And when I got outside the gate, I couldn't see a trace of O. Schrutt. I went across Maxing Strasse to that cafe. I sat at a sidewalk table and was told I'd have to wait till seven to be served.
My interesting Balkan waiter was setting ashtrays out on the tables. He must work morning and afternoons - takes the night off, for cooking up sly reports to make the next day.
He eyed me with immeasurable slyness. He let me catch his eyes, and then showed me, with a side glance, that he noticed how my motorcycle was parked in exactly the same place it was yesterday afternoon. That was all; he just showed me he knew that much.
And suddenly I began to get a little nervous about coming back to Waidhofen - about this frotting waiter recognizing me on the day of the bust. I should have a disguise! So I decided to cut all my hair off.
But when this waiter brought an ashtray to my table, and sort of dealt it across the tabletop like a playing card, I got a little bolder and asked him if he'd been around Hietzing when they had a zoo bust - twenty years or so ago.
He said he hadn't been around.
So I said, 'You must have heard about it, though. They don't know who it was that had the idea. He was never identified.'
'I understand,' he said, 'that whoever it was ended up like a lamb chop.'
See? Sly frotter. He knew it all along.
So I asked him, 'What sort of fellow would ever try such a thing?'
'A madman,' he said. 'A real psych case.'
'You mean,' I suggested, 'someone with inherited flaws? Or someone who had a background heaped with insecurities and frustrations - a type from a broken home?'
'Why sure,' he said - still humoring me, the frotter. 'That's what I meant, all right.'
'A case of transference,' I added.
'An error of judgment,' he pronounced.
'A lack of logic,' I said.
'A total loss of logic,' said the waiter; he beamed at me. His armload of polished glass ashtrays threw little sharp triangles of sun up to his face.
But I have my own idea of who the mad zoo buster might have been. After all, it's perfectly fair to have your own theory on this matter; it's an open question. And I can think of the perfect man for the job; at least, from all I've heard about him, he would have been ripe for it - both for the divine idea and the flaw in his youthful foresight that caused him to be eaten. He was somehow related to me too; he was rumored to have driven a hunted newspaper editor to Hungary, and rumored not to have gotten back. But everyone knows that the editor was saved, and so it's possible to assume that the driver might have gone to Hungary and gotten back - at a time when those he most wanted to see were unavailable. Well, it's possible. This person did love animals. I happen to know he once expressed grave concern over a park squirrel who'd been tattooed - so deeply that its mind could only dance in circles.
It could have been him, as easily as it could have been another - say, some guilt-ridden relative of Hinley Gouch.
Then that sly Balkan waiter said, 'Sir, are you all right?' Trying to make me think I wasn't, you see; suggesting that I'd been doing funny things with my hands or mouth, maybe.
You have to watch out for these Balkans. I once knew of one who failed to recognize his best friend over a urinal.
But I wasn't about to let a frotting Balkan trick me. I said, 'Of course I'm all right. Are you?' Seeing, already, what would happen to his armload of ashtrays, one morning soon, when he'd raise his sly eyes and lose his smug composure - in the face of a charging Rare Spectacled Bear from across Maxing Strasse.
'I only thought, sir,' the waiter said, 'that maybe you wanted some water. You seemed to be dizzy, or at loose ends - as they say.'
But I wasn't going to let him get the best of me. I said:
Bolje rob nego grob!
Better a slave than a grave!
Then I said, 'Right? That's right, isn't it?'
Incredibly sly, like a stone, he said, 'Would you like anything to eat?'
'Just coffee,' I told him.
'Then you'll have to wait,' he said, thinking he'd fix me good. 'We don't serve till seven.'
'Then tell me where's the nearest barbershop,' I said.
'But it's almost seven now,' he said.
'I want a barber,' I told him, nastily.
'They won't cut your hair till seven, either,' he said.
'How do you know I want my hair cut?' I asked him, and that shut him up. He pointed round the Platz off Maxing Strasse; I pretended I didn't see the barber's striped pole.
Then, just to confuse him, I sat at the table past seven o'clock - doodling in my notebook. I pretended I was sketching his portrait, keeping my eyes on him and making him nervous while he served a few other early people.
At seven o'clock they open the zoo. There's no one who goes that early, though. There's just a fat man with a gambler's green eyeshade, smug as a sultan in the ticket booth. Over the booth, from time to time, the giraffe's head looms.
THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: EPILOGUE
I grew up in Kaprun, a well-read child because Watzek-Trummer knew the value of books; a child with historical perspectives too, because Ernst filled me in as I went along - leaving gaps here and there, I assure you, until I was properly old enough to hear it all.
Before he sent me to the University of Vienna, Watzek-Trummer saw to it that I learned to drive the Grand Prix racer, 1939 - suggesting to me that the bike was an almost genetical inheritance. So I was certainly deprived of nothing: I had my hot rod. First thing I did was to strip it of that degrading mail cart.
But after I'd done some thinking about Gottlob Wut, I began to consider the Grand Prix racer as something really too special for me to waste on my adolescence, and getting all the details from Ernst, I made my first trip out of Kaprun. That was in the summer of '64. I was eighteen.
I drove the Grand Prix racer to the NSU factory at Neckarsulm, where I tried to speak with one of the manager types concerning the prize-worthy motorcycle that had been my inheritance. I told a mechanic first, as that was the first type I met in the factory - how this had been the bike of Gottlob Wut, the masterful, mystical mechanic of the 1930 Italian Grand Prix. But the mechanic hadn't heard of Wut; neither had the young manager type I finally found.
'What you got there?' he said. 'A tractor?'
'Wut,' I told him. 'Gottlob Wut. He was killed in the war.'
'No kidding?' said the manager. 'I heard that happened to a number of people.'
'The Grand Prix of Italy, 1930,' I said. 'Wut was the key man.'
But the young manager only remembered the drivers, Freddy Harrell and Klaus Worfer. He knew no Wut.
'Well, get to it,' he said. 'How much you want for that old thing?'
And when I mentioned that perhaps it was a museum piece - and did NSU have a place where they honored their old racers? - the manager laughed.
'You'd make a great salesman,' he told me, only I didn't tell him that I'd planned to give it away - if they had a nice place for it.
The bike show was full of awful, spiteful motorcycles that made spitting sounds when they were revved. So I started up my racer and - in my mind - loosened all their frotting aluminum parts.
I drove back to Kaprun and told Watzek-Trummer that we ought to keep the motorcycle in storage somewhere, and drive it only for emergencies. Of course, with his historical perspective, he agreed.
Then I went to Vienna and attempted to join in the university life. But I met no one very interesting; most of them hadn't even read as much as I had, and none of them knew as much as Ernst Watzek-Trummer. There was one student I remember fairly well, though - a Jewish kid who was a parttime spy for a secret Jewish organization that hunted down old Nazis. The kid had lost all eighty-nine members of his family - disappeared, he said - but when I questioned him as to how he knew, then, that he even belonged to this family, he confessed he had 'adopted' them. Because as far as he really knew, he had no family. He remembered no one, except the RAF pilot wh
o flew him out of the Belsen area after the camp was busted. But he 'adopted' this eighty-nine-member family because on the records he'd seen, that looked like the largest single family who had vanished without a leftover. It was for them, he said, that he made himself the ninetieth member of the family - the survivor, at least in name.
He was fairly interesting, with his parttime apprentice spying, but apparently he became very good at his job and was so boastful that his picture got in one of the Vienna papers, as being single-handedly responsible for the discovery and arrest of a certain Richter Mull, a Nazi war criminal. But that publicity made the kid nervous, and his secret Jewish organization disowned him. He used to sit around in the university Kellers; remembering what had happened to America's Wild Bill Hickok, he never sat back-to a window or a door. When I told Ernst Watzek-Trummer about him, Ernst said, 'A war-paranoid type.' It was something he'd read.
And then there was my good friend Dragutin Svet. I met him on a ski trip to Tauplitz my second year at the university. He was a Balkan studies fellow, a Serb by birth, and we did a lot of skiing together. He always wanted to meet Watzek-Trummer.
But we had a falling out. A silly thing. I went with him once to Switzerland, skiing again, and while we were there, we overheard a group of men speaking Serbo-Croat in our Gasthaus lobby. It turned out there was a sort of convention of exiled Serbs, a mean-looking crew of old folk, for the most part, and a few young, idealistic-looking, soldierly chaps. Some of the old ones - so the word was - had fought side by side with the Chetnik general Drazha Mihailovich.
We got to go in their dining-room, though our age and nervousness put us under suspicion. I was trying to remember some witty Serbo-Croat when this one old fellow said, in German - nastily leering at me the length of their table - 'Where are you from boy?' And I said, truthfully, 'Maribor, by way of Slovenjgradec.' And several men put down their cocktails and said severely, 'Croat? Slovene?' Since I didn't want to embarrass my friend Dragutin Svet, the Serb by birth, I blurted the only Serbo-Croat I could remember:
Bolje rob nego grob!
Better a slave than a grave!
Which, as Watzek-Trummer later explained, was precisely the opposite of what I should have said; it was my own father's unheroic improvising that got me in trouble with the diehard Chetniks. Because there was a deeply insulted man at the head of the table who leaned over a long way toward me; he had only one hand and used it remarkably well, to toss a shot of Scotch in my face.
My friend Dragutin Svet refused to understand the accident, and he thought me in bad taste for making such word play with a slogan the Serbs take so seriously. And I didn't see much of Svet thereafter.
I got a job with a certain Herr Faber, to keep my hand in - and my eyes open for - motorcycles. Also, I needed to finance my education, which appeared to be taking longer than it should have. All because my thesis project was rejected by a certain Herr Doktor Ficht.
This thesis was to be my HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY, as I thought it was well enough detailed, and even creative. But this Ficht was furious. He said it was a decidedly biased and incomplete picture of history, and flippant besides - and there were no footnotes. Well, in trying to calm him down, I discovered that Herr Doktor Ficht used to be Herr Doktor Fichtstein, Jew, who'd lived a wharf rat's life on the Dutch coast during the war - having been caught only once: escaping after they'd injected his gums with some tooth-mortifying chemical too new and experimental to be safe. The previous Fichtstein was enraged that I should be so pretentious as to dash through the war with so little mention of the Jews. I tried to explain that he should really look at my autobiography as what is loosely called fiction - a novel, say. Because it's not intended to be real history. And I added, besides, that I thought the Doktor was making a rather Russian-American value judgment by claiming that no picture of atrocity can be complete without the millions of Jews. Numbers again, you see. Ficht, or Fichtstein, seemed to miss my point altogether, but I confess, statistics have a way of getting the best of you. They can make almost anything, all by itself, seem not in the least atrocious.
But that run-in made my university career look a bit long-term. That is, I'd have to stay around until I mastered some academic subject or other - rather than show them what I already knew and have done with it.
Watzek-Trummer, of course, doesn't understand universities at all. He declares that they all must have read too much before they were interested in anything, which prevented them, later, from becoming interested in anything they read. He's rather perplexing on this issue. Self-educated men, you know, are unbudging.
Ernst still reads like a demon. I see him every Christmas, and I never come without a stock of books for him. Unlike most old people, though, his reading has become more selective; that is, he no longer reads everything he can get his hands on. In fact, he's often unimpressed with the books I bring him. He begins, he browses, he stops at page ten. 'I know it already,' he says, and lays it aside.
Actually, I go home for Christmas more to read the books Trummer has than to flatter myself into thinking I'm bringing him any favors.
Watzek-Trummer is a retired postman now, and very venerable in the town. He keeps three rooms in the Gasthof Enns; he's even something of a tourist attraction, when he permits it.
One of Trummer's rooms is all books; one room stores the Grand Prix racer, 1939; one room has a bed, and a kitchen table - even though Ernst eats all his meals in the Gasthof now. The kitchen table is for sitting at, leaning on and talking over - a habit he says he can't break, even though he's alone now.
Whenever I'm home, I sleep in the room with the 1939 Grand Prix racer. And I enjoy my Christmases very much.
Believe me, Ernst Watzek-Trummer can tell you a thing or two.
The Twenty-second and Very Last Zoo Watch: Tuesday, 6 June 1967, @ 7.30 a.m.
I'VE STOPPED FOR a coffee in Hutteldorf-Hacking, not more than a mile west of Hietzing. There's some countryside here, though it's mostly small vineyards; you've got to go a mile more if you want to see cows.
At the minimum, then, the oryx has a two-mile trip before his first lay.
Hutteldorf-Hacking is taken aback with me. I got a winner of a haircut back in Hietzing.
Following that sneaky waiter's directions, I went round the Platz off Maxing Strasse and was Hugel Furtwangler's first customer.
'Shave or haircut?' said little Hugel Furtwangler. You could tell he wanted to give me both, or at least the haircut - since shaves are cheaper.
'Just a shave,' I said. 'But a total shave.'
And pretentiously nodding as if he understood me, he packed some hot towels around my cheeks. But I said, 'Get the eyebrows too, won't you?' And that stopped him from looking so know-it-all.
'Eyebrows?' Hugel said. 'You want your eyebrows shaved?'
'A total shave, please, Hugel,' I said. 'And no nonsense now.'
'Oh well,' he said. 'I worked at the hospital once. We'd get them sometimes after fights, and you'd have to shave their eyebrows then.'
'Everything,' I said. 'Just shave my whole head, please.'
And that threw him off again, although he tried to pretend he wasn't baffled.
'You mean you want a haircut,' he said.
'Just a whole shave,' I insisted. 'I don't want my hair cut, I want it shaved off altogether - smooth as the end of my nose.' And he gawked at my nose as if it would help him to understand me.
'If I'm going to shave your head,' he said, 'I have to cut the hair first. I have to cut it down close in order to shave it.'
But I wasn't going to have him talking to me as if I were a child or a madman to be humored along. I said, 'Hugel, you do whatever you think is necessary to get the job done. Only, no gashes in my head, please. I'm a bleeder, you know - there's been a touch of hemophilia in our family for years, so no cuts, please, or I'll be bled like a steer in your chair.'
And Hugel Furtwangler gave a phony laugh - humoring me again, thinking he was in control.
'You're
a real laugher, aren't you, Hugel?' I said. And he kept right on.
'Such a sense of humor you have,' he said. 'And so early in the morning!'
'Sometimes,' I told him, 'I laugh so loud that I bleed through my ears.' But he still kept up his giggle, and I could see he was set in his ways of belittling me. So I changed the subject.
'Lived in the zoo long, Hugel?' I asked. And he harumphed over that.
'Did you ever see a zoo bust, Hugel?' I asked. And he snuck down behind my head in the mirror, pretending he was trimming the base of my neck.
'There was one, you know,' I said.
'But they didn't get out,' he said - knowing all along, the frotter.
'You were here, then?' I asked.
'Oh, such a long time ago,' he said. 'I don't remember where I was.'
'Were you always a barber, Hugel?' I asked.
'It runs in the family,' he said, '--like your bleeding!' And he thought himself so funny that he almost cut my ear off.
'Watch it,' I said, going stiff in my chair. 'You didn't break the skin, did you?' And that sobered him some; he worked with great care.
But when he'd given me no more than what looked like a normal haircut, he said, 'It's not too late. I can stop here.'
'Shave me,' I said, staring stonefaced at the mirror. And he did.
He was starting up his giggles again, while I inspected my head front-and-back in the mirror, when his second customer came in.
'Ah, Herr Ruhr,' said Hugel. 'I'm ready for you right away.'
'Morning, Hugel,' said heavy Herr Ruhr.
But I leapt back from the mirror and stared at Herr Ruhr.He looked a little alarmed, and I said, 'This barber's a laughing fool. I ask for a shave and look what he gives me.'
Hugel gave a little pip of a cry, razor in his tiny hand - shaving cream on the backs of his knuckles.
'Watch out for him, Herr Ruhr,' I said, running my hand over my gleaming head. 'He's a dangerous man with that razor.' And Herr Ruhr stared at the razor in little Hugel's hand.
'He's crazy!' cried Hugel Furtwangler. 'He wanted me to do it!' But dancing with his razor, and his face so bright red, Hugel looked a little crazy himself. 'And he's a bleeder too!' Hugel shouted.