The Curse of the Labrador Duck (22 page)

The Lustgarten awaited me. The site had been used to grow vegetables and herbs until taken over in the seventeenth century by the Great Elector, who apparently favored pleasure over nutrition. I
walked through the grounds, keeping myself open for anything that would instill lusty thoughts. Nothing did. I continued past ever so many museums on the island, but I didn’t have the impression that I would find my enduring image inside any of them. In my ideal world, where admission to all museums is free, Museum Island will be in line for a big change, and I suppose that isn’t likely to happen until Berlin crawls out from under its crippling debt.

I came to the Gertraudenbrücke, a bridge adorned by a bronze statue of St. Gertrude, the patron saint of a hospital long since demolished. The statue, rich with symbolism, has Gertrude leaning over a poor boy, offering him a lily (symbolic of virginity; his or hers, I don’t know), a flagon of wine (indicating love), and a distaff (for charity). The mice at the base were probably symbolic of rodents in general. The boy was using his knee to pin a rather distraught-looking goose. Next to the bridge was the Galgenhaus (Gallows House), so named because, history tells us, an innocent girl was hanged there. There was no plaque describing the hanging, but signs indicated that parts of the building were for rent.

Carrying on with my search for simple charms, I discovered a café that provided me with a
bis’ Weissbräu
and the day’s special—
Gebackener Camenbert mit Preiselbeersauce
. I knew the word
mit
, and guessed that
Camenbert
was Camembert cheese, but I relied on my phrase book to bail me out on the other words.
Gebäck
are pastries, and
Preiselbeeren
are cranberries. Thoroughly vegetarian, it came with French bread and a salad based on clover. It was almost good enough to become my enduring image, but not quite.

When a planned meeting with the brother of a work colleague did not materialize, I went off in search of dinnertime adventures on my own. Wandering west along the Torstrasse, I found a series of Middle Eastern cafés and take-aways, and opted for a falafel sandwich to go. I felt a bit like part of the scenery, among the early-evening crowd, even though almost everyone was more appropriately dressed for the warm summer weather than I. And then, while walking along the Invalidenstrasse, a patch on my left thigh seemed strangely cool. Despite my best efforts to eat carefully, my last bite had caused a stream of tahini sauce to pour down my leg and onto my shoe. So much for being an inconspicuous part of the backdrop.

A few steps farther along, I came across a strip of rubble and grass with a bit of new construction on either side of the street. It seemed odd to have so large a chunk of valuable real estate so poorly used in a city of this size. And how odd that the site should be so linear. Could it be that I had found the site of a chunk of the notorious Berlin Wall? Little of the wall remains, and most of the material that had made up the wall has now been recycled in road construction. One thousand years from now, our ancestors will curse us for the wall’s near-complete demolition. I understand the need to put unpleasant things behind us, but if they get put too far behind, we tend to forget them and run the risk of repeating them.

Heading back toward the hotel, I strolled through the Volkspark am Weinbergsweg. The park was packed on that early Sunday evening, and my stroll was leisurely, if only because there were acres of skin exposed to the fading sunlight, and some of it was worth looking at. In an era of depleted ozone and soaring skin cancer rates, some people had seen altogether too much sun that afternoon. One young lady had rolled up her white tube top so that just her nipples were covered. Her boyfriend caught my eye and scowled. I suspect he had been doing a lot of scowling that afternoon. A few dogs looked very warm. A few books looked very well read. A few fellows in Jamaican national colors looked very Rastafarian. A gentleman tending a cheap metal barbecue spouting big blue flames looked very perplexed. At lunchtime, I had been the youngest person in the restaurant. This evening I was the oldest person in the park, and the only person whose trousers were stained with tahini sauce. Could this be my enduring vision of Germany? A scene of young people enjoying their youth in a city park, as they did in so many urban centers? I could see nothing that made it an image of Berlin as opposed to an image of, for instance, Cincinnati.

I
WAS OFF
for the zoology museum early the next morning. It was a Monday, and the museum was closed, as most German museums are on that day. I was, however, a bit distressed to find that the main entrance was barred by a big metal gate, and there was no one in sight. I tried one side of the building and then the other without success, and then found a man in a traffic-control kiosk. “
Guten Morgen. Mein
Name ist Professor Glen Chilton.
” I threw in “Professor” for a bit of oomph. “
Ich möchte gern Frank Steinheimer sehen.
” The traffic control guy looked at the lady he had been chatting with, and they both shrugged. I tried again in English, and they shrugged again. I ventured the word
Ornithologie,
and finally
Zoologie,
and was directed to the correct door. The museum’s Keeper of the Keys offered to guard my bags and hailed Steinheimer.

This was the third time I had met up with Steinheimer. The first was when he had helped me on my initial visit to Tring. The second was the bird collection conference in Leiden. Each time I saw him he looked younger, more casual, happier, and more full of youthful vigor. If he doesn’t stop this, he will soon be an irresistible woman-magnet. Steinheimer was dressed particularly casually that day because he had come in during his vacation time to help me and a pair of young researchers from the Czech Republic. He took me to the Labrador Duck, which, he explained, hadn’t been brought out for examination in a very long time. Steinheimer then did exactly what I hoped that he would do—he offered the three of us a tour of the facility.

The Museum für Naturkunde is one of the largest natural history collections in the world, with more than 60 million specimens of mammals, insects, and plants, and representatives of almost all the bird species known to science. It was founded in 1810 as an expansion of the collection of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The list of contributors to the bird collection reads like a who’s-who of early ornithology. In a refrain all too familiar, much of the collection would likely have been lost to wartime bombing but for the efforts of curators who hid specimens away in cellars, bank vaults, and village schools.

Clearly Steinheimer loves the Berlin museum very much. We started our tour in one room of the ornithology branch of the museum’s scholarly library. Books were shelved floor to ceiling, and the ceiling was very high indeed. Ladders provided access to items out of reach of the spiral staircase and balcony. Given the value of the collection, I was surprised that we were allowed to amble in, and even more surprised that Steinheimer was allowed to handle the books without white cotton gloves. I certainly wasn’t going to leave my fingerprints on them. He showed us examples of the first books ever devoted entirely to birds, dating from the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, originals of books I had only heard of and had not seen even as reprints. The hand-colored artwork in some was both subtle and emphatic. Two of the best books were in need of rebinding, which would cost about
1,000. This seemed a small price to pay, considering that together they were worth about
300,000. Steinheimer claimed it would not take long to make a short stack of books whose combined value would exceed 1 million euros.

Steinheimer then took us through the collection of stuffed birds, which contained many items whose scientific value was inestimable. These had escaped demolition in Allied bombing by the narrowest of margins. We were shown a specimen, no longer more than a foot and a small bundle of feathers, with a shard of glass impaled in its wooden base. The glass had been part of a window before the bombs started landing. He showed us wooden cabinets with shrapnel still embedded. Some specimens were quite dirty, but considering the hell they had been through during the war and since, it is surprising that they remain at all. The one thing that we weren’t able to see was arguably the museum’s greatest treasure. There are only a handful of
Archeopteryx
fossils in the world, and Berlin has one of the best. This creature is usually seen as an intermediate between bird-like dinosaurs and full-fledged birds. I am sure that everyone has seen photographs of
Archeopteryx
fossils, and many museums own re-creations, but to see a real one would be near the pinnacle of my scientific experiences. The museum had recently cobbled together the funding necessary to put their fossil on display, but at the time of my visit, it was locked away in a safe, and unfortunately I didn’t have a good enough reason to ask them to take it out.

The zoology collection is impressive, but the buildings that house it are both astounding and terrible at the same time. If these buildings had been constructed with any less care, Allied bombs would have reduced them to a smoking pile of rubble. Even so, the “temporary” roofs installed immediately after the bombs fell were still in place. Some rooms were unheated. There is no modern security system, and no fire sprinklers. If a fire breaks out during working hours, someone is appointed to walk around the buildings banging on a gong. Indeed, the east wing of the museum has yet to be restored, sixty years on, making it one of the few remaining war ruins in all of Berlin.

After the museum tour, Steinheimer took the Czech researchers on a loop of Berlin, leaving me to complete my usual tricks with the Labrador Duck. A handsome little male, he was a bit dirty but otherwise in good shape. His gray-brown glass eyes had particularly large pupils, making him look more alert than most specimens. Steinheimer had described it as the finest Labrador Duck in the world, but it isn’t quite that high up the list. He sits on a simple but elegant wooden base with a slot to hold a Plexiglas cover. The duck normally lives in a glass-fronted cabinet with a stuffed Great Auk and a couple of exotic-looking black birds with long, curvy bills. The tag around his left leg was not particularly revealing, giving only its catalogue number, 14094, and the printed words
Zoolog. Museum Berlin.
Even if we don’t know exactly where or when this Labrador Duck was collected, we do know a little about how it came to be in Berlin. Writing in 1954 about extinct and endangered birds in the collection, Erwin Stressmann explained that Martin Heinrich Carl Lichtenstein purchased the specimen for 18 thaler from a Hamburg dealer named G. A. Salmin on August 17, 1838.

To show what a complete prat I can be, Steinheimer had been able to correct me on an assumption. What I had thought was the site of the Berlin Wall the night before was merely a construction site, fully 500 yards inside the region formerly known as East Berlin. He showed me on a map where I could find the river that had made up part of the boundary between East and West, and I set off for it, en route to the train out of town.