But Watzek-Trummer would counter; 'You never said what happened after you and Gottlob Wut got to Maribor. Did this Wut have a lady friend there? Why didn't he come with you?'
And Vratno: 'Which one of you was this mythical eagle? Frau Drexa Neff, the laundress across the street - and she's Muttie Marter's friend, I've talked to her - why is she kept in the dark about it? She's always talking about this great bird, and all of you get funny faces. Who was the bird, Ernst? Was Zahn Glanz that eagle? Was he? and what happened to this Glanz?'
Then Watzek-Trummer, historian without equal, keeper of every detail - Watzek-Trummer would ramble on: 'All right, all right, I'm with you, to a point. But after all those Slivnicas were blown up, minus one, and after the bit with the radio in the mountains - when Borsfa Durd was already dead and buried, in his way, I mean - and after you let Balkan Four go by and you'd marched to Maribor with that other outfit. When you were in Maribor, Vratno - is what I mean - what happened to this Gottlob Wut?'
On and on they went, a snacking merry-go-round, until my mother would rustle from the other room and my father would eat up, drink up, talk up and leave Ernst Watzek-Trummer to keep track of the rest of the night. Which he did, with increasing insomnia - perhaps owing to the growing discomfort of my mother's pregnancy, because she tossed about rather loudly from February into March. And Ernst gave up his partitioned bedroom; he sat by the kitchen window instead, poured my mother a glass of milk whenever she came sleeplessly waddling into the kitchen; otherwise, he watched the nightwatchmen on the Schwindgasse - the hourly floodlights from the former Bulgarian Embassy, and the hourly check of the house doors along the street.
A Russian officer who carried a revolver walked flush against the buildings - a poor target for flower vases or boiling pasta pots; he tried each lobby lock. He was covered by a Russian infantryman, a machine-gunner, who walked just off the curb in the street - himself a poor target for heaved windowboxes, because it would take considerable determination to launch anything very weighty that far into the street. The machine-gunner watched windows; the officer first felt his hand around the jambs before stepping into doorways. The floodlights from the former embassy moved in front of them. There wasn't a curfew, exactly, but e
ven a light left on after midnight was suspicious, and therefore Watzek-Trummer settled for a candle on the kitchen table and kept the windowshade drawn to an inch above the sill. So Watzek-Trummer had his window inch for watching Russian watchmen; Ernst insists he kept a kind of peace on the Schwindgasse by casting a hex, a pox, a jinx, a trance or even blessing over the machine-gunner as he passed. Because the first thing Watzek-Trummer noticed about the machine-gunner was that he was too nervous; he watched the windows behind himself more than he watched those coming into the moving floodlight ahead - and he clicked on and off the safety on his gun. So Ernst contends that his duty at the window inch was to keep the gunner calm; and be available for the morning exodus of the laundress Frau Drexa Neff, another nighttime window-watcher, who would bob up from her cellar cubby and holler across the street to Ernst, 'How's her coffee look to you, Herr Trummer? Low enough, is it, so I should pick up hers with mine?' And Watzek-Trummer would usually say, 'No, the coffee's fine, but we could use some fancy almonds, or the best French brandy the rations man has today.' And feisty Drexa: 'Ha! You need some sleep, Herr Trummer. Ha! That's what, all right.'
So that was February and most of March, 1946, with Drexa - as March came on and on - asking Watzek-Trummer if Hilke had had me overnight, and with no other incidents except this: on Plosslgasse, two blocks south of Watzek-Trummer's window inch, a man was machine-gunned for peeing out a window into an alley (because, it turned out, his toilet was stopped up), after midnight. The noise of which, had the Schwindgasse machine-gunner wheeling himself around and around in the street, clicking his safety on and off - checking the night sky for hurtling windowboxes, kitchen utensils and wet, wadded socks. Which never came, or he'd have surely opened up.
And this incident too: the Soviets seized the entire Danube Shipping Company assets under the heading of war booty. Which was disputed in an Allied Council meeting or two.
But nothing else until I was spectacularly born.
Watzek-Trummer remembers a bit of light snow, recalls my mother waddling to the kitchen some time past midnight and not being pacified by her usual glass of milk. He remembers Grandfather and Vratno getting dressed and calling out the lobby door to the Russian hangout at the former Bulgarian Embassy. And three of them, then, in a Russian squad car, batting off to the Soviet-sector clinic.
That would have been early morning, one or two a.m. of 25 March 1946. It was three or four, Ernst remembers, when Grandfather phoned back to the apartment to tell Watzek-Trummer and my grandmother about me - a boy! Nine pounds, nine ounces, which was big, I might add, considering the diet of that occupied year. And my grandmother took up the candle and whirled across the kitchen to the windowshade drawn to one inch above the sill - and she flung up the shade, candle in her hand, and cried across the street to her friend the laundress, 'Drexa! It's a boy! Nearly ten pounds too!'
Watzek-Trummer recalls: he was midway from the phone to Grandmother, off his feet, he believes - spread out in the air and reaching to put out the candle - when the floodlights came into the kitchen and Grandmother was propelled toward him and right past him. Their paths crossed; he recalls looking over his shoulder as she was flung by him - her very surprised face, not even bleeding yet. In fact, Watzek-Trummer doesn't remember hearing the machine-gunning until after he recrossed the kitchen to her and tried to sit her up.
It's Drexa Neff who has told Watzek-Trummer the details, really. How the gunner was a few feet past the window and looking over his shoulder, as he would do forever, when Grandmother Marter scared the wits out of him with her ghostly candle and her screaming in a language the Russian didn't understand. And after he shot her - Drexa is very clear about this - the whole street was floodlit, but you couldn't see the faces that were in every window, just inches above the sill. At least not until Watzek-Trummer started screaming. 'They killed Frau Marter! She was just saying she was a grandmother now!' And how the street rained kitchenware and bits of pottery; how it was down street, only a few doors from where Frau Marter was shot, that the machine-gunner caught in his neck the first piece of well-aimed crock or lead or silver; and down on one knee, weaving a downed boxer's weave, he opened up his machine-gun again and took out a row of third-story windows from the Argentinier corner of the Schwindgasse half-way to Prinz-Eugen-Strasse. And would have gone the whole block length if the Russian officer hadn't got in the way - or had not been able to get out of the way; whatever, the gunner blew his officer down the sidewalk and stopped his sweep shot then. He covered his head with his arms and made a ball of himself in the street; everyone's kitchenware - some of which Drexa could identify, and even told Watzek-Trummer where it was bought and for how much - covered the Russian gunner, lying kitty-corner across from the former Bulgarian embassy, out of which no one ran to try and fetch him.
So I was born on 25 March 1946 and my birth was overshadowed not only by this aforementioned mistake. Because although I weighed nine pounds, nine ounces, and my mother had a short labor and smooth delivery, no one would ever remember. Although there was even a significant argument concerning my name - whether I be a Zahn, but my father asked, 'Who was Zahn?' and got no answer, or whether I be a Gottlob, but my mother asked, 'What was he to you?' and got no answer, so that Grandfather's suggestion was approved, because no questions and answers were necessary concerning a Siegfried, the name that carried Vratno to safety - even though there was this pertinent discussion, hardly anyone would associate me with the date of my birth. Because not only was my grandmother machine-gunned within moments of my delivery - which wouldn't be remembered by many, either - but because on the twenty-fifth of March 1946, Tito's partisans finally hunted down and captured the Chetnik general Drazha Mihailovich, the last honest and stupid liberator or revolutionary left in the world.
The Nineteenth Zoo Watch: Tuesday, 6 June 1967, @ 6.15 a.m.
WELL, I KNOW, Graff, I may seem to you to be turning my back on old principles. Well, there are some things, I see now, that you just can't split the hair over.
I mean, you always end up arbitrating in the end, don't you? What's the good of being so selective if you end up with more animals left in the zoo than animals that make it out? Now I'm certainly not advocating any slaughter, and I think we ought to save the bigger, rougher ones for last. But what kind of zoo bust would it be if you kept everything big or a little bit dangerous in its cage?
I tell you, I understand these animals - they know what the whole thing's for; or they will know, if you just point the way.
Now I don't mean to apply this to other things, but it's the liberators with unswerving principles who never get the revolution off the ground.
I'm sure. If you let these animals know you're for all of them, even the gelada baboon, even if we have to save him for near the end - I mean, all of them get let out of the cages - they'll be up at those gates, one hundred per cent. Nobody trusts favoritism!
I really mean it; even the frotting gelada baboon. I'm not going to be the one to let a little personal experience run my mind amuck.
(CONTINUING:)
THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: MY REAL HISTORY
Nothing was done about Grandmother Marter's death. The minutes of the Allied Council meetings are full of incidents much less understandably accidental than that one. The obviously premeditated ones, for example, were thought to be the work of hirelings for the Upravlenye Sovietskovo Imushchestva v Avstrii, or USIA - the Administration for Soviet Property in Austria. Which, under the label of war booty, made off with four hundred Austrian enterprises; foundries, spinning mills, factories for machinery, chemicals, electrical equipment, glass and steel, and a motion picture corporation. Hired killers made off with the Austrians who resisted the USIA.
The majority of these weren't killings of my grandmother's type. Wild shootings, rapes and bombings were more up the alley of the Russian soldier. It was the abductions that bothered the Allied Council, and these seemed to be carried out by the notorious Benno Blum Gang - a cigarette-smuggling ring, also black-marketing nylon stockings. For the privilege of operating in the Russian sector, the Benno Blum Gang deftly did away with people. Benno Blum's Boys would waylay people all over Vienna, and skulk back to the Russian sector when the heat was on - although the Soviets claimed to be hunting down Benno Blum too. In fact, about twice a month some Russian soldier would shoot someone and say that he'd thought it was Benno Blum. Although no one ever saw Benno Blum, to know what he looked like - or if he existed.
So there was a rather general illegality about the Soviet-sector operations in Vienna, which diverted any interest the Allied Council might have taken in my grandmother's commonplace machine-gunning.
But Watzek-Trummer helped my grandfather. He varied his nights between his kitchen partition and the master bedroom - going from time to time to sprawl beside Grandfather on the master bed; head-by-head, they indulged each other's anger - sometimes ranting so loudly that the floodlights from the former Bulgarian embassy would linger at the remembered kitchen window and blink, as if to say: Go to sleep in there, and stop your complaining. It was an accident. Don't plot against us.
But there were enough incidents that clearly weren't accidents to bring about the New Control Agreement on 28 June 1946 which eliminated Soviet veto power over the elected Parliament. This dissolved the Russian Booty Department, although Benno Blum, perhaps revenge-bent, appeared to be more active than ever, snitching a third of the anti-Soviets in Vienna - and causing Chancellor Figl to say, in a sad speech in Upper Austria, 'We have had to write down against a very long list of names simply the word "disappeared".'
'Like Zahn Glanz, huh?' said Vratno. 'Is that what happened?'
And irritable Watzek-Trummer said, 'Ask your wife, or do you only talk bed talk in bed?'