Then I'm really not sure what I listened for and heard; if there was another thang-whump or two, or if I asked Keff, 'How many bees, would you guess?' And whether Keff and I had a highly technical discussion on the number of bees per box and the number of boxes that had toppled off - whether it was just the third-tier rows on the trailer's uphill, hind-end side, or was it more or less. And did it matter how many?
And whether Keff answered or guessed; if all of this had happened on the spot, or if my counting of bees hadn't really been later, semi-conscious and semi-sunk in an Epsom salts bath. If any of this was three minutes after the last thang-whump I really heard, or three days after - three Epsom salts baths away.
And did the faces of the only true mourners crouch about me there on that down-falling road, in that bee-conspiring night? Did the animals accuse me then, mourn him then? Or was that soaked out of me in Epsom salts too?
The weeping wallaroo, the shaken oryx, the despairing Rare Spectacled Bears. When did I see them mourning him?
Was it there, with my eyes still puffed shut? Or was it countless cathartic baths away, and long after Siggy had reached and surpassed his quota of bee stings?
Part Two
The Notebook
The First Zoo Watch: Monday, 5 June 1967 @ 1:20 p.m.
I WON'T ACTUALLY go inside until mi
dafternoon. Another hour or so in this sun won't hurt me a bit; I might even dry out. As you certainly know, Graff, I left Waidhofen in a considerable downpour. And the roads were slick almost all the way to Hietzing, even though the rain stopped once I was out of the mountains.
I wasn't at all sure of the time when I left. When was it that the milkman first arrived? Everything happened very fast and early; I'm sure I was away by nine, and I've been at this cafe just long enough to order - a tea with rum, because the rain gave me some chill. So then, if I left at nine and it's one-twenty now, we can figure on four hours - Waidhofen to the Hietzinger Zoo. And that's with a wet road.
You know the cafe I'm at? On the Platz, off Maxing Strasse, across from the main zoo gate. I'm simply resting up and drying out. I'll just saunter over to the zoo about midafternoon, browse a bit, and find myself a spot to hide by the time they start ushering customers out and locking up for the night. That way I'll be inside to see the changing of the guard, if they have such a thing, and I'll be in a position to observe the habits of the nightwatchman. I hope I'll have the opportunity to talk with some of the animals, too, and let them know they've got nothing to fear from me. I'll stay until the zoo reopens; when there's enough of a crowd I'll just meander out, as if I've been an early-morning, paying customer.
Right now, the cafe's very nice. My waiter rolled back the awning for me, and I've got a tableful of sun; the sidewalk's warm to my feet. A pretty nice waiter, as waiters in the outer districts go. He's got a Balkan look, and his accent's as light as the chinking of wineglasses.
'Come here after the war?' I asked him.
'Oh, I missed the whole bit,' he said.
'What did you miss?' I asked.
'The whole damn war,' he said.
I couldn't tell if he was disappointed about it, or if it was at all true. It's true of you, isn't it, Graff? You were all Salzburg people, weren't you? And moved yourselves well west of Zurich before the war, you've said. I'd guess that Switzerland was as well off as any place on the continent and you had Salzburg to come back to. The Americans occupied Salzburg, didn't they? And from all I've heard, they kept things pretty clean.
My waiter just brought me my tea with rum. I asked him, 'The Americans are a marvelously clean people, aren't they?'
'I never met one,' he said.
Sly, these Balkans. He's just the right age for the war, and I'll bet he didn't miss a thing. But if you take me, for example, I'm just the wrong age. I was in the right place for the war, all right, but it passed me by when I was in the womb, and on my way there - and again too fresh from the womb to even take part in the post-mortem. That's a bit of what you live with if you're twenty-one in 1967, in Austria; you don't have a history, really, and no immediate future that you can see. What I mean is, we're at an interim age in an interim time; we're alive between two times of monstrous decisions - one past, the other coming. We're taking up the lag in history, for who knows how long. What I mean is, I have only a pre-history - a womb and pre-womb existence at a time when great popular decisions with terrible consequences were being made. We may be fifty before it happens again; anyway, now science has seen to it that monstrous decisions don't need popular support. You see, Graff, in our case, it's the pre-history that made us and mattered to what we'd become. My vita begins with my grandparents and is almost over on the day I was born.
My waiter just brought me the Frankfurt newspaper. He opened it to page three and let it fall in my lap. There's a photo from America of a German shepherd dog eating the dress off a Negress. There's an unmistakably white policeman standing by, truncheon raised; he's going to whop the Negress, it looks like, just as soon as the dog gets off her. Quite blurry in the background, there's a line of black people plastered against a storefront by an incredible stream from a fire hose. Didn't I say how these Balkans were sly? My waiter just walked off and left this in my lap. Marvelously clean people, the Americans; they wash their black folk with fire hoses.
I guess if you're twenty-one in 1967, in America, you needn't glut yourself with pre-history; in America I understand that there are crusades every day. But I'm not in America. I'm in the Old World, and what makes it old isn't that it's had a head start. Any place that's lagging, waiting again for The National Crisis - that's an Old World, and it's often a pity to be young in it.
I guess if I cared very profoundly I'd go to America, join the blackest extreme and wash white people with fire hoses. But it's only an idea that pops up every now and then, and I don't really give it much thought.
My waiter came to take his newspaper back.
'All done with it, sir?' he asked, and held out his hand. He's missing an index finger, down to the base knuckle. I gave him back his paper, spreading my thumb on the white policeman's face.
'Well, it's a German paper,' I said. 'Don't you think it must give some old Germans a kick to see a little racism in America?' Just to nudge him, I said that.
'I couldn't venture a guess,' he told me, sly as he could be. Extra spiffy waiters, these Balkans. Half of them appear to have been full professors, before taking up their humble trade.
Vienna puzzles you that way. It's all pre-history - smug and secretive. It leaves me out, every time. But if we're supposed to be the generation that's to profit from our elders' mistakes, I feel I ought to know everyone's error.
My tea's cold, but it's heavy on the rum. A good waiter, no matter what else I say of him. But how did he lose that finger? If you asked him, he'd tell you - as a little boy, he was run over by a tram. Only there weren't any trams in far-eastern, small-town Yugoslavia when he was a little boy; there may not even be trams there now. But I guess if you were in America and asked a fingerless man how he lost it - probably a man who'd slashed it to the bone in a bottleneck - he'd tell you how a red-hot trigger burned it off while he was shooting the enemy in Manchuria.