Setting Free the Bears Read online

  The Number of Bees That Will Do

  THE HEADLIGHT WAS dancing over them; the squat, alive boxes, three tiers high, looming in front of and fast above us. The humming iron bottom of the flatbed - sagging under honey and level with our coming headlight - reflected our unfair arrival back to us.

  Siggy's elbow pumped twice, whumped me in the chest and rocked me off his shoulders. But I was already helping him; my hands were already knuckling into the tight squeeze of seat and gas tank between us. I pushed up and off from my wrists, snapped my arms out straight and felt myself move away from Siggy and the beast, very slowly, it seemed - for a hundred miles of down-hill-flying road I was pushing myself up and off; for a hundred miles, I was floating behind and away 'from the beast, who was still in second gear and would never find first.

  The jogging-red tail-light pranced below and in front of me. And I thought: I'm going to sit in the air and float this road down to Waidhofen. I'm going to clear these bees by a mile; for a hundred miles I will never come down.

  And the tail-light moved away from me, sidestepped, tried to make up its mind and direction - had, of course, no place to go.

  The longest hundred miles I was ever in the air strangely took no time at all. Not even time enough for the indefatigable Siggy to free his knees from under the handlebars, though time enough for me to see him trying - his dome snapping back and catching all the weird reflections of headlight, tail-light, edges and faces of bee box, flatbed, hulking tractor-fender and the iron parts of Keff's open mouth.

  The tail-light, doing the damnedest dance, fell down on the road and spattered patterns of red-light, white-light pieces - did its dance out and went dark. Siggy, tucking his dome in the shadows, and in his duckjacket, put the old beast on its side.

  The headlight pierced under the flatbed to the safe road beyond. The bike, on its side, was taking that route, flowering sparks from the drag of the tailpipe searing along - of foot pedal and kickstand, of handlebar and wheel hub, biting off chunks of the falling-down road.

  And won't it surprise you, Keff, to see me fly over the whole damn mess and meet up with Siggy when he ducks out from under the far side of your terrible cargo?

  But what did you do, Keff? Just what precisely did you think you were doing - when you lurched forward, Keff, and stalled; when you stalled and then lurched, or whatever the order was? What were you trying to do, Keff? What in your too-late brain could you ever have been thinking? Keff, why did you think you could ever get out of the way?

  Why did you move, Keff - so that Siggy slid under the flatbed, but not out the other side?

  Oh, you didn't move much, Keff, but just enough so that something caught a part of Siggy or his beast - an axle? an inch of tire? the outjutting edge of the flatbed's bottom? God, something said THANG! - a hollow, iron ringing that shook the moon.

  You didn't move much, Keff, but you lurched.

  Just as I was about to fly over your awesome cargo, you lurched, Keff! And Siggy, or a part of his beast, said THANG! up under the flatbed's bottom; and Gallen, her long, loveless arms only pretending to steady the terrible third-tier bee boxes, jumped! Knew the game was up and that the hives were moving beyond her control. She jumped clear; just as I was about to buzz over your bees, Keff - just then. You lurched, stalled, choked - whatever it is you do, and did, behind your gauges, gears, and ominous iron parts.

  And the third-tier bee boxes hung on edge for as long as it had taken me to travel my hundred miles in the air; they fell in slow motion, feathered down to the powder-soft road and the waiting iron edge of the flatbed. The bees and I fell in slow motion, Keff.

  Did I decide to put in a landing when I saw them fall? I came down mushy in the road, which was harder than it looked, and chewed all the skin off the heels of my hands.

  But the bee boxes fell harder than I did. They were as heavy and vulnerable as water balloons. Their frail sides split, and they spilled their running, spongy hives.

  God, what did they say? What did the bees say? Was it 'Who's mashed my home in the middle of night?' Or was it 'Who's woken me up - crashed into the hive, crushed my babies in their waxy little cells of sleep! And who blinds me now with this light?'

  Because the beast wouldn't die, would not put out its headlight; it shone up under the trailer, so beautifully amber, on the great gobs of honey that drooled down over the flatbed's edge.

  Well, the light caught you too, Keff - coming up the road to me, loping bearlike and swinging your great arms round your head, smacking your pants cuffs and leaping, Keff - yes, leaping - and turning around in the air, hugging yourself, Keff; and bending low; and again loping on toward me.

  Did Gallen get to me before you did, Keff? Or did I only imagine her there for a second before you scooped me up like a ball and half carried, half rolled me up the mountain, out of the light that was showing the bees the way?

  And did the stinging begin then? I don't remember feeling a thing. I remember hearing a quieted, much duller repetition of the original THANG! the beast, or something, had made against the trailer. I remember it, thang-whump, thang-whump, up under the flatbed's bottom.

  Siggy, were you trying to lift the trailer off you - still trying to get your poor, wedged knees out from under the handlebars? Your fist, or forearm - your dome? - thang-whump and thang-shump again; did you know I'd hear you and come running?

  I heard you. I came running. And I would have gotten there if the bees hadn't closed my eyes, filled my ears and slowed me to a crawl. Even then I might have gotten there, if Keff hadn't come lumbering down on me, taking me over his hip and up under his arm and bumbling me back up the road.

  If I screamed, it was to hear a human sound; to drown out the bee drone - what was it they were saying?

  'Here is the breaker of homes, the masher of baby bees! And he can't get away if we follow his light!'

  And after that, what was the true order of things?

  There was Keff, telling me what I already knew: 'Oh, smarty, I listened. I listened! I heard your engine die, and I listened for it to start up, but it didn't. I didn't hear it, smarty! I said to the girl, "Just you steady those boxes and we'll finally get across this road." Oh, smarty, ask her! We both listened, and you weren't coming. Nobody was coming. How did you get here so fast that I never heard?'

  And before that, or during that, or even after that, the blinking-blue Volkswagen came down from St Leonhard, having heard, they said, the THANG! - even up there.

  I was trying to open my eyes sometime in all of that. But they wouldn't open, and Gallen put her mouth to them and wetted them cool for me.

  And again Keff assured me that he had listened.

  Then I'm really not sure what I listened for and heard; if there was another thang-whump or two, or if I asked Keff, 'How many bees, would you guess?' And whether Keff and I had a highly technical discussion on the number of bees per box and the number of boxes that had toppled off - whether it was just the third-tier rows on the trailer's uphill, hind-end side, or was it more or less. And did it matter how many?

  And whether Keff answered or guessed; if all of this had happened on the spot, or if my counting of bees hadn't really been later, semi-conscious and semi-sunk in an Epsom salts bath. If any of this was three minutes after the last thang-whump I really heard, or three days after - three Epsom salts baths away.

  And did the faces of the only true mourners crouch about me there on that down-falling road, in that bee-conspiring night? Did the animals accuse me then, mourn him then? Or was that soaked out of me in Epsom salts too?

  The weeping wallaroo, the shaken oryx, the despairing Rare Spectacled Bears. When did I see them mourning him?

  Was it there, with my eyes still puffed shut? Or was it countless cathartic baths away, and long after Siggy had reached and surpassed his quota of bee stings?

  Part Two

  The Notebook

  The First Zoo Watch: Monday, 5 June 1967 @ 1:20 p.m.

  I WON'T ACTUALLY go inside until mi
dafternoon. Another hour or so in this sun won't hurt me a bit; I might even dry out. As you certainly know, Graff, I left Waidhofen in a considerable downpour. And the roads were slick almost all the way to Hietzing, even though the rain stopped once I was out of the mountains.

  I wasn't at all sure of the time when I left. When was it that the milkman first arrived? Everything happened very fast and early; I'm sure I was away by nine, and I've been at this cafe just long enough to order - a tea with rum, because the rain gave me some chill. So then, if I left at nine and it's one-twenty now, we can figure on four hours - Waidhofen to the Hietzinger Zoo. And that's with a wet road.

  You know the cafe I'm at? On the Platz, off Maxing Strasse, across from the main zoo gate. I'm simply resting up and drying out. I'll just saunter over to the zoo about midafternoon, browse a bit, and find myself a spot to hide by the time they start ushering customers out and locking up for the night. That way I'll be inside to see the changing of the guard, if they have such a thing, and I'll be in a position to observe the habits of the nightwatchman. I hope I'll have the opportunity to talk with some of the animals, too, and let them know they've got nothing to fear from me. I'll stay until the zoo reopens; when there's enough of a crowd I'll just meander out, as if I've been an early-morning, paying customer.

  Right now, the cafe's very nice. My waiter rolled back the awning for me, and I've got a tableful of sun; the sidewalk's warm to my feet. A pretty nice waiter, as waiters in the outer districts go. He's got a Balkan look, and his accent's as light as the chinking of wineglasses.

  'Come here after the war?' I asked him.

  'Oh, I missed the whole bit,' he said.

  'What did you miss?' I asked.

  'The whole damn war,' he said.

  I couldn't tell if he was disappointed about it, or if it was at all true. It's true of you, isn't it, Graff? You were all Salzburg people, weren't you? And moved yourselves well west of Zurich before the war, you've said. I'd guess that Switzerland was as well off as any place on the continent and you had Salzburg to come back to. The Americans occupied Salzburg, didn't they? And from all I've heard, they kept things pretty clean.

  My waiter just brought me my tea with rum. I asked him, 'The Americans are a marvelously clean people, aren't they?'

  'I never met one,' he said.

  Sly, these Balkans. He's just the right age for the war, and I'll bet he didn't miss a thing. But if you take me, for example, I'm just the wrong age. I was in the right place for the war, all right, but it passed me by when I was in the womb, and on my way there - and again too fresh from the womb to even take part in the post-mortem. That's a bit of what you live with if you're twenty-one in 1967, in Austria; you don't have a history, really, and no immediate future that you can see. What I mean is, we're at an interim age in an interim time; we're alive between two times of monstrous decisions - one past, the other coming. We're taking up the lag in history, for who knows how long. What I mean is, I have only a pre-history - a womb and pre-womb existence at a time when great popular decisions with terrible consequences were being made. We may be fifty before it happens again; anyway, now science has seen to it that monstrous decisions don't need popular support. You see, Graff, in our case, it's the pre-history that made us and mattered to what we'd become. My vita begins with my grandparents and is almost over on the day I was born.

  My waiter just brought me the Frankfurt newspaper. He opened it to page three and let it fall in my lap. There's a photo from America of a German shepherd dog eating the dress off a Negress. There's an unmistakably white policeman standing by, truncheon raised; he's going to whop the Negress, it looks like, just as soon as the dog gets off her. Quite blurry in the background, there's a line of black people plastered against a storefront by an incredible stream from a fire hose. Didn't I say how these Balkans were sly? My waiter just walked off and left this in my lap. Marvelously clean people, the Americans; they wash their black folk with fire hoses.

  I guess if you're twenty-one in 1967, in America, you needn't glut yourself with pre-history; in America I understand that there are crusades every day. But I'm not in America. I'm in the Old World, and what makes it old isn't that it's had a head start. Any place that's lagging, waiting again for The National Crisis - that's an Old World, and it's often a pity to be young in it.

  I guess if I cared very profoundly I'd go to America, join the blackest extreme and wash white people with fire hoses. But it's only an idea that pops up every now and then, and I don't really give it much thought.

  My waiter came to take his newspaper back.

  'All done with it, sir?' he asked, and held out his hand. He's missing an index finger, down to the base knuckle. I gave him back his paper, spreading my thumb on the white policeman's face.

  'Well, it's a German paper,' I said. 'Don't you think it must give some old Germans a kick to see a little racism in America?' Just to nudge him, I said that.

  'I couldn't venture a guess,' he told me, sly as he could be. Extra spiffy waiters, these Balkans. Half of them appear to have been full professors, before taking up their humble trade.

  Vienna puzzles you that way. It's all pre-history - smug and secretive. It leaves me out, every time. But if we're supposed to be the generation that's to profit from our elders' mistakes, I feel I ought to know everyone's error.

  My tea's cold, but it's heavy on the rum. A good waiter, no matter what else I say of him. But how did he lose that finger? If you asked him, he'd tell you - as a little boy, he was run over by a tram. Only there weren't any trams in far-eastern, small-town Yugoslavia when he was a little boy; there may not even be trams there now. But I guess if you were in America and asked a fingerless man how he lost it - probably a man who'd slashed it to the bone in a bottleneck - he'd tell you how a red-hot trigger burned it off while he was shooting the enemy in Manchuria.

  Some people are proud, and some have their doubts.

  And I can look at how left out of these times I feel - how I rely on pre-history for any sense and influence - and I can simplify this aforementioned garble. I can say: all anyone has is a pre-history. Feeling that you live at an interim time is something in the nature of being born and all the things that never happen to you after birth.

  And once in a rare sometime, there's a grand scheme that comes along and changes all of that.

  So I'll tip this good waiter fairly, and be getting myself across the street. There's many an animal I'd like to have a word with.

  (BEGINNING)

  THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: PRE-HISTORY I

  30 May 1935: Hilke Marter, my mother-to-be, celebrates her fifteenth birthday. Her back against a naked trellis, she lolls in a Grinzing wine garden; some miles below her, the thin sun is melting its way to the snow's last, Baroque hiding places in downtown Vienna; above her, the meltwater trickles through the Vienna Woods, and the treetops are bobbing in a ground fog as intricate as the lacework in the downtown lingerie. Melt, says the day, and my mother melts.

  Zahn Glanz, Hilke's first boyfriend, has such soft and blurry, mudpuddly eyes. But what my mother most admires are the few threads of cornsilk he wears on his bright chin. And Zahn can make his wineglass hum by skidding his tongue round the rim; he can change to an octave higher by the force of his grip on the stem. In 1935, art is still common in glassware, even in public places, and talents as graceful as Zahn's develop, simply, to greatness.

  So Zahn thinks he'll be a journalist, or a politician. And he'll never take Hilke to places where the radio doesn't work - or isn't always on, and loud enough - just so he'll be up with the current events.

  'Watch you don't jar the trellis,' says Zahn, and my mother leans forward, fingers the table, looks over her shoulder and up to the speaker box wedged in the latticework above her head.

  Even the waiter is careful he doesn't disturb Zahn's contact with the world outside the wine garden; he tiptoes - a gingerbread man crumbling softly over the terrace.

  And Rad
io Johannesgasse complies with Zahn's readiness. Hitler is quoted as saying that Germany has neither the intention nor desire to interfere with internal affairs of Austria, or to annex or incorporate Austria.

  'I'll cut off my trunk,' said Zahn Glanz, 'if a bit of that's true.'

  Oh, your what? Hilke thinks. No, you wouldn't. Oh, don't.

  The Second Zoo Watch: Monday, 5 June 1967 @ 4.30 p.m.

  SHORTLY AFTER I came in, I watched them feed the Big Cats. Everyone in the zoo seemed to have been waiting all day for that.

  At the time, I was having a look at Bennet's cassowary, a wingless bird, related to emus and ostriches. It has enormous feet, which are said to be dangerous. But what I thought was interesting is that the bird has a bony casque on top of its head, and the information sheet speculated that this was to protect it - 'as it bolts through dense undergrowth at amazing speeds.' Now why would cassowaries be bolting through dense undergrowth at amazing speeds? They don't look especially stupid. My own theory on the evolution of that head armor is that the cassowaries only grew such helmets after people started trapping them in dense undergrowth, and chasing them at amazing speeds. Perhaps a worry gland produced it. It certainly is nothing they'd need if they were left alone.

  Anyway, I was having a look at Bennet's cassowary when the Big Cats started their caterwauling. Well, everyone around me was hopping, and shoving, just dying to get to the spectacle.

  Inside the Cat House, it smells very strong. People were remarking on that, all right. And I saw two terrible things.

  First, this keeper came and flipped a horse steak through the bars to the lioness; the keeper flipped it right in a puddle of her pee. Everyone snickered, and waited for the lioness to make some derisive expression.

  Second, the keeper was more professional with the cheetah; he slid the meat in on a little tray, shook it off, and the cheetah pounced on it, snapping it around in his mouth. Just the way a house cat breaks a mouse's neck. Great roars from everyone. But the cheetah shook his meat too hard; a big hunk flew off and plopped on the ledge outside the bars. Everyone was hysterical. You see, the cheetah couldn't quite reach it, and, being afraid someone would steal it, the poor animal set up this roar. Some children had to be taken outside the Cat House when all the other Big Cats started roaring too. They thought, you see, that this cheetah was threatening their own food. All of them were crouched down over their meat hunks, eating much too fast. All down the cage row, the tails were swishing - flanks flexed and twitching. And naturally, the people started hollering too. Someone pranced in front of the cheetah, pretending to make a grab for the meat on the ledge. The cheetah must have lost his mind, trying to jam his head between the bars. Then the keeper came back with a long pole that had a sort of gaffing hook on the end of it. The keeper snared the meat and flung it through the bars like a jai-alai ball. The cheetah reeled to the rear of his cage, the meat caught in his mouth. God, he ate up that meat in two terrible bites and swallows - not one bit of chewing - and sure enough, he gagged, finally spewing it all back up.