Gods and Soldiers

by Rob Spillman

  She went to every performance in which he was billed in the cast. A seat in the middle of the second row; the first would have been too obvious.

  Though she was something other than a groupie, she was among the knot of autograph-seekers one night, who hung about the foyer hoping that he might leave the theatre that way. He did appear, making for the bar with the theatre’s director, and for a moment, under the arrest of programs thrust at him, happened to encounter her eyes as she stood back from his fans—he had a smile of self-deprecating amusement, meant for anyone in his line of vision, but that one was her.

  The lift of his face, his walk, his repertoire of gestures, the oddities of his lapses in expression onstage that she secretly recognized as himself appearing, became almost familiar to her. As if she somehow knew him, and these intimacies knew her. Signals. If invented, they were very like conviction. At the box office, there was the routine question, “D’you have a season ticket?” She supposed that was to have been bought when the Rendall Harris engagement was first announced.

  She thought of a letter. Owed it to him for the impression that his performances had made on her. His command of the drama of living, the excitement of being there with him. After the fourth or fifth version in her mind, the next was written. Mailed to the theatre, it was most likely glanced through in his dressing room or at his hotel, among the other “tributes,” and would either be forgotten or taken back to London for the collection of memorabilia it seemed actors needed. But, with him, there was that wry sideways tilt to the photographed mouth.

  Of course, she neither expected nor received any acknowledgment.

  After a performance one night, she bumped into some old friends of Laila’s, actors who had come to the memorial, and who insisted on her joining them in the bar. When Rendall Harris’s unmistakable head appeared through the late crowd, they created a swift current past backs to embrace him, to draw him with their buddy, the theatre director, to a space made at the table, where she had been left among the bottles and glasses. The friends, in the excitement of having Rendall Harris among them, forgot to introduce her as Laila’s daughter, Laila who’d played Corday in that early production where he’d been Marat; perhaps they had forgotten Laila—best thing with the dead if you want to get on with your life and ignore the hazards, like that killer taxi, around you. Charlotte’s letter was no more present than the other one, behind the volumes of plays. A fresh acquaintance, just the meeting of a nobody with the famous. But not entirely, even from the famous actor’s side. As the talk lobbed back and forth, the man, sitting almost opposite her, thought it friendly, from his special level of presence, to toss something to the young woman whom no one was including, and easily found what came to mind: “Aren’t you the one who’s been sitting bang in the middle of the second row, several times lately?” And then they joined in laughter, a double confession—hers of absorbed concentration on him; his of being aware of it or at least becoming so at the sight, here, of someone out there whose attention had caught him. He asked, across the voices of the others, which plays in the repertoire she’d enjoyed most, what criticisms she had of those she didn’t think much of. He named a number that she hadn’t seen. Her response was another confession: she had seen only those in which he had played a part.

  When the party broke up and all were meandering their way, with stops and starts in backchat and laughter, to the foyer, a shift in progress brought Rendall Harris’s back right in front of her. He turned swiftly, as lithely as a young man, and—it must have been impulse in one accustomed to being natural, charming, in spite of his professional guard—spoke as if he had been thinking of it: “You’ve missed a lot, you know, so flattering for me, avoiding the other plays. Come some night, or there’s a Sunday-afternoon performance of a Wole Soyinka you ought to see. We’ll have a bite in the restaurant before I take you to your favorite seat. I’m particularly interested in audience reaction to the chances I’ve taken directing this play.”

  Rendall Harris sat beside her through the performance, now and then whispering some comment, drawing her attention to this and that. She had told him, over lasagna at lunch, that she was an actuary, a creature of calculation, that she couldn’t be less qualified to judge the art of actors’ interpretation or that of a director. “You know that’s not true.” Said with serious inattention. Tempting to believe that he sensed something in her blood, sensibility. From her mother. It was or was not the moment to tell him that she was Laila’s daughter, although she carried Laila’s husband’s name, a name that Laila was not known by.

  Now, what sort of a conundrum was that supposed to be? She was produced by—what was that long term?—parthenogenesis. She just growed, like Topsy? You know that’s not true.

  He arranged for her a seat as his guest for the rest of the repertoire in which he played the lead. It was taken for granted that she would come backstage afterward. Sometimes he included her in other cast gatherings, with “people your own age,” obliquely acknowledging his own, old enough to be her father. Cool. He apparently had no children, adult or otherwise, didn’t mention any. Was he gay? Now? Can a man change sexual preference, or literally embrace both? The way he embraced so startlingly, electric with the voltage of life, the beings created only in words by Shakespeare, Strindberg, Brecht, Beckett—oh, you name them, from the volumes holding down the letter telling of that Saturday. “You seem to understand that I—we—actors absolutely risk, kill ourselves, trying to reach the ultimate identity in what’s known as a character, beating ourselves down to let the creation take over. Haven’t you ever wanted to have a go yourself? Thought about acting?”

  She said, “I know an actuary is the absolute antithesis of all that. I don’t have the talent.”

  He didn’t make some comforting effort. Didn’t encourage magnanimously—Why not have a go? “Maybe you’re right. Nothing like the failure of an actor. It isn’t like other kinds of failure. It doesn’t just happen inside you; it happens before an audience. Better to be yourself. You’re a very interesting young woman, depths there. I don’t know if you know it, but I think you do.”

  Like every sexually attractive young woman, she was experienced with the mostly pathetic drive that aging men have toward young women. Some of the men are themselves attractive, either because they have somehow kept the promise of vigor—mouths filled with their own teeth, tight muscular buttocks in their jeans, no jowls, fine eyes that have seen much to impart—or because they’re well known, distinguished, yes, even rich. This actor, whose enduring male beauty was an attribute of his talent—he was probably more desirable now than he had been as a novice Marat in Peter Weiss’s play; all the roles he had taken—he had emerged from the risk with a strongly endowed identity. Although there was no apparent reason that he should not make the usual play for this young woman, there was no sign that he was doing so. She knew the moves; they were not being made.

  The attention was something else. Between them. Was this a question or a fact? They wouldn’t know, would they? He simply welcomed her like a breeze that blew in with this season abroad, in his old home town, and seemed to refresh him. Famous people have protégés, a customary part of the multiply responsive public reception. He told her, sure to be indulged, that he wanted to go back to an adventure, a part of the country he’d been thrilled by as a child, wanted to climb there, where there were great spiky plants with red candelabras. She told him that it was the wrong season—those plants wouldn’t be in bloom in this, his kind of season—but she’d drive him there; he took up the shy offer at once, and left the cast without him for two days, when the plays performed were not those in which he had the lead. They slipped and scrambled up the peaks he remembered, and, at the lodge in the evening, he was recognized, took this as inevitable, autographed bits of paper, and quipped privately with her that he had been mistaken in the past for a pop star he hadn’t heard of but ought to have. His unconscious vitality invigorated people around him wherever he was. No wonder he was such an innova
tive director; the critics wrote that in his hands the classic plays, even the standbys of Greek drama, were reimagined, as if this were the way they were meant to be and never had been before. It wasn’t in his shadow that she stood but in his light. As if she had been reimagined by herself. He was wittily critical at other people’s expense, and so with him she was free to think—say—what she found ponderous in those she worked with: the predictability among her set of friends, which she usually tolerated without stirring them up. Not that she saw much of her friends at present. She was part of the cast of the backstage scene now, a recruit to the family of actors in the coffee shop at lunch, privy to their gossip, their bantering with the actor-director who drew so much from them, rousing their eager talent.

  The regular Charlie dinners with her father, often postponed, were subdued; he caught this from her. There wasn’t much for them to talk about. Unless she wanted to show off her new associations.

  The old impulse came, unwelcome, to go with her father to the theatre. Suppressed. But returned. To sit with him and together see the man commanding on the stage. What for? What would this resolve? Was she Charlotte or Charlie?

  Charlie said, “Let’s see the play that’s had such rave reviews. I’ll get tickets.” He didn’t demur, had perhaps forgotten who Rendall Harris was, might be.

  He led her to the bar afterward, talking of the play with considering interest. He had not seen Beckett in ages; the play wore well, was not outdated. She didn’t want to be there. It was late, she said. No, no, she didn’t want a drink, the bar was too crowded. But he persuaded gently, “We won’t stay. I’m thirsty, need a beer.”

  The leading actor was caught in a spatter of applause as he moved among the admiring drinkers. He talked through clusters of others and then arrived.

  “Rendall, my father.”

  “Congratulations. Wonderful performance—the critics don’t exaggerate.”

  The actor dismissed the praise as if he’d had enough of that from people who didn’t understand what such an interpretation of Vladimir or Estragon involved, the—what was that word he always used?—risk. “I didn’t feel right tonight. I was missing a beat. Charlotte, you’ve seen me do better, hey, m’darling.”

  Her father picked up his glass but didn’t drink. “Last time I saw you was in the play set in an asylum. Laila de Morne was Charlotte Corday.”

  Her father told.

  “Of course, you always get chalked up in the critics’ hierarchy by how you play the classics, but I’m more fascinated by the new stuff—movement theatre, parts I can take from zero. I’ve sat in that bathtub too many times, knifed by Charlotte Cordays. . . .” The projection of that disarmingly self-deprecating laugh.

  She spoke what she had not told, had not yet found the right time and situation to say to him: “Laila de Morne is my mother.” No more to be discarded in the past tense than the performance of the de Sade asylum where she had been Charlotte Corday to his Marat. “That’s how I was named.”

  “Well, you’re sure not a Charlotte to carry a knife, spoil your beautiful aura with that, frighten off the men around you.” Peaked eyebrows, as if he were, ruefully, one of them—a trick from the actors’ repertoire contradicted by a momentary, hardly perceptible contact of those eyes with her own, diamonds, black with the intensity that it was his talent to summon, a stage prop taken up and at once released, at will.

  Laila was Laila.

  When they were silent in the pause at a traffic light, her father touched the open shield of his palm to the back of her head, the unobtrusive caress he had offered when driving her to boarding school. If she was, for her own reasons, now differently disturbed, that was not to be pried at. She was meant to drop him at his apartment, but when she drew up at the entrance she opened the car door at her side, as he did his, and went to him in the street. He turned—what’s the matter? She moved her head—nothing. She went to him and he saw, without understanding, that he should take her in his arms. She held him. He kissed her cheek, and she pressed it against his. Nothing to do with DNA.

  MARLENE VAN NIEKERK

  • South Africa •

  from AGAAT

  IT’S A WIND-STILL evening. Agaat has opened the swing doors so that I can hear the yard-noise of milk cans and the returning tractors and the closing of shed doors.

  Now it has gone quiet. Now I hear only the sprinklers and the pump down by the old dam, that Dawid will go to switch off at ten o’clock. Closer by is the twilight song of thrushes and Cape robins, a light rustling every now and again in the bougainvillea on the stoep, a few slight sleeping sounds of the small birds, sparrows, white-eyes, that settle there for the night in the centre of the bush.

  On the mirror an abstract painting is limned, midnight-blue like the inside of an iris, with the last dusk-pale planes and dark stains from which one can surmise that the garden is deep and wide, full of concealed nooks, full of the silence of ponds, full of small stipples of reflected stars on the wet leaves, full of the deep incisions of furrows.

  Green, wet fragrances of the night pour into the room, from water on lawns and on hot-baked soil and dusty greenery.

  I smell it, Agaat. Everything that you have prepared before me.

  She removes the spray of roses in the little crystal vase from the tray and places it next to my bed on the night-table with the candle.

  Had enough? Was it good? Are you feeling better now? No way you could have gone to sleep on such a hungry stomach.

  She clears away the tray, switches off the main lights.

  Now how about warm milk, with sugar and a drop of vanilla?

  That’s good, later, I gesture.

  On her way out she takes her embroidery out of the basket. She looks in the little blue book lying on the chair. She reads the last page and sighs. She searches through the pile, pulls out another. She puts it down on the embroidery. I can always tell when she wants to give up the reading, when she becomes disheartened with it. But these are her two projects. She doesn’t leave a thing half-done. Especially when she doesn’t yet know how it is to end.

  The candle casts a glow on the wall next to my bed. In it stirs the shadow of the crepuscule in the glass vase. Longer and shorter stretch and shrink the buds. Stirred by the air that freshened from the window.

  It billows the gauze lining at the open doors outwards and inwards. The flame stirs, casts a silhouette of stems on the wall, crystal and water and tiny air bubbles trouble the light. Doubly magnified in the shadow on the wall where he perches in the rose twigs, front feet clasped together, I see the praying mantis.

  She wouldn’t bring a thing like that in here without intention. The most exemplary motionless creature she could think of. Little hands folded in prayer. The green membranous wings like coat-tails draped over the abdomen, the triangular head with the bulbous eyes.

  I look at the mirror. I see the candle flame and its yellow glow, the shadows, the coruscation of the water, the vase, the rose, the spriggy limbs of the praying mantis. These then are the things reflecting in the three panels where the garden has now darkened. When the flame stirs, the shadows dance, the reflections of the shadows dance, the supplicant raises its front legs in the rose.

  Does a mirror sometimes preserve everything that has been reflected in it? Is there a record of light, thin membranes compressed layer upon layer that one has to ease apart with the finger-tips so that the colours don’t dissipate, so that the moments don’t blot and the hours don’t run together into inconsequential splotches? So that a song of preserved years lies in your palm, a miniature of your life and times, with every detail meticulous in clear, chanting angel-fine enamel, as on the old manuscripts, at which you can peer through a magnifying glass and marvel at so much effort? So many tears for nothing? For light? For bygone moments?

  A floating feeling takes possession of me, to and fro I look between the shadow picture on the wall and the reflection in the mirror. A story in a mirror, second-hand. About what was and what is to be. About
what I have to come to in these last days and nights. About how I must get there over the fragments I am trying to shore. I step on them, step, as on stones in a stream. Agaat and I and Jak and Jakkie. Four stepping-stones, every time four and their combinations of two, of three, their powers to infinity and their square roots. Their sequences in time, their causes and effects. How to join and to fit, how to step and to say: That is how I crossed the river, there I walked, that was the way to here. How to remember, without speech, without writing, without map, an exile within myself. Motionless. Solid. In my bed. In my body. Shrunken away from the world that I created. With images that surface and flow away, flakes of light that float away from me so that I cannot remember what I have already remembered and what I have yet to remember. Am I the stream or am I the stone and who steps on me, who wades through me, to whom do I drift down like pollen, like nectar, like a fragrance, always there are more contents to be ordered into coherence.

  Through the open doors I smell the night ever more intensely. It permeates my nose like a complex snuff. Can one smell sounds? I hear the dikkops, from a northerly direction. Christmas, christmas, christmas, they cry in descending tones, christmas comes. The yard plovers cry as they fly up, a disturbance at the nest? The frogs strike up, white bibs bulging in the reeds. Under the stoep a cricket starts filing away at its leg-irons. Here next to my head something prays in the void. That I may be permitted to make the journey one more time, on stippled tracks for my eyes, pursuing place names that are dictated to me, the last circuit, a secret, a treasure that neither moth nor rust can destroy, a relation, a sentence hidden amongst words.