Setting Free the Bears Page 15

  But butchers are notoriously unimaginative types, and the Kohlmarkt butcher is no exception. He calls Radio Johannesgasse to report a man in a bird-suit, inexpertly driving a taxi.

  'What sort of man, you tell me,' says the butcher, 'would buy a whole chicken and crunch off the legs on the edge of his taxi's door? Just so - opening and shutting the door on his poor chicken's legs until he had them sawed through. And he threw away the chicken!' says the butcher, who thinks the people should be warned.

  But Radio Johannesgasse already has been informed of something feathery - from a worried cab-company man, who phoned after someone was arrested on Wahringer Strasse for blasphemous rantings and general disturbances concerning a possible seraph. So the word is out on Zahn, all right. The only one who's heard it on the radio and isn't interested is Kurt von Schuschnigg, for whom this day has too much time.

  The next thing to befall poor Kurt is Nazi Cabinet member Seyss-Inquart, reporting a most unreasonable phonecall from a diatribing Goebbels in Munich. Seyss has been told to seize control of the Cabinet and see to it that Schuschnigg calls off the plebiscite. Seyss-Inquart is almost apologetic about it; perhaps he's not sure if things aren't happening a bit too fast. He and Schuschnigg go along to find President Miklas, after Schuschnigg - or someone near him - has sent a Chancellery pageboy to pick up the fallen mass of bed sheets that is interfering with traffic in the Michaelerplatz.

  And Grandfather Marter has again decided that the head librarian will stay at home; in fact, since he heard the first radio report of the taxi-driving, birdlike creature, my grandfather has not left the window. Grandmother brings him his coffee, and Hilke watches the Schwindgasse with him. The sun isn't down on the street yet. It's an occasional sun, anyway, and it strikes, when it does, only the topmost stories and roofs across the street - and is impressive only when it catches the brass ball cupped in the palms of a cupid atop the Bulgarian embassy. There are cupids all over, but only the Bulgarians gave theirs a brass ball to hold; or someone else gave it, perhaps to insult the Bulgarians. Anyway, it's the only embassy building on the Schwindgasse, and it's given Grandfather something to watch while he's waiting for Zahn. Grandfather has noticed that even the Bulgarians are making and receiving phonecalls today. A short, heavy man, who must have hair all over himself, has been stooped at the phone in the front-office window, all the while that Grandfather has been standing watch.

  When Grandfather hears the latest news brief of the Kohlmarkt butcher's experience, he asks Grandmother for a tea with rum. The Kohlmarkt butcher has an eye for detail. Radio Johannesgasse broadcasts a picture of a madman in a bird-suit, reeking of cognac, driving a taxi with JA! SCHUSCHNIGG! chalked on the hood.

  If Schuschnigg pays any attention to this local affair now, it's only because he has enough imagination to see what the Nazi news agency could do with such an item: A secret Bolshevik society of terrorists disguised as birds, taking over the city's public transportation systems to prevent voters from participating in Schuschnigg's rigged plebiscite. But local disturbances can't seem very important to Schuschnigg now. He's having trouble enough convincing old President Miklas that Germany's demand of Seyss-Inquart should probably be carried out. And old Miklas, so long inactive, is picking this occasion to offer resistance.

  Perhaps Schuschnigg has read the writing on the wall, on his early-morning stroll through the dark-paneled offices of the Chancellery; Maria Theresia and Aehrenthal, and the small wood-carved Madonna for the murdered Dollfuss: a gallery of Austria's deciders - always for or against Germany.

  No such heavy thoughts are weighing down Zahn Glanz. He's a bird, and flying. He's coming up Goethegasse and almost doesn't stop for the tram coming round the Opernring. It's unfortunate that Zahn makes such a display of last-minute stopping; the squeals attract the attention of some rowdy street workers, waiting for a drill-bit replacement. One of them must have just been near a radio, because the JA! SCHUSCHNIGG! on the hood appears to have special significance. It's lucky for Zahn, though, that they don't conceal their excitement and approach the taxi with stealth. Instead, they raise an awful cry and charge, and Zahn has time enough to feel quite threatened. He shoots the intersection with only one of the workers making it to the running board. And if that worker was pleased with himself - if he's been leering in the window at Zahn - he's not very happy when Zahn reaches the Schillerplatz and startles a drove of pigeons, dung-dropping their terror in flight.

  'Cawk!' Zahn screams to them, birds of a feather. And the worker is convinced he should be waiting for the drill-bit with his friends, and not hanging on to the handle of the locked door, and beating his head on the rolled-up window - receiving only once and briefly, a terrible glance from the empty eyeholes of the armored eagle.

  Round the Schillerplatz and through a close arch of the Academy of Graphic Arts, the worker flattens himself against the taxi and hears the echo of some awful wail he doesn't recognize as his own.

  Zahn Glanz, in the clear for a moment, kindly slows his taxi and aims for the last archway of the Academy of Graphic Arts. Then he opens his door. Not too hard; he just lets it swing out, carrying the surprised, clutching worker off the running board. The worker dangles, watching the arch approach; then he lets go of the handle, and Zahn closes the door. In his rear-view mirror, he can see the worker backpedaling and almost catching up with his own momentum. But he topples over a little foolishly, and somersaults out of Zahn's mirror.

  Zahn decides that alley travel is advisable, since he's not sure who's after him. But he runs out of gas in the alley alongside the Atelier Theater. His taxi comes to rest just under the billboard portrait of dark-eyed Katrina Marek, who's been a sensational Antigone for the past two weeks.

  'Pardon me,' says Zahn, because he bumps Katrina when he opens the door. If it even crosses his mind that it's strange of the actress Katrina Marek to be dressed in a sheet for hailing taxis, Zahn doesn't give it much thought. He's dressed none too smartly himself.

  And once again my grandfather is troubled by what he calls his far-sightedness.

  'Hilke,' he says. 'Would you bring me my coat? I think I'll be going out.' And although there are two possible entrances to the Schwindgasse, Grandfather settles his gaze on one.

  Meanwhile, the eagle is still preferring alley travel; he swoops along the garbage routes, and it's not until he emerges in the Rilke Platz that he realizes he's in my mother's neighborhood. Zahn feels a little weighed down from all his swooping under chainmail. He boards the hindmost platform of a Gusshausstrasse tram, just starting up from behind the technical high school. Zahn thinks it's wise to stay outside the tramcar, but the tram picks up a little speed, and the eagle's pieplates begin to clap. The conductor squints down the aisle; he thinks a piece of the tram is loose and flapping. Zahn hangs back on the handrail and takes one step down the platform stairs. Someone points at him from a pastry-shop window. Zahn rides the platform stairs alone; his tail feathers learn to fly.

  And he'd have been all right that way, for at least the block or two farther he had to go, except that a throng of technical-high-school students, sitting in the last car, decide to come out on the platform for a smoke.

  'Morning, boys,' the eagle says, and they don't say a word. So Zahn asks, 'You haven't seen Katrina Marek this morning, have you? She's wearing her sheet, you know.'

  And one of the student mechanics says, 'You wouldn't be that birdman, would you?'

  'What birdman?' says another.

  'What birdman?' says Zahn.

  'The one who's terrorizing people,' the student says, stepping a little closer, and one of his friends remembers, then; he steps up closer too.

  Zahn is wishing he had his head off so he'd have better peripheral vision - and know, if he were to jump, whether he'd hit a hitching post or a litter basket.

  'It looks like my stop coming up,' says Zahn, only the tram isn't slowing any. He puts one foot down another platform step, and leans out on the handrail.

  'Get him!' shouts
the closest student, and brings a lunch pail down on Zahn's hand. But the eagle flies off backwards, losing one of his claws.

  Zahn makes an awful clatter, and his pieplates spark on the sidewalk; several little fastening wires gouge the eagle's back. But he is less than a block away from my mother's, and hasn't time to grieve over the pieplates spinning and rolling free down the sidewalk and along the curb.

  My grandfather says, 'You can shut off the damn radio, Hilke' - having just heard the news brief of the birdman's brutal kidnapping of a worker from an Opernring street crew.

  Hilke already has her coat, and she puts her scarf on - loose around her neck. She follows Grandfather to the staircase landing outside the apartment. Grandfather looks up the marble-and-iron-spiral stairs, tuning his ear to the opening of letter slots and doors. Then he leads Hilke downstairs and through the long lobby to the great door with the foot-length crank-open handle. Hilke peers up and down the street, but my grandfather looks only left - to the corner at Argentinierstrasse. He watches a man who's tamping his pipe bowl with his thumb and standing back-to Argentinier.

  Then the man turns round to the corner and ducks his head, thinking he hears the approaching wing beat of a hundred pigeons. And Zahn Glanz, banking on the corner, topples the man and jars himself off balance down a short flight of steps and against the door of someone's cellar cubby. So that Zahn is below sidewalk level and altogether out of sight when the man picks himself up and shakes the pipe tobacco out of his hair; and looks both ways along the street - and seeing nothing at all, bolts down Argentinierstrasse with a wing beat all his own.

  Grandfather waves. Zahn is crawling up to the sidewalk when a bustling little laundress opens the cellar-cubby door. She jousts the eagle with a sock stretcher, and prances lively up to the sidewalk; she's going to give the bird a clout, but Zahn lays his limp, cold remaining claw against her indignant bosom. The laundress drops to her knees, convinced the thing is real.

  Zahn is winging to my mother. He chooses to fly the last few yards and nearly clears a parked car, getting his beak caught on the aerial and ripping off his whole head. Grandfather gets a grip under the pieplates and clatters Zahn through the great lobby door. Hilke scoops the eagle's head under her arm and covers it with her scarf. Downstreet, the laundress still kneels on the sidewalk, hiding her face in her hands; fanny-up, she seems to be expecting some ungentlemanly visit from a god.

  My mother picks up feathers and bits of down; fussily she gets them all, from the parked car to Grandmother's kitchen. Where Zahn slumps against the oven - an almost-plucked bird, wrapped in tinfoil and ready to bake.

  'Zahn,' says Grandfather. 'Where did you leave the taxi?'

  'With Katrina Marek,' Zahn says.

  'Where?' asks Grandfather.

  'I ran out of gas right under her nose,' Zahn says.

  'How far from here, Zahn?' says Grandfather.

  'She was wearing her sheet,' Zahn says.

  'Did anyone see you leave the taxi?' Grandfather asks.

  'The proletariat,' says Zahn, 'they're rising up to destroy the city.'

  'Did anyone see where you left it, Zahn?' Grandfather shouts.

  'Katrina Marek,' says Zahn. 'I should go back for her.'

  'Put the poor boy to bed,' says Grandmother. 'He's totally addled. Get him out of that costume and put him to bed.'

  'Jesus,' says Zahn. 'It's been one long day.' But my mother is too kind to tell him that the morning's just beginning.

  And although I'm sure that Schuschnigg already has guessed the outcome, the day must seem long to him too. It's only nine-thirty when Hitler makes a phonecall and delivers a personal ultimatum to the poor Chancellor: the plebiscite must be postponed for at least two weeks, or Germany will invade Austria this evening. So Schuschnigg and the faithful Skubl confer: the class of 1915 Austrian reservists are called to colors, supposedly to keep order on the upcoming election day; the Socony Vacuum Oil Company of Austria is asked to supply extra fuel to motorize possible troop movements. And Chancellor Schuschnigg gloomily notices that by noontime the city is preparing a second day of celebrations for Schuschnigg's Austria. Leaflets for the plebiscite are floating down the streets. The sun is very warm and bright at noon. The people don't seem to notice the increase of militia on the fringe of every little fest. And the militia, too, are tapping their boots to waltzes and patriotic marches, from radios pointed out the open windows.

  Schuschnigg makes his third phonecall to Mussolini, but the Duce is still unavailable. Someone sends another message to France.

  The noontide report on Radio Johannesgasse is somewhat vague with the worldwide news. It's about the Salzburg border being closed, and the uncounted troop build-up; a rhino assembly of tanks inching forward in the night, a daze of headlights peering across the border, and, in the morning, a screen of smoke hanging above the German forests - from a million cigarettes lit and puffed once and put out on signal. And something about how Radio Berlin is broadcasting the news of yesterday's and today's Bolshevik riots in Vienna, where there haven't been any rioting Bolsheviks since the great siege and capture of the Schlingerhof Palace in 1934.

  The local news is more detailed. The kidnapped worker has been found; he was beaten off the birdman's speeding taxi and miraculously escaped with scratches. The birdman, the worker estimates, is at least seven feet tall. That was in the Schillerplatz. The birdman was then spotted on a Gusshausstrasse tram; a brave group of technical-high-school students tried to capture him but were overpowered. And lastly, on the Schwindgasse, the birdman assaulted Frau Drexa Neff, laundress. Frau Neff maintains the creature is most certainly not human, and she didn't see which way it went after it attacked her. Authorities in the nearby Belvedere Gardens are searching the shrubs and trees. And there is still no sign of the apparently abandoned taxi, with JA! SCHUSCHNIGG! on the hood.

  But my grandfather knows where to look. By checking the theater listings and discovering where Katrina Marek has been astounding as Antigone, and by realizing that the Atelier Theater is neatly between the castaway worker at the Schillerplatz and the eagle's first taxiless appearance on the Gusshausstrasse tram. So Grandfather empties a two-quarter cookie crock and dampens a sponge; he puts a funnel in his overcoat pocket. Zahn doesn't have a key on him, so Grandfather hopes the eagle left it in the ignition. Then Hilke puts the sponge in her pocketbook, and Grandfather carries the cookie crock under his arm, hefting it up as if it were full; they leave the Schwindgasse apartment, trusting my grandmother will tend to the undisturbed sleep of Zahn Glanz, laid to rest in Hilke's bed.

  It's unfortunate that Kurt von Schuschnigg is of a more compromising nature than my grandfather. At a little after two-thirty, Schuschnigg bows to one of Germany's ultimatums. He asks that Seyss-Inquart phone Goring in Berlin and convey the Chancellor's decision to postpone the plebiscite; Seyss-Inquart also tells Goring that Schuschnigg has not resigned his Chancellorship. Grandfather, of course, could tell Kurt a thing or two about the insatiable nature of Field Marshal Goring's appetite.

  But my grandfather isn't available for consultation. He's walking my mother out of the Tankstelle on the Karlsplatz, with a cookie crock of gasoline under his arm - just three-quarters full, so he can walk without slopping. My mother is smiling more than a family-outing smile, because Grandfather has told the Tankstelle man that the cookie crock is a surprise for an uncle, who eats too much and is always running out of gas.

  They cross the Getreidemarkt, whispering family secrets; they slow down to look at the billboards on the Atelier Theater.

  'Oh, look,' says Grandfather, reading matinee times.

  And Hilke says, 'I think there's more around the side.' And turns up the alley, trying not to be startled by the taxi squatting under Katrina Marek's nose. 'Come on,' she says to Grandfather. 'It's really the best picture I've seen of her.'

  'Just a minute,' says Grandfather, still staring at the matinee schedule. But he moves along, reading, and darts a look up and down the street; he sticks his
hand round the corner of the alley and waggles a finger at my mother. She takes the damp sponge out of her pocketbook and rubs JA! SCHUSCHNIGG! off the taxi's hood. Then she stands back to look at Katrina Marek, and moves casually round the taxi, here and there whisking away a flake of chalk. Then she comes back out of the alley and tugs my grandfather's arm.

  'Come on, go look,' she says. 'It's a wonderful picture of her.'

  'You read this,' says Grandfather. 'Would you just read this? Isn't that amazing?' And he moves around the corner, pointing back to the matinee schedule. Hilke tosses her head, gets a look both ways; she shakes her bracelet for Grandfather.

  From the alley, Grandfather says, 'A real beauty, you're right.' And removes the gas cap his first trip round the taxi; inserts the funnel while leaning against a fender, gazing fondly at Katrina Marek. 'What do you think of that schedule?' he calls, and my mother jingles her bracelet again. Grandfather empties the cookie crock into the gas tank. On his way out of the alley, he passes the driver's-side window and is delighted to see the key in the ignition.

  'This is truly incredible,' says Hilke, pointing to the schedule. She takes Grandfather's arm, and together they walk on, past the alley and up a block. Then Grandfather makes her a bow, kisses her cheek and hands her the cookie crock. My mother returns the kiss and goes straight on, while Grandfather turns up a side block. He comes out behind the theater and waltzes into the alley, facing the taxi head-on.

  My mother tosses herself along, throwing back her hair for the storefront windows to see; she cuddles the cookie crock against her high, light bosom; she sees herself, transparent, passing through racks of dresses, rows of shoes, swivel displays of cakes and pastries; through the Kaffeehaus windows too, she sees herself lift faces from the rims of cups - and pass indelibly, even if transparent, through the mind of everyone who's looking out when my mother looks in. She imagines Zahn Glanz is watching her too, in his dreams brought on by her girlishly perfumed bed. But she's not in such a trance that she forgets her street corners; she slows at Faulmanngasse and Muhl, and hesitates until she recognizes the driver before she hails the taxi coming along.