Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson

Author:Hans Keilson [Keilson, Hans]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux New York
Published: 2011-09-26T14:36:31+00:00

VIII.

The doctor was standing in the front hall in his hat and coat. It was quarter past ten. He rubbed his hands together. “I came on my bicycle,” he said. He usually used a motorcycle, since he’d had to put his car into a garage because of the shortage of gasoline. It was pitch-black outside. “We’re going right now?” he asked, and he peered up the steps.

Marie had taken off her apron. Her hands were puffy and red, her face was shining. Still, she was calm and focused. “Can I help with something,” she said, “or . . .”

“Let’s go,” Wim said to the doctor, and let him go first. Then, turning back to Marie, “It’s better if you wait here downstairs, maybe in the front room . . .”

“Don’t forget the coat,” she replied.

Wim stopped on the stairs. “Right,” he said, and he leaped back down in two big jumps. He pulled his hat down tight over his head.

“Which door?” the doctor asked when Wim came running back up the stairs behind him. He was a little out of breath because he was wearing his heavy winter coat.

They walked into the room in their hats and coats like two men from some commission, officials who had come to launch an investigation into a case of death where foul play was suspected. They stepped decisively up to the bed, stood standing alongside it for a second, and calmly considered the case before them, their hands buried deep in their coat pockets. Then the doctor shoved his left hand under the dead man’s neck, grabbed his stiff left arm with the other hand, and pulled. The body slid out of the symmetrical position it had been in until then, and now lay a little diagonal and tilted onto the right side of the face and body. The doctor looked at the prominent Adam’s apple of the dead man in silence. Wim stood hesitantly next to him.

“If we sit him up first,” he said.

“That won’t work,” the doctor answered, puffing up his cheeks a little, “with the rigor mortis.” He had already tested it out. Silence. Wim held his hands clasped behind his back; he had the strange feeling of not being in his own house, but rather in a strange house for a wake.

“It’s not so simple, really,” the doctor began anew.

Wim turned back the covers and measured the length of the body. “It seems to me, Doctor—like this—if we lay him across our shoulders, like a plank, I could maybe do it myself . . .”

“Impossible! You think with a dead body . . . !”

“Or I could have him on my back, piggyback, and you could prop him up from behind so that he doesn’t fall backward”—and he lightly bent forward and pulled the arms into two curves at chest height, as though putting them into two stirrups—“like this.”

The doctor hesitated before he answered: “The joints are still too stiff.”

Wim was silent.

“Have you ever actually seen a corpse?” the doctor asked suddenly, and turned the body onto its back.

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