That one line. It cracks open his facade. It reveals what’s underneath. Rosalind sees Orlando. He sees her. That’s the whole play, right there.
I feel the lines like I haven’t before, like I’m truly understanding Shakespeare’s intentions. I feel as if there really was a Rosalind and an Orlando and I’m here to represent them. It isn’t acting in a play. It goes back further than that. It’s much bigger than me.
“Ten-minute break,” Linus calls at the end of Act One. Everyone heads out for a smoke or a coffee. But I am reluctant to leave the stage.
“Willem,” Petra calls to me. “A word.”
She’s smiling, which she rarely does, and at first I read it for pleasure, because isn’t that what a smile communicates?
The theater empties out. It’s just the two of us now. Not even Linus. “I want to tell you how impressed I am,” she begins.
Inside I’m a little boy grinning on a birthday morning, about to get the presents. But I try to keep my face professional.
“With so little experience, to know the language so well. We were taken with your ease with the language at your audition, but this . . .” She smiles again, only now I notice that it looks a bit like a dog baring its fangs. “And the blocking, you have it cold. Linus tells me that you even learned some of the fight choreography.”
“I observed,” I tell her. “I paid attention.”
“Excellent. That’s just what you needed to do.” And there’s that smile again. Only now do I begin to doubt it reflects any pleasure. “I spoke to Jeroen today,” she continues.
I don’t say anything but my gut twists. All this, and now Jeroen is going to lumber back with his cast.
“He’s terribly embarrassed by what happened, but most of all he’s disappointed to have let down his company.”
“There’s no one to blame. He was in an accident,” I say.
“Yes. Of course. An accident. And he very much wants to be back for the last two weeks of the season and we will do our best to adapt to meet his needs, because that is what you do when you are part of a cast. Do you understand?”
I nod, even though I don’t really understand what she’s on about.
“I understand what you were trying to do up there with your Orlando.”
Your Orlando. Something about the way she says that makes me feel like it won’t be mine for much longer.
“But the role of the understudy is not to bring his own interpretation to the part,” she continues. “It is to play the part as the actor you’re replacing played it. So in effect, you aren’t playing Orlando. You are playing Jeroen Gosslers playing Orlando.”
But Jeroen’s Orlando is all wrong, I want to say. It’s all machismo and prancing and no revealing; and without vulnerability, Rosalind wouldn’t love him, and if Rosalind doesn’t love him, why should the audience care? I want to say: Let me do this. Let me do it right this time.
But I don’t say any of that. And Petra just stares at me. Then, finally she asks: “Do you think you can manage that?”
Petra smiles again. How foolish of me—of all people—not to recognize her smile for what it was. “We can still cancel for this weekend,” she says, her voice soft, the threat clear. “Our star has had an accident. No one would fault us.”
Something given, something taken away. Does it always have to work like that?
The cast starts to drift back into the theater, the ten-minute break over, ready to get back to work, to make this happen. When they see me and Petra talking, they go quiet.
“Are we understood?” she asks, her voice so friendly it’s almost singsong.
I look at the cast again. I look at Petra. I nod. We’re understood.
Forty-five
When Linus releases us for the afternoon, I bolt for the door. “Willem,” Max calls.
“Willem,” Marina calls behind her.
I wave them off. I have to be fitted for my costume and then I have only a couple hours until Linus will meet me to go through my marks on the amphitheater stage. As for what Marina and Max have to say: if it’s compliments of my performance, so Jeroen-like even Petra was impressed, I don’t want to hear it. If it’s questions about why I’m playing it like this, when I played it so differently before, then I really don’t want to hear it.
“I have to go,” I tell them. “I’ll see you tonight.”
They look wounded, each in their own way. But I just walk away from them.
Back at the flat, I find W, Henk, and Broodje busy at work, pages of yellow pad on the coffee table. “That’s Femke in,” Broodje is saying. “Hey, it’s the star.”
Henk and W start to congratulate me. I just shake my head. “What’s all this?” I gesture to the project on the table.
“Your party,” W says.
“My party?”
“The one we’re throwing tonight,” Broodje says.
I sigh. I forgot all about that. “I don’t want a party.”
“What do you mean you don’t want a party?” Broodje asks. “You said it was okay.”
“Now it’s not. Cancel it.”
“Why? Aren’t you going on?”
“I’m going on.” I go into my room. “No party,” I call.
“Willy,” Broodje yells after me.
I slam the door, lie down on the bed. I close my eyes and try to sleep, but that’s not happening. I sit up and flip through one of Broodje’s copies of Voetbal International but that’s not happening either. I toss it back on my bookshelf. It lands next to a large manila envelope. The package of photos I unearthed from the attic last month.
I open the envelope, thumb through the pictures. I linger on the one of me and Yael and Bram from my eighteenth birthday. It’s like an ache, how much I miss them. How much I miss her. I’m so tired of missing things I don’t have.
I pick up the phone, not even calculating the time difference.
She answers straight away. And just like that time before, I’m at a loss for words. But not Yael. Not this time.
“What’s wrong? Tell me.”
“Did you get my email?”
“I haven’t checked it. Is something wrong?”
She sounds panicked. I should know better. Out-of-the-blue phone calls. They require reassurance. “It’s nothing like that.”
“Nothing like what?”
“Like before. I mean, nobody is sick, though someone did break an ankle.” I tell her about Jeroen, about my taking on his part.
“But shouldn’t this make you happy?” she asks.
I thought it would make me happy. It did make me so happy this morning. Hearing about Lulu’s letter made me happy this morning. But now that’s worn off and all I feel is her recrimination. How far the pendulum can swing in one day. You’d think I’d know that by now. “It appears not.”
She sighs. “But Daniel said you seemed so energized.”
“You spoke to Daniel? About me?”
“Several times. I asked his advice.”
“You asked Daniel for advice?” Somehow this is even more shocking than her asking him about me.
“I wondered if he thought I should ask you to come back here.” She pauses. “To live with me.”
“You want me to come back to India?”
“If you want to. You might act here. It seemed to go well for you. And we could find a bigger flat. Something big enough for both of us. But Daniel thought I should hold off. He thought you seemed to have found something.”
“I haven’t found anything. And you might’ve asked me.” It comes out so bitter.
She must hear it, too. But her voice stays soft. “I am asking you, Willem.”
And I realize she is. After all this time. Tears well up in my eyes. I’m grateful, in that small moment, for the thousands of kilometers that separate us.
“How soon could I come?” I ask.
There’s a pause. Then she gives the answer I need: “As soon as you want.”
The play. I’ll have to do it this weekend, and then Jeroen will come back or I can quit. “Monday?”
“Monday?” She sounds only a little bit surprised. “I’ll have to ask Mukesh what he can do.”
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?”