Comedy in a Minor Key

by Hans Keilson

  “Yes, yes,” Wim said. “Ours sold perfume.”

  The doctor made a wry face.

  “A perfume salesman? Yes, well, we’ll all need a little prettying up after the war. It’s not the worst thing. Poor Nico!” His words sounded bitter, almost as if reproaching Nico for deserting them.

  Wim pressed his lips together and audibly expelled the air through his nose with a quick jerk of his throat. “Hmmph.” A bit embarrassed, they stared at the bed.

  Marie was reminded, by the fact that he had been lying there motionless the whole time in the same mute position, that he was dead. A dead man lay in her house, a house in which no new life had yet been born. Over and over again this thought came into her mind. The doctor started to pump the dynamo on his pocket flashlight with his thumb, so that a delicate whirring sound filled the death chamber. The stubby bulb’s bright light meandered across the unresponsive face and lifeless hands on the blanket and highlighted individual parts of the dead body more clearly.

  “How long was he here with you?”

  “Almost a year, he came in April.”

  “Such a long time? —And how was it? Was he difficult?”

  “Not at all,” Marie interjected. She followed the men’s conversation only insofar as it ran parallel with her own thoughts. “Not at all.”

  “I see. It isn’t always that way. Did you know him from before?”

  “No,” Wim responded.

  “Things happen sometimes, with these accidental combinations . . . We’re all only human, and it lasts so long.”

  “I know,” Wim answered calmly. “Not him. It went well. It’s such a shame, about Nico.”

  Silence.

  “Yes, well, he can’t stay here.” The doctor interrupted their silence and stepped decisively back from the bed into the middle of the room. The husband and wife followed him.

  “Of course not. But how—?” Marie asked, so soundlessly that no one could hear her.

  “Maybe someone could try to contact the police,” Wim said. He looked directly at the doctor. He had been thinking this for a long time.

  “The police, Wim?”

  “Yes—”

  He avoided looking at her. Thoughts whirled in his head like the airplanes arriving from unknown distances.

  “Wim!”

  “The police will get him in any case,” the doctor said airily, and he rubbed his eyelids with his right hand. “But you have to stay out of it. Then they can make their arrangements with a clear conscience.”

  “What arrangements, Doctor?”

  “Burying him, of course. —But now it’s still too bright. I’ll come back around ten. It’s lucky that it’s a new moon. I’ll work everything out with your husband.”

  Wim nodded. He had understood what the doctor meant by this talk of the new moon and it still being too bright outside. Of course, so that’s what you did when this happened. It wasn’t too bad. He’d be careful breaking it to Marie. She wouldn’t sleep a wink tonight. Still, what a strange thought, that while you are lying in your warm bed the other man, even if he’s dead—or rather, because he’s dead . . .

  Before the doctor left he went up to Marie, took her right hand in his hands, and said in a solemn voice, “There is no one here to offer condolences to. That’s often how it turns out. But still, it must be a loss for you. In fact, you probably have the most difficult burden—problem,” he corrected himself.

  Marie looked at him calmly. Her face was serious and she thought about what he had said. A problem, yes, but she had happily taken it upon herself. It seemed to her that she had learned something in the process.

  “But it’s not as dangerous as you think,” the doctor continued, because he had the impression that they were still a little frightened. “There are a lot of other things that could have happened. Never mind infectious diseases that we have to report—diphtheria, a child with polio. That is very, very unpleasant. But there are also children born in circumstances like this . . .”

  “That’s impossible,” Marie stammered. It was horrible to think of. Children? Did people have no sense of responsibility?

  “Really, it’s true,” the doctor confirmed, having guessed Marie’s thoughts. “I have personally brought quite a few into the world. Four little Jewish babies. Strong boys. They scream just like every child screams when it comes into the world. But that’s the danger! Someone could hear them! The neighbors! In childless marriages, after twelve, fourteen barren years, suddenly there are children born. Naturally they are sent off to other families.”

  Wim and Marie exchanged a glance and smiled. It might be serious, even slightly sad, but they had to laugh. What couldn’t you find in this world! But the doctor was right, children are born everywhere, in bomb shelters, during air raids, and often quicker than you might like. Everywhere, in the grip of death, life goes on too. And in terms of their situation here, it was better to have a dead man in the bed than a woman with a screaming newborn. He was right about that too.

  “I have to go now,” the doctor said. Wim walked him downstairs.

  When he came back upstairs, Marie was standing at the end of the bed by the dead man’s feet. He went over to her and together they looked at Nico in silence.

  “Wim, do you actually know how Jews bury their dead?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, they have rules and customs for everything, they must have some for when someone dies.” Behind her curiosity there was a burning pain that cried out for more consolation than it was possible to give.

  “Of course. I read something about it once.” He spoke quietly, whispering, as though it wasn’t proper to speak out loud, in front of a dead man, about the way you propose to bury him. Especially since he hadn’t expressed any preference himself. Wim considered for a moment, then said, “I think they wash him and put him in a burial cloth with no seams.”

  “Well, we could wash him too.”

  “Oh, Marie, let’s let it go. Nico didn’t follow the laws anymore. He won’t hold it against us.”

  “We don’t have a shroud, and I’m sure he didn’t have one for himself. Who goes into hiding with a shroud? Or should I look and see?”

  “And then they sit with him all night, say their prayers by candlelight—yes, I think they call it sitting shibbe or something like that.”

  “Hmm. Well, we can’t do any of that.”

  “Beforehand they lay him, when he’s died, on the ground, wrapped in a sheet.”

  “Maybe that, Wim?”

  “Yes, Marie, we’ll do that.”

  She took a step back. “Come, I’ll help.”

  “Not now. Let’s wait, the doctor is coming back around ten o’clock. He’ll help me.”

  “He’s coming again?”

  “It’s too hard to carry a dead body, you know.”

  “To carry?” She gestured down with her hand. “Here, on the floor?”

  He hesitated. “Not here, Marie.”

  He raised his hand and gestured in the direction of the window. “We, the doctor and I, will lay him on the ground—in the park. It’s a new moon. Under a bench. No one will see us.”

  “Wim.”

  A quiet crying rose within her and shook her body with delicate shakes. “No, oh no—yes—what else can we do? . . . Nico, Nico . . .” She held her hand over her eyes. Wim led her out of the room and down the stairs.

  III.

  They usually ate fifteen minutes after Wim came home from the office. He had a job as a bookkeeper in a machine factory. In winter, after the time change, he left his office around five o’clock, but either way, summer or winter, they always ate at quarter after six. Both of them, after rather easygoing childhoods, had grown accustomed to doing everything as precisely and punctually as possible. Especially Marie. It gave life, which after all had so many changes and surprises in store, especially in times of war and foreign occupation, a certain fixed form that you could cling to when there was otherwise no shore in sight.

&nb
sp; In March, when everything was back to normal again and Marie could breathe easy. Wim left the house at the usual time in the morning, and came home again at the usual time in the evening.

  One night in April, Wim said in passing during the meal: “So he’s coming today.”

  “That’s good,” Marie said, and kept eating. They had made all the necessary preparations for his arrival. But they were both still tense and easily excited.

  “A little more soup, Wim?”

  “There’s more? Sure. But shouldn’t we set aside a plate? From now on you’ll have to cook bigger portions. There won’t be any more leftovers.”

  “I’ll cook big enough portions,” Marie said as she handed him the soup, “that we can have hot leftovers the next day at lunch. There will be enough potatoes and porridge as long as there’s any at all.”

  “Do you think he’ll eat a lot?”

  “You usually get hungrier when you have nothing to do all day but sit and wait from one meal to the next.” She waited until he had finished his soup.

  “Can we keep eating from the soup plates?” Marie said. She stood up to get the vegetables and potatoes from the kitchen.

  “Yes, sure, you’ll have less to wash up.” She gathered up the spoons.

  “Just bring the pot,” he called after her.

  But she brought, as always, the dinner service with flowers around the edges, which included the deep plates. It was part of her dowry.

  “What is he ever going to do with his time?” Wim said. “It’s horrible, it’s like self-inflicted prison! Maybe he’ll study something.”

  “We go to the lending library too. And then there are our books. —But who knows if we could stand it,” Marie added.

  Wim could see that she was already completely used to the thought of it. He still thought back often to their first conversation about it, after Jop—an office colleague who, he assumed, often handled such things—had asked whether Wim ever thought about fulfilling his “patriotic duty” and . . . “Patriotic duty,” Jop had said, and the concept, which had never made the slightest impression on Wim before, much less been able to move him toward any action, sounded new and full of meaning, now that the Netherlands had been conquered and occupied. Jop knew the people he approached: with one he talked about “a purely humane act,” with another it was about “Christian charity for the persecuted,” and to a third he spoke of “patriotic duty.” This was how he achieved his goal, the same in each case.

  “I’ll talk to Marie, Jop. I’m not opposed to taking someone in. We have enough room.”

  “Almost everyone is doing it,” Jop said, to strengthen his resolve. He knew that it was up to the wives. They sat home all day with their guests and had to do most of the work. “A man or a woman, I have to know that too.”

  “Okay, Jop.”

  At first Marie hesitated. “Not because I have anything against Jews,” she had said. “But to involve yourself so intimately with a stranger’s fate, spend all that time under the same roof for who knows how long—you know that’s not how I do things.” She was speaking the truth. It corresponded to the shape of her body: medium height, thin, almost youthful, with something cold and dry about it. Only where she loved was there a resonance of deeper feelings, and then she could overcome all sorts of resistance. It was in her nature to make all her objections up front, at the start. This made her a bit slow to take action, but it saved her all sorts of reproaches and resentments after the fact.

  Wim was silent. He thought it was a good thing that she was reluctant. They had known each other for around seven years now—he was nineteen when they met and she was twenty-one—and they had been married for three years. She had her own view of things, which was entirely independent and often contradicted his, and she had expressed it in a calm, firm voice. He loved this about her.

  “Maybe I’m being selfish, but I don’t like this kind of thing. Besides, it’s too serious a decision to make lightly.”

  “Jop says it’s a patriotic duty.”

  She laughed. He had never spoken like that in his life. But when she saw that he meant it seriously, she stopped.

  Wim said: “It’s the only way we can fight back, the only way we can do anything at all to show that it isn’t all right. Civil disobedience.”

  She thought about the young men who had died in battle, about the five days of the invasion, about Rotterdam and much more. The decision slowly ripened inside her.

  “Obviously,” she replied, “a refugee like this is not a source of income, at least not for us.” She had heard that unbelievably high prices were often offered, and often demanded too.

  The next day, after she decided on her preconditions, she agreed. “A man of course. I’ll give him the front room upstairs. It’s roomy and bright, and if you have to spend the whole day in it . . . What do you think? . . . He doesn’t need to stare at the curtain all day. He will definitely have to stay away from the window, I mean . . . Well, we’ll see . . . And in the distance there’s the ocean, you can see it in the shape of the clouds and in the morning air, it’ll be some distraction . . . What do you think?”

  It sounded good to Wim.

  Jop brought the stranger at night, in the dark, a little before eleven. Marie let them in and Jop quickly said goodbye; he had to be home by eleven, because of the curfew. “Say hello to Wim, I’ll come by tomorrow and check in.”

  The stranger stood in the front hall. He was wearing his hat pulled far down over his face and had a medium-sized satchel in his left hand and a black leather briefcase under his arm. Marie opened the first door on the right, to the front room. All the lights were off. Through the open sliding door, the lights shone in from the back room, where Wim sat busy with some work at the table. Books and notebooks were scattered on the dark brown tablecloth. A teacup sat nearby. The thin, fragrant smoke of a little wood fire fed with peat hung in the room.

  When Marie had opened the door for him, he had mechanically, hesitantly walked through the half-dark front room. Marie shut the door behind him. When he saw Wim sitting there, he stopped in the frame of the sliding door, at the threshold to the back room. Only now did he seem to remember that he was inside. He slowly took off his hat.

  Wim had stood up and meticulously tightened the cap on his fountain pen, then put it in the upper left pocket of his vest. He saw how the stranger, with an almost unnoticeable motion of his head, had let his gaze stray a little to the right, to the stove. He thought he saw the man’s nostrils tighten and then relax again from breathing in the delicate wood- and peat smoke. He wore a winter coat and seemed to be hot from running through the city. There were beads of sweat on his forehead, and his face—dark-complexioned, with little wrinkles around the mouth, and eyes carved deep into his otherwise firm, clean-shaven skin—glittered in the light. His large, dark, somewhat melancholy eyes looked feverish and flickering. His hair was thick and smooth, low over his forehead. A Spanish type! Wim could see that the stranger was older than he was; around forty, he guessed.

  “Please come in,” Wim said. Nothing else occurred to him besides this everyday phrase. At the same time he invited the man to come closer with a nod of his head.

  The stranger stepped silently over the threshold. He carried his suitcase and briefcase as though he were used to keeping them with him. He had his hat in his left hand as well.

  Wim took a few steps toward him, stretched out his right hand, and said quietly, as was his habit, “Welcome.”

  The stranger gripped his hand. They stood close together, both about the same height. “Thank you,” the guest said.

  Later he let Marie take his coat and hat, so that she could hang them in the front hall, and let Wim set his suitcase and briefcase in a corner. But suddenly he said, in a bright voice, “Perhaps it’s better if the coat and hat stay in here for now. I’ll bring them along to my room later.” Marie turned around in the doorway and looked, embarrassed, at the men.

  “That is better,” Wim confirmed, and laughed a
friendly laugh at her. Turning back to the other man: “You’re right. We still have to learn how it’s done.” Now Marie laughed too. She put the man’s things on a chair and fetched some tea.

  The conversation was halting. Finally, the stranger, his eyes looking calmer and less feverish, began: “It all happened so fast, Jop had to leave right away.”

  So he called him “Jop” too. Wim made a mental note.

  “He had to get back home on time,” the other man went on.

  Wim gradually regained his usual composure. Even if he was the younger man here, he was still the host, and that brought with it various responsibilities. He felt that the other man had understood precisely the reasons for Wim’s initial discomfort and that he had made an effort to dispel it, even though he found himself in an even less comfortable situation. Wim offered him a cigarette and said, as he lit the match, “My wife and I are happy we can do something for you.”

  Marie nodded at his words and slowly exhaled the smoke of her cigarette through her nose. She too had fully recovered her poise. Their first encounter had been so confused—the stranger was right, everything happened so fast, Jop had to get home on time. They had needed to make their way slowly back into the trusted port of a safe, well-known conventionality.

  The stranger swept his hand over his hair. He could not yet believe he was safe here.

  “The conditions in which we find ourselves together here,” Wim started up again, “are not exactly of a sociable nature. The purpose of our being together isn’t either. We will go through it together, but still, I would like to know your name . . . You must know our names already, yes?”

  “In the dark I couldn’t read it,” the stranger answered, and he seemed a little embarrassed.

  They were shocked. “Jop didn’t tell you our names?” Wim said. What could that mean?

  “No—” he replied, “and it was better that way. Something could have happened on the way here, after all. It’s always better if you don’t know too much. You have to be careful to the end.”

  Here he paused for a moment, looked at Marie and Wim, and then said, hesitantly, “So I hope you will permit me to . . . ach, let’s use first names, you can call me Nico.”