Forty-six
I hang up the phone with Yael, feeling as though someone has opened a window and let the air in. This is how it is with traveling. One day, it all seems hopeless, lost. And then you take a train or get a phone call, and there’s a whole new map of options opening up. Petra, the play, it had seemed like something, but maybe it was just the latest place the wind blew me. And now it’s blowing back to India. Back to my mother. Where I belong.
I’m still holding the envelope of photos. Once again, I forgot to ask Yael about them. I look at the one of Saba and mystery girl and realize now why she looked familiar to me the first time I saw her. With her dark hair and playful smile and bobbed hair, she looks quite a bit like Louise Brooks, this . . . I grab the newspaper clipping . . . this Olga Szabo. Who was she? Saba’s girlfriend? Was she Saba’s one that got away?
I’m not quite sure what to do with them now. The safest thing would be to put them back in the attic, but that feels a little like imprisoning them. I could make copies of them and take the originals with me, but they still might get lost.
I stare at the picture of Saba. I flip to one of Yael. I think of the impossible life those two had together because Saba loved her so much and tried so hard to keep her safe. I’m not sure it’s possible to simultaneously love something and keep it safe. Loving someone is such an inherently dangerous act. And yet, love, that’s where safety lives.
I wonder if Saba understood this. After all, he’s the one who always said: The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.
Forty-seven
It’s half past four. I’m not due to meet Linus until six for a quick tech run through before the curtain. Out in the lounge, I hear Broodje and the boys. I don’t want to face them. I can’t imagine telling them I’m going back to India in three days.
I leave my phone on the bed and slip out the door, saying good-bye to the boys. Broodje gives me such a mournful look. “Do you even want us to go tonight?” he asks.
I don’t. Not really. But I can’t be that cruel. Not to him. “Sure,” I lie.
Downstairs, I bump into my neighbor Mrs. Van Der Meer, who’s on her way out to walk her dog. “Looks like we’re getting some sun finally,” she tells me.
“Great,” I say, though this is one time I’d prefer rain. People will stay away in the rain.
But, sure enough, the sun is fighting its way through the stubborn cloud cover. I make my way over to the little park across the street. I’m almost through the gates when I hear someone calling my name. I keep going. There are a thousand Willems. But the name gets louder. And then it yells in English. “Willem, is that you?”
I stop. I turn around. It can’t be.
But it is. Kate.
“Jesus Christ, thank God!” she says, running up to me. “I’ve been calling you and there’s no answer and then I came over but your stupid bell doesn’t work. Why didn’t you pick up?”
It feels like I sent her that email a year ago. From a different world. I’m embarrassed by it now, to have asked her to come all this way. “I left it in the flat.”
“Good thing I saw your dog-walking neighbor and she said she thought you went this way. It’s like one of your little accidents.” She laughs. “It’s a day of them. Because your email came at the most serendipitous moment. David was intent on dragging me to the most hideous sounding avant-garde Medea in Berlin tonight and I was desperately trying to find an excuse not to go, and then this morning I got your email so I came here instead. And I was on the plane when I realized I had no idea where you were performing. And you didn’t answer your phone and I got a little panicky, so I thought I’d track you down. But now here we are and everything’s good.” She exaggeratedly wipes a hand across her brow. “Phew!”
“Phew,” I say weakly.
Kate’s radar goes up. “Or maybe not phew.”
“Perhaps not.”
“What is it?”
“Can I ask you to do something?” I’ve asked Kate so much already. But having her there? Broodje and the boys, they may not know any better. But Kate will. She can see through all the bullshit.
“Of course.”
“Will you not go tonight?”
She laughs. As if this is a joke. And then she realizes it’s not a joke “Oh,” she says, turning serious. “Are they not putting you on? Did the other Orlando’s ankle mysteriously heal?”
I shake my head. I look down and see that Kate is holding her suitcase. She literally did come straight from the airport. To see me.
“Where are you staying?” I ask Kate.
“The only place I could find at the last minute.” She pulls out a slip of paper from her bag. “Major Rug Hotel?” she says. “I have no idea how to pronounce it, let alone where it is.” She hands me the paper. “Do you know it?