Murder in the Dark

by Margaret Atwood

  Should you share the bread or give the whole piece to your sister? Should you eat the piece of bread yourself? After all, you have a better chance of living, you’re stronger. How long does it take to decide?

  Imagine a prison. There is something you know that you have not yet told. Those in control of the prison know that you know. So do those not in control. If you tell, thirty or forty or a hundred of your friends, your comrades, will be caught and will die. If you refuse to tell, tonight will be like last night. They always choose the night. You don’t think about the night however, but about the piece of bread they offered you. How long does it take? The piece of bread was brown and fresh and reminded you of sunlight falling across a wooden floor. It reminded you of a bowl, a yellow bowl that was once in your home. It held apples and pears; it stood on a table you can also remember. It’s not the hunger or the pain that is killing you but the absence of the yellow bowl. If you could only hold the bowl in your hands, right here, you could withstand anything, you tell yourself. The bread they offered you is subversive, it’s treacherous, it does not mean life.

  There were once two sisters. One was rich and had no children, the other had five children and was a widow, so poor that she no longer had any food left. She went to her sister and asked her for a mouthful of bread. ‘My children are dying,’ she said. The rich sister said, ‘I do not have enough for myself,’ and drove her away from the door. Then the husband of the rich sister came home and wanted to cut himself a piece of bread; but when he made the first cut, out flowed red blood.

  Everyone knew what that meant.

  This is a traditional German fairy-tale.

  The loaf of bread I have conjured for you floats about a foot above your kitchen table. The table is normal, there are no trap doors in it. A blue tea towel floats beneath the bread, and there are no strings attaching the cloth to the bread or the bread to the ceiling or the table to the cloth, you’ve proved it by passing your hand above and below. You didn’t touch the bread though. What stopped you? You don’t want to know whether the bread is real or whether it’s just a hallucination I’ve somehow duped you into seeing. There’s no doubt that you can see the bread, you can even smell it, it smells like yeast, and it looks solid enough, solid as your own arm. But can you trust it? Can you eat it? You don’t want to know, imagine that.

  The Page

  The page waits, pretending to be blank. Is that its appeal, its blankness? What else is this smooth and white, this terrifyingly innocent? A snowfall, a glacier? It’s a desert, totally arid, without life. But people venture into such places. Why? To see how much they can endure, how much dry light?

  I’ve said the page is white, and it is: white as wedding dresses, rare whales, seagulls, angels, ice and death. Some say that like sunlight it contains all colours; others, that it’s white because it’s hot, it will burn out your optic nerves; that those who stare at the page too long go blind.

  The page itself has no dimensions and no directions. There’s no up or down except what you yourself mark, there’s no thickness and weight but those you put there, north and south do not exist unless you’re certain of them. The page is without vistas and without sounds, without centres or edges. Because of this you can become lost in it forever. Have you never seen the look of gratitude, the look of joy, on the faces of those who have managed to return from the page? Despite their faintness, their loss of blood, they fall on their knees, they push their hands into the earth, they clasp the bodies of those they love, or, in a pinch, any bodies they can get, with an urgency unknown to those who have never experienced the full horror of a journey into the page.

  If you decide to enter the page, take a knife and some matches, and something that will float. Take something you can hold onto, and a prism to split the light and a talisman that works, which should be hung on a chain around your neck: that’s for getting back. It doesn’t matter what kind of shoes, but your hands should be bare. You should never go into the page with gloves on. Such decisions, needless to say, should not be made lightly. There are those, of course, who enter the page without deciding, without meaning to. Some of these have charmed lives and no difficulty, but most never make it out at all. For them the page appears as a well, a lovely pool in which they catch sight of a face, their own but better. These unfortunates do not jump: rather they fall, and the page closes over their heads without a sound, without a seam, and is immediately as whole and empty, as glassy, as enticing as before.

  The question about the page is: what is beneath it? It seems to have only two dimensions, you can pick it up and turn it over and the back is the same as the front. Nothing, you say, disappointed. But you were looking in the wrong place, you were looking on the back instead of beneath. Beneath the page is another story. Beneath the page is a story. Beneath the page is everything that has ever happened, most of which you would rather not hear about.

  The page is not a pool but a skin, a skin is there to hold in and it can feel you touching it. Did you really think it would just lie there and do nothing?

  Touch the page at your peril: it is you who are blank and innocent, not the page. Nevertheless you want to know, nothing will stop you. You touch the page, it’s as if you’ve drawn a knife across it, the page has been hurt now, a sinuous wound opens, a thin incision. Darkness wells through.

  IV.

  Mute

  Whether to speak or not: the question that comes up again when you think you’ve said too much, again. Another clutch of nouns, a fistful: look how they pick them over, the shoppers for words, pinching here and there to see if they’re bruised yet. Verbs are no better, they wind them up, let them go, scrabbling over the table, wind them up again too tight and the spring breaks. You can’t take another poem of spring, not with the wound-up vowels, not with the bruised word green in it, not yours, not with ants crawling all over it, not this infestation. It’s a market, flyspecked; how do you wash a language? There’s the beginning of a bad smell, you can hear the growls, something’s being eaten, once too often. Your mouth feels rotted.

  Why involve yourself? You’d do better to sit off to the side, on the sidewalk under the awning, hands over your mouth, your ears, your eyes, with a cup in front of you into which people will or will not drop pennies. They think you can’t talk, they’re sorry for you, but. But you’re waiting for the word, the one that will finally be right. A compound, the generation of life, mud and light.

  She

  knows exactly what she’s doing. Well, why not? Along the street, around the corner, the piece of her that’s just disappearing. If that’s the way it works, that’s what she’ll do. Sometimes in shorts, with tanned thighs, like cabbages, or the whole body falling liquid from the shoulders: whatever’s about to happen. Lace at the throat, the ankle, skimming the breasts, wherever they’re putting it this year, and a laugh or not, at the pulsepoint. What will it get her? Something. You have to know when to run and where, how to close a door, gently. Just a little showing, something that looks like flesh, they follow, a few white stones dropped in the forest, under the trees, shining in the moonlight, clues, a trail. To get from one point to the next and then see another, and another beyond that. She deals in longing, the sickness of the heart, stuttering of the arteries, would you call it suffering, where does it lead? Deeper into the forest, deeper into the moonlight. They think they’ll come out from among the trees and she will be there, finally waiting, for them, all cool white light.

  Worship

  You have these sores in your mouth that will not heal. It’s from eating too much sugar, you tell yourself. To the gods men offer flowers and food, remember those chrysanthemums, those pumpkins, at the altar, even in that square brick church? The one that smelled like wet feet wearing socks, for a long time. Thanksgiving. That’s why he brings you roses, on occasion, and chocolates when he can’t think of anything else. For the same reasons too: worship or ritual or sucking up. Prayer is wanting. Jesus, Jesus he says, but he’s not praying to Jesus, he’s praying to
you, not to your body or your face but to that space you hold at the centre, which is the shape of the universe. Empty. He wants response, an answer from that dark sphere and its red stars, which he can touch but not see. How does it feel to be a god, for five minutes anyway? Now you know what they have to put up with. Those groans that sound so much like suffering and perhaps are, you can’t tell by listening.

  You aren’t really a god but despite that you are silent. When you’re being worshipped there isn’t much to say. It’s White Gift Sunday, tinned goods this time, in tissue paper, for the poor, and that’s you up there, shining, burning, like a candle, like a chalice, burnished; with use and service. After you’ve been serviced, after you’ve been used, you’ll be put away again until needed.

  Iconography

  He wants her arranged just so. He wants her, arranged. He arranges to want her.

  This is the arrangement they have made. With strings attached, or ropes, stockings, leather straps. What else is arranged? Furniture, flowers. For contemplation and a graceful disposition of parts to compose a unified and aesthetic whole.

  Once she wasn’t supposed to like it. To have her in a position she didn’t like, that was power. Even if she liked it she had to pretend she didn’t. Then she was supposed to like it. To make her do something she didn’t like and then make her like it, that was greater power. The greatest power of all is when she doesn’t really like it but she’s supposed to like it, so she has to pretend.

  Whether he’s making her like it or making her dislike it or making her pretend to like it is important but it’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is making her. Over, from nothing, new. From scratch, the way he wants.

  It can never be known whether she likes it or not. By this time she doesn’t know herself. All you see is the skin, that smile of hers, flat but indelible, like a tattoo. Hard to tell, and she never will, she can’t. They don’t get into it unless they like it, he says. He has the last word. He has the word.

  Watch yourself. That’s what the mirrors are for, this story is a mirror story which rhymes with horror story, almost but not quite. We fall back into these rhythms as if into safe hands.

  Liking Men

  It’s time to like men again. Where shall we begin?

  I have a personal preference for the backs of necks, because of the word nape, so lightly furred; which is different from the word scruff. But for most of us, especially the beginners, it’s best to start with the feet and work up. To begin with the head and all it contains would be too suddenly painful. Then there’s the navel, birth dimple, where we fell from the stem, something we have in common; you could look at it and say, He also is mortal. But it may be too close for comfort to those belts and zippers which cause you such distress, and comfort is what you want. He’s a carnivore, you’re a vegetarian. That’s what you have to get over.

  The feet then. I give you the feet, pinkly toed and innocuous. Unfortunately you think of socks, lying on the floor, waiting to be picked up and washed. Quickly add shoes. Better? The socks are now contained, and presumably clean.

  You contemplate the shoes, shined but not too much – you don’t want this man to be either a messy slob or prissy – and you begin to relax. Shoes, kind and civilized, not black but a decent shade of brown. No raucous two-tones, no elevator heels. The shoes dance, with the feet in them, neatly, adroitly, you enjoy this, you think of Fred Astaire, you’re beginning to like men. You think of kissing those feet, slowly, after a good scrubbing of course; the feet expand their toes, squirm with pleasure. You like to give pleasure. You run your tongue along the sole and the feet moan.

  Cheered up, you start fooling around. Footgear, you think. Golf shoes, grassy and fatherly, white sneakers for playing tennis in, agile and sweet, quick as rabbits. Workboots, solid and trustworthy. A good man is hard to find but they do exist, you know it now. Someone who can run a chainsaw without cutting off his leg. What a relief. Checks and plaids, laconic, a little Scottish. Rubber boots, for wading out to the barn in the rain in order to save the baby calf. Power, quiet and sane. Knowing what to do, doing it well. Sexy.

  But rubber boots aren’t the only kind. You don’t want to go on but you can’t stop yourself. Riding boots, you think, with the sinister crop; but that’s not too bad, they’re foreign and historical. Cowboy boots, two of them, planted apart, stomp, stomp, on main street just before the shot rings out. A spur, in the groin. A man’s gotta do, but why this? Jackboots, so highly shined you can see your own face in the right one, as the left one raises itself and the heel comes down on your nose. Now you see rows of them, marching, marching; yours is the street-level view, because you are lying down. Power is the power to smash, two hold your legs, two your arms, the fifth shoves a pointed instrument into you; a bayonet, the neck of a broken bottle, and it’s not even wartime, this is a park, with a children’s playground, tiny red and yellow horses, it’s daytime, men and women stare at you out of their closed car windows. Later the policeman will ask you what you did to provoke this. Boots were not such a bright idea after all.

  But just because all rapists are men it doesn’t follow that all men are rapists, you tell yourself. You try desperately to retain the image of the man you love and also like, but now it’s a sand-coloured plain, no houses left standing anywhere, columns of smoke ascending, trenches filled with no quarter, heads with the faces rotting away, mothers, babies, young boys and girls, men as well, turning to skulls, who did this? Who defines enemy? How can you like men?

  Still, you continue to believe it can be done. If not all men, at least some, at least two, at least one. It takes an act, of faith. There is his foot, sticking out from under the sheet, asleep, naked as the day he was born. The day he was born. Maybe that’s what you have to go back to, in order to trace him here, the journey he took, step by step. In order to begin. Again and again.

  Strawberries

  The strawberries when I first remember them are not red but blue, that blue flare, before the whitehot part of the wire, sun glancing from the points of waves. It was the heat that made things blue like that, rage, I went into the waste orchard because I did not want to talk to you or even see you, I wanted instead to do something small and useful that I was good at. It was June, there were mosquitoes, I stirred them up as I pushed aside the higher stems, but I didn’t care, I was immune, all that adrenalin kept them away, and if not I was in the mood for minor lacerations. I don’t get angry like that any more. I almost miss it.

  I’d like to say I saw everything through a haze of red; which is not true. Nothing was hazy. Everything was very clear, clearer than usual, my hands with the stained nails, the sunlight falling on the ground through the apple-tree branches, each leaf, each white five-petalled yellow-centred flower and conical fine-haired dark red multi-seeded dwarf berry rendering itself in dry flat two-dimensional detail, like background foliage by one of the crazier Victorian painters, just before the invention of the camera; and at some time during that hour, though not for the whole hour, I forgot what things were called and saw instead what they are.

  Him

  Every time, when you open the door to him, it’s much the same: as if he’s just come from another planet, he stands there semi-blinded, by the sudden light, as if you are shedding it, from within, as if he is his own dark hurtling gravity-free interior and he’s just landed and you are the land. He knows he has to make his alien greeting and you know it too, it will be courteous, and awkward because of his difficulties with the language. I come in peace, you want to prompt him, but don’t. He’s anxious enough already. It’s the way he inclines his head, looking instead at the floor, having looked at you first with eyes so unprotected and candid you couldn’t look back. Like many other sad men, he wants only to be allowed. To be taken in.

  You’re tired of the sadness of men, it’s been used on you too often, sadness like a clumsy plumber’s wrench, a tool for bludgeoning water. Sadness has been offered as a good reason for you to do all sorts of
things. He’s not offering it. He’s not without sadness but he’s no purveyor of his own grief, he’s unconscious of it; he’s unconscious. He likes watching well-played games.

  You want to get fancy, you want to say, he’s like a tree or a stone, one of those mute contained objects, but for once you avoid metaphors: there’s nothing else you want to change him into. Your years of practice, that skill in metamorphosis, count for nothing here. How many times have you awakened in the moonlight and seen those indigo shadows instead of eyes, hard as if cast by granite, and thought, I’m in bed with a killer? You can crumple all that time up with one hand now and throw it away.

  Your worst fear is that you might have missed this. Still, you have to come clean and it angers you; but how can it? Isn’t this what you wanted? Isn’t this the man through whom all men can be forgiven? Must be forgiven, because now you’re beginning to remember the way the others were partly like him.

  Hopeless

  Today I seem to myself merely sentimental, at the window, looking out at the slush and worrying about the Book of Job. Religion, the burnt heart gripped in its ritual thorns, the chest wall open like a display window. Why are there hookworms? Why are there explosions, on the road, in the wrists, blood hazing the ionosphere?