What was Dame Giraude thinking as she looked out over the battlements, assessing the enemy? She must have known that this battle was unwinnable, that her town and all the people—in it were doomed. Did she despair, was she praying for a miracle, was she proud of herself for having fought for what she believed in? Watching her co-religionists fry the next day, she must have felt that there was more evidence in support of her own theories of evil than of de Montfort’s.
Tony has been there, she has seen the terrain. She has picked a flower, some sort of tough-stemmed vetch; she has pressed it in the Bible, she has stuck it into her scrapbook, under L for Lavaur. She has bought a souvenir, a small satin pillow stuffed with lavender. According to the local residents, Dame Giraude is still there, still down in the well. That was all they could think of to do, in those days, with women like her: throw them into wells, or off steep cliffs or parapets—some unrelenting vertical—and watch them splatter. ,
Maybe Tony will write something about Dame Giraude, sometime. A study of female military commanders. Iron Hands, Velvet Gloves, she could call it. But there isn’t much material.
She doesn’t want to go on with this battle right now; she’s not in the mood for slaughter. She gets up from her chair and pours herself a glass of water; then, on top of Europe in the thirteenth century, she spreads out a street map, a map of downtown Toronto. Here is the Toxique, here is Queen Street, here is Roz’s renovated office building; here are the ferry docks, and the flat Island where Charis’s house still stands. Over here is the Arnold Garden Hotel, which is now a big clay-sided hole in the ground, a site of future development, because failing hotels go cheap and someone cut a good deal. Here is McClung Hall, and, to the north, Tony’s own house, with West in it, upstairs in bed, groaning gently in his sleep; with the cellar in it, with the sand-table in it, with the map on it, with the city in it, with the house in it, with the cellar in it, with the map in it. Maps, thinks Tony, contain the ground that contains them. Somewhere in this infinitely receding headspace, Zeriia continues to exist.
Tony needs the map for the same reason she always uses maps: they help her to see, to visualize the topology, to remember. What she is remembering is Zenia. She owes her this remembrance. She owes her an end.
LVII
Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn’t come neatly cut into evensized lengths, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.
An ending, then. November 11, 1991, at eleven o’clock in the morning, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It’s a Monday. The Recession is thickening, there are rumours of big-company bankruptcies, famine is rolling over Africa; in what was once Yugoslavia there is ethnic feuding. Atrocities multiply, leaderships teeter, car factories grind to a halt. The war in the Gulf is over and the desert sands are spackled with bombs; the oil fields still burn, clouds of black smoke roiling out over the greasy sea. Both sides claim to have won, both sides have lost. It’s a dim day, wreathed in mist.
The three of them stand at the back of the ferry as it churns its way through the harbour, outbound towards the Island, trailing the momentary darkness of its wake. From the mainland they can hear, faintly, the sound of bugles, and of muffled shots. A salute. The water is quicksilver in the pearl-coloured light, the wind is slight, cool, but mild for the time of year, the month. The pause month, the month of empty branches and held breath, the fog month, the greyish hush before winter.
Month of the dead, month of returning, thinks Charis. She thinks of the grey weeds waving, under the poisonous, guileless water, at the bottom of the lake; of the grey fish with lumpy chemical growths on them, wafting like shadows; of the lamprey eels with their tiny rasping teeth and sucking mouths, undulating among the husks of wrecked cars, the empty bottles. She thinks of everything that has fallen in, or else been thrown. Treasures and bones. At the beginning of November the French decorate their family graves with chrysanthemums, the Mexicans with marigolds, making a golden path so the spirits can find their way. Whereas we go in for poppies. The flower of sleep and forgetting. Petals of spilled blood.
Each one of them has a poppy stuck into the front of her coat. Flimsy plastic but who can resist, thinks Roz, though she liked the cloth ones better. It’s like those awful daffodils for cancer, pretty soon every single flower will be hooked up with some body part or disease. Plastic lupins for lupus, plastic columbines for colostomies, plastic aspidistras for AIDS, you have to buy the darn things though, it protects you from getting hit up every time you walk out the door. I have one already. See?
It was Tony who insisted on this particular day. Remembrance Day. Bloody Poppy Day. Tony is getting more bizarre by the minute, in Roz’s opinion; but then, so are they all.
Remembrance Day is only fitting, thinks Tony. She wants to do Zenia justice; but she’s remembering more than Zenia. She’s remembering the war, and those killed by it, at the time or later; sometimes wars take a long time to kill people. She’s remembering all the wars. She craves some idea of ceremony, of decorum; not that she’s getting one whole hell of a lot of cooperation from the others. Roz did wear black, as requested, but she’s tarted it up with a red-and-silver scarf. Black brings out my eye bags, she said. I needed something else right next to my face. Goes with my lipstick—this is Rubicon, hot off the press. Like it? You don’t mind, do you honey?
And as for Charis ... Tony looks sideways at the receptacle Charis is holding: not the chintzy copper urn with the imitation Greek handles peddled by the crematorium, more like a stirrup cup really, but something even worse. It’s a handmade ceramic flower vase, heavily artistic, in mottled shades of mauve and maroon, donated to Charis by Shanita, from the stockroom of Scrimpers, where it had been gathering dust for years. Charis insisted on something more meaningful than the tin can that Tony’s been keeping in her cellar, so before they got their ferry tickets they transferred Zenia from canister to vase, in the Second Cup coffee shop. Roz poured; the ashes were stickier than Tony had expected. Charis couldn’t bear to look, in case there were any teeth. But she’s got her nerve back by now; she stands at the railing of the ferry, her pale hair spread out, looking like a ship’s figurehead going backwards and cradling the lurid flower vase with Zenia’s earthly remains inside it. If the dead come back for revenge, thinks Tony, the flower vase alone will be enough to do it.
“Would you say this is halfway?” asks Tony. She wants them to be over the deepest part.
“Looks right to me, sweetie,” says Roz. She’s impatient to get this over. When they reach the Island they are all going to Charis’s house for tea, and, Roz trusts and hopes, some form of lunch: a piece of homemade bread, a whole wheat cookie, anything. Whatever it is will taste like straw—that brown-rice, dauntingly healthy, lipstickless taste that is the base note of everything Charis cooks—but it will be food. She has three Mozart Balls tucked into her purse as a sort of anti-vitamin supplement and starvation fallback. She intended to bring champagne but she forgot.