An intimate picnic in The Blind Assassin is a lover’s picnic on the grass that might fleetingly Genesis but more directly alludes to Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyát “XI.”
Iris Chase has returned from her wedding trip with Richard and is unhappy. By luck, she runs into Alex Thomas and agrees to meet him later. Their first assignation is a picnic in a public park.
Like Eve and Adam, Iris and Alex’s picnic sit beneath an apple tree in a public park where they share a picnic stuffed into a paper bag. There is something unappetizing about this meal, but the picnickers scarcely notice: “She looks at his rolled-up shirt sleeve, white or a pale blue, then his wrist, the browner skin of his hand. He throws out radiance, it must be reflected sun. Why isn’t everyone staring? Still, he’s too noticeable to be out there–out in the open. There are other people sitting around, sitting on the grass, or lying on it, propped one elbow-other picnickers, in their pale summer clothing. It’s all very proper. Nevertheless, she feels that the two of them are alone; as if the apple tree they are sitting under is not a tree but a tent; as if there’s a fine line drawn around them with chalk. Inside this line, they’re invisible.”
When Alex asks for a cheese sandwich, “She rummages in the paper bag. No, she says, but there’s a hard-boiled egg. She’s never been this happy before. Everything is fresh again, still to be enacted.
Just what the doctor ordered, he says. A bottle of lemonade, a hard-boiled egg, and Thou. He rolls the egg between his palms, cracking the shell, then peeling it away. She watches his mouth, the jaw, and the teeth.
Beside me singing in the public park, she says. Here’s the salt for it.
Thanks. You remembered everything.”
This parody of Omar’s rubaiyat is clear, but the original is Edward Fitzgerald’s version is memorable:
“Here with a loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A flask of Wine, a Book of Verse-and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness
And Wilderness is Paradise now.”
[Fitzgerald later revised the lines:
“A Book of Verses underneath a Bough,A
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread-and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness-
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”
See Margaret Attwood. The Blind Assassin: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2000