At the risk of sounding polemical, I'd like to say that there are two ways to live a long time in this world. One is to trade with violence strictly as a free agent, with no cause or love that overlaps what's expedient; and if you give no direct answers, you'll never be discovered as lying to protect yourself. But I don't exactly know what the other way to live a long time is, although I believe it involves incredible luck. There certainly is another way, though, because it's not always the O. Schrutts who live a long time. There are just a few survivors of a different nature around.
I think that patience has something to do with it too.
For example, I'll bet there are a few survivors among O. Schrutt's previous small-mammal charges. If they've been patient enough to live, they'll finally get to see the fellow they've been so patient for. They'll jar their trancelike faces over a newspaper, they'll twitch their old bashed hands in their exhausted laps - a spasm will fling them out of their TV-watching chairs; O. Schrutt is news again, they'll see - recognizing him through twinges in a scar that's been numb for twenty years or more. Their crippled feet will uncramp enough to stagger them to a phone; they'll lose their speech impediments, talking to the operator; they'll breathe twenty back years of patience into the mouthpiece.
That's right, dear Franz, it's him, I seen his picture, and for God's sakes, call Stein right away - to cheer him up, at last. O. Schrutt it was, I'm sure - kicking and screaming with a bunch of wild animals; their keeper, of course. And of course he had the night shift, and his uniform on too. Yes, the nametag still - right on the TV! I got to go tell Weschel, he's got no phone - and with his eyes, no paper or TV. But you call poor Stein, quick as you can. Oh, he'll be tickled to hear!
Because nobody stops looking for the disappeared. It's only the surely dead who flatly can't end up as you'd want or expect them to.
It's got to be my good faith, O. Schrutt; it's got me believing that some of your small-mammal charges will survive even you.
(CONTINUING:)
THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: MY REAL HISTORY
25 March 1953. For my seventh birthday, my mother took me on the train to Kaprun - just twenty days after the death of Stalin, and the custardlike disappearance of my father. Ernst Watzek-Trummer and Grandfather met us in Kaprun on the Grand Prix racer, which had slowly and inexpertly made a nervous trip from Vienna.
And so what was left of us settled in Kaprun, a village very small at the time; this was before the hydroelectric power dam in the mountains, and before the big ski lift brought less-hardy skiers to the town.
My grandfather became the postmaster of Kaprun; Watzek-Trummer became the town handyman, and he delivered the mail - in the winter, towing it in rough brown bags on a sled that was mine when there wasn't any mail. I would occasionally ride the mailbags on top of the sled and allow Ernst to skid me over the steep winter streets. My mother made red cord tassels to tie up the bags, and a red cord tassel with a ball of wool on the end was attached to my stocking hat.
In the summers, Ernst Watzek-Trummer delivered the mail in a high two-wheeler cart that was mounted to the rear fender of the Grand Prix racer, which must have made Gottlob Wut roll over in his grave, if you could call it a grave.
We were quite happy in Kaprun; we were in the American sector now, of course, and within broadcasting range of Salzburg. In the evenings we listened to the American station that played all the Negro music - with rich-voiced women wailing, and yodeling trumpets and guitars: groin-blues. I remember that music without Watzek-Trummer's help, I really do. Because once at the Gasthof Enns, in the village, an American Negro, a soldier on leave, accompanied the radio with his harmonica, and sang, like a great iron bucket left out in the rain. It was winter; against the snow he was the blackest thing in Kaprun; people touched him to see if he felt like wood. He walked my mother home from the Gasthof Enns, and pulled me behind on the mail sled. He sang a line or two, then he signaled to me and I honked his harmonica up from the sled - through the little Y-shaped village, quite late at night, I think. Grandfather could talk English with the soldier, and later the Negro sent Watzek-Trummer a book of photographs about civil rights in America.
Much else, I don't remember, and Watzek-Trummer's selective memory hasn't found anything important in these years - when I was eight, and then nine. There's just this: when the last Soviet soldier left Vienna on 19 September 1955 my grandfather suffered a small stroke - pitching backward into a stack of loose mail. People saw little squares of him falling through their side of the mailboxes in the post-office cage. But Grandfather recovered quickly. Only one thing: his
eyebrows went from grey to white, overnight. And that's another one of those details which I may have remembered myself, or which Watzek-Trummer may have remembered for me - or, more likely, it was some combined, repetitive remembering from the two of us.
I remember the only important thing, though - all by myself, I'm sure. Because Watzek-Trummer either finds this hard to remember himself, or at least hard to remember out loud to me.
I was ten and a half on the twenty-fifth of October 1956 - Flag Day, the first anniversary of the official end to the occupation. Grandfather and Ernst had been nine steady-drinking hours at the Gasthof Enns when they started going through old trunks in the post-office basement - our family storage center too. I don't know whatever could have possessed him, but my old grandfather found (or was looking for, all along) the eagle-suit - completely featherless, because the lard had long ago given out; a slightly greasy, gleaming suit of partially rusted pieplates; the head, and beak in particular, was solid rust. But my grandfather put the thing on, insisting to Watzek-Trummer that it was his turn to be the eagle, since both Ernst and Zahn Glanz once had a crack at it. And what better day for the Austrian eagle than Flag Day?
Except that this Flag Day was somewhat marred. At least for my mother. Only two days before, the streets of Budapest had been suddenly bled; fortunately, the Hungarians at least had a cleared route of escape, because Austrian officials, after the Russian withdrawal from Vienna, had removed the barbed wire and picked the minefields along the Austro-Hungarian border. A good thing. Because the Hungarian political police and the Soviet Army had driven more than 170,000 refugees across the border, where Vienna - sympathetic to occupied peoples - had taken them under her eagle's wing. And they were still coming across on Flag Day.
I can only guess that why this affected my mother so strongly was rooted back in March of '38, when Zahn Glanz either crossed the Hungarian border at Kittsee or he didn't cross at all. And if you choose to think of Zahn as crossing, then you might think of him as crossing back - with, perhaps, 170,000 other refugees from Hungary.
I only think this because such things must have been on Hilke's mind to make her react as she did, to Grandfather - striding, magnificent, into our Kaprun kitchen, and shrieking under his bald bird helmet. 'Cawk!' he cried. 'Austria is free!'
My mother moaned; she dug her fingers into me, where I was being made to model for a knitted sweater. Then she was up and charging the surprised, featherless eagle in the doorway, and caught him there, up against the jamb. She ground her knee between his legs, lifting the hem of his chainmail dress; she tugged and tugged to get his helmet off.
'Oh God, Zahn,' she whimpered, so that Grandfather pulled roughly away from her and took the eagle head off himself. And couldn't look at her straight, but sort of turned his face away and mumbled, 'Oh, I just found it in the P.O., Hilke. Oh, I'm so sorry, but my God, Hilke, it's been eighteen years!' But he still wouldn't meet her eyes.
She stayed sagged against the doorjamb; her face was ageless, even sexless - showed nothing at all. She said in a radio-announcing voice, 'They keep coming in. More than one hundred and seventy thousand now. All of Hungary is coming to Vienna. Don't you think we should go back now - in case he tries to look us up?'
'Oh, Hilke,' Grandfather said. 'No, oh no. There's nothing back in the city for us.'
Still radio-announcing, she said, 'Editor Lennhoff did successfully escape to Hungary. That's a fact.'
Grandfather tried to stand still enough so his pieplates wouldn't rattle, but she heard his noise and looked up at him; her real voice and face came back.
My mother said, 'You left him there once, you know. You made him stay behind for your bankbook, when he could have come with us.'
'You watch it, girl,' said Watzek-Trummer, and caught her hair in one hand. 'You just get hold of yourself now, you hear?'
'You left Zahn in Vienna!' my mother screamed at the bird, who rattled under his pieplates and turned away from her altogether. Watzek-Trummer yanked my mother's hair.
'Stop it!' he hissed. 'Damn you, Hilke, your Zahn Glanz didn't have to stay so long as he did. He didn't have to drive any editors to Hungary, did he? And what makes you so sure he did, anyway?'