Kralju Pero, ti se nase zlato
Churchill-u si na cuvanje dato ...
King Peter, you are our gold,
We sent you to Churchill to keep you for us ...
But then, the old Serb ranted, the chicken-hearted King had been bullied by the British into what was best for Yugoslav unity. King Peter announced on 12 September 1944, that support of Marshal Tito's People's Army was the best chance for Yugoslavia. The King denounced Mihailovich and Chetniks - called all those 'Traitors to the Fatherland' who wouldn't join the partisan army. Did the King know, the old Serb asked, that only six days before his betrayal of his people, Chetniks had risked their lives in the night to honor the King's birthday - bonfires on every mountaintop and singing aflaunt their love for the King, under blackout conditions too?
Did my father even know that? And Vratno confessed he'd been tied up for a time in the mountains himself - but not in Serbian mountains.
Well, then, did my father know what the Serbs sang now?
Necemo Tita Bandita--
Hocemo Kralja, i ako ne valja!
We don't want Tito the Bandit--
We want the King, though he is no good!
So you shouldn't want him, then, my father told the Serb. But the old man chanted in Vratno's face:
Bolje grob nego rob!
Better a grave than a slave!
'No,' my father said. 'Anything's better than a grob.' Undoubtedly thinking: Especially as fresh a grave as the one that received Gottlob Wut.
But Vratno didn't kill the old Serb for siphoning. He made a deal. The sidecar model 600, with twenty-three leftover grenades, for some of the Serb's underground handiwork - a transit permit, with name and photograph, that would enable my father to cross the Austrian border on the racer. Because he was going to Berlin to kill Hitler, he said.
'Why don't you kill Tito?' the Serb asked. 'You wouldn't have to drive so far.'
But they made the deal. A certain Siegfried Schmidt was issued German-command special-messenger transit papers by the very undermanned but efficient Serb underground of Maribor. And one cold but bright morning in mid-December of '44, Siegfried Schmidt - formerly, Vratno Javotnik - crossed into Austria and over the Mur River on a 1939 Grand Prix racer, stripped of its warlike fanfare (for special-messenger service), and fled north toward the city of Graz on what is now called Route 67.
And I choose to believe that it was the same cold but bright morning of December '44 when Chetnik Captain Rakovich was finally caught by the partisans and dragged back to Chachak - where his body was rearranged and displayed in the market plaza.
But concerning what happened to my father after the cold, bright morning of his entry into Austria, I can only guess. After all, Siegfried Schmidt was not protected for long by his Wehrmacht uniform, his Grand Prix racer, and his special papers - which were special only as long as the Germans held Austria.
One morning my father fled north to Graz, but he was never clear about how long he stayed in Graz - or when it was, exactly, that he drove north-northeast to Vienna. He wouldn't have stayed long in Graz, for sure, because Yugoslav partisans were crossing the Austrian border quite soon after him, without the need of special papers. And Vienna couldn't have been too safe for Siegfried Schmidt, motorcycle messenger, either; on 13 April 1945 - just four months after my father left Maribor - the Soviets captured Vienna with the aid of Austrian resistance fighters. The Soviets were supposed to be liberating the city, but for a liberating army they did a surprising amount of raping and such. The Soviets obviously had difficulty considering Austria as a real victim of Germany; they'd seen so many Austrian soldiers fighting with the Germans on the Russian front.
But whatever the conditions, on the thirteenth of April, 1945, Siegfried Schmidt must have gone underground.
And on the thirtieth of April, French troops crossed into Austria over the Vorarlberg; the following day, the Americans entered from Germany; and when the British came into the country a week or so later, from Italy, they were surprised to find Yugoslav partisans running amok in the Carinthian and Styrian provinces.
Austria was overrun - and Vienna stayed indoors; learned it wasn't wise to welcome the liberators with open arms.
And there's very little that's clear in my father's account of this. Abandoned apartment houses were the best places - though popular, too often crowded, and not wanting the company of some fool who wouldn't leave his incriminating motorcycle behind. Vratno would remember: quarter-faces slanting through letter slots - 'No room for soldiers, you hide somewheres else.'
Food would get you temporary entry, but food could get you killed too.
Vratno would remember warm-weather months indoors; recalled a week spent in trying to trap a Russian and get his uniform - for in Wehrmacht cloth, my father's language abilities wouldn't be convincing enough.
Foremost, he would remember this one summer night. A sector near the Inner City, floodlights caught his flight at every roaring alley end - the Grand Prix racer bolting zigzag and hard-to-hit He remembered what must have been the Belvedere Gardens - soldiers in the trees with flashlights, and Vratno running the racer almost flush to the high concrete wall, where he must have made a poor target but tore his elbow and knee against the jagged bomb tears in the concrete. He recalled a fountain that wasn't turned on; that would have to be the Schwarzenberg Platz. And remembered being forced to double back when he ran into a daze of floodlights and Russian voices.
Vratno would always remember: Gottlob Wut behind him, whispering into the indigo-blue ear hole - and weaving to Wut's flawless directions, my father jumped curbs and traveled down sidewalks close to the building walls and dodging the occasional door that jutted out; skidding lightless down darker and darker streets, waiting for the wall or door he wouldn't see coming to smack him head-on.
Vratno always remembered a great lobby door, one side twisted off its hinges - the inner lobby where he skidded to, dark as a cave and marble-cool. He recalled daring his headlight once, and seeing the spiraling staircase going up at least four landings - to what he hoped were abandoned apartments. He remembered, forever; lifting his front wheel to the first step, revving, and jouncing madly up the wide but shallow marble stairs to the first landing, where he popped the clutch of the fierce Grand Prix and battered into the first apartment. And opened his eyes then, killed the engine - waited for the shot. Then he set the lock bolts back in place and closed the sprung door of the apartment.
Remembered then are floodlights coming down the street and into the lobby. Voices in Russian were saying, 'There's no bike been ditched in here.'
At dawn cigarettes all over the floor, and what might have been good china was smashed; a rank, bleached corner of the kitchen where other hideaways, from this or an earlier occupation, decided to make their toilet. Cupboards empty, of course. Beds with knifed mattresses - occasionally peed-in beds. And only one of many stuffed animals still had its eyes unplucked - on the window sill of what must have been a young girl's room.
Vratno remembered: how odd it was, in a city apartment, to see an occasional chicken feather lacing the floor. But above all, he would cling to this - for days, the one bright spot on the whole dark street: a brass ball that caught the sun for a while each day; the ball was held in a cupid's hands; the cupid had half of its head bombed off, but still perched angelic above what used to be the Bulgarian Embassy - in fact, the only embassy building on the Schwindgasse.
The Seventeenth Zoo Watch: Tuesday, 6 June 1967, @ 5.45 a.m.
YOU KNOW, GRAFF, once before there was a zoo bust in Vienna. Its failure is little-known history now. And the details are not the clearest.
No one seems to know just what went on in the zoo during the late years of the war. There was a time, though - let's say, early '45, when the Russians had captured the city, but before the other powers had agreed on the terms of occupation - when there wasn't anything to feed the people. There's no telling what the animals did for food. There are some accounts of what t
he people did for food, though - since there wasn't the manpower, or the concern, to keep the zoo well guarded.
But four men, say, even if they were unarmed - and almost everyone who moved about was armed then too - could do a pretty slick job of making off with a fair-sized antelope; even a camel, or a small giraffe.
And that happened. There were raids, although some city-guard outfit was supposedly protecting the zoo; they had the future in mind - a kind of emergency rationing.
For you, and you and you - you get the left hindquarters of this here kangaroo. And you get this rump steak of hippo; just remember, you got to boil it a good long while.
But regardless of the city-guard outfit, there were successful raids. One bold, hungry crew made off with a wild Tibetan yak. One man, all alone, stole a whole seal.
I suppose there were plans for a full-scale raid. I suppose it was only a matter of time, before some well-organized group of citizens or soldiers, from any army, would decide there was a profit to be made in large meat-locker operations in a starving city.
But nothing that well organized came off.
There was also in the city a would-be noble hero, who thought the animals had suffered enough; he foresaw a grand slaughter and figured a way to thwart the butchers. No one knows who he was; he's only known by his partial remains.
Because, of course, the animals ate him. He busted in one night and let loose every animal he could find. I think he is reputed to have opened just about all the cages before he was eaten. Naturally, the animals were hungry too. He should have thought of that.
And so his good intentions backfired. I don't know if any animals even got outside the main gate, or whether they were all attacked within the general confines. I suppose animals ate other animals too, before the mob got wind of what had happened and swooped into the chaos with old grenades and kitchen utensils.
The details are cloudy. With so many small mammals underfoot all over the city, who was going to keep accurate records on animals? But the confusion must have been really something, and I imagine the Russians got in on it some time during the long night - thinking, perhaps, from all the fierce clamor, that they had a revolution on their hands, already.
I believe that neither tanks nor planes were used, but everything else must have been fair game.
I hope everyone who ate an animal choked on it. Or exploded when his bowels seized up.
After all, it wasn't the animals' war.
They should have been eating all the O. Schrutts.
(CONTINUING:)
THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: PRE-HISTORY II
The Americans occupied the Salzburger province, which includes Kaprun - such a peaceful spot that it made the few Americans who came all the way into the village very friendly. In fact, about the only unpeaceful thing I was told of - and this, before the Americans came - was the setting afire of my grandfather's brother, the postmaster of Kaprun. In general, though, it was so relatively comfortable in Kaprun that I can't speak too well for the wisdom of my grandfather's taking his family and Ernst Watzek-Trummer back to Vienna. Or at least they should have waited to see how the four-way occupation of the city was going to work out.
But in the early summer of '45, my mother had an interest in returning to the liberated city. This was before the other Allies had arrived at a definitive agreement with the Soviets too. Even the reports of the Russian occupation should have been enough to dissuade them from going back so soon.
It had something to do with Hilke's idea about Zahn Glanz. Now that the war was over, she felt that Zahn would be sure to look her up. And my grandmother, of course, wanted to see how her little apartment and her abandoned china might have fared. And Grandfather, perhaps, was anxious to return some fourteen books - seven years and three months overdue - to the foreign-language reading room of the International Student House, where Grandfather had been the head librarian. I can't think of any reason Ernst Watzek-Trummer might have had for going back - other than his protective feelings toward the Marter family, and perhaps to take out more books from Grandfather's library. Watzek-Trummer, living seven years with my grandfather, had begun to value an education.
Whatever - or all things combined - it was very poor timing of them to leave Kaprun when they did, in the first week of July, '45.
Also, Grandfather's trip was made difficult by the deplorable state of Zahn Glanz's old taxi. The trip was made easier, however, by Grandfather's political record - vouchsafes, in letter and visa form, from resistance leaders who knew that the Nazi role of Grandfather's brother had been a disguise, and sympathized with the family for the postmaster's flaming death. Watzek-Trummer, too, had a record of some note - mostly, a clever bunch of train derailments and subtle arson jobs at the depot in Zell am See.
So in the early morning of 9 July 1945, Grandfather Marter and his crew made an inconceivable journey through rubble and occupying armies, and entered Vienna in the late evening - having had more trouble with the paper work of the Soviets than with anyone else's red tape.
That was the day the Allies resolved the sectioning of the city. The Americans and the British grabbed up the best residential areas, and the French wanted the shopping areas. The Russians were long-term realistic; they settled themselves in the worker-industrial areas, and crouched themselves around the Inner City - near all the embassies and government buildings. The Russians for example - and much to Grandfather's uneasiness - occupied the fourth district, which included the Schwindgasse.
And sixteen out of twenty-one districts had Communist police chiefs. And in the Soviet-established Renner provisional government, the Minister of Interior, Franz Honner, had fought with the Yugoslav partisans. Renner himself, however, was a veteran Austrian socialist, and had his own premonitions about the suspiciously forward-looking occupation of the liberating Soviets.
So did my grandfather have his anxieties, as he drove down a Schwindgasse darker and more windowless than he'd ever seen.
Watzek-Trummer said, 'It's a ghost-town street, like the cowboys are always finding.'
Grandmother, in the back seat, hummed or moaned to herself.
When Grandfather drove over the sidewalk and into the lobby, some Russian soldiers in the former Bulgarian embassy put the floodlights on them from across the street. Papers were shown again, and Grandfather spoke a little dated Russian - relying on his experience from the foreign-language reading room to send the soldiers away. Then, before they unpacked the taxi, they went up to the first landing, found the keyhole rusted, and shoved against a previously weakened lock bolt - springing open the door.
'Oh, they've been peeing in here, the bastards,' Watzek-Trummer said; in the dark he cracked his shin on a large, heavy metal thing a few feet inside the doorway. 'Give a light,' he said. They've left a cannon here, or something.'
Grandmother crunched on what must have been her china; she moaned a little. And Grandfather put the flashlight on a very battered and muddy motorcycle, sagged against an armchair because it had no kickstand to hold itself up.
No one spoke, no one moved, and from down the hall, out of my mother's room, they heard someone who'd held his breath too long finally let it go - exhale what might have been interpreted as a last despairing breath. Grandfather put his flashlight out, and Hilke said, 'I'll get the soldiers, right?' But no one moved; my mother heard her old bed creak. 'In my bed?' she said to Grandfather, and then broke his grip on her arm - bumped the chair and motorcycle, moving down the hall toward her room. 'Zahn?' she said. 'Oh, Zahn, Zahn!' And bolted in the dark for the open door of her room. Watzek-Trummer got the flashlight from Grandfather and caught Hilke before she reached the doorway. He snapped her back up the hallway, and peeking round the jamb, blinked the light into her room.
On the bed was a dark, long-bearded man - a white paste on his lips, like a man with a thirsty, cotton-filled mouth. He sat dead-center in the bed, held his motorcycle boots in his hands and stared at the light.
'Don't
shoot!' he cried, in German - and then repeated himself, in Russian, in English and in some unrecognizable Slavic tongue. 'Don't shoot! Don't shoot! Don't shoot!' He waved the motorcycle boots above his head, conducting his own voice more than he was threatening.
'You have papers?' said Grandfather, in German and the man threw a billfold to him.
'They're not right!' the man cried, in Russian - trying to guess his captors behind the dazzling light.
'You're Siegfried Schmidt?' my grandfather said. 'A special messenger.'
'Up yours, messenger,' said Watzek-Trummer. 'You're too late.'
'No, I'm Javotnik!' said the man on the bed, sticking with Russian - fearing they were only trying to trap him with their German.
'It says Siegfried Schmidt,' my grandfather said.
'Fake!' said my father. 'I'm Vratno, Vratno Schmidt,' he mumbled. Then he said, 'No, Javotnik.'
'Siegfried Javotnik?' Watzek-Trummer asked. 'Where'd you get your dirty Wehrmacht suit?'
And my father fell to ranting in Serbo-Croat; those in the doorway puzzled at him. My father chanted:
Bolje rob nego grob!
Better a slave than a grave!
'Yugoslav?' said Grandfather, but Vratno didn't hear him; he bundled on the knifed mattress, and Grandfather walked in the room and sat beside him on the bed. 'Come on, now,' Grandfather said. 'Take it easy.'
And then Watzek-Trummer asked, 'Which army are you hiding from?'
'All of them,' my father said, in German - then in English, then in Russian, then in Serbo-Croat. 'All of them, all of them, all of them.'