Rupert Thomson - The Insult

I stepped into the ditch. There was still some light in the sky, and through the bushes I could see several children from the village gathered in the field. They seemed to be playing some kind of game. One of them — the leader, presumably — had his right elbow in his left palm and a cigarette between his fingers. There was a cartwheel propped against a tree, and a boy had been tied to it. I couldn’t see his face. I could only see the other children taunting him and their leader pacing up and down, taking quick drags from his cigarette.

‘Now,’ the leader was saying, ‘you’re going to talk.’

‘He ain’t going to talk,’ said one of the others.

‘He’ll talk.’ Smiling, the leader passed his cigarette to the boy who stood beside him. ‘Do his face.’

The boy who was tied to the wheel strained sideways, and it was then that I saw the blond hair falling across his forehead.

I fought my way through the bushes and ran across the field, shouting. The children stood still for a moment, staring at me, then the leader threw his cigarette away, not looking where it landed, and they scattered. I knelt down in front of Mazey and undid the string they’d bound him with. As soon as he was free, he took his right arm in his left hand and cradled it. He looked out across the field with his mouth stretched wide.

‘Did they hurt you?’

When he didn’t answer me, I gently took his shirt-sleeve and rolled it up. There were three round burns in a cluster on the inside of his arm, just below the elbow. I drew him close to me. I could feel his heart beating and his breath coming faster than usual. It may sound strange, but I was proud of him then. He talked — but only to me. He wouldn’t talk to anyone else. Not even if he was tortured.

He moved in my arms and I loosened my hold on him. He walked a few steps to where the cigarette lay in the grass, a thin spiral of blue smoke rising defiantly into the air. With no expression on his face, he put his shoe on the cigarette and crushed it out.

Of course I couldn’t protect him every moment of the day, but I had the feeling, as we walked home that evening, that I’d left him on his own for too long. I ought to be spending more time with him — but what about my work? And if I gave up work, where would the money come from? Maybe, in the back of my mind, I was already beginning to think of taking a husband.

The hotel was frequented not only by strangers but by local people as well and, during the evening, the small bar at the back was one of the few places in the area where you could have a quiet drink. Peter Kroner wasn’t a stranger exactly, but he wasn’t a local either. He came from a village some distance to the east. He was the foreman at a limestone quarry (Edwin Bock worked for him, among others). His family owned a small vineyard, too, producing a red wine that was fruity and sweet. The wine was popular, and Karl made a point of keeping half a dozen bottles in stock. That was Kroner’s excuse (he seemed, even then, like a man who needed excuses). He would call in for a drink on his way home from work, even though the hotel wasn’t on his way home at all, and his first words as he walked through the door were always the same: ‘So how’s it selling?’ He didn’t expect a reply. He didn’t care if it was selling or not. He almost never drank his father’s wine; he said it disagreed with him. It was one of the things I liked him for: though he was still living with his parents, he treated them with a healthy disrespect — or so it seemed to me. He was eleven years older than I was, and still unmarried. He had soft black hair and skin that didn’t take a razor well. Whenever I looked at him, he looked away, which I found flattering. It surprised me that I was flattered, but I was.

He began to come into the bar at lunchtime.

‘Don’t you ever do any work?’ I asked him once, and instantly regretted it because it gave him just the kind of opening he needed.

‘Can’t seem to concentrate,’ he muttered.

His eyes all jittery, his face looking grazed.

Axel was standing at my elbow suddenly, behind the bar, and he was grinning. ‘Why don’t you dance with him?’

Dance with him? There wasn’t even any music.

‘I don’t know,’ and Kroner twisted his glass of whisky on its base, ‘it’s just that I keep thinking about you.’

Dance with him.

‘I could be married,’ I said, ‘for all you know.’

‘You’re not married. I asked.’

‘I’m twenty-six years old. If I’m not married yet, there must be something wrong with me.’

‘Not that I can see.’

Exasperated now, I said, ‘I’ve got a child.’

‘I know,’ and Kroner grinned, ‘but he isn’t yours, is he?’

‘I love him like he’s mine.’

Kroner’s eyes moved across my face, first one way, then the other, not stopping anywhere, just sliding over it. Afterwards he looked into his drink again.

‘Then I’ll love him, too,’ he said in a quiet voice, and nodded to himself. ‘I’ll love him, too.’

Two months later I was wearing a pale-yellow dress down to the floor and he was wearing a dark-blue suit, and there was confetti on his shoulders and in his hair — tiny pale-blue horseshoes, tiny silver bells. His father’s sweet red wine flowed all afternoon and on into the evening. Dr Holbek recited a poem in our honour. He called it ‘A Connubial Epiphany’. We hardly knew what the title meant, let alone the poem, but we both applauded loudly at the end. There was a five-piece band, and we were in each other’s arms. Round and round we went, until my heels blistered.

‘There,’ I said to Axel, who was watching from a castle on the far side of the world. ‘I’m dancing with him. Are you satisfied?’

I never wanted Peter Kroner’s children — that wasn’t the point of the marriage — but he took one from me anyway (if you can have a man put his seed in you and call it taking; I think you can). It was a baby girl and, just after she was born, he came into the bedroom with an armful of pink roses. There were twenty-six of them, and they’d travelled all the way from the city, he said, by special courier.

‘I’m so proud of you.’ His grazed face blurred and I felt his lips on my cheek.

As far as I was concerned, it was like a robber going back to the bank he’d stolen from and congratulating it. I didn’t say anything, though. I couldn’t. The smell of the roses sickened me, their heavy sweetness thickening the air. I had to ask the midwife to stand them by the open window. Kroner didn’t notice. He was holding his baby daughter in both hands and his face had softened like a saint’s.

‘Black hair,’ he said, ‘just like her dad.’

I had given birth at my father’s house, which was where we were living then. Kroner wasn’t happy about it — his parents’ house was bigger — but I’d insisted, not so much for my own sake as for Mazey’s. I didn’t want him to be uprooted from the only place he knew.

It was a hot summer. Every day Kroner would drive over to the quarry, and I would stay in the house and sit by the window and think of the stream all dried up at the bottom of the field and the willow’s branches trailing in the mud. In my head everything was numb. I didn’t feel much for the child. When it lay in my arms and I looked down at its raw, puckered skin, it wasn’t love I felt, or even fondness. I’d loved once and I wasn’t about to be tricked into loving again — especially not by a pink, twitching thing with someone else’s hair. And besides, after loving Axel and then Mazey, there didn’t seem to be anything left over. It was so different from Mazey, too. I remembered how envious Eva had been, and now I understood. This new child cried all the time. There was so much strength in its tiny, swollen body. I heard the crying not with my ears, but my nerves; I felt like wood under a blunt saw, splintering. I’d find myself staring into her mouth, the hard curve of her tongue, dark-red, it was, almost purple-black at times, and then I’d want to hurt her.