The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
Tony has chosen May 2, 1211, the day before the massacre. The besieging Catholics are represented by kidney beans, the defending Cathars by grains of white rice. Simon de Montfort is a red Monopoly man, Dame Giraude a blue one. Red for the cross, blue for the Cathars: it was their colour. Tony has already eaten several of the kidney beans, which strictly speaking she should not have done until after the battle. But nibbling helps her to concentrate.
What was Dame Giraude thinking as she looked out over the battlements, assessing the enemy? She must have known that this battle was unwinnable, that her town and all the people in it were doomed. Did she despair, was she praying for a miracle, was she proud of herself for having fought for what she believed in? Watching her co-religionists fry the next day, she must have felt that there was more evidence in support of her own theories of evil than of de Montfort's.
Tony has been there, she has seen the terrain. She has picked a flower, some sort of tough-stemmed vetch; she has pressed it in the Bible, she has stuck it into her scrapbook, under L for Lavaur. She has bought a souvenir, a small satin pillow stuffed with lavender. According to the local residents, Dame Giraude is still there, still down in the well. That was all they could think of to do, in those days, with women like her: throw them into wells, or off steep cliffs or parapets - some unrelenting vertical - and watch them splatter.
Maybe Tony will write something about Dame Giraude, sometime. A study of female military commanders. Iron Hands, Velvet Gloves, she could call it. But there isn't much material.
She doesn't want to go on with this battle right now; she's not in the mood for slaughter. She gets up from her chair and pours herself a glass of water; then, on top of Europe in the thirteenth century, she spreads out a street map, a map of downtown Toronto. Here is the Toxique, here is Queen Street, here is Roz's renovated office building; here are the ferry docks, and the flat Island where Charis's house still stands. Over here is the Arnold Garden Hotel, which is now a big clay-sided hole in the ground, a site of future development, because failing hotels go cheap and someone cut a good deal. Here is McClung Hall, and, to the north, Tony's own house, with West in it, upstairs in bed, groaning gently in his sleep; with the cellar in it, with the sand-table in it, with the map on it, with the city in it, with the house in it, with the cellar in it, with the map in it. Maps, thinks Tony, contain the ground that contains them. Somewhere in this infinitely receding headspace, Zenia continues to exist.
Tony needs the map for the same reason she always uses maps: they help her to see, to visualize the topology, to remember. What she is remembering is Zenia. She owes her this remembrance. She owes her an end.
57
Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized lengths, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.
An ending, then. November 11, 1991, at eleven o'clock in the morning, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It's a Monday. The Recession is thickening, there are rumours of big-company bankruptcies, famine is rolling over Africa; in what was once Yugoslavia there is ethnic feuding. Atrocities multiply, leaderships teeter, car factories grind to a halt. The war in the Gulf is over and the desert sands are spackled with bombs; the oil fields still burn, clouds of black smoke roiling out over the greasy sea. Both sides claim to have won, both sides have lost. It's a dim day, wreathed in mist.
The three of them stand at the back of the ferry as it churns its way through the harbour, outbound towards the Island, trailing the momentary darkness of its wake. From the mainland they can hear, faintly, the sound of bugles, and of muffled shots. A salute. The water is quicksilver in the pearl-coloured light, the wind is slight, cool, but mild for the time of year, the month. The pause month, the month of empty branches and held breath, the fog month, the greyish hush before winter.
Month of the dead, month of returning, thinks Charis. She thinks of the grey weeds waving, under the poisonous, guileless water, at the bottom of the lake; of the grey fish with lumpy chemical growths on them, wafting like shadows; of the lamprey eels with their tiny rasping teeth and sucking mouths, undulating among the husks of wrecked cars, the empty bottles. She thinks of everything that has fallen in, or else been thrown. Treasures and bones. At the beginning of November the French decorate their family graves with chrysanthemums, the Mexicans with marigolds, making a golden path so the spirits can find their way. Whereas we go in for poppies. The flower of sleep and forgetting. Petals of spilled blood.
Each one of them has a poppy stuck into the front of her coat. Flimsy plastic but who can resist, thinks Roz, though she liked the cloth ones better. It's like those awful daffodils for cancer, pretty soon every single flower will be hooked up with some body part or disease. Plastic lupins for lupus, plastic columbines for colostomies, plastic aspidistras for AIDS, you have to buy the darn things though, it protects you from getting hit up every time you walk out the door. I have one already. See?
It was Tony who insisted on this particular day. Remembrance Day. Bloody Poppy Day. Tony is getting more bizarre by the minute, in Roz's opinion; but then, so are they all.
Remembrance Day is only fitting, thinks Tony. She wants to do Zenia justice; but she's remembering more than Zenia. She's remembering the war, and those killed by it, at the time or later; sometimes wars take a long time to kill people. She's remembering all the wars. She craves some idea of ceremony, of decorum; not that she's getting one whole hell of a lot of cooperation from the others. Roz did wear black, as requested, but she's tarted it up with a red-and-silver scarf. Black brings out my eye bags, she said. I needed something else right next to my face. Goes with my lipstick - this is Rubicon, hot off the press. Like it? You don't mind, do you honey?
And as for Charis ... Tony looks sideways at the receptacle Charis is holding: not the chintzy copper urn with the imitation Greek handles peddled by the crematorium, more like a stirrup cup really, but something even worse. It's a handmade ceramic flower vase, heavily artistic, in mottled shades of mauve and maroon, donated to Charis by Shanita, from the stockroom of Scrimpers, where it had been gathering dust for years. Charis insisted on something more meaningful than the tin can that Tony's been keeping in her cellar, so before they got their ferry tickets they transferred Zenia from canister to vase, in the Second Cup coffee shop. Roz poured; the ashes were stickier than Tony had expected. Charis couldn't bear to look, in case there were any teeth. But she's got her nerve back by now; she stands at the railing of the ferry, her pale hair spread out, looking like a ship's figurehead going backwards and cradling the lurid flower vase with Zenia's earthly remains inside it. If the dead come back for revenge, thinks Tony, the flower vase alone will be enough to do it.
"Would you say this is halfway?" asks Tony. She wants them to be over the deepest part.
"Looks right to me, sweetie," says Roz. She's impatient to get this over. When they reach the Island they are all going to Charis's house for tea, and, Roz trusts and hopes, some form of lunch: a piece of homemade bread, a whole wheat cookie, anything. Whatever it is will taste like straw - that brown-rice, dauntingly healthy, lipstick-less taste that is the base note of everything Charis cooks - but it will be food. She has three Mozart Balls tucked into her purse as a sort of anti-vitamin supplement and starvation fallback. She intended to bring champagne but she forgot.
It will be a wake of sorts, the three of them gathered around Charis's round table, munching away at the baked goods, adding to the seven-grain crumbs on the floor, because death is a hunger, a vacancy, and you have to fill it up. Roz intends to talk: it will be her contribution. Tony has picked the da
The funny thing is, she actually feels sad. Now figure that out! Zenia was a tumour, but she was also a major part of Roz's life, and her life is past the midpoint. Not soon, but sooner than she wants, she'll begin to set like the sun, to dwindle. When Zenia goes into the lake Mitch will go too, finally; Roz will finally be a widow. No. She'll be something more, something beyond that. What? She will wait and see. But she'll take off her wedding ring, because Charis says it constrains the left hand and that's the hand Roz needs to draw on, now.
She feels something else she never thought she would feel, towards Zenia. Oddly enough, it's gratitude. What for? Who knows? But that's what she feels.
"Should I just pour it out or throw in the whole thing?" says Charis. She has a sneaking wish to keep the vase for herself: it has a strong energy.
"What would you do with it afterwards?" says Tony, looking at her sternly, and after a moment - in which she pictures the vase full of flowers, or standing empty on a shelf, giving off a baleful crimson light in both cases - Charis says, "You're right." It would be a mistake to keep the vase, it would be holding Zenia to the earth; she has already seen the results of that, she doesn't want a repeat. The mere absence of a body would not stop Zenia; she would just take somebody else's. The dead return in other forms, she thinks, because we will them to.
"Heave ho, then," says Roz, "last one in's a rotten stinker!" What on earth is she thinking of? Cold water! Summer camp! Talk about mood swings! Not to mention bad taste. How much more of her life is she going to spend showing off, playing for cheap laughs? How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age. Their eyes, their ancient glittering eyes, are gay.
But this is death, and death is Death, capital D, never mind whose, so sober up, Roz. Anyway she is sober, it's only the way things come out of her. Bite my tongue, God, I didn't mean it. It's just the way I am.
Tony gives Roz an annoyed glance. What she herself would like is a little gunfire. A ritual cannon shot, the flag lowering to half-mast, a single bugle note quivering in the silvery air. Other dead fighters get that, so why not Zenia? She thinks of solemn moments, battlefield vignettes: the hero leaning on his sword or spear or musket, gazing down with noble and philosophical grief at his freshly killed opponent. Of equal rank, it goes without saying. I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
All very well, in art. In real battles, more likely a quick rifling of the watch pocket and the cutting off of ears as souvenirs. Old photographs of hunters with one foot on the bear carcass, clowning around with the sad sawed-off omnivorous ravenous head. Reduction of your sacred foe to a rug, with all the paintings and poems a kind of decorous curtain to disguise the gloating discourse going on behind.
"Okay," she says to Charis, and Charis thrusts both arms and both hands and the flower vase straight out from her body, over the railing, and there is a sharp crack, and the vase splits in two. Charis gives a little shriek and pulls her hands back as if they've been burned. She looks at them: there's a slight blue tinge, a flickering. The pieces of the vase splash into the water, and Zenia trails off in a long wavering drift, like smoke.
"Holy Moly!" says Roz. "What did that?"
"I think she hit it on the railing," says Tony.
"No," says Charis in a hushed voice. "It cracked by itself. It was her." Entities can cause things like that, they can affect physical objects; they do it to get your attention.
Nothing Roz or Tony is likely to say will change her mind, so they say nothing. Charis herself is oddly comforted. It pleases her that Zenia would attend her own scattering, make herself known. It's a token of her continuation. Zenia will now be free, to be reborn for another chance at life. Maybe she will be more fortunate next time. Charis tries to wish her well.
Nevertheless she's shaking. She takes the hands held out to her, one on either side, and grips them tightly, and in this way they glide in to the Island dock. Three dark-coated middle-aged women; women in mourning, thinks Tony. Those veils had a purpose - those outmoded veils, thick and black. Nobody could see what you were doing in there behind them. You could be laughing your head off. She isn't, though.
No flowers grow in the furrows of the lake, none in the fields of asphalt. Tony needs a flower, however. A common weed, because wherever else Zenia had been in her life, she had also been at war. An unofficial war, a guerrilla war, a war she may not have known she was waging, but a war nevertheless.
Who was the enemy? What past wrong was she seeking to avenge? Where was her battlefield? Not in any one place. It was in the air all around, it was in the texture of the world itself; or it was nowhere visible, it was in among the neurons, the tiny incandescent fires of the brain that flash up and burn out. An electric flower would be the right kind for Zenia, a bright, lethal flower like a short circuit, a thistle of molten steel going to seed in a burst of sparks.
The best Tony can do is a sprig of Queen Anne's lace from Charis's backyard, already dry and brittle. She picks it surreptitiously as the others go in the back door. She will take it home and press it as flat as possible, and tape it into her scrapbook. She'll place it at the very end, after Tallinn, after Valley Forge, after Ypres, because she is a sentimentalist about dead people and Zenia is dead, and although she was many other things, she was also courageous. What side she was on doesn't matter; not to Tony, not any more. There may not even have been a side. She may have been alone.
Tony stares up at Zenia, cornered on the balcony with her failing magic, balancing on the sharp edge, her bag of tricks finally empty. Zenia stares back down. She knows she has lost, but whatever her secrets are she's still not telling. She's like an ancient statuette dug up from a Minoan palace: there are the large breasts, the tiny waist, the dark eyes, the snaky hair. Tony picks her up and turns her over, probes and questions, but the woman with her glazed pottery face does nothing but smile.
From the kitchen she hears laughter, and the clatter of dishes. Charis is setting out the food, Roz is telling a story. That's what they will do, increasingly in their lives: tell stories. Tonight their stories will be about Zenia.
Was she in any way like us? thinks Tony. Or, to put it the other way around: Are we in any way like her?
Then she opens the door, and goes in to join the others.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the following for their help: my agents Phoebe Larmore and Vivienne Schuster; my editors Ellen Seligman, Nan A. Talese, and Liz Calder; David Kimmel, for helping with some of the historical details; Barbara Czarnecki, Judi Levita, Marly Rusoff, Sarah Beal, and Claudia Hill-Norton; Joan Sheppard, Donya Peroff, and Sarah Cooper; Michael Bradley, Garry Foster, Kathy Minialoff, Gene Goldberg, and Alison Parker; Rose Tornato. Thanks also to Charles and Julie Woodsworth, to Dorris Heffron, and to John and Christiane O'Keeffe, for premises rendered.
John Keegan's The Face of Battle and The Mask of Command were most useful for background, as were None Is Too Many by Irving Abella and Harold Troper and The War Against the Jews, by Lucy S. Dawidowicz; and also for specific battles and events, Richard Erdoes's A.D. 1000 and The Unknown South of France by Henry and Margaret Reuss. The assassination of ballistics expert Gerald Bull is dealt with in Bull's Eye, by James Adams, and in Wilderness of Mirrors, by Dale Grant.
The image of the body as a lampshade is courtesy Lenore Mendelson Atwood; the expression "brain snot" is courtesy E.J.A. Gibson. The red-and-white footprints recall a story told to me by Earle Birney; the toboggan incident and the black-painted apartment, from Graeme Gibson; the ghost as dry rice was suggested by an episode recounted by P.K. Page; the notion of a flesh dress came from James Reaney's poem "Doomsday, or the Red-Headed Woodpecker"; the tale of the heroic German aunt was suggested partly by Thomas Karl Maria Schwarz; and the professor who disallowed military essay topics for women from an anecdote related by Susan Crean.
Zenia is pronounced with a long e, as in seen; Charis with a hard c as in karma. The Teutones (second century B.C.) are distinct from the Teutons (tenth century A.D.).
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939, and grew up in northern Quebec and Ontario, and later in Toronto. She has lived in numerous cities in Canada, the U.S., and Europe.
She is the author of more than forty books - novels, short stories, poetry, literary criticism, social history, and books for children.
Atwood's work is acclaimed internationally and has been published around the world. Her novels include The Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye - both shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Robber Bride; Alias Grace, winner of the prestigious Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, and a finalist for the Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize and a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and Oryx and Crake, a finalist for The Giller Prize and the Man Booker Prize. Her most recent book of fiction is Moral Disorder. Atwood is the recipient of numerous honours, such as the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence in the U.K., the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature in the U.S., Le Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and she was the first winner of the London Literary Prize. She has received honorary degrees from universities across Canada, and one from Oxford University in England.
Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson.
Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride
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