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Read Russia 2nd pass:Layout 1 5/2/12 1:03 AM Page 17
B a s i l e u s / 17
museum, with half of them scattering on the way there, he saw an entire
room devoted to the motley feathered tribes of Russia’s central region. There
was an active study group there too.
At the age of forty Ertel was a lean, emphatically trim and tidy gentleman,
rather colorless, as if water and various lotions had washed the natural
coloring off his bony face; only his nose—thin, with a fine, inky veinlet running
across its narrow crook—flooded with pink blood in the cold, and the
tips of the fingers that the master craftsman used with such exceptional sensitivity
to prepare his various delicate specimens were the same bright pink.
The times were long since gone when biology faculty student Pasha Ertel
mostly dined on the carcasses of partridges and woodcocks that he was commissioned
to mount by a hunting and fishing shop. Now Pavel Ivanovich had
his own workshop in Moscow, with fifteen employees—his own pupils—
working in it; he had an established professional reputation, thanks to which
museums of natural history, not only in Russia but across Europe, commissioned
him to produce items for their collections. As he climbed into his
Ford Mondeo, wearing his dark-gray cashmere coat and silk tie that shimmered
like liquid silver, the workshop-owner could have been taken for a
highly paid employee of some bank or the manager of some thriving company.
Pavel Ertel was compared with the famous taxidermist and naturalist
Fyodor Lorents, and it was predicted that his reputation in life would endure,
like Lorents’s, after death—if only because of the longevity of superlatively
fabricated and systematized exhibits that could stand in museums for two
hundred years or more.
Ertel’s own personal passion was still birds. In drawing the stocking of
skin and feathers over the flexible frame wrapped in elastic bandages, he
could express a distinctive, habitual manner of extending a wing and convey
the very ability to rise into the air. Feathered predators were the birds he
did best. These noble knights of the air, armored in battle plumage reminiscent
of fearsome swords and chain mail with holes rusted through it in places,
aroused a species of rapturous battle frenzy in the taxidermist’s soul. Because
in actual fact he was the Baron von Ertel, the descendant of naval, artillery
and guards officers who had served the Russian Empire honorably for ten
generations. After the October coup, his family had contrived to pass themselves
off as agricultural Volga Germans, an element of international labor.
During the Second World War the von Ertels had been exiled, together with
the Volga Germans, to the Chita region, and from there the family later
began its slow return to urban civilization, studying in teacher-training col-