The Blind Assassin

by Margaret Atwood

The word is a flame burning in a dark glass. —SHEILA WATSON

Tell me where it hurts, she’d say. Stop howling. Just calm down and show me where. But some people can’t tell where it hurts. They can’t calm down. They can’t ever stop howling.

The real name of the city was erased from memory by the conquerors, and this is why - say the tale tellers - the place is now known only by the name of its own destruction. The pile of stones thus marks both an act of deliberate remembrance, and an act of deliberate forgetting. They’re fond of paradox in that region.

since imperviousness and subterfuge were reserved for the nobility.

He doesn’t mind her nervousness: he likes to think he’s already costing her something.

He puts his jacket around her shoulders. Old tweed, old tobacco, a singed odour. An undertone of salt. His skin’s been there, next to the cloth, and now hers is.

The carpets were woven by slaves who were invariably children, because only the fingers of children were small enough for such intricate work. But the incessant close labour demanded of these children caused them to go blind by the age of eight or nine, and their blindness was the measure by which the carpet-sellers valued and extolled their merchandise: This carpet blinded ten children, they would say. This blinded fifteen, this twenty. Since the price rose accordingly, they always exaggerated. It was the custom for the buyer to scoff at their claims. Surely only seven, only twelve, only sixteen, they would say, fingering the carpet. It’s coarse as a dishcloth. It’s nothing but a beggar’s blanket. It was made by a gnarr.

There were lots of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything, and the gods of Sakiel-Norn were no exception. All of them were carnivorous; they liked animal sacrifices, but human blood was what they valued most. At the city’s founding, so long ago it had passed into legend, nine devout fathers were said to have offered up their own children, to be buried as holy guardians under its nine gates.

I pulled myself up and out of my tangled bed, then forced myself through the usual dawn rituals - the ceremonies we perform to make ourselves look sane and acceptable to other people. The hair must be smoothed down after whatever apparitions have made it stand on end during the night, the expression of staring disbelief washed from the eyes. The teeth brushed, such as they are. God knows what bones I’d been gnawing in my

Next it was time for the graduates to receive their diplomas. Up they trooped, solemn and radiant, in many sizes, all beautiful as only the young can be beautiful. Even the ugly ones were beautiful, even the surly ones, the fat ones, even the spotty ones. None of them understands this - how beautiful they are.

There’s nothing like a shovelful of dirt to encourage literacy.

Looking at the blur of heads, down there in the audience - the older heads - I could imagine a miasma of old spite, old envy, old condemnation, rising up from them as if from a cooling swamp.

But the old wound has split open, the invisible blood pours forth. Soon I’ll be emptied.

Laura borrowed this pen - without asking, as she borrowed everything - then broke it, effortlessly. I forgave her, of course. I always did; I had to, because there were only the two of us. The two of us on our thorn-encircled island, waiting for rescue; and, on the mainland, everyone else.

The front entrance has been widened, a wheelchair ramp installed, the original heavy doors replaced by plate-glass ones: In and Out, Push and Pull, the twentieth century’s bossy quadruplets.

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

So when time had begun to run out on Adelia with no really acceptable husband in sight, she’d married money - crude money, button money. She was expected to refine this money, like oil.

Nevertheless, in this way I collected enough fragments of the past to make a reconstruction of it, which must have borne as much relation to the real thing as a mosaic portrait would to the original. I didn’t want realism anyway: I wanted things to be highly coloured, simple in outline, without ambiguity, which is what most children want when it comes to the stories of their parents. They want a postcard.

From a financial point of view, the war was a miraculous fire: a huge, alchemical conflagration, the rising smoke of which transformed itself into money.

Nobody is born with that kind of selflessness: it can be acquired only by the most relentless discipline, a crushing-out of natural inclination, and by my time the knack or secret of it must have been lost. Or perhaps I didn’t try, having suffered from the effects it had on my mother.

Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it’s noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.

She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone - to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny.

Over the trenches God had burst like a balloon, and there was nothing left of him but grubby little scraps of hypocrisy. Religion was just a stick to beat the soldiers with, and anyone who declared otherwise was full of pious drivel.

(What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves - our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies. Now that I’ve been one myself, I know.)

People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.

An ex-professor once told him he had a diamond-hard intellect and he’d been flattered at the time. Now he considers the nature of diamonds. Although sharp and glittering and useful for cutting glass, they shine with reflected light only. They’re no use at all in the dark.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

Perhaps my steamer trunk should go to Sabrina, despite her decision to remain incommunicado, despite - this is where it festers - her persistent neglect of me. Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both.

The house looked unowned, transient, like a picture in a real-estate flyer. It no longer seemed connected with me in any way. I tried to recall the sound of my footsteps, in winter boots on the dry creaking snow, walking quickly home, late, concocting excuses; the inky portcullis of the doorway; the way the light from the street lamps fell on the snowbanks, ice blue at the edges and spotted with the yellow Braille of dog pee. The shadows were different back then. My uncalm heart, my breath unscrolling, white smoke in the freezing air. The hectic warmth of my fingers; the rawness of my mouth under my fresh lipstick.

Why is a honeymoon called that? Lune de miel, moon of honey - as if the moon itself is not a cold and airless and barren sphere of pockmarked rock, but soft, golden, luscious - a luminous candied plum, the yellow kind, melting in the mouth and sticky as desire, so achingly sweet it makes your teeth hurt. A warm floodlight floating, not in the sky, but inside your own body.

I suppose I ought to have seen Mussolini’s Fascist troops in their black uniforms, marching around and roughing people up - were they doing that yet? - but I did not see them. That sort of thing tends to be invisible at the time unless you yourself happen to be the object of it. Otherwise you see it only later, in newsreels, or else in films made long after the event.

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labelled bones.

When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You’re your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too - leave them behind. You don’t yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.

Perhaps her mind is slipping, perhaps she’s going off the tracks, perhaps she is coming unhinged. Unhinged, like a broken door, like a rammed gate, like a rusting strongbox. When you’re unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things get in that ought to be shut out. The locks lose their powers. The guards go to sleep. The passwords fail.

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.

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

only said marriage was an outworn institution. I said it had nothing to do with love, that’s all. Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can’t put love into a contract.

The baby was brought in later in the afternoon, wrapped in a pink blanket. I’d already named her, in my head. Aimee meant one who was loved, and I certainly hoped she would be loved, by someone. I had doubts about my own capacity to love her, or to love her as much as she’d need. I was spread too thin as it was: I did not think there would be enough of me left over.

What possesses them, these young girls with a talent for self-immolation? Is it what they do to show that girls too have courage, that they can do more than weep and moan, that they too can face death with panache? And where does the urge come from? Does it begin with defiance, and if so, of what? Of the great leaden suffocating order of things, the great spike-wheeled chariot, the blind tyrants, the blind gods? Are these girls reckless enough or arrogant enough to think that they can stop such things in their tracks by offering themselves up on some theoretical altar, or is it a kind of testifying?

asked her what on earth she meant. She said it was obvious: her real mother was Laura, and her real father was that man, the one in The Blind Assassin. Aunt Laura had been in love with him, but we’d thwarted her - disposed of this unknown lover somehow. Scared him off, bought him off, run him off, whatever; she’d lived in Winifred’s house long enough to see how things were done by people like us. Then, when Laura turned out to be pregnant by him, we’d sent her away to cover up the scandal, and when my own baby had died at birth, we’d stolen the baby from Laura and adopted it, and passed it off as our own.

I mourned her, of course. She was my daughter. But I have to admit I mourned the self she’d been at a much earlier age. I mourned what she could have become; I mourned her lost possibilities. More than anything, I mourned my own failures.

I tortured myself with visions of her, imprisoned, struggling, trapped in a painful fantasy of her own making, or trapped in another fantasy, equally painful, which was not hers at all but those of the people around her. And when did the one become the other? Where was the threshold, between the inner world and the outer one? We each move unthinkingly through this gateway every day, we use the passwords of grammar - I say, you say, he and she say, it, on the other hand, does not say - paying for the privilege of sanity with common coin, with meanings we’ve agreed

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 fact is that my heart has been acting up again. Acting up, a peculiar phrase. It’s what people say to minimize the gravity of their condition. It implies that the offending part (heart, stomach, liver, whatever) is a fractious, bratty child, which can be brought into line with a slap or a sharp word. At the same time, that these symptoms - these tremors and pains, these palpitations - are mere theatrics, and that the organ in question will soon stop capering about and making a spectacle of itself, and resume its placid, off-stage existence.

Lugubrious. I know it; and sentimental as well. But please bear with me. The dying are allowed a certain latitude, like children on their birthdays.

Men had urges, in those days; they were numerous, these urges; they lived underground in the dark nooks and crannies of a man’s being, and once in a while they would gather strength and sally forth, like a plague of rats. They were so cunning and strong, how could any real man be expected to prevail against them?

Most of us will. We’ll choose knowledge no matter what, we’ll maim ourselves in the process, we’ll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive: love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We’ll spy relentlessly on the dead: we’ll open their letters, we’ll read their journals, we’ll go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, from those who have deserted us - who’ve left us holding the bag, which is often a good deal emptier than we’d supposed.

The end, a warm safe haven. A place to rest. But I haven’t reached it yet, and I’m old and tired, and on foot, and limping. Lost in the woods, and no white stones to mark the way, and treacherous ground to cover.

Wolves, I invoke you! Dead women with azure hair and eyes like snake-filled pits, I summon you! Stand by me now, as we near the end! Guide my shaking arthritic fingers, my tacky black ballpoint pen; keep my leaking heart afloat for just a few more days, until I can set things in order.

Eros with his bow and arrows is not the only blind god. Justitia is the other one. Clumsy blind gods with edged weapons: Justitia totes a sword, which, coupled with her blindfold, is a pretty good recipe for cutting yourself.