The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘Footsteps. Outside.’ He turned back into the room. He was picking at the skin around a nail; it was as if only one of his hands was alive, and it was preying on the other. Something had woken him, he was saying. When he looked out of the window he saw a man crossing the car-park. The man was tall and thin, with pale hair, and he carried his arms at some distance from his body, the way you might if your clothes were wet. At the top of the steps that led down to the pool the man stopped, glanced round, his head on one side, listening, then he turned and disappeared into the steam.

  ‘There was something about it,’ Loots said. ‘I don’t know what.’ He was shivering. I could hear his teeth.

  ‘It was probably a guest,’ I said.

  ‘There aren’t any guests apart from us. I looked.’

  ‘Maybe you were dreaming.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so.’

  After Loots had left the room, I went to the window. Leaned against it. I’d just remembered something. Tall and thin, with pale hair. They were more or less the same words Munck had used about the man in the railway station. The man who had stared at Nina. Followed her.

  What was this, a coincidence?

  I looked out of the window. The car-park was empty. Dead leaves blew over the gravel, moving in loose formations, like birds, or dancers.

  I closed the curtains.

  It had been a disconcerting evening. We checked into our rooms, which were next to each other, on the first floor. While I was unpacking, Loots called through my door, saying that he’d meet me in the dining-room downstairs; though we’d arrived too late for supper, Edith Hekmann had agreed to put something out for us. Nine o’clock was striking as I locked my door. Looking left, there was a window with a view of the car-park. In front of the window stood a small upholstered chair and a table which had a telephone on it. The main body of the landing stretched away to my right. I walked until I reached the top of the stairs, then, on impulse, I walked further, discovering two more rooms, numbers 6 and 7. At the far end of the landing there was a door with no number on it. I tried the handle; it was locked. Was this where Karin’s father had been kept? I bent down and put my nose to the keyhole, but all I could smell was dust and varnish.

  ‘Is there something I can help you with?’

  It was Edith Hekmann’s voice. I straightened up, turned round. She was watching me from the top of the stairs.

  ‘I was lost,’ I said.

  ‘I thought I heard somebody fall.’

  ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

  ‘It’s always dark up here,’ she said. ‘We try and keep the lights turned off. It saves on electricity.’ She paused. ‘I don’t suppose it makes much difference to you.’

  ‘No difference at all.’ I smiled.

  ‘Were you looking for something?’

  ‘No, not really. Well, the stairs, I suppose.’

  ‘That door you were listening at,’ she said, ‘there’s a notice on it.’

  ‘Is there?’ I reached out with blind man’s hands. ‘What’s it say?’

  ‘It says Private.’

  I started to apologise, but she was already walking back down the stairs, smoke trailing from her cigarette.

  I saw her again in the dining-room, a large draughty space at the back of the building, with windows on two sides. The floor was made of creaking boards that gave under your feet. On the walls were several dismal paintings of farmyards, cottages and cattle. I joined Loots at a round table near the door. One low-voltage light bulb hung above the white-lace tablecloth. Shielded by a wide, pale-pink china shade with a scalloped edge, it gave me the feeling that I was looking up a woman’s skirt, at something that was glowing.

  Loots spoke in a whisper. ‘It’s more like an old people’s home than a hotel –’

  But he couldn’t elaborate because Edith Hekmann was walking across the room towards us. She served a plate of cold meat, some warmed-up cabbage and a few slices of stale bread, with tinned fruit to follow. Tap-water to drink. Though she’d already eaten, she sat with us throughout the meal. Between courses, she smoked a cigarette. Every once in a while, as I leaned close to her, I thought I could smell alcohol on her breath. She asked where we’d come from. Loots told her. She’d only been to the city once in her life, she said, making no attempt to hide her obvious distaste. She’d seen enough.

  ‘It must’ve changed a lot since you were there,’ Loots said.

  ‘It was six weeks ago.’ She left the room. I heard her talking to the girl who was washing dishes in the kitchen.

  ‘I was only trying to be polite,’ Loots whispered.

  I imitated him. ‘It must’ve changed a lot since –’

  He kicked me under the table.

  Everything I’d eaten or drunk that night carried the flavour of slightly rotten eggs. I didn’t mention it. Instead, I complimented her on the meal. Her mouth widened and she touched the palm of one hand to her hair, feeling the shape of her hair rather than the hair itself. It was a gesture I recognised. My mother always used to do it. On her it seemed pretentious, neurotic. When Edith Hekmann did it, however, it betrayed a strangely haunting vanity. The vanity of a woman who had lived her life in isolation and had never been admired. She could believe that she was beautiful because she had nobody to contradict her. I realised that I was looking forward to being alone with her. Alone, I could indulge her, draw her out. Alone, we would get on; I was sure of it.

  I leaned towards her, smelled the alcohol again. ‘You said not many people come here now. What about before?’

  That was all the encouragement she needed. She launched into a history of the inn. It began when a man came from the city to study the water. Inside his suitcase were hundreds of tiny bottles no bigger than rifle cartridges. He collected samples, did tests, wrote reports. At the end of his stay he told the people of the village that the water had all kinds of beneficial powers and properties. He even listed the chemicals it contained, and in what proportions. Largely on the strength of what he said, a family called the Bohlins built the inn. It was a modest place, but each room had a balcony with its own hanging basket of geraniums, and there was a natural hot sulphur pool among the rocks at the back. To begin with, the inn was often full. Statesmen, actors, dukes – they all drove up from the city to take the waters; it was the fashionable thing to do (in Mrs Hekmann’s mouth, the word had a disdainful twist to it). During the day they lounged in the pool with their newspapers and their cigars, or played croquet on the lawn (there’d been a lawn back then). They spent the evenings on their balconies, sipping the foul-tasting water and telling each other how much better they felt. The inn had kept her father in work. A carpenter by trade, he’d built most of the furniture. He used to carry out repairs on the property as well. All this was before her time, of course. Though even when her older brother Karl took over, the place had been popular. By then it catered more to people who had read about it in books, or people who had genuine ailments, but somehow they weren’t made to feel welcome by Karl and his wife, and they seldom came back. Soon even the locals stayed away, and during the last few years it had become a lodging-house where old people from the village lived, people who had no family left, people who could afford to pay for bed and board.

  ‘Now, if someone comes,’ she said, ‘we wonder why.’

  She left the table again. This time I heard a cupboard open and close. I thought I heard a cork spring from a bottle, too. There was no mistaking the smell clouding the air around her when she sat down. Something sweet, it was. Sherry, perhaps. Or a liqueur.

  ‘All those sick people we got,’ she said.

  I smiled to myself, but she didn’t even notice.

  People with skin disease, gallstones, rheumatism, they all came to the springs thinking they could cure themselves; sometimes they even left thinking they were cured, which was good for business, of course. In her opinion, they were fooling no one but themselves. All the water did was make your skin soft when you bathed in it, soft
in a way that didn’t seem quite natural. In the end your mind went soft as well. She’d never spent much time in it. In fact, in her family, they’d never even learned to swim.

  ‘My husband swam in it,’ she said, ‘but it didn’t do anything for him.’ She paused. ‘He’s dead, in case you’re wondering.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I can’t say I am.’ She laughed. ‘Towards the end, it was –’ She paused to light another cigarette and left the sentence dangling. ‘We never got on very well,’ she went on. ‘We never did see eye to eye about much.’

  ‘Do you live here alone then?’

  She hesitated, as if the question had several answers and she had to choose between them. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘I have a son.’

  ‘I haven’t seen him,’ Loots said.

  ‘He’s away.’ She tapped her cigarette against the edge of a saucer. We were drinking coffee by then, so weak you could taste the water in it. ‘I had a daughter, but she left. That was twenty years ago.’

  Karin, I thought.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘there’s just the two of us now. Everybody else is either dead or gone.’

  What stayed in my mind, what was still there as I lay in bed, seeing nothing but the window and the rain on it, was the satisfaction in her voice. They were the last words she’d spoken before she left us, and they ran together, they were slightly slurred, but there was none of the self-pity or regret you might have expected. If anything, she seemed to be taking a kind of pleasure in what had happened. She was almost gloating.

  After dinner I’d walked down to the pool with Loots. The night was cold and clear. In the moonlight his cheekbones looked more rounded than ever, and polished, too, like bedknobs. He stood on the terrace with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hoisted. He talked about the steam rising off the water, how odd it looked, almost artificial. I thought of Gregory’s bald head.

  ‘You didn’t mention Nina,’ he said suddenly. ‘You didn’t say you knew her.’

  ‘No, I know. I’m not sure why. And now it feels too late, somehow.’ I walked across the terrace to the wooden rail that bounded it. ‘Maybe it’ll just come up naturally,’ I said, ‘in conversation.’ I leaned my forearms on the rail. Beyond it, the ground plunged into darkness. In the distance, on the far side of the valley, I saw trees outlined against the sky. The sky was lighter than the trees, the division between the two uneven, serrated, as if a piece of torn black paper had been placed on a piece of paper that was grey. ‘They’re not a very close family,’ I went on, after a while. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if she didn’t even know that Nina’s missing.’

  Loots joined me at the rail. ‘She’s strange.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘It’s the way she looks at us.’

  ‘I didn’t notice anything.’

  In the silence that followed I could hear the sulphur water rushing along its narrow channel in the rock and tumbling down into the pool. I thought Loots was being dramatic. Her prickly manner had to do with where she lived; it was as natural as a dialect. You couldn’t judge her for it.

  ‘She’s a country person,’ I told him. ‘You know what country people are like. They’re suspicious. They don’t like strangers.’

  ‘She runs a hotel.’

  ‘Yes, but nobody’s stayed here for ages.’

  Loots didn’t say anything.

  ‘There’s just a couple of fucked-up old people to look after,’ I went on. ‘You’d be strange.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He didn’t sound convinced.

  He stepped back from the rail and began to take off his clothes. I asked him what he was doing.

  ‘I’m going to take the waters,’ he said.

  He stripped down to his underpants, which were baggy and misshapen. He was very thin: shoulderblades like triangles (I thought of the signs you see on the back of trucks sometimes, or outside nuclear facilities, the signs that mean CAUTION: RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL). I watched him spring into the air, turn over twice and slide into the water, exactly the kind of acrobatic dive that I would have predicted. There was no need to comment on it. Instead, I asked him what the water was like.

  ‘Warm,’ he said. ‘Kind of silky, too.’

  ‘Silky?’

  ‘Yes. Like there’s oil in it. Are you coming in?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  I found a bench and sat down. Loots floated somewhere below me. I’d never liked swimming. Even before I was shot, I didn’t like it. And afterwards, it just got worse. I went swimming at the clinic once. Therapy, they called it. I panicked. It was the four sides of the pool – I didn’t believe they were there. When I stretched a hand out, there’d be no tiles, no ropes – nothing to hold on to. It was like being someone who thought the world was flat: the pool was something I could reach the end of and, when I did, I’d fall over the edge.

  ‘You’re sure you don’t mind me going tomorrow?’ Loots said.

  ‘I don’t mind at all. How long will you stay at your uncle’s?’

  ‘Till Wednesday.’

  ‘And you’ll come for me on your way back?’

  A note of uncertainty must have crept into my voice, because he laughed.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t just leave you here, would I.’

  I lay awake on the first floor of the hotel, rain still landing on the window, making the glass look torn. It was Saturday night. Wednesday wasn’t far away. And I had no sense of what might happen after that. I wasn’t sure that returning to the city was such a good idea, and yet I could hardly stay where I was. It was as if I’d found myself in the pool after all. I couldn’t keep swimming indefinitely, but how could I get out if I didn’t trust the edges?

  Chapter 3

  In the morning I walked to the local garage with Loots to buy petrol. A kilometre, Mrs Hekmann had told us, but it was more like three. Loots claimed she’d misled us deliberately, out of some perversity or spite. I disagreed. It was simply that the road was so familiar to her; she thought of it as shorter than it actually was. In the end, it didn’t matter. We enjoyed our walk. Loots described the countryside as we passed through it. There were pine forests, stands of silver birches. There were houses made of wood and painted the same colours as the land, green or brown or yellow, many with carved balconies and eaves. There were farmyards inhabited by geese with orange beaks, and barns weathered to an even grey, the skins of scavengers and rodents nailed to their walls. Loots was more observant than the day before, more specific, his descriptive powers honed, no doubt, by the knowledge that he would soon be gone. Once, though, his voice lifted in genuine excitement as he noticed a cow standing on a frozen stream and drinking from a hole in the ice.

  Later, I stood outside the hotel and listened to him drive away. At the last minute he’d asked if I wanted to come with him. It wasn’t too late, he said. I smiled. The truth was, I was eager for him to leave; there was a great impatience in me that I couldn’t have explained. The sound of the car was a shape in the air that slowly sharpened to a point, then sharpened still further, into nothing. It was only then, in the silence, that I felt uncertain. I went up to my room and slept.

  When I woke up, it was dark but I thought I had time to stretch my legs before dinner so I put on my overcoat and a pair of gloves, and went downstairs. The hallway was deserted. I opened the front door and stood on the porch. Smoke blew past my face from a chimney somewhere not too far away. The wood they burned in the village had a sweet edge to it and, for a moment, I had the feeling that I’d travelled back in time, that I’d been returned to some much earlier part of my life.

  I crossed the road and ducked between the rails of a fence, then climbed down a steep grass bank into a field. Edith Hekmann had told me there was a river at the end of it. I took a few steps, stopped and listened. I thought I could hear the water, though it could have been the wind in the trees. And besides, if that stream the cow was drinking from had frozen over, then maybe the river wa
s frozen, too.

  As I wandered through the long grass, the city came to me, the city as it had been when I moved back to it – those first few weeks of freedom. Night after night I’d walked down empty shopping streets, through parks, over bridges: a process of reacquaintance, a new life laid over the old one. In the red-light district the whores would hiss and whistle as I passed their ultraviolet doors. Some of them even learned my name, I walked that way so often. To them I wasn’t blind or strange; I was just a man, like any other. Who else knew me? Gregory, brooding over a schnapps in Leon’s. Loots on his bicycle, juggling unlikely objects with his feet. And then there was Nina, whose appearance was no less magical. Can I kiss you? What kind of opening line was that? In some ways, I felt like Jan Salenko: I could remember every time I’d ever seen her – from the first moment, in the Bar Sultan, to the last, outside the Kosminsky. I could remember every motel and every drink. I could remember every drive. She was the only person I’d ever told my secret to in its entirety. I didn’t think I’d frightened her, whatever Candy said. I thought Munck had it right. It was a family crisis. She’d had to sever all connections, I understood that now. I understood. The city would look after me.

  But Visser had ruined it. He found me and everything began to fall apart. I had to leave my hotel room, my home. I had to hide like some kind of criminal or refugee. I had to start again, from scratch. I couldn’t forgive him for that. A thought went through my head, as random as a bird across the sky. Suppose I killed him. Not for revenge, but for relief. I’d be acting in self-defence. You couldn’t call it murder. Not after the way he’d persecuted me. Manslaughter, maybe. But not murder. So. Say Visser was dead. What would happen then? Would there be somebody waiting to step into his shoes, some Visser-worshipper, some eager protégé? Or would the entire project be shelved, its secret files stored in dusty vaults under the clinic, ignored, forgotten and even, in the end, destroyed? There was no way of knowing. It was an idea, though. To do away with him. To liberate myself.

  The ground sloped downwards suddenly. I had to be careful; it would’ve been easy to turn an ankle. Still, I thought, I was free of Visser for the time being. The far north-east of the country, a place most people had never even heard of. Of course it was tempting fate to think that way. Visser was master of the surprise appearance: like a tragedy or a natural disaster, he always struck when you were least expecting it. I stopped and looked around. Looked for his face floating in the darkness of the field. Looked for that earnest, condescending face. But there was nothing. Only grass sloping downwards, combed by the wind. Only trees huddled in a grove and a hard cold sky above.