Just imagine: if my invented O. Schrutt had lived through all the walk-on parts I anticipated him to play, what would that O. Schrutt be doing now? What more perfect thing could he be than this second-shift nightwatchman at the Hietzinger Zoo?
(CONTINUING:)
THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: PRE-HISTORY II
I can't make my father fit the ethnographic maps of Yugoslavia. He was born in Jesenje in 1919, which at least made him a Croat, and possibly a Slovene. He was certainly not a Serb, although Vratno Javotnik was such a worldly sort of Yugoslav, I believe he was the only Yugoslav to whom being a Serb instead of a Croat wouldn't have made any difference - and splitting the hair between Croats and Slovenes would have been absurd for him. His politics were strictly personal.
By that I mean he had no affiliations. If he was born in Jesenje, it's likely he was baptized a Roman Catholic. If not, it's at least certain he was in no way near enough Serbia to be Eastern Orthodox. But it couldn't have mattered to Vratno, one way or the other.
One thing seems to have mattered, though. My father was something of a linguist, and Jesenje is less than fifty miles from the University of Zagreb, where my father studied languages. This may have been a premonition on his part - pessimism at a tender age: to master the speech of several occupying armies before they came to occupy.
Whatever the motives, Vratno was in Zagreb on the twenty-fourth of March, 1941, when Foreign Minister Tsintsar-Markovich left Berlin for Vienna, and when the students at the University of Belgrade demonstrated on that Serbian campus - burning German textbooks and picketing all the German classes.
The Croatian reaction in Zagreb was probably sullen - the feeling that the Serbs were sure to get everyone killed by their lunatic defiance of Germany. Vratno only thought they'd missed the point. It didn't matter whose side you were going to be on; when Germany came into Yugoslavia, one day it could save your skin to speak German. Burning your textbooks was certainly unwise.
So the next day my father left Zagreb for Jesenje. It's my belief that he traveled light.
That day the Tripartite Pact was signed in Vienna; Vratno was probably en route to Jesenje when he heard the news. I'm sure he guessed that various Serbian zealots wouldn't accept this welcome to Germany. And I'm sure Vratno turned to practicing his German idioms.
All the way into Jesenje, I can hear him practicing.
In fact, on the next night, while in Belgrade the General Staff of the revolution was in its final, deciding session, Vratno was probably perfecting his irregular verbs. When the bold takeover was in process, and plans for the impossible resistance against Germany were being made, Vratno was making umlaut sounds.
In Belgrade, the quisling government was overthrown; Prime Minister Tsvetkovich was arrested at 2.30 a.m. And Prince Paul was caught later aboard a train in Zagreb; he was exiled to Greece. In Belgrade there were heroes: Lieutenant Colonel Danilo Zobenitsa, tank corps commander and the rescuer of young King Peter; Professor Radoye Knezevich, King Peter's former tutor; Ilya Trifunovich Birchanin, commander of Chetniks, those diehard Serb guerrillas of World War One - the only warriors, they say, who can fight hand to hand with the Turks.
And in Jesenje was my father, making himself universally fluent, preparing for his sly survival.
The Ninth Zoo Watch: Tuesday, 6 June 1967, @ 3.15 a.m.
A FEW MINUTES ago I had this urge to make a bed check on the elephants. I'm sure at one time or another everyone has heard, as I have, that elephants never sleep. So I decided to go check on the elephants, even at the risk of disturbing the other, finally sleeping animals - or even at the risk of catching the awful attention of O. Schrutt, professional insomniac. After all, there aren't many opportunities in this world for testing myths. And the myth of the never-sleeping elephant is one that I've often thought needed testing.
I can tell you, I already had my doubts about the myth. What I expected to find in the House of Pachyderms was a boulder field of heavily sleeping elephants - cages of elephant mounds. I pictured them heaped together, circled like a Western wagon train - their trunks draped over each other, like great pythons sunning on bouldertops.
But if you take this night's
example, the myth was substantiated. The elephant quarters were uncannily awake. The elephants stood in a perfect row, and hung their great heads over the front of their stalls like restless horses in an ordinary barn. They nodded, and waved their trunks, they breathed in slow motion.
When I walked in front of their stalls, they reached their trunks out to me - they opened and closed their nostrils to me. Their trunks kissed my hands. One of them had a cold - a runny trunk that rattled.
'When I come back for the real thing,' I whispered, 'I'll bring some medicated cough drops for you.'
It nodded: All right, if you can remember. But I've had colds before.
The bored elephants nodded: Bring a lot of cough drops. We'll probably all have colds by then. Everything's very catching here.
It's puzzling to me. Perhaps there's some connection between their sleeplessness and how long they live. Seventy years without a snooze? Although it seems unlikely, perhaps there's a myth snorted trunk to trunk among the elephants - that if you fall asleep, you die.
Someone should find a way to tell them it's perfectly healthy to sleep.
I'll bet there's no one, though, who could convince O. Schrutt of that.
I heard him when I stalked back to my hedgerow from the House of Pachyderms. I heard him taking chances with the animals' sleep. Doors in the Small Mammal House were creaked, and sliding glass was slid.
O. Schrutt, creeping around in the residue of infrared. O. Schrutt is up to no good, I'll bet. But so long as he chooses to stay inside the Small Mammal House, I'll just have to wait my chance.
Or maybe go back and ask the sleep-suspicious elephants, who must be wise: what prompts O. Schrutt to indulge himself with infrared? And: more than twenty years or so ago, just what did old O. Schrutt do?
(CONTINUING:)