Setting Free the Bears

With a miraculous, run-on fumble, the driver finds the right change for the waiter - touches my mother's shoulder again, and gets his chin tucked under his scarf. The waiter holds the door; the snow scoots over the driver's boots and flies up his pants. He slaps his knees together, spreads himself out thin and knifes into the flurry. At the sight of him, the horn blares again.

Lennhoff still must be in a hurry. The taxi reels round the Ballhausplatz, drifts to a curb and caroms off. Then the snow makes the taxi's straightaway journey seem so slow and soft.

'I'd like to drive a taxi,' says Zahn.

'It's easy enough to do,' the waiter says. 'You just have to know how to drive.'

And Zahn orders a bowl of hot wine soup. One bowl with two spoons. Hilke is fussy about the spicing; Zahn sprinkles not enough cinnamon and too much clove. The waiter watches the spoons compete.

'I could have given you two bowls,' he says.

And Zahn hears the signal blip he knows so well - news-time, Radio Johannesgasse. He pins down my mother's spoon with his own and wishes the waves in the soup to be still.

Worldwide: French charge d'affaires in Rome, M. Blondel, is rumored to have suffered some unspeakable insult from Count Ciano; and Anthony Eden has resigned from whatever he's been doing.

Austria: Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg has confirmed his new appointments to the Cabinet - Seyss-Inquart and four other Nazis.

Local: there's been a tram accident in the first district, at the intersection of Gumpendorfer Strasse and Nibelungengasse. A driver on Strassenbahn Line 57, Klag Brahms, says he was creeping down Gumpendorfer when a man came running out of Nibelungen. The tram tracks were iced, of course, and the driver didn't want to risk a derailment. Klag Brahms says the man was running very fast, or was caught in a gale. But a woman in the second tramcar says the man was being chased by a gang of youths. Another passenger in the same tramcar refutes the woman's theory; the unidentified source says that this woman is always seeing lookalike gangs of youths. The victim himself is as yet unidentified; anyone who thinks he knows him may call Radio Johannesgasse. The man is described as old and small.

'And dead,' the waiter says, while Hilke tries to remember all the old, small men she knows. No one she can think of was ever in the habit of running on Nibelungengasse.

But Zahn is counting up his fingers. 'How many days ago was it,' he asks, 'when Schuschnigg went to Berchtesgaden and visited with Hitler?' And the waiter starts counting his own fingers.

'Ten,' says Zahn, with fingers enough. 'Just ten days, and now we've got five Nazis on the Cabinet.'

'Half a Nazi a day,' says the waiter, and spread-eagles a handful of fingers.

'Little old Herr Baum,' my mother says, 'isn't his shoe-shop on some street like Nibelungen?'

And the waiter asks Zahn, 'Don't you think the man was chased? I've seen those gangs around myself.'

And Hilke's seen them too, she remembers. In trams, or in the theater, they sprawl their legs in the aisles; arm in arm, they shoulder you off the sidewalks. Sometimes they march in step, and they're great at following you home.

'Zahn?' my mother asks. 'Would you like to come home for supper?'

But Zahn is looking out the window. When the wind drops, the guard of honor looms clear and motionless; then the snow gusts him over. A totem-soldier, turned to ice - if you bashed his face, his cheek would break off bloodless in the snow.

'That's no defense at all,' says Zahn, and adds, 'now the trouble starts.'

'Now?' the waiter says. 'It started four years ago. Four years ago this July, when you weren't even much of a student. He came in here and had a cup of mocha. He sat just where you're sitting. I'll never forget him.'

'Who?' says Zahn.

'Otto Planetta,' the waiter says. 'Had his cup of mocha, watching out the window, the smug pig. Then a whole truckful of them unloaded outside. SS Standarte Eighty-nine, but they looked like Army Regulars. This Otto Planetta - he had his change all counted - he said, "Why, there's my brother." And out he went, marched right in with the rest of them, and killed poor Dollfuss; he shot him twice.'

'Well, it didn't work,' says Zahn.

'If I'd known who he was,' the waiter says. 'I'd have had him where he sat - right where you're sitting.' And the waiter fumbles in his apron pocket, conies up with a pair of meat shears. 'These would have done him, all right,' he says.

'But Schuschnigg took over,' says my mother. 'And didn't Dollfuss want Schuschnigg?'

'In fact,' Zahn says, 'when Dollfuss was dying, he asked that Schuschnigg be the new Chancellor.'

'He asked for a priest,' the waiter says, 'and they let him die without one.'

My mother can remember more; these are the sad, family pieces of history she remembers over the rest. 'His wife and children were in Italy,' she says. 'His children sent him flowers on the day he was killed, so he never got them.'