Setting Free the Bears

  I believe that Bijelo Slivnica and his unpleasant family were still sitting tight when the car blew up.

  The noise of which brought my father bolting out on Smartin Street and up behind Wut on the racer, Gottlob turned back to the garage and established Vratno on the running, warmed-up sidecar model 600.

  'Why'd you do it, Wut?' my father asked.

  'For some time now,' said Gottlob Wut, I've wanted to be on the road again.'

  But whatever the reason Wut gave, there was this understood: they were even. My father had not submerged Gottlob Wut, and Gottlob had not abandoned my father.

  They weren't followed. Scout Outfit Balkan 4 was hard to find on Sundays, and when found, they were hard to mobilize - owing to a lack of carburetors.

  When they got to Dravograd, Wut and my father heard the carefully censored news. A well-liked Ustashi family of six had been killed - sabotaged on Smartin Street, Slovenjgradec. Ustashi and German troops seized Zivanna Slobod, notorious Serbian prostitute - and the murderess responsible for this crime. In accordance with German and Ustashi proclamations, one hundred Serbs will be shot for each German or Ustashi murdered. In Slovenjgradec, Serbs were being sought to answer for the crime. Six Slivnicas equals six hundred Serbs - Zivanna Slobod and five hundred and ninety-nine others.

  And in Dravograd my father was thinking: But there were seven Slivnicas. Bijelo, Todor, Gavro, Lutvo, Baba, Julka, and Dabrinka makes seven. Whichever one escaped saved the lives of one hundred Serbs, but my father, who was unconcerned with politics, wasn't comforted by that thought.

  'I think it was Dabrinka who wasn't blown up,' Vratno told Wut. 'She had the least flesh to get in the way of flying stuff.'

  'Doubtful,' said Wut. 'It must have been the driver. He was the only one who might possibly have seen it coming, and he had the wheel to hold on to - to keep himself from going through the roof.'

  They discussed it further over a urinal in a Dravograd dive.

  'Who would have been the driver?' asked Wut.

  'Todor always drove,' said Vratno. 'But he also had the most flesh to get in the way of flying stuff, if you go by my theory.'

  'I don't go by any theories,' said Gottlob Wut. 'It's just very pleasant to be on the road again.'

  The Fourteenth Zoo Watch: Tuesday, 6 June, 1967, @ 5.00 a.m.

  I'M STALLING. BUT I have my reasons!

  One thing, it's beginning to get light out - as if this moon hasn't been light enough. And foremost, I don't see how I can get into the Small Mammal House without O. Schrutt seeing me. If I were inside and O. Schrutt came in, that would be a different matter; then I could listen to where he was and avoid him in the maze. But I don't like the idea of making a dash up those stairs and coming through that doorway, when I can't be sure what part of the maze O. Schrutt is in.

  So I've decided: I have to wait for the plotting gelada baboon to come outside again. Now that it's getting light, I can see the outside terrace of the Monkey Complex from the end of my hedgerow. When that gelada baboon comes out, I'll make my move.

  It's simple. I'll station myself behind the children's drinking fountain, near the entrance to the Small Mammal House. Then I'll get that baboon's attention; I'll lob rocks at him; I'll leap out from behind the fountain and make rude, insulting gestures. That will set him off, I know. And when he's raging, O. Schrutt will come pelting down those stairs, fit to kill. And when O. Schrutt is going through his paranoiac ritual at the Monkey Complex, I'll streak silent and barefoot into the Small Mammal House; I'll get myself well back in the maze. O. Schrutt may come out so fast that he'll leave the bloody evidence this time. And if not, then at least I'll be in there when he starts up again.

  At least, there's been no indication that he'll let up. The fiend seems bent on keeping everyone up till the zoo opens. No wonder the animals always look so drowsy.

  You may think, Graff, that I sound extreme. But if there's an ulterior motive behind this zoo bust, it would certainly be the exposing of old O. - even if I don't know exactly what he is, yet.

  I know where he's come from, though. Twenty or more years ago - it's common history what various O. Schrutts were up to. I know the route O. Schrutt has been, and I'll bet there are those along that route who'd be surprised to hear of O. Schrutt again. At least, there are those who'd be more than interested to find an O. Schrutt who still wears his nametag and has kept both epaulettes.

  Ha! After how many atrocities to previous small mammals, how very fitting that old O. should end up here.

  (CONTINUING:)

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

  My father and Gottlob Wut spent two years in the mountains of northern Slovenia. Twice they were lonesome and planned trips. The first one, to Austria, ended at the Radel Pass along the mountain border. The Austrian Army guards appeared very formal and thorough with their rifles and paper work at the checkpoint. Wut decided that they'd have to abandon the motorcycles to make a crossing feasible, so they drove back into the Slovenian mountains that same night. And the second trip, to Turkey, ended just south-east of Maribor at the Drava River, where the Ustashi had accomplished another massacre of Serbs the night before; an elbow of the Drava was clogged with corpses. My father would always remember a raft snagged in some deadfall along the bank. The raft was neatly piled with heads; the architect had attempted a pyramid. It was almost perfect. But one head near the peak had slipped out of place; its hair was caught between other heads, and it swung from face to face in the river wind; some faces watched the swinging, and some looked away. My father and Gottlob again drove back to the Slovenian mountains, near the village of Rogla, and that night slept in each other's arms.

  In Rogla, an old peasant named Borsfa Durd kept them alive for the privilege of having rides on the sidecar model 600. Borsfa Durd was scared of the racer - he never understood what kept it upright - but he loved to sit toothless in the sidecar while my father bumped him over the mountains. Borsfa Durd got them fuel and food; he raided the Ustashi depot at Vitanje - until the August of '44, when he was returned to Rogla in a fellow-villager's mulch wagon. The terrified villager said the Ustashi had stood there kicking old Durd on his head on the wagon floor and shovelpacked mulch all around him; only the soles of his shoes were visible at the peak of the mulch mound, when everyone tried to extricate him for a proper burial in Rogla. But the mulch was too wet and heavy, too hardpacked, so a certain mass of mulch was chopped and rolled off the wagon into a hole; the hole was circle-shaped because that was the appropriate cut of the mulch mass, which was said to contain Borsfa Durd. Although no one really saw more of him than the soles of his shoes, the fellow-villager who'd brought him back, in his reeking wagon, testified that it was Borsfa Durd without a doubt - and Gottlob Wut said he recognized the shoes.

  So Borsfa Durd was buried coffinless in a chunk of mulch, which ended the fuel-and-food supply for the runaway motorcycles and their keepers. My father and Gottlob Wut thought they'd better move; if the Ustashi at the depot in Vitanje were at all curious as to why Borsfa Durd had been raiding their supplies, Vratno and Gottlob could be expecting a visit. So they left, taking what Borsfa Durd had owned for clothes.

  Relying on the topographical maps, they went over a route in the daytime, dressed as peasants and scouting on foot - the motorcycles were always stashed in brush; they'd walk five miles down the mountains, spotting the villages for small armies of any kind, and then five miles back to the motorcycles - out again on the bikes at night, this time in their Wehrmacht uniforms. By checking the route in the daytime, they not only knew how far away they were from villages, but they could drive most of the time with their headlights out and be reasonably confident of where they were going. They had some fuel left over from Borsfa Durd's next to last raid at Vitanje, but there's no doubt it would have been safer to abandon the motorcycles; they'd have run little risk, dressed as peasants and traveling on foot. This alternative, however, was never mentioned; it must be understood that t
he scout-outfit leader of Motorcycle Unit Balkan 4 had deserted the war in order to devote his time to motorcycles, not to escape anything in particular - especially on foot.

  In fact, Gottlob Wut was such a bad walker that they couldn't for long keep up their routine of five miles out and back in one day. Wut developed shin splints, or water on the spine, or an ailment stemming from early childhood - when he had somehow cheated on his learning-to-walk responsibilities, and depended, even at that time, on wheels. Actually, he confessed to Vratno, it was just one wheel at first. Wut had been the unicycle champion of Neckarsulm Technical High School for three straight years. As far as Gottlob knew, he still held the school record for the unicycle: three hours and thirty-one minutes of steady wheeling and balancing with no rest and without touching the ground with heel or toe. This performance was recorded on Parents' Night too, on the speaker's platform - when hundreds of weary elders drooped and shifted on hard benches, praying for three hours and thirty-one minutes that Wut would fall and break his boring neck.

  But Gottlob Wut simply needed a wheel or two under his spine, in order to stay even moderately upright for any length of time.

  They were a long time in the mountains, with only one incident. They were in the habit of fishing for food, or raiding, at night, the villages they'd spotted in the daytime. But on the third of September, 1944, they'd been two days with nothing but berries and water when they fell in with an odd crew. Croats, they were - a ragged peasant army - on their way to join Mihailovich and his diehard Chetniks. Gottlob and my father, fortunately in Borsfa Durd's old clothes, were ambushed by them in a valley below Sv. Areh. The ambush was all shouts, a stick or two, and a very old gun fired in the air. The Croats were, among other things, lost, and they offered Vratno and Gottlob safe passage for good directions out of where they were. It was a very odd crew - Croats wanting to join up with Serbs! They had apparently all been unwillingly involved in a recent partisan-Ustashi massacre of Serbs, and had seen for themselves how the Serbs were abused. Of course, their position was hopeless; there couldn't have been any organized Chetniks of any account in Slovenia. But my father and Gottlob spent a day and an evening with them, eating off a captured cow and drinking a wine so new it was pulpy. Vratno told the Croats how Gottlob hadn't been able to talk since he was shot in the brain. Which excused old Wut from the Serbo-Croat.

  The Croats said the Germans were losing the war.

  The Croats also had a radio, which was how Vratno and Gottlob discovered the date as 3 September - and were able to confirm their guess that the year was '44. And that evening they heard a Communist communique on Radio Free Yugoslavia, concerning a partisan victory over the Germans at Lazarevats. The Croats wildly protested, saying they'd had it from Serb sources that the Chetniks were surrounding Lazarevats and therefore must have been responsible for the victory and the capture of some two hundred Germans. The Croats insisted there were no partisans within miles of Lazarevats; then one of them asked where Lazarevats was, and the poor, befuddled Croats bemoaned again how lost they were.

  That same evening, Vratno excused Gottlob and himself. And plodded back to the motorcycles. He explained to the Croats how Gottlob's muteness caused him pain, and they had to find a doctor. The poor Croats were so hopeless; not one of them even had the sense to notice that my father and Gottlob went off in the opposite direction from how they'd been headed at the ambush.

  Vratno gave Wut a translation of the radio broadcast.

  'Mihailovich is a goner,' Wut said. 'The trouble with the Chetniks and all those fool Serbs is that they've got no idea of propaganda. They don't even have a party line - not so much as a slogan! There's nothing to grab on to. Now these partisans,' said Wut, 'they've got the radio controls, and a simple, unswerving line: defend Russia; communism is anti-Nazi; and the Chetniks really side with the Germans. Does it matter if it's true?' Wut asked. 'It's repeated and repeated, and it's very simply principled. The very essence,' said Wut, 'of effective propaganda.'

  'I didn't know you had any ideas,' my father said.

  'It's all in Mein Kampf,' said Wut, 'and you certainly have to agree. Adolf Hitler is the greatest propaganda artist of all time.'

  'But Germany's losing the war,' my father said.

  'Win or lose,' said Gottlob Wut, 'look at how much that little fart got going. Look at how far the fart has gone!'

  The Fifteenth Zoo Watch: Tuesday, 6 June 1967, @ 5.15 a.m.

  O. SCHRUTT HAS GONE too far!

  Oh, my part was easy. When that sulking baboon came out on the prowl again, I tore around the Monkey Complex and broke cover - for a moment - going full-tilt for the children's drinking fountain. I didn't even have to cause a stir; the old gelada saw me coming before I got behind the fountain. He brayed, he barked, he crowed; in a frenzy, he chomped the chain of his trapeze. And, of course, the zoo joined in again.

  And, of course, O. Schrutt left some small mammals in the midst of their various agonies and stormed out the door.

  He went off the deep end this time; this time, he went inside the Monkey Complex. I waited only a second, horrified at the din O. Schrutt and the monkeys made; it all squeezed out a small, open skylight in the Monkey Complex, like one tremendous lungful blown in a flute and squeezed out through only one shrill finger hole. And before O. Schrutt came outside again, I dashed up the stairs and into the Small Mammal House.

  I didn't stop to look in the cages. I pelted down the nearest aisle, took a left and then a narrower right - considered entering a chute, but thought against it - and finally stopped where I felt it quite safe; I was within listening distance of the main door, and I was around several corners from whatever way O. Schrutt might come; there were corners and turnoffs enough between us, so that I could hear him coming and have time to plot my next, avoiding move.

  I saw briefly that I'd stopped alongside the aardvark's glasshouse. But it wasn't until I'd made an effort to control my panting that I realized the aardvark wasn't alone.

  There was a stand-off! In one corner of his home, the aardvark backed himself up on the root of his tail - balancing, and holding his foreclaws out like boxing gloves; in the opposite, diagonal corner, facing the aardvark, was the small but vicious Indo-Chinese fishing cat - a nasty little item, hackles up and back arched high. They hardly moved. It didn't appear that either one would attack, but each time the aardvark would slightly lose and then catch his balance on the root of his tail, the fishing cat would snarl and hiss and lower its chin to the sawdust floor. And the aardvark - old sluggish earth pig - would snort a low sort of snort. I was trying to weigh all the odds in my mind when I heard O. Schrutt.

  He sounded like he was just outside the Monkey Complex, but his bullying voice was coming my way. 'There's nothing here, you fake of a baboon! You try me once more, and I'll have you go a round with my little jaguarundi! I'll give you something to scream about, I will!'

  While beside me the fishing cat yowled, faked a spring; and the aardvark grunted, stiffened up on his hind legs and the thick root of his tail. They stood off each other - my God, for how long?

  O. Schrutt! He makes his own theater! He creates a late show all for himself!

  O. Schrutt came roaring into the Small Mammal House. I heard him taunt someone; and then I heard the combat boots walking round a corner closer to me, one aisle to my left and one up; I traced an aisle to my right, padding coolly barefoot on the cement. I waited for O. Schrutt's next move.

  Only twice did I actually see O. Schrutt in the maze.

  Once, when I was crouched flush to a cage wall, but below a cage window - out of the infrared reflected through the glass, I think, and a whole aisle-length away - I saw old O. approach one of his productions. He slid back the glass to the cage! That's the glass that slides, the whole damn window face slides back. O. Schrutt's got a little key that lets him unlock the sliding glass - it makes sense; if someone heavy died, or someone vicious was sick and wouldn't come out, you wouldn't want to fool around with that little back door o
ff the chute - but O. Schrutt opens the glass to urge his gladiators on! If he thinks a stand-off is much too calm, he slips his cattle prod inside and touches off one of his contestants. And, of course, they can't see him, standing in the void - inserting his electric arm; it comes groping at them out of the dark, and jolts them neatly, once or twice.

  I saw him conduct the vocal levels up, then slide the glass back - cutting off the complaints. Then he watched, with interest, the Tasmanian devil skittering side to side and yelling as if it were running over hot coals - kept at bay by the surly ratel. O. Schrutt watched quite calmly, I thought - his raving mind at ease, or drugged.

  And once more I saw O. Schrutt. This time, I was perfectly safe in observing him. He'd gone in one of the chutes, so I just watched a whole glassy row of animals, looking for which cage would suddenly exhibit old O. at the back door - from where, I knew, he had the animals' perspective, and couldn't see a thing beyond the front glass.

  I watched him break up a stand-off that looked like it had been running over-long. Two tired giant anteaters looked as if they had taken all they could stand from a wildly pacing, panting jaguarundi - long, low, lean, little tropical cat. O. Schrutt is sly! He doesn't want any blood. O. Schrutt's overseers would be suspicious of mangled small mammals. O. Schrutt is a careful director; he keeps the matches at an exhausting standstill; he's there with his cattle prod to break up anything that gets out of hand.

  I saw enough, I'll tell you. O. Schrutt operates on all scales.

  The slow loris exchanges terrified glances with a lemur. The Malayan tree shrew is aghast at the startled leaps of the kangaroo rat. I was so ashamed to see: even the dying bandicoot is forced to endure the antics of the flying phalanger. And the expectant mother ocelot lies haggard in her cage corner, listening to the grunts and scuffles in the chute behind her back door.