by John Irving
'War paranoid,' announced Watzek-Trummer, who'd read and remembered a number of things from Grandfather's overdue books.
So they went back to the taxi for their food and clothes, and got water from the inner courtyard well pump behind the main lobby. Then they fed and washed my father and dressed him in one of Watzek-Trummer's nightshirts. Watzek-Trummer slept in the taxi, keeping a wary guard; Hilke and my grandmother slept in the master bedroom, and Grandfather watched over the war paranoid in Hilke's old bed. Until three or four a.m., 10 July 1945, when my mother came to relieve Grandfather at his watch.
Three or four a.m., it was - very scarce predawn light and a light rain, Watzek-Trummer remembered, sleeping in the taxi. Three or four a.m., and Hilke, covering my father's sleeping beard with her hand, notices his forehead is somewhat the age of what she imagines Zahn Glanz's forehead to be - noticed how his hands were young too. And Vratno, waking once and bolting upright in my mother's old, knifed bed, saw a slim, sad-mouthed girl - more the green stem than the flower - and said, 'Dabrinka! I told that foolish Wut it would have to be you who wasn't blown up.' in German, in English, in Russian, in Serbo-Croat.
Limiting herself to one language, Hilke said in German, 'Oh, you're all right now. You're safe here, hush. You're back, you - whoever.' And gently shoved my father back down on her bed on his back, and lay over him herself - it being a damp, chilly, light-rainy night for both their summer nightshirts.
Many languages were whispered; though the rain was light, it lasted long, and many drops fell. Tireless Ernst Watzek-Trummer, sleeping light as the rain, remembers the rustling on the old, knifed bed that sent me giddily on my long way into this scary world. In very scarce predawn light. With a light rain falling. At three or four a.m., 10 July 1945, when Ernst Watzek-Trummer was sleeping unusually light.
Old Watzek-Trummer, historian without equal, has kept track of the details.
The Eighteenth Zoo Watch: Tuesday, 6 June 1967, @ 6.00 a.m.
THE RARELY DISEASED binturong is coughing; the shambling bearcat of Borneo, suffering from his peculiar, unnamable disorder.
And O. Schrutt is waiting to be relieved of his command. His own unmarketable narcotics have finally soothed him. It's peaceful in the Small Mammal House, the infrared is off, and a lazy, docile-appearing O. Schrutt is greeting the dawn with a cigarette - puffed like a luxury cigar. I see great smoke rings rise above the ponds for the Various Aquatic Birds.
And it's clear to me, with it growing so light out - so quickly too - that we'll have to do most of our work when it's still dark. We'll have to have O. Schrutt safely tucked away - have the keys in hand, and some prearranged order of releasing - before it's light outside.
And clearly the chief problem is this: though it's simple enough to unlock the cages, how do we get the animals out of the general zoo area? How do we get them out the gates? Put them at large in Hietzing, and hopefully guide them in the countryside direction?
This is crucial, Graff. It's why, among other things, the earlier zoo bust failed. What do you do with forty or so animals loose within the confines of the whole zoo? We can't lead them out the main gate, or into the Tiroler Garten, one at a time. That way, some cluck in Hietzing would be sure to spot one and give the alarm before we're finished up inside. They have to leave all at once.
Can we expect them to stand in line?
It seems we'll have to divide them in some orderly fashion. We'll have to save all the antagonists till last, and maybe we'll release the bigger ones through the back gateway and into the Tiroler Garten; they can sneak away through predawn Maxing Park.
I think I must admit it will be a case for Fate.
See us now: the elephants are playing water sports in the ponds for Various Aquatic Birds; countless Miscellaneous Range Animals are chomping the potted plants along the paths; all the wild monkeys are teasing the zebras, scattering after the back-and-forth clattering, bewildered giraffe; some of the small mammals could easily get lost.
If it's still around, surely the least auklet will get stepped on.
When they're all on the loose, how do you get their attention? How do you say, 'All right, out the gate, and make it snappy?'
Some of them may not even leave.
It's one reason I've always doubted Noah's neat trick of pairing up the gangplank to the ark.
So I think this calls for faith. I think there's no point in discussing the possibilities for chaos, because it's a matter of the mass frame of mind. We either convey the spirit to them or we don't.
And you can't draw the line anywhere, either. Not this time.
(CONTINUING:)
THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: PRE-HISTORY II
On 2 August 1945, my mother had her suspicions confirmed by a Soviet Army doctor; she was married to Vratno Javotnik in St Stephen's, in what was a small but noisy ceremony - throughout which my grandmother hummed or moaned, and Ernst Watzek-Trummer sneezed; Ernst had caught a cold, sleeping in a taxi.
And there were other noises - the dismantling work at one of the side altars, where a crew of US Army engineers were sweatily removing an unexploded bomb which had been dropped through the mosaic roof of St Stephen's and was wedged between some organ pipes. For some months after the bombing, the organist had been too nervous to play either loudly or well.
As in any other wedding, after the oaths my mother shyly kissed my father's newly shaved face. Then they were clumsily followed up the aisle and out of the cathedral by burly Americans bearing their bomb like a very heavy, just christened child.
The wedding party was held in the newly established American hamburger spa on the Graben. The young couple were most secretive. In fact, most of what I know of their relationship is a sparsely documented tale - relying on the interpretations, if not actual witness, of Ernst Watzek-Trummer. Ernst maintains that the most he ever heard the couple say in public was the discussion concerning Hilke's wish that Vratno shave for the wedding. Which was very shy talk, even for such a domestic matter.
Nevertheless, the record has it. 2 August 1945 Hilke Marter was given in marriage by her father, an ex-librarian with fourteen books overdue for seven years and three-plus months; Ernst Watzek-Trummer was best man for the groom.
Record also has it that 2 August 1945 was the last day of bickering at Potsdam, and the only day in which Truman and Churchill slumped a bit off their mark. The British and Americans had come prepared to Potsdam - this time aware of Russian means and motives of occupation, as observed in the Balkans and in Berlin. But Churchill and Truman had been thinking hard since 17 July, and Potsdam's last day marked a slacking off. It was on the issue of war booty, and Russian claims in Eastern Austria - the Russians declaring that they had been most heavily damaged by the war and that Germany would have to make it good. Russian statistics are always staggering; they claimed 1710 cities and 70,000 villages destroyed - a loss of 6,000,000 buildings, making 25,000,000 homeless, not to mention the damage to 31,850 industries and enterprises. The losses to be made good by Germany were losses for which certain Austrian war booty could be seized. A language confusion was operative; the Russians spoke of Austria's liberation in the same breath as they spoke of Austria's co-responsibility with Germany for the war.
Later, Soviet representative of the Potsdam Economic Commission, Mr I.M. Maisky, confessed that war booty meant any property that could be moved to the Soviet Union. But aside from letting this vague phrase slip by, Churchill and Truman were prepared for Stalin's aims, this time.
Vienna herself was not unprepared, either - by the time of the Potsdam conference. She'd simply been caught by surprise before then, but made some strongly independent gestures thereafter.
On 11 September 1945 the Allied Council had their first meeting in the Soviet-occupied Imperial Hotel on the Ringstrasse, under the chairmanship of Russia's Marshal Koniev.
And Vratno Javotnik was not unprepared, either - even for pending family life. My grandfather got him some legitimate refugee papers and a job a
s interpreter-aid to himself - Grandfather having landed fat work as a documentor for the supposedly kept-up-to-date minutes of the Allied Council meetings.
Just fourteen days after the first meeting, Vienna held its first free parliamentary elections since the Anschluss. And much against the grain of all previous Soviet efforts, the Communist party won less than six per cent of the total vote - only four seats out of one hundred and twenty-five in the National Rat. The socialist and People's parties about split even.
What Vienna really wasn't prepared for was what bad losers the Soviets could be.
What Ernst Watzek-Trummer was totally unprepared for was the recorded assumption of the Hacking district police who had listed Watzek-Trummer as deceased, since 12 March, 1938 - the victim of a fire which consumed his hen-house. I doubt if Watzek-Trummer could seriously have been offended by the lack of faith shown in him by the Hacking district police. But whatever, Ernst refused to find a job, and at Grandfather's suggestion, made himself busy with apartment repairs and modifications on the Marters' Schwindgasse home.
In the daytime, then, Watzek-Trummer and the womenfolk had the Schwindgasse to themselves. When laundry ladies would chide him for his laziness, his puttering-about at home, Trummer would say, 'I'm legally dead. What better excuse for not working is there?'
The first thing Watzek-Trummer did was to partition a section of the kitchen into his private bedroom. Next he took the fourteen overdue books underarm and went to find the foreign-language reading room of the International Student House, which was no longer operating - which had, in fact, been bombed and looted. So Watzek-Trummer tore all the library labels out of the books and took them home again - giving up the idea of trading them for fourteen he hadn't read. Grandfather did bring him new books, but books were very scarce, and the bulk of the literature in the Schwindgasse apartment was Grandfather's and Vratno's homework - the minutes of the Allied Council meetings, which Watzek-Trummer found evasive and dull.
But despite Watzek-Trummer's discontent with his reading material, he did a most charitable thing - as a wedding present for Hilke and my father. He scraped all the camouflage off the 1939 Grand Prix racer, and stripped it further - of all warlike insignia, traces of radio mounts and obvious machine-gun creases - and painted it glossy black; thereby he made it a private vehicle, not so easily subject to Russian confiscation as war booty, and gave my mother and Vratno a luxury. Although fuel was precious, and travel between the sectors of occupation was tedious - even for an interpreter-aid with a paper-work job on the Allied Council.
So Watzek-Trummer provided the shy newlyweds a means to get off by themselves, where they must have relaxed and talked more easily to each other than they ever did in the Schwindgasse apartment. Watzek-Trummer insists that they were always shy with each other, at least in public or on any occasion Trummer had to observe them. Their talking was done at night, with Ernst Watzek-Trummer sleeping characteristically light behind the light walls of his partitioned bedroom in the kitchen. Watzek-Trummer maintains that they never raised their voices - nor did he beat her, nor did she ever cry - and the rustling that Watzek-Trummer heard through and over his thin partition was always gentle.
Often, after midnight, Vratno would go into the kitchen and serve himself a sandwich and a glass of wine. Whereupon, Watzek-Trummer would pop out from behind his partition and say, 'Blutwurst tonight, is it? What is there for cheese?' And together they'd hold a conspiracy of snacking, silently spreading bread, cautiously cutting sausage. When there was brandy they'd stay up later, and my father would speak of a highly fantastical motorcycle genius, with whom he once had beards in common. And much later, when there was both wine and brandy, Vratno would whisper to Ernst Watzek-Trummer. 'Zahn Glanz,' Vratno would say. 'Does the name ring a bell for you? Who was Zahn Glanz?' And Watzek-Trummer would counter: 'You knew a Wut, you said. What was it about this Wut you knew?' And together they'd politic into the night, often interpreting the Soviet-sponsored newspaper, the Osterreichische Zeitung - of 28 November 1945 for example, which told of Nazi bandits in Russian uniform bringing disgrace to the Soviets by a series of rural rapes and murders, not to mention a few isolated downtown incidents. Or the edition of 12 January 1946, which told of a certain Herr. H. Schien of Mistelbach, Lower Austria, who was arrested by the Soviets after he'd spread false rumors about Russian soldiers plundering his home. Or, occasionally, they would discuss my father's and grandfather's homework, the minutes of the Allied Council meetings - one in particular, dealing with an incident on 16 January 1946, which occurred on the US military 'Mozart' Train that ran American troops between Salzburg and Vienna. A United States Army technical sergeant, Shirley B. Dixon, MP, turned away a Russian train-boarding party including Soviet Captain Klementiev and Senior Lieutenant Salnikov. The Russians went for their guns, but Technical Sergeant Shirley B. Dixon, USA, MP, quick-on-the-draw, shot both Russians - killing Captain Klementiev and wounding Senior Lieutenant Salnikov. In the Allied Council meeting, the Soviets claimed that their men had been victims of a language confusion, and Marshal Koniev demanded fast-gun Shirley B. Dixon's punishment. Dixon, however, was said, by a military court, to be doing his duty.
Watzek-Trummer, who'd indulged himself in a rash of American Western movies, claimed that the name Shirley B. Dixon rang a bell for him. Wasn't that the gun-fighter-turned-deputy in the one about poisoning water holes in Wyoming? But my father thought that Shirley was usually a girl's name, which prompted Watzek-Trummer to remember the one about the great-breasted lady outlaw who straightened or flattened-out in the end, by marrying an effeminate pacifist judge. So they concluded that Shirley B. Dixon, the fastest gun on the Mozart Train, was actually a Wac.
And Vratno would ask again, 'Zahn Glanz? You must have known him.'
But Watzek-Trummer would counter; 'You never said what happened after you and Gottlob Wut got to Maribor. Did this Wut have a lady friend there? Why didn't he come with you?'
And Vratno: 'Which one of you was this mythical eagle? Frau Drexa Neff, the laundress across the street - and she's Muttie Marter's friend, I've talked to her - why is she kept in the dark about it? She's always talking about this great bird, and all of you get funny faces. Who was the bird, Ernst? Was Zahn Glanz that eagle? Was he? and what happened to this Glanz?'
Then Watzek-Trummer, historian without equal, keeper of every detail - Watzek-Trummer would ramble on: 'All right, all right, I'm with you, to a point. But after all those Slivnicas were blown up, minus one, and after the bit with the radio in the mountains - when Borsfa Durd was already dead and buried, in his way, I mean - and after you let Balkan Four go by and you'd marched to Maribor with that other outfit. When you were in Maribor, Vratno - is what I mean - what happened to this Gottlob Wut?'
On and on they went, a snacking merry-go-round, until my mother would rustle from the other room and my father would eat up, drink up, talk up and leave Ernst Watzek-Trummer to keep track of the rest of the night. Which he did, with increasing insomnia - perhaps owing to the growing discomfort of my mother's pregnancy, because she tossed about rather loudly from February into March. And Ernst gave up his partitioned bedroom; he sat by the kitchen window instead, poured my mother a glass of milk whenever she came sleeplessly waddling into the kitchen; otherwise, he watched the nightwatchmen on the Schwindgasse - the hourly floodlights from the former Bulgarian Embassy, and the hourly check of the house doors along the street.
A Russian officer who carried a revolver walked flush against the buildings - a poor target for flower vases or boiling pasta pots; he tried each lobby lock. He was covered by a Russian infantryman, a machine-gunner, who walked just off the curb in the street - himself a poor target for heaved windowboxes, because it would take considerable determination to launch anything very weighty that far into the street. The machine-gunner watched windows; the officer first felt his hand around the jambs before stepping into doorways. The floodlights from the former embassy moved in front of them. There wasn't a curfew, exactly, but e
ven a light left on after midnight was suspicious, and therefore Watzek-Trummer settled for a candle on the kitchen table and kept the windowshade drawn to an inch above the sill. So Watzek-Trummer had his window inch for watching Russian watchmen; Ernst insists he kept a kind of peace on the Schwindgasse by casting a hex, a pox, a jinx, a trance or even blessing over the machine-gunner as he passed. Because the first thing Watzek-Trummer noticed about the machine-gunner was that he was too nervous; he watched the windows behind himself more than he watched those coming into the moving floodlight ahead - and he clicked on and off the safety on his gun. So Ernst contends that his duty at the window inch was to keep the gunner calm; and be available for the morning exodus of the laundress Frau Drexa Neff, another nighttime window-watcher, who would bob up from her cellar cubby and holler across the street to Ernst, 'How's her coffee look to you, Herr Trummer? Low enough, is it, so I should pick up hers with mine?' And Watzek-Trummer would usually say, 'No, the coffee's fine, but we could use some fancy almonds, or the best French brandy the rations man has today.' And feisty Drexa: 'Ha! You need some sleep, Herr Trummer. Ha! That's what, all right.'
So that was February and most of March, 1946, with Drexa - as March came on and on - asking Watzek-Trummer if Hilke had had me overnight, and with no other incidents except this: on Plosslgasse, two blocks south of Watzek-Trummer's window inch, a man was machine-gunned for peeing out a window into an alley (because, it turned out, his toilet was stopped up), after midnight. The noise of which, had the Schwindgasse machine-gunner wheeling himself around and around in the street, clicking his safety on and off - checking the night sky for hurtling windowboxes, kitchen utensils and wet, wadded socks. Which never came, or he'd have surely opened up.
And this incident too: the Soviets seized the entire Danube Shipping Company assets under the heading of war booty. Which was disputed in an Allied Council meeting or two.
But nothing else until I was spectacularly born.
Watzek-Trummer remembers a bit of light snow, recalls my mother waddling to the kitchen some time past midnight and not being pacified by her usual glass of milk. He remembers Grandfather and Vratno getting dressed and calling out the lobby door to the Russian hangout at the former Bulgarian Embassy. And three of them, then, in a Russian squad car, batting off to the Soviet-sector clinic.