Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [217]
The catch is that Zenia is considerably taller than Tony, and Tony would of course be aiming for the head. Symmetrical retaliation: Zenia’s pattern has been to attack her victims at the point of most vulnerability, and the most vulnerable point is the one most prized, and Tony’s most vulnerable point is her brain. That’s how she was trapped by Zenia in the first place: that was the temptation, the bait. Tony got suckered in through her own intellectual vanity. She thought she’d found a friend who was as smart as she was. Smarter was not a category.
Tony’s love for West is her other most vulnerable point, so it stands to reason that it’s through West that Zenia will attack her now. It’s to protect West that she’s doing this, really – he would not survive another slice cut out of his heart.
She hasn’t shared her plans with Roz or Charis. Each of them is a decent person; neither would condone violence. Tony knows that she herself is not a decent person, she’s known that ever since childhood. She does act like one, most of the time, because there’s usually no reason not to, but she has another self, a more ruthless one, concealed inside her. She is not just Tony Fremont, she is also Tnomerf Ynot, queen of the barbarians, and, in theory, capable of much that Tony herself is not quite up to. Bulc egdirb! Bulc egdirb! Take no prisoners, because in order to protect the innocent, some must sacrifice their own innocence. This is one of the rules of war. Men have to do hard things, they have to do hard man-things. Hard-man things. They have to shed blood, so that others may live out their placid lives suckling their infants and rummaging in their gardens and creating unmusical music, free from guilt. Women are not usually called upon to commit such cold-blooded acts, but this does not mean they are incapable of them. Tony clenches her small teeth and invokes her left hand, and hopes that she will rise to the occasion.
In front of her face she holds the Globe and Mail, opened to the business section. She’s not reading, however: she’s watching the lobby for Zenia. Watching, and getting jittery, because it isn’t every day she does something this risky. To cut the tension, to give herself some critical distance, she folds up the paper and takes her lecture notes out of her bag. It will focus her mind to review them, it will refresh her memory: she hasn’t given this lecture since last year.
The lecture is a favourite among her students. It’s the one on the role of female camp-followers through the ages, before and after battles – their handiness as bodies-for-hire, rapees, and producers of cannon fodder, their tension-reducing, nursing, psychiatric, cooking and laundering and post-massacre looting and life-terminating skills – with a digression on venereal diseases. Rumour has it that the students’ nickname for this lecture is “Mother Courage Meets Spotted Dick,” or “Whores ‘n’ Sores”; it usually attracts a contingent of visiting engineers, who come for the visuals, because Tony has an impressive instructional film she always screens. It’s the same one the army showed to its new recruits at the time of the Second World War to promote the use of condoms, and features many a rotted-off nose and green, leaking male organ. Tony is used to the nervous laughter. Put yourself there, she will tell them. Pretend it’s you. Now: less funny?
At that time syphilis was considered to be a self-inflicted wound. Some guys used VD to get themselves invalided home. You could be court-martialled for having a dose, just as you could for shooting yourself in the foot. If the wound was the disease, then the weapon was the whore. Yet another weapon in the war of the sexes, the whore of the sexes, the raw of the sexes, the raw sexes