Rupert Thomson - The Insult

When I saw Kroner the next morning, in the hospital, he looked as if he’d aged twenty years. I thought the shock must have done it, the way earthquakes are said to. His hair went white overnight. Close up, though, I realised I’d got it wrong; it was just that he was still covered with limestone dust from the quarry. His eyes were open, but he didn’t seem to know us. He was still very weak, the Sister said. We weren’t allowed to stay for long.

The doctor told me that the stroke had been a major one. A blood vessel in Kroner’s brain had ruptured, resulting in a haemorrhage. It meant one side of his body would be paralysed. It also meant he’d lost the power of speech — temporarily, at least. He would be kept under observation for the next few days. Before too long, however, he’d be sent home, where he’d be in my charge. The doctor wanted to know if I understood the implications of this. I said I did (it was like Mazey, only worse; it was almost funny). According to the doctor, Kroner would have to begin again, from the beginning, like a child. To walk, to talk. To tie a shoelace. Drive a car. This would be more difficult, he thought, because they’d detected a stubborn streak in the patient, an unwillingness to return from where he was.

‘We can only do so much. In the end, it’s up to him.’

Three weeks later Kroner had another stroke. It was less significant, the doctor said, but the date of his release was postponed indefinitely. He stayed in hospital all summer. Two or three afternoons a week I would drive down there, usually alone (the sight of Karin seemed to upset him; once he even wet himself). If the weather was fine, they lifted him into a bath chair and let me push him through the grounds. These days I hardly recognised him. The left half of his face had slipped, and one of the nurses had put a side-parting in his hair and brushed it flat. He looked like a different person. Nobody I knew, though. Sometimes, as I wheeled him round, I found myself believing it: we were strangers, and I was just being neighbourly, doing a good deed. Other days I pitied him, the state he was in, but at the same time I could see the justice of it. What he’d done to Mazey, him and his people up at the quarry, while I was weighed down with his child — or afterwards, when the child was born and my mind was nothing but a misted-over pane of glass. Sometimes the men who seem the most respectable and decent are the worst. There are whole parts of them kept secret. But he’d drunk deep from his own medicine, and the taste of it had altered him for ever.

I was on my way to visit him once when a hub-cap came loose and ran on ahead of the car. I watched it leave the road in a straight line, bouncing across uneven ground, confident but ludicrous. I thought no more about it until I parked outside the hospital. But then I saw the wheel, and I stood there in the sunshine, staring at it. You never know how strong somebody is, and if they’re against you, how long the struggle will last. Looking at the wheel, black instead of silver, blind, somehow, I knew it was over. Kroner had come to the end of the cruelty that was in him, and it hadn’t worked. There were straps to hold him upright in his chair. I remember fingering the leather that afternoon and thinking back: that drive across the county years before, the knife glinting on the seat beside me … There’d be no need for knives, not any more.

I thought of Kroner’s love for me, which I’d spurned. I thought of how he’d lavished it on his little girl instead, his daughter. I thought of how my child had ruined his.

And the truth was worse than any of us knew.

It was while he was in the hospital that we found out she was pregnant.

That summer Karin ran away. She was gone for almost a week and when she came back, she was riding in the front seat of a fast, steel-blue car with number-plates I didn’t recognise. The man behind the wheel had unusual, bright-orange hair.

‘Chromanski’s the name,’ he said, shaking my hand.

He told me where he was from — a large town, about two hours to the west of us. He said he was a lawyer. I thought he was rather young to be a lawyer, but I chose not to question it. He’d met Karin in the lobby of the Hotel Europa one night, while he was having a drink with two associates.

He took me aside. ‘Your daughter’s beautiful. Unfortunately, I’m already engaged to be married.’ He looked up, saw Karin through the window. She was sitting on the porch, twisting a strand of hair around her index finger. ‘And besides,’ he said, with a smile that was faintly conspiratorial, ‘she’s under age, isn’t she?’

‘And pregnant,’ I said.

That put a new expression on his face.

But he seemed honest enough: he hadn’t taken advantage of her, and he’d driven her all the way home, a distance of more than a hundred kilometres. I thanked him for going to such trouble. Trouble’s the word, he said, grinning, and I thought he could well be right about that. Karin was still sitting on the porch when Chromanski left. He smiled at her as he walked away across the grass. She watched him turn his steel-blue car round as if her last chance of happiness was locked in the boot.

Later that day, she told me she’d gone to the town to find a father for her child. Each morning she sat in the lobby of the largest hotel, the Europa, and waited for the right man to appear. Her plan was to let the man make love to her, and then pretend the child was his. Her condition didn’t show yet. She’d studied herself from every angle in the mirror. There was a slight curve to her belly, but nothing a man would notice. At last, one evening, she met Alexander Chromanski. He was a little drunk. Her eyes were beautiful, he told her. Brown and silver, like loose change. ‘Not worth much then,’ she replied, her bitterness surprising her. ‘On the contrary,’ he said. On the contrary. Those were his exact words. She’d never met anyone who spoke that way, and it seemed beautiful to her, at least as beautiful as her eyes were to him. She thought he must be the man she’d been looking for.

‘You were going to deceive him,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘He would’ve been happy.’

I moved to the window. ‘Sly,’ I said, ‘just like your father.’

She joined me, staring at the place where Chromanski’s car had been. ‘Did he say anything to you?’

‘Nothing much. He said he was engaged.’

‘And what did you tell him?’

‘The truth.’

After that, Karin didn’t want to see anyone. I arranged for her to live at my father’s house outside the village. On the same day I freed Mazey from his chains and brought him home to the hotel. He moved into my old room on the first floor, at the back. I screwed a hook into the ceiling near the window and hung his wind-chimes from it. The weeks went by. Then, towards the end of June, Karin asked for me. She was worried about the brown line that ran from her belly-button to the triangle of new dark hair between her legs. I told her it was normal. She couldn’t get used to it, she said. It was as if someone had been drawing on her in the night. Her body was not her own. She said she’d thought of throwing herself off the roof of the Hotel Europa. If she got three lines in the paper she’d be satisfied. Then she looked at me, and I could tell from her eyes that she hadn’t forgotten Emerald Joe and that singer, Esztergom. She wasn’t threatening me, though. She didn’t have that kind of nature. Later, she lay on her bed and wept at the thought of her death, the smallness of the article, her own insignificance. I knew she wouldn’t do it — her vanity would prevent her — but, at the same time, it was too late to dream of husbands.

When Kroner was discharged, in September of that year, I moved him into the room next to Mazey’s. I saw that his broken tooth had blackened; it must have happened gradually, over the last few months, but I felt as if I’d only just noticed. He had partial use of the left side of his body, and he could make noises that were almost words (they were like words with all the hard sounds taken out), which was the best that could be expected. He spent his days upstairs in a wheelchair. I had run a piece of string out of his window, down the outside wall and in through the back door, and I’d attached a bell to the end of it; if he needed something, he could pull the string with his good hand.