The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘You remember your uncle’s box, with the dancing shoes on it?’

  I sat up. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about Axel?’

  That wasn’t difficult.

  ‘A mountain and a castle,’ I said, ‘and snow, too, because it’s high up where the castle is.’

  He turned and looked at me.

  ‘It’s a place he always dreamed of going,’ I explained.

  He was still looking at me, and it was a while before he spoke. ‘I’m not sure I can do snow.’

  The two boxes were lowered into the same hole, first Eileen’s, then Axel’s. My father had surpassed himself. He’d carved a range of mountains that stretched the entire width of the lid. He’d also carved the castle, perched high up in a lonely pass. He’d even carved a snowline. I noticed several members of the Poppel family peering suspiciously at Axel’s box, and I thought they were right to be suspicious. That lid, it was a hint. Axel wasn’t with Eileen in the ground at all. Axel had gone to a completely different place.

  I glanced down at the child in my arms. He was wide awake and staring up into the sky, a sky filled with racing clouds and frantic autumn leaves. His eyes moved to my face. His mouth opened and his hands moved this way and that in the air, palms upwards, as if he was trying to balance it. He didn’t make a sound, though. Not a sound.

  Most people had caught a glimpse of the truck when it was towed back through the village. Others had visited the site of the accident. Some had even seen the bodies of the deceased. No one could believe the child had survived. It was a miracle, they said. Equally miraculous was my eagerness to adopt him – especially to the Poppels. They’d always doubted me and, even now, suspected that I might be up to something. They set their narrow minds to work on the problem, but they got nowhere with it. There wasn’t anywhere to get. I could have told them that.

  It was with a querying air that Mrs Poppel came up to me after the service. She offered her condolences. I offered mine.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘at least they’re together.’

  I nodded. That’s what you think.

  She gave me a look that lasted seconds, then she stooped over the baby and tickled him under his chin. I stared down at her – the reddened eyelids, the dirt under her fingernails.

  At last she straightened up. She stepped back, gathering her black shawl around her shoulders. ‘He’s good, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He is.’

  Not long after the funeral I was preparing supper for my father one evening when I heard the jingling sound of reins outside. Through the window I watched a horse and cart lurch to a standstill in the clearing behind the house, two lanterns swinging from the tail-board. Several people clambered down on to the ground. I saw a woman first and recognised the high, pinched nose on her.

  ‘It’s the Poppels,’ I told my father.

  Five of them had come. Mrs Poppel, her sister, her sister’s daughter (or granddaughter – you never could tell, with the Poppels) and two sons, including the one who’d asked me for a dance at the wedding. They sat against the kitchen wall on straight-backed chairs drinking cherry brandy, which was all we had in the house. The two men took out tobacco pouches and rolled cigarettes that were as thin as matches. They smoked quickly, furtively, their eyes high up in the corners of the room.

  Not until Mrs Poppel had drained her glass did she begin to speak. It was about the child. She was grateful to me for having taken him. She thought it was fitting. I was family, after all; I was blood. What’s more, I was the right age – just two years older than her poor Eileen. A tear fattened on her lower eyelid. I watched it burst and spill across her cheek.

  ‘And it’s one less mouth for you to feed,’ I said.

  They bred like rabbits, the Poppels. Like rabbits.

  ‘Well, yes,’ she said, ‘there is that, of course …’ She looked at my father, who had hardly said a word. ‘And if you should ever think the child might need a father,’ and she glanced at her son, the one sitting across the room, the one who liked dancing, ‘well …’

  Her son was staring at the wall. The hand holding the cigarette rested on his thigh, the cigarette pointing inwards, at his wrist. His eyes sprang towards me and then away again, as if the look was attached to a length of elastic.

  ‘A baby’s one thing,’ I said. ‘A husband’s quite a different matter.’

  My father cleared his throat and spat into the fire. The phlegm sizzled. ‘Contributions,’ he said, ‘would always be welcome.’

  I wasn’t sure he meant it. I thought he was probably just telling the Poppels that their visit was over. He wasn’t a great one for socialising, Arno Hekmann.

  I waited until the cart had disappeared up the track and then I turned to him. ‘Contributions?’ I said.

  My father lit his pipe. ‘I don’t see why not.’

  As he leaned back in his chair and lifted his eyes to the smoke-blackened ceiling, I thought I saw a smile cross his face.

  Later that night, though, he told me he was worried about money. There was less work than there used to be. He wasn’t sure we could afford to keep the child. I reminded him that I was working now. And I would go on working. They didn’t pay me much at the hotel, but it was better than nothing.

  ‘If all else fails,’ I said, ‘I’ll get married.’

  My father contemplated me through coils of blue pipe-smoke.

  ‘But not to some Poppel,’ I added.

  Now that Axel and Eileen were gone and my father was alone, I spent half of every week at the house. In the mornings I would walk into the village with Mazey bound tightly into a blanket on my back. When I reached the hotel I would lay him in a drawer, the same drawer that I’d found him in (it wouldn’t be long before he grew out of it). If I was cleaning, I carried the drawer from room to room with me. If I was sweeping the terrace or scooping leaves out of the pool, I took the drawer outside. If I was cooking, the drawer stood on the kitchen table, among the fruit and vegetables. He was never any trouble. It was only his hands opening and closing in the air above the drawer that told you he was there. Eva didn’t mind my bringing Mazey to work with me. She had two children of her own now, Thomas and Anna, yet she seemed more interested in mine. She thought there was something different about him. She was almost envious.

  ‘He’s so quiet,’ she said, ‘so,’ and she bit her pale bottom lip, trying to think of the word, ‘so peaceful.’

  He had always been quiet. I could only remember him making one sound, and that was when he called out to me from the floor of the truck, to tell me he was there. He’d been quiet ever since. To me, that was normal. Also, it was an absence of something; it would have been hard for me to notice it, this being my first child. He didn’t cry at night; in fact, he seldom cried at all, not even when he cut his teeth. Eva told me this was unheard of. She’d never come across a child who didn’t cry when it was teething.

  ‘You must be giving him something,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not.’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘You’re not giving him alcohol?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Some kind of herb, then?’

  I shook my head.

  It was Eva who told me about the rumours that were spreading through the village. People thought Mazey might be a prophet or a saint. That was the reason he’d survived that terrible plunge through the woods. That was the reason he’d been spared the fate of his unfortunate parents. You might almost say that they’d been sacrificed on his behalf. They had died that he might live.

  ‘That’s absurd,’ I said.

  Eva lifted a finger to silence me. ‘I didn’t tell you about the miracle.’

  The week before, she’d taken Mazey shopping in the village. It was late afternoon, already dark. Several people were in the grocer’s when she walked in. While she was waiting to be served, her arms grew tired and she sat Mazey on the counter. Suddenly there was a violet flash in the square outside and then a loud crack overhead, like a dry stick being
snapped in two, and all the lights went out.

  ‘He was sitting on the counter,’ she said, ‘and somehow there was this glow around him, I don’t know if it was a reflection or what it was, but anyway, everybody noticed it. And because everybody in the shop was looking at him, they all saw him lift his arms up and at the same moment that he lifted his arms, the lights came on again — but only in the shop. The rest of the village was still in darkness.’ Eva stared at me with eyes that were wide and glistening, mesmerised by her own re-telling of the story.

  It sounded like a coincidence to me.

  ‘I know,’ Eva said, ‘but people are talking.’

  The next time I cut Mazey’s hair, she asked me for a lock of it. I gave it to her without thinking. A week later, while I was cleaning the lobby, I found the lock of hair. It had been laid on a square of brown velvet, then sealed into a small gilt box with a glass lid on it. The box had been fixed to the wall above the entrance to the hotel. When I asked her what it was doing there, kinks appeared in both her eyebrows; they could have been about to tie themselves in knots.

  ‘It’s so there’s calmness in the house,’ she said, as if it was perfectly obvious, ‘his calmness,’ and she sent a glance to the corner of the kitchen, where Mazey lay sleeping. She took me by the arm and led me into the shadows by the cellar door. ‘Tell me, is he talking yet?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Not even one word? Not even,’ and she lifted her shoulders towards her ears, and smiled a smile that was as small and plump as a ripe plum, ‘not even – Mama?’

  ‘No. Nothing.’

  She frowned for a moment, then her dark eyes widened. ‘Perhaps he’s about to make an utterance. Who knows, perhaps he’ll speak in tongues!’ She moved closer. ‘Don’t mention it to Karl,’ she said. ‘The lock of hair, I mean. If you don’t say anything, he probably won’t notice. Men generally don’t.’

  If it had only been Eva who was acting in this manner I would have put it down to one sulphur bath too many and thought little more about it. But one afternoon in February a young couple, recently married, approached me as I was walking home. They wanted me to bring Mazey to their house, so he could bless it. It wasn’t far, they said. Just round the corner.

  Was it their eagerness that I succumbed to? Was I reminded of myself and Axel, the way we used to be – the way we could have been? Or was I just too tired after my day’s work to think of an excuse? I don’t know. In any case, I followed them and stood on the threshold of the house with Mazey and he was silent, as usual, and he stared, as usual, then we left. That was the blessing.

  Winter moved northwards, leaving the landscape brown and sodden. We visited a rich man who’d been afflicted with a painful and incurable disease. I stood at his bedside, Mazey in my arms. We had only been there for half an hour when the man opened his eyes and said, ‘He just sits there, doesn’t he,’ and then he smiled and died. There was the feeling among the family that the child had lifted the rich man’s suffering and eased his difficult transition from this world to the next. There was the belief that the child had done good. I believed it, too. I was his mother, after all, and I was proud of him.

  After that, we were often summoned to the beds of the dying to give them succour. We were summoned to the fields as well so the harvest would be plentiful. We were even summoned by the childless, in the hope that they might conceive. Each time Mazey appeared somewhere, the tales of his mysterious powers were enhanced and multiplied. More miracles were reported. Mazey passed an orchard and all the apples ripened. Mazey touched a sack of flour and when it was opened there was a gold coin in it. Just about the only thing he didn’t do was bring somebody back from the dead – but he was probably saving that for his adolescence. Presents were showered on him: slaughtered animals, fruit and vegetables, alcohol, cigars – even money. Far from not being able to afford to keep him, my father and I found that he was more than paying for himself. I was worried, though. The Poppels were becoming interested again. I knew how their minds worked. I could see them driving through the village and the surrounding countryside with Mazey sitting on a piece of velvet in the back of their cart. There would be giant banners, painted in red and gold: SEE THE HOLY CHILD! TOUCH HIS BLESSED GARMENTS AND BE HEALED! and also, naturally, CONTRIBUTIONS WELCOME! They would grant audiences with him. They would sell locks of his hair. They would guarantee fertility, good fortune, peace of mind. He would make them rich.

  The Poppels were stupid people and it would take them time to realise all this, but when they did, it would be hard to convince them of my innocence. They’d remember how swiftly I’d adopted him and suddenly they’d see everything that had happened in a new light: the child was gifted, even sacred, and somehow I’d known it all along. This was the truth they’d been trying to get at during the week of the funeral. This was the knowledge I’d cunningly concealed from them. The Poppels were only a threat if they felt they might have been wronged in some way. Well, they would feel wronged. And, like most stupid people, once they’d got that idea into their heads, it would be almost impossible to dislodge it. Mazey had already become, to some extent, the property of the village: the track to our house was being worn out by the feet of supplicants. How long before the Poppels tried to claim him as their own? He was all I had, but I would lose him if something wasn’t done.

  We celebrated Mazey Hekmann’s second birthday. That morning my father had told me that certain people in the village wanted to build a shrine to him. It was to be erected on the shore of the lake, in the place where we had found the truck; people were saying it was the site of his spiritual rebirth. My father was sitting in his chair by the stove, his pipe unlit in his hand.

  ‘They’ll probably ask me to build it for them.’ He laughed his hollow laugh. ‘Strange thing is, I could use the work.’

  I looked up from the cake I was icing and for once I could see we were both thinking the same thought: Where will it end?

  Curiously enough, it was the church that saved us.

  One night there was a knock on the door. I opened it and peered out into the darkness. The village doctor was standing there.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong house,’ I told him. ‘There’s no one sick in here.’

  ‘That’s what I’m here to find out.’ He stepped forwards into the light and removed his hat. ‘I’ve come to see the child. The pastor sent me.’

  The doctor was a small bald man with a fragile manner. He always looked to me as if he’d just broken something valuable and was expecting punishment. His name was Holbek, and it was said of him that he wrote poetry at night.

  He spent a long time examining Mazey with all kinds of tools and instruments which he produced from his black leather bag. At one point he asked me if Mazey could talk. I shook my head. Not yet, I said. Does he ever smile? the doctor asked. I looked at my father. I don’t know, I said. I can’t remember.

  At last the doctor turned to face us, one of his hands clasped in the other.

  ‘It’s as I thought,’ he said.

  I stood beside my father, waiting for the doctor to continue.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the child may be a saint, for all I know, but he is also,’ and he lowered his eyes for a moment and then lifted them again, ‘he is also retarded.’

  ‘I knew there was something about him,’ I exclaimed.

  Holbek gave me a watchful look. The child’s mind was a seed that would never grow, he said, quoting from a poem he had not yet written. He couldn’t be sure whether the condition was inherited or whether it was the result of the terrible accident that had robbed him of his parents. He simply couldn’t say. However, it would be a great strain on all of us. He hoped we understood.

  I tried to conceal my relief. No one would take him from us now.

  ‘Please assure the pastor that I intended none of this,’ I said. ‘Quite the opposite, in fact. I don’t know how it started, but I’m glad it’s over.’ I moved closer to the doctor, who was looking at me strangely. ‘Ple
ase let it be known throughout the village that my child is not a holy child, but a simple one.’

  The doctor nodded.

  ‘His mother was a Poppel,’ I said. ‘That probably explains it.’

  I thanked the doctor for coming, then showed him to the door. I stood in the yard and watched him walk away, his short dark figure merging quickly with the night.

  During the next few weeks the village turned against us. Doors closed as we walked along the street. Faces looked away. They’d been deceived, not by the child or by me, but by themselves – though that wasn’t how they saw it, of course. They’d put their faith in Mazey, and he’d made fools of them. Their reverence was replaced by wariness at first, and then by fear. His eyes weren’t calm; they were blank. His silence wasn’t serenity, but emptiness. So it is that people are betrayed by their desperate craving for gods. But we lived on, as we had always done, in our house out in the woods – my father, my son, and me.

  There came a time when the hotel’s fortunes began to change for the better. Eva was convinced it was because she’d taken the gilt box down from above the door and ceremonially burned the contents, but the fact was, our national economy was booming and the new prosperity could be felt, even in the more remote corners of the country. We had guests most nights. They weren’t the actors and statesmen of half a century before. They were ordinary people who wanted to escape for a weekend: pensioners, businessmen, romantic couples. Over the years, as Karl had started drinking heavily, first at home, then in the nearby town, Eva had come to rely on me. By the time I was twenty-four, I was practically running the place. I worked hard, with only a part-time cook and a chambermaid to help me. I saw less of my father, less of Mazey. It was a condition of my employment, in any case, that Mazey be left at home. As a baby he’d been no trouble, but things were different now that he was five. ‘It’s those eyes of his,’ Eva would say, shivering dramatically. ‘They put people off.’

  It was true. Mazey was tall for his age, with pale-blond hair that fell across his forehead, just the way his father’s used to, but if you looked him in the eye you could see that something wasn’t right. He seemed to be looking through the world, rather than at it. For him, the world was like a pane of glass. You couldn’t guess what lay beyond the glass, though. Sometimes people stood in front of him and his gaze seemed to be saying, You’re not there. You don’t exist. They felt like ghosts all of a sudden. He even did it to me now and then. There were times when I felt that his eyes had stopped just behind my eyes, inside my mind, and that they were reading what was written there, a story I had never told, a secret nobody had guessed – the truth. And then I’d have to remind myself of what he was: a simpleton, an idiot, a fool – with only me to care for him, only me to trust. Only one truth counted any more, and that was this: we would never cause each other harm.