Setting Free the Bears

  My mother said that the Grand Prix racer was still parked in front of the Serbian restaurant, so Ernst Watzek-Trummer and Grandfather walked up to get it, chatting with Russian soldiers along the way.

  'A big man,' Grandfather said to the soldiers. 'I think his name is Todor Slivnica. He's got bad scars, was grenaded in a car once. He's with my son-in-law, and maybe with another man too.' But no one had seen a soul - except, earlier, my mother walking home with a Russian soldier, the most gentlemanly-looking one she ran across; she'd dared to ask that he walk her home. He was a young one; in the last block, he'd held her hand, but I guess that was all he wanted.

  The soldiers along the way had seen no one else all evening.

  And when Grandfather and Trummer got to the Serbian restaurant, there was the racer outside, and inside there was a singer singing Serbo-Croat, and couples or dark groups of men clapping and singing along from their tables. Very gay.

  But Watzek-Trummer thought the whole Serb joint was in league. He shouted. 'Todor Slivnica!' And the singer stopped; she wrung her hands. No one accused Watzek-Trummer of being rude; the waiters just shook and shook their heads.

  They were about to leave when Grandfather said, 'Oh my God, Ernst.' And pointed out an enormous man sitting alone at a table by the door; he was beginning to eat a custard out of a little glass dish. They'd walked right by him when they came in.

  So they moved in on the man, whose face the candlelight made as multi-colored, and multi-shaped as a semi-crushed prism.

  'Todor Slivnica?' Watzek-Trummer asked. The big man smiled and stood up - an awesome yard, it seemed, above Grandfather and Ernst. Todor tried to bow, as if he were little.

  My grandfather, not knowing any Serbo-Croat, could only say, 'Vratno Javotnik?'

  And Todor let the blood flush his scars, made his whole face blink neonlike; taking up the little glass dish, he scooped the jiggling custard into his paw and spread his fingers out flat, with the custard quivering like a rare gift under Grandfather's nose, and then brought his other fist down on it - fop! and squeech!

  Then Todor Slivnica sat down and smiled, a dollop of custard sliding into one of his deeper-grooved scars. And he gestured - to the custard on the walls, to the custard all over the table, all over Grandfather and Ernst, and even smoking on the pulled-low overhead lantern. Everywhere there was custard, Todor Slivnica pointed and smiled.

  Where is Vratno Javotnik? Why he's here, on your nose, and here, on the lantern overhead - and even here! In space.

  So Watzek-Trummer had remembered that, has kept it all straight in his mind, to interpret - the riddle of where my father went is tied up in Todor Slivnica's symbolic gestures. Todor, among other things, was known for his sense of humor.

  The Twentieth Zoo Watch: Tuesday, 6 June 1967, @ 6.30 a.m.

  AN INTERESTING THING. O. Schrutt has changed his clothes! Or not changed them, exactly, but he's disguised them. He's got a rain slicker on; it covers his nametag and epaulettes. And he has neatly, purposefully untucked his pants from his combat boots. It almost looks like he's wearing regular shoes - or, at least, just lifters.

  O. Schrutt is getting ready for full daylight, and for the keepers who'll relieve him. O. Schrutt is not stupid; he takes good care of his indulgences. O. Schrutt will not likely be appearing as an addict in public. He's had his fix; he can outwardly endure a nonviolent day.

  At the risk of sounding polemical, I'd like to say that there are two ways to live a long time in this world. One is to trade with violence strictly as a free agent, with no cause or love that overlaps what's expedient; and if you give no direct answers, you'll never be discovered as lying to protect yourself. But I don't exactly know what the other way to live a long time is, although I believe it involves incredible luck. There certainly is another way, though, because it's not always the O. Schrutts who live a long time. There are just a few survivors of a different nature around.

  I think that patience has something to do with it too.

  For example, I'll bet there are a few survivors among O. Schrutt's previous small-mammal charges. If they've been patient enough to live, they'll finally get to see the fellow they've been so patient for. They'll jar their trancelike faces over a newspaper, they'll twitch their old bashed hands in their exhausted laps - a spasm will fling them out of their TV-watching chairs; O. Schrutt is news again, they'll see - recognizing him through twinges in a scar that's been numb for twenty years or more. Their crippled feet will uncramp enough to stagger them to a phone; they'll lose their speech impediments, talking to the operator; they'll breathe twenty back years of patience into the mouthpiece.

  That's right, dear Franz, it's him, I seen his picture, and for God's sakes, call Stein right away - to cheer him up, at last. O. Schrutt it was, I'm sure - kicking and screaming with a bunch of wild animals; their keeper, of course. And of course he had the night shift, and his uniform on too. Yes, the nametag still - right on the TV! I got to go tell Weschel, he's got no phone - and with his eyes, no paper or TV. But you call poor Stein, quick as you can. Oh, he'll be tickled to hear!

  Because nobody stops looking for the disappeared. It's only the surely dead who flatly can't end up as you'd want or expect them to.

  It's got to be my good faith, O. Schrutt; it's got me believing that some of your small-mammal charges will survive even you.

  (CONTINUING:)

  THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: MY REAL HISTORY

  25 March 1953. For my seventh birthday, my mother took me on the train to Kaprun - just twenty days after the death of Stalin, and the custardlike disappearance of my father. Ernst Watzek-Trummer and Grandfather met us in Kaprun on the Grand Prix racer, which had slowly and inexpertly made a nervous trip from Vienna.

  And so what was left of us settled in Kaprun, a village very small at the time; this was before the hydroelectric power dam in the mountains, and before the big ski lift brought less-hardy skiers to the town.

  My grandfather became the postmaster of Kaprun; Watzek-Trummer became the town handyman, and he delivered the mail - in the winter, towing it in rough brown bags on a sled that was mine when there wasn't any mail. I would occasionally ride the mailbags on top of the sled and allow Ernst to skid me over the steep winter streets. My mother made red cord tassels to tie up the bags, and a red cord tassel with a ball of wool on the end was attached to my stocking hat.

  In the summers, Ernst Watzek-Trummer delivered the mail in a high two-wheeler cart that was mounted to the rear fender of the Grand Prix racer, which must have made Gottlob Wut roll over in his grave, if you could call it a grave.

  We were quite happy in Kaprun; we were in the American sector now, of course, and within broadcasting range of Salzburg. In the evenings we listened to the American station that played all the Negro music - with rich-voiced women wailing, and yodeling trumpets and guitars: groin-blues. I remember that music without Watzek-Trummer's help, I really do. Because once at the Gasthof Enns, in the village, an American Negro, a soldier on leave, accompanied the radio with his harmonica, and sang, like a great iron bucket left out in the rain. It was winter; against the snow he was the blackest thing in Kaprun; people touched him to see if he felt like wood. He walked my mother home from the Gasthof Enns, and pulled me behind on the mail sled. He sang a line or two, then he signaled to me and I honked his harmonica up from the sled - through the little Y-shaped village, quite late at night, I think. Grandfather could talk English with the soldier, and later the Negro sent Watzek-Trummer a book of photographs about civil rights in America.

  Much else, I don't remember, and Watzek-Trummer's selective memory hasn't found anything important in these years - when I was eight, and then nine. There's just this: when the last Soviet soldier left Vienna on 19 September 1955 my grandfather suffered a small stroke - pitching backward into a stack of loose mail. People saw little squares of him falling through their side of the mailboxes in the post-office cage. But Grandfather recovered quickly. Only one thing: his
eyebrows went from grey to white, overnight. And that's another one of those details which I may have remembered myself, or which Watzek-Trummer may have remembered for me - or, more likely, it was some combined, repetitive remembering from the two of us.

  I remember the only important thing, though - all by myself, I'm sure. Because Watzek-Trummer either finds this hard to remember himself, or at least hard to remember out loud to me.

  I was ten and a half on the twenty-fifth of October 1956 - Flag Day, the first anniversary of the official end to the occupation. Grandfather and Ernst had been nine steady-drinking hours at the Gasthof Enns when they started going through old trunks in the post-office basement - our family storage center too. I don't know whatever could have possessed him, but my old grandfather found (or was looking for, all along) the eagle-suit - completely featherless, because the lard had long ago given out; a slightly greasy, gleaming suit of partially rusted pieplates; the head, and beak in particular, was solid rust. But my grandfather put the thing on, insisting to Watzek-Trummer that it was his turn to be the eagle, since both Ernst and Zahn Glanz once had a crack at it. And what better day for the Austrian eagle than Flag Day?

  Except that this Flag Day was somewhat marred. At least for my mother. Only two days before, the streets of Budapest had been suddenly bled; fortunately, the Hungarians at least had a cleared route of escape, because Austrian officials, after the Russian withdrawal from Vienna, had removed the barbed wire and picked the minefields along the Austro-Hungarian border. A good thing. Because the Hungarian political police and the Soviet Army had driven more than 170,000 refugees across the border, where Vienna - sympathetic to occupied peoples - had taken them under her eagle's wing. And they were still coming across on Flag Day.

  I can only guess that why this affected my mother so strongly was rooted back in March of '38, when Zahn Glanz either crossed the Hungarian border at Kittsee or he didn't cross at all. And if you choose to think of Zahn as crossing, then you might think of him as crossing back - with, perhaps, 170,000 other refugees from Hungary.

  I only think this because such things must have been on Hilke's mind to make her react as she did, to Grandfather - striding, magnificent, into our Kaprun kitchen, and shrieking under his bald bird helmet. 'Cawk!' he cried. 'Austria is free!'

  My mother moaned; she dug her fingers into me, where I was being made to model for a knitted sweater. Then she was up and charging the surprised, featherless eagle in the doorway, and caught him there, up against the jamb. She ground her knee between his legs, lifting the hem of his chainmail dress; she tugged and tugged to get his helmet off.

  'Oh God, Zahn,' she whimpered, so that Grandfather pulled roughly away from her and took the eagle head off himself. And couldn't look at her straight, but sort of turned his face away and mumbled, 'Oh, I just found it in the P.O., Hilke. Oh, I'm so sorry, but my God, Hilke, it's been eighteen years!' But he still wouldn't meet her eyes.

  She stayed sagged against the doorjamb; her face was ageless, even sexless - showed nothing at all. She said in a radio-announcing voice, 'They keep coming in. More than one hundred and seventy thousand now. All of Hungary is coming to Vienna. Don't you think we should go back now - in case he tries to look us up?'

  'Oh, Hilke,' Grandfather said. 'No, oh no. There's nothing back in the city for us.'

  Still radio-announcing, she said, 'Editor Lennhoff did successfully escape to Hungary. That's a fact.'

  Grandfather tried to stand still enough so his pieplates wouldn't rattle, but she heard his noise and looked up at him; her real voice and face came back.

  My mother said, 'You left him there once, you know. You made him stay behind for your bankbook, when he could have come with us.'

  'You watch it, girl,' said Watzek-Trummer, and caught her hair in one hand. 'You just get hold of yourself now, you hear?'

  'You left Zahn in Vienna!' my mother screamed at the bird, who rattled under his pieplates and turned away from her altogether. Watzek-Trummer yanked my mother's hair.

  'Stop it!' he hissed. 'Damn you, Hilke, your Zahn Glanz didn't have to stay so long as he did. He didn't have to drive any editors to Hungary, did he? And what makes you so sure he did, anyway?'

  But my mother tore her hair free of him and weaved back to me, where I balanced on the modeling chair, somewhat crucified in a thus far unseamed sweater, fastened on me with pins.

  Watzek-Trummer took the huddled eagle back to the post-office basement, and that night my mother woke me very late - rubbed her cold, wet face across my own and tickled me down under the covers with a fur-collared coat she only wore for trips. And then she took one. Leaving behind no symbolic gestures to be interpreted - that we might guess, for example, how long she would be gone, or how and with whom she would end up.

  Leaving us not so much, even, as custard on the walls, or soles of shoes to be recognized as final.

  Although my grandfather didn't need any evidence to know she wouldn't be back. Less than two weeks later, in November '56, Kaprun and the surrounding Salzburger mountains had their first snowfall - a wet, heavy storm that turned to ice at night. So after supper, Grandfather took the mail sled and - although no one saw him - put on the eagle's pieplate armor; he hiked two and a half miles up the glacier field toward the summit of the Kitzsteinhorn. He had a flashlight with him, and when he'd been gone several hours, Watzek-Trummer got up from our kitchen table and looked out the window up the mountain. And saw a faint light, almost motionless, bunking midway up the glacier, under the black peak of the Kitzsteinhorn. Then the light came down - the sled must have been careening, because the light shot straight down, leapt, zigzagged, steered to a route more roundabout than it had climbed: a logger's swath cut across the lower mountain, below the glacier field. The old skiers called it the Catapult Trail. It bent very steeply through fourteen S-curves, three and one quarter miles down to the village.

  Now, of course, there's an aerial tramcar that takes you up there, and the new skiers call the trail the Suicide Run.

  But Grandfather took the mail sled down what was then called the Catapult, and Trummer and I followed the light of his descent from our kitchen window.

  'That's your grandfather, boy,' said Ernst. 'Just look at him go.'

  We followed him through eight, then nine S-curves in the timber - he must have been sitting up and steering with his feet - and then his flashlight-headlight became so blurry it looked like a whole line of speeding traffic on the freeway. Though Watzek-Trummer claims he counted that Grandfather made one more S-curve before we lost sight of him altogether. That would have made ten out of fourteen, which isn't a bad percentage for a mail sled at night.

  Ernst told me I wasn't to come and shut me up in our kitchen, from where I watched a tiny band of flashlights combing the mountain under the Kitzsteinhorn until dawn. When they found my grandfather, who'd been catapulted off the Catapult by striking a log the new snow had almost hidden. The mail sled, by some mystical steering I'll never understand, made it back to the village all by itself.

  In fact, when they got Grandfather out of the forest, it was the mail sled Watzek-Trummer wanted found. And when they'd found it and brought it up to him, Watzek-Trummer laid my grandfather on it and eased him down the mountain and through the village to the Gasthof Enns. Where Ernst drank four brandy coffees and waited for the priest. Who was upset that Trummer refused to remove the eagle-suit. Watzek-Trummer vowed that Grandfather would be buried just as he was, in armor - featherless but masked. Ernst was given little debate. Grandfather had made his point clear some time ago, that the Catholics would never have their way with his body after what that traitorous Cardinal Innitzer did in '38. So to end all discussion, Watzek-Trummer said, 'You remember Cardinal Innitzer, Father? He sold out Vienna to Hitler. He encouraged all his flock to endorse the Fuhrer.'

  And the priest said, 'But the Vatican never endorsed it.'

  'The Vatican,' said Watzek-Trummer, 'has a history of being fashionably late.' Because old Ernst was still
reading, all he could get.

  Then I was sent for, and together, Ernst and I, we straightened poor grandfather's pieplates and packed snow around him - so he'd keep cool while the coffin was being made.

  Watzek-Trummer said to me, 'It was a stroke, of sorts; it was his heart, one way or another. But at least this is a better burial than some I've heard of.'

  After which, we went home, Ernst and I. I was a confident ten; if I felt at all abandoned by my family, I at least felt left in good hands. You couldn't have much better than Ernst Watzek-Trummer. Keeper of the family album - egg man, postman, historian, survivor. Responsible, finally, for seeing that I would survive to understand my heritage.

  The Twenty-first Zoo Watch: Tuesday, 6 June 1967, @ 6.45 a.m.

  THE CAGE-CLEANERS WERE admitted a little after 6.30. O. Schrutt opened the main gate for them, and he left the gate open. He put a chain across the entrance, though; there's a sign hung on it, probably a NO ADMITTANCE sign - although it's hung in such a way that I can't read it.

  The cage-cleaners are a sour, shaggy lot; they went in the House of Reptiles and came out with their paraphernalia, and then went en masse to the House of Pachyderms.

  Then I thought that if O. Schrutt would only move away from the gate, I could leave straightaway. I wanted to be casually outside the zoo when O. Schrutt left. Perhaps I could see where he went!

  Does O. Schrutt eat a normal breakfast?

  But some sort of morning watchman met O. Schrutt at the gate. There were very few words between them. Perhaps the new watchman chided old O. about wearing the rain slicker in so much sun. But O. Schrutt simply vanished; he stepped over the chain across the gateway, and I didn't even see which way he turned.

  I had to wait for the new watchman to slowly make a half-hearted round. When he finally went into the Small Mammal House, the cage-cleaners were still in the House of Pachyderms. But before I left my hedgerow and made it out the main gate, I saw the new watchman turn on the infrared! Funny, but I can't remember when O. Schrutt turned it off. This watch has worn me out, I guess.