That would have been early morning, one or two a.m. of 25 March 1946. It was three or four, Ernst remembers, when Grandfather phoned back to the apartment to tell Watzek-Trummer and my grandmother about me - a boy! Nine pounds, nine ounces, which was big, I might add, considering the diet of that occupied year. And my grandmother took up the candle and whirled across the kitchen to the windowshade drawn to one inch above the sill - and she flung up the shade, candle in her hand, and cried across the street to her friend the laundress, 'Drexa! It's a boy! Nearly ten pounds too!'
Watzek-Trummer recalls: he was midway from the phone to Grandmother, off his feet, he believes - spread out in the air and reaching to put out the candle - when the floodlights came into the kitchen and Grandmother was propelled toward him and right past him. Their paths crossed; he recalls looking over his shoulder as she was flung by him - her very surprised face, not even bleeding yet. In fact, Watzek-Trummer doesn't remember hearing the machine-gunning until after he recrossed the kitchen to her and tried to sit her up.
It's Drexa Neff who has told Watzek-Trummer the details, really. How the gunner was a few feet past the window and looking over his shoulder, as he would do forever, when Grandmother Marter scared the wits out of him with her ghostly candle and her screaming in a language the Russian didn't understand. And after he shot her - Drexa is very clear about this - the whole street was floodlit, but you couldn't see the faces that were in every window, just inches above the sill. At least not until Watzek-Trummer started screaming. 'They killed Frau Marter! She was just saying she was a grandmother now!' And how the street rained kitchenware and bits of pottery; how it was down street, only a few doors from where Frau Marter was shot, that the machine-gunner caught in his neck the first piece of well-aimed crock or lead or silver; and down on one knee, weaving a downed boxer's weave, he opened up his machine-gun again and took out a row of third-story windows from the Argentinier corner of the Schwindgasse half-way to Prinz-Eugen-Strasse. And would have gone the whole block length if the Russian officer hadn't got in the way - or had not been able to get out of the way; whatever, the gunner blew his officer down the sidewalk and stopped his sweep shot then. He covered his head with his arms and made a ball of himself in the street; everyone's kitchenware - some of which Drexa could identify, and even told Watzek-Trummer where it was bought and for how much - covered the Russian gunner, lying kitty-corner across from the former Bulgarian embassy, out of which no one ran to try and fetch him.
So I was born on 25 March 1946 and my birth was overshadowed not only by this aforementioned mistake. Because although I weighed nine pounds, nine ounces, and my mother had a short labor and smooth delivery, no one would ever remember. Although there was even a significant argument concerning my name - whether I be a Zahn, but my father asked, 'Who was Zahn?' and got no answer, or whether I be a Gottlob, but my mother asked, 'What was he to you?' and got no answer, so that Grandfather's suggestion was approved, because no questions and answers were necessary concerning a Siegfried, the name that carried Vratno to safety - even though there was this pertinent discussion, hardly anyone would associate me with the date of my birth. Because not only was my grandmother machine-gunned within moments of my delivery - which wouldn't be remembered by many, either - but because on the twenty-fifth of March 1946, Tito's partisans finally hunted down and captured the Chetnik general Drazha Mihailovich, the last honest and stupid liberator or revolutionary left in the world.
The Nineteenth Zoo Watch: Tuesday, 6 June 1967, @ 6.15 a.m.
WELL, I KNOW, Graff, I may seem to you to be turning my back on old principles. Well, there are some things, I see now, that you just can't split the hair over.
I mean, you always end up arbitrating in the end, don't you? What's the good of being so selective if you end up with more animals left in the zoo than animals that make it out? Now I'm certainly not advocating any slaughter, and I think we ought to save the bigger, rougher ones for last. But what kind of zoo bust would it be if you kept everything big or a little bit dangerous in its cage?
I tell you, I understand these animals - they know what the whole thing's for; or they will know, if you just point the way.
Now I don't mean to apply this to other things, but it's the liberators with unswerving principles who never get the revolution off the ground.
I'm sure. If you let these animals know you're for all of them, even the gelada baboon, even if we have to save him for near the end - I mean, all of them get let out of the cages - they'll be up at those gates, one hundred per cent. Nobody trusts favoritism!
I really mean it; even the frotting gelada baboon. I'm not going to be the one to let a little personal experience run my mind amuck.
(CONTINUING:)
THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: MY REAL HISTORY
Nothing was done about Grandmother Marter's death. The minutes of the Allied Council meetings are full of incidents much less understandably accidental than that one. The obviously premeditated ones, for example, were thought to be the work of hirelings for the Upravlenye Sovietskovo Imushchestva v Avstrii, or USIA - the Administration for Soviet Property in Austria. Which, under the label of war booty, made off with four hundred Austrian enterprises; foundries, spinning mills, factories for machinery, chemicals, electrical equipment, glass and steel, and a motion picture corporation. Hired killers made off with the Austrians who resisted the USIA.
The majority of these weren't killings of my grandmother's type. Wild shootings, rapes and bombings were more up the alley of the Russian soldier. It was the abductions that bothered the Allied Council, and these seemed to be carried out by the notorious Benno Blum Gang - a cigarette-smuggling ring, also black-marketing nylon stockings. For the privilege of operating in the Russian sector, the Benno Blum Gang deftly did away with people. Benno Blum's Boys would waylay people all over Vienna, and skulk back to the Russian sector when the heat was on - although the Soviets claimed to be hunting down Benno Blum too. In fact, about twice a month some Russian soldier would shoot someone and say that he'd thought it was Benno Blum. Although no one ever saw Benno Blum, to know what he looked like - or if he existed.
So there was a rather general illegality about the Soviet-sector operations in Vienna, which diverted any interest the Allied Council might have taken in my grandmother's commonplace machine-gunning.
But Watzek-Trummer helped my grandfather. He varied his nights between his kitchen partition and the master bedroom - going from time to time to sprawl beside Grandfather on the master bed; head-by-head, they indulged each other's anger - sometimes ranting so loudly that the floodlights from the former Bulgarian embassy would linger at the remembered kitchen window and blink, as if to say: Go to sleep in there, and stop your complaining. It was an accident. Don't plot against us.
But there were enough incidents that clearly weren't accidents to bring about the New Control Agreement on 28 June 1946 which eliminated Soviet veto power over the elected Parliament. This dissolved the Russian Booty Department, although Benno Blum, perhaps revenge-bent, appeared to be more active than ever, snitching a third of the anti-Soviets in Vienna - and causing Chancellor Figl to say, in a sad speech in Upper Austria, 'We have had to write down against a very long list of names simply the word "disappeared".'
'Like Zahn Glanz, huh?' said Vratno. 'Is that what happened?'
And irritable Watzek-Trummer said, 'Ask your wife, or do you only talk bed talk in bed?'
Not that they had soured on each other, really. It was only that it had been hashed out so much before, they'd come round to this so many times.
But they did have it out once, all right - although I've no right to remember it as well as I do, since I wasn't quite four months old at the time. I guess Ernst Watzek-Trummer has remembered it for me, like most important things.
Anyway, one night in the summer, the seventeenth of July 1946, my father came home in a drunken babble, having heard the news that Drazha Mihailovich had been executed by a parti
san firing squad. And Watzek-Trummer said, 'What about this Mihailovich? What was he, really?' But Vratno cried, 'He was abandoned!' And began to describe a ghastly vision for Watzek-Trummer, concerning a fantastical motorcycle mechanic who was gulped down a stand-up crapper in Maribor. Vratno talked not about Mihailovich but about Gottlob Wut, with whom my father once had beards in common. Vratno called to mind the sloppy Heine Gortz's question, 'Who are you with Wut?' And speculated how he might have kicked Heine Gortz down into the crapper, and then grabbed Bronsky, or Metz, or both, bending them back over the urinal while Gottlob freed himself and cracked their skulls with his concealed Amal racing carburetor.
And suddenly Watzek-Trummer said, 'You mean you didn't do all that? You didn't even try to do any of that?'
'I said we just met,' my father told him, 'and Gottlob was a good enough sport to go along with it.'
'Oh, he was was he?' Watzek-Trummer roared.
'Well, I told you now, Trummer!' Vratno said. 'Now you tell me, OK? Tit for tat, Trummer. Who was Zahn Glanz?'
But Watzek-Trummer stared at my father and said, 'I don't consider the information equal.'
My father screamed at him, 'Zahn Glanz, damn you!' And the floodlights came on across the street, scanning windows near and far.
Then my mother was out of her room, with her nightgown open so wide that Ernst Watzek-Trummer looked away from her. She said. 'What was that? Who's here?'
'Zahn Glanz!' Vratno shouted at her, 'Zahn Glanz is here!' And with a flourishing gesture to her room, he said, 'Zahn Glanz! What you call me in there sometimes - and they're usually the best times too!'
So Watzek-Trummer sent a blow across the kitchen table - with his former cleaver hand, his chicken-chopping hand - and belted my father up against the sink, where his elbow struck a faucet and started the water running.
Grandfather Marter came out of his master bedroom and whispered, 'Oh, please, don't any of you get near the window. You know it's very dangerous this late at night.' He looked at all of them, perplexed; they all sulked, eyes down. My grandfather added, 'Better not run the water so hard. It's summer, you know, and there's probably not an awful lot of water.'
Then Watzek-Trummer remembers that I started to cry, and my mother went back to her room to me. Funny, how wailing babies bring people to their senses. Even the floodlights went out with my crying. Babies cry; that's perfectly all right.
But that was when it all came out, one way or another. On the seventeenth of July, 1946, when Drazha Mihailovich was shot as a traitor. Which prompted the New York Times to suggest that the Russians build a statue of Mihailovich in Red Square, because Drazha Mihailovich was, among other things, the ironical Saviour of Moscow.
Watzek-Trummer, who still read everything he could get his hands on, tried to make peace in the kitchen by remarking, 'Isn't it amazing? The Americans have so many good afterthoughts!'
Which was true enough, of course. Very like the Russians in this respect: they react best to statistics and have little interest in details.
For example, it happened - was even witnessed - that one twenty-nine-year-old Viennese social worker, name of Anna Hellein, was dragged off her train by a Soviet guard at the Steyregg Bridge checkpoint on the United States-Soviet demarcation line, where she was raped, murdered and left on the rails. She was decapitated by a train shortly thereafter. But this in no way produced action by the Allied Council so much as did Chancellor Figl's list of eleven recent murders by men in Soviet uniform. Now, you see, it was the numbers that impressed them. But Figl's request that the Austrian police be armed, and be permitted to defend themselves and other citizens from men in uniform - of any army - was postponed a bit because the Soviets produced a list of their own; from some anonymous source, the Soviets counted thirty-six hundred 'known Nazis' within the police force. Numbers again, you see.
Actually, the problem with the police was decommunizing it, which went on slowly for about five years. Actually arming the police - or, that is, making the police worth having - was a somewhat slower process. As late as 31 March 1952, when I'd just had my sixth birthday, the Soviets prevented the police chief in their sector from sending any armed force to quell a horde of rioting Communists attacking the Greek embassy - protesting the recent execution of Beloyannis and three other Greek Communists. In fact, the rioters were brought to the scene in Soviet Army trucks.
Even later, when there was a riot due, the Soviets disarmed the police in their sector, taking away their rubber truncheons - which proved too effective in quelling riots, even though they were never quite what Chancellor Figl had in mind by 'arming' his policemen.
But the Soviets were losing Vienna, and that made them unreasonable; in fact there were setbacks all over.
In June of '48 the Yugoslav Communist party was expelled from the Cominform - Tito didn't need his crutches any more - and in November of '48, Soviet soldiers attempted to arrest someone on Sweden Bridge in down-town Vienna and were beaten back by angry crowds, rushing to the defense. Angry crowds were doing the Russians harm, even in their own sector.
And because of their tiff with Yugoslavia, the Soviets withdrew their support of Yugoslav claims in Austria's southland, Carinthia and Styria, and consequently, the Yugoslavs had to drop the whole idea of expanding into Austria.
This brought an odd number of Yugoslavs to Vienna, by the way; strange Yugoslavs - some Ustashi, I'm told, who were in the thick of plots and counterplots along the Austro-Yugoslav border when they were cut off. And the implication is that they found work with Benno Blum, who still had use for good abductors and roughies in general. Even though the records claim that Benno Blum was virtually washed up by 10 March 1950, when gangmember Max Blair was the subject of an Allied Council meeting, there's some evidence that a bit of Benno survived thereafter.
At least Ernst Watzek-Trummer claims so, and I take my history from him.
Ernst was there, anyway - 5 March 1953. When I was twenty days short of being seven, Joseph Stalin died. My grandfather and Watzek-Trummer had a celebration of their own, a little brandy round the kitchen table and spirits higher than their portions. But my parents were out, so I have to rely on Watzek-Trummer's account of their affairs. Not that I wasn't usually with my parents, only not for this celebration. And even I must admit - though Watzek-Trummer has certainly influenced me in this - that my parents had a relationship which struck me, at best, as being shy and unspoken. I was out with them from time to time - most memorably, sunny drives on the Grand Prix racer with my mother's arms around my father and myself, locking me against his stomach and pushing my knees tight against the gas tank I straddled. My father whispering Wutlike maxims of motorcycle-riding in my ear.
But on 5 March 1953, Joseph Stalin died, and Vratno and Hilke took a night out together, to celebrate, and they left me behind - to the old men's celebration at the kitchen table. I don't even remember my mother coming home, though it certainly must have been startling.
Because she came home alone, more puzzled than upset, and sat round the kitchen table with my grandfather and Watzek-Trummer (and maybe, with me too), wondering out loud whatever could have possessed Vratno.
Because, she said, they were comfortably wined and dined and sitting in a Serbian restaurant that Vratno frequently enjoyed, somewhere up by the Sudbahnhof - still in the Russian sector - when all at once, in comes this man, dark-skinned, bearded, small but fierce-eyed. Though he was friendly, Mother insisted to Watzek-Trummer. This man sat down with them at their table.
'The killer is dead!' he said to them, in German, and they toasted one with him. Then the man pinched Vratno's arm and said something my mother said sounded like this:
Bolje grob nego rob!
Better a grave than a slave!
And Vratno looked startled, but not very - only a little; perhaps because he hadn't thought that he looked very much like a Yugoslav of any kind, sitting talking German, as he was, with a Viennese lady.
But the man went on: a little Serbo-Croat, and
a little German now and then - he was being polite to Hilke. He also put his arm around my father and, my mother guessed, wanted him to come for a drink somewhere, alone. But Vratno said, in German, how he didn't really want to leave his wife, even for a short while, or for a drink or two - or even to meet some more homelanders. But the whole thing was very gay until the man said something my mother said sounded like this:
Todor.
Just that, once or twice - all by itself, or in sentences of Serbo-Croat. Vratno looked startled again - this time, even very startled. But the man kept smiling all the time.
It was then that Vratno very rudely tried to whisper to my mother without the man hearing; it was something about how she should go to the ladies' room, find an open phone and call Watzek-Trummer just as quick as she could. But this man kept laughing and slapping Vratno's back, leaning over between my father's face and my mother's - so they couldn't really whisper with success.
It was then, my mother said, that the other man came in.
Hilke Marter-Javotnik had maintained that he was the biggest man she ever saw, and that when he came in, my father leaned across the table and kissed her hard on the mouth; got up, then, looked down at his feet, hesitated - but the first, smaller man said, in German, 'Your wife is very lovely, but she'll be safe - with me.' And Vratno looked up at the huge man and walked past him, right out the door.
The big one, whom the little one called Todor, went right out after my father.
The worst thing about the big one, my mother said, was that his face was lopsided - sort of chewed or blown off - and flecked with bluish scars; some, jagged, stuck like gum on his face, and some were of silver thinness, deep enough to tug and wrinkle the surrounding skin.
There wasn't anything wrong with the little one. He stayed and had a drink with her; then he went to bring back Vratno, he said, but never came back himself. And neither did my father.