If I see the house somewhere in the country, the dream is more long-drawn-out, or I remember its details better. I turn around, walk back to the house, and climb the steps. This dream recognition comforts me seeing the house again in different surroundings is no more surprising than encountering an old friend by chance in a strange place. For example, in my dream I'm in Rome, see the house, and realize I've seen it already in Bern. I'm not picturing Bahnhofstrasse in my hometown, but another city, or another country. Then I realize that I've seen the house before. I go on, confused, because the house is familiar but its surroundings are not. It's one in a row of buildings in a district I don't know. I'm walking through a strange town and I see the house. The dreams were similar, variations on one dream and one theme. In later years I dreamed about the building again and again. But because the building had darkened with the passing of the years and the smoke of the trains, I imagined that the grand inhabitants would be just as somber, and somehow peculiar-deaf or dumb or hunchbacked or lame. I assumed that grand people would live in such a grand building. Inside, I imagined a stairwell with plaster moldings, mirrors, and an oriental runner held down with highly polished brass rods. I used to think that if it made itself any heavier and wider, the neighboring buildings would have to move aside and make room for it.
I had been aware of this building since I was a little boy. The entryway through which the woman had led me to the tap in the courtyard was a side entrance.
The front door was flanked by pillars, and from the corners of the architrave one lion looked up Bahnhofstrasse while another looked down. Several steps led up to the first floor and the stairwell they were wide at the bottom, narrower above, set between walls topped with iron banisters and curving outwards at street level. The old building was as tall, but with only four floors, a first floor of faceted sandstone blocks, and above it three floors of brickwork with sandstone arches, balconies, and window surrounds.
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