Setting Free the Bears Page 17
Now the animals are dropping off; groans, stretches, sighs, slumps; a brief, shrill-voiced argument in the Monkey Complex, and someone swings a trapeze against an echoing wall. But I can't sleep.
When O. Schrutt emerges for another round, I want to get inside his blood-lit den and see just what it is that makes old O. turn on the infrared. One reason, I can guess: O. Schrutt is not a man who likes to be seen. Even by animals.
(CONTINUING:)
THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: PRE-HISTORY I
Saturday, 12 March 1938: 1.00 a.m. at the Chancellery on the Ballhausplatz. Miklas has given in. Seyss-Inquart is Chancellor of Austria.
Seyss is in conference with Lieutenant General Muff. They want to make certain that Berlin knows everything is in control, and that the German border troops no longer think of crossing.
Poor Seyss-Inquart, he should know better:
If you bring lions to your home,
They'll want to stay for dinner.
But about two o'clock, it's Muff who phones Berlin and attempts the put-off. Perhaps he says, 'It's all right, you can take your armies home now; it's all right, we've got our politics just like yours now; you don't have to hang around our border now, because it's really all right here.'
And at two-thirty, after a frantic bicker between the War Office, the Foreign Office and the Reich Chancellery, Hitler's personal adjutant is asked to wake up the Fuhrer.
Wake up any man at two-thirty in the morning, says Grandfather - even a reasonable man - and see what you get.
At two-thirty, Zahn Glanz is pressing my mother against the great lobby door, and Grandmother still hasn't heard anyone cranking a phone. Grandfather is bringing out the little things now: a crate of kitchenware, a carton of food and wine, a box of winter scarves and hats, and the crocheted bedspreads.
'If not all the china,' says Grandmother, 'maybe just the gravyboat?'
'No, Muttie,' says Grandfather, 'just what we need' - and makes the last check of Hilke's room. He packs the eagle-suit in the bottom of a winter army duffel.
In the kitchen, Grandfather empties the spice rack and tumbles all the little jars into the duffel, thinking that anything with enough spice can taste like food; then the radio.
Grandmother whispers from the staircase, 'I just looked in that car, and you're going to have a whole seat left empty.'
'I know it,' says Grandfather, thinking that there's room for one more who's leaving Vienna this morning before light.
It's not Schuschnigg. He leaves the Ballhausplatz, shakes hands with a tearful guard, ignores the Nazi salute from the file of citizens with swastika armbands.
The apologetic Seyss-Inquart drives Schuschnigg home - to ten weeks of house arrest and seven years in Gestapo prisons. All because Kurt von Schuschnigg has claimed he's committed no crime, and has refused the protection of the Hungarian embassy - has not joined the lines of monarchists, Jews, and some Catholics, who've been jamming up the Czech and Hungarian customs ports since midnight.
Grandfather finds the traffic is all going the other way. East. But Grandfather seems to feel that the Czechs and Hungarians will be next, and he doesn't want to have to move again; especially since then there would be no choice of moving east or west, but only east again - and that would be Russia. My grandfather has a picture of himself, in nightmares: driven to the Black Sea, hunted by Cossacks and wild-haired Turks.
So driving west, he has no traffic going his way. St Veit is dark, Hacking is darker. Only the lighted trams are still going in my grandfather's direction; the conductors wave swastika flags; at the stations, men with armbands and nametags are singing; someone bloops a one-note tuba.
'Is this the fastest route west?' my grandmother asks.
But Grandfather finds his way. He stops at the only unlighted hen-house in the outskirts of Hacking.
Ernst Watzek-Trummer has plucked and spitted three anonymous chickens over a low-coal fire on the hen-house floor. He gnaws at a bone on his roost. Grandfather and the patriot gather a pail of eggs and water, and hard-boil the eggs. Watzek-Trummer slaughters and plucks his best capon; it's thrown in the pail to boil. Then they hobble four prime hens and a stud champion rooster. Hilke bundles them violently together in a blanket; they go berserk on the floor under the back seat, against the long duffel which separates my mother from my grandmother. Ernst Watzek-Trummer takes the front seat by Grandfather, each to his own side of the kitchenware crate - the egg pail on the floor between them. Before they leave, Watzek-Trummer sets his chickens loose and lights the hen-house afire. In the glove compartment, he stows his best slaying-cleaver.
The three anonymous chickens, spitted and charred, and the freshly boiled capon, a bit underdone, are hacked and ripped apart by Watzek-Trummer while Grandfather drives. Ernst distributes chicken parts and hard-boiled eggs while Grandfather turns south, through Gloggnitz and Bruck an der Mur, then west, and even a little north - skirting mountains. He settles straight-ahead west at St Martin.
That's a long way from Vienna; that puts them almost due south of Linz and nearly out of gas. The Mercedes, used to taxi-living, bubbles up its radiator once - even though it's March - and Ernst Watzek-Trummer has to cool it off with lukewarm water from the egg pail.
My mother, in the back seat, doesn't say a word. She feels she's still pinching Zahn Glanz's knee between her own, and feels Zahn's despairing weight - making her back take on the grain of the wood in the great lobby door.
Grandmother says, 'The live chickens are smelling.'
'We need gas,' says Grandfather.
And in Pruggern they find there's still a celebration going on. Grandfather rolls down his window and slows for a policeman with his coat uniform open down his chest - and somehow, a swastika armband stretched enough to slip over his head and collar his neck. It's hard to tell whether he put it on himself or had his head held while someone else did the fitting.
Watzek-Trummer sets the glove compartment ajar and holds it half shut with his knee; the slaying-cleaver winks at him. My grandfather shoves a Nazi salute out the window. 'I'm glad to see the whole country's not gone to bed on such a night!' he says. But the policeman peers inside, suspicious of the egg pail and scattered chickens.
Ernst Watzek-Trummer clomps my grandfather's back. 'His brother's got a seal of office in Salzburg now!' he says. 'You should see Vienna, and all the Bolsheviks we've passed along the way - running east.'
'Your brother's got a seal?' the policeman says.
'I may be sent to Munich!' says Grandfather gayly.
'Well, bless you,' the policeman says. Watzek-Trummer passes him a hard-boiled egg.
'Keep it up!' says Grandfather. 'Keep the whole town up till dawn!'
'I wish I knew what was going on,' the policeman says. 'I mean, really, you know.'
'Just keep it up,' says Grandfather, and starts to pull ahead, then stops. 'You wouldn't have any gas for us, would you?' he asks.
'There's things we could siphon,' says the policeman. 'You wouldn't have a hose?'
'Just happen to,' Watzek-Trummer says.
They find a mail truck in the back buildings of a dark post-office lot. The policeman even does the sucking to get the siphon hose started, so they give him one of the capon's legs.
And my mother bears down on the imagined knee between her own; she rubs the window with the heel of her hand, as if it were a crystal ball to show her every safe, unfoolish move Zahn Glanz will make to get himself out of Vienna.
And the rest is mostly hearsay; That Hilke assumes Zahn finds out - almost as soon as befuddled Muff - the German border troops are crossing anyway. That, as a fact among few, Zahn does forward the draft of Grandfather's endorsed bankbook to the postmaster of Kaprun. That Zahn may have been reading Lennhoff's editorial about the German Putsch as late as noon, and then heard of the warm welcome Hitler was receiving in Linz - where the Fuhrer marched to from the border at Passau, with soldiers and tanks, 'to visit his mother's grave.' And that Zahn,
or someone like him, was the one who borrowed or stole the taxi which drove the criminal editor Lennhoff across the Hungarian border at Kittsee - having been turned away by the Czechs. If Zahn Glanz wasn't the driver, why did he never meet my mother in Kaprun? So he must have been the driver. And carried with him half of what I was at that time, because then I was, at best, only an idea of my mother's - half of which, if it didn't cross the Hungarian border at Kittsee, went wherever Zahn Glanz went.
And the rest is simply the seven-year affair of living in the protective shadow of my grandfather's brother, the postmaster of Kaprun, who kept his official post by joining the Nazi party, and because Kaprun was so small then, found the post not demanding, and the Nazi guise quite easy to maintain, except in the presence of the one youth club he supervised - some member of which suspected the postmaster's sincerity and caught him off guard in a poorly insulated latrine stall of the Hitler Youth's barracks, and roasted him with a lightweight SS flamethrower the postmaster had demonstrated just that morning. But that was when the war was almost over, and I don't think my mother or my grandparents suffered or starved so very much, especially owing to the food-hoarding genius of Ernst Watzek-Trummer, and the spices my grandfather wisely added to the last duffel packed in Vienna.
And the rest is all in Goring's telegram to Hitler in Linz, because Goring at his radio in Berlin heard of the Fuhrer's triumphant welcome in that first city. Goring asked, 'If the enthusiasm is so great, why not go the whole hog?' And Hitler certainly went ahead and did that. In Vienna alone, the first wave of Gestapo arrests took seventy-six thousand. (And if Zahn Glanz wasn't the driver of the editor's getaway taxi, wouldn't he have been one of these seventy-six thousand? So he must have been the driver.)
And the rest, as far as I was concerned, had to wait for my mother's second suitor. I wouldn't want to say, exactly, that he was a suitor less worthy than the first - or that I've condemned my mother for not letting Zahn Glanz father me. Because even if it wasn't carried in the genes, something of Zahn Glanz certainly got into me. I only want to show how Zahn Glanz put an idea of me in my mother. Even if he put nothing else there.
The Eighth Zoo Watch: Tuesday, 6 June 1967, @ 3.00 a.m.
ALMOST EVERYONE IS asleep. One of the Various Aquatic Birds is garbling, prophecies or indigestion. I'm certainly awake, and I don't believe that sleep ever comes to O. Schrutt. But everyone else has finally dropped off.
I've been thinking: How do they know the last great auk is dead? The Irishmen at Trinity Bay - did they hear the great auk's final murmur? Did it actually say, 'I am the last, there are no more'?
I've heard that Irishmen are always drunk. How could they be sure this great auk washed ashore was the last? It might have been a plot. The great auks might have anticipated their own extinction, and sent a martyr - instructed to identify itself as final. And somewhere, maybe in deserted coastal cottages in Wales, a tribe of great auks are living still, multiplying, and teaching their young about the martyr who washed itself ashore that they might live - and be not gullible.
I wonder if the great auk is a bitter bird. I wonder if their young are warlike, if they're organized in diving teams, scuttling small fishing boats, spreading rumors as old and unbelievable as sea serpents and mermaids - working up to the day when the Great Auk Navy will rule the waterways of the world. Human history happens that way. I wonder: do the surviving great auks bear grudges?
I've also been thinking about O. Schrutt. Curious that I should have created his namesake. I thumbed back through my various fictions, true and false, and found the other O. Schrutt. A decidedly more tender-aged O. Schrutt than this nightwatchman. Curious that my invented O. Schrutt should be a bit-character, a walk-on part, an alphabetized member of Vienna's Nazi youth. It's very curious, isn't it?
Just imagine: if my invented O. Schrutt had lived through all the walk-on parts I anticipated him to play, what would that O. Schrutt be doing now? What more perfect thing could he be than this second-shift nightwatchman at the Hietzinger Zoo?
(CONTINUING:)
THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: PRE-HISTORY II
I can't make my father fit the ethnographic maps of Yugoslavia. He was born in Jesenje in 1919, which at least made him a Croat, and possibly a Slovene. He was certainly not a Serb, although Vratno Javotnik was such a worldly sort of Yugoslav, I believe he was the only Yugoslav to whom being a Serb instead of a Croat wouldn't have made any difference - and splitting the hair between Croats and Slovenes would have been absurd for him. His politics were strictly personal.
By that I mean he had no affiliations. If he was born in Jesenje, it's likely he was baptized a Roman Catholic. If not, it's at least certain he was in no way near enough Serbia to be Eastern Orthodox. But it couldn't have mattered to Vratno, one way or the other.
One thing seems to have mattered, though. My father was something of a linguist, and Jesenje is less than fifty miles from the University of Zagreb, where my father studied languages. This may have been a premonition on his part - pessimism at a tender age: to master the speech of several occupying armies before they came to occupy.
Whatever the motives, Vratno was in Zagreb on the twenty-fourth of March, 1941, when Foreign Minister Tsintsar-Markovich left Berlin for Vienna, and when the students at the University of Belgrade demonstrated on that Serbian campus - burning German textbooks and picketing all the German classes.
The Croatian reaction in Zagreb was probably sullen - the feeling that the Serbs were sure to get everyone killed by their lunatic defiance of Germany. Vratno only thought they'd missed the point. It didn't matter whose side you were going to be on; when Germany came into Yugoslavia, one day it could save your skin to speak German. Burning your textbooks was certainly unwise.
So the next day my father left Zagreb for Jesenje. It's my belief that he traveled light.
That day the Tripartite Pact was signed in Vienna; Vratno was probably en route to Jesenje when he heard the news. I'm sure he guessed that various Serbian zealots wouldn't accept this welcome to Germany. And I'm sure Vratno turned to practicing his German idioms.
All the way into Jesenje, I can hear him practicing.
In fact, on the next night, while in Belgrade the General Staff of the revolution was in its final, deciding session, Vratno was probably perfecting his irregular verbs. When the bold takeover was in process, and plans for the impossible resistance against Germany were being made, Vratno was making umlaut sounds.
In Belgrade, the quisling government was overthrown; Prime Minister Tsvetkovich was arrested at 2.30 a.m. And Prince Paul was caught later aboard a train in Zagreb; he was exiled to Greece. In Belgrade there were heroes: Lieutenant Colonel Danilo Zobenitsa, tank corps commander and the rescuer of young King Peter; Professor Radoye Knezevich, King Peter's former tutor; Ilya Trifunovich Birchanin, commander of Chetniks, those diehard Serb guerrillas of World War One - the only warriors, they say, who can fight hand to hand with the Turks.
And in Jesenje was my father, making himself universally fluent, preparing for his sly survival.
The Ninth Zoo Watch: Tuesday, 6 June 1967, @ 3.15 a.m.
A FEW MINUTES ago I had this urge to make a bed check on the elephants. I'm sure at one time or another everyone has heard, as I have, that elephants never sleep. So I decided to go check on the elephants, even at the risk of disturbing the other, finally sleeping animals - or even at the risk of catching the awful attention of O. Schrutt, professional insomniac. After all, there aren't many opportunities in this world for testing myths. And the myth of the never-sleeping elephant is one that I've often thought needed testing.
I can tell you, I already had my doubts about the myth. What I expected to find in the House of Pachyderms was a boulder field of heavily sleeping elephants - cages of elephant mounds. I pictured them heaped together, circled like a Western wagon train - their trunks draped over each other, like great pythons sunning on bouldertops.
But if you take this night's
example, the myth was substantiated. The elephant quarters were uncannily awake. The elephants stood in a perfect row, and hung their great heads over the front of their stalls like restless horses in an ordinary barn. They nodded, and waved their trunks, they breathed in slow motion.
When I walked in front of their stalls, they reached their trunks out to me - they opened and closed their nostrils to me. Their trunks kissed my hands. One of them had a cold - a runny trunk that rattled.
'When I come back for the real thing,' I whispered, 'I'll bring some medicated cough drops for you.'
It nodded: All right, if you can remember. But I've had colds before.
The bored elephants nodded: Bring a lot of cough drops. We'll probably all have colds by then. Everything's very catching here.
It's puzzling to me. Perhaps there's some connection between their sleeplessness and how long they live. Seventy years without a snooze? Although it seems unlikely, perhaps there's a myth snorted trunk to trunk among the elephants - that if you fall asleep, you die.
Someone should find a way to tell them it's perfectly healthy to sleep.
I'll bet there's no one, though, who could convince O. Schrutt of that.
I heard him when I stalked back to my hedgerow from the House of Pachyderms. I heard him taking chances with the animals' sleep. Doors in the Small Mammal House were creaked, and sliding glass was slid.
O. Schrutt, creeping around in the residue of infrared. O. Schrutt is up to no good, I'll bet. But so long as he chooses to stay inside the Small Mammal House, I'll just have to wait my chance.
Or maybe go back and ask the sleep-suspicious elephants, who must be wise: what prompts O. Schrutt to indulge himself with infrared? And: more than twenty years or so ago, just what did old O. Schrutt do?
(CONTINUING:)
THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: PRE-HISTORY II
I wonder where my stealthy father was when the Luftwaffe bombed the open city of Belgrade, without a declaration of war. I feel certain that Vratno wasn't observing any protocol either.