The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  I was still dancing when someone coughed behind me.

  ‘Mr Blom?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Your sulphur bath is ready. Down in the pump-room. If you’d like to follow me …’

  I glanced round. At the top of the stairs I saw a short, wooden looking man with ginger hair and a mole in the middle of his cheek. Mr Kanter, presumably. The masseur.

  I beamed at him. ‘I’d be delighted to.’

  That night I sat at the same round table, under the same pale-pink china lampshade. Nothing would ever be different in that room, no matter how long I stayed. I couldn’t imagine another guest, for instance. I couldn’t imagine it in summer.

  The old people had eaten earlier, and I was alone with Mrs Hekmann. I thought she’d forgiven me for siding with the enemy, as she called it; in fact, she seemed to have forgotten all about it. I could feel her suspicion lifting with each minute that went by. Her hand moved forwards, into the light; her index-finger tapped her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray. She smelled of alcohol already; she must’ve started earlier than usual. I could see the kitchen doorway over her shoulder, a rectangle of yellow that was interrupted, every now and then, as the silhouette of Martha, her hired girl, passed through it.

  ‘And how was it,’ she said, ‘with Mr Kanter?’

  I had to smile. ‘I’ve never come across anything quite like it.’

  ‘There’s nothing like it in that city of yours, I’m sure.’

  ‘Not that I know of.’ Like most people who live in the country, she wanted to be told that there was nowhere better, and I was quite happy to oblige.

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ she said.

  It had been an unusual experience, to say the least. I’d followed Kanter down a flight of stairs, into the basement. Though he hardly spoke, there was an air of ritual about the whole procedure. In the pump-room two enamel baths stood side by side on a floor of wooden slats. He’d already filled one for me. The water was hot, he said, naturally hot, and sprang from almost directly underneath the building. It was beneficial for the joints, the muscles and, most of all, the skin. You could drink it, too, though the taste was, how should he put it, acquired. The water also fed the pool. People said it was red, but actually it was more of a brown colour.

  ‘It’s quite a smell,’ I said.

  He chuckled and tugged absent-mindedly at one of his ears. ‘I’ve lived here so long, I don’t notice it.’

  He left me alone while I took off my clothes and lowered myself into the bath. I was surprised at how quickly I became accustomed to the smell. I was surprised at the texture as well, until I remembered what Loots had said on our first night.

  When I’d soaked for about fifteen minutes, Kanter told me it was time to take a shower. After the shower he dried my shoulders and my back, then asked me to lie down in a small, wood-panelled room, under a sheet. I was supposed to relax, he said. He was an awkward man, not talkative at all, not tactile either, and yet his work demanded a certain intimacy with strangers. You’d think he would have become less awkward as the years went by, but he hadn’t; instead, he’d grown so used to his awkwardness that, like the smell of sulphur, it was something he was no longer aware of.

  I ‘relaxed’. In fifteen minutes Kanter was back again. He led me into another room. I lay face-down on a bed that was narrow, high and padded, like the bed in a doctor’s surgery. Kanter opened a bottle and worked some perfumed oil into his hands. Then he began.

  Towards the end of the massage I felt him place one forearm lengthways across the small of my back. Leaning all his weight on it, he drove it repeatedly up my spine towards my neck. He grunted a little with the effort. I had the feeling I was being crushed.

  At last he stood back, panting. I sat up. He handed me my shirt.

  ‘Was that one of your special techniques?’ I asked him.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I bet you feel good now, don’t you?’

  I could hardly deny it.

  I smiled at Edith Hekmann. ‘What’s for supper?’

  ‘It’s stew.’ She lifted the lid on a cast-iron pot. ‘You walking all night like that,’ she said, ‘it’s just like something my son would do.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘There’s something about you reminds me of him.’ She looked at me carefully. ‘I think it’s your eyes. You’ve got the same eyes.’

  I watched her ladle a generous helping of stew on to my plate. I put my face above it and breathed in.

  ‘Smells good,’ I said, wanting to seal myself in her favour.

  I began to eat.

  She rose from her chair and crossed the crooked floorboards to the kitchen. I heard her talking to Martha. The collision of cutlery and dishes, the murmur of voices underneath. I remembered something that had happened when I woke that evening. For a few moments I was aware of TV signals. I didn’t get any pictures, though. Just a million white fast-moving molecules on a black backdrop – a blizzard, violent and quiet. It was Visser, trying to get through. How apt the image was! How perfectly it captured his frustration and his impotence! And just think. Soon I’d have my silver room. Then I’d be free of him for ever, out of reach, immune.

  Mrs Hekmann returned. She brought the smell of alcohol with her, stronger than before. I ate; she smoked a cigarette. There was the sense that things could not be otherwise.

  I could hear the wind in the yard outside. I felt a storm was on its way: leaves shifting like chicken feathers, something metal falling over – it was as if the air itself was changing shape. When Edith Hekmann began to speak, her words were so much a part of it that I knew she’d felt it, too.

  ‘It was a day like this my brother died.’ She paused, the wind rising to fill the silence. ‘North of here, it was. Down by the lake.’

  Carving Babies

  Chapter 1

  Some sulphur water got into the lake that year. There are springs everywhere under the earth and one of them must have burst sideways, found a new path to the surface. I remember that was the first thing I did when I saw the truck. I bent down at the water’s edge and put my hand in it. I touched my fingers to my tongue. The taste was faint, but it was there. Like gas.

  I stood up.

  There was a creaking in the woods around me, the sound of doors opening. I wasn’t scared, though. I wasn’t scared. I saw a bird go catapulting through the trees, a red line high up in the green. There was a wind up there, too, the leaves and branches all tumultuous, but that was far away. Where I was, everything was still.

  My eyes came down.

  The crashed truck on the lakeshore with its headlamps staring stupidly into the water. And two bodies, neither of them moving. One with its arms and legs spread crooked on the roots of a tree. The other sitting behind the wheel, chin on chest, no sign of any hands.

  The forest creaking and that smell lifting off the lake. Smell of the devil, smell of health – people were always saying one thing or another. To me it wasn’t anything like that. To me it was the smell of something that was unexpected, out of place. I couldn’t argue with it, though. In fact, it made a kind of sense to me.

  My mother left us when I was too young to remember. The story was, she’d died of a fever, but there was no stone in the cemetery, at least none that I could find. When I was older I asked my father about it.

  ‘Where’s the stone?’ I said.

  He sat at the kitchen table for longer than it takes to boil a kettle. He was tall, Arno Hekmann, even when he was seated. A stiff-jointed, thick-skinned man, with sharp bones to his elbows. Words came slowly to him at the best of times, though he could explode with anger, if provoked. I remember looking at his hand, which was driven deep into his hair, and thinking of a spade left in the ground when the day’s work is over – but this was work that had scarcely begun.

  I said it again. ‘Where’s her stone?’

  He didn’t have an answer. He didn’t even have a decent lie. He could have said we were too poor to buy a stone. He cou
ld have said it wasn’t a stone at all, it was wood, and he’d carved the name on it himself – but it had rotted, or it had been washed away by floods, or undergrowth had buried it. Or it was marble, the best that money could buy, and somebody had stolen it. He could’ve said any number of things to lay my curiosity to rest. But he didn’t.

  And that was the most I ever got from him – a silence stubborn as an animal’s. Eventually he would push me away with the flat of his hand, shout at me to do a chore that didn’t need doing, but when I looked at him upside-down, through a crack in the kitchen door, his face was the shape of the stone I was asking about, the shape of stones I’d seen on other people’s graves, and I knew then that he was keeping things from me. Uncle Felix knew something, he was fidgety with knowledge, but he was too cowardly to part with it. If he so much as mentioned her name, he said, my father would cut him into pieces with his chisels and his saw and drop him down between the walls of whatever house he happened to be building. (In our family, Uncle Felix was the one with the stories.) Karl, my older brother, was just as silent on the subject. If I asked him where the stone was, he stared at me until I felt his eyes had passed right through my head and stuck in the wall behind me. Once, he tried denying she had ever lived, his eyebrows gathering into one dark line across his forehead.

  ‘We must’ve come from something,’ I said.

  ‘Think what you like,’ was his reply.

  Axel, the youngest, was the only one who wasn’t hiding anything. He didn’t have anything to hide: there could hardly have been time for him to be born before she left.

  Years later someone told me that she’d run off with another man. You’d never have guessed it, though, not from looking at my father. He didn’t seem to miss her at all, nor did I ever hear him curse her memory. Instead, his pride solidified. Stood thick and still in him, like dripping or cold grease; there were days when you could almost touch the thick white shape of it. He believed in himself the more because his wife had not. When lightning blew a hole in the roof of our house, he paid no heed. Maybe he thought it was a test of his fortitude, his patience. Maybe he thought he answered the lightning by building the roof back on. I don’t know. I always felt he should have listened, should have moved us on. West, to where the water in the ground was clear and had no smell. Or south, into the pastureland. Maybe that would have been the end of it then, instead of just the beginning.

  My Uncle Felix bore no resemblance to my father, not in his build nor in his nature. He was altogether more excitable, more harmless, too – a frothy man with a left eye that winked without him meaning it to and a smell to his skin like sour milk. He never married, though he considered himself a ladies’ man. I loved to watch him getting ready for a dance. He would stand in front of the tin mirror in the kitchen, legs apart and slightly bent, flattening his wild hair with lard. Then he’d step back, turn one cheek to the mirror, then the other, and he’d shoot air through the gaps in his teeth, a kind of whistle that was like a rocket going off. He always wore his Sunday trousers, which were wide at the thigh, but much wider by the time they reached his ankles. The turn-ups were so roomy, we used to hide things in there – dead frogs, cigar stubs, empty sardine tins – knowing he’d discover them later, in the middle of a waltz, perhaps, or even, though I couldn’t quite imagine it, an embrace. The next morning he’d come after us with a belt, the buckle coiled around his fist, the rest of it licking at the air. A threat was all it was. We didn’t have to run too fast to stay out of his way; his right leg had been withered by polio when he was a boy. That was also the reason that he never worked much, relying on my father and Karl to bring in the money while he stayed at home and split wood, or swept the floors, or boiled bones for soup.

  Once, when it was autumn and my brothers were gone for the day, helping my father with a job, Uncle Felix took me walking through the forest to a spring he knew. It was historical, the water. Centuries old. You could tell by looking at the rock, which was stained a strange red colour, as if tea had been drunk from it. Some famous theatre actresses had bathed there naked once. Or were they ballerinas? He couldn’t remember now. It was difficult for him to climb down the steep steps with his bad leg, but he seemed determined. There was a place that was his favourite, out of sight of the footpath and screened by trees. He told me I should bathe there. If I bathed, I’d grow into a woman. I’d be beautiful.

  I wasn’t sure.

  ‘It smells bad,’ I said, wrinkling my nose.

  He grinned. ‘So does medicine,’ he said, ‘but it makes you better, doesn’t it.’

  I looked at him, sitting on a shoulder of rock, with his knees drawn up tight against his chest and his walking-stick beside him.

  ‘Don’t you want to bathe?’ I said.

  He stuck his lips out and shook his head. ‘It’s too late for me.’

  ‘Didn’t you do it when you were young?’

  He smiled, but didn’t answer. He told me to hurry or else the sun would drop behind the hill and I’d catch cold. I took off all my clothes and handed them to him. He placed them next to his walking-stick in a neat pile. I walked over the rock, part of it red, as he’d promised it would be, part still white and crystalline. I stepped down into the pool, which was only knee-deep, and stood under the rush of sulphur water. It crashed on to my shoulders, exploded, sprayed out sideways. And all the time Uncle Felix was sitting above me, where it was dry, just watching me and smiling.

  It didn’t seem unnatural to me at the time, but later, when I thought about it, it gave me a strange feeling. Whenever I was naked, I’d look round, expecting him to be there, staring at me. I’d be alone and yet I’d feel as if I wasn’t. Even years afterwards, when he was dead.

  I could never tell anyone about it – not even Axel, during the time when I was closest to him. It wasn’t because it was a secret (Uncle Felix didn’t ever use the word). It was because it was too delicate a thing to find words for. If I told it to someone else, they’d turn it into something far more obvious; they’d turn it into something that it wasn’t.

  He never actually touched me, you see. He just watched.

  There’s love and everybody talks about it, but not all of us come close to it – or, if we do, it’s not in the expected way.

  What Uncle Felix said about becoming a woman, becoming beautiful, it didn’t mean much to me. In our house we were all treated the same. I was still being passed off as a boy, even when I was twelve or thirteen. It was easier for everyone to pretend that I was just like them rather than to start thinking about what I was really like. I understood that, somehow. I understood that it might also make life easier for me. I kept my hair cut short. I swore, and spat, and kicked at stones and car tyres and empty cans. I shared my brothers’ clothes – Axel’s usually, or Karl’s when he grew out of them. My body seemed to play along. My blood, for instance: it came late, as if worried it might upset things. I didn’t learn grace or guile or any of the tricks girls played with make-up; there wasn’t anyone to learn it from. Not that they were coarse men particularly; they behaved the way they’d behave in a bar or any other place where there were men together and no women. If I’d been pretty, with a soft, red mouth and honey curls, maybe it would’ve been different. Maybe they would’ve put me up high like something holy, trod silently around me with faces raised in fear and awe. But the most that anyone ever said of me was, She’s got something, and that was Uncle Felix. I didn’t know what he meant by that either. If I look at the only photograph of me that still exists – I’m at a country fair, aged nine – I can see that my spine had a certain straightness to it and there was something steady in my eyes. Maybe that’s what he meant. Or maybe it was just that he’d seen me naked one September, under that hot, rust-coloured water.

  The first time I put on a dress, nobody knew where to look. They all seemed to lose something, all at the same time. Their eyes searched the rafters, the fireplace, the gloom beneath the kitchen table. Or ran along the mantelpiece, the skirting-board. Or just
rested on their boots. Uncle Felix had bought it for me off a van that came through the village every Tuesday, creaking under the weight of household goods and new clothes wrapped in cellophane. It was harvest festival, a dance at the church hall, and I sat with my back against the wall all night. I couldn’t even down a few glasses, the way I might have done at home – I was a girl, and girls couldn’t be seen to drink, at least not in public. My green-and-purple dress was too new; it wouldn’t lie against my skin, but stuck out as stiffly as washing when it freezes on the line in winter. I watched my uncle crawl past me like a crab, some toothless woman nailed to him by the hands and feet. From a distance there seemed to be a monstrous creature loose in the room. My head ached with the music, a bow pitching on the strings of a violin like a ship’s deck in a storm. I began to feel sick. Nobody paid me any heed. I saw Karl with a brown bottle upside-down in his mouth, his Adam’s apple jumping as he drained it dry. I sat there so long, my legs grew into the floor. If anyone had come to me then, it would’ve been too late. I’d have shaken my head, my brushed-out hair catching on the foolish lace collar of my dress, my body made of the same wood as the walls, the chairs, the door.

  They were all drunk on the way home, boasting about how they’d danced with this one, then with that one, and the moon rolled among the bare branches of the trees like the woman I’d seen outside the hall, falling from one man’s arms into another’s. The truck lurched and swayed on the dirt track, and my uncle hit his head on the window, and when he touched his fingers to the place, they came away black, as if they’d been dipped in ink.

  ‘I’m hurt,’ he cried, ‘I’m hurt,’ but he was laughing.

  It was Karl driving, his eyes splayed on his face, his hands bouncing on the wheel, he couldn’t seem to get a grip on it, and all the others shouting, their voices loud against the hard curve of the roof, lifted by the alcohol.

  Then we saw the house.

  A hole blown clean through the roof, scorched walls and, when we moved closer, lines burned all the way across the floor, as though some great cat had stretched out, leaning on its claws, and done its scratching there.