WHEN I CALL TO MIND Kaltenburg’s feverish look as he reported on his trip to Leningrad, I also see an angry, obstreperous child who had just learned that the family was planning to make a journey westward. I can see myself plucking at the tablecloth, “Dresden,” my parents had said, as though it were a magic word: “We can stop over in Dresden.” But what did they mean, “stop over,” so our real destination was further away? I started to cry, why wasn’t my nanny there to comfort me, where was Maria anyway, she had left the house, and we weren’t going to come back to this place again either, the garden, the fields, the long winter. Let them go without me. I would manage alone here in our house on the edge of Posen. My father shook his head, “Let’s drop it,” no one would promise me we would be away from home for just a week or two, “Let’s drop the subject,” and sure enough there was no further mention of the journey over the following few days.
I did not feel relieved. When my parents withdrew into the study, I sensed trouble. I didn’t understand what they were talking about or how serious the situation was, but I sat up next morning when they mentioned an enormous “meteorite from space,” a “Steller’s sea cow,” and the “great auk.” These really were magic words, and coming from my father’s mouth they sounded as if my mother had invented them and immediately passed them on to him so that he could savor their taste for himself. Perhaps my mother had found them the night before, in the study from which my parents had emerged—as I could see from the landing—for the first time in a long time without looking worried. I knew what an auk was, and a sea cow, but what would a great auk look like?
“As big as an Atlantic puffin?”
“Bigger.”
“Like a guillemot?”
“Bigger.”
“And where do great auks live?”
“They don’t live anywhere, not anymore.”
That’s all they would tell me: “You’ll see when we get to Dresden,” and “It’s a promise.”
They couldn’t have enticed me there with a Church of Our Lady, a castle, a Brühl Terrace, but the prospect of seeing a strange creature excited my curiosity. It was more than a ruse to make the journey more acceptable to me, I could see it in my mother’s downcast eyes when we stood in front of the bombed-out museum, feel it in her angry tone as we three were having our last lunch together. What did my mother know about the twelve crates of exhibits hidden in Weesenstein Castle since 1942? “Steller’s sea cow,” she whispered to my father across the table, “great auk,” the magic words had lost their power, could not summon up the creatures. And so it was, in that oppressed atmosphere, that I remained none the wiser about their appearance, didn’t dare ask, would have had to whisper as well, just as we went on whispering over the following decades.
My parents conferred in my father’s study, I listened at the door, there were the usual neatly addressed envelopes containing seed samples lying on the desk, my father was still working on his tests. I heard a rustling sound, my mother had picked up a packet of taiga grass seeds, she held a sample of a Siberian plant in her hand, either the two of them spoke in low voices or I preferred not to hear them, preferred to interpret a plan of escape as holiday planning.
For a good while my imagination had been gradually enlarging an Atlantic puffin or a razor-billed auk, in my mind the bird had taken on hitherto inconceivable dimensions, and I grouped a flock of great auks around the Steller’s sea cow, a massive, heavy animal with a shimmering gray and green hide, resting on its short front flippers. In fact I assumed that the sea cow would be a mounted specimen, although I was sure my parents had not deliberately set out to mislead me. In my mind’s eye flesh and muscle and skin spread themselves over the skeletal frame as though of their own accord. Perhaps I would have been disappointed if I really had got to see the animal in February 1945, and I can remember not being altogether able to believe it at first when a colleague later explained in passing that the Steller’s sea cow in our collection was just a skeleton, not quite complete.