Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [33]
She tunes back in to the conversation: they’re talking about some war. Charis wishes they wouldn’t get going on war, but they often do these days. It seems to be in the air, after a long time of not being there much at all. Roz starts it; she asks Tony questions, because she likes to ask people questions about things they’re supposed to know about.
One of their lunches a few months ago was all about genocide, and Roz wanted to talk about the Holocaust, and Tony launched into a detailed thing about genocides through the ages, Genghis Khan and then the Cathars in France, and then the Armenians being butchered by the Turks, and then the Irish and the Scots and what the English did to them, death after horrible death, until Charis thought she was going to throw up.
Tony can deal with all of that, she can handle it, maybe to her it’s just words, but for Charis the words are pictures and then screams and moans, and then the smell of rotting meat, and of burning, of burning flesh, and then physical pain, and if you dwell on it you make it happen, and she can never explain this to Tony in a way that Tony will understand, and also she’s afraid they’ll decide she’s being silly. Hysterical, a nitwit, a flake. She knows they both think that sometimes.
So she’d got up and gone down the dark splintery stairs to the washroom, where there was a Renoir poster on the wall, a rounded pink woman drying herself leisurely after the bath, with blue and mauve highlights on her body, and that was peaceful; but when she’d gone back upstairs Tony was still in Scotland, with the Highland women and children being hunted down in the hills and spitted like pigs and shot like deer.
“The Scots!” said Roz, who wanted to get back to the Holocaust. “They’ve done very well for themselves, look at all those bankers! Who cares about them?”
“I do,” said Charis, surprising herself as much as she did the two of them. “I care.” They looked at her in amazement, because they were used to her taking mental time off when they talked about war. They thought it didn’t interest her.
“You do?” said Roz, her eyebrows up. “Why, Charis?”
“You should care about everybody,” said Charis. “Or maybe it’s because I’m part Scottish. Part Scottish, part English. All those people who used to kill one another so much.” She leaves out the Mennonites because she doesn’t want to upset Roz, although the Mennonites don’t count as real Germans. Also they never kill people; they only get killed, instead.
“Sweetie, I’m sorry,” said Roz, contrite. “Of course! I keep forgetting. Stupid moi, thinking of you as pure crème de la WASP.” She patted Charis’s hand.
“Nobody’s killed them recently, though,” said Charis. “Not all at once. But I guess that’s how we ended up here.”
“Ended up here?” said Tony, looking around. Did Charis mean the Toxique, or what?
“Because of wars,” said Charis, unhappily; it’s an insight she doesn’t like much, now that she’s had it. “In this country. Wars of one sort or another. But that was then. We should try to live in the now – don’t you think? Or at least, I try to.”
Tony smiled at Charis with affection, or the closest she usually got to it. “She’s absolutely right,” she said to Roz, as if this were a noteworthy event.
Right about what though, Charis wonders. The wars, or the now? Tony’s standard response to the now would be to tell Charis how many babies are being born per minute, in the now she’s so