Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [145]
“My mother was a Roumanian gypsy,” says Zenia carelessly. “She said it ran in the family.”
“It does,” says Charis. This makes sense to her: she knows about gifts like that, there’s her own grandmother. Zenia’s black hair and dark eyes, and also her fatalism – they’d go with being a gypsy.
“She was stoned to death, during the war,” says Zenia.
“That’s terrible!” says Charis. No wonder Zenia has cancer – it’s the past lying inside her, an oppressive heavy-metals past that she’s never cleaned out of herself. “Was it the Germans?” Being stoned to death seems worse to her than being shot. Slower, more bruising, more painful; but not very German. When she thinks of Germans she thinks of scissors, of white enamel tables. When she thinks of stoning, it’s dust and flies and camels and palm trees. As in the Old Testament.
“No, by a bunch of villagers,” says Zenia. “In Roumania. They thought she had the evil eye, they thought she was hexing their cows. They didn’t want to waste their bullets so they used stones. Stones and clubs. Gypsies weren’t the most popular item, there. I guess they still aren’t. But she knew it was going to happen, she was a clairvoyant. She handed me over to a friend she had, in another village, the night before. That’s what saved me.”
“So you must speak some Roumanian,” says Charis. If she’d known all of this, she would have gone about curing Zenia some other way. Not just with yoga and cabbages. She would have tried more visualization, and not just about the cancer: about the Roumanians. Perhaps the keys to Zenia’s illness are hidden in another language.
“I’ve repressed it,” says Zenia. “You would too. I got a look at my mother after they’d finished with her. They left her there, lying in the snow. She was just a big lump of rotting meat.”
Charis flinches. This is a stomach-turning image. It explains why Zenia throws up so much – if that’s what’s inside her head. She needs to get such poisonous images out of her.
“Where was your father?” she says, to steer Zenia away from the dead mother.
“He was a Finn,” says Zenia. “It’s where I get my cheekbones.”
Charis has only a vague notion of where Finland is. It has trees, and people with saunas and skin boots, and reindeer. “Oh,” she says. “Why was he in Roumania?”
“He wasn’t,” says Zenia. “They were both Communists, before the war. They met at a youth congress in Leningrad. He was killed later, in Finland, fighting the Russians, in the Winter War. Ironic, isn’t it? He thought he was on their side, but it was them who killed him.”
“My father was killed in the war, too,” says Charis. She’s glad they have a bond in common.
“I guess a lot of people were,” says Zenia dismissively. “But that’s history.” She has gathered up the cards and is laying out a new batch. “Ah,” she says. “The Queen of Spades.”
“Is that still my cards?” says Charis.
“No,” says Zenia. “These are mine.” She isn’t looking at the cards now, she’s looking at the ceiling, obliquely, out of her half-closed eyes. “The Queen of Spades is bad luck. Some say it’s the death card.” Her long black hair falls like a heavy veil around her head.
“Oh, no,” says Charis, dismayed. “I don’t think we should do this. This is too negative.”
“Okay,” says Zenia, as if she doesn’t care what she does. “I think I’ll go to bed.”
Charis listens to her as she climbs up the stairs, dragging one foot after the other.
37
The winter wore on. It wore them down. Taking a bath was an arctic experience, feeding the chickens was a polar expedition: trudging through the snow, battling the fierce winds that swept in off the lake. The chickens themselves were cosy enough, inside the house that Billy built. The straw and droppings kept them warm, the way they were supposed to.
Charis wished there were a layer of straw under her own house. She tacked some old blankets over the walls, she stuffed some obvious cracks with wadded newspapers. Luckily they had enough wood: Charis had managed to acquire some, cheap, from a person who had given