The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [193]
Reverie intrudes at intervals.
She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.
In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoined. How they’d loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?
Sometimes she wants to put a match to him, have done with him; finish with that endless, useless longing. At the very least, daily time and the entropy of her own body should take care of it – wear her threadbare, wear her out, erase that place in her brain. But no exorcism has been enough, nor has she tried very hard at it. Exorcism is not what she wants. She wants that terrified bliss, like falling out of an airplane by mistake. She wants his famished look.
The last time she’d seen him, when they’d gone back to his room – it was like drowning: everything darkened and roared, but at the same time it was very silvery, and slow, and clear.
This is what it means, to be in thrall.
Perhaps he carries an image of her always with him, as if in a locket; or not an image exactly, more like a diagram. A map, as if for treasure. What he’ll need to get back.
First there’s the land, thousands of miles of it, with an outer circle of rock and mountains, ice-covered, fissured and wrinkled; then forest tangled with windfall, a matted pelt of it, dead wood rotting under moss; then the odd clearing. Then heaths and windswept steppes and dry red hills where war goes forward. Behind the rocks, at ambush within the parched canyons, the defenders crouch. They specialize in snipers.
Next come the villages, with squalid hovels and squinting urchins and women lugging bundles of sticks, the dirt roads murky with pig-wallow. Then the railroad tracks running into the towns, with their stations and depots, their factories and warehouses, their churches and marble banks. Then the cities, vast oblongs of light and dark, tower upon tower. The towers are sheathed in adamant. No: something more modern, more believable. Not zinc, that’s poor women’s washtubs.
The towers are sheathed in steel. Bombs are made there, bombs fall there also. But he bypasses all of that, comes through it unscathed, all the way to this city, the one containing her, its houses and steeples encircling her where she sits in the most inward, the most central tower of them all, which doesn’t even resemble a tower. It’s camouflaged: you could be forgiven for confusing it with a house. She’s the tremulous heart of everything, tucked into her white bed. Locked away from danger, but she is the point of it all. The point of it all is to protect her. That’s what they spend their time doing – protecting her from everything else. She looks out the window, and nothing can get at her, and she can get at nothing.
She’s the round O, the zero at the bone. A space that defines itself by not being there at all. That’s why they can’t reach her, lay a finger on her. That’s why they can’t pin anything on her. She has such a good smile, but she doesn’t stand behind it.
He wants to think of her as invulnerable. Standing in her lighted window, behind her a locked door. He wants to be right there, under the tree, looking up. Taking courage, he climbs the wall, hand over hand past vine and ledge, happy as a crook; he crouches, raises the window, steps down in. The radio’s gently on, dance music swelling and fading. It drowns out footsteps. There’s not a word between them, and so begins again the delicate, painstaking ransack of the flesh. Muffled, hesitating and dim, as if underwater.
You’ve led a sheltered life, he’d said to her once.
You could call it that, she’d said.
But how can she ever get out of it, her life, except through him?
The Globe and Mail, May 26, 1937
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