Horses

Horses are an unexpected but materially present part of the Soviet arrival at Landauer House: their iron-shod hooves announce the soldiers before they appear, and their tethering, feeding, and smell make the occupation of the house physical and immediate. In a scene shaped by the contrast between mechanized warfare and animal movement, they disrupt the hidden occupants’ assumptions about what is coming and make the house a meeting place for people, equipment, and animals.

The sound before the arrival

Laník and his sister are crouched in darkness below the house when heavy, iron-shod footsteps ring across the pavement above them and travel through the concrete. His sister wonders whether the sound belongs to a Golem; Laník rejects the supernatural explanation and identifies a horse. The correction does not dispel the suspense. The hoofbeats multiply until they suggest half a dozen animals moving around the forecourt, while someone hammers on the front door.

The delay between hearing the horses and seeing them gives their arrival an uncanny quality. Laník first imagines the Russians, but the animals’ presence seems incongruous in a world of mechanized warfare. Their hooves provide a sound the concealed pair cannot yet interpret as part of an ordinary military arrival. The scene makes an apparently familiar animal strange again: before a horse can be seen as transport or equipment, its iron-shod steps become a possible monster’s approach.

At the threshold of the Glass Room

When Laník climbs out of the basement, the horses remain audible beyond the house’s glass panels. He notices their scrape and a distinctive snort as he crosses the living area, now no longer the Glass Room it once was. The afternoon sun cuts through gaps in the tarpaulin he has rigged, while the sound of battle has receded up the hill. The animals are thus encountered amid the damage and altered use of the home, not in a pastoral setting: they stand outside a refuge that has been improvised inside a compromised modernist interior.

The narrative briefly filters the horses through Laník’s imaginative associations. Their presence calls up cowboys, campfires, and scenes from films or Karl May’s books. These borrowed images measure the distance between his familiar cultural references and the immediate reality at the door. The contrast is comic, but it also holds the encounter in suspension: Laník approaches the front door cautiously, hearing an animal before understanding who has arrived with it.

Animals among soldiers and supplies

Outside, Laník finds Soviet soldiers, including a woman officer with a pistol aimed at him. Several companions and horses have come into view. At least three animals are tethered to the front railings, where they eat hay scattered on the ground. One deposits steaming dung on the travertine pavement, a bodily detail that brings the army’s presence out of the realm of abstraction and into the house’s immediate surroundings.

The soldiers move their equipment into the Glass Room: machine guns, a mortar, grenade launchers, and rifles, which they dismantle and clean. Oil smears the linoleum. The horses remain outside, tethered and feeding, while military gear fills the interior. This arrangement puts animal labor and modern weapons in a single frame without making the horses merely an image of an obsolete past: they are living members of a battle-weary force that has carried its equipment and its daily needs to the house.

The sister comes up from the basement and protests as the soldiers move in; they answer her objections with laughter. The horses’ presence is part of this new occupation of domestic space, alongside the soldiers’ gear and the practical traces of their stay. The house is no longer simply a shelter from the fighting. Its threshold and rooms become a temporary military setting, and the animals help make that change visible in concrete, unruly terms.

The soldiers’ road and the scene’s contrast

The woman officer identifies herself as a sergeant-major and recounts a sequence of places the soldiers have passed, from Rostov and Odessa through Jassy, Kishinev, Bucharest, Budapest, and Bratislava. She describes a continuing advance in which men and women die and more arrive, calling it patriotic duty. Her account gives the horses’ arrival a wider military context: they have reached the center of Europe with a force that has crossed a long chain of places, although the text does not specify the animals’ own route or history.

The scene’s irony lies in the coexistence of the modern and the animal, not in a claim that one has replaced the other. Gunfire and heavy weapons belong to mechanized warfare; horses still move around the forecourt, eat hay, and leave dung on its pale stone. Their ordinary needs and bodily presence interrupt the abstraction of military advance. At the same time, the narration does not give them human motives or an independent account of the journey. Their significance comes from what their presence does to the scene: it makes war audible, visible, and physical at the very moment a concealed civilian expects to encounter an invading army.