The Robber Bride (26 page)

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

U
nder 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!

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?