The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [49]
I felt confused, and also inadequate: whatever it was he was asking or demanding, it was beyond me. This was the first time a man would expect more from me than I was capable of giving, but it would not be the last.
“Yes,” I said.
In the week before she died – one of those dreadful mornings – my mother said a strange thing, though I didn’t consider it strange at the time. She said, “Underneath it all, your father loves you.”
She wasn’t in the habit of speaking to us about feelings, and especially not about love – her own love or anyone else’s, except God’s. But parents were supposed to love their children, so I must have taken this thing she said as a reassurance: despite appearances, my father was as other fathers were, or were considered to be.
Now I think it was more complicated than that. It may have been a warning. It may also have been a burden. Even if love was underneath it all, there was a great deal piled on top, and what would you find when you dug down? Not a simple gift, pure gold and shining; instead, something ancient and possibly baneful, like an iron charm rusting among old bones. A talisman of sorts, this love, but a heavy one; a heavy thing for me to carry around with me, slung on its iron chain around my neck.
IV
The Blind Assassin: The cafe
The rain is light, but steady since noon. Mist rises from the trees, from the roadways. She comes past the front window with its painted coffee cup, white with a green stripe around it and three steam trails coming up out of it in wavering lines, as if three clutching fingers have slid down the wet glass. The door is marked CAFE in peeling gold letters; she opens it and steps inside, shaking her umbrella. It’s cream-coloured, as is her poplin raincoat. She throws back the hood.
He’s in the last booth, beside the swing door to the kitchen, as he said he’d be. The walls are yellowed by smoke, the heavy booths are painted a dull brown, each with a metal hen’s-claw hook for coats. Men sit in the booths, only men, in baggy jackets like worn blankets, no ties, jagged haircuts, their legs apart and feet in boots planted flat to the floorboards. Hands like stumps: those hands could rescue you or beat you to a pulp and they would look the same while doing either thing. Blunt instruments, and their eyes as well. There’s a smell in the room, of rotting planks and spilled vinegar and sour wool trousers and old meat and one shower a week, of scrimping and cheating and resentment. She knows it’s important to act as if she doesn’t notice the smell.
He lifts a hand, and the other men look at her with suspicion and contempt as she hurries towards him, her heels clacking on the wood. She sits down across from him, smiles with relief: he’s here. He’s still here.
Judas Priest, he says, you might as well have worn mink.
What did I do? What’s wrong?
Your coat.
It’s just a coat. An ordinary raincoat, she says, faltering. What’s wrong with it?
Christ, he says, look at yourself. Look around you. It’s too clean.
I can’t get it right for you, can I? she says. I won’t ever get it right.
You do, he says. You know what you get right. But you don’t think anything through.
You didn’t tell me. I’ve never been down here before – to a place like this. And I can hardly rush out the door looking like a cleaning woman – have you thought of that?
If you just had a scarf or something. To cover your hair.
My hair, she says despairingly. What next? What’s wrong with my hair?
It’s too blonde. It stands out. Blondes are like white mice, you only find them in cages. They wouldn’t last long in nature. They’re too conspicuous.
You’re not being kind.
I detest kindness, he says. I detest people who pride themselves on being kind. Snot-nosed nickel-and-dime do-gooders, doling out the kindness. They