Comedy in a Minor Key

by Hans Keilson

But he did it anyway. You don’t unlearn an old, year-long habit as quickly as that.

  IX.

  “As long as it doesn’t rain!” Marie tossed and turned—as she had many times already—onto her right side, pulled up her knees, and listened into the night . . . As long as it doesn’t rain. He should at least be spared that.

  She could not get warm. Wim lay next to her in his bed, the blanket pulled up over his head, and he slept. No noise came from outside. Only the warm, muffled beating of his breath against the blanket, next to her, slow and heavy, as though he had to sleep against a certain resistance.

  The first night Nico was in the house, she had also not been able to sleep, more from fear and amazement: whether it would all turn out well, and that no one had discovered him yet. Back then at the beginning, everything in the house had seemed so different to her, every slight sound had suddenly taken on a new meaning through the secret that she was hiding under her roof.

  A secret! It was not only that they had sheltered him—he himself, his person, his life, constituted the secret. It was as though a no-man’s-land lay all around him, alien and impenetrable. It was impossible to bridge the gap. Even while he was alive, everything she heard him say, everything she saw—his voice, his movements—was like something seen from the opposite bank of a river while mist hung over the water and masked any clear view. It almost melted away into the impersonal, colorless swirls of fog. Now he was dead and they had managed to get him out of the house—but a secret had been left behind, as one last thing. At first it seemed to her that she, tears in her eyes and alone in his room, had discovered it, as though the fog had suddenly lifted and the other riverbank had come closer, right up next to her, so that she could see it precisely and know everything about it: its slope, its bushes and shrubs and hollows. Yet the more she looked, the more it rose like mist from the water, enveloping everything. Marie was frightened when she realized that a secret you discover by chance only conceals another, still greater secret behind it, which can never be discovered. And that every bit of knowledge, every revelation, is only like egg whites whisked until they’re sweet and mixed into the dough to break it up and release its flavor . . .

  She was itching to tell Wim about it; best would be now, while it was still close to her. When he woke up, she would start. Should she wake him up?

  Marie straightened up, dug her elbows into the soft pillow, and supported her head in her hands. Next to her was the hidden, muffled beating of a warm body. It was so cold tonight! She pulled the blankets up over her shoulders and back. Again she saw the picture before her eyes.

  After she had carefully shut the house door behind the two men, she had run quickly up to his room. She could still hear the footsteps hurriedly and unsteadily moving farther and farther away on the gravel. Then it was quiet. She looked around the room and began straightening up. Not so much out of fear that when they found him someone might come here, where he had hidden, nor from a desire to remove all his traces, as out of a secret wish to have him near her again. The men carried the body; she too could carry something—his things, what he had lived with.

  She had always taken care to keep his room so that, if necessary, just a quick tidying up would make it look uninhabited. His suits and coat stayed in Wim’s closet; his clothes, writing implements, papers, and toiletries remained concealed in the hiding place.

  Once, on a Sunday, the doorbell rang and an older man, a stranger, asked to speak to Wim. Marie let him into the front hall and asked, just in passing, what matter this might be concerning.

  “Are you the woman of the house?” the stranger replied, and he looked at Marie with what seemed to her a peculiar, rather pointed smile. It made her uneasy. When she said yes, he hesitated a moment before saying, “Well, I’d much rather discuss it with your husband, confidentially.” Confidentially! Marie was terribly afraid. This didn’t sound good.

  She called Wim and then hurried upstairs. “Nico, a strange man . . . Come on, disappear.” She helped him stuff his things into a small valise that stood prepared for cases like this, and opened the closet. The hiding place was behind it. They had come across it by accident.

  Between the two rooms on the second floor ran the stairs to the first floor. If you took out the side wall of the built-in closet in Nico’s room, on the side where the stairs were, you found an empty space roomy enough to hide someone. Wim, in his spare time, had cleanly sawed off the bottom half of the wooden wall, put in molding to conceal the signs of the sawing, and run the molding around the entire closet, halfway up, to give a uniform impression. On the bottom too, where the wall met the floor, he had added a baseboard for support. With one skillful hand movement, which Nico soon practiced and mastered, you could take out the wall, slip inside, and fasten the wall from the inside with bolts and crossbars while someone put the wall back in place from the outside. It was good work, well made, and they had all taken pleasure in it.

  The strange man stayed a bit longer than half an hour—he had come on someone’s recommendation and was looking for a place to house someone who had gone into hiding. Wim had to bring all his cleverness to bear, to decline in a circumspect way without letting it show that they already had someone: “It’s just that we’ve been married such a short time, you understand, and we’re much too careless and inexperienced with such things, especially my wife, no, no, and I’m gone all day too.” Even when someone came recommended, you had to be careful. It might be a provocateur trying to get into your confidence . . .

  —Well, Nico stayed the whole time like a scared little sheep in his pen and waited until they let him out again. Luckily such visits didn’t happen often.

  Marie pulled the sheet off the bed. By now they must be turning into the park. No, this was not the ending they expected. They had imagined it differently—not ending for them until it all ended. How, exactly? Maybe that she and Wim would one day appear upstairs and tell him: “Nico, we made it!”? Or in the middle of the night, the thunder of the artillery from the coast, the indescribable din of thousands of airplanes, bombs, and the delicate, rhythmical clattering of the machine guns? . . . And he, yes, what would he do? What would he have done . . . Cheer? Hug them? Marie! Wim! It’s happened, at last, too late but at last—at last! Or, in a weak voice, half questioning, as though he couldn’t quite believe it: “Really?” He would look at her hopelessly, his eyes filled with tears, as if he were in shock. “But Nico, aren’t you happy?” Yes, of course, but still, could you call this happiness? He had grown so tired from the long wait, from being shut away. His happiness too had grown so tired, so locked away . . . What would he actually do? She had often thought about it. But in truth it was impossible to imagine.

  She lifted out the wall and took the things from the hiding place: the little laundry bag, a few stockings, a folder with a pen, books. When she pulled out a few newspapers that he had saved, God knows why, a little packet fell to the floor. She bent down. What was that? It was a tiny little bundle of sealed yellow paper, half opened on one corner, lucky star printed in big black letters. A pinch of tobacco fell out and scattered on the floor. Cigarettes! American cigarettes! She smelled them. Delicate, spicy American tobacco, the kind she had smoked before the war and not since, not for years. How did he get a hold of this packet? From Coba? Or had he saved it as a kind of relic? Why? And hidden it from them here in the hiding place? It was still more than half full, he had smoked maybe six or seven. Smoked them alone! Wim too, he would have so loved to . . . But he smoked them alone!

  And suddenly she had understood, fully understood. She saw it in front of her. She felt an ache, a constriction in her throat, which had gone dry, and without realizing it tears came to her eyes. She sat down on the couch, the packet still in her hand. Smoked them alone! Smoked when he was alone—when he felt lonely—when he couldn’t go on . . . He hid it from them!

  She saw him lying here on the couch, staring at the blanket. His left arm curled under his head on the pillow, his right hand on his fo
rehead. Nothing about him moves. Only when he breathes, a quaking and trembling fractures the flow of air into countless little clipped puffs of breath . . . I can’t go on, I can’t! But no screams, no rage, no tears. He stretches out his arms alongside his body and leaves them lying there, two worn-out, rotten wooden hooks. His breath gets shallower; there is no more quaking. His heart in his chest beats slowly, slowly; there’s time, lots of time . . . Then he turns his head a little to the right and shuts his eyes. He is taken up into a kind of fog, his body gradually sucked into a whirlpool, limb by limb, casting up spray. But he doesn’t feel any bliss, any salvation, any relief from the approaching annihilation . . . can’t go on . . . can’t go on. He lies there like that for a long time. Then all at once he sees himself lying there, as if in a mirror. He is frightened. He is lying across from himself; he could stretch out his hand and touch his own body over there. But no, at the same time he is immeasurably far removed from himself. And this combination, near and at the same time separate, awakens a feeling of tension, of torment, that takes away all his senses. There is nothing around him. Only him, alone, cut off from everything that is usually his, everything that binds him as with fine, thin nerve fibers to life itself.

  Something in him arises, something in him has had an idea. Still numb, he slowly gets up and slips like a sleepwalker to the closet, opens up the hiding place, rummages around, and finds the little yellow packet. It is still bulging, still full. He pulls out a cigarette and puts the rest back into the hiding place.

  And then, on the edge of the couch, he smokes this cigarette, pull by pull . . .

  When he has smoked it down to the end, he carries the ashtray with the stub to the garbage and empties it there. With his hand he waves away the faint smell of smoke in the room. No one needs to know . . .

  A secret! No one needs to know, Marie thought, and shut her eyes, half upright in her bed. A wistful, melancholy feeling rises up in her, the same as the previous night in his room. Poor Nico! A secret—what a horrific piece of theater—from them, the ones who were keeping him as a secret. But had it never occurred to them that he too might have something he didn’t share with them? Had they really forgotten? Were they without any secrets from him, for that matter? Sometimes they seemed to sense it, when they observed him without his realizing it, when he ate or sat there in silence and stared into space . . . Was it his race, the history of his people? Yes, that too, why deny it, but that was only part of it. For that was something they could understand to a certain extent, they could empathize and so share it with him somehow. Something different, foreign, something we ourselves are not, is relatively accessible to our understanding. But the decisive thing remains unexplained. The spark in him, the splinter of the great fire that burns in the world and that we call Life, mysterious, solitary, finding new form in every human being and revealing itself only in a fraction of a second, breaking through the fire wall of the body in an illuminated moment, and then a light, a sign of connection, of togetherness, but still solitary and indestructibly full of mystery.

  The cigarettes belonged to him alone. Everything else he had shared with them, or they with him, depending on how you looked at it. He had often given her flowers, through Wim since he couldn’t get them himself, and Wim got a little book as a present from him on his birthday. But the cigarettes—no, he couldn’t share those.

  What would Wim say? Would he understand, or would he be annoyed? He so craved a good cigarette.

  Marie threw herself back onto the pillow and pulled the covers up under her chin. Wim still lay there with the covers over his head, his breath coming deep, heavy, and even. The poor boy, the whole experience hit him too, harder than he let on. Sleep was his only escape, the only way he could be fresh for work again in the morning. The excitement of the past few days had taken a lot out of him.

  Nico was lying under a bench in the park. In just a few hours someone would find him. And then? Sometimes a quiet fear came over her, a fear that further complications were still to come. But she fought against it, she didn’t want this fear. Should she tell Wim about it at all? Maybe tomorrow?

  She dropped off to sleep. When she woke up again, she crept to the window and let a little air in through the blackout curtains. It was still night out. She lay down again but no longer felt tired. The experiences of last night were before her spirit again, but clearer, sharper, as though purified of all superficial thoughts and feelings through the fine-mesh sieve of sleep.

  She felt connected to the dead man in a way she had never managed with the living. Outside, a cock crowed in a yard that bordered the park.

  She would keep his secret, burn the cigarettes. No one else would ever smoke them!

  X.

  The next morning.

  At first neither of them dared to look at each other.

  “Good morning, Marie.” —Slowly it changed.

  Then, when they sat down together as usual at the breakfast table, which held as always the deep soup plates, bread, butter, and marmalade, they would have gladly discussed the situation again, especially what the future had in store. For they had, each of them in private, the uncertain feeling that it wasn’t entirely played out yet. On the contrary. Something new could still follow, something they couldn’t yet guess.

  Even though they knew that they were both thinking the same thing, neither one dared to disturb the other’s inner silence. Marie had put the pot of porridge back on the warm stove and now they both sat bent over the steaming plates and stirred the hot porridge. Now and then Wim paused from spooning his food, turned around in his chair, and started moving a poker back and forth in the stove, stirring around in the flame.

  “Nice and warm,” he said, and he rubbed his hands together.

  “Do you want some more porridge?” Marie asked, and she stood up to take the pot from the stovetop.

  “Why?” Wim asked. He ordinarily ate only one plateful.

  “I had some extra milk,” she answered.

  “Ah, right.”

  She scooped some out for him and then took some more herself. Each of them ate one and a half portions.

  “Do you want to maybe lie down again for a while?” Wim said, sticking his napkin back into the napkin ring. She looked like she had had a terrible night’s sleep.

  “Me? Why?” She looked at him questioningly. Had he observed her in the night after all? “You should have another piece of bread,” she said. “You usually eat more anyway.” Every morning, after their porridge, they ate two pieces of buttered toast with marmalade or another kind of spread.

  “No thanks, I’ve had enough.” He stayed calmly sitting in his chair, to keep her company.

  “Then I’ll give it to you for the office,” she replied, and started cutting the bread . . . “You’re coming home for lunch?” Because it sometimes happened that he stayed in the factory and took his midday meal with him in the morning.

  “Of course—I’m coming home today . . .”

  Finally she got up the courage.

  “Do you think that we’ll hear what . . . happened soon?”

  “Definitely. Maybe as early as tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? So long?”

  Pause.

  She had put the last bite into her mouth, and as she put the cover on the butter dish and tightened the lid of the marmalade jar, tasks that seemed to require her whole attention, she got to the point: “Do you think there will be any complications?”

  “Complications?” He thought about it. “No, I’m sure there won’t be,” he replied after a while, totally calm and in a tone meant to indicate how slight he thought the possibility was.

  “But . . .”

  “But? Oh, I don’t think they’ll go door-to-door searching houses over this.”

  His head tilted a little to one side—he considered. They hadn’t, when you came right down to it, fully thought through all the consequences of the situation. They hadn’t, and the doctor hadn’t either. The only thought on their minds was to get the
dead body out of the house as quickly as possible.

  “But Wim!” Marie was slightly startled when he said “door-to-door.” Even though she had secretly considered the possibility herself, it gave her a little shock to hear the words spoken. She made an effort to keep her thoughts in check and not give free rein to another feeling rising within her, a feeling of anxiety and fear.

  He stood up. “If anything happens, you can reach me at the factory. I have to go now.”

  “See you later.” In a sudden burst she threw her arms around him and kissed him. And when he kissed her back, he felt all at once how well she was holding up, how well she had held up all year.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said tenderly, “everything will be fine.” At the moment when he said it, he believed it himself.

  At half past nine the milkman came. He rang twice, one ring right after the other. Marie had worked out this signal with him and also with a few other people; it was nicer to know in advance whether there would be a known face or an unknown face on the other side of the door, in these times . . .

  “Same as always,” Marie said, and she passed him the blue enamel pot. He filled it up.

  “They found a man here in the park this morning,” he said, giving her back the filled pot. The sturdy kid stood there in his wooden shoes, legs wide apart, and he shut the lid on the white-enameled, thick-necked milk canister.

  “So . . .” Marie replied. She couldn’t see his face. Her heart began to pound but she stayed standing calmly in the door. “Any yogurt today?”

  Without answering, he dragged the milk canister back to the street, lifted it onto his cart with one swing, and reappeared next to her with two little white bottles full of yogurt.

  “Thanks.”

  “A dead man—” he continued.

  “Here . . . in our park?” Marie asked, and she heard something else start to sound in her voice, a feeling of relief, of resolution . . . “Where did you hear that?” Did this question go too far? It suddenly struck her that he was offering up the same sensational piece of news from one house to the next, like a town crier, wherever his cart took him . . . They found a man here in the park this morning . . . A dead man! . . . Yes . . .