Rupert Thomson - The Insult

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.

‘Jesus,’ Karl said. ‘Jesus Christ.’

I could only whisper, ‘Who did it?’

My father stood in the blackened house with one hand wrapped over the back of his neck. People in the village often said Arno Hekmann was a good man in a crisis because he didn’t rise too fast. Just one word came out of him that night and we waited minutes for it.

‘Lightning,’ he said at last.

Though he looked at me in my stiff dress, as if it wasn’t lightning he was thinking of, but women. His laughter was one hollow sound and then nothing.

I looked down at my hands, with their hard palms and their broken nails, a boy’s hands on a girl’s dress, and I remembered the pretty little thing that Karl had brought home the year before and how one kiss on the porch had left her drained, like a flower needing water, her head drooping, her eyes half-closed.

We slept under the firs and pines that night. The air still felt astonished; I could smell the hole the lightning had made, not just in the timbers of the house, but in the sky. I curled around a tree-trunk and when I woke, the cold had poured into all my joints and set. My brother Axel was the only one who’d slept in a straight line on the ground. The rest were huddled, crooked, folded-up. Opening slowly as they came round. Old pen-knives, almost rusted solid.

October, that was. After a night of watching people dance.

It was a small village, even in those days, population three hundred and fifty or so, but out in the hollow, which was where our house was, it was population five — my two brothers, my father, my uncle and me.

By the following spring, that was no longer true.

It was a bitter winter. The first snows fell at the beginning of November, before the roof was mended, and lasted till the middle of January. At dawn I’d have to shovel snow off the kitchen floor while the others worked above me (some of it I used for making tea). We had no money coming in. Two of our goats died. We lived on potato soup and boiled white beans. The only luxury was that hot spring Uncle Felix had taken me to. For three days I tunnelled through the drifts with Axel. At last we reached the place and, shivering, stripped off our clothes. We stood for what seemed like hours under that stream of strange, rusty-looking water, and we were so warm suddenly, we couldn’t stop laughing. During the summer Uncle Felix had often asked me to go down to the spring with him, but I always said no. If he’d come with us that day, I wouldn’t have minded. But he was in bed, with a chill.

Over the New Year storms descended on us. The new roof held. Then, towards the end of January, the wind suddenly sank out of the world like the last of the water running from a bath and there was a night of perfect silence. You couldn’t even hear a dog bark or a car cross the bridge, and the air was clear all the way from the cold crust of the earth to the surface of the moon. That was the night we listened to Uncle Felix breathe. It was the breathing-in we heard, a thin, urgent sound, almost plaintive, like someone straining repeatedly to lift a weight, and failing.

Karl murmured, ‘Maybe we should get a doctor.’

‘In the morning,’ I heard my father say.

But Uncle Felix kept us awake for much of the night and we slept later than usual. When we woke up he was dead, his mouth open, as if he’d thought about saying something and then decided against it.

‘I told you.’ Karl was leaning against the window, staring out. ‘I told you we should’ve got a doctor.’

My father shook his head. ‘It would’ve been too late. There was nothing we could have done.’

I thought he was probably right. Felix had gone to bed in his Sunday jacket and his wide trousers that grew wider as they reached the floor. His hair was greased flat and there was a dried rose in his lapel. He had prepared himself as thoroughly as he would have done for any dance.

My father drew the blanket over his brother’s face.

Later that morning, before the undertakers arrived, I hid a few objects in the cuffs of Uncle Felix’s trousers, and it seemed odd to think he wouldn’t be coming after us this time. In the left cuff, a small bottle of water from his favourite spring; I had to seal it tight, or it would smell. In the right, the comb he always used when he stood in front of the tin mirror, and a picture postcard of a beautiful woman, which I’d found in the top drawer of his desk. She was standing on a tigerskin rug in a long tight dress, with her face in profile and her head thrown back, a cigarette pointing like a thin white pistol at the ceiling. I wondered whether she was one of the famous theatre actresses he’d talked about. I tried to imagine her naked on the stained red rocks, with her head thrown back, her cigarette alight and pointing at the sky.

We buried Uncle Felix in February, which meant it took pickaxes to dig the hole, and even then it wasn’t nearly deep enough. I wore the dress he’d bought for me the year before — it was still the only dress I owned, though it was softened now by many washes. My father had built the box himself, with cuts of wood left over from the roof. On the lid he carved FELIX HEKMANN and, underneath the name, he carved a pair of dancing shoes. As they lowered Felix into the hole, I glanced at Axel. His face was pale and serious, and someone had parted his hair; I smiled across at him, to comfort him. He held my look and then, still serious, he winked at me with his left eye. Then winked again, three times in succession, very quickly. It was an uncanny imitation. I had to put a hand over my face. My shoulders shook and tears poured from my eyes. Everybody thought I was crying, and they were very gentle with me when the funeral was over.

That night, or one soon after, I saw Felix in a dream. He was standing under the hot spring in his best clothes and he was laughing the way he’d laughed the night we drove home in our truck, knowing nothing of the lightning or the ruined house.

The spring I turned sixteen, Axel took me to the willow tree. I’d always known it was there — I paddled close to its trailing yellow branches every summer — but it was just a tree to me, a tree like all the others.

It was warm for the time of year, and we’d both woken before dawn. Axel whispered in my ear, something about going for a walk, something about the stream, and I nodded in agreement. We eased out of the bed. Karl, who’d slept like a stone ever since I could remember, slept heavily on, one of his arms reaching to the floor, his fingers just touching it, making him seem delicate. My father was also asleep, lying on his back, with his hands folded on the outside of the blanket.

We went out through the back, past the shed where the goats were penned. Their shoe-shaped faces turned; their yellow, devil eyes slit upright at us. We told them to be quiet. Then down into the field below. The sun was still behind the ridge, though the trees up on the crown were coloured with it, as if the bark had been stripped away, as if they were down to naked wood.

The grass licked at my bare legs.

Axel wasn’t wearing any shoes. I watched his heels rise, with something of the mill-wheel in their rhythm. The left one, the right one, the left one — one after the other, they kept rising. I watched his heels, shiny with dew, as I followed him across the field.

A grey bird curved through the air like a flung stone.

We stopped above the stream. There were trees there — poplars, willows, oak and fir. That time of year, the stream was swollen, snow melting further north and running down to us. My brother sat on the bank where it lifted clear of the fast-flowing water. It was a flat place, just mud and tufts of grass.