Poor Rosa had taken one look at Jan and had fallen flat on her face, literally as well as figuratively; there was an icy patch on the pavement, and she was so busy staring at him she forgot to look where she was walking. Though Elise was supposed to be with Dieter, she was not unmoved by the Greek god; Jan spent a good deal of his time trying to elude one or the other or both. Maybe he didn’t always try. I paid little attention to the proceedings; Tony and I were renewing old acquaintances. If Tony hadn’t been there, I might have taken a friendly interest in Jan myself. Or I might not; his humor was a bit too heavy-handed and his manners were too formal for my tastes. In fact, I had been a little surprised when he asked to join our frivolous group.

The conference had officially ended the morning I took the pictures. We were celebrating, looking forward to a few days of skiing, drinking beer, and so on. Especially so on. We must have had a few beers already, to judge from some of the antics I had photographed: Dieter burying a wildly gesticulating Elise in a pile of snow; Dieter upside down in a snowbank with only his feet protruding; Jan gravely constructing a snowman as anatomically accurate as the medium allowed, assisted by both Elise and Rosa; Tony leering insanely into the lens of the camera in blurred close-up.

That was the last of that group; dodging Tony, I had slipped and fallen and sprained my ankle. So, while the rest of them were on the slopes the next day, I languished in the hotel with my foot up.

The manager of the hotel couldn’t have been sweeter. When he learned of my misadventure, he sent flowers, food, wine, and his own cane—a stout, solid article decorated from foot to curved handle with the little metal-and-enamel insignia that are the badges of local hiking societies. Reading the cane occupied me for a good fifteen minutes and amused me no end. With its aid, I was able to hobble around; and later that evening, when my so-called pals had abandoned me to whoop it up in the nightclubs of Garmisch, Herr Hoffman invited me to join him for a brandy.

He explained with grave courtesy that he thought I might be getting bored with the four walls of my room, and that was certainly true; but the contents of his private sitting room would have been worth a visit even if I had been able-bodied and otherwise occupied. There were several examples of the painted peasant furniture called Bauernmalerei, including a huge Schrank, or cupboard, as fine as any I had seen in the Bayrisches Museum. Each of the double doors had a pair of painted panels—formal bouquets of tulips, roses, and lilies. The creature comforts were nice, too—twenty-year-old brandy; a fire blazing on the open hearth, a fat, purring Siamese kitten to warm my knees and lick my fingers; and a Brahms quartet playing softly in the background.