The Curse of the Labrador Duck (19 page)

Lutz and I left the administrative building, and using a back door, entered the building used to house the public display. Constructed in the fifteenth century as a monastery, after World War II it had been rebuilt rather cheaply and was now in need of a complete overhaul. This is all very well, but the people who hold the purse strings at Mainz City Hall didn’t see the museum as a big priority. It was much lower in importance than the city’s annual carnival, for instance. I could see where paint was jumping off the walls, and the ceiling had goopy water stains.

My head was spinning in anticipation. Was it possible that I was about to rediscover a precious specimen thought to have been destroyed sixty years before? Could it be that the stuffed Labrador Duck was just waiting for me to come along and spot it? A Mr. Hildebrand listened to the story in German. Lutz got his response in German. I practiced my look of casual aloofness and probably failed miserably. At this point, I really wish I could report to you that the Labrador Duck, Great Auk, and three Passenger Pigeons were sitting in the corner of a basement, a bit dusty and a bit smoky, but otherwise in fine shape. Regrettably, I can’t. Hildebrand explained that these birds had been well and truly incinerated, with not a trace remaining.

I was provided with a ticket labeled
Freier Eintritt
, and so I got to enter yet another museum without paying. Unlike some of the world’s great museums that I had visited, and with the deepest respect for the people working at the Natural History Museum, who were shackled by a too-small budget, this one was in pretty ratty shape. One can do only so much with a fifteenth-century monastery, but this wasn’t it. The paint scheme was straight out of your grandparents’ kitchen, circa 1955. Lightbulbs were burned out; radiators were exposed; some of the explanatory labels had been constructed decades before on a manual typewriter. I saw little artistic flair. Most of the displays left me asking why in the world I, or anyone else, should care. Room 12, labeled
Heimische Tiere
, was probably the best of the lot, with some effective, if dated, displays of animals arranged by habitat type, including field and stream, woodland, and creatures to be found near the house. Inexplicably, one end wall was covered with a hundred
mounted heads of horned animals. Or just the skull and horns. Or just the horns.

This is not to say that the museum has nothing to be proud of. It has three stuffed quaggas that survived the war when so many other specimens were lost. The combination of stallion, mare, and foal represents a good chunk of the world’s entire collection of this species of extinct horse-cum-zebra. I was told that there was now interest in genetic analysis to determine if the foal was the offspring of the adults on display. These three specimens are housed adequately, but whoever is in charge of finances for the rest of this museum should be ashamed and embarrassed.

Disappointed by the museum, but determined not to be disappointed by Mainz, I set off to discover something about it. I ate my take-away lunch in a small square in the shadow of St. Christoph Gutenberg Pfarrkirche. Dating to the ninth century, the church is dedicated to St. Christopher, but is better known as the parish church where Johann Gutenberg was probably baptized. You will probably remember Gutenberg as the whiz kid who invented the printing press. According to the people at the Association for the Beatification of Gutenberg, the Mainz hero began life as Johann Gensfleisch but changed his name to Gutenberg, feeling that “Beautiful Mountain” was a more dignified surname than “Goose Flesh.”

I found the tourist information office, despite a series of signs that pointed me to the middle of the Rhine, the city’s crematorium, and the transit of Venus across the Sun. The woman behind the desk provided me with an annotated map of Mainz. Out of English versions, she was able to provide me one with marginal notes in French. She circled the
Dom
and the church of St. Stephen as places that absolutely should not, could not, must not be missed. I baited her. “I understand that there is a natural history museum in town.” “Yes,” she said, “It’s…it’s right…” She couldn’t immediately find it on the map. “Is it any good? Is it worth a trip?” Diplomatically, she neither lied nor warned me off. “Yeah…well…well…We all had to go there as children, but…yeah…it’s okay.” Mainz city councillors should hear this sort of halfhearted endorsement.

I strolled to the river. What a river it is. Romans had been sensible enough to build a settlement where the Main meets the Rhine.
The Romans knew a river when they saw one; the Rhine runs more than 800 miles from the Swiss Alps through Liechtenstein, Austria, France, Germany, and Holland before emptying into the North Sea. I was delighted to see that, unlike so many other great rivers in Europe, this one had some actual commercial traffic. Each barge that chugged by had a single gray automobile on deck. A little less useful than a lifeboat, I would have thought.

Marching toward the center of town, I found the
Dom
, although it looked a lot more like a fortress than a cathedral. The windows that pierced the outer walls are the sort seen often in British castles, designed to make it easy to fire arrows down on potential invaders. About two dozen people had seated themselves in pews on the right side of the nave, but no one was seated on the left side. Risking some horrible faux pas, I plunked myself down on the left side. From my vantage point, the
Dom
seemed to be saying: “This monument to our praise of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit will still be standing long after the memory of humankind has passed from the Earth.” Parishioners may be bathed in warm light on a bright Sunday, but it was all a bit bleak the day I visited. Much of the construction had been completed in dark red sandstone, with dark marble floors and an acute shortage of windows. There was also a surprising paucity of tributes to God.

At the entrance to the
Dom
, there was a large sign written in German, English, Spanish, Italian, Sanskrit, Croatian, Djiboutian, and !Kung click language, explaining that, as a house of worship, a degree of decorum in style of dress was appropriate. As I sat contemplating the nature of my immortal soul, and why the Dom’s columns were square instead of round, a couple off to my left got into an argument. They were dressed in matching cut-off jeans, T-shirts, and denim baseball caps. The argument, loud and prolonged, concerned a message displayed on their digital camera. “Look,” she shouted, “it says right there, ‘Picture is blurred.’” “Well, I don’t care what it says,” he replied. “For what we paid for that camera, it had better be in focus!”

The Gutenberg Museum, Mainz’s most popular museum, was just down the way. The people of Mainz are very proud of Gutenberg, and very proud of God, presumably not in that order. After all, there is only one Gutenberg Museum in Mainz and lots of really big
churches. Without Gutenberg there would be no cheap erotic novels, but without God, reasoned the citizens of Mainz, there wouldn’t be much of anything. Not having gone to the Gutenberg Museum in Strasbourg the previous summer, in a sense of fair play, I didn’t go to the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz.

E
VERYONE IS ENTITLED
to a bad day now and then. Once in a while, for reasons completely beyond your control, a day goes wrong from beginning to end. On a morning with an important meeting, your water heater dies without warning and your hair must be washed in cold water in the kitchen sink. Your cat gets sick on the carpet. Your nose begins to bleed for no good reason. Pixies move your car keys from the hall closet where they are placed carefully every day to a dark corner of the laundry room. Not that keys would do you any good because your car has a flat, and the spare tire, checked just last week, is now inexplicably flat too. There is no predicting such days; these things just happen, and you comfort yourself by humming tunes from Broadway musicals. You are a nice person and, being a nice person, you don’t want to make anyone else miserable. But try as you might to keep it all to yourself, your bad day takes on a life of its own, and when you finally get to work, you pass it along. And as long as it doesn’t happen too often, no one really minds.

But when bad days happen to the same person again and again, and that person makes an art form out of passing along their bad mood, a reputation is in the making. Some miserable people lose their friends, and some lose their jobs, but some manage to hang on and pollute their immediate world. In some cases the poisoned atmosphere can linger, even after the poisoner has moved on to new challenges. This is my theory to explain why some workplaces have a reputation for being uncooperative and inefficient year after year. Everyone knows it, but no one knows how to stop it.

The Zoologisches Institut der Universität Tübingen was digging itself out from under a reputation for being uncooperative and inefficient. When I had contacted the museum about ten years earlier, asking about their Labrador Duck, cooperation and efficiency were nowhere to be seen. The response to my first letter warned me that the curator was extremely reluctant to respond to inquiries because
of “internationally organized gangs” that had stolen specimens from the museum. I passed along contact details for well-placed persons in the world of ornithology who could vouch for my honorable character, but this effort did not elicit any response. The response to another request two months later explained that I could expect help shortly. In this case, “shortly” meant “never,” and, in the end, I couldn’t even get an acknowledgment that the museum really had a Labrador Duck. Luckily, all of that had changed in the interval, and my new contact, Dr. Erich Weber, was being entirely enthusiastic and cooperative.

The trip from Frankfurt to Stuttgart was on a state-of-the-art ICE train. The interior was painted in soothing shades of blue, green, and aubergine. The WC had a lovely floral scent and was nicer than any I have visited on an airplane. At the end of the carriage, an LCD display showed the anticipated time of arrival and our current speed. My handwritten notes read: “The top speed I saw was
161 km/hr!
,
183 km/hr!
,
196 km/hr!
,
212 km/hr!
,
234 km/hr!
, 250 km/hr!” Some of my fellow passengers munched on pastries or pretzels, but two gentlemen across the aisle toasted each other’s health with goose liver pâté on crackers and a big bottle of champagne. If airline travel were anything like this, I would do a lot more traveling.

The train from Stuttgart to Tübingen was less sophisticated, but no less fun. I traveled with seven students from the Atlanta university system, plus one fellow who wanted to make it absolutely clear that he was from Columbus, Ohio, not Atlanta. They were a delight to be with. Enthusiastic, polite, engaged, and forward looking. Bound for Heidelberg, but with a long layover, they had decided to fill the time with a side trip to the university town of Tübingen. They were particularly keen on Tübingen because of its ties to Goethe, who drank heavily and vomited wildly there in the late eighteenth century. They politely asked about Canada, and showed at least a passing interest in my duck quest. I was polite too, pretending that I knew all about Goethe.

I really, really wish I could have spent the night in Tübingen. The city of 87,000 residents is usually described in terms of the grace of medieval stained glass, cobbled alleys, and half-timbered houses, all enriched by the presence of its enthusiastic university student body,
which swells the population by 22,000. No inconspicuous regional college this, it employs every eighth person in Tübingen. Count Württemberg established the university in 1477, after a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. His vision was of an institution to help “the world to drink comforting and healing wisdom and thereby extinguish the pernicious fire of human ignorance and blindness.” These seem like particularly lofty goals considering that, for many students, their time at university is mainly an opportunity to move away from home. An overnight stay would have given me a chance to see some of this, and more time to work on my pronunciation; Toob-in-ghen, not Tube-in-jen.

My first goal at Tübingen’s
Hauptbahnhof
was to unload my backpack. I couldn’t find a checked luggage desk, so I scouted for lockers. None was really big enough, but I crammed my bag into a locker that asked me for
1.50. The locker told me that it would accept coins in any combination of
0.50,
1.00, or
2.00, but that I wasn’t to expect any change. Fair enough, but no matter what combination of coins I gave it, my offering wasn’t satisfactory. I tried another locker, with the same result. Figuring that I had to be doing something wrong, I asked a train station employee for help. After hearing me speak German with an accent, he shrugged his shoulders and walked away. In desperation I tried creative combinations of British pound coins, Canadian quarters, and American nickels, but my locker loved me none the more. I thought about stuffing my chewing gum into the coin slot, but didn’t. It looked as though I was going to be stuck with my backpack.