My father ate his stuffed cabbage with great gusto. I don’t know what he had been doing that morning, the meeting with his botanist colleagues wasn’t due until the afternoon. I paid no further attention to my parents’ conversation until my mother suddenly dropped her voice. Now, I thought, she’s telling him what happened at the Brühl Terrace, but she made no mention of the incident at all, she was talking about the zoological museum.
“It’s a shame, I couldn’t show him anything, no great auk and no ‘World of Beetles.’ The museum is closed. No, not one of its closing days. The museum is no longer standing.”
My father shook his head, the air raid last autumn, utterly deplorable, but my mother wouldn’t leave it at that.
“Now you see what they’re capable of, so something good has come out of our canceled museum visit after all.”
Not a word about who she meant by “they,” whether my mother blamed the Allies for this destruction or perhaps those who had rejected the precaution of evacuating the exhibits, because they liked to think that a city like Dresden was immune.
My mother turned to me, and almost seemed to be enjoying a certain satisfaction: “You see, people are capable of anything, you’ll remember this day for the rest of your life.”
She turned out to be right. I thought of her words again in the years after Stalin’s death, I was well past my twenties and learned that the collection had definitely not been completely destroyed after all, the most precious items were still in their secret depository. It made me think of my parents, and I caught myself thinking, Your parents didn’t have a clue, while it seemed to me that I was old enough by then, that we were all old enough at last to find out at least half the truth, even if only from a hushed aside. The great auk: the last British specimen of this bird variety was caught in 1840, the very last Icelandic breeding pair on the third of June 1844—I could recite the dates like a schoolboy when I was approaching fifty and saw our Dresden great auk for the first time. I had already lived far longer than my parents did, but I could still hear their words, and to this day the great auk is inseparably linked with the memory of our last family lunch together.
“Are you sure you don’t want any more of the Frikadelle?”
I shook my head, the mashed potatoes and peas were more than enough for me, and so my father, who had been eyeing my plate throughout, fell upon the German beefsteak. It was when they came to pay that my parents began to whisper to each other, we were already getting our coats on and they still hadn’t settled the question: he, who publicly ate unfinished rissoles from other people’s plates, and she, who left her otter cap lying openly on the fine tablecloth without caring what anyone thought — these two grownups who were my parents, sophisticated people as I thought, who were my guides through the big city, were unsure how much to tip, whether it was even the thing to do in a good restaurant like this, in Dresden. I had never seen my parents like this, positively nervous, and it was only once we were back down in the Old Market that they regained their self-confidence.
My father, who will have seen the Botanical Garden on the northern side of the Great Garden in prime condition, early in the afternoon of the thirteenth of February, with its beds and plots and neatly winding paths. My father, who was apparently going to meet colleagues there, who was expected. My father among a group of botanists, all alive, all still healthy, their faces perhaps already beginning to show optimism as they talked quietly about the summer ahead. By that evening, reunited with his family, my father would be back in the Great Garden, in the spacious park, soon to be strewn with craters, uprooted shrubs, shattered trees, and the many dead, to whom he himself was going to belong.
My father the botanist, who was drawn back to botany again at the unforeseeable end of his life. Did he take us to the Great Garden because he knew the way from that morning, or because he looked to the protection of trees and fields and flowers, which always had a calming effect on him, or was it that he followed the crowds escaping from the flames in the inner city, hoping by some miracle to snatch his family from certain death?
To this day I, the son who survived, have not made a single visit to the Heide cemetery to stand at one of the mass graves and conjure up an image of my parents. Instead, I go to the Great Garden, across the meadow on its western edge, and stand under an English oak for which Dresdeners have a special name: the Splinter Oak. It must be some three hundred years since somebody planted it in this spot, as a border marker, they say, the park hadn’t been conceived of then. If you come from the zoo side, you don’t notice anything: just a tall, gnarled tree with beautifully striated bark. But if you walk around the trunk, the skin of the tree seems suddenly to burst apart, revealing the bright, open, light wood, framed by thick, knobbly protrusions. Looking up, crooked branches, as though their growth had taken place against solid, tormenting air resistance, the broken places, and below the thick foliage of the crown a torn-open area, splintered, shattered, fissured. It takes a while to realize that the scarring across the entire trunk is uniform: this is where the bomb splinters are embedded in the bark, they’re still there. On that side the wood has taken on an unusual, lustrous brown hue. Dead wood lies on the ground, it powders when you kick it, rotten: for years a fungus has been spreading through the inside of the stricken tree, a late consequence of the bombing. It survived that night, but eventually it will be destroyed by the sulfur shelf mushroom. At the Splinter Oak I have a memory, my parents are standing there in front of me.
3
WHEN THE INTERPRETER asked what made me choose my specialty, she added that she supposed if your father was a botanist it was not unlikely that you would take to ornithology. It is true that from an early age I have had a certain conception of nature; the self-evident receptiveness of my parents to the world of living things was bound to rub off on their child. But I was not willing to claim that coming from such a home I was more or less bound to end up as a biologist, let alone set my heart on becoming a zoologist, least of all an ornithologist. I went through a phase in my childhood when I didn’t like these creatures at all. For a long time I was fonder of the cat that brought in the bird than I was of its present to me, laid at my feet with excitement and pride to claim my friendship.
Mother and Father surmised that my aversion was due to an experience I can barely recall, though they often told me about it. It seems that once when I was alone in the house a young bird blundered into our drawing room, and I was infected with the panic of the young creature, which for some reason could not find its way through the open French window and into the garden. I wanted to get away from this agitated, flapping thing that made such awful noises, but just like the ruffled bird, instead of running out into the garden or simply opening the door to the entrance hall, where I would have been safe, I huddled in a corner. When I was eventually found between the stove and the sideboard, I must have been a picture of utter confusion; I don’t remember, but that’s how my parents described it to me.
All I can recall is this unpredictable creature caught up in the dark curtains, I’m staring at the striped edge of the shiny rectangle of cloth, apparently stirring idly in the mild afternoon air, though in fact its motion results from the frantic movements of the young bird, which cannot shake the heavy material with commensurate force. Its claws gripping tightly, the bird climbs higher, and the next moment it is hidden in a fold, but I know it’s still there, the hem of the curtain silently brushes the parquet floor. Did it really enter the drawing room of its own accord, or did the cat bring it in? In my memory the bird more and more assumes the form of a swift — even while the ornithologist in me says that a swift would never fly through an open door into a house, and if it did its flight velocity would make it smash headfirst into a wall, and if it survived it would not be able to get off the floor to bury itself in the curtains.