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"We're not accustomed to sleeping in the same room," Grandmother told him.
"Of course not!" Theobald cried. "I just meant that I wished your rooms could be closer together." This worried Grandmother, clearly.
"How far apart must we be put?" she asked.
"Well, I've only two rooms left," he said. "And only one of them is large enough for the two boys to share with their parents."
"And my room is how far from theirs?" Johanna asked coolly.
"You're right across from the W.C.!" Theobald told her, as if this were a plus.
But as we were shown to our rooms, Grandmother staying with Father--contemptuously to the rear of our procession--I heard her mutter, "This is not how I conceived of my retirement. Across the hall from a W.C., listening to all the visitors."
"Not one of these rooms is the same," Theobald told us. "The furniture is all from my family." We could believe it. The one large room Robo and I were to share with my parents was a hall-sized museum of knickknacks, every dresser with a different style of knob. On the other hand, the sink had brass faucets and the headboard of the bed was carved. I could see my father balancing things up for future notation in the giant pad.
"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.
