NEAR SULDEN

Near Sulden, years ago, in a quiet inn to which I had withdrawn for several weeks so as to see as few people as possible and to have contact only with what was absolutely necessary, for which the area around Sulden is suited like no other—and it was above all for the sake of my diseased lung that I had gone to the remoteness of Sulden, which I knew from earlier days—a Herr Natter from Innsbruck, the only guest in the inn aside from myself, who stated that he had once been rector of the University of Innsbruck but had been dismissed from office because of a libelous attack and had actually been thrown into prison, though shortly thereafter his innocence had been established, told me each day what he had dreamed the previous night. In one of the dreams he told me about, he had run around to hundreds of Tirolean authorities to get permission to have his father’s grave opened, but this had been denied him, whereupon he had tried to open his father’s grave himself and, after hours of the most exhausting digging, had finally succeeded. He said he had wanted to see his father once more. However, when he opened the coffin and actually removed the lid, it was not his father lying in the coffin but a dead pig. As usual, Natter wanted to know, in this case as well, what his dream meant.