r in Munich; the samovar is
Warsaw one night in May; the lucerna is Rome ... and all that those places
mean to me. I never realized how _things_ could be _alive_--be
personal--until I was left all alone in the midst of these.

VERA

There, don't you see? They're so _dominating_. I knew you before all
this.... I wish you would get away--be _yourself_.

JEAN

No. I shall stay here. As close as possible.

VERA

But really, Jean! I'm thinking of your work. Perhaps you don't appreciate
what an insidious drug memory can be. Especially the memory of
unhappiness. Let's be frank, Jean, for the sake of your future. You _have_
been unhappy.

JEAN

Unhappy? Yes, I have been outrageously unhappy! Years of it! Sharp arrows
and poisoned wine. I wanted to die....

VERA

_Jean!_

JEAN

You read a play by Strindberg, and you say it's very strong, very
artistic, but all the while you believe it is only the nightmare of a
diseased mind. It's just a _play_--you shut the book and return to "real"
life, thankfully. Well, the Strindberg play has been my real life, and
real life my play, my impossible dream. You can't imagine how terrifying
it is to feel the situation develop around you. Two bodies caught naked in
an endless wilderness of thorns. Every movement one makes to free the
other only wounds him the more. Two souls, each innocent and aspiring,
bound together by serpents, like the Laocoon.... It is one of those things
that are absolutely impossible ... and yet _true_.

VERA

I'll help you pack. Now. You _must_!

JEAN

We had the deepest respect and admiration for one another, but somehow we
never walked in step. His emotion repressed mine, my emotion repressed
his. Sometimes one was the slave, sometimes the other. We couldn't both be
free at the same time. There was always something to hide, to be afraid
of.... Not words nor acts, but moods. It passed over from one soul to the
other like invisible rays. And we couldn't separate. That was part of it.
We just went on and on....

VERA

People wondered. The first time I met Paul--

JEAN

What do you feel?

VERA

I wondered, afterward, what it really was. He seemed to impress me like a
powerful motor car stalled in a muddy road.

JEAN

Ah. I know!

VERA

Poor child.

JEAN

No. You don't understand, I _was_ unhappy, in the ordinary sense,
unbelievably so. But that wasn't all. I was alive! I lived as the man
lives who faints in the dark mine undergr