The Blind Assassin

by Margaret Atwood

One day he said to me – he had some English – “Why are you sad?” “I’m not sad,” I said, and began to cry. Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.

Father wouldn’t have left a note though. He would have been aware of the implications.

He turned then, and at first I was not sure he could see me. I stretched out my hand, like a drowning person beseeching rescue. In that moment I had already committed treachery in my heart.

Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.

Sex or death, or both together – that was what they had in mind.

On the eighth day there was an anonymous phone call: Laura was not dead, but was working in a waffle booth at the Sunnyside Amusement Park.

Richard and Winifred would not have wished to be in such close proximity to other people’s armpits, or to those who counted their money in dimes. Though I don’t know why I’m being so holier-than-thou, because I wouldn’t have wanted it either.

It’s all gone now, Sunnyside – swept away by twelve lanes of asphalt highway sometime in the fifties. Dismantled long ago, like so much else. But that August it was still in full swing.

“Thanks for everything, anyway,” she said to the waffle man. She shook hands with him. She didn’t realize he’d cashed her in.

“It may not be fair but it’s true. Underneath, it’s true,” she said.

They said if I wanted to serve God, I should do it in the life to which he has called me.” A pause. “But what life?” she said. “I have no life!”

I thought I could cope with Richard, with Winifred. I thought I could live like a mouse in the castle of the tigers, by creeping around out of sight inside the walls; by staying quiet, by keeping my head down. No: I give myself too much credit. I didn’t see the danger. I didn’t even know they were tigers. Worse: I didn’t know I might become a tiger myself. I didn’t know Laura might become one, given the proper circumstances. Anyone might, for that matter.

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in.

She was necessary to Richard, I on the other hand could always be replaced. My job was to open my legs and shut my mouth.

I will always remember this, she tells herself. Then: Why am I thinking about memory? It’s not then yet, it’s now. It’s not over.

I’ve thought out the story, she says. I’ve thought out the next part of it. Oh? You’ve got your own ideas? I’ve always had my own ideas.

You’re endorsing treachery to one’s country? You’ve traded the general social good for private contentment? Well, those were the people that were going to kill them. Their fellow citizens.

Only a few had those intentions – the elite, the top cards in the deck. You’d condemn the rest along with them? You’d have our twosome betray their own people? That’s pretty selfish of you. It’s history, she says. It’s in The Conquest of Mexico – what’s his name, Cortez – his Aztec mistress, that’s what she did. It’s in the Bible too.

You don’t understand. You don’t even try. You don’t understand at all what it’s like. It’s not as if I enjoy it.

This town is a sieve.

It was spring. The spring of 1936. That was the year everything began to fall apart. Continued to fall apart, that is, in a more serious fashion than it was doing already.

I had to blot out the ambient noise: like a tightrope walker crossing Niagara Falls, I could not afford to look around me, for fear of slipping.

I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it?

I was sand, I was snow – written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

She went so far as to produce an essay entitled,‘Does God Lie?’ It was very unsettling to the entire class.”

“An affirmative one.” She looked down at her desk, where Laura’s essay was spread out in front of her. “She cites – it’s right here – First Kings, chapter twenty-two – the passage in which God deceives King Ahab. ‘Now therefore, behold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets.’ Laura goes on to say that if God did this once, how do we know he didn’t do it more than once, and how can we tell the false prophecies apart from the true ones?”

In her opinion God is like a radio broadcaster and we are faulty radios, a comparison I find disrespectful, to say the least.”

These people needed something to remember themselves by. An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don’t really believe you’re there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.

“That this was what he was really like,” said Laura patiently. “That underneath, he was burning up. All the time.”