. for animals don’t know how to laugh or smile.”

This emboldens me to admit that I once saw a horse laugh. Till now I assumed that this was nothing special and I didn’t dare make a big deal of it; but if it is such a rarity, I will gladly elaborate.

Well, it was before the war; it could be that since then horses no longer laugh. The horse was tied to a sedge fence that surrounded a little yard. The sky was dark blue. The air was particularly mild, even though it was February. And in contrast to this heavenly calm, there was no human presence. To make a long story short, I found myself near Rome, on a country road just outside the city limits, on the border between the city’s humble outskirts and the first fringe of the peasant Campagna.

The horse also was a Campagna horse: young and graceful, of that shapely, tiny breed with nothing pony-like about it, on the back of which, however, a big rider looks like a grown-up on a little doll’s stool. It was being brushed by a fun-loving stable boy, the sun shone on its hide, and it was ticklish under the shoulders. Now a horse has, so to speak, four shoulders, and perhaps for that reason, is twice as ticklish as a man; besides which, this horse also seemed to have a particularly sensitive spot on the inside of each of its haunches and every time it was touched there, it could hardly keep from laughing.

As soon as the currycomb came close, it drew back its ears, became uneasy, wanted to edge over with its mouth, and when it couldn’t do this, bared its teeth. But the comb marched merrily on, stroke after stroke, and the lips revealed ever more of the teeth, while the ears lay themselves farther and farther back, and the horse tipped from one leg to the other.

And suddenly it started to laugh. It flashed its teeth. With its muzzle it tried as hard as it could to push away the boy who was tickling it – just like a peasant girl would do with her hand, and without trying to bite him. It also attempted to turn itself around and to shove him away with its entire body. But the stable boy held the advantage. And when with the currycomb he arrived in the vicinity of its shoulders, the horse could no longer control itself; it shifted from leg to leg, shivered all over and pulled back the gums of its teeth as far as it could. For a few seconds then, it behaved just as a man tickled so much that he can’t even laugh anymore.

The learned skeptic will object here that a horse couldn’t laugh after all. One must admit to the validity of his objection, insofar as, of the two, the one who whinnied with laughter was the stable boy. The ability to whinny with laughter seems in fact to be exclusively a human talent. But nonetheless, the two of them were obviously playing together, and as soon as they started it all over again from the beginning, there could be no doubt that the horse wanted to laugh and was already anticipating the sequence of sensations.

So learned doubt defines the limitations of the beast’s ability, that it cannot laugh at jokes.

This, however, should not always be held against the horse.

Awakening

I shoved the curtain aside – the soft night! A gentle darkness lies in the window cutout of the hard room darkness like the water surface in a square basin. I don’t really see it at all, but it’s like in the summer when the water’s as warm as the air and your hand hangs out of the boat. It’s going on six o’clock, November 1.

God woke me up. I shot up out of sleep. I had absolutely no other reason to wake up. I was torn out like a page from a book. The moon’s crescent lies delicate as a golden eyebrow on the blue page of night.

But on the morning side at the other window it’s getting green. Parrot-feathery. The pale reddish stripes of sunrise, they too are already streaking the sky, but everything’s still green, blue and silent. I jump back to the other window: Is the moon still there? She’s there, as though in the deepest hour of night’s secret. So convinced is she of the effectiveness of her magic, like an actress on stage.