Blind Assassin (124 page)

The Blind Assassin: Yellow curtains

How did the war creep up? How did it gather itself together? What was it made from? What secrets, lies, betrayals? What loves and hatreds? What sums of money, what metals?

Hope throws a smokescreen. Smoke gets in your eyes and so no one is prepared for it, but suddenly it’s there, like an out-of-control bonfire—like murder, only multiplied. It’s in full spate.

The war takes place in black and white. For those on the sidelines that is. For those who are actually in it there are many colours, excessive colours, too bright, too red and orange, too liquid and incandescent, but for the others the war is like a newsreel—grainy, smeared, with bursts of staccato noise and large numbers of grey-skinned people rushing or plodding or falling down, everything elsewhere.

She goes to the newsreels, in the movie theatres. She reads the papers. She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

She’s made up her mind. She’s determined now, she’ll sacrifice everything and everyone. Nothing and nobody will stand in her way.

This is what she’ll do. She has it all planned out. She’ll leave the house one day as if it’s any other day. She’ll have money, money of some description. This is the unclear part, but surely something will be possible. What do other people do? They go to the pawnshop, and that’s what she will have done as well. She’ll get the money by pawning things: a gold watch, a silver spoon, a fur coat. Bits and pieces. She’ll pawn them little by little and they won’t be missed.

It won’t be enough money but it will have to be enough. She’ll rent a room, an inexpensive room but not too dingy—nothing a coat of paint won’t brighten up. She’ll write a letter saying she isn’t coming back. They’ll send emissaries, ambassadors, then lawyers, they’ll threaten, they’ll penalize, she’ll be afraid all the time but she’ll hold firm. She’ll burn all her bridges except the bridge to him, even though the bridge to him is so tenuous.
I’ll be back,
he said, but how could he be sure? You can’t guarantee such a thing.

She’ll live on apples and soda crackers, on cups of tea and glasses of milk. Cans of baked beans and corned beef. Also on fried eggs when available, and slices of toast, which she’ll eat at the corner café where the newsboys and early drunks also eat. Veterans will eat there too, more and more of them as the months go past: men missing hands, arms, legs, ears, eyes. She’ll wish to talk with them, but she won’t because any interest from her would be sure to be misunderstood. Her body as usual would get in the way of free speech. Therefore she will only eavesdrop.

In the café the talk will be about the end of the war, which everyone says is coming. It will only be a matter of time, they’ll say, before it’ll all be mopped up and the boys will be back. The men who say this will be strangers to one another, but they’ll exchange such comments anyway, because the prospect of victory will make them talkative. There will be a different feeling in the air, part optimism, part fear. Any day now the ship will come in, but who can tell what might be on it?

Her apartment will be above a grocery store, with a kitchenette and a small bathroom. She will buy a house plant—a begonia, or else a fern. She will remember to water this plant and it will not die. The woman running the grocery store will be dark-haired and plump and motherly, and will talk about her thinness and the need for her to eat more, and about what should be done for a chest cold. Perhaps she will be Greek; Greek, or something like it, with big arms and a centre part in her hair, and a bun at the back. Her husband and son will be overseas; she’ll have pictures of them, framed in painted wood, hand-tinted, beside the cash register.

Both of them—she and this woman—will spend a lot of time listening: for footsteps, a telephone call, a knock on the door. It’s hard to sleep under these circumstances: they’ll discuss remedies for sleeplessness. Occasionally the woman will press an apple into her hand, or an acid-green candy from the glass container of them on the counter. Such gifts will be more comforting to her than their low price would suggest.

How will he know where to reclaim her? Now that her bridges have been burned. He’ll know, however. He’ll find out somehow, because journeys end in lovers meeting. They should. They must.

She’ll sew curtains for the windows, yellow curtains, the colour of canaries or the yolks of eggs. Cheerful curtains, like sunshine. Never mind that she doesn’t know how to sew, because the woman downstairs will help her. She’ll starch the curtains and hang them up. She’ll get down on her knees with a whisk and clean out the mouse droppings and dead flies under the kitchen sink. She’ll repaint a set of canisters she’ll find in a junk store, and stencil on them: Tea, Coffee, Sugar, Flour. She will hum to herself while doing this. She’ll buy a new towel, a whole set of new towels. Also sheets, these are important, and pillowcases. She’ll brush her hair a lot.

These are the joyful things she will do, while waiting for him.

She’ll buy a radio, a small tinny secondhand one, at the pawnshop; she’ll listen to the news, to keep up with current events. Also she’ll have a telephone: a telephone will be necessary in the long run, although no one will call her on it, not yet. Sometimes she’ll pick it up just to listen to it purr. Or else there will be voices on it, having a conversation on the party line. Mostly it will be women, exchanging the details of meals and weather and bargains and children, and of men who are somewhere else.

None of this happens, of course. Or it does happen, but not so you would notice. It happens in another dimension of space.

The Blind Assassin: The telegram

The telegram is delivered in the usual way, by a man in a dark uniform whose face brings no glad tidings. When they’re hired for the job they teach them that expression, remote but doleful, like a dark blank bell. The closed coffin look.

The telegram comes in a yellow envelope with a glassine window, and it says the same thing telegrams like that always say—the words distant, like the words of a stranger, an intruder, standing at the far end of a long empty room. There aren’t many words, but every word is distinct:
inform, loss, regret.
Careful, neutral words, with a hidden question behind them:
What did you expect?

What’s this about? Who is this? she says. Oh. I remember. It’s him. That man. But why did they send it to me? I’m scarcely the next of kin!

Kin? says one of them. Did he have any? It’s meant to be a witticism.

She laughs. It’s nothing to do with me. She crumples up the telegram, which she assumes they’ve read on the sly before passing it on to her. They read all of the mail; that goes without saying. She sits down, a little too abruptly. I’m sorry, she says. I feel quite strange all of a sudden.

Here you go. This’ll buck you up. Drink it down, that’s the ticket.

Thank you. It’s nothing to do with me, but still it’s a shock. It’s like someone walking on your grave. She shivers.

Easy does it. You look a little green. Don’t take it personally.

Perhaps it was a mistake. Perhaps they got the addresses mixed.

Could have done. Or perhaps it was his own doing. Perhaps it was his idea of a joke. He was an odd duck, as I recall.

Odder than we thought. What a filthy rotten thing to do! If he was alive you could sue him for mischief.

Perhaps he was trying to make you feel guilty. That’s what they do, his kind. Envious, all of them. Dog in the manger. Don’t let it worry you.

Well, it’s not a very nice thing, no matter how you look at it.

Nice? Why would it be nice? He was never what you’d call
nice.

I suppose I could write to the superior officer. Demand an explanation.

Why would he know anything about it? It wouldn’t have been him, it was some functionary on this end of things. They just use what’s written down in the records. He’d say it was a snafu, by no means the first, from what I hear.

Anyway, no sense in making a fuss. It would just draw attention, and no matter what you do you’ll never find out why he did it.

Not unless the dead walk. Their eyes are bright, all watching her, alert. What are they afraid of? What are they afraid she’ll do?

I wish you wouldn’t use that word, she says fretfully.

What word? Oh. She means
dead.
Might as well call a spade a spade. No sense not. Now, don’t be…

I don’t like spades. I don’t like what they’re used for—digging holes in the ground.

Don’t be morbid.

Get her a handkerchief. It’s no time to badger her. She should go upstairs, have a little rest. Then she’ll be right as rain.

Don’t let it upset you.

Don’t take it to heart.

Forget it.

The Blind Assassin: The destruction of Sakiel-Norn

In the night she wakes abruptly, her heart pounding. She slips out of bed and makes her way silently towards the window, and raises the sash higher and leans out. There’s the moon, almost full, spider-veined with old scars, and below it the ambient sub-orange glow cast up into the sky by the street lights. Beneath is the sidewalk, patchy with shadow and partially hidden by the chestnut tree in the yard, its branches spread out like a hard thick net, its white-moth flowers glimmering faintly.

There’s a man, looking up. She can see the dark eyebrows, the hollows of the eye sockets, the smile a white slash across the oval of his face. At the V below his throat there’s pallor: a shirt. He lifts his hand, motions: he wants her to join him—slip out of the window, climb down through the tree. She’s afraid though. She’s afraid she’ll fall.

Now he’s on the windowsill outside, now he’s in the room. The flowers of the chestnut tree flare up: by their white light she can see his face, the skin greyish, half-toned; two-dimensional, like a photograph, but smudged. There’s a smell of burning bacon. He isn’t looking at her, not at her exactly; it’s as if she is her own shadow and he’s looking at that. At where her eyes would be if her shadow could see.

She longs to touch him, but she hesitates: surely if she were to take him in her arms he would blur, then dissolve, into shreds of cloth, into smoke, into molecules, into atoms. Her hands would go right through him.

I said I would come back.

What’s happened to you? What’s wrong?

Don’t you know?

Then they’re outside, on the roof it seems, looking down on the city, but it isn’t any city she’s ever seen. It’s as if one huge bomb has fallen on it, it’s all in flames, everything burning at once—houses, streets, palaces, fountains and temples—exploding, bursting like fireworks. There’s no sound. It burns silently, as if in a picture—white, yellow, red and orange. No screams. No people in it; the people must be dead already. Beside her he flickers in the flickering light.

Nothing will be left of it, he says. A heap of stones, a few old words. It’s gone now, it’s erased. Nobody will remember.

But it was so beautiful! she says. Now it seems to her like a place she’s known; she’s known it very well, she’s known it like the back of her hand. In the sky three moons have risen. Zycron, she thinks. Beloved planet, land of my heart. Where once, long ago, I was happy. All gone now, all destroyed. She can’t bear to look at the flames.

Beautiful for some, he says. That’s always the problem.

What went wrong? Who did this?

The old woman.

What?

L’histoire, cette vieille dame exaltée et menteuse.

He shines like tin. His eyes are vertical slits. He isn’t what she remembers. Everything that made him singular has been burned away. Never mind, he says. They’ll build it up again. They always do.

Now she’s afraid of him. You’ve changed so much, she says.

The situation was critical. We had to fight fire with fire.

You won, though. I know you won!

Nobody won.

Has she made a mistake? Surely there was news of victory. There was a parade, she says. I heard about it. There was a brass band.

Look at me, he says.

But she can’t. She can’t focus on him, he won’t stay steady. He’s indeterminate, he wavers, like a candle flame but devoid of light. She can’t see his eyes.

He’s dead, of course. Of course he’s dead, because didn’t she get the telegram? But it’s only an invention, all of this. It’s only another dimension of space. Why then is there such desolation?

He’s moving away now, and she can’t call after him, her throat won’t make a sound. Now he’s gone.

She feels a choking pressure around the heart. No,
no, no, no,
says a voice inside her head. Tears are running down her face.

This is when she wakes up really.