The Robber Bride (71 page)

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 day and Charis the container, so the vocals will be up to Roz.

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.

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.