Tangiers
or
A Previous Life
Post war drama in two scenes by Christian Lanciai
The characters:
Laura The porter
Frank Marcel
The stage is a shabby hotel in Tangiers after the war.
Scene 1. A shabby hotel lobby
Laura (comes to the counter) I am looking for a certain Frank Norton.
Porter He is not in at the moment.
Laura But he lives here?
Porter Yes, if you could call that living.
Laura What else would it be?
Porter Madam, he never gets a visit. You are the first ever. Visits is the last thing he is expecting. He doesn’t live here. He is on a temporary visit. That’s what he himself calls his staying here. You can never know when he is here and when he is not here. Sometimes he stays away for days and weeks. When he comes back it is always of a sudden. I don’t know anything about him and don‘t want to know anything about him. For me it is enough that he is just one of many wrecks after the war.
Laura So you suggest that there is no idea in my waiting for him?
Porter That’s about it.
Laura I stay at the hotel Casablanca a few blocks away.
Porter Then I will certainly not try to persuade you to move here.
Laura Could I leave a message for him?
Porter Honestly speaking I don’t think that is any idea, but of course you are welcome to.
Laura Is he then completely washed out?
Porter You must have survived the war yourself. Then you must know something about what the war has done to people.
(offers her pen and pencil. She starts writing something deep in thought. While she is writing, Frank enters. She becomes aware of him immediately.)
Laura Frank!
Frank (harkens, like struck by lightning, collects himself at once) How the hell did you get here?
Laura It doesn’t matter. I am here.
Frank What are you doing here?
Laura I learned that you were here and happened to pass by.
Frank How did you learn it?
Laura I asked where you had gone.
Frank Why did you do that? Don’t you know that I am dead?
Laura I can see, Frank, that you are not dead.
Frank What do you want from me?
Laura I would like to know what happened.
Frank Don’t you know? The whole world knows. I am a decorated war hero. I only made good all the way. I made no mistakes and got a medal for surviving. Surely you must know that?
Laura It’s not enough. It doesn’t explain why you are here in Tangiers just drinking yourself out of life.
Frank So you are aware of that. Well, you have the right to know what happened. You actually helped me to it. That’s probably why you feel some kind of responsibility for my case. Well then, Laura, you asked for it. Serve me a double, Adolphe, so that I could get through this examination. (The porter serves him a double.) Would you also like to have one?
Laura I could take a small one for the sake of company.
Frank Good. Then you could endure listening to me for a while. Come! (She also gets a small one, and he brings her over to a small table where they sit down.)
I told you I was dead. That’s not the whole truth. I should have been dead. Unfortunately I survived, and that’s worse than if I had died.
Laura I know what happened to you.
Frank In that case you only know the official version. What do you know?
Laura I was in it from the start. You were sent on a mission to France some months before the invasion. Gestapo took you in. They tortured you to learn what you were going to do. But they didn’t break you. You were liberated when the partisans stormed the prison. You were badly hurt but could recover. Then you were sent to Burma, where you continued to excel until the war was over. After the war you got stuck here. Because you didn’t reveal your mission to the Germans you were decorated.
Frank That’s what I thought. You know nothing.
Laura What don’t I know?
Frank You had better not know about it.
Laura Frank, I was in it from the beginning. I knew what your mission was all about. I was against your being sent out on it since I felt you were too sensitive. I was the general’s secretary and was used by him to analyse your suitability. In spite of my advising against it he found you the most suitable candidate. Have you forgotten that I asked you to refrain from the mission and, if you were caught, rather reveal everything than let them break you?
Frank You know that they didn’t break me.
Laura What is it that I don’t know?
Frank That everything is just deceit and hypocrisy. I am worse than dead, Laura. I am nothing. I am a wreck of the war where not even the ribs of the keel stick up from the sand. I have chosen to bury myself alive and not without good reasons.
Laura You are a war hero, Frank. No one can take that away from you. You can’t deny it.
Frank (laughs hard) I deny it with every right in the world!
Laura You can’t deny the truth.
Frank No, that’s the only thing I can’t deny, but with that right and truth I have the right to deny the official truth.
Laura (collecting herself, like as if to take off) Have you forgotten how it was, Frank? Have you forgotten that you confided in me and that I showed you the same confidence? Have you forgotten that we loved each other and did everything together except going to bed, since that was against regulations – we were both on duty, I on staff and you as an officer. We had our duties which in wartime had priority to love, which we had to postpone till after the war. Now the war is over since more than a year. I am searching for that Frank who wanted me after the war, but he never came back after the war. No one could tell me what had happened to you, there were some loose rumours that you had been sent to Burma, and then no one knew anything more, until I met the general on the anniversary celebrations of the end of the war and the invasion. I asked him about you, he was your senior and principal, so he if anyone should have to know something, and reluctantly he gave me your address in Tangiers. He knew no more about you than that you like so many other war heroes now had nothing else to do but to drink.
Frank We are redundant. We are not needed any more. We are scrapped. We have nothing to do in this world. All we have is our memories, but my memories are nothing to be proud of. I will tell you exactly how it is. I am ashamed to show myself to people, and there is no person in the world I would less have liked to show me to than you.
Laura (after some pause) Why?
Frank (after some pause) Since you were in the service and probably still are, you should have some right to know. The truth is, Laura, that I broke to the Gestapo. I revealed the secret of my mission. I couldn’t withstand the constantly exacerbated torture. I just wanted to die. When I couldn’t I betrayed my country.
Laura (is silent)
Frank So now you know. You might as well go home. There is nothing for you to do here. The wreck you behold in front of you is not the same man that you sent out on heroic secret missions of intelligence. He is a traitor and a living dead, a man who survived himself to his own unspeakable misfortune. (rises, drinks to the bottom and wants to leave) Go home, Laura. Your Frank isn’t any more. Here you only find his ghost, like some other zombie.
Laura No, Frank, it’s worse than that.
Frank What do you mean?
Laura It was intended that you should get caught.
Frank I don’t understand.
Laura The mission you were sent on was fake. You got that mission because you were enough stubborn and assiduous and loyal to never willingly reveal your mission but at the same time sensitive enough not to be able to hold out at length. It was intended that the Germans should catch you to force some false information out of you, which they never would have believed if you
hadn’t believed it yourself. You were a decoy to fool the Germans to regroup before the D-day.
Frank (more and more horrorstruck) So they used me. They exploited me for their damned cursed war. I was just an expendable pawn in the game, a means to wage for the end! Was the general really that inhuman?
Laura Everyone was equally inhuman in the war, Frank. It was like a universal mental world disease, which contaminated everyone who had power and responsibility. Why do you think Churchill and Roosevelt executed the bombing of Dresden with its carefully premeditated intentional firestorm that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians? Why do you think the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki although it was well known what the first one had accomplished? All wars are just madness, and everyone who starts and takes part in them have to be insane. Or else they would never have anything to do with it. I was against that you should be sent out as a decoy. It was inhuman. I tried to persuade you not to agree to do it. But the war spared no one, and the only innocents are all the victims.
Frank So you knew that I would be sent out just for a trick perhaps to meet with certain death?
Laura The general knew it was taking a great risk, but he took it, proved right and won.
Frank But you knew about it and did not tell me?
Laura We were all under oath and the compulsion of the war laws. I did what I could to stop the operation, but my human means were not enough. Inhumanity ran us all down.
Frank This explains why I was not allowed to die.
Laura Did you want to die?
Frank I tried. All of us who were sent out on missions behind the German lines had a small ampulla of cyanide inserted into a tooth by operation, which we easily could bite off if we would land in too difficult situations, like interrogation by Gestapo or the SS, and we were guaranteed a quick death after twenty seconds. When the torture became too intolerable I could not stand it any longer and bit the tooth through. But the poison did not work. The twenty seconds passed without anything happening, and that was the cruelest moment in my life, when I was forced to live on against my own will and then had no other choice but my own breakdown and the admission of my mission. Then I died harder than if I really had died.
Laura So you rather chose death than to give in to the pressures of the Gestapo?
Frank Of course.
Laura Frank, then you are saved.
Frank What do you mean?
Laura Then you haven’t lost yourself. Then you really are a war hero. You have nothing to be ashamed of! On the contrary. They sent you to death,
but you overcame death by rather choosing death yourself than to betray the mission you were sent out to betray.
Frank But I betrayed it!
Laura Yes, but that was the intention! You were sent out especially to betray it! The Germans walked into the prepared trap, while you, poor darling, didn’t know you had succeeded with your mission by actually betraying it, which you only did because you had failed to die, although according to the program you should have been permitted to die!
Frank What unfathomable pranks destiny expose us to when it pleases to play with us using the cruelty and inhumanity of war for an instrument!
Laura Come back, Frank. You are alive!
Frank Yes, you actually seem to have succeeded in bringing me back alive.
Laura Reality always survives, and we live in order for us to experience it.
Frank What about some food? I am hungry.
Scene 2. The shabby hotel room.
(Frank rises from the bed where he has been lying together with Laura, both without undressing, goes over to a small rickety desk and pours himself a drink.)
Laura Don’t drink any more now, my love.
Frank What else can I do?
Laura Anything is more beneficial than that.
Frank Nothing is more beneficial for an old redundant and scrapped soldier. There are tens of thousands like me all over the world who should have been allowed to die rather than being forced to survive, which is the only thing worse than death.
Laura Don't be so bitter.
Frank I am only realistic. There is nothing to live for now when the war is over. As long as the war went on you had at least something which could be worth dying for, the war kept you alive and alert in constant tension, but now when all that is gone there is nothing but emptiness, and when you have emptied a bottle to compensate even that emptiness even the bottle will just be replenished with emptiness.
Laura Have you entirely forgotten that you had a life before the war?
Frank Did I?
Laura Has the war then completely brainwashed you and burnt you out so that you have forgotten yourself? Why did you at all apply for service in the Intelligence?
Frank Have you never understood it? I was a failure. I wanted to get out of my failure. The war danger offered an opportunity of an alternative of a best way to get rid of my life for perhaps a good cause.
Laura So you looked up the war danger just to escape from reality?
Frank No, for an alternative. My career had busted, or rather, I had busted my career, where I had made a shit of myself, but I had gathered contacts.
Laura Yes, you did travel all over Europe. That’s why you got your commission. You spoke French fluently and could count as a Frenchman. What European languages did you not speak?
Frank I also managed with Russian, German, Spanish, Turkish and Italian.
Laura Of course you knew Italian. That’s the mother language of music. Wasn’t Italy where you studied music?
Frank Among other things.
Laura Why didn’t you become a concert pianist?
Frank (empties his glass after having filled it up) That was my dream Piano music is the most beautiful there is, and there was only one thing more beautiful, and that was piano in combination with an orchestra in a real piano concerto. I struggled like a horse. I played seven hours a day although Arthur Rubinstein recommended no more than three. I learned the entire great classical repertoire, Rachmaninov's second, all five of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky's first, Schumann's and Grieg's, both of Brahms, both of Chopin and a few more, and I could have continued to become established. I only had appreciative and appraising criticisms. Even Vladimir Horowitz heard me and appreciated me, but most of all I Iearned from Clifford Curzon, who opened my eyes to the other side of the matter. No one played finer than he, but he was hypersensitive and found it constantly more difficult to perform to audiences. Finally it was enough if just someone in the audience crackled with something, a paper bag or anything, for him to break it off, rise and search among the audience to by his glance brand the perpetrator. Other pianists were even more sensitive and quit playing in public altogether. But that was not the reason why I quit.
Laura What was it?
Frank It was the established snob mentality among established musicians. They were not fart classy, but the more established they grew, the more unbearable they became sliding down towards inhumanity. I don't know if perhaps the music itself was to blame, but Mozart, Schubert and Mendelssohn did not become like that, neither did the maestros of Italian opera, but the first one to completely lose all distance to himself and his own humanity to completely get lost in his own narcissism and derail into an inhuman monster of a motherfucker was Richard Wagner. I think that's where music went wrong. After him innumerable musicians have lost their humanity in the same way by intolerable conceit and especially many leading ones They have almost ruined the whole world of music. I didn't want to take part in such a human decay of a kind of constantly accelerated self-manufactured hubris with the loss of all detachment as a serious symptom of mental unsoundness. I was afraid of losing my humility. After my last concert, my most ambitious
one, where I managed to execute the entire program with flying colours except the very last part, which unfortunately became the blot that ruined the whole protocol, I refrained from concerting for good while I instead more and more made my way to more obscure underground clubs and bars
Laura I think I attended that concert. It was all Chopin, wasn't it?
Frank Yes, with the Fantasy ops 49 for a conclusion.
Laura Everyone wondered where you had gone. You just disappeared.
Frank That was the intention. I never wanted to be seen in public again.
Laura But it was not such a bad performance. As you said, everything went well but the last one.
Frank But it is always the last number that has to be successful if anything! It's the final bar that completes the all-round impression, and it has to be overwhelmingly positive! Or else the entire concert comes out wrong and is a failure!
Laura But what was it that went wrong?
Frank I got off. Perhaps it didn't show, but I noticed it myself, and that was enough to get overwhelmed by despair. I tried to get over it, but the tempo faltered, which it never must do. It must flow continuously all the way up to the final tape. Or else you will inevitably fail and fall, even if you only notice it yourself.
Laura You took it too hard.
Frank I know I was too sensitive. I couldn’t stand the petty jealousy between the musicians. I couldn’t stand bullies who considered themselves superior and who I could only regard as parasites on music. I couldn’t stand humbugs who only lived on their technique and thought that music was just technique. And above all, any kind of airs and graces deterred me and made me see the world of music as a prison for maniacs, which they could never liberate themselves from as long as they didn’t break out from themselves. That’s what I did.
Laura And with your international contacts you were the ideal type for an agent, so that when you were contacted you were too willing to catch on.
Frank Yes, it was at a joint in East End in London. Some recruiter had heard me play there sometimes, so he decided to make me an offer, which I couldn’t resist.
Laura So you went on going around in all Europe and playing at bars while you carried through your secret missions. Was that how it happened?
Frank Until the war came too close. Then the music wasn’t enough any more, but I had to do the intelligence full time.
Laura Did you never miss the music?
Frank It served no purpose. It is too late now. My hands are ruined. The Gestapo nailed me, stuck broken matchsticks under my nails and then pulled out the nails. For them it was just routine. For me it was worse than death and the hardest possible death. It was a comprehensive death that made any kind
of resurrection impossible. (drinks and pulls himself together) But one thing I don’t understand. How could the general know that I was here?
Laura I don’t know. He just knew it.
Frank He shouldn’t have known it. After my last mission I was very careful about covering every trace of me for a definite disappearance. No one was to know where I had gone. Still the general knew.
Laura We usually keep track of our agents whatever happens to them.
Frank Of course, but I oughtn’t to have been found.
Laura Why?
Frank My last mission was my most dangerous one. If the general knew where I was, and if he gave the address to you, so that you could find me, the risk is that also others could find me.
Laura Who must not find you?
Frank Don’t you know there is a new war on, which it wages without weapons but which is the more cold and cruel just for being waged behind the curtains underground? My last mission was in Vienna, which I gladly accepted in the foolish hope of perhaps being able to retrace my lost music there, but it turned out the opposite. The city is partitioned between the Russians and the allies, and the communists are gradually subjecting all eastern Europe to their dictatorship. What I found and had to report was so horrible that I wanted to get off completely forever. Therefore I fled by Greece and the Mediterranean here. I thought my escape had succeeded, until you dropped by.
Laura Come back, Frank! It is not too late! You must still have many of your old friends left, schoolmates, perhaps even in your family, and back home in England your former employers could surely arrange a completely safe existence for you. You do get a soldier's pension with additions, don't you?
Frank I needed nothing extra. I managed all right with what I already had. I declined further offers from the family and the service. I just wanted to die, and until I died to at least be allowed to remain drunk all the time.
Laura But you are alive! You have the right to live! It is your duty to live! You might still even be of good use with all your knowledge!
Frank You don't know what you are talking about. What's the kind of world we have after the war? It is completely ruined, denaturalised and dehumanised. There is almost only inhumanity and ruins left. Before the last war you could go almost anywhere in Europe without a passport. Already after the first world war you needed passport everywhere, and it's even worse now, when certain European countries are completely closed up if not even partitioned. It's not a human world we have received to take care of after the war, Laura, but a cemetery of debris and rubbish, where inhumanity now is the ruler and thrives on ravishing those surviving victims that still remain after the holocaust. There is nothing for me to do in an inhuman world, Laura, except to drink and numb myself until I die.
Laura And what about me then? Do I not exist? Will I not do? I did come back, didn't I? Then you also can do it. (A prudent knock on the door.)
Frank (interrupted) It sounds like the porter. (goes to open) What is it, Adolphe?
Porter Pardon me, monsieur, but two gentlemen are here asking for you.
Frank What kind of gentlemen?
Porter Two proper well dressed gentlemen.
Frank (consterned, collects himself) Ask them to wait. I will be right down.
Laura Who are they?
Frank They have found me.
Laura Who?
Frank Those who know that I know too much.
Laura And who are they?
Frank Why couldn't they have left me in peace! I was completely harmless and happy in slowly but safely sinking down into the bottle with the only reliably good company there is in the world which is whisky! But those idiots had to at any price do their utmost to implement whatever folly enforced on them by politics, without ever understanding that the only thing they accomplish is just harm, until it is too late and they perish themselves in the hopeless perdition of their activities. Politics is a hopeless case from beginning to end, which sometimes could start off well for an exception but which always has to end up in a maximum of bad results with only ruined lives to harvest. Life is and has always been and will always remain a tragedy, and the more you try to get away from its hopelessness, the worse will be your own tragedy.
Laura But what do they want? Do you know who they are? The porter told me that no one ever visited you. Are these the first ones after me?
Frank They must have followed you through all Europe. You are in danger, Laura. It doesn’t matter what happens to me, but you must not get involved.
Laura I am involved already, and I am here to stay. That was my only intention by looking you up.
Frank You don’t know what you were doing.
Laura Then tell me!
Frank (grasps her) Laura, the post war games are not for women. You should never have come here. I told you that at once, but you came, and now it is too late. The most dangerous crime in the world today, which almost infallibly must lead to death, is knowing too much, when all the world’s leading powers mainly devote themselves to eliminating those who do, from Stalin to Truman and everyone with any power in between. You must be familiar with the murder of the UN diplomat Folke Bernadotte in Israel?
Laura The one with the white buses north from Germany after the war? He fell victim to some terror attack in Israel, didn’t he?
Frank Even his crime was knowing too much, like Jan Masaryk and many others. I also know too much, Laura.
Laura I will not let you go anyway.
Frank (embraces her) Then don’t.
Laura Since obviously I already know too much I might as well learn some more, especially if we are now going to die together, for that is what you imply, isn’t it?
Frank Laura, you can still save yourself.
Laura I don’t want to as long as you don’t want to or can’t save yourself. Frank I need a drink. (sits down and refills his glass.)
Laura Don’t drink now, but try to be lucid and tell me what this situation is all about. What kind of well dressed gentlemen are here to pay you a visit?
Frank It does not matter, but I know what they want, and that’s enough. They are here to complete and clean up after their activity, which only consists of sweeping dirt under the carpet, and all that dirt consists of political murders, eliminations, the erasure of any traces, denial of history, character assassinations of people in high positions that can’t be disposed of but are the more dangerous for knowing too much, frightening such persons to perpetual silence if they don’t prefer to die, forcing suicides and all that kind of things. They were frustrated by my disappearance, but now that they have found me, they want to eliminate the last existent risk of my knowledge of too much of the truth. Laura, to make it all easier to understand, the whole world is bankrupt, but it can’t stand hearing about it. It can’t bear the truth, while I gave it the damn for the sake of the truth.
Laura And they want to murder you for that?
Frank The two world wars were the greatest and most disastrous mistake in history, after the first the situation could in some ways be saved, but president Wilson was overrun by his own in America, and that’s why the League of Nations never became the global supreme power which it needed to be to secure the world peace. Instead the first world war led to the second, and here we are now with the result of the whole world order transformed into the ghost of a ruin, while those fools who now are in charge already have started accelerating its derailment to hell. America should never have used atomic bombs in the war. This mistake has put off all the possibilities of the world order. They weren’t actually neither meant to be used, they were created out of fear of Germany being on the way to manufacture them, but when it was evident that Germany was out of all danger on that point, the Manhattan project should have been cancelled, but instead the generals pushed it on and enforced the application of the atomic bombs against the explicit advice and will of the responsible scientists. Consequently Oppenheimer was later branded as a security risk by the miltary The practical use of the atomic bombs could only lead to other powers feeling the urge of acquiring atomic weapons, and thus there as a mad race fired off to become the foremost terror nation. Even England joined the race, which I openly dared to condemn. I suggested
that England instead would take the initiative to take the lead in condemning all military use of nuclear power, and then I was blacklisted by my own. To get rid of me they sent me to Vienna to find out what the Russians were up to when they when they wrapped all eastern Europe up in the dictatorship of Stalin. I immediately saw that the Russians would not hesitate to get the atomic bomb themselves by any means, and that nothing could stop them. I did not supply them with nuclear secrets, but I realized they could not be left out. Then there was this matter of the Jews, the holocaust, the concentration camps and Israel. They gave them Israel just to get rid of them, and the whole construction of the state was a self-deceit which only could lead to perpetual conflict with the Arabs. Even the orthodox Jews of Israel condemned the Israeli state. It was enforced by terrorism, the Stern gang blew up King David and murdered the diplomat Folke Bernadotte, because he knew too much about the improprieties behind the creation of the state, whose leaders, like David Ben Gurion and Menachem Begin were ruthless opportunists for whom the end justified any means. I knew too much about Stalin’s plans for a world domination, about the great Israelic bluff, about the mendacity of the Truman administration and about the dirty play of England to stay in power as a world empire at any price, so that everyone shared an interest in getting rid of me. I tried to disappear but will not succeed until I am finally executed for having seen through the entire world order bluff, why they imagine that I alone could threaten it by calling its bluff. That bluff will become obvious anyway, and the world order will not improve as a consequence of that. I know too many mortal weaknesses in every part of the game, why all parts have every reason in the world to get me disposed of, just to eliminate the possibility of the other part getting hold of me. (footsteps in the stairs outside)
Thank you for coming, even if it just brought death to both of us. (A knock on the door.)
Laura This is for me.
Frank How could it be? Are you expecting someone? (The door opens and a prudent elderly man shows up.)
Laura I am glad you could come, doctor Marcel.
Marcel (indicates Frank) Is this the patient?
Laura Yes.
Marcel Don’t be afraid, my man. I am not going to hurt you. This young lady contacted me because she was worried about your condition. Let me just examine you.
Frank There is nothing wrong with me.
Marcel You can say that again, but look at your hands. Laura told me you were a stranded pianist, now I see why.
Laura He was tortured by the Gestapo. Will he ever be able to play again?
Marcel I understand your concern. The Gestapo found a special inhuman pleasure in torturing musicians out of their music. I am afraid, my man, that they made a thorough job on you.
Frank I have nothing to live for anyway.
Laura Don’t say that!
Marcel Have you even tried to play again?
Frank It's no use. It will only give me pain, and it will only sound painful.
Marcel I am not so sure of that. You could work away the pain. If you just keep at it assiduously and refuse to give up, the nerves will gradually withdraw and the pains will ease. And once you have mastered the art, you could always regain it, like a language you have forgotten - it is still there somewhere in the back of your head, and all you need to do is to dig it up again by practice.
Frank But the fingers are stiff. Playing used to be my life's greatest and only pleasure. It's no fun anymore when you don't have the same freedom of movement. My fingers are decrepit, and so I am an invalid, good for nothing, but to die. The only way you could help me would be to give me the means of a proper suicide.
Marcel That's no way out. There is no such thing as a proper suicide, since there is never any proper cause for it.
Frank Did you see those two well dressed men sitting in the lobby as you entered?
Marcel Yes. They looked very proper. Are they acquaintances of yours?
Frank They are here to kill me. I am just waiting for them to come up here and finish the job. By coming here you risked your life, for if they kill me and Laura they don't want any witnesses.
Marcel I am a doctor. Since I knew something about you. I did not come here without an escort. Two policemen are waiting outside the hotel. Your two friends will not be able to do anything. If they are wise they will just sneak out unnoticed.
Frank They will wait for me some other day. Now they know I exist, and they will not drop the scent of me.
Marcel I am not so sore that anyone wants you dead apart from those, especially not the local authorities. Now they have been warned, and they will not let you die, as little as I will let any of my patients die.
Frank You condemn me to life.
Marcel Is that such a horrible punishment?
Frank The worst imaginable.
Marcel Not if you start playing the piano again. That if anything will soften your horrible life.
Laura Are you angry with me for providing doctor Marcel?
Frank How could I be. What is done is done.
Marcel At least I don't think you will have any more visitors today. Those two proper gentlemen downstairs are probably gone by now.
Laura I suggest that we all three go out together and say hallo to the policemen on the way, and that we then go for lunch.
Frank If you insist.
Laura I do insist.
Marcel Thanks for the invitation. I will be your chaperon then.
(They rise. Laura lays her arm around Frank, they walk out of the room together, and Marcel follows them behind.)
The End.
Gothenburg 9-13 March 2019, translated and improved in July 2024.