The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  While at work I left Mazey with my father. Mazey’s silent staring didn’t disturb my father in the least. If anything, it suited him; he’d never been one to use words when silence would do just as well. He thought Mazey needed something to occupy him, though. Hunting through a drawer of odds and ends, he found an old pen-knife with a dark, bone handle and three blades of differing sizes. He gave it to the boy, began to teach him how to whittle. Mazey caught on quickly – so quickly, in fact, that my father claimed his own carpentering skills had skipped a generation; he saw himself in Mazey, which made the task of looking after him much easier, more of a pleasure. Mazey had a natural talent, he said, and it was a shame he was simple because he could have been a fine craftsman. What Mazey actually produced were strange, smooth shapes that didn’t look like anything, but somehow this seemed right: he was carving what was in his mind. And he would be absorbed for hours, sitting on the ground with that old blunt knife and a few off-cuts from whatever piece of furniture his grandfather happened to be working on. In those days I finished late at the hotel. Walking along the track towards our house, I’d see the stubborn bulk of it, down in the hollow, the whole place in darkness. The only light would be coming from the barn, and as I crossed the yard I’d see the two of them still bent over bits of wood, their figures shadowy, seeming to sway inside the dirty yellow tent of light shed by the hurricane lamp that hung from a beam above their heads.

  Something else Mazey did was go off on his own. He’d touch his grandfather on the shoulder or pull at his sleeve, and he’d point away from the house, into the trees. Then he’d be gone. Once, when he was four, I found him on the road that led into the village. Four years old and he was halfway to the bridge! At first it worried me. But as the years went by, I got used to it; that curiosity or restlessness, it was part of his character. By the time he was six or seven, he would often be gone for the entire day. At nightfall he’d walk in through the kitchen door and, dragging a chair over to the sink, he’d climb up on to it and drink from the cold tap. So far as I could tell, he kept out of the village – almost as if he remembered how it had turned against him once.

  The closest he would go was Miss Poppel’s place, which was on the edge of the village, across the road from the hotel. It was her front garden that attracted him. It had grown since I was a child. A jungle of broken machinery and appliances: vacuum-cleaners, bits of tractors, bicycle-wheels, refrigerators, ovens, ploughs. Salenko, the local mechanic, donated car-parts, the same way a butcher might give you free bones if you had a dog. She was especially fond of exhaust-pipes, which made excellent wind-chimes, she said. She must have had at least a dozen sets of wind-chimes hanging up outside her house. There were the exhaust-pipes, of course, but there were also hub caps, tin cans, even bottles (strictly for light summer breezes). Mazey’s favourite was the one that had been there the longest, the one made out of door-hinges. Though it took a strong wind to stir them into sound, he was just as happy sitting beneath the crab-apple tree and watching them twist silently on their lengths of copper wire. He could sit there for hours. And Miss Poppel would bring him a glass of fresh goat’s milk or a slice of something she had baked that day. She had promised him that the wind-chimes would be his when she was dead. She was going to mention them specifically in her will.

  When I passed Miss Poppel’s house after work, Mazey would often appear from behind some rusting piece of metal and we’d walk home together. I’d tell him what kind of day I’d had; I’d tell him stories, too, like how much Uncle Karl had drunk, or how long Aunt Eva had stayed in the sulphur water. It was like talking to myself, really, because he never said anything; I couldn’t even be sure that he was listening.

  On one such evening, when he was six or seven, I happened to mention the chimes. Gusts of wind had been rattling the doors and windows of the hotel all afternoon; I hadn’t heard the chimes myself, but I’d imagined Mazey in Miss Poppel’s garden, entranced. As usual, though, I left no room for him to speak. I’d already started telling him how Eva’s cigarettes had blown into the pool, so I almost missed it.

  ‘They were singing.’

  I stopped in my tracks. Mazey walked on a few steps and then turned round and looked at me.

  ‘Did you say something?’ I said.

  ‘They were singing.’

  I began to laugh out loud, right there in the middle of the road. He didn’t seem to understand what all the fuss was about. In his head, perhaps, he’d been talking for years.

  That night, after I’d put Mazey to bed, I told my father what had happened. My father was cleaning his pipe, chipping at the inside of the bowl with a knife and tapping the scrapings on to the top of the stove. He listened to me, but didn’t stop what he was doing. He waited until I’d finished, then he spoke.

  ‘I never heard him say anything.’

  ‘I didn’t either,’ I said, ‘not until today.’

  My father was silent for a while, packing tobacco into his pipe. He tamped the tobacco down, then held a lit match above it and bent the flame by sucking hard on the stem of the pipe. When he’d got the smoke moving in clouds towards the ceiling he looked at me. ‘Maybe it’s only you he’ll talk to.’

  Towards the end of the month I saw some evidence of this. I passed Miss Poppel’s house on my way home, but there was no sign of Mazey. I thought nothing of it; he wasn’t there every day and, anyway, I was later than usual that evening. But just before I reached the bridge, I heard chanting coming from a field on my right.

  I stepped into the ditch. There was still some light in the sky, and through the bushes I could see several children from the village gathered in the field. They seemed to be playing some kind of game. One of them – the leader, presumably – had his right elbow in his left palm and a cigarette between his fingers. There was a cartwheel propped against a tree, and a boy had been tied to it. I couldn’t see his face. I could only see the other children taunting him and their leader pacing up and down, taking quick drags from his cigarette.

  ‘Now,’ the leader was saying, ‘you’re going to talk.’

  ‘He ain’t going to talk,’ said one of the others.

  ‘He’ll talk.’ Smiling, the leader passed his cigarette to the boy who stood beside him. ‘Do his face.’

  The boy who was tied to the wheel strained sideways, and it was then that I saw the blond hair falling across his forehead.

  I fought my way through the bushes and ran across the field, shouting. The children stood still for a moment, staring at me, then the leader threw his cigarette away, not looking where it landed, and they scattered. I knelt down in front of Mazey and undid the string they’d bound him with. As soon as he was free, he took his right arm in his left hand and cradled it. He looked out across the field with his mouth stretched wide.

  ‘Did they hurt you?’

  When he didn’t answer me, I gently took his shirt-sleeve and rolled it up. There were three round burns in a cluster on the inside of his arm, just below the elbow. I drew him close to me. I could feel his heart beating and his breath coming faster than usual. It may sound strange, but I was proud of him then. He talked – but only to me. He wouldn’t talk to anyone else. Not even if he was tortured.

  He moved in my arms and I loosened my hold on him. He walked a few steps to where the cigarette lay in the grass, a thin spiral of blue smoke rising defiantly into the air. With no expression on his face, he put his shoe on the cigarette and crushed it out.

  Of course I couldn’t protect him every moment of the day, but I had the feeling, as we walked home that evening, that I’d left him on his own for too long. I ought to be spending more time with him – but what about my work? And if I gave up work, where would the money come from? Maybe, in the back of my mind, I was already beginning to think of taking a husband.

  The hotel was frequented not only by strangers but by local people as well and, during the evening, the small bar at the back was one of the few places in the area where you could have a quiet drink. Pete
r Kroner wasn’t a stranger exactly, but he wasn’t a local either. He came from a village some distance to the east. He was the foreman at a limestone quarry (Edwin Bock worked for him, among others). His family owned a small vineyard, too, producing a red wine that was fruity and sweet. The wine was popular, and Karl made a point of keeping half a dozen bottles in stock. That was Kroner’s excuse (he seemed, even then, like a man who needed excuses). He would call in for a drink on his way home from work, even though the hotel wasn’t on his way home at all, and his first words as he walked through the door were always the same: ‘So how’s it selling?’ He didn’t expect a reply. He didn’t care if it was selling or not. He almost never drank his father’s wine; he said it disagreed with him. It was one of the things I liked him for: though he was still living with his parents, he treated them with a healthy disrespect – or so it seemed to me. He was eleven years older than I was, and still unmarried. He had soft black hair and skin that didn’t take a razor well. Whenever I looked at him, he looked away, which I found flattering. It surprised me that I was flattered, but I was.

  He began to come into the bar at lunchtime.

  ‘Don’t you ever do any work?’ I asked him once, and instantly regretted it because it gave him just the kind of opening he needed.

  ‘Can’t seem to concentrate,’ he muttered.

  His eyes all jittery, his face looking grazed.

  Axel was standing at my elbow suddenly, behind the bar, and he was grinning. ‘Why don’t you dance with him?’

  Dance with him? There wasn’t even any music.

  ‘I don’t know,’ and Kroner twisted his glass of whisky on its base, ‘it’s just that I keep thinking about you.’

  Dance with him.

  ‘I could be married,’ I said, ‘for all you know.’

  ‘You’re not married. I asked.’

  ‘I’m twenty-six years old. If I’m not married yet, there must be something wrong with me.’

  ‘Not that I can see.’

  Exasperated now, I said, ‘I’ve got a child.’

  ‘I know,’ and Kroner grinned, ‘but he isn’t yours, is he?’

  ‘I love him like he’s mine.’

  Kroner’s eyes moved across my face, first one way, then the other, not stopping anywhere, just sliding over it. Afterwards he looked into his drink again.

  ‘Then I’ll love him, too,’ he said in a quiet voice, and nodded to himself. ‘I’ll love him, too.’

  Two months later I was wearing a pale-yellow dress down to the floor and he was wearing a dark-blue suit, and there was confetti on his shoulders and in his hair – tiny pale-blue horseshoes, tiny silver bells. His father’s sweet red wine flowed all afternoon and on into the evening. Dr Holbek recited a poem in our honour. He called it ‘A Connubial Epiphany’. We hardly knew what the title meant, let alone the poem, but we both applauded loudly at the end. There was a five-piece band, and we were in each other’s arms. Round and round we went, until my heels blistered.

  ‘There,’ I said to Axel, who was watching from a castle on the far side of the world. ‘I’m dancing with him. Are you satisfied?’

  I never wanted Peter Kroner’s children – that wasn’t the point of the marriage – but he took one from me anyway (if you can have a man put his seed in you and call it taking; I think you can). It was a baby girl and, just after she was born, he came into the bedroom with an armful of pink roses. There were twenty-six of them, and they’d travelled all the way from the city, he said, by special courier.

  ‘I’m so proud of you.’ His grazed face blurred and I felt his lips on my cheek.

  As far as I was concerned, it was like a robber going back to the bank he’d stolen from and congratulating it. I didn’t say anything, though. I couldn’t. The smell of the roses sickened me, their heavy sweetness thickening the air. I had to ask the midwife to stand them by the open window. Kroner didn’t notice. He was holding his baby daughter in both hands and his face had softened like a saint’s.

  ‘Black hair,’ he said, ‘just like her dad.’

  I had given birth at my father’s house, which was where we were living then. Kroner wasn’t happy about it – his parents’ house was bigger – but I’d insisted, not so much for my own sake as for Mazey’s. I didn’t want him to be uprooted from the only place he knew.

  It was a hot summer. Every day Kroner would drive over to the quarry, and I would stay in the house and sit by the window and think of the stream all dried up at the bottom of the field and the willow’s branches trailing in the mud. In my head everything was numb. I didn’t feel much for the child. When it lay in my arms and I looked down at its raw, puckered skin, it wasn’t love I felt, or even fondness. I’d loved once and I wasn’t about to be tricked into loving again – especially not by a pink, twitching thing with someone else’s hair. And besides, after loving Axel and then Mazey, there didn’t seem to be anything left over. It was so different from Mazey, too. I remembered how envious Eva had been, and now I understood. This new child cried all the time. There was so much strength in its tiny, swollen body. I heard the crying not with my ears, but my nerves; I felt like wood under a blunt saw, splintering. I’d find myself staring into her mouth, the hard curve of her tongue, dark-red, it was, almost purple-black at times, and then I’d want to hurt her.

  I couldn’t get over the feeling that I’d been robbed, somehow, or cheated. Partly it was Kroner himself: the joy he took in the child, the holy face he had when he looked down at her, the lightness in his step – I was sickened by it just as I’d been sickened by the flowers. There were days when he seemed to be looking at me with a kind of crafty pleasure, as if he’d slipped something past me. He’d married me. I’d had his child. He’d got his own way all along, and I was too exhausted to do anything about it.

  I was just settling into my chair on the back porch one morning when I heard the sound of an engine in low gear. I couldn’t think who might be visiting – I didn’t have many friends – and though I didn’t feel like company, I was curious to see whose car appeared in the clearing. It was Karl’s, but Eva was driving and she was alone. I watched her open the door. She was wearing a loose blue dress and a pair of bedroom slippers. As she turned towards the house, I saw the bruising on her cheek and around her eye, and then I knew why she had come.

  We sat on the porch all morning drinking sweet black coffee. I smoked one of her cigarettes, my first for more than a year, which made the world glass over. She noticed the cushions I’d arranged beneath me.

  ‘Does it still hurt?’

  I nodded.

  ‘After I had Thomas,’ she said, ‘they sewed me up too tight. They had to cut me open again.’

  ‘Eva.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She threw her cigarette into the yard.

  She told me Karl had started drinking in the mornings. He had a few before he went out, and by the time he came home at night he was so loud the roof seemed to jump right off the house. The children were frightened. Even the guests were frightened. She tried to smile, but it hurt. I watched her carefully. Her left eye looked like the letter e if you typed it on the hotel typewriter and then went back and typed another e on top of it. She was still talking about Karl. She wondered if I could speak to him. He was my brother, after all. She couldn’t think who else to ask.

  I didn’t think it was right of Karl, hitting her like that, but at the same time, knowing him as I did, I could see how she might have driven him to it. Her hair was dry and split, and her skin was turning spongy. There was a slackness about her, a lack of energy, that I knew would infuriate him. He would want to take hold of her and shake her. Wring her out.

  ‘There’s no point me talking to him,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He doesn’t listen to me. He never has.’

  Sighing, Eva lit another cigarette. She looked greedy when she smoked; it was the way her lips reached out for the filter, as if they couldn’t wait to draw the smoke from it.

  ‘What about yo
ur husband?’ she said.

  That evening I spoke to Kroner. He knew Karl through his father and the wine business. I persuaded him to have a drink with Karl, though I told him I didn’t think it would do much good.

  ‘Just try,’ I said. ‘For Eva’s sake.’

  Three nights later the door burst open and Kroner stood in the middle of the room, his face more grazed than usual, his clothes dishevelled. He was shouting.

  ‘He broke my tooth. He broke my fucking tooth.’

  The baby started crying.

  Kroner touched one hand against his mouth, then took it away and looked at it. ‘Your family,’ he shouted. ‘Your fucking family –’

  ‘My father’s in the next room –’

  ‘You, your brother, your crazy fucking child …’ He was circling the room, first one way, then the other. He kept touching his mouth and looking at his hand. There wasn’t much to see. ‘I don’t know why I got into this. I don’t have the first idea …’

  I looked at the baby’s hard, curved tongue. I thought of feeding her, but her blunt gums hurt my breasts.

  ‘I don’t – I just don’t have the first fucking idea –’

  ‘Nor do I,’ I said in a quiet voice.

  He heard me, though, and suddenly his hands flew up into the air and his face creased above his eyebrows, through his chin. ‘Don’t say that, Edith.’