The Road to Mecca

Act II starts up a few minutes later, as Marius, Elsa, and Helen all sit at Helen’s table. Marius has brought vegetables for Helen and chides her about her diet, telling Elsa that Helen’s former vegetable garden “has been crowded out by other things” (41). Elsa tells Marius that the Karoo looked “dry and desolate” as she drove through it on her way to visit Helen, and she judges it, telling Marius she sees it as “God without mankind” (42). Marius pushes back on this and says she “judge[s] it too harshly” (42). Elsa asks if the “Coloured folk” in the town have “as many reasons to be as contented as you,” and Marius says that they “have every reason to be,” telling Elsa, “It is my world—and Helen’s—and we can’t expect an outsider to love or understand it as we do” (43).

Elsa leaves the room and Marius tells Helen he believes he and Elsa could start arguing. Marius then tells Helen that he needs to leave soon to write his next sermon, saying, “And, thanks to you, I know what I want to say” (44). Marius explains that when he was digging up the vegetables in his garden, he heard a little voice in his head saying “thank you,” and that he had “deep and very painful wounds in my soul” when he first came to New Bethesda, but the town has allowed him to “[discover] life” (45). He tells Helen he now wants to “give thanks, but in a way that I’ve never done before” in the sermon, saying that when he has said that in the past, it has been with an “actor’s vanity” (45). Helen says he should say that tomorrow, and the two reflect on when he first came to New Bethesda 21 years ago, when Helen was still with her late husband, Stefanus. Helen remarks, “It feels like another life” (47).

Elsa re-enters and puts the application down on the table so that they can discuss it. Marius tells Helen that the room at the nursing home is “definitely yours—that is, if you want it, of course” (48) and asks her some final questions about her application, such as the year of her confirmation and her husband’s middle name, as well as whether she currently has a will. Helen pushes back and says she’s “worked out a plan for everything” (51), saying that she’ll go to doctors’ appointments and have Katrina take care of the house more so she can stay at home. Marius tells Helen that Katrina will move soon because her husband got a new job, which makes Helen extremely upset. Helen tells Marius that Katrina “is the only friend I’ve got left in the village,” which Marius is discouraged by, telling her the others in town “behave towards you in the way you apparently want them to, which is to leave you completely alone” (53).

Helen complains about how the “village has changed” and about her loneliness, and Marius tells her, “[I]f you are really that unhappy and lonely here, then I don’t know why you have any doubts about leaving” (54). Helen calls out for Elsa to stop her, because she’s about to sign the nursing home application form, but Elsa resists, telling Helen, “[I]f you haven’t got the guts to [say no], then too bad. I’m not going to do it for you” (55). Elsa, who says she’s in a state of “very near total mental and emotional exhaustion” (55), starts arguing with Marius, whom she thinks is trying to “bully and blackmail” (56) Helen into signing the form. Marius tells Elsa that his concern is that Helen “gets a chance to live out what is left of her life as safely and humanely as possible” (57), revealing that the burn on the wall is actually from a candle being knocked over and setting the curtains on fire. When a neighbor saw the flames and came in, he found that Helen “had stopped trying to put out the flames herself and was just standing staring at them” (57).

Elsa gets upset at Helen for lying to her and says she’ll be leaving early in the morning, telling Helen, “You’ve abandoned yourself. […] You’ve certainly made me make a fool of myself again, but this time I don’t think it’s funny” (58). Marius tells Elsa this is why they were trying to persuade Helen to leave, saying that “we don’t persecute harmless old ladies” (59). Elsa pushes back on this, telling Marius that it’s clear the people in town don’t think that Helen is “harmless,” referencing how children have stoned Helen’s house and statues and parents “frighten naughty children with stories of Miss Helen’s ‘monsters’” (60). Elsa says that Helen’s statues in her yard are monsters to the townspeople because “they express Helen’s freedom” and that she visits Helen because “she challenges me into an awareness of myself and my life, of my responsibilities to both that I never had until I met her” (61). Elsa says that Helen is “the first truly free spirit I have ever known” (61).

Marius is surprised by this, instead referring to Helen’s statues as “idolatry” (61). He recalls a time when Helen skipped church because she was suddenly inspired to create an owl statue, an incident he refers to as turning “your back on your church, on your faith and then on us […] for the company of those cement monstrosities” (63). Elsa tells Helen that Marius and the others are all jealous of Helen and her freedom; when Helen asks Marius if this is true, he gets angry and says he feels “as if I were on trial,” telling Helen that he cares about her but that she “isn’t free” and is “trapped in the nightmare this house has become” (64). He continues, claiming, “Your life has become as grotesque as those creations of yours out there” (65).

Marius asks Helen why she abandons her faith and she asks, “What faith?” (65), telling Marius that she lost her faith long, long ago. She says she had gotten used to the emptiness she felt the night 15 years ago after Stefanus’s funeral, when Marius followed her home and pulled Helen’s curtains and closed her shutters: “In doing that it felt as if you were putting away my life as surely as the undertaker had done to Stefanus” (66). She tells Marius that she wasn’t mourning Stefanus and was instead feeling “black widowhood for my own life” (66). Helen describes sitting that evening and waiting for darkness when the last candle went out; but instead, the light stayed lit and “seemed to find its courage again” (67). She directs Elsa to start lighting the candles around the room and starts describing the inspirational vision she had that evening of the city of Mecca, saying that the Wise Men and camels she has outside are traveling in the direction of Mecca and the “East” (67).

Elsa finishes lighting the candles and the room’s “full magic and splendor is revealed” (68). Helen tells Marius to look at the light, saying, “This is my world and I have banished darkness from it” (68). She says that this is not “madness,” because she’s aware that her Mecca isn’t the real city, but it’s “as near as I could get to the real Mecca” (68). Helen tells Marius that her journey to Mecca “is over now,” and that she won’t be needing the application form, explaining, “I can’t reduce my world to a few ornaments in a small room in an old-age home” (68).

Marius feels defeated that he could never reach Helen and they say goodbye to each other. After he leaves, Elsa tells Helen that she believes Marius is in love with Helen, but Helen says she is not in love with him. Elsa says that she now feels jealous and lonely. She brings up the woman on the road again and says she hopes she didn’t get a lift, because “there’s no Mecca waiting for her at the end of that road” and “the sooner she knows what the score really is, the better” (72). Elsa divulges to Helen that she had an abortion, and that after she dropped off the woman, she sat in her car and screamed, hating everyone, including herself. Elsa says tonight she “wanted to punish us […] for our stupid helplessness” (73) before starting to cry in a moment of emotional release. 

The two decompress a bit and Helen says that after tonight, she thinks she understands something: “The road to my Mecca was one I had to travel alone […] [and] now that it is over, there is only me there at the end of it. It couldn’t have been any other way” (74). She says that her Mecca “is finished, and with it […] the only real purpose my life has ever had” (74). Helen says that she must now teach herself to blow out her candles “and what that means” (75).

Elsa goes to her bag and offers Helen Valium, which Helen mistakes for an artificial sweetener. Elsa says that Helen should have made an angel sculpture so that “they would leave you alone,” but Helen says, “Good heavens, no” and that the village “doesn’t need more of those” (75). If she did make one, she says, “I’d have it pointing to the East. Where else? I’d misdirect all the good Christian souls around here and put them on the road to Mecca” (76). The two laugh, and Elsa says that she loves Helen “so much it hurts” (76). Helen asks, “What about trust?” (76). The play ends with Elsa’s response: “Open your arms and catch me! I’m going to jump!” (76).