As the fever with shivers weakens me and the twenty-inch strip of gauze is stuffed, day after day, into my arm wound, I, wrapped in my cocoon, can still scarcely grasp what has happened. I experience my first nightmares in my sleep and am not yet able to make sense of them. My father sits in my room, and now and then leaves quietly and comes back; and during all those days, more and more corpses are recovered. Every day I talk to the journalists from Stern; and their Peruvian colleagues are terribly upset when the first pictures of me appear in the foreign magazines Life, Paris Match and Stern. Meanwhile, Comandante del Carpio, apparently to protect me, forbids the local press any contact with me. On January 9, a delegation from the company Lockheed arrives. The participants visit the crash site, but they will provide no new details about the reasons for the accident.
On January 11, I move from the Lindholm family’s to the Holstons’ house. The next day a funeral service is held for the thirteen-year-old Nathan Lyon and eighteen-year-old Dave Ericson. What I don’t know, and will find out only years later: They are the two boys who were waiting in line in front of us on that morning of December 24, 1971, when none of us suspected what would happen a few hours later. That day the recovery of corpses is officially ended.
That same day, January 12, my father goes to Pucallpa. When he returns in the afternoon, he is serious and very pale, but composed.
He says he has identified my mother. He tells me very calmly that he had a scuffle with a journalist who tried to hold his camera into the zinc coffin and photograph my mother’s remains. He even knocked the camera out of this fellow’s hand. I’m horrified. Ordinarily, my father would never do something like that.
He goes on to say that he’s not 100 percent sure that the female corpse is my mother. Apart from the lower jaw, the head was missing. However, he took a closer look at the corpse’s foot. My mother had very distinctive feet. Her second toes on both feet were much longer than the big toes, and the little toes were very bent—my father often used to tease my mother about that. And that was the case with this corpse too. My father asks me whether I can remember what shoes my mother was wearing on the day of the accident. When I describe her flat leather shoes with the saddle-stitch seam, which she had brought back a few years ago from a Europe trip, my father nods imperceptibly and looks down at the floor. There was a shoe like that with the corpse.
So my mother is really dead. At that moment, when it becomes a certainty, I feel nothing at all. And I’m surprised at myself. But hadn’t I actually known it for a long time? Had there really still been reason to hope nineteen days after the crash? My emotional void disconcerts me. Shouldn’t I break down crying now? Neither my father nor I do that. He, too, is completely unemotional, and today I know that was our way of protecting ourselves at that time: Everything drips off me as if I were made of glass. And he speaks about it as if it were one of his scientific cases. Which doesn’t mean that all this doesn’t matter to him. It actually matters to him immensely, occupies all his thoughts and feelings.
My father can best show his feelings through angry outbursts, and that’s what he does now too, toward the journalists who bother him during what are, with certainty, the worst moments of his life, as he stands before the remains of the person he loved most in the world. Or he directs his rage toward the authorities who work with appalling sloppiness and trample on his feelings. He will expend a great deal of energy to achieve complete certainty about whether that corpse shown to him in the zinc coffin no. 22 was really Maria Koepcke, born von Mikulicz-Radecki.
During those days he tells me that he’s not entirely sure, that he’s plagued by doubts. He also tells me that the state of the corpse raises big questions. Why was the upper part of the head missing, if the corpse otherwise appeared fully intact? And most disturbing of all: Why was the corpse in such a fresh state? I, too, know very well that a corpse in the jungle can remain intact at most for a few days. I remember all too well the presence of the king vultures, which I found near the three corpses four days after the crash. Ants, bugs, flies, turtles and vultures, specialized in feeding on carrion, promptly find any cadaver, however well concealed it may be.
So why was my mother’s body still so well preserved? There’s only one answer, and it’s horrible: She must have still been alive for a long time. In fact, she cannot have died more than a few days ago. If that’s really true, what must she have suffered in the two weeks before? My mind takes in this information, but my protective mechanism doesn’t let it get close to me. Perhaps I appear completely coldhearted to my father? Her mother lies for two weeks helpless in the jungle and for some reason cannot move—perhaps her pelvis is broken or her spine—and this girl, her daughter, doesn’t say a word. She leans back in bed and simply falls asleep again. Wakes up and asks when the men from Stern are coming today. Eats dinner as if nothing happened.
But maybe he understands what’s going on with me. Or he’s too preoccupied with himself to worry about me at all. Maybe he’s going through the exact same thing, for he’s speaking as if someone else was in the morgue and had a fight with journalists there. What he’s really thinking and feeling at that time—to this day, I don’t know. Later on, we never again spoke about those days.
A brief letter to his sister, which he wrote a day after the identification, perhaps best conveys my father’s distraught state:
Yesterday I looked at Maria’s corpse. The coffin was already soldered up; everything was difficult. I had to have an actual scuffle with the journalists. I was shown Maria’s wedding ring. Whether it was found on the hand no one knew. The definite identification is supposed to have been made through the dental bridge, but the upper part of the skull was missing. Incidentally, the corpse was astonishingly fresh, that is, only destroyed a little bit by vultures and insects. According to our experiences with mammalian corpses laid out in the forest, after about five or six days only bones and pieces of skin should be left. One foot was still relatively recognizable. It could be Maria’s foot (which does have a very distinctive toe shape), but I’m not entirely sure. I would like to ask you to have the corpses examined and assessed there. It’s not impossible that Maria was still alive for days and that the missing parts of the skull were removed later. It would probably be best for you to get in touch with Johann-Georg (my mother’s brother, who was himself a doctor). The rest of the family doesn’t need to know any of this for the time being. Before January 7, no corpse was found. Many of the corpses are unidentifiable. Skulls might be needed to reach the quantity of 91.
Thoughts like these are tormenting him as I, too, write to my aunt and grandmother at the same time. The contrast between our letters couldn’t be greater:
Since Daddy is writing you a letter right now, I wanted to send you a few lines too. Please excuse the poor and uneven handwriting! It’s because I’m writing in bed. I’ve also broken my right collarbone, so I have to be careful.
I’m already doing much better. My wounds are healing well, and I can move really well. All the people here are friendly to me and bring me books and chocolate (unfortunately much too much). The food is always very good. At the moment, I’m living in the house of my doctor, an American. I like it here.
Now I would like to end my letter, because I have another to write.
Considering that I’m seventeen years old and rather eloquent, my dazed state in light of the terrible events all around me, in which I feel like I’m cut off from myself, can be read from these lines. Clearly, I am extremely eager to assure everyone how well I’m doing. In German, the little word “gut,” meaning “good” or “well,” appears four times in this short letter! And this is a day after my mother’s corpse was found.
Today it seems to me as if I had to tell myself again and again: You’re doing well, Juliane, you did it! You’re doing so well. As if at least I didn’t want to worry the people around me, who were consumed by grief and sorrow.
Only since my aunt’s death in the summer of 2010 do I know that my father didn’t
give up his inquiries into the corpse’s identity and cause of death. He wanted to have certainty. But it was as if the chaotic and corrupt circumstances in Pucallpa and the confusing results in Germany, where the corpse was transferred, wanted to confound him more than ever. Due to the difficult circumstances of the recovery, no one had taken photos of the place where the corpse was found or the original position of the body. The surrounding area was not investigated. No one even knew with certainty where the shoe was found.
What is taken for granted for any accident in Germany was completely neglected in those days in the Peruvian jungle—perhaps because of the extreme conditions during the recovery. Eventually the corpses were apparently just packed in bags and taken away.
The day my father stood before the corpse that he thought was his wife, and yet wasn’t certain, a wedding ring was shown to him. He could identify that definitively, for the date of his engagement with Maria and his first name were engraved on its inside. It was clearly my mother’s wedding ring. When my father asked whether it was found on the corpse’s hand, no one could confirm that for him. When he wanted to keep it, they refused him the ring with the argument that the judge had to see it first. My father never saw the ring again. When he inquired with the judge, the military and the responsible hospital, no one would admit to hearing anything about the ring.
The coffin was closed and soldered up again, while my father was still there. On that same day, January 12, it went on to Lima. Here Dr. Luis Felipe Roveredo embalms the corpse on January 13, so that it will make it through the flight to Germany. From my godfather’s garden, a small bouquet is attached to the coffin. It comes from the same bush from which a wreath was woven for my mother on the day of her wedding. On January 14, at six o’clock in the evening, in a hangar at the Jorge Chávez International Airport in Lima/Callao, a funeral service is held. Friends tell us later that the ceremony was really moving and was given an especially dramatic effect by the taking off and landing of airplanes. Many friends and colleagues pay their last respects to my mother. The next morning her coffin is transported on a Lufthansa plane to Frankfurt, and on another to Munich. On January 21, what are thought to be my mother’s remains are buried in Aufkirchen on Lake Starnberg, where her father was buried too. My father and I did not attend either ceremony due to my condition—though I suspect that his reason for staying with me was not only that he did not want to leave me alone but also that he could not have endured the grief.
Why was the burial in Germany? Why not in Peru? I can only surmise the answer, for my father didn’t speak to me about his reasons. I knew that my parents were planning to return to Germany in a few years. How much my father was preoccupied in those days and weeks with his own death is evident to me from another letter to my aunt Cordula, in which he explains in detail how he would like the grave to be designed, which also already provides a place for himself. My aunt clearly found it advisable to write in her reply: Please also consider in all your decisions that you have to be there for Juliane. Having already lost her mother, she needs her father twice as much.
A lot is going through my father’s head those days, and they’re not pretty thoughts. At one point he says to me that he doesn’t consider it out of the question that my mother might still have been alive even when she was found. “But then why is she dead?” I ask with consternation.
For a while he doesn’t speak. Then he says: “Perhaps she was killed?”
The answer is terrible and inconceivable to me. Why would someone have done that?
As a matter of fact, my father cannot get the thought out of his head. He wants to know whether the corpse is his wife or not. He also wants to know when and how my mother died. He asks his sister Cordula to arrange an autopsy in Munich, which she does. But the results are long in coming.
In February, four weeks after the burial, Gerd Heidemann, of Stern, will attend to this at my father’s request. Heidemann even engages the district attorney’s office. The outcome will be more than shattering for my father: the postmortem examination not only neglected to resolve clearly whether the remains are identifiable as Maria Koepcke, but to his horror he finds out that instead of an embalmed and still well-preserved body, only several bones arrived in Munich.
How can that be? A satisfying answer was never found. Was the coffin inadvertently switched? But then why was Maria Koepcke’s lower jaw, the only part of the corpse that could be clearly identified based on her dentist’s casts of the jaw, in the coffin? Both doctors—the one in Lima who performed the embalming, and the one in Munich who conducted the autopsy, or was supposed to conduct it—indicate that it’s impossible for the corpse to have decomposed so completely within those few days. Did someone want to cover something up? My father is inclined to suspect that. But then, what would there be to cover up? It’s a mystery that will never be solved.
In the weeks that follow, my father does everything he can to arrange an exhumation. He sends a sworn statement to Hamburg, in which he describes meticulously what he saw on January 12, 1972, in Pucallpa and compares his observations with his experiences with vertebrates laid out in the jungle. He also encloses a notarized statement from the doctor in Lima, who was the last to see the corpse before its transfer. My aunt translates it into German. But aside from a notice in Stern on February 23, 1972, the matter comes to nothing. The report reads:
WRONG CORPSE
The plane crash in Peru, which only the seventeen-year-old Juliane Koepcke survived after an eleven-day march through the jungle, has found a mysterious epilogue. Fifteen days after the crash Juliane’s father saw his wife’s corpse “astonishingly intact,” had preservatives poured into the coffin and the corpse sent to Munich for examination. But only parts of the skeleton arrived there, from which it cannot even be ascertained whether they belong to a man or woman. Among them, however, was the lower jaw of Frau Dr. Koepcke. Now it can no longer be determined whether the ornithologist had survived the plane crash and died only later.
My father spared me all these nasty details in the time after my recovery in Yarinacocha and in the weeks that followed. But how hard it must have been for him not only to accept the loss of the only person to whom he had ever opened up, but also to be cheated of her corpse, never to know how his beloved wife had died and where her mortal remains might have been in the end.
Even though I knew of my father’s grim suspicions, I myself did not doubt until recently that my mother lies buried in Aufkirchen on Lake Starnberg. It was simpler for me that way. I knew instinctively how important it was to recover my inner balance. Since there was nothing more my father could do, he let the matter rest. Or so I thought—until, after my aunt’s death, I found all these shocking documents.
I also heard nothing back then about the fact that on January 24, 1972, a funeral service was held in Pucallpa for the fifty-four dead who came from the city, and the corpses were interred in the mausoleum inscribed as Alas de Esperanza. Only recently did I find the special supplement that appeared in the newspaper Impetu in Pucallpa that day. According to it, the authorities had originally planned to bury the unidentifiable body parts in a mass grave. The families of the victims, however, found that “impious, godless and inhumane,” and successfully fought this measure. And so these human remains, too, were laid to rest in the mausoleum that I visited for the first time twenty-seven years later with Werner Herzog.
During the recovery work, a twenty-six-year-old voluntary helper named Mario Zarbe displayed an incredible intuition and found almost half of the corpses on his own. According to the information in the special supplement, which contained personal statements along with numerous obituaries, at least six people survived the crash; according to other accounts, it was twelve. After the official end of the recovery, a group of civilians, who didn’t want to give up, found six more corpses, among them that of the one American boy, the eighteen-year-old David Ericson, for whom a funeral service had already been held.
Personally, I’ve never believed there w
as a crime against my mother and regard my father’s suspicions at that time as the grim thoughts of a distraught person. The horrible suspicion he was harboring shows me what a devastating condition he must have been in.
As for her final resting place, I think that her mortal remains are probably mainly in the Alas de Esperanza monument. What’s the difference if her name isn’t written there? Perhaps it’s as good a place for her as Aufkirchen on Lake Starnberg. And what’s much more important: I’m certain that she has found her peace.
A breathtaking sunset, such as occur only in the tropics, turns the sky bloodred. In a few minutes it will be night.
“Shall we get going soon?” my husband, who knows me as no one else does, asks cautiously. It’s a suspicious sign when I say nothing for longer than ten minutes. Then he knows that I’m back in the past again with my thoughts.
He’s right: Tomorrow we have a long day of travel ahead of us. When I think of it, my heart leaps for joy. Soon I will be in Panguana.
An hour later we’re packing again. And suddenly I can’t help thinking of the suitcase that was so unexpectedly brought to us back then. It was one of the suitcases that my mother and I had packed in Lima for the Christmas celebration in the jungle in 1971. It was completely intact. Only the outside of it was soaked. Among other things, there was a Christmas stollen in it, very similar to the one so often described in the newspaper reports. My father and I actually ate this one.
Tapes with birdcalls were also delivered to us, and then something else that made me especially happy: my fountain pen, on which I had written my name with waterproof ink to avoid any mix-ups. After all, almost all my friends wrote with an identical fountain pen. For a long time it was among my greatest treasures—until it was stolen from me years later, along with my purse, during a trip to San Ramón. This loss pained me deeply. Since the crash it had been my faithful companion and a constant reminder of the fact that the two of us found our way against all odds out of the depths of the jungle, not unlike a lost needle in a haystack, back to life.
When I Fell From the Sky Page 15
