The Robber Bride (70 page)

There were nobody’s fingerprints on the needle, except Zenia’s, they tell her. As for her swan dive into the fountain, she could have fallen. She was a tall woman, and the sheet-metal balcony railings were really too low for safety; standards should be improved. Such a thing is possible. If she’d been leaning over. On the other hand, the heroin could have been a plant. It might have been murder.

Or it might have been suicide, Tony tells them. She would like them to believe this. She tells them that Zenia may not have been a well person.

Of course, say the men in overcoats politely. We know about that. We found the prescriptions in her suitcase, we traced the doctor. Seems she had a fake health card as well as some fake passports, but the disease itself was real enough. Six months to live: ovarian cancer. But there was no suicide note.

Tony tells them there wouldn’t have been: Zenia was not really the note-writing kind.

The men in overcoats look at her, their small eyes glinting with
scepticism. They don’t buy any of these theories, but they don’t have another one, not one that holds water.

Tony sees how it will be: Zenia will prove too smart for the men in overcoats. She will outfox them, just as she’s always outfoxed everyone else. She finds herself being pleased about this, elated even, as if her faith in Zenia – a faith she didn’t realize she had – is being vindicated. Let them sweat! Why should everyone know everything? It’s not as if there are no precedents: history teems with people who died in unclear ways.

Still, she feels honour-bound to report the conversation about Gerry Bull and Project Babylon, although it’s not merely honour that impels her: she hopes very much that if Zenia was murdered it was by professionals, rather than by anyone she knows. The men tell her they are retracing Zenia’s steps, as best they can, via her plane tickets; she has certainly been in some very odd places in the last little while. But there’s nothing conclusive. They shake hands and depart, asking Tony to call them if she hears anything else. She says she will.

She’s left facing the unlikely possibility that all three of Zenia’s most recent stories – or parts of them, at least – may have been true. What if Zenia’s cries for help really were cries for help, this time?

After the police are finished there is a cremation. Roz pays for it, because when she tracks down the lawyer, the one who arranged Zenia’s funeral the first time around, he is quite annoyed. He takes it as a personal slight that Zenia has chosen to be alive all this time without consulting him about it. Her will was probated the first time around, not that there was anything to probate because she didn’t leave an estate, only a small bequest to an orphanage near Waterloo that turned out not to exist any more, and on top of that he never got paid. So what do they expect from him?

“Nothing,” says Roz. “It will all be taken care of.”

“Well, what about it?” she says to Tony and Charis. “Looks like we got left holding the sack. She doesn’t seem to have any relatives.”

“Except us,” says Charis.

Tony sees no point in contradicting her, because it is Charis’s belief that everyone is related to everyone else through some kind of invisible root system. She says she will take charge of the ashes until the three of them can figure out something more suitable. She puts the canister with Zenia in it down in the cellar, in her box of Christmas tree decorations, wrapped up in red tissue paper, beside the gun. She doesn’t tell West it is there, because this is a female matter.

S
o now Zenia is History.

No: now Zenia is gone. She is lost and gone forever. She’s a scattering of dust, blown on the wind like spores; she’s an invisible cloud of viruses, a few molecules, dispersing. She will only be history if Tony chooses to shape her into history. At the moment she is formless, a broken mosaic; the fragments of her are in Tony’s hands, because she is dead, and all of the dead are in the hands of the living.

But what is Tony to make of her? The story of Zenia is insubstantial, ownerless, a rumour only, drifting from mouth to mouth and changing as it goes. As with any magician, you saw what she wanted you to see; or else you saw what you yourself wanted to see. She did it with mirrors. The mirror was whoever was watching, but there was nothing behind the two-dimensional image but a thin layer of mercury.

Even the name Zenia may not exist, as Tony knows from looking. She’s attempted to trace its meaning –
Xenia
, a Russian word for hospitable, a Greek one pertaining to the action of a foreign pollen upon a fruit;
Zenaida
, meaning daughter of Zeus, and the name of
two early Christian martyrs;
Zillah
, Hebrew, a shadow;
Zenobia
, the third-century warrior queen of Palmyra in Syria, defeated by the Emperor Aurelian;
Xeno
, Greek, a stranger, as in
xenophobic; Zenana
, Hindu, the women’s quarters or harem;
Zen
, a Japanese meditational religion;
Zendic
, an Eastern practitioner of heretical magic – these are the closest she has come.

Out of such hints and portents, Zenia devised herself. As for the truth about her, it lies out of reach, because – according to the records, at any rate – she was never even born.

But why bother, in this day and age – Zenia herself would say – with such a quixotic notion as the truth? Every sober-sided history is at least half sleight-of-hand: the right hand waving its poor snippets of fact, out in the open for all to verify, while the left hand busies itself with its own devious agendas, deep in its hidden pockets. Tony is daunted by the impossibility of accurate reconstruction.

Also by its futility. Why does she do what she does? History was once a substantial edifice, with pillars of wisdom and an altar to the goddess Memory, the mother of all nine muses. Now the acid rain and the terrorist bombs and the termites have been at it, and it’s looking less and less like a temple and more and more like a pile of rubble, but it once had a meaningful structure. It was supposed to have something to teach people, something beneficial; some health-giving vitamin or fortune-cookie motto concealed within its heaped-up accounts, most of them tales of greed, violence, viciousness, and lust for power, because history doesn’t concern itself much with those who try to be good. Goodness in any case is problematic, since an action can be good in intent but evil in result, witness missionaries. This is why Tony prefers battles: in a battle there are right actions and wrong actions, and you can tell them apart by who wins.

Still, there was once supposed to be a message.
Let that be a lesson to you
, adults used to say to children, and historians to their readers.
But do the stories of history really teach anything at all? In a general sense, thinks Tony, possibly not.

Despite this she still plods on, still weaves together her informed guesses and plausible assumptions, still ponders over her scraps of fact, her potsherds and broken arrowheads and tarnished necklace beads, arranging them in the patterns she thinks they must once have made. Who cares? Almost nobody. Maybe it’s just a hobby, something to do on a dull day. Or else it’s an act of defiance: these histories may be ragged and threadbare, patched together from worthless leftovers, but to her they are also flags, hoisted with a certain jaunty insolence, waving bravely though inconsequently, glimpsed here and there through the trees, on the mountain roads, among the ruins, on the long march into chaos.

Tony is down in the cellar, in the middle of the night, because she doesn’t feel like sleeping. She’s wearing her dressing gown and her wool work socks and her raccoon slippers, which are finally on their last legs, although they don’t have any legs and the legs they are on are hers. One of them has lost a tail, and they now have only one eye between them. Tony has become used to having eyes on her feet, like the eyes the ancient Egyptians painted on the prows of their boats. They provide extra guidance – extra spirit guidance, you might say – a thing Tony is coming to believe she needs. Maybe when these slippers kick the bucket she will buy some other ones, other ones with eyes. There’s a choice of animal: pigs, bears, rabbits, wolves. She thinks she will get the wolves.

Her sand-table map of Europe has been rearranged. Now it’s the second decade of the thirteenth century, and what will later be France is being torn apart by religious wars. By this time it’s no longer the Christians versus the Muslims: instead it’s the Catholics versus the Cathars. The dualist Cathars held that the world was divided between the forces of good and the forces of evil, the spiritual
and the material, God and the Devil; they believed in reincarnation, and had female religious instructors. Whereas the Catholics ruled out rebirth, thought women unclean, and held by force of logic that since God was by definition all-powerful, evil was ultimately an illusion. A difference of opinion that cost many lives, though there was more at stake than theology, such as who was to control the trade routes and the olive crops, and the women, who were getting out of hand.

Carcassonne, stronghold of Languedoc and the Cathars, has just fallen to the bloodthirsty Simon de Montfort and his brutal army of crusading Catholics, after a siege of fifteen days and a failure of the water supply. Full-spectrum killing ensued. Tony’s main focus of interest is not Carcassonne, however, but Lavaur, which was attacked next. It resisted for sixty days under the leadership of the castle’s chatelaine, Dame Giraude. After the town finally succumbed, eighty knights were butchered like pigs and four hundred Cathar defenders were burned alive, and Dame Giraude herself was thrown down a well by de Montfort’s soldiers, with a lot of stones piled on top of her to keep her down. Nobility in war gets a name for itself, thinks Tony, because there is so little of it.

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.

E
very 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.