The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  She opens her file drawer and takes out the Z file, the same one with the glossy in it, and turns a few pages. There it all is, the skeleton of the skeleton in the closet: days, hours, places. It still hurts.

  Why not use the same detective, less explaining to be done, and she was super good, Harriet, Harriet Thing, Hungarian but she WASPed her name - Harriet Bridges. Used to say she got to be a detective because if you were a Hungarian woman dealing with Hungarian men, you had to be one anyway. Roz finds the number, picks up the phone. She has to go through a gatekeeper to get through - Harriet must be doing better if she has a secretary, or probably it's one of those service-sharing offices - but she wheedles and pushes, and Harriet is finally not in a meeting any more, but there on the line.

  "Hi, Harriet, this is Roz Andrews. Yeah, I know, it's been years. Listen, I want you to do something for me. Actually, the same thing you did before, sort of. The same woman. Well, I know she's dead. I mean, she was dead, but now she isn't. I saw her! In the Toxique....

  "I haven't the faintest. That's where you come in!

  "If I were you I'd start with the hotels, but you can't count on her using her own name. Remember?

  "I'll send over the photo by courier. Just find her. Find out what she's up to. Who she's seeing. Phone me as soon as you know anything. Anything! What she has for breakfast. You know how nosy I am.

  "Mark the bill Personal. Thanks. You're a doll. We'll do lunch!"

  Roz hangs up. She ought to feel better but she doesn't, she's too keyed up. Now that she's set the thing in motion she can hardly wait for the results, because until she knows exactly where Zenia is, Zenia might be anywhere. She might be outside Roz's house right now, she might be climbing in through the window, gunny sack over her shoulder to carry away the loot. What loot? That's the question! Roz is almost ready to go out there and do the rounds herself, mooch from hotel to hotel with her precious glossy photo under her arm, lie, insinuate, bribe the desk clerks. She's impatient, she's irritable, she's avid, her skin is crawling with curiosity.

  Maybe it's menopause, now wouldn't that be nice for a change? Maybe she'll get that surge of energy and joie de vivre they're always talking about. It's long overdue.

  Or maybe this isn't raging hormones. Maybe it's sin. One of the Seven Deadlies, or rather two of them. The nuns were always keen on Lust, and Roz has thought recently that maybe Greed was the one with her own name on it. But here comes Anger, blindsiding her; and Envy, the worst, her old familiar, in the shape of Zenia herself, smiling and triumphant, an incandescent Venus, ascending not from a seashell but from a seething cauldron.

  Let's face it, Roz, you're envious of Zenia. You always have been. Envious as Hell. Yes God, but so what? Judas Priest, what do I do about it? Down on your knees! Humiliate yourself Mortify your soul! Scrub the toilet!

  How long do I have to live before I'm rid of this junk, thinks Roz. The garage sale of the soul. She'll go home early, have a snack, pour herself a small drink, run a bath, put in some of the stuff Charis keeps deluging her with, from that hophead store where she works. Ground-up leaves, dried flowers, exotic roots, musty-hayfield aromas, snake oil, mole bones, age-old recipes brewed by certified crones. Not that Roz has a thing against crones, since at the rate she's going she'll soon be one herself.

  It'll relax you, says Charis, though Roz, you have to help out! Don't fight it! Go with it. Lie back. Float. Picture yourself in a warm ocean.

  But every time Roz tries this, there are sharks.

  BLACK ENAMEL

  17

  All history is written backwards, writes Tony, writing backwards. We choose a significant event and examine its causes and its consequences, but who decides whether the event is significant? We do, and we are here; and it and its participants are there. They are long gone; at the same time, they are in our hands. Like Roman gladiators, they are under our thumbs. We make them fight their battles over again for our edification and pleasure, who fought them once for entirely other reasons.

  Yet history is not a true palindrome, thinks Tony. We can't really run it backwards and end up at a clean start. Too many of the pieces have gone missing; also we know too much, we know the outcome. Historians are the quintessential voyeurs, noses pressed to Time's glass window. They can never actually be there on the battlefield, they can never join in those moments of supreme exaltation, or of supreme grief either. Their re-creations are at the best just patchy waxworks. Who'd choose to be God? To know the whole story, its violent clashes, its melees, its deadly conclusions, before it even begins? Too sad. And too demoralizing. For a soldier on the eve of battle, ignorance is the same as hope. Though neither one is bliss.

  Tony sets down her pen. Such thoughts are as yet too nebulous to be formulated for the present purpose, which is a lecture she's promised to deliver to the Society of Military Historiographers two months from now. What she's leading up to is the defeat of Otto the Red at the hands of the Saracens on July 13, 982, and its inscription by later chroniclers as moral exemplum. It will be a good lecture, good enough - her lectures are always good enough - but as time goes on she has come to feel, at these events, more and more like a talking dog. Cute, no doubt; a clever trick; a nice dog; but nonetheless a dog. She used to think that her work was accepted or rejected on its own merits, but she's begun to suspect that the goodness of her lectures is somehow not the point. The point is her dress. She will be patted on the head, praised, fed a few elite dog biscuits, and dismissed, while the boys in the back room get down to the real issue, which is which one of them will be the next society president.

  Such paranoia. Tony banishes it, and goes to get herself a drink of water.

  She's in the cellar, in her dressing gown and raccoon slippers, in the middle of the night. She couldn't sleep, and she didn't want to disturb West by working in her office, which is down the hall from the bedroom. Her computer makes beeping sounds, and the light could wake him. When she eased herself down from the bed, when she tiptoed from the room, he was sleeping like an innocent, and also snoring like one, in a regular, gentle, maddening way.

  Perfidious West. Indispensable West.

  The real reason she came downstairs is that she wanted to consult the phone book, the Yellow Pages, under Hotels, and she didn't want him to catch her doing it. She didn't want him to realize that she's been snooping on him, on him and Zenia, on his beside-the-phone scribblings. She didn't want to disappoint him, or, worse, alarm him. She's now looked up every hotel in the city beginning with A. She's made a list: the Alexandra, the Annex, the Arnold Garden, the Arrival, the Avenue Park. She could phone them all, ask for the room number, disguise her voice - or she wouldn't have to say a word, she could pose as a heavy-breathing phone pervert - and see if it's Zenia.

  But there's a phone in the bedroom, right beside the bed. What's to stop West from hearing the tiny ping it makes when you hang up the other phones, and from listening in? She could use West's own phone, the Headwinds line; but it's just above the bedroom, and how to explain herself if surprised in the act? Better to wait. If Zenia is to be headed off - and Tony at the moment does not have the faintest idea how this is to be accomplished - West must be kept out of it as much as possible. He must be insulated. He's already been damaged enough. For kindly and susceptible souls like West's, the real world, especially the real world of women, is far too harsh a place.

  The room Tony is writing in is the games room; or that's what she and West call it. It's the big part of the cellar, between the furnace room and the laundry room, and unlike these has indoor-outdoor carpet on the floor. West's game is a pool table, which takes up a relatively large amount of space and has a fold-up plywood ping-pong overlay that can be added to it; which is what Tony is writing on. Tony isn't much good at pool - she can understand the strategy, but she pokes too hard, she has no finesse; however, she's a whiz at ping-pong. West is the opposite - despite his amazing spider-monkey reach, he's clumsy at high speeds. Sometimes, to give herself a handicap, Tony will pla
y a game with her right hand, not quite as good as her left, though she can beat him that way also. When Tony's been wiped out too often at pool, West will suggest a game of ping-pong, though it's a foregone conclusion that he'll get creamed. He's always been very considerate, that way. It's a form of chivalry.

  Which is a measure of how much, right now, Tony stands to lose.

  But ping-pong is a diversion. Tony's real game is off in a corner, beside the tiny refrigerator they keep down there for ice-water and West's beer. It's a large sand-table, bought at a daycare-centre garage sale some years ago, but it isn't full of sand. Instead it contains a three-dimensional map of Europe and the Mediterranean, made of hardened flour-and-salt paste, with the mountain ranges in relief and the major bodies of water done in blue Plasticine. Tony has been able to use this map over and over, adding and subtracting canals, removing marshes, altering coastlines, building and unbuilding roads and bridges and towns and cities, diverting rivers, as occasion has demanded. Right now it's set up for the tenth century: the day of Otto the Red's fateful battle, to be exact.

  For the armies and the populations, Tony doesn't use pins or flags, not primarily. Instead she uses kitchen spices, a different one for each tribe or ethnic grouping: cloves for the Germanic tribes, red peppercorns for the Vikings, green peppercorns for the Saracens, white ones for the Slavs. The Celts are coriander seeds, the Anglo-Saxons are dill. Chocolate sprinkles, cardamom seeds, four kinds of lentils, and little silver balls indicate the Magyars, the Greeks, the North African kingdoms, and the Egyptians. For each major king, chief, emperor, or pope, there's a Monopoly man; areas in which each has sovereignty, actual or nominal, are marked by lengths of cut-up plastic swizzle stick, in matching colours, stuck into squares of gum eraser.

  It's a complex system, but she prefers it to more schematic representations or to ones that show the armies and the strongholds only. With it she can depict interbreeding and hybridization, through conquest or through the slave trade, because populations are not in fact homogeneous blocks, but mixtures. There are white peppercorns in Constantinople and Rome, traded as slaves by the red peppercorns, who rule them; the green peppercorns trade from south to north, as well as from east to west and back again, using lentils. The Frankish rulers are really cloves, the green peppercorns have infiltrated the Celto-Ligurian corianders. There is a continuous ebb and flow, a blending, a shift of territories.

  To keep the lighter spices from rolling around, she uses a touch of hairspray. Gently, though; otherwise they will be blown away. When she wants to change the year or the century, she scrapes off this or that population and sets up again. She uses tweezers; otherwise her fingers get covered with seeds. History isn't dry, it's sticky, it can get all over your hands.

  Tony pulls a chair over to her sand-table and sits down to study it. On the west coast of Italy, near Sorrento, a group of cloves is pursuing a smaller group of fleeing green peppercorns: the Teutons are out to get the Saracens, or so they intend. The Monopoly man among the cloves is Otto the Red - impetuous, brilliant Otto, Otto the Second, the Germanic emperor of Rome. On and on ride Otto and the cloves, between the indifferent sea and the wrinkly dry mountains, sweating under the gruelling sun; they are buoyant with adrenalin, high on the prospect of bloodshed and loot, dizzy with imminent winning. Little do they know.

  Tony knows more. Behind the folds of dry earth and stone, out of sight, a large force of Saracen peppercorns is lying in ambush. The band of fleeing green peppercorns running away up front are only decoys. It's the oldest trick in the book, and Otto has fallen for it. Soon his men will be attacked from three sides, and the fourth side is the sea. They will all be killed, or most of them will be; or they'll be pushed back into the sea, where they'll drown, or they'll crawl away wounded and die of thirst. Some of them will be captured and sold for slaves. Otto himself will escape with barely his life.

  Go back, Otto, thinks Tony. She is fond of Otto, he's a favourite of hers; also she feels sorry for him because he had a fight with his wife that morning, before he left on this ill-starred expedition, which may account for his recklessness. Losing your temper is bad for war. Otto, go back! But Otto can't hear her, and he can't see the world from above, as she can. If only he'd sent out scouts, if only he'd waited! But waiting can also be fatal. So can going back. He who fights and runs away may live to fight another day, or else he may just get speared from behind.

  Already Otto has come too far. Already the great tweezers in the sky descend, and the green peppercorns rise up from behind the hot rocks, ride out of hiding, and give chase along the arid shore. Tony feels awful about this, but what can she do? She's helpless. It's too late. It was too late a thousand years ago. All she can do is visit the beach. She has done that, she has seen the hot dry mountains, she has pressed a small spiky flower for her scrapbook. She has bought a souvenir: a pair of salad servers, carved from olive wood.

  Absent-mindedly she picks up one of Otto's fallen cloves, dips it into her glass of water to get rid of any hairspray, and pops it into her mouth. It's a bad habit of hers, eating parts of the armies on her map; luckily there are always replacements in the bottles on the spice shelves upstairs. But the dead soldiers would have been eaten too, one way or another; or at least dismembered, their possessions dispersed. That's the thing about war: the polite formalities go by the wayside, and the proportion of funerals to actual deaths tends to be low. Already the Saracens are finishing off the wounded, a mercy under the (nurseless, waterless) circumstances, and stripping them of their armour and weapons. Already the scavenging peasants wait their turn. Already the vultures have gathered.

  It's too late for Otto, but what about her? And if she had another chance, another turn, another beginning, with Zenia, would she have acted differently? She doesn't know, because she knows too much to know.

  18

  Tony was the first one of them to befriend Zenia; or rather, Tony was the first one to let her in, because people like Zenia can never step through your doorway, can never enter and entangle themselves in your life, unless you invite them. There has to be a recognition, an offer of hospitality, a word of greeting. Tony has come to realize this, although she didn't at the time. The question she asks about herself now is simply: why did she do it? What was there about her, and also about Zenia, that made such a thing not only possible but necessary?

  Because she did issue an invitation, there's no doubt about it. She didn't know she was doing it, but ignorance in such matters is no defence. She opened the door wide, and in came Zenia, like a long-lost friend, like a sister, like a wind, and Tony welcomed her.

  It was a long time ago, in the early sixties, when Tony was nineteen; not a period she remembers with much pleasure, before the advent of Zenia. In retrospect it seems to her empty, cindery, devoid of comforts; though while she was undergoing it she considered that she was doing all right.

  She studied a lot, she ate and slept, she rinsed out her stockings in the McClung Hall second-floor washbasin and twisted them up in a towel and hung them neatly above the clanking radiator in her room, on a coat-hanger suspended from the curtain rod by a string. She had various little well-worn runways that got her through the weeks, like mice through a field; as long as she stayed on them she was safe. She was dogged, she plodded on, nose to the ground, wrapped in a protective numbness.

  As she recalls, it was November. (She had a wall calendar on which she crossed off the days, though there was no special date she was heading towards or anticipating; but it gave her the feeling of moving forward.) She'd been living in McClung Hall for the past three years, ever since the death of her father. Her mother had died earlier and was presently in a metal canister the shape of a miniature depth charge, which she kept on a closet shelf, tucked in behind her folded sweaters. Her father was in the Necropolis, although his 1940s German pistol was in a box of old Christmas tree decorations, about all she'd kept from the family house. She'd been intending to reunite her parents - take a trowel to the Necropolis on
e day, plant her mother beside her father like an aluminum-alloy tulip bulb - but she was held back by the suspicion that her mother, at least, would have gone a long way to avoid such a thing. Anyway, she didn't at all mind having her mother in her room, on her shelf, where she could keep an eye on her. (Assign her a location. Tether her down. Make her stay put.)

  Tony had a room to herself because the girl who was supposed to be sharing with her had taken an overdose of sleeping pills and had had her stomach pumped, and had then disappeared. People tended to, in Tony's experience. For weeks before she left, the roommate had stayed in bed all day with her clothes on, reading paperback novels and weeping softly. Tony hated that. It bothered her more than the sleeping pills.

  Tony had the sensation of living by herself, but of course she was surrounded by others; other girls, or were they women? McClung Hall was called a women's residence, but girls was what they said to one another. Hey girls, they would call, running up the stairs. Guess what!

  Tony did not feel she had much in common with these other girls. Groups of them would spend the evenings - when they weren't out on dates - in the Common Room, sprawled on the dispirited orangy-brown chesterfield and the three overstuffed and leaking easy chairs, in their pyjamas and housecoats and big bristly hair rollers, playing bridge and smoking and drinking coffee, and dissecting their dates.

  Tony herself did not go out on dates; she did not have anybody to go with. She did not mind this; in any case, she was happier in the company of people who had died a long time ago. That way there was no painful suspense, no disappointment. Nothing to lose.