The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘So what’s in it for you?’ he said.

  While he was visiting his uncle, I told him, I’d stay in the village, which was in a valley surrounded entirely by mountains. In the mountains, I said, people often had problems with their TVs. With reception …

  Loots interrupted. ‘You’ll stop getting those programmes!’

  I went to seize him by the shoulders, but in my enthusiasm I missed completely, embraced the air instead and overbalanced.

  What was in it for me? What wasn’t in it for me? The signals that Visser was transmitting would lose their way. The further north I went, the weaker they’d become. Until they faded altogether. I’d regain my night vision by a process of elimination, as it were, and Visser would have no say in the matter. The mountains would defend me. In the mountains I’d be free.

  ‘It’ll be like old times,’ I said. ‘You know, when we were looking for The Invisible Man.’

  There was no breaking and entering involved, I told him. No dangerous driving. In fact, for one of my ideas, it was astonishingly mild. Harmless, even. We could travel up and back together, in his car.

  ‘Just like old times,’ I said again.

  We left at six in the morning, while it was still dark, but daylight came and, with it, nothingness. The hours passed slowly; I’d forgotten how dull it was, how utterly interminable.

  I’d spoken to Karin Salenko the day before. I wanted to learn a little more about the village. But when she answered, I didn’t know how to begin. It was awkward, since our only common ground was Nina. I said the first thing that occurred to me: ‘I met your husband.’

  ‘Jan Salenko?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He was telling me about when you were eight, climbing into your father’s truck –’

  ‘He doesn’t forget a thing, does he.’

  ‘He said you were the most beautiful girl in the village.’

  ‘That wasn’t difficult.’

  I smiled.

  ‘You didn’t ring up to talk about me, though,’ Karin said.

  ‘No.’ I told her about the trip I was planning. I couldn’t go into the real reasons behind it, so I presented it as a pilgrimage, a journey to the birthplace of someone I still loved, a kind of homage.

  Karin was quiet for a few seconds, and when she spoke again, her voice was uneven, as if she’d been crying. ‘I’ve only been back once,’ she said, ‘and that was years ago.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘A mistake. I’ve had nightmares about it ever since.’ I heard her tall glass clink against the phone. ‘You mentioned my father,’ she went on. ‘It was to do with him.’

  When she was fifteen, he had a stroke. He couldn’t talk much after that. The next year, in the spring, she ran away, and it was impossible to keep in touch with him. Sometimes she called the hotel where her mother worked. She used to think she could hear him listening on the other end. She wrote letters, too. But it wasn’t enough. Still, it was three or four years before she returned. Her mother was standing on the porch that day, wearing a pair of spectacles that made her eyes look twice the size of other people’s. There was no sign of her father. Karin asked where he was. Upstairs, her mother said. In the back.

  She found him sitting by the window, strapped into a bath chair with leather belts. The room smelled of his incontinence. He didn’t know her at first. He leaned forwards, peering at her through his eyebrows. One of his hands moved constantly, the way plants do underwater. She took the hand and held it. Then he said her name.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s me.’

  He didn’t answer any of her questions, though, and he didn’t ask her any either. There was only one thing he would talk about and that was his wife, her mother: Edith Hekmann. Karin wasn’t prepared for the flood of bitterness and rage that he unleashed. After sitting with him for an hour, she realised that he didn’t know her at all. It was a coincidence, him mentioning her name when she walked in. Her name was just a reflex. Something he repeated over and over, like a prayer, to anyone who happened to appear in the room. It had no meaning. She remembered staring at the steam rising from the sulphur pond and the fir trees, ghostly, beyond. Beside her, a man whispering her name. Karin, Karin. Piss grew in a dark pool on the floor. When she kissed him goodbye, he gripped her wrist with his good hand and she could feel the useless fury trembling in it.

  ‘In a way, I was lucky,’ Karin said. ‘Three weeks later he was gone.’

  I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘And now you’re going there …’ She drank from her glass again.

  ‘Your mother,’ I said. ‘Does she still work at the hotel?’

  ‘She owns it now.’ Karin lit a cigarette. ‘It’s not hard to find. It’s the only hotel in the village.’

  ‘Should I give her any message?’

  She let a few moments pass. It was so quiet, I thought the line had gone dead.

  ‘Mrs Salenko?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No message. In fact, don’t mention me at all.’

  After I’d put the phone down, I sat in the apartment for a long time, listening – the fridge, a car starting, rain on the skylight …

  I turned to Loots. ‘Where are we?’

  He told me the name of the town we’d just passed through. I’d never heard of it. I opened the window, but it was drizzling, so I had to close it again.

  I reached for the radio and switched it on. The news was just beginning. A feeling went through me, quick as an eel.

  It was exactly one year to the day since I’d been shot.

  Towards midday we blew a tyre. There was a flat bang and the car began to swerve, first one way, then the other, as if we were dodging missiles. We ended up on the wrong side of the road, two wheels in a shallow ditch. I could tell that Loots had been startled by the incident: a smell was rising off him, sharp and bitter, like the milky fluid in the stalks of plants.

  We pushed the car back on to level ground. The air was damp; I could feel it sticking to the walls of my lungs. The south-bound traffic hurtled past us. Up here they judged you by your number-plate, and we were city people. No one was going to stop for us.

  I asked Loots what the scenery was like. He said it was nothing special.

  ‘You have to describe it for me,’ I said. ‘I want to see it.’

  He sighed. ‘It’s flat. Just fields, really. Some hills off to the right. That’s about it.’

  ‘And the sky?’

  ‘Grey.’

  I thanked him.

  He muttered something under his breath, then I heard him unlock the boot and lift out his tools. While Loots changed the wheel, I stood at the edge of the road with my hands in my pockets. I was looking eastwards, imagining the fields, the hills.

  We drove on. I knew he was in a better mood half an hour later when he suddenly announced that the landscape had changed. The hills had moved closer, he told me, and more rock was showing through. It had holes in it, he said, like cheese.

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Like cheese?’ I chuckled.

  At four in the afternoon we stopped at a roadside restaurant. I could smell coffee as soon as we walked in – a sour, boiled-down smell that meant it had been brewing for hours. They were playing music which managed to sound the same all the time without ever quite repeating itself. Robert Kolan came to mind. I took a table by the window and Loots sat oppositie. Our waitress seemed nervous. I thought it was probably me. Blind men are bad luck for some people, like the wrong number of magpies or a hat left on a bed. I wanted to explain that I was only blind during the day and that it wouldn’t be long before I could see her waiting on me, any moment now, in fact – but then she’d think I was deranged as well.

  Our meat and dumplings arrived. We hadn’t eaten since dawn and the food smelled good. During the meal Loots talked with the long-distance lorry-drivers at the next table. He asked them about the road conditions further north. They told him rain was forecast. It might be a bit greasy in places. Watch the bends.
r />   ‘We already blew a tyre,’ Loots said.

  ‘Where are you headed?’ one of them asked.

  Loots told him the name of the village.

  ‘Don’t know it,’ the man said.

  ‘I do,’ said another. ‘There’s nothing there. Nothing but a bad smell, anyway.’

  A couple of the men murmured in agreement.

  ‘That’ll be the sulphur springs,’ Loots said. ‘My friend here, he’s got a condition. Kidney stones. We heard about the springs, that they were good for that.’

  I could feel the lorry-drivers’ eyes move over me. I knew what they were thinking. Kidney stones as well? Poor bastard. I was impressed by Loots’ performance. That story about my condition, I could use that later on.

  While we were eating our dessert, the lorry-drivers filed past us. They told us to take it easy. We said we would. The door to the restaurant creaked and then they were outside. I could hear them talking in the car-park, short sentences, no more than phrases, really, lobbed from one man to the other, like a game played with an invisible ball.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Loots said.

  I nodded.

  Outside, the wind was blowing hard. The car-park was the first thing I saw that evening. It was almost empty, the men already gone. I looked back towards the restaurant, a white timber building with a row of coloured lights along the roof. Loots buttoned his coat and tucked his chin into his collar. Beyond him there were clouds, high up, all moving at the same speed. A thin moon haunted the corner of the sky.

  As soon as we were driving, a man’s face appeared in front of me: it was the President, addressing the nation from his private office in the capital. He’d been criticised in the press for his economic policy, and there’d been rumours of an affair as well. Now he was on TV, to reassure us. He sat at his bureau desk in a a sober dark-blue suit. His grey hair swept neatly over the tops of his ears, and his hands were folded on a rectangle of green leather. Everything about him was scripted, composed – except for his left thumb, that is, which was twitching.

  I opened the window. Loots took a deep breath, shifted in his seat. I couldn’t see him, but I could imagine him: he always hunched over the wheel, his shoulders up around his ears.

  ‘I’m sorry about the tyre, Loots.’

  ‘That’s all right. Anything on TV?’

  ‘Only the President.’

  We drove northwards, with the leader of our country still on air. He was doing something that politicians often do: he was smiling every fifteen seconds, and his smile never had anything to do with what he was saying. It reminded me of the smile some adults use with children. It means they’ve been confronted by something they’re not familiar with, and might even be frightened of. I found him bearable if I concentrated on his thumb; it was the only part of him that seemed natural, the only part I trusted.

  And, suddenly, as I watched, his whole face wobbled, buckled, then slid sideways, like a wax figure melting in a fire.

  My turn to smile. The mountains. We were almost in the mountains.

  Loots saw the signpost first. Then I saw it: white, and sharpened at one end. Fourteen kilometres to the village. It pointed left, a thin road that wound up from the valley floor.

  ‘We’re almost out of petrol.’ Loots looked anxious.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘There’s bound to be some in the village.’

  For a few minutes we drove along the bottom of a gradually ascending gully. Fir trees rose above us on both sides. The smell of woodsmoke found its way into the car. There was a mountain ahead of us and the road swung westwards, around it, clinging to the lower slopes. I could see the snow now, glowing, high above. We were still among the fir trees, though, a forest that turned black when you looked into it. Loots hit a pothole, muttered something. The surface of the road was disintegrating. Probably it was hardly ever used.

  Then, without any warning, the trees stepped back, and there was land on either side of us, rough pasture by the look of it, with slabs of rock showing, smooth and rounded in some places, jutting like the fins of fish in others.

  We rounded a sharp right-angled bend and suddenly I could smell it. A hot, damp smell. Sulphur. We crept on to a bridge of narrow wooden slats that spanned a stream. I could see the shallow water breaking over beds of stones.

  ‘We’ll only just make it,’ Loots said.

  I was peering through the windscreen. ‘Can you see the hotel?’

  ‘Yes. There’s someone standing on the porch. A woman.’

  ‘It must be her,’ I said.

  Edith Hekmann was watching us approach. And there was a word in her head, too. I could hear it across the sloping patch of grass that separated us, as clearly as if she’d shouted it: Strangers. The word always meant the same thing to somebody like her. Just one thing. People who are in the wrong place.

  Loots parked in front of the hotel. As he shifted into neutral, the engine spluttered and cut out. He turned the key in the ignition. The engine fired, then died again.

  ‘We’ve run out of petrol.’ Loots was talking through his window to the woman on the porch. He sounded apologetic.

  She just watched us. She had grey curls and thick, stockinged ankles, and she wore a shapeless dress with a cardigan over it. One of Loots’ hands rose from the steering-wheel and touched the growth of bristle on his chin.

  ‘You passing through?’ the woman said.

  ‘No,’ Loots said. ‘We’re looking for a place to stay.’

  ‘The petrol station’s down the road,’ the woman said, ‘about a kilometre.’

  Loots thanked her.

  ‘But it’ll be closed now,’ the woman said.

  I opened my door and got out. I stretched, then moved round to the back of the car. I was wearing my dark glasses and tapping at the unpaved road with my white stick. I started drawing in the dust with it. I drew a woman’s face. Eyes, nose, mouth – all in the right place. Then, remembering what Karin had said, I added a pair of spectacles. The woman crossed the patch of grass. She stopped beside me and stood with her head at an angle, examining the picture. In the meantime I filled the background in. Behind the face was the hotel. A porch with a chair on it. Steps. Two windows. A stone chimney at the side. I even drew the pump on the front lawn. Though I got the handle wrong, deliberately.

  ‘Not bad for a blind man,’ the woman said.

  I studied her through my dark glasses, as though she was something I might be interested in buying. If the price was right. ‘You must be Mrs Hekmann.’

  She grunted.

  ‘You run the hotel,’ I said, ‘don’t you.’

  The cigarette in her fingers had burned down to the filter. One flick of her wrist and it was past me, into the road.

  ‘The waters are famous,’ I said. ‘I heard about it.’

  ‘It’s sulphur water. It’s not going to do much for you.’

  My head dropped. I moved my white cane on the ground – one way, then the other. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I heard about it, anyway.’

  She was still staring at me. It didn’t bother her that she might have offended me, not even remotely. She was simply coming to some decision of her own.

  ‘We don’t usually get people at this time of year.’ She paused. ‘We don’t usually get people at all.’

  ‘If you know of somewhere else …’ Blindly, I looked away from her, into the great dark night. Trees breaking like waves on the far side of the road.

  ‘It’s fifteen each,’ she said, ‘and that includes the pool.’

  ‘The pool?’

  ‘The waters. What you came here for.’

  What I came here for.

  ‘What’s the reception like up here?’ I said. ‘The reception?’

  ‘You know, the reception. On TV.’

  ‘You mean the picture?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You don’t get much of a picture, not up here,’ she said.

  ‘Loots?’ I said. ‘Let’s get the cases out.’

  I w
oke in a kind of panic, an orange sky above me and, closer than the sky, the dark arc of a car’s tyre, and I could hear the sirens circling. I lay still, my body hot and damp. I waited until I knew I was in bed. Until I knew which bed it was. The drive north: I remembered it slowly, and in detail – the puncture, the lorry-drivers in the restaurant, some fin-shaped rocks, my sketch of Edith Hekmann. I remembered myself all the way back to where I was, shivering a little as I felt the sweat begin to dry.

  I swung my legs on to the floor and waited again. Then I stood up. I crossed the room to the small basin in the corner. I ran the cold tap. Cupping my hands under it, I brought the water to my face. Once, twice, three times. I couldn’t find the towel, though. I had to use the curtain instead; it smelled unpleasantly of mildew and tobacco. As I stood there, drying my hands and face, I heard a light tapping on the door.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s me. Loots.’

  I opened the door. Loots’ narrow face floated up out of the darkness on the first-floor landing. He was wearing an overcoat. And socks. He moved past me, into the room.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said.

  I closed the door. ‘Yes. I’m fine.’

  ‘I heard shouting.’

  ‘I had a dream.’ I went and sat on the bed. ‘I’m sorry. Did I wake you?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I was already awake. It was something else.’ He stood at the window and parted the curtain with one hand. ‘Did you hear anything?’

  ‘Like what?’