The tram stopped. I had to get off.

STERN: You know, Guilden, not so long ago your nonsense would have struck me as just silly. But now that I’ve spent nearly three weeks struggling to exist in nonexistence, to—how shall I put it—to inhabit a role which you will say has no life of its own, now I’m very careful with all those “to be’s” and “not to be’s.” Between them, you see, is only an “or.” Everyone is given to choose. Certain people have already chosen: some have chosen the struggle for existence; others, the struggle for nonexistence. Crossing the line of footlights is like passing through customs: for the right to sojourn on the far side of the lights, one must pay certain duties.

GUILDEN: I don’t understand.

STERN: Ah, but understanding isn’t everything. You must also make up your mind.

PHELIA: Have you made up yours?

STERN: Yes.

GUILDEN: You’re an odd duck. If we told Timer, he’d have a good laugh. Although our patron has been rather dour lately. Yesterday, when you skipped rehearsal again, he flew into a terrible rage. That’s why I’ve come, to warn you that if you mean “not to exist” at rehearsal again today, then Timer has threatened—

STERN: I know. Let him. I have nothing, you understand, nothing, or rather, no one to bring to your rehearsal. Until the role comes to me, until I see it right here, as I see you now, I have no business at your gatherings.

PHELIA looks pleadingly at STERN, but he has disappeared inside himself, he neither sees nor hears.

GUILDEN: But there ought to be an outside pair of eyes: first the director’s, then the spectator’s—

STERN: Rubbish. Spectators: if you took their coats off the hooks in the cloakroom and seated them in the theater, and hung those spectators on the cloakroom hooks instead, art would not suffer. As for the director—his eyes, as you put it: I would gouge them out—out of the theater. To hell with them! An actor needs his character’s eyes. Only. If Hamlet were to walk in here, search out my pupils with his own, and say to me—You know what, my friends, don’t be angry, but I must work. Sooner or later I shall summon him, and then … Away, I say.

GUILDEN: Phelya, did you hear that? He spoke to us just now like a real prince. We’d better go. Rehearsal starts in fifteen minutes.

PHELIA: Stern, darling, come with us.

STERN: Leave me. I beg you. For me as well, it is about … to start.

“Left alone, Stern sits very still for some time, like this. Then”—Rar reached abruptly for the shadowy emptiness of the bookshelves: his listeners followed with their eyes—“ … Then … he takes a book—the first to hand. I’ll summarize his monologue.”

STERN: Now then, let’s see. Act II, Scene 2: “I’ll speak to him again.” (To me:) “What do you read, my lord?” “Words, words, words.” Oh, if only I could know: the words that were in that book. If only I could know: that knot of meanings. “What is the matter, my lord?”—“Between who?”

From out of the room’s gathering darkness, the ROLE appears soundlessly in the doorway. Through the murk, like the reflection in a cheap looking glass, it mimes the actor’s every gesture. STERN, sitting with his back to the door, doesn’t notice the ROLE until, gliding up from behind, it touches his shoulder.

ROLE: Listen, would you like to know the words in that book I’ve been in the habit of perusing in the second scene of the second act for the last 320 years straight? I suppose I could lend them to you-of course, not gratis.

The black phantom has already subsided into the empty armchair opposite the actor: for a minute STERN and the ROLE peer intently at each other.

STERN: No. You won’t do.