I picked up the blade again and cut through the transparent skin around the eyes until the eyelids were separated from the dark eyeballs. Now for the brain. I made an incision diagonally toward the base of the skull, noting that the neck and tongue were released by the same cut. I lifted the brain out carefully, the eyeballs, taking trouble not to get any secretions or blood on the dead sparrow’s feathers. I sprinkled borax over the head and packed the eye cavities tightly with wadding.
Professor Kaltenburg stood by the periodical shelves, randomly pulling out one issue after another and leafing through them. Perhaps he was looking for his own name. I turned the head and neck skin back again with my index fingers, took the sparrow by the beak, and shook the neck feathers back into place. Kaltenburg was restless.
“Do you remember a man coming to the door and telling me he had run over one of my jackdaws? Well, the story simply didn’t add up at all. Turns up on an old bike talking about his car. He probably didn’t even have a driving license, let alone a car. Didn’t it ever strike you as odd? And how would a jackdaw finish up under his wheels? That alone might have set you thinking. I tell you, he got rattled on the way home and lost his nerve.”
I introduced the closed tweezers into the eye cavity and coaxed the head feathers back into place. Then the skin was painted with the toxic solution.
“They suddenly turn all humble and come crawling to me, holding out their blood-soaked bags. They’re looking for punishment, they want me to bawl them out. But I won’t give them the satisfaction, I thank them politely and let them go on their way. I could see at a glance, that dead jackdaw was full of lead shot.”
“Can’t these people be held to account?”
“Do you want me to shout it from the rooftops? Even the slowest would get the idea. And then we’d have a new popular sport, shooting Kaltenburg’s birds. The Institute would be closed within a month.”
“You’ve never told me about all this.”
“Naturally I don’t tell you everything. I don’t want you losing your confidence on account of such things.”
So much for the skinning. Now the bird had to be totally reconstructed. Kaltenburg left me working alone for a while, went wandering off through the rooms. When he came back, he seemed distracted: “If we ever go to Vienna together, remind me to show you the two sea eagles in their eerie that Crown Prince Rudolf shot nine days before he committed suicide in Mayerling.”
While Kaltenburg was telling me about Vienna, I grew calmer with every hand movement.
“And then if you go to the Natural History Museum in Bucharest sometime, you’ll be amazed. The dioramas alone: in the low lighting you have to look hard for the animals between the grasses and bushes.”
On his first visit there, standing in front of the display cases on the upper floor, Kaltenburg had almost burst into tears, “You know what that means with me”: the exuberant multiplicity of species, subspecies, varieties, although no one — neither a curator nor a bird — was using the display to show off. Despite the great wealth of information, a kind of restraint prevailed, you could almost say tact, which immediately told visitors that here they had pulled off the trick of preserving respect for nature while at the same time offering every possible detail an inquiring wildlife enthusiast could desire about birds, these shy creatures.
“I remember two birds in particular, you’ve guessed it, a couple of jackdaws, eastern jackdaws, male and female, the label said they had been collected not long before my visit in April 1950 by some enthusiastic soldiers on army land in Bucharest.”
Kaltenburg in front of the periodicals, completely lost in thought.
“Incidentally, don’t forget to take a quick look at the wall on the landing before you rush upstairs: there’s a niche there — you might say a display case — with two urns containing the ashes of the long-serving director of the museum — a student of Haeckel’s — Grigore Antipa, and his wife.”
The less fat a skin contains, the easier it is to preserve. By the afternoon I had managed to produce a sparrow skin that I was satisfied with. Kaltenburg was too.
“I said you could do it.”
Outside, it was rapidly getting dark. Conscientiously I wrote out the label, naming Kaltenburg as the collector, Funk as the taxidermist. The first bird skin I had contributed to the collection.
“They must be just about finished by now.”
Ludwig Kaltenburg looked at me inquiringly.
“In the Great Garden, I mean.”
It was no longer on his mind. “Are you still talking about the amateur marksmen?” And no, the hunt was due to last only until eleven that morning. “They’ll have gathered in their spoils ages ago. Imagine how much work will be coming the way of our curators and taxidermists when the SST comrades start logging in what they’ve bagged.”
9
IF THE INTERPRETER HADN’T asked me about the year the Ornithological Collection episode took place, I would never have realized that — although I can remember every word, Kaltenburg’s oddly changeable tone, the sparrow I skinned, and the gloom of a December day — I couldn’t remember whether it was 1955, or a year later, or 1957. It felt as though I had spent a day with Kaltenburg in a secluded room out of time. I have no date to attach to my feeling of helplessness to influence external events, let alone put a stop to the hunt in the Great Garden, for example by wandering all unsuspecting into the park for a stroll and thus forcing the shooting party to suspend their activities for a while at least.
It’s possible that I would have been arrested for disturbing the peace and interrogated, a refractory young man who, despite repeated warnings, had gained access to a prohibited area; it’s also possible that in the case of such a transgression I would have been threatened with consequences, declared insane, expelled from the university because I had insulted upright members of the Society for Sport and Technology. Perhaps the professor had wanted to protect me. Or he knew me better than I knew myself and thought it would be easier for me to bear my own impotence away from the scene than standing at the edge of the Great Garden, counting the shots, seeing the birds fall out of the trees in front of me, avoiding the eyes of the law enforcers.
A Sunday in December: to establish the exact date, all I would have had to do was consult our skin collection. Among countless specimens I would find a young male sparrow, with a delicate bluish sheen to its gray head and distinctly, almost cosmetically rimmed walnut-brown cheeks, whose label bore the professor’s name as well as mine. Or I might look among the corvids to identify birds shot that morning in the Great Garden. Then I would be able to put a date to Kaltenburg’s exclamation “I don’t want you losing confidence,” this anxious thought, expressed in an offhand sentence, which I couldn’t relate to anything in particular, and which, it seems to me, corresponds to the helplessness I felt that day. Ludwig Kaltenburg and I, spending a day out of time in the ornithology room, both depressed, both trying to look forward to the days, weeks, years that lay ahead of us.
I can at least say with some certainty, without further research, that our time together among the dead birds fell within the period when all the talk was about the return of the Dresden art treasures from secret Soviet collections. Amazed, almost stunned, and a little suspicious, we stood in front of the paintings in the Zwinger Gallery, expecting someone to speak up under cover of the dense mass of visitors and expose the exhibition as a nonevent, a collection of more or less skilled copies. In fact, among the circle of those to whom I talked about things that were not for the ears of strangers, it was Ludwig Kaltenburg who, without taking the precaution of sounding out art historians who knew something about the subject, was the only one not to harbor any doubt whatsoever about the authenticity of these newly liberated Rembrandts, Vermeers, and Raphaels. The professor firmly believed in the sincerity of the new, transformed Soviet Union, and he wouldn’t have been Ludwig Kaltenburg if he had been worried simply by finding he stood alone in his opinion.