The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  After I’d finished the letter, I studied the photograph again. She wasn’t a bad-looking girl, though she didn’t have the fine features of her mother. She looked more like me: headstrong, spirited, but plain. There was also something of Mazey in her – the nose, the upper lip. A Hekmann, not a Kroner. I didn’t answer the letter. There was no point. What would I have said? I left it on a shelf in the kitchen, wedged between two glass jars. I forgot it was even there.

  Mazey came to me one morning. At forty-three, the shine in his hair had gone and there were thin lines around his mouth, but otherwise he hadn’t aged at all. I’ve often noticed how backward people look younger than they really are, as if their flesh is somehow backward, too; Mazey could easily have passed for twenty-eight or – nine. He stood in the kitchen that day, and the fingers of his left hand curled and uncurled against his leg. I asked him what was wrong. He wouldn’t say. In his right hand he was holding Jan Salenko’s photograph.

  ‘Reading my letters now, are you?’

  He held the picture up in front of me. ‘The baby,’ he said. ‘Where’s the baby?’

  It took me a few moments, then I understood. He thought the girl in the picture was Karin. And if Karin was there, the baby ought to be there as well – even after all these years. I told him that it wasn’t Karin he was looking at but Nina, her daughter. He was looking at the baby, I told him, only the baby had grown up. I could see he didn’t believe me. He had never understood change, especially when it was slow. I took him outside. I picked up an acorn off the ground and then I showed him the oak tree it had come from. I told him the tree had been an acorn once. It was the same with the picture, I said. The girl used to be a baby. He just stared at me as if I was making the whole thing up. He was convinced that the girl in the picture had hidden the baby, and he wanted to know where it was. I tried to explain it to him again, but he turned away from me. He stood in the car-park, staring at the photograph, his left hand curling and uncurling against his leg.

  My father had died at around that time, of old age. There were only a few of us at the funeral; he’d lived so long that most of the people who knew him were already gone. My father had two suits, which he kept for Sundays. He was buried in one of them, and I dressed Mazey in the other. At the graveside I stood with Mazey’s arm in mine and watched the box drop into the ground. My father had carved the symbols of his trade on the lid – a hammer, a saw, a handful of nails; I remember thinking that the nails must have taken him a while. I felt Mazey remove his arm from mine and looked to see what he was doing. He’d opened one of the blades on his pen-knife and he was testing it against his thumb, the way my father had taught him. When he disappeared shortly after the funeral, I thought I understood: my father’s death had awakened an old restlessness in him.

  But he disappeared every month, returning in clothes that were filthy, often torn and sometimes even spotted with blood. After a year or so, the length of time that he was gone began to grow. Sometimes he would be away for as long as a week. I was worried that he might walk out one day and not come back at all. It was only by chance that I found out where he was going. I was emptying his pockets so I could wash his clothes when I found a ticket stub. It was a tram ticket, and it had the city’s name on it. He’d been going to the capital, more than six hundred kilometres away. Sometimes I found money in his pockets, too, money he hadn’t had on him when he set out. Sometimes there were stains in his underwear, which alarmed me. When I asked him what he did there, in the city, he became sullen and wouldn’t answer. The only way to find out would be to follow him again. Though I was afraid of what I might discover, I felt I had no choice; it was part of my responsibility to him.

  The next time he told me he was going out, I was ready. I’d prepared some food and a change of clothing, and I’d made arrangements with Martha, the hired help, to run the place while I was away. I felt like a fool, though, because I was back two hours later. Mazey had hitched a lift on the main road; I’d stood there helplessly while he disappeared into the distance in some stranger’s car. It was at least a month before he left again. This time I borrowed an estate car from one of our neighbours (Mazey would have recognised our truck). I sat behind the wheel and watched him walk away from the house. It was a bright, cold October day. A clear blue sky, dead leaves clattering across the ground.

  He walked until he reached a junction a couple of kilometres west of the village, then he turned to the south, along a road that led towards the motorway. After another quarter of an hour, he found a grass verge that was to his liking and began to wait. I had to hide the car behind a tree because that section of the road was straight and whenever he heard the sound of an engine he looked in my direction. He kept his thumb stuck out in the air, I noticed, even when there was nothing coming. It was the middle of the morning before someone stopped for him. I didn’t recognise the car; it wasn’t anyone we knew. I followed the car for an hour and a half. It dropped him at a service station about one hundred and twenty kilometres south-west of the village. There were toilets, petrol pumps. There was a café-restaurant with a red-and-white-striped awning. I parked in the shadow of a removal van and watched Mazey as he walked into the restaurant. He bought a soft drink, then he went and stood next to a man who was sitting at the counter. I saw the man shake his head. I found that my mouth was hanging open. I suppose I’d never imagined Mazey speaking to anyone apart from me. I felt a sudden jealousy of all these strangers. I watched him move along the counter, stopping at the shoulder of every driver. He knew the procedure; obviously he had done it many times before. The way he approached the men, the way he nodded when they turned him down. The way he drank from his Styrofoam cup and then crushed it when it was empty and tossed it in the bin. I’d lost him. I wondered when exactly this had happened.

  He was offered a lift by a tall fat man who drove an oil tanker. This was a relief. I’d been dreading something fast; the estate I’d borrowed was a rickety thing, more than ten years old. The tanker would be no problem, though. Also it was silver, which made it impossible to lose in traffic. We travelled south, through flat grey land. It was country I’d never seen before. There were almost no trees. Morning became afternoon and the bright sky clouded over. It began to drizzle.

  At last, towards dusk, the driver stopped for something to eat. I parked almost parallel with the tanker, but slightly behind it. From where I was sitting I could see Mazey’s shoulder and his forearm. I watched him climb down out of the cab, his face in profile against the cold sodium lights. He followed the driver into the cafeteria and bought a sandwich. I went to the toilets while I had the chance. There was an attendant eating peanuts out of a tin and watching a black-and-white TV. On the way out I dropped a few small coins into a Tupperware container, but she didn’t even look at me. I hurried to the car. Just then Mazey left the cafeteria. He didn’t go back to the tanker. Instead, he wandered around the car-park. At one point he walked right towards me and I had to duck down, hide under the dashboard. This is madness, I thought, crouching on the floor among sweet-wrappers, dirty tissues, bits of mud from other people’s shoes. I should go home.

  When I lifted my head and peered through the bottom half of the windscreen, I saw Mazey hoisting himself up into the tanker’s cab. Over in the cafeteria the driver was just finishing his meal. He wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist, then put on a dark-blue wool hat. I had the feeling he was going to be driving through the night.

  I was right. It was two-thirty in the morning before he stopped again, this time in a rest-area. There were no facilities; it was just a section of unmarked road that curved off the motorway and joined it again two hundred metres further on. I parked beyond the tanker, at the far end of the curve, and adjusted my wing-mirror so I could see the tanker from where I was sitting. The drizzle had eased. A rain-mist now. Tiny particles of water drifting in the dark air, floating rather than falling. I got out of the car to stretch my legs. There wasn’t much traffic any more, but if something did go past, i
t made a sound like someone drawing curtains.

  I climbed a grass bank behind the car, and then I walked along the top of it, through some newly planted saplings, until I could look down into the oil tanker’s cab. The driver was still sitting at the wheel. His head was leaning against the window and his eyes were closed. At first I thought he was asleep. But then his mouth opened and his chest swelled; as if he’d just breathed in. It was only then that I saw Mazey. He had his back to me and his head was on the driver’s lap. I could only see his hair, the collar of his shirt and his right elbow. I took a step backwards, turned away. I was thinking of Axel as I stumbled among the saplings. Thinking of the branches of the willow tree, the stream flowing beneath us, his tea-coloured summer skin. It had poisoned us, the pleasure we had taken in each other. It had poisoned all the earth around us, all the air. It had poisoned most of the lives that came after us. They never knew the source of it. They never knew it came from that one tree, on that first morning. Before anybody woke. When I reached my car I suddenly doubled over and vomited a frothy yellow liquid on to the ground. I couldn’t think what I’d eaten to produce such a colour. Trembling, I got into the front seat. I wanted to wash my mouth out. All I could find was a bottle of distilled water, which my neighbour used for topping up the battery.

  I hardly slept that night. Every time a lorry started up, my eyes snapped open and I wiped the condensation off the window and looked into the wing-mirror. But the silver tanker never moved. Not until eight in the morning, when the door on the driver’s side slammed shut. The tall fat man spat twice, then turned and climbed the grass bank. He stood among the saplings for a while, just looking out across the landscape, before unbuttoning his trousers. His urine smoked in the cold morning air.

  At ten o’clock Mazey was dropped at another service station on the motorway. He stood shivering among the petrol pumps, his hands in his pockets. I watched the tanker pull away without him. I was glad to see the back of it. But because I’d followed it for so many hours, I went on seeing it long after it was gone: a silver disc with banks of tail-lights under it, black mud flaps, giant tyres. I watched Mazey walk from car to car, bending down to speak to each driver, as if he was selling something. Though I was cold, a kind of heat rose through me as it occurred to me that maybe that was exactly what he was doing. The money in his pockets – how else had he got hold of it?

  It took him another two lifts to complete his journey. It was a wet day, rain angling across the motorway, but I was grateful for the weather: the cars Mazey travelled in drove slowly, and I was even less likely to be noticed. The last car was a pale-green saloon, which put him down on the outskirts of the city, not far from the main bus terminal. He stood on the pavement for a moment, his mouth set in a straight line as he looked around him. Then he began to walk. I parked, making a note of the name of the street, then followed him on foot. The temperature had dropped into single figures; fog cloaked the tops of the buildings. Mazey walked the same way he walked when he was in the village, as though unaware of his surroundings, as though people were ghosts. His shoulders were drawn in towards his chest and his fists were pushed right to the bottom of his pockets. He only had a thin coat to cover him. It was one of Kroner’s coats – too short in the arm, threadbare, too, not even waterproof. His shoes were worn down at the heels so they tilted sideways and inwards; they moved sloppily on his feet, like moored boats. I saw him as someone who didn’t know him, and it shamed me that I hadn’t clothed him better.

  The rain slackened off. Finally it stopped altogether. Mazey was examining the buildings now. We were nearing his destination. I didn’t like the area. The streets were wide and derelict. The apartment blocks were many storeys high, their windows curtained with rags or sheets of newspaper or plain brown cardboard. The shops had all been fortified with metal grilles. They sold newspapers, chewing-gum, cigarettes. Fruit that was almost rotten. Fridges and televisions that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Miss Poppel’s front lawn. There was a bar on almost every corner. They had metal grilles as well. I didn’t see too many people – just tramps, drunks, old women with dogs. Mazey began to fit. His threadbare coat, his worn-down shoes. Is this where he belongs? I wondered. At the end of an alleyway I saw the slick grey surface of a canal.

  He stopped in front of a building, looked up, then he pushed through the door and vanished inside. I crossed the road towards it. Through the cracked glass panel in the door I could see a hallway, a row of brown metal letter-boxes along one wall, a narrow flight of stairs. I opened the door, let it swing shut behind me. Then I stood there, listening. I heard Mazey’s footsteps somewhere above me. I heard him knock on a door. I climbed the stairs quickly, then stopped again and listened. He knocked again. I couldn’t see him, but it sounded as though he was on the floor above. The door opened and I heard a voice that wasn’t his. The door closed. I climbed to the next floor. There were only four doors on the landing and I put my ear to each one of them in turn. When I’d worked out which apartment he had entered, I climbed one more flight of stairs and then I sat down on a step and waited.

  The building was quiet. Just somebody scraping the bottom of a saucepan with a spoon. And one half of an argument – the woman’s voice. I was sitting by a window. I could see rooftops, factory smoke. And, in the distance, a strip of dull green, which was where the city ended. I hadn’t realised I was so high up. The street must have been built on a hill.

  Flies nuzzling the chalky glass.

  It was always Axel that I saw, with his eyes narrowed against the sunlight, and the stream running below us, and I couldn’t believe the beauty of those moments forty years before had led to this. A staircase in a dismal, run-down building. A street whose name I didn’t even know. What did I have in mind? I no longer knew.

  More than an hour passed.

  The door to the apartment opened and, looking down between the metal banisters, I saw the top of Mazey’s head. He was leaving. He was alone. I heard his footsteps fade, the front door shut. From my window I could see him walking back along the street.

  After sitting still for so long, it was an effort to move. My knees were cold and stiff; I had to rub the life back into them. At last I stood up. I went back down the stairs and knocked on the apartment door.

  A man’s voice called out. ‘Erik? Is that you?’

  I knocked again.

  The door opened, on a chain. I saw a man who could have been my age. He wore a green sun-visor and his grey hair was cropped close to his head.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There was someone here,’ I said. ‘Just now.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He’s my son.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ the man said, ‘because he’s my son, too.’

  I stared at him through the narrow gap. There was a cut on the bridge of his nose, the kind of cut Karl used to get when he drank too much and then fell over.

  ‘Could I come in, please?’

  The man studied me for a few moments, then he closed the door. I was about to knock again when I heard him unlatch the chain. This time the door opened wide. The man bent slightly from the waist, and his right hand drifted away from his body. It was a gesture of welcome, but he was mocking me with it.

  I walked past him. There were only two rooms. The first was a kitchen. Under the window was a bath that had a wooden board on top of it. The floor was dark-green linoleum. My shoes stuck to it.

  The second room wasn’t much larger than the first. There were three single beds in there, each bed pushed against a different wall. All the surfaces were covered with ashtrays, bottles, glasses. Someone had pinned a playing card to the fireplace – the Jack of Hearts. A man sprawled on one of the beds, his head and shoulders propped against the wall, a leather cap wedged on to his curly black hair. He wore a diamond stud in his left ear. Dirt had collected round it.

  ‘Who are you?’ I said.

  The man yawned and looked out of the window. I heard his jawbone creak.

  ‘I
think you’re the one who should be answering questions,’ said the man who’d let me in. He was standing beside me now. Light filtered through his visor, and the upper half of his face had a sickly green tint to it. He smelled of cheap deodorant.

  ‘I want to know what my son was doing here.’

  ‘He’s been coming here for a while now.’

  I turned and looked at him.

  ‘Two years. Maybe three.’ The man unscrewed the top off a bottle and drank from it. ‘The first year he only came here twice. Then it got more regular.’

  ‘This place is filthy,’ I said.

  ‘That doesn’t bother Erik,’ the man said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said the man on the bed, still looking out of the window. ‘Erik doesn’t seem to mind at all. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Erik doesn’t even notice.’ He held his hand out for the bottle.

  ‘Erik’s not exactly clean himself,’ said the man with the visor.

  ‘Erik shits his pants.’ The man on the bed drank from the bottle, then he looked at the man who was standing just behind me. They both laughed.

  ‘Erik?’ I said.

  ‘That’s his name,’ said the man with the visor.

  ‘His name’s Mazey. His name’s always been Mazey, ever since he was born.’

  There was a moment’s silence in the room.

  ‘Well, it’s Erik when he’s here,’ said the man with the visor.

  ‘And what’s your name?’ I asked him.

  ‘Not Erik.’

  ‘His name’s Ackal,’ said the man on the bed.