Setting Free the Bears Page 2

  'You'll love it more,' said Siggy. 'Up in mountains. We'll go to Italy! We'll travel light - that's third, traveling light. I'll take my big rucksack, all our stuff in one pack and sleeping bags rolled on top. Nothing else. Just some fishing rods. We'll fish through the mountains to Italy!

  'Frot Doktor Ficht!' he cried.

  'Frot him,' I said.

  'May his teeth all fall out!'

  'In the opera.'

  'Frot him good!' said Siggy. And then he said, 'Graff? You're not sorry you flunked, are you? I mean, it doesn't matter so much.'

  'It couldn't matter,' I said, and it really didn't - with the night air smelling like a young girl's hair. The tendrils of the heavy trees stooped and swooshed over the rock garden, and hushed the sounds of waterlap in the pools.

  'Early in the morning,' said Siggy, 'we'll load up and slip away. You can just hear us! We'll be rumbling past the university before old Ficht has swabbed his gums! We'll be out of Vienna before he's uncorked his gunky jar.

  'We'll go by the palace. We'll wake up everyone! They'll think it's a runaway Strassenbahn - or a hippopotamus!'

  'A farting hippopotamus,' I said.

  'A whole army of them farting!' said Siggy. 'And then we'll be out on the curvy roads. We'll have trees overhead and crickets smacking off our helmets.'

  'I don't have a helmet,' I said.

  'I've got one for you,' said Siggy, who'd been getting ready for this trip.

  'What else do I need?' I asked.

  'Goggles,' he said. 'I've got them too. A World War One pilot's goggles - frog eyes, with yellow lenses. They're terrifying! And boots,' said Siggy. 'I've got real trompers for you.'

  'We should go pack,' I said.

  'Well, we should finish our beers.'

  'And then go.'

  'Go off in a roar!' said Siggy. 'And tomorrow night we'll have a sip from a river in the mountains, or a drink of a lake. Sleep in the grass, let the sun wake us.'

  'With dew on our lips.'

  'With country girls beside us!' said Siggy. 'Barring acts of God.'

  So we drank up. There was a murmur of voices on the terrace, faces from the tables round us swam and bobbed in our beers.

  Then the pumping of the kick starter, and the faraway sucking sound of the pistons that seemed to be rising from miles beneath the engine. The grunt of it catching, and the slow, untroubled drumming of its even idle. Siggy let it warm, and I looked over the hedgerows to the tables on the terrace. The onlookers weren't irritated, but they stopped their murmuring and cocked their heads to us; the slow beat of our engine was in rhythm with the first buffs of the spring-heavy air.

  And there was a new lump in the back vent-pocket of Siggy's duckhunter's jacket; when I looked again at our table, I saw that the saltshaker was gone.

  The First Act of God

  SIGGY DROVE. WE came through an arch into the Plaza of Heroes; I tipped back my head and watched the pigeons cross the tops of the buildings; the pudgy Baroque cupids peered at me from the government houses. The morning seemed more golden than it was, through the famous yellow tint of my World War One pilot's goggles.

  A cheek-chewing old woman wheeled a pushcart full of flowers along the Mariahilferstrasse, and we pulled to the curb beside her to buy some saffron crocuses; we stuck them in the air holes of our crash helmets. 'Boys up to no good,' said the floppy-gummed hag.

  We drove on, tossing our flowers to the girls who waited for buses. The girls had their scarves off their heads; the scarves flapped about their throats, and most of the girls had flowers already.

  We were early; we met the horsecarts coming to the Naschmarkt with their vegetables and fruits, and more flowers. Once we passed a horse who'd been shell-shocked by the traffic, and who pranced at our motorcycle. The drivers were cheerful and shouting from their squealing wagon-seats; some of the drivers had their wives and children with them, it was such a glorious day.

  Schonbrunn Palace looked lonely; no tourist buses, no crowds with cameras. A cool mist hung over the palace grounds; a thin haze crept close to the trimmed hedgerows, stole turtlelike across the green, green lawns. We watched the country roll in and be pushed back.

  In the suburb of Hietzing, on the country edge of the palace grounds, we smelled the first zoo whiffs from the Hietzinger Zoo.

  We stopped for a traffic light, and an elephant trumpeted over our idle.

  'We've time enough, haven't we?' said Siggy. 'I mean, we've all the time in the world, as I see it.'

  'We shouldn't leave Vienna,' I said, 'without seeing how spring has struck the zoo.'

  Well, yes - the Hietzinger Zoo, gated by stone, admission granted by a jowled toad of a man with a gambler's green eyeshade. Siggy parked the motorcycle out of the sap drip, out from under the trees and flush to the gambler's booth - the ticket taker's domish stall - over which we saw the giraffe's head tottering on its neckpole. The shambly heap of the giraffe followed its neck; bucket-hooved, its legs tried to keep up. There was a raw, hairless spot on its thin chin, where it had scraped the high storm fence.

  The giraffe looked down the fence line to the greenhouses of the botanical gardens; the plates of glass were still frosty with dew. It was too early for much sun, and there was no one else to watch the giraffe. Down the long cobbly alley, between the buildings and cages, there was no one but a cage-cleaner, who sagged with his mop.

  Hietzinger Zoo hadn't been there long, but the buildings were as old as Schonbrunn; a part of the palace grounds, the buildings were all rubbled now - unroofed, three-walled, with the open spaces filled in by bars or screens. The animals had inherited the ruins.

  The zoo was waking up and making public sounds. The walrus belched in his murky pool; we saw his old fish stiff on the pool curb, where he'd nudged them out of his water and left their scales on his mustache. The duck pond was talking breakfast, and down the alley some animal hammered in its cage.

  The Rare Birds Building made a din for us - little and large ladies in costume hats with broken, choir voices; and over-lording, the dull-clothed condors sat hugely on the toppled columns, perched on the fallen bust of some Habsburg great. They took the statues' pedestals for their own, and glared at the meshing pulled over the ruin above them. A split carcass of sheep lay in the weeds of the building's floor, and some South American with a terrifying wing-span had old meat in his breast feathers; the flies zipped from sheep side to bird, and the condor snapped his nicked, bone-colored beak at them.

  'Our feathered friends,' said Siggy, and we went on to see what was thumping in its cage.

  It was the Famous Asiatic Black Bear, crouched in a back corner of his cage and rocking himself sideways to slam his buttocks into the bars. There was a little printed history of the bear, fixed to a map of the world, with the species' roaming area shaded black and a red star to mark the spot where he was taken - in the Himalayas - by a man named Hinley Gouch. The Asiatic Black Bear, the history explained, had his cage facing away from the other bears because he was 'enraged' when he saw them; he was a particularly ferocious bear, the history said, and iron bars enclosed him in his own three-sided ruin because he was capable of digging through concrete.

  'I wonder how old Gouch got him?' said Siggy.

  'Nets, perhaps,' I said.

  'Or maybe he just talked him into coming to Vienna,' said Siggy. But we didn't think Hinley Gouch was a Viennese. More likely he'd been one of those misplaced Britishers, in league with a hundred brawny Sherpas who'd routed the bear into a ready-dug pit.

  'It would be fun getting him and Gouch together again,' said Siggy, and we didn't look at the other bears.

  There were people coming down the alley behind us now, and a group watched the giraffe scrape its chin. The building in front of us was for small mammals; it was a restored ruin, with four more or less original walls, a roof and boarded windows. Inside, a sign told us, were the nocturnal beasts - 'who are always asleep and anonymous in other zoos.' But here they had infrared light in the thick-glassed cage
s, and the animals behaved as if it were night. We could see them in a purplish glow, but the world outside their glass was black for them; they went unsuspiciously about their nocturnal habits, never knowing they were watched.

  There was an aardvark, or earth pig, sluffing off old bristles on a rough board hung over him for that purpose. There were giant anteaters licking bugs off the glass, and the arboreal rat of Mexico. There was a bat-eared fox and a ring-tailed lemur; and a two-toed sloth who seemed, upside down, to catch our movements on the other side of the glass - whose dark little eyes, not so big as his nostrils, seemed to follow us dimly in the outside world, which wasn't quite dark for him. But for the others there was nothing; not for the flying phalanger, and not for the slow loris, was there anything beyond the infrared under glass. And maybe not for the sloth, either; maybe it was only dizziness from hanging upside down that made his eyes roam after us.

  In the aisles between the cages it was dark, but our hands were tinted purple and our lips were green. There was a special sign on the giant anteaters' glasshouse; an arrow indicated a little trough on the bottom corner of the glass, leading into the anteaters' lair. When you put your fingers there, an anteater came to lick. The long tongue came through the maze that kept the world from getting in; there was a new look in the anteater's eye, upon finding a finger in the dark. But it licked like any tongue does, and made us feel a little closer to the nocturnal habits of the beasts.

  'Oh, God!' said Siggy.

  And people had found the Small Mammal House now. Children squealed through the infrared aisles; their mauve hair and bright pink eyes - their green tongues waggling.

  So we took a dirt path off the alley; we'd had quite enough of ruins. And we came to an open area where the Miscellaneous Range Animals were - including the Assorted Antelopes. Now this was better. There were zebras nuzzling along the fence line, hipping up to each other and blowing in each other's ears; their stripes ran cross-pattern to the hexagons of the fence, and it made us giddy to see them move.

  Outside the fence and coming toward us was a wild-haired little boy who wheezed and held his crotch as he ran. The boy ran past us and stopped, bent over as if he'd been kicked. He dropped his cupped palm down between his knees. 'Lord! Balls!' he hooted. Then he grabbed himself up again, and rabbited down the dirt path away from us.

  There was no question that he'd seen the oryx with the rapierlike horns, very long and nearly straight, spiraled on the basal half and sloped backwards on the same plane with the wrinkly forehead and the sleek black nose; no question he'd seen the old oryx under his thin shade tree, brindled by the sun and shade-spots dappling his back - a soft, lowing look in his large black eyes. A bull oryx too, by his low, heavy chest and his thick-wrinkled neck. The slope of his back ran downhill off the hump of his neck to the base of his tail. And a bull from just under his buttocks, he was, all the way to the knots on his lean knees.

  'God, Siggy,' I said. 'How big, do you think?'

  'The biggest ever, Graff,' said Siggy. They had to dangle cock-eyed, just to fit in the oryx's narrow hind stance.

  So we read the history of the oryx from East Africa, 'best-armed of all antelopes.'

  'Hinley Gouch,' said Siggy, 'never had the balls to be responsible for this.'

  And quite true, so we read - this oryx had been born in the Hietzinger Zoo, and that certainly made us glum.

  So down the dirt path, back to the gate; we passed all the signs for the pachyderms, and only gave a glance to the little wallaroo - 'the famous hill-living and very agile kangaroo.' It lolled on its side, propped on an elbow and scratching its hip with a curled fist. It gave us a short look with its long, bored face.

  Then we were passing the sign for the Big Cats, and passing the glint off the gambler's green eyeshade - his ticket booth surrounded by an eager human covey - passing heads turned toward the groggy, waking caterwaul of a lion; heads were turned upward to greet the giraffe.

  Outside the zoo, there were two girls admiring our motorcycle. One of them admired it so much that she sat on it, hugging the gas tank between her knees; she was a thick, busty girl whose black sweater had ridden up over her paunch. And her hips jiggled taut each time she clamped that lovely teardrop of a tank.

  The other girl stood in front of the bike, fingering the cables for the clutch and front brake; she was a very thin girl, with more ribs to show than breast. With a yellow hue to her face, she had a sad, wide mouth. Her eyes were as gentle as the oryx's.

  'Well, Siggy,' I said, 'it's surely an act of God.'

  And it wasn't even ten in the morning.

  God Works in Strange Ways

  'GRAFF,' SAID SIGGY, 'that fat one's surely not for me.'

  But when we came closer, we saw how the thin girl's lips had a bluish tint, as if she'd been long immersed in water and had taken some chill.

  And Siggy said, 'That thin one's not too healthy-looking. Perhaps, Graff, you can set her straight.'

  When we were up to them, the fat girl said to her companion, 'See now? I told you it was two boys taking a trip.' She jounced on the seat of the motorcycle, flapping the gas tank between her thighs.

  'Well,' said Siggy. 'Thinking of driving off with it, were you?'

  'Was not,' the fat girl said. 'But I could drive this thing if I wanted to.'

  'Bet you could,' said Siggy. He patted the gas tank and drummed his fingers over her knee.

  'Watch out for him,' the thin girl said. She had a strange spasm in her chin, and she wouldn't stop playing with the cables; looped under the handlebars, the cables were all atangle from her twisting them.

  'Say, Graff,' Siggy whispered. 'Do you think that thin one's contagious? I don't mind if you want her. I'll just make do with the old fatty here.'

  And the fat one said, 'Say, you boys. Would you buy us a beer?'

  'There's a place for beer in the zoo,' said the thin one.

  'We've just been in the zoo,' I said.

  And Siggy whispered, 'It's rabies, Graff. She's got rabies.'

  'You've not been in the zoo with a girl on your arm!' the fat one said. 'And you've not gone through the Tiroler Garten, I'll bet. There's a mile of moss and ferns, and you can take off your shoes.'

  'Well, Graff,' said Siggy. 'What do you say?'

  'He's wild for it!' the fat girl shouted.

  'Graff?' said Siggy.

  'Well, sure,' I said. 'We're in no hurry.'

  'Fate shapes our course,' said Siggy.

  So we went to the Biergarten, surrounded by bears - and all of them watched us, except the Famous Asiatic Black Bear, whose cage didn't allow him to face the Biergarten or other bears.

  The polar bears sat and panted in their swimming pool; now and then they took a slow, loud lap. The brown bears paced, brushing their thick coats against the bars; their heads swayed low to the ground, in rhythm with some ritual of stealth they were born knowing and pointlessly never forgot - no matter how out of place wariness was to them here.

  Downwind from our table and Cinzano umbrella, squat and hot in their shared cage, was a reeking pair of Rare Spectacled Bears from the Andes - 'the bears with the cartoon countenance.' They looked like they'd been laughed right out of Ecuador.

  And Siggy was unnerved to find no radishes in the Biergarten. The dark, fat girl was named Karlotta, and she had a pastry with her beer; but the thin one was Wanga, and she would have nothing but syrupy bock. Siggy touched his fat Karlotta under the table; my Wanga's hand was dry and cool.

  'Oh, they should have more ice for the polar bears,' said Wanga. And no more for you, I thought.

  'Siggy,' said Karlotta, 'could use a little ice himself.' And her arms went under the table, groping for him. She had dark little ringlets for bangs, glossy and damp on her forehead.

  The Spectacled Bears had a blotch of white running forehead-to-nose and over their throats. Their squint-eyes were bandit-masked in shaggy black mats like the rest of their fur; their coats looked oddly slept on, like a series of cowlicks. They rapped
their long claws on the cement.

  Poor Wanga ran her tongue lightly over her lips, as if she were feeling out where she was chapped and hurt.

  'Is this your first trip?' she asked.

  'Oh, I've been all over,' I said.

  'To the Orient?' she asked.

  'All over the Orient.'

  'In Japan?'

  'Bangkok,' I said.

  'Where's Bangkok?' said Wanga, so softly I leaned near to her.

  'India,' I said. 'Bangkok, India.'

  'Oh, India,' she said. 'The people are very poor there.'

  'Yes, very,' I agreed, and watched her touch gently her broad mouth - hide her thin lips with her pale hand.

  'You there!' said Karlotta to me. 'Don't you hurt her. Wanga, tell me if he hurts you.'

  'We're talking,' Wanga said.

  'Oh, he's a nice boy,' said Karlotta, and from under the table she gave me a slight goose with her wedging toe.

  The Spectacled Bears slumped against each other, shoulder to shoulder; one dropped its head on the other's chest.

  'Graff,' said Siggy, 'don't you think Karlotta would enjoy the oryx?'

  'I want to see the hippo,' Karlotta said. 'The hippo and the rhino.'

  'Karlotta wants everything big,' said Siggy. 'Well, Karlotta, it's the oryx for you.'

  'We'll meet you behind the hippohouse,' I said. Because I didn't want frail Wanga to see the oryx. Thus Siggy has it in his notebook: You have to draw the line somewhere.

  'Karlotta,' said Siggy, 'this oryx will give you some jolt.' And Karlotta rubbed her paunch with the palm of her hand.

  'Ha!' she said.

  The Rare Spectacled Bears sat upright and stared.

  The Hippohouse

  THERE WAS A moat around the rhino's field, and a fence on the outside of the moat. If the rhino tried to ram the fence, he'd break his legs falling into the moat; the knee-pieces of the rhino's armor were cracked and open, like sun-splits in baked clay.

  The field he jogged in was flat, and the grass was beaten to scruff. The field was somewhat elevated too - a hard, dry plateau surrounded by the hippohouse and the high, iron gates to the Tiroler Garten. If you lay flat on the ground just inside the Tiroler Garten, you could see under the boughs of the trees, through the gardens all the way to Maxing Park. If you sat up out of the ferns, you could see the rhino's back - the top of his driftwood head and the tip of his horn. The ground shook when the rhino ran.