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.
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.