The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  He was right. Baskets still hung above the balconies, though they’d been bleached by the weather and most of the geraniums had died. The rooms were bare and gloomy, plagued by mosquitoes in the summer, and by draughts and damp in winter. The natural sulphur pond had filled with fungus and algae. But Karl only nodded and, turning away from his father’s long, excited face, said, ‘Maybe.’

  There was dancing in the Bohlins’ garden that evening. Though it had rained earlier in the day, the clouds had blown away and the sky was almost clear by the time dusk fell. There were paper lanterns dangling from the trees and strings of pearly light bulbs and red tin ashtrays in the shape of hearts. I thought of Felix flat on his back in his cheap box, already dressed for the occasion. He would probably have danced with Mrs Bohlin’s widowed sister, a small woman with a fierce gaze and pointed teeth. I could imagine them waltzing together on the damp grass, the bare bulbs silvering his greased black hair, his left eye winking.

  ‘Uncle Felix should be here,’ I said.

  I was dancing with Axel. We were pretending to be brother and sister, keeping a respectable distance between us, even exaggerating it, but every now and then, as we passed through a dark corner of the garden, he drew me close to him and I could feel his thing pressing against my belly.

  ‘Felix,’ Axel said. ‘Do you remember the time we put yoghurt in his trousers and it spilled all over that woman’s shoes when they were dancing and she thought –’

  I was laughing even before he’d finished.

  We whirled past our father, who was drinking schnapps with the bride’s uncle. I could tell from the way his jaw swung that he was already drunk.

  Axel nudged me. ‘Look, there’s Edwin.’

  ‘What about it?’ I said.

  ‘He’s got his eye on you.’

  I gave Axel a look. Edwin Bock was the ugliest boy in the village.

  Axel grinned. ‘He has. Look.’

  I glanced sideways. Bock was sitting on a chair under a tree with his hands wedged between his thighs. When he saw me looking, his eyes slid sideways and he blushed.

  ‘Bock’s a nobody,’ I said.

  ‘Why don’t you dance with him?’

  ‘I don’t want to.’ We’d come to a halt, but I could still feel Axel’s warm hand on the small of my back.

  ‘Think how embarrassed he’d be.’

  ‘He’s already embarrassed –’

  ‘Oh, go on. Dance with him.’ Axel was grinning again. ‘You’d really make his evening.’ The wind gusted suddenly and blew his hair into his eyes.

  ‘Since when did you care about making Edwin Bock’s evening?’

  I let go of Axel’s hand and, turning away, ducked under a string of light bulbs and crossed the grass to the table where the food had been laid out. I saw Eva Bohlin through the crowd. She was a full-breasted, slow-boned girl with dull black hair. She had the curious habit of looking at Karl, no matter who she was talking to. I supposed it must be love that made her behave like that. When Axel came over and stood beside me, I handed him a piece of pumpernickel bread with pickle and smoked cheese on it. I asked him what he thought of Eva.

  ‘Not my type.’ He bit into the bread and cheese.

  ‘What is your type?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘It’ll be strange for Karl,’ I said, ‘with all Dad’s furniture around. It’ll almost be like still being at home.’

  ‘It’ll be better than that.’ As Axel glanced up at the inn, his face took on a darkness, a kind of discontent, I hadn’t seen before.

  ‘Will it?’ I said, staring at him. I didn’t think so, and nor, I thought, should he. We were each other’s reason why.

  ‘Well,’ he said after a while, ‘at least there’ll be one less in the bedroom,’ and he looked at me and then he began to smile.

  I would lie next to Axel with my head on his chest, the stream trickling over stones below us. His body had altered, grown. I couldn’t remember Karl without hair on his face and legs. That summer Axel had it as well, though it wasn’t coarse and black like his brother’s. It was finer, softer – almost coppery. Sometimes he was restless now. His face would shadow over and he would shift suddenly, shake me off like sand. I would sit up with my arms around my knees and watch the shallow water run. But I was happiest with my eyes closed and my cheek against his skin and the smell of it as sunlight touched him, the smell of wood-shavings, sea salt, apricot.

  It was almost time to climb back through the field to the house, but as usual I didn’t want to go. I didn’t feel like mopping floors or drawing water from the well or boiling sausage. I couldn’t bear to see my father’s teeth lunging at his fork, or his mouth, glassy with grease. I wished there was somewhere else we could go. Then Axel spoke, and what he said was so close to what I’d been thinking that all of me went still:

  ‘I’ve heard about a place.’

  ‘What place?’

  He began to describe it for me. The valleys were smooth as dust, and pale-pink or, sometimes, silver-grey. There were no walls or fences, and almost no trees. Everything was open. The people’s faces were yellow and wrinkled, like leaves in autumn. Their eyes were narrow. They wore skirts – not just the women, the men, too – and they rode small horses with thick, black manes. The country was high up, but the mountains were even higher – unimaginably high and jagged and dazzling with snow. Up there the sky was always blue, and the air was so pure and clear it hurt your lungs the first few times you breathed it. The castles in those mountains looked like the castles in fairy-tales. They were real, though. Holy people lived in them. From the battlements you could see halfway round the world. You could see so far, in fact, that in the distance the surface of the land began to bend. It was the curve of the earth itself that you were looking at.

  ‘If only we could go there,’ I murmured.

  His face didn’t alter; he didn’t seem remotely affected by what I’d said. I thought it was probably because he’d taken himself there so many times already, with his knowledge of the place, with his own descriptions. He’d already been.

  After that, I was always asking him to describe the place to me so I could be there with him. He never tired of it. Sometimes what he told me could have come from an encyclopaedia – how to avoid altitude sickness, what the local music sounded like, why certain flowers could grow high up. Other times he gave me impressions that were arbitrary and vague, like memories. I asked him how he knew about it. He’d seen some pictures once, he said. They were in a magazine that somebody had left at the inn. When he looked for the magazine again, though, it was gone. It didn’t matter, really; he could still remember it. He found some other magazines from the same series, but there was nothing in them that interested him much.

  One morning I asked him what the name of the country was. It was strange I hadn’t thought of asking him before. He said he didn’t know. I watched him as he stared up into the branches of the willow tree.

  ‘The highest mountain in the world,’ he said, ‘what’s it called?’

  ‘Mount Everest.’

  He nodded. ‘It was somewhere near there.’

  It was hot, July or August, with a white sky that hurt to look at, and I came up out of the garden with vegetables for that evening’s meal. From the barn I heard my father sawing and I thought of Uncle Felix and the night he died, but the breathing of the saw was out, not in – out as it cut down into the wood, in as it drew back, out as it cut down again. I stopped in the doorway. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw my father bent over the sawhorse, his right arm moving like one of those rods that drive the wheels on a train. I noticed a square frame behind him, low on the floor, and a wide half-moon of blond wood propped up against the wall.

  ‘Is that a bed you’re making?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a bed.’ He didn’t pause in his work; his sweat dropped on to the pine and darkened it.

  ‘It’s for the inn, I suppose.’ My father had been hired to build some furniture – wardrobes for the
bedrooms, chairs and tables for a restaurant. Karl and Eva had taken his advice. They were trying to make something of the place.

  ‘Didn’t you hear yet?’

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘We’re losing Axel.’

  I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.

  My father stopped sawing, straightened up. ‘He’s fixing to get married. This bed’s for the wedding night.’ He ran one hand carefully over the headboard, and his long teeth showed.

  ‘Married?’ I said. ‘Who to?’

  ‘The Poppel girl. I thought you knew.’

  The white sky beat against my neck. Standing on the line between the darkness of the barn and the brilliance outside, I felt caught between two worlds, adrift suddenly, abandoned. I knew Axel had been seeing Eileen Poppel and, though I sometimes wondered why, I certainly never thought it would come to anything. The Poppel family – scrap-dealers from across the valley. And Eileen, their only daughter. Not exactly what you’d call a catch, though, with her mouth too small and her wrists that you could snap in your hands like kindling, if you’d a mind, and that pale-blue vein wriggling through the thin skin at the edge of her left eye. She looked like, if you shouted at her, she’d just lie down and die. I could feel the white sky burning, burning. Married? Certainly I never suspected it would come to that.

  ‘At least there’ll be some help for you around the place.’ My father spoke to me from the world he belonged to, a dark world, steeped in wood-chips, sweat, and resin.

  ‘You mean they’re going to live here?’ I stared at him.

  ‘Only till they get a place of their own.’

  I walked back into the glare below the house. Five shrivelled heads of beetroot nodded in my hand. I wanted to start running, but I didn’t know which way to go. I wanted to burst into flame. Instead, I stood at the kitchen sink with a knife against my thumb and the cold tap dripping, and I skinned the beetroots and sliced their wet, violet flesh on to a plate.

  The next morning Axel woke me at the usual time. I followed him out of the house, across the clearing. It wasn’t light yet; the goats shuffled in their pen. Past the shed, along the footpath, down into the field.

  Then, halfway across, I stopped. I just stopped and watched him walk away from me. His feet rising, falling, rising. He thought I was still behind him. He didn’t realise. The stupidity of those feet of his.

  ‘I’m not coming,’ I called out.

  He looked over his shoulder. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Is it true you’re getting married?’

  He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, it’s true.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She’s going to have a baby.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘It’s my baby.’ He began to walk towards me, not looking at me. Looking at the grass.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Stay there.’

  He kept walking until I could see the freckles on his face.

  ‘One last time,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Edie.’ He grasped my wrist and tried to pull me towards him. My arm was horizontal in the air, but my feet hadn’t moved. ‘One last time.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ I shouted. ‘I said no.’

  He held on to my wrist with both hands. Then, at last, he let it go. My arm returned to me, like a boat cast loose on dark water.

  ‘Three days ago,’ I said. ‘That was the last time.’

  His face brightened suddenly. ‘You’re jealous.’

  In one flowing, almost circular movement I picked up a fallen branch and swung it at his head. He caught the blow on his forearm. It still hurt, though.

  ‘You’re dead,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ Holding his forearm, he stared at me. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  I threw the branch down in the grass and walked away from him. After a while I looked round. I was surprised how small he was. There was half a field between us and a wind getting up, clouds blowing southwards. If I spoke now, he would hear me.

  ‘It was your choice,’ I said.

  One night I hacked the marriage bed to pieces with my father’s axe. I woke up and lay quite still – shocked, fearful, regretting what I’d done. I put a coat over my nightshirt and crept out to the barn. How was I going to explain it? My father would be furious. All that work.

  But when I saw the bed standing on its four legs in the moonlight, not finished yet, but whole, somehow, and beautiful, I changed my mind. I wished I’d done it after all. I stood there, undecided. The axe I’d used in the dream was hanging on the wall; its newly polished steel seemed to beckon me. The axe began to speak. Edith. Take me down. Do it. I turned and ran out of the barn. Ran straight into my father who had heard a noise and come out with his gun.

  ‘What are you doing up?’

  ‘The bed – I wanted to make sure it was all right.’

  He gave me a look of bewilderment as I moved past him, back into the house.

  For most of that week I didn’t talk and no one talked to me. I was out in the vegetable garden every day, planting for the spring. Carrots, I put in. Potatoes, too, and radishes. The wind brought squalls with it. I laboured on as the rain came down, soaked to the skin and shivering. In the barn behind me, the bed took shape, its headboard carved with the names of the bride and groom, and round the names there was fruit – apples and wild figs and grapes – and over them, a canopy of leaves. Axel was hardly there, except to sleep. Either he was working with my father, repairing storm damage, or he was over at the Poppels’ place, a muddle of shacks on a side road, half an hour’s walk from where we lived. I still couldn’t understand it. The Poppel men were a bunch of good-for-nothings, drunks. They passed you in their cart sometimes, horse teeth in their heads and startled, bloodshot eyes, and nothing on the back except some bedsprings, maybe, and a punctured tyre. But that was where he went, to drink with them and play cards and lie down on something with that pale girl.

  The wedding was still weeks away and suddenly I could stand it no longer. I asked Karl and Eva if I could move into the hotel. In return, I’d be a chambermaid, a gardener – anything. Karl listened to me as if I was talking to him from somewhere very far away and when I’d finished he just nodded. He didn’t query my decision or my motives. All he said was, ‘We could use another pair of hands round here.’

  They gave me a small, north-facing room on the first floor. It had a single bed; the headboard was plain, varnished wood – no fruit on it, no names. I had a wash-basin, too, and a tall wardrobe that leaned forwards, away from the wall, like a waiter taking orders. Standing at the window I could see the pool below me. There were fir trees at one end, to shelter bathers from the wind. A flight of steps led down to the water. The steps had been cut out of the rock and then reinforced with cement. Beyond the pool was a wooden terrace; this was where the famous people must have strolled in the past, with their silk dressing-gowns and their cigars.

  I had more contact with Eva than with Karl and, though she could be remote at times, she couldn’t match his almost total lack of interest. Five years older than I was, she would sit me down at the kitchen table and question me. For instance, she wanted to know whether I’d fallen out with my family. I said I hadn’t. I told her that my brother Axel and his wife would be living in our house and I thought that, as newly-weds, they ought to have some privacy.

  ‘Then what’s that on your arm?’ Eva was pointing at the dark-red, wedge-shaped scar that ran in a straight line from the edge of my right hand towards the inside of my elbow.

  ‘I did it on the stove,’ I said. ‘I tripped and fell against it.’

  ‘It must’ve hurt.’ Drawing greedily on a cigarette with her pale, plump lips, she seemed to want it to have hurt.

  I nodded.

  It had happened the day I told my father I was leaving. Breakfast was finished and I was clearing the plates away. Axel had already left the room.

  ‘You’re walking out on us?’ My father
’s eyes were pewter-coloured in the gloom of the kitchen and his hands lay on the table, red and swollen at the knuckle.

  ‘I’m going to live at Karl’s. He needs help with the hotel.’

  ‘There’s plenty of work around here.’

  I shrugged. ‘That Poppel girl can do it.’

  ‘You’re walking out,’ he said, ‘just like your mother.’

  ‘I thought she died.’

  His head turned slightly to one side, as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard me right. He was looking at me all the time, though, his anger rising, slowly rising. It was like watching milk come to the boil.

  But I couldn’t stop myself. ‘She wasn’t my mother, anyway,’ I said. ‘I never even knew the woman.’

  Through the window I watched Axel cross the clearing, carrying a struggling guinea fowl by its feet.

  I said it again. ‘She wasn’t my mother. Your wife, maybe. But not my –’

  I didn’t see the hand coming. I thought for a moment that I must have rushed forwards suddenly and hit my face on something. The room spun round and I fell against the stove. My right arm touched it first. I felt the flesh melt. I couldn’t tell if I’d screamed or not. There was a kind of echo of a scream, in the walls of the kitchen, somehow, up near the rafters. And the sweet, rotten smell of my own skin burning. Axel came running in. My father was standing over me. I could see the air between his trouser pocket and his hand.

  He pushed Axel across the room. ‘Get some butter.’

  ‘We haven’t got any.’

  ‘Fat then.’

  Axel came towards me with a scoop of white lard in a spoon. He sat on his haunches in front of me and let a whistle through his lips. ‘Nasty wound.’

  Which wound? I almost said. The one you did, or the one done by the stove? But I kept silent. I took the spoon from him and melted the fat on to the burn myself.

  ‘What happened to your mouth?’ he asked.

  ‘Must’ve hit it when I slipped.’

  My father hadn’t spoken at all. From where I was sitting, on the floor, I saw his right boot shift sideways, scrape at a mark made by the lightning years before.