The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [90]
“Do you remember it?” I said.
“Not really. A few details were misplaced along the way – my name and so forth – and then I ended up with the missionaries, who felt that forgetfulness would be the best thing for me, all things considered. They were Presbyterians, a tidy bunch. We all had our heads shaved, for the lice. I can recall the feeling of suddenly having no hair – how cool it was. That’s when my memories really begin.”
Although I was beginning to like him better, I’m ashamed to admit that I was more than a little skeptical about this story. There was too much melodrama in it – too much luck, both bad and good. I was still too young to be a believer in coincidence. And if he’d been trying to make an impression on Laura – was he trying? – he couldn’t have chosen a better way.
“It must be terrible,” I said, “not to know who you really are.”
“I used to think that,” said Alex. “But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn’t need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway – family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I’m free of the temptation, that’s all. I’m free of the strings. Nothing ties me down.” He said something else, but there was an explosion in the sky and I couldn’t hear. Laura heard though; she nodded gravely.
(What was it he said? I found out later. He said, At least you’re never homesick.)
A dandelion of light burst above us. We all looked up. It’s hard not to, at such times. It’s hard not to stand there with your mouth open.
Was that the beginning, that evening – on the dock at Avilion, with the fireworks dazzling the sky? It’s hard to know. Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.
Hand-tinting
Wild geese fly south, creaking like anguished hinges; along the riverbank the candles of the sumacs burn dull red. It’s the first week of October. Season of woollen garments taken out of mothballs; of nocturnal mists and dew and slippery front steps, and late-blooming slugs; of snapdragons having one last fling; of those frilly ornamental pink-and-purple cabbages that never used to exist, but are all over everywhere now.
Season of chrysanthemums, the funeral flower; white ones, that is. The dead must get so tired of them.
The morning was brisk and fair. I picked a small bunch of yellow and pink snapdragons from the front garden and took them to the cemetery, to place them at the family tomb for the two pensive angels on their white cube: it would be something different for them, I thought. Once there I performed my small ritual – the circumlocution of the monument, the reading of the names. I think I do it silently, but once in a while I catch the sound of my own voice, muttering away like some Jesuit saying a breviary.
To pronounce the name of the dead is to make them live again, said the ancient Egyptians: not always what one might wish.
When I’d been all the way around the monument, I found a girl – a young woman – kneeling before the tomb, or before Laura’s place on it. Her head was bowed. She was wearing black: black jeans, black T-SHIRT and jacket, a small black knapsack of the kind they carry now instead of purses. She had long dark hair – like Sabrina’s, I thought with a sudden lurching of the heart: Sabrina has come back, from India or wherever she’s been. She’s come back without warning. She’s changed her mind about me. She was intending to surprise me, and now I’ve spoiled it.
But when I peered more closely, I saw this girl was a stranger: some overwrought graduate student, no doubt. At first I’d thought she was praying, but no, she was placing a flower: a single white carnation, the stem wrapped in tinfoil. As she stood up, I saw that she was crying.
Laura touches people. I do not.
After the button factory picnic, there was the usual sort of