The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [135]
He lights a cigarette, he prowls, he looks out the window. Cinders darken the snow. A streetcar grinds past. He turns away, he prowls, nests of words in his head.
He checks his watch: she’s late again. She’s not coming.
VII
The steamer trunk
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.
Impossible, of course.
I pay out my line, I pay out my line, this black thread I’m spinning across the page.
Yesterday a package arrived for me: a fresh edition of The Blind Assassin . This copy is merely a courtesy: no money will result, or not for me. The book is now in the public domain and anyone at all can publish it, so Laura’s estate won’t be seeing any of the proceeds. That’s what happens a set number of years after the death of the author: you lose control. The thing is out there in the world, replicating itself in God knows how many forms, without any say-so from me.
Artemesia Press, this outfit’s called; it’s English. I think they’re the ones who wanted me to write an introduction, which I refused to do, of course. Probably run by a bunch of women, with a name like that. I wonder which Artemesia they have in mind – the Persian lady general from Herodotus who turned tail when the battle was going against her, or the Roman matron who ate the ashes of her dead husband so her body could become his living sepulchre? Probably the raped Renaissance painter: that’s the only one of them that gets remembered now.
The book is on my kitchen table. Neglected masterpieces of the twentieth century, it says in italic script under the title. Laura was a “modernist,” we are told on the inside flap. She was “influenced” by the likes of Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Smart, Carson McCullers – authors I know for a fact that Laura never read. The cover design isn’t too bad, however. Shades of washed-out brownish purple, a photographic look: a woman in a slip, at a window, seen through a net curtain, her face in shadow. Behind her, a segment of a man – the arm, the hand, the back of the head. Appropriate enough, I suppose.
I decided it was time for me to phone my lawyer. Or not my real lawyer. The one I used to consider mine, the one who handled that business with Richard, who battled Winifred so heroically, though in vain – that one died several decades ago. Ever since then I have been passed from hand to hand within the firm, like some ornate silver teapot fobbed off on each new generation as a wedding gift, but that nobody ever uses.
“Mr. Sykes, please,” I said to the girl who answered. Some receptionist or other, I suppose.I imagined her fingernails, long and maroon and pointed. But perhaps these are the wrong kind of fingernails for a receptionist of today. Perhaps they are ice blue.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Sykes is in a meeting. Who may I say is calling?”
They might as well use robots. “Mrs. Iris Griffen,” I said, in my best diamond-cutting voice. “I’m one of his oldest clients.”
This did not open any doors. Mr. Sykes was still in a meeting. He is a busy lad, it appears. But why do I think of him as a lad? He must be in his mid-fifties – born, perhaps, in the same year Laura died. Has she really been dead that long, the time it’s taken to grow and ripen a lawyer? Another of those things that must be true because everyone else agrees they are, although they don’t seem so to me.
“May I tell Mr.