Mona in Three Acts

by Griet Op de Beeck

  “It couldn’t get much worse, could it, eh, Mona?” There’s defeat in Marie’s gaze. “Of course, you always took your father’s side, whatever he did.”

  “All those bad things were really bad, Mom. It just sounds a bit strange now because he’s been gentler to me than ever before.”

  “Oh, so you’re saying I’m lying?”

  “No. I think sometimes there isn’t just one truth but versions of the facts that mainly say something about the person sharing them, and that people only hear what they’re able to hear, or want to hear, and sometimes that’s the same thing. But that says just as much about me, doesn’t it?”

  “And then you talk me under the table, that’s how you always win. Oh well, your mother will just have to manage on her own.” She folds her hands and twiddles her thumbs.

  “Yes, that’s the reason we’re all here, to prove that you have no one you can count on.” Charlie gets up and goes to the bathroom.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m just—I don’t feel very well, I’m so worried. What if Dad dies? I sometimes think I won’t be able to manage. He looks so dreadful sometimes, so absent and almost green in the face, and he’s been eating like a bird for so long, and he—” She breathes rapidly and wheezes a bit as she talks.

  Alexander lets a silence fall for a moment, then says, “They said that if all goes well, he may have five years. Five years is a long time. You can’t let yourself immediately think the worst, it won’t help anyone.”

  I don’t know whether this is the most constructive way of comforting someone, but I can’t think of anything better either.

  “If he dies, what do I have left? Anne-Sophie has run off. You’ve got your own lives.” She looks at us. “I do understand that, you know. You’re busy with all kinds of things. And Marvin has gotten too clever for his grandma. I mean, I already know: I’m going to be all on my own.” She rubs her forehead and stops for a moment. “I think I’ll just go with him when the time comes. I won’t need to live anymore, and then you can all get on with your own lives without the burden of your mother.”

  Alexander jumps to his feet and leans over, his face right in hers, and he says, “I’d really appreciate it if you never said a thing like that again. Never, never ever again.” He speaks in a muted way, slow but hissing with white rage. “I wasn’t even ten when you—it’s—you can’t . . . You’re allowed to be sad, you’re allowed to complain about Dad, you’re allowed to whine and cry as much as you like, but dumping this on us now, now after everything, it’s more than I can take.”

  I blanch.

  Marie starts to cry again, really sobbing now. “Nobody understands me, nobody.”

  “No, we understand you too well. Maybe that’s the problem.”

  “Why are you turning on me now, son?” She looks up at the ceiling and fights for breath.

  “Why don’t you understand?” Then Alexander starts to cry. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen him shed a tear in his adult life.

  “I’ve done everything for you, everything.” She monotonously plants the words between each sob. “And I’m constantly misunderstood. How is it possible?” She holds her head in her hands, distraught.

  Charlie comes back in, shrugs, and raises her arms and hands as if to say: What’s going on here?

  “We’re all under pressure because of Dad.” I make it sound reassuring.

  Charlie kneads Alexander’s shoulders.

  Marvin stands in the doorway. “Are you having a fight?”

  “No, no, my little Marv,” Marie says with a red face.

  “Sometimes grown-ups need to have a fight and then they can make up again, the way you do with your friends at school.” Charlie goes over to Marvin and leads him back into the dining room.

  “Whatever we do, it’s never good enough,” Alexander says. He sits down again. The flag is at half-mast. He’s as unsteady now as he was firm a moment ago. “That’s how it feels to me, anyway.”

  “But it is,” Marie says. “I’m very happy with everything you do for me, and for Dad. I do say that all the time. I don’t get it.”

  “The queen of mixed messages, that’s what you are.”

  Charlie comes back into the room.

  “Of what?” She looks at me from under her brows, a child that doesn’t understand why they’re not allowed to poke their fingers in the socket. “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this,” she sobs, more quietly now.

  “Well, I don’t either,” Alexander bites back.

  “In such difficult times, other families support each other.” Marie stands up and walks over to the cupboard containing the napkins. Her blouse is crooked, and I can see a glimpse of her belly—a triangle of white flesh, creamy, it folds over her skirt slightly. I don’t know why, but the sight makes an impression on me: such a well-groomed woman letting everything go for a moment.

  “Let’s agree that we don’t always understand each other but that everyone means well.” Someone’s got to try something, I think.

  Charlie asks, “Shall I top up the wine, or does anyone want coffee instead?”

  “Yes, coffee, yes,” Marie says. She sits down again, her gaze on the big wedding photo of her and Dad hanging on the wall, she in bright yellow, her face radiant, Dad in a subtle dark suit, as though everything is still possible.

  “The coffee’s brewing. I’ll have another glass of wine, anyone else?” Charlie announces.

  “No, thank you,” Marie says, rubbing a napkin over her whole face.

  “What about you, sweetheart? Alcohol’s good for forgetting.” Charlie smiles cautiously as she says it and lays her hand on the back of Alexander’s neck.

  Some forgetting is difficult, I think as I fill up my glass again.

  14

  Marvin comes over with three thick photo albums. He has to make a family tree for school and he wants photos of us when we were little, and one of now. He lays the fat books on the table, pulls up a chair close to mine, and kneels on it.

  “Come on, let’s choose together,” he says. He leafs and leafs and asks how old I am in one shot.

  “Four or five perhaps,” I say.

  I’m wearing a short white skirt with red flowers and a sweater with sleeves like wings. My mother has picked me up, probably just for the photo, because, in my memory, she stopped doing that once I started nursery school. My left arm rests on her shoulder. We’re in the garden and, in the distance and blurred, I see a swing in front of green bushes. I’m looking straight into the lens; in my eyes there are dreams and a sad knowingness.

  “And that’s your real mom?” He points at her.

  “Yes.” She was a beautiful woman, it has to be said. “Your daddy looks like her, don’t you think?”

  “No,” Marvin says seriously. “Daddy looks like himself.”

  “Oh yes, of course.”

  “I’m glad my mommy isn’t dead.”

  “Me too.”

  “Is Grandpa going to die?” He poses the question in exactly the same tone as the previous one.

  “I hope not.”

  “Me too. Grandpa can be funny sometimes.” He continues to leaf. “Do you still miss your mom?”

  Only when I hesitate does he look at me. How much honesty can a boy of ten take?

  “Sometimes I miss having a mom,” I say, which isn’t a lie.

  “Yes, but you do have a mom, right? Granny?”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  He points at a photo showing people, popsicles, sun, and a garden. Adults shelter in the shade, children sit in a circle, I stand in the middle of the picture, looking down, my silent mouth drawn into a thin line. “What was this party?”

  “I think it must have been my birthday, twelve, I’m guessing.”

  “I wish I was twelve.” Marvin turns a few pages and stops at a portrait of the family together on the sofa. Dad, Marie, Alexander between them, he looks down to the right as though there’s something more interesting happening there. “That’s Daddy th
ere, with the dirty face?” Marvin asks with a laugh.

  I nod. Marie is holding Anne-Sophie with her right arm, still a baby with large eyes and a straight back, she looks into the lens, Marie and Dad look at her with something of a smile and deep longing. I’m sitting on the arm of the sofa next to Dad, looking at Alexander. The circles under my eyes are so dark you’d think I was a thirty-five-year-old woman with a mild drinking problem.

  “Dad says Anne-Sophie might fly back at some point,” Marvin says.

  “Yes, she probably will.”

  “Dad says I knew her when I was little, but I don’t really remember.”

  “That’s normal, you were very young.”

  “It’s strange that you can forget relatives.”

  He picks up a second album and goes through it much more quickly.

  “Can’t you find anything you like?”

  “I want a picture of you looking happy,” he says in a matter-of-fact tone.

  I pick up the third album and begin to leaf through it.

  15

  We stroll around the pond in the park near the hospital. At times like this, the world becomes smaller in every way. A toddler is feeding the ducks; every sixty seconds she shouts, “Ducky, come and eat!” Her little voice squeaks. Her mother tears chunks from a baguette before giving them to her daughter, who throws the bread as far as she can. This woman is good at vicarious pleasure, I think.

  Marie asks if we can stop for a while, she wants to smoke a cigarette, and women shouldn’t walk and smoke at the same time, it’s inelegant. Now I have to ask, I tell myself. Most people would consider it a very normal request, but there are different laws in our family, that’s the way it is.

  “I wondered—I wondered whether I could visit Dad on my own from now on.” I let a silence follow. “And if possible for a bit longer than just an hour.”

  “Oh, so you’re keeping secrets from your mother now.”

  “Of course not. It’s just, I’ve realized it’s what I need.”

  “Oh, right.” She tries to light her cigarette, which is difficult in the wind. I cup my hands to help her.

  “It’s just—he’s my father.”

  “Yes.” She smiles. “And my husband.”

  “Yes.” I’m happy the toddler is so actively engaged; we can look at her instead of each other. “I’d just like to have a real conversation with him and that’s easier when it’s just the two of us.”

  Marie rubs the tip of her shoe along her calf. “That’s possible, yes, that he does want to have a proper conversation with you.”

  There’s not much I can say to this, so I give it a wide berth. “I don’t need more than the three times a week you’ve allocated in the schedule.”

  “I start to worry when I’m not with him. What am I supposed to do then?” She inhales deeply and holds in the smoke for a long time.

  “You live nearby. You could pop home, have lunch with a friend, or do some shopping in town, something relaxing, and then come back with renewed energy.”

  Marie looks distressed. “You know I find that difficult.”

  I nod.

  Marie’s cigarette sparks. “Fine, of course you can speak to your father. I hope it does you some good.”

  The little girl shakes the bread bag empty, and her mother has to hold on to her or else she’d plunge into the pond, she’s that enthusiastic. “Bye-bye, ducks!”

  “Thanks, Mom. That’s sweet of you.”

  Marie throws the butt on the ground and uses her heel to twist it into the grass, then she looks at me. “What do I always do wrong?” She stares ahead. She sounds calm, not accusing. “I’d really like to know.”

  I stare into the distance. I see a large building on the edge of the road that has been partially demolished. The arm of a crane dangles uselessly. There’s something touching about destruction when it’s incomplete.

  “Shall we go back?” As though she’s uncertain what the answer will be.

  “Yes,” I say.

  16

  “Well, pal, you’d have been better off asking me to write that play.” Louis makes it sound like a joke.

  “Oh, so your girlfriend shares all our state secrets with you, is that it?” Marcus wraps his arm around Louis’s neck as though he’s trying to strangle him. With that muscular arm around him, Louis looks even more like a little boy.

  “Mona does everything I ask.”

  They both laugh.

  “Wait until I’m finished with the text. Have a bit of faith in a director’s genius, eh?” Marcus grins and puts his sunglasses back on his nose. “Get yourselves a good seat.” Then he moves on, the engaging host, doing his rounds.

  “Someone needs to tell him his new look is ridiculous—sunglasses, I mean, really,” Louis whispers, too loud.

  “Admit it, you’d like to be him.”

  “Him? Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Without the coke habit and the sartorial excesses, perhaps, but the rest.”

  Louis looks around, as though he’s not listening, which might be the case.

  “And who’s that?”

  “Which one?”

  “The good-looking man, tall with dark hair, there in the corner.”

  “Oh, Nathan, he’s in the play, very good actor. Why?”

  “He’s glanced over at you three times already.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “No, really.” Louis pinches my cheek teasingly. “Stick with your master, all right?”

  I hear the announcement: “It’s starting in three minutes, folks. Three minutes, everyone take a seat.”

  The national broadcasting channel has made a documentary about Marcus, a sixty-minute portrait with clips of his work and interviews with artistic buddies and other friends. Now his assistant is having it shown on a big screen for the whole gang. Around thirty people have been invited, actors, the production crews, and associates. When Louis goes to greet Elise, I watch Nathan, who’s standing with Frank, the youngest of us. Nathan talks with his hands, I like that in people. When Frank begins to answer, Nathan suddenly looks over at me. When he sees that I’m also looking at him, he smiles quickly, then he turns his head away at once.

  Everyone sits down. Louis has taken a seat two rows away from me, next to Elise. The documentary begins with shots of Marcus in action during rehearsals in the theater, the voice gushing about him as one of the pioneers of Low Countries theater. Marcus has his sunglasses on top of his head so he can see properly.

  At the twenty-minute mark, it turns out that Marcus’s mother is also in the documentary. She’s a leggy, tall woman with a skinny neck and a disproportionately large mouth full of teeth. She looks as though her thoughts are elsewhere the whole time, and she talks in a brisk and measured manner, like she’d worked out her responses in advance. I remember Marcus’s drunken stories about his mother; he only ever talked about her when he was drunk. I’m on the edge of my seat.

  “It was already apparent at an early age: Marcus was a gifted child—creative, dreamy, elusive—not a typical child, but his parents weren’t typical either, of course.” She chuckles at this, there’s something forced about it. “Not an easy child either, he knew very well what he wanted, he tried to bend things to his will from a very young age, and from time to time he’d have tantrums so extreme it would sometimes worry me.” I glance sideways at Marcus. He sits there watching as though nothing else exists, in the kind of total concentration he can have during a rehearsal. “What I’m the most proud of?” The woman fans back her endless hair and reflects: “That he exploited his talent and turned his weaknesses into his strength.” Her expression is thoughtful. When the interviewer out of frame asks which weaknesses she was thinking of, she replies, “No comment,” like it’s a political talk show and they’re trying to corner her. The interviewer allows the pause to go on a bit, and she adds, “Marcus is an artist pur sang, I’ve always encouraged him in that.” I look at the woman, who doesn’t seem the least bit like a mother talking
about her child. While the audience had been watching with merry, distracted interest, passing the occasional comment, it is now deathly quiet. The mother shares a few anecdotes from his early childhood, names one of her favorite shows of his and explains why she liked it. Then the interviewer asks how she’d describe their relationship. With a moment’s hesitation, she replies: “It’s awful that I can’t give him all my motherly love, which is so much, so powerful, so unescapable. He is my only son, but he has abandoned me. In the emotional sense, at least.” Then she holds a hand more or less in front of her eyes, as though she wants to hide tears from the camera. They switch to a clip from a rehearsal in which Marcus is giving a tongue-lashing to a technician who has done something wrong. The cruel power of editing.

  Marcus, the man of grand gestures and the endless show, certainly in this kind of company, certainly at the moment in which he is also expected to be the star, sits bolt upright in his chair. I wonder why he gave the filmmakers permission to interview his mother. Some kinds of hope never fade, maybe. Everyone remains silent until there’s a clip of Marcus’s Hamlet production from a couple of years ago, a widely praised production. Then Elise makes a comment. It’s not a very funny remark, but everyone laughs all the same. Marcus doesn’t join in.

  17

  He huffs and puffs as though he’s just climbed a mountain, but he’s only pulling up the pants I’d gotten to his knees while he was still lying down. I help him into his suit jacket. He looks helplessly at the pair of shoes I’ve laid out.

  “Come on, up on the bed,” I say before putting a pair of socks on him, and then the shoes, a minor victory over my aversion, anything for a good cause. I roll the wheelchair up to the bed and put the note of apology to the nurses on the pillow.