They were uprooted, the pair of them, this herder of cows and this carrier of sacks; the past had slipped away from them, and their future was too uncertain to be worth troubling their minds about it. They drifted along aimlessly on the tide of life — what was the point of living, really?

When Doll went to work with his young wife in the early morning, and when he hurried home on his own in the evening after tending the cows all day, his route took him past a large grey house with all its windows shut up, giving it a gloomy and forbidding air. On the door of the house was a very old brass plate, tarnished through neglect and stained with verdigris where the brass had been dented. Engraved on the plate were the words: ‘Dr. Wilhelm — Veterinarian’.

When Doll and his wife walked past this gloomy house for the first time after the end of the war, she had said: ‘He’s topped himself, too — did you hear?’

‘Yes …’, Doll had replied, in a tone of voice intended to indicate to his wife that he did not wish to pursue the subject.

But Alma had ploughed on regardless, exclaiming angrily: ‘Well, I’m glad the old boy’s dead! If ever I hated anyone, it was him — in fact I hate him still …’

‘Fine, fine’, Doll had interrupted. ‘He’s dead, let’s forget him. Don’t let’s talk about him again.’

And they didn’t talk about him again. Whenever Dr. Doll approached the house, he fixed his gaze studiously on the other side of the street, while his wife kept on eyeing the house with a resentful or scornful look. Neither reaction suggested they had succeeded in forgetting, as Doll had wished, and they both knew — although they said nothing — that they neither could forget nor wanted to forget. The dead veterinarian Wilhelm had caused them too much heartache for that.

He called himself a veterinarian on his brass plate, but in truth he was such a coward that he had hardly ever dared to go near a sick horse or cow. The local farmers knew this so well that they only ever called him out to give injections to pigs with erysipelas, which is why he was known far and wide as ‘Piglet Willem’. He was a big, heavily built man in his sixties, with a grey, sallow face that was twisted into a permanent grimace, as if he had the taste of bile in his mouth.

There was absolutely nothing about this vet to set him apart from the common run of men, except for one thing: he was a connoisseur of fine wine. He drank schnaps and beer as well, but only for its alcohol content, because he had been for a long time what one might term a ‘moderate drinker’; he needed a certain amount of alcohol every day, but his intake could not be called excessive. Wine was his real passion, though, and the better the wine, the happier he was. At such times, the bilious wrinkles in his face would soften, and he was seen to smile. For a man of his means, it was a somewhat expensive passion, but he usually found a way to indulge it.

Shortly before five in the afternoon, nothing would keep him at home a moment longer, and not even the most urgent phone call could get him to attend a sick animal. He picked up his stick, put on his little Tyrolean hat with its badger-hair plume, and strolled sedately along the street, dressed invariably in knee breeches, and walking with his feet splayed out to the sides.

Dr. Wilhelm — Piglet Willem — was just a short walk away from his destination, a small hotel where at one time he had effectively had his own private supply of wine on tap. That was when the landlord was still alive, a man who dearly liked a drink himself. After his death, the establishment was run by his widow and then increasingly by their youngest daughter, a girl of mercurial temperament and fierce dislikes, one of which — and not the least of them — was the vet, Dr. Wilhelm.

To his profound dismay, the vet found that the daughter of the house now frequently refused to bring him the bottle of wine he had ordered, only bringing him a glass instead, though other tables were still getting their bottles often enough. If he then complained, speaking with his characteristic slow and measured delivery through that caustic, nutcracker mouth of his, she would cut him off as soon as he started with her quick, sharp tongue: ‘You expect your wine every day. The others just come in occasionally — that’s the difference! You’d drink us dry if I let you!’

Other times, she would not even deign to reply. Or else she would reach quickly for his glass and say: ‘If you don’t want the glass, I’ll be happy to take it back again. You don’t have to drink it!’ In short, she took care to remind him every day that he was entirely dependent on her whims for the satisfaction of his drinking desires. He had to put up with her insults and her diminishing servings of wine with a grumpy sigh, but still he came back every day for more, without dignity or shame.

From the little hotel, the vet would then process sedately, with his curiously splay-footed gait, halfway across the town to the little railway station, where he generally entered the second-class waiting room shortly before six o’clock. Here he often had the good fortune to find the town’s wealthy corn merchant sitting at the table reserved for regulars, where he himself had a seat, and this gentleman was always happy to share his wine with him. Sometimes the corn merchant would be sitting at a separate table with one or more of his customers, in which case the vet would go up to them, inquire gravely ‘May I?’, and was generally invited to join them. For here Dr.