Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (28 page)

“You may do that later,” Johanna informed him. “Where do
I
stay?”

As a family, we dutifully followed Theobald and my grandmother down the long, twining hall, my father counting the paces to the W.C. The hall rug was thin, the color of a shadow. Along the walls were old photographs of speed-skating teams — on their feet the strange blades curled up at the tips like court jesters' shoes or the runners of ancient sleds.

Robo, running far ahead, announced his discovery of the W.C.

Grandmother's room was full of china, polished wood, and the hint of mold. The drapes were damp. The bed had an unsettling ridge at its center, like fur risen on a dog's spine — it was almost as if a very slender body lay stretched beneath the bedspread.

Grandmother said nothing, and when Theobald reeled out of the room like a wounded man who's been told he'll live, Grandmother asked my father, “On what basis can the Pension Grillparzer hope to get a B?”

“Quite decidedly C,” Father said.

“Born C and will die C,” I said.

“I would say, myself,” Grandmother told us, “that it was E or F.”

In the dim tearoom a man without a tie sang a Hungarian song. “It does not mean he's Hungarian,” Father reassured Johanna, but she was skeptical.

“I'd say the odds are not in his favor,” she suggested. She would not have tea or coffee. Robo ate a little cake, which he claimed to like. My mother and I smoked a cigarette; she was trying to quit and I was trying to start. Therefore, we shared a cigarette between us — in fact, we'd promised never to smoke a whole one alone.

“He's a great guest,” Herr Theobald whispered to my father; he indicated the singer. “He knows songs from all over.”

“From Hungary, at least,” Grandmother said, but she smiled.

A small man, clean-shaven but with that permanent gun-blue shadow of a beard on his lean face, spoke to my grandmother. He wore a clean white shirt (but yellow from age and laundering), suit pants, and an unmatching jacket.

“Pardon me?” said Grandmother.

“I said that I tell dreams,” the man informed her.

“You
tell
dreams,” Grandmother said. “Meaning, you
have
them?”

“Have them and tell them,” he said mysteriously. The singer stopped singing.

“Any dream you want to know,” said the singer, “he can tell it.”

“I'm quite sure I don't want to know any,” Grandmother said. She viewed with displeasure the ascot of dark hair bursting out at the open throat of the singer's shirt. She would not regard the man who “told” dreams at all.

“I can see you are a lady,” the dream man told Grandmother. “You don't respond to just every dream that comes along.”

“Certainly not,” said Grandmother. She shot my father one of her how-could-you-have-let-this-happen-to-me? looks.

“But I know one,” said the dream man; he shut his eyes. The singer slipped a chair forward and we suddenly realized he was sitting very close to us. Robo, though he was much too old for it, sat in Father's lap. “In a great castle,” the dream man began, “a woman lay beside her husband. She was wide awake, suddenly, in the middle of the night. She woke up without the slightest idea of what had awakened her, and she felt as alert as if she'd been up for hours. It was also clear to her, without a look, a word, or a touch, that her husband was wide awake too — and just as suddenly.”

“I hope this is suitable for the child to hear, ha ha,” Herr Theobald said, but no one even looked at him. My grandmother folded her hands in her lap and stared at them — her knees together, her heels tucked under her straight-backed chair. My mother held my father's hand.

I sat next to the dream man, whose jacket smelled like a zoo. He said, “The woman and her husband lay awake listening for sounds in the castle, which they were only renting and did not know intimately. They listened for sounds in the courtyard, which they never bothered to lock. The village people always took walks by the castle; the village children were allowed to swing on the great courtyard door. What had woken them?”

“Bears?” said Robo, but Father touched his fingertips to Robo's mouth.

“They heard horses,” said the dream man. Old Johanna, her eyes shut, her head inclined toward her lap, seemed to shudder in her stiff chair. “They heard the breathing and stamping of horses who were trying to keep still,” the dream man said. “The husband reached out and touched his wife. ‘Horses?' he said. The woman got out of bed and went to the courtyard window. She would swear to this day that the courtyard was full of soldiers on horseback — but
what
soldiers they were! They wore
armor!
The visors on their helmets were closed and their murmuring voices were as tinny and difficult to hear as voices on a fading radio station. Their armor clanked as their horses shifted restlessly under them.

“There was an old dry bowl of a former fountain, there in the castle's courtyard, but the woman saw that the fountain was flowing; the water lapped over the worn curb and the horses were drinking it. The knights were wary, they would not dismount; they looked up at the castle's dark windows, as if they knew they were uninvited at this watering trough — this rest station on their way somewhere.

“In the moonlight the woman saw their big shields glint. She crept back to bed and lay rigidly against her husband.

“‘What is it?' he asked her.

“‘Horses,' she told him.

“I thought so,' he said. ‘They'll eat the flowers.'

‘“Who built this castle?' she asked him. It was a very old castle, they both knew that.

“‘Charlemagne,' he told her; he was going back to sleep.

“But the woman lay awake, listening to the water, which now seemed to be running all through the castle, gurgling in every drain, as if the old fountain were drawing water from every available source. And there were the distorted voices of the whispering knights —
Charlemagne's
soldiers speaking their dead language! To this woman, the soldiers' voices were as morbid as the eighth century and the people called Franks. The horses kept drinking.

“The woman lay awake a long time, waiting for the soldiers to leave; she had no fear of actual attack from them — she was sure they were on a journey and had only stopped to rest at a place they had once known. But for as long as the water ran she felt that she mustn't disturb the castle's stillness or its darkness. When she fell asleep, she thought Charlemagne's men were still there.

“In the morning her husband asked her, ‘Did you hear water running, too?' Yes, she had, of course. But the fountain was dry, and out the window they could see that the flowers weren't eaten — and everyone knows horses eat flowers.

“‘Look,' said her husband; he went into the courtyard with her. ‘There are
no
hoof prints, there are no droppings. We must have
dreamed
we heard horses.' She did not tell him that there were soldiers, too; or that, in her opinion, it was unlikely that two people would dream the same dream. She did not remind him that he was a heavy smoker who never smelled the soup simmering; the aroma of horses in the fresh air was too subtle for him.

“She saw the soldiers, or dreamed them, twice more while they stayed there, but her husband never again woke up with her. It was always sudden. Once she woke with the taste of metal on her tongue as if she'd touched some old, sour iron to her mouth — a sword, a chest plate, chain mail, a thigh guard. They were out there again, in colder weather. From the water in the fountain a dense fog shrouded them; the horses were snowy with frost. And there were not so many of them the next time — as if the winter or their skirmishes were reducing their numbers. The last time the horses looked gaunt to her, and the men looked more like unoccupied suits of armor balanced delicately in the saddles. The horses wore long masks of ice on their muzzles. Their breathing (or the men's breathing) was congested.

“Her husband,” said the dream man, “would die of a respiratory infection. But the woman did not know it when she dreamed this dream.”

My grandmother looked up from her lap and slapped the dream man's beard-gray face. Robo stiffened in my father's lap; my mother caught her mother's hand. The singer shoved back his chair and jumped to his feet, frightened, or ready to fight someone, but the dream man simply bowed to Grandmother and left the gloomy tearoom. It was as if he'd made a contract with Johanna that was vital but gave neither of them any joy. My father wrote something in the giant pad.

“Well, wasn't
that
some story?” said Herr Theobald. “Ha ha.” He rumpled Robo's hair — something Robo always hated.

“Herr Theobald,” my mother said, still holding Johanna's hand,
“my father died of a respiratory infection?

“Oh, dear,” said Herr Theobald. “I'm sorry,
meine Frau
,” he told Grandmother, but old Johanna would not speak to him.

We took Grandmother out to eat in a Class A restaurant, but she hardly touched her food. “That person was a gypsy,” she told us, “a satanic being, and a Hungarian.”

“Please, Mother,” my mother said. “He couldn't have known about Father.”

“He knew more than you know,” Grandmother snapped.

“The schnitzel is excellent,” Father said, writing in the pad. “The Gumpoldskirchner is just right with it.”

“The Kalbsnieren are fine,” I said.

“The eggs are okay,” said Robo.

Grandmother said nothing until we returned to the Pension Grillparzer, where we noticed that the door to the W.C. was hung a foot or more off the floor, so that it resembled the bottom half of an American toilet-stall door or a saloon door in the Western movies. “I'm certainly glad I used the W.C. at the restaurant,” Grandmother said. “How revolting! I shall try to pass the night without exposing myself where every passerby can peer at my ankles!”

In our family room Father said, “Didn't Johanna live in a castle? Once upon a time, I thought she and Grandpa rented some castle.”

“Yes, it was before I was born,” Mother said. “They rented Schloss Katzelsdorf. I saw the photographs.”

“Well,
that's
why the Hungarian's dream upset her,” Father said.

“Someone is riding a bike in the hall,” Robo said. “I saw a wheel go by — under our door.”

“Robo, go to sleep,” Mother said.

“It went ‘squeak squeak,'” Robo said.

“Goodnight, boys,” said Father.

“If you can talk, we can talk,” I said.

“Then talk to each other,” Father said. “I'm talking to your mother.”

“I want to go to sleep,” Mother said. “I wish no one would talk.”

We tried. Perhaps we slept. Then Robo whispered to me that he had to use the W.C.

“You know where it is,” I said.

Robo went out the door, leaving it slightly open; I heard him walk down the corridor, brushing his hand along the wall. He was back very quickly.

“There's someone
in
the W.C,” he said.

“Wait for them to finish,” I said.

“The light wasn't on,” Robo said, “but I could still see under the door. Someone is in there, in the dark.”

“I prefer the dark myself,” I said.

But Robo insisted on telling me exactly what he'd seen. He said that under the door was a pair of
hands.

“Hands?”
I
said.

“Yes, where the feet should have been,” Robo said; he claimed that there was a hand on either side of the toilet — instead of a foot.

“Get out of here, Robo!” I said.

“Please come see,” he begged. I went down the hall with him but there was no one in the W.C. “They've gone,” he said.

“Walked off on their hands, no doubt,” I said. “Go pee. I'll wait for you.”

He went into the W.C. and peed sadly in the dark. When we were almost back to our room together, a small dark man with the same kind of skin and clothes as the dream man who had angered Grandmother passed us in the hall. He winked at us, and smiled; I had to notice that he was walking on his hands.

“You see?” Robo whispered to me. We went into our room and shut the door.

“What is it?” Mother asked.

“A man walking on his hands,” I said.

“A man
peeing
on his hands,” Robo said.

“Class C,” Father murmured in his sleep; Father often dreamed that he was making notes in the giant pad.

“We'll talk about it in the morning,” Mother said. “He was probably just an acrobat who was showing off for you, because you're a kid,” I told Robo.

“How did he know I was a kid when he was in the W.C.?” Robo asked me.

“Go to
sleep
,” Mother whispered.

Then we heard Grandmother scream down the hall.

Mother put on her pretty green dressing gown; Father put on his bathrobe and glasses. I pulled on a pair of pants, over my pajamas. Robo was in the hall first. We saw the light coming from under the W.C. door. Grandmother was screaming rhythmically in there.

“Here we are!” I called to her.

“Mother, what is it?” my mother asked.

We gathered in the broad slot of light. We could see Grandmother's mauve slippers and her porcelain-white ankles under the door. She stopped screaming. “I heard whispers when I was in my bed,” she said.

“It was Robo and me,” I told her.

“Then, when everyone seemed to have gone, I came into the W.C,” Johanna said. “I left the light
off.
I was
very
quiet,” she told us. “Then I saw and heard the wheel.”

“The
wheel?”
Father asked.

“A wheel went by the door a few times,” Grandmother said. “It rolled by and came back and rolled by again.”