Ernst’s work was not going well, his passion for it dissipated. There were other, brighter ornithologists whose ambition burned more intensely, like the men currently filming a couple of South American hummingbird species at the zoo, with full funding from the Reich Office for Educational Film. A military research institute had even given them a camera that was able to record 1500 frames a second, and it was reported they were developing some kind of new flying machine that could hover on the spot.
Even if Ernst was to study with ardent effort, what did all this knowledge amount to anyway? Science only seemed to matter nowadays if it demonstrated some sort of application to the military or big business. His doctorate felt as unattainable now as the mystical city of Lhasa, only much less enticing. At least the birds were familiar terrain for him – no bizarre theories of plummeting icy moons, or remnant ancestors of Atlantis. He stared at the bold letters typed on the front page of his thesis: Avifauna of Tibet: under supervision of Dr Erwin Stresemann. He was glad to have left his laboratory at the University of Göttingen, and that incompetent fool Kühn, who called himself a professor. Berlin University was truly the epicentre of world academia and it felt good to be in the company of fine colleagues such as Stresemann, who was the author of the popular Handbook of Zoology. Even so, Ernst’s heart simply wasn’t in his studies anymore; he would have loved to be back trekking in Tibet.
He slammed a field guide down on the table, accidentally scratching his hand on the edge of a shrivelled hoopoe. The bird’s claws caught the thin skin on his wrist, ripping it open. A searing pain shot up his arm. He pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket, holding it between his teeth as he wrapped it around his wrist to stop the nasty gash from bleeding. His eyes darted around the room, searching for something with which he might clean the wound, resting at last on a bottle of French brandy. He opened the lid and poured some of the brown liquid onto his bloodied handkerchief, swearing as he reapplied it, the alcohol searing his flesh.
‘Control yourself,’ he said out loud.
The walls seemed to be closing in, the photographs encroaching on him. Here he was in one, kneeling beside the pelts of four brown bears on that first glorious expedition in 1931 with crazy Brooky. Beside it hung a daguerreotype of the Panchen Lama, whom Ernst was fortunate enough to have met in exile near Shanghai in 1934. The revered leader sat cross-legged on his throne, his brush of a moustache obscuring his mouth. Ernst thought he looked like a rare bird on display, feathers preened and oiled, cheeks rouged, eyes ringed with kohl and his thin lips painted red.
Ernst noticed a congealed smear of blood on the hoopoe’s foot. Its long, slender beak lay prised open. He could have sworn he heard it laughing.
‘Shut up, you ugly beast!’ he yelled at the specimen. His breathing quickened. He saw his face in the mirror: eyes bloodshot, cheeks sunken.
He picked up the bird’s carcass and flung it across the room. It landed with a thud against a metal bookcase. Ernst stood up. Clasping his wrist, he hurried down the hallway. He struggled with the latch then slammed the door behind him and ran out onto the gravel path.
There had been another hoopoe once. Scratching around in the dirt, it showed off its colourful crest as it pecked at the seeds Ernst’s father left out. Ernst stood and watched it feed on what only he knew would be its last supper. The bird leapt into the air and, with a sudden snap, crashed to earth, its cinnamon-coloured body crumpled, striped wings fluttering. It lay on its back, clawing furiously at the sky.
He heard a roar of fury and disgust, and looked up to see his father, face rigid as wax, standing at the study window, the shutter swinging loose in the light breeze. Behind him, Ernst could see piles of papers stacked on the large desk.
‘Ernst!’ he yelled, stubbing his cigarette out on the wooden frame. ‘Come inside immediately!’
As soon as his father called his name, he knew it was all over. Ernst dropped his slingshot and hurried along the path towards the house, feeling the chasm between him and his father deepening with every step. He stood in front of the heavy wooden doors of the study. His father would be seated behind his mahogany desk, one hand holding a pipe, the other stroking his beard that smelled permanently of stale tobacco. As he waited, Ernst could hear him talking on the phone. Although his father’s words were muffled, he could make out the urgency in his tone.
He knocked tentatively. After a few moments of silence, he heard his father call out.
‘Enter!’
The door creaked as he opened it. The study was lined with shelves groaning with the weight of books of all sizes, their leather spines embossed with gold lettering. Ernst noticed a volume of Goethe’s Faust. Framed photographs of his father standing in front of an array of his beloved horses covered the walls, alongside a proud display of dour-looking family ancestors, all dressed in their Sunday best. Albert Schäfer had been a looming but absent figure as Ernst was growing up. A celebrated entrepreneur, he ran the successful Harburger Phoenix Rubber factory, travelling the world from Russia to the Americas on company business. Today he wore his usual suit and tie, his hair slicked down with a neat, slightly off-centre part, his moustache covering a mouth set in a crooked line.
‘Come forward, boy.’
Ernst walked across the Persian rug and stood in the middle of the room, before his father. Albert Schäfer’s lips were pursed, his nose empurpled with rage. He flattened his left palm on a blotter, picked up a fountain pen and began to write. The solemn silence in the room was broken only by the fierce scratching of the nib. His father lowered his pipe and flicked a small yellow booklet across the desk. It landed in front of Ernst. It was his report card, and it wasn’t good.
‘What do you have to say for yourself?’
‘Nothing, sir.’
The hoopoe had been his father’s favourite; he fed the flamboyant little show-off every day, enamoured with the splendour of what he called its ‘majestic markings’. He frequently bored Ernst with the details of its peregrinations, tales of its annual migration over the hurdle of the Alps, its determined tiny body enduring altitudes of up to 3000 metres in order to arrive back in the Schäfer’s front garden at the beginning of each spring. And after breeding inside the old shed, the bird waking Ernst every day at dawn for months on end by hooting its scientific name over and over – Upupa epops, Upupa epops – he was glad to see it gone each autumn. The old man spoke about how the exultant call mesmerised him, taking him back to the idyllic days of his childhood, growing up on his grandparents’ farm. He read somewhere that the hoopoe’s numbers had declined since then, and Schäfer Senior thought it was his noble duty to feed the bird and encourage its survival. That day, however, Ernst had seen it as a brilliant opportunity to add a rare specimen to his growing collection.
After several minutes, the clock in the hallway chimed eleven, marking out the time the boy knew he might have left under his father’s roof. He could see by the way the man sat up straight, rigid with fury, that his father was finally doing what he thought needed to be done. He had been threatening to send Ernst away for years, so the words he knew were now being etched so forcefully onto a single sheet of his father’s best-quality paper came as no surprise. Ernst was almost glad things instantly became so clear, so simple.
His father looked up. Ernst proffered a queasy smile. Their eyes met, but like the same poles of two magnets forced together, they repelled each other’s gaze. Ernst stood there, perched between his childhood and the rest of his days, feeling his time in Waltershausen shortening with every swing of the clock’s pendulum. He stared at his father, noticing for the first time the grey bristles on his cheeks, skin cracked like that of an antique marionette. Schäfer Senior dipped his pen into the inkwell, accidentally knocking the bottle across the desk. The stain spread across the blotting pad, but he simply moved over a little, ignoring the mess. He returned to the letter, finally signing it with a flourish. Glaring at his young son from over the top of his spectacles, he finally spoke.
; ‘You will leave for Heidelberg this Monday. Herr Direktor was expecting you next year, but I have taken the liberty of calling him to make earlier arrangements.’ He opened a drawer and pulled out a leather strap, slowly placing it on the desk. Fingers of smoke reached across the desk, curling around Ernst’s throat. ‘You have crossed the line with your behaviour this time, and there is no better place than a strict boarding school to drill some good sense into a wayward boy. Discipline is what a young man needs, and I’m afraid your Mutti has spoiled you rotten. This wildness must be tamed.’
In the tainted light of dusk, Ernst headed towards home, taking his usual shortcut through the lawns. He walked briskly. His shadow stopped following him as the sun sank behind the linden trees. The neighbourhood of the zoo precinct was deserted at this hour, the street lamps blinking in the fading light. Children had already been dragged home by their nannies for dinner, bath and bed. A large bird stood on the crossbar of a swing set in the centre of a playground, preening its shiny feathers. Nebelkrähe, mist crow. The smell of smoke and fried bacon hung heavily in the air. Ernst’s wrist throbbed, and he felt a stabbing pain in his chest. Colour continued to leach from the sky. He spun around, sensing he was being followed, yet saw no one.
Back home, he retreated to his study yet again, a tapestried cushion propped up against the small of his back. He surveyed the room, which held almost the sum total of who he was. His achievements were measured in head counts, in the preserved corpses of animals he’d carefully plucked off this earth. Thankfully, he was a crack shot. Almost from the time he could walk, he would secretly tag along on other men’s hunting trips. Like a soldier falling in line, in his tiny hiking boots he strode across the most inaccessible places, on account of the birds. He was eager to see their thick rainbow plumage. From behind the trees, he watched as shooters crept silently through the underbrush, stalking a woodpecker or a rare hawkfinch. One old man he followed on many an occasion always took off a bird in flight with one clean shot. He watched the man carefully, trying to learn how it was done. For Ernst, blowing a wing off was not an option; a bird with missing wing bones was useless to a collector. It was either a pellet straight to the breast or it would be left there to die.
A row of tiny bird skulls – a memento mori from many of his hunting expeditions – now lined the top shelf of his desk, tucked between textbooks on taxidermy, zoology, biology. To collect was to control.
Ernst’s eyes rested on a dusty brown bottle lodged between a box of cigars and a framed photo of his father. The bottle was a gift from Brooky, when they first met back in 1930, just before they set off on their first expedition together. Although the ink had faded, the elaborate lettering on the label was still legible: Laudanum, opium from the poppy plant, whose large, delicate blood-red petals flirted with death. The curved bottle on the shelf was a seductress; Ernst had never opened it, although Brooky often urged him to try it, saying it would be life-changing. Even his beloved Goethe had explored the notion I change my brain, therefore I am, but Ernst believed that man held the world together only through immersion in nature.
He thought about Brooky’s decline into drink, and how fed up everyone became with the American towards the end of their second expedition. The lily-livered adventurer had fled in the middle of the night, leaving Ernst to face an onslaught of Chinese warlords and their marauding tribes. But Ernst, determined to complete the expedition, led the entire entourage through the precarious hills of China by himself. Although they still kept up a correspondence of sorts, Brooky’s desertion had tarnished their friendship. Admittedly, there had been some misgivings about the joint project from the start. It felt self-defeating in some way to try to wed German scientists with Americans, their attitudes being so different. But Ernst was an obstinate man, just like his father; once he made a decision, he stuck to it. It was indeed an honour to be part of an American expedition, to be affiliated with an institution as prestigious as the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. It gave him the unique opportunity to hunt the elusive panda bear. But he knew that even at the age of twenty-one, he demonstrated more leadership skills than Brooky ever would. Some nights out there in the wilds of Kham, curled up on top of his own bedroll, the mules snorting as they swished at gnats with their shabby tails, Ernst dreamt of his snail-paced progress up the ranks of academia. He imagined himself, funded by some generous philanthropist who recognised the importance of his work, catapulted to the heights of success.
‘Why do you have to kill so many of them?’ Herta asked him later that evening as they sat in his study, the incident with Klaus still haunting her. She stroked an eagle that lay on his desk. ‘Can’t you just observe them while they are alive?’
‘Dead birds tell us tales,’ he replied, sounding like a father admonishing his delinquent child. ‘We can learn all sorts of things from preserved specimens – their diet, for example, or their patterns of migration. And besides, it is important to build a collection for future generations. There’s no telling what pressing biological questions will be of concern to our children. This way, future scientists will have material and samples to study. Surely it’s better to preserve dead birds for science than simply watch them become dinner for rats.’
‘But they would still be alive if you didn’t shoot them, Ernst.’
He took the eagle from her and placed it on the desk. ‘Don’t touch, my dearest,’ he said, taking her elbow and leading her to the kitchen, her slippers scraping on the floor in feeble protest. ‘It’s in the interests of science. You wouldn’t understand.’
Oh, that she could take flight from all this, migrate to more hospitable lands. She would climb to the heights of the sky, teasing the wisps of clouds, barely flapping a wing as she cruised over villages, fields and lush forests. Poised somewhere between mankind and heaven, she would travel thousands of miles to see the world. It pained her to see the eagle recruited now as the Reichsadler, a symbol of less lofty ideals. If she had those mighty wings, she would set off on her own private exodus, drop the swastika from her talons, swapping it for the olive branch, and perhaps follow the bald eagle across the Atlantic to taste life there. And then, at the end of days, she would fly around the throne of God.
Herta took her precious copy of the Bible from the shelf, opened to Proverbs and read out loud:
‘There are three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.’
She marked the page and set the book aside. Plunging her hand into a bowl, she kneaded raw minced meat between her fingers, preparing klops for dinner, one of Ernst’s favourite meals.
Ernst returned to his study and loosened the bandage Herta had wrapped around his wrist. How could his own wife criticise him, see his life’s work as barbaric? Herta thought the thrill of the hunt was pitiless, chasing after an animal whose only desire was to survive. It seemed she was incapable of understanding how much it was a spiritual event for him. He, Ernst Schäfer, was not a bloodthirsty man. On the contrary: who else but someone who truly venerated nature would put up with the attention to detail necessary for the preservation of an animal’s carcass? Not many were willing to endure the putrid smell of decay in order to bring the world a thing of beauty to behold.
As people gazed through the glass at the dioramas of natural-history museums around the world, they shared in the wonders of nature, and its serenity. They didn’t realise it was impossible to be a hunter without loving the animal you chased. Somehow, he needed to make Herta see that he was a dedicated chronicler of the wild, sacrificing his own comfort for future generations, so that through his work all might witness the beauty of this earth.
Himmler must not catch wind of Herta’s protests; the man was a bloodhound when it came to sniffing out dissent. Ernst would never forget the time he overheard the Kommandant laughing with another senior SS officer about the Polish intelligentsia:
‘We should give them a chance to examine potatoes from under the ground.’ Ernst understood he had to be careful not to end up in a precarious position because of his feisty wife.
He reached up and took the small bottle of laudanum down from the shelf. His fingers left marks in the dust and he wiped them on his trousers. Over in the corner of the room his shiny new leather boots stood tall alongside his worn-out hiking shoes, which lay slumped in the corner. That evening, poring over photos of his trip with Brooky, he tried to slip one of the worn boots on again but, like a jilted lover, it put up a stiff resistance. A pair of Tibetan slippers stood in front of the boots. The Panchen Lama, garbed in robes embroidered with silken threads of crimson and gold, had given them to Ernst as a gift.
Ernst looked up. From his desk he could see Herta reading in the loungeroom, her back towards him. Himmler was right about the benefits of a wife; she gave his restless soul a hearth and a home. He watched the woman he loved as she set the book aside and moved over to a corner of the room. She lifted her precious flute from its case and brought it to her lips. The music was warm and tender, but he could hear the quivering in her breath, like a songbird singing to its friends of its longing to be free. He knew that feeling all too well. Part of him ached to escape from trying to be a perfect husband, a studious scientist, a spotless officer of the Reich. Tibet, like a sultry mistress, waited in the background, beckoning him irrevocably towards her seductive terrain.
CHAPTER 17
Early November 1937
As the new year approached and the departure date loomed closer, Ernst and Herta’s apartment became the ersatz headquarters of the expedition. With so many people constantly coming and going, Herta was being driven to despair.
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