Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson

tell Wim about it; best would be now, while it was still close to her. When he woke up, she would start. Should she wake him up?
    Marie straightened up, dug her elbows into the soft pillow, and supported her head in her hands. Next to her was the hidden, muffled beating of a warm body. It was so cold tonight! She pulled the blankets up over her shoulders and back. Again she saw the picture before her eyes.
    After she had carefully shut the house door behind the two men, she had run quickly up to his room. She could still hear the footsteps hurriedly and unsteadily moving farther and farther away on the gravel. Then it was quiet. She looked around the room and began straightening up. Not so much out of fear that when they found him someone might come here, where he had hidden, nor from a desire to remove all his traces, as out of a secret wish to have him near her again. The men carried the body; she too could carry something—his things, what he had lived with.
    She had always taken care to keep his room so that, if necessary, just a quick tidying up would make it look uninhabited. His suits and coat stayed in Wim’s closet; his clothes, writing implements, papers, and toiletries remained concealed in the hiding place.
    Once, on a Sunday, the doorbell rang and an older man, a stranger, asked to speak to Wim. Marie let him into the front hall and asked, just in passing, what matter this might be concerning.
    “Are you the woman of the house?” the stranger replied, and he looked at Marie with what seemed to hera peculiar, rather pointed smile. It made her uneasy. When she said yes, he hesitated a moment before saying, “Well, I’d much rather discuss it with your husband, confidentially.” Confidentially! Marie was terribly afraid. This didn’t sound good.
    She called Wim and then hurried upstairs. “Nico, a strange man . . . Come on, disappear.” She helped him stuff his things into a small valise that stood prepared for cases like this, and opened the closet. The hiding place was behind it. They had come across it by accident.
    Between the two rooms on the second floor ran the stairs to the first floor. If you took out the side wall of the built-in closet in Nico’s room, on the side where the stairs were, you found an empty space roomy enough to hide someone. Wim, in his spare time, had cleanly sawed off the bottom half of the wooden wall, put in molding to conceal the signs of the sawing, and run the molding around the entire closet, halfway up, to give a uniform impression. On the bottom too, where the wall met the floor, he had added a baseboard for support. With one skillful hand movement, which Nico soon practiced and mastered, you could take out the wall, slip inside, and fasten the wall from the inside with bolts and crossbars while someone put the wall back in place from the outside. It was good work, well made, and they had all taken pleasure in it.
    The strange man stayed a bit longer than half an hour—he had come on someone’s recommendation and was looking for a place to house someone who had goneinto hiding. Wim had to bring all his cleverness to bear, to decline in a circumspect way without letting it show that they already had someone: “It’s just that we’ve been married such a short time, you understand, and we’re much too careless and inexperienced with such things, especially my wife, no, no, and I’m gone all day too.” Even when someone came recommended, you had to be careful. It might be a provocateur trying to get into your confidence . . .
    —Well, Nico stayed the whole time like a scared little sheep in his pen and waited until they let him out again. Luckily such visits didn’t happen often.
    Marie pulled the sheet off the bed. By now they must be turning into the park. No, this was not the ending they expected. They had imagined it differently—not ending for them until it all ended. How, exactly? Maybe that she and Wim would one day appear upstairs and tell him: