The Curse of the Labrador Duck (26 page)

Without information to the contrary, I assumed the Église Saint-Germain is the church in which Sand’s grandmother arranged for her to take her First Communion. Bits and pieces of the church date
back to the eleventh century. Money was donated for reconstruction in 1895, but due to miscalculations about the strength of the foundations, the church came tumbling down the following year. It took eight years to stick it all back up. I then took in the Maison rue des Pavillons, where Sand took up residence after separating from her husband.

I found myself in the Place du Marché. As far back as the 1400s, this was La Châtre’s main square and the very heart of its industrial and commercial workings. At one time the Place du Marché was the place to be big and important and cool. Sand purchased wax and tobacco there. If I had wanted either, I would have been out of luck; like the rest of the village, the shop was closed for a two-hour lunch break.

I removed myself to a smaller square known as Place du Docteur Vergne, after someone who performed cataract operations, where George Sand’s parents used to smooch covertly. Perhaps Sand was conceived here. My wanderings led me to a lovely little grassy square known as the Place de l’Abbaye. Two centuries earlier it was a little less manicured than it is today, and reports say George Sand frequented the square with her botanist friend Jules Néraud, to whom the concluding chapter of
Indiana
is dedicated. Unable to find an open rest room, I utilized an isolated spot behind a wall. Next to the square, I stumbled across the house of François Ajasson de Grandsagne, one-time mayor of La Châtre and father of Stéphane, who taught George Sand biology, and probably bonked her silly.

In my two-hour walk through La Châtre, I spied only one other tourist, working off the same town map I had picked up at the tourist information office. Like me, she stopped at the village-approved highlights, read the blurbs provided, smiled, and walked on. She was carrying a copy of
Indiana
.

E
ven though I was slowly draining our bank account, Lisa had been very good about waving good-bye when I took off on trips to exotic spots to see duck corpses. But when it came time to see two pairs of ducks in Austria and the Czech Republic, there had been some pretty good hint dropping about who my next travel companion should be. Being a sneaky sort of person, I somehow managed to turn all this around to come off as the good husband who was taking his wife on a romantic second honeymoon to exotic destinations in Europe. First stop Vienna, then on to Prague.

Before departing, I reviewed what I knew about Vienna. My impressions all revolved around some very large sewers, burly men in army jeeps, a Ferris wheel, and a bit of gunplay, all in black-and-white. My limited knowledge of the Austrian capital all came down to the 1950 film based on the novella
The Third Man
, by Graham Greene. Any sensible married man in Vienna would try to show his wife a good time by visiting sites of great romance. Indeed, the brochures sent to us by the Vienna tourism offices featured an awful lot of photographs of young couples kissing. Instead of being sensible, in addition to examining two Labrador Ducks at the Naturhistorisches
Museum, Lisa and I set out to visit some of the Viennese locales featured in
The Third Man
.

A series of flights brought us into Vienna close to midnight, but, ever the intrepid adventurers, we set off very early the next morning, east along the Mariahilferstrasse, toward the grand center of Vienna. On that chilly, gray October morning, the street was a cliché about the power of retail shopping. If you can’t buy it on Mariahilferstrasse, then you probably don’t need it. The expanse of pavement devoted to pedestrian traffic was far greater than the corridor for vehicles. All around was a parade of temples to name-brand watches and exclusive clothing. In stark contrast, an impressive series of street vendors were selling roasted
Maroni
from the top of fire-filled oil drums.
Maroni
look a lot like chestnuts. We were invited to sample twelve for two euros, or we could be cheap and have just eight for
1.50. I have never eaten
Maroni,
and they probably taste great, but I was put off by their smell of wet socks.

The retail corridor gave way to Museum Quarter. The Natural History Museum is a grand affair, across the Maria-Theresien Platz from the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Opened in 1889, its displays run the range of natural history broadly defined, from archaeology and anthropology through zoology and paleontology. Entering the museum through the opulent front doors would make one feel part of something grand. We entered through the considerably less grandiose staff entrance off the Burgring. The
Kurator
of the
Vogel-sammlung
, Ernst Bauernfeind, was away on the day of our visit. In his place we were greeted by Anita Gamauf, whom I had met at the conference in Leiden the previous fall. Gamauf, a researcher and curatorial assistant, is no giant of a woman. If she were standing on a telephone directory she might be described as medium height, but only by someone not paying attention. But what Gamauf is missing in altitudinal accomplishment she makes up for in enthusiasm.

Usually I have no trouble concentrating when I get down to work, but the behind-the-scenes workspace of Vienna’s Natural History Museum is an opportunity for distraction. Now a storage and work area, the room had once been a gallery open to the public. The great arches still sported paintings of cherubs, peering down while I worked. They made me shudder. Lisa speculated on whether creatures
are considered cherubs if they don’t have wings. Hidden speakers serenaded us with strains of Viennese waltzes, and it occurred to me that it was the first time I had heard a Viennese waltz since Lisa and I took ballroom dance lessons fifteen years before.

With her mouth slightly agape, the Labrador Duck hen looked as though she were talking. With his head cocked a bit to one side, his bill slightly twisted, her drake looked as though he were dutifully pretending to listen. She had been given bright lemon-yellow eyes. His are brown. They rest on wooden bases that are identical, except that the hen’s is 2 cm shorter and narrower. Small cards glued to the bases read
Camptolaemus labradorius
, an archaic scientific name for the Labrador Duck, and the relative position of these cards suggested that when these specimens had been on public display, the hen had been situated to the left of the male. The hen had a substantial patch of lighter-colored feathers on her upper neck that I had not seen in other females, but if this signified something important, I couldn’t figure out what it was.

The hen was acquired from a well-known Hamburg natural history merchant named Brandt in 1846; her earlier whereabouts are unknown. The drake dates back a further sixteen years, and is one of 160 birds the museum obtained between 1821 and 1832 from Baron von Lederer, who had been swanning around in America, acting as the New York consulary agent for an Austrian blue blood, possibly Emperor Franz I. This duck was probably swept to the great beyond while wintering in or near New York City.

After completing my peek and poke, Lisa retrieved Gamauf, who took us through a series of vault doors, down to the museum’s sub-subbasement, where the bulk of the research collection was kept in cold storage. She showed us some of the museum’s great treasures, including a really fine Great Auk and some mid-eighteenth-century stuffed hunting falcons, complete with hoods and jesses. The falcons shouldn’t have been a surprise, given that many of the early treasures came to the museum from Austria’s royal family. Gamauf told us about one important contributor to the museum’s holdings, heir to
the throne Archduke Rudolf. In 1889, the same year the natural history museum opened, the archduke and his mistress, Mary Vetsera, did away with themselves.

With no particular plans for lunch, Gamauf agreed to join us, leading us to a nice place just across Bellariastrasse. I was a little frightened by the waiters dressed in tuxedos, but discovered that this was the normal situation in Vienna. Lisa and Gamauf had cranberries and fried cheese, and I had a pastry stuffed with spinach. When I asked for a beer, our waiter was far too polite to ask me what sort of beer I wanted, and just used his judgment. Gamauf paid for lunch, and wouldn’t even entertain discussion on the matter.

W
ITH TWO MORE
ducks behind us, Lisa and I set off in the tracks of Graham Greene’s imagination. I had first read
The Third Man
more than twenty years earlier, and felt I was ready for a reread. The protagonist, Rollo Martins, wrote novels of questionable merit about the American Wild West under the pseudonym Buck Dexter. Martins is invited to Vienna by his school chum Harry Lime. Set in 1950, Vienna is attempting to rebuild itself from the ravages of war. Arriving in the Austrian capital and finding that Lime has died in an automobile accident, Martins makes his way to the cemetery just in time for the funeral. There he meets Colonel Calloway, a British military police officer, who informs Martins that Lime had been involved in deadly black-market dealings in penicillin. Calloway strongly suggests that Martins return to London forthwith. Instead Martins sets about to discover the truth behind the death of his friend. He becomes romantically involved with Lime’s girlfriend, an actress of marginal talent. Martins eventually discovers that Lime’s death was faked, a ruse to end the criminal investigation that would have landed him in jail. In an attempt to bring Lime to justice, Martins falls in with Colonel Calloway and winds up fatally shooting Lime in Vienna’s sewer system. Pretty bleak. Not a chuckle in sight.

Tramping in the footsteps of Rollo Martins, we found the weather very cooperative. It was a bleak February when Martins landed in Vienna. Ours was a bleak October day, like an incomplete eclipse with the sun hidden by low and heavy clouds. At least it wasn’t snowing on us as it had been on Martins. We started our tour with a visit
to the Hofburg complex and the Neue Burg, not far from the natural history museum. On page 68 of my copy of
The Third Man
, Martins is stuffed into a car and believes that he is being driven somewhere secluded to be murdered. From the racing car, Martins “caught sight of the Titans of Hofburg balancing great globes of snow above their heads, and then they plunged into ill-lit streets beyond, where he lost all sense of direction.”

The Hofburg complex has been the center of Viennese administration for six hundred years. Once housing the imperial apartments, it now houses the offices of Austria’s president. In Greene’s day, the region around the Hofburg would have been swarming with Russian, French, British, and American army personnel sporting rifles. As we arrived at the plaza in front of the Neue Burg, we found it swarming with Austrian army personnel sporting rifles and accompanied by an impressive display of jeeps, tanks, transport trucks, and helicopters. Was this some sort of recruitment campaign gone mad? We never found out.

I had a rare moment of navigational frustration after leaving the Hofburg through an eastern portal. Lisa and I stood on a street corner, each clutching a street map of Vienna. I could find our current location on both maps, although they refused to agree with each other. Stuffing the less detailed of the two maps into a trash can, we walked south along the Augustinerstrasse, where we spied Greene’s Titans. In the corner of a small plaza, peering down at us from a roof high above, stood Atlas holding a globe and surrounded by navigational instruments—sextants and telescopes, that sort of thing. In the other corner of the plaza, a stout woman, probably a goddess, also supported a globe. She was surrounded by the sorts of mathematical instruments that we were told to purchase for sixth-grade math class and then never used.

Just around the corner we found the Hotel Sacher. In
The Third Man
, after too many drinks, Colonel Calloway’s driver takes Martins to Vienna’s most famous hotel, the Sacher, where Calloway’s name carries enough clout to get Martins a room for the night. Lisa suggested that we stroll into the hotel to have a little look around, but I was put off by the burly men with grim faces guarding the doors on both sides.

The Sacher was receiving a pretty major face-lift, even as patrons arrived and departed. Distinguished-looking older gentlemen, no doubt very rich, were accompanied by ladies much younger, whom I suspected were growing richer by the hour. The hotel may not be the city’s center of indiscretion today, but there was a time when the noble and rich saw it as Vienna’s prime destination for extramarital coitus. As we were there in the low season, we might have secured a double room for just
358. If we wanted to splurge, we might have found ourselves in a presidential suite for
3,444. If that all seems a bit pricey, you will be pleased to know that children under six years of age stay free in their parents’ room.

We traveled north aiming for the Josefstadt Theater, which plays a pivotal role in
The Third Man
. Here Martins first meets Anna Schmidt, a second-rate Hungarian actress and Lime’s girlfriend. Founded 126 years before Greene’s time and 216 years before Lisa and I arrived, the theater has hosted innumerable ballet, opera, and theatrical performances. Beethoven wrote a piece,
The Consecration of the House
, specifically for this theater, and, although I have not heard it, I am sure it has lots and lots of notes.