Setting Free the Bears

And finally decided on this:

Dear Ernst Watzek-Trummer/ I am very sorry to tell you that my very good friend and your relation/ Siegfried Javotnik/ was killed on a motorcycle while performing a secret mission/ the details of which I will explain to you when you hear from me soon/ You may be proud of his work/ My condolences/ Hannes Graff/

And sent that, not hopeful of much better coming from me, and not daring to think further of when I must go meet this Trummer, to whom, I was sure, it would be hard to lie. But at the moment, I simply couldn't have faced another of Watzek-Trummer's sort of funerals.

And I was thinking how Ernst would be dimly impressed with me - as someone who couldn't possibly have the remotest idea of what family griefs of his kind were like. Because if Siggy ever got anything right, he was right about this one thing: my family and I did miss the whole war, which, strangely, I felt a bit guilty about.

I remember one thing from the war. In Salzburg, at the close of the American occupation, my mother, who was something of a bopper for her time, remarked on how sad she was that Salzburg would have to go back to the old music now - since the Americans took their Negro-horn radio station with them.

I believe that was the only thing my family lost from the war. And my mother wouldn't have had it in the first place, if there hadn't been a war.

So I couldn't very well feel at ease with Watzek-Trummer, with such scanty horrors of my own. Frot me if I wasn't thinking that my unwillingness to go with Siggy's body had to do with my belief that I didn't have nearly enough calamities on record to hold a candle to Trummer - and his ghastly burial duties, direct and indirect, certain and implied, one by one.

So I left it all to Keff and said I'd go see Trummer someday soon; but I made no plans. I wouldn't. I'd seen what schemes for things could do.

Frotting Siggy! What really got me was how, for all his scheming, he would have doomed himself if he'd ever had the chance to go through with it. He'd gone so totally paranoid at the end, what with his prying the Balkan waiter and little Hugel Furtwangler, that if he'd really tried the zoo bust, those two would have put the word on him. Asking so many smart questions about the other zoo bust, he was practically confessing before the crime. And shaving his head was a dumb disguise, to say the least.

We simply mustn't call attention to our extremities, I'm convinced.

And frot me if we ever would have gone to Italy, simply to play on the beaches - planless, as he'd promised first. If there's an aquarium in Naples, there's probably a zoo in Rome. And wouldn't that have been the total, flying finish - knocking over all the animal pens on the continent, until the Regent's Park in London would be laying on extra keepers, waiting for the notorious zoo busters to strike there?

But sitting up in my room on the bed, looking out through that nighttime forsythia, I really missed him not popping up on the window ledge any more. For it was a little bit like sitting there waiting for him to come back from that reconnaissance mission. And I began to think that if he had gotten by the roadblock, or if I'd just left with him when he first came crawling in over the ledge, I guess I would have gone along with it. I mean, it was a doomed idea, and bad that he lost all reason to the plan - dec

iding all the beasts would get the open door, even the eaters - but I don't think I could have let him try it alone. I would have gone along to introduce my strain of caution, my vein of limitless common sense - to see if there wasn't some way I could get him safely out again, unclawed, and maybe even spring an antelope or two in the process.

That was the funny feeling, that came hazy and yellow to me from the forsythia garden, clinging with spray from the falls: I would have gone with him, but only because he obviously needed looking after.

I mean, thinking coldly, it was a brainless, impossible plan.

But I'd go along with Gallen right now, for virtually the same reasons that I would have indulged Siggy. Though, I had to admit, there hadn't been much in that for me. So far. And, I confess, knocking over Gallen seemed to me as impossible as any knocking over of the Hietzinger Zoo.

What Keff Also Did

KEFF DID ALL the planning. I would have nothing to do with it, and Gallen told him as much.

So I was still sitting on the bed, Saturday evening, the tenth of June, 1967. I was trying to guess where Siggy was, but I didn't know the way the train lines ran. Whether Siggy would ride in Keff's box to Salzburg, before turning south, or whether he'd be turning south as soon as Steyr - in which case, he would be turning south by now, since Steyr was just a bit west of Waidhofen and Siggy had left an hour ago.

I imagined a most melodramatic race. Siggy, riding rigid in his box - a determined traveler - and I wondered if they'd sent my telegram out of Waidhofen yet, although it didn't matter; it would, at some point along the way, leap over Siggy wherever he was and be the first of them to touch down in Ernst Watzek-Trummer's rooms at the Gasthof Enns.

Watzek-Trummer, of course, would be sitting at his unnecessary kitchen table. While Siggy was hurrying prone.

And then I heard the crawling, clawing sounds in the vines under my window, and I think all my bee stings stung me over again. I saw the paws come groping over the window ledge; I heard grunts. Backing out of my bed, I screamed, 'All right! I'll go with you! We'll let them out, if that's what you want!'

But it was Keff. Looking very surprised at my shouting. I couldn't move to help him in, and he appeared to take that as a rebuke; he looked shyly away from me when he swung his thick legs in.

'I didn't mean to scare you,' he said sadly. 'But we're ready, smarty.'

'Why go?' I said, finding it hard to trust enormous Keff.

'Because they've got you on the spot now,' he said. 'You're good for taxes. The more you stay, the more you owe - for your room, for one thing. And then there's the accident. Windisch says you owe him for the bees, you see. They're going to take it out of you, smarty. They'll fine you to death if you don't go.' And he wouldn't look at me; he swayed his lowered ape's head.

'Where's Gallen, Keff?' I said.

'In the orchard,' said Keff, 'on the town side of the mountain.'

'With the bike?' I asked.

'It's registered new, in my name,' said Keff. 'So they won't know how to trace it, if they care enough to look that hard. I'll stay here after you're gone. If old Tratt comes, I'll hold her here till morning. That gives you some distance, you see.'