Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson Page A

—— to —— you can go for a quiet little walk. No more than an hour, and not too far from the house. And don’t come back to the house too late, because of the neighbors.”
    “Yes, thank you, Wim.”
    They shared his happiness. “At least you can stretch your legs. You’ll still have to do without sunshine.”
    But he appeased them and said that even this little thing felt like a piece of good fortune.
    Good fortune!—And still the constant fear that a flashlight would suddenly come on in the darkness before him and a stern voice would ask, while the light blinded his face: “Aha! So, ah . . . Where do you live?” He doesn’t say anything.“Come on, tell me already.” He stays stubbornly silent. “You’ll tell me all right. Come with me.” And he knows what that means. He will confess everything, yes, he will say everything . . . I liveat . . . No, no, not that, that would be cowardice, villainy, they didn’t deserve that. Even if they killed him, tortured him to death, he would keep his mouth shut, despite, yes, despite all their torture and . . . Marie, Wim, you can count on me, they’ll get nothing out of me!
    When he stood up from the family table that evening, he walked into the front room and stood for a long time in front of the vase, a few steps away from it. Finally he went up to it and pensively smoothed out a little crease in the lace doily it stood on.

VII.
    Marie was still standing in the kitchen doing the laundry when Wim appeared at her side. He made a noticeable fuss busying himself about the stove and the stone kitchen counter, where pots and bowls were standing that he shoved back and forth as though he were looking for something. He didn’t find it, whatever it was. All the while he was sneaking a surreptitious look at Marie, who pulled a shirt out of the soapy water, looked at it, and then dunked it back in. No, she wasn’t crying anymore. She seemed calmer to him. Her face was still red but that could just as well be from the effort and the steam.
    “What are you looking for?” she asked, without looking up, and kept working. Laundry these days, when you couldn’t get any decent detergent anymore . . . !
    “Oh, never mind.”
    “Matches?”
    “Yes, I thought they were here—”
    “In the drawer on the right.” She turned her headwithout taking a break from her scrubbing. “No—there—yes. Aren’t there any in the room?”
    “I couldn’t find them there either,” Wim said. Then he saw them lying on the ledge by the stove, behind the photograph of his mother. He took the box and left again.
    She hadn’t asked, but the doctor must be coming back at any moment. Wim was growing impatient.
    It was Nico’s shirt that she had pushed back into the soapy water. She hadn’t waited until Coba came; she herself started washing whatever clothes of his she could find.
    He had brought only clothes with him; Marie had given him sheets and towels. She also darned his stockings and mended his suits. So much was falling apart, and he didn’t have much. Most of the wash, and Wim’s clothes, she took to a laundry.
    During his illness he had gone through especially many clothes; she had to change the sheets three times, plus the washcloths, the pajamas. At first it was just an ordinary cold—stuffy nose, scratchy throat, a hacking cough every now and then. As so often happens when the seasons are changing. Nico had managed a few jokes about it at first. “My right tonsil,” he said, and he seemed to swallow, his hand on his throat. “The right—you know, if you take the time to do it you can watch it yourself and see very nicely how it progresses. Tomorrow it’ll be in the left one too”—again his hand on his throat, a painful swallow—“I feel it today already.”
    Marie had laughed too, even though she could tell how dejected and defeated he felt.
    They treated it themselves, with aspirin, hot fluids, a scarf around his neck in the evenings. Wim had come home