The Robber Bride (55 page)

Roz calls up Tony at her History Department office. “You won’t believe this,” she says.

There is a pause while Tony tries to guess what it is she’s being called upon not to believe. “Probably not,” she says.

“Zenia’s back in town,” says Roz.

There’s another pause. “You were talking to her?” says Tony.

“I ran into her in a restaurant,” says Roz.

“You never just run into Zenia,” says Tony. “Look out, is my advice. What’s she up to? There must be something.”

“I think she’s changed,” says Roz. “She’s different from the way she used to be.”

“A leopard cannot change its spots,” says Tony. “Different how?”

“Oh, Tony, you’re so pessimistic!” says Roz. “She seemed – well, nicer. More human. She’s a freelance journalist now, she’s writing on women’s issues. Also” – Roz drops her voice – “her tits are bigger.”

“I don’t think tits can grow,” says Tony dubiously, having once looked into it.

“Most likely they didn’t,” says Roz. “They’re doing a lot of artificial ones now. I bet she got them implanted.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me,” says Tony. “She’s upping her strike capability. But tits or no tits, watch your back.”

“I’m just having her over for a drink,” says Roz. “I have to, really. She knew my father, during the war.” The full implications of which Tony could hardly be expected to understand.

So nobody could say, later, that Roz wasn’t warned. And nobody did say it, and nobody said, either, that Roz
was
warned, because Tony wasn’t one of those intolerable serves-you-right friends and she never reminded Roz of the precautions she had urged. But once the chips were down, Roz reminded herself. You walked into it with your eyes open, she would berate herself. Dimwit! What led you on?

She knows now what it was. It was Pride, deadliest of the Seven Deadlies; the sin of Lucifer, the wellspring of all the others. Vainglory, false courage, bravado. She must have thought she was some kind of a lion-tamer, some kind of a bullfighter; that she could succeed where her two friends had failed. Why not? She knew more than they’d known, because she knew their stories. Forewarned was forearmed. Also she was overconfident. She must have thought she
would be guarded and adroit. She must have thought she could handle Zenia. She’d once had pretty much the same attitude towards Mitch, come to think of it.

Not that she’d felt the pride working in her at the time. Not at all. That was the thing about sins – they could dress up, they could disguise themselves so you hardly knew them. She hadn’t thought she was being proud, merely hospitable. Zenia wanted to say thank you, because of Roz’s father, and it would have been very wrong of Roz to deny her the opportunity.

There had been another kind of pride, too. She’d wanted to be proud of her father. Her flawed father, her cunning father, her father the fixer, her father the crook. She’d told little bits of his war story when people were interviewing her for magazine profiles, Roz the Business Whiz,
how did you get your start, how do you juggle all your different lives, what do you do about daycare, how does your husband cope, what do you do about the housework
, but even while she was telling about him, her father the hero, her father the rescuer, she knew she was sprucing him up, shining a good light on him, pinning posthumous medals onto his chest. He himself had refused to discuss it, this shadowy part of his life.
What do you need to know for?
he’d say.
That time is over. People could get hurt
. Waiting for Zenia, she’d been more than a little nervous about what she might find out.

46

W
hen Zenia does come for a drink, finally – she hasn’t rushed it – it’s a Friday and Roz is wiped because it’s been a vile week at the office, input overload times ten, and the twins have chosen this day to give each other haircuts because they want to be punk rockers, even though they’re only seven, and Roz has been intending to parade them for Zenia but now they look as if they have a bad case of mange, and they show no signs of repentance at all, and anyway Roz doesn’t feel she should display anger because girls should not be given the idea that being pretty is the only thing that counts and that other people’s opinions of how they ought to arrange their bodies are more important than their own.

So after her first yelp of surprise and dismay she has tried to act as if everything is normal, which in a way it is, although her tongue is just a stub because she’s bitten it so hard, and she has dutifully repressed her strong desire to send them upstairs to take baths or play in their playroom, and when Zenia arrives at the front door, wearing amazing lizard-skin shoes, three hundred bucks at least and with heels so high her legs are a mile long, and a cunning fuchsia-and-black
raw silk suit with a little nipped-in waist and a tight skirt well above the knees – Roz is so disgusted that mini-skirts have come back, what are you supposed to do if you have serious thighs, and she remembers those skirts from the last time around, in the sixties, you had to sit down with your legs glued together or all would be on view, the once-unmentionable, the central item, the foul and disgraceful blot, the priceless treasure, an invitation to male peering, to lustful pinching and leering, to foaming at the mouth, to rape and pillage, just as the nuns always warned – there are the twins, wearing Roz’s cast-off slips from their dress-up box and running down the hall with Mitch’s electric shaver, chasing the cat, because they want it to be a punk rock mascot, although Roz has told them before that the shaver is strictly out of bounds and they will be in deep trouble if Mitch discovers cat fur caught in it, it’s bad enough when Roz can’t find her own shaver and uses Mitch’s on her legs and pits and isn’t careful enough washing the stubble out of it. The twins pay no attention to her because they assume she’ll cover for them, lie herself blue, hurl her body in front of the bullets, and they’re right, she will.

Zenia sees them, and says, “Are those yours? Did they fall in the food processor?” and it’s just like something Roz might have said herself, or thought at least, and Roz doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

She laughs, and they have the drink in the sun room, which Roz refuses to call the conservatory even though she’s always hankered after a conservatory, a conservatory with miniature orange trees in it, or orchids, like the ones in twenties murder mysteries, the kind with the map of the English mansion and an X where the body gets found, in the conservatory quite frequently. But although the sun room is glass and has a Victorian cupola thing on top it’s too small to be a real conservatory, and the word itself is too highfalutin for the voice of Roz’s mother, which lives on intermittently inside Roz’s
head and would sneer, although it’s full of plants, plants with limited lifespans, because whose responsibility are they exactly? Mitch says he doesn’t have the time, although he was the one who ordered all this vegetation; but Roz’s thumb is not green, it’s brown, the brown of withered sedges. It’s not that she doesn’t want the plants to live. She even likes them, though she can’t tell the difference between a begonia and a rhododendron. But these things should be done by professionals: a plant service. They come, they see, they water, they cart away the dying, they bring fresh troops.

She has a service like that for the office, so why not here? Mitch says he doesn’t want yet more strangers tramping through the house – he’s suffering from decorator burnout – but it’s possible that he likes the image of Roz with an apron and a watering can, just as he likes the image of Roz with an apron and a frying pan, and an apron and a feather duster, even though Roz can’t cook her way out of a paper bag, why did God make restaurants if he intended her to cook, and she has a phobia about feather dusters, having been force-fed on them in childhood. The constant is the apron, the Good Housekeeping guarantee that Roz will always be home whenever Mitch chooses to get back there.

Or there may be another agenda, another nuance to the guilt Roz is supposed to feel, and does feel, over the
kaput
plants, because Mitch wanted a swimming pool instead of a sun room, so he could dive into a chlorine purification bath and sterilize his chest hair and kill whatever athlete’s foot and crotch fungus and tongue rot he may have picked up from plucking the ripening floozies; but Roz said an outdoor swimming pool was ridiculous in Canada, two months of swelter and ten of freeze-your-buns-off, and she refused to have an indoor one because she knew people who did and their houses smelled like gas refineries on a hot day because of all the chemicals, and there would be complicated machinery that would break down and that Roz would somehow be responsible for getting fixed. The
worst thing about swimming pools as far as Roz is concerned is that they are one step too close to the great outdoors. Wildlife falls into them. Ants, moths, and such. Like the lake at summer camp, she’d be flailing along and suddenly there would be a bug, right at nose level. Swimming, in Roz’s opinion, is a major health hazard.

Zenia laughs and says she couldn’t agree more, and Roz talks on, because she’s nervous at seeing Zenia again after all these years, she remembers the reputation, the aura of green poison that encircled Zenia, the invisible incandescence, touch her and you’d get burned; and she remembers history, the stories of Tony and Charis. So she has to step carefully here, it’s no wonder she’s nervous, and when she’s nervous she talks. Talks, and also eats, and also drinks. Zenia takes one olive and chews it daintily, Roz gobbles the lot, and touches up Zenia’s martini, and pours herself another, and offers a cigarette, words pouring out of her like ink from a squid. Camouflage. She’s relieved to note that Zenia smokes. It would be intolerable if she were thin and well-dressed and unwrinkled and a knockout, and a non-smoker as well.

“So,” says Roz, when she’s made a sufficient fool of herself to consider the ice broken. “My father.” Because this is what she wants, this is the point of the visit. Isn’t it?

“Yes,” says Zenia. She leans forward and sets down her glass, and rests her chin thoughtfully on one hand and frowns slightly. “I was only a baby, of course. So I have no real memories of that time. But my aunt always talked about your father, before she died. About how he got us out. I guess if it weren’t for him I’d just be ashes now.

“It was in Berlin. That’s where my parents lived, in a good neighbourhood, in a respectable apartment – it was one of those old Berlin buildings with the mosaic tiles in the front hall and the oblong staircase with the wooden banister, and the maid’s room and the back balcony overlooking a courtyard, for hanging out the wash.
I know, because I saw it – I went back. I was there in the late seventies, I had an assignment in Berlin – the Berlin nightlife, for some travel magazine, you know the sort of thing, sexy cabaret, kinky strip clubs, telephones on the tables. So I took the afternoon off and I found it. I had the address, from some old papers of my aunt’s. The buildings all around were newer, they’d been rebuilt after the bombing, the whole place was practically levelled; it was amazing, but that one old building was still there.

“I rang all the buzzers and someone opened the door, and I went in and up the stairs, just as my parents must have done hundreds of times. I touched the same banister, I turned the same corners. I knocked at the door, and when it opened I said some relatives of mine had once lived there and could I look around – I speak a little German, because of my aunt, though my accent’s old-fashioned – and the people let me in. They were a young couple with a baby, they were very nice, but I couldn’t stay long. I really couldn’t stand it, the rooms, the light coming through the windows … they were the same rooms, it was the same light. I think my parents became real to me for the first time. Everything, all of it became real. Before that, it was just a bad story.”

Zenia stops talking. This is what people often do when they come to the hard part, Roz has discovered. “A bad story,” she prompts.

“Yes,” says Zenia. “It was already the war. Things were in short supply. My aunt had never married, there was such a shortage of men after the first war a lot of women couldn’t, so she thought of our family as her family too, and she used to do things for us. Mother us – that’s how she put it. So on this one day, my aunt was going to my parents’ apartment; she was taking them some bread she’d baked. She went up the stairs as usual – there was a lift, one of those lifts like an iron cage, I saw it – but it was out of order. As she was about to knock, the door on the other side of the landing opened and the woman who lived there – my aunt knew her only by
sight – this woman came out and grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her inside. ‘Don’t go in, don’t try to go in there,’ she said. ‘They’ve been taken away.’

“ ‘Taken, where?’ said my aunt. She didn’t ask who by, she didn’t need to ask that.

“ ‘Don’t try to find out,’ said the woman. ‘Better not.’ She had me in there with her because my mother had seen them coming, she’d looked out the window and she’d seen them coming along the street, and then when they’d turned in at the doorway and started up the stairs she’d guessed where they were headed and she’d run out the back door, the maid’s door, and along the back balcony, with me wrapped up in a shawl – the balconies at the back adjoined one another – and she’d pounded at this woman’s kitchen door, and the woman had taken me in. It happened so fast she hardly knew what she was doing, and most likely if she’d had time to think she never would have done anything so dangerous. She was just an ordinary woman, obedient and so on, but I suppose if someone shoves a baby at you, you can’t just step back and let it fall to the ground.

“I was the only one saved, the others were all taken. I had an older brother, and an older sister too. I was much younger, I was a late baby. I have their picture; it’s something my aunt brought with her. See –” Zenia opens her purse, then her wallet, and slides out a snapshot. It’s a square picture with a wide white border, the figures tiny and fading: a family group, father, mother, two young children, and another older woman, off to one side. The aunt, Roz assumes. Both of the children are blond.