Comedy in a Minor Key

by Hans Keilson

  The rest of the afternoon was a long wait that almost shredded his nerves to pieces. Would Marie come? What would she say? What excuse could he give? Nothing, nothing, he had betrayed himself. It was all over. He had to leave here, change his hiding place. But where would he go? Where?

  But Marie didn’t come until she brought him downstairs for dinner.

  He was pale and distraught. No matter how hard he tried to act like everything was normal, he could not manage to answer Wim’s hello with the same ease and natural tone. Wim and Marie both noticed it right away and left him alone. They knew he had moods like this sometimes, moods that rose up now and then and disappeared again, like thunderstorms that couldn’t quite make it across a body of water. Poor devil! Who knew what thoughts oppressed him. The prospect of yet another winter? . . .

  That evening he went back to his room early.

  The woman had not said anything. Nico felt her silence as a double burden. It made it his duty to speak up, but he didn’t say anything either. And for him it was a deception, almost a betrayal. He admitted it to himself. But still he kept quiet. Why? Out of fear of the consequences, which he did not know but which presented themselves as terrible in any case. They would turn him out of the house on the spot, or even . . . He knew that he was irrationally conjuring up a danger that would be easy to avert if they knew about it. But he kept quiet, with a grim stubbornness. It stayed a secret, and he held on to the foolhardy hope that it would continue to stay a secret.

  Starting in December, the cleaning woman no longer appeared at the house. She stayed away on her own account. Her health had gotten worse again.

  When Nico thought about her, the same cold terror ran through him as before and he shut his eyes. Later he felt a kind of longing for the gap-toothed smile on that suffering, puffy face, a craving that imperceptibly lessened his fear. He could not answer the question: Why?

  VI.

  Sometimes he had moments, Hours of blind despair and dull hopelessness, when he hated them—them and the vase that stood downstairs in the front room, on a little table with a lace doily next to the bookcase. It was a Chinese vase, an acquisition of Wim’s. He had brought it home from an auction one day, as a present for Marie and, he added laughing, for himself.

  It was about sixteen inches high, porcelain, hand-painted with lustrous blue and red flowers and figures. Despite its size and its double-curved form it looked charming and delicate. It was their quiet pride and joy. They never needed to point it out to anyone; whoever walked into the room noticed it right away; Nico too when he saw it for the first time. He admired it unreservedly. Wim stood nearby and laughed, bashful and a little mischievous.

  “But yes, it’s a beautiful thing to have in your house . . . ! How did you find it?” Wim told the story: “. . . and I’d never been to a real auction before. It was really exciting! I saw it standing there before the auction started, and I just bid along with everyone else. To tell you the truth I couldn’t afford it. It was like I was drunk.”

  “Yes, yes, I know how that is.”

  “You can’t always be reasonable, you know? Marie’s eyes almost popped out of her head at first. But she didn’t say anything. And now . . . ! If we weren’t in such times, we would have bought some more. We have a couple of books about Far Eastern art too. Right there . . . ,” and he pointed to the second shelf of the bookcase.

  “But why not? If you have the money, now is the best time to invest in something of lasting value.”

  Wim laughed. “Of course, but not vases. If something happens, they’re the first thing to break in half.”

  “May I hold it for a moment?” Nico had asked.

  “It’s not heavy at all, just a little slippery.”

  And Nico had held it carefully in both hands while he gently turned it all the way around and examined it, attentively and lovingly. It was, in fact, a magnificent specimen, one to be truly proud of.

  Then Wim had taken it back—“All right, give it here”—and put it down again on the small table, with one hand.

  But in his downcast hours of deep despondency, Nico could have hurled down the vase too, shattered it to pieces, if it were here in his room. Since he couldn’t touch it, all that remained was to hate it. It became a symbol to him: he hated this symbol, and he hated the people who owned this symbol.

  Then his room was filled with suffering faces—contorted, disfigured, beaten to a pulp—whose features he eagerly studied to see if they weren’t perhaps known to him. He heard groaning, whimpering, sniveling, wailing, calling upon God, cursing God; saw men and women, very old and very young—they were endless, the images he saw and heard in these hours. He lay on the sofa, fully clothed, and in his dazed state he was as if lying in wait for new images that washed up out of his imagination and brought with them new agitations and new, more painful images.

  When he breathed in deep, he tasted gas. Gas! His room was full of gas! He closed his eyes and burrowed his head into the pillow. What did the others understand of all this? And if they did understand it—what did it mean to them? In their safe, protected, domestic life!—Safe? Protected? Since they had taken him in? No, no, he was being unfair. But their house, their home, their things—their world—how it all had attracted him and soothed him at first. And now: how vain, how inflated, how worthless! For he measured things now with a cosmic measure, which gripped him tight and shook him back and forth. What trust in each other? What danger? And what a gulf between people! Consolation! Consolation? . . . Was there any such thing?

  When he stood at the window behind the curtain and looked out—“outside” was a mosaic of countless little squares and rectangles—it was better, sometimes. But other times, often, he didn’t have the heart to stand up from the bed, to arise and venture the few steps to the window. He lay there as though in chains and brooded. Memories rose up inside him, and not only personal memories: history took shape, the past spoke the bloody language of fate. And horror, horror, overpowering, the way something is only when it rises up out of forgetting.

  When he came here, to this house, he would have happily taken a place on a pile of coal in a barn and been satisfied. Now he slept in a bed, ate at a table, was treated as a human being. But the longer it lasted, the greater his demands grew. Since he couldn’t demand anything of the outer world—what he did receive was freely offered, almost a gift—his demands turned inward and more and more excessive. But people were helping him, they were helping him, didn’t that mean anything? Yes, it meant a lot. And it was also nothing. He was turning into nothing. It was unbearable. It meant his annihilation, his human annihilation, even if it—maybe—saved his life. The little thorn that grows invisibly in anyone who lives on the help and pity of others grew to gigantic proportions, became a javelin lodged deep in his flesh and hurting terribly.

  How proudly they had given him this room, how gratefully he had received it. How imprisoned, abandoned, and wretched he had felt in it. The loneliness of loneliness. He had never liked to spend too much time at home, and now he had to. A spring arrived, a summer, an autumn . . . behind the curtains. The landscape, the sky, the distant sea, were not always a consolation, a balm to soothe the eye. Often, too often, they were a door that stayed closed.

  With his counterfeit papers he could risk being out on the street during new moons in fall and winter. He went alone. They had precisely calculated the days in advance on the calendar, together. “So, Nico, from —— to —— you can go for a quiet little walk. No more than an hour, and not too far from the house. And don’t come back to the house too late, because of the neighbors.”

  “Yes, thank you, Wim.”

  They shared his happiness. “At least you can stretch your legs. You’ll still have to do without sunshine.”

  But he appeased them and said that even this little thing felt like a piece of good fortune.

  Good fortune!—And still the constant fear that a flashlight would suddenly come on in the darkness before him and a stern voice would
ask, while the light blinded his face: “Aha! So, ah . . . Where do you live?” He doesn’t say anything.“Come on, tell me already.” He stays stubbornly silent. “You’ll tell me all right. Come with me.” And he knows what that means. He will confess everything, yes, he will say everything . . . I live at . . . No, no, not that, that would be cowardice, villainy, they didn’t deserve that. Even if they killed him, tortured him to death, he would keep his mouth shut, despite, yes, despite all their torture and . . . Marie, Wim, you can count on me, they’ll get nothing out of me!

  When he stood up from the family table that evening, he walked into the front room and stood for a long time in front of the vase, a few steps away from it. Finally he went up to it and pensively smoothed out a little crease in the lace doily it stood on.

  VII.

  Marie was still standing in the kitchen doing the laundry when Wim appeared at her side. He made a noticeable fuss busying himself about the stove and the stone kitchen counter, where pots and bowls were standing that he shoved back and forth as though he were looking for something. He didn’t find it, whatever it was. All the while he was sneaking a surreptitious look at Marie, who pulled a shirt out of the soapy water, looked at it, and then dunked it back in. No, she wasn’t crying anymore. She seemed calmer to him. Her face was still red but that could just as well be from the effort and the steam.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked, without looking up, and kept working. Laundry these days, when you couldn’t get any decent detergent anymore . . . !

  “Oh, never mind.”

  “Matches?”

  “Yes, I thought they were here—”

  “In the drawer on the right.” She turned her head without taking a break from her scrubbing. “No—there—yes. Aren’t there any in the room?”

  “I couldn’t find them there either,” Wim said. Then he saw them lying on the ledge by the stove, behind the photograph of his mother. He took the box and left again.

  She hadn’t asked, but the doctor must be coming back at any moment. Wim was growing impatient.

  It was Nico’s shirt that she had pushed back into the soapy water. She hadn’t waited until Coba came; she herself started washing whatever clothes of his she could find.

  He had brought only clothes with him; Marie had given him sheets and towels. She also darned his stockings and mended his suits. So much was falling apart, and he didn’t have much. Most of the wash, and Wim’s clothes, she took to a laundry.

  During his illness he had gone through especially many clothes; she had to change the sheets three times, plus the washcloths, the pajamas. At first it was just an ordinary cold—stuffy nose, scratchy throat, a hacking cough every now and then. As so often happens when the seasons are changing. Nico had managed a few jokes about it at first. “My right tonsil,” he said, and he seemed to swallow, his hand on his throat. “The right—you know, if you take the time to do it you can watch it yourself and see very nicely how it progresses. Tomorrow it’ll be in the left one too”—again his hand on his throat, a painful swallow—“I feel it today already.”

  Marie had laughed too, even though she could tell how dejected and defeated he felt.

  They treated it themselves, with aspirin, hot fluids, a scarf around his neck in the evenings. Wim had come home and told them how many people at his factory were out with the exact same symptoms. It is always a consolation to learn that something unpleasant is shared by everyone.

  One evening he suddenly had a fever. Aspirin again, a bigger dose. When his temperature reached 102 they decided to fetch their doctor. Dr. Nelis, an even younger man, energetic, unmarried, understood right away what the situation was, even before Wim had brought him all the way into his confidence. He had several such cases in his practice at the moment.

  “Doctor, there’s one more thing . . .”

  “The neighbors? I understand.”

  “It’s that my wife . . . and I . . . They can see, of course, that we’re still healthy and up and about . . .”

  “What do you mean?” the doctor replied. “There are invisible illnesses too, that you can have and still be up and about.”

  “But they know that we’ve never been sick. And so if you start coming more often now . . . all at once like this . . .” He looked at the floor.

  Silence. Dr. Nelis folded his hands and thought hard about it for a moment.

  Suddenly he looked up and said, “Do you have a record player?”

  “A record player?” Wim was absolutely staggered. What could a record player possibly have to do with it? “No!”

  “Too bad.”

  Silence again.

  “Maybe I could borrow one,” Wim responded, without knowing why exactly he should borrow a record player. Neither of them was particularly musical, Marie and him.

  “Really? Oh, never mind, we don’t need it,” the doctor said. But Wim noticed that the doctor was still thinking about this record player.

  Finally he worked up the courage and asked, “Why, Doctor? Why a record player?”

  Dr. Nelis smiled a little and looked fixedly at Wim.

  “Oh”—the words came out of his mouth slowly and with a slight drawl, as though he were making a little fun of himself—“well, I’m crazy about records, I have quite a collection myself. It’s my hobby. Everyone in town knows that about me—people know something like that about anyone who’s even a little in the public eye, after all. I could say that I was visiting you to listen to one of your records. A particular record I’ve been trying to chase down forever and that you happen to have, ‘L’invitation au Voyage’ for example, with words by Baudelaire, music by—Duparc? or Poulenc? . . . which one is it again?”

  “I have no idea,” Wim answered. “I don’t know it.”

  “Too bad,” the doctor said, “it’s heavenly—the vocals . . . ‘Luxe, calme, volupté.’ ” He hummed the melody softly. “I wish I owned it.” He stared at the ceiling, lost in a reverie. “Enfin, I’ll come to give your wife a couple of calcium injections against fatigue and general listlessness. There’s a lot of that going around these days. Goodbye.”

  In the meantime, Marie had told Nico that Wim had gone for the doctor.

  “Isn’t it too risky—for you . . .” he had asked in a dull voice.

  “Don’t worry, Nico. Dr. Nelis is good, in every way. And you’re sick.”

  “Yes, I do feel sick,” he answered softly, and he leaned back deeper into the pillow and shut his eyes. He had always known that they wouldn’t leave him in the lurch here . . .

  “As long as it doesn’t turn into a double pneumonia,” Dr. Nelis said to Marie and Wim downstairs in the back room, after he had thoroughly examined the patient. “He isn’t strong.”

  Marie turned pale. “I do what I can, with the food situation . . .”

  “I know, it’s impossible to manage,” the doctor replied. “His inner defenses too are not that strong . . . at least that’s how it seems to me. And no wonder!” he added. “I gave him an injection. I’ll come again tonight.”

  After a week his condition was unchanged, despite the new medicine that everyone was talking about at the time.

  Marie was gripped by an uneasiness she had never felt before. She suffered. It wasn’t so much the thought that he might not get through his illness, it was the idea that his defenses weren’t strong enough. What could she do?

  When he was still healthy and stuck in his room, in recent days and weeks, she had never forgotten to put on a happy and confident face when she walked in. She had read somewhere or other, in a housewives’ magazine that was still appearing at irregular intervals, that you had to stay positive. Positive! That was supposed to be the best way to overcome difficult circumstances. Without her exactly realizing it, this thought had lodged deep inside her and revealed itself first through her attitude toward Nico. Stay positive! But after he fell sick, it didn’t seem to work for her anymore. Carefully, timidly, she crept into his room and watched his feverish, sweaty face with its
closed eyes and half-open mouth struggling for breath. In his illness and helplessness, his whole being—or at least so she felt—expressed itself more clearly, and she had never perceived it more deeply than she did now. Sick and helpless, wasn’t this his true state? His behavior before was what was remarkable: playing chess—with himself—practicing French and English, reading books. All of it, all of it, was nothing but a kind of medicine to try to heal his affliction. And Wim and she had often wondered at his behavior. Sometimes it seemed to her almost uncanny. It stood like a wall between him and them, which slowly, slowly crumbled as the war dragged on and everything aberrant and inhuman became typical and everyday.

  “I have to go look in on him again,” she said one night after she and Wim had gone to bed.

  “He’s probably already asleep—you’ll wake him up . . .”

  She insisted: “I’ll be very quiet.”

  Even before she had finished closing the door to his room behind her, she heard a breathless, congested voice: “Marie . . .”

  She turned on the light; the bed stood outside its dim circle of illumination. His beard had grown and it covered his chin and cheeks, so that he looked older and more emaciated. She stood next to his bed.

  “Should I fluff the pillow for you again?”

  “Ah, yes.”

  She helped him sit up. He supported himself with great difficulty on the mattress while she hurriedly pounded the pillow with both hands. It was limp with heat. Then she helped him as he let himself fall back. It visibly did him good. His hair was a confused tangle on his head, like the absolute mess after a downpour. It hung damp and sticky over his forehead and temples. The half darkness of the room gave his face an ashy coloring. Two feverish eyes were wide-open in his face, as though gathering all the shadows of the bedroom into themselves.