Schäfer Ernst - The Hollow Bones

I remember you once told me about mockingbirds and their special talents for mimicry. They steal the songs from others, you said. I want to ask you this: how were our own songs stolen from us, the notes dispersed, while our faces were turned away?

Berlin, 1936. Ernst Schfer, a young, ambitious zoologist and keen hunter and collector, has come to the attention of Heinrich Himmler, who invites him to lead a group of SS scientists to the frozen mountains of Tibet. Their secret mission: to search for the origins of the Aryan race. Ernst has doubts initially, but soon seizes the opportunity to rise through the ranks of the Third Reich.

While Ernst prepares for the trip, he marries Herta, his childhood sweetheart. But Herta, a flautist who refuses to play from the songbook of womanhood and marriage under the Reich, grows increasingly suspicious of Ernst and his expedition.

When Ernst and his colleagues finally leave Germany in 1938, they realise the world has its eyes fixed on the horror they have left behind in their homeland.

A lyrical and poignant cautionary tale, The Hollow Bones brings to life one of the Nazi regimes little-known villains through the eyes of the animals he destroyed and the wife he undermined in the name of science and cold ambition.

While The Hollow Bones is a work of fiction, it is inspired by true events. This is an invented narrative, fed by imagination, and I have used artistic licence with historical facts, geographies and character details.

21 July 1992
Bavaria

I am searching your face for remnants of the young man, the one who wrote of the cries of the holy Lammergeier as it feeds on the bones of the dead. The brilliant scientist who described the rare Tibetan bunting bird that resembles a flying amulet. Such extraordinary attention to the intricate detail of our world, such careful observation and recording. In your tales you described the faces of Tingri pilgrim women singing for alms, babies tied to their backs. You wrote so beautifully of the ragyapa , scavengers of the city who collected the horns of sheep and goats to protect the edges of their ragged tents against icy winds. All those fantastical accounts you brought back from distant shores, more magical than any trinket you might have picked up from a village marketplace to carry home to me.

As you prepare to leave the world you were so hungry to explore, I imagine I can see a tinge of regret in your eyes and I wonder how we both became the people we are. History unfolded in ways we never could have dreamt of when we were children growing up in our pretty town. Who might we have been had we met in a different place, or another time, citizens of a land far away from our own sullied, shadowy one?

As I watch you sleep restlessly, your wrinkled hand against the white sheet, I am conjuring up our impossible reunion, pretending I am standing at the entrance to 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, under the wings of the bronze angel silhouetted against the sunlight as it lifts a dead soldier out of the flames of war. I see your familiar figure walk towards me through the throngs of passengers jostling to board their trains. You carry the leather travelling case embossed with your initials that I gave you on our tenth wedding anniversary. We embrace, and lips meet, our love made inconspicuous as it is swallowed by the crowd.

At our house on the edge of the park, I picture the children awaiting your return. Little Heidi is fluent in three languages and plays the flute, all of my abandoned dreams re-emerging when I see her small fingers positioned above the keys. How long it has been since I held a flute in my hands. Our Brooke is captain of the school archery team. His fathers son. You are a professor of ornithology, specialising in rare Tibetan birds, and I sometimes slip into the crowded lecture theatre to watch you standing at the podium, spinning your exotic tales to another crop of enthralled students. You are filled with knowledge about birds: the iridescence of feathers, the wizardry of flight, the vagaries of their migrations. We spend our summers on Campobello Island with the Roosevelt clan and send money home to our families to help them rebuild their lives.

On the bed by the window you stir, and your once strong fist claws at the sheet as you struggle to breathe. Soon we will both disappear forever, our story hidden away in dusty archives. Gone will be those children who followed a slender path to their hideaway in the woods, gone will be the lovers who kissed on that fateful day at the zoo. I want to forget the darkness and remember only the good; illusion is such a temptress. It wont be long before we will both float weightlessly, unmoored, our bones hollow like the birds. I remember you once told me about mockingbirds and their special talents for mimicry. They steal the songs from others, you said. I want to ask you this: how were our own songs stolen from us, the notes dispersed, while our faces were turned away?