Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [86]
“Rented you to who?” says Tony.
“Men,” says Zenia. “Oh, not out on the street! Not just anyone! Old generals and whatnot. She was a White Russian; I guess the family had money, once – back in Russia, I suppose. She claimed to be some sort of a countess, though God knows Russian countesses were a dime a dozen. There was a whole bunch of White Russians in Paris; they’d been there since the revolution. She liked to say she was used to good things, though I don’t know when that would have been.”
Tony hasn’t known this – that Zenia’s mother was Russian. She has only known Zenia’s story of recent years: her foreground. Her life at the university, her life with West, and with the man before him and the one before that. Brutes, both of them, who wore leather jackets and drank, and hit her.
She examines the cast of Zenia’s high cheekbones: Slavic, she supposes. Then there’s her slight accent, her air of scornful superiority, her touch of superstition. The Russians go in for icons and so forth. It all makes sense.
“Rented?” she says. “But how old were you?”
“Who knows?” says Zenia. “It must’ve started when I was five, six, earlier maybe. Really I can’t remember. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have some man’s hand in my pants.”
Tony’s mouth opens. “Five?” she says. She is horrified. At the same time she admires Zenia’s candour. Zenia doesn’t seem to get embarrassed by anything. Unlike Tony, she is not a prude.
Zenia laughs. “Oh, it wasn’t obvious, at first,” she says. “It was all very polite! They would come over and sit on the sofa – God, she was proud of that sofa, she kept a silk shawl draped over it, embroidered with roses – and she would tell me to sit beside the nice man, and after a while she’d just go out of the room. It wasn’t real sex, at first. Just a lot of feeling up. Sticky fingers. She saved the big bang till I was what she called grown up. Eleven, twelve … I think she did fairly well on that one, though not many of those men were filthy rich. Penny-pinching shabby genteel, with a little put by, or some shady trade. They were all in the black market, they all had an angle, they lived in between the walls, you know? Like rats. She bought me a new dress for the occasion, on the black market too, I guess. I made my début on the sitting-room rug – she never let them use the bed. His name was Major Popov, if you can believe it, just like something out of Dostoevsky, with brown crusts up his nose from taking snuff. He didn’t even take off his pants, he was in such a hurry. I stared at those embroidered roses on the fucking shawl the whole time. I offered up the pain to God. It isn’t as though I was sinning for fun! I was very religious, at the time; Orthodox, of course. They still have the best churches, don’t you think? I hope she got a hefty slice out of old Popov. Some men will give up a lot of lunches, for a virgin.”
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