Gods and Soldiers

by Rob Spillman

  Charlotte did not correct this, out of respect for her mother’s ambitions. But when she went to the next room, where the lawyer was arranging chronologically the press cuttings and programs and photographs of Laila in the roles for which the wardrobe had provided, she turned over a few programs and remarked, more to be overheard by him than to him, “Never really had the leads she believed she should have had, after the glowing notices of her promise, very young. When she murdered Marat. In his bathtub, wasn’t it? I’ve never seen the play.” Confiding the truth of her mother’s career, betraying Laila’s idea of herself—perhaps also a move toward a love affair.

  The three young people broke out of the trappings of the past for coffee and their concerns of the present. What sort of court cases does a civil-rights lawyer take on? What did he mean by “not the usual litigation”? No robberies or hijackings? Did the two young women feel that they were discriminated against? Did the plum jobs go to males? Or was it the other way around—did bad conscience over gender discrimination mean that women were now elevated to positions they weren’t really up to? Women of any color, and black men—same thing? What would have been a sad and strange task for Charlotte alone became a lively evening, an animated exchange of opinions and experiences. Laila surely would not have disapproved; she had stimulated her audience.

  There was a Sunday evening at a jazz club, sharing enthusiasm and a boredom with hip-hop, Kwaito. After another evening, dinner and dancing together—that first bodily contact to confirm attraction—he offered to help again with her task, and on a weekend afternoon they kissed and touched among the stacks of clothes and boxes of theatre souvenirs, his hand brimming with her breast, but did not proceed, as would have been natural, to the beautiful and inviting bed, with its signature of draped shawls and cushions. Some atavistic taboo, a notion of respect for the dead—as if her mother still lay there in possession.

  The love affair found a bed elsewhere and continued uncertainly, pleasurably enough but without much expectation of commitment. A one-act piece begun among the props of a supporting-part career.

  Charlotte brushed aside any offers, from him or from her office friend, to continue with the sorting of Laila’s—what? The clothes were packed up. Some seemed wearable only in the context of a theatrical wardrobe and were given to an experimental-theatre group; others went to the Salvation Army, for distribution to the homeless. Her father arranged with an estate agent to advertise the apartment for sale; unless you want to move in, he suggested. But it was too big; Charlie couldn’t afford to, didn’t want to, live in a style not her own, even rent-free. They laughed again in their understanding, not in criticism of her mother. Laila was Laila. He agreed, but as if thinking of some other aspect of her. Yes, Laila.

  The movers came to take the furniture to be sold. She half thought of inheriting the bed; it would have been luxurious to flop diagonally across its generosity, but she wouldn’t have been able to get it past the bedroom door in her small flat. When the men departed with their loads, there were pale shapes on the floor where everything had stood. She opened windows to let out the dust and, turning back suddenly, saw that something had been left behind. A couple of empty boxes, the cardboard ones used for supermarket delivery. Irritated, she went to gather them. One wasn’t empty; it seemed to be filled with letters. What makes you keep some letters and not others? In her own comparatively short life, she’d thrown away giggly schoolgirl stuff, sexy propositions scribbled on the backs of menus, once naïvely found flattering, a polite letter of rejection in response to an application for a job beyond her qualifications—a salutary lesson on what her set called the real world. This box apparently contained memorabilia that was different from the stuff already dealt with. The envelopes had the look of personal letters: hand-addressed, without the printed logos of businesses, banks. Had Laila had a personal life that wasn’t related to her family-the-theatre? One child, the product of divorced parents, hardly counts as “family.”

  Charlotte—that was the identity she had in any context relating to her mother—sifted through the envelopes. If her mother had had a personal life, it was not a material possession to be disposed of like garments taken on and off; a personal life can’t be “left to” a daughter, like a beneficiary in a will. Whatever letters Laila had chosen to keep were still hers; best to quietly burn them, as Laila herself had been consumed, sending them to join her. They say (she had read somewhere) that no one ever disappears, up in the atmosphere, stratosphere, whatever you call space—atoms infinitely minute, beyond conception of existence, are up there forever, from the whole world, from all time. As she shook this one box which was not empty, so that the contents would settle and not spill when it was lifted, she noticed some loose sheets of writing paper lying face down. Not held in the privacy of an envelope. She picked them out, turned them face up. Her father’s handwriting, more deliberately formed than Charlie knew it. What was the date at the top of the page, under the address of the house she remembered as home when she was a small girl? A date twenty-four years back. Of course, his handwriting had changed a bit; it does with different stages in one’s life. His Charlie was twenty-eight now, so she would have been four years old when he wrote that date. It must have been just before the divorce and her move to a new home with Laila.

  The letter was formally addressed, on the upper left-hand side of the paper, to a firm of lawyers, Kaplan McLeod & Partners, and directed to one of them in particular: “Dear Hamish.” Why on earth would Laila want to keep from a dead marriage the sort of business letter that a neurologist might have to write to a legal firm—on some question of a car accident maybe, or the nonpayment of some patient’s consultation fee or surgery charges. (As if her father’s medical and human ethics would ever have led him to the latter. . . .) The pages must have got mixed up with the other, truly personal material at some time. Laila and Charlotte had changed apartments frequently during Charlotte’s childhood and adolescence.

  The letter was marked “Copy”:

  “My wife, Laila de Morne, is an actress and, in the course of pursuing her career, has moved in a circle independent of one shared by a couple in marriage. I have always encouraged her to take the opportunities, through contacts she might make, to further her talent. She is a very attractive woman, and it was obvious to me that I should have to accept that there would be men, certainly among her fellow-actors, who would want to be more than admirers. But while she enjoyed the attention, and sometimes responded with a general kind of social flirtation, I had no reason to see this as a more than natural pleasure in her own looks and talents. She would make fun of these admirers, privately, with sharp remarks on their appearance, their pretensions, and, if they were actors, directors, or playwrights, on the quality of their work. I knew that I had not married a woman who would want to stay home and nurse babies, but from time to time she would bring up the subject. We ought to have a son, she said, for me. Then she would get a new part in a play and the idea was understandably postponed. After a successful start, her career was, however, not advancing to her expectations. She did not succeed in getting several roles that she had confidently anticipated. She came home elated one night and told me that she had been accepted for a small part in a play overseas, in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She had been selected because the leading actor himself, Rendall Harris, had told the casting director that she was the most talented of the young women in the theatre group. I was happy for her, and we gave a farewell party at our house the night before the cast left for the United Kingdom. After Edinburgh, she spent some time in London, calling to say how wonderful and necessary it was for her to experience what was happening in theatre there and, I gathered, trying her luck in auditions. Apparently unsuccessfully.

  “Perhaps she intended not to come back. But she did. A few weeks later, she told me that she had just been to a gynecologist and confirmed that she was pregnant. I was moved. I took the unlikely luck of conception—I’d assumed, when we made love on the night of the
party, that she’d taken the usual precautions; we weren’t drunk, even if she was triumphant—as a symbol of what would be a change in our perhaps unsuitable marriage. I am a medical specialist, a neurological surgeon.

  “When the child was born, it looked like any other red-faced infant, but after several months everyone remarked how the little girl was the image of Laila, her mother. It was one Saturday afternoon, when she was kicking and flinging her arms athletically—we were admiring our baby’s progress, her beauty, and I joked, ‘Lucky she doesn’t look like me’—that my wife picked her up, away from me, and told me, ‘She’s not your child.’ She’d met someone in Edinburgh. I interrupted with angry questions. No, she prevaricated, all right, London, the affair began in London. The leading actor who had insisted on her playing the small part had introduced her to someone there. A few days later, she admitted that it was not ‘someone,’ it was the leading actor. He was the father of our girl. She told this to other people, our friends, when through the press we heard the news that the actor, Rendall Harris, was making a name for himself in plays by Tom Stoppard and Tennessee Williams.

  “I couldn’t decide what to believe. I even consulted a colleague in the medical profession about the possible variations in the period of gestation in relation to birth. Apparently, it was possible that the conception had taken place with me, or with the other man a few days before or after the intercourse with me. Laila never expressed any intention of taking the child and making her life with the man. She was too proud to let anyone know that he most likely wouldn’t want her or the supposed progeny of their affair.

  “Laila has devoted herself to her acting career and, as a result, I have of necessity had a closer relation than is customary for the father with the care of the small girl, now four years old. I am devoted to her and can produce witnesses to support the conviction that she would be happiest in my custody.

  “I hope this is adequate. Let me know if anything more is needed, or if there is too much detail here. I’m accustomed to writing reports in medical jargon and thought that this should be different. I don’t suppose I’ve a hope in hell of getting Charlie; Laila will put all her dramatic skills into swearing that she isn’t mine!”

  That Saturday: it landed in the apartment looted by the present and filled it with blasting amazement, the presence of the past. That Saturday, coming to her just as it had come to him. Charlotte/Charlie (which was she?) received exactly as he had what Laila (yes, her mother—giving birth is proof ) had told.

  How do you recognize something that is not in the known vocabulary of your emotions? Shock is like a ringing in the ears; to stop it, you snatch back to the first page, read the letter again. It says what it said. This sinking collapse from within, from your flared, breathless nostrils down to your breasts, stomach, legs, and hands, hands that not only feel passively but go out to grasp what can’t be. Dismay, that feeble-sounding word, has this ghastly meaning. What do you do with something you’ve been told? Something that now is there in the gut of your existence. Run to him? Thrust his letter at him, at her—but she’s out of it now, she has escaped in smoke from the crematorium. And she is the one who really knows—knew.

  Of course, he didn’t get custody. He was awarded the divorce, but the mother was given the four-year-old child. It is natural, particularly in the case of a small girl, for a child to live with the mother. Despite this “deposition” of his, in which he was denied paternity, he paid maintenance for the child. The expensive boarding school, the drama and dance classes, even those holidays in the Seychelles, three times in Spain, once in France, once in Greece, with the mother. Must have paid generously. He was a neurologist, more successful in his profession than the mother was on the stage. But this couldn’t have been the reason for the generosity.

  Charlotte/Charlie couldn’t think about that, either. She folded the two sheets, fumbled absently for the envelope they should have been in, weren’t, and with them in her hand left the boxes, the letters, Laila’s apartment locked, behind the door.

  He could only be asked: why he had been a father, loving.

  The return of this Saturday—it woke her at three, four in the morning, when she had kept it at bay through the activities of the day, work, navigating alone in her car through the city’s crush, leisure time occupied in the company of friends who hadn’t been told. She and her father had one of their regular early dinners at his favorite restaurant, went to a foreign movie by a director whose work she admires, and the news of that Saturday couldn’t be spoken, was unreal.

  In the dark, when the late-night traffic was over and the dawn traffic hadn’t begun: silence.

  The reason.

  He believed in the chance of conception, that one night of the party. Laila’s farewell. Even though his friend, the expert in biological medicine, had implied that if you didn’t know the stage of the woman’s fertility cycle you couldn’t be sure—the conception might have been achieved a few days before or after that unique night.

  I am Charlie, his.

  The reason.

  Another night thought, an angry mood: Who do they think they are, deciding who I am to suit themselves? To suit her vanity—she could, at least, bear the child of an actor with a career in the theatre that she hadn’t attained for herself. To suit his wounded macho pride—refusing to accept another male’s potency; his seed had to have been the winner.

  And in the morning, before the distractions of the day took over, shame, ashamed of herself, Charlie, for thinking so spitefully, cheaply about him.

  The next reason that offered itself was hardly less unjust—confusedly hurtful to her. He had paid one kind of maintenance, and he had paid another kind of maintenance, loving her in order to uphold the conventions before what he saw as the world—the respectable doctors in white coats who had wives to accompany them to medical-council dinners. If he had married again, it would have been to a woman like these. Laila was Laila. Never risk another.

  The letter that belonged to no one’s daughter was moved from place to place, to a drawer under sweaters, to an Indian box where she kept earrings and bracelets, behind books of plays—Euripides and Racine, Shaw and Brecht, Dario Fo, Miller, Artaud, Beckett, and, of course, an annotated “Marat/Sade.” Charlotte’s inheritance, never read.

  When you are of many minds, the contention makes someone who has been not exactly what one wanted, who doesn’t yet count, the only person to be told. In bed, yet another night, after lovemaking, when the guards were down, along with the physical tensions. Mark, the civil-rights lawyer, who acted in the mess of divorce litigation only when it infringed constitutional rights, said, in response, of the letter, “Tear it up.” When she appealed (it was not just a piece of paper): “Have a DNA test.” How to do that without taking the whole cache that was the past to the father? “Get a snip of his hair.” All that would be needed to go along with a sample of her blood. Like whoever it was in the Bible cutting off Samson’s hair. But how was she supposed to do that? Steal up on her father in his sleep somewhere?

  Tear it up. Easy advice from someone who had understood nothing. She did not.

  But a circumstance came about, as if somehow summoned. . . . Of course, it was fortuitous. . . . A distinguished actor-director had been invited by a local theatre to direct a season of classical and avant-garde plays, taking several lead roles himself. It was his first return to the country, to the city where he was born and which he had left to pursue his career—he said in newspaper interviews and on radio, television—how long ago? Oh, twenty-five years. Rendall Harris. Newspaper photographs: an actor’s expression, assumed for many cameras, handsomely enough late-middle-aged, a defiant slight twist to the mouth to emphasize character, the eyebrows raised together amusedly, a touch of white in the short sideburns. Eyes difficult to make out in newsprint. On television, alive; something of the upper body, gestures, coming into view, the close-up of his changing expressions, the deep-set long eyes, gray darkening with some deliberate intensity, almos
t flashing black, meeting yours, the viewer’s. What had she expected? A recognition? Hers of him? His, out of the lit-up box, of her? An actor’s performance face.

  She couldn’t ignore the stir at the idea that the man named by her mother was in the city. Laila was Laila. Yes. If she had not gone up in smoke, would he have met her again, remembered her? Had he ever seen the baby, who was at least two when he went off for twenty-five years? What does a two-year-old remember? Had she ever seen this man as a younger self, been taken in by those strikingly interrogative eyes, received?

  She was accustomed to going to the theatre with friends or with the lawyer-lover, though he preferred films, one of his limited tastes that she could at least share. Every day—every night—she thought about the theatre. Not with Mark. Not beside any of her friends. No. In a wild recurrent impulse, there was the temptation to be there with her father, who did not know that she knew, had been told, as he was that Saturday. Laila was Laila. For him and for her.

  She went alone when Rendall Harris was to play one of the lead roles. There had been ecstatic notices. He was Laurence Olivier reincarnated for a new—the twenty-first—century, a deconstructed style of performance. She was far back in the box-office queue when a board went up: “House Full.” She booked online for another night, an aisle seat three rows from the proscenium. At the theatre, she found herself, for some reason, hostile. Ridiculous. She wanted to disagree with the critics. That’s what it was about.

  Rendall Harris—how do you describe a performance that manages to create for the audience the wholeness, the life of a man, not just “in character” for the duration of the play but what he might have been before the events chosen by the playwright and how he might be, alive, continuing after? Rendall Harris was an extraordinary actor, man. Her palms were up among the hands applauding like the flight of birds rising. When he came out to take the calls, summoning the rest of the cast around him, she wasn’t in his direct sight line, as she would have been if she’d asked for a seat in the middle of the row.