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THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: EPILOGUE
I grew up in Kaprun, a well-read child because Watzek-Trummer knew the value of books; a child with historical perspectives too, because Ernst filled me in as I went along - leaving gaps here and there, I assure you, until I was properly old enough to hear it all.
Before he sent me to the University of Vienna, Watzek-Trummer saw to it that I learned to drive the Grand Prix racer, 1939 - suggesting to me that the bike was an almost genetical inheritance. So I was certainly deprived of nothing: I had my hot rod. First thing I did was to strip it of that degrading mail cart.
But after I'd done some thinking about Gottlob Wut, I began to consider the Grand Prix racer as something really too special for me to waste on my adolescence, and getting all the details from Ernst, I made my first trip out of Kaprun. That was in the summer of '64. I was eighteen.
I drove the Grand Prix racer to the NSU factory at Neckarsulm, where I tried to speak with one of the manager types concerning the prize-worthy motorcycle that had been my inheritance. I told a mechanic first, as that was the first type I met in the factory - how this had been the bike of Gottlob Wut, the masterful, mystical mechanic of the 1930 Italian Grand Prix. But the mechanic hadn't heard of Wut; neither had the young manager type I finally found.
'What you got there?' he said. 'A tractor?'
'Wut,' I told him. 'Gottlob Wut. He was killed in the war.'
'No kidding?' said the manager. 'I heard that happened to a number of people.'
'The Grand Prix of Italy, 1930,' I said. 'Wut was the key man.'
But the young manager only remembered the drivers, Freddy Harrell and Klaus Worfer. He knew no Wut.
'Well, get to it,' he said. 'How much you want for that old thing?'
And when I mentioned that perhaps it was a museum piece - and did NSU have a place where they honored their old racers? - the manager laughed.
'You'd make a great salesman,' he told me, only I didn't tell him that I'd planned to give it away - if they had a nice place for it.
The bike show was full of awful, spiteful motorcycles that made spitting sounds when they were revved. So I started up my racer and - in my mind - loosened all their frotting aluminum parts.
I drove back to Kaprun and told Watzek-Trummer that we ought to keep the motorcycle in storage somewhere, and drive it only for emergencies. Of course, with his historical perspective, he agreed.
Then I went to Vienna and attempted to join in the university life. But I met no one very interesting; most of them hadn't even read as much as I had, and none of them knew as much as Ernst Watzek-Trummer. There was one student I remember fairly well, though - a Jewish kid who was a parttime spy for a secret Jewish organization that hunted down old Nazis. The kid had lost all eighty-nine members of his family - disappeared, he said - but when I questioned him as to how he knew, then, that he even belonged to this family, he confessed he had 'adopted' them. Because as far as he really knew, he had no family. He remembered no one, except the RAF pilot wh
o flew him out of the Belsen area after the camp was busted. But he 'adopted' this eighty-nine-member family because on the records he'd seen, that looked like the largest single family who had vanished without a leftover. It was for them, he said, that he made himself the ninetieth member of the family - the survivor, at least in name.
He was fairly interesting, with his parttime apprentice spying, but apparently he became very good at his job and was so boastful that his picture got in one of the Vienna papers, as being single-handedly responsible for the discovery and arrest of a certain Richter Mull, a Nazi war criminal. But that publicity made the kid nervous, and his secret Jewish organization disowned him. He used to sit around in the university Kellers; remembering what had happened to America's Wild Bill Hickok, he never sat back-to a window or a door. When I told Ernst Watzek-Trummer about him, Ernst said, 'A war-paranoid type.' It was something he'd read.
And then there was my good friend Dragutin Svet. I met him on a ski trip to Tauplitz my second year at the university. He was a Balkan studies fellow, a Serb by birth, and we did a lot of skiing together. He always wanted to meet Watzek-Trummer.
But we had a falling out. A silly thing. I went with him once to Switzerland, skiing again, and while we were there, we overheard a group of men speaking Serbo-Croat in our Gasthaus lobby. It turned out there was a sort of convention of exiled Serbs, a mean-looking crew of old folk, for the most part, and a few young, idealistic-looking, soldierly chaps. Some of the old ones - so the word was - had fought side by side with the Chetnik general Drazha Mihailovich.
We got to go in their dining-room, though our age and nervousness put us under suspicion. I was trying to remember some witty Serbo-Croat when this one old fellow said, in German - nastily leering at me the length of their table - 'Where are you from boy?' And I said, truthfully, 'Maribor, by way of Slovenjgradec.' And several men put down their cocktails and said severely, 'Croat? Slovene?' Since I didn't want to embarrass my friend Dragutin Svet, the Serb by birth, I blurted the only Serbo-Croat I could remember:
Bolje rob nego grob!
Better a slave than a grave!
Which, as Watzek-Trummer later explained, was precisely the opposite of what I should have said; it was my own father's unheroic improvising that got me in trouble with the diehard Chetniks. Because there was a deeply insulted man at the head of the table who leaned over a long way toward me; he had only one hand and used it remarkably well, to toss a shot of Scotch in my face.
My friend Dragutin Svet refused to understand the accident, and he thought me in bad taste for making such word play with a slogan the Serbs take so seriously. And I didn't see much of Svet thereafter.
I got a job with a certain Herr Faber, to keep my hand in - and my eyes open for - motorcycles. Also, I needed to finance my education, which appeared to be taking longer than it should have. All because my thesis project was rejected by a certain Herr Doktor Ficht.
This thesis was to be my HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY, as I thought it was well enough detailed, and even creative. But this Ficht was furious. He said it was a decidedly biased and incomplete picture of history, and flippant besides - and there were no footnotes. Well, in trying to calm him down, I discovered that Herr Doktor Ficht used to be Herr Doktor Fichtstein, Jew, who'd lived a wharf rat's life on the Dutch coast during the war - having been caught only once: escaping after they'd injected his gums with some tooth-mortifying chemical too new and experimental to be safe. The previous Fichtstein was enraged that I should be so pretentious as to dash through the war with so little mention of the Jews. I tried to explain that he should really look at my autobiography as what is loosely called fiction - a novel, say. Because it's not intended to be real history. And I added, besides, that I thought the Doktor was making a rather Russian-American value judgment by claiming that no picture of atrocity can be complete without the millions of Jews. Numbers again, you see. Ficht, or Fichtstein, seemed to miss my point altogether, but I confess, statistics have a way of getting the best of you. They can make almost anything, all by itself, seem not in the least atrocious.
But that run-in made my university career look a bit long-term. That is, I'd have to stay around until I mastered some academic subject or other - rather than show them what I already knew and have done with it.
Watzek-Trummer, of course, doesn't understand universities at all. He declares that they all must have read too much before they were interested in anything, which prevented them, later, from becoming interested in anything they read. He's rather perplexing on this issue. Self-educated men, you know, are unbudging.
Ernst still reads like a demon. I see him every Christmas, and I never come without a stock of books for him. Unlike most old people, though, his reading has become more selective; that is, he no longer reads everything he can get his hands on. In fact, he's often unimpressed with the books I bring him. He begins, he browses, he stops at page ten. 'I know it already,' he says, and lays it aside.
