The Robber Bride

As Tony prepares a lecture for the Society of Military Historiographers, she thinks about the challenges of chronicling history. Historians, she believes, are too removed from actual events to present a fully contextualized snapshot of the past. She also feels like the token female in an academic field crowded with men. In the middle of the night, disturbed at finding Zenia’s name and hotel extension among West’s papers, Tony writes down all the hotels in Toronto, prepared to call them looking for Zenia and to preempt any contact with West.

Tony’s basement doubles as the game room, and her “game” is a three-dimensional, topographical “sand-table map” of Europe and the Mediterranean. She uses the map to plot various historical epochs and battles using colored seeds and spices to represent relevant populations. Currently, she reenacts the tenth century battle between the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II and the Saracens, an affiliation of Arabs, Muslims, and Turks. She uses her historical perspective to look back on events with Zenia, wondering if, given her current knowledge, she would have acted differently: “She doesn’t know, because she knows too much to know” (126).