The Curse of the Labrador Duck (35 page)

Lisa and I settled into a workbench near a window, surrounded by storage cabinets that reached from the floor to the ceiling high above. These cabinets contained one of the world’s great ornithological collections. It can boast about 170,000 skins of 4,200 bird species. It
also has 2,700 skeletons of 1,080 species, 850 species represented by 7,500 alcohol specimens, and a jumbo collection of nests and eggs.

St. Petersburg’s Labrador Duck, a drake, was something of an oddity. Although it was a long, skinny study skin rather than a taxidermic mount, it had light brown glass eyes. I suspect that this specimen started its life-after-death experience as a taxidermist’s creation and for economy of space was later converted into a study skin. A really nice job had been done of it, and the specimen retained a touch of the artistic. There are some small pinholes in the webs between the toes, which suggests to me that it was pinned to a display board sometime in the past. It resides in a cardboard box, ornately decorated with the beautiful paper often found on the inside covers of precious old books. Between examinations, the Labrador Duck shares its box with an extinct Heath Hen.

When I first contacted Loskot ten years earlier, he explained that his duck had come to Russia from the Hamburg dealer G. A. Salmin sometime between 1830 and 1840, but the rest of its history is lost to the mists of time. For a spell after World War II, the hen from Dresden via Königstein joined the drake, but you have already read that story. When Paul Hahn constructed his book on extinct North American birds, he had been able to gather a lot less information on this specimen, perhaps because he was working under the restrictions of the Cold War. When his book on extinct birds came out in 1963, he was able to write only: “UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS: 24. Musej Zoologicheskogo Instituta Akademii, Leningrad. Male adult.”

I finished poking and measuring the duck and put him back in his box. After the gentlest of hints, Loskot generously offered to give Lisa and me a tour of the public galleries. They proved a most startling contrast between the wealth of their contents and the shabby, third-rate way in which they are displayed. On offer were three mammoths, one of which had been excavated from the frozen wastes of Siberia in 1902, some 44,000 years after it had died. Other displays included dioramas of penguins and northern seabirds,
and a particularly good grouping of ungulates with corrugated noses.

Despite this wealth, the displays themselves were horrid. The lighting was poor, the wooden bases crude, paint flaked everywhere, and the cheap glass in the displays was rippled. Old cardboard labels read “CCCP,” even though the Soviet Union had dissolved fourteen years earlier. By chance, we had arrived on the sixty-fourth anniversary of the start of the war between Russia and Germany. These hostilities were commemorated by the glass panels of a display, still perforated by bullet holes. Further along, a display of skeletons of whales and seals was oddly perforated by a giraffe skeleton. The whole area was in a state of repair, disassembly, construction, disintegration, or demolition; difficult to say which. Clear sight lines were a thing of legend. The floor was erupting everywhere, and if the museum were in America, it would be closed immediately for fear of a major lawsuit.

However, to describe the museum as a dump would have been uncharitable, callous, and a gross misrepresentation. This is a great museum that has the misfortune to be situated in a country that can’t afford to keep it up to a high standard. The displays were much better attended than those in some of the far fancier museums I have seen in richer countries. The museum hosts between 700,000 and 900,000 visitors each year. On the day of our visit, several young people used the exhibits to practice their painting and sketching, with an albatross being rendered in ink and a petrel in pastels. Much like Russia herself, the Zoological Institute is stationed somewhere in the abyss between here and there.

When I had first contacted Loskot about my visit, I had offered to take him and his wife, Vera, out for a meal. On the day, they showed incredible hospitality by hosting lunch in the room outside Loskot’s office. The room spoke of a day when natural history museum research was a priority. Cabinets were filled with great volumes of ornithological study. Whether they belonged to the institution or to Loskot wasn’t clear. Beside the window perched an old record player of the same vintage as the telephone in the entrance foyer. Vera served us well-steeped tea which was then diluted with hot water, a Russian tradition. We were offered rye bread, ham, tarts, and chocolate-covered biscuits. As we ate, we chatted and discovered many common
interests. We found that Vera studies the taxonomy of parasitoid flies, not so far from my interest in fleas. I found that Loskot and I share a passion for the song dialects of birds and jazz music. He showed me his directional microphone and digital recording machine, which, quite frankly, is a hell of a lot nicer than my dingy old analogue equipment. Lisa and I pulled out our Russian phrase book to try out a couple of the simpler expressions, but, regrettably, for those raised on English, some Russian syllables are nearly impossible to pronounce.

I pulled out a letter that Loskot had sent me ten years before in response to my inquiry about the duck in St. Petersburg. Vera described me as “dangerous” for keeping all my old correspondence. Could this reflexive caution be a holdover from the former Soviet era? Is caution still ingrained even in the most welcoming of people? With a twinkle in her eye, Vera also described me as “difficult” for turning down the offer of more food. Before we left the museum, Vera and Loskot warned us sternly about pickpockets and Romany thieves, and reminded us about the hazards of drinking tap water. After saying good-bye to Vera, Loskot guided us back through the dusty tunnel system to the museum entrance. He clasped my right hand firmly in both of his and wouldn’t let go until he could think of the proper English phrase. He said, “Please write.”

B
ACK OVER THE
Neva River, we purchased bottles of drinking water from a street vendor, which were cheap by anyone’s standards. We did as we had been told, checking that the bottle had an intact seal; cheap is one thing, but heavy-metal poisoning is another. In the warmth of midsummer, vendors like her might be the only thing keeping the residents of St. Petersburg alive.

We walked broad boulevards and thought the streets resembled something more North American than typically European. With many other pedestrians, we waited at a major intersection for the walk light to turn green. The automobile traffic was continuous. After a period, a uniformed man with a walkie-talkie descended from a kiosk to stop the traffic. We all started to cross.
“Nyet!”
he shouted, and waved through a police escort and a couple of limousines flying diplomatic flags. Having seen the entourage pass, we resumed our crossing along with fifty or sixty other pedestrians. Again he shouted,
“Nyet!,”
ordering us all back to the sidewalk so that the traffic could continue unimpeded, spoke into his walkie-talkie, and climbed back into his kiosk. Surely this abuse of privilege is the sort of thing of which revolutions are made.

Given Peter’s particular choice of geography, St. Petersburg requires an extensive system of canals. We chose to proceed west along the Moyka Canal. Crossing one bridge after another, we were amazed at the number of tour boats that plied the canal. At one point, near a large yellow building, the Yusupov Palace, every passing boat seemed to provide its patrons with a commentary. We heard the spiel in Italian, French, German, and Russian, but not in English, and so we had to pull out our guidebook. In the early twentieth century not everyone was entirely pleased with the influence that peasant Grigory Rasputin had over the Russian court. With the promise of a party, Rasputin was lured to Yusupov Palace on the evening of December 17, 1916. There he was poisoned. Leaving nothing to chance, Prince Yusupov then shot Rasputin. Checking back later, Yusupov found that Rasputin was still alive and after a brief struggle shot him three more times. Not satisfied with that, Yusupov had Rasputin’s corpse beaten and tossed into the river. An autopsy, performed after his body was discovered three days later, showed Rasputin was still alive when dumped in the river and that he eventually died of drowning. Out came
The Beano,
and Lisa took another photograph.

Cutting south along the Kryukov Canal, peeping at every exotic building on offer, we found that the drone of tour-boat commentary resumed in front of St. Nicholas’ Cathedral. Built around the same time as Yusupov Palace, the cathedral is a beautiful structure of pale blue and white, topped by golden domes. At St. Nicholas’, it all came down to weddings, christenings, and other religious services—pretty typical cathedral stuff. The guidebook didn’t mention anyone famous being poisoned, shot, beaten or drowned. Certainly very pretty; the camera came out again so Lisa could snap another picture of me and
The Beano
.

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
arriving at the square around the Hermitage and Winter Palace at 10:00, thirty minutes too early for the opening, we watched workers rolling up acres of sod that had been put down
the day before as part of a commemoration of the Day of Remembrance and Sorrow, when Hitler’s forces had attacked. I brought out my camera and had Lisa snap a photo of me holding up
The Beano
in front of the Winter Palace.

First we queued to enter the Hermitage, and then found ourselves in the line to buy tickets. It became clear pretty quickly that Lisa and I did not have the proper temperament to deal with Russian line-ups. In St. Petersburg, stature and pushiness are inversely proportional. At the head of line I held up two fingers and tried a gruff Russian accent on the word “д
B
a,” but I think it was the wrong genitive singular, and so had to pay the foreigner’s rate—three times as much as for small pushy Russians.

In contrast to the austerity of the Zoology Institute, the Hermitage had weathered Russia’s stormy transition to a free-market economy. Its floors were inlaid with the finest woods in intricate geometric patterns, and skirting boards were done in marble. Galleries featured great towering ceilings with high windows that allowed the most subtle filtered light to pass through. Walls were finished in red or blue or cream or gilt. Great urns and bowls had been created of marble, malachite, and jasper, the result of a competition to see who could use more construction material.

I discovered an interesting painting by Matthias Withoos (1627–1703) that featured a hedgehog, a frog, and two mice partying under a thistle. Interesting, but not particularly good. Paulus Potter (1625–1654) had chosen to paint the backside of a bull, although I cannot imagine why. Joachim Wtewael (1566–1638) had created a piece called
Lot and His Daughters
. The quality was good, but it left me asking why Lot’s daughters were naked, and why Lot was copping a feel. Michelangelo’s sculpture
Crouching Boy
may be the only piece by the artist in Russia, but it isn’t a particularly good piece, having been knocked off while Mike was waiting for the pub to open. For all of the Hermitage’s fame, Lisa felt the housing outpaced the contents.

After a lunch of sandwiches and ice cream, Lisa and I headed off down Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg’s main artery. Once named the Street of Tolerance, it is a promenade of churches, palaces, businesses, and retail opportunities. A must-see for any visitor, the avenue runs southeast from the city’s core, where all well-dressed and soon-to-be-well-dressed
citizens stroll, and where pickpockets are drawn to tourists like a pride of lions to a zebra with a hangover.

A left turn off Nevsky Prospekt at the Kanal Griboedova revealed the quintessential image of Russia. It was the church I would paint if I had any talent as a painter. And some paint. The Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood was constructed on the spot where Czar Alexander II was assassinated in 1831. A riot of mosaic enamel tiles and swirling domes and carved marble and gaudy colors, the ornamentation emphasized the pastel tone of the remainder of the city. The church also seemed as much a tribute to the nation’s mourning over the loss of Alexander as a celebration of Christianity. Out came the camera, and Lisa snapped another quick one of me and
The Beano
. Hawkers around the church offered quick sketches, bottled water, toilet opportunities, and nested Russian dolls. Not all of these dolls followed the theme of traditionally garbed women, instead featuring Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin, Harry Potter, and even Michael Jackson, although he was labeled “John Lennon.”

S
OME WORDS TRANSLATE
from Russian to English fairly easily, but most do not. On a menu, for instance, you might be willing to guess that ordering the O
M
лe
T
would result in the eventual appearance of an omelet, and you wouldn’t be disappointed—unless you really didn’t like omelets. Similarly, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to squeeze the words
Coca-Cola
out of Кoкa-Кoкa. However, no amount of hard squinting could turn the word шпи
H
a
T
into “spinach” as my phrase book suggested.

The prime difficulty isn’t so much that Russian is a foreign language, as that it uses an alphabet that I just couldn’t wrap my noodle around. Invented in the ninth century by a monk named Cyril, Cyrillic has, at least in a nominal sense, only seven more letters than English, but these include г, ж, and я, none of which are pronounced like they look. On top of that, Cyrillic includes a bunch of diphthongs, like юй. Regrettably, after you learn a few of the simpler letters, you find that vowels and diphthongs sometimes, but not always, change pronunciation depending on whether or not they are stressed. “Stress in Russian,” claimed my phrase book, “is irregular.” And after all that, Russian is one of only a hundred languages in Russia. We prayed
that we didn’t get into a cab with a driver who spoke only Nivkh or Vespian.

My Russian phrase book was remarkably frank in the section entitled “Making Friends.” It included some of my favorite expressions, including Tы пpeкpaco
B
ыглялишb! (You look hot!), Ba
M
пpи
H
ec
T
и ч
TO
-
H
ибyдb пи
T
b? (Can I get you a drink?),
MOжHO
T
eбя пoцeд
OB
a
T
b? (May I kiss you?), Xo
T
и
T
e п
O
й
T
и
V OT
eлb (Let’s go back to your hotel), and M
OжHO
c дpyг
OM
? (May I bring a friend?). If you can’t have fun in St. Petersburg on a Friday night with those five expressions, it’s time to check your pulse. Of course, that sort of fun should always be mixed with a degree of caution. Russia can claim two unfortunate statistics. It is at, or near the top of, the world’s chart in terms of an increasing incidence of HIV. It also has a terribly high number of huge boyfriends with no sense of humor.