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But my mother tore her hair free of him and weaved back to me, where I balanced on the modeling chair, somewhat crucified in a thus far unseamed sweater, fastened on me with pins.
Watzek-Trummer took the huddled eagle back to the post-office basement, and that night my mother woke me very late - rubbed her cold, wet face across my own and tickled me down under the covers with a fur-collared coat she only wore for trips. And then she took one. Leaving behind no symbolic gestures to be interpreted - that we might guess, for example, how long she would be gone, or how and with whom she would end up.
Leaving us not so much, even, as custard on the walls, or soles of shoes to be recognized as final.
Although my grandfather didn't need any evidence to know she wouldn't be back. Less than two weeks later, in November '56, Kaprun and the surrounding Salzburger mountains had their first snowfall - a wet, heavy storm that turned to ice at night. So after supper, Grandfather took the mail sled and - although no one saw him - put on the eagle's pieplate armor; he hiked two and a half miles up the glacier field toward the summit of the Kitzsteinhorn. He had a flashlight with him, and when he'd been gone several hours, Watzek-Trummer got up from our kitchen table and looked out the window up the mountain. And saw a faint light, almost motionless, bunking midway up the glacier, under the black peak of the Kitzsteinhorn. Then the light came down - the sled must have been careening, because the light shot straight down, leapt, zigzagged, steered to a route more roundabout than it had climbed: a logger's swath cut across the lower mountain, below the glacier field. The old skiers called it the Catapult Trail. It bent very steeply through fourteen S-curves, three and one quarter miles down to the village.
Now, of course, there's an aerial tramcar that takes you up there, and the new skiers call the trail the Suicide Run.
But Grandfather took the mail sled down what was then called the Catapult, and Trummer and I followed the light of his descent from our kitchen window.
'That's your grandfather, boy,' said Ernst. 'Just look at him go.'
We followed him through eight, then nine S-curves in the timber - he must have been sitting up and steering with his feet - and then his flashlight-headlight became so blurry it looked like a whole line of speeding traffic on the freeway. Though Watzek-Trummer claims he counted that Grandfather made one more S-curve before we lost sight of him altogether. That would have made ten out of fourteen, which isn't a bad percentage for a mail sled at night.
Ernst told me I wasn't to come and shut me up in our kitchen, from where I watched a tiny band of flashlights combing the mountain under the Kitzsteinhorn until dawn. When they found my grandfather, who'd been catapulted off the Catapult by striking a log the new snow had almost hidden. The mail sled, by some mystical steering I'll never understand, made it back to the village all by itself.
In fact, when they got Grandfather out of the forest, it was the mail sled Watzek-Trummer wanted found. And when they'd found it and brought it up to him, Watzek-Trummer laid my grandfather on it and eased him down the mountain and through the village to the Gasthof Enns. Where Ernst drank four brandy coffees and waited for the priest. Who was upset that Trummer refused to remove the eagle-suit. Watzek-Trummer vowed that Grandfather would be buried just as he was, in armor - featherless but masked. Ernst was given little debate. Grandfather had made his point clear some time ago, that the Catholics would never have their way with his body after what that traitorous Cardinal Innitzer did in '38. So to end all discussion, Watzek-Trummer said, 'You remember Cardinal Innitzer, Father? He sold out Vienna to Hitler. He encouraged all his flock to endorse the Fuhrer.'
And the priest said, 'But the Vatican never endorsed it.'
'The Vatican,' said Watzek-Trummer, 'has a history of being fashionably late.' Because old Ernst was still
reading, all he could get.
Then I was sent for, and together, Ernst and I, we straightened poor grandfather's pieplates and packed snow around him - so he'd keep cool while the coffin was being made.
Watzek-Trummer said to me, 'It was a stroke, of sorts; it was his heart, one way or another. But at least this is a better burial than some I've heard of.'
After which, we went home, Ernst and I. I was a confident ten; if I felt at all abandoned by my family, I at least felt left in good hands. You couldn't have much better than Ernst Watzek-Trummer. Keeper of the family album - egg man, postman, historian, survivor. Responsible, finally, for seeing that I would survive to understand my heritage.
The Twenty-first Zoo Watch: Tuesday, 6 June 1967, @ 6.45 a.m.
THE CAGE-CLEANERS WERE admitted a little after 6.30. O. Schrutt opened the main gate for them, and he left the gate open. He put a chain across the entrance, though; there's a sign hung on it, probably a NO ADMITTANCE sign - although it's hung in such a way that I can't read it.
The cage-cleaners are a sour, shaggy lot; they went in the House of Reptiles and came out with their paraphernalia, and then went en masse to the House of Pachyderms.
Then I thought that if O. Schrutt would only move away from the gate, I could leave straightaway. I wanted to be casually outside the zoo when O. Schrutt left. Perhaps I could see where he went!
Does O. Schrutt eat a normal breakfast?
But some sort of morning watchman met O. Schrutt at the gate. There were very few words between them. Perhaps the new watchman chided old O. about wearing the rain slicker in so much sun. But O. Schrutt simply vanished; he stepped over the chain across the gateway, and I didn't even see which way he turned.
I had to wait for the new watchman to slowly make a half-hearted round. When he finally went into the Small Mammal House, the cage-cleaners were still in the House of Pachyderms. But before I left my hedgerow and made it out the main gate, I saw the new watchman turn on the infrared! Funny, but I can't remember when O. Schrutt turned it off. This watch has worn me out, I guess.
And when I got outside the gate, I couldn't see a trace of O. Schrutt. I went across Maxing Strasse to that cafe. I sat at a sidewalk table and was told I'd have to wait till seven to be served.
My interesting Balkan waiter was setting ashtrays out on the tables. He must work morning and afternoons - takes the night off, for cooking up sly reports to make the next day.
He eyed me with immeasurable slyness. He let me catch his eyes, and then showed me, with a side glance, that he noticed how my motorcycle was parked in exactly the same place it was yesterday afternoon. That was all; he just showed me he knew that much.
And suddenly I began to get a little nervous about coming back to Waidhofen - about this frotting waiter recognizing me on the day of the bust. I should have a disguise! So I decided to cut all my hair off.
But when this waiter brought an ashtray to my table, and sort of dealt it across the tabletop like a playing card, I got a little bolder and asked him if he'd been around Hietzing when they had a zoo bust - twenty years or so ago.
He said he hadn't been around.
So I said, 'You must have heard about it, though. They don't know who it was that had the idea. He was never identified.'
