Ernst Watzek-Trummer has plucked and spitted three anonymous chickens over a low-coal fire on the hen-house floor. He gnaws at a bone on his roost. Grandfather and the patriot gather a pail of eggs and water, and hard-boil the eggs. Watzek-Trummer slaughters and plucks his best capon; it's thrown in the pail to boil. Then they hobble four prime hens and a stud champion rooster. Hilke bundles them violently together in a blanket; they go berserk on the floor under the back seat, against the long duffel which separates my mother from my grandmother. Ernst Watzek-Trummer takes the front seat by Grandfather, each to his own side of the kitchenware crate - the egg pail on the floor between them. Before they leave, Watzek-Trummer sets his chickens loose and lights the hen-house afire. In the glove compartment, he stows his best slaying-cleaver.
The three anonymous chickens, spitted and charred, and the freshly boiled capon, a bit underdone, are hacked and ripped apart by Watzek-Trummer while Grandfather drives. Ernst distributes chicken parts and hard-boiled eggs while Grandfather turns south, through Gloggnitz and Bruck an der Mur, then west, and even a little north - skirting mountains. He settles straight-ahead west at St Martin.
That's a long way from Vienna; that puts them almost due south of Linz and nearly out of gas. The Mercedes, used to taxi-living, bubbles up its radiator once - even though it's March - and Ernst Watzek-Trummer has to cool it off with lukewarm water from the egg pail.
My mother, in the back seat, doesn't say a word. She feels she's still pinching Zahn Glanz's knee between her own, and feels Zahn's despairing weight - making her back take on the grain of the wood in the great lobby door.
Grandmother says, 'The live chickens are smelling.'
'We need gas,' says Grandfather.
And in Pruggern they find there's still a celebration going on. Grandfather rolls down his window and slows for a policeman with his coat uniform open down his chest - and somehow, a swastika armband stretched enough to slip over his head and collar his neck. It's hard to tell whether he put it on himself or had his head held while someone else did the fitting.
Watzek-Trummer sets the glove compartment ajar and holds it half shut with his knee; the slaying-cleaver winks at him. My grandfather shoves a Nazi salute out the window. 'I'm glad to see the whole country's not gone to bed on such a night!' he says. But the policeman peers inside, suspicious of the egg pail and scattered chickens.
Ernst Watzek-Trummer clomps my grandfather's back. 'His brother's got a seal of office in Salzburg now!' he says. 'You should see Vienna, and all the Bolsheviks we've passed along the way - running east.'
'Your brother's got a seal?' the policeman says.
'I may be sent to Munich!' says Grandfather gayly.
'Well, bless you,' the policeman says. Watzek-Trummer passes him a hard-boiled egg.
'Keep it up!' says Grandfather. 'Keep the whole town up till dawn!'
'I wish I knew what was going on,' the policeman says. 'I mean, really, you know.'
'Just keep it up,' says Grandfather, and starts to pull ahead, then stops. 'You wouldn't have any gas for us, would you?' he asks.
'There's things we could siphon,' says the policeman. 'You wouldn't have a hose?'
'Just happen to,' Watzek-Trummer says.
They find a mail truck in the back buildings of a dark post-office lot. The policeman even does the sucking to get the siphon hose started, so they give him one of the capon's legs.
And my mother bears down on the imagined knee between her own; she rubs the window with the heel of her hand, as if it were a crystal ball to show her every safe, unfoolish move Zahn Glanz will make to get himself out of Vienna.
And the rest is mostly hearsay; That Hilke assumes Zahn finds out - almost as soon as befuddled Muff - the German border troops are crossing anyway. That, as a fact among few, Zahn does forward the draft of Grandfather's endorsed bankbook to the postmaster of Kaprun. That Zahn may have been reading Lennhoff's editorial about the German Putsch as late as noon, and then heard of the warm welcome Hitler was receiving in Linz - where the Fuhrer marched to from the border at Passau, with soldiers and tanks, 'to visit his mother's grave.' And that Zahn,
or someone like him, was the one who borrowed or stole the taxi which drove the criminal editor Lennhoff across the Hungarian border at Kittsee - having been turned away by the Czechs. If Zahn Glanz wasn't the driver, why did he never meet my mother in Kaprun? So he must have been the driver. And carried with him half of what I was at that time, because then I was, at best, only an idea of my mother's - half of which, if it didn't cross the Hungarian border at Kittsee, went wherever Zahn Glanz went.
And the rest is simply the seven-year affair of living in the protective shadow of my grandfather's brother, the postmaster of Kaprun, who kept his official post by joining the Nazi party, and because Kaprun was so small then, found the post not demanding, and the Nazi guise quite easy to maintain, except in the presence of the one youth club he supervised - some member of which suspected the postmaster's sincerity and caught him off guard in a poorly insulated latrine stall of the Hitler Youth's barracks, and roasted him with a lightweight SS flamethrower the postmaster had demonstrated just that morning. But that was when the war was almost over, and I don't think my mother or my grandparents suffered or starved so very much, especially owing to the food-hoarding genius of Ernst Watzek-Trummer, and the spices my grandfather wisely added to the last duffel packed in Vienna.
And the rest is all in Goring's telegram to Hitler in Linz, because Goring at his radio in Berlin heard of the Fuhrer's triumphant welcome in that first city. Goring asked, 'If the enthusiasm is so great, why not go the whole hog?' And Hitler certainly went ahead and did that. In Vienna alone, the first wave of Gestapo arrests took seventy-six thousand. (And if Zahn Glanz wasn't the driver of the editor's getaway taxi, wouldn't he have been one of these seventy-six thousand? So he must have been the driver.)
And the rest, as far as I was concerned, had to wait for my mother's second suitor. I wouldn't want to say, exactly, that he was a suitor less worthy than the first - or that I've condemned my mother for not letting Zahn Glanz father me. Because even if it wasn't carried in the genes, something of Zahn Glanz certainly got into me. I only want to show how Zahn Glanz put an idea of me in my mother. Even if he put nothing else there.
The Eighth Zoo Watch: Tuesday, 6 June 1967, @ 3.00 a.m.
ALMOST EVERYONE IS asleep. One of the Various Aquatic Birds is garbling, prophecies or indigestion. I'm certainly awake, and I don't believe that sleep ever comes to O. Schrutt. But everyone else has finally dropped off.
I've been thinking: How do they know the last great auk is dead? The Irishmen at Trinity Bay - did they hear the great auk's final murmur? Did it actually say, 'I am the last, there are no more'?
I've heard that Irishmen are always drunk. How could they be sure this great auk washed ashore was the last? It might have been a plot. The great auks might have anticipated their own extinction, and sent a martyr - instructed to identify itself as final. And somewhere, maybe in deserted coastal cottages in Wales, a tribe of great auks are living still, multiplying, and teaching their young about the martyr who washed itself ashore that they might live - and be not gullible.
I wonder if the great auk is a bitter bird. I wonder if their young are warlike, if they're organized in diving teams, scuttling small fishing boats, spreading rumors as old and unbelievable as sea serpents and mermaids - working up to the day when the Great Auk Navy will rule the waterways of the world. Human history happens that way. I wonder: do the surviving great auks bear grudges?
I've also been thinking about O. Schrutt. Curious that I should have created his namesake. I thumbed back through my various fictions, true and false, and found the other O. Schrutt. A decidedly more tender-aged O. Schrutt than this nightwatchman. Curious that my invented O. Schrutt should be a bit-character, a walk-on part, an alphabetized member of Vienna's Nazi youth. It's very curious, isn't it?