Rupert Thomson - The Insult

‘Minkels is deaf. He’ll never know.’

‘What if somebody comes in,’ I hissed, ‘to buy something?’

He grinned. ‘We’d have to be unlucky. It’s only once or twice a week that happens.’

I let him do it, not inside me, but between my thighs, among the hurricane lamps, the leaning towers of hunting-caps (which toppled just before his stuff came out), the knives with dainty deer’s feet for handles, and he was right: Minkels never knew.

I dreaded being caught, though. As the older of the two, I’d be blamed for it. And besides, I was the girl and girls always led boys on; girls were always guilty. Axel didn’t seem to worry. It just never entered his head. Sometimes I think that quality of his rubbed off on me and that, unknowingly, he prepared me for much of what came after. Or maybe it was in our blood and he was simply showing it to me. I often wondered how deep it went, and at what point it would turn into treachery. If we’d been caught, would he have pretended it had nothing to do with him? I could see it, somehow. I could see him smiling at me from some blameless place while I stood there in the sun with fingers pointing at me. He’d be smiling the way he’d smiled that first morning by the stream. Under the yellow leaves. Sometimes it seems to me that what I did was in revenge for this imaginary betrayal. Though there was an actual betrayal, of course. There was that, too, eventually.

When I was seventeen, Karl married the Bohlin girl. I didn’t know much about her, except that she wasn’t the one I’d seen standing in his arms on the back porch like something in need of water. Her name was Eva. She was the only daughter of the people who owned the inn on the edge of the village. They were old for parents, almost the age of grandparents, and they were eager for her to take a husband so they could hand the business over. They already knew Karl on account of the work he and my father had done for them, and they were delighted to have him as a son-in-law. My father was pleased as well, partly because it sealed the bond between the two families and partly because he thought that Karl was bettering himself, marrying not into money, it was true, but into property, which was the next best thing. And, with a hotel, there was always the possibility of wealth.

‘You can make a go of it,’ he told Karl at the wedding party. ‘The place needs work, that’s all.’

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.