations, the color combinations, the form of the plumage, the pose, and there house sparrows, whose varieties reveal themselves only to the patient observer: every single bird has been carefully treated to create a lifelike impression. Even a habitual visitor can occasionally succumb to the illusion that he is surrounded here not by mounted specimens but by silent observers: I sometimes experience this when I stand lost in thought at a display cabinet and discover with a shock a bird that has fallen from its base.
We sat down again at the wooden table, on two angles of a corner, close together; Frau Fischer sketched a finch in her notebook, then flipped back to the beginning of the book and looked at me, concentrating completely on the matter in hand. This I took to be my signal to stand up. I positioned myself behind the table, my thumb in the English bird book, and examined the interpreter as you would a schoolchild. We moved briskly through the Turdidae family, we touched on warblers, chats, redstarts, and thrushes, Frau Fischer had retained everything very well, I presented her with the English names and then the Latin ones, and she reeled off both German and English equivalents as though she had always known them. Just as quickly, we put titmice and sparrows behind us and came back to the finches, where we had started.
I laid a gentle finger on the gray head of a bird slightly smaller than a sparrow, with a crimson forehead and breast, its back cinnamon-colored. The answer came without hesitation: the Bluthänfling, the linnet, Latin Carduelis cannabina or — very confusingly — also Acanthis cannabina. She made a note, “unusual white edges to primary feathers,” and drew an arrow from it pointing to her linnet sketch.
The teacher posed the questions, the pupil answered, but after a while a third voice intruded into our dialogue: “If we ever go to Vienna together, you must remind me to show you the crown prince’s last eagles.”
The voice of my teacher, Ludwig Kaltenburg. He taught me to observe mounted birds as you would live creatures.
If you’re ever in Vienna, I said to Frau Fischer, you must go to the Natural History Museum and take a look at the two sea eagles that Crown Prince Rudolf of Habsburg shot a few days before his suicide. It would be hard to find such strange mounted specimens anywhere — the pose, the expression, the plumage — and remember, the taxidermist will have had not just two dead birds on the table before him as he went to work but another death on his mind, and so the two eagles, not to say the one double-headed eagle of the Habsburg emblem, became in his hands two birds with drooping feathers, bowed down with grief as though they knew on the day they were hunted that the man who ended their lives would soon take his own. They are anything but proud heraldic beasts, and perhaps that’s why the little explanatory tablet was added, otherwise such taxidermy might have been regarded in 1889 as an insult to the Crown. They’re beautiful, these two eagles from the Orth region, the wide, marshy Danube meadows, they’re far more beautiful than many a superb, lavishly spruced-up eagle specimen.
“Your teacher — was that the same Ludwig Kaltenburg who wrote The Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse?” asked Katharina Fischer.
Yes.
“The author of A Duck’s Life?”
The very same.
“Didn’t he write Archetypes of Fear too? And Studies of Young Jackdaws?”
As a young academic he made a name for himself with his work on jackdaws.
I shouldn’t have mentioned Ludwig Kaltenburg, not at that point, because now the interpreter was no longer so focused, constantly mixing up goldfinch and goldhammer, thistle finch and yellowhammer, despite the mounts in front of her. Nor could she get the names for Carduelis chloris, the greenfinch, to stick in her mind. Either she couldn’t connect one name with the other or one of the names did not match the bird.
“The goldfinch — isn’t that this bird here with the bright yellow head and yellow belly?”
No, that’s the yellowhammer, Emberiza citrinella. Citrinella, lemon-colored, that ought to be easy to remember. The goldfinch is what we call the Stieglitz. The ending of its German name betrays its Slav origins. It’s onomatopoeic, supposedly, and no doubt that’s why it eventually managed to establish itself on equal terms alongside the old Germanic name Distelfink, thistle finch. A bird translated, you might say.
But this still wasn’t enough to imprint the goldfinch on the interpreter’s long-term memory, her gaze seemed to be held by the cardboard boxes on top of the cupboard, DAMAGED NESTS, NO LABEL, NEST STANDS, perhaps she was avoiding looking at me. The goldfinch, strikingly colorful with a red face against its black-and-white head, brown body, the rump again white, the tail and wings — they have a yellow band, hence the “gold”—are black.
We had begun by discussing the fact that my voice had never taken on a local timbre, despite the sixty years I had spent in Dresden. Certain everyday expressions, of course, one or two constructions, and unconsciously, especially when I’m tired, a slight slurring of my speech. But for me Saxon has remained a foreign tongue. Sometimes I secretly envy people who are at home in a recognizable dialect or even just a regional inflection, I’ve always listened carefully, acquiring a tone here, a touch of red, a few words there, which in time ran together to form a yellow band, and I’ve mixed them all into my total speech picture, my parents’ white High German, the darker coloration of my surroundings here. You could say someone like me has a goldfinch accent, with a bit of local color picked up in every quarter.
“So I’d have to think of you as a goldfinch.”
I asked the interpreter to point out the thistle finch on the desk for me.
“This colorful one,” she said and drew a circle around her drawing of a goldfinch.
“And Ludwig Kaltenburg was your teacher? Of course, it’s easy to forget that he taught zoology in Leipzig for years. Because he was an Austrian, I always think of him as someone whose whole life was bound up with Vienna. His famous Dresden Institute. When did he leave the GDR?”