The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [155]
In theory I could go wherever I liked, in practice there were invisible barriers. I kept to the main streets, the more prosperous areas: even within those confines, there were not really very many places where I felt unconstrained. I watched other people – not the men so much, the women. Were they married? Where were they going? Did they have jobs? I couldn’t tell much from looking at them, except the price of their shoes.
I felt as if I’d been picked up and set down in a foreign country, where everyone spoke a different language.
Sometimes there would be couples, arm in arm – laughing, happy, amorous. Victims of an enormous fraud, and at the same time its perpetrators, or so I felt. I stared at them with rancour.
Then one day – it was a Thursday – I saw Alex Thomas. He was on the other side of the street, waiting for the light to change. It was Queen Street, at Yonge. He was the worse for wear – he had on a blue shirt, like a worker, and a battered hat – but it was him all right. He looked illuminated, as if a shaft of light were falling on him from some invisible source, rendering him frighteningly visible. Surely everyone else on the street was looking at him too – surely they all knew who he was! Any minute now they would recognize him, they’d shout, they’d give chase.
My first impulse was to warn him. But then I knew that the warning must be for both of us, because whatever trouble he was involved in, I was suddenly involved in it as well.
I could have paid no attention. I could have turned away. That would have been wise. But such wisdom was not available to me then.
I stepped down off the curb and began to cross towards him. The light changed again: I was stranded in the middle of the street. Cars honked their horns; there were shouts; the traffic surged. I didn’t know whether to go back or forward.
He turned then, and at first I was not sure he could see me. I stretched out my hand, like a drowning person beseeching rescue. In that moment I had already committed treachery in my heart.
Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.
Sunnyside
Three days after this, Laura was due to arrive. I had myself driven down to Union Station to meet the train, but she wasn’t on it. She wasn’t at Avilion either: I phoned Reenie to check, provoking an outburst: she’d always known something like this would happen, just because of the way Laura was. She’d gone with Laura to the train, she’d shipped off the trunk and everything as instructed, she’d taken every precaution. She should have accompanied her all the way, and now look! Some white slaver had made off with her.
Laura’s trunk turned up on schedule, but Laura herself appeared to have vanished. Richard was more upset than I would have predicted. He was afraid she’d been spirited away by unknown forces – people who had it in for him. It could be the Reds, or else an unscrupulous business rival: such twisted men existed. Criminals, he hinted, who were in cahoots with all sorts of folks – folks who’d stop at nothing to assert undue influence on him, because of his growing political connections. Next thing you knew we’d get a blackmail note.
He was suspicious of many elements, that August; he said we had to keep a sharp lookout. There had been a big march on Ottawa, in July – thousands, tens of thousands of men who claimed to be unemployed, and who were demanding jobs and fair pay, egged on by subversives bent on overthrowing the government.
“I bet young what’s-his-name was mixed up