Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

the factories. She interposed herself between my grandfather—said to be convalescing—and everyone else, and met daily with the male secretary and with the various factory foremen. As she was the only one who could understand what my grandfather was saying, or who claimed she could, she became his interpreter; and as the only one allowed to hold his hand, she guided his signature; and who’s to say she didn’t use her own judgment sometimes?
    Not that there were no problems. When the war began, a sixth of the workers had been women. By the end of it this number was two-thirds. The remaining men were old, or partially crippled, or in some other way unfit for war. These resented the ascendancy of the women, and grumbled about them or made vulgar jokes, and in their turn the women considered them weaklings or slackers and held them in ill-disguised contempt. The natural order of things—what my mother felt to be the natural order—was turning turtle. Still, the pay was good, and money greases the wheels, and on the whole my mother was able to keep things running smoothly enough.
    I imagine my grandfather, sitting in his library at night, in his green leather-covered chair studded with brass nails, at his desk, which was mahogany. His fingers are tented together, those of his feeling hand and those of his hand without feeling. He’s listening for someone. The door is half-open; he sees a shadow outside it. He says, “Come in”—he intends to say it—but nobody enters, or answers.
    The brusque nurse arrives. She asks him what he can be thinking of, sitting alone in the dark like that. He hears a sound, but it isn’t words, it’s more like ravens; he doesn’t answer. She takes him by the arm, lifts him easily out of his chair, shuffles him off to bed. Her white skirts rustle. He hears a dry wind, blowing through weedy autumn fields. He hears the whisper of snow.
    Did he know his two sons were dead? Was he wishing them alive again, safe home? Would it have been a sadder ending for him, to have had his wish come true? It might have been—it often is—but such thoughts are not consoling.
The gramophone
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    Last night I watched the weather channel, as is my habit. Elsewhere in the world there are floods: roiling brown water, bloated cows floating by, survivors huddled on rooftops. Thousands have drowned. Global warming is held accountable: people must stop burning things up, it is said. Gasoline, oil, whole forests. But they won’t stop. Greed and hunger lash them on, as usual.
    Where was I? I turn back the page: the war is still raging.Raging is what they used to say, for wars; still do, for all I know. But on this page, a fresh, clean page, I will cause the war to end—I alone, with a stroke of my black plastic pen. All I have to do is write:1918. November 11. Armistice Day.
    There. It’s over. The guns are silent. The men who are left alive look up at the sky, their faces grimed, their clothing sodden; they climb out of their foxholes and filthy burrows. Both sides feel they have lost. In the towns, in the countryside, here and across the ocean, the church bells all begin to ring. (I can remember that, the bells ringing. It’s one of my first memories. It was so strange—the air was so full of sound, and at the same time so empty. Reenie took me outside to hear. There were tears running down her face.Thank God, she said. The day was chilly, there was frost on the fallen leaves, a skim of ice on the lily pond. I broke it with a stick. Where was Mother?)
    Father had been wounded at the Somme, but he’d recovered from that and had been made a second lieutenant. He was wounded again at Vimy Ridge, though not severely, and was made a captain. He was wounded again at Bourlon Wood, this time worse. It was while he was recovering in England that the war ended.
    He missed the jubilant welcome for the returning troops at Halifax, the victory parades and so forth, but there was a special reception in Port