Setting Free the Bears Page 37

  I said, seriously, 'To Kaprun.' And she looked away. 'When I come back,' I said, 'how can I find you?'

  'If you come back,' she said, still turned away.

  'I will,' I said. 'And where will you be?'

  'Oh, I'm very fond of zoos,' she said, in the cold, bright voice again. 'I expect I'll visit the zoo often. You might find me there, when you decide to try it again - with a new plan.'

  But I wasn't going to have us go out this way. I said, 'I'm going for a while to Kaprun, and I know I'll want to see you again.'

  'You mean, when you're all better?' she said, mock-sweet. 'When you're all done with it?' But I knew that wasn't the way it worked, and was the wrong attitude to carry off with me. You can't rush getting over anything. Even the notebook is clear on this:

  The figures make a certain sum, no matter how you add them up.

  Officious, as ever. Another half-truth, as always.

  I said, 'Gallen, I'm sorry. And I won't forget about you.'

  'Then come to Vienna with me, Graff,' she said, and I couldn't tell what kind of edge her voice had now.

  'I have to go to Kaprun,' I said.

  'Then how will you find me?' she asked - my question. And it was her unsharp, thick and natural voice again - a genuine query.

  'Kahlenberg,' I said, 'is a place you'll hear about when you're in the city. Take any Grinzing tram and a bus up through the Vienna Woods. Go there Wednesday evenings,' I said. 'There's a view of the Danube, and all Vienna.'

  'And you'll come some Wednesday, I suppose,' she said.

  'You be there every Wednesday,' I said. But this was pushing her too hard, and roundabout from where she'd first taken a stance.

  She said, 'Maybe.' With a touch of that bright coldness in her voice.

  'I'll take you to the buses in Klosterneuburg,' I said. 'The first outlying tram stop is in Josefdorf.'

  'I don't want to ride with you,' she said. 'I'll just walk.'

  And because I felt I was losing again, I said, 'Well, sure. You're a strong-legged girl, I know. It won't hurt you.'

  'You said Thursdays?' she asked.

  'Wednesdays,' I said quickly. 'Any Wednesday night.'

  'You'll come then?' she asked.

  'For sure,' I said, and she started to go. I said, 'Wednesday.'

  'Maybe,' she said, and kept her fine legs strutting away from me.

  Trying to make light of it all, I said, 'I'm going to watch your sweet behind till you're out of sight.'

  But she wasn't exactly smiling when she turned round to me. 'Not a long, last look, though?' she said, 'Or is it?'

  'No,' I said - so quickly that her mouth came close to smiling. She kept walking away from me; I watched her almost to where the road turned.

  Then I called, 'Wednesday!'

  'Maybe,' she called, in an uninterpretable voice, and didn't turn around.

  'For sure!' I hollered, and she was gone.

  I sat in the road ditch, letting her get all the way into Klosterneuburg; I didn't want to pass her on the road.

  Around me the morning was coming on stronger. The domestic life of the trimly hedged and fenced fields. The borders separating cows from corn; the property lines orderly and unmistakable in the sun. All cows were belled; all sheep were ear-notched.

  All men have names, and specific places where they're allowed to go.

  A wind picked up and blew the roadside dust in my face. I watched the motorcycle brace against the little gale and shudder on its kickstand. I saw the mirror mounted on the handlebars, reflecting some anonymous patch of tar-smeared gravel off the roadside - and a petal-part of a flower, grown too close to the road. But when I looked behind the motorcycle, I just couldn't say, for sure, which flower lent its part to that reflection. Or just which stretch of tar-smeared gravel.

  Things didn't piece together any better than before.

  And that should have been no surprise to me. I knew. All the figures in your frotting column make the sum, but the figures are in no way bound to be otherwise related. They're just all the things you've ever paid for. As unfitted to each other as toothpaste and your first touch of warm, upstanding breast.

  Gallen was in Klosterneuburg. Where there still were monasteries. And monks making wine.

  And Gallen, who might some Wednesday meet me in Kahlenberg, was now of the nature of Todor Slivnica's custard - to be interpreted from wherever it all lay spattered.

  Congratulations to All You Survivors!

  HANNES GRAFF, I thought, is too split-haired and loose-ended to ever rise up out of this road ditch and ride his beastly motorcycle out of this deceptively ordered countryside.

  And orderly, too, were the towns I'd go through. If only I could get myself started.

  An easy plan. Through Klosterneuburg, Konigstetten, Judenau and Mitterndorf; through Hankenfeld or Asperhofen, Perschling, Pottenbrunn and wee St Hain; to the big town of Amstetten and three hours west on the Autobahn - where you can easily drive faster than the frotting wind. Then there would still be an hour south of Salzburg, through the little Lofer Range; and I know a place to eat in Furth. And after-dinner coffee in Kaprun, across that well-worn kitchen table - a second pair of elbows, speaking. Now, at least, with something to say. Something needless and lunatic enough to hold the attention of doughty Watzek-Trummer. Surely, I thought, Ernst Watzek-Trummer has had enough experience with pointless schemes to be sympathetic.

  But I thought, too, that I wouldn't rise up from the road ditch, just yet. Or if I did, there was no need to hurry my visit to Kaprun.

  Let the grave mound grow a little grass, I always say. Grass is nice, and it will not hurt you, Siggy.

  So I'd move along in the general direction of Kaprun, for sure. But I'd creep up on it slowly, you might say; I'd have myself more familiar with this frotting memorabilia I was trucking to Watzek-Trummer.

  But what deadened me in the road ditch was that none of my ideas was very stirring, and there seemed to be no excitable planning called for - for this trip.

  Something new to get used to, I thought. How Hannes Graff was rendered inert. What worse awareness is there than to know there would have been a better outcome if you'd never done anything at all? That all small mammals would have been better off if you'd never meddled in the unsatisfactory scheme of things.

  And I surveyed once again this unalterable countryside around me - namable and controlled. A pasture down the road with three white fences and one brown; with nine ewes, one ram and one watchful dog. A pasture up the road with one stone wall, one briar hedge, one wire fence, and one forest - the boundary at the rear; with one horse, and six splotched dairy cows - and, conceivably, an old bull in the woods behind. But not an oryx, surely.

  Across the road was a forest, through which the old wind tunneled, furrowing the pine needles.

  Then the watchful sheepdog barked over the road at the forest. So, someone's coming, I thought, and I got on the motorcycle - thinking I'd better leave, ready or not, because I looked pretty foolish just sitting there.

  The dog barked more. At someone coming on a well-walked path through the tidy forest, and probably someone who'd come this way, at this time, for years and years - and for years and years, this dog has always barked. A domestic chore, connected to wagging the tail. Which the dog will do next, I thought - at any moment, now, when this farmer's wife or daughter breaks out of the forest and up on the road. And shouldn't see me here, suspiciously inert.

  But when I tried to pump the kick starter, my legs were spongy; the heel piece of my boot wouldn't grip the lever. And I forgot to open the gas line. I leaned over and sniffed the carburetor, filled my mind with woozy thoughts of fuel sloshing loose in my skull. I had all I could do to keep the bike upright; I tottered back and forth.

  So whoever it is will just have to see me here, I thought; I'll be a non-routine blob on the landscape. Someone will stick the dog on me. Or perhaps the dog is really barking at me; only he's got this crazy habit, derived from sheep, of looking in ano
ther direction from what he's barking at.

  But the dog was barking furiously now. And I thought: Whether it's me or not he's barking about, why didn't he bark at me before now? If that's the sort of dog he is - given so easily to woofing at the slightest thing.

  The dog was berserk; he snapped around his sheep and drove the flock into a tight circle. He's lost his head, I thought - familiar with the symptoms. The sheepdog is going to eat his sheep!

  He was the most unreasonably behaving dog I have ever seen.

  I was still watching him, and shaking on the motorcycle, when the shoulder-to-shoulder pair of Rare Spectacled Bears tumbled out of the forest and huffed across the road, not more than twenty yards from me. The dog dropped flat down on his belly - paws spread, ears tight to his head.

  But the Rare Spectacled Bears were not looking for sheep, or dogs - or cows in the next field, or a possible bull in the woods. They were running steadily together; they came down in my road ditch and up over the fence, into the sheepdog's field. He howled by the huddled flock, and the bears pushed on - not at unreasonable speed; not even hurrying, really. They just headed for the woods at the far end of the field - where, more than likely, they would still keep running. The inexhaustible, remarkable, and very Rare Spectacled Bears, running back to the Andes in Ecuador. Or at least to the Alps.

  But when they reached the end of the field, they stopped and cocked their heads back toward me. I wanted to wave, but I didn't dare. I wanted them to go on. If they'd ever waved back to me, or had shouted 'Hello!' - if they'd said 'Thank you!' or 'Frot you!' - I wouldn't have been able to believe they were really there. They just paused, though, and went on again; they ran shoulder to shoulder into the woods.

  I was so thankful that their escape didn't take on the custardlike quality of too many other endings.

  And I suddenly didn't dare stay there any longer. In case, I thought, the Famous Asiatic Black Bear comes next. Or even gibbons. Or Siggy astride the oryx - the remaining flesh and ghosts of the Hietzinger Zoo. That would have spoiled this little token offered me by these Rare Spectacled Bears. That would not have allowed me to believe in them, either.

  So I worked the kick starter this time. The bike made a ragged, suffering idle under me. I was still shaky. Even so, I couldn't stay there - until, perhaps, the Rare Spectacled Bears passed by me again, this time followed by some more of those who had temporarily escaped. Vratno Javotnik on the Grand Prix racer, '39 - leaving Gottlob Wut behind. And other selected mammals.

  I looked nervously to the woods behind the field, and was happy to see that the Rare Spectacled Bears were gone - leaving the pastures at least not quite the same, at least not for this moment. Cows fretted; the sheep still obeyed the panting dog. A little something had been harmlessly disrupted, and I certainly don't imply that it made things all frotting rosy. Only that I was able to sincerely imagine coming this way again, some Wednesday. And meeting someone from the area, who would tell me: There are bears in Klosterneuburg.

  Really?

  Oh yes. Bears.

  But they've done no harm?

  Not these Bears. They're strange bears.

  Rare Spectacled Bears?

  Well, I don't know about that.

  But they're multiplying?

  I don't know about that, either. But they're very friendly with each other, you know.

  Oh yes, I know.

  And that was a little something to know, anyway. And enough to get the motorcycle running under me. I listened to my idle coming smoother; it still had rough edges, of course. But I braced my feet on each side of the old beast, and it sat steady; it waited for me, now. Then I identified all its parts in my head; there's a certain confidence in having names for things. I called my right hand Throttle, and turned it up. I called my left hand Clutch, and pulled it in. Even my right foot responded to the gear lever, and found first - and it's not a particularly impressive right foot.

  The point is, everything worked. Oh, sure, for a while I would have to be careful, and keep a sharp eye on the mechanics of things. But for that moment, at least, everything was functioning. My eyes too; I saw no more bears, but I could see the grass they'd bent down for a path across the field. Tomorrow the grass would be sprung back in place, and only the watchful dog might remember them with me. And he would forget before I would, for sure.

  As for those casualties back at the Hietzinger Zoo - even for old O. Schrutt's mind, left behind, name by name and roar by roar - I will admit to being responsible. For sure, I will turn myself over to Ernst Watzek-Trummer. Historian without equal, and the keeper of details. He should make a fine confessor, for sure.

  So I felt the clutch in my left hand; I controlled the throttle and front brake with my right. I put myself in gear and was properly balanced when I came out of the gravel at the roadside. I was steady, shifting up, when I rode into the full-force wind. But I didn't panic; I leaned to the curves; I held the crown of the road and drove faster and faster. I truly outdrove the wind. For sure - for the moment, at least - there was no gale hurrying me out of this world.

  For sure, Siggy, I'll have to let your grave mound grow a little grass.

  For sure, Gallen, I'll look you up some Wednesday.

  For sure, I expect to hear great things of the Rare Spectacled Bears.

  READ ON FOR AN EXTRACT OF

  IN ONE PERSON

  THE BREATHTAKING NEW NOVEL FROM BESTSELLING AUTHOR JOHN IRVING

  A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love - tormented, funny, and affecting - and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences.

  Chapter 1

  AN UNSUCCESSFUL CASTING CALL

  I'm going to begin by telling you about Miss Frost. While I say to everyone that I became a writer because I read a certain novel by Charles Dickens at the formative age of fifteen, the truth is I was younger than that when I first met Miss Frost and imagined having sex with her, and this moment of my sexual awakening also marked the fitful birth of my imagination. We are formed by what we desire. In less than a minute of excited, secretive longing, I desired to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost--not necessarily in that order.

  I met Miss Frost in a library. I like libraries, though I have difficulty pronouncing the word--both the plural and the singular. It seems there are certain words I have considerable trouble pronouncing: nouns, for the most part--people, places, and things that have caused me preternatural excitement, irresolvable conflict, or utter panic. Well, that is the opinion of various voice teachers and speech therapists and psychiatrists who've treated me--alas, without success. In elementary school, I was held back a grade due to "severe speech impairments"--an overstatement. I'm now in my late sixties, almost seventy; I've ceased to be interested in the cause of my mispronunciations. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but fuck the etiology.)

  I don't even try to say the etiology word, but I can manage to struggle through a comprehensible mispronunciation of library or libraries--the botched word emerging as an unknown fruit. ("Liberry," or "liberries," I say--the way children do.)

  It's all the more ironic that my first library was undistinguished. This was the public library in the small town of First Sister, Vermont--a compact red-brick building on the same street where my grandparents lived. I lived in their house on River Street--until I was fifteen, when my mom remarried. My mother met my stepfather in a play.

  The town's amateur theatrical society was called the First Sister Players; for as far back as I can remember, I saw all the plays in our town's little theater. My mom was the prompter--if you forgot your lines, she told you what to say. (It being an amateur theater, there were a lot of forgotten lines.) For years, I thought the prompter was one of the actors--someone mysteriously offstage, and not in costume, but a necessary contributor to the dialogue.

  My stepfather was a new actor in the First Sister Players when my mother met him. He had come to town to teach at Favorite River Academy--th
e almost-prestigious private school, which was then all boys. For much of my young life (most certainly, by the time I was ten or eleven), I must have known that eventually, when I was "old enough," I would go to the academy. There was a more modern and better-lit library at the prep school, but the public library in the town of First Sister was my first library, and the librarian there was my first librarian. (Incidentally, I've never had any trouble saying the librarian word.)

  Needless to say, Miss Frost was a more memorable experience than the library. Inexcusably, it was long after meeting her that I learned her first name. Everyone called her Miss Frost, and she seemed to me to be my mom's age--or a little younger--when I belatedly got my first library card and met her. My aunt, a most imperious person, had told me that Miss Frost "used to be very good-looking," but it was impossible for me to imagine that Miss Frost could ever have been better-looking than she was when I met her--notwithstanding that, even as a kid, all I did was imagine things. My aunt claimed that the available men in the town used to fall all over themselves when they met Miss Frost. When one of them got up the nerve to introduce himself--to actually tell Miss Frost his name--the then-beautiful librarian would look at him coldly and icily say, "My name is Miss Frost. Never been married, never want to be."

  With that attitude, Miss Frost was still unmarried when I met her; inconceivably, to me, the available men in the town of First Sister had long stopped introducing themselves to her.

  *

  THE CRUCIAL DICKENS NOVEL--THE one that made me want to be a writer, or so I'm always saying--was Great Expectations. I'm sure I was fifteen, both when I first read it and when I first reread it. I know this was before I began to attend the academy, because I got the book from the First Sister town library--twice. I won't forget the day I showed up at the library to take that book out a second time; I'd never wanted to reread an entire novel before.

  Miss Frost gave me a penetrating look. At the time, I doubt I was as tall as her shoulders. "Miss Frost was once what they call 'statuesque,'" my aunt had told me, as if even Miss Frost's height and shape existed only in the past. (She was forever statuesque to me.)