Not that they had soured on each other, really. It was only that it had been hashed out so much before, they'd come round to this so many times.
But they did have it out once, all right - although I've no right to remember it as well as I do, since I wasn't quite four months old at the time. I guess Ernst Watzek-Trummer has remembered it for me, like most important things.
Anyway, one night in the summer, the seventeenth of July 1946, my father came home in a drunken babble, having heard the news that Drazha Mihailovich had been executed by a parti
san firing squad. And Watzek-Trummer said, 'What about this Mihailovich? What was he, really?' But Vratno cried, 'He was abandoned!' And began to describe a ghastly vision for Watzek-Trummer, concerning a fantastical motorcycle mechanic who was gulped down a stand-up crapper in Maribor. Vratno talked not about Mihailovich but about Gottlob Wut, with whom my father once had beards in common. Vratno called to mind the sloppy Heine Gortz's question, 'Who are you with Wut?' And speculated how he might have kicked Heine Gortz down into the crapper, and then grabbed Bronsky, or Metz, or both, bending them back over the urinal while Gottlob freed himself and cracked their skulls with his concealed Amal racing carburetor.
And suddenly Watzek-Trummer said, 'You mean you didn't do all that? You didn't even try to do any of that?'
'I said we just met,' my father told him, 'and Gottlob was a good enough sport to go along with it.'
'Oh, he was was he?' Watzek-Trummer roared.
'Well, I told you now, Trummer!' Vratno said. 'Now you tell me, OK? Tit for tat, Trummer. Who was Zahn Glanz?'
But Watzek-Trummer stared at my father and said, 'I don't consider the information equal.'
My father screamed at him, 'Zahn Glanz, damn you!' And the floodlights came on across the street, scanning windows near and far.
Then my mother was out of her room, with her nightgown open so wide that Ernst Watzek-Trummer looked away from her. She said. 'What was that? Who's here?'
'Zahn Glanz!' Vratno shouted at her, 'Zahn Glanz is here!' And with a flourishing gesture to her room, he said, 'Zahn Glanz! What you call me in there sometimes - and they're usually the best times too!'
So Watzek-Trummer sent a blow across the kitchen table - with his former cleaver hand, his chicken-chopping hand - and belted my father up against the sink, where his elbow struck a faucet and started the water running.
Grandfather Marter came out of his master bedroom and whispered, 'Oh, please, don't any of you get near the window. You know it's very dangerous this late at night.' He looked at all of them, perplexed; they all sulked, eyes down. My grandfather added, 'Better not run the water so hard. It's summer, you know, and there's probably not an awful lot of water.'
Then Watzek-Trummer remembers that I started to cry, and my mother went back to her room to me. Funny, how wailing babies bring people to their senses. Even the floodlights went out with my crying. Babies cry; that's perfectly all right.
But that was when it all came out, one way or another. On the seventeenth of July, 1946, when Drazha Mihailovich was shot as a traitor. Which prompted the New York Times to suggest that the Russians build a statue of Mihailovich in Red Square, because Drazha Mihailovich was, among other things, the ironical Saviour of Moscow.
Watzek-Trummer, who still read everything he could get his hands on, tried to make peace in the kitchen by remarking, 'Isn't it amazing? The Americans have so many good afterthoughts!'
Which was true enough, of course. Very like the Russians in this respect: they react best to statistics and have little interest in details.
For example, it happened - was even witnessed - that one twenty-nine-year-old Viennese social worker, name of Anna Hellein, was dragged off her train by a Soviet guard at the Steyregg Bridge checkpoint on the United States-Soviet demarcation line, where she was raped, murdered and left on the rails. She was decapitated by a train shortly thereafter. But this in no way produced action by the Allied Council so much as did Chancellor Figl's list of eleven recent murders by men in Soviet uniform. Now, you see, it was the numbers that impressed them. But Figl's request that the Austrian police be armed, and be permitted to defend themselves and other citizens from men in uniform - of any army - was postponed a bit because the Soviets produced a list of their own; from some anonymous source, the Soviets counted thirty-six hundred 'known Nazis' within the police force. Numbers again, you see.
Actually, the problem with the police was decommunizing it, which went on slowly for about five years. Actually arming the police - or, that is, making the police worth having - was a somewhat slower process. As late as 31 March 1952, when I'd just had my sixth birthday, the Soviets prevented the police chief in their sector from sending any armed force to quell a horde of rioting Communists attacking the Greek embassy - protesting the recent execution of Beloyannis and three other Greek Communists. In fact, the rioters were brought to the scene in Soviet Army trucks.
Even later, when there was a riot due, the Soviets disarmed the police in their sector, taking away their rubber truncheons - which proved too effective in quelling riots, even though they were never quite what Chancellor Figl had in mind by 'arming' his policemen.
But the Soviets were losing Vienna, and that made them unreasonable; in fact there were setbacks all over.
In June of '48 the Yugoslav Communist party was expelled from the Cominform - Tito didn't need his crutches any more - and in November of '48, Soviet soldiers attempted to arrest someone on Sweden Bridge in down-town Vienna and were beaten back by angry crowds, rushing to the defense. Angry crowds were doing the Russians harm, even in their own sector.
And because of their tiff with Yugoslavia, the Soviets withdrew their support of Yugoslav claims in Austria's southland, Carinthia and Styria, and consequently, the Yugoslavs had to drop the whole idea of expanding into Austria.
This brought an odd number of Yugoslavs to Vienna, by the way; strange Yugoslavs - some Ustashi, I'm told, who were in the thick of plots and counterplots along the Austro-Yugoslav border when they were cut off. And the implication is that they found work with Benno Blum, who still had use for good abductors and roughies in general. Even though the records claim that Benno Blum was virtually washed up by 10 March 1950, when gangmember Max Blair was the subject of an Allied Council meeting, there's some evidence that a bit of Benno survived thereafter.
At least Ernst Watzek-Trummer claims so, and I take my history from him.
Ernst was there, anyway - 5 March 1953. When I was twenty days short of being seven, Joseph Stalin died. My grandfather and Watzek-Trummer had a celebration of their own, a little brandy round the kitchen table and spirits higher than their portions. But my parents were out, so I have to rely on Watzek-Trummer's account of their affairs. Not that I wasn't usually with my parents, only not for this celebration. And even I must admit - though Watzek-Trummer has certainly influenced me in this - that my parents had a relationship which struck me, at best, as being shy and unspoken. I was out with them from time to time - most memorably, sunny drives on the Grand Prix racer with my mother's arms around my father and myself, locking me against his stomach and pushing my knees tight against the gas tank I straddled. My father whispering Wutlike maxims of motorcycle-riding in my ear.
But on 5 March 1953, Joseph Stalin died, and Vratno and Hilke took a night out together, to celebrate, and they left me behind - to the old men's celebration at the kitchen table. I don't even remember my mother coming home, though it certainly must have been startling.
Because she came home alone, more puzzled than upset, and sat round the kitchen table with my grandfather and Watzek-Trummer (and maybe, with me too), wondering out loud whatever could have possessed Vratno.
Because, she said, they were comfortably wined and dined and sitting in a Serbian restaurant that Vratno frequently enjoyed, somewhere up by the Sudbahnhof - still in the Russian sector - when all at once, in comes this man, dark-skinned, bearded, small but fierce-eyed. Though he was friendly, Mother insisted to Watzek-Trummer. This man sat down with them at their table.