Setting Free the Bears

In fact, it would be an easy job. We wouldn't have to wriggle the fishes very far, or keep them out of water too long. Just across a street or two - and maybe there's a small park before the sea wall, if I remember rightly. And then we'd launch them free in the Bay of Naples.

In fact, Graff, it will be even easier than the Hietzinger Zoo.

Part Three

Setting Them Free

P.S.

OF COURSE, THERE'S more to the notebook than that. And, of course, the zoo watches and the autobiography don't appear together in the original; it was my idea to interleaf them. Because, I felt, it was almost impossible to endure either the verbosity of Siggy's souped-up history or the fanaticism of his frotting zoo watches - if you were to read them whole. At least, it was for me; I found myself skipping back and forth, though part of that may have been due to my discomfort at being forced to read in Auntie Tratt's bathtub, where I spent a week, or almost that long, soaking my bee stings.

But I still feel the two journals demand separation, if only for literary reasons. And certainly Siggy made some obscure connections between his awesome history and his scheme for busting the zoo; though, for my own part, I can't speak too well for the logic in that.

Again, if only for literary reasons. I couldn't see the sense in reproducing the other memorabilia in the notebook. All those frotting poems and proverbs. All his exclamation points, addresses and phone numbers, reminders of due dates for library books; and what constitutes his ill-kept bibliography.

I'm afraid that Doktor Ficht was at least right in griping about poor Siggy's failure to footnote. He obviously drew as heavily from Watzek-Trummer's library as he did from old eyewitness Ernst himself.

To mention a few of Siggy's jottings:

I'm quite pleased with Brook-Shepherd's Anschluss. B-S really knew what was the matter.

D. Martin goes to the heart of it in Ally Betrayed!

Poor L. Adamic is a hopeless propagandist in My Native Land.

All the info is in Stearman's The Soviet Union and the Occupation of Austria. But his footnotes are longer than the text.

There's a lot of emotional writing in Stoyan Pribichevich's World Without End and G.E.R. Gedye's Fallen Bastions.

And other entries, without his pronouncements:

Kurt von Schuschnigg's Austrian Requiem, and Sheridon's Kurt von Schuschnigg.

The Schmidt Trial Protocols, esp. the testimonies of Skubl, Miklas and Raab; and The Nuremburg Testimonies, esp. of Goring and Seyss-Inquart.

The Official Minutes of the Meetings of the Allied Council and Executive Committee, 1945-55.

Plamenatz's The Truth About Mihailovich.

Vaso Trivanovich's The Treason of Mihailovich.

Colonel Zivan Knezevich's Why the Allies Abandoned the Yugoslav Army of General Mihailovich.

And countless references to:

What Ernst Watzek-Trummer said.

It was some days, however, before I could read any of this - confined to the bathtub as I was. Epsom salts, with the tub water changed hourly.

Of course, they brought me all of Siggy's honey-covered things. I was some time separating the pages of the notebook; I had to steam them open, over my bath water. And then I had to wait a few days before I could see clearly to read - until my bee swellings had come down enough to let me hold my eyes open. I ran a fever too, and vomited a bit - the poison in my system excessive as it was.

But if my bee dose was excessive, I wouldn't have wanted any part of the overdose that must have been poor Siggy's lot. And no one would tell me if it had been his head I heard go THANG! - and put him out before the bees filled him up - or if I'd only imagined his struggling under the flatbed, after he'd toppled the hives.

As the notebook says:

God knows. Or guesses.

But when I did get down to reading, I can assure you there were spots that gave me twinges more considerable than my bee wounds. There was this: