Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson Page B

and told them how many people at his factory were out with the exact same symptoms. It is always a consolation to learn that something unpleasant is shared by everyone.
    One evening he suddenly had a fever. Aspirin again, a bigger dose. When his temperature reached 102 they decided to fetch their doctor. Dr. Nelis, an even younger man, energetic, unmarried, understood right away what the situation was, even before Wim had brought him all the way into his confidence. He had several such cases in his practice at the moment.
    “Doctor, there’s one more thing . . .”
    “The neighbors? I understand.”
    “It’s that my wife . . . and I . . . They can see, of course, that we’re still healthy and up and about . . .”
    “What do you mean?” the doctor replied. “There are invisible illnesses too, that you can have and still be up and about.”
    “But they know that we’ve never been sick. And so if you start coming more often now . . . all at once like this . . .” He looked at the floor.
    Silence. Dr. Nelis folded his hands and thought hard about it for a moment.
    Suddenly he looked up and said, “Do you have a record player?”
    “A record player?” Wim was absolutely staggered. What could a record player possibly have to do with it? “No!”
    “Too bad.”
    Silence again.
    “Maybe I could borrow one,” Wim responded, without knowing why exactly he should borrow a record player. Neither of them was particularly musical, Marie and him.
    “Really? Oh, never mind, we don’t need it,” the doctor said. But Wim noticed that the doctor was still thinking about this record player.
    Finally he worked up the courage and asked, “Why, Doctor? Why a record player?”
    Dr. Nelis smiled a little and looked fixedly at Wim.
    “Oh”—the words came out of his mouth slowly and with a slight drawl, as though he were making a little fun of himself—“well, I’m crazy about records, I have quite a collection myself. It’s my hobby. Everyone in town knows that about me—people know something like that about anyone who’s even a little in the public eye, after all. I could say that I was visiting you to listen to one of your records. A particular record I’ve been trying to chase down forever and that you happen to have, ‘L’invitation au Voyage’ for example, with words by Baudelaire, music by—Duparc? or Poulenc? . . . which one is it again?”
    “I have no idea,” Wim answered. “I don’t know it.”
    “Too bad,” the doctor said, “it’s heavenly—the vocals . . .
‘Luxe, calme, volupté.’
” He hummed the melody softly. “I wish I owned it.” He stared at the ceiling, lost in a reverie. “
Enfin
, I’ll come to give your wife a couple of calcium injections against fatigue and general listlessness. There’s a lot of that going around these days. Goodbye.”
    In the meantime, Marie had told Nico that Wim had gone for the doctor.
    “Isn’t it too risky—for you . . .” he had asked in a dull voice.
    “Don’t worry, Nico. Dr. Nelis is good, in every way. And you’re sick.”
    “Yes, I do feel sick,” he answered softly, and he leaned back deeper into the pillow and shut his eyes. He had always known that they wouldn’t leave him in the lurch here . . .
    “As long as it doesn’t turn into a double pneumonia,” Dr. Nelis said to Marie and Wim downstairs in the back room, after he had thoroughly examined the patient. “He isn’t strong.”
    Marie turned pale. “I do what I can, with the food situation . . .”
    “I know, it’s impossible to manage,” the doctor replied. “His inner defenses too are not that strong . . . at least that’s how it seems to me. And no wonder!” he added. “I gave him an injection. I’ll come again tonight.”
    After a week his condition was unchanged, despitethe new medicine that everyone was talking about at the time.
    Marie was gripped by an uneasiness she had never felt before. She suffered. It wasn’t so much the