(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.