The increasingly oppressive cramped quarters in the House of Assembly, the smell of carcasses and alcohol and toxins, by turns sweetish and then acrid, that penetrated our rooms from the taxidermy workshops, depending on weather conditions, the damp, the musty walls topped by a temporary roof, the floods during heavy, prolonged rain. Dangers that threatened to ruin our specimens and eventually our health as well, and even the DDT that we personally sprinkled for years over the open drawers: all of this is so closely associated with my work in the collection that I would be hard-pressed to recognize anything in this new space if it weren’t for the old familiar animals.
“You weren’t born in Dresden, were you?” Frau Fischer inquired cautiously soon after we met. Usually it took her only three sentences at most to tell by their accents where people came from, she said, but in my case she still couldn’t make up her mind. “I couldn’t even guess at the general direction,” she admitted as she took her pens and notebook out of her backpack and cast a first glance at the birds I had got ready.
It’s true, I’m not from here, and it was only by accident, or rather because of the state of affairs at the time, that I came to Dresden early in 1945, when I was eleven: my parents had decided to leave the city of Posen and head west. Even before that we must have moved around a lot; I never had a chance to pick up a regional twang at home, let alone a dialect. I think they may even have taken care to choose a nanny for me who spoke clear High German.
I have a mental image of myself in my best Sunday shirt sitting on the bench in our kitchen, and my nanny wiping my bare legs with a damp washcloth. Could my parents have taken the nanny along on the move to Dresden?
Long-term memory, short-term memory. The interpreter had asked for a half-hour break during which she would like to be distracted, in order to test whether all the names she now had in her short-term memory really were lodged in her long-term memory. She wanted me to examine her afterward to find out, but meanwhile in this half-hour break she preferred not to stay around the mounted animals, perhaps because she needed to match the word with the object purely in her mind’s eye, or because after a while she had become uncomfortable in the presence of the birds: they perch on their branches as though they’ve just landed, as though they’re going to take off again at any moment, and if people are not used to them they’re afraid of scaring them away with a nervous movement. So we had exchanged the windowless room with its egg sets and mounted specimens for my office, which gave me a chance to smoke a cigarette and offer Katharina Fischer a coffee.
She scanned the bookcase; there was a small pile of volumes from our library, I’d been using them over the past few weeks, and next to them my little reference library. The interpreter quickly took in the Journal of Ornithology, The Bird Observer, next to Grzimek’s Animal Life and Wassmann’s Encyclopedia of Ornithology. By comparison, in this light the hardback dictionaries on the top shelf look older than they are, German and Russian, German and English, editions from before and after reunification, slightly scuffed, darkened with age, as though I hadn’t touched them for years. Archetypes of Fear is absent from the bookcase.
No, on that night when we arrived in this city, which was in the process of turning into a sea of rubble no longer warranting the name of “city,” my nanny was not with me as, wrapped in a blanket, I lay on the grass in the Great Garden. People all around, the whole park full of people, squatting in the darkness, walking to and fro, talking quietly, looking up at the sky without a word, and all of them strangers. Huddled next to me were an old couple; in the bright glow the man’s face was lit up as though by candlelight. The rims of his eyes, the furrows around his mouth, and the stubble of his beard turning red, then yellowish, white, then dark gray as the clouds passed over the treetops. The woman was wearing a good but no longer new coat, a broad shawl over her upper body, I can’t remember, was she wearing a cap, a hat, her head was resting on the man’s shoulder. Exhausted, in the open air, on a February night, they had nodded off. A noise like nothing ever heard before drove the two of them out of my mind.
We sat for quite a while facing the birds I had lined up — that’s to say she sat, I soon got up again to stand behind the table and point out to her the crucial differences. Working from left to right, as seen from her perspective, I gave her the German names for the chaffinch, the brambling, the linnet, the twite, the mealy redpoll, let’s leave out the Arctic redpoll, it can be annoyingly hard to identify with any certainty, but go on to the serin, bullfinch or hawfinch, though the four stonebirds can be omitted despite their lovely pink plumage, then the scarlet grosbeak, the great rosefinch, the pine grosbeak — enormous compared to the others — the crossbill, the Scottish crossbill, the parrot crossbill, and finally the Carduelis finches, the siskin, the greenfinch, and the goldfinch, also known as the thistle finch.
While I walked along the line, she began to draw up a list, the English names first; she had acquired an English bird book and was leafing through her Peterson’s Field Guide, the section on finches. But watch out, I broke in, that you don’t mix up the goldfinch with the German Goldfink, which is a brambling in English, or, worse still, group it with the snowfinch, which isn’t a finch at all but a sparrow, just as the scarlet rosefinch is not a Rosenfink in German; the German for that is Karmingimpel, and only the Swedes call the scarlet rosefinch a Rosenfink.
Maybe I was overtaxing her a little at the start, but I had known straightaway that any interpreter who prepares so thoroughly for a conversation that may never take place, no, in all probability never will take place in the way she anticipates, must on no account be undertaxed. The Peterson Frau Fischer is using is a work I seldom consult: although its structure is conventional, I have always found it a bit awkward to use, because the illustrations, descriptions, and maps are each collected into separate sections of their own. I placed the Svensson/Mullarney/Zetterström next to it; descriptions on the left, on the right birds drawn against the light, silhouettes in a low-lying mist, and Katharina Fischer realized at first glance that it is all about recognizing the birds in their natural environment, not indoors.
To really complicate matters — so began my sentence when I felt she had spent slightly too long poring over the bird books — be careful not to confuse “sparrow” with “sparrow.” Depending on who you’re talking to, British or American, it means either a true sparrow or our German Ammer, one of the New World buntings, which you’ll see over here only once in a lifetime as an accidental that has drifted across the Atlantic. So what we call an Ammer, the British call simply a bunting: easy to remember.
I was afraid my remarks might have confused the interpreter so thoroughly by now that she might be wishing she had never taken on the job. So I thought I would gradually begin to simplify the business, first of all by eliminating certain finches that never appear locally and that were therefore, I hoped, unlikely to crop up in the conversation when Frau Fischer’s assignment required her to start moving birds around between languages. I removed a few examples from the table: the two-barred crossbill, the Sinai rosefinch, the evening grosbeak, the white-wing grosbeak, the red-fronted serin, the Syrian serin, the Corsican finch, the citril finch, the twite, and the beautiful blue chaffinch vanished from our sight, and as Katharina Fischer found, the whole arrangement now seemed much more manageable.