STRANGER. I tried to hang myself in the closet.
RUDOLPH. [Speaking very slowly] Was that what happened that Holy Thursday Eve, when you were taken to the hospital—what the rest of us children were never permitted to know?
STRANGER. [Speaking in the same manner] Yes.—There you can see how little we know about those that are nearest to us, about our own homes and our own lives.
RUDOLPH. But why did you do it?
STRANGER. I was twelve years old, and tired of life! It was like groping about in a great darkness—I couldn't understand what I had to do here—and I thought the world a madhouse. I reached that conclusion one day when our school was turned out with torches and banners to celebrate "the destroyer of our country." For I had just read a book which proved that our country had been brought to destruction by the worst of all its kings—and that was the one whose memory we had to celebrate with hymns and festivities.[1]
[Pause.
RUDOLPH. What happened at the hospital?
STRANGER. My dear fellow, I was actually put into the morgue as dead. Whether I was or not, I don't know—but when I woke up, most of my previous life had been forgotten, and I began a new one, but in such a manner that the rest of you thought me peculiar.—Are you married again?
RUDOLPH. I have wife and children—somewhere.
STRANGER. When I recovered consciousness I seemed to myself another person. I regarded life with cynical calm: it probably had to be the way it was. And the worse it turned out the more interesting it became. After that I looked upon myself as if I were somebody else, and I observed and studied that other person, and his fate, thereby rendering myself callous to my own sufferings. But while dead I had acquired new faculties—I could see right through people, read their thoughts, hear their intentions. In company, I beheld them stripped naked—Where did you say the fire started?