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—