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We want the King, though he is no good!
So you shouldn't want him, then, my father told the Serb. But the old man chanted in Vratno's face:
Bolje grob nego rob!
Better a grave than a slave!
'No,' my father said. 'Anything's better than a grob.' Undoubtedly thinking: Especially as fresh a grave as the one that received Gottlob Wut.
But Vratno didn't kill the old Serb for siphoning. He made a deal. The sidecar model 600, with twenty-three leftover grenades, for some of the Serb's underground handiwork - a transit permit, with name and photograph, that would enable my father to cross the Austrian border on the racer. Because he was going to Berlin to kill Hitler, he said.
'Why don't you kill Tito?' the Serb asked. 'You wouldn't have to drive so far.'
But they made the deal. A certain Siegfried Schmidt was issued German-command special-messenger transit papers by the very undermanned but efficient Serb underground of Maribor. And one cold but bright morning in mid-December of '44, Siegfried Schmidt - formerly, Vratno Javotnik - crossed into Austria and over the Mur River on a 1939 Grand Prix racer, stripped of its warlike fanfare (for special-messenger service), and fled north toward the city of Graz on what is now called Route 67.
And I choose to believe that it was the same cold but bright morning of December '44 when Chetnik Captain Rakovich was finally caught by the partisans and dragged back to Chachak - where his body was rearranged and displayed in the market plaza.
But concerning what happened to my father after the cold, bright morning of his entry into Austria, I can only guess. After all, Siegfried Schmidt was not protected for long by his Wehrmacht uniform, his Grand Prix racer, and his special papers - which were special only as long as the Germans held Austria.
One morning my father fled north to Graz, but he was never clear about how long he stayed in Graz - or when it was, exactly, that he drove north-northeast to Vienna. He wouldn't have stayed long in Graz, for sure, because Yugoslav partisans were crossing the Austrian border quite soon after him, without the need of special papers. And Vienna couldn't have been too safe for Siegfried Schmidt, motorcycle messenger, either; on 13 April 1945 - just four months after my father left Maribor - the Soviets captured Vienna with the aid of Austrian resistance fighters. The Soviets were supposed to be liberating the city, but for a liberating army they did a surprising amount of raping and such. The Soviets obviously had difficulty considering Austria as a real victim of Germany; they'd seen so many Austrian soldiers fighting with the Germans on the Russian front.
But whatever the conditions, on the thirteenth of April, 1945, Siegfried Schmidt must have gone underground.
And on the thirtieth of April, French troops crossed into Austria over the Vorarlberg; the following day, the Americans entered from Germany; and when the British came into the country a week or so later, from Italy, they were surprised to find Yugoslav partisans running amok in the Carinthian and Styrian provinces.
Austria was overrun - and Vienna stayed indoors; learned it wasn't wise to welcome the liberators with open arms.
And there's very little that's clear in my father's account of this. Abandoned apartment houses were the best places - though popular, too often crowded, and not wanting the company of some fool who wouldn't leave his incriminating motorcycle behind. Vratno would remember: quarter-faces slanting through letter slots - 'No room for soldiers, you hide somewheres else.'
Food would get you temporary entry, but food could get you killed too.
Vratno would remember warm-weather months indoors; recalled a week spent in trying to trap a Russian and get his uniform - for in Wehrmacht cloth, my father's language abilities wouldn't be convincing enough.
Foremost, he would remember this one summer night. A sector near the Inner City, floodlights caught his flight at every roaring alley end - the Grand Prix racer bolting zigzag and hard-to-hit He remembered what must have been the Belvedere Gardens - soldiers in the trees with flashlights, and Vratno running the racer almost flush to the high concrete wall, where he must have made a poor target but tore his elbow and knee against the jagged bomb tears in the concrete. He recalled a fountain that wasn't turned on; that would have to be the Schwarzenberg Platz. And remembered being forced to double back when he ran into a daze of floodlights and Russian voices.
Vratno would always remember: Gottlob Wut behind him, whispering into the indigo-blue ear hole - and weaving to Wut's flawless directions, my father jumped curbs and traveled down sidewalks close to the building walls and dodging the occasional door that jutted out; skidding lightless down darker and darker streets, waiting for the wall or door he wouldn't see coming to smack him head-on.
Vratno always remembered a great lobby door, one side twisted off its hinges - the inner lobby where he skidded to, dark as a cave and marble-cool. He recalled daring his headlight once, and seeing the spiraling staircase going up at least four landings - to what he hoped were abandoned apartments. He remembered, forever; lifting his front wheel to the first step, revving, and jouncing madly up the wide but shallow marble stairs to the first landing, where he popped the clutch of the fierce Grand Prix and battered into the first apartment. And opened his eyes then, killed the engine - waited for the shot. Then he set the lock bolts back in place and closed the sprung door of the apartment.
Remembered then are floodlights coming down the street and into the lobby. Voices in Russian were saying, 'There's no bike been ditched in here.'
At dawn cigarettes all over the floor, and what might have been good china was smashed; a rank, bleached corner of the kitchen where other hideaways, from this or an earlier occupation, decided to make their toilet. Cupboards empty, of course. Beds with knifed mattresses - occasionally peed-in beds. And only one of many stuffed animals still had its eyes unplucked - on the window sill of what must have been a young girl's room.
Vratno remembered: how odd it was, in a city apartment, to see an occasional chicken feather lacing the floor. But above all, he would cling to this - for days, the one bright spot on the whole dark street: a brass ball that caught the sun for a while each day; the ball was held in a cupid's hands; the cupid had half of its head bombed off, but still perched angelic above what used to be the Bulgarian Embassy - in fact, the only embassy building on the Schwindgasse.
The Seventeenth Zoo Watch: Tuesday, 6 June 1967, @ 5.45 a.m.
YOU KNOW, GRAFF, once before there was a zoo bust in Vienna. Its failure is little-known history now. And the details are not the clearest.
No one seems to know just what went on in the zoo during the late years of the war. There was a time, though - let's say, early '45, when the Russians had captured the city, but before the other powers had agreed on the terms of occupation - when there wasn't anything to feed the people. There's no telling what the animals did for food. There are some accounts of what t
he people did for food, though - since there wasn't the manpower, or the concern, to keep the zoo well guarded.
But four men, say, even if they were unarmed - and almost everyone who moved about was armed then too - could do a pretty slick job of making off with a fair-sized antelope; even a camel, or a small giraffe.
And that happened. There were raids, although some city-guard outfit was supposedly protecting the zoo; they had the future in mind - a kind of emergency rationing.
For you, and you and you - you get the left hindquarters of this here kangaroo. And you get this rump steak of hippo; just remember, you got to boil it a good long while.
