Read Setting Free the Bears Page 30


  Which totally puzzled me about Keff and his intentions.

  But I read on and momentarily rid my mind of a certain planless dark. I put off further the empty telegram form for Ernst Watzek-Trummer. These startling lines were my distraction:

  Letting off a thoroughly good sneeze is a natural, spontaneous, frank action of which some people really are a little afraid in the same way that they are afraid of being spontaneous and letting themselves go in their sex life.

  It has been contended that there must be a direct connection between a person's ability to have a thoroughly good sneeze and the ability to have a satisfying orgasm.

  Which was so fascinating to me that I made a point of not falling asleep until Gallen came back to see if I needed more witch hazel.

  'Like your book?' she mumbled.

  'It's lowered my resistance even more,' I said, feeling nice and playful. And just waiting for her to come near me with that nut-scented washcloth. But she handed it to me to do for myself, and sat herself down on the edge of my bed, at the foot. She crossed her nice legs, kicking up - for just a second - her long apron-like skirt.

  So I saw her burns - two perfect fist-sized burns on the insides of her legs between each ankle and calf, just where mine had been from the bike.

  'How'd you get those?' I said, sitting up fierce and letting her know I frotting well knew what they had to come from.

  'Keff fixed the motorcycle,' Gallen said. 'He's teaching me to drive.' And when I stared at her, she said, 'I can do it very well, except for the starting. I don't have enough kick, Keff says.' But I gaped at her, so she went on. 'I just stalled it, Graff, and when I tried to start it again, I pulled it over on me. While I was kicking, you know.'

  'Gallen,' I said. 'Just what's going on, please?'

  'Well, that's how I was burned,' she said. 'Really! When the pipes touched me, you see.'

  'What is frotting Keff teaching you to drive for?' I shouted.

  'So somebody knows,' said Gallen. 'So one of us can, when you take me with you, when you go - if you want to, Graff.'

  And she didn't jump up and go this time, when I sat forward to touch her.

  'Only if you want to take me with you, Graff,' she said. But when I leaned so far forward that I could tuck her head down in the crook of my neck, Keff's sex book slipped off my lap to the floor. Where both of us stared at it and broke our kind of trance over each other.

  When she was still looking down at The ABZ, I reared up in bed and gave out with a tremendous sneeze - harumphing so, it snapped her eyes back up to my face.

  Well, she blushed so much I knew she'd read the book before giving it to me. Anyone would have remembered the sneezing part. And when she flashed out of my room, I only hoped I hadn't scared her away from her plan.

  Well, it wasn't really a scheme sort of plan - or hardly more of a plan than Siggy and I had started off with. Rationalizing, and welcoming it, I thought it was at least so much better and less defined a plan than the one I'd just read about. And would, I hoped, lead my mind out of poor Siggy's zoo notions.

  Anyway, it was a pleasure to let Gallen run through my head that way. It was pleasure enough to keep me another night from composing Watzek-Trummer's telegram.

  I even slept, and dreamt the coward's dream of impossible isolation. The landscape unidentified, and no wildlife other than our own - Gallen and I, in daylight lasting only as long as we'd care to have it, in weather of our whim; on forest floors, not damp and lake shores free of biting insects. Unbelievably uninterrupted, we danced through the poses I remembered from the faint, indistinct sketches in The ABZ of Love.

  While Siggy, in Keff's box, couldn't intrude on us with his awesome details. And all beasts threatening my perfect peace were snug in the Hietzinger Zoo.

  What Ernst Watzek-Trummer Received by Mail

  IN KEFF'S SEALED and simple box, Siggy left Waidhofen for Kaprun on the Saturday evening train, 10 June 1967. My telegram preceded the body by hours enough for Ernst Watzek-Trummer to be warned to meet the train on Sunday noon.

  I wrote several drafts of the telegram. I began:

  Herr Watzek-Trummer/ I am informed that you were the guardian of Siegfried Javotnik/ a friend/ who was killed on a motorcycle/ and who arrives in Kaprun on this Sunday noon/ Hannes Graff/ who will write you at a later date/

  And rewrote, to this:

  Dear Herr Watzek-Trummer/ Arriving Sunday noon is your charge/ Siegfried Javotnik/ who was killed on a motorcycle/ He was my friend/ I will get in touch with you/ Yours/ Hannes Graff/

  And this:

  My Dear Watzek-Trummer/ I am grieved to say that your charge and my friend/ Siegfried Javotnik/ was killed in a freak motorcycle accident in Waidhofen/ He will arrive in Kaprun on Sunday noon/ I will see you myself soon/ Hannes Graff/

  And finally decided on this:

  Dear Ernst Watzek-Trummer/ I am very sorry to tell you that my very good friend and your relation/ Siegfried Javotnik/ was killed on a motorcycle while performing a secret mission/ the details of which I will explain to you when you hear from me soon/ You may be proud of his work/ My condolences/ Hannes Graff/

  And sent that, not hopeful of much better coming from me, and not daring to think further of when I must go meet this Trummer, to whom, I was sure, it would be hard to lie. But at the moment, I simply couldn't have faced another of Watzek-Trummer's sort of funerals.

  And I was thinking how Ernst would be dimly impressed with me - as someone who couldn't possibly have the remotest idea of what family griefs of his kind were like. Because if Siggy ever got anything right, he was right about this one thing: my family and I did miss the whole war, which, strangely, I felt a bit guilty about.

  I remember one thing from the war. In Salzburg, at the close of the American occupation, my mother, who was something of a bopper for her time, remarked on how sad she was that Salzburg would have to go back to the old music now - since the Americans took their Negro-horn radio station with them.

  I believe that was the only thing my family lost from the war. And my mother wouldn't have had it in the first place, if there hadn't been a war.

  So I couldn't very well feel at ease with Watzek-Trummer, with such scanty horrors of my own. Frot me if I wasn't thinking that my unwillingness to go with Siggy's body had to do with my belief that I didn't have nearly enough calamities on record to hold a candle to Trummer - and his ghastly burial duties, direct and indirect, certain and implied, one by one.

  So I left it all to Keff and said I'd go see Trummer someday soon; but I made no plans. I wouldn't. I'd seen what schemes for things could do.

  Frotting Siggy! What really got me was how, for all his scheming, he would have doomed himself if he'd ever had the chance to go through with it. He'd gone so totally paranoid at the end, what with his prying the Balkan waiter and little Hugel Furtwangler, that if he'd really tried the zoo bust, those two would have put the word on him. Asking so many smart questions about the other zoo bust, he was practically confessing before the crime. And shaving his head was a dumb disguise, to say the least.

  We simply mustn't call attention to our extremities, I'm convinced.

  And frot me if we ever would have gone to Italy, simply to play on the beaches - planless, as he'd promised first. If there's an aquarium in Naples, there's probably a zoo in Rome. And wouldn't that have been the total, flying finish - knocking over all the animal pens on the continent, until the Regent's Park in London would be laying on extra keepers, waiting for the notorious zoo busters to strike there?

  But sitting up in my room on the bed, looking out through that nighttime forsythia, I really missed him not popping up on the window ledge any more. For it was a little bit like sitting there waiting for him to come back from that reconnaissance mission. And I began to think that if he had gotten by the roadblock, or if I'd just left with him when he first came crawling in over the ledge, I guess I would have gone along with it. I mean, it was a doomed idea, and bad that he lost all reason to the plan - dec
iding all the beasts would get the open door, even the eaters - but I don't think I could have let him try it alone. I would have gone along to introduce my strain of caution, my vein of limitless common sense - to see if there wasn't some way I could get him safely out again, unclawed, and maybe even spring an antelope or two in the process.

  That was the funny feeling, that came hazy and yellow to me from the forsythia garden, clinging with spray from the falls: I would have gone with him, but only because he obviously needed looking after.

  I mean, thinking coldly, it was a brainless, impossible plan.

  But I'd go along with Gallen right now, for virtually the same reasons that I would have indulged Siggy. Though, I had to admit, there hadn't been much in that for me. So far. And, I confess, knocking over Gallen seemed to me as impossible as any knocking over of the Hietzinger Zoo.

  What Keff Also Did

  KEFF DID ALL the planning. I would have nothing to do with it, and Gallen told him as much.

  So I was still sitting on the bed, Saturday evening, the tenth of June, 1967. I was trying to guess where Siggy was, but I didn't know the way the train lines ran. Whether Siggy would ride in Keff's box to Salzburg, before turning south, or whether he'd be turning south as soon as Steyr - in which case, he would be turning south by now, since Steyr was just a bit west of Waidhofen and Siggy had left an hour ago.

  I imagined a most melodramatic race. Siggy, riding rigid in his box - a determined traveler - and I wondered if they'd sent my telegram out of Waidhofen yet, although it didn't matter; it would, at some point along the way, leap over Siggy wherever he was and be the first of them to touch down in Ernst Watzek-Trummer's rooms at the Gasthof Enns.

  Watzek-Trummer, of course, would be sitting at his unnecessary kitchen table. While Siggy was hurrying prone.

  And then I heard the crawling, clawing sounds in the vines under my window, and I think all my bee stings stung me over again. I saw the paws come groping over the window ledge; I heard grunts. Backing out of my bed, I screamed, 'All right! I'll go with you! We'll let them out, if that's what you want!'

  But it was Keff. Looking very surprised at my shouting. I couldn't move to help him in, and he appeared to take that as a rebuke; he looked shyly away from me when he swung his thick legs in.

  'I didn't mean to scare you,' he said sadly. 'But we're ready, smarty.'

  'Why go?' I said, finding it hard to trust enormous Keff.

  'Because they've got you on the spot now,' he said. 'You're good for taxes. The more you stay, the more you owe - for your room, for one thing. And then there's the accident. Windisch says you owe him for the bees, you see. They're going to take it out of you, smarty. They'll fine you to death if you don't go.' And he wouldn't look at me; he swayed his lowered ape's head.

  'Where's Gallen, Keff?' I said.

  'In the orchard,' said Keff, 'on the town side of the mountain.'

  'With the bike?' I asked.

  'It's registered new, in my name,' said Keff. 'So they won't know how to trace it, if they care enough to look that hard. I'll stay here after you're gone. If old Tratt comes, I'll hold her here till morning. That gives you some distance, you see.'

  'What's in it for you, Keff?' I said, and watched him knot his eyebrows; tennis-ball-sized, they welted out from his head.

  'Aw, smarty,' he said. 'Please, I do mean it good for you.' But then he looked at me - a faint menace in his eyes. 'Your nice girl's waiting now, and you're going to go if I have to lug you, smarty.'

  'You don't have to,' I said, and packed what there was. Notebook, sleeping bags, helmets - in the rucksack or tied on top. There was nothing worth saving the duckjacket for, and I gave Siggy's pipes to Keff. Then I gave him back The ABZ of Love.

  'Aw, smarty,' he said.

  'It wasn't your fault, Keff,' I said, and actually gave a squeeze to the bit of his arm I could get my hand around.

  Then Keff caught me under my shoulders and lowered me by the armpits, half down the castle wall - so I wouldn't have so far to drop, and plop so loud in the garden when I landed. For a moment, I thought he wasn't going to let me go. He held me straight down and a little away from the wall; I couldn't even hear him breathing. Hanging, I said up to him, 'Keff, it's too bad you never knew Todor Slivnica. Because I'll bet you could have taken him.'

  Then I looked straight up above me and saw him giving down his puzzled little O-shaped grin, above his three, thick chins.

  'OK, smarty,' said Keff, and he dropped me. I fell softly in the garden and broke straightaway for the forsythia. In the grove, still in the courtyard, I peered out the gate and all around me. Waiting for an absolutely empty landscape, and not a sound on the cobblestones.

  But before I made my break for the road, I threw a look back to my previous window and saw Keff pressed against the grate - the enormity of his shadow blotting out whole shrubs and garden plots below. His shadow, segmented by bars, loomed so much bigger than Siggy's had, and although the great Keff had turned so gentle to me, his caged shadow struck me as even more violent and determined than what Siggy once had cast.

  And the Gallen I was headed for now seemed altogether different-promising, too, than the girl of the first evening, when I'd lightly held her; whom I'd left standing in the spray of the falls while I hurried to my Siggy's room to inquire why he aped caged animals at the window grate.

  So I jogged up the dark orchard road with his clutter in my skull, doing my fighting best to keep the slightest plan from raking the slightest root in my stung head.

  While Siggy, unresisting, was being carried farther and farther away from the scene of his schemes - while, I imagined, O. Schrutt's watch had not yet begun, and the Famous Asiatic Black Bear, taking his brief rest when he could get it, slept as stonily as Siggy.

  But I cut the imagining there. I broke out of my jog and ran full-out on my bathtub-tired legs, digging for Gallen, with no more in my head than the most immediate of plots. Only the essentials.

  Would she be there - where Keff said? Would the bike start? And since she'd had the lessons to make her be our driver, where would I put my hands when I held her as she drove us away?

  The Feel of the Night

  I HAD TO be careful where I put my hands. This girl was skittish of them, and a nervous driver anyway. Gallen had been well enough taught the mechanics of it - the gearing and leaning - but she had this caution about her that was carried a little too far. She startled easy, at stuff in the road that wasn't there.

  'Well, Keff didn't teach me at night,' she said - the helmet so funny, high up on her head, and her braid whipping side to side, as she kept looking for things off the road. About to leap out at us I guess.

  So I didn't want to add to her nervousness any, and I was moderate about my hands; I stayed around her waist - except when we were coasting, when I'd let them rest, just lightly, on her hips. She wore her brown leather ladies' jacket, with an old belt Keff gave her to sash it shut. Around her waist, I let my hands go under the jacket and flattened my palms against her warm blouse. But they were the tightest tummy muscles I'd ever felt, so I didn't move against her any.

  I once said, in her helmet's ear hole, 'Gallen, you drive very well.'

  But she startled at that too. Turning her head around, she said, 'What?' And almost dumped us.

  When we slowed for the little towns, I could talk more easily. I said, 'It's getting late. We could find a campsite.' But she was convinced we should ride through the night and get out of the Waidhofen vicinity - well up in the mountains to the southeast. So if they did care enough to look very hard for us, we'd be hard to find.

  But I don't think she wanted to sleep out that night with me. In fact, I wondered if she'd make a travel plan that would have us never sleeping in the dark. For as long as we were together, I foresaw, we'd be nervously driving every night, throughout the night; even if we liked a place well enough to stay awhile, we'd still go off and drive in circles - until the dawn.

  But then she surprised me. She s
topped in the biggest town we'd come to so far, still before midnight. Mariazell it was - big and touristy. The whole place was a sort of summerized ski lodge, and the loudest club still open had a young, dancing crowd of smart dressers - rock-and-roll music mashing down the flowers in the window-boxes.

  My Gallen kept us idling a while, out in front of the place; she just stared in the open windows and looked over all the couples, smoking on the outside steps. They looked us up and down, as well.

  It was then I realized that Gallen von St Leonhard hadn't been out of Waidhofen, ever; this was city life to her, and awesome. Attractive to her.

  It was killing, really, though unnerving, that there was such a world lust, even in her.

  And when we were out on the road again, I dared to let my fingers dig at her tummy; just a little kneading, you might say. I thought her muscles weren't quite so tensed. I kissed her, awkwardly, through her helmet's ear hole, and she let some of her weight rest against me.

  Out of town, she pulled the bike into a flashy lay-over on a corner and scared me so much that she had me digging into her tummy harder, which she felt of course, and knew she'd had the edge on me for a moment. I felt her belly chuckle.

  But still she wouldn't stop. We drove straightaway south now, and every coming town was darker. She even developed a feel for speed. And the whole night was wondrously eventless, as if we had stepped out of the gale of this world, as Siggy's old Chetnik hero would have claimed - out in limbo - and were moving nowhere.

  Present, somewhere in my mind, was the unnecessary and elbow-worn kitchen table, and Siggy hurrying prone in the box. But I got through most of the night without actually seeing them. It was only when we headed east, through Stubming, that my peace was jarred.

  Another drunken town frotter peeing in another town fountain, as if someone had arranged it: that I would always be the one to catch them at it. Only this one didn't dive for cover; perhaps Gallen drove not quite so bomblike as Siggy. This one simply gawked, his cold part held out in his hand. We struck him numb in our headlight and then batted past him; I felt Gallen's tummy tighten, just a bit.