The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘Can’t you come any sooner?’

  He was silent for a moment. ‘Not really. Not unless I leave right now.’

  It was my turn to be silent.

  ‘You want me to leave now?’ His voice lifted, as if he couldn’t quite believe it.

  ‘I wouldn’t ask,’ I said, ‘not unless it was important.’

  ‘What’s wrong? Are you in trouble?’

  ‘Yes, I think I am.’

  ‘I knew there was something about that place –’ He checked himself. ‘What kind of trouble?’

  ‘I can’t talk, Loots.’

  ‘You can’t tell me anything?’

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Just come.’

  Back in my room I stood at the wash-basin, leaning on it, with my head lowered. I wondered if Edith Hekmann had listened to that call as well. The porcelain beneath my hands. The coolness of it. The smooth, rounded edges.

  Don’t you want to know the truth?

  All I could see now were the buttons on her cardigan. The four brown buttons. Like hazelnuts. And that sleeve of hers, unravelling, unravelling –

  You don’t want to know?

  Something was coming apart. I didn’t dare to lift my head. I couldn’t look into the mirror.

  I was afraid of what I might see.

  Of what I might not see.

  During the night I left my room and tiptoed through the darkened house. Halfway down the stairs I heard somebody murmuring. It seemed to be coming from behind the wall. I thought it must be one of the residents – old people having trouble sleeping. The clock struck three as I stepped on to the porch. The snow had stopped. I’d walked out into an odd silence, a padded world.

  I crossed the car-park and, passing through the clustered fir trees, started down the stone steps towards the pool. Then, suddenly, I lost my footing. I was rolling, over and over. I had to throw my hands up around my head, to protect it. When I landed at the bottom of the steps, my glasses and my cane were gone.

  I lay on my back in the snow. I didn’t seem to be hurt. Just shaken. Had I woken anyone? I lay there, listening. All I could hear was the sound of sulphur water tumbling into the pool. I sat up. Rubbed my elbow, then my knee. I’d been lucky. One of these days I was going to break something.

  Why had I fallen, though?

  I hadn’t been careless or impatient – in fact, I was sure I could remember watching my feet sink, one after the other, into the pure, unblemished snow. There was no reason to have fallen, none at all.

  I limped to the edge of the pool. I knelt, reached down with one hand. Above the waterline the walls were sharp to the touch, encrusted with mineral deposits; below it, they were smooth, almost velvety, the consistency of dust. A rope had been fastened along the side in even loops, for people to hold on to. Over the years it had petrified, and it was now as hard as china.

  The sound of the water, that sulphur smell, the rope’s strange texture – all this I could claim to know.

  I slowly raised my head.

  But what about the things my undiminished senses couldn’t help me with? What about the trees on the far side of the valley? What about the stars?

  The night before, in the middle of her story, Edith Hekmann had taken me to Mazey’s room. She was so insistent, pulling on my sleeve, that I couldn’t refuse. It was up the stairs and through the door I’d put my ear to once, the door marked PRIVATE. Then along a cramped passageway, no more than shoulder-wide. Mazey’s room was at the end, on the right. She let me go in first. After what I’d heard, I’d been expecting something bizarre, extravagant – if not demented. I was disappointed. It was a room like any other room. A window, a single bed, a chair. A basin in the corner. Taps. A perfectly ordinary room. And Edith Hekmann was just a mother, proudly showing off her child. I found myself thinking of Gabriela, the Gabriela who appeared in my dreams. Always being admired for something, being special, winning.

  Almost angrily, I said, ‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’

  Edith Hekmann laughed. ‘Above you.’

  I reached up with my left hand. Nothing at first, just air. Then I felt something that was made of wood. It was smooth, carved into a shape. And it moved when I touched it.

  At last I made the connection. ‘It’s a baby.’

  I let go of it and it swung sideways. There was a series of small collisions, as wood knocked against wood. Click click CLICK CLICK click click – it reminded me of pool balls on a table, the sound they make when somebody breaks.

  ‘How many are there?’ I asked her.

  ‘I never counted.’ She came and stood beside me. ‘It’s years since he made one, but he still looks at them. Still lies there on his bed and looks at them.’ She walked past me, into the room. ‘He’s got talent,’ she said, ‘don’t you think?’

  I didn’t know if talent was the word. I murmured something.

  ‘Karin took the baby away from him,’ she said, ‘and once they were gone there was no one who could explain it to him, not even me.’ There was a silence. ‘She turned him into what he is.’

  I was only half-listening, though. I was still looking up into the mass of babies that were hanging from the ceiling …

  It was a while before I turned to face her. She was standing by the window, looking out into the night. I thought she’d forgotten I was there. But then she spoke again.

  ‘Are you artistic, Mr Blom?’

  I was still kneeling at the edge of the pool. I was no longer aware of my heart beating, or the places where I’d hurt myself; I was no longer aware of the cold. I was thinking about the wooden babies twisting on their strings –

  A perfectly ordinary room.

  There was a feeling now, a feeling that I remembered having in the car-park after I’d been shot. I was falling from a plane, and the plane was flying on without me. It wasn’t just separation, abandonment. It was the falling itself. Something giving way, something seeming to expand in front of me. A kind of gap had opened up, and it was widening. I left my screams behind, thin sounds curving into absolute infinity.

  My dark glasses, my white cane. Where were they?

  I tried to remember the lay-out of the steps. Think. THINK. There were three flights in all. You walked down the first flight, then turned to your right and walked down another one. Then you turned to your left. The last flight was the longest. I must have fallen somewhere near the top of the last flight.

  I began with the bottom step, feeling the length and breadth of it, searching the ground on either side as well. It was a laborious process, and my hands were almost numb, but I could think of no other way. It would look odd, I thought, if someone saw me from an upstairs window. It would look like worship, part of some quaint religion.

  I found my cane on the seventh step. I sat down and examined it; it seemed undamaged. The glasses would prove more difficult. A wind pushed at the trees near by – a night wind; I could detect no daylight in it yet. Not that it made much difference now. There would no longer be any days or nights for me. There would only be time – continuous, unvarying.

  The eighth step yielded nothing. I was cold and tired. What if the glasses had landed some distance away, in the shrubbery?

  As I started on the ninth step, my hand discovered something hard and rounded, with a kind of edge around it. I bent my nose to it. Leather.

  It was a shoe.

  ‘Mrs Hekmann?’

  Wait a minute. It wasn’t a woman’s shoe. It was too big to be a woman’s shoe.

  ‘Who are you?’ I said.

  I found a second shoe.

  ‘Loots?’ I said. ‘It’s not you, is it?’

  No, it couldn’t be. Not yet.

  ‘Who are you?’

  My son. He’s come back.

  ‘Mazey?’

  I was standing now. I could feel his breath on my face.

  I had no idea what he intended. I had the feeling I should treat him as I would an animal. Stay calm. No sudden movements. Whatever you do, don’t run.


  Something was placed against my chest. I was pushed backwards. I staggered down one step, then another. I didn’t fall, though. It must have been his hand.

  I still had my cane. Supposing I used it as a weapon?

  No sooner had the thought occurred to me than the cane was snatched out of my grasp. I heard it leave his hand. The sound it made, the sound a whip makes when it cuts through empty air. I heard it land in water somewhere to my left.

  The violence was happening in silence.

  Nothing was being said.

  ‘What is it, Mazey? What do you want?’

  The hand pushed me backwards once again. I managed not to lose my balance. I had to be somewhere near the bottom now. I reached out with my foot, found level ground.

  Words would be no use. He wasn’t even going to speak.

  Was he trying to frighten me? Probably not. He didn’t know what fear was. I remembered what Edith Hekmann had said. The simple things he doesn’t understand. Like we get older.

  Like we die.

  I thought she must have told him that I’d wronged her. Now he was trying to get rid of me. He wanted me gone. Was he capable of measuring his own violence, though? Somehow I doubted it. He could kill me and not even be aware of it. He would stoop over my body with a kind of abstract curiosity, not understanding why all the movement had gone out of it.

  It was also possible that she’d loosed him on me like a dog.

  I walked backwards, trying to determine where he was. But he was moving quietly, if he was moving at all; the snow took every sound and softened it. Suddenly my heel tipped; there was nothing under it. I’d reached the edge of the pool. There was only one way to keep track of him – at least, only one that I could think of. I had to translate each movement he made into a noise. I had to make him visible.

  I turned quickly, jumped in.

  It was warm, warmer than I’d expected. Almost the same temperature as a bath. I rose to the surface. My head cooled as the night air closed over it. I was out of my depth. I worked the toe of one shoe against the heel of the other. I worried that Mazey might leap in after me, land on top of me. I wouldn’t stand a chance then.

  At last my feet were free of my shoes. I slipped out of my jacket and swam away from it. I had no sense of where Mazey was. My plunge into the pool must have taken him by surprise. Confused him.

  I don’t like swimming-pools. The words came to me, but they were strangely meaningless, redundant. Could it be that one fear cancels another? I was making for the middle. I was calm. Moving cautiously through the water, scarcely disturbing it. So I could hear what was happening.

  Then, some distance behind me, the water erupted. It was him. It had to be. He’d stood there on the edge and thought about it. Then he’d jumped.

  I started swimming faster, away from the noise. Staying afloat was hard, especially in clothes; it was sulphur water, and it didn’t support you the way water usually does. I could hear splashing coming from behind me. It didn’t sound as if he swam too often. That was a relief. It meant I was in my element, as opposed to his. Unless it was his fury I was hearing …

  I felt the bottom with my feet; I’d reached the shallow end. I couldn’t stop to rest, though. I had to keep moving away from him, around the pool. While I was crouching there, with my head turned in his direction, I noticed that the sounds were weaker than before. They didn’t seem to be coming any closer either. It was as if he hadn’t moved in the water. And suddenly I realised. All that splashing. Swimming didn’t sound like that. But drowning might. Then I understood why he’d hesitated so long before he jumped. He’d never been in the pool before. He couldn’t swim.

  I began to make my way towards him. It was quiet now and I had the feeling I was entering a trap. The silence, I didn’t trust it. What if he was waiting for me? I swam more slowly, trying to listen out for him.

  I trod water, called his name.

  There was no reply.

  I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it, but I thought I sensed something move beneath the water, something reaching sluggishly for the surface. An arm, maybe. A hand.

  I took one deep breath and dived. I touched the bottom of the pool. There was a kind of dust down there, centimetres thick, and soft as velvet. I pushed my fingers through it. But there was nothing else.

  I rose to the surface, took some air. Then dived again.

  Nothing.

  The water was so warm, so dense.

  I shifted some distance to my left and dived a third time. The fingers of my right hand touched his teeth. His mouth was open. He’d been lying right below me.

  I came up shouting. ‘Mrs Hekmann? Mrs Hekmann?’

  I dived again and tried to lift him. But he weighed more than I did. I got halfway to the surface, then I had to let him go. I had the feeling I was sweating, even though I was underwater.

  It was probably too late anyway. His body was a dead weight: no movement in it, no resistance. I swam until I reached the side of the pool. I clung to the rope that felt like porcelain and began to shout again.

  ‘Mrs Hekmann?’

  I just clung to the rope and shouted.

  ‘You must have woken just about everyone in the village,’ she said, ‘screaming and yelling like that. What’s the matter with you? Did you fall in the pool?’

  ‘It’s your son,’ I said.

  ‘What about him?’

  I was sitting on the terrace in wet clothes, my hands wedged under my arms. I could still feel the imprint of his teeth at the end of my fingers.

  ‘What about my son?’ she said.

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘He’s at the bottom of the pool,’ I told her. ‘He drowned.’

  Her voice was in my ear suddenly. ‘I could shoot you for saying that.’ She stepped back. ‘Why would he be in the pool? He can’t swim.’

  ‘He jumped in.’

  ‘He wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘He wanted – to kill me.’ I was shivering. It was hard to speak’. ‘I jumped in to get away from him. He came after me. I tried to save him, but it was too late.’

  She walked away and when she returned she was dragging something along the ground. I thought it was probably one of those long-handled nets that people use for scooping leaves out of a pool. Or it could have been a gardening implement. A hoe, for instance.

  ‘There’s nothing there,’ she said after a while.

  ‘He’s further out,’ I said, ‘towards the middle.’

  The water swirled as she poked at it.

  ‘You’ll need some men,’ I told her.

  ‘I found a jacket,’ she said, ‘that’s all.’

  ‘It’s probably mine.’

  She lifted it clear. I heard it dripping, then it landed on the ground beside me with a soft slap.

  ‘There’s nothing else,’ she said.

  ‘You should get some men,’ I said.

  But she wasn’t listening. She’d started talking, half to herself, I heard the words child and lake. She was back in her story again, somewhere near the beginning.

  Her voice faded, the way stations fade on the radio. Then it came back, stronger than before. I thought she must be pacing up and down beside the pool.

  Her life was made up of everything that she could not forget. That wasn’t so uncommon. The difference was, she had to rehearse it constantly, as if it hadn’t happened yet. She went over it again and again, even though she knew it off by heart.

  My teeth were clattering so hard, I couldn’t keep my mouth closed. My body ached from being held in one position for too long.

  ‘Get some men,’ I said.

  One hand on the banisters, I climbed the stairs to the first floor. Though I didn’t expect Loots for a while yet, I doubted I’d be able to sleep. All I could think of was the dead man lying in the dust at the bottom of the pool. Martha had fetched two brothers from the village. I hadn’t caught their names. One of them ran the grocer’s shop. They were o
ut there now, dredging the water for Mazey’s body. I wondered how soft his skin would be by the time they brought him up. I wondered whether they would find my shoes.

  I felt for the lock and slid my key into it. I needn’t have bothered; the door was already open. I walked into my room. I could tell there was someone there. I could tell who it was, too. The smell of smoke gave her away.

  ‘Mrs Hekmann?’

  Where was she? I remembered the chair and table by the window. I thought she must be sitting there.

  ‘Did they find him yet?’ she said.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe he went to the city. He’s always doing that –’

  ‘I told you. He’s dead.’

  ‘But of course there’s no reason for him to go there,’ she said, ‘not now.’

  She was sliding a hard object around on the surface of the table. The ashtray, probably. I doubted if she knew she was doing it. It was like Nina and the beer mats.

  Nina …

  ‘I’ve decided to tell you the rest,’ Edith Hekmann said.

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’

  ‘Of course he didn’t tell me everything. I’m going to have to make some of it up. But I’ve got a pretty good idea. The bare bones of it, in any case.’ A hollow chuckle.

  ‘You don’t have to do that,’ I said. ‘I just told you.’

  ‘You’re not chicken, are you?’

  I laughed, but it sounded unconvincing.

  ‘It won’t take long,’ she said.

  And though the room was different, it was just like that other night. She began a long way back, in a place where the story ran smoothly. She set you afloat on it. You drifted. Then, quite suddenly, you were in white water and by then, of course, there was nothing you could do.

  She’d found out that Mazey was going to the city and she’d found out why. He had a photograph of Nina, the one Jan Salenko had sent. He thought it was Karin, though. Not that they looked identical. They didn’t. But the girl in the photo and the girl in his memory were the same age. For Mazey, that was enough. The two girls were the same girl, and he was determined to find her. He had a question for her. An important question.