Terns

Terns are both a species of bird and a recurring point of reference in the novel’s account of scientific observation. First watched along the Baltic coast, they return in the memories of a researcher who captures, measures, and sometimes kills them for preservation. The birds’ fragile bodies and the language of classification bind natural history to the later measurement of human beings, making the distinction between impartial inquiry and coercive science increasingly difficult to sustain.

Observation on the Baltic coast

As a young ornithologist, Werner Stahl spent hours and days in a hide on the Baltic coast near Peenemünde watching terns nest. He remembers their chattering, raucous calls, and manoeuvres over mates and territory. The scene is not simply one of detached observation: it presents the birds in active relation to one another, moving through a habitat and a season of breeding.

Stahl’s recollection also includes the deliberate conversion of living animals into specimens. He chloroformed some birds and handed them to a taxidermist, who skinned and preserved them. Their feathers remained bright and sharp, seemingly alive, while cotton wool protruded from their empty eye sockets. The precise, almost clinical memory holds beauty and violence together: preservation keeps a visible record, but only after the animal has been killed and transformed into an object for study.

From bird study to human classification

Stahl describes his early work as an investigation of hybridisation among five species in the same genus, Sterna. He says that most captured birds were released, while some were chloroformed and skinned because evidence had to be preserved for the future. That justification establishes the logic of his research: the living creature is observed, measured, and, in selected cases, made into a permanent specimen so that it can be compared and classified later.

The novel makes that logic recur when Stahl measures a woman at the biometric centre. He examines her facial structure with callipers, records a widow’s peak, and compares her skin with a von Luschan colour chart. Asked how he entered the field, he traces his career from tern research to a team at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography in Munich, where he specialised in human hybridisation. The transition does not make the two kinds of research identical, but it puts their shared methods—capturing detail, measuring bodies, and preserving evidence—into unsettling proximity.

The specimen and the memory

The birds return to Stahl’s thoughts after he has examined photographs of Hana Hanáková and considers the possibility that she is carrying his child. His mind moves from her recorded bodily features to the terns: beautiful, sleek animals, white and grey, crested with black, and designed for speed. He remembers one palpitating in his palm, watching him with a terrified eye as he prepared it for chloroform. The recollection makes the procedure’s violence intimate rather than abstract. He had to steel himself to do it.

That memory sits uneasily beside Stahl’s work at the biometric centre. He treats human bodies as measurable evidence, while the terns recall the cost of turning a living subject into an object of knowledge. His language of preservation promises a record for the future, yet the image that persists is not a neutral specimen: it is a fragile creature held in a researcher’s hand, alive and afraid. The birds therefore become a recurring counterweight to the supposed neutrality of classification, exposing the vulnerability that scientific systems can erase even as they claim to document it.

A motif of observation and control

The novel first invokes the terns in a café scene, where a crowded gathering of women strikes Stahl as an animal colony. He imagines crows and parakeets mixing across a species boundary and recalls the terns’ calls, courtship, and territorial manoeuvres. The comparison reveals how readily his trained habits turn human company into a field of animal behaviour to be watched and sorted. It also foreshadows the biometric centre’s ambition to make bodies legible through observation and measurement.

Across these appearances, the birds are not only a symbol of scientific cruelty. They are remembered as particular animals, with distinct colours, movements, calls, and vulnerability, even though the surviving view of them is largely mediated by Stahl’s recollections. That tension matters: the same observer who recognizes their beauty also kills some of them to preserve evidence. The terns’ recurring presence gives the novel a concrete way to examine the gap between seeing a living being and reducing it to a specimen, and between knowledge that records bodies and power that classifies them.