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See us now: the elephants are playing water sports in the ponds for Various Aquatic Birds; countless Miscellaneous Range Animals are chomping the potted plants along the paths; all the wild monkeys are teasing the zebras, scattering after the back-and-forth clattering, bewildered giraffe; some of the small mammals could easily get lost.
If it's still around, surely the least auklet will get stepped on.
When they're all on the loose, how do you get their attention? How do you say, 'All right, out the gate, and make it snappy?'
Some of them may not even leave.
It's one reason I've always doubted Noah's neat trick of pairing up the gangplank to the ark.
So I think this calls for faith. I think there's no point in discussing the possibilities for chaos, because it's a matter of the mass frame of mind. We either convey the spirit to them or we don't.
And you can't draw the line anywhere, either. Not this time.
(CONTINUING:)
THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: PRE-HISTORY II
On 2 August 1945, my mother had her suspicions confirmed by a Soviet Army doctor; she was married to Vratno Javotnik in St Stephen's, in what was a small but noisy ceremony - throughout which my grandmother hummed or moaned, and Ernst Watzek-Trummer sneezed; Ernst had caught a cold, sleeping in a taxi.
And there were other noises - the dismantling work at one of the side altars, where a crew of US Army engineers were sweatily removing an unexploded bomb which had been dropped through the mosaic roof of St Stephen's and was wedged between some organ pipes. For some months after the bombing, the organist had been too nervous to play either loudly or well.
As in any other wedding, after the oaths my mother shyly kissed my father's newly shaved face. Then they were clumsily followed up the aisle and out of the cathedral by burly Americans bearing their bomb like a very heavy, just christened child.
The wedding party was held in the newly established American hamburger spa on the Graben. The young couple were most secretive. In fact, most of what I know of their relationship is a sparsely documented tale - relying on the interpretations, if not actual witness, of Ernst Watzek-Trummer. Ernst maintains that the most he ever heard the couple say in public was the discussion concerning Hilke's wish that Vratno shave for the wedding. Which was very shy talk, even for such a domestic matter.
Nevertheless, the record has it. 2 August 1945 Hilke Marter was given in marriage by her father, an ex-librarian with fourteen books overdue for seven years and three-plus months; Ernst Watzek-Trummer was best man for the groom.
Record also has it that 2 August 1945 was the last day of bickering at Potsdam, and the only day in which Truman and Churchill slumped a bit off their mark. The British and Americans had come prepared to Potsdam - this time aware of Russian means and motives of occupation, as observed in the Balkans and in Berlin. But Churchill and Truman had been thinking hard since 17 July, and Potsdam's last day marked a slacking off. It was on the issue of war booty, and Russian claims in Eastern Austria - the Russians declaring that they had been most heavily damaged by the war and that Germany would have to make it good. Russian statistics are always staggering; they claimed 1710 cities and 70,000 villages destroyed - a loss of 6,000,000 buildings, making 25,000,000 homeless, not to mention the damage to 31,850 industries and enterprises. The losses to be made good by Germany were losses for which certain Austrian war booty could be seized. A language confusion was operative; the Russians spoke of Austria's liberation in the same breath as they spoke of Austria's co-responsibility with Germany for the war.
Later, Soviet representative of the Potsdam Economic Commission, Mr I.M. Maisky, confessed that war booty meant any property that could be moved to the Soviet Union. But aside from letting this vague phrase slip by, Churchill and Truman were prepared for Stalin's aims, this time.
Vienna herself was not unprepared, either - by the time of the Potsdam conference. She'd simply been caught by surprise before then, but made some strongly independent gestures thereafter.
On 11 September 1945 the Allied Council had their first meeting in the Soviet-occupied Imperial Hotel on the Ringstrasse, under the chairmanship of Russia's Marshal Koniev.
And Vratno Javotnik was not unprepared, either - even for pending family life. My grandfather got him some legitimate refugee papers and a job a
s interpreter-aid to himself - Grandfather having landed fat work as a documentor for the supposedly kept-up-to-date minutes of the Allied Council meetings.
Just fourteen days after the first meeting, Vienna held its first free parliamentary elections since the Anschluss. And much against the grain of all previous Soviet efforts, the Communist party won less than six per cent of the total vote - only four seats out of one hundred and twenty-five in the National Rat. The socialist and People's parties about split even.
What Vienna really wasn't prepared for was what bad losers the Soviets could be.
What Ernst Watzek-Trummer was totally unprepared for was the recorded assumption of the Hacking district police who had listed Watzek-Trummer as deceased, since 12 March, 1938 - the victim of a fire which consumed his hen-house. I doubt if Watzek-Trummer could seriously have been offended by the lack of faith shown in him by the Hacking district police. But whatever, Ernst refused to find a job, and at Grandfather's suggestion, made himself busy with apartment repairs and modifications on the Marters' Schwindgasse home.
In the daytime, then, Watzek-Trummer and the womenfolk had the Schwindgasse to themselves. When laundry ladies would chide him for his laziness, his puttering-about at home, Trummer would say, 'I'm legally dead. What better excuse for not working is there?'
The first thing Watzek-Trummer did was to partition a section of the kitchen into his private bedroom. Next he took the fourteen overdue books underarm and went to find the foreign-language reading room of the International Student House, which was no longer operating - which had, in fact, been bombed and looted. So Watzek-Trummer tore all the library labels out of the books and took them home again - giving up the idea of trading them for fourteen he hadn't read. Grandfather did bring him new books, but books were very scarce, and the bulk of the literature in the Schwindgasse apartment was Grandfather's and Vratno's homework - the minutes of the Allied Council meetings, which Watzek-Trummer found evasive and dull.
But despite Watzek-Trummer's discontent with his reading material, he did a most charitable thing - as a wedding present for Hilke and my father. He scraped all the camouflage off the 1939 Grand Prix racer, and stripped it further - of all warlike insignia, traces of radio mounts and obvious machine-gun creases - and painted it glossy black; thereby he made it a private vehicle, not so easily subject to Russian confiscation as war booty, and gave my mother and Vratno a luxury. Although fuel was precious, and travel between the sectors of occupation was tedious - even for an interpreter-aid with a paper-work job on the Allied Council.
So Watzek-Trummer provided the shy newlyweds a means to get off by themselves, where they must have relaxed and talked more easily to each other than they ever did in the Schwindgasse apartment. Watzek-Trummer insists that they were always shy with each other, at least in public or on any occasion Trummer had to observe them. Their talking was done at night, with Ernst Watzek-Trummer sleeping characteristically light behind the light walls of his partitioned bedroom in the kitchen. Watzek-Trummer maintains that they never raised their voices - nor did he beat her, nor did she ever cry - and the rustling that Watzek-Trummer heard through and over his thin partition was always gentle.
Often, after midnight, Vratno would go into the kitchen and serve himself a sandwich and a glass of wine. Whereupon, Watzek-Trummer would pop out from behind his partition and say, 'Blutwurst tonight, is it? What is there for cheese?' And together they'd hold a conspiracy of snacking, silently spreading bread, cautiously cutting sausage. When there was brandy they'd stay up later, and my father would speak of a highly fantastical motorcycle genius, with whom he once had beards in common. And much later, when there was both wine and brandy, Vratno would whisper to Ernst Watzek-Trummer. 'Zahn Glanz,' Vratno would say. 'Does the name ring a bell for you? Who was Zahn Glanz?' And Watzek-Trummer would counter: 'You knew a Wut, you said. What was it about this Wut you knew?' And together they'd politic into the night, often interpreting the Soviet-sponsored newspaper, the Osterreichische Zeitung - of 28 November 1945 for example, which told of Nazi bandits in Russian uniform bringing disgrace to the Soviets by a series of rural rapes and murders, not to mention a few isolated downtown incidents. Or the edition of 12 January 1946, which told of a certain Herr. H. Schien of Mistelbach, Lower Austria, who was arrested by the Soviets after he'd spread false rumors about Russian soldiers plundering his home. Or, occasionally, they would discuss my father's and grandfather's homework, the minutes of the Allied Council meetings - one in particular, dealing with an incident on 16 January 1946, which occurred on the US military 'Mozart' Train that ran American troops between Salzburg and Vienna. A United States Army technical sergeant, Shirley B. Dixon, MP, turned away a Russian train-boarding party including Soviet Captain Klementiev and Senior Lieutenant Salnikov. The Russians went for their guns, but Technical Sergeant Shirley B. Dixon, USA, MP, quick-on-the-draw, shot both Russians - killing Captain Klementiev and wounding Senior Lieutenant Salnikov. In the Allied Council meeting, the Soviets claimed that their men had been victims of a language confusion, and Marshal Koniev demanded fast-gun Shirley B. Dixon's punishment. Dixon, however, was said, by a military court, to be doing his duty.
Watzek-Trummer, who'd indulged himself in a rash of American Western movies, claimed that the name Shirley B. Dixon rang a bell for him. Wasn't that the gun-fighter-turned-deputy in the one about poisoning water holes in Wyoming? But my father thought that Shirley was usually a girl's name, which prompted Watzek-Trummer to remember the one about the great-breasted lady outlaw who straightened or flattened-out in the end, by marrying an effeminate pacifist judge. So they concluded that Shirley B. Dixon, the fastest gun on the Mozart Train, was actually a Wac.
And Vratno would ask again, 'Zahn Glanz? You must have known him.'
