Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [9]
The Comparative Religion people got hold of it in the seventies, but since then it’s been turned into makeshift offices for the overflow from various worthy but impoverished departments – people who are thought to use mostly their minds rather than pieces of glossy equipment, and who don’t contribute much to modern industry, and who are therefore considered to be naturally adapted to seediness. Philosophy has established a bridgehead on the ground floor, Modern History has claimed the second. Despite some halfhearted attempts at repainting (already in the past, already fading), McClung is still the same dour, circumspect building it always was, virtuous as cold oatmeal and keeping itself to itself.
Tony doesn’t mind its shabbiness. Even as a student she liked it here – compared, that is, with where she could have been. A rented room, an anonymous studio apartment. Some of the other, more blasé students called it McFungus, a name that has been passed down over the years, but for Tony it was a haven, and she remains grateful.
Her own office is on the second floor, just a couple of doors down from her old room. Her old room itself has become the coffee room, a wilfully cheerless place with a chipped pressboard table, several mismatched straight chairs, and a yellowing Amnesty poster of a man tied up in barbed wire and stuck full of bent nails. There’s a drip coffee machine that spits and dribbles, and a rack where they are all supposed to keep their environmentally friendly washable mugs, with their initials painted on them so they won’t get one another’s gum diseases. Tony has gone to some trouble with her own mug. She’s used red nail polish, on black: it says Gnissapsert On. People occasionally use one another’s mugs, by mistake or from laziness, but nobody uses hers.
She pauses at the coffee room, where two of her colleagues, both dressed in fleecy jogging suits, are having milk and cookies. Dr. Ackroyd, the eighteenth-century agriculture expert, and Dr. Rose Pimlott, the social historian and Canadianist, who by any other name would still be a pain in the butt. She wonders if Rose Pimlott and Bob Ackroyd are having a thing, as Roz would say. They’ve been putting their heads together quite frequently in recent weeks. But most likely it’s just some palace plot. The whole department is like a Renaissance court: whisperings, gangings-up, petty treacheries, snits, and umbrage. Tony tries to stay out of it but succeeds only sometimes. She has no particular allies and is therefore suspected by all.
Especially by Rose. Tony continues to resent the fact that, two years ago, Rose accused one of Tony’s graduate courses of being Eurocentric.
“Of course it’s Eurocentric!” Tony said. “What do you expect in a course called Merovingian Siege Strategy?”
“I think,” said Rose Pimlott, attempting to salvage her position, “that you might teach the course from the point of view of the victims. Instead of marginalizing them.”
“Which victims?” said Tony. “They were all victims! They took turns! Actually, they took turns trying to avoid being the victims. That’s the whole point about war!”
What Dr. Rose Pimlott knows about war you could stick in your ear. But her ignorance is willed: mainly she just wants war to get out of her way and stop being such a nuisance. “Why do you like it?” she said to Tony recently, wrinkling her nose as if talking about snot or farts: something minor and disgusting, and best concealed.
“Do you ask AIDS researchers why they like AIDS?” said Tony. “War is there. It’s not going away soon. It’s not that I like it. I want to see why so many other people like it. I want to see how it works.” But Rose Pimlott would rather not look, she’d rather let others dig up the mass graves. She might break a nail.
Tony considers telling Rose that Laura Secord, whose portrait on the old chocolate