Setting Free the Bears

'Todor makes a fine motorcycle,' said Bijelo the eldest; he had an eye for bikes, all right. He'd stolen some Italian's Norton, over the border in Tarviso - oh, before he was a responsible head of a family - and had ridden the great chugger over the mountains back to Yugoslavia, crossing where there wasn't a customs checkpoint because he crossed where there wasn't a road. But he was so carried away to be back in his homeland with it, and finally driving on a real road, that he drove it into the Sava River on the outskirts of Bled, climbed out wet but wildly happy, knowing how he'd do it again if he had the chance - and this time, make it all the way to Slovenjgradec. So he said.

He was a good teacher for my father, at least. My father rode Todor Slivnica under Bijelo's critical eye, for hours every evening - with Baba offering her own broad back, should Todor give out, and Julka claiming that she could clamp a gas tank or her brother's ribcage tighter than Vratno could.

My father, riding long hours through the nighttime kitchen would see his shy Dabrinka maybe once or twice. She poured the wine, she served the coffee, she was pinched by her sisters and she never met my father's eyes. Once, on a corner sharp left, Vratno held a smile up for Dabrinka; he would have waited forever to catch her eyes. But Todor turned his head, the back of which usually pretended to be the headlight and necessary gauges. Todor dumped my father on the corner sharp left.

'You must have leaned too far, Vratno,' he said, then leaned himself closer to where my father sat. 'I think it should be grownup ladies for you,' he said. 'You don't have to go outside this house to get it, and you don't have to kill yourself looking for it, either.' And Todor made a scissors of his index and middle finger, thick as garden shears, and he snipped his finger scissors just above my father's lap.

Oh, now that the linguist hunt was over, Todor Slivnica's humor was brightening, you could tell.

The Tenth Zoo Watch: Tuesday, 6 June 1967, @ 3.45 a.m.

SEEING THOSE ELEPHANTS has made me sleepy, but if they can be insomniacs for seventy years or more, I can hold out for a few more hours. It's just because of the lull in here; for a

moment, I was bored.

When I came back from the House of Pachyderms, it was so quiet that I went on by my hedgerow. I went down the path to the oryx's pen. For no good reason, I realized, I'd been putting off visiting the oryx.

It was easy, climbing the pen, but I saw as soon as I set foot inside that the oryx was in his shed. His hind hooves were splayed out the shed door, over the ramp; silky white hairs lay over his fetlocks. He looked like someone who'd been felled with a sledge as he came in his house - ambushed in his doorway. But when I gingerly came up behind him, he raised his head and shoved his face out the doorway into the moonlight; I touched his wet black nose; he sort of mooed. It was a little disappointing, he was so docile; I'd expected to be challenged - to be backed against his shed wall, threatened with horn and hoof, until I proved to him I was the sort he could trust. But the oryx needed no proof; he lay back again, stretched, raised up again, sliding his great hip out from under himself - kneeling, actually! His great bollocks bumped the boards of the ramp. He stood up tiredly, as if to say: All right, I'll show you where the bathroom is. You probably can't find it by yourself.

He invited me into his shed; that is, he backed up, completely off the ramp, and with his nodding head, he showed me about his room: This is where I sleep when it's cold - when it's warmer, as you saw, I hang a piece of me out the shed door. And this is where I take my brunch, by the glassless window. And this is where I sit to read.

He knocked about the shed (expecting, I think, that I was going to feed him something), and when I showed him I didn't have anything, he somewhat indignantly walked out of his house. The moonlight bounced off the ramp; his balls wobbled and were shot through by the strobe-light effect of the reflecting moon.

Something more definite should be said for the size. Not basketballs - that's exaggerating, of course. But they're bigger than softballs and - really! - bigger than the elephant balls I saw standing at attention just a while ago. They're volleyball-sized, only too heavy to be perfectly round. They're volleyballs that look sat on, or with the air let out - little dents where the ball collapsed for lack of air. That's as close as I can come, other than to point out that they're dangled in long, loose leather moneybags, and also, that they're a little crusty - owing, I'm sure, to the muck in the poor oryx's slum.

Imagine: the oryx was born in the Hietzinger Zoo! Brainwashed! He thinks his balls are just for lugging around. They never told him; he probably wouldn't know what to make of a lady.

And that's when I got to thinking: Why isn't there an antelope of sorts, a mountain goat or experienced gnu, who could show this poor oryx what his volleyballs are for?

I'm convinced: it's abstinence that's given them their size!

So I made a check of the surrounding pens, looking for a lady who might enlighten the naive and apathetic oryx. Now this was hard. The blesbok was too small and skittish - would only teach our oryx frustration. I felt the white-tailed gnu was far too hairy; Mrs Gray's waterbuck looked absurdly virginal; the lesser kudu had little to offer; the hartebeest had too thin a back; and the only female wildebeest had a beard. There was nothing in all the Hietzinger Zoo as perfect for the oryx as a gentle old madam cow.

So I decided. Rather than corrupt the oryx with a lascivious llama, I'd hope for the best on the day of the bust; that our oryx would escape forever to the Wachau pasture lands along the Danube, plundering queenly cows and lording over the awe-struck herds.

And thus encouraged, I skulked past the Small Mammal House. O. Schrutt was off somewhere in the back streets of the Small Mammal Maze - still creaking doors, I could hear, and sliding the sliding glass.

But along with O. Schrutt's sounds of clumsiness, I could hear something new from my stand just outside the open door, O. Schrutt had woken up his charges; there were shuffles, scratchings, claws clacking on the glass. And just as I began to think of this waking as a preface to O. Schrutt's own sudden emergence in the aisle, and his striking out for the open door - just as I'd turned a bit down the path, and was retreating to my hedgerow - I heard a wail from some lost aisle of the Small Mammal Maze. A cry cut off at full force, as if O. Schrutt had flung open a door on some poor beast's nightmare and slammed the door shut again as quickly as he'd opened it - fearing, perhaps, he'd be involved in the beastly dream.

But the wail was contagious. The Small Mammal House whimpered and moaned. Oh, the screams blared and were cut off again, muffled but not altogether gone. As if a certain zoo train had passed you somewhere, going fast, and the frightened animals' cries had slashed out at you like a passing buggy driver's whip; and the cries hung for a moment all around, like the sting of the whip lingering on your neck after the buggy driver had slashed and passed on.

So I pawed my way through the nearest root gap and crawled under and behind my hedge. Holding my breath.

It wasn't until I exhaled, and heard a thousand exhalations round me, that I realized the rest of the zoo was awake again too.

(CONTINUING:)

THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: PRE-HISTORY II

On Sunday the twenty-sixth of October, 1941, Vratno Javotnik was judged by the Slivnicas as being prepared to meet Gottlob Wut, who had Sunday habits convenient for a meeting.

The scout outfit had Sundays off. There was no guard at the Balkan 4 Barracks on Smartin Street, and no guard at the motorcycle unit's garage - a nearby block down Smartin Street, flush to the Mislinja riverbank.

Sunday was Wut's day for a leisurely breakfast with his Serbian mistress, whom he'd openly moved to a Smartin Street apartment, half-way between the Balkan 4 barracks and the garage. Wut would cross Smartin Street every Sunday morning, briskly out of the barracks, wearing his bathrobe and unlaced dress shoes, carrying his uniform under his arm; it was the only day of the week he wasn't wearing or carrying his crash helmet. Wut had his own key to the Serbian woman's apartment. All Smartin Street watched Wut let himself in.

Occasionally, one of the scout outfit's members would have stand-by messenger duty on Sundays. In which case, one of the 600 cc NSU side-valve sidecar models would be parked in front of the barracks. Otherwise, all the bikes were locked up, downstreet at the garage.

Wut had a key for the garage too. He'd leave his mistress in the late afternoon and go down to his motorcycles, letting himself in again, neat in his uniform - this time - his bathrobe under his arm. Then he'd fiddle with the bikes until dark. He'd start them, adjust them, tighten them, bounce on them, leave little tickets tied to several handlebars - stating the nature of maladies he'd discovered, noting ill effects of maladies left uncorrected, sometimes suggesting punishments for the more careless of his drivers.