The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays

They Are Dying Out

Characters

HERMANN QUITT

HANS, his confidant

FRANZ KILB, minority stockholder

QUITT’S WIFE

A large room. The afternoon sun is shining in from one side. The distant silhouette of a city, as though it were seen through a huge window, is visible in the background. (The background might also be formed by a backdrop, similar to a movie screen, with the silhouette of the city vaguely outlined against it.)

QUITT, wearing a sweat suit, is working out on a punching bag, belaboring it with his fists, feet, and knees. HANS, his confidant, wearing tails, stands next to him with a tray and a bottle of mineral water, watching. QUITT takes a sip from the bottle, pours some on his head, and sits down on a stool.

QUITT

I feel sad today.

HANS

So?

QUITT

I saw my wife in a dressing gown and her lacquered toes and suddenly I felt lonely. It was such a no-nonsense loneliness that I have no trouble speaking about it now. It relieved me, I crumbled, melted away in it. The loneliness was objective, a quality of the world, not something of myself. Everything stood with its back to me, in gentle harmony with itself. While I was taking a shit I heard the sounds I was making as if they came from a stranger in the next cubicle. When I took the bus to the office—

HANS

So as to maintain contact with the people and to study their needs. For the purpose of R and D?

QUITT

— the sad curve which the bus described at one point at a wide traffic circle cut like a yearning dream deep into my heart.

HANS

The world’s sorrow

Cut Mr. Quitt’s feelings

To the marrow.

Hold on to your senses, Mr. Quitt. Someone as wealthy as you can’t afford these moods. A businessman who talks like that, even if he really feels like that, is only giving a campaign speech. Your feelings are a luxury and are useless. They might be useful to those who could live according to them. Mr. Quitt: for example, why don’t you make me a gift of the sorrows from your leisure time to reflect about my work. Or—

QUITT

Or?

HANS

Or become an artist. You’re already supporting violin recitals; you even condescended to collect money in public for the acquisition of a painting by the National Gallery. The wealth of feelings that is yours as of any given date this month is not only useful but is even essential for an artist. Why don’t you paint the curve, the curve of yearning which your bus described, on canvas? Why don’t you sell your experience as a painting?

QUITT

(Stands up.) Hans, you’re playing your daily role as if you knew it by rote. More realistically, please! More lovingly! Grander!

HANS

And the way Mr. Quitt just stepped out of his role — was that pure make-believe too?

QUITT

Let’s not start splitting hairs. I admit: the salesgirl in the aforementioned bus eating French fries that smelled of rancid oil ruined my feelings — well, I would have loved to have slapped her face. On the other hand: shortly afterwards I met a black on the street; he was completely absorbed in the photos he’d just picked up from the drugstore, grinning to himself, swept away in remembrance, so that I suddenly remembered along with him, I felt solidarity with him. You’re laughing. But there are moments when one’s consciousness, too, takes a great leap forward.

HANS

But brutal reality

In no time destroys

That sense of solidarity.

However, I am laughing because you told me many times how you like to remember the time when you lived for days on end in Paris on nothing but French fries and ketchup.

QUITT

I had guests when I was telling that story. And in company, I sometimes also mention “the wood anemones and the hazelnut bushes from the springtime of my youth.”

HANS

Does the addition of these artistic elements facilitate negotiations?

QUITT

Yes: by serving as an allegory for what is being left unsaid. The wood anemones beneath the hazelnut bushes then signify something altogether different. Only those who speak know that. The poetic element is for us a manifestation of the historic element, even if it is only a convention. Without poetry we would be ashamed of our deals, would feel like primordial man. By the way, just who exactly is coming today?

HANS

Harald von Wullnow

Karl-Heinz Lutz

Berthold Koerber-Kent

Paula Tax

all of them businessmen and friends of Quitt.

QUITT

I still have to change. If my wife comes, tell her to take care of the guests — then we can be sure that she’ll go “bargain hunting” instead of flushing the toilet the whole time. Incidentally, I feel genuinely sad. Almost a comfortable feeling. (Exit.)

HANS

How easily Mr. Quitt talks about himself! You have to envy him his sadness. He becomes talkative then, like someone who’s being filmed. In any event, time passes more quickly with a sad Quitt, because when he feels good he is distant, unapproachable, rubs his hands together briskly, hops up and down once, that’s his Rumpelstiltskin act. (He sits down on the stool.) And what about me? What was I allowed to feel this morning? Isn’t it true that you can tell more stories about yourself when you’ve just woken up than at any other time? Thus: the sun rose and shone into my open mouth. I hadn’t had any dreams. I even find it repulsive the way people purse their mouth when they say “dream.” When I brushed my teeth my gums bled. I would have liked to do it. But there was nothing doing. I: made a list of the meat to be ordered. Who am I, where did I come from, where am I going? Me … Yes, me, me! Always me. Why not someone else? (He reflects and shakes his head.) I have to try it when I’m with people. (He gets up. MINORITY STOCKHOLDER KILB appears in the background.) I can’t remember anything personal about myself. The last time anyone talked about me was when I had to learn the catechism. “Your humble servant” of “Your Grace.” Once I had a thought but I forgot it at once. I’m trying to remember it even now. So I never learned to think. But I have no personal needs. Still, I can indulge in a few gestures. (He raises his fist but pulls it down again at once with the other hand. Now he notices KILB.) Who are you, where did you come from, and so forth?

KILB

My name is Franz Kilb. (HANS laughs.) Don’t you like the name?

HANS

It’s something else. I was talking to myself just now — nuently almost. We don’t have anything against names here. And what are you?

KILB

A minority stockholder.

HANS

The minority stockholder, perhaps?

KILB

Yes, the minority stockholder, Franz Kilb, the terror of the boards of directors, the clown of the stockholders’ meetings, the tick in the navel of the economy with the nuisance value of 100—it’s me, perking up again. (HANS steps forward and puts one fist in front of KILB’s face while showing him out with the other hand.) Are you serious?

HANS

(Steps back and drops his arms.) I’d like to be. But I’m only serious when Mr. Quitt is serious. Nonetheless: it is my honor — scram! (KILB sits down on the stool.) So now you’re going to tell us the story of your life, is that it?

KILB

I own one share of every major corporation in the country. I travel from one stockholders’ meeting to the next and spend the nights in my sleeping bag. I go by bike — see, look at the trouser clips. I’m a bachelor in the prime of life, my reflexes function perfectly. (He strikes his kneecap and his foot hits HANS.) This is my Boy Scout knife; during the Second World War I passed my lifeguard test, I can pull you out of the water with my teeth. There are people who hold me in high esteem, but I don’t put my name on any political endorsements. I once appeared on What’s My Line? I said I was self-employed, no one guessed what I did. At stockholders’ meetings I sit with my rucksack and keep my hand up all the time. Stockholders’ meetings where the board ignores someone who asks for the floor are null and void. How quiet it is here. Can you hear how quietly I am speaking? My last mistress called me demonic, the press (He quickly proffers a few newspaper clippings.) calls me a gadfly. I am quicker than you think. (He has tripped up HANS, who has fallen on his knees.) I live from my dividends and am a free person, in every respect. My motto is: “Anyone who’s for me gets nothing from me; anyone against me will get to know me.” That’s a warning for you.

(QUITT returns. KILB gets up at once, makes a bow, and steps into the background.)

QUITT

The ubiquitous Mr. Kilb. (To HANS) Stop dusting your tails. As I was looking in the mirror while changing, it struck me as ridiculous that I was growing hair. These insensitive, indifferent threads. I was sitting on the bed, my head in my hands. After some time, I thought: If I keep holding my head like that, all my thoughts will cease. Besides, I really moved myself when I and my sadness regarded the blanket that I had thrown back in the morning. I will prove to you that my feelings are useful.

HANS

Watch out, if you say it once more, you’ll suddenly even believe it. But seriously, I’ve never heard of a mad businessman. Only the other-directed find themselves ominous. But you’re incapable of being at odds with the world. And if you are, you manage to make a profit at it.

QUITT

You’re becoming schematic, Hans.

HANS

Because I’m a compulsive talker.

KILB

Ask him about his parents. His father was an itinerant actor. His mother made dolls which she couldn’t sell. Both of them failed to return from a trip around the world. They’re supposed to have jumped into a volcano. He’s their only child.

QUITT

(To HANS) I’m not sick. Let’s talk about something more harmless.

(Pause.)

KILB

For example, the immortality of the soul?

(Pause.)

QUITT

The reason I’m not sick is because I, Hermann Quitt, can be just the way I feel. And I’d like to be the way I feel. I feel like the blues, Hans. (Pause.) In any event, sometimes I go somewhere and I think I’ve come in through the wrong door. Another second and they’ll ask me who I am. Or I suddenly stand on an incline in my empty office, see the pencil roll down from the desk top and the papers slide off. Even when I come in here, I often become afraid that I’ve intruded. Frequently when I look at a familiar object I think: Where’s the trick? People I’ve known for ages I suddenly call by their last name. That’s not just an old dream. But I wanted to talk about something else. (Pause. KILB raises his hand. QUITI has suddenly butted his head against the punching bag.) What’s still possible? What’s there left for me to do? Recently I drove through a suburban street where I used to walk every day. Suddenly I saw an old board for posters. In those days I used to look it over and read everything on it. Now the board was nearly empty, only one poster left, an ad for a pondered milk that’s long off the market. (He raises his arms.) As I drove slowly past, the posters of all the bygone chocolates, toothpastes, and elections passed before my mind’s eye, and in this gentle moment of recollection I was overcome by a profound sense of history.

KILB and HANS

(Simultaneously) And then you palled it up with your chauffeur?

(Pause. Honking offstage.)

QUITT

That’s Lutz. He also honks that way at night when he comes home. It’s a signal for his wife to turn on the microwave oven. Made in Japan. Go help him with his coat.

(HANS exits.)

KILB

(Steps forward.) How does that story about your parents go?

QUITT

It’s not idiotic enough. I once dreamed I was losing my hair. Whereupon someone told me that I was afraid of becoming impotent. But perhaps it only meant that I was afraid of losing my hair.

KILB

But why are you afraid of losing your hair? What does that mean? Besides, I caught sight of you recently. You were sitting on a bench by the river, rather absentmindedly engrossed in nature.

QUITT

Absentmindedly?

KILB

You hadn’t even wiped the pigeon shit off the bench. Besides, experience tells me that the contemplation of nature is the first sign of a waning sense of reality. And your eyelids scarcely blinked, like a child’s.

QUITT

Oh, go on, go on. It’s beautiful to hear a story about oneself.

KILB

I went to have lunch. Steak and French fries. After all, I exist too.

QUITT

Kilb, I’ve admired you for a long time. I like your ruthlessness. That time when you brought an effigy of me to the stockholders’ meeting and hung it on the lectern! And had yourself carried bodily out of the hall! I envy you too. Next to you I feel constricted, caught inside my skin, and notice how limited I am. I can tell you this now because it’s just the two of us.

(KILB draws QUITT forward by both ears and smacks a kiss on his lips. QUITT gives him a kick.)

KILB

So as to re-establish the previous state of affairs. (He retreats.)

(Simultaneously HANS leads LUTZ, VON WULLNOW, and KOERBER-KENT into the room. KOERBER-KENT, a businessmanpriest, represents a Catholic-owned company; he is dressed in a suit, but wears the collar of his profession.)

LUTZ

(To his colleagues) As I said, we weren’t the first ones. We just observed them in the beginning, let them overextend themselves; then we got the green light from our overseas affiliates, tackled them, and down they went. He of course tried to bluff us, but we were on to him long ago. We let him twist in the wind a while longer and then we bagged him.

(They laugh, each in his own way.)

VON WULLNOW

(To QUITT) Quite something, that bike out there leaning against your fence. My father once gave me one almost like it, together with my first pair of knickers. They don’t do work like that any more nowadays. Instead of selling you a bike, they dress it up like a machine, with speedometer and horn. And a machine of course is allowed to wear out more quickly than a simple bike. It is also characteristic of machines that they become obsolete. A bike wouldn’t. Do you ride it to work? (QUITT points to KILB.) I wondered straight off why it was so dirty.

LUTZ

I’ll take his arms. Who’ll take the legs?

QUITT

And if we trip, the dragon seed falls out of his mouth. And the new Adam leaps to his feet.

KOERBER-KENT

He doesn’t bother me. I find him entertaining. He reminds me of some dark urge inside myself. Besides, he doesn’t really mean it. He can’t help it, that’s all. Ever since we had a chat, just the two of us, I believe him.

LUTZ

It’s easy to believe someone if it’s just the two of you. I believe anyone if it’s just the two of us. But I get nothing out of it. That’s why I try not to be alone with anyone. It falsifies the facts.

VON WULLNOW

He has no sense of honor, that s.o.b. He reminds me of an old nag we used to have at home. He pissed every time he stepped from his stall out on the pavement. It made such a wonderful splashing sound. He moved through the world with his joint dangling. And look how bowlegged he is. And the part in the middle of his hair — which isn’t really centered. The threadbare fly, the pointy-toed shoes, that’s no way to live!

KOERBER-KENT

Von Wullnow, you’re wasting your time. There’s no insulting him. Your elaborate insults only increase his self-esteem. Let’s sit down and begin. I have to prepare a sermon today.

LUTZ

What are you going to preach on?

KOERBER-KENT

About the fact that death makes all men equal. Even us.

VON WULLNOW

(Indicating KILB.) He’d like that. But now — should he hear everything?

LUTZ

But we’re not going to say anything that no one besides us should hear, are we?

(Pause. The businessmen laugh. KILB is playing with his tongue in his mouth. HANS leaves. The businessmen sit down on a set of matching chairs and sofa.)

VON WULLNOW

Are you standing comfortably, Kilb? We’re only human, after all. (The businessmen laugh again. QUITT’S WIFE appears. She looks at all of them, then walks diagonally through the room and disappears. To KOERBER-KENT) Do you as a priest also employ female help in your enterprises?

KOERBER-KENT

How do you mean?

VON WULLNOW

I was just thinking about the fact that you aren’t married, neither happily nor at all.

KOERBER-KENT

No, we can’t marry.

VON WULLNOW

I didn’t mean it that way.

QUITT

I don’t understand your allusions.

VON WULLNOW

But you understand that they are allusions?

LUTZ

(Distracting them.) Of course, women are cheaper. But you have to be careful. Every month a few of them pull a fast one on us.

KOERBER-KENT

By pilfering inventory?

LUTZ

No, by becoming pregnant. Scarcely have they started work when they turn up with child — not out of passion, mind you, but out of cold calculation; and we have to pay the maternity benefits.

VON WULLNOW

One shouldn’t always be talking about the good old days, but things were different in the past. You didn’t even need to talk about the good old days then. Everyone was one big happy family in my grandfather’s shop. They didn’t work for my father, they worked for the shop, and that also meant for themselves — at least that’s the feeling you got, and that’s what mattered. Anyway, our system is the only one in which it is possible to work for oneself. It’s incredible how strong my sense of solidarity was with my workers. It cut through all class differences and thresholds of natural feeling when they made their work easier for themselves by singing songs or urging each other on during particularly difficult jobs, with original chants which, incidentally, should be collected before they are forgotten altogether. Today they get the work over and done with, mutely and indifferently, that’s all. Their thoughts are somewhere else, nothing creative any more, no imagination. I must say I admire our imports from the South. They’re alive during their work, are happy to be together. Work is still part of their life for them. Moreover, in the good old days the workers used to take pride in their products; when they went for their Sunday walks they proudly pointed out to their children anything in the vicinity made by their own hands. Nowadays, most children haven’t the faintest idea what their parents do at work.

KILB

Why, do you want them to point out the bolt in the car which their father personally screwed in, or the stick of margarine Mother wrapped herself?

VON WULLNOW

I don’t have my cane with me. I refuse to touch you with my bare hands.

KOERBER-KENT

I recently had my library repapered. Of course, I helped with the work, and then I noticed the lack of enthusiasm with which the paper hangers were working, despite the fact that I was paying better than minimum wages. Why is it, I asked them, that you can’t develop any passion for your work even though you are paid for it? The good souls didn’t have any answer to that one.

VON WULLNOW

Typical.

(KILB clipping his fingernails in the meantime.)

KOERBER-KENT

They only think of the money. They’ve got nothing in their minds except bread and broads, as I always put it. Instead of enrolling in evening courses or absorbing our cultural heritage, they spend their wages on refrigerators, crystal, and knickknacks. Since they no longer have any respect for the public good — not to use a religious word in this circle — they have become possessed by the devil of personal happiness, as I sometimes say jokingly. And yet there’s no way for them to be personally happy without considering the public good. You’re scarcely born and already you’re pushing into the revolving door of the here and now and can’t push your way back out, I always say. The paper wraps the stone, consumption cracks the character.

VON WULLNOW

A story. No sermon without a little story, right? I know my rhetoric. Which, incidentally, is another art that has gone to the dogs among us … I was walking through the supermarket.

QUITT

You in a supermarket?

VON WULLNOW

Mine, of course. But I wanted to tell a story.

QUITT

Von Wullnow, the supermarket baron, that’s news.

VON WULLNOW

I had to invest, taxes forced us to. I don’t have to explain that to you. And besides, a big chain is just the right market for some of our products. That way we have our own outlets and don’t need to discount to the retailers.

QUITT

“Harald Count von Wullnow Supermarkets.”

VON WULLNOW

We called them Miller-Markets. Anyway, when I went to inspect one of them, I couldn’t help noticing a woman who made herself conspicuous by standing around a long time with an empty shopping cart. I watched her and wondered to myself, because, aside from the furtive glances she was casting about, she seemed almost ladylike. Suddenly she came up to me and said softly, Do you think they still have the giant-size detergent on sale that was advertised last week? Too bad, I thought afterward. She was just my shirt size, I liked her layout. But to lose one’s dignity over a consumer article like that! I felt quite ashamed for the person.

(KILB has placed his hands underneath his armpits and is producing farting noises.)

LUTZ

All I have to say against the consumers is that they aren’t informed. Why don’t they read the business sections in their papers which publicize the Good Housekeeping tests? Why don’t they join the consumer councils? No wonder they can’t tell the products apart. Did you ever watch the faces of housewives during a sale? A mass of mindless, dehumanized, panic-stricken grimaces that don’t even perceive each other any more, staring hypnotically at objects. No logic, no brains, nothing but the seething, stinking subconscious. A happening at the zoo, gentlemen. No awareness, no life, no feeling for quality. I know whereof I speak.

KILB

(Interrupts them.) Fire!

QUITT

(Ignores him.) And whereof are you speaking?

LUTZ

You know very well. We stopped production just now. Our quality product had no chance against your mass-produced one. Your brand is a household name, even our packaging, a three-dimensional picture on a hexagonal cover, was too revolutionary. Consumers are conservative, their curiosity about progress is fly-by-night. That was our first fire — I mean fiasco.

(Looks at KILB.)

QUITT

When your product came on the market, I immediately put ours on the steal-me list.

KOERBER-KENT

Please explain.

QUITT

The steal-me list is a full-page ad which we publish once a week in the major newspapers. It lists the ten products of ours that are shoplifted with the greatest frequency. Simultaneously we send this list as posters to the trade. There they construct a kind of altar display of the listed objects and the poster with the legend SHOPLIFTERS’ HIT PARADE is hung above it. This boosts sales. I immediately put my product at the top of the list and left it there, until Lutz gave up. I must say I’ve grown fond of it in the meantime and look at it in its plain square package with genuine affection. Still, I’m going to stop production on it.

LUTZ

What do you mean?

QUITT

It was a losing proposition for a long time. I just didn’t want you to get a swelled head.

VON WULLNOW

Marvelous, Quitt! That’s the old school spirit, but I can see now how important it is that we reach an agreement in time.

QUITT

Otherwise why would you be here?

VON WULLNOW

Businessmen are people who get things moving, as Schumpeter says. Let’s oil the machinery of the world.

KILB

Someone’s coming.

VON WULLNOW

(Doesn’t hear him.) This is an important day. For the first time we want to give up our atomization. We’ve been lonely long enough. We planned in loneliness, in sad isolation we watched the market, helplessly each of us set his price by himself, hoping for the best. Despising everything that was alien, each of us on his little island watched the other’s advertising campaigns. We did not recognize our mutual needs, were even proud of our individualism. That has to change; we can’t go on like this.

(PAULA TAX hurriedly enters.)

QUITT

I was just thinking of you, Paula.

PAULA

And?

QUITT

Nothing bad.

VON WULLNOW

Have a seat. (To the others) I always find it embarrassing to say to a woman, Sit down. (To PAULA) All of us were thinking of you. Even the Vicar-General, I think?

KOERBER-KENT

(Jokingly) Now I know why I felt the whole time as if a door had been left open somewhere.

KILB

Your signet ring is tarnished, Monsignore.

KOERBER-KENT

Continue, my friend. (KILB remains silent.) He’s never got more than one sentence in him. The habit of quick interjections has ruined him.

(PAULA has sat down. She is still wearing riding clothes. QUITT’S WIFE comes in again. She pretends she is looking for something. PAULA loosens her scarf and shakes her hair. QUITT’S WIFE stomps her feet. As she walks on, the heel of her shoe gets caught in a crack in the floor. She hops backward, slips back into the shoe, and tries to walk out with measured steps. KILB barks after her and she disappears with a scream.)

QUITT

Perhaps the reason for the nausea is that only a minute ago you could have held an entirely different opinion of the matter, and in that case the story would have taken an entirely different turn.

PAULA

You look at me as if I should ask, What does this mean?

QUITT

Please remind me later that I must still explain something to you.

PAULA

When?

QUITT

Later.

LUTZ

I don’t want to be pushy. There’s a lot at stake today. I wouldn’t have been able to fall asleep last night without my autogenic training. I usually think of the ocean when that happens, but even that sparkled for a long time like freshly mashed spinach from my new freezer package, and the moon above had been crossed out with a felt pen and a smaller one circled in beside it.

VON WULLNOW

All right, let’s get down to business. I assume, if not our conversation, then what we mean by it is ears only. In any event, you have my word of honor. (He takes a look around.) The Vicar-General swears on this, doesn’t he? Lutz promises, or no? And Quitt? Nods. Mrs. Tax’s thoughts are still nudging her horse with her thighs. And our guest of honor? (He nods briefly toward KILB.)

QUITT

Hans.

(HANS appears at once, frisks KILB, shakes his head—“no microphone”—and withdraws again. KILB thereupon takes his stool and sits down with the others, assumes the pose of a kibitzer.)

VON WULLNOW

We’re no sharks. But we’ve learned that free enterprise is a dog-eat-dog business. Public opinion regards us as monsters belching cigar smoke. And in the often so poetically quoted moments of those overly long cross-country trips we see ourselves like that: we’ve become what once we didn’t want to become at any price. Don’t shake your head, Vicar-General. You know that’s not the way I mean it. No, we aren’t just the bad guys in a game: we really are bad. Even as a gourmet, my face has slowly but surely become less and less soulful — although for a long time I hoped for the opposite. Just take a look at your colleagues business-lunching in the three-star restaurants, Lutz: their jowls register a lifelong sellout. A lifelong circus, not just twice a year like the housewives. Still, it is premature undialectical impressionism, as Mrs. Tax would surely say, trying to dump on us. After all, we didn’t become monsters because we relished it. My primal experience is the thought: There’s no such thing as a human being who becomes inhuman of his own accord. That’s what I tell myself whenever I have to put myself together again after having done something I actually abhor in my heart of hearts.

QUITT

What you’re trying to say is that it’s futile to try to enlarge the market any further by means of price wars.

LUTZ

(Glances at KILB.) Not like that. Everyone should be able to translate it into his own terms.

QUITT

Competition is a game. Fighting is childish. Together we can underbid the small fry until they long to live from dividends. Not force, but the gentle law of displacement. When I was a child I would sometimes quietly sit down on something that someone else wanted, and absentmindedly whistle a song to myself.

KOERBER-KENT

You’re not at confession here, Quitt.

QUITT

To the point: first of all: there are too many products, the market has become opaque. Who is producing too much? One of us? Perish the thought. Who then? They, of course. We’re going to make the market transparent again. Second: now there are no longer too many products but too many units of the same product. The refrigeration plants are bursting with butter, I read at breakfast today. Is our supply too large? No, demand is too low, and that’s the catch we live off of. Third of all: is demand too low because prices are too high? Of course. And prices are too high because wages are too high, right? So we are going to have to pay lower wages. But how? By having the work done more cheaply somewhere else. Say, “Mauritius represents an excellent labor market. The plantations have accustomed the population to hard work for generations. The nimble Asiatic fingers have become skilled and are a proven value.” Therefore, we will be able to claim that our merchandise is a bigger bargain. That’s the biggest drawing card. Besides, imagine that all goods will bear the legend: “Made in Mauritius.” I remember the yearning such labels used to instill in me as a child. Why shouldn’t they exert the same effect on our beloved consumers? In any event, demand will rise and we will match up our prices again. Fourth: from time to time we take a walk through the forest by ourselves so as to feel like human beings. Fifth: (To VON WULLNOW) All this time I’ve felt the irresistible urge to wipe off your wet mouth. (He wipes off VON WULLNOW’S mouth with a handkerchief. To KILB) Repeat what I’ve said just now.

(Pause.)

KILB

(Moves his lips, falters, tries again, shakes his head. He hops on his stool toward QUITT.) Anyway, it sounded logical. As logical as this here. (He tugs at both his ears and his tongue sticks out of his mouth, grabs his chin, and the tongue slips back inside. The businessmen meanwhile have exchanged significant glances.)

LUTZ

So we’re celebrating already?

QUITT

I’m not finished yet.

KOERBER-KENT

What were you playing just now? It was just a game, wasn’t it? Because in reality you are—

QUITT

(Interrupts him.) Yes, but only in reality. (To VON WULLNOW) And you are speechless?

VON WULLNOW

I’m just getting used to you again. Perhaps you’re just one of those people who like to squeeze other people’s pimples.

QUITT

(Strikes his forehead histrionically.) True, I was carried away by something. But now I’m normal again.

VON WULLNOW

It passed so quickly I’ve already forgotten it. I was brushed by a bat. Did something happen? Besides, you haven’t finished yet.

QUITT

What is important is that from now on none of us does anything without the other. When I buy raw materials without informing you of my source, that’s treason. When Lutz brings a new product on the market to corner a share of the turf, that’s treason. If the Vicar-General pays his female labor a lower scale than we do, because they are devout farm girls, and depresses prices, that’s treason. If you, Paula, let your workers share in the profits and have to raise prices all by yourself, that’s treason. (To VON WULLNOW) That’s the way you want it, isn’t it?

VON WULLNOW

Mrs. Tax would probably pose the counterquestion: But what if I let them share because I find it reasonable — say, to increase production?

QUITT

(To PAULA, as if she had answered for herself) It’s not treason as long as you don’t raise your prices without first consulting us. And as long as you and I have the same habits, you can’t betray me. And now the champagne, Hans.

(A cork pops backstage. HANS appears at once, carrying a tray with champagne glasses and a bottle which is still smoking. The ceremony of pouring the champagne. QUITT points ironically to the quality of the champagne and glasses, for example: “Dom Perignon 1935, Biedermeier glasses, handblown, notice the irregularities in the glass.” The group rises to its feet, clinks glasses, drinks quietly, looking into each other’s eyes. KILB has not gotten up. While the others are drinking he briefly laughs a few times without the others paying him any heed. He pulls out his knife, turns it back and forth, and lets it fall mumblety-peg fashion to the floor. They look at him without interest. He puts the knife away and plays a little on his harmonica. HANS has already left with the tray. KILB gets up and spits at the feet of each person, one after the other. In front of PAULA he uses his hand to pull out his chin, simultaneously sticking out his behind. The rest continue to regard him benignly. Suddenly he picks up LUTZ and the priest, who don’t object, one after the other, and puts them down somewhere else. He crisscrosses the stage. In passing, he kicks them lightly on the backs of their knees so that their legs give a little, except for the last one. He offers PAULA his thigh, Harpo Marx fashion, which she holds and then lets drop again; he makes an exception of QUITT, only casting sidelong glances at him. Now he has also begun to speak.)

KILB

And I? Is it my job to take care of the entertainment? Am I the critter whose ears are allowed to hear everything? Or the poodle in front of whom you lie down naked in bed? I can drag you across your beautiful lawns with my teeth. I’ll stuff the gaps in your beautiful whole sentences with pus. I’ll cram your spray-deodorized private parts into Baggies. You singe the fluff off slaughtered chickens with a candle. In Switzerland they say “chicken skin” instead of “goose bumps.” Enjoy! Enjoy! I always speak this calmly, dear lady. Here, you’ve dropped your Charmin. (He pulls out a strip of toilet paper and places it over her arm; she smiles, unimpressed.) If you ever catch fire it will be me who wraps you in blankets until you choke to death. And when you all freeze to death I’ll sit beside you cracking my knuckles. Diabolical, don’t you agree? (More and more embarrassed) Let yourselves be conjured up out of your personal hedgerows, you, the bewitched of the business world, a free man stands before you, a model, a picture-book figure. (He slaps his hands together, slaps his thighs and the soles of his shoes like a folk dancer, only more slowly and awkwardly.) Let’s swing a little! Action! Lights! A little circus atmosphere! Not just words against which the brain is defenseless anyway! Conserve your vocal chords! More body language! (He picks up a champagne glass and lets it drop somewhat helplessly, makes a vain reflex movement to catch it, which he tries to overplay.) And don’t stand around like a bunch of stiffs! Anyway, far too statuesque! Move. You will be recognized by your movements. Let’s celebrate. (He dances PAULA a few steps farther across the stage, then stops in front of her. He starts unbuttoning her blouse … He encourages himself by beating his fists together and blowing into the hollow of his hands. In between he sticks his hands into his armpits as if they were freezing. No one stops him. Sidelong glances at QUITT. QUITT watches him attentively as well as remotely, almost impatiently. KILB tugs the blouse out of the riding britches, somewhat indecisively. PAULA merely smiles. He steps back as if he were giving up, performs another pathetic slapping gesture without really slapping his hands together. Suddenly QUITT leaps forward, seizes KILB’S hand, and wants to use it to tear off PAULA’S blouse himself. KILB resists. QUITI“ S WIFE enters, watches with interest. QUITT lets go of KILB and tears off the blouse himself. PAULA crosses her arms in front of her breasts without undue hurry. QUITT’S WIFE leaves. QUITT places another champagne glass in KILB’S hand, simultaneously takes the other glasses into his fist, and smashes them, one after the other, on the floor, repeating KILB’S words—”Enjoy! enjoy!“—while doing so … nudges him in the side until KILB, too, drops his glass, somewhat indecisively. QUITT walks from one person to the other and spits into each face; lifts up a splinter of glass and attacks KILB with it, throws the splinter away, and puts KILB into a headlock; leads him back and forth like this and butts his head against the others. In the headlock, trying to free himself) You misunderstood me, Quitt. There’s no method to your madness. It is unaesthetic, vulgar, formless. But worst of all, it is unmusical, has neither melody nor rhythm. That wasn’t how we planned it. Don’t you understand a joke? Can’t you distinguish between ritual and reality any more? Know your limits, Quitt.

QUITT

(While pushing him into a chair and dragging him offstage on it) Until now you have lived off the fact that I have my limits, you phony. Now show me my limits, you model of the independent life. (Far upstage he tips him out of sight and comes back.)

(PAULA walks off with measured steps. HANS reappears with a dustpan and whisk broom. The others are cleaning themselves. Everyone begins to smile. QUITT does not smile. HANS sweeps the splinters together. PAULA returns dressed and smiles also, with closed lips.)

VON WULLNOW

I believe he’s finally learned his lesson.

KOERBER-KENT

He’ll never learn anything, He’s got no memory. The jack-in-the-box merely uses the floor to propel himself. He doesn’t forget because he doesn’t remember anything. The horsefly lands on the very spot it’s just been shooed away from. He doesn’t think backward and forward like us who have a sense of history — as Mrs. Tax might say — he only has a good nose. I would call him a mere animal, an involuntary, fidgeting animal. The sparrows in the field, not by living, but by being lived, are the divine principle. I can see him now on his bicycle animalistically rushing down the tree-lined avenues.

QUITT

Don’t always look at me when you speak; I can’t listen to you that way.

VON WULLNOW

It’s a pity that there are no more tree-lined avenues. How sweet, for instance, the memory of the manor house at dawn — the house at the vanishing point of the two rows of chestnut trees, the windows reflecting darkly, only the dormers of the servants’ quarters already lighted up; a hedgehog rustles in the dry leaves at our feet, the special stagnant air of that time of day when the sick go into themselves and die willingly, and a chestnut suddenly thuds down and bursts on the gun on our shoulder while we have turned around for one last look at our parents’ house before we stalk cross-country to our hunting ground. Yes, a delicate being, our minority stockholder, as delicate as a thief when it comes to opening a drawer, as delicate as a murderer when it comes to handling a knife.

LUTZ

Von Wullnow, your language is so elevated it makes me hesitate to tell my joke now.

VON WULLNOW

I order you to. You’ve been looking all this time as if you had something to get off your chest.

LUTZ

Two people love each other. They make love so rapidly, the way you sometimes devour a slice of bread with honey on it. When they are finished — (Glances at PAULA.) Oh, pardon me.

VON WULLNOW

Mrs. Tax isn’t listening anyway. And besides, she’s above that sort of thing. She’d probably consider our dirty jokes as proof of our commercialized sexuality, wouldn’t you? Go on.

LUTZ

— the man gets up at once. Oh, says the woman, you’ve scarcely finished and you’re already leaving? And that’s supposed to be love? Look, the man replies, I counted to ten, didn’t I?

(There’s either brief laughter or there isn’t. VON WULLNOW is already in the process of departing with LUTZ and KOERBERKENT — only HANS, who is still sweeping up broken glass, giggles, kneeling on the floor. The gentlemen turn around toward him; he gets up and proceeds out in front of them, giggling.)

VON WULLNOW

Quitt, we trust you as you trust us. Forget your superannuated sensitivity. Sensitive for me is a word I only associate with condoms.

QUITT

(To PAULA) Aren’t you leaving?

PAULA

I was to remind you that you still wanted to explain something to me.

QUITT

I merely wished you would stay, now you can go. (Pause. PAULA sits down again. Pause.) I noticed how I happened to think of you disgustingly by chance. One minute before and all I could have attached to you was your name. Suddenly there was something conspicuous about you. I wanted to get up and grab you between the legs.

PAULA

Are you speaking about me or about a thing?

QUITT

(Laughs briefly. Pause.) Just now I almost said: About you, you thing. Something seems to want to slip out of me today, something I’m afraid of but which still tantalizes me. You know the stories about laughing at funerals. Once I sat opposite a woman I didn’t know. We looked into each other’s eyes until I felt hot. Suddenly she stuck out her tongue at me, not just mockingly, a little between her lips, but all the way to the root, with the whole face a gruesome grimace — as though she wanted to stick herself out at me. Ever since then I’ve felt like doing something like that myself. Usually I manage to do it only in my head, for just a moment. It starts with my wanting to undo someone’s shoelaces who’s walking by or pulling a hair out of his nose, and stops with the urge to unzip my fly in company.

PAULA

Shouldn’t we talk about our arrangement instead?

QUITT

But I’m finally beginning to enjoy talking. I am speaking now. Before, my lips just moved. I had to strain my muscles to enunciate properly. My whole chin ached, the cheeks became numb. Now I know what I am saying.

PAULA

Are you Catholic?

QUITT

Why! You’re actually listening to me!

PAULA

Because you’re talking about yourself like the deputy of universal truth. What you experience personally you want to experience for all of us. The blood you sweat in private you bring as a sacrifice to us, the impenitent ones. Your ego wants to be more than itself, your sentimentality appeals to my inability to feel, your urge to confess merely has the effect of demonstrating to me that I’m still unawakened. You behave as though your time had finally come. Actually, your time as Quitt who suffers his life in exemplary bourgeois fashion has long since passed. Your suffering is over. The fact that you insist so much on yourself makes you suspect. You lack a sense of history, you’re much too much of an example of Western civilization for me.

QUITT

But even if it is for the last time, I’d like to be at the center of things, just by myself. Otherwise I would feel written off once and for all, like a machine, wouldn’t be able to utter a single word meant for someone else. Once when I stepped out of the house the children yelled after me: I know who you are! I know who you are! Tauntingly, as though the fact that I could be identified was something bad. Besides, it seemed inappropriate to me just now to tell something like a story after you thought about me in such abstract terms.

(Pause.)

PAULA

Sit down. (QUITT does so. Pause. They look at each other. PAULA looks away.) Yes, my outfit bothers me too now. And I can’t think of anything I’d like to say to you. But I would like to say something to you. (Pause.) It’s pleasant to sit here in the twilight. I wasn’t thinking of anything just now. That was nice too. (Pause.) Do you like evaporated milk? I suddenly feel like having evaporated milk. (Pause. She speaks as if she wants to avoid speaking of something else.) My workers should never see me like this. Normally, I buy my clothes ready-to-wear, I even feel good in them. By the way, it occurred to me before that we should also plan our advertising together from now on. I would like to go on the basis that we don’t generate any artificial needs but only awaken the natural ones of which people aren’t conscious yet. Most people don’t even know their needs. Advertising, insofar as it describes a product, is only another word for consciousness-raising. What we should avoid is advertising which is inappropriate to its product because it creates misconceptions among the consumers about the nature of the product. That would be the very deception or simulation of something that isn’t there which we are always accused of. But our products exist and their very existence makes them rational — otherwise we, as rational beings, would not have had them produced in a rational manner from rational raw materials by rational people. And if our advertisements don’t lie but only provide an exact description of our rational products, then the advertising will be just as rational. Take a look at the socialist states. They have no irrational products — and still they advertise, because the rational needs advertising most of all. That’s what transmits the idea of what is rational. For me advertising is the only materialistic poetry. As an anthropomorphic system it endears us to the objects from which we have been alienated by ideology. It animates the world of goods and humanizes them, so that we can feel at home with them. I can’t tell you how deeply touched I am when I read on an old fire wall in giant letters PEPSI–COLA HITS THE SPOT. When I see a detergent container in front of a rising sun, it blows my mind. Today, twenty years later, they simply gave the same product the sappy designation IT’S THE PEPSI GENERATION, and my mind goes blank. When I’m feeling unproductive, I look at ads in magazines, it makes my mood seem ridiculous; so advertising is also a form of consolation, but of a concrete, rational kind, as distinct from bourgeois obscurantist poetry. And think with how much more dignity and how much more progressively the copywriters can work than the poets! While the poets in their isolation conjure up something vague, the copywriters, working as an efficient team, describe the definite. Indeed, they are the only truly creative ones — they think something they had no idea about beforehand. Incidentally, we noticed recently what was wrong with the slogan for one of our products. It contained the phrase “a level tablespoon” and the product didn’t sell. Finally it occurred to one member of the team to substitute the word “heaping” for small. Instead of “level tablespoon” we used “a heaping teaspoon,” and suddenly sales increased by almost 100 percent.

(HANS enters during the last sentence and turns on the light.)

QUITT

(To HANS) We don’t need any light.

(HANS turns off the light and leaves.)

PAULA

I can hear my wristwatch ticking.

QUITT

You should be able to afford a noiseless watch. But that probably is an heirloom, not just any old watch. So please try to remember. (Pause.) Or don’t try to remember — as you please.

PAULA

If you tell a child who is singing to itself: Very nice, go on singing! it will stop singing. But if you say: Stop! it will go on singing.

QUITT

There are women who—

PAULA

Stop it, nothing can come of that.

QUITT

There are women you can’t touch because if you did you would be desecrating an heirloom. A necklace, then, has a story which makes every caress of the neck a mere afterthought. Everything about the woman is so complete that every experience you share with her only reminds her of something in her past. Whatever you tell her, she immediately interrupts you with this introverted nodding of the head. She is untouchable, inside and out. She is so full of memories. The most mysterious, delicately stuttering impulse immediately evokes a doppelganger who has already made the impulse crystal-clear to the woman. You begin to understand sex killers: only the slitting open of the belly provides him with the attention every individual deserves. You can’t run your hands through a hooker’s hair — so that her hairdo won’t get messed up.

PAULA

It’s just as you say it is. But why is it like that? Who is responsible for that? And who makes sure that it stays that way? And who profits by it? Instead of naming the causes, you make fun of their appearances. And precisely that happens to be one of the causes. To describe pure appearances is a man’s kind of joke. Von Wullnow would say that I would say: undialectical impressionism.

QUITT

And you: because you’ve got so many causes on your mind, you forget to bother with the appearances. Instead of appearances, you see nothing but causes. And when you eliminate the causes so as to change the appearances, they have already changed so that you have to eliminate entirely different causes. And if you look at me now, please become aware of me for once and not my causes.

PAULA

You have a beautiful tie pin. Your shirt is so new that one can still see the pinholes. Your grinding jaws manifest will power. Your delicate hands might be those of a pianist. One of your earlobes has dried shaving cream on it. And while you behave animalistically, the creases on your pants give you away.

(QUITT gets up and pulls PAULA toward him. She wraps her arms exaggeratedly around him and also puts one leg around his hip, throws back her head, and sighs derisively. He lets go of her at once and walks away. She walks backward. They pursue each other alternately for a short time. Then they walk around by themselves, finally stop.)

QUITT

Please stop being conceptual. I once gave someone a present, some chocolate for his child. The chocolate was wrapped in small squares, each one with a picture of a different fairy-tale motif. Oh, the father said disappointedly, it’s not a puzzle! And then he said: That’s it, deprivation of the imagination by the chocolate manufacturers. When he said that, I suddenly stood very distantly beside him and felt radically alone. I looked down at the floor in utter loneliness. So, please stop.

PAULA

But you were the one who started it.

QUITT

Do you see that nail sticking out of the wall there?

PAULA

Yes.

QUITT

It’s long, isn’t it?

PAULA

Very long.

QUITT

And how thick is your head?

(Pause.)

PAULA

Perhaps I should turn on the light after all.

(Pause.)

QUITT

Today the doorbell rang. Because I was curious who it was, I went to open the door myself. It was only the eggman, whom the so-called estate sends around from house to house once a week. He always comes at the same time. I’d forgotten. “Can’t you be someone else for once?” I wanted to scream.

(Pause.)

PAULA

And what if I were someone else?

(QUITT takes one step toward her. She does not step back.)

QUITT

And recently I saw a silent film. No music had been dubbed in, so it was almost completely quiet in the theater. Only now and then when something funny happened a few scattered children laughed and stopped again at once. Suddenly I had a sense of death. The feeling was so strong that I yanked my legs far apart and spread my fingers. What social conditions can you use to explain that? Does this syndrome already bear someone’s name? If so, whose?

PAULA

I can’t explain it to you by social conditions. It is unconditionally yours and can’t be emulated. As a social factor it’s not worth mentioning. The masses have other worries.

QUITT

But which will pass.

PAULA

Yes, because the conditions will pass too.

QUITT

And then the masses will perhaps have my worries, which do not pass.

(WIFE appears with a magazine in her hand.)

WIFE

Austrian dramatist, dead, seven letters?

QUITT

Nestroy.

WIFE

No.

QUITT

Across or down?

WIFE

Across.

QUITT

Raimund.

WIFE

Of course. (Exits.)

(Pause.)

PAULA

The watch — it isn’t an heirloom. (Pause.) Is that still too conceptual?

QUITT

Now I won’t tell you what I’m thinking.

PAULA

And what are you thinking?

QUITT

It’s kind of you to ask. But why don’t you ask me of your own volition? I yearn to be questioned by you. Do I have to bang my head against the floor to make you ask about me? (He throws himself on the floor and actually bangs his head a few times against it, then stands up at once and steps up to PAULA.) I would like to snap at the world now and swallow it, that’s how inaccessible everything seems to me. And I too am inaccessible, I twist away from everything. Every event I could possibly experience slowly but surely transforms itself back into lifeless nature, where I no longer play a role. I can stand before it as I do before you and I am back in prehistory without human beings. I imagine the ocean, the fire-spewing volcanoes, the primordial mountains on the horizon, but the conception has nothing to do with me. I don’t even appear dimly within it as a premonition. When I look at you now, I see you only as you are, and as you are entirely without me, but not as you were or could be with me; that is inhuman.

PAULA

Excuse me, but I can’t concentrate any longer. (She takes a step, so that their bodies touch.) So what were you thinking?

(Pause.)

QUITT

You know it anyway.

PAULA

Perhaps. But I’d like to hear you say it.

QUITT

Now I feel strong enough not to tell you any more.

PAULA

(Steps back.) We are alone.

QUITT

I am alone and you are alone, not we. I would not want to transpose the “we” of our deal to you and me at this moment.

PAULA

Isn’t this moment, too, part of our deal?

QUITT

Don’t you get out of your box even for a second?

PAULA

Your impatience is what keeps me boxed in.

QUITT

(Flings her to the floor. She lies there, supports herself on one elbow. Then she gets up.) How gracefully you get back on your feet!

PAULA

I’d like to leave now.

QUITT

Hans!

(HANS appears with a long fur coat over his arm and first walks in the wrong direction.)

QUITT

Over here. Where did you think you were?

HANS

(Helps PAULA into her coat.) Always with you, Mr. Quitt. It was bright in the room I just left.

PAULA

Hans, you’re good at helping people into their coats.

HANS

Mrs. Quitt has the same one.

PAULA

(To QUITT) I would like to tell you something about myself, Quitt, just like this, without being asked to. And note that, for the first time, I’m speaking about myself. After your wife left I slowly exhaled. And while exhaling … please don’t laugh.

QUITT

I’m not laughing.

PAULA

While exhaling … please don’t laugh.

QUITT

Another second and I will.

PAULA

(Loudly) As I exhaled, love set in. (She leaves.)

QUITT

(To HANS) Don’t say anything.

HANS

I’m not saying anything.

(QUITT’S WIFE enters, turns on mild indirect lighting, and sits down. She gives HANS a signal to leave.)

QUITT

Nobody’s cleaned up. (HANS proceeds to dust. To his WIFE) And what did you do all day?

WIFE

You saw what I did: I went in and out and back and forth.

QUITT

And what was it like in town?

WIFE

People respected me.

(HANS leaves.)

QUITT

Was there anything new?

WIFE

I stole this blouse.

QUITT

The main thing is not to get caught. Anything else?

WIFE

I stopped here and there and then walked on. Why don’t you sit down too?

QUITT

You don’t look well.

(Pause.)

WIFE

Yes, but at least it’s already evening. (She gets up and walks out quickly.)

(QUITT sits down even before she’s gone. He remains alone for a while. The silhouette of the city is completely illuminated in the meantime. HANS returns with a book. QUITT looks up.)

HANS

It’s me, still.

QUITT

Tell me, Hans, what’s your life actually like?

(HANS sits down.)

HANS

I knew what you would say the moment you opened your mouth. But I couldn’t interrupt you at that point. So let’s forget it.

(Pause.)

QUITT

Stop looking me in the eye.

HANS

I do that whenever I’m at a loss how to please you.

QUITT

Tell me about yourself.

HANS

What do you mean?

QUITT

Don’t you understand, I am curious to know your story. How do you behave when you would like to speak but can only scream? Don’t you sometimes get so tired that you can only imagine everything flat on the ground? Doesn’t it also sometimes happen to you that when you think of your relationship to others you only see heavy wet rags lying around everywhere? Now tell me about yourself.

HANS

You mention me.

Yourself you mean.

(Pause.)

QUITT

Why does my itty-bitty mind go yakking so affectedly into the big wide world? And can’t help itself? (Screams) And doesn’t want it any differently? I am important. I am important. I am important. Incidentally, why don’t you look me in the eye now?

HANS

Because there’s nothing new to see there.

(Pause.)

QUITT

Please read to me.

HANS

(Sits down and reads.) “‘I shall have to let you go after all,’ his uncle said one day at the end of the midday meal, just as a magnificent thunderstorm was breaking, sending the rustling rain like diamond missiles down into the lake, so that it twitched and seethed and heaved. Victor made no reply whatever but listened for what else would come. ‘Everything is futile in the end,’ his uncle started up again in a slow drawn-out voice, ‘it’s futile, youth and old age don’t belong together. The years that could have been used have passed now, they are lowering down on the other side of the mountains and no power on earth can drag them back to the near side where cold shadows are already falling.’ Victor could not have been more awed. The venerable old man happened to be sitting in such a way that the lightning flashes illuminated his face, and sometimes, in the dusky room, it seemed as though fire flowed through the man’s gray hair and light trickled across his weatherbeaten face. ‘Oh, Victor, do you know life? Do you know that thing that people call old age?’—‘How could I, Uncle, as I am still so young?’—‘True, you don’t know it, and there’s no way you could. Life is boundless as long as you are still young. You always think you still have a long stretch ahead of you, that you’ve traveled only a short way. That’s why you put so much off to the next day, why you put this and that aside, to tackle it later on. But then when you want to tackle it, it is too late and you notice that you are old. That is why life is a limitless field if you look at it from the beginning, and is scarcely two paces long when you regard it from the end. It is a sparkling thing, something so beautiful that you feel like plunging into it, and you feel that it would have to last forever — and old age is a moth darting in the dusk, fluttering ominously about our ears. That is why you would like to stretch out your hands so as not to have to leave, because you have missed so much. When an aged man stands on a mountain of achievements, what good is it to him? I have done much, all sorts of things, and have nothing from it. Everything turns to dust in a moment if you haven’t built an existence that outlasts your coffin. The man who has sons, nephews, and grandsons around him in his old age will often become a thousand years old. Then the same many-sided life persists even when he is gone, life continues just the same; yes, you don’t even notice that one small segment of this life veered off to the side and never came back any more. With my death everything that I myself have been will disappear.’ After these words the old man stopped speaking. He folded his napkin together, as was his custom, rolled it into a cylinder, and shoved it into the silver ring which he kept for the purpose. Then he assembled the various bottles into a certain order, put the cheese and sweetmeats on their plates, and plunged the glass bells over them. Yet of all these objects he took none away from the table, as was his usual habit, but left them standing there and sat before them. Meanwhile, the thunderstorm had passed, with softer flashes and a muted thundering it moved down the far slope of the craggy eastern mountain range, and the sun fought its way back out, gradually filling the room with a lovely fire. At daybreak the next morning Victor took his walking stick into his hand and slung one strap of his satchel over his arm. The spitz, who understood everything, bounded with joy. Breakfast was consumed amid much small talk. ‘I’ll take you as far as the gate,’ the uncle said when Victor had gotten up, had hitched his satchel on his shoulder, and was about to take his leave. The old man had gone into the adjacent room and must have triggered a spring or set off some kind of mechanical contraption; for at that moment Victor heard the rattling of the gate and saw, through the window, how that gate opened slowly by itself. ‘Well,’ said his uncle while walking out, ‘everything is ready,’ Victor reached for his walking stick and placed his cap on his head.

The uncle walked down the stairs with him and across the open space in the garden as far as the gate. Neither said a word during their walk. At the gate the uncle stopped. Victor looked at him for a while. Tears shimmered in his bright-colored eyes, testifying to a profound emotion — then he suddenly bent down and vehemently kissed the wrinkled hand. The old man emitted a dull uncanny sound like a sob — and pushed the youth out by the gate. In two hours the latter had reached Attmaning, and as he stepped out from the dark trees toward the town he happened to hear its bells tolling, and never has a sound sounded so sweet to him as this tolling which fell so endearingly upon his ears, a sound he had not heard for so long. The Innkeeper’s Alley was filled with the beautiful brown animals of the mountains which the cattle dealers were driving down toward the lowland, and the inn’s guest room was full of people since it was market day. It seemed to Victor as if he had been dreaming for a long time and had only now returned to the world. Now that he was back out in the fields of the people, on their highways, part of their merry doings, now that the expanse of gentle rolling hills stretched out wide and endless before him, and the mountains which he had left hovered behind as a blue wreath; now his heart came apart in this great circumambient view and outraced him far, far beyond the distant, scarcely visible line of the horizon …”

QUITT

How nice that this armchair has a headrest. (Pause.) How much time has passed since then! In those days, in the nineteenth century, even if you didn’t have some feeling for the world, there at least existed a memory of a universal feeling, and a yearning. That is why you could replay the feeling and replay it for the others as in this story. And because you could replay the feeling as seriously and patiently and conscientiously as a restorer — the German poet Adalbert Stifter after all was a restorer — that feeling was really produced, perhaps.

In any event, people believed that what was being played there existed, or at least that it was possible. All I actually do is quote; everything that is meant to be serious immediately becomes a joke with me, genuine signs of life of my own slip out of me purely by accident, and they exist only at the moment when they slip out. Afterward then they are — well — where you once used to see the whole, I see nothing but particulars now. Hey, you with your ingrown earlobes! it suddenly slips out of me, and instead of speaking with someone whom I notice, I step on his heels so that his shoe comes off. I would so like to be full of pathos! Von Wullnow, with a couple of women bathing in the nude at sunrise, bawled out nothing but old college songs in the water — that’s what’s left of him. What slips out of me is only the raw sewage of previous centuries. I lead a businessman’s life as camouflage. I go to the telephone as soon as it rings. I talk faster with the car door open behind me. We fix our prices and faithfully stick to our agreements. Suddenly it occurs to me that I am playing something that doesn’t even exist, and that’s the difference. That’s the despair of it! Do you know what I’m going to do? I won’t stick to our arrangement. I’m going to ruin their prices and them with it. I’m going to employ my old-fashioned sense of self as a means of production. I haven’t had anything of myself yet, Hans. And they are going to cool their hot little heads with their clammy hands, and their heads will grow cold as well. It will be a tragedy. A tragedy of business life, and I will be the survivor. And the investment in the business will be me, just me alone. I will slip out of myself and the raw sewage will sweep them away. There will be lightning and thunder, and the idea will become flesh.

(There is thunder.)

HANS

This time

I can find no rhyme.

QUITT

Good night.

(HANS leaves. QUITT drums his fists on his chest and emits Tarzan-like screams. Pause. His WIFE comes in and stops in front of him.)

WIFE

I have something else to say to you.

QUITT

Don’t speak to me. I want to get out of myself now. I am now myself and as such I am on speaking terms only with myself.

WIFE

But I would like to say something to you. Please.

(Pause.)

QUITT

(Suddenly very tender) Then tell me. (He takes her around the waist, she moves in his embrace.) Tell me.

WIFE

I … where it … because … hm (She clears her throat.) … and you … isn’t it … (She laughs indecisively.) … this and that … and autumn … like a stone … that roaring … the Ammonites … and the mud on the soles of the shoes … (She puts her hand to her face, and the stage becomes dark.)

END ACT ONE

The silhouette of the city. The punching bag has been replaced by a huge balloon which, almost imperceptibly, is shrinking. A large, slowly melting block of ice with a spot shining on it has replaced the matching sofa and armchairs, a glass trough with dough rising in it somewhere else, also with a spot on it. A piano. A large boulder in the background with phrases slowly and constantly appearing and fading on it: OUR GREATEST SIN — THE IMPATIENCE OF CONCEPTS — THE WORST IS OVER — THE LAST HOPE. Next to them are children’s drawings. The usual stage lighting (which remains the same throughout).

HANS is lying on an old deck chair, dressed as before, and is asleep. He is mumbling in his sleep and laughs; time passes.

QUITT walks in from behind the wall, rubbing his hands. He executes a little dance step while walking. He whistles to himself.

QUITT

It’s been ages since I’ve whistled! (He hums. The humming makes him want to talk.) Hey, Hans! (HANS leaps up out of his sleep and immediately goes to relieve QUITT of the coat which he isn’t wearing.) You can’t stop acting the servant even in your sleep, can you? When I was just singing to myself I suddenly couldn’t stand being alone any more. (He regards HANS.) And now you’re already annoying me again. Were you dreaming of me? Oh, forget it, I don’t even want to know. (He whistles again. HANS whistles along.) Stop whistling. It’s no fun if you whistle along.

HANS

I dreamed. Really, I was dreaming. The dream was about a pocket calendar with rough and smooth sides. The rough sides were the work days, the smooth ones the days which I have off. I slithered for days on end over calendar pages.

QUITT

Dream on, little dreamer, dream — just as long as you don’t interpret your dreams.

HANS

But what if the dream interprets itself — as it did just now?

QUITT

You are talking about yourself — why is that?

HANS

You’ve infected me.

QUITT

And how?

HANS

By employing your personality — and having success with yourself too. Suddenly I saw that I lacked something. And when I thought about it I realized that I lacked everything. For the first time I didn’t just sort of exist for myself, but existed as someone who is comparable, say, with you. I couldn’t bear the comparing any more, began to dream, evaluated myself. Incidentally, you just interrupted me and it was important. (He sits down and closes his eyes. He shakes his head.) Too bad. It’s over. I felt really connected when I was dreaming. (To QUlTT) I don’t want to have to go on shaking my head much longer.

QUITT

It occurs to me I should have gotten you up earlier. Then you wouldn’t get ideas like this. So you want to leave me?

HANS

On the contrary, I want to stay forever. I still have much to learn from you.

QUITT

Would you like to be like me?

HANS

I have to be. Recently I’ve been forcing myself to copy your handwriting. I no longer write with a slant but vertically. That is like standing up after a lifetime of bowing down. But it hurts, too. I also no longer put my hands like this … (Thumbs forward, fingers backward on his hips) on my hips, but like you do … (Fingers forward, thumbs backward) That gives me more self-confidence. Or standing up … (He stands up.) I stand on one leg and play with the other like you. A new sense of leisure. Only when I buy something, say at the butcher’s, I place my legs quite close together and parallel and don’t move from the spot. That makes an upper-class impression, and I always get the best cut and the freshest calf’s liver. (He yawns.) Have you noticed that I no longer yawn as unceremoniously as I used to, but with a pursed mouth, like you?

QUITT

The long and short of it: you are still here for me?

HANS

Because I am compelled to be as free as you are. You have everything, live only for yourself, don’t have to make any comparisons any more. Your life is poetic, Mr. Quitt, and poetry, as we know, produces a sense of power that oppresses no one — but rather dances the dance of freedom for us, the oppressed. At one time I felt caught in the act even when someone watched me licking stamps. Now I don’t bat an eyelash when someone calls me a lackey; carry the garbage can out onto the sidewalk in my tails absolutely unfazed; walk self-confidently arm in arm with the ugliest woman; do work, willy-nilly, which isn’t mine to do — that is my freedom, which I have learned from you. In the past I used to be envious of what you could afford to do. I didn’t feel treated like a man but like a mannequin — notice my new freedom, I’m already playing with words! — cursed you under my breath as a bloodsucker, did not see the human being in you, but only the corporation mogul. That’s how unfree I was. Now, as soon as I imagine you, I see the self-assured curve that your watch chain describes over your belly and already I am moved.

QUITT

This sounds familiar. (HANS laughs.) So you’re just making fun of me. I should have known that someone with your history would never change. But you’re not the one who matters. It’s the others that count.

HANS

Do you actually despise yourself, Mr. Quitt? — Now that you’ve screwed them all?

QUITT

Myself? No. But I might despise someone like me. (Long pause.) Why don’t you react? Just now when you weren’t answering me, what I said began to crawl back into me and wanted to make itself unsaid, and me too, by shriveling me deep inside. (Pause.) You’re making fun of my language. I would much prefer to express myself inarticulately like the little people in the play recently, do you remember? Then you would finally pity me. This way I suffer my articulateness as part of my suffering. The only ones that you and your kind pity are those who can’t speak about their suffering.

HANS

How do you want to be pitied? Even if you became speechless with suffering your money would speak for you, and the money is a fact and you — you’re nothing but a consciousness.

QUITT

(Derisively) Pity only occurred to me because the characters in the play moved me so — not that they were speechless, but that despite their seemingly dehumanized demeanor they wanted really to be as kind to each other as we spectators who all live in more human surroundings are already with each other. They, too, wanted tenderness, a life together, et cetera — they just can’t express it, and that is why they rape and murder each other. Those who live in inhuman conditions represent the last humans on stage. I like that paradox. I like to see human beings on the stage, not monsters. Human beings, gnarled with suffering, unsche-matic, drenched with pain and joy. The animalistic attracts me, the defenseless, the abused and insulted. Simple people, do you understand? Real people whom I can feel and taste, living people. Do you know what I mean? People! Simply … people! Do you know what I mean? Not fakes but … (He thinks for quite a while.) people. You understand: people. I hope you know what I mean.

HANS

I can’t take your jokes so soon after waking up. But let’s suppose you’re being serious. There must be another possibility which makes your dichotomy — here fakes, there human beings — look ridiculous.

QUITT

Which?

HANS

I don’t know.

QUITT

Why not?

HANS

That I don’t know is the very thing that lends me hope. Besides, as one of those whom you have in mind: I can say it: every time when the curtain rises I become discouraged at the prospect that things will be human again up there any moment now. Let’s further assume that you mean what you say: perhaps the people on stage moved you — not because they were people, but because everything was shown as it is. For example, if you recognize a portrait as true to life, you frequently develop a peculiar sympathy for the person in the portrait without necessarily having any feeling for the real person. Couldn’t the same thing have happened to you when you saw the play? That you empathized with the inarticulate people represented there on the stage and think, therefore, that you have done with the real ones? And why do you want to see real characters on stage at all, who belong in the past and are alien to you?

QUITT

Because I like to think back to the days when I was poor too, and couldn’t express myself, and primarily because the painted grimaces from my own class sit in the audience anyway. On stage I want to see the other class, as crude and as unadorned as possible. After all, I go to the theater to relax.

HANS

(Laughs.) So, you are being derisive.

QUITT

I meant that seriously. (He laughs. Both of them laugh.)

(WIFE enters.)

HANS

Here comes one of your real people.

WIFE

Are you laughing at me?

QUITT

Who else?

WIFE

And what were you saying about me?

HANS

Nothing. We were only laughing about you.

(WIFE laughs too; she slaps QUITT on the shoulder, nudges him in the ribs.)

QUITT

We’re all merry for once, right?

HANS

Since business is so good, Mr. Quitt — why don’t you cross my palm with silver?

QUITT

You’re welcome.

(He wants to put the coin into HANS’s outstretched hand but HANS pulls back the hand and stretches out the other. Now QUITT wants to put the coin into that hand, but HANS, so as to adjust to QUITT, has already stretched out his first hand again. When he notices that QUITT … he stretches out his second hand again. But QUITT tries to put the coin into HANS’s first hand again and in the meantime, etc. Until QUITT puts the coin away again, walks to the piano, and plays a boogie. WIFE takes HANS and dances with him … Then QUITT suddenly plays a slow, sad blues and sings along with it.)

QUITT

Sometimes I wake up at night

and everything I want to do next day

suddenly seems silly,

how silly to button your shirt,

how silly to look in your eyes,

how silly the foam on the glass of beer,

how silly to be loved by you.

Sometimes I lie awake

and everything I imagine

makes everything that much more inconceivable—

inconceivable the pleasure of standing at a hot-dog stand,

inconceivable New Zealand,

inconceivable thinking of sooner or later,

inconceivable to be alive or dead

I want to hate you and hate plastic,

you want to hate me and hate the fog.

I want to love you and love hilly countrysides,

you would like to love me

and have a lovely city, a lovely color, a lovely animal.

Everyone stay away from me,

it is the time after my death

and what I just imagined, with a sigh, as my life

are only blisters on my body

which sigh when they burst

(He stops singing.) But things are going well for us right now, aren’t they? I saw a woman walking in the sun with a full shopping bag and I knew at once: Nothing more can happen to me now! I hear an old lady say: “Parsley on the stalk? I’ve never eaten that.” And then she says: “Well, and I don’t think I’ll indulge in it now.” Nothing can happen to me any more! Nothing can happen to me any more! (He continues to sing.)

No dream

could make anything seem stranger

than what I’ve already experienced

and there’s no cure

for the peace and quiet

(He speaks again.) … with which every morning I let the dingaling out from behind my fly to fidget in the peep show to relieve the pressure which I could no longer imagine during the sleepless night. (VON WULLNOW, KOERBER-KENT, and LUTZ appear silently. WIFE wants to leave.) Stay here. (She leaves. HANS leaves too. Pause.) So you still exist. (Pause.) Why don’t we make ourselves comfortable? (Pause.) What can I offer you? Schnapps? Cognac?

KOERBER-KENT

No, thank you. It’s still too early for that.

QUITT

Or juice, freshly squeezed.

KOERBER-KENT

That doesn’t agree with my stomach. Hyperacidity.

QUITT

Then a few breadsticks. Or would you prefer some other snack?

LUTZ

Thank you, we really don’t want anything. Seriously, don’t go to any trouble.

QUITT

You’ve got a frog in your throat. Hans will make you a camomile tea. (LUTZ shakes his head.) Camomile which we picked ourselves at the Mediterranean. The blossoms are intact!

LUTZ

(Clears his throat.) I’m over it already. I don’t need anything.

QUITT

And you, Monsignore? Perhaps you’d like a mint lozenge? One hundred percent pure peppermint.

KOERBER-KENT

I’m perfectly happy too.

QUITT

I’d put it on your tongue myself.

KOERBER-KENT

I usually enjoy sucking on mint lozenges, but not today.

QUITT

Why not today? It isn’t Friday, is it?

KOERBER-KENT

I simply don’t want to. That’s all.

QUITT

You want to jilt me?

KOERBER-KENT

If that’s how you take it.

QUITT

I’m offended.

(He walks out. KOERBER-KENT wants to make a gesture to stop him but VON WULLNOW makes a sign not to.)

VON WULLNOW

I know. I could cut off his head with one slash of the whip and let the decapitated chicken slap on the table before you. I was grinding my teeth so fiercely just now, some must have cracked. (He shows his teeth.) There! You traitor, you upstart, you Polack! (Raving) My hand even trembled briefly, which almost never happens to me. In the meantime, of course, it has become completely steady again. Look! (He holds out his hand.) But we have to be rational now, in the most economic sense of the word: at first as rational as necessary and then, when he no longer has any need for our reason, as irrational as possible. I’m already looking forward to my irrationality. (He makes a pantomime of trampling, torturing, and throttling.)

LUTZ

(Interrupts him.) Yes, that’s it; we have to let ourselves go for a moment. Like you just now. Perhaps that’ll teach us what to do next. Let’s say or do whatever comes to mind. That will determine our method. After all, that’s the way he does it. So let’s dream. (Pause. They concentrate. Pause.) Nothing is happening. I only see myself cutting a steak against the grain or playing tennis in such short pants that my testicles are hanging out on one side. (Pause. They concentrate.) Do you know what I’m most afraid of about myself? (They regard him expectantly.) That one day I will get up in a restaurant so lost in thought that I forget to pay the check.

(Pause. KOERBER-KENT scratches his behind and they regard him.)

KOERBER-KENT

I just happened to think of our minority stockholder …

(Pause.)

LUTZ

Don’t you ever dream?

KOERBER-KENT

Ah! Monstrous dreams!

LUTZ

Well! Let’s hear.

KOERBER-KENT

(Powerfully) I … I’m walking in the woods alone …

(Long, embarrassed silence. Pause. VON WULLNOW laughs.)

LUTZ

You are laughing?

VON WULLNOW

I was remembering.

LUTZ

Was it that funny?

VON WULLNOW

Remembering it was. (Pause.) The grain bins in the loft, the trickling grain and the mouse shit inside, the swirl of grain that my memory delved into like a boy’s naked foot, the grains between the toes, the vacated wasp nest, still so enlivened by memories, on the underside of the roof tile. (Pause.) I’ve got to stop. Remembering makes me a good person. Otherwise I would make up in a moment. Oh, Quitt. Oh, Quitt, why hast thou forsaken us?

LUTZ

Now I know what we are going to do. We have to talk about ourselves, about us as individuals — what we’re really like. I for one sometimes feel like hopping up and down on the street and don’t do it. Why not? And last summer passed by without my having enjoyed it once while I was sitting in my office with its tinted window. Every so often I do something crazy: I eat the rotten part of an apple, slam a car door before everyone’s gotten out … or something like that … and if that doesn’t help, there’s always … (To KOERBER-KENT) our minority stockholder. (QUITT returns.) He’ll show him where the moon is rising.

QUITT

I do miss you. And perhaps you miss me too.

VON WULLNOW

Quitt, today I had a bag of flour in my hand. Do you know how long it has been since I’ve held flour in my hands? I don’t even know myself. The package was so soft and heavy. This weight in my hand and at the same time the gentleness of the pressure — I was transported into delicious unreality. Doesn’t the same thing ever happen to you?

QUITT

I find the most vicious reality more bearable than the most delicious feeling of unreality.

LUTZ

(Trying to distract) How is your wife?

QUITT

My wife? My wife is fine.

LUTZ

She looked well just now. With her cheeks all rosy as though she’d just played tennis. That made me think of my wife, who has to rock the child all day long on the terrace. You know, we have a retarded child who screams as soon as we stop rocking: my wife stands days on end in the garden and pushes the swing, imagine that. But she’s gotten to like doing it nowadays. She says that it calms her down too. And she feels it makes her superior to the other women in the neighborhood who can’t think of anything to do but tell their cleaning women how to do chores. By the way, excuse me for talking about myself.

QUITT

I like women who do nothing but give orders.

VON WULLNOW

I know you like hearing stories, I have one.

QUITT

Is it long?

VON WULLNOW

Very brief. A child walks into a shop and says, “Six rolls, the Daily News, and three salt sticks!”

QUITT

Go on.

VON WULLNOW

That’s the story.

(Pause.)

QUITT

It’s beautiful.

VON WULLNOW

(Suddenly embraces him vehemently.) I knew you would like it. I knew it. I’m usually too shy to touch anyone, but this time I simply must. (He pulls QUITT’s cuffs out of his jacket, takes his hand.) I’ve been looking at this dirty fingernail all the time — now I have to clean it for you. (He does so, using his own fingernail, steps back.) I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’m blissed out with memories recently. Do you remember that time we dressed up as workers at the opera ball? With red bandanas, T-shirts, high-pegged pants, and muddy boots. The way we stepped on the ladies’ toes? The way we scratched our crotches? Staring at everything, our mouths agape? Ordered Crimean champagne and drank out of the bottle? And at the end pushed our caps back and sang the “Internationale”?

QUITT

Crimean champagne is an illegal label. It should be called “Sparkling Wine from the Crimea.” (Pause.) Yes, we played the part very expertly, so that we could only play ourselves.

VON WULLNOW

And now you’re in cahoots with them.

QUITT

How so?

VON WULLNOW

By thinking only of yourself. The huge share of the market which you control provides the enemies of the free-enterprise system, who are our enemies too, with the welcome opportunity—

LUTZ

(Interrupts him. Quickly) Not like that. (To QUITT) I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. Everything I encounter looks like a sign to me. When I read in the papers “Next Wednesday, junk collection,” then I sense at once: “That junk, that’s me.” Recently when I entered a tobacco shop somewhere out in the country I saw an obituary pinned up on the wall — and under the obituary lay a filthy, shriveled-up glove: that leather glove, that’ll soon be me, my heart fluttered.

QUITT

And I recently saw an empty plastic bag in a hallway with the legend “Hams from Poland” on it. Should that have been a sign too? In any event, I suddenly felt incredibly safe when I read that.

LUTZ

Don’t you ever think of death?

QUITT

I can’t.

VON WULLNOW

(Strikes his fist against his forehead.) And I can’t any more! I’d like to open a newspaper now and read the word asshole in it. This jungle. This slime. This swamp. These will-o’-the-wisps. (LUTZ has nudged him with his elbow and VON WULL-NOW calms down.) These will-o’-the-wisps above the swamp when we used to walk home in fall after our dancing lessons! Wanda on my arm, I could feel her goose bumps through her blouse, and a pheasant screamed in its sleep as I kissed her — an ugly word actually, kissing — only the cracks of our lips touch each other, as unfeeling as peeled-off bark. (Pause. VON WULLNOW looks at LUTZ, who gives him the cue by forming the word nature with his lips.) Why nature? Of course, I was about to talk about nature: it was nature that made me aware — by teaching me how to perceive. Houses, streets, and I were just a daydream at first, dreamer and what he dreamed were in the same bubble where the dreamer — hypnotized by the invariably same, never-changing spot on the buckling house wall, grown together in his sleep with the same street curve day in and day out — also considered himself part of his dream. Dark spots inside me as the only thing undefined. Then the bubble burst and the dark spots inside me unfolded like the forests outside me. Only then did I begin to define myself as well. Not the civilization of house and street, but nature made me aware of myself — by making me aware of nature. So: only in the perception of nature, not in the hallucinatory hodgepodge of the objects of civilization, can we arrive at our own history. But nowadays most people have become so civilized that they simply dismiss rapport with nature as some kind of withdrawal into childhood — although it is children whom one keeps having to make artificially aware of nature — or, even if they pretend to have rapport with nature, cannot endure this nature without the mirage of civilization: inside the forest they have no feeling for the forest; except from the perspective of the window of their terraced house which they designed and built themselves, and which they would immediately sell to someone — only then would the same forest be an experience of nature for them. You’re going to ask me what I mean by all this.

QUITT

No.

VON WULLNOW

I mean to say that you, you with your ruthless overexpansion, are destroying our nature. You senselessly transform the old countryside where we could come to our senses into construction sites. Your blind department stores squat like live bombs in our old city centers. Every day a new branch goes up, differing from the others only by its tax identification number, which you even set up in neon light to blink from its roof as an advertisement of your sense of public responsibility!

QUITT

A good idea, isn’t it?

VON WULLNOW

You’re ruining our reputation by carrying on just the way the Joneses think a businessman behaves.

QUITT

Perhaps it’s not our reputation I’m ruining but you.

VON WULLNOW

You know neither honor nor shame. The manure pit behind my country house is too good for you. I’d like to choke you by stuffing blotting paper down your throat. I damn you! Whosoever utters your name before me, there shall I reach into his mouth and rip out his tongue, and with my very own hands in fact. Wait, I’m going to step on your foot. (He does so, not that QUITT reacts. VON WULLNOW blows up his cheeks and slaps them with his hands. He bites the back of his hand. He hits his head with his fist, quickly touches up his hair.) You’ve disappointed me, Quitt. It’s a pity about you. I liked you best of all. We’ve got so much in common. I still admire you. Whenever I have to reach a decision I think of what you would do under the same circumstances. (He screams) You rat, you Judas, for twenty pieces of silver—

QUITT

Thirty, to be exact.

VON WULLNOW

Twenty, I say.

QUITT

(To KOERBER-KENT) But thirty is right, isn’t it?

KOERBER-KENT

Yes, it was thirty pieces of silver. According to the latest findings, it’s a question of—

VON WULLNOW

(Screaming) Pervert! Atavist! (LUTZ places a hand on his shoulder.) I once dreamed that we grew old together. Every day we drove in a carriage through town, playing bridge. And now all that is supposed to remain a dream? Let’s stop fighting each other, Quitt. It could be so beautiful — just the four of us — that is, five, counting Mrs. Tax — and since all the others have thrown in the towel in the meantime, we lone wolves have become so big there’s no longer any need for arrangements. Those who help us into our coats after our conferences could conduct our affairs for us. Let’s not underbid each other any more.

QUITT

I underbid you. (VON WULLNOW roars.) Does it help?

VON WULLNOW

A hobnailed boot in your privates! Don’t you understand me! What am I at this moment? A radical! How I’d simply like to yawn at you. Do you have a slice of bread on you?

QUITT

Are you hungry?

VON WULLNOW

I’d like to have something to crumble between my fingers. My brain is scraping against my brain pan. Actually a pleasant sensation. So animalistic. (To LUTZ) I won’t say anything more now. (To QUITT) I’d like to switch with you, you shark. Besides, it’s time for your wife to pass through the room again, isn’t it? Come on, say something, I’d like to have something to laugh about! Dear Hermann … (Pause. He takes QUITT’s arm.) You know, I could be your father? Let’s go fishing together, fathers always take their sons fishing. Up the stream before the thunderstorm hits. I’d like to be drunk now so that I could remember something. (He lets go of QUITT’s arm.) Apropos streams. You ruin them with your plastic monsters, let the countryside choke on plastic still lives stamped “biodegradable” where no environment is even left or, at most, a multicolored mildew on the ground, a soot-colored dust on a sweetly crinkling leaf, a fish belly in the churning water. Do you know what children ask when they’re actually shown a big ripe tomato? Is it made of plastic? they ask. And I personally saw a child that didn’t want to sit down in a Rolls-Royce because the seat wasn’t made of plastic. Let’s stop all this overexpansion, Hermann — or let’s limit ourselves to products for environmental protection. There’s still a pretty penny to be made in that field. Everything could be the way it used to be.

QUITT

But you stopped expanding a long time ago. Besides, as you say so rightly, the functional units are diminishing in size. So the number of units can continue to increase, right? I’m not the kind of man who wants to leave everything the way it is. I can’t see anything without wanting to utilize it. I want to make everything I see into something else. And so do you! Except that you can’t any more.

VON WULLNOW

(Steps away from QUITT.) You refuse to understand us.

QUITT

I understand you very well. You know what it means when one of us becomes human or even speaks about death. An emotion, after the first moment of fright, becomes a method for us.

VON WULLNOW

It’s not that I call your behavior treason — but what should I call it? Faithlessness? Treachery? Unreliability? Falseness? Cuntiness? Disloyalty?

QUITT

Those are the expressions you apply to employees. Among us I would call it businesslike behavior.

VON WULLNOW

Now I really won’t say anything more. I’ll stick my finger down my throat in front of you. (Does so and leaves, but returns at once.) And I really was attached to you. (He leaves and returns.) You with your frog’s body. (He leaves and returns.) My spit is too good for you. All I’ll do is spit it from the back to the front of my mouth. (Does so, leaves once more, returns once more, is beside himself, makes a horrible face, and leaves once and for all.)

(LUTZ wants to say something.)

QUITT

I know what you want to say.

LUTZ

Then you say it.

QUITT

It’s true. I didn’t stick to our agreement.

LUTZ

But you didn’t plan it that way.

QUITT

I simply forgot about it, did I?

LUTZ

Not exactly forgot perhaps, but you didn’t take it seriously enough.

QUITT

Why should I have taken it seriously?

LUTZ

(Laughs.) Not bad. Very tricky indeed … (Pause.) Excuse me, I interrupted you. You were going to say something.

QUITT

No, that was it.

LUTZ

Why don’t you defend yourself?

QUITT

Why don’t you accuse me?

LUTZ

You must be very unhappy.

QUITT

Why?

LUTZ

One is completely locked up inside oneself like you only when one is miserable. I know that from my own experience.

QUITT

Don’t compare me with yourself.

LUTZ

There, you see. For you there’s only you, you don’t even want to be compared. You must be in pretty bad shape. (He’s been playing with his forefinger and thumb the whole time, unconsciously, as though he were counting money.)

(QUITT takes hold of his hand.)

QUITT

Why don’t you admit it: that’s nothing but your new gesture for something tangible? Anyway, you’ve been counting money ever since you started to talk.

LUTZ

All right. Now I’m going to tell you what I think of you.

QUITT

But watch out. Perhaps you’ll think differently once you’ve begun to speak.

LUTZ

Once I begin to speak everything is completely thought out. I don’t stutter. (To KOERBER-KENT) He multiplied his share of the market at our expense. I have nothing against his methods, but he should have discussed them with us. And besides, of course I do have something against his methods: he recruits the ex-convicts away from us in the labor market and promises them a sympathetic environment — and that means that he leaves them entirely to themselves in a certain area of production and pays all of them the same low wages. As he admitted just now, he manufactures smaller and smaller amounts of his products but without changing the size of the package, so that the buyers believe they’re getting the same amount. This way his prices appear to remain the same while we have to raise ours. He lets doctors buy shares in his drug firms and then they prescribe his medicines. (To QUITT) You duplicate our most expensive products with cheap materials. Your guarantees are only valid for Three-Star refrigerators. You print the national eagle on your retail price tags, so that it looks as though they are government-approved. Your price tags are huge — so that people believe your things are cheaper even when they are at least as expensive as anywhere else. The price structure has cracked, Quitt. We are standing at the deathbed — at the deathbed of the old concept of price — and have gotten sore feet ourselves. We shiver in the shadow of your competition. As far as I’m concerned, I’m still far too calm. Perhaps that is the calm before the next breach of the agreement, which will be my downfall. I can already see the hailstorm in the distance, and panic flattens my ears against my head. I’m afraid, Quitt, afraid of the great storm when I won’t be wearing the thick coat of capital. And yet I tried to save the structure by firing thousands. Quitt, you ruined our prices. You pushed them down to prewar levels! Everything has a slight crack. Every day there’s one product less on the market. It’s all over with the beautiful diversity of the market. Even the high consecration is for nothing. It’s the end of all our proud figures. I’m at a loss. I am at a most poodle-befuddled loss and in utter despair. (To KOERBER-KENT) I was my parents’ only child. Even my birth was a practical decision: it meant my mother’s death. At age four I kneaded imitation coins out of mud. At age seven I picked flowers for invalids in the neighborhood and sold them. In school they called me “Moneybags.” A sensible boy, my father said. He still has respect for material values, said my relatives. Before my first communion, the priest said that if you really wanted something afterward and really believed it, the wish would come true. Still feeling the pressure of the host against my gums, I walked all the way home with my head lowered: because every cell of my body believed I would find the coin I had wished for. (To no one in particular) Since that time I’ve had my doubts about religion. (To KOERBER-KENT) But I remained reasonable and became more and more reasonable. He’s all business, people said of me. But now it’s all over. All over. I don’t want to believe anything any more. What’s there left to believe in if that s.o.b. destroys our prices and our rational system? What kind of age is that? What’s still valid? I too want to be unbusinesslike at last! (Pause.) I dreamed that I was running and kept on running so that a huge banknote wouldn’t fall off my chest. Just the way I keep on talking now. I’d like to put my head into a bowl of water and drown myself. (Exit.)

(KOERBER-KENT wants to follow him but returns again. QUITT paces up and down.)

KOERBER-KENT

(With lowered head) I don’t envy you, Quitt. I could also tell you about myself, like the others, but that’s not my way. I never talk about myself. I’m proud that I eliminated myself from my own calculations long ago. I’m not interested in poking around the lint in my navel. I’m glad that I can be replaced. (Pause.) I pity you, Quitt. And I’m afraid for you. I recently saw a drawing a painter made of his dying wife: the pupils had lost almost all their color in the fever, and the iris, too, had become very pale. Nothing but a dark circle separated it from the white of the eye around it, and the centrifugal force of dying had even thickened this circle. It was as if the eyes sighed toward the observer. The artist’s pencil had hatched an endless sea of sighs from a mortal seeing hole, as I called it. And the following morning the woman is supposed to have really died. (A popping sound backstage.) What was that?

QUITT

Hans is at work. He isn’t very good at uncorking bottles. There’s almost always a pop when he opens the cooking wine.

(Pause.)

KOERBER-KENT

Aren’t you afraid to die? (He raises his head and wants to transfix QUITT—but QUITT happens to be standing behind him.)

QUITT

Over here.

KOERBER-KENT

Don’t you ever quickly push everything away from you just because you are deathly afraid? (QUITT steps away from him and comes to a halt with his back to him. KOERBER-KENT lowers his head again and closes his eyes.) Someone once told me how he dreamed he was dying. He was sitting on a sled and said: I am dying. Then he was dead, and at some point they closed the coffin lid over him. And only then did he become deathly afraid: he didn’t want to be buried. He woke up, his heart was fibrillating. Besides, he was very ill, the dream wanted to kill him. Cause of death: a dream, you could say. (Very loudly) You see, dying in your sleep isn’t at all peaceful, but perhaps the worst death of all.

(QUITT has kept pacing around in the meantime, absentmindedly, and now stands in front of KOERBER-KENT.)

QUITT

(Very softly) Really?

KOERBER-KENT

(Is startled. Looks up at QUITT now.) I know from other stories (One can hear a key turning in a lock backstage and a door handle being pressed down.) that a dying person keeps looking away whenever his eye catches a specific object, as though he could postpone death in this way … (He listens.) Someone pushed down a door handle just now, no? Why don’t I hear a door opening? (Pause.) Once during a meal I personally sat opposite a man who suddenly started putting the table in order: put the knife and fork parallel to each other, wiped the edge of the glass with his napkin, shoved the napkin into its silver ring. Then he keeled over dead.

QUIIT

(Distracted) Who kneeled on the bread?

KOERBER-KENT

He keeled over dead, I said. (Frightened) You’re afraid too.

QUITT

(Scratching his pants absentmindedly) Damnit, the cleaner didn’t get that spot out either. Yes? I’m listening.

KOERBER-KENT

He was still smiling beforehand — (Two or three distinctly audible steps backstage.) but in his deathly fear he bared his lower teeth instead of his upper teeth, as you would expect. Nothing wrong with a dead dwarf, that’s still a vegetative process, almost. But a fully grown corpse, just imagine that! It’s monstrous. (He listens.) Why doesn’t he walk on? Wasn’t someone just walking back there?

QUITT

My baby fat starts growing back when I listen to you. You and your deathly fear — at the moment everything seems thinkable to me and also beside the point.

KOERBER-KENT

What? What?

QUITT

It was just the floor creaking, I’m sure of it.

(PAULA appears in a dress and with a veil in front of her face. At the sight of her, QUITT unzips his fly halfway down and up again. A garbage can cover bangs loudly on a hard floor backstage.)

KOERBER-KENT

As I said, I’ve got an eye for those who are marked. (He points to QUITT.) It’s that thin line on the upper lip … (He notices PAULA.) It’s you! How good that you are here. Perhaps you could … him … (He tries to find the word.) What’s the word?

QUITT

Congratulate him?

KOERBER-KENT

No.

QUITT

Work on him?

KOERBER-KENT

Something like that … no.

QUITT

Take him over your knees?

KOERBER-KENT

(Panic-stricken) Oh, God, how did this happen? I can’t find the right word any more. What are they doing to me? Come down, eclipse of the sun! Hellfire, burst forth from the earth!

(QUITT walks up to PAULA and whispers in her ear.)

PAULA

(Loudly) “Deathly afraid?” (To KOERBER-KENT) You are trying to make him deathly afraid? Do you think he’ll admit us back into the market?

KOERBER-KENT

(Screams) I know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen thousands die in the war. (QUITT sighs. KOERBER-KENT resumes normal tone of voice at once.) Am I keeping you from something?

QUITT

Not at all.

KOERBER-KENT

(Screams) I can read signs. I know why you hunch up your shoulders when you walk around. But soon you will shoulder the necessary weight of death, no matter what, Hermann Quitt. Even if you dangle your arms back and forth like that and scurry every which way. Even if you sit up straight as a candle in your deathly fear! (He begins walking out backward. HANS appears, wearing his chef’s hat.) You won’t even be able to imagine the moment. There will be nothing but abrupt, animalistic, anxiety-ridden anticipation. You will be so afraid you won’t even dare to swallow, and the spit will turn sour in your mouth. Your death will be gruesome beyond all imaginings, complete with moaning and bellowing. I know what I’m talking about. With moaning and bellowing. (He walks backward into HANS and emits a scream. Exit.)

(HANS also exits. QUITT and PAULA look at one another for a long time.)

QUITT

If you keep looking at me, I will lose the rest of my feelings.

PAULA

I won.

QUITT

Why?

PAULA

Because you were the first to talk.

QUITT

Now it’s your turn.

PAULA

I love you, still. (She laughs.)

QUITT

Why are you laughing?

PAULA

Because I succeeded in saying that.

QUITT

I can’t buy myself anything with that.

PAULA

You are so artificial. You’re sacrificing the truth now for a slick cliché.

QUITT

Moreover, I didn’t give you any excuse for it. (Pause.) I keep having to get used to you all over again. (He looks her over from head to foot.)

PAULA

I’m not one of those.

QUITT

Who, after all, is one of those? (Pause.) I’m tired. When I take a step I feel as if my real body has stayed behind. I don’t need you. When I saw you I was happy, but I also was a bit turned off. I took that as a sign that all my desire for you is gone.

(She laughs. He regards her considerately until she has finished.)

PAULA

What you say is supposed to humiliate me. But the voice that I hear flatters me.

QUITT

You’ve changed. You’re out of breath. Before, when you used to show your feelings you used to be much more self-assured. Why can’t it be that way now? Stop playing the humble woman. I only want to touch you when you talk matter-of-factly. (Spitefully) Incidentally, why are you by yourself and not with the team? Do you call that creative?

My head hurts. Besides, I like you better when you wear pants.

PAULA

Your head is also hurting me, yes, your whole life … (QUITT pats her arm.) You pat me the way a conductor raps his baton … (She caresses him.)

QUITT

Your caresses tickle me.

PAULA

Yes, because you don’t want to enjoy them. (QUITT’S WIFE enters. She is wearing the same dress as PAULA. She notices, stops, and leaves again.) Now caress me too. (QUITT caresses her and steps away from her.) That was one too few. (QUITT returns and caresses her once more.) Oh yes. (Pause.) Tell me about yourself.

QUITT

(Animatedly) I was thirsty a few days ago. (Pause.) It just occurred to me.

PAULA

Look at me, please.

QUITT

I don’t like to look at you.

PAULA

Well, what am I like?

QUITT

Unchanged.

PAULA

Before I got to know you better I thought you were unfeeling and tough. I once heard you say of me — the brunette there — as about a whore.

QUITT

You always tell yourself stories like that afterward.

PAULA

What would you say I would say now? Mr. Quitt?

QUITT

Don’t call me that. (She puts her hand on his shoulder. Suddenly she begins to choke him. He lets her do so for some time, then shakes her off. QUITT’S WIFE has returned in a different dress. She watches, giggling inaudibly, sucking her thumb. QUITT seats himself in the deck chair and lowers his head. PAULA squats down and wants to take his head in her hands. He gives her a kick. She falls down and gets up, warbling. He kicks her again. She gets up, warbling. He wants to kick her again, but she eludes him, warbling.) Your slimy tongue. Your absurd hips.

PAULA

(Lifts her dress.) Look at the way my thigh is twitching. Can you see it? Why don’t you come closer? (QUITT grunts.) Come on.

(QUITT puts his hand on her thigh. PAULA presses her head close to him. Pause.)

QUITT

All right, get lost now. (He steps back. Pause.) The saliva in your mouth will run over in a moment. And the way your eyeballs jerk back and forth! (He turns away. Pause.)

PAULA

I’m going already. It’s no use. I’ll sell.

QUITT

(Regards her.) And I’ll determine the fine print.

PAULA

Only promise me that you won’t clean up the moment after I’ve left.

QUITT

Buying yourself a hat can be very comforting.

PAULA

Now I know why I like you. It’s so easy to think of something else when you’re talking.

QUITT

Tomorrow at this time it will already be lighter, or darker. Perhaps that will comfort you too.

PAULA

(Suddenly embraces QUITT’S WIFE, releases her, and tosses QUITT a friendly as well as a serious kiss as she walks out.) “No hard feelings …”

(QUITT throws a stool after her. PAULA exits.

QUITT’S WIFE comes closer. They stand opposite each other, not saying anything. The stage light changes after some time. First sunshine, then cloud shadows moving across the two of them. Crickets chirp. Far off in the distance a dog barks. The sound of the ocean. A child screams something into the wind. Distant church bells. Woolly tree blossoms blow across the stage. Both of them as silhouettes in the dusk against the backdrop of city lights, which are just coming on. The noise of an airplane engine, very close, slowly receding — while previous stage lighting comes back on. Quiet.)

WIFE

(Softly) You look so unapproachable.

QUITT

Remembering does that. I’m just remembering. Let me be. I’ve got to remember to the end. (He sits down on the deck chair. She steps closer. He touches her lightly with his foot.)

WIFE

Yes?

QUITT

Nothing, nothing. (He leans back and closes his eyes.)

WIFE

(Sighs.) Oh.

QUITT

(To himself) So that it crashes and splinters …

WIFE

What will you do?

QUITT

(To himself) Stop. Destroy. (He looks back at her.) Strange: when I look at you, my thoughts skip a beat.

WIFE

I’d like to speak about myself for once too.

QUITT

Not again!

WIFE

Why, are you listening to me?

QUITT

You could have been talking about yourself while you asked that. Did you wash your hair?

WIFE

Yes, but not for you. I am not well.

QUITT

Then scream for help.

WIFE

When I scream for help, you reply by telling me a story how you once needed help. (Pause. She laughs a few times in quick succession as though about something funny. QUITT doesn’t react.) Help!

QUITT

You have to shout at least twice.

WIFE

I can’t any more.

QUITT

(Gets up.) Then do away with yourself. (He turns away.)

WIFE

(Mechanically wipes the dandruff off his shoulders.) You’re up to something. I can’t look at you for too long, otherwise I’ll find out what.

QUITT

What do you want? I have a pink face, my body is warm, pulse eighty.

(Pause.)

WIFE

My eyes are burning. I’m so sad I forgot to blink.

QUITT

What’s there to eat today?

WIFE

Filet of veal with truffles.

QUITT

I see. Well, well. Interesting. What is there to eat today?

WIFE

But you just asked that. Why are you so distracted?

QUITT

(To himself) Because every possibility has been tried except the very last one, and that one shouldn’t turn into just another idle mental exercise! Of course, filet of veal with truffles, you said so — I hear it only now. Why am I so distracted? I have to tell you something, my dear.

(A pause. She looks at him.)

WIFE

No, please don’t say it. (She shies back.)

QUITT

I have to tell someone.

WIFE

(Shies back and holds her ears shut.) I don’t want to hear it.

QUITT

(Follows her.) You’ll know it in a moment.

WIFE

Don’t say it, please don’t. (She runs away and he follows her. Quiet. Pause. She returns, slowly, walking backward, and goes off again, not that one sees her face.)

(KILB storms in. HANS appears behind him, wearing the chef’s hat. KILB is holding a knife and runs back and forth.)

KILB

You have to die now. It’s no use. I’m alone. No one pays me. Not even they. It’s our last way out. Don’t contradict me. (He notices that there’s no one present, and puts the knife back in his pocket.) He isn’t even here! And I rehearsed it so well! Into the room and right at him! One, two. A picture without words, only dashes for the caption underneath.

HANS

You have to try again.

KILB

I have to concentrate once more for that. If I’m as unconcentrated as I am now, everything could just as easily be something else, I think, even I myself. And that is a hideous feeling. Leave me alone.

HANS

But look at me first: because it’s really me now. People used to say about me: That fellow, it’s eating him up inside, but one day he’ll blow his stack and the walls will come tumbling down. That moment has come. So I will leave the room and cook the truffled filet with special tenderness, thinking how it will be left over for me. I leave Mr. Quitt to his fate, he believes in things like that. First of all, I’m going to stick to myself and I am curious what that will bring. My big toe is already itching, a good sign; I’m becoming human.

KILB

How?

HANS

Because an itching big toe means that you should remember something, and someone who remembers becomes a human being. So all I need to do is remember.

There was a time something inside me wanted to scream

At the mere thought that I might dream.

Now I want to learn to dream without end

So that the floor of facts I might transcend.

My eyes I want to learn to close

So as to know more of the little I knows.

In my youth a palm reader told me a fable

That I would be able

To change the world’s plan.

I hereby announce that at least my world is changing.

(He quickly punches the balloon punching-bag fashion. The balloon bursts. HANS exits.

KILB concentrates, puts the stool on its legs, gently closes the cover of the piano, puts in order what needs putting into order.

QUITT returns.)

KILB

Not yet!

QUITT

You again.

KILB

But we haven’t seen each other in ages.

QUITT

Not ages enough. Recently I thought of a mistake I once made. I couldn’t remember what kind of mistake it had been — but I was sure at once that it was not an important mistake. Later on I remembered more distinctly: it had been an important mistake after all. It occurred to me only when I was dealing with you.

KILB

Please stay like that.

(Pause.)

QUITT

Kilb, I’m happy that you came. And please note that I said “I’m happy” and not “it makes me happy.”

KILB

Please don’t become too friendly now. (Pause. QUITT regards him for a long time.) Why are you looking at me?

QUITT

I’m only too tired to look elsewhere. Why don’t you at least sit down, so that I won’t become even more tired. (He points to the deck chair.)

KILB

No, that’s too deep for me, I’ll never be able to get out of it. (QUITT sits down in it.) Particularly if you keep your hands in your pockets the way you do. I always keep my hands out of my pockets in moments of danger.

QUITT

Kilb, nothing is possible any longer. I feel like I’m the sole survivor, and I find it unappetizing that there’s nothing left except me. If only there were an appetizing explanation for this state of affairs — but my awareness is the awareness of a pile of garbage in an infinite empty space. Imagine: the telephone no longer rings, the postman doesn’t come any more, all street noises have ceased, only the wind is rustling one dream further away — the world has already died. I’m the only one who hasn’t heard of the catastrophe. I’m actually only a phantom of myself. What I see are afterimages, what I think are afterthoughts. A hair bends over on my head and I’m frightened to death. The next moment will be the last and un-time will begin. Just a moment ago there was still a bubble where I was, but not any more. I know that my time is over. You were right, Paula.

KILB

Absolutely right. You’re an anachronism, Mr. Quitt. Like the goose step of your soul right now.

QUITT

Be quiet. No one but I can say that. (He bounces a little ball and looks at KILB.) Now that it’s just the two of us, instead of becoming different you only become afraid that you might become different. (Pause.) There is nothing unthought of any more. Even the Freudian slip from the unconscious has already become a management method. Even dreams are dreamed from the beginning so as to be interpretable. For example, I no longer dream anything that isn’t articulated, and the pictures of the dream follow each other logically like the sequence of days in a diary. I wake up in the morning and am paralyzed with all the speeches I’ve heard in the dream. There’s no longer the “and suddenly” of the old dreams. (The ball escapes and rolls away.) Oh, too bad … (He gets up. KILB has approached.) The chair really is too deep, you’re right. When I think of myself, using precise concepts, I have one attack of nausea after the other. This businessman with a handkerchief in his breast pocket and his English worsted suit full of Weltschmerz on board his private plane the soot from whose jets drifts down on the workers’ apartment projects, with organ music of the Old Masters oozing from the built-in loudspeakers — stop it, get rid of it, bomb it, it’s logical. But: every logical conclusion is immediately contradicted within me by this totally indecisive yet totally self-assured feeling.

KILB

It’s logical. You want to go on living.

QUITT

The little man wants to put on airs.

KILB

Why not. What else has the little man left to put on?

QUITT

You’re right. Why not? A good cue. I’m still stuck too deep in my role. Spitefully I walk past the spastics in the V.A. hospitals and look away when someone rummages in garbage cans for food. Why do I do it, actually? There’s scarcely anyone who looks as if he could still fall out of his role. I once walked on the street and suddenly noticed that I didn’t have anything to do with my face any more …

KILB

The old story with the masks.

QUITT

Yes, but now someone who experienced it is telling about it. Outside, the muscles clung’ to the dead skin, then one dead layer on top of the other, only inside, in the deepest center, where I should have been, there was still a little twitching and something wet. A car would have to crash into me at once! — Only then would I stop making a face. And not merely show my true face when I can’t avoid the onrushing car any more, I thought. But this dead skin, that already was my true face.

KILB

Nothing but stories. Where’s the connection?

QUITT

I don’t know anything about myself ahead of time. My experiences only occur to me in the telling. That establishes the connection. I’m now going to tell you what is hell for me: hell for me is the so-called bargain, what’s cheap. In a dark hour I happened into a restaurant which had the same menu that people like me usually eat, only half as expensive — but this wasn’t the same food: the meat deep-frozen, thrown into the pan and fried to death; the potatoes waterlogged; the vegetables something slopped into the pot with the liquid from the can; the paper napkin shredding after one wipe, and tossed in as a freebie, a tablecloth with static electricity, which made the hairs on my fingers stand on end. Pressed to the table because others sat next to and beside me, the only view the frosted windowpane in front of which the potted flowers flapped in the air from the heating vent. Only a luxurious existence isn’t a punishment, I thought. Only the greatest luxury is worthy of a human being. What’s cheap is inhuman.

KILB

That’s why your products are always the cheapest.

QUITT

How much do you want for your answer? For once, couldn’t I be the topic? Me — that’s what makes me shy back, that’s what I have had enough of, up to here, and what still lies at the tip of my tongue all the time — something as rare and ridiculous as a living mole. I feel watched by all sides like the dead flesh from a wound that has long since healed, and still I dance on the inside with self-awareness. Yes, inside I’m dancing! I once sat in the sun in actual shock, the sun was shining on me, not that I felt it, and I really felt like the outline of suffocating nothingness in the airy space around me. But even that was still me, me, me. I was in despair, could think neither back nor forward — had no sense of history left. Each recollection came in dribs and drabs, unharmoniously, like the recollection of a sex act. This aching lack of feeling, that was myself, and I was not only I but also a quality of the world. Of course, I asked about the terms. Why? Why this condition? These conditions — why no history but only these conditions? But all the conditional requirements were fulfilled. No “whys” helped any more. Only the unconditional requirements remained. “I’m bored,” a child once said. “Then play at something. Paint something. Read something. Do something,” it was told. “But I can’t, I’m bored,” it said. (He keeps taking objects from his pockets, looks at them, and puts them back again.) The goose step of my soul, you said? I want to speak about (Laughs.) myself without using categories. I don’t want to mean anything any more, please, not be a character in the story any more. I want to freeze at night in May. Look, these are photos of me: I look happy in all of them and yet I never was. Do you know the feeling when one has put a pair of pants on backward? One time I was happy: when I visited someone in a tenement and during a long pause in the conversation I could hear the toilet flushing in the apartment next door. I became musical with happiness! Oh, my envy of your sleepy afternoons in those tenements with their mysteriously gurgling toilet bowls! Those are the places I long for: the projects at the edge of the city where the telephone booths are lit up at night. To go into airport hotels and simply check oneself in for safekeeping. Why are there no deper-sonification institutes? How beautiful it used to be when you opened a new can of shoe polish! And I could still imagine buying a ham sandwich, looking at cemeteries, having something in common with someone. Sometimes one thing simply led exhilaratingly to the other — that’s what it meant to feel alive! Now I’m heavy and sore and bulky with myself. (He punches himself under his chin while talking, kicks his calf.) One wrong breath and I disintegrate. Do you know that I hear voices? But not the kind of voices that madmen hear: no religious phrases, or poetry regurgitated from schooldays, or one-shot philosophies, none of the traditional formulas — but movie titles, pop tunes, advertising slogans. “Raindrops are falling on my head,” it frequently resounds in a whisper in the echo chamber of my head, and in the middle of an embrace a voice interrupts me with “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” or “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.” And I am positive that in the future even madmen will hear only voices like that — no longer “Know thyself” or “Thou shalt honor thy father and mother …” the superego voices of our culture. While one set of monsters is being exorcised, the next ones are already burping outside the window. (He interrupts himself.) How odd: while I go on talking logically like this, I simultaneously see, for example, a wintry lake at dusk which is just beginning to freeze over, or a small tree with a bottle stuck on its top, and an unshaven Chinese who peers around a doorway — now he’s gone again — and, moreover, during the whole time I keep humming a certain moronic melody inside myself. (He hums. KILB wants to say something.) No, I am speaking now. I am blowing my horn! The goose step of my soul. You should try it too. At least try … Stand still, why don’t you! Do I spit when I talk? Yes, I can feel the spit bubbles on my teeth. But my time to speak isn’t over yet. At one time I used to think, Let’s hope the next world war doesn’t start before my new suit is ready. By talking I want to have the transmission of consciousness, now, before you are finished with me. For too long my lips have held themselves joylessly shut. (He suddenly embraces KILB and holds on to him.) Why am I talking so fluently? Whereas I actually feel the need to stutter. (He bends over and therefore presses KILB more tightly. KILB is writhing.) I w … want to s … stutter … And why do I see everything so distinctly? I don’t want to see the grain in the wood floor so distinctly. I’d like to be nearsighted. I’d like to tremble. Why am I not trembling? Why am I not stuttering? (He bends over vehemently and KILB writhes.) I once wanted to sleep. But the room was so big. Wherever I lay down I created spots of sleeplessness. The room was too big for me alone. Where is the place to sleep here? Smaller! Smaller! (He bends over so much that KILB groans. He bends even more and the groaning ceases. KILB falls on the floor and doesn’t move. QUITT crosses his arms. Pause.) I can smell the cologne he smelled of. (Pause.) How happy I became once when I put on a shirt one of whose buttons had just been sewn on. My shirt is torn. How beautiful! Then I wore it long enough for it to become threadbare.

(Pause.

A tremendous burping pervades the entire room.

Long pause.

The burping.

QUITT runs his head against the rock. After some time he gets up and runs against the rock again. He gets up once more and runs against the rock. Then he just lies there. The stage light has been extinguished. Only the trough with the risen dough, the melting block of ice, the shriveled balloon, and the rock are lighted. A fruit crate trundles down, as though down several steps, and comes to rest in front of the rock. A long gray carpet rolls out from behind the rock: snakes writhe on the rolled-out carpet and in the fruit crate.)

Translated by MICHAEL ROLOFF

in collaboration with Karl Weber