The Blind Assassin Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Praise

  I

  The bridge

  The Toronto Star, May 26, 1945

  The Blind Assassin. By Laura Chase. Reingold, Jaynes & Moreau, New York, 1947

  II

  The Blind Assassin: The hard-boiled egg

  The Globe and Mail, June 4, 1947

  The Blind Assassin: The park bench

  The Toronto Star, August 25, 1975

  The Blind Assassin: The carpets

  The Globe and Mail, February 19, 1998

  The Blind Assassin: The lipstick heart

  The Colonel Henry Parkman High School Home and School and Alumni Association Bulletin, Port Ticonderoga, May 1998

  III

  The presentation

  The silver box

  The Button Factory

  Avilion

  The trousseau

  The gramophone

  Bread day

  Black ribbons

  The soda

  IV

  The Blind Assassin: The cafe

  The Port Ticonderoga Herald and Banner, March 16, 1933

  The Blind Assassin: The chenille spread

  The Mail and Empire, December 5, 1934

  The Blind Assassin: The messenger

  The Mail and Empire, December 15, 1934

  The Blind Assassin: Horses of the night

  Mayfair, May 1935

  The Blind Assassin: The bronze bell

  V

  The fur coat

  The Weary Soldier

  Miss Violence

  Ovid's Metamorphoses

  The button factory picnic

  Loaf givers

  Hand-tinting

  The cold cellar

  The attic

  The Imperial Room

  The Arcadian Court

  The tango

  VI

  The Blind Assassin: The houndstooth suit

  The Blind Assassin: Red brocade

  The Toronto Star, August 28, 1935

  The Blind Assassin: Street walk

  The Blind Assassin: The janitor

  Mayfair, February 1936

  The Blind Assassin: Alien on Ice

  VII

  The steamer trunk

  The Fire Pit

  Postcards from Europe

  The eggshell hat

  Besotted

  Sunnyside

  Xanadu

  VIII

  The Blind Assassin: Carnivore stories

  Mayfair, July 1936

  The Blind Assassin: Peach Women of Aa'A

  The Mail and Empire, September 19, 1936

  The Blind Assassin: The Top Hat Grill

  IX

  The laundry

  The ashtray

  The man with his head on fire

  The Water Nixie

  The chestnut tree

  X

  The Blind Assassin: Lizard Men of Xenor

  Mayfair, May 1937

  Letter from BellaVista

  The Blind Assassin: The tower

  The Globe and Mail, May 26, 1937

  The Blind Assassin: Union Station

  XI

  The cubicle

  The kitten

  Beautiful view

  Brightly shone the moon

  Betty's Luncheonette

  The message

  XII

  The Globe and Mail, October 7, 1938

  Mayfair, June 1939

  The Blind Assassin: The Be rage Room

  The Blind Assassin:Yellow curtains

  The Blind Assassin: The telegram

  The Blind Assassin: The destruction of Sakiel-Norn

  XIII

  Gloves

  Home fires

  Diana Sweets

  Escarpment

  XIV

  The golden lock

  Victory comes and goes

  The heap of rubble

  XV

  The Blind Assassin Epilogue: The other hand

  The Port Ticonderoga Herald and Banner, May 29, 1999

  The threshold

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  BY MARGARET ATWOOD

  Copyright Page

  Imagine the monarch Agha Mohammed Khan, who orders the entire population of the city of Kerman murdered or blinded - no exceptions. His praetorians set energetically to work. They line up the inhabitants, slice off the heads of the adults, gouge out the eyes of the children. . . . Later, processions of blinded children leave the city. Some, wandering around in the countryside, lose their way in the desert and die of thirst. Other groups reach inhabited settlements . . . singing songs about the extermination of the citizens of Kerman....

  -- RYSZARD KAPUCISKI I swam, the sea was boundless, I saw no shore.

  Tanit was merciless, my prayers were answered.

  O you who drown in love, remember me.

  --INSCRIPTION ON A CARTHAGINIAN FUNERARY URN

  The word is a flame burning in a dark glass.

  --SHEILA WATSON

  Acclaim for Margaret Atwood's THE BLIND ASSASSIN

  Winner of the Booker Prize and the International Association of Crime Writers Dashiell Hammett Award

  "A literary high-wire act. . . . Big and ambitious. . . . A sweeping family saga."

  --Newsweek

  "Brilliant.... Opulent.... Atwood is a poet . . . as well as a contriver of fiction, and scarcely a sentence of her quick, dry yet avid prose fails to do useful work, adding to a picture that becomes enormous."

  --John Updike, The New Yorker

  "Bewitching. . . . A killer novel.... Atwood's crisp wit and steely realism are reminiscent of Edith Wharton. . . . A wonderfully complex narrative."

  --The Christian Science Monitor

  "With [The Blind Assassin], Ms. Atwood offers added certification to her lofty position in world literature. . . . [It] is marked by lyrical writing and the intricacy of the narrative. The reader is repeatedly caught by surprise. . . . Almost to the last page, the book retains its sense of mystery."

  --Mel Gussow, The New York Times

  "Chilling.... Lyrical.... [Atwood's] most ambitious work to date."

  --The Boston Globe

  "Hauntingly powerful. . . . Margaret Atwood is one of the greatest writers alive. . . . [Her] style is tight, authoritative and as glittering and hard as a diamond. . . . The Blind Assassin is a novel of luminous prose, scalpel-precise insights and fierce characters.... Atwood's new work is so assured, so elegant and so incandescently intelligent, she casts her contemporaries in the shade."

  --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  "Expansive. . . . A tour de force.... [The Blind Assassin] is in the best tradition of gothic melodrama."

  --Chicago Tribune

  "Ingenious.... Atwood performs a spectacular sleight of hand, fashioning a bewitching, brilliantly layered story of how people see only what they wish to."

  --Entertainment Weekly

  "You won't be able to put it down." --New York Post

  "Brilliant. . . . Bountiful. . . . Meticulously furnished with the clothing, cuisine and locutions of the period.... Capacious, audacious."

  --San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle

  "Vintage Atwood--furious, funny, brilliant and subversive. . . . Atwood achieves an almost impossible combination--a hall of mirrors, with cutting insights at every turn, cloaked in a dreamy, all-enveloping atmosphere that seduces the reader with every sentence. . . . Iris Chase Griffen is one of the most memorable in a long line of dangerous, driven Atwood women.... In The Blind Assassin, [Atwood's] talents are on full display."

  --The Times-Picayune

  "Enthralling. . . . Unforgettable. . . . Iris Chase
is a brilliant addition to Atwood's roster of fascinating fictional narrators. Not only is her story sinuously complex, but she is entertaining company."

  --Time

  "Complex and rich in period detail.... [A] stylish family saga."

  --People

  "The Blind Assassin has enough mysteries to keep even a casual reader engaged. . . . There is a steely quality to Ms. Atwood's writing that's a bit scary but also exhilarating; no one gets away with anything."

  --The Wall Street Journal

  "Rewarding. . . . Intricate. . . . Atwood continues to stretch the bounds of fictional technique."

  --The Seattle Times

  "Sexy, readable, far-fetched, and intelligent.... Atwood brings style and substance together to make a beautiful plaster cast of all the proprieties and constrictions of the bourgeois colonial town that, in the decades after the war, British Toronto still was, and adds to it the vivid colors of human cruelty, love, and sin."

  --Vince Passaro, Elle

  "An intricately structured, often poetically rendered novel that's also graced by [Atwood's] mordant wit. . . . So flush is The Blind Assassin with knowing, telling details, it's almost possible to close the book feeling the author has again slipped the bonds to create a fiction more persuasive than reality."

  --Daily News

  "Assured. . . . A harsh portrait of class warfare and sexual exploitation, a knowing satire of pulp fiction and literary cultism, and an unflinching meditation on the uses of art, all wrapped up with Atwood's customary aplomb."

  --Chicago Sun-Times

  "Atwood's best novel to date.... It's a fair bet that The Blind Assassin will join that list of novels that stand beyond the reach of criticism."

  --The Denver Post

  "The Blind Assassin is by far the most intricately plotted of Atwood's novels to date, a puzzle designed to beguile the reader much as the tales of Scheherazade beguiled King Shahryar."

  --The Oregonian

  "Intricate, haunting.... The Blind Assassin . . . is the kind of story so full of intrigue and desperation that you take it to bed with you simply because you can't bear to put it down. . . . Atwood has achieved an astonishing feat. It's one thing to write an accomplished novel; it's another entirely to spin a tale so brilliantly that the reader internalizes it."

  --Harper's Bazaar

  "Entirely convincing.... Atwood is wonderfully perceptive."

  --The Economist

  I

  The bridge

  Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car fell a hundred feet into the ravine, smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow creek at the bottom. Chunks of the bridge fell on top of it. Nothing much was left of her but charred smithereens.

  I was informed of the accident by a policeman: the car was mine, and they'd traced the licence. His tone was respectful: no doubt he recognized Richard's name. He said the tires may have caught on a streetcar track or the brakes may have failed, but he also felt bound to inform me that two witnesses - a retired lawyer and a bank teller, dependable people - had claimed to have seen the whole thing. They'd said Laura had turned the car sharply and deliberately, and had plunged off the bridge with no more fuss than stepping off a curb. They'd noticed her hands on the wheel because of the white gloves she'd been wearing.

  It wasn't the brakes, I thought. She had her reasons. Not that they were ever the same as anybody else's reasons. She was completely ruthless in that way.

  "I suppose you want someone to identify her," I said. "I'll come down as soon as I can." I could hear the calmness of my own voice, as if from a distance. In reality I could barely get the words out; my mouth was numb, my entire face was rigid with pain. I felt as if I'd been to the dentist. I was furious with Laura for what she'd done, but also with the policeman for implying that she'd done it. A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water.

  "I'm afraid there will be an inquest, Mrs. Griffen," he said.

  "Naturally," I said. "But it was an accident. My sister was never a good driver."

  I could picture the smooth oval of Laura's face, her neatly pinned chignon, the dress she would have been wearing: a shirtwaist with a small rounded collar, in a sober colour - navy blue or steel grey or hospital-corridor green. Penitential colours - less like something she'd chosen to put on than like something she'd been locked up in. Her solemn half-smile; the amazed lift of her eyebrows, as if she were admiring the view.

  The white gloves: a Pontius Pilate gesture. She was washing her hands of me. Of all of us.

  What had she been thinking of as the car sailed off the bridge, then hung suspended in the afternoon sunlight, glinting like a dragonfly for that one instant of held breath before the plummet? Of Alex, of Richard, of bad faith, of our father and his wreckage; of God, perhaps, and her fatal, triangular bargain. Or of the stack of cheap school exercise books that she must have hidden that very morning, in the bureau drawer where I kept my stockings, knowing I would be the one to find them.

  When the policeman had gone I went upstairs to change. To visit the morgue I would need gloves, and a hat with a veil. Something to cover the eyes. There might be reporters. I would have to call a taxi. Also I ought to warn Richard, at his office: he would wish to have a statement of grief prepared. I went into my dressing room: I would need black, and a handkerchief.

  I opened the drawer, I saw the notebooks. I undid the crisscross of kitchen string that tied them together. I noticed that my teeth were chattering, and that I was cold all over. I must be in shock, I decided.

  What I remembered then was Reenie, from when we were little. It was Reenie who'd done the bandaging, of scrapes and cuts and minor injuries: Mother might be resting, or doing good deeds elsewhere, but Reenie was always there. She'd scoop us up and sit us on the white enamel kitchen table, alongside the pie dough she was rolling out or the chicken she was cutting up or the fish she was gutting, and give us a lump of brown sugar to get us to close our mouths. 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 Toronto Star, May 26, 1945

  QUESTIONS RAISED IN CITY DEATH

  SPECIAL TO THE STAR

  A coroner's inquest has returned a verdict of accidental death in last week's St. Clair Ave. fatality. Miss Laura Chase, 25, was travelling west on the afternoon of May 18 when her car swerved through the barriers protecting a repair site on the bridge and crashed into the ravine below, catching fire. Miss Chase was killed instantly. Her sister, Mrs. Richard E. Griffen, wife of the prominent manufacturer, gave evidence that Miss Chase suffered from severe headaches affecting her vision. In reply to questioning, she denied any possibility of intoxication as Miss Chase did not drink.

  It was the police view that a tire caught in an exposed streetcar track was a contributing factor. Questions were raised as to the adequacy of safety precautions taken by the City, but after expert testimony by City engineer Gordon Perkins these were dismissed.

  The accident has occasioned renewed protests over the state of the streetcar tracks on this stretch of roadway. Mr. Herb T. Jolliffe, representing local ratepayers, told Star reporters that this was not the first mishap caused by neglected tracks. City Council should take note.

  The Blind Assassin. By Laura Chase. Reingold, Jaynes & Moreau, New York, 1947

  Prologue: Perennials for the Rock Garden

  She has a single photograph of him. She tucked it into a brown envelope on which she'd written clippings, and hid the envelope between the pages of Perennials for the Rock Garden, where no one else would ever look.

  She's preserved this photo carefully, because it's almost all she has left of him. It's black and white, taken by one of those boxy, cumbers
ome flash cameras from before the war, with their accordion-pleat nozzles and their well-made leather cases that looked like muzzles, with straps and intricate buckles. The photo is of the two of them together, her and this man, on a picnic. Picnic is written on the back, in pencil - not his name or hers, just picnic. She knows the names, she doesn't need to write them down.

  They're sitting under a tree; it might have been an apple tree; she didn't notice the tree much at the time. She's wearing a white blouse with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and a wide skirt tucked around her knees. There must have been a breeze, because of the way the shirt is blowing up against her; or perhaps it wasn't blowing, perhaps it was clinging; perhaps it was hot. It was hot. Holding her hand over the picture, she can still feel the heat coming up from it, like the heat from a sun-warmed stone at midnight.

  The man is wearing a light-coloured hat, angled down on his head and partially shading his face. His face appears to be more darkly tanned than hers. She's turned half towards him, and smiling, in a way she can't remember smiling at anyone since. She seems very young in the picture, too young, though she hadn't considered herself too young at the time. He's smiling too - the whiteness of his teeth shows up like a scratched match flaring - but he's holding up his hand, as if to fend her off in play, or else to protect himself from the camera, from the person who must be there, taking the picture; or else to protect himself from those in the future who might be looking at him, who might be looking in at him through this square, lighted window of glazed paper. As if to protect himself from her. As if to protect her. In his outstretched, protecting hand there's the stub end of a cigarette.

  She retrieves the brown envelope when she's alone, and slides the photo out from among the newspaper clippings. She lays it flat on the table and stares down into it, as if she's peering into a well or pool - searching beyond her own reflection for something else, something she must have dropped or lost, out of reach but still visible, shimmering like a jewel on sand. She examines every detail. His fingers bleached by the flash or the sun's glare; the folds of their clothing; the leaves of the tree, and the small round shapes hanging there - were they apples, after all? The coarse grass in the foreground. The grass was yellow then because the weather had been dry.

  Over to one side - you wouldn't see it at first - there's a hand, cut by the margin, scissored off at the wrist, resting on the grass as if discarded. Left to its own devices.

  The trace of blown cloud in the brilliant sky, like ice cream smudged on chrome. His smoke-stained fingers. The distant glint of water. All drowned now.

  Drowned, but shining.

  II