S. Gazan - The Dinosaur Feather

“Well, you were wrong,” Anna interrupted her.

Cecilie smiled a fleeting smile.

“I like him very much,” she said, with emphasis.

The truth was that things between Anna and Thomas were a total nightmare. They had known each other only five months, and they didn’t live together. Obviously, they would live together now that they were having a baby.

It had started with a chance meeting in a bar in Vesterbro. He was way out of her league, she thought, when she spotted him by the window to the courtyard where he stood with his arms folded, feet at ten to two, with a very straight back and a cigarette in a clenched fist. His T-shirt was rather tight, but it was probably hard to resist the temptation to dress like that when you had a great body, which he did.

Smug, Anna had thought. Thomas was a doctor at Hvidovre Hospital, he was currently training in his specialty, and he was in his mid-thirties. His hair was short, almost white; his skin was fine and freckled, and his eyes were very intense. He left at ten to two; just like his feet, Anna thought, as she watched him exit the bar.

He called her two days later. She had told him her name, and he had found her on the Internet. Dinner? Okay. From then on, they were dating.

It had gone wrong almost immediately. Anna still couldn’t understand exactly how it had happened, but the fact was that she had never been so miserable in all her life, and how this was linked directly to her being madly in love got lost in the drama. Or it did at the time. Thomas loved her, he told her so. But she didn’t believe it. You’re a bit paranoid, he laughed. Anna, however, loved him to distraction. The more he kept her at arm’s length, the more she loved him. She didn’t have a clue what was going on. She didn’t know if they were a couple, if he loved her (he said he did), or if he didn’t (he behaved that way). He would arrive several hours late, or fail to show up altogether without a phone call of explanation. She didn’t know if they had a future together; she didn’t know where he was, why he said the things he said, why sometimes she was allowed to go out with him and his friends and other times not: “Why would you want to do that, sweetheart?” She could offer no reply. She just wanted to go.

Thomas told her to calm down. “Don’t ruin it, it’s fine as it is,” he would say. She tried, but it didn’t work. Thomas had only met Anna’s parents a few times, and none of the occasions had been a success. Anna had never met Thomas’s parents. In the spring Thomas wanted a two-week break; “I love you Anna, never doubt that, I just can’t have this pressure all the time,” he had said and looked irritably at her. In fact, he had been so exhausted after an all-night argument, which Anna had started, that he nearly gave a patient the wrong medication. During their two weeks apart, Anna did a pregnancy test.

“Looks like we’re having a baby,” he said and smiled when they met up again. Anna stared at him.

“Are you pleased?”

“I would have chosen a different time,” he said.

They moved in together shortly before Lily was born. That was nearly three years ago.

The Natural History Museum was an upward extension of the Institute of Biology, and it towered like a decorated ferry over the surrounding buildings. The top two floors of the museum were open to the public. The rest of the building consisted of laboratories and offices symmetrically arranged around a fireproof core where collections of insects, mollusks and vertebrates had been gathered, identified and preserved by Danish scientists for hundreds of years. The Vertebrate Collection on the third floor housed a vast amount of vertebrates; downstairs were two invertebrate departments with mollusks, and furthest down was the whale basement, which included the mounted skeleton of an adult baleen whale.

Anna’s external supervisor was Dr. Tybjerg. He was a vertebrate morphologist who specialized in the evolution of cynodont birds. He was Professor Helland’s polar opposite. He had brown, thinning hair, dark eyes, a small nimble body, and he wore pebble glasses at work that made Anna smile because he looked like a parody of himself. Dr. Tybjerg was shy and very earnest. He never canceled their meetings, and he always arrived well prepared, bringing with him any books he had mentioned at their previous meeting or a photocopy of an article he had promised her. His speech was staccato. He added impressive amounts of sugar to his strong black tea. To begin with he had found it hard to look her in the eye and had clammed up like an oyster on the few occasions Anna had asked him personal questions.

Dr. Tybjerg was the first person to take Anna to the Vertebrate Collection.

“You can’t learn about bones from books,” he said, as they walked down the corridor to the collection. “And you must never,” he added, giving Anna a stern look, “draw any conclusions about bones from drawings or photographs—never!”

Dr. Tybjerg unlocked the door and disappeared down aisles of cupboards. Anna stopped, overwhelmed by the unfamiliar smell of preserved animals, before venturing further inside. It was neither dark nor light. It was like a drug-addict-proof bathroom: you could see enough to find the toilet paper, but not a vein in your arm.

The Vertebrate Collection consisted of a large room divided by display cases with glass doors behind which stuffed animals were exhibited and cabinets with drawers containing boxes and cases in varying sizes, in which the boiled and cleaned bones were stored. Dr. Tybjerg marched down the aisles with familiar ease and stopped halfway.

“This is where the birds are kept,” he said, cheerfully.

The air-conditioning was making a strange noise, and there was an awful smell. Anna peered into the cabinets with their rows of birds, neatly lined up. Ostriches, a dodo skull, and tiny sparrows of every kind. Dr. Tybjerg moved down an aisle to the left and disappeared around the corner.

“This is a sacred place,” he said from somewhere in the twilight, and Anna could hear him rattling doors. She walked close to one of the display cabinets, pressed her nose against the glass, and tried to make out in the gloom what kind of bird was on the other side. It was large and brown, with a plump tail feather. Its wings had been spread out, as if the bird had been about to take off or land when it died, and Anna spotted a stuffed mouse that had been placed in its beak for illustration. Its wing span was six feet, at least, and the bird made all the others in the cabinet look like a flock of frightened chickens.

“A golden eagle,” Dr. Tybjerg said. Anna nearly jumped out of her skin. He had gone around the cupboards and come up behind her without her noticing. He held two long wooden boxes under his arm. She reached out her hand to support herself against a cabinet.

“Don’t touch the glass in the door,” he warned. “It’s genuine crystal. You’ll break it.”

“Does it have to be so dark in here?” Anna asked.

“Come on,” he said, ignoring her question. Anna followed him. Back in the corridor she realized her legs were shaking.

“Now, let’s take a look at this,” Dr. Tybjerg said, as he settled down at a table by a window. “This is a Rhea Americana .” Carefully, he lifted a bird skull out of the box.

“It’s a secondarily flightless bird and so has a skeleton that is quite like that of predatory dinosaurs, in that it has an unkeeled sternum. This makes it a good skeleton to practice on,” he explained, “because when it comes to flying birds, everything is welded together. The bones of secondarily flightless birds, however, are somewhat reminiscent of those of primitive birds. Now, let’s go through it together.”

Anna made herself comfortable and watched Dr. Tybjerg take out the bones from the box and spread them out on the table. A build-your-own-bird kit. He started pairing them up and Anna watched, fascinated. She had no idea where anything went, but she liked the gentle movements of his hands.