The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  Where is West in all of this? Tony has relinquished him, because how could she ever compete with Zenia? And even if she could compete, she wouldn't think of it. Such a thing would be dishonourable: Zenia is her friend. Her best friend. Her only friend, come to think of it. Tony has not been in the habit of having friends.

  Or it may be otherwise; it may be that there's no room left for West, between the two of them. They're too close together.

  So there's Zenia and Tony now, and Zenia and West; but no longer any West and Tony.

  Sometimes there are the three of them together. Tony goes with Zenia and West to their place, the new one they moved into after painting their old one black. The new place isn't new, but dingy and cheap and falling apart, an over-the-store walk-up east on Queen. This apartment has a long living room with one window, its glass rattled by passing streetcars; a big raffish kitchen, with tattered orange wallpaper and a table, a wooden one with cracked blue paint, and four mismatched chairs; and a bedroom, where Zenia and West sleep together on a mattress on the floor.

  Zenia makes them scrambled eggs, and strong, amazing coffee, and West plays his lute for them: he does have one, after all. He sits on a cushion on the floor, his long legs bent at the knees and sticking up like the back legs of a grasshopper, and fingers deftly, and sings old ballads.

  The water is wide, I cannot get over,

  And neither have I wings to fly,

  Build me a boat that can carry two,

  And both shall row, my love and I,

  he sings. "There's an Irish version too," he adds, "with a boatman."

  Really he is singing for Zenia, not for Tony at all. He is deeply in love with Zenia; Zenia has told Tony this, and indeed it's obvious. Zenia must feel the same way about West, because she praises him, she extols him, she strokes him with her eyes. He is such a gentle man, she's told Tony during their coffee talks; so thoughtful, unlike most men, who are slobbering brutes. He values her for the right reasons. He worships her! She is very fortunate to have found such a sweet man. Of course he's great in the sack as well.

  The sack? thinks Tony. What is the sack? It takes her a minute. She has never been in the presence, before, of two people who are in love with each other. She feels like a stray child, ragged and cold, with her nose pressed to a lighted window. A toy-store window, a bakery window, with fancy cakes and decorated cookies. Poverty prevents her entrance. These things are for other people; nothing for her.

  But Zenia seems to be aware of this, too - of Tony's singleness, her forlorn wistfulness - and smooths it over. She's very considerate. She distracts, she acts, she talks gaily of other things. Recipes, shortcuts, wrinkles, and twists: she hasn't lived from hand to mouth for nothing, she has a full supply of useful knacks. The secret of the scrambled eggs, for instance, is the fresh chervil and chives - she has several pots of herbs growing on the windowsill - and a little water added, and not too high a flame; the secret of the coffee is the coffee grinder, a wooden one with a handle and an enchanting pull-out drawer.

  Zenia is full of secrets. She laughs, she throws her secrets casually this way and that, her teeth flashing white; she pulls more secrets out of her sleeves and unfurls them from behind her back, she unrolls them like bolts of rare cloth, displaying them, whirling them like gypsy scarves, flourishing them like banners, heaping them one on top of another in a glittering, prodigal tangle. When she's in the room, who can look at anything else?

  But Tony and West do look - just for a moment - when Zenia has her back turned. They look sadly at each other, a little shamefaced. In thrall, is what they are. They know they can no longer drink beer together calmly in the afternoons. It is Zenia, now, who borrows Tony's Modern History notes. West gets the benefit of them too, of course, but only second-hand.

  Once Tony forgot to sign out of McClung Hall and then stayed at Zenia's too late. She ended up spending the night on Zenia's living-room floor, rolled in a blanket, on top of Zenia's coat and her own coat and West's. In the morning, very early, West went back with her to McClung Hall and gave her a boost onto the bottom platform of the fire escape, which was too high for her to reach otherwise.

  It was a daring thing to do, staying out all night, but she doesn't want to do it again. For one thing it was too humiliating, coming back with West on the streetcar and then the subway, unable to think of what she should be saying to him, then being lifted up by him and deposited on the fire escape platform like a parcel. For another thing, sleeping outside the bedroom with both of them inside it made her too unhappy.

  She didn't sleep, anyway. She couldn't, because of the sounds. Thick sounds, unknown sounds, deep sounds, hair-covered and snouted and root-like, muddy and hot and watery sounds from underneath the earth.

  "I think your mother was a romantic," says Zenia, out of nowhere. She is mixing batter for the langues de chat she's making; Tony is sitting at the table copying out her own history notes for Zenia, who as usual is short of time. "I think she was in search of the perfect man."

  "I don't think so," says Tony. She's a little taken aback: she thought the file on her mother was closed.

  "She sounds fun-loving," says Zenia. "She sounds full of life."

  Tony can't quite understand why Zenia wants to excuse her mother. She herself has not done so, she realizes now. "She liked parties," she says briefly.

  "I bet she tried to have an abortion, and it didn't work out," says Zenia cheerfully. "Before she married your father. I bet she filled the bathtub up with boiling water and drank a lot of gin. That's what they used to do."

  This is a darker view of her mother than Tony herself has ever taken. "Oh, no," she murmurs. "She wouldn't have done that!" Though it could be true. Maybe that's why Tony is so small. Neither of her parents was particularly diminutive. Maybe her growth got stunted by the gin. But then, wouldn't she be an idiot as well?

  Zenia fills the shallow moulds and slides them into the oven. "The war was a strange time," she says. "Everybody screwed everybody, they just cut loose! The men thought they were going to die, and the women thought that too. People couldn't get used to being normal again, afterwards."

  Wars are Tony's territory. She knows all this, she has read about it. Plagues have the same effect: a panic, a hothouse forcing, a sort of greedy hysteria. But it seems unfair that such conditions should have applied to her own parents. They should have been exempt. (Her father, the Christmas after her mother ran away, standing in the middle of the living room with an armful of glass ornaments, standing there in front of the naked Christmas tree as if paralyzed, not knowing what to do. Herself going for the stepladder, taking the ornaments gently from his hands. Here. I can hang them on! He would have thrown them, otherwise. Thrown them against the wall. Sometimes he would pause that way, in the middle of doing a simple thing, as if he'd gone blind or lost his memory. Or suddenly regained it. He was living in two times at once: hanging the Christmas tree ornaments, and blowing holes in enemy children. So no wonder, thinks Tony. Despite his increasingly drunken and fragmented and, yes, violent and frightening later years, she has more or less forgiven him. And if Anthea hadn't run away, would he have ended up on the floor, with his blood soaking into the morning paper? Not likely.)

  "She abandoned me," says Tony.

  "My own mother sold me," says Zenia, with a sigh.

  "Sold you?" says Tony.

  "Well, rented me out," says Zenia. "For money. We had to eat. We were refugees. She'd made it as far as Poland before the war but she'd seen what was coming; she got out somehow, bribery or something, forged passports, or else she went down for a bunch of train guards, who knows? Anyway, she made it as far as Paris; that's where I grew up. People were eating garbage then, they were eating cats! What could she do? She couldn't get a job, God knows she didn't have any skills! She had to have money somehow."

  "Rented you to who?" says Tony.

  "Men," says Zenia. "Oh, not out on the street! Not just anyone! Old generals and whatnot. She was a White Russian; I gue
ss the family had money, once - back in Russia, I suppose. She claimed to be some sort of a countess, though God knows Russian countesses were a dime a dozen. There was a whole bunch of White Russians in Paris; they'd been there since the revolution. She liked to say she was used to good things, though I don't know when that would have been."

  Tony hasn't known this - that Zenia's mother was Russian. She has only known Zenia's story of recent years: her foreground. Her life at the university, her life with West, and with the man before him and the one before that. Brutes, both of them, who wore leather jackets and drank, and hit her.

  She examines the cast of Zenia's high cheekbones: Slavic, she supposes. Then there's her slight accent, her air of scornful superiority, her touch of superstition. The Russians go in for icons and so forth. It all makes sense.

  "Rented?" she says. "But how old were you?"

  "Who knows?" says Zenia. "It must've started when I was five, six, earlier maybe. Really I can't remember. I can't remember a time when I didn't have some man's hand in my pants."

  Tony's mouth opens. "Five?" she says. She is horrified. At the same time she admires Zenia's candour. Zenia doesn't seem to get embarrassed by anything. Unlike Tony, she is not a prude.

  Zenia laughs. "Oh, it wasn't obvious, at first," she says. "It was all very polite! They would come over and sit on the sofa - God, she was proud of that sofa, she kept a silk shawl draped over it, embroidered with roses - and she would tell me to sit beside the nice man, and after a while she'd just go out of the room. It wasn't real sex, at first. Just a lot of feeling up. Sticky fingers. She saved the big bang till I was what she called grown up. Eleven, twelve ... I think she did fairly well on that one, though not many of those men were filthy rich. Penny-pinching shabby genteel, with a little put by, or some shady trade. They were all in the black market, they all had an angle, they lived in between the walls, you know? Like rats. She bought me a new dress for the occasion, on the black market too, I guess. I made my debut on the sitting-room rug - she never let them use the bed. His name was Major Popov, if you can believe it, just like something out of Dostoevsky, with brown crusts up his nose from taking snuff. He didn't even take off his pants, he was in such a hurry. I stared at those embroidered roses on the fucking shawl the whole time. I offered up the pain to God. It isn't as though I was sinning for fun! I was very religious, at the time; Orthodox, of course. They still have the best churches, don't you think? I hope she got a hefty slice out of old Popov. Some men will give up a lot of lunches, for a virgin."

  Zenia tells this story as if it's a piece of casual gossip, and Tony listens, electrified. She has never heard of such a thing. Correction: she has heard of such things, more or less, but she has heard of them only in books. Such baroque, such complicated European things don't happen to real people, or to people she might meet. But how would she know? These activities might be going on all around her, but she doesn't see them because she wouldn't know where to look. Zenia would know. Zenia is older than Tony, in years not so much, but in other ways a lot. Beside Zenia, Tony is a child, ignorant as an egg.

  "You must have hated her," says Tony.

  "Oh, no," says Zenia seriously. "That wasn't until later. She was very nice to me! When I was little she made me special meals. She never raised her voice. She was beautiful to look at, she had long dark hair braided and wound around her head like a saint, and big sorrowful eyes. I used to sleep with her in her big white feather bed. I loved her, I adored her, I would have done anything for her! I didn't want her to be so sad. That's how she was able to get away with it."

  "How terrible," says Tony.

  "Oh well," says Zenia, "who gives a shit? Anyway it wasn't only me - she rented herself out, too. She was a sort of bargain-basement mistress, I suppose. For gentlemen down on their luck. Only Russians though, and nobody below the rank of major. She had her standards. She helped them with their pretensions, they helped her with hers. But she wasn't very successful at the sex part, maybe because she didn't really like it. She preferred suffering. There was quite a turnover of men. Also she was sick a lot of the time. Coughing, just like an opera! Blood in the hankie. Her breath smelled worse and worse, she used to wear a lot of perfume, when she could get it. I suppose it was TB, and that's what killed her. What a corny death!"

  "You were very lucky not to get it yourself," says Tony. All of this seems so archaic. Surely nobody gets TB any more. It's a vanished illness, like smallpox.

  "Yes, wasn't I?" says Zenia. "But I was long gone by the time she finally croaked. As I got older I didn't love her any more. I did most of the work, she kept most of the money, and that was hardly fair! And I couldn't stand listening to her coughing, and crying to herself at night. She was so hopeless; I think she was stupid, as well. So I ran away. It was a mean thing to do, I suppose; she didn't have anybody by that time, any man; only me. But it was her or me. I had to choose."

  "What about your father?" says Tony.

  Zenia laughs. "What father?"

  "Well, you must have had one," says Tony.

  "I did better," says Zenia. "I had three! My mother had several versions - minor Greek royalty, a general in the Polish cavalry, an Englishman of good family. She had a photograph of him, just the one man - but three stories. The story about him changed, depending on how she felt; though in all three of the stories he died in the war. She used to show me where, on the map: a different place, a different death for each. Charging the German tanks on horseback, behind the French lines in a parachute, machine-gunned in a palace. When she could afford it she would put a single rose in front of the picture; sometimes she would light a candle. God knows whose photo it was really! A young man in a jacket, with a knapsack, sort of blurry, looking over his shoulder; not even in uniform. Pre-war. Maybe she bought it. Myself, I think she got raped, by a bunch of soldiers or something, but she didn't want to tell me. It would've been too much - for me to discover that my father was someone like that. But it would figure, wouldn't it? A woman with no money, on the run from one place to another, by herself - no protection. Women like that were fair game! Or else she had a Nazi lover, some German thug. Who can tell? She was quite a liar, so I'll never know. Anyway, she's dead now."

  Tony's own little history has dwindled considerably. Beside Zenia's, it seems no more than an incident, minor, grey, suburban; a sedate parochial anecdote; a footnote. Whereas Zenia's life sparkles - no, it glares, in the lurid although uncertain light cast by large and portentous world events. (White Russians!)

  So far Tony has seen Zenia as very different from herself, but now she sees her as similar too, for aren't they both orphans? Both motherless, both war babies, making their way in the world by themselves, trudging onwards with their baskets over their arms, baskets containing their scant, their only worldly possessions - one brain apiece, for what else do they have to rely on? She admires Zenia tremendously, not least for keeping her cool. Right now, for instance, when other women might be crying, Zenia is actually smiling - smiling at Tony, with perhaps a hint of mockery, which Tony chooses to interpret as a touching gallantry, a steely courage in the face of adverse destiny. Zenia has been through horrors, and has emerged victorious. Tony pictures her on a horse, cloak flying, sword-arm raised; or as a bird, a silver and miraculous bird, rising triumphant and unscathed from the cinders of burning and plundered Europe.

  "There's one thing about being an orphan, though," says Zenia thoughtfully. Two jets of smoke come out of her perfect nostrils. "You don't have to live up to anyone else's good opinion of you." She drinks the dregs of her coffee, butts out her cigarette. "You can be whoever you like."

  Tony looks at her, looks into her blue-black eyes, and sees her own reflection: herself, as she would like to be. Tnomerf Ynot. Herself turned inside out.

  25

  Under the circumstances, what can Tony withhold? Not very much.

  Certainly not money. Zenia has to eat - Zenia, and West too, of course - and how are they to do that unless Tony, replete with
the wealth of the dead, will lend Zenia the odd twenty, the odd fifty, the odd hundred, from time to time? And then how is Zenia to pay it back, things being what they are? She has a scholarship of some kind, or so she has implied, but it doesn't cover the whole shot. In the distant past she panhandled and to a certain extent hooked her way through Europe and across the ocean; although - she tells Tony, as Tony's eyes widen and blink - she'd much rather roll a nice middle-class drunk any time, it's quicker and a good deal cleaner. In the more recent past she's made extra cash by waiting on tables and by cleaning washrooms in second-rate hotels - drudgery is the price of virtue - but when she does that she's too tired to study.

  She's too tired anyway. Love takes it out of you, and love-nests require feathering, and who does the cooking and laundry and cleaning up around Zenia's place? Not West, poor angel; man-like, he has trouble cooking an egg or making himself a cup of tea. (Ah, thinks Tony, I could make his tea! She longs for such simple domestic chores, to offer up to West. But she censors this almost immediately. Even the boiling of West's tea-water would feel like a betrayal of Zenia.)

  Also, Zenia indicates, it costs to defy the social order: freedom is not free, it comes with a price. The front lines of liberation get the first bullets. Already Zenia and West are paying more than they should for that rat-bag of an apartment because the dirty-minded hypocrite of a landlord has come to suspect they aren't married. Toronto is so puritanical!