The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  Zenia sees them, and says, "Are those yours? Did they fall in the food processor?" and it's just like something Roz might have said herself, or thought at least, and Roz doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.

  She laughs, and they have the drink in the sun room, which Roz refuses to call the conservatory even though she's always hankered after a conservatory, a conservatory with miniature orange trees in it, or orchids, like the ones in twenties murder mysteries, the kind with the map of the English mansion and an X where the body gets found, in the conservatory quite frequently. But although the sun room is glass and has a Victorian cupola thing on top it's too small to be a real conservatory, and the word itself is too highfalutin for the voice of Roz's mother, which lives on intermittently inside Roz's head and would sneer, although it's full of plants, plants with limited lifespans, because whose responsibility are they exactly? Mitch says he doesn't have the time, although he was the one who ordered all this vegetation; but Roz's thumb is not green, it's brown, the brown of withered sedges. It's not that she doesn't want the plants to live. She even likes them, though she can't tell the difference between a begonia and a rhododendron. But these things should be done by professionals: a plant service. They come, they see, they water, they cart away the dying, they bring fresh troops.

  She has a service like that for the office, so why not here? Mitch says he doesn't want yet more strangers tramping through the house - he's suffering from decorator burnout - but it's possible that he likes the image of Roz with an apron and a watering can, just as he likes the image of Roz with an apron and a frying pan, and an apron and a feather duster, even though Roz can't cook her way out of a paper bag, why did God make restaurants if he intended her to cook, and she has a phobia about feather dusters, having been force-fed on them in childhood. The constant is the apron, the Good Housekeeping guarantee that Roz will always be home whenever Mitch chooses to get back there.

  Or there may be another agenda, another nuance to the guilt Roz is supposed to feel, and does feel, over the kaput plants, because Mitch wanted a swimming pool instead of a sun room, so he could dive into a chlorine purification bath and sterilize his chest hair and kill whatever athlete's foot and crotch fungus and tongue rot he may have picked up from plucking the ripening floozies; but Roz said an outdoor swimming pool was ridiculous in Canada, two months of swelter and ten of freeze-your-buns-off, and she refused to have an indoor one because she knew people who did and their houses smelled like gas refineries on a hot day because of all the chemicals, and there would be complicated machinery that would break down and that Roz would somehow be responsible for getting fixed. The worst thing about swimming pools as far as Roz is concerned is that they are one step too close to the great outdoors. Wildlife falls into them. Ants, moths, and such. Like the lake at summer camp, she'd be flailing along and suddenly there would be a bug, right at nose level. Swimming, in Roz's opinion, is a major health hazard.

  Zenia laughs and says she couldn't agree more, and Roz talks on, because she's nervous at seeing Zenia again after all these years, she remembers the reputation, the aura of green poison that encircled Zenia, the invisible incandescence, touch her and you'd get burned; and she remembers history, the stories of Tony and Charis. So she has to step carefully here, it's no wonder she's nervous, and when she's nervous she talks. Talks, and also eats, and also drinks. Zenia takes one olive and chews it daintily, Roz gobbles the lot, and touches up Zenia's martini, and pours herself another, and offers a cigarette, words pouring out of her like ink from a squid. Camouflage. She's relieved to note that Zenia smokes. It would be intolerable if she were thin and well-dressed and unwrinkled and a knockout, and a non-smoker as well.

  "So," says Roz, when she's made a sufficient fool of herself to consider the ice broken. "My father." Because this is what she wants, this is the point of the visit. Isn't it?

  "Yes," says Zenia. She leans forward and sets down her glass, and rests her chin thoughtfully on one hand and frowns slightly. "I was only a baby, of course. So I have no real memories of that time. But my aunt always talked about your father, before she died. About how he got us out. I guess if it weren't for him I'd just be ashes now.

  "It was in Berlin. That's where my parents lived, in a good neighbourhood, in a respectable apartment - it was one of those old Berlin buildings with the mosaic tiles in the front hall and the oblong staircase with the wooden banister, and the maid's room and the back balcony overlooking a courtyard, for hanging out the wash. I know, because I saw it - I went back. I was there in the late seventies, I had an assignment in Berlin - the Berlin nightlife, for some travel magazine, you know the sort of thing, sexy cabaret, kinky strip clubs, telephones on the tables. So I took the afternoon off and I found it. I had the address, from some old papers of my aunt's. The buildings all around were newer, they'd been rebuilt after the bombing, the whole place was practically levelled; it was amazing, but that one old building was still there.

  "I rang all the buzzers and someone opened the door, and I went in and up the stairs, just as my parents must have done hundreds of times. I touched the same banister, I turned the same corners. I knocked at the door, and when it opened I said some relatives of mine had once lived there and could I look around - I speak a little German, because of my aunt, though my accent's old-fashioned - and the people let me in. They were a young couple with a baby, they were very nice, but I couldn't stay long. I really couldn't stand it, the rooms, the light coming through the windows ... they were the same rooms, it was the same light. I think my parents became real to me for the first time. Everything, all of it became real. Before that, it was just a bad story."

  Zenia stops talking. This is what people often do when they come to the hard part, Roz has discovered. "A bad story," she prompts.

  "Yes," says Zenia. "It was already the war. Things were in short supply. My aunt had never married, there was such a shortage of men after the first war a lot of women couldn't, so she thought of our family as her family too, and she used to do things for us. Mother us - that's how she put it. So on this one day, my aunt was going to my parents' apartment; she was taking them some bread she'd baked. She went up the stairs as usual - there was a lift, one of those lifts like an iron cage, I saw it - but it was out of order. As she was about to knock, the door on the other side of the landing opened and the woman who lived there - my aunt knew her only by sight - this woman came out and grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her inside. 'Don't go in, don't try to go in there,' she said. 'They've been taken away.'

  " 'Taken, where?' said my aunt. She didn't ask who by, she didn't need to ask that.

  " 'Don't try to find out,' said the woman. 'Better not.' She had me in there with her because my mother had seen them coming, she'd looked out the window and she'd seen them coming along the street, and then when they'd turned in at the doorway and started up the stairs she'd guessed where they were headed and she'd run out the back door, the maid's door, and along the back balcony, with me wrapped up in a shawl - the balconies at the back adjoined one another - and she'd pounded at this woman's kitchen door, and the woman had taken me in. It happened so fast she hardly knew what she was doing, and most likely if she'd had time to think she never would have done anything so dangerous. She was just an ordinary woman, obedient and so on, but I suppose if someone shoves a baby at you, you can't just step back and let it fall to the ground.

  "I was the only one saved, the others were all taken. I had an older brother, and an older sister too. I was much younger, I was a late baby. I have their picture; it's something my aunt brought with her. See -" Zenia opens her purse, then her wallet, and slides out a snapshot. It's a square picture with a wide white border, the figures tiny and fading: a family group, father, mother, two young children, and another older woman, off to one side. The aunt, Roz assumes. Both of the children are blond.

  What amazes Roz is how contemporary they look: the knee-high skirts on the women, from the late twenties? the early thirties? - the smart hats,
the makeup, it could be the retro look, in some fashion magazine, right now. Only the clothes of the children are archaic; that, and their haircuts. A suit and tie and short back and sides for the boy, and a fussy dress and ringlets for the girl. The smiles are a little tight, but smiles were, in those days. They are dress-up smiles. It must have been a special occasion: a vacation, a religious holiday, somebody's birthday.

  "That was before the war," says Zenia. "It was before things got really bad. I was never part of that world. I was born right after the war started; I was a war baby. Anyway, that's all I have, this picture. It's all that's left of them. My aunt searched, after the war. There was nothing left." She slides the photo carefully back into her wallet.

  "What about the aunt?" says Roz. "Why didn't they take her, too?"

  "She wasn't Jewish," says Zenia. "She was my father's sister. My father wasn't Jewish either, but after the Nuremberg laws were passed he was treated as one, because he was married to one. Hell, even my mother wasn't Jewish! Not by religion. She was Catholic, as a matter of fact. But two of her four grandparents were Jewish, so she was classified as a mischling, first degree. A mixture. Did you know they had degrees?"

  "Yes," says Roz. So Zenia is a mixture, like herself!

  "Some of those mischlings survived longer than the real Jews," says Zenia. "My parents, for instance. I guess they thought it wouldn't happen to them. They thought of themselves as good Germans. They weren't in touch with the Jewish community, so they didn't even hear the rumours; or if they did, they didn't believe them. It's astonishing what people will refuse to believe."

  "How about your aunt?" says Roz. "Why did she get out? If she wasn't Jewish at all, wasn't she safe?" Though come to think of it, safe is a silly word to use in such a context.

  "Because of me," says Zenia. "They would have figured out sooner or later that my parents had three children, not two. Or some neighbour of my aunt's would have seen or heard me, and turned us in. A baby, in the home of an unmarried woman who just a little while before had no baby at all. People get a huge bang out of denunciation, you know. It makes them feel morally superior. God, how I hate that smug self-righteousness! People patting themselves on the back for murder.

  "So my aunt started looking for a way to get me out, and then she found herself in a whole other world - the underground world, the black market world. She'd always lived above ground, but she had to go into that other world in order to protect me. There isn't a place on earth where that world doesn't exist; all you have to do is take a few steps off to the side, a few steps down, and there it is, side by side with the world people like to think of as normal. Remember the fifties, remember trying to get an abortion? It only took three phone calls. Provided you could pay, of course. You'd get handed along the line, to somebody who knew someone. It was the same in Germany at that time, for things like passports, only you had to be careful who you asked.

  "What my aunt needed was some fake papers saying I was her daughter, by a husband killed in France, and she got some; but they wouldn't have stood up to much scrutiny. I mean, look at me! I'm hardly Aryan. My brother and my sister were both blond, and my father had light hair; my mother too. I must be some kind of throwback. So she knew she had to get me away, she had to get me right out. If they caught her she'd be up for treachery, because she was helping me. Some treachery! Christ, I was only six months old!"

  Roz doesn't know what to say. "Poor you," which is what she murmurs to the stories of workplace crises or personal mishap or romantic catastrophe, as told to her by her friends, hardly seems to cover it. "How awful," she says.

  "Don't feel sorry for me," says Zenia. "I was hardly conscious. I didn't know what was going on, so it was no strain on me; though I must have registered that things had changed and my mother wasn't there any more. Anyway my aunt got in touch with your father, or I should say your father's friends. It was through the man who arranged the papers for her - that man knew someone who knew someone else, and after they'd checked her out and skimmed some money off her they passed her on. All black markets work that way. Try buying drugs, it's the same thing: they check you out, they pass you on. Luckily my aunt had some money, and her desperation must have been convincing. As I said, she'd never married, so I became her cause; she risked her life for me. It was for her brother, too. She didn't know then he'd been killed, she thought he might come back. Then, if he did and if she'd failed, what could she say?

  "So your father and his friends got her out, through Denmark and then through Sweden. They told her it was relatively easy. She didn't have an accent or anything, and she looked as German as they come.

  "My aunt was a kind of mother to me. She brought me up, she did her best, but she wasn't a happy woman. She'd been ruined, destroyed really, by the war. The loss of her brother and his family, and then the guilt also - that she hadn't been able to stop any of it, that she had somehow participated. She talked about your father a lot - what a hero he was. It gave her back a little bit of faith. So I used to pretend that your father was my father, and that some day he would come to get me, and I'd move into his house. I wasn't even sure where he lived."

  Roz is practically in tears. She remembers her father, the old rascal; she's glad to know that his dubious talents were of service, because he's still her favourite parent and she welcomes the chance to think well of him. The two martinis aren't helping, in the get-a-grip department. How lucky she herself has been, with her three children and her husband, her money, her work, her house. How unfair life is! Where was God when all of this was happening, in sordid Europe - the injustice, the merciless brutality, the suffering? In a meeting, is where. Not answering the phone. Guilt wells up out of her eyes. She would like to give Zenia something, just a little something, to make up to her for God's neglect, but what could possibly be adequate?

  Then she hears a small voice, a small voice clear as ice-water, right at the back of her head. It's the voice of experience. It's the voice of Tony. Zenia lies, it says.

  "Do you remember Tony?" Roz blurts out, before she can stop herself. "Tony Fremont from McClung Hall?" How can she be such a jerk, such a shit, as to question Zenia's story, even in her head? No one would lie about such a thing. It would be too mean, it would be too cynical, it would be virtually sacrilegious!

  "Oh yes," Zenia laughs. "That was a million years ago! Tony and her funny war collection! I see she's written a couple of books. She was always a bright little thing."

  Bright little thing causes Roz to feel, by comparison, large and dim. But she trudges forward. "Tony told me you were a White Russian," she says. "A child prostitute, in Paris. And Charis says your mother was a gypsy, and was stoned to death by Roumanian peasants."

  "Charis?" says Zenia.

  "She used to be Karen," says Roz. "You lived with her on the Island. You told her you had cancer," she adds, pressing relentlessly on.

  Zenia looks out the window of the sun room, and sips at the edge of her martini. "Oh yes, Charis," she says. "I'm afraid I told some awful - I didn't always tell the truth, when I was younger. I think I was emotionally disturbed. After my aunt died I had some hard times. She had nothing, no money; we lived over storefronts. And when she was gone, nobody would help me. This was in Waterloo, in the fifties. It wasn't a good time or place for orphans who didn't fit in.

  "So part of what I told Tony was true, I did work as a hooker. And I didn't want to be Jewish, I didn't want to be connected with all of that in any way. I guess I was running away from the past. That was then, this is now, right? I even got my nose done, after I'd gone to England and landed a magazine job and could afford it. I suppose I was ashamed. When those things get done to you, you feel more ashamed than if you'd done them yourself to other people. You think maybe you deserved it; or else that you should have been stronger - able to defend yourself, or something. You feel - well, beaten up.

  "So I made up a different past for myself - it was better to be a White Russian. Denial, I guess you could call it. I lived with a
White Russian, once, when I was sixteen, so I knew something about them.

  "With Karen - with Charis - I must have been having some kind of a nervous breakdown. I needed to be mothered; my shrink says it was because my own mother was taken away. I shouldn't have said I had cancer, because I didn't. But I was sick, in another kind of way. Karen did wonders for me.

  "It wasn't a good thing - it was terrible, I suppose, to tell those stories. I owe both of them an apology. But I didn't think I could've told them the real story, what really happened to me. They wouldn't have understood it."

  She gives Roz a long look, straight out of her deep indigo eyes, and Roz is touched. She, Roz - she alone - has been chosen, to understand. And she does, she does.

  "After I left Canada," Zenia says, "things got worse. I had big ideas, but nobody seemed to share them. Looking the way I do doesn't help, you know. Men don't see you as a person, they just see the body, and so that's all you see yourself. You think of your body as a tool, something to use. God, I'm tired of men! They're so easy to amuse. All you have to do to get their attention is take off your clothes. After a while you want a bit more of a challenge, you know?

  "I worked as a stripper for a year or so - that's when I had my breasts done, this man I was living with paid for it - and I got into some bad habits. Coke first, and then heroin. It's a wonder I'm not dead. Maybe I was trying to be, because of my family. You'd think that because I didn't really know them it wouldn't hurt. But it's like being born minus a leg. There's this terrible absence.

  "It took me a long time, but I've finally come to terms with myself. I've worked it through. I was in therapy for years. It was hard, but now I know who I am."

  Roz is impressed. Zenia has not evaded, she hasn't wriggled or squirmed. She has owned up, she has admitted, she's confessed. That shows - what? Honesty? Good will? Maturity? Some admirable quality. The nuns used to put a high value on confessing, so much so that Roz once confessed to placing a dog turd in the cloakroom, something she had not actually done. They didn't let you off punishment for confessing, though - she got the strap, all the same, and when you confessed to the priest you had to do penance - but they thought more highly of you, or so they said.