And then, installing everything here in its new space, I noticed two bird skins which had lain peaceably side by side for more than half a century. One was a representative of a subspecies of reed bunting, unfortunately no longer officially recognized, on which someone — no doubt one of my predecessors — had bestowed the binomial second term kaltenburgi, in honor of Ludwig Kaltenburg. The other was an ordinary local reed bunting prepared by Eberhard Matzke, whom Kaltenburg would later stubbornly insist on seeing as his powerful adversary.
“I can imagine it sometimes feels a bit uncanny when you know the birds so well. Or is it the other way round — the more you know about them, the more familiar they become?”
I pushed the drawer back into the cabinet. Katharina Fischer still had to pick up her coat. If I had observed correctly, in the course of the afternoon the birds had become more familiar to her too, although we hadn’t done much more than bandy names around and keep our eyes carefully fixed on the row of finches as we did so. I asked her if she remembered the chaffinch sitting on a branch.
“Certainly.”
That chaffinch used to be Martin Spengler’s pet bird. That is to say, it lived in the room Martin used as a studio and where he slept, you couldn’t call it an apartment. One day the chaffinch simply dropped off its perch. Such a small organism can’t take too much turpentine in the atmosphere. It might now be numbered among the forgotten birds if Martin hadn’t bequeathed it to the collection.
As we were about to say our goodbyes, it occurred to Frau Fischer to ask me what had made me take a special interest in goldfinches. “Was it while you were a child in Posen?”
No, not until later, when both Posen and childhood were behind me. For me the goldfinch was associated with Dresden. There was a chaotic time lasting several months, or maybe it was only weeks, when I stayed in various places, and I could easily have finished up in an orphanage but for a family that was prepared to take an orphan along with their own three children. I never really felt at home there, though the parents tried hard. But I suppose by the age of eleven, or almost twelve, you’re too old to fit in with a new family. I soon began roaming about in the more deserted parts of the city, the mounds of rubble, the thistle-covered areas, it was the thistles that brought the goldfinches to Dresden.
She nodded, thanked me, shook my hand, and turned to go. The rain had stopped. Then she turned around again in the doorway to say, “If you’d like, I’ll phone and let you know how the job went.”
It was getting dark, I saw Katharina Fischer getting into her car, she gave me a last wave, her brake lights came on briefly, and the engine started. The car turned out of the car park into the drive, the red taillights disappeared, and while the glass door was slowly closing before me, I recalled how hard it was for me as a child to accept that what we called a sea swallow was not a swallow but a tern, and what we knew as an Alpine crow was not related to the crow family at all but was a kind of chough, and so on with a whole host of names — I just couldn’t get it into my head that birds are not attached to their names in the way we are attached to names, even when we know they’re misleading. No matter how well my parents explained it to me, they could name as many species as they liked, I simply refused to accept that the mountain finch didn’t live in the mountains, the oystercatcher did not live on oysters, and the plumage of the purple gallinule was not purple but indigo through and through. It certainly didn’t help when my parents persisted in telling me that my exciting discovery about the swift had been due to the fact that despite its Latin name it does have legs — I didn’t want to hear anything about swifts. Today I know all about the bastardized Latin and Greek, about the crude misunderstandings and twisted spellings, the hair-raising mistakes of translation and observation. All the same, I have never quite given up thinking that you have to get to know every single bird individually to learn anything about the unique characteristics of its kind.
III
1
IONCE KEPT JACKDAW specimens under my nose for six weeks. It must have been in the midsixties, and I’ve never forgotten the smell of jackdaw since. You won’t know what I mean unless you know their characteristic smell. Rather pungent. If you filter out the overriding smell of naphthalene, it smells like leather at first. Having pinned down this smell in turn, if you go on holding the specimen to your nose, it will feel more and more as though you have a powder on your tongue that just won’t mix with saliva. A hint of burned tar when you rub it between your fingers. But not of cold ash. No, cold ash would have upset me.
A Danish colleague had asked me to check out something for him in connection with our jackdaws, I think beak anomalies were his field, and he was following up some ideas arising from the work he had done on jackdaws in recent years. It was a favor, a routine investigation such as we often undertake for each other; you send a specimen for comparison to someplace on the other side of the world, and only if the colleague there notices any discrepancies do you make the trip yourself to look at the foreign bird specimens. To carry out this friendly act with the utmost conscientiousness will not have taken me long, since I knew our jackdaws so well, but then they lay — while the Danish specimen had long since been returned to its homeland — half the winter long on the desk in front of me. They were Ludwig Kaltenburg’s jackdaws.
I can see the jackdaws at play in the Dresden sky above the slopes of the Elbe valley, as though putting on a performance for me and Ludwig Kaltenburg, standing on the big balcony. And Kaltenburg, who must have watched this display countless times, who had surely never known a sunset over the city without the black dots wheeling in the evening sky above, was following their mock aerial battles, nosedives, and antics as if his protégés were showing off their skills purely for the visitor’s benefit. Soon he was completely absorbed in the sight of his jackdaw flock, which made its way home at dusk. It was as though he were seeing them for the first time.
I never saw Kaltenburg so concerned about any of his other animals as he was about the jackdaws. I remember him giving me a protracted explanation of why they needed bringing in every evening. Protracted, not because Kaltenburg expressed himself in complicated sentences or because his language wasn’t vivid — there was no one who could describe something as clearly as Professor Kaltenburg. No, protracted because while talking to me he was on the roof waving his arms about to call the jackdaws in. I was holding the ladder, just watching his feet on the top rung, and trying to work out which way Kaltenburg would be flinging his upper body next. He stretched up, gesticulating, started to wobble, and at the same time turned toward me as I gripped the ladder tightly down below.
A jackdaw has no innate fear of natural predators, it has to learn from its parents the likely form in which mortal danger will appear. But most of Kaltenburg’s jackdaws had been used to people since the day they were hatched, to a human being who had no fear of cats or birds of prey, so if the professor did not want to lose them, he had no choice but to lure his birds back to the cage for the night. It took one or two hours every night — up to a point the creatures would willingly follow him into the room, but then they would take off again, playing with their flightless comrade, trying to draw him up to the roof ridge, until Kaltenburg finally had them all safe inside.