Horses

Horses appear as living creatures and as figures through which the novel makes hunger, historical violence, and helpless witness tangible. In Johanna’s recurring dream, mounted soldiers stop at a castle fountain to water their horses; as the visions return, both animals and riders diminish under cold and deprivation. The horses’ need is not decorative background: it gives the dream its physical urgency and becomes the detail that haunts Johanna’s family after her death. A related, harsher animal logic shapes T. S. Garp’s novel Procrastination, where famine has made the zoo’s remaining animals so hungry that they eat the young anarchist who frees them.

The Horses in Johanna’s Dream

A dream man tells the story of a woman and her husband lodging in an old castle. The courtyard is open to the village, and one night the woman wakes to the sound of horses trying to stand quietly. At the window she sees armored riders whose closed visors and indistinct voices make them seem remote from ordinary human life. They do not dismount; wary and apparently in transit, they look toward the dark castle windows while their horses shift beneath them.

The courtyard fountain is supposed to be dry, yet it flows in the dream. Water laps over its worn rim, and the horses drink. This brief act gives the spectral scene a material center: the soldiers may belong to a distant past, but their animals have a present need, and the water answers it. The fountain seems to draw from sources throughout the castle, while the woman listens to water running through its drains and to the knights speaking their dead language. Her husband returns to sleep; she remains awake, unwilling to disturb the castle’s stillness.

In the morning, the couple find no hoofprints or droppings, and the fountain is dry. The flowers remain uneaten, though the husband observes that horses eat flowers. The woman does not tell him she saw soldiers, and she doubts that two people could share one dream. The contrast between her private certainty and the courtyard’s ordinary evidence leaves the visitation unresolved: the horses might have been dreamed, but the scene’s sensory force will not be dismissed by the absence of tracks.

Repetition, Hunger, and Historical Time

The woman sees the soldiers twice more during her stay. Each return changes the image. In colder weather, fog rises from the fountain and the horses are covered in frost; the company is smaller, as though winter or skirmishes have reduced its numbers. On the last appearance, the horses look gaunt, and the men seem less like bodies than empty suits of armor balanced in their saddles. Ice hangs in long masks over the animals’ muzzles, and their breathing sounds congested.

The dream man adds that the woman’s husband will die of a respiratory infection, though she does not know this when she sees the vision. Johanna reacts by striking the teller’s beard-gray face. The blow registers the painful force of a story that joins an imagined medieval scene to an intimate future death. It is not only the husband’s fate that makes the dream disturbing: the horses’ repeated dwindling has made suffering visible before the dreamer can explain it.

Later, Johanna tells her grandchild that the final visit brought only nine soldiers. Everyone looked hungry; she supposes they must have eaten the extra horses. The fountain has frozen, so the men break the ice with swords and long pikes, melt it in a pot, and make soup from clean-gnawed bones taken from their saddlebags. Johanna imagines possible animals whose bones they might be, but refuses to decide that they belonged to the missing soldiers. Her refusal preserves an uncertainty the dream has made unbearable: hunger is certain, while the precise fate of each horse and rider remains unknown.

The Dream’s Afterlife in the Family

Johanna’s dream does not end with the castle. After Johanna dies suddenly in her sleep, her daughter stops traveling, troubled by the soldiers and horses she has come to imagine through her mother’s account. She says she had always known the horses would be thin and the soldiers miserable, but had not understood how thin or how miserable. The dream’s images have passed from one generation to another, where they become less an apparition than a burden of belated recognition.

The family’s later experience gives this inherited grief no neat resolution. The dream’s strength is eventually dimmed by events in the real world, especially Robo’s death in a homemade bombing at university. His last letter had dismissed the self-importance of student radical factions and complained about the food; then he went to history class, and the classroom was destroyed. The juxtaposition does not make the medieval riders a prediction of Robo’s death. Rather, the story sets the dream’s slow, intimate vision of depletion beside a modern violence that arrives abruptly, keeping the family’s sense of vulnerability alive in another form.

Horses and the Animal Logic of Procrastination

In Procrastination, Garp makes animals central to a different history of hunger. The novel is set in Vienna from 1938 to 1945 and through the Russian occupation. Its young anarchist waits too long to strike against the Nazis; later, as a zookeeper at Schönbrunn, he sees Vienna’s population starving and midnight raids on the zoo become a source of stolen food. He decides to liberate the remaining animals, which are innocent of his country’s political inaction and acquiescence.

By the time he frees them, however, the animals are starving too. They eat the anarchist, a consequence Garp describes as natural; a starving mob then easily slaughters the animals while awaiting the Russian forces. The episode refuses the comforting idea that a good intention can undo conditions of deprivation. The animals are not simply symbols of political innocence: their hunger determines what they do, and their release changes neither their condition nor the famine around them.

Years later, in 1956, the anarchist’s mother repeats his gesture during the Hungarian refugee crisis, hoping to awaken a complacent Vienna. But the zoo is healthy again, its animals well fed and content. Only a few can be coaxed out of their cages, and those that wander into the paths and gardens are confined and returned unharmed. The old woman is arrested, and a police doctor discovers that she has cancer. Set against the earlier disaster, this failed release turns on changed circumstances: the same act that once ended in death becomes an ineffectual gesture when hunger and historical danger no longer operate in the same way.

Narrative Significance

Across Johanna’s dream and Garp’s embedded novel, horses and other animals register the material costs that human accounts of history can obscure. In the dream, thirst and cold give the spectral riders bodily presence; in Procrastination, hunger governs what animals can do, regardless of the liberator’s intentions. The episodes are not equivalent—the first remains an uncertain vision passed through memory, while the second is a fictionalized sequence of political failure—but both resist treating animals as scenery for human drama.

The horses’ dwindling number, frosted muzzles, and imagined consumption by the surviving soldiers make deprivation accumulate across repeated visits. Johanna’s daughter inherits that accumulation as an image she cannot unsee. The zoo story, by contrast, places animal suffering inside a public history of famine and political delay, then tests the old woman’s attempt to repeat her son’s liberation under radically altered conditions. Together, these appearances make animal need a measure of history: compassion may perceive it, and liberation may be intended, but neither can by itself restore what deprivation has taken.