The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘Jesus,’ Karl said. ‘Jesus Christ.’

  I could only whisper, ‘Who did it?’

  My father stood in the blackened house with one hand wrapped over the back of his neck. People in the village often said Arno Hekmann was a good man in a crisis because he didn’t rise too fast. Just one word came out of him that night and we waited minutes for it.

  ‘Lightning,’ he said at last.

  Though he looked at me in my stiff dress, as if it wasn’t lightning he was thinking of, but women. His laughter was one hollow sound and then nothing.

  I looked down at my hands, with their hard palms and their broken nails, a boy’s hands on a girl’s dress, and I remembered the pretty little thing that Karl had brought home the year before and how one kiss on the porch had left her drained, like a flower needing water, her head drooping, her eyes half-closed.

  We slept under the firs and pines that night. The air still felt astonished; I could smell the hole the lightning had made, not just in the timbers of the house, but in the sky. I curled around a tree-trunk and when I woke, the cold had poured into all my joints and set. My brother Axel was the only one who’d slept in a straight line on the ground. The rest were huddled, crooked, folded-up. Opening slowly as they came round. Old pen-knives, almost rusted solid.

  October, that was. After a night of watching people dance.

  It was a small village, even in those days, population three hundred and fifty or so, but out in the hollow, which was where our house was, it was population five – my two brothers, my father, my uncle and me.

  By the following spring, that was no longer true.

  It was a bitter winter. The first snows fell at the beginning of November, before the roof was mended, and lasted till the middle of January. At dawn I’d have to shovel snow off the kitchen floor while the others worked above me (some of it I used for making tea). We had no money coming in. Two of our goats died. We lived on potato soup and boiled white beans. The only luxury was that hot spring Uncle Felix had taken me to. For three days I tunnelled through the drifts with Axel. At last we reached the place and, shivering, stripped off our clothes. We stood for what seemed like hours under that stream of strange, rusty-looking water, and we were so warm suddenly, we couldn’t stop laughing. During the summer Uncle Felix had often asked me to go down to the spring with him, but I always said no. If he’d come with us that day, I wouldn’t have minded. But he was in bed, with a chill.

  Over the New Year storms descended on us. The new roof held. Then, towards the end of January, the wind suddenly sank out of the world like the last of the water running from a bath and there was a night of perfect silence. You couldn’t even hear a dog bark or a car cross the bridge, and the air was clear all the way from the cold crust of the earth to the surface of the moon. That was the night we listened to Uncle Felix breathe. It was the breathing-in we heard, a thin, urgent sound, almost plaintive, like someone straining repeatedly to lift a weight, and failing.

  Karl murmured, ‘Maybe we should get a doctor.’

  ‘In the morning,’ I heard my father say.

  But Uncle Felix kept us awake for much of the night and we slept later than usual. When we woke up he was dead, his mouth open, as if he’d thought about saying something and then decided against it.

  ‘I told you.’ Karl was leaning against the window, staring out. ‘I told you we should’ve got a doctor.’

  My father shook his head. ‘It would’ve been too late. There was nothing we could have done.’

  I thought he was probably right. Felix had gone to bed in his Sunday jacket and his wide trousers that grew wider as they reached the floor. His hair was greased flat and there was a dried rose in his lapel. He had prepared himself as thoroughly as he would have done for any dance.

  My father drew the blanket over his brother’s face.

  Later that morning, before the undertakers arrived, I hid a few objects in the cuffs of Uncle Felix’s trousers, and it seemed odd to think he wouldn’t be coming after us this time. In the left cuff, a small bottle of water from his favourite spring; I had to seal it tight, or it would smell. In the right, the comb he always used when he stood in front of the tin mirror, and a picture postcard of a beautiful woman, which I’d found in the top drawer of his desk. She was standing on a tigerskin rug in a long tight dress, with her face in profile and her head thrown back, a cigarette pointing like a thin white pistol at the ceiling. I wondered whether she was one of the famous theatre actresses he’d talked about. I tried to imagine her naked on the stained red rocks, with her head thrown back, her cigarette alight and pointing at the sky.

  We buried Uncle Felix in February, which meant it took pickaxes to dig the hole, and even then it wasn’t nearly deep enough. I wore the dress he’d bought for me the year before – it was still the only dress I owned, though it was softened now by many washes. My father had built the box himself, with cuts of wood left over from the roof. On the lid he carved FELIX HEKMANN and, underneath the name, he carved a pair of dancing shoes. As they lowered Felix into the hole, I glanced at Axel. His face was pale and serious, and someone had parted his hair; I smiled across at him, to comfort him. He held my look and then, still serious, he winked at me with his left eye. Then winked again, three times in succession, very quickly. It was an uncanny imitation. I had to put a hand over my face. My shoulders shook and tears poured from my eyes. Everybody thought I was crying, and they were very gentle with me when the funeral was over.

  That night, or one soon after, I saw Felix in a dream. He was standing under the hot spring in his best clothes and he was laughing the way he’d laughed the night we drove home in our truck, knowing nothing of the lightning or the ruined house.

  The spring I turned sixteen, Axel took me to the willow tree. I’d always known it was there – I paddled close to its trailing yellow branches every summer – but it was just a tree to me, a tree like all the others.

  It was warm for the time of year, and we’d both woken before dawn. Axel whispered in my ear, something about going for a walk, something about the stream, and I nodded in agreement. We eased out of the bed. Karl, who’d slept like a stone ever since I could remember, slept heavily on, one of his arms reaching to the floor, his fingers just touching it, making him seem delicate. My father was also asleep, lying on his back, with his hands folded on the outside of the blanket.

  We went out through the back, past the shed where the goats were penned. Their shoe-shaped faces turned; their yellow, devil eyes slit upright at us. We told them to be quiet. Then down into the field below. The sun was still behind the ridge, though the trees up on the crown were coloured with it, as if the bark had been stripped away, as if they were down to naked wood.

  The grass licked at my bare legs.

  Axel wasn’t wearing any shoes. I watched his heels rise, with something of the mill-wheel in their rhythm. The left one, the right one, the left one – one after the other, they kept rising. I watched his heels, shiny with dew, as I followed him across the field.

  A grey bird curved through the air like a flung stone.

  We stopped above the stream. There were trees there – poplars, willows, oak and fir. That time of year, the stream was swollen, snow melting further north and running down to us. My brother sat on the bank where it lifted clear of the fast-flowing water. It was a flat place, just mud and tufts of grass.

  ‘If we wait here,’ he said, ‘the sun’ll come to us.’

  I sat beside him. Stared at the water where it swirled around a root. The root arched out of the water and curved back down again in a kind of bow. If you looked at the root and its reflection both at once, as if they were joined, as if they were one completed thing, they made a shape that was exactly like a mouth.

  The sun was above the ridge now, to our left, but it hadn’t touched us yet. We were still sitting in the shade.

  ‘You never kissed anyone, did you?’

  I turned to look at him. His head was bent and he was scratching
at the mud with a piece of stick he’d sharpened. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just know.’

  He was still scratching at the mud. It wasn’t drawings he was doing, just lines that didn’t look like anything.

  ‘Maybe I did,’ I said.

  ‘Who with then?’ He looked sideways at me, his lip curling. Then he said the name of a boy who lived in the village.

  I laughed in his face. I was like that sun bursting over the curve of the hill and landing on everything in the world at once and turning it a colour suddenly.

  His head dipped again.

  ‘You didn’t do it yet,’ he muttered. ‘I know you didn’t.’

  I was strong now. I could say anything I liked. Even the truth.

  ‘So what if I didn’t.’

  His body went still. All of it. The hand with the whittled stick in it stopped moving. Even his head, which wasn’t moving anyway, seemed strangely motionless. It was as if he was listening to himself think.

  ‘So what,’ I said.

  He lay back with his head against the willow’s trunk. He didn’t look at me. He looked up into the tree instead, its pale-yellow waterfall of leaves and branches.

  ‘Would you like to?’ he said, without moving.

  There’s a way of holding on to a moment, of making it last almost indefinitely, but anything you do, you have to do it slowly, and in absolute silence, and you have to separate your mind from it, it’s not you who’s doing it, it’s someone else.

  I placed my lips where his were and I pressed. I remember thinking of the school teacher, and the way she held that spongy pale-pink paper against a piece of writing to make it dry.

  Then I leaned on one elbow, looking down at him.

  He just lay there and smiled. I almost hated him in that moment. His light-brown hair falling forwards, his lazy mouth. A scattering of freckles across his nose.

  ‘Try it again,’ he said.

  There was a bird awake somewhere near by. Its call was like a seesaw. Backwards and forwards, the call went. Backwards and forwards. It was then that I thought of Uncle Felix. I felt he was watching, even though I knew he was dead. If I looked round, he would be there, on the other side of the stream, with his knees drawn up against his chest and his walking-stick beside him. He’d be smiling.

  ‘What is it?’

  But I didn’t look round. I looked into my brother’s eyes instead and saw the black parts widen suddenly. I seemed to be rushing down towards him.

  I thought I’d startled him and so I said, ‘It’s nothing.’

  Before I could move, he sat up. One of his hands was on my shoulder. Then he covered my mouth with his. I was inside him then. His face so close, it was blurred. I could taste his breath.

  ‘It’s your mouth that should be open,’ he said, ‘not your eyes.’

  I did as he said.

  We stayed kissing until the sun reached us. When I opened my eyes again, everything in the world was blue and we had shadows.

  That was the morning Axel told me about the trees. He said we’d been born in a house that was made of the wrong wood. Unlucky wood, it was. The kind of wood that if you make railway sleepers out of it, the train crashes. Or if you turn it into matches, girls set fire to their dresses. Some trees were haunted at the core and if you used them to make a house, the haunting spread from the wood into the people, like a disease. Those trees were only good for burning, and even then you had to have your wits about you; a fire built out of that kind of wood might stubbornly refuse to burn, or else it might burn too well and greedily consume whole forests. Our father was a carpenter. He should have known. Which trees helped, which hindered.

  ‘And this one?’ I remember asking.

  Axel looked up into the weeping willow. ‘You might think from its name that it’s sad. It isn’t, though.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘It’s a pleasure tree. You don’t find them hardly ever. I’ve looked and looked and this one’s the only one I’ve found.’

  ‘A pleasure tree?’ I said. ‘What’s that mean?’

  He looked across at me. ‘What do you think it means?’

  We began to go further. The tree showed our hands new places. Always at dawn, with goats’ eyes watching as we left the house, and then that walk through wet grass to the stream. At dawn, with everybody still asleep.

  Summer came. Our shadows followed us, grew longer.

  One morning he undid his trousers and pulled down his pants and there was his thing, smooth as stripped wood, blond, too, like a kind of pine, and it grew in the sunlight, faster than any tree, faster than a plant, and it jumped, almost as if it was counting.

  I took it in my fingers and it still felt smooth, softer than I’d imagined, it was strange, the softness of the skin and the hardness just beneath, and moving one against the other, and then I put it in my mouth and closed my eyes, and my eyelids burned as the sun lifted over the ridge, reached through the trees, another day.

  ‘Who else have you been learning from?’ I heard him say.

  But because there was admiration in his voice, I didn’t need to answer.

  There was a moment just before the juice from him was in my mouth, when I had already the taste of it: I could see his head on the ground, turned sideways, and his left eye narrowed, almost closed, the tip of an arrow drawn in charcoal, and his back arching away from the earth, just shoulderblades and buttocks touching, and as his body twisted, a hollow appeared between the raised muscles of his stomach and the bay where his hip-bone was, and his ribs pushed upwards through his soft, tea-coloured skin.

  There never was someone more beautiful than that.

  With his light-brown hair slipping down into his eyes, and his body, whippet-lean, and the stories he could tell, such stories, Axel Hekmann could have had any girl he wanted. I saw the way they looked at him – sideways, along their cheeks, or upwards, through their eyelashes, or even over their shoulders as they walked away from him. And yet he chose his sister. His plain sister. There had to be some kind of perversity in him. Maybe it was the sense of doing wrong – or else he somehow knew I’d go along with it. It was a question I never asked. I didn’t dare. There was the fear that I’d be opening his eyes to something he hadn’t seen, and that everything would then, quite suddenly, be over. And I couldn’t imagine that, it being over; I felt raw on the inside if I thought about it, as if I’d been scraped out with a spoon. But I couldn’t imagine the future either. Each time he reached out at night and touched me on my breasts or between my legs, we had my father and my brother lying in the same room with us, and my uncle watching, too, his hair smoothed down with lard and a postcard of an actress in his hand. Certain kinds of secrets, they’re quiet and dead; they can be kept. There are others, though, that are alive and growing, and have a tendency to reveal themselves.

  Sometimes he was so rash, so obvious, I thought that what he really wanted was to be found out. There was the time he took my hand and put it inside his pants while we were riding in the back of the truck, with Karl and my father right in front of us, in the cab. If they’d turned round, looked through the narrow pane of glass, they would have seen. But he did it on my hand anyway and then laughed when I tried to work out what to do with it. I let the wind take it in the end and then I spat on my hand and wiped it on a piece of sacking, though I couldn’t get rid of that pale-green smell it had, sweet and salty at the same time, nothing like a girl’s. Another time we were in the grocery store and I was wandering between the shelves of outdoor things. I liked the smells – the green rubber waders, the orange leather work-gloves. He came up behind me and his breath was in my ear. I could feel his thing against my hip.

  ‘Minkels is deaf. He’ll never know.’

  ‘What if somebody comes in,’ I hissed, ‘to buy something?’

  He grinned. ‘We’d have to be unlucky. It’s only once or twice a week that happens.’

  I let him do it, not inside me, but between my thighs, among the hurricane l
amps, the leaning towers of hunting-caps (which toppled just before his stuff came out), the knives with dainty deer’s feet for handles, and he was right: Minkels never knew.

  I dreaded being caught, though. As the older of the two, I’d be blamed for it. And besides, I was the girl and girls always led boys on; girls were always guilty. Axel didn’t seem to worry. It just never entered his head. Sometimes I think that quality of his rubbed off on me and that, unknowingly, he prepared me for much of what came after. Or maybe it was in our blood and he was simply showing it to me. I often wondered how deep it went, and at what point it would turn into treachery. If we’d been caught, would he have pretended it had nothing to do with him? I could see it, somehow. I could see him smiling at me from some blameless place while I stood there in the sun with fingers pointing at me. He’d be smiling the way he’d smiled that first morning by the stream. Under the yellow leaves. Sometimes it seems to me that what I did was in revenge for this imaginary betrayal. Though there was an actual betrayal, of course. There was that, too, eventually.

  When I was seventeen, Karl married the Bohlin girl. I didn’t know much about her, except that she wasn’t the one I’d seen standing in his arms on the back porch like something in need of water. Her name was Eva. She was the only daughter of the people who owned the inn on the edge of the village. They were old for parents, almost the age of grandparents, and they were eager for her to take a husband so they could hand the business over. They already knew Karl on account of the work he and my father had done for them, and they were delighted to have him as a son-in-law. My father was pleased as well, partly because it sealed the bond between the two families and partly because he thought that Karl was bettering himself, marrying not into money, it was true, but into property, which was the next best thing. And, with a hotel, there was always the possibility of wealth.

  ‘You can make a go of it,’ he told Karl at the wedding party. ‘The place needs work, that’s all.’