Rupert Thomson - The Insult

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.’

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 could 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.