But regardless of the city-guard outfit, there were successful raids. One bold, hungry crew made off with a wild Tibetan yak. One man, all alone, stole a whole seal.
I suppose there were plans for a full-scale raid. I suppose it was only a matter of time, before some well-organized group of citizens or soldiers, from any army, would decide there was a profit to be made in large meat-locker operations in a starving city.
But nothing that well organized came off.
There was also in the city a would-be noble hero, who thought the animals had suffered enough; he foresaw a grand slaughter and figured a way to thwart the butchers. No one knows who he was; he's only known by his partial remains.
Because, of course, the animals ate him. He busted in one night and let loose every animal he could find. I think he is reputed to have opened just about all the cages before he was eaten. Naturally, the animals were hungry too. He should have thought of that.
And so his good intentions backfired. I don't know if any animals even got outside the main gate, or whether they were all attacked within the general confines. I suppose animals ate other animals too, before the mob got wind of what had happened and swooped into the chaos with old grenades and kitchen utensils.
The details are cloudy. With so many small mammals underfoot all over the city, who was going to keep accurate records on animals? But the confusion must have been really something, and I imagine the Russians got in on it some time during the long night - thinking, perhaps, from all the fierce clamor, that they had a revolution on their hands, already.
I believe that neither tanks nor planes were used, but everything else must have been fair game.
I hope everyone who ate an animal choked on it. Or exploded when his bowels seized up.
After all, it wasn't the animals' war.
They should have been eating all the O. Schrutts.
(CONTINUING:)
THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: PRE-HISTORY II
The Americans occupied the Salzburger province, which includes Kaprun - such a peaceful spot that it made the few Americans who came all the way into the village very friendly. In fact, about the only unpeaceful thing I was told of - and this, before the Americans came - was the setting afire of my grandfather's brother, the postmaster of Kaprun. In general, though, it was so relatively comfortable in Kaprun that I can't speak too well for the wisdom of my grandfather's taking his family and Ernst Watzek-Trummer back to Vienna. Or at least they should have waited to see how the four-way occupation of the city was going to work out.
But in the early summer of '45, my mother had an interest in returning to the liberated city. This was before the other Allies had arrived at a definitive agreement with the Soviets too. Even the reports of the Russian occupation should have been enough to dissuade them from going back so soon.
It had something to do with Hilke's idea about Zahn Glanz. Now that the war was over, she felt that Zahn would be sure to look her up. And my grandmother, of course, wanted to see how her little apartment and her abandoned china might have fared. And Grandfather, perhaps, was anxious to return some fourteen books - seven years and three months overdue - to the foreign-language reading room of the International Student House, where Grandfather had been the head librarian. I can't think of any reason Ernst Watzek-Trummer might have had for going back - other than his protective feelings toward the Marter family, and perhaps to take out more books from Grandfather's library. Watzek-Trummer, living seven years with my grandfather, had begun to value an education.
Whatever - or all things combined - it was very poor timing of them to leave Kaprun when they did, in the first week of July, '45.
Also, Grandfather's trip was made difficult by the deplorable state of Zahn Glanz's old taxi. The trip was made easier, however, by Grandfather's political record - vouchsafes, in letter and visa form, from resistance leaders who knew that the Nazi role of Grandfather's brother had been a disguise, and sympathized with the family for the postmaster's flaming death. Watzek-Trummer, too, had a record of some note - mostly, a clever bunch of train derailments and subtle arson jobs at the depot in Zell am See.
So in the early morning of 9 July 1945, Grandfather Marter and his crew made an inconceivable journey through rubble and occupying armies, and entered Vienna in the late evening - having had more trouble with the paper work of the Soviets than with anyone else's red tape.
That was the day the Allies resolved the sectioning of the city. The Americans and the British grabbed up the best residential areas, and the French wanted the shopping areas. The Russians were long-term realistic; they settled themselves in the worker-industrial areas, and crouched themselves around the Inner City - near all the embassies and government buildings. The Russians for example - and much to Grandfather's uneasiness - occupied the fourth district, which included the Schwindgasse.
And sixteen out of twenty-one districts had Communist police chiefs. And in the Soviet-established Renner provisional government, the Minister of Interior, Franz Honner, had fought with the Yugoslav partisans. Renner himself, however, was a veteran Austrian socialist, and had his own premonitions about the suspiciously forward-looking occupation of the liberating Soviets.
So did my grandfather have his anxieties, as he drove down a Schwindgasse darker and more windowless than he'd ever seen.
Watzek-Trummer said, 'It's a ghost-town street, like the cowboys are always finding.'
Grandmother, in the back seat, hummed or moaned to herself.
When Grandfather drove over the sidewalk and into the lobby, some Russian soldiers in the former Bulgarian embassy put the floodlights on them from across the street. Papers were shown again, and Grandfather spoke a little dated Russian - relying on his experience from the foreign-language reading room to send the soldiers away. Then, before they unpacked the taxi, they went up to the first landing, found the keyhole rusted, and shoved against a previously weakened lock bolt - springing open the door.
'Oh, they've been peeing in here, the bastards,' Watzek-Trummer said; in the dark he cracked his shin on a large, heavy metal thing a few feet inside the doorway. 'Give a light,' he said. They've left a cannon here, or something.'
Grandmother crunched on what must have been her china; she moaned a little. And Grandfather put the flashlight on a very battered and muddy motorcycle, sagged against an armchair because it had no kickstand to hold itself up.
No one spoke, no one moved, and from down the hall, out of my mother's room, they heard someone who'd held his breath too long finally let it go - exhale what might have been interpreted as a last despairing breath. Grandfather put his flashlight out, and Hilke said, 'I'll get the soldiers, right?' But no one moved; my mother heard her old bed creak. 'In my bed?' she said to Grandfather, and then broke his grip on her arm - bumped the chair and motorcycle, moving down the hall toward her room. 'Zahn?' she said. 'Oh, Zahn, Zahn!' And bolted in the dark for the open door of her room. Watzek-Trummer got the flashlight from Grandfather and caught Hilke before she reached the doorway. He snapped her back up the hallway, and peeking round the jamb, blinked the light into her room.
On the bed was a dark, long-bearded man - a white paste on his lips, like a man with a thirsty, cotton-filled mouth. He sat dead-center in the bed, held his motorcycle boots in his hands and stared at the light.
'Don't