Setting Free the Bears

'Oh, he'll be coming up now, any time,' said Karlotta. She scratched herself and showed me a leer. 'My left boob's itchy,' she whispered. 'There's a truckload of ground in my bra.' She squirmed and goosed me where I stood, and I watched the bilious pool with the fruit floating in it - and big, bobbing thatches of celery. Suddenly there were bubbles.

First we saw nostrils - two gaping holes, quite bottomless - and then came the thick-lidded eyes. Its head kept rising and rising, and its long pink mouth kept opening and opening; I saw the stump of an impossible epiglottis; I smelled from its dank, empty mouth a whole windowbox of rotted geraniums. The children threw food to it, and it rested its chin on the pool curb; the children threw peanuts, marsh-mallows and caramel corn - they threw paper bags and souvenirs of the zoo, an old man's newspaper and a tiny pink sneaker. When the hippo had enough, he just rolled his head off the curb and made the pool a sea. He sprayed us and sank in his vat.

'He'll be up again now,' said Karlotta. 'God, he could swallow me whole!'

On the back of Karlotta's sturdy leg was the imprint of a fern - an accurate fossil on her dark, flexing calf. I slipped away from the vat rim unnoticed, and left Karlotta in the hippohouse.

Drawing the Line

'I DON'T KNOW how you could have done it,' said Siggy. 'You've such bad taste.'

'Where did Wanga go?' I said.

'I lost her somewhere, Graff. I was just trying to get away from that fatty there.'

'We went to the hippohouse,' I said. 'In a few hours it's going to be dark.'

'Thank yourself for that, Graff. Honestly, I don't know how you could have! There's a point, you know, where a fellow should stop and think.'

'If we left now,' I said, 'we'd be in the country before dark.'

'Karlotta!' said Siggy. 'I just can't imagine! Rich as mud, was it? I should think you'd feel contaminated.'

'You're a crude oaf!' I said. 'Wearing her bloomers for a hat, dancing around like a jester.'

'But I draw the line somewhere, Graff. Oh yes.' And he began to fiddle with the motorcycle.

'Well, how frotting grand of you that is!' I said. 'It might interest you to know that it wasn't so bad. Not at all bad!'

'I've no doubt of that, Graff,' he said. 'Skill is more common than beauty.' Well, stuffed and officious, that line reappears in his jottings: Finesse is no substitute for love.

And at the zoo gate he was ignoring me, rising up on the kick starter and throwing down all his weight.

'You're a doctrinaire forker, Siggy,' I said.

But the engine caught and he throttled it up and down, nodding his head to the music. I swung up behind him, and we buckled on our crash helmets. Then on with my World War One pilot's goggles, to tint my world yellow - to pinch and addle my mind.

'Siggy?' I said. But he didn't hear.

He turned us out of the Platz at the Hietzinger Zoo, while behind us the lions were roaring for freedom and food, and Karlotta, I could easily imagine, was in the process, both awkward and admiring, of feeding herself to the hippo.

Night Riders

FOR SEVERAL TOWNS now, we hadn't seen a Gasthaus lighted. There were farms with one tiny light still burning, most likely an attic light left burning always - a beac

on to say: There's someone still up, if you've any plans to sneak about. There'd be a dog too, who really was awake.

But the towns were all dark, and we roared through them, seeing no one; just once, we saw a man peeing in a fountain. We caught him suddenly in our headlight and in the clamor of our engine, and he dived to the ground, still fumbling himself, as if we'd been so many megatons dropped out of the night. That was in a place called Krumnussbaum; just before Blindenmarkt, Siggy stopped. He killed the engine and headlight, and the quiet of the woods sealed up the road.

'Did you see that man back there?' he said. 'Have you looked at these towns? It must have been like this during the blackout.' And we thought about that a minute, while the woods went cautiously about their night noises again, and things came out to watch.

When he turned on the headlight, the trees seemed to leap back out of the road; centuries of night-watchers scurried back in hiding - ferrets and owls, and the ghosts of Charlemagne's lookouts.

'Once,' said Siggy, 'I found a very old helmet in the woods. It had a spike and visor on it.' And his voice hushed the night noises; we heard the river for the first time.

'Is that ahead of us?' I said.

So he worked the kick starter and got us moving slowly. We crossed the Ybbs just out of Blindenmarkt, and Siggy swung the bike sideways on the bridge. Just out of the headlight's beam the river was a black, rumpled sheet in the wind, but the spot where the light struck seemed waterless; the river was shallow and clear, and we saw the pebbles on the bottom as if there'd been no water to cover them.