Blind Assassin (125 page)

Gloves

Today it’s raining, the thin, abstemious rain of early April. Already the blue scilla are beginning to flower, the daffodils have their snouts above ground, the self-seeded forget-me-nots are creeping up, getting ready to hog the light. Here it comes—another year of vegetative hustling and jostling. They never seem to get tired of it: plants have no memories, that’s why. They can’t remember how many times they’ve done all this before.

I must admit it’s a surprise to find myself still here, still talking to you. I prefer to think of it as talking, although of course it isn’t: I’m saying nothing, you’re hearing nothing. The only thing between us is this black line: a thread thrown onto the empty page, into the empty air.

The winter’s ice in the Louveteau Gorge is almost gone, even in the shaded crevasses of the cliffs. The water, black and then white, hurtles down through the limestone chasms and over the boulders, effortlessly as ever. A violent sound, but soothing; alluring, almost. You can see how people are drawn to it. To waterfalls, to high places, to deserts and deep lakes—places of no return.

Only one corpse in the river so far this year, a drug-ridden young woman from Toronto. Another girl in a hurry. Another waste of time, her own. She had relatives here, an aunt, an uncle. Already they’re the objects of narrow sideways looks, as if they had something to do with it; already they’ve assumed the cornered, angry air of the consciously innocent. I’m sure they’re blameless, but they’re alive, and whoever’s left alive gets blamed. That’s the rule in things like this. Unfair, but there it is.

Yesterday morning Walter came round, to see about the spring tune-up. That’s what he calls the household fix-it routine he goes through, on my behalf, every year. He brought his toolbox, his hand-held electric saw, his electric screwdriver: he likes nothing better than to be whirring away like part of a motor.

He parked all these tools on the back porch, then stomped around outside the house. When he came back in he had a gratified expression. “Garden gate missing a slat,” he said. “I can whack her in today, paint her when it’s dry.”

“Oh, don’t bother,” I say, as I do every year. “Everything’s falling apart, but it will last me out.”

Walter ignores this, as always. “Front steps too,” he says. “Need paint. One of them should come right off—put a new one on her. You let it go too long, the water gets in and then you get the rot. Maybe a stain though, for the porch, better for the wood. We could put another colour strip along the edges of the steps, so people could see better. The way it is they could miss their footing, hurt themselves.” He uses
we
out of courtesy, and
by people
he means me. “I can have that new step in later today.”

“You’ll get all wet,” I said. “The weather channel says more of the same.”

“Nope, it’ll clear up.” He didn’t even look at the sky.

Walter went off to get the necessities—some planks, I suppose—and I spent the interval reclining on the parlour sofa, like some vaporous novelistic heroine who’s been forgotten in the pages of her own book and left to yellow and mildew and crumble away like the book itself.

A morbid image, Myra would say.

What else would you suggest? I would reply.

The fact is that my heart has been acting up again.
Acting up,
a peculiar phrase. It’s what people say to minimize the gravity of their condition. It implies that the offending part (heart, stomach, liver, whatever) is a fractious, bratty child, which can be brought into line with a slap or a sharp word. At the same time, that these symptoms—these tremors and pains, these palpitations—are mere theatrics, and that the organ in question will soon stop capering about and making a spectacle of itself, and resume its placid, off-stage existence.

The doctor isn’t pleased. He’s been muttering about tests and scans, and trips into Toronto where the specialists lurk, those few who have not fled for greener pastures. He’s changed my pills, added another one to the arsenal. He’s even suggested the possibility of an operation. What would be involved, I asked, and what would be accomplished? Too much of one, as it turns out, and not enough of the other. He suspects that nothing short of a whole new unit—his term, as if it’s a dishwasher we’re talking about—will do. Also I would have to stand in line, waiting for someone else’s unit, one that’s no longer needed. Not to put too fine a gloss on it, someone else’s heart, ripped out of some youngster: you wouldn’t want to install an old rickety wizened-up one like the one you intend to throw away. What you want is something fresh and juicy.

But who knows where they get those things? Street children in Latin America is my guess; or so goes the most paranoid rumour. Stolen hearts, black-market hearts, wrenched from between broken ribs, warm and bleeding, offered up to the false god. What is the false god? We are. Us and our money. That’s what Laura would say.
Don’t touch that money,
Reenie would say.
You don’t know where it’s been.

Could I live with myself, knowing I was carrying the heart of a dead child?

But if not, then what?

Please don’t mistake this rambling angst for stoicism. I take my pills, I take my halting walks, but there’s nothing I can do for dread.

After lunch—a piece of hard cheese, a glass of dubious milk, a flabby carrot, Myra having fallen down this week on her self-appointed task of stocking my refrigerator—Walter returned. He measured, sawed, hammered, then knocked on the back door to say he was sorry for the noise but everything was shipshape now.

“I made you some coffee,” I said. This is a ritual on these April occasions. Had I burned it this time? No matter. He was used to Myra’s.

“Don’t mind if I do.” He removed his rubber boots carefully and left them on the back porch—Myra has him well trained, he’s not allowed to track what she calls
his dirt
onto what she calls
her carpets
—then tiptoed in his mammoth socks across my kitchen floor; which, thanks to the energetic scourings and polishings of Myra’s woman, is now as slick and treacherous as a glacier. It used to have a useful adhesive skin on it, an accumulation of dust and grime like a thin coating of glue, but no longer. I really should strew it with grit, or I’ll slip on it and do myself an injury.

Watching Walter tiptoe was a treat in itself—an elephant walking on eggs. He reached the kitchen table, setting his yellow leather work gloves down on it, where they lay like giant, extra paws.

“New gloves,” I said. They were so new they almost glowed. Not a scratch on them either.

“Myra got those. Guy three streets over, took the ends of his fingers off with a fretsaw and she’s all steamed up about it, worried I’ll do the same or worse. But that guy’s a numbnuts, moved here from Toronto, pardon my French but he shouldn’t be allowed to fool with saws, could of took his head off while he was at it, no loss to the world either. I told her, have to be ten bricks short of a load to pull a stunt like that, and anyways I don’t own a fretsaw. But she makes me cart the darn things around anyways. Every time I go out the door, it’s Yoo-hoo, here’s your gloves.”

“You could lose them,” I said.

“She’d buy others,” he said gloomily.

“Leave them here. Say you forgot them and you’ll pick them up later. Then just don’t pick them up.” I had an image of myself, during lonely nights, holding one of Walter’s vacated, leathery hands: it would be a companion of sorts. Pathetic. Maybe I should buy a cat, or a small dog. Something warm and uncritical and furry—a fellow creature, helping me to keep watch by night. We need the mammalian huddle: too much solitude is bad for the eyesight. But if I got something like that I’d most likely trip over it and break my neck.

Walter’s mouth twitched, the tips of his upper teeth showed: it was a grin. “Great minds think alike, eh?” he said. “Then maybe you could dump the suckers in the trash, accidentally on purpose.”

“Walter, you are a rascal,” I said. Walter grinned more, added five spoons of sugar to the coffee, downed it, then placed both hands on the table and levered himself into the air, like an obelisk raised by ropes. In that motion I suddenly foresaw what his last action would be, in relation to me: he’ll hoist one end of my coffin.

He knows it too. He’s standing by. He’s not a handyman for nothing. He won’t make a fuss, he won’t drop me, he’ll make sure I travel in level, horizontal safely on this last, short voyage of mine. “Up she goes,” he’ll say. And up I will go.

Lugubrious. I know it; and sentimental as well. But please bear with me. The dying are allowed a certain latitude, like children on their birthdays.

Home fires

Last night I watched the television news. I shouldn’t do that, it’s bad for the digestion. There’s another war somewhere, what they call a minor one, though of course it isn’t minor for anyone who happens to get caught up in it. They have a generic look to them, these wars—the men in camouflage gear with scarves over their mouths and noses, the drifts of smoke, the gutted buildings, the broken, weeping civilians. Endless mothers, carrying endless limp children, their faces splotched with blood; endless bewildered old men. They cart the young men off and murder them, intending to forestall revenge, as the Greeks did at Troy. Hitler’s excuse too for killing Jewish babies, as I recall.

The wars break out and die down, but then there’s a flareup elsewhere. Houses cracked open like eggs, their contents torched or stolen or stomped vindictively underfoot; refugees strafed from airplanes. In a million cellars the bewildered royal family faces the firing squad; the gems sewn into their corsets will not save them. Herod’s troops patrol a thousand streets; just next door, Napoleon makes off with the silverware. In the wake of the invasion, any invasion, the ditches fill up with raped women. To be fair, raped men as well. Raped children, raped dogs and cats. Things can get out of control.

But not here; not in this gentle, tedious backwater; not in Port Ticonderoga, despite a druggie or two in the parks, despite the occasional break-in, despite the occasional body found floating around in the eddies. We hunker down here, drinking our bedtime drinks, nibbling our bedtime snacks, peering at the world as if through a secret window, and when we’ve had enough of it we turn it off. So
much for the twentieth century,
we say, as we make our way upstairs. But there’s a far-off roaring, like a tidal wave racing inshore. Here comes the twenty-first century, sweeping overhead like a spaceship filled with ruthless lizard-eyed aliens or a metal pterodactyl. Sooner or later it will sniff us out, it will tear the roofs off our flimsy little burrows with its iron claws, and then we will be just as naked and shivering and starving and diseased and hopeless as the rest.

Excuse this digression. At my age you indulge in these apocalyptic visions. You say,
The end of the world is at hand. You
lie to yourself—
I’m glad I won’t be around to see it
—when in fact you’d like nothing better, as long as you can watch it through the little secret window, as long as you won’t be involved.

But why bother about the end of the world? It’s the end of the world every day, for someone. Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.

What happened next? For a moment I’ve lost the thread, it’s hard for me to remember, but then I do. It was the war, of course. We weren’t prepared for it, but at the same time we knew we’d been there before. It was the same chill, the chill that rolled in like a fog, the chill into which I was born. As then, everything took on a shivering anxiety—the chairs, the tables, the streets and the street lights, the sky, the air. Overnight, whole portions of what had been acknowledged as reality simply vanished. This is what happens when there’s a war.

But you are too young to remember which war that might have been. Every war is
the war
for whoever’s lived through it. The one to which I’m referring began in early September of 1939, and went on until…Well, it’s in the history books. You can look it up.

Keep the home fires burning,
was one of the old war slogans. Whenever I heard that, I used to picture a horde of women with flowing hair and glittering eyes, making their way furtively, in ones or twos, by moonlight, setting fire to their own homes.

In the months before the war began, my marriage to Richard was already foundering, though it might be said to have foundered from the beginning. I’d had one miscarriage and then another. Richard on his part had had one mistress and then another, or so I suspected—inevitable (Winifred would later say) considering my frail state of health, and Richard’s urges. Men had urges, in those days; they were numerous, these urges; they lived underground in the dark nooks and crannies of a man’s being, and once in a while they would gather strength and sally forth, like a plague of rats. They were so cunning and strong, how could any real man be expected to prevail against them? This was the doctrine according to Winifred, and—to be fair—to lots of other people as well.

These mistresses of Richard’s were (I assumed) his secretaries—always very young, always pretty, always decent girls. He’d hire them fresh from whatever academy produced them. For a while they would patronize me nervously, over the telephone, when I’d call him at the office. They would also be dispatched to purchase gifts for me, and order flowers. He liked them to keep their priorities straight: I was the official wife, and he had no intention of divorcing me. Divorced men did not become leaders of their countries, not in those days. This situation gave me a certain amount of power, but it was power only if I did not exercise it. In fact it was power only if I pretended to know nothing. The threat hanging over him was that I might find out; that I might open what was already an open secret, and set free all kinds of evils.

Did I care? Yes, in a way. But half a loaf is better than none, I would tell myself, and Richard was just a kind of loaf. He was the bread on the table, for Aimee as well as for myself. Rise above it, as Reenie used to say, and I did try. I tried to rise above it, up into the sky, like a runaway balloon, and some of the time I succeeded.

I occupied my time, I’d learned how to do that. I had taken up gardening in earnest now, I was getting some results. Not everything died. I had plans for a perennial shade garden.

Richard kept up appearances. So did I. We attended cocktail parties and dinners, we made entrances and exits together, his hand on my elbow. We made a point of a drink or two before dinner, or three; I was becoming a little too fond of gin, in this combination or that, but I wasn’t too close to the edge as long as I could feel my toes and hold my tongue. We were still skating on the surface of things—on the thin ice of good manners, which hides the dark tarn beneath: once it melts, you’re sunk.

Half a life is better than none.

I’ve failed to convey Richard, in any rounded sense. He remains a cardboard cutout. I know that. I can’t truly describe him, I can’t get a precise focus: he’s blurred, like the face in some wet, discarded newspaper. Even at the time he appeared to me smaller than life, although larger than life as well. It came from his having too much money, too much presence in the world—you were tempted to expect more from him than was there, and so what was average in him seemed like deficiency. He was ruthless, but not like a lion; more like a sort of large rodent. He tunnelled underground; he killed things by chewing off their roots.

He had the wherewithal for grand gestures, for acts of significant generosity, but he made none. He had become like a statue of himself: huge, public, imposing, hollow.

It wasn’t that he was too big for his boots: he wasn’t big enough for them. That’s it in a nutshell.

At the outbreak of the war, Richard was in a tight spot. He’d been too cozy with the Germans in his business dealings, too admiring of them in his speeches. Like many of his peers, he’d turned too blind an eye to their brutal violations of democracy; a democracy that many of our leaders had been decrying as unworkable, but that they were now keen to defend.

Richard also stood to lose a lot of money, since he could no longer trade with those who had overnight become the enemy. He had to do some scrambling, some kowtowing; it didn’t sit well with him, but he did it. He managed to salvage his position, and to scramble back into favour—well, he wasn’t the only one with dirty hands, so it was best for the others not to point their own tainted fingers at him—and soon his factories were blasting away, full steam ahead for the war effort, and no one was more patriotic than he. Thus it wasn’t counted against him when Russia came in on the side of the Allies, and Joseph Stalin was suddenly everybody’s loveable uncle. True, Richard had said much against the Communists, but that was once upon a time. It was all swept under the carpet now, because weren’t your enemy’s enemies your friends?

Meanwhile I trudged through the days, not as usual—the usual had altered—but as best I could.
Dogged
is the word I’d use now, to describe myself then. Or
stupefied,
that would do as well. There were no more garden parties to contend with, no more silk stockings except through the black market. Meat was rationed, and butter, and sugar: if you wanted more of those things, more than other people got, it became important to establish certain contacts. No more transatlantic voyages on luxury liners—the
Queen Mary
became a troop ship. The radio stopped being a portable bandshell and became a frenetic oracle; every evening I turned it on to hear the news, which at first was always bad.

The war went on and on, a relentless motor. It wore people down—the constant, dreary tension. It was like listening to someone grinding his teeth, in the dusk before dawn, while you lie sleepless night after night after night.

There were some benefits to be had, however. Mr. Murgatroyd left us, to join the army. It was then I learned to drive. I took over one of the cars, the Bentley I think it was, and Richard had it registered to me—that gave us more gasoline. (Gasoline was rationed, of course, though less so for people like Richard.) It also gave me more freedom, although it was not a freedom that had much use for me any more.

I caught a cold, which turned to bronchitis—everyone had a cold that winter. It took me months to get rid of it. I spent a lot of time in bed, feeling sad. I coughed and coughed. I no longer went to the newsreels—the speeches, the battles, the bombings and the devastation, the victories, even the invasions. Stirring times, or so we were told, but I’d lost interest.

The end of the war approached. It got nearer and nearer. Then it occurred. I remembered the silence after the last war had ended, and then the ringing of the bells. It had been November, then, with ice on the puddles, and now it was spring. There were parades. There were proclamations. Trumpets were blown.

It wasn’t so easy, though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.