Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

They are also interested in the needle found on the balcony, they continue, and. in the fact that Zenia died of an overdose before even hitting the water. Could she have been trying the stuff out, without knowing the unusual strength of what she was buying, or selling? There were track marks on her left arm, although they looked old. According to the overcoats, there have been more and more overdoses like that; someone is flooding the market with high-octane product, and even the experienced aren’t prepared.

There were nobody’s fingerprints on the needle, except Zenia’s, they tell her. As for her swan dive into the fountain, she could have fallen. She was a tall woman, and the sheet-metal balcony railings were really too low for safety; standards should be improved. Such a thing is possible. If she’d been leaning over. On the other hand, the heroin could have been a plant. It might have been murder.

Or it might have been suicide, Tony tells them. She would like them to believe this. She tells them that Zenia may not have been a well person.

Of course, say the men in overcoats politely. We know about that. We found the prescriptions in her suitcase, we traced the doctor. Seems she had a fake health card as well as some fake passports, but the disease itself was real enough. Six months to live: ovarian cancer. But there was no suicide note.

Tony tells them there wouldn’t have been: Zenia was not really the note-writing kind.

The men in overcoats look at her, their small eyes glinting with scepticism. They don’t buy any of these theories, but they don’t have another one, not one that holds water.

Tony sees how it will be: Zenia will prove too smart for the men in overcoats. She will outfox them, just as she’s always outfoxed everyone else. She finds herself being pleased about this, elated even, as if her faith in Zenia—a faith she didn’t realize she had—is being vindicated. Let them sweat! Why should everyone know everything? It’s not as if there are no precedents: history teems with people who died in unclear ways.

Still, she feels honour-bound to report the conversation about Gerry Bull and Project Babylon, although it’s not merely honour that impels her: she hopes very much that if Zenia was murdered it was by professionals, rather than by anyone she knows. The men tell her they are retracing Zenia’s steps, as best they can, via her plane tickets; she has certainly been in some very odd places in the last little while. But there’s nothing conclusive. They shake hands and depart, asking Tony to call them if she hears anything else. She says she will.

She’s left facing the unlikely possibility that all three of Zenia’s most recent stories—or parts of them, at least—may have been true. What if Zenia’s cries for help really were cries for help, this time?

After the police are finished there is a cremation. Roz pays for it, because when she tracks down the lawyer, the one who arranged Zenia’s funeral the first time around, he is quite annoyed. He takes it as a personal slight that Zenia has chosen to be alive all this time without consulting him about it. Her will was probated the first time around, not that there was anything to probate because she didn’t leave an estate, only a small bequest to an orphanage near Waterloo that turned out not to exist any more, and on top of that he never got paid. So what do they expect from him?

“Nothing,” says Roz. “It will all be taken care of.”

“Well, what about it?” she says to Tony and Charis. “Looks like we got left holding the sack. She doesn’t seem to have any relatives.”

“Except us,” says Charis.

Tony sees no point in contradicting her, because it is Charis’s belief that everyone is related to everyone else through some kind of invisible root system. She says she will take charge of the ashes until the three of them can figure out something more suitable. She puts the canister with Zenia in it down in the cellar, in her box of Christmas tree decorations, wrapped up in red tissue paper, beside the gun: She doesn’t tell West it is there, because this is a female matter.

So now Zenia is History.

No: now Zenia is gone. She is lost and gone forever. She’s a scattering of dust, blown on the wind like spores; she’s an invisible cloud of viruses, a few molecules, dispersing. She will only be history if Tony chooses to shape her into history. At the moment she is formless, a broken mosaic; the fragments of her are in Tony’s hands, because she is dead, and all of the dead are in the hands of the living.

But what is Tony to make of her? The story of Zenia is insubstantial, ownerless, a rumour only, drifting from mouth to mouth and changing as it goes. As with any magician, you saw what she wanted you to see; or else you saw what you yourself wanted to see. She did it with mirrors. The mirror was whoever was watching, but there was nothing behind the two-dimensional image but a thin layer of mercury.

Even the name Zenia may not exist, as Tony knows from looking. She’s attempted to trace its meaning—Xenia, a Russian word for hospitable, a Greek one pertaining to the action of a foreign pollen upon a fruit; Zenaida, meaning daughter of Zeus, and the name of two early Christian martyrs; Zillah, Hebrew, a shadow; Zenobia, the third-century warrior queen of Palmyra in Syria, defeated by the Emperor Aurelian; Xeno, Greek, a stranger, as in xenophobic; Zenana, Hindu, the women’s quarters or harem; Zen, a Japanese meditational religion; Zendic, an Eastern practitioner of heretical magic—these are the closest she has come.

Out of such hints and portents, Zenia devised herself. As for the truth about her, it lies out of reach, because—according-to the records, at any rate—she was never even born.

But why bother, in this day and age—Zenia herself would say—with such a quixotic notion as the truth? Every sobersided history is at least half sleight-of-hand: the right hand waving its poor snippets of fact, out in the open for all to verify, while the left hand busies itself with its own devious agendas, deep in its hidden pockets. Tony is daunted by the impossibility of accurate reconstruction.

Also by its futility. Why does she do what she does? History was once a substantial edifice, with pillars of wisdom and an altar to the goddess Memory, the mother of all nine muses. Now the acid rain and the terrorist bombs and the termites have been at it, and it’s looking less and less like a temple and more and more like a pile of rubble, but it once had a meaningful structure. It was supposed to have something to teach people, something beneficial; some health-giving vitamin or fortune-cookie motto concealed within its heaped-up accounts, most of them tales of greed, violence, viciousness, and lust for power, because history doesn’t concern itself much with those who try to be good. Goodness in any case is problematic, since an action can be good in intent but evil m result, witness missionaries. This is why Tony prefers battles: in a battle there are right actions and wrong actions, and you can tell them apart by who wins.

Still, there was once supposed to be a message. Let that be a lesson to you, adults used to say to children, and historians to their readers. But do the stories of history really teach anything at all? In a general sense, thinks Tony, possibly not.

Despite this she still plods on, still weaves together her informed guesses and plausible assumptions, still ponders over her scraps of fact, her potsherds and broken arrowheads and tarnished necklace beads, arranging them in the patterns she thinks they must once have made. Who cares? Almost nobody. Maybe it’s just a hobby, something to do on a dull day. Or else it’s an act of defiance: these histories may be ragged and threadbare, patched together from worthless leftovers, but to her they are also flags, hoisted with a certain jaunty insolence, waving bravely though inconsequently, glimpsed here and there through the trees, on the mountain roads, among the ruins, on the long march into chaos.