Just One Year

Monday. It’s in three days. But what is there to stay for? The flat is finished. Soon enough Daniel and Fabiola will be back with the baby, and there won’t be room for me.

“It’s not too soon?” I ask.

“It’s not too soon,” she says. “I’m just grateful it’s not too late.”

There’s a hitch in my throat and I can’t speak. But I don’t need to. Because Yael starts speaking. In torrents, apologizing for keeping me at arm’s length, telling me what Bram always said, that it wasn’t me, it was her, Saba, her childhood. All the things I already knew but just didn’t really understand until now.

“Ma, it’s okay.” I stop her.

“It’s not, though,” she says.

But it is. Because I understand all the ways of trying to escape, how sometimes you escape one prison only to find you’ve built yourself a different one.

It’s a funny thing, because I think that my mother and I may finally be speaking the same language. But somehow, now words don’t seem as necessary.

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?

Hotel Magere Brug. I know exactly where it is. I rode past it almost every day of my life. On weekends they used to serve homemade pastries in the lobby, and Broodje and I would sneak in sometimes to take some. The manager pretended not to notice.

I take her suitcase. “Come on. I’ll take you home.”

• • •

The last time I was at the boat, it was September; I got as far as the pier before I rode away. It looked so empty, so haunted, like it was mourning his loss, too, which made a certain sense because he built it. Even the clematis that Saba had planted—“because even a cloud-soaked country needs shade”—which had once run riot over the deck, had gone shriveled and brown. If Saba had been here, he would’ve cut it back. It’s what he always did when he came back in the summer and found the plants ailing in his absence.

The clematis is back now, bushy and wild, dropping purple petals all over the deck. The deck is full of other blooms, trellises, vines, arbors, pots, viny flowering things.

“This was my home,” I tell Kate. “It’s where I grew up.”

Kate was mostly quiet on the tram ride over. “It’s beautiful,” she says.

“My father built it.” I can see Bram’s winked smile, hear him announce as if to no one: I need a helper this morning. Yael would hide under the duvet. Ten minutes later, I’d have a drill in my hand. “I helped, though. I haven’t been here in a long time. Your hotel is just around the corner.”