"It's where they've put her."
"Well, get her out of there," he said. "Take her somewhere decent. Somewhere more…"
"Private," I said. "Yes, I'll do that. I should tell you there's been some implication-from the police, one of them was just here-some suggestion…"
"What? What did you tell them? What suggestion?" He sounded quite alarmed.
"Only that she did it on purpose."
"Nonsense," he said. "It must have been an accident. I hope you said that."
"Of course. But there were witnesses. They saw…"
"Was there a note? If there was, burn it."
"Two of them, a lawyer and something in a bank. She had white gloves on. They saw her turn the wheel."
"Trick of the light," he said. "Or else they were drunk. I'll call the lawyer. I'll handle it."
I set down the telephone. I went into my dressing room: I would need black, and a handkerchief. I'll have to tell Aimee, I thought. I'll say it was the bridge. I'll say the bridge broke.
I opened the drawer where I kept my stockings, and there were the notebooks-five of them, cheap school exercise books from our time with Mr. Erskine, tied together with kitchen string. Laura's name was printed on the top cover, in pencil-her childish lettering. Underneath that: Mathematics. Laura hated mathematics.
Old schoolwork, I thought. No: old homework. Why had she left me these?
I could have stopped there. I could have chosen ignorance, but I did what you would have done-what you've already done, if you've read this far. I chose knowledge instead.
Most of us will. We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive: love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We'll spy relentlessly on the dead: we'll open their letters, we'll read their journals, we'll go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, from those who have deserted us-who've left us holding the bag, which is often a good deal emptier than we'd supposed.
But what about those who plant such clues, for us to stumble on? Why do they bother? Egotism? Pity? Revenge? A simple claim to existence, like scribbling your initials on a washroom wall? The combination of presence and anonymity-confession without penance, truth without consequences-it has its attractions. Getting the blood off your hands, one way or another.
Those who leave such evidence can scarcely complain if strangers come along afterwards and poke their noses into every single thing that would once have been none of their business. And not only strangers: lovers, friends, relations. We're voyeurs, all of us. Why should we assume that anything in the past is ours for the taking, simply because we've found it? We're all grave robbers, once we open the doors locked by others.
But only locked. The rooms and their contents have been left intact. If those leaving them had wanted oblivion, there was always fire.
Fourteen
The golden lock
I have to hurry now. I can see the end, glimmering far up ahead of me, as if it's a roadside motel, on a dark night, in the rain. A last-chance postwar motel, where no questions are, asked and none of the names in the front-desk register are real and it's cash in advance. The office is strung with old Christmas-tree lights; behind it a clump of murky cabins, the pillows fragrant with mildew. A moon-faced gas pump out front. No gas though, it's run out many decades ago. Here's where you stop.
The end, a warm safe haven. A place to rest. But I haven't reached it yet, and I'm old and tired, and on foot, and limping. Lost in the woods, and no white stones to mark the way, and treacherous ground to cover.
Wolves, I invoke you! Dead women with azure hair and eyes like snake-filled pits, I summon you! Stand by me now, as we near the end! Guide my shaking arthritic fingers, my tacky black ballpoint pen; keep my leaking heart afloat for just a few more days, until I can set things in order. Be my companions, my helpers and my friends; once more, I add, for haven't we been well-acquainted in the past?
All things have their place, as Reenie used to say; or, in a fouler mood, to Mrs. Hillcoate, No flowers without shit. Mr. Erskine did teach me a few useful tricks. A well-wrought invocation to the Furies can come in handy, in case of need. When it's primarily a question of revenge.
I did believe, at first, that I wanted only justice. I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else. But as Mr. Erskine also pointed out, Eros with his bow and arrows is not the only blind god. Justitia is the other one. Clumsy blind gods with edged weapons: Justitia totes a sword, which, coupled with her blindfold, is a pretty good recipe for cutting yourself.
You'll want of course to know what was in Laura's notebooks. They're as she herself left them, tied up with their grubby brown string, left for you in my steamer trunk along with everything else. I haven't changed anything. You can see for yourself. The pages torn out of them were not torn out by me.
What was I expecting, on that dread-filled May day in 1945? Confessions, reproaches? Or else a diary, detailing the lovers' meetings between Laura and Alex Thomas? No doubt, no doubt. I was prepared for laceration. And I received it, though not in the way I'd imagined.
I cut the string, fanned out the notebooks. There were five of them: Mathematics, Geography, French, History, and Latin. The books of knowledge.
She writes like an angel, it says of Laura, on the back of one of the editions of The Blind Assassin. An American edition, as I recall, with gold scrollwork on the cover: they set a lot of store by angels in those parts. In point of fact, angels don't write much. They record sins and the names of the damned and the saved, or they appear as disembodied hands and scribble warnings on walls. Or they deliver messages, few of which are good news: God be with you is not an unmixed blessing.
Keeping all this in mind, yes: Laura wrote like an angel. In other words, not very much. But to the point.
Latinwas the notebook I opened first. Most of the remaining pages in it were blank; there were jagged edges where Laura must have ripped out her old homework. She left one passage, a translation she'd made-with my help, and also with the help of the library at Avilion-of the concluding lines of Book IV of Virgil's Aeneid. Dido has stabbed herself on the burning pyre or altar she's made of all the objects connected to her vanished lover, Aeneas, who has sailed away to fulfil his destiny through warfare. Although bleeding like a stuck pig, Dido is having a hard time dying. She was doing a lot of writhing. Mr. Erskine, as I recall, enjoyed that part.
I remembered the day she wrote it. The late sunlight was coming in through my bedroom window. Laura was lying on the floor, kicking her sock feet in the air, laboriously transcribing our scribbled-over collaboration into her book. She smelled of Ivory soap, and of pencil shavings.
Then powerful Juno felt sorry for her long-time sufferings and uneasy journey, and sent Iris from Olympus to cut the agonising soul from the body that still held onto it. This had to be done because Dido was not dying a natural death or one caused by other people, but in despair, driven to it by a crazy impulse. Anyway Proserpine hadn't yet cut off the golden lock from her head or sent her down to the Underworld.
So now, all misty, her wings yellow as a crocus, trailing a thousand rainbow colours that sparkled in the sunlight, Iris flew down, and hovering over Dido, she said: As I was told to do, I take this sacred thing which belongs to the God of Death; and I release you from your body.
Then all warmth stopped at once, and her life vanished into the air.
"Why did she have to cut off a piece of the hair?" said Laura. "That Iris?"
I had no idea. "It was just a thing she had to do," I said. "Sort of like an offering." I'd been pleased to discover that I had the same name as a person in a story, and wasn't just named after some flower, as I'd always thought. The botanical motif, for girls, had been strong in my mother's family.