Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

"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 bu

ilt 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.