Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood Page A

Ticonderoga just for him. The train stopped. Cheering broke out. Hands reached up to help him down, then hesitated. He emerged. He had one good eye and one good leg. His face was gaunt, seamed, fanatical.
    Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it’s noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.
    Thus my mother and my father. How could either of them atone to the other for having changed so much? For failing to be what was expected. How could there not be grudges? Grudges held silently and unjustly, because there was nobody to blame, or nobody you could put your finger on. The war was not a person. Why blame a hurricane?
    There they stand, on the railway platform. The town band plays, brass mostly. He’s in his uniform; his medals are like holes shot in the cloth, through which the dull gleam of his real, metal body can be seen. Beside him, invisible, are his brothers—the two lost boys, the ones he feels he has lost. My mother is there in her best dress, a belted affair with lapels, and a hat with a crisp ribbon. She smiles tremulously. Neither knows quite what to do. The newspaper camera catches them in its flash; they stare, as if surprised in crime. My father is wearing a black patch over his right eye. His left eye glares balefully. Underneath the patch, not yet revealed, is a web of scarred flesh, his missing eye the spider.
    “Chase Heir Hero Returns,” the paper will trumpet. That’s another thing: my father is now the heir, which is to say he’s fatherless as well as brotherless. The kingdom is in his hands. It feels like mud.
    Did my mother cry? It’s possible. They must have kissed awkwardly, as if at a box social, one for which he’d bought the wrong ticket. This wasn’t what he’d remembered, this efficient, careworn woman, with a pince-nez like some maiden aunt’s glinting on a silver chain around her neck. They were now strangers, and—it must have occurred to them—they always had been. How harsh the light was. How much older they’d become. There was no trace of the young man who’d once knelt so deferentially on the ice to lace up her skates, or of the young woman who’d sweetly accepted this homage.
    Something else materialized like a sword between them. Of course he’d had other women, the kind who hung around battlefields, taking advantage. Whores, not to mince a word my mother would never have pronounced. She must have been able to tell, the first time he laid a hand on her: the timidity, the reverence, would have been gone. Probably he’d held out against temptation through Bermuda, then through England, up to the time when Eddie and Percy were killed and he himself was wounded. After that he’d clutched at life, at whatever handfuls of it might come within his reach. How could she fail to understand his need for it, under the circumstances?
    She did understand, or at least she understood that she was supposed to understand. She understood, and said nothing about it, and prayed for the power to forgive, and did forgive. But he can’t have found living with her forgiveness all that easy. Breakfast in a haze of forgiveness: coffee with forgiveness, porridge with forgiveness, forgiveness on the buttered toast. He would have been helpless against it, for how can you repudiate something that is never spoken? She resented, too, the nurse, or the many nurses, who had tended my father in the various hospitals. She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone—to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny.
    However, my father wasn’t so healthy as all that. In fact he was a shattered wreck, as witness the shouts in the dark, the nightmares, the sudden fits of rage, the bowl or glass thrown against the wall or floor, though never at