Blind Assassin (118 page)

The Globe and Mail, May 26, 1937

Red Vendetta in Barcelona

PARIS. SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Although news from Barcelona is heavily censored, word has got through to our correspondent in Paris of clashes between rival Republican factions in that city. The Stalin-backed Communists, well armed by Russia, are rumoured to be carrying out purges against the rival
POUM
, the extremist Trotskyists who have made common cause with the Anarchists. The heady early days of Republican rule have given way to an atmosphere of suspicion and fear, as Communists accuse the
POUM
of “fifth-column” treachery. Open street fighting has been observed, with city police siding with the Communists. Many
POUM
members are said to be in jail or in flight. Several Canadians may have been caught in the crossfire, but these reports remain unverified.

Elsewhere in Spain, Madrid continues to be held by the Republicans, but Nationalist forces under General Franco are making significant gains.

The Blind Assassin: Union Station

She bends her neck, rests her forehead on the edge of the table. Imagines his advent.

It’s dusk, the station lights are on, his face is haggard in them. Somewhere nearby there’s a coast, ultramarine: he can hear the cries of gulls. He swings aboard the train through clouds of hissing steam, hoists his duffel bag onto the rack; then he slumps into the seat, takes out the sandwich he’s bought, unwraps it from the crumpled paper, tears it apart. He’s almost too tired to eat.

Beside him is an elderly woman who’s knitting something red, a sweater. He knows what she’s knitting because she tells him; she’d tell him all about it if allowed, about her children, about her grandchildren; no doubt she’s got snapshots, but hers is not a story he wishes to hear. He can’t think about children, having seen too many dead ones. It’s the children that stay with him, even more than the women, more than the old men. They were always so unexpected: their sleepy eyes, their waxy hands, the fingers lax, the tattered rag doll soaked with blood. He turns away, gazes at his face in the night window, hollow-eyed, framed by his wet-looking hair, the skin greenish black, bleared with soot and the dark shapes of trees rushing past behind it.

He clambers past the old woman’s knees into the aisle, stands between cars, smokes, tosses the butt, pisses into the void. He senses himself going the same way—off into nothingness. He could fall away here and never be found.

Marshland, a dimly seen horizon. He returns to his seat. The train is chilly and damp or overheated and muggy; he either sweats or shivers, perhaps both: he burns and freezes, as in love. The bristly upholstery of the seat back is musty and comfortless, and rasps against his cheek. At last he sleeps, mouth open, head fallen to the side, against the dirty glass. In his ears is the ticking of the knitting needles, and under that the clacking of the wheels along the iron rails, like the workings of some relentless metronome.

Now she imagines him dreaming. She imagines him dreaming of her, as she is dreaming of him. Through a sky the colour of wet slate they fly towards each other on dark invisible wings, searching, searching, doubling back, drawn by hope and longing, baffled by fear. In their dreams they touch, they intertwine, it’s more like a collision, and that is the end of the flying. They fall to earth, fouled parachutists, botched and cindery angels, love streaming out behind them like torn silk. Enemy groundfire comes up to meet them.

A day passes, a night, a day. At a stop he gets out, buys an apple, a Coca-Cola, a half-pack of cigarettes, a newspaper. He should have brought a mickey or even a whole bottle, for the oblivion that’s in it. He looks out through the rain-blurred windows at the long flat fields unrolling like stubbled rugs, at the clumps of trees; his eyes cross with drowsiness. In the evening there’s a lingering sunset, receding westward as he approaches, wilting from pink to violet. Night falls with its fitfulness, its starts and stops, the iron screams of the train. Behind his eyes is redness, the red of tiny hoarded fires, of explosions in the air.

He wakes as the sky grows lighter; he can make out water on one side, flat and shoreless and silvery, the inland lake at last. On the other side of the tracks are small discouraged houses, laundry drooping on the lines in their yards. Then an encrusted brick smokestack, a blank-eyed factory with a tall chimney; then another factory, its many windows reflecting palest blue.

She imagines him descending into the early morning, walking through the station, through the long vaulted hall lined with pillars, across the marble floor. Echoes float there, blurred loudspeaker voices, their messages obscure. The air smells of smoke—the smoke of cigarettes, of trains, of the city itself, which is more like dust. She too is walking through this dust or smoke; she’s poised to open her arms, to be lifted up by him into the air. Joy clutches her by the throat, indistinguishable from panic. She can’t see him. Dawn sun comes in through the tall arched windows, the smoky air ignites, the floor glimmers. Now he’s in focus, at the far end, each detail distinct—eye, mouth, hand—though tremulous, like a reflection on a shivering pool.

But her mind can’t hold him, she can’t fix the memory of what he looks like. It’s as if a breeze blows over the water and he’s dispersed, into broken colours, into ripples; then he reforms elsewhere, past the next pillar, taking on his familiar body. Around him is a shimmering.

The shimmering is his absence, but it appears to her as light. It’s the simple daily light by which everything around her is illuminated. Every morning and night, every glove and shoe, every chair and plate.

The cubicle

From here on in, things take a darker turn. But then, you knew they would. You knew it, because you already know what happened to Laura.

Laura herself didn’t know it, of course. She had no thought of playing the doomed romantic heroine. She became that only later, in the frame of her own outcome and thus in the minds of her admirers. In the course of daily life she was frequently irritating, like anyone. Or dull. Or joyful, she could be that as well: given the right conditions, the secret of which was known only to her, she could drift off into a kind of rapture. It’s her flashes of joy that are most poignant for me now.

And so in memory she rambles through her mundane activities, to the outward eye nothing very unusual—a bright-haired girl walking up a hill, intent on thoughts of her own. There are many of these lovely, pensive girls, the landscape is cluttered with them, there’s one born every minute. Most of the time nothing out of the ordinary happens to them, these girls. This and that and the other, and then they get older. But Laura has been singled out, by you, by me. In a painting she’d be gathering wildflowers, though in real life she rarely did anything of the kind. The earth-faced god crouches behind her in the forest shade. Only we can see him. Only we know he will pounce.

I’ve looked back over what I’ve set down so far, and it seems inadequate. Perhaps there is too much frivolity in it, or too many things that might be taken for frivolity. A lot of clothes, the styles and colours outmoded now, shed butterflies’ wings. A lot of dinners, not always very good ones. Breakfasts, picnics, ocean voyages, costume balls, newspapers, boating on the river. Such items do not assort very well with tragedy. But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell-burst, the plummet of the car from the bridge.

It’s April now. The snowdrops have come and gone, the crocuses are up. Soon I’ll be able to take up residence on the back porch, at my mousy, scarred old wooden table, at least when it’s sunny. No ice on the sidewalks, and so I have begun to walk again. The winter months of inactivity have weakened me; I can feel it in my legs. Nevertheless I am determined to repossess my former territories, revisit my watering holes.

Today, with the aid of my cane and with several pauses along the way, I managed to make it as far as the cemetery. There were the two Chase angels, not obviously any the worse for wear after their winter in the snow; there were the family names, only slightly more illegible, but that might be my eyesight. I ran my fingers along these names, along the letters of them; despite their hardness, their tangibility, they appeared to soften under my touch, to fade, to waver. Time has been at them with its sharp invisible teeth.

Someone had cleared away last autumn’s soggy leaves from Laura’s grave. There was a small bunch of white narcissi, already wilted, the stems wrapped in aluminum foil. I scooped it up and chucked it into the nearest bin. Who do they think appreciates these offerings of theirs, these worshippers of Laura? More to the point, who do they think picks up after them? Them and their floral trash, littering the precincts with the tokens of their spurious grief.

I’ll give you something to cry about,
Reenie would say. If we’d been her real children she would have slapped us. As it was, she never did, so we never found out what this threatening
something
might be.

On my return journey I stopped at the doughnut shop. I must have looked as tired as I felt, because a waitress came over right away. Usually they don’t serve tables, you have to stand at the counter and carry things yourself, but this girl—an oval-faced girl, dark-haired, in what looked like a black uniform—asked me what she could bring me. I ordered a coffee and, for a change, a blueberry muffin. Then I saw her talking to another girl, the one behind the counter, and I realized that she wasn’t a waitress at all, but a customer, like myself: her black uniform wasn’t even a uniform, only a jacket and slacks. Silver glittered on her somewhere, zippers perhaps: I couldn’t make out the details. Before I could thank her properly she was gone.

So refreshing, to find politeness and consideration in girls of that age. Too often (I reflected, thinking of Sabrina) they display only, thoughtless ingratitude. But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.

Up to a point, of course.

The waitress in her blue smock brought the coffee. Also the muffin, which I regretted almost immediately. I couldn’t make much of an inroad into it. Everything in restaurants is becoming too big, too heavy—the material world manifesting itself as huge damp lumps of dough.

After I’d drunk as much of the coffee as I could manage, I set off to reclaim the washroom. In the middle cubicle, the writings I remembered from last autumn had been painted over, but luckily this season’s had already begun. At the top right-hand corner, one set of initials coyly declared its love for another set, as is their habit. Underneath that, printed neatly in blue:

Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.

Under that, in purple ballpoint cursive:
For an experienced girl call Anita the Mighty Mouth, I’ll take you to Heaven,
and a phone number.

And, under that, in block lettering, and red Magic Marker:
The Last Judgment is at hand. Prepare to meet thy Doom and that means you Anita.

Sometimes I think—no, sometimes I play with the idea—that these washroom scribblings are in reality the work of Laura, acting as if by long distance through the arms and hands of the girls who write them. A stupid notion, but a pleasing one, until I take the further logical step of deducing that in this case they must all be intended for me, because who else would Laura still know in this town? But if they are intended for me, what does Laura mean by them? Not what she says.

At other times I feel a strong urge to join in, to contribute; to link my own tremulous voice to the anonymous chorus of truncated serenades, scrawled love letters, lewd advertisements, hymns and curses.

The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ,

Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit

    Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your Tears blot out a Word of it.

Ha, I think. That would make them sit up and bark.

Some day when I’m feeling better I’ll go back there and actually write the thing down. They should all be cheered by it, for isn’t it what they want? What we all want: to leave a message behind us that has an effect, if only a dire one; a message that cannot be cancelled out.

But such messages can be dangerous. Think twice before you wish, and especially before you wish to make yourself into the hand of fate.

(
Think twice,
said Reenie. Laura said,
Why only twice?
)