It was late afternoon by now, only a few of us were left, and it was so quiet you could hear the hum of the radiators and the gently tapping rain on the roof.
"There's nothing wrong with my seeing his hump," Thea now said; although there was a cooing tone in her voice as she tried to match her emotions to his touch, Langerhans wasn't going to be taken in so easily and cheaply; he withdrew his hand with undignified haste and blushed, as he always did when contradicted: "It seems you still don't understand your own situation, Thea," he said quietly, his voice devoid of emotions not relevant to the subject at hand (it was this voice that made him so detestable and unapproachable): "You shouldn't worry about yourself so much, you know; after all, what can happen? Nothing. Go ahead, don't be afraid to be a little more vulgar, it's okay, we're talking business here, plain and simple. You'll simply sell your body, that crack between your legs, to be exact, because that's all you've got left, that slit. Your life has finally revealed its true nature to you. That's all there is, that hole, that body, and nothing else. He's killed your husband. So what? He's killed your father-in-law. Big deal. He's also killed your father, but that doesn't matter either, because you're scared, because you're all alone. They're all dead, but you're alive, and when he tears off his shirt you can see he's quite attractive. You don't even want to see his hump. So his offer sounds like a good deal all around. Be a slut, my dear, and don't try to be his mother."
"But even a slut could be a mother, have you ever thought of that?" Thea said, even more quietly.
"Go ahead, catch your breath. Take your time."
"You're being very nice."
"No, I'm just trying to understand you."
"But what should I do with all that phlegm? while I'm doing all that cursing it just builds up, almost choking me. What should I do? I think I should be spitting at that point. It was dumb to cut that. I'll choke on it, I'm telling you. What should I do?"
"Swallow it."
"I can't, I just can't."
"You can't spit on the glass, if that's what you had in mind."
Thea shrugged her shoulders. "You still need me?"
"We'll take a short break," Langerhans said.
I got up from the chair on which I had been comfortably swinging back and forth; Thea was heading toward us.
This was the dull part of the day, as always happened when rehearsals stretched into the late afternoon: even if the rehearsal hall's tall, narrow, highly placed windows had not been covered with black curtains, anyone interested in the outside world and looking out through the heavily barred windows would see little besides a few slender chimneys rising above grim walls, darkening in the rapidly descending twilight, and blackened roof tiles across the way, and a sky that more often than not was depressingly, monotonously gray; still, sometimes I'd stand by those curtains for a while, usually after politely offering my chair to Thea, who, when not onstage, liked to sit next to Frau Kühnert at the little table near the edge of the director's platform; my small courtesy toward Thea came in handy because around that time of the day, as late afternoon was turning into evening, insecurity and anxiety took hold of me, nearly suffocated me; we'd call it simple anxiety, I suppose, since I really had nothing to do here, I was only an observer, which after a while proved to be not only exhausting but downright unhealthy; I just had to get up and look for something to do; but the view from the window didn't relieve my anxiety, if only because I went on being an observer — though not of gestures, faces, and accents, which in the artificial light of the cavernous hall had become all too familiar, along with the personal, often secret motives animating them; what I saw from the window, from behind crude iron bars, was a different set of relationships, between walls, roofs, and the sky, and I had nothing to do with them either, except as an observer, yet even here I could see some subtle changes: no matter how relentlessly gray the sky may have appeared, the various shades of light had enough play to emphasize certain details over others, so that the same view in fact was constantly changing, looked new and different; and similarly, under the even glare of the rehearsal lights there were enough surprises to make transparently familiar gestures and responses seem startlingly fresh; in my better moments I could consider myself rich in the accumulated knowledge of these details and the relationships among them, but I had to forgo the natural desire to contribute actively, to participate; my mind may have been producing some very decent ideas, but I had no clearly defined role, no real niche, and this proved to be a fundamental handicap here, where one's place in the strict hierarchy was determined by the role one played, where only rank could give validity and weight to one's observations; in a certain sense I was tolerated only in the chair I occupied, and it wasn't a permanent chair either but an extra one put in for me, temporarily; I was nothing more than an "interested Hungarian," as somebody once said, standing right behind me, not at all concerned that I might overhear this odd characterization, which, come to think of it, wasn't offensive, given its factual correctness, perhaps more accurate than the person who spoke it might have thought; anyway, my situation was not so unusual or unfamiliar; I could have found it highly symbolic that I was deprived of a chance to interfere with the course of events, made a silent witness, an observer condemned to inaction who also had to bear, all by himself, the consequences of his silence and his helplessness, without the chance to blow off steam; I was indeed a Hungarian, in this sense very much a Hungarian: no wonder Frau Kühnert's pleasant attentiveness and Thea's flattering interest were so gratifying.
Thea stopped in front of us, and by now I was holding the back of the chair, ready to give her my seat; there was something characteristically exaggerated in my politeness — I shouldn't have been so afraid of losing that modicum of goodwill she had shown me — but she wasn't ready to sit down yet, she didn't even step up on the platform as she usually did but, rather, she slid her two elbows to the table and without so much as casting a glance at us leaned her chin on its edge, like a child — she had to get on her toes to do this — and then, resting her head on her arms, slowly closed her eyes.
"What a disgusting piddling around all this is," she said softly, without batting her eyelids; she was perfectly aware that her little performance, for all its hamming, was impressive enough to hold us captive; after all, a truly great actress was doing the hamming, by way of relaxing, and it seemed to betray real emotion. Frau Kühnert did not respond, let her go on, and I didn't start for the window, as was my custom, to disappear behind the black curtains, I was curious; she paused effectively, making us wait, then let out a small sigh, giving us time to watch her shoulders gently rise and fall; with her eyes still closed, she lowered her voice even more, making herself barely audible and, as someone yielding to exhaustion but unable to stop the flow of thoughts, continued, savoring her words: "He'll ruin me, he has ruined me, with this disgusting fussing and piddling."
By now the silence in the rehearsal hall was so deep you could hear not only the rain pattering on the roof and the radiators humming but Frau Kühnert closing her prompt book with a real thump; but she must have meant this rather abrupt gesture as only a prelude to another, more sensible move, because it made as little sense to close the prompt book as it did to leave it open: Frau Kühnert came to the first rehearsal with the full play already memorized, as the actors did, and from then on her only job was to enter the various changes in the text, erase them if necessary, re-enter the final version in ink, and make sure the changes were clearly marked in all copies of the script, and to be on the safe side, she had to sit there with the thick master copy, saving her attention and voice for the moments when someone unexpectedly got stuck, when she would feed them their cues with the eagerness of a good student; this happened very seldom, of course, so now, like one who has finally found real work for which she feels inner motivation, she rested her veiny, masculine hand on the closed book a second, and then gently yet eagerly slid the hand onto Thea's head.