The Blind Assassin

by Margaret Atwood

At night the house was more than ever like a stranger’s.

And so Laura and I were brought up by her. We grew up inside her house; that is to say, inside her conception of herself. And inside her conception of who we ought to be, but weren’t. As she was dead by then, we couldn’t argue.

Boats are female for Walter, as are busted car engines and broken lamps and radios – items of any kind that can be fiddled with by men adroit with gadgetry, and restored to a condition as good as new. Why do I find this reassuring? Perhaps I believe, in some childish, faith-filled corner of myself, that Walter might yet take out his pliers and his ratchet set and do the same for me.

Both sides feel they have lost.

Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence.

“Chase Heir Hero Returns,” the paper will trumpet. That’s another thing: my father is now the heir, which is to say he’s fatherless as well as brotherless. The kingdom is in his hands. It feels like mud.

They were now strangers, and – it must have occurred to them – they always had been. How harsh the light was. How much older they’d become.

Over the trenches God had burst like a balloon, and there was nothing left of him but grubby little scraps of hypocrisy.

They’d been killed by the blunderings of a pack of incompetent and criminal old men who might just as well have cut their throats and heaved them over the side of the SS Caledonian.

But appearances are deceptive. I could never have driven off a bridge. My father could have. My mother couldn’t.

F is for Fire, Good servant, bad master. When left to itself It burns faster and faster.

The fire can’t hurt him, nothing can hurt him. I am in love with him for this reason.

“I’m not going to have a husband anyway,” said Laura. “I’m going to live by myself in the garage.” “I’m not going to have one either,” I said, not to be outdone.

Probably God was in the broom closet. It seemed the most likely place.

I could remember her absence, now, much better than her presence.

The bank has Roman pillars, to remind us to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, such as those ridiculous service charges.

“They look bizarre,” I said. “Or very ill. Nobody’s face is green! Or mauve.” Laura was unperturbed. “It’s the colours of their souls,” she said. “It’s the colours they ought to have been.”

Faute de mieux, I was to be the son in Chase and Sons, and if I was ever going to run the show I needed to get my hands dirty.

I felt scorned by the women and stared at by the men.

She’d been living on her nerves, carrying around this immense weight of knowledge like some evil packsack, and now she’d handed it over to me she was free to sleep.

It’s a slow race now, between me and my heart, but I intend to get there first. Where is there? The end, or The End. One or the other. Both are destinations, of a sort.

Wasn’t that right? he asked me, with a smile. He had a habit of appealing to me on matters concerning the ladies.

It hurt me to see my father agreeing with sentiments I felt he didn’t share.

I believe he’s sound, underneath it all.”

Do I blame him? No. Not any more. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but he was only doing what would have been considered – was considered, then – the responsible thing. He was doing the best he knew how.

It was God, looking down with his blank, ironic searchlight of an eye. He was observing me; he was observing my predicament; he was observing my failure to believe in him. There was no floor to my room: I was suspended in the air, about to plummet. My fall would be endless – endlessly down.

Such dismal feelings however do not often persist in the clear light of morning, when you are young.

While saying this, she examined me with interest and a certain chilly amusement, to see how I would take it – this reduction of my engagement ring to a minor errand.

(She was a card player, I discovered later. Bridge, not poker – she would have been good at poker, good at bluffing, but it was too risky, too much a gamble; she liked to bid on known quantities.

(This was how Winifred always spoke of women in relation to Richard – entanglements, like nets, or webs, or snares, or merely like pieces of gummy string left lying around on the ground, that you might get caught on your shoe by mistake.)

Not like you, darling, he says. Like me. I’m the one with nothing to lose. She says, But you’ve got me. I’m not nothing.

The real danger comes from herself. What she’ll allow, how far she’s willing to go.

But in the end, back she comes. There’s no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out; enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.

Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself, through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and snuffles, romance only sighs. Does she want more than that – more of him? Does she want the whole picture?

He likes to imply indifference – that he doesn’t care whether she’ll arrive or not – but it’s just an act, one of several.

It’s best to keep him in suspense, it’s best to keep him hungry.

He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever. Right. Yes. The usual choices.

He’ll be hampered by her ability to see.

Water is nebulous, it has no shape, you can pass your hand right through it; yet it can kill you.

I’m not worried as such. I never worry. But I don’t trust what’s happening. I don’t trust my friends. My so-called friends.

Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn’t even know he’s been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off.

To expose the workings of the system, the machinery, the way it keeps you alive just so long as you’ve got some kick left in you, how it uses you up, turns you into a cog or a souse, crushes your face into the muck one way or another.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.

No cloud without a silver lining, is their motto. And no silver lining without a cloud.

I’d felt like crying, but cry once and it’s all over: if you cry, the reliable men will despise you, and then they will not be reliable any more.

Gazing out the window. Hesitating. Thinking, How lost to myself I have become.

Also of breathlessness, as if I were in over my head. But over my head in what? Not water; something thicker. Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.

I concealed this anxiety of mine as well as I could, and took frequent baths: I felt I was becoming addled inside, like an egg.

At all of these places the car and driver would wait, and I would walk briskly in, through whatever gate or door, trying to look purposeful; trying not to look so lonely and empty. Then I would stare and stare, so I would have something to say later.

A topography like wet clay, a surface the hands would glide over.