Comedy in a Minor Key

by Hans Keilson

  “Marie . . .”

  “Yes?” She spoke very softly as though afraid to make his condition worse with any loud noise. But he didn’t say anything else. He closed his eyes and lay there as though he had just that moment fallen asleep. Only his arms, stretched out on the blanket but lying right up against his body, trembled now and then. Then he raised them gingerly, straight up, and let them fall again, like wings that he wanted to unfold but then, tired and powerless, just curled up again. It was almost as if he were not breathing anymore. Only the blanket on his body moved, almost imperceptibly, up and down.

  Marie bent down over his stubbly face so that she could pick up the softest sound from his lips in case he looked like he was about to speak. She waited like that for a time. She saw the beads of sweat on his forehead and the little rivulets slowly dripping down his face and neck and sinking into the cavities above his collarbone. His pajama top was half open, and a warm, strong smell rose up toward her from the damp shining skin under the hair on his chest. When she felt under his armpits, she noticed that the fabric was soaked through with sweat, the fabric at his sides and his elbows too.

  She took a washcloth and first wiped his face and head; then, after opening another button of his pajama top, she washed his chest and painstakingly wiped his armpits. She felt the heat from his body. She fetched a bottle of eau de cologne from her bedroom, a bottle she had saved for special occasions, sprayed a few drops onto his forehead, and blew on it lightly to spread the perfume so that its coolness would pleasantly refresh his hot skin. It helped. She saw his face become more lively again.

  “I’ll get you a fresh pair of pajamas, yes?” she said, bent closely over him.

  A weak nod was the answer. When she was going over to the hiding place where his clothes were, she heard him say, with great effort, “I don’t have any more . . .”

  He didn’t own much, and what little he had had been used up in the days he’d been sick. She went out to the hall, where the laundry bag was still full of the clean clothes that had come back from the laundry that day, and she pulled out a pair of Wim’s pajamas from the bottom of the bag. She called Wim to come help her, and together they dressed Nico. Even though he couldn’t do much to help, since he was already so weakened by his illness, and even though they themselves had no experience nursing sick people, everything went smoothly.

  “Thank you, it was so hot,” he said weakly, when he was lying motionless on his back again. Wim was already in the doorway.

  “So, you’ll sleep better now. Good night,” Marie said, and she left the room on tiptoes.

  Outside in the hall, they stopped for a moment and listened, as though standing outside a room where a child was sleeping. Their eyes met.

  “Come on, Marie!” He opened the door to their room.

  She followed slowly after him, still on tiptoes.

  VIII.

  The doctor was standing in the front hall in his hat and coat. It was quarter past ten. He rubbed his hands together. “I came on my bicycle,” he said. He usually used a motorcycle, since he’d had to put his car into a garage because of the shortage of gasoline. It was pitch-black outside. “We’re going right now?” he asked, and he peered up the steps.

  Marie had taken off her apron. Her hands were puffy and red, her face was shining. Still, she was calm and focused. “Can I help with something,” she said, “or . . .”

  “Let’s go,” Wim said to the doctor, and let him go first. Then, turning back to Marie, “It’s better if you wait here downstairs, maybe in the front room . . .”

  “Don’t forget the coat,” she replied.

  Wim stopped on the stairs. “Right,” he said, and he leaped back down in two big jumps. He pulled his hat down tight over his head.

  “Which door?” the doctor asked when Wim came running back up the stairs behind him. He was a little out of breath because he was wearing his heavy winter coat.

  They walked into the room in their hats and coats like two men from some commission, officials who had come to launch an investigation into a case of death where foul play was suspected. They stepped decisively up to the bed, stood standing alongside it for a second, and calmly considered the case before them, their hands buried deep in their coat pockets. Then the doctor shoved his left hand under the dead man’s neck, grabbed his stiff left arm with the other hand, and pulled. The body slid out of the symmetrical position it had been in until then, and now lay a little diagonal and tilted onto the right side of the face and body. The doctor looked at the prominent Adam’s apple of the dead man in silence. Wim stood hesitantly next to him.

  “If we sit him up first,” he said.

  “That won’t work,” the doctor answered, puffing up his cheeks a little, “with the rigor mortis.” He had already tested it out. Silence. Wim held his hands clasped behind his back; he had the strange feeling of not being in his own house, but rather in a strange house for a wake.

  “It’s not so simple, really,” the doctor began anew.

  Wim turned back the covers and measured the length of the body. “It seems to me, Doctor—like this—if we lay him across our shoulders, like a plank, I could maybe do it myself . . .”

  “Impossible! You think with a dead body . . . !”

  “Or I could have him on my back, piggyback, and you could prop him up from behind so that he doesn’t fall backward”—and he lightly bent forward and pulled the arms into two curves at chest height, as though putting them into two stirrups—“like this.”

  The doctor hesitated before he answered: “The joints are still too stiff.”

  Wim was silent.

  “Have you ever actually seen a corpse?” the doctor asked suddenly, and turned the body onto its back. Wim gave a start.

  “Of course,” he said hastily, “my father, a long time ago, I was very young.”

  “I see.” And then he went on, staring at the blankets: “I am always surprised how few grown men and women have actually really seen a dead body. That is, in normal times. A lot of people see one for the first time in their thirties. It’s strange. Everyone has a lot more to do with love, earlier and more often, of course. But they should have to see a dead body at least once a week. Then everyone would have a better sense of equilibrium, and lots of fears and anxieties would just disappear.” He pulled his gaze back from the blankets and raised it to Wim. “Do you still remember it, then?”

  “Sure I do,” Wim answered, and reflected back, thinking hard.

  He was a boy, seven years old, when one day—he was wearing a black velvet coat with a cream-colored pointed collar—his mother called him into the music room, where there was an open coffin. She herself was standing, with tear-swollen eyes, in a posture that he would never forget, tall and straight with her thin figure, as though she were growing from one minute to the next, leaning against one of the double doors and saying in a soft, melodious voice—she was a singer—and a tone he had never heard her speak in before and would never hear again: “Wim, that’s Father. He is dead. Say goodbye to him, my boy.” And Wim had stepped up to the open coffin, which had a long piece of glass lying across the top, lengthwise, and had looked closely at Father. What was that under his chin? A long, wide block of wood lay on his chest and held up Father’s chin. His face looked serious and was almost totally without wrinkles. He looked different, better than he did before when he was lying sick in bed. He was wearing a frock coat with a big white carnation from the garden in the buttonhole. Wim examined the carnation and noticed that you can’t smell a flower through glass. Only in this flower, blooming behind glass but giving off no more scent, did the astonished child recognize the sign of death. His father also lay behind the glass covering and you could see him but not smell him. Two thick, burning candles stood at the head end of the coffin, and at the foot end lay a big wreath with a blue ribbon, on which was written in golden letters: TO THEIR BELOVED DADDY—THE CHILDREN.

  “He’s still too young,” his aunt whispered to his mother when she s
aw the boy standing there.

  “Thank God,” his uncle whispered back. Father’s brother had been living in the house for a week and taking care of all the necessary business. The following year, he married Wim’s mother and moved to India with her. The children were sent to boarding school.

  When Wim’s aunt led him quietly out of the room, Coba came in through the other door. She was very pale and sobbing uninterruptedly. Even though she was older, the rules of family precedence demanded that the son take his leave of his father first . . .

  “The two of us will manage it.” The doctor interrupted the silence.

  “Yes,” Wim answered with conviction, as though he had had the exact same thought at the same time. How yellow Nico’s teeth looked already, like wax. Were they cold to the touch too?

  “Grab his feet,” the doctor said as he gripped under the armpits and lifted the upper body from the sheets. They laid him on the floor. Then they started over, their faces turned toward each other, Wim at the foot end and the doctor at the head end, and they carried the corpse by the armpits and feet, the way it was done in old “Burial of Christ” paintings, slowly and carefully—Wim was walking backward—out of the bedroom and down the stairs.

  The light was on in the stairwell. When they opened the door, they would be visible from outside.

  “Let’s put him down again,” the doctor said. He seemed uncomfortable carrying the body this way.

  “Here in the hall?” Wim replied, and laid the legs down on the carpet. Something inside him resisted the idea of laying the dead body right down here in the hallway, where everybody walked back and forth all the time.

  The doctor straightened up, since he had been bent over the whole time they were carrying the body. “A sheet—we need some kind of sheet to wrap him up,” he said. “The pajamas will be too bright outside.”

  “Marie, get a sheet, or a blanket,” Wim said after opening the door to the room where Marie sat waiting with nothing to do. “We need to wrap him in something dark.”

  “A blanket?” She stood up quickly and hurried from the room. She had been staring at the clock the whole time; it was after 10:30 and there was no time to lose if Wim was to get home again before curfew. He wanted to call after her that he would get the blanket himself, if she would only tell him where . . . But she was already out of the room.

  She was not prepared to see him again, here in the hall and lying on the floor in such a position. She had no doubt heard the men slowly, step by step, coming down the stairs with a heavy weight. But still, catching sight of him like this came as quite a shock. There, where the milk bottles and bread basket and all the other everyday things stood during the day, where the letters fell when they were slipped through the mail slot, where you walked in and out, and where he himself had come in—there he lay now, dead. The doctor was standing on the stairs, his right elbow propped on the banister and his head in the palm of his hand. In front of him, on the floor between the stairs and the door to the front room: the body.

  Since she had left the front room at full speed and shut the door behind her, she had no other choice, her feet acted on their own, defending themselves as though she were suddenly standing in front of an abyss, taking a couple of tiny steps and then jumping over Nico with a little leap, a small, barely noticeable jump, just enough to clear the body. Her eyes, reflecting horror, shame, and sadness, were looking at the doctor, who was watching this performance—first her hesitation and then her helpless decision—without changing his position, bent over with his head in his hand. He nodded to her. “And some safety pins too,” he whispered, “please—”

  “Of course,” she breathed, and crept sideways up the stairs.

  The three of them wound the body in a blanket that had earlier been on his bed, and fastened the bundle with pins as though preparing him for a sailor’s grave. When they were done, the clock in the hall showed ten minutes to eleven. In ten minutes they could have all this behind them.

  Marie turned out the light in the hall and opened the house door.

  The moonless night was cold. Marie shivered. It’s good that he’s snugly wrapped in a warm blanket, she thought, and this curious idea wouldn’t let her go even though she realized in the same moment that whether it was cold or warm he wouldn’t feel anything. Nico, Nico . . .

  The men in their coats stared out into the shapeless, chilly darkness and listened tensely for any sound. A house door banged shut a little farther up the street. There was a whistle. A dog came bounding with muffled, flying leaps across the gravel, shooting through the night. Silence.

  “Let’s go,” Wim ordered softly, and he grabbed the legs from the floor with both hands, bundling them together, and lifted them onto his right hip so that he could walk forward this time, even if he did have to walk turned slightly to the right. At the same time, the doctor pulled the shrouded body up from the ground in one motion and supported it on his right shoulder, wrapping both arms tightly around it.

  The first steps down the garden path to the gate and down the sidewalk were hurried and bumpy as the dead body pitched from side to side. They had trouble keeping it from slipping out of their hands. By the time they got to the street they had found their rhythm, or it had found itself, and the body moved back and forth with it, making it easier for them to carry it. They cautiously crept through the darkness and stepped softly so that no one would hear them. Only a few feet on the other sidewalk, and then they would have to turn into the park entrance. Wim, who went first, felt more than saw where the chain-link fence separating the footpath from the park was interrupted by an opening. The doctor, who was carrying the greater burden, willingly followed.

  Here at the entrance to the park, shielded by bushes whose tops cast weak black shapes against the darkness, they felt safer. Thanks to the rain of the past few days, the ground was loose enough to muffle their footsteps, but also not so wet that they would get stuck. After a few hundred feet they crossed over the high arch of a narrow wooden bridge, under which a little waterway flowed through the park and ended in a small pond surrounded by poplars and lindens, right at the edge of the pastures and fields. The planks creaked and they hurried to get back to the path. On the other side, twenty feet away, stood a gnarled, formless mass, black in the darkness. It was a bench—two flat, horizontal planks with a gap in between as the sitting surface and a sharply tilted plank in parallel as a back support, with feet and joints of cast iron.

  After they put the blanket onto the bench and rolled out the body, they lifted it over the back of the backrest, put it down on the edge of the grass, and pushed it carefully between the cast-iron feet. It fit comfortably. Then they took the same way back, in silence, a tired, numb feeling in their arms. It struck eleven. Three minutes later the doctor got on his bicycle in front of the house. Since Wim didn’t know if he should thank the doctor or not, he only whispered, “Good night.”

  “Good night,” Dr. Nelis murmured, and disappeared into the darkness. Wim went into the house.

  After he had taken off his hat and coat, he stood for a moment—as he never usually did—in front of the little oval mirror in the hall. He straightened his tie, wiped his forehead and between his neck and collar with a handkerchief, combed his hair, and did similar things that you think of only when you’re in front of a mirror. He was amazed and found it hard to grasp that he looked the way his mirror image showed him.

  Marie hurried down the stairs. She looked pale, with a touching tension around her mouth and eyes. Doubtless she had been crying upstairs in his bedroom.

  “So,” Wim said, looking straight at her a little pityingly.

  She didn’t ask anything. He pressed his lips together and nodded a couple times, as if to say: So, we managed it . . .

  They went into the back room. Wim fell into the armchair next to the stove, his legs crossed, his hands spread wide, gripping the arms of the chair as though he wanted to jump right up again.

  Marie sat at the table.

  Silen
ce. She waited like someone who herself had something to hide. Should she go first?

  “The stove is off,” Wim said. He stroked its cold iron with his hand.

  Would it be better for her to tell him now, after all? It was ultimately nothing very important . . . It was so cold down here.

  “I’ll brew us up some coffee,” Marie said, and stood up hastily.

  Us? The two of them, Wim and herself. And a dry ship’s biscuit along with it, as always.

  While they were drinking their coffee, Wim suddenly stretched and asked, “Is it raining?”

  They both listened.

  “No—thank God, no.” Pause.

  The three of them had ended every single day like this for almost a year, together, with a cup of coffee and a dry piece of hardtack, often in silence, each given over to their thoughts, but still together—waiting, waiting . . . There was gratitude in this habit, and a little tiredness, from the night to come that they were about to enter alone or as a pair, and a furtive, sad happiness in the smiling, incomprehensible futility.

  . . . He fit comfortably underneath, Wim eventually thought.

  “Did you bring back the blanket?” Marie asked timidly.

  “Outside in the hall.”

  It got colder in the room. And so empty . . .

  Why didn’t Wim say anything? Had he maybe noticed something after all? Should she go first and tell him—oh, it was too insignificant. But it had struck her a blow, this last thing, this revelation, this last, unheard conversation. Tomorrow, maybe, she would be able to tell him.

  “Let’s go to sleep, Marie,” Wim said. He started his nightly tour through the house, part of the regular duties of a proper man of the house before going to sleep: front door, door to the shed, back door, all closed, the gas in the kitchen turned off, wood chopped in the cellar for the next morning. In the last few months he had also gone upstairs to check that the windows were closed there too. You never knew . . . Today too he went upstairs. Actually it’s pointless, he said to himself.