Blind Assassin (27 page)

“Are you a pacifist?” I said. It seemed like the sort of thing he might be. If he said yes, I intended to disagree with him, because I wanted his attention. He was talking mostly to Laura.

“Not a pacifist,” said Alex. “But my parents were both killed in the war. Or I assume they must have been killed.”

Now we’ll get the orphan story, I thought. After all the fuss Reenie’s been making, I hope it’s a good one.

“You don’t know for sure?” said Laura.

“No,” said Alex. “I’m told that I was found sitting on a mound of charred rubble, in a burned-out house. Everyone else there was dead. Apparently I’d been hiding under a washtub or a cooking pot—a metal container of some kind.”

“Where was this? Who found you?” Laura whispered.

“It’s not clear,” said Alex. “They don’t really know. It wasn’t France or Germany. East of that—one of those little countries. I must have been passed from hand to hand; then the Red Cross got hold of me one way or another.”

“Do you remember it?” I said.

“Not really. A few details were misplaced along the way—my name and so forth—and then I ended up with the missionaries, who felt that forgetfulness would be the best thing for me, all things considered. They were Presbyterians, a tidy bunch. We all had our heads shaved, for the lice. I can recall the feeling of suddenly having no hair—how cool it was. That’s when my memories really begin.”

Although I was beginning to like him better, I’m ashamed to admit that I was more than a little skeptical about this story. There was too much melodrama in it—too much luck, both bad and good. I was still too young to be a believer in coincidence. And if he’d been trying to make an impression on Laura—was he trying?—he couldn’t have chosen a better way.

“It must be terrible,” I said, “not to know who you really are.”

“I used to think that,” said Alex. “But then it came to me thatwho I really am is a person who doesn’t need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway—family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I’m free of the temptation, that’s all. I’m free of the strings. Nothing ties me down.” He said something else, but there was an explosion in the sky and I couldn’t hear. Laura heard though; she nodded gravely.

(What was it he said? I found out later. He said,At least you’re never homesick. )

A dandelion of light burst above us. We all looked up. It’s hard not to, at such times. It’s hard not to stand there with your mouth open.

Was that the beginning, that evening—on the dock at Avilion, with the fireworks dazzling the sky? It’s hard to know. Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.

Wild geese fly south, creaking like anguished hinges; along the riverbank the candles of the sumacs burn dull red. It’s the first week of October. Season of woollen garments taken out of mothballs; of nocturnal mists and dew and slippery front steps, and late-blooming slugs; of snapdragons having one last fling; of those frilly ornamental pink-and-purple cabbages that never used to exist, but are all over everywhere now.

Season of chrysanthemums, the funeral flower; white ones, that is. The dead must get so tired of them.

The morning was brisk and fair. I picked a small bunch of yellow and pink snapdragons from the front garden and took them to the cemetery, to place them at the family tomb for the two pensive angels on their white cube: it would be something different for them, I thought. Once there I performed my small ritual—the circumlocution of the monument, the reading of the names. I think I do it silently, but once in a while I catch the sound of my own voice, muttering away like some Jesuit saying a breviary.

To pronounce the name of the dead is to make them live again, said the ancient Egyptians: not always what one might wish.

When I’d been all the way around the monument, I found a girl—a young woman—kneeling before the tomb, or before Laura’s place on it. Her head was bowed. She was wearing black: black jeans, black T-shirt and jacket, a small black knapsack of the kind they carry now instead of purses. She had long dark hair—like Sabrina’s, I thought with a sudden lurching of the heart: Sabrina has come back, from India or wherever she’s been. She’s come back without warning. She’s changed her mind about me. She was intending to surprise me, and now I’ve spoiled it.

But when I peered more closely, I saw this girl was a stranger: some overwrought graduate student, no doubt. At first I’d thought she was praying, but no, she was placing a flower: a single white carnation, the stem wrapped in tinfoil. As she stood up, I saw that she was crying.

Laura touches people. I do not.

After the button factory picnic, there was the usual sort of account of it in theHerald and Banner- which baby had won the Most Beautiful Baby contest, who’d got Best Dog. Also what Father had said in his speech, much abbreviated: Elwood Murray put an optimistic gloss on everything, so it sounded like business as usual. There were also some photos—the winning dog, a dark mop-shaped silhouette; the winning baby, fat as a pincushion, in a frilled bonnet; the step-dancers holding up a giant cardboard shamrock; Father at the podium. It wasn’t a good picture of him: he had his mouth half-open, and looked as if he were yawning.

One of the pictures was of Alex Thomas, with the two of us—me to the left of him, Laura to the right, like bookends. Both of us were looking at him and smiling; he was smiling too, but he’d thrust his hand up in front of him, as gangland criminals did to shield themselves from the flashbulbs when they were being arrested. He’d only managed to blot out half of his face, however. The caption was, “Miss Chase and Miss Laura Chase Entertain an Out-of-Town Visitor.”

Elwood Murray hadn’t managed to track us down that afternoon, in order to find out Alex’s name, and when he’d called at the house he’d got Reenie, who’d said our names should not be bandied about with God knows who, and had refused to tell him. He’d printed the picture anyway, and Reenie was affronted, as much by us as by Elwood Murray. She thought this photo verged in the immodest, even though our legs weren’t showing. She thought we both had silly leers on our faces, like lovelorn geese; with our mouths gaping open like that we might as well have been drooling. We’d made a sorry spectacle of ourselves: everyone in town would laugh at us behind our backs, for mooning over some young thug who looked like an Indian—or, worse, a Jew—and with his sleeves rolled up like that, a Communist into the bargain.

“That Elwood Murray ought to be spanked,” she said. “Thinks he’s so all-fired cute.” She tore the paper up and stuffed it into the kindling box, so Father wouldn’t see it. He must have seen it anyway, down at the factory, but if so he made no comment.

Laura paid a call on Elwood Murray. She did not reproach him or repeat any of what Reenie had said about him. Instead she told him she wanted to become a photographer, like him. No: she wouldn’t have told such a lie. That was only what he inferred. What she really said was that she wanted to learn how to make photographic prints from negatives. This was the literal truth.

Elwood Murray was flattered by this mark of favour from the heights of Avilion—although mischievous, he was a fearful snob—and agreed to let her help him in the darkroom three afternoons a week. She could watch him print the portraits he did on the side, of weddings and children’s graduations and so forth. Although the type was set and the newspaper run off by a couple of men in the back room, Elwood did almost everything else around the weekly paper, including his own developing.

Perhaps he might teach her how to do hand-tinting, as well, he said: it was the coming thing. People would bring in their old black-and-white prints to have them rendered more vivid by the addition of living colour. This was done by bleaching out the darkest areas with a brush, then treating the print with sepia toner to give a pink underglow. After that came the tinting. The colours came in little tubes and bottles, and had to be very carefully applied with tiny brushes, the excess fastidiously blotted off. You needed taste and the ability to blend, so the cheeks wouldn’t look like circles of rouge or the flesh like beige cloth. You needed good eyesight and a steady hand. It was an art, said Elwood—one he was quite proud to have mastered, if he did say so himself. He kept a revolving selection of these hand-tinted photos in one corner of the newspaper-office window, as a sort of advertisement. Enhance Your Memories, said the hand-lettered sign he’d placed beside them.

Young men in the now-outdated uniforms of the Great War were the most frequent subjects; also brides and grooms. Then there were graduation portraits, First Communions, solemn family groups, infants in christening gear, girls in formal gowns, children in party outfits, cats and dogs. There was the occasional eccentric pet—a tortoise, a macaw—and, infrequently, a baby in a coffin, waxen-faced, surrounded by ruffles.

The colours never came out clear, the way they would on a piece of white paper: there was a misty look to them, as if they were seen through cheesecloth. They didn’t make the people seem more real; rather they became ultra-real: citizens of an odd half-country, lurid yet muted, where realism was beside the point.

Laura told me what she was doing vis-a-vis Elwood Murray; she also told Reenie. I expected a protest, an uproar; I expected Reenie to say that Laura was lowering herself, or acting in a tawdry, compromising fashion. Who could tell what might go on in a darkroom, with a young girl and a man and the lights off? But Reenie took the view that it wasn’t as if Elwood was paying Laura to work for him: rather he was teaching her, and that was quite different. It put him on a level with the hired help. As for Laura being in a darkroom with him, no one would think any harm of it, because Elwood was such a pansy. I suspect Reenie was secretly relieved to have Laura showing an interest in something other than God.

Laura certainly showed an interest, but as usual she went overboard. She nicked some of Elwood’s hand-tinting materials and brought them home with her. I found this out by accident: I was in the library, dipping into the books at random, when I noticed the framed photographs of Grandfather Benjamin, each with a different prime minister. Sir John Sparrow Thompson’s face was now a delicate mauve, Sir Mackenzie Bowell’s a bilious green, Sir Charles Tupper’s a pale orange. Grandfather Benjamin’s beard and whiskers had been done in light crimson.

That evening I caught her in the act. There on her dressing table were the little tubes, the tiny brushes. Also the formal portrait of Laura and me in our velvet dresses and Mary Janes. Laura had removed the print from its frame, and was tinting me a light blue. “Laura,” I said, “what in heaven’s name are you up to? Why did you colour those pictures? The ones in the library. Father will be livid.”

“I was just practising,” said Laura. “Anyway, those men needed some enhancing. I think they look better.”

“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 theyought to have been.”

“You’ll get in big trouble! They’ll know who did it.”

“Nobody everlooks at those,” she said. “Nobodycares.”

“Well, you’d better not lay a finger on Grandmother Adelia,” I said. “Nor the dead uncles! Father would have your hide!”

“I wanted to do them in gold, to show they’re in glory,” she said. “But there isn’t any gold. The uncles, not Grandmother. I’d do her a steel grey.”

“Don’t you dare! Father doesn’t believe in glory. And you’d better take those paints back before you’re accused of theft.”

“I haven’t used much,” said Laura. “Anyway, I brought Elwood a jar of jam. It’s a fair trade.”

“Reenie’s jam, I suppose. “Out of the cold cellar—did you ask her? She counts that jam, you know.” I picked up the photograph of the two of us. “Why am I blue?”

“Because you’re asleep,” said Laura.

The tinting materials weren’t the only things she nicked. One of Laura’s jobs was filing. Elwood liked his office kept very neatly, and his darkroom as well. His negatives were placed in glassine envelopes, filed according to the date on which they’d been taken, so it was easy for Laura to locate the negative of the picnic shot. She made two black-and-white prints of it, one day when Elwood had gone out and she had the run of the place to herself. She didn’t tell anybody about this, not even me—not until later. After she’d made the prints, she slipped the negative into her handbag and took it home with her. She did not consider it stealing: Elwood had stolen the picture in the first place by not asking permission of us, and she was only taking away from him something that had never really belonged to him anyway.

After she’d accomplished what she’d set out to do, Laura stopped going to Elwood Murray’s office. She gave him no reason, and no warning. I felt this was clumsy of her, and indeed it was, because Elwood felt slighted. He tried to find out from Reenie if Laura was ill, but all Reenie would say was that Laura must have changed her mind about photography. She was full of ideas, that girl; she always had some bee in her bonnet, and now she must have a different one.