Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

Father was making his hands go crazy beside his head. "She's got a wheel or two missing," he hissed at my mother, but she cuffed him and knocked his glasses askew on his face.

"Then someone came and looked under the door," Grandmother said, "and that is when I screamed."

"Someone?" said Father.

"I saw his hands, a man's hands -- there was hair on his knuckles," Grandmother said. "His hands were on the rug right outside the door. He must have been looking up at me."

"No, Grandmother," I said. "I think he was just standing out here on his hands."

"Don't be fresh," my mother said.

"But we saw a man walking on his hands," Robo said.

"You did not," Father said.

"We did!' I said.

"We're going to wake everyone up," Mother cautioned us.

The toilet flushed and Grandmother shuffled out the door with only a little of her former dignity intact. She was wearing a gown over a gown over a gown; her neck was very long and her face was creamed white. Grandmother looked like a troubled goose. "He was evil and vile," she said to us. "He knew terrible magic."

"The man who looked at you?" Mother asked.

"That man who told my dream," Grandmother said. Now a tear made its way through her furrows of face cream. "That was my dream," she said, "and he told everyone. It is unspeakable that he even knew it," she hissed to us. "My dream -- of Charlemagne's horses and soldiers -- I am the only one who should know it. I had that dream before you were born," she told Mother. "And that vile, evil magic man told my dream as if it were news.

"I never even told your father all there was to that dream. I was never sure that it was a dream. And now there are men on their hands, and their knuckles are hairy, and there are magic wheels. I want the boys to sleep with me."

So that was how Robo and I came to share the large family room, far away from the W.C, with Grandmother, who lay on my mother's and father's pillows with her creamed face shining like the face of a wet gh

ost. Robo lay awake watching her. I do not think Johanna slept very well; I imagine she was dreaming her dream of death again -- reliving the last winter of Charlemagne's cold soldiers with their strange metal clothes covered with frost and their armor frozen shut.

When it was obvious that I had to go to the W.C, Robo's round, bright eyes followed me to the door.

There was someone in the W.C. There was no light shining from under the door, but there was a unicycle parked against the wall outside. Its rider sat in the dark W.C; the toilet was flushing over and over again -- like a child, the unicyclist was not giving the tank time to refill.

I went closer to the gap under the W.C. door, but the occupant was not standing on his or her hands. I saw what were clearly feet, in almost the expected position, but the feet did not touch the floor; their soles tilted up to me -- dark, bruise-colored pads. They were huge feet attached to short, furry shins. They were a bear's feet, only there were no claws. A bear's claws are not retractable, like a cat's; if a bear had claws, you would see them. Here, then, was an impostor in a bear suit, or a declawed bear. A domestic bear, perhaps. At least -- by its presence in the W.C. -- a housebroken bear. For by its smell I could tell it was no man in a bear suit; it was all bear. It was real bear.

I backed into the door of Grandmother's former room, behind which my father lurked, waiting for further disturbances. He snapped open the door and I fell inside, frightening us both. Mother sat up in bed and pulled the feather quilt over her head. "Got him!" Father cried, dropping down on me. The floor trembled; the bear's unicycle slipped against the wall and fell into the door of the W.C, out of which the bear suddenly shambled, stumbling over its unicycle and lunging for its balance. Worriedly, it stared across the hall, through the open door, at Father sitting on my chest. It picked up the unicycle in its front paws. "Grauf?" said the bear. Father slammed the door.

Down the hall we heard a woman call, "Where are you, Duna?"

"Harfl" the bear said.

Father and I heard the woman come closer. She said, "Oh, Duna, practicing again? Always practicing! But it's better in the daytime." The bear said nothing. Father opened the door.

"Don't let anyone else in," Mother said, still under the featherbed.

In the hall a pretty, aging woman stood beside the bear, who now balanced in place on its unicycle, one huge paw on the woman's shoulder. She wore a vivid red turban and a long wrap-around dress that resembled a curtain. Perched on her high bosom was a necklace strung with bear claws; her earrings touched the shoulder of her curtain-dress and her other, bare shoulder where my father and I stared at her fetching mole. "Good evening," she said to Father. "I'm sorry if we've disturbed you. Duna is forbidden to practice at night -- but he loves his work."

The bear muttered, pedaling away from the woman. The bear had very good balance but he was careless; he brushed against the walls of the hall and touched the photographs of the speed-skating teams with his paws. The woman, bowing away from Father, went after the bear calling, "Duna, Duna," and straightening the photographs as she followed him down the hall.

"Duna is the Hungarian word for the Danube," Father told me. "That bear is named after our beloved Donau." Sometimes it seemed to surprise my family that the Hungarians could love a river, too.

"Is the bear a real bear?" Mother asked -- still under the featherbed -- but I left Father to explain it all to her. I knew that in the morning Herr Theobald would have much to explain, and I would hear everything reviewed at that time.

I went across the hall to the W.C. My task there was hurried by the bear's lingering odor, and by my suspicion of bear hair on everything; it was only my suspicion, though, for the bear had left everything quite tidy -- or at least neat for a bear.

"I saw the bear," I whispered to Robo, back in our room, but Robo had crept into Grandmother's bed and had fallen asleep beside her. Old Johanna was awake, however.