You can’t get the smell of these birds off your fingers. You can spend several minutes washing your hands, soap and disinfectant and sand, you can scrub your fingertips until they bleed: it’s no use, the slightest trace develops into a tremendous olfactory memory. You mustn’t touch a live jackdaw when its fellows are nearby — they invariably see it as an attack. How often had one of Kaltenburg’s birds hacked at the back of his hand just because he had gently picked up another jackdaw, which resolutely refused to be led into the cage? And here was I, bending over the dead jackdaws, pushing them around on the desk, with unpecked hands to which their smell was clinging.
Every morning I arrived very early at the collection, setting to work with numb fingers, and every time I had the feeling that the jackdaw skins in their protective feather coats had retained some of the warmth of my hands overnight. While the winter cold seeped slowly out of my limbs, the space gradually turned into a jackdaw room. I postponed the work in hand. Let a colleague go to the bird dealer instead of me. My article on the migratory movements and distribution of the thistle finch was supposed to be submitted by January. I withdrew. There was no space on my desk for finch specimens. When the sun shone on my back at midday, I was enveloped in a jackdaw cloud.
The skins included Taschotschek, a descendant of Tschok, Kaltenburg’s very first jackdaw. Naturally I was familiar with all of his jackdaws, I could tell them apart by their faces, though the specimens now had no eyes. Taschotschek was a special case, however, there were more memories connected with her than with any other bird of her species.
I once asked Kaltenburg whether he somehow felt bereaved by the death of a creature he had studied for a lifetime, having perhaps hand-reared it. No, not bereavement. But nostalgia, yes, that was something he felt, like every healthy person. He often thought back to his first meeting with Tschok, in a damp and dark dealer’s shop in Vienna that he used to visit as a young man. There was a disheveled, shy young bird sitting in a corner at the back somewhere, the dealer thought it hardly worth bringing it out, but Kaltenburg saw its beak, its eyes, and had to have this jackdaw straightaway. The dealer virtually made him a present of it. It was through Tschok that he had started observing birds closely. His experiences with this bird had opened up a new world for him. He owed his first major contribution to ornithology to Tschok. A close, decisive bond, no doubt about it. But all the same: never sadness.
Did he wish his first jackdaw were still alive? That would be flying in the face of nature. And if he had the choice of going back to the time when he had Tschok around him day and night — no, he wouldn’t dream of it, he wouldn’t swap the present for the interwar years. In a certain sense Tschok wasn’t dead anyway, he survived in his descendants, to his surprise he had discovered Tschok’s characteristics in every brood. That was why he had given the young bird who most resembled Tschok the name of Taschok, and called the most similar among its descendants Taschotschek, which was followed by a second Tschok — and so on from one generation to another.
My knowledge of the live Taschotschek distorted my view of its skin, which was now a softly stuffed, feathered display specimen like the others. When I was classifying them into groups I was inclined to start with Taschotschek, to look upon her as the holotype of a subspecies yet to be discovered. I pushed the others aside, until only Taschotschek lay on the desk in front of me, and then one by one I added others, relatives of Tachotschek, descendants, but also jackdaws who had found their way to this flock as if by accident and had stayed on.
For Taschotschek attracted other jackdaws. It was almost as if she were recruiting new birds for Kaltenburg, as if she knew how pleased he would be by the increase in his jackdaw flock, and how important it was to him to keep its size constant. Because, naturally, there were losses all the time, two young jackdaws paired off and left, many birds disappeared without trace, simply failed to return in the evening — a careless flight maneuver, a hunter; the other birds couldn’t tell Kaltenburg what had happened.
The neighbors must have thought him insane, a man who crept around on the roof in his old sports jacket every evening at sunset to gather in birds and put them to bed. Ludwig Kaltenburg was soon so well known in the city that people brought him dead jackdaws. On one occasion someone came to the door, full of remorse, stammering out a confession: he had run over a bird, and he wondered whether — and here he opened a stained bundle — it was one of the Herr Professor’s jackdaws.
In this sack of feathers with legs and beak I saw the movements of the living Taschotschek, saw her look and her behavior that had so often made us laugh, Kaltenburg and me. I saw her jumping onto Ludwig Kaltenburg’s shoulder and tugging nervously at his hair if there was a visitor she was doubtful about. Kaltenburg could be a gambler too, he was mindful of limits but sometimes exceeded them. Taschotschek wouldn’t have minded if Kaltenburg had followed his jackdaw flock up into a stormy sky to participate in their breakneck aerial maneuvers; in other words she trusted his capability within her own sphere but sometimes seemed a bit skeptical about him as a judge of human character. If someone seemed to the jackdaw to be threatening, and if Kaltenburg moved too close to that person, or the conversation took on a tone that sounded dangerous to her, she didn’t hold back as she normally did, at first observing strangers in complete silence, then gradually making contact with them. If there was someone present whom she thought of as the enemy of her friend, she would fly out of the room, perch on the rooftop, and make a racket until Kaltenburg had no choice but to break off the conversation, leaving the dumbfounded visitor alone for a while, and appear on the ladder outside.
This was something I witnessed several times, and in a few cases it occurred to me later that Taschotschek had not been wrong. At one time, when we had just returned from an excursion on which the jackdaws had accompanied us for quite a distance, a man appeared — unannounced — who insisted on talking to Kaltenburg. I didn’t know him, Kaltenburg treated him like a stranger too, yet something about this man interested Kaltenburg. Taschotschek scuttled about uneasily on the tabletop, went over to the sugar bowl, seemed to want to block Kaltenburg’s view of his uninvited guest, spread her wings and got one of them in the tea — and Ludwig Kaltenburg, who normally never lost his composure over an animal, reacted irritably, brushing Taschotschek roughly away onto the back of the armchair.
Suddenly she didn’t just look worried — as far as you can say that of a bird — she looked terrified. And she took off, out through the balcony door, which stood slightly ajar all year round, trying with her wing-flapping motions to entice Kaltenburg out onto the roof. She instantly struck up her usual noise. Kaltenburg went on ignoring the jackdaw’s din, until eventually he turned to me: “Could you go and see what’s got into her again?”
I climbed up the ladder, Taschotschek refused to calm down for me, wouldn’t let me touch her, and as I stood up there, with the old city beneath me in the afternoon light and the agitated jackdaw flapping under my nose, I regretted leaving the room: what was Kaltenburg discussing with his visitor, whom I took to be a stranger, what risk might he be letting himself in for? No, Kaltenburg wasn’t the type to let himself in for anything. But why was he so keen on talking undisturbed to his visitor, and why did he want not only his favorite jackdaw out of the way but me too? It’s possible that this bird really had more than once helped him out of a difficult situation, and but for Taschotschek it is possible that Kaltenburg would have had to leave Dresden much sooner.