I'm Not Stiller by Max Frisch

of Rip van Winkle?'
    Only by means of this trick—that's to say by holding the lighter, which I relit every time it went out, and with the cigar in the other hand, all the time on the point of lighting the splendid cigar, indeed once setting the cigar aglow, so that all I had to do was to draw on it, but every time prevented—prevented by Rip van Winkle, whose story was obviously more acutely important than my cigar—only by means of this trick could I compel my busy defence counsel to listen at all.
    The story goes something like this.
    Rip van Winkle, a descendant of that intrepid van Winkle who opened up the country of America while serving under Hendrik Hudson, was a born lazybones but at the same time, it seems, a thoroughly good fellow, who didn't fish for the sake of the fish but in order to dream, for his head was full of so-called thoughts, which had little to do with his reality. His reality, a good little wife whom everyone in the village could only pity or admire, didn't have an easy time with him. Rip certainly felt he ought to have a trade, a masculine trade, and he liked to pretend he was a hunter, which had the advantage of allowing him to roam around for days on end where no one saw him. He generally came back without so much as a single pigeon, carrying nothing but a bad conscience. His little house was the most neglected in the whole village, to say nothing of his garden. Nowhere did the weeds flourish so merrily as in his garden, and it was always his goats that wandered off and fell into the ravines. He bore it without bitterness, for he was philosophically inclined, unlike his ancestors who all gazed down from the old pictures with every appearance of being men of action. For days at a time he would sit outside his dilapidated little house with his chin in his hand pondering why he wasn't really happy. He had a wife and two children, but he wasn't happy. He had expected more of himself; he was fifty and he still expected more, even if his good wife and his companions smiled about it. Only Bauz, his shaggy dog, understood him and wagged his tail when Rip took down his gun to go squirrel hunting. He had inherited the gun, a heavy thing with a great deal of ornament, fromhis forefathers. They must have smiled to themselves when Rip talked about his hunting; what he had seen always exceeded what he had shot. And since his stories couldn't be roasted, his wife, the mother of two children, had soon had enough of them; she called him a lazy good-for-nothing, in front of everyone, which he couldn't stand. So in order to unburden himself of his stories, Rip used to spend almost every evening in the village tavern, where there were always a few people to listen to him, even if his stories couldn't be roasted. His splendid gun and the tired dog at his feet were witnesses enough when Rip talked about his hunting. People liked him, because he never spoke ill of anyone; on the contrary it seems as though he was always a bit afraid of the world and badly needed to be liked. He drank a bit too, no doubt. And if no one listened, that didn't matter either; in any case, Rip and his dog, which put its tail between its legs as soon as it heard Mrs van Winkle coming, didn't go home before midnight, because every evening there was a palaver of which Rip understood as little as his dog, a palaver while he took off his boots, and of course it was obvious things couldn't go on like this, but that had been obvious for years ... One day Rip and his faithful dog went squirrel hunting again, striding out as long as the village could see them; then, as usual, Rip made his first stop, taking a bite from his provisions while Bauz kept watch in case anyone should come round the hill. In return, as usual, Bauz got a small bone, and Rip lit his pipe in order to give his good old dog, who was loudly gnawing at the bare bone, a bit of a rest too. Finally they trotted on into the morning, into the wide sweep of hilly country above