Free Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson Page A

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 carefullybetween 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.
    Silence. 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