The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  I noticed that Mazey had become restless, as if the talk had affected him as well. I didn’t want to chain him up again, but at the same time I was worried about him wandering too far. After all, what if there was some truth to the rumours? What if he tangled with a wild animal or fell into the clutches of a Satanic cult? I couldn’t warn him; he wouldn’t be able to understand the kind of danger I was talking about. Maybe I could follow him, though. Then, if he got into trouble, I could help. It was an idea. And hadn’t I always been curious about where he went?

  I waited on the porch, sitting in a rocking-chair and smoking cigarettes to pass the time. I had a small knapsack on my lap. It had some food in it, and a box of cartridges. Kroner’s rifle leaned against the wall behind me. There was a wind that night, and the trees on the far side of the road roared like a furnace with the door open. I could see the silhouette of Miss Poppel’s house, still uninhabited. I could hear the dull clank of the exhaust-pipes as they swung from the crab-apple tree. I thought of the birthday present I’d given Mazey. It was a tape of his wind-chimes. I’d recorded them one day when he was out. He kept the tape in his pocket at all times, along with his pen-knife; they were his prized possessions. We always played it if we drove somewhere together in the car.

  I’d been sitting there for almost an hour when I heard footsteps in the house behind me. We didn’t have any guests that night. With Karin gone and Kroner confined to a wheelchair, it could only mean one thing. I put my cigarette out under my shoe, then I sat back and kept quite still.

  The front door opened and Mazey appeared on the porch. He was wearing a long coat; his head was bare. He closed the door quietly, one hand on the handle, the other flat against the wood, so he could feel the lock catch. It was surprising to see what care he put into it. I watched him move down the steps and over the grass. He was heading away from the village, making for the bridge. I waited until he was hidden by the trees before I rose out of my chair. When I reached the road I could see him on the bend in front of me, a tall figure, stoop-shouldered, with hair that was so pale, it was hard to tell if it was fair or grey. He seemed at one with the night and the empty road and the fast clouds high above. He seemed at home.

  At the bridge I felt exposed: only one lane each way and thin metal railings on either side. I hid behind an upright while he crossed ahead of me. Thick, silver water below. I watched a duck land and blacken it. Mazey turned his head at the noise, but it was just a reflex; he didn’t stop to look. Once he was over the river, I had to break into a run to catch up. Me, a forty-five-year-old woman, running …

  I chose to walk in the grass at the edge of the road, close to the tree-line. Then, if he did happen to turn round, he wouldn’t see me. But I was struck by his purpose, his concentration. He didn’t look behind him, not even once. He didn’t hesitate at all, or dawdle, or meander. Sometimes his head moved from side to side, but I presumed he was just checking his bearings. He had the air of someone who knew exactly where he was going. I was reminded of something Eva had said once, before the sulphur got into her brain and ate everything intelligent. He looks like he could walk all day and all night, too. Like he could walk for ever. Then she’d thought for a moment. He looks like he could walk from this world right into the next.

  I’d fallen into a rhythm, I was hypnotised by it, so I almost missed his sudden plunge into the trees. I had to break into a run again. Up the grass bank, across the road and down the bank on the other side, keeping my eyes locked on the place where he had been. I parted low branches, ducked into the undergrowth. The trees closed over me.

  In the forest everything was black and silver. Mostly black, though. I stood still, just inside it, listening. I heard the crack of dead wood, bracken hissing. It had to be him. I began to move forwards, following the noise. Something caught on my cheek and tore the skin.

  At last I saw a path.

  It was quiet now, except for my own feet in the leaves. I walked on, further into the forest. It was quiet, but not peaceful. Once I saw a man’s head float between two trees. Mazey? But it was too high off the ground, even for him. It must have been a bird. Or a piece of pale bark. Or just the fall of moonlight.

  All of a sudden, there was a thrashing in the undergrowth ahead of me and to my right. It sounded like horses being ridden in a stream. It sounded wet. A scream lifted out of the darkness. One high note held for three or four seconds. Then it cut out. Darkness poured back into the space it left. Darkness pushing at me, almost too thick to breathe. The scream wasn’t human. But it was pain. It was definitely pain. I gripped the rifle hard. Shock had dropped me into a kind of crouch and I was panting.

  I forced myself to go on again, along the path. Towards the scream. I kept low and I whispered to myself, it didn’t matter what, just words, any words. I felt the ground with my foot each time I took a step. I thought of a mother rolling up her sleeve and dipping her elbow in a tub of water, testing it for temperature. Not my mother, though. Someone else’s. And all the time I scanned the forest that massed in front of me. Trees jumped sideways. Moonlight was fog, then snow, then water. Darkness bellied like a black sail with the wind behind it.

  Then I saw him.

  He was below me. There was a glade, a shallow bowl among the trees. A steep bank rose on the far side of it, casting a shadow. The earth had eroded there, and I could see a tangle of exposed roots. The path I was on circled the edge of the glade, keeping some distance above it.

  I stood still, one hand braced against a tree. He was sitting on his haunches with his back to me and, just for a moment, I had the impression that he was washing clothes. I took two silent steps and stopped beside another, larger tree. I could see one side of his face now – half of it, anyway: an ear, part of his cheek, the tip of his nose. In the moonlight his skin shone like bone. He was crouched over something. An animal of some kind. Not a dog or a cat. Larger than that. A deer, perhaps. He seemed to have his hands inside it. His arms were black to the elbow. Though in daylight, I realised, they wouldn’t be black. They’d be red.

  That scream, it must have been the animal.

  WHO COULD DO SUCH A THING?

  Whether I made a noise as I stood there, or whether he just sensed my presence, I couldn’t be sure, but suddenly he was looking over his shoulder, with his head angled in my direction. He didn’t move for at least a minute. I knew he was looking at me, but I didn’t think he knew who I was; I didn’t think he recognised me. And yet I found I couldn’t move. I was hardly even breathing.

  At last he stood up. He began to walk towards me. He didn’t hurry, though. His arms didn’t swing at all, or even bend; they just hung at his sides like dead weights. He came up out of the glade in one straight line and for the first time in minutes I was aware of the wind moving in the trees above my head.

  He stopped in front of me. I noticed something I’d never noticed before. The colour of his eyes wasn’t a colour at all, not even grey. It was just empty, drained. Or perhaps this was another trick, something moonlight did.

  He was staring at me.

  I could see dark patches on his clothes and his arms. I could smell the blood. I wasn’t frightened of him, and yet I knew I had to speak first.

  ‘It’s very late.’

  I used my strictest voice with him.

  ‘You should be in bed.’

  His face didn’t alter.

  ‘No baby,’ he said.

  He had looked in the hotel. He had looked in his grandfather’s house as well. He had looked high and low – behind doors, under beds, in drawers. Then, one night, his mother had explained where babies came from. A hand placed over her stomach. In here. And if they came from there, they could go back again. They could hide in there. And so he began to look for the baby in living things. All those dogs and chickens slaughtered and torn open. He was looking for Nina, that was all. He wouldn’t rest until he found her.

  I lifted the rifle until it was pointing at his head. He didn’t move. Moonlight down one side of hi
s face, his eyes still searching mine. Pull the trigger. Pull it. I felt my finger tighten. Because I wasn’t sure what else I could do. There was the institution, of course. I could go to Kroner in his wheelchair and I could say, ‘You were right about the boy.’ Kroner. The tension in my finger eased. I lowered the rifle, looked at it. It was Kroner’s rifle. There was his name, etched into the stock. And he was channelling his thoughts through it. I couldn’t believe I’d listened. His mind like cardboard when it’s been rained on. His brain all soggy. And I had listened.

  On the way back to the hotel, I threw the rifle into the bushes. If we were broken into, I’d use a hammer to defend myself. A kitchen knife. The broom.

  At seven-thirty the next morning I went into Kroner’s room and drew the curtains. He was awake. One eye clear and blinking, the other sloppy.

  I put my face close to his. ‘You think that’s going to work, do you? You really think that’s going to work?’

  His mouth fell sideways like an ice-cream melting. ‘Dssh –’

  ‘I suppose you were going to make his death look like an accident,’ I said, ‘or was it suicide you were thinking of?’

  ‘– Nnnnsshh – Nnnnsshh –’

  I picked his glass up from the bedside table and held it above his face. I tilted it very slowly until the water trickled down the outside of the glass, off the end and down, in one thin stream, on to his forehead, into his eyes.

  ‘Now look what you made me do,’ I said.

  He was moving his head from side to side. Some of the water had gathered in the worry lines. Interesting. Some of it had slid into his ears. I reached for a cloth and dabbed his face with it. Then I sat down on the edge of the bed.

  ‘I’m going to tell you something about accidents.’ I stared at the ceiling for a moment, as if I didn’t know quite where to begin. But I did, of course. I knew exactly. ‘You remember my brother and his wife? They had that terrible accident. The one where their truck went off the road and down that steep slope and they both died –’

  He was making his usual soggy sounds. I could tell he was listening, though. His one good eye was fixed on me.

  ‘It wasn’t an accident at all,’ I said. ‘I killed them.’

  I watched the eye move round in its socket, trying to escape. There was nowhere for it to go.

  ‘I borrowed one of my father’s hacksaws and cut through a track-rod. I only sawed into it a bit. I didn’t have much time, you see.’ I smiled to myself. ‘It’s the kind of thing that might not have worked. Not when I wanted it to, anyway.’ I paused again. ‘I was lucky, I suppose.’

  I looked down at him once more.

  ‘Yes, that’s right, it was me,’ I said when I saw the look in his eye. ‘I did it.’

  Outside, it was bright and cool. When I drove into the clearing with Mazey, my father was sitting on the back porch cleaning his rifle. This didn’t strike me as a coincidence at all. It was more like part of what had happened. The fever lifts. You return to normal. Something’s run its course. In daylight the idea of shooting Mazey seemed far-fetched and desperate, the light wind of someone else’s madness blowing through my head.

  I said good morning to my father.

  He looked up from his gun, his eyes pale, a crop of silver stubble on his cheeks and chin. ‘Any word of Karin?’

  I shook my head. I reached into the back of the car and lifted a small battery-operated cassette machine off the seat. It was Kroner’s – he’d bought it just before his stroke; he liked new gadgets – but he would have no further use for it. I carried it across the yard and stood it on the bonnet of the truck. I asked Mazey for his tape. He handed it to me. I put it in the cassette machine, then I pressed the button that said PLAY. My father looked from me to Mazey and back again.

  ‘We have to chain him up,’ I said, ‘like before.’

  This time my father’s eyes rested on Mazey for longer. Mazey didn’t notice. As usual, he was hypnotised by the cassette machine; he still hadn’t got used to the idea that you could hear the wind-chimes even though they were nowhere to be seen. My father studied him for a few moments, then looked down at the gun that lay across his lap.

  ‘You know where it is,’ he muttered.

  I left Mazey in the yard while I walked into the barn. I found the padlocks and the chain on a shelf next to my father’s rack of tools. As I turned away, I noticed the Leaning Tower of Pisa in the corner, propped against the wall, unwanted now, and gathering dust. It seemed a pity he had never finished it. It could have been his masterpiece. I’d always looked forward to the day when doves were roosting in those little arches. Outside in the yard, I ran one end of the chain around Mazey’s ankle and fastened it with a padlock. Then I took the other end and hooked it through the truck’s front bumper. Mazey stood still the whole time, his eyes fixed on the cassette machine. The fact that he was being chained to the truck again made no impression on him. Somehow it would have been easier if he had kicked and screamed. I’d never forgotten that drive back from the institution when he was eight, and how eerily untouched he seemed, and how remote.

  My father laid his rifle on a piece of cloth and, rising to his feet, walked slowly towards us. He touched Mazey on the shoulder. ‘Do you have your knife?’

  Mazey nodded.

  ‘Show it to me.’

  Mazey took the knife from his trouser pocket and held it out to my father on the flat of his hand. There was blood on the knife, and I knew what blood it was, but my father didn’t remark on it. He snapped one blade out, then the other. Tested both blades with the side of his thumb.

  ‘I thought so,’ he muttered. ‘Blunt.’

  He turned on his heel and walked away from us. I watched him vanish into the darkness of the barn. We waited in the yard, Mazey and I, both facing in different directions. After a while I heard the rasp of a grindstone.

  When my father stepped out into the sunlight, he was carrying two or three blocks of wood. He’d cleaned the blood off the knife, and the edges of the blades were bright silver, thinner than before. He handed the knife and the wood to Mazey.

  ‘Let’s see what you can do with those.’

  I drank a glass of water in the kitchen. Out on the porch I said goodbye to my father. He nodded. The gun lay on the cloth in front of him, each piece ready to be oiled. It would be hours before he reassembled it. As I drove away, I saw Mazey in the rear-view mirror. He was sitting on the ground beside the truck, with his head bent, whittling.

  All summer Mazey was kept chained to the truck outside my father’s house. All summer he carved the blocks of wood my father gave him. This time it was different, though. No strange, smooth shapes. Nothing you had to puzzle over, or guess at.

  All summer he carved babies.

  Babies sitting up, babies lying down. Babies on their backs or on their stomachs. Babies sleeping, laughing, kicking, crying (he even carved the tears). My father tried to persuade him to turn his hand to something else, but he wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. Each new block of wood that he was given became another baby, as if that was the only shape the wood contained, as if that was all it could ever be.

  One morning in August I sat beside him. I remember counting them. There were thirty-seven – some life-size, others no bigger than your thumb. He put down his knife and picked up a block of wood that was as yet untouched. He held it in the palm of one hand and placed his other hand on top of it, and then he looked at me.

  ‘Baby,’ he said. ‘In here.’

  Many years later, on a warm September morning, a letter arrived. I turned it over in my hands, examined the writing on the envelope. I didn’t recognise it. The postmark was a city in the northwest; I didn’t know anyone who lived there. When I tore the letter open, a photograph fell out and landed on the floor. I bent down, picked it up. There were two people in the picture, a man and a girl. I didn’t recognise either of them. I looked at the envelope again to make sure it was addressed to me. There my name was, on the front. I took the picture out to the porch a
nd stood in the sunlight, studying it. The girl was embracing the man, her right arm passing across his chest, her two hands joining on his left shoulder. Now I thought about it, she looked something like my daughter, Karin. I’d only seen Karin once since she left. It was Kroner she came for – which was just as well because he died a few weeks afterwards. She stayed for less than an hour. She was rude. I turned my attention to the man again and suddenly everything fell into place. It was Jan Salenko, twenty years on. He’d thickened, the way men do, but there was the same strangely grateful look to him, as if he didn’t deserve to be in the picture. My eyes drifted back to the girl. I thought of that cold December night and the baby I’d delivered. I’d even named her. Nina.

  Jan Salenko had written a long letter, telling me that he and Karin were separating, a separation that would end, he supposed, in divorce. He poured out his feelings to me – all his misery, his longing, his regret. I thought it odd to be receiving news that was so personal when I hardly knew the man. After all, they’d married in secret, against my will. For the past twenty years I hadn’t even had an address for them. But I knew enough to have told him, even at the beginning, that it wouldn’t last. That much was obvious to anyone. In fact, it was astonishing that it had lasted as long as it had. What did he expect from me now? Sympathy? I read on. Towards the end of the letter he mentioned his daughter. At least he still had her, he wrote. Nina lived in the capital now, but they saw each other every two or three months. They got on well. He was enclosing a picture of the two of them, taken a few weeks back.