RUDOLPH. You're not dead, then?
STRANGER. In a way, yes!—I have come back from America after thirty years—there was something that pulled at me—
I wanted to see my childhood's home once more—and I found those ruins! [Pause] It burned down last night?
RUDOLPH. Yes, you came just in time. [Pause.
STRANGER. [Dragging his words] That's the place—such a tiny place for such a lot of destinies! There's the dining-room with the frescoed walls: palms, and cypresses, and a temple beneath a rose-coloured sky—that's the way I dreamt the world would look the moment I got away from home. And the stove with its pale blossoms growing out of conches. And the chimney cupboard with its metal doors—I remember as a child, when we had just moved in, somebody had scratched his name on the metal, and then grandmother told us it was the name of a man who had killed himself in that very room. I quickly forgot all about it, but when I later married a niece of the same man, it seemed to me as if my destiny had been foretold on that plate of metal.—You don't believe in that kind of thing, do you?—However, you know how my marriage ended!
RUDOLPH. Yes, I've heard——
STRANGER. And there's the nursery—yes!
RUDOLPH. Don't let us start digging in the ruins!
STRANGER. Why not? After the fire is out you can read things in the ashes. We used to do it as children, in the stove——
RUDOLPH. Come and sit down at the table here!