He's not quite far enough away to suit me yet; I would guess he's only at the ponds of Various Aquatic Birds. I believe that's him I hear, skipping stones across the ponds - bonking, now and then, a rare and outraged Aquatic Bird.
Let O. Schrutt get a little farther off. Let him get to the House of Pachyderms, let him rouse the rhino or echo his keys in the hippohouse. When he's a whole zoo away from me, I'll be in that Small Mammal Maze to see what's what.
And if there's time, old O., I've something else in mind. It's easy enough to do. Just move that safety rope six inches or a foot nearer the Famous Asiatic Black Bear's cage. It wouldn't be hard at all. There's just a rope strung between those posts; they have an awkward, concrete base, but they're certainly not immovable.
How would that fix you, O. Schrutt? Just change your safety line a foot or so - move you closer than you think you are, old O., and when you waggle your taunting head, we'll all watch it get lopped off.
And now, if that's him I hear, O. Schrutt is braying his empathy with the elephants' paranoia concerning sleep. Now he's far enough away.
(CONTINUING:)
THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: PRE-HISTORY II
The 1939 Grand Prix racer 500 cc could summon 90 h.p. at 8000 r.p.m., and hit 150 m.p.h. when stripped of unnecessary parts, but my father was allowed no more than 80 m.p.h. when he took to driving the racer in the spring of '42. Vratno carried a necessary part. Namely, Gottlob Wut as passenger - the constant, correcting voice in my father's indigo-blue ear hole.
'You should
be in third now. You steered us through that last one more than you leaned. You're much too nervous; you're tight, your hands will cramp. And never use your rear brake on the downhills. Front-brake work, if you've got to brake at all. Use that rear brake again and I'll disconnect it. You're very nervous, you know.'
But Gottlob Wut never said a thing about what a good job my father was doing at pretending he'd never driven before. And only after Wut had been forced to disconnect the rear brake did he ask Vratno where he lived and what he did for food. Clerical work, my father told him - occasional translations for pro-German Slovenes and Croats in a sub-government position. Whatever that meant. Wut never asked again.
Although it wasn't exactly fair to call the Ustashi pro-German, they were pro-winning - and in the spring of '42, the Germans were still winning. There was even a Ustashi militia who wore Wehrmacht uniforms. In fact, the Slivnica twins, Gavro and Lutvo, had Wehrmacht uniforms of their own, which they wore only for dress-up, or for going out at night. The twins weren't part of any unit Vratno knew of, and once Bijelo scolded them on their manner of acquiring the uniforms; it seems they had several changes. The Ustashi overseer for the Slivnicas was alarmed, and called the twins a 'relationship risk'.
'Our family,' said Todor, 'has never been afraid to risk relationships of any kind.'
But Todor was often snappish in the spring of '42. After all the work, the Ustashi had either lost interest or given up their hope that Gottlob Wut would betray anything vital enough to make him touchable. At least, as long as the Germans were winners - and as long as the Ustashi were pro-winning - Wut seemed quite safe from revenge. About all Wut was guilty of was the keeping and disguising of a Grand Prix racer in a motorcycle unit meant to have slower and less delicate war models. And Zivanna Slobod, Wut's ritual-minded Serbian mistress, turned out to be a Serb more by accident than inclination - and a 'political outlaw', as she was called on record, only because her list of lovers included every political or apolitical type imaginable. So they couldn't very well incriminate Wut on her account either. And Sundays were free; what Wut did with the racer and my father, he did on his own time. It could even be argued that Wut's Sundays demonstrated extra effort on the part of the motorcycle unit's leader - a kind of keeping-in-shape exercise. The Ustashi simply had nothing they could ever make stick on Gottlob Wut.
'We could steal his pet racer,' Bijelo suggested. 'That might make him do something foolish.'
'We could steal the Serbian woman,' said Todor.
'Great cow of a woman,' grumped jealous Baba, a titter-minded toad of a girl - as my father has described her. 'You'd need a van to move her.'
'It seems to me,' said Julka, 'that Wut is more fond of the motorcycle.'
'Certainly,' my father agreed. 'But stealing it would do nothing. He'd have perfectly good military means for recovering it, or at least for looking. And I'm not so sure that the German command would even mind him having a racer.'
'We'll just kill him, then,' said Todor.
'The Ustashi,' Bijelo said, 'are in need of being legal, to a point.'
'The Ustashi are boring me to death,' said Todor.
'They have to stay on the right side,' Bijelo said. 'Wut is a German, and the Ustashi are siding with the Germans now. The idea is to make Wut be a bad German.'
'Impossible,' said Vratno. 'He doesn't think one way or the other about being a German, so how could he be a bad one?'
'Well,' Bijelo said, 'I don't think the Ustashi are so very much interested in Wut any more. People are changing sides all the time, and the Ustashi have to come out with the winner. That's no longer so easy.'
Because there were too many side wars within the war; whole sides were changing sides. In the spring of '42, the worldwide Communist press suddenly changed its mind about the Chetnik colonel Drazha Mihailovich - who was now a general. A suspiciously Russian-located station called Radio Free Yugoslavia was reporting that Drazha Mihailovich and his Chetniks were siding with the Germans. Radio Free Yugoslavia - and through them, even the BBC - was saying that a certain blacksmith's son had been the only freedom fighter all along. Josip Broz Tito was the leader of the real resistance, and the defenders of Yugoslavia were Communist partisans, not hairy Chetniks. It seemed that Russia was looking ahead; with remarkable optimism, they appeared to be looking past the Germans to a more crucial issue in Yugoslavia.
Who would run the country when the war was over?
'Communists,' said Bijelo Slivnica. 'It's quite obvious, really. The Chetniks fight the Germans, the partisans fight the Germans, and in a little while the whole Red Army will be here - fighting Germans. In between Germans and after Germans, partisans and the Red Army will fight Chetniks - claiming that Chetniks side with the Germans. Good propaganda is what counts.'
'A divine scheme,' said Todor.
'Publicity's the thing,' Bijelo said. 'Look: the Chetniks beat the Germans in Bosnia, right? But Radio Free Yugoslavia broadcasts that it was partisans who did the beating, and that they discovered Chetniks in Wehrmacht uniforms.'