1944 (Part IV)

And returning to the bit and bridle, I would definitively have them the next day. In the afternoon again three times I tried mounting my horse and again three times I found myself on the ground. 

He was ever more listless and did not especially have an appetite. When I would give him a sugar cube, he took it with such a grimace on his face, as if he were doing me a terrible favor, even twice trying to bite me. 

Very sadly he stood in this closed garage-stable, sometimes melancholically hanging, like an elephant’s trunk, his long gray black-dotted thing, the balls cut clean off. He kind of tried to look through the glass of the closed window, through which now nothing special was happening. 

I, though, had very big plans. 

I even began to demount a portion of the fence between this kind of ours, neighboring abandoned garden, wanting on a doubly bigger terrain to arrange something of a kind of parkour and there starting tomorrow to begin to trot on my horse. 

I began even to dream of some kind of two-wheeler. On the third day as usual early in the morning I attended to him as needed. He continued not to have much of an appetite, he got three cubes of sugar, like never he drank more than a bucket’s full of water and again tried once to bite me. 

He left the impression of ever greater defeat. This day I was supposed to finally get the bit and bristle, so in the morning I didn’t even try to mount him, I just continued to finish demounting the fence, and in the early afternoon I went to barter on the matter of the bristle. 

Final negotiations lasted about two hours and happened at the completely other end of this small town. When happily, with the bristle and great plans for the rest of the day and in general for the future, I was returning before three to my horse, already from a distance I felt that something bad had happened. 

When I got closer, I saw the garage-stable window broken in, glass lying on the grass on the side of the street. The garden gate was open wide, as were the doors to the garage-stable, closed by me not a whole three hours ago with a large and strong lock, which now hung off a ripped hinge. 

Of my horse there was of course no trace, and to this also the bucket had disappeared. Like an idiot I stood for some time at the open gate, nervously waving the bristle and bit in my hand and trying to comprehend how this was possible, that my so precisely and exactly for several days prepared plan could so suddenly and so effectively collapse. 

Almost in tears I ran to my mother, who quickly came to the scene of the incident. When she returned, laughing, though I was not at all up for laughing, she retold what she heard from eyewitnesses of the whole happening. 

They told that when again some Asians spurned a very large herd of hoses, my horse sensed and saw all this, he got as if an attack of frenzy. In front of them with his hooves he broke the window, trying naively to get out through the window opening, which was yet completely impossible, the whole time screaming and whinnying like some slaughtered hog. 

The Asians with the Schmeissers, who spurned the herd, knew what kind of horse this was, because what they may not know, horses they knew perfectly. 

They quickly knocked down the gate, tore the lock off the hinge and my horse with a gallop, whinnying in happiness, with raised tail joined his company. Such a wild horse this stock. 

Unfortunately the next day with a sour taste I had to go to the garden and fix every damage and innovation I made in connection with the three day stay of my horse in the garage.