The Blind Assassin

  The average working man wouldn't read that kind of thing, though - the working man the comrades think is so inherently noble. What those guys want is his stuff. Cheap to buy, value for a dime, fast-paced action, with lots of tits and ass. Not that you can print the words tits and ass: the pulps are surprisingly prudish. Breasts and bottom are as far as they'll go. Gore and bullets, guts and screams and writhing, but no full frontal nudity. No language. Or maybe it's not prudishness, maybe they just don't want to be closed down.

  He lights a cigarette, he prowls, he looks out the window. Cinders darken the snow. A streetcar grinds past. He turns away, he prowls, nests of words in his head.

  He checks his watch: she's late again. She's not coming.

  VII

  The steamer trunk

  The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

  Impossible, of course.

  I pay out my line, I pay out my line, this black thread I'm spinning across the page.

  Yesterday a package arrived for me: a fresh edition of The Blind Assassin . This copy is merely a courtesy: no money will result, or not for me. The book is now in the public domain and anyone at all can publish it, so Laura's estate won't be seeing any of the proceeds. That's what happens a set number of years after the death of the author: you lose control. The thing is out there in the world, replicating itself in God knows how many forms, without any say-so from me.

  Artemesia Press, this outfit's called; it's English. I think they're the ones who wanted me to write an introduction, which I refused to do, of course. Probably run by a bunch of women, with a name like that. I wonder which Artemesia they have in mind - the Persian lady general from Herodotus who turned tail when the battle was going against her, or the Roman matron who ate the ashes of her dead husband so her body could become his living sepulchre? Probably the raped Renaissance painter: that's the only one of them that gets remembered now.

  The book is on my kitchen table. Neglected masterpieces of the twentieth century, it says in italic script under the title. Laura was a "modernist," we are told on the inside flap. She was "influenced" by the likes of Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Smart, Carson McCullers - authors I know for a fact that Laura never read. The cover design isn't too bad, however. Shades of washed-out brownish purple, a photographic look: a woman in a slip, at a window, seen through a net curtain, her face in shadow. Behind her, a segment of a man - the arm, the hand, the back of the head. Appropriate enough, I suppose.

  I decided it was time for me to phone my lawyer. Or not my real lawyer. The one I used to consider mine, the one who handled that business with Richard, who battled Winifred so heroically, though in vain - that one died several decades ago. Ever since then I have been passed from hand to hand within the firm, like some ornate silver teapot fobbed off on each new generation as a wedding gift, but that nobody ever uses.

  "Mr. Sykes, please," I said to the girl who answered. Some receptionist or other, I suppose.I imagined her fingernails, long and maroon and pointed. But perhaps these are the wrong kind of fingernails for a receptionist of today. Perhaps they are ice blue.

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Sykes is in a meeting. Who may I say is calling?"

  They might as well use robots. "Mrs. Iris Griffen," I said, in my best diamond-cutting voice. "I'm one of his oldest clients."

  This did not open any doors. Mr. Sykes was still in a meeting. He is a busy lad, it appears. But why do I think of him as a lad? He must be in his mid-fifties - born, perhaps, in the same year Laura died. Has she really been dead that long, the time it's taken to grow and ripen a lawyer? Another of those things that must be true because everyone else agrees they are, although they don't seem so to me.

  "May I tell Mr. Sykes what it concerns?" said the receptionist.

  "My will," I said. "I'm considering writing one. He's often told me that I should." (A lie, but I wanted to establish in her easily distracted brain the fact that Mr. Sykes and I were as close as two peas in a pod.) "That, and some other matters. I ought to come into Toronto soon, to consult him. Perhaps he could give me a call, when he can spare a minute."

  I imagined Mr. Sykes receiving the message; I imagined the tiny chill that would run down the back of his neck as he tried to place my name, and then succeeded. Goose feet on his grave. It's what you feel - even I feel - when coming across those small items in the paper concerning folks once famous or glamorous or notorious, and long thought dead. Yet it appears they continue to live on, in some shrivelled, darkened form, encrusted with years, like beetles under a stone.

  "Of course, Mrs. Griffen," said the receptionist. "I'll make sure he gets back to you." They must take lessons - elocution lessons - to achieve just the right blend of consideration and contempt. But why am I complaining? It's a skill I perfected, once, myself.

  I set down the phone. No doubt there will be some eyebrow-raising among Mr. Sykes and his youthful, balding, Mercedes-driving, tubby-bellied cronies: What can the old bat possibly have to leave?

  What, that is, worth mentioning?

  In one corner of my kitchen there's a steamer trunk, stuck with tattered labels. It's part of the matched luggage set from my trousseau - clear yellow calfskin once, dingy now, the steel bindings marred and grimy. I keep it locked, the key sunk deep in a sealer jar filled with bran cereal. Coffee and sugar tins would be too obvious.

  I wrestled with the jar lid - I must think of some better, easier hiding place - and finally got it open, and extracted the key. I knelt with some difficulty, turned the key in the lock, lifted the lid.

  I hadn't opened this trunk for some time. The singed, autumn-leaf smell of old paper rose to greet me. There were all of the notebooks with their cheap cardboard covers, like pressed sawdust. Also the type-script, held together by a crisscross of ancient kitchen string. Also the letters to the publishers - from me, of course, not from Laura, she was dead by then - and the corrected proofs. Also the hate mail, until I stopped saving it.

  Also five copies of the first edition, with the dust jackets still in mint condition - tawdry, but dust jackets were then, in the years just after the war. The colours are a garish orange, a flat purple, a lime green, printed on flimsy paper, with an awful drawing - a faux Cleopatra type with bulbous green breasts and kohl-rimmed eyes and purple necklaces from navel to chin and an enormous, pouting orange mouth, rising up like a genie from the writhing smoke of a purple cigarette. Acid is eating into the pages, the virulent cover fading like the feathers of a stuffed tropical bird.

  (I received six free copies - the author's copies, they were called - but I gave one of them to Richard. I don't know what became of it. I expect he tore it up, which was what he always did with pieces of paper he didn't want. No - I remember now. It was found on the boat with him, on the galley table, beside his head. Winifred sent it back to me with a note: Now look what you've done! I threw it out. I didn't want anything near me that had ever touched Richard.)

  I've often wondered what to do with all of this - this cache of odds and ends, this tiny archive. I can't bring myself to sell it, but I can't bring myself to discard it either. If I do nothing, the choice will be left to Myra, tidying up after me. After her first moments of shock - supposing she begins to read - there will no doubt be some ripping and shredding. Then a struck match and none the wiser. She'd interpret that as loyalty: it's what Reenie would have done. In the old days trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there's ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many years, with all concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves?

  Perhaps I should leave this trunk and its contents to a university, or else to a library. It would at least be appreciated there, in a ghoulish way. Ther
e are more than a few scholars who'd like to get their claws into all this waste paper. Material, they'd call it - their name for loot. They must think of me as a fusty old dragon crouched on an ill-gotten hoard - some gaunt dog-in-the-manger, some desiccated, censorious wardress, a prim-lipped keeper of the keys, guarding the dungeon in which starved Laura is chained to the wall.

  For years they've bombarded me with letters, wanting Laura's own letters - wanting manuscripts, mementoes, interviews, anecdotes - all the grisly details. To these importunate missives I used to compose tersely worded replies:

  "Dear Miss W., In my view your plan for a 'Commemoration Ceremony' at the bridge which was the scene of Laura Chase's tragic death is both tasteless and morbid. You must be out of your mind. I believe you are suffering from auto-intoxication. You should try an enema."

  "Dear Ms. X., I acknowledge your letter concerning your proposed thesis, though I can't say that its title makes a great deal of sense to me. Doubtless it does to you or you would not have come up with it. I cannot give you any help. Also you do not deserve any.'Deconstruction' implies the wrecking ball, and 'problematize' is not a verb."

  "Dear Dr. Y, Concerning your study of the theological implications of The Blind Assassin: my sister's religious beliefs were strongly held but were scarcely what is called conventional. She did not like God or approve of God or claim to understand God. She said she loved God, and as with human beings that was a different thing. No, she was not a Buddhist. Don't be fatuous. I suggest you learn to read."

  "Dear Professor Z: I have noted your opinion that a biography of Laura Chase is long overdue. She may well be, as you say, 'among our most important female mid-century writers.' I wouldn't know. But my co-operation in what you call 'your project' is out of the question. I have no wish to satisfy your lust for phials of dried blood and the severed fingers of saints.

  Laura Chase is not your 'project.' She was my sister. She would not have wished to be pawed over after her death, whatever that pawing over might euphemistically be termed. Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don't consider that."

  "Dear Miss W: This is your fourth letter on the same subject. Stop pestering me. You are a drone."

  For decades I took a grim satisfaction in this venomous doodling. I enjoyed licking the stamps, then dropping the letters like so many hand grenades into the shiny red box, with the sense of having settled the hash of some earnest, greedy snoop. But lately I've stopped answering. Why needle strangers? They don't give a hoot what I think of them. For them I'm only an appendage: Laura's odd, extra hand, attached to no body - the hand that passed her on, to the world, to them. They see me as a repository - a living mausoleum, a resource, as they term it. Why should I do them any favours? As far as I'm concerned they're scavengers - hyenas, the lot of them; jackals on the scent of carrion, ravens hunting for roadkill; corpse flies. They want to pick through me as if I'm a boneheap, looking for scrap metal and broken pottery, for shards of cuneiform and scraps of papyrus, for curios, lost toys, gold teeth. If they ever suspected what I've got stashed away here, they'd jimmy the locks, they'd break and enter, they'd knock me over the head and make off with the boodle, and feel more than justified.

  No. Not a university then. Why give them the satisfaction?

  Perhaps my steamer trunk should go to Sabrina, despite her decision to remain incommunicado, despite - this is where it festers - her persistent neglect of me. Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both. These things are hers by right. You might even say they are her inheritance: she is, after all, my granddaughter. She is also Laura's grandniece. Surely she will want to inform herself about her origins, once she gets around to it.

  But no doubt Sabrina would reject such a gift. She's an adult now, I keep reminding myself. If she has anything to ask me, anything to say to me at all, she'll let me know.

  But why doesn't she? What can be taking her so long? Is her silence a form of revenge, for something or someone? Not for Richard, surely. She never knew him. Not for Winifred, from whom she ran away. For her mother then - for poor Aimee?

  How much can she possibly remember? She was only four.

  Aimee's death was not my fault.

  Where is Sabrina now, and what can she be seeking? I picture her as a thinnish girl, with a hesitant smile, a little ascetic; lovely though, with her grave eyes blue as Laura's, her long dark hair coiled like sleeping serpents around her head. She won't have a veil, though; she'll have sensible sandals, or even boots, the soles worn down. Or has she assumed a sari? Girls of her sort do.

  She's on some mission or other - feeding the Third World poor, soothing the dying; expiating the sins of the rest of us. A fruitless task - our sins are a bottomless pit, and there's lots more where they came from. But that's God's point, she'd doubtless argue - the fruitlessness. He's always liked futility. He thinks it's noble.

  She takes after Laura in that respect: the same tendency towards absolutism, the same refusal to compromise, the same scorn for the grosser human failings. To get away with that, you have to be beautiful. Otherwise it seems mere peevishness.

  The Fire Pit

  The weather remains unseasonably warm. Balmy, kindly, dry and bright; even the sun, so pale and thin usually at this time of year, is full and mellow, the sunsets lush. The brisk, smiley-face folks on the weather channel say it's due to some distant, dusty catastrophe - an earthquake, a volcano? Some new, murderous Act of God. No cloud without a silver lining, is their motto. And no silver lining without a cloud.

  Yesterday Walter drove me into Toronto for the appointment with the lawyer. It's a place he never goes if he can help it, but Myra put him up to it. That was after I said I'd be taking the bus. Myra wouldn't hear of it. As everyone knows, there's only one bus, and it leaves in the dark and returns in it. She said that when I got off the bus at night, the motorists would never see me and I'd be squashed like a bug. Anyway, I shouldn't be going to Toronto by myself, because, as everyone also knows, it's populated entirely by crooks and thugs. Walter, she said, would take care of me.

  Walter wore a red baseball cap for the trip; between the back of it and the top of his jacket collar his bristly neck bulged out like a biceps. His eyelids were creased as knees. "I would of took the pickup," he said, "built like a brick shithouse, give the buggers something to think about before ramming into me. Only there's a few springs gone, so it's not such a smooth ride." According to him, the drivers in Toronto were all crazy. "Well, you'd have to be crazy to go there, eh?" he said.

  "We're going there," I pointed out.

  "But only the once. Like we used to tell the girls, once don't count."

  "And did they believe you, Walter?" I said, stringing him along as he likes to be strung.

  "Sure. Dumb as a stump. Specially the blondes." I could feel him grinning.

  Built like a brick shithouse. That used to be said about women. It was meant as a compliment, in the days when not everyone had a brick shithouse: only wooden ones, flimsy and smelly and easy to push over.

  As soon as he'd got me into the car and buckled me up, Walter turned on the radio: electric violins wailing, twisted romance, the four-square beat of heartbreak. Trite suffering, but suffering nonetheless. The entertainment business. What voyeurs we have all become. I leaned back against the pillow provided by Myra. (She'd provisioned us as if for an ocean voyage - she'd packed a lap rug, tuna sandwiches, brownies, a thermos of coffee.) Out the window was the Jogues River, pursuing its sluggish course. We crossed it and turned north, past streets of what used to be workers' cottages and are now what is known as "starter homes," then a few small businesses: an auto wrecker, a foundering health-food emporium, an orthopedic shoe outlet with a green neon foot flashing on and off as if walking all by itself in one place. Then a miniature shopping mall, five stores, of which only one had managed to get the Christmas tinsel up yet. Then Myra's beauty parlour, The Hair Port. There was a picture of a crop-headed person in th
e window, whether male or female I really couldn't say.

  Then a motel that used to be called Journeys End. I suppose they were thinking of "Journeys end in lovers meeting," but not everyone could be expected to get the reference: it might have come across as too sinister, a building all entrances but no exits, reeking of aneurysms and thromboses and emptied bottles of sleeping pills and gun wounds to the head. Now it's called simply Journeys. How wise to have changed it. So much more inconclusive, so much less terminal. So much better to travel than to arrive.

  We passed a few more franchises - smiling chickens offering platters of their own fried body parts, a grinning Mexican wielding tacos. The town water tank loomed up ahead, one of those huge bubbles of cement that dot the rural landscape like comic-strip voice balloons emptied of words. Now we'd hit open country. A metal silo lifted out of a field like a conning tower; by the roadside, three crows pecked at a furry burst lump of groundhog. Fences, more silos, a huddle of damp cows; a stand of dark cedar, then a patch of swamp, the summer's bulrushes already ragged and balding.

  It began to drizzle. Walter turned the windshield wipers on. To their soothing lullaby, I went to sleep.

  When I woke up, my first thought was, Did I snore? If so, had my mouth been open? How unsightly, and therefore how humiliating. But I couldn't bring myself to ask. In case you're wondering, vanity never ends.

  We were on the eight-lane freeway, close to Toronto. That was according to Walter: I couldn't see, because we were stuck behind a swaying farm truck top-heavy with crates of white geese, bound no doubt for market. Their long, doomed necks and frantic heads poked out here and there through the slats, their beaks opened and closed, uttering their tragic and ludicrous cries, drowned out by the racket of wheels. Feathers stuck to the windshield, the car filled with the smell of goose shit and gas fumes.

  The truck had a sign on it that said, If You're Close Enough To Read This You're Too Close. When it finally turned off, there was Toronto up ahead, an artificial mountain of glass and concrete rising from the flat lakeside plain, all crystals and spires and giant shining slabs and sharp-edged obelisks, floating in an orange-brown haze of smog. It looked like something I'd never seen before - something that had grown up overnight, or that wasn't really there at all, like a mirage.