Comedy in a Minor Key

VI

Sometimes he had moments, Hours of blind despair and dull hopelessness, when he hated them — them and the vase that stood downstairs in the front room, on a little table with a lace doily next to the bookcase. It was a Chinese vase, an acquisition of Wim’s. He had brought it home from an auction one day, as a present for Marie and, he added laughing, for himself.

It was about sixteen inches high, porcelain, hand-painted with lustrous blue and red flowers and figures. Despite its size and its double-curved form it looked charming and delicate. It was their quiet pride and joy. They never needed to point it out to anyone; whoever walked into the room noticed it right away; Nico too when he saw it for the first time. He admired it unreservedly. Wim stood nearby and laughed, bashful and a little mischievous.

“But yes, it’s a beautiful thing to have in your house…! How did you find it?” Wim told the story: “… and I’d never been to a real auction before. It was really exciting! I saw it standing there before the auction started, and I just bid along with everyone else. To tell you the truth I couldn’t afford it. It was like I was drunk.”

“Yes, yes, I know how that is.”

“You can’t always be reasonable, you know? Marie’s eyes almost popped out of her head at first. But she didn’t say anything. And now…! If we weren’t in such times, we would have bought some more. We have a couple of books about Far Eastern art too. Right there…,” and he pointed to the second shelf of the bookcase.

“But why not? If you have the money, now is the best time to invest in something of lasting value.”

Wim laughed. “Of course, but not vases. If something happens, they’re the first thing to break in half.”

“May I hold it for a moment?” Nico had asked.

“It’s not heavy at all, just a little slippery.”

And Nico had held it 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’t touch 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, how gratefully 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 — 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 live at… 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.