Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

"I saw fewer and fewer soldiers," she said. "The last time they came there were only nine of them. Everyone looked so hungry; they must have eaten the extra horses. It was so cold. Of course I wanted to help them! But we weren't alive at the same time; how could I help them if I wasn't even born? Of course I knew they would die! But it took such a long time.

"The last time they came, the fountain was frozen. They used their swords and their long pikes to break the ice into chunks. They built a fire and melted the ice in a pot. They took bones from their saddlebags -- bones of all kinds -- and threw them in the soup. It must have been a very thin broth because the bones had long ago been gnawed clean. I don't know what bones they were. Rabbits, I suppose, and maybe a deer or a wild boar. Maybe the extra horses. I do not choose to think," said Grandmother, "that they were the bones of the missing soldiers."

"Go to sleep, Grandmother," I said.

"Don't worry about the bear," she said.

In the breakfast room of the Pension Grillparzer we confronted Herr Theobald with the menagerie of his other guests who had disrupted our evening. I knew that (as never before) my father was planning to reveal himself as a Tourist Bureau spy.

"Men walking about on their hands," said Father.

"Men looking under the door of the W.C," said Grandmother.

"That man," I said, and pointed to the small, sulking fellow at the corner table, seated for breakfast with his cohorts -- the dream man and the Hungarian singer.

"He does it for a living," Herr Theobald told us, and as if to demonstrate that this was so, the man who stood on his hands began to stand on his hands.

"Make him stop that," Father said. "We know he can do it."

"But did you know that he can't do it any other way?" the dream man asked suddenly. "Did you know that his legs were useless? He has no shinbones. It is wonderful that he can walk on his hands! Otherwise, he wouldn't walk at all." The man, although it was clearly hard to do while standing on his hands, nodded his head.

"Please sit down," Mother said.

"It is perfectly all right to be crippled," Grandmother said, boldly. "But you are evil," she told the dream man. "You know things you have no right to know. He knew my dream," she told Herr Theobald, as if she were reporting a theft from her room.

"He is a little evil, I know," Theobald admitted. "But not usually! And he behaves better and better. He can't help what he knows."

"I was just trying to straighten you out," the dream man told Grandmother. "I thought it would do you good. Your husband has been dead quite a while, after all, and it's about time you stopped making so much of that dream. You're not the only person who's had such a dream."

"Stop it," Grandmother said.

"Well, you ought to know," said the dream man.

"No, be quiet, please," Herr Theobald told him.

"I am from the Tourist Bureau," Father announced, probably because he couldn't think of anything else to say.

"Oh my God!" Herr Theobald said.

"It's not Theobald's fault," said the singer. "It's our fault. He's nice to put up with us, though it costs him his reputation."

"They married my sister," Theobald told us. "They are family, you see. What can I do?"

"'They' married your sister?" Mother said.

"Well, she married me first," said the dream man.

"And then she heard me sing!" the singer said.

"She's never been married to the other one," Theobald said, and everyone looked apologetically toward the man who could only walk on his hands.

Theobald said, "They were once a circus act, but politics got them in trouble."

"We were the best in Hungary," said the singer. "You ever hear of the Circus Szolnok?"

"No, I'm afraid not," Father said, seriously.

"We played in Miskolc, in Szeged, in Debrecen," said the dream man.