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His own flashlight, tilted from his hip and pointed overhead, illuminated him for me. The watchman was lighting up himself.
I saw him head-on, his old face lightly tinged by infrared - with a rich magenta scar, sharp and thin, from the top of his gray crew-cut head, past his ear to his left nostril, where it plunges through to the gum. A part of his upper lip is tucked in by it, and appears as a slightly raised hackle - baring all the scarlet of his upper left gum. It was no proper duel that caused it. Perhaps a foil gone berserk.
Head-on, I saw him - that face, and that remarkable uniform-front. It's not only that he hasn't, somehow, lost his epaulettes; his uniform still has a nametag. O. Schrutt, he is - or was once. And if it's not still O. Schrutt, inside that old uniform, why would he have left the nametag on? o. SCHRUTT, with the period very faded. What an edge it seems to give you - to find out someone's name before they've even seen your face. This watchman is O. Schrutt.
Strange, but that's a name I've used before; I've had O. Schrutt on my lips before. It's possible I knew an O. Schrutt; surely I've known one Schrutt or another in my time. Vienna is full of Schrutt families. And I also believe I've used this name in one fiction or another. That's it, I'm sure; I've made up an O. Schrutt before.
But this O. Schrutt is real; he searches the upper tree limbs for ocelots and such. Animals don't sleep when O. Schrutt is on the prowl, and neither do I.
I can't sleep now, although O. Schrutt's gone back to his Small Mammal House. He retreated from my hedges, pretending lack of interest; casually backing down the path - he would then erupt, in circles, exposing each lurking bit of the darkness around him. O. Schrutt makes vowel sounds when he whirls his light. 'Aah!' he cries, and 'Oooh!' - surprising the shapes that hide just out of his beam.
Now the animals are dropping off; groans, stretches, sighs, slumps; a brief, shrill-voiced argument in the Monkey Complex, and someone swings a trapeze against an echoing wall. But I can't sleep.
When O. Schrutt emerges for another round, I want to get inside his blood-lit den and see just what it is that makes old O. turn on the infrared. One reason, I can guess: O. Schrutt is not a man who likes to be seen. Even by animals.
(CONTINUING:)
THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: PRE-HISTORY I
Saturday, 12 March 1938: 1.00 a.m. at the Chancellery on the Ballhausplatz. Miklas has given in. Seyss-Inquart is Chancellor of Austria.
Seyss is in conference with Lieutenant General Muff. They want to make certain that Berlin knows everything is in control, and that the German border troops no longer think of crossing.
Poor Seyss-Inquart, he should know better:
If you bring lions to your home,
They'll want to stay for dinner.
But about two o'clock, it's Muff who phones Berlin and attempts the put-off. Perhaps he says, 'It's all right, you can take your armies home now; it's all right, we've got our politics just like yours now; you don't have to hang around our border now, because it's really all right here.'
And at two-thirty, after a frantic bicker between the War Office, the Foreign Office and the Reich Chancellery, Hitler's personal adjutant is asked to wake up the Fuhrer.
Wake up any man at two-thirty in the morning, says Grandfather - even a reasonable man - and see what you get.
At two-thirty, Zahn Glanz is pressing my mother against the great lobby door, and Grandmother still hasn't heard anyone cranking a phone. Grandfather is bringing out the little things now: a crate of kitchenware, a carton of food and wine, a box of winter scarves and hats, and the crocheted bedspreads.
'If not all the china,' says Grandmother, 'maybe just the gravyboat?'
'No, Muttie,' says Grandfather, 'just what we need' - and makes the last check of Hilke's room. He packs the eagle-suit in the bottom of a winter army duffel.
In the kitchen, Grandfather empties the spice rack and tumbles all the little jars into the duffel, thinking that anything with enough spice can taste like food; then the radio.
Grandmother whispers from the staircase, 'I just looked in that car, and you're going to have a whole seat left empty.'
'I know it,' says Grandfather, thinking that there's room for one more who's leaving Vienna this morning before light.
It's not Schuschnigg. He leaves the Ballhausplatz, shakes hands with a tearful guard, ignores the Nazi salute from the file of citizens with swastika armbands.
The apologetic Seyss-Inquart drives Schuschnigg home - to ten weeks of house arrest and seven years in Gestapo prisons. All because Kurt von Schuschnigg has claimed he's committed no crime, and has refused the protection of the Hungarian embassy - has not joined the lines of monarchists, Jews, and some Catholics, who've been jamming up the Czech and Hungarian customs ports since midnight.
Grandfather finds the traffic is all going the other way. East. But Grandfather seems to feel that the Czechs and Hungarians will be next, and he doesn't want to have to move again; especially since then there would be no choice of moving east or west, but only east again - and that would be Russia. My grandfather has a picture of himself, in nightmares: driven to the Black Sea, hunted by Cossacks and wild-haired Turks.
So driving west, he has no traffic going his way. St Veit is dark, Hacking is darker. Only the lighted trams are still going in my grandfather's direction; the conductors wave swastika flags; at the stations, men with armbands and nametags are singing; someone bloops a one-note tuba.
'Is this the fastest route west?' my grandmother asks.
But Grandfather finds his way. He stops at the only unlighted hen-house in the outskirts of Hacking.
