Free Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson

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 everydaythings 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