Kaltenburg (11 page)

“So an individual bird not only supplies information about itself and its species but will also tell you something about the people who discovered, named, and prepared it, and possibly last saw it alive.”

The name of Gustav Kramer on a label will remind any ornithologist that this colleague discovered how birds navigate by a solar compass, and he will also be reminded that Kramer was killed in 1959 during a mountain tour in southern Italy trying to climb up to the nest of a pair of rock pigeons.

I led Frau Fischer to a pull-out cabinet and opened a drawer containing sections of our finch collection. The birds lay tightly packed, finches from Russia, finches from Italy. A rock sparrow from Kazakhstan, where our own thistle finch and their gray-head meet and intermingle. Our last large consignment of finches came from Görlitz, where the customs people had confiscated the birds on their way from Belarus to a Brussels restaurant. All those already dead on arrival at the German border were passed on to us. In a second drawer there were Saxon finches from the last one hundred and fifty years. The offspring of a linnet and a thistle finch, next to it a cross between a finch and a canary, such as breeders commonly used to produce.

“So when you look at bird skins you see people you know.”

Or used to know. Friends. I felt that more keenly than ever before during the preparations for the move from the city center out to the collection's new building. During the few weeks I spent going through all the holdings, I examined skins that I hadn't seen for years, and while I was packing up in one department after another I found that beside the systematic organization of the collection a completely different network of connections had developed. Birds I had first come across in a film by Knut Sieverding turned out to be in the same drawer as a species discovered by the aforementioned Reinhold—and it was Reinhold who had helped Knut to land his first big filming commission. Night herons, great tits, birds of paradise, magpies, starlings, a crow from Ludwig Kaltenburg's Institute, lay next to a glassy-eyed crow collected by Christian Ludwig Brehm in 1810 and personally prepared by him: I found new interconnections everywhere.

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.

I
ONCE 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.

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.