Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson Page B

of the couch, he smokes this cigarette, pull by pull . . .
    When he has smoked it down to the end, he carries the ashtray with the stub to the garbage and empties it there. With his hand he waves away the faint smell of smoke in the room. No one needs to know . . .
    A secret! No one needs to know, Marie thought, and shut her eyes, half upright in her bed. A wistful, melancholy feeling rises up in her, the same as the previous night in his room. Poor Nico! A secret—what a horrific piece of theater—from them, the ones who were keeping him as a secret. But had it never occurred to them that he too might have something he didn’t share with them? Had they really forgotten? Were they without any secrets from him, for that matter? Sometimes they seemed to sense it, when they observed him without his realizing it, when he ate or sat there in silence and stared into space . . . Was it his race, the history of his people? Yes, that too, why deny it, but that was only part of it. For that was something they could understand to a certain extent, they could empathize and so share it with him somehow. Something different, foreign, something we ourselves are not, is relatively accessible to our understanding.But the decisive thing remains unexplained. The spark in him, the splinter of the great fire that burns in the world and that we call Life, mysterious, solitary, finding new form in every human being and revealing itself only in a fraction of a second, breaking through the fire wall of the body in an illuminated moment, and then a light, a sign of connection, of togetherness, but still solitary and indestructibly full of mystery.
    The cigarettes belonged to him alone. Everything else he had shared with them, or they with him, depending on how you looked at it. He had often given her flowers, through Wim since he couldn’t get them himself, and Wim got a little book as a present from him on his birthday. But the cigarettes—no, he couldn’t share those.
    What would Wim say? Would he understand, or would he be annoyed? He so craved a good cigarette.
    Marie threw herself back onto the pillow and pulled the covers up under her chin. Wim still lay there with the covers over his head, his breath coming deep, heavy, and even. The poor boy, the whole experience hit him too, harder than he let on. Sleep was his only escape, the only way he could be fresh for work again in the morning. The excitement of the past few days had taken a lot out of him.
    Nico was lying under a bench in the park. In just a few hours someone would find him. And then? Sometimes a quiet fear came over her, a fear that further complicationswere still to come. But she fought against it, she didn’t want this fear. Should she tell Wim about it at all? Maybe tomorrow?
    She dropped off to sleep. When she woke up again, she crept to the window and let a little air in through the blackout curtains. It was still night out. She lay down again but no longer felt tired. The experiences of last night were before her spirit again, but clearer, sharper, as though purified of all superficial thoughts and feelings through the fine-mesh sieve of sleep.
    She felt connected to the dead man in a way she had never managed with the living. Outside, a cock crowed in a yard that bordered the park.
    She would keep his secret, burn the cigarettes. No one else would ever smoke them!

X.
    The next morning.
    At first neither of them dared to look at each other.
    “Good morning, Marie.” —Slowly it changed.
    Then, when they sat down together as usual at the breakfast table, which held as always the deep soup plates, bread, butter, and marmalade, they would have gladly discussed the situation again, especially what the future had in store. For they had, each of them in private, the uncertain feeling that it wasn’t entirely played out yet. On the contrary. Something new could still follow, something they couldn’t yet guess.
    Even though they knew that they were both thinking the