Mona in Three Acts

by Griet Op de Beeck

  I stand there looking at the concrete evidence of her passing and feel nothing. Or maybe everything, it’s hard to say sometimes. Her death was so unexpected. She left and never came back.

  I couldn’t cry at the time and that’s always stayed with me. Tears were for weaklings and you had to save them for your pillow, that’s what my mother said, in more innocent times. Would she have felt this she was applicable to her own passing?

  Even today, it’s still not possible to talk about her. Daddy says it’s too painful for Marie, as though it could prove she’s not a worthy replacement. The photos have been put away in a greenish box at the bottom of that heavy oak cupboard in the dining room, and there’s also a metal case with a few of her belongings. I wouldn’t even know where to look for it. I wonder whether Dad sometimes gets it out when he’s alone.

  Once, when I was twelve or thirteen, it was an evening after a party—with free-flowing alcohol, I’ll bet—he told me that sex with my mother was much better than with her. There was something apocalyptically dark about the look in his eyes. Suddenly Marie became her, the vague word that was usually used for my mom if mentioning her was unavoidable, like a stranger who comes along and begins to stir a pot that has been sealed for centuries. I didn’t respond at the time, but I’ve never forgotten it.

  There’s a lot I have forgotten. I’ve got very few real memories, all in all. Louis once said that it’s often better not to want to know, and I wonder if he’s right. My life not feeling like my own can really upset me sometimes.

  I’ve never really missed my mom, that’s how it feels to me. I don’t know whether it’s even possible, a child still missing its mother if she dies so young—or might there be exceptions? I don’t think I’ve ever met a harder woman than her. Well, I wasn’t an easy child, I guess. I was bossy, constantly chattering, oversensitive too. I think I unintentionally provoked her now and then, as though I had to fight her. Maybe my image of my mom is colder than strictly necessary; Alexander is much milder when he talks about her. Of course, he always stayed just out of range, but as far as I can remember, he never ended up in the basement. I should ask him sometime. He was very good at making himself invisible, and he was always easy, like it wasn’t hard at all, his smile ever ready, always prepared to make minor sacrifices to keep the peace. When the adults were looking. He was cleverest of us back then too.

  Just beyond the beech tree, there’s a woman polishing a double gravestone. She’s scrubbing away on her hands and knees like she’s going to eat off it. She’s got two pots of flowers with her, those little pink and blue ones, a bit of life to put among the dead, that’s nice of her. It must be her parents’ grave, I think. She must have loved them a lot. A better daughter than I ever was. I’ve never been able to tell anybody that I don’t miss my mother, that I couldn’t cry that night, because in addition to a quiet kind of sorrow, I also felt a sense of relief. In the morning I looked up at the sun that was high in the sky and thought: It’s a new day. Honestly, I missed my dad more because the absence of a person who’s standing right in front of you is more intense, it seems. It puzzled me.

  I bike home again, my head full of vague thoughts. As I pass the café by the theater, I slow down. A quick glass of wine. Just one wouldn’t hurt, would it? Then I hear Marcus calling. I see him sitting on the terrace, there in the corner, he’s waving me over. I can’t, I think, but now I have to. Just the one, don’t stay long. I stop, lock up my bike, and walk over to him.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asks, even before I’ve sat down. I’m a little amazed he’s so good at reading faces.

  “Strange day,” I say, smiling.

  “Tell me.”

  “Oh, it’s not that important.” I wouldn’t know where to begin, to be honest, and certainly not with him.

  But Marcus continues to look at me—he’s one of those men who won’t take no as an answer on principle.

  “I went to my mother’s grave,” I say, with some gravity in the hope that this one line will suffice. Most people don’t like talking about mortality or other such doom and gloom.

  “Oh, has she been dead for long?” Marcus isn’t most people. I should have expected this.

  I nod. “Died when I was nine. Car accident.”

  “Awful.” Marcus takes a cheese cracker from a china jar on the table. “I go to my father’s grave at least once a month. I talk to him—that kind of helps.”

  “Was he a nice father?”

  “A bastard,” Marcus says, “but that doesn’t mean you don’t miss him any less, apparently. Maybe more even, because you’re obliged to miss what you never had enough of.” He puts the cracker in his mouth and then immediately takes another one.

  So that’s possible too. I almost want to tell him what I was thinking just now, but I take some cash from my purse and ask whether he wants a drink.

  9

  I can get through this, I think, when I see his head coming closer, eyes closed, mouth already slightly open. I wonder why I’m thinking this now; I was so happy when Louis called me to meet up again. He was going to kidnap me, he’d said, sounding excited. I was happy he wanted to make an effort for me. I’m glad he wants me and that he wants me here and now, no mistaking it.

  He brought me to this beautifully renovated 1960s manor house in the middle of the countryside. A lot of right angles, large expanses of glass with a view onto the garden and a stretch of water upon which boats sometimes sail past. Louis is staying here to write while the owner, a friend of his, is abroad for six weeks. He’d prepared lunch for us. The table in the open kitchen was laid with proper napkins and beautiful, stylish cutlery. There were three kinds of bread, real butter and olive oil, a couple of different types of fish, Ganda ham, and slices of tomato and onion in rings cut too thick. He can’t cook at all, he said, but he’d done his best for me. He poured chilled Meursault and put the bottle in a real wine cooler where it tinkled against the ice cubes. We ate and talked. He ate fast, I noticed that. They say that the speed with which you eat matches the speed of your thoughts.

  “Does that old-fashioned boat out there belong to your friend?”

  Louis nodded.

  “Then don’t we really have to—”

  “That’s the wonderful thing about my life now,” he interrupted me. “I don’t have to do anything, or at least very little.” He grinned from ear to ear, rolled a slice of smoked halibut around his fork, and shoved all of it into his mouth, as though he was trying to make further conversation impossible.

  “Come on, we can’t pass up such an authentic Jane Austen moment.”

  Louis carried on chewing, adding a piece of bread to his mouth.

  “The ultimate chance to prove yourself as a gallant gentleman with a knack for romance.” The more reluctant he became, the more I pushed. It was a reflex.

  When he stepped into the boat, it began to wobble dangerously. I sat down at the far end, and he looked thoughtfully at the plank that served as a seat, wiped his hand vaguely over it, as though worried his fancy clothes would get dirty. He sat down, waited until the boat came more or less to rest, took an oar in each hand, and looked at them, as though they were the most complicated instruments ever and only serviceable by someone with a degree in rowing. He moved them around in the water with no sense of rhythm or direction. We kept drifting toward the bank. I couldn’t watch anymore.

  “Shall I take over?”

  He nodded gratefully and I took the paddles from him. Laughing, he posed like a young maiden: thighs together, hands on his knees, the opposite end of the spectrum from manly and sexy.

  And now, floating around on this quiet water, his face comes closer. His movements cause the sloop to rock, but he keeps coming. His right eye is bigger than his left one, I only notice this now, and his breath smells of the smoked fish he had for lunch, but I’m going to kiss him. Louis is clever and charming and funny, and I don’t think appearances matter, so I let him come closer and off we go. He kisses like he hasn’t bee
n able to kiss anyone for seven years, more frenzied than eager, more uncontrolled than passionate, and there’s no proper conclusion to it. No smacking sound to seal the kiss. He just disappears, tongue and all, back the way he came, abruptly. I don’t know how it’s possible, maybe it has to do with the unstable boat. He pulls his head back, looks at me, and smiles a bigger smile than I’ve ever seen on his face. I smile back. He puts his hand between my legs, where there isn’t much space because the oar handles are there too, and here comes that mouth again.

  “Gently,” I try.

  Louis is fourteen years older than me, but for a moment I feel like a teacher with a student who still has everything to learn. The second kiss proceeds in a more controlled manner on his part. Maybe he can improve, practice makes perfect and all that. Maybe it was a mistake all the same. I lay my hand on his hand and move it down a bit, more toward my knees. He runs his fingers through my hair. Then I pick up the oars again.

  “Shall we go back to dry land?” I ask, as though I’m trying to oblige him, the water hater.

  He looks a little confused, strokes my cheek, and says, “All right, then.”

  We got cold out on the water. It’s only spring, and the air cools down fast. I want a hot drink, but he pours a glass of red wine and suggests we sit in the living room. I say I adore the view right here in the kitchen. Tables, I think, and hard chairs. They’re better than sofas with voluptuous cushions.

  We talk, we’re good at that, and then the conversation turns to his brother. Louis was eighteen when he died, apparently. Although I have a talent for asking for more, I simply nod and listen.

  “I’d just spent six months studying abroad. I came home, happy and not happy, the way it goes with those kinds of adventures. My whole family was standing at the door to welcome me back, all except my brother. He was ill, I knew that of course, but he was supposed to get it fixed. He was the bear of the family, the sportsman, the invincible member of the gang. His letters had explained all the steps taken in his treatment, and I’d been optimistic. From a distance. And all of a sudden, I see him sitting, well, lying more like it, in the armchair. If they’d shown me a photo beforehand, I’d have said, ‘I don’t know that boy’—that’s how much damage the cancer had done.” Louis takes a sip and stares at his glass. He makes the wine dance as though this dash of happiness can help him. “I barely dared to look at him, afraid that my brother would see what I was staring at: death itself, which he clearly didn’t feel ready for. His body did, perhaps, but not his mind. I knew this from his letters and what my parents had told me. I embraced him, delicately, like he might break. After that, I fled upstairs, claiming I had to take an urgent shower after my long trip, but really it was to pull myself together.” There are ravines in Louis’s eyes, gravel, swamps. As though they want to say Save me, as though he believes I can. And I, I stay with him. “Three months and six days later, he was dead. It was very quiet after that.” He puts down his glass and takes my hands in his and it actually feels nice.

  When he brings me home later and we’re sitting in the car in front of my apartment, I’m the one who kisses him, because I want to. Lips are just lips, this man is this man, with his deluge of words and his helplessness. He’s one person but also all kinds of things, and that’s unusual, I think as I kiss him again.

  10

  I’d put on a bikini under my clothes, it’s best to be prepared in this kind of situation, and yet I stand here dithering. We were supposed to get ready, the man had said, and then come out. He’d pointed toward an area with changing rooms that led to showers on the other side. Get ready, that could mean anything. Nothing worse than being that one girl who’s too prudish to go naked. The only thing worse is being naked among other people who are all dressed. The safest bet is often the best one, I decide, so I stick to the bikini and come out of the dressing room, walk through the locker room and out into the night. I’m the last person, the rest are all standing in a clump, just next to the sweat lodge. The only light comes from the burning torches. Only Sasha is wearing a swimsuit, she looks at me with embarrassment or relief in her eyes, I can’t say which.

  Nobody had to feel obliged, Marcus had said, but it would be special if we could experience this as a group—cleansing ourselves together, being brought closer to ourselves and each other, which of course meant nobody dared refuse, at least I didn’t. I wouldn’t voluntarily take part in this kind of ritual invented by people with too much imagination and too few useful hobbies to elevate their existence above pure idleness, not in a thousand years. But now there’s no avoiding it. So I stand here, shivering in a bikini among people I actually don’t know that well. I wonder whether that’s an advantage or a disadvantage.

  For a while I considered getting out of it with an excuse, like a terrible illness or a family member on their deathbed—the more dramatic, the more credible. I thought about that as I walked in and was hugged by a woman with a makeup-less, grooved face. She smelled of sandalwood and unwashed clothes and the knots and tangles in her hair were permanent. If they’d told me I could pick one of a hundred random women I wouldn’t want to have hug me, I would have pointed her out without hesitation. It didn’t get much better when a man—the boyfriend of the woman with the knotty hair, I guessed—told me what we were going to experience together. His story was emptier than mountain skies. He used words like transformation and letting go and Mother Earth. I expected the woman with the hair to bring out a tambourine, but that didn’t happen. I repressed a yawn of boredom, and of discomfort, I think.

  First we’re all supposed to do the Salutation to the Four Directions, then he’ll purify us before we go into the sweat lodge, he says. He runs some kind of rustling branch excruciatingly slowly over the front of each person’s body, from top to bottom, and then does the other side. Once he has finished with you, you can duck through the narrow entrance into the sweat lodge and form a circle. Marcus goes first. We’re standing close by and apart from him; there’s not much to look at. It’s dark everywhere and somehow you find your eyes inclined to follow that branch, like a child follows a finger or a dog a treat that you hold in the air and move playfully from left to right. When the man gets below Marcus’s waist, I look away, but I’ve seen it and all the others have too, I’m certain. He’s as large as you’d expect for a man with his ego. Right now, I’m relieved I’m not a man. I see people go and stand ready, one by one, I see them half-heartedly trying not to stare at whoever is receiving the treatment, and I’m grateful for this bikini.

  I’m the last to crawl into the hut. It’s pitch dark inside. I squeeze between Sasha and Marcus. Squeeze, that’s the word, the circle’s too big for this sweat lodge, that’s how it feels. However hard I try not to touch the others, it’s impossible to avoid it. I try not to think about the fact we’ll be sweating like pigs soon. I don’t know what’s worse, my sweat touching their bodies, or theirs mine. I feel the sand and grass under my buttocks. I want to leave.

  The man, sitting amicably among us, says that it’s all about letting go here and we have to do that literally. This powerful ritual, as he calls it, is going to last four hours and no one can leave the hut, so anyone who needs to relieve themselves should let it flow, and menstruating women can entrust their blood to the earth. I want to know whose piss and dried menstrual blood is seeping up into my skin at this very moment. Which predecessors have shared their juices with the earth? I shudder at the thought. I want to leave.

  In phase one, the focus stays on the dead; the man makes his voice sound all echoey. We’re supposed to share everything we want with the group: sounds, screams, words, sentences. Everyone should react the way they feel when they think about death and dying. The last things I want to think about with my almost-naked butt in the sand and grass, with people I only really wanted to make a Chekhov play with, are my mother and my grandmother. And death in the abstract, I’d rather not go there, probably because I’m afraid of it, but please allow me that fear, it’s mine, I don’t need t
o share it, not in the form of yelping, weird noises, sweat, piss, or blood.

  The temperature in the hut rises, the man starts humming some kind of primal song and encourages us to join him. It doesn’t take long for Marcus to lead the way. He produces a howling scream that gives me the chills even in the middle of all this sweating. The others won’t be outdone, apparently, and they too growl, roar, sob, shout, scream, and screech as though they’re being clubbed to death, very slowly, by a sadist. They’re actors, at the end of the day, so it’s hardly surprising. I remain silent and hope Marcus doesn’t notice. If Chekhov were sitting here, I’m sure he’d remain silent. Of course, Chekhov would surely have refused to come, he had a personality and stuff.

  Sasha invites her dead brother to come and join us in the circle and share this magisterial experience with her. Joris expresses his gratitude at being able to be here with us because we can help him shoulder his sorrows. Marcus thunders that he is connected with his deeper self and that we should all reach for that point because it’s an unbelievable gift. He uses words like pain and impotence and broken and being lost with no inhibition. In the meantime, I try to guess how many minutes have already passed. I try to daydream myself to another place, somewhere pleasant, like a proper chair or something, with all my clothes on, in good company, where people are conversing politely or remaining modestly quiet. And yet, a restless kind of anxiety, hard to put your finger on but present, prevails.

  I see the shadows, feel the others. I hope no one has relieved themselves already. I’m afraid I’ll have to pee soon, I’ve got a small bladder, always have. I’m just glad I didn’t have any of the tea offered to us in the reception area. I don’t understand how I’ve let myself get maneuvered into this situation, to be honest, but I do understand, of course. Meanwhile, the terrifying sounds are only getting louder. I want to leave.