Free Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson Page B

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.
    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