The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [137]
Perhaps I should leave this trunk and its contents to a university, or else to a library. It would at least be appreciated there, in a ghoulish way. There are more than a few scholars who’d like to get their claws into all this waste paper. Material, they’d call it – their name for loot. They must think of me as a fusty old dragon crouched on an ill-gotten hoard – some gaunt dog-in-the-manger, some desiccated, censorious wardress, a prim-lipped keeper of the keys, guarding the dungeon in which starved Laura is chained to the wall.
For years they’ve bombarded me with letters, wanting Laura’s own letters – wanting manuscripts, mementoes, interviews, anecdotes – all the grisly details. To these importunate missives I used to compose tersely worded replies:
“Dear Miss W., In my view your plan for a ‘Commemoration Ceremony’ at the bridge which was the scene of Laura Chase’s tragic death is both tasteless and morbid. You must be out of your mind. I believe you are suffering from auto-intoxication. You should try an enema.”
“Dear Ms. X., I acknowledge your letter concerning your proposed thesis, though I can’t say that its title makes a great deal of sense to me. Doubtless it does to you or you would not have come up with it. I cannot give you any help. Also you do not deserve any.‘Deconstruction’ implies the wrecking ball, and ‘problematize’ is not a verb.”
“Dear Dr. Y, Concerning your study of the theological implications of The Blind Assassin: my sister’s religious beliefs were strongly held but were scarcely what is called conventional. She did not like God or approve of God or claim to understand God. She said she loved God, and as with human beings that was a different thing. No, she was not a Buddhist. Don’t be fatuous. I suggest you learn to read.”
“Dear Professor Z: I have noted your opinion that a biography of Laura Chase is long overdue. She may well be, as you say, ‘among our most important female mid-century writers.’ I wouldn’t know. But my co-operation in what you call ‘your project’ is out of the question. I have no wish to satisfy your lust for phials of dried blood and the severed fingers of saints.
Laura Chase is not your ‘project.’ She was my sister. She would not have wished to be pawed over after her death, whatever that pawing over might euphemistically be termed. Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don’t consider that.”
“Dear Miss W: This is your fourth letter on the same subject. Stop pestering me. You are a drone.”
For decades I took a grim satisfaction in this venomous doodling. I enjoyed licking the stamps, then dropping the letters like so many hand grenades into the shiny red box, with the sense of having settled the hash of some earnest, greedy snoop. But lately I’ve stopped answering. Why needle strangers? They don’t give a hoot what I think of them. For them I’m only an appendage: Laura’s odd, extra hand, attached to no body – the hand that passed her on, to the world, to them. They see me as a repository – a living mausoleum, a resource, as they term it. Why should I do them any favours? As far as I’m concerned they’re scavengers – hyenas, the lot of them; jackals on the scent of carrion, ravens hunting for roadkill; corpse flies. They want to pick through me as if I’m a boneheap, looking for scrap metal and broken pottery, for shards of cuneiform and scraps of papyrus, for curios, lost toys, gold teeth. If they ever suspected what I’ve got stashed away here, they’d jimmy the locks, they’d break and enter, they’d knock me over the head and make off with the boodle, and feel more than justified.
No. Not a university then. Why give them the satisfaction?
Perhaps my steamer trunk should go to Sabrina, despite her decision to remain incommunicado, despite – this is where it festers – her persistent neglect of me. Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both. These things are hers by right. You might even say they are her inheritance: she is, after all, my granddaughter.