Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson

carefully in both hands while he gently turned it all the way around and examined it, attentively and lovingly. It was, in fact, a magnificent specimen, one to be truly proud of.
    Then Wim had taken it back—“All right, give it here”—and put it down again on the small table, with one hand.
    But in his downcast hours of deep despondency, Nico could have hurled down the vase too, shattered it to pieces, if it were here in his room. Since he couldn’ttouch it, all that remained was to hate it. It became a symbol to him: he hated this symbol, and he hated the people who owned this symbol.
    Then his room was filled with suffering faces—contorted, disfigured, beaten to a pulp—whose features he eagerly studied to see if they weren’t perhaps known to him. He heard groaning, whimpering, sniveling, wailing, calling upon God, cursing God; saw men and women, very old and very young—they were endless, the images he saw and heard in these hours. He lay on the sofa, fully clothed, and in his dazed state he was as if lying in wait for new images that washed up out of his imagination and brought with them new agitations and new, more painful images.
    When he breathed in deep, he tasted gas. Gas! His room was full of gas! He closed his eyes and burrowed his head into the pillow. What did the others understand of all this? And if they did understand it—what did it mean to them? In their safe, protected, domestic life!—Safe? Protected? Since they had taken him in? No, no, he was being unfair. But their house, their home, their things—their world—how it all had attracted him and soothed him at first. And now: how vain, how inflated, how worthless! For he measured things now with a cosmic measure, which gripped him tight and shook him back and forth. What trust in each other? What danger? And what a gulf between people! Consolation! Consolation? . . . Was there any such thing?
    When he stood at the window behind the curtain and looked out—“outside” was a mosaic of countless little squares and rectangles—it was better, sometimes. But other times, often, he didn’t have the heart to stand up from the bed, to arise and venture the few steps to the window. He lay there as though in chains and brooded. Memories rose up inside him, and not only personal memories: history took shape, the past spoke the bloody language of fate. And horror, horror, overpowering, the way something is only when it rises up out of forgetting.
    When he came here, to this house, he would have happily taken a place on a pile of coal in a barn and been satisfied. Now he slept in a bed, ate at a table, was treated as a human being. But the longer it lasted, the greater his demands grew. Since he couldn’t demand anything of the outer world—what he did receive was freely offered, almost a gift—his demands turned inward and more and more excessive. But people were helping him, they were helping him, didn’t that mean anything? Yes, it meant a lot. And it was also nothing. He was turning into nothing. It was unbearable. It meant his annihilation, his human annihilation, even if it—maybe—saved his life. The little thorn that grows invisibly in anyone who lives on the help and pity of others grew to gigantic proportions, became a javelin lodged deep in his flesh and hurting terribly.
    How proudly they had given him this room, howgratefully he had received it. How imprisoned, abandoned, and wretched he had felt in it. The loneliness of loneliness. He had never liked to spend too much time at home, and now he had to. A spring arrived, a summer, an autumn . . . behind the curtains. The landscape, the sky, the distant sea, were not always a consolation, a balm to soothe the eye. Often, too often, they were a door that stayed closed.
    With his counterfeit papers he could risk being out on the street during new moons in fall and winter. He went alone. They had precisely calculated the days in advance on the calendar, together. “So, Nico, from