The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  Then how can Tony refuse when Zenia comes to her room one evening, in tears and minus a term paper for Modern History, with barely a moment to spare? "If I flunk this course it's game over," she says. "I'll have to leave university, it's back on the streets for me. Shit, you don't know, Tony - you just don't know! It's such hell, it's so degrading, I can't go back to that!"

  Tony is bewildered by her tears; she has thought of Zenia as tearless, more tearless even than herself. And now there are not only tears but many tears, rolling fluently down Zenia's strangely immobile face, which always looks made-up even when it isn't. On some other woman the mascara would run; but that isn't mascara, it's Zenia's real eyelashes.

  It ends with Tony writing two term papers, one for herself and one for Zenia. She does this nervously: she knows it's highly risky. She's stepping over a line, a line she respects. But Zenia is doing Tony's rebelliousness for her so it's only fair that Tony should write Zenia's term paper. Or that is the equation Tony makes, at some level below words. Tony will be Zenia's right hand, because Zenia is certainly Tony's left one.

  Neither of the term papers is about battles. The Modern History professor, bald-headed, squinty-eyed, leather-elbow-patched Dr. Welch, is more interested in economics than he is in bloodshed, and he has made it clear to Tony - who suggested the out-of-control sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders - that he does not consider war an appropriate subject for girls. So both of the papers are about money. Zenia's is on the Slavic slave trade with the Byzantine Empire - Tony picked this because of Zenia's Russian ancestors - and Tony's is about the tenth-century Byzantine silk monopoly.

  Byzantium interests Tony. A lot of people died unpleasantly there, most of them for trivial reasons; you could be torn in pieces for dressing wrong, you could be disembowelled for smirking. Twenty-nine Byzantine emperors were assassinated by their rivals. Blinding was a favourite method; that, and joint-by-joint dismemberment, and slow starvation.

  If the professor hadn't been so squeamish Tony would have chosen to write about the assassination of the Byzantine emperor Nicephorus Phocas by his beautiful wife, the empress Theophano. Theophano started life as a concubine and worked her way to the top. When her autocratic husband became too old and ugly for her she had him killed. Not only that, she helped to do it. On December 1, 969, she persuaded him to leave his bedroom door unlocked, promising sexual favours, no doubt, and in the middle of the night she entered his room with her younger, better-looking lover, John Tsimisces - who would later have her imprisoned in a convent - and a band of mercenaries. They woke Nicephorus up - he was sleeping on a panther skin, a nice touch - and then John Tsimisces split his head open with a sword. John was laughing.

  How do we know that? thinks Tony. Who was there to record it? Was Theophano laughing, as well? She speculates about why they woke him up. It was a sadistic touch; or perhaps it was revenge. By all accounts Nicephorus was a tyrant: proud, capricious, cruel. She pictures Theophano on her way to the assassination, with a purple silk mantle thrown over her shoulders and gold sandals. Her dark hair swirls around her head; her pale face shines in the torchlight. She walks first, and quickly, because the most important element in any act of treachery is surprise. Behind her come the men with swords.

  Theophano is smiling, but Tony doesn't see it as a sinister smile. Instead it's gleeful: the smile of a child about to put its hands over someone's eyes from behind. Guess who?

  There's an element of sheer mischief in history, thinks Tony. Perverse joy. Outrageousness for its own sake. What is an ambush, really, but a kind of military practical joke? Hiding yourself, then jumping out and yelling Surprise! But none of the historians ever mentions it, this quality of giddy hide-and-seek. They want the past to be serious. Dead serious. She muses over the phrase: if dead is serious, is alive then frivolous? So the phrasemakers would have it.

  Maybe Theophano woke up Nicephorus because she wanted him to appreciate her cleverness before he died. She wanted him to see how duplicitous she was, and how mistaken he had been about her. She wanted him to get the joke.

  Both of the papers are up to Tony's usual standard; if anything, the silk monopoly one is better. But Zenia's gets an A and Tony's a mere A minus. Zenia's reputation for brilliance has affected even Professor Welch, it seems. Or perhaps it's the way she looks. Does Tony mind? Not particularly. But she notices.

  She also feels remorseful. Up until now she has always paid the strictest attention to academic decorum. She never borrows other people's notes, although she lends them; her footnotes are impeccable; and she is well aware that writing a term paper for someone else is cheating. But it isn't as if there's any benefit to herself. Her motives are of the best: how could she turn away her friend? How could she condemn Zenia to a life of sexual bondage? It isn't in her. Nevertheless, her conscience troubles her; so maybe it's justice that she's received a mere A minus. If this is the only punishment in store for her she'll have gotten off lightly.

  Tony composed her two term papers in March, when the snow was melting and the sun was warming up, and the snowdrops were appearing through the mud and old newspapers and decaying leaves on front lawns, and people were becoming restive inside their winter coats. Zenia was becoming restive too. She and Tony no longer spent their evenings drinking coffee at Christie's Coffee Shop on Queen East; they no longer talked intensely, far into what Tony considered the night. Partly Tony didn't have the time, because the final exams were coming up and her own brilliance was something she had to work at. But also it was as if Zenia had learned all she needed to know about Tony.

  The reverse was far from true: Tony was still curious, still fascinated, still avid for detail; but when Tony asked questions, Zenia's answers - although good-natured enough - were short, and her eyes wandered elsewhere. She had the same affable but absent-minded attitude towards West now, too. Although she still touched him whenever he came into the room, although she still doled out little flatteries, little praises, she wasn't concentrating on him. She was thinking about something else.

  On a Friday in early April, Zenia climbs in through Tony's bedroom window in the middle of the night. Tony doesn't see her do it, because she's asleep; but suddenly her eyes open and she sits up straight in her bed, and there's a woman standing in the darkness of the room, her head outlined against the yellowy-grey oblong of the window. In the instant of waking Tony thinks it's her mother. Anthea could not be disposed of so easily, it appears: compressed into a cylinder, tossed into the lake, forgotten. She's come back to exact retribution, but for what? Or maybe she has returned, far too late, to collect Tony and take her away at last, to the bottom of the deep blue sea, where Tony has no desire to go, and what would she look like if Tony were to turn on the light? Herself, or a bloated watercolour?

  Tony goes cold all over. Where are my clothes? Anthea is about to say, out of the middle of her faceless face. She means her body, the one that's been burned up, the one that's been drowned. What can Tony reply? I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

  All this is wordless. What Tony experiences is a complex wave of recognition and dread, shock and the lack of it: the package that comes intact whenever unvoiced wishes come true. She is too paralyzed to scream. She gasps, and puts both hands over her mouth.

  "Hi," says Zenia quietly. "It's me."

  There's a pause while Tony recovers herself a little. "How did you get in?" she asks, when her heart is again inaudible.

  "The window," says Zenia. "I climbed up the fire escape."

  "But it's too high," says Tony. Zenia is tall, but not tall enough to reach the bottom platform. Is West down there, did he give her a boost? Tony moves to switch on her bedside light, then thinks better of it. She isn't supposed to have anyone in her room at this time of night, and dons and busybodies prowl the corridors, on the sniff for cigarette smoke and contraband sex.

  "I went up that tree and swung over from the branch," says Zenia. "Any lunatic could do it. You should really get some sort of a lock on your window." She sits down,
cross-legged, on the floor.

  "What's the matter?" says Tony. There has to be something: even Zenia wouldn't just climb in through somebody's window in the middle of the night on a passing whim.

  "I couldn't sleep," says Zenia. They are both almost whispering. "I needed to talk to you. I'm feeling so bad about poor Professor Welch."

  "What?" says Tony. She doesn't understand.

  "About how we cheated on him. I think we should confess. It was forgery, after all," says Zenia pensively. She's talking about the term paper, on which Tony spent so much time and generous care. There was nothing dishonest about the paper itself: just about the name on it, which was Zenia's.

  Now Zenia wants to tell, and there goes Tony's life. Many large though shadowy possibilities loom ahead for Zenia - journalism, high finance, even politics have all been mentioned - but university professor has never been among them; whereas for Tony it's the only thing. It's her vocation; without it she'll be useless as an amputated hand. What else can she do? Where else can her pedlar's pack of knowledge, the doodads and odd fragments and frippery she accumulates like lint, be exchanged for an honest living? Honest: that's the key. Stripped of her intellectual honesty, her reputation, her integrity, she'll be exiled. And Zenia is in a position to strip her.

  "But I did it to help you!" says Tony, aware even as she says it that her own motives will cut no ice with the authorities. (For a moment she thinks, I could simply deny I wrote the thing. But Zenia has the original, in Tony's back-slanted handwriting. Naturally she had to copy it out in her own.)

  "I know," says Zenia. "But still. Well, maybe I'll think differently in the morning. I'm just depressed, I'm down on myself; sometimes I feel so shitty I just want to jump off a bridge, you know? I feel like such an impostor sometimes. I feel I don't belong here - that I'm just not good enough. Or for West, either. He's so squeaky clean. Sometimes I'm afraid I'll get him dirty, or break him, or something. You know the worst of it? Sometimes I want to. When I'm - you know. Under a lot of stress."

  So it's not only Tony whose life is threatened, but West's too. From what she's seen of West and his unquestioning devotion, Tony is convinced that Zenia could indeed wreak havoc. One contemptuous flick of her hand could splatter him all over the sidewalk. How did Zenia get so much power without Tony noticing? Insofar as West is concerned, Tony did notice. But she trusted Zenia to use that power well. She trusted Zenia. Now both she and West are in danger, now she must save them both. "Stress?" she says faintly.

  "Oh, the money thing. Tony, you wouldn't know, it's not something you've ever had to deal with. The fucking rent's a few months behind, and the fucking landlord's threatening to have us evicted; he says he'll phone the university and make a stink. There's no point in even bothering West with any of it - he's such a baby, he just leaves all those practical things to me. If I told him how much we owe he'd go out and sell his lute, no question; I mean, what else does he have? He'd do anything for me, though it wouldn't even make a dint, poor lamb; but he's fond of those sacrificial gestures. I just don't know what to do. It's all such a burden, Tony. That's when I get so fucking depressed!"

  Tony has given Zenia money for the rent, several times already. However, she knows what Zenia will say if she mentions this. But Tony! We had to eat! You don't know what it's like, to be hungry. You just don't get it! You don't know what it's like to have no money at all!

  "How much?" she says in a cold, meticulous voice. It's a neat piece of blackmail. She's being bushwhacked.

  "A thousand dollars would see us out of the woods," says Zenia smoothly. A thousand dollars is a great deal of money. It will make a definite hole in Tony's nest egg. Also it's much more than could possibly be needed for back rent. But Zenia doesn't beg, she doesn't plead. She knows that Tony's response is a foregone conclusion.

  Tony gets out of bed in her polo pyjamas with blue mice in clown suits printed on them, sent to her from California by her mother, left over from when she was fourteen - her nocturnal wardrobe has not been upgraded, because who would ever see it, and one of the things she minds most about this evening in retrospect is that Zenia got a good look at her absurd pyjamas - and goes over to her desk and turns the desk lamp on, briefly, and writes the cheque. "Here," she says, thrusting it at Zenia.

  "Tony, you're a brick," says Zenia. "I'll pay you back later!" Both of them know this isn't true.

  Zenia exits via the window, and Tony goes back to bed. A brick: hard, foursquare, a potential murder weapon. You could bash in quite a few skulls, with a brick. No doubt Zenia will be back later for more money, and then more. Tony has gained nothing but time.

  26

  Two days later West comes to McClung Hall and seeks out Tony, and asks her if she's seen Zenia, because Zenia is gone. She's gone from the apartment, she's gone from the precincts of the university, she appears to be gone from the entire city, because nobody - not the bearded theatrical men, not the thin, ballet-faced, horse-maned women, and not the police, when West finally calls them - knows where she is. Nobody saw her go. She is simply not there any more.

  Gone with her are the thousand dollars Tony gave her, plus the contents of her joint account with West - two hundred dollars, give or take. There would have been more, but Zenia took some out earlier on the pretext that their good friend Tony, who was not as rich as they'd all thought, had asked her for a temporary loan, being too shy to mention it to West. Gone also is West's lute, which is located several weeks later by Tony during a diligent and inspired search of second-hand stores, and is purchased by her on the spot. She carries it to the apartment herself and shoves it at West like a lollipop, hoping to soothe his unhappiness. But it makes scarcely any impact on him, where he sits by himself in the middle of the floor, on a large threadbare cushion, staring at the wall and drinking beer.

  Zenia has left a letter for West. She did have that much consideration, or - Tony thinks, with her new insight into the twists of Zenia's soul - that much calculation. My darling, I am not worthy of you. Some day you will forgive me. I will love you till I die. Your loving Zenia. Tony, who has been the recipient of a similar letter, knows what these avowals are worth, which is nothing at all. She knows how such letters can be hung around your neck like lockets made of lead, heavy keepsakes that will drag you down for years. But she understands too West's need to rely on Zenia's assurances. He needs them like water, he needs them like air. He would rather believe that Zenia has renounced him out of misplaced nobility than that she's been taking him for a ride. Women can make fools of men, thinks freshly disabused Tony, even if they weren't fools to begin with.

  West's desolation is palpable. It envelops him like a cloud of midges, it marks him like a slashed wrist, which he holds out to Tony (mutely, without moving) to be bandaged. Given the choice, she would not have elected the role of nurse and comforter, having been so bad at it with her father. But there isn't a lot else on offer, and so Tony makes cups of tea for West, and pries him off his cushion, and - not knowing what else to do - takes him out for walks, like a dog or invalid. Together they meander across parks, together they cross at the corners, holding hands like the babes in the wood. Together they silently lament.

  West is in mourning, but Tony is in mourning too. They have both lost Zenia, although Tony has lost her more completely. West still believes in the Zenia he has lost: he thinks that if she would only come back and allow herself to be forgiven and cherished and cared for, all could go on as before. Tony knows better. She knows that the person she's lost has never really existed in the first place. She does not yet question Zenia's story, her history; indeed, she uses it to explain her: what can you expect of someone with such a mangled childhood? What she questions is Zenia's good will. Zenia was only using her, and she has let herself be used; she has been rummaged, she has been picked like a pocket. But she doesn't have much time to feel sorry for herself because she's too busy feeling sorry for West.

  West's hand lies passively in Tony's. It's as if he's blind: he goes wher
e Tony steers, sucked dry of any will of his own, careless of where he's headed. Precipice or safe haven, it's all the same to him. Once in a while he seems to wake; he peers around, disoriented. "How did we get here?" he says, and Tony's tenderized little heart is wrung.

  What bothers her the most is West's drinking. It's still only beer, but there's a lot more of it going into him than there used to be. It's possible he's not ever completely sober. Zenia's absence is like a path, a path Tony recognizes because she's seen it before. It leads downwards and ends abruptly in a square of bloodstained newspaper, and West stumbles along it as if he's sleepwalking. She's powerless to stop him, or to wake him either. What sort of match is skinny, awkward, and bone-headed Tony, with her oversized spectacles and walks in the park and cups of tea, for the memory of shimmering Zenia that West carries next to his heart, or else instead of it?

  Tony is worried sick about him. She loses sleep. Inky rings appear beneath her eyes, her skin turns to paper. She writes her final exams in a frantic trance rather than with her usual cool rationality, calling upon reserves of stashed-away knowledge she didn't even know she had.

  West on the other hand doesn't even turn up, at least for the Modern History exam. The vortex is taking him down.

  Roz passes Tony in the hallway of McClung and notes her dreadful appearance.

  "Hey, Tone," she says. (She has reverted to this pet name since the defection of Zenia, which she knows about, of course. The grapevine here has many tendrils. Tony without Zenia is no longer viewed with trepidation, and can be treated as a diminutive again.) "Hey, Tone, how's it goin'? Holy cow, you look awful." She puts her big warm hand on Tony's pointy bird-shoulder. "It can't be that bad. What's the matter?"

  Who else does Tony have to talk to? She can't talk to West about himself, and Zenia is absent. Once upon a time she would have talked to no one, but ever since Christie's Coffee Shop she has developed an appreciation for confidences. So they go to Roz's overstuffed room and sit on Roz's pillow-covered bed, and Tony disgorges.