Setting Free the Bears

'Marvelous!' says Zahn.

'You're beautiful,' Hilke tells the eagle, and pokes his downy parts, where the feathers are all wadded up and stuck on the thickest - under his tin-jutting chin, wild across his breast and gathered in his wing pits.

'Take off your head,' says Zahn. 'You can't drink with your head on.'

And a wave of jostling men surges up behind the eagle. 'Yes! Take off your head!' they shout, and reach and slosh their way nearer the bird.

'Don't crowd! Show some respect!' Grandfather says.

A violinist skitters to the balcony above their table - a cellist, stooping and grunting, follows. They refold their handkerchiefs.

'Music!' says Grandfather, lording over the Keller now.

The violinist tweaks his bow. The cellist creaks a string of finger-thickness; everyone clutches his spine, as if the cellist had struck a vertebra.

'Now quiet!' says Grandfather, still in charge. The eagle spreads his wings.

'Take off your head,' Zahn whispers, and the music begins - a Volkslied to make the mighty blubber.

Hilke helps the eagle off with his head. Ernst Watzek-Trummer crinkles his old elfish face and sinks a dimple deep in his chin. My mother wants to kiss him; my grandfather does - out of second-joy, perhaps, to find so many gray hairs fringing the eagle's ears. Only a man of my grandfather's generation could be the Austrian eagle.

Ernst Watzek-Trummer is overcome - toasted and kissed by a man of some education, he can tell. He keeps agonized time with the Volkslied. His head is reverently passed around; it skids from hand to hand, losing lard and some of its gleam.

The windows frost. Someone suggests they devise a plan to fly the eagle - to hang him and swing him from the balustrade of St Michael's. If they did it at St Michael's, then Schuschnigg could see. Suspenders are offered. The eagle seems willing, but my grandfather is stern.

'Sirs,' he says, and hands back a broad pair of red suspenders. 'Please, sirs.' And surveys the puzzled, blurry faces of the men holding up their pants with their thumbs. 'My daughter is with us,' says Grandfather, and he gently lifts my mother's face to the crowd. They retreat, admonished, and the eagle survives a near-swinging - what might have been a most elastic flight, with the combined snap-and-stretch of strong and weak suspenders.

Ernst Watzek-Trummer makes it safely to Zahn's taxi. At Grandfather's suggestion, the eagle blunts his beak with a wine cork - so he won't give injury on his way through the throng to the door. With beak corked - and a little bit bent, getting into the taxi - he enfolds my mother and grandfather in the back seat, while Zahn reels them through the Michaelerplatz, under the rumpling bed sheets that bless Schuschnigg, and down the Kaffeehaus alleys off the Graben.

Zahn announces, with shouts and his horn, the deliverance of Austria, 'Cawk! Cawk!' he cries. 'The country's free!' And the by now weary observers, sobering in coffee and behind hand-rubbed peep sights on steamy windows, pay little attention. They're already tired of miracles. This is only some large bird in a flying taxi's backseat.

And waiting up for them, is my grandmother - book open, tea cold. When she sees the eagle led into her kitchen, she turns to Grandfather as if he's brought home a pet they can't afford to feed. 'Lord, look at you!' she says to him. 'And your daughter with you all the while.'

'Cawk!' the eagle says.

'What does it want, Zahn?' Grandmother asks. And to Grandfather: 'You haven't bought it, have you? Or signed anything?'

'It's the Austrian eagle!' says Grandfather. 'Show some respect!'

And Grandmother looks, not quite respectfully; she peers past the corked beak, into the eyeholes.

'Frau Marter,' says the eagle. 'I'm Ernst Watzek-Trummer, from Hacking.'

'A patriot!' Grandfather shouts, and clomps the eagle's shoulder. A feather falls; it appears to go on falling forever.

'Muttie,' says Hilke. 'He made the suit himself.'

And Grandmother makes a wary reach, touching the plumage on the eagle's breast.

Grandfather gently says, 'It's just a little last fling I was having, Muttie. Our daughter's been properly looked after.'

'Oh, indeed she has!' says Zahn, and thumps the eagle.

And Grandfather very sadly says, 'Oh, it's Austria's last fling too, Muttie.' And he genuflects before the eagle.

Ernst Watzek-Trummer covers his eyeholes, trembles his feathers and starts to cry - a grinding whimper into his beak.

'Cawk! Cawk!' says Zahn, still gay, but the eagle's helmet is rattling with sobs.