The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [240]
I’ve swathed myself in a shawl: the evening is warm for the season, but I don’t feel it as warmth, only as an absence of cold. I view the world clearly from here – here being the landscape glimpsed from the top of a wave, just before the next one drives you under: how blue the sky, how green the sea, how final the prospect.
Beside my elbow is the stack of paper I’ve been adding to so laboriously, month after month. When I’m done – when I’ve written the final page – I’ll pull myself up out of this chair and make my way to the kitchen, and scrabble around for an elastic band or a piece of string or an old ribbon. I’ll tie the papers up, then lift the lid of my steamer trunk and slide this bundle in on top of everything else. There it will stay until you come back from your travels, if you ever do come back. The lawyer has the key, and his orders.
I must admit I have a daydream about you.
One evening there will be a knock at the door and it will be you. You’ll be dressed in black, you’ll be toting one of those little rucksacks they all have now instead of handbags. It will be raining, as it is this evening, but you won’t have an umbrella, you’d scorn umbrellas; the young like their heads to be whipped about by the elements, they find it bracing. You’ll stand on the porch, in a haze of damp light; your glossy dark hair will be sodden, your black outfit will be soaked, the drops of rain will glitter on your face and clothes like sequins.
You’ll knock. I’ll hear you, I’ll shuffle down the hallway, I’ll open the door. My heart will jump and flutter; I’ll peer at you, then recognize you: my cherished, my last remaining wish. I’ll think to myself that I’ve never seen anyone so beautiful, but I won’t say so; I wouldn’t want you to think I’ve gone scatty. Then I’ll welcome you, I’ll hold out my arms to you, I’ll kiss you on the cheek, sparsely, because it would be unseemly to let myself go. I’ll cry a few tears, but only a few, because the eyes of the elderly are arid.
I’ll invite you in. You’ll enter. I wouldn’t recommend it to a young girl, crossing the threshold of a place like mine, with a person like me inside it – an old woman, an older woman, living alone in a fossilized cottage, with hair like burning spiderwebs and a weedy garden full of God knows what. There’s a whiff of brimstone about such creatures: you may even be a little frightened of me. But you’ll also be a little reckless, like all the women in our family, and so you will come in anyway. Grandmother , you will say; and through that one word I will no longer be disowned.
I’ll sit you down at my table, among the wooden spoons and the twig wreaths, and the candle which is never lit. You’ll be shivering, I’ll give you a towel, I’ll wrap you in a blanket, I’ll make you some cocoa.
Then I’ll tell you a story. I’ll tell you this story: the story of how you came to be here, sitting in my kitchen, listening to the story I’ve been telling you. If by some miracle that were to happen, there would be no need for this jumbled mound of paper.
What is it that I’ll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn’t yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don’t prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull.
But I leave myself in your hands. What choice do I have? By the time you read this last page, that – if anywhere – is the only place I will be.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to the following: my invaluable assistant, Sarah Cooper; my other researchers, A. S. Hall and Sarah Webster; Professor Tim Stanley; Sharon Maxwell, archivist, Cunard Line Ltd., St. James Library, London; Dorothy Duncan, executive director, Ontario Historical Society; Hudson’s Bay/Simpsons Archives, Winnipeg; Fiona Lucas, Spadina House, Heritage Toronto; Fred Kerner; Terrance