Four Letter Word

by Joshua Knelman

  ‘What part did you get?’

  ‘Elena.’

  ‘I think Sonya has more lines,’ he said. Not for the first time,

  I was grateful we don’t have children.

  ‘Guy,’ I said, ‘Elena is a great role and I’m perfect for her.’

  ‘Why? Because she’s beautiful and useless?’

  I laughed. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘And because she married a man she despises.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. Elena doesn’t despise Serebryakov.’

  ‘Was Papp there?’

  ‘He was.’

  ‘Is he a big guy?’

  ‘No, small.’

  Then he smiled. ‘So you’re going to play Elena at the Public,’ he said.

  ‘I can hardly believe it.’

  ‘Who’s playing Vanya?’

  ‘Max Brokoff.’

  ‘That’s good. Who’s playing Astrov?’ He stood up and put the remote on top of the set, then, because I hadn’t answered, he turned a cold, suspicious eye on me and repeated the question.

  ‘Edward Day,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, really,’ he said.

  ‘I knew you’d be upset,’ I said. ‘But it’s not important. It just happened and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.’

  He paced around in front of me, looking for something. ‘Uncle Vanya, Uncle Vanya,’ he said. ‘Ah, here they are.’ It was his cigarettes. He lit one up and blew a ring in my direction, very contemptuous and cool. ‘If I remember correctly, Astrov and Elena kiss twice,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Once very briefly; Vanya interrupts them, and then near the end, as she’s leaving.’

  ‘So you’ll be kissing Ed Day twice a night for what, six weeks?’

  ‘I won’t be me and Ed won’t be him, we’ll be Russians, for God’s sake. It’s a play. We kiss in front of two hundred people. If you want to see it, I’ll get you a ticket. I’m married now, the past is over. We’re professionals. He knows it, I know it and you know it.’

  ‘He knows it. How does he know it?’

  ‘I told him,’ I said. ‘We had coffee and I told him.’

  Which is true, darling, I wasn’t lying. We did have coffee and I did tell you we would have to be professional and forget the past. But my hand was shaking so badly I couldn’t lift the cup without rattling it in the saucer, and you rested your hand on my arm and you said, ‘It’s been nearly eight years. It will be eight years next Thursday.’

  ‘You had coffee?’ Guy said.

  ‘Yes. At Dante’s.’

  ‘And after that?’

  And here of course I did lie. I said I came straight home. He went to his desk and pushed a few pages around. ‘When do rehearsals start?’ he asked. ‘April 15.’

  ‘Opening?’

  I couldn’t answer him. I stared at him and I felt my blood thinning in my veins. I knew exactly what he meant to do, and I knew I couldn’t stop him. He’s going to shadow me like a body double through the whole production. My darling, we’ll never be alone!

  He looked up from his calendar with his chilly smile. ‘About the end of May?’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. I gave myself over to loathing him. Why, I asked myself, am I bound to this wretch. I had the paradoxical wish that he hadn’t saved you that night, so long ago, when we were all so innocent – or at least you and I were innocent – I sometimes think Guy was born cruel. If he hadn’t saved you, we would have no debt to him and we could tell him to go to the devil, but of course, there would be no we because you wouldn’t be here. Because he saved your life, I can’t entirely despise him, and I know now, as I’ve never understood before, that I am not entirely myself when I’m away from you, that your life is as dear to me as my own.

  As if he was reading my mind – I sometimes think he can – he said, ‘I save his life, he fucks my wife. Does that strike you as fair, Madeleine?’

  ‘It’s over,’ I said. ‘It was over long ago.’

  ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Well, in that case I know how pleased you’ll be that I can go with you. As it happens, my calendar is completely clear.’

  Two kisses, my love. Two kisses in front of two hundred strangers, six nights a week and twice on Saturdays. That’s what we are to have, that’s what will be allowed. My Elena will be the most ensnared, frustrated, beaten-down Elena the stage has yet seen, and those stolen kisses with Astrov so charged with burning passion and cruel restraint the audience will think that Anton Chekhov sat down at his desk a hundred years ago with Madeleine Delavergne in his mind’s eye, pleading for the right to live free of family, duty, and the indifferent tyranny of her tiresome husband, free to live only for love. How we will astound them as our lips meet and our hearts race, our senses yearning towards each other – just as we did this afternoon at the door to that marvelous hotel room – and Guy Margate will be there, in the front row, night after night, powerless to do anything but look on. It will be our secret triumph over him, and no one will know what it cost us and why we must pay and pay and pay the price.

  But know this, my dearest love, the day you say we’ve paid enough, Anton Chekhov and Guy Margate be damned, this time I’ll find my courage, bid good riddance to my conscience, and be forever and

  Entirely yours,

  Madeleine

  PETER BEHRENS

  with First Canadian Army in France

  August 10 1944

  Margo ma chère,

  The letter is to be the wings of a dove and somehow fly between us but it’s no bird, this letter. My pen is almost dry so is my mouth I can’t speak. Haven’t had a decent thought in days.

  I’m trying to shake myself out like the sheets we stripped from the bed that morning in Maine. Shook them, left in a bundle for the charwoman to wash and wring and hang where the sun and the clean breeze would cure them.

  You’ll never get me clean, Margo, I’m afraid.

  Let me tell you this. The sun here is the same sun as in Maine or Canada. I would not believe it, but know it’s true.

  There is a rifleman in Lt. Trudeau’s platoon, Pvt. Blais, a farmer – no, a farmer’s son. From Arthabaska.

  I’ll tell you about him later.

  Right now there are planes humming overhead. Our planes always. The Germans possess none, apparently.

  They say we own the sky.

  What can I tell you, that will kill the frenzy of distance between us?

  The people from Brigade say that we have beaten the Germans only they do not know they are beaten, and therefore we, the infantry, will have to walk to Germany and remind them again every mile, every farm, every village, on each street corner.

  Where are you reading this? What clothes do you wear? Do your fingers really touch this paper? Does the ink speak to you? Are the leaves fat and soft on shade maples outside your papa’s house in Westmount? Does sunlight filter slowly? Pale green light in early afternoon when you lie down for your nap. And when you awaken and draw the water in your bath and your underclothes fall on the tiles, what do you have to do with me then? How are we connected exactly, Margo? I feel more of a connection to certain bullets than to you. And you lie in the tub, gorgeous. You step outside in the late afternoon wearing a silk dress and the black straw on your head, your heels tap-tapping along the stone path out to the garage. Does your father’s garage smell of rubber and gasoline still, and grassblades, fermenting on each blade of the mower? The air is always cool in there, isn’t it. The air plays with you.

  The rasp of silk upon your legs, Margo.

  I’m thinking of your wrists now.

  I once knew my wife, down to her bones.

  Do you have a sweet tan this summer? Comme une huronne?

  I have no appetite for adjectives.

  Whatever sense I once had, whatever solidity I inherited from my Norman ancestors, has been beaten out of me, I think, in this growling ground. This summer of things bursting.

  My father’s people, the Taschereaus, came out of Normandy to N
ew France, did you know?

  Let me dispose of my adjectives, please. In your arms, please let me release them.

  bloody,

  silly,

  faecal,

  loud,

  beaten,

  red,

  terror.

  You see I have slipped into nouns, so let me deliver a few more. You don’t have to unwrap these, Margo. Just sign for them, then you can put them away.

  Child,

  children,

  machine-gun,

  antitank,

  .303,

  88,

  tree-burst,

  counterattack,

  head wound,

  prisoner,

  neck wound,

  aorta,

  femoral artery,

  battle.

  And men of good cheer are singing now. In this little ‘rest area’ the men of the Regiment de Maisonneuve are being fed hamburgers and fèves au lard and a bottle each of Black Horse beer.

  P’tit Canada dans un pâturage normande.

  Are your thighs still your thighs?

  I’m sorry. I apologise.

  O ma femme.

  Is the little boy … no I shall not think of him. No I shall not. I don’t want him to appear in this place.

  Your cunt.

  I’m sorry. I apologise. Je vous en prie.

  The whitest peau the softest skin the tissue of yourself, Margo. Your grey eyes fix me.

  In the last letter you announced that you are now living in your parents’ house. You say that you have gone home, because you were lonely – you and the boy.

  Your father, that maudit Irlandais. He has you.

  Me, I want you on your back.

  I want your belly sweet and warm like sugar pie.

  Anti-tank.

  Howitzer.

  Tiger.

  Bocage.

  Tell your father he can cover me. Tell him that to lose your head out here, c’est tellement facile. The 88s do come cracking through the forest at dawn, high velocity, very flat trajectory, dismembering trees. What kills is often not the shell itself but spinning bits of riflemen, and splinters of rocks and trees. The thing comes at you like a girl you want, like a cunt, so sweet and so indirect.

  Soldiers in rifle companies are killed by pieces of other soldiers in rifle companies. Arms, boots, knees. I tell my platoon leaders, it’s another reason to keep the men from bunching up which is what they will always do at first, like cattle, no matter their training.

  Think of your men, I say, as sources of shrapnel, dangerous. Watch out for those flying steel helmets. A splinter of leg bone can do astonishing damage.

  My Sergeant Major, on the beach.

  There.

  I want you to cover me.

  Three young German boys in a staff car on the road through the woods. As little Lieutenant Duclos reported, he fully intended to offer them a chance of surrender. Only Corporal Dextraxe offered them a lively burst instead. And the young lieutenant, the jesuitical prig, straight out of Brébeuf, was quite cool delivering his report. He’ll lose no sleep over dead Boches. It was the corporal, one of our best, a rugged forester from Megantic, who was trembling and cursing.

  Their company commander, this is who I am. Their confessor. I am not your husband any more, Margo. I don’t belong to anyone but the tree-bursts and right now the greasy floating of air from the hamburger tent where our survivors gorge.

  Replacements are due up tomorrow: for my company, seventeen fresh men.

  Everyone is tired.

  The riflemen assure me there are beautiful, famished girls alive in the basements of Caen who will do it with vigour for a piece of cheese. And afterwards they’ll offer you a bottle of apple brandy for one lousy Sweet Caps cigarette.

  I don’t want to tell you the stories Margo. I must find someplace else to put them as soon as I get home.

  I don’t want you to think the less of me.

  Your papa, the old banshee, he would have me anaesthetised with his Irish religion, not so different from mine really. The French and the Irish. He would have my balls off, wouldn’t he? An exorcism. Doesn’t want me returning from this filth to touch a cool, clean daughter. He wishes she had married a snowman, with a carrot for a nose and instead of a prick, an icicle.

  That Pvt. Blais, the rifleman I mentioned. The imbecile got his girl pregnant last year just before shipping for England. Her old man put her off to the Grey Nuns in Montreal where she had the child and was forced to give it up and is now a slavey, scrubbing floors for the Sisters, and very miserable. Her letter which he showed me is pathetic, do they send girls in the country to school at all? This one hardly makes herself understood. In any case. Will you go to the convent and perhaps see the Mother Superior to determine what can be done, you may drop the name of my uncle, the bishop. The girl’s name is Lucie something or other, from Tingwick, fifteen or sixteen of age. Blais is a good chap and insists they will marry if he survives. Perhaps you can find her a maid’s position. With the wages they’re paying at Vickers these days I expect you are short of slaves in Westmount.

  Oh my dear. Oh mon dieu. I am shook up and no one but you knows it.

  Forgive what you can. I give you my blood, my heart, my kisses for our son. Johnny

  10 Sydenham Avenue,

  Westmount, P.Q.

  August 10 1944

  Dear Jean,

  Still no word from you will you please drop a line, we’re all terribly worried.

  Are you in France? We think you must be.

  As I wrote in my last, Henry and I are back at No.10, and here very happily. I know you wanted us to keep up the flat but it was just too bleak there, Jean, you really wouldn’t have wanted me to stay. We couldn’t get anyone to clean the place and Dornal Avenue is not my cup of tea. Never was, never will be. After the war we’ll find something much nicer. Patty and Frankie are such a help with p’tit Henri. At this very moment Frankie is giving him his bath, I can hear him splashing. He’s a lucky boy to have doting aunts and grandparents while his papa is overseas. This morning at breakfast Daddy was feeding H scrambled eggs off his plate. Sweet! I only wish you could have been there.

  I hope you’re safe wherever you are, dearest.

  Daddy says the war is practically over.

  The things you put in your letters …

  I understand how hard it is for you to be separated from the people you love.

  You’re a passionate man.

  When this is over and we’re together once more I’ll be able to show you that I love you.

  All you expect of me, all you want – I’ll try to be all those things but I don’t know if I am able. If I fail your expectations, what will you do then? In some ways my life is easier now that you are so far away. Wartime. A perfectly good excuse not to bother each other.

  Our boy is good and sweet. He is in love with balls, any sort – balloons, tennis balls, golf balls, baseballs, rubber bouncing balls. He saw the globe in Daddy’s study and reached out shouting ba, ba, ba.

  Listen Jean I’m cold without you. Whatever it is in you that throws me out of whack, I need that now. The days are the days are the days.

  Sometimes I want to scream at this letter paper, or lick it, chew it. I’d like to destroy my own weakness. I want to snap the pen in half and throw it out the window.

  Will we ever travel? I want to see Rome. France. I want to see Paris with my husband, who was an officer in the war.

  You were always complaining that I was not affectionate enough, that you were made to feel unsure of my love, that my feelings for you were small and inaccessible. And I remember you saying any number of times that I did not understand myself.

  As if you did, Jean.

  It made me angry to hear you say those things and I was afraid you could be right. But now I know I must have you in a life of trouble. And lately I feel inside a sense of luck about everything, and an openness, Johnny, that wasn’t there before.

  Before you went away
I felt this way only once or twice, when you were inside me. I tried to tell you but you weren’t prepared to listen because you were a man going off to the war. Now it’s with me almost all the time, this feeling, the very opposite of foreboding. I don’t know where it comes from, Johnny. Joy. All the things the nuns said about you, most of the warnings were true, but I still don’t care. I know now that you are going to survive and come home. I have seen in dreams, don’t laugh, you and me and Henry together. I’ll be everything for you and we’ll make more babies won’t we. When the war is over and you’ve come home we’ll go away for a good long time. We’ll go down to Maine, or up north. I’ll want you to tell me everything you have seen and felt. And then we’ll leave the war behind us and walk into the rest of our lives.

  I think you have to keep yourself within yourself and not give too much to your men and when you are feeling very low, get some sleep.

  Everyone here sends their love and best wishes,

  yours xxx Margo

  URSULA K. LE GUIN

  The Kalends of June, 766 BCE

  To Aeneas the Trojan, King of Latium, visiting at the court of the Lord Tarchon of Caere in Etruria, greetings!

  I hardly know how to write to you, my dear husband, since we are both probably illiterate. In fact even the Etruscans may not have figured out how to write yet. But I miss you very much, and I believe a love letter can be sent even if it can’t be written or read, so long as the love is strong enough. People are always making insuperable obstacles out of the most trivial things. After all, the fact that you fought in the Trojan War in the thirteenth century BCE and I live in Italy in the eighth, which seems to present a considerable obstacle to our union, made no difference at all. You crossed the centuries to come to me, and it only took you seven years. And, thanks to the oracle, my father chose you for his son-in-law before he even met you. You had to get poor Turnus out of the way first, but then we got married, and fell in love – the proper order of events, I think – and since then our happiness together has only grown.