Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

Tony sets down her pen. Such thoughts are as yet too nebulous to be formulated for the present purpose, which is a lecture she’s promised to deliver to the Society of Military Historiographers two months from now. What she’s leading up to is the defeat of Otto the Red at the hands of the Sarat;ens on July 13, 982, and its inscription by later chroniclers as moral exemplum. It will be a good lecture, good enough—her lectures are always good enough—but as time goes on she has come to feel, at these events, more and more like a talking dog. Cute, no doubt; a clever trick; a nice dog; but nonetheless a dog. She used to think that her work was accepted or rejected on its own merits, but she’s begun to suspect that the goodness of her lectures is somehow not the point. The point is her dress. She will be patted on the head, praised, fed a few elite dog biscuits, and dismissed, while the boys in the back room get down to the real issue, which is which one of them will be the next society president.

Such paranoia. Tony banishes it, and goes to get herself a drink of water.

She’s in the cellar, in her dressing gown and raccoon slippers, in the middle of the night. She couldn’t sleep, and she didn’t want to disturb West by working in her office, which is down the hall from the bedroom. Her computer makes beeping sounds, and the light could wake him. When she eased herself down from the bed, when she tiptoed from the room, he was sleeping like an innocent, and also snoring like one, in a regular, gentle, maddening way.

Perfidious West. Indispensable West.

The real reason she came downstairs is that she wanted to consult the phone book, the Yellow Pages, under Hotels, and she didn’t want him to catch her doing it. She didn’t want him to realize that she’s been snooping on him, on him and Zenia, on his beside-the-phone scribblings. She didn’t want to disappoint him, or, worse, alarm him. She’s now looked up every hotel in the city beginning with A. She’s made a list: the Alexandra, the Annex, the Arnold Garden, the Arrival, the Avenue Park. She could phone them all, ask for the room number, disguise her voice—or she wouldn’t have to say a word, she could pose as a heavy-breathing phone pervert—and see if it’s Zenia.

But there’s a phone in the bedroom, right beside the bed. What’s to stop West from hearing the tiny ping it makes when you hang up the other phones, and from listening in? She could use West’s own phone, the Headwinds line; but it’s just above the bedroom, and how to explain herself if surprised in the act? Better to wait. If Zenia is to be headed off—and Tony at the moment does not have the faintest idea how this is to be accomplished—West must be kept out of it as much as possible. He must be insulated. He’s already been damaged enough. For kindly and susceptible souls like West’s, the real world, especially the real world of women, is far too harsh a place.

The room Tony is writing in is the games room; or that’s what she and West call it. It’s the big part of the cellar, between the furnace room and the laundry room, and unlike these has indoor-outdoor carpet on the floor. West’s game is a pool table, which takes up a relatively large amount of space and has a foldup plywood ping-pong overlay that can be added to it; which is what Tony is writing on. Tony isn’t much good at pool—she can understand the strategy, but she pokes too hard, she has no finesse; however, she’s a whiz at ping-pong. West is the opposite—despite his amazing spider-monkey reach, he’s clumsy at high speeds. Sometimes, to give herself a handicap, Tony will play a game with her right hand, not quite as good as her left, though she can beat him that way also. When Tony’s been wiped out too often at pool, West will suggest a game of pingpong, though it’s a foregone conclusion that he’ll get creamed. He’s always been very considerate, that way. It’s a form of chivalry.

Which is a measure of how much, right now, Tony stands to lose.

But ping-pong is a diversion. Tony’s real game is off in a corner, beside the tiny refrigerator they keep down there for ice-water and West’s beer. It’s a large sand-table, bought at a daycarecentre garage sale some years ago, but it isn’t full of sand. Instead it contains a three-dimensional map of Europe and the Mediterranean, made of hardened flour-and-salt paste, with the mountain ranges in relief and the major bodies of water done in blue Plasticine. Tony has been able to use this map over and over, adding and subtracting canals, removing marshes, altering coastlines, building and unbuilding roads and bridges and towns and cities, diverting rivers, as occasion has demanded. Right now it’s set up for the tenth century: the day of Otto the Red’s fateful battle, to be exact.

For the armies and the populations, Tony doesn’t use pins or flags, not primarily. Instead she uses kitchen spices, a different one for each tribe or ethnic grouping: cloves for the Germanic tribes, red peppercorns for the Vikings, green peppercorns for the Saracens, white ones for the Slavs. The Celts are coriander seeds, the Anglo-Saxons are dill. Chocolate sprinkles, cardamom seeds, four kinds of lentils, and little silver balls indicate the Magyars, the Greeks, the North African kingdoms, and the Egyptians. For each major king, chief, emperor, or pope, there’s a Monopoly man; areas in which each has sovereignty, actual or nominal, are marked by lengths of cut-up plastic swizzle stick, in matching colours, stuck into squares of gum eraser.

It’s a complex system, but she prefers it to more schematic representations or to ones that show the armies and the strongholds only. With it she can depict interbreeding and hybridization, through conquest or through the slave trade, because populations are not in fact homogeneous blocks, but mixtures. There are white peppercorns in Constantinople and Rome, traded as slaves by the red peppercorns, who rule them; the green peppercorns. trade from south to north, as well as from east to west and back again, using lentils. The Frankish rulers are really cloves, the green peppercorns have infiltrated the Celto-Ligurian corianders. There is a continuous ebb and flow, a blending, a shift of territories.

To keep the lighter spices from rolling around, she uses a touch of hairspray. Gently, though; otherwise they will be blown away. When she wants to change the year or the century, she scrapes off this or that population and sets up again. She uses tweezers; otherwise her fingers get covered with seeds. History isn’t dry, it’s sticky, it can get all over your hands.

Tony pulls a chair over to her sand-table and sits down to study it. On the west coast of Italy, near Sorrento, a group of cloves is pursuing a smaller group of fleeing green peppercorns: the Teutons are out to get the Saracens, or so they intend. The Monopoly man among the cloves is Otto the Red—impetuous, brilliant Otto, Otto the Second, the Germanic emperor of Rome. On and on ride Otto and the cloves, between the indifferent sea and the wrinkly dry mountains, sweating under the gruelling sun; they are buoyant with adrenalin, high on the prospect of bloodshed and loot, dizzy with imminent winning. Little do they know.

Tony knows more. Behind the folds of dry earth and stone, out of sight, a large force of Saracen peppercorns is lying in ambush. The band of fleeing green peppercorns running away up front are only decoys. It’s the oldest trick in the book, and Otto has fallen for it. Soon his men will be attacked from three sides, and the fourth side is the sea. They will all be killed, or most of them will be; or they’ll be pushed back into the sea, where they’ll drown, or they’ll crawl away wounded and die of thirst. Some of them will be captured and sold for slaves. Otto himself will escape with barely his life.