Rupert Thomson - The Insult

‘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.

‘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.