Rupert Thomson - The Insult

Jan Salenko had written a long letter, telling me that he and Karin were separating, a separation that would end, he supposed, in divorce. He poured out his feelings to me — all his misery, his longing, his regret. I thought it odd to be receiving news that was so personal when I hardly knew the man. After all, they’d married in secret, against my will. For the past twenty years I hadn’t even had an address for them. But I knew enough to have told him, even at the beginning, that it wouldn’t last. That much was obvious to anyone. In fact, it was astonishing that it had lasted as long as it had. What did he expect from me now? Sympathy? I read on. Towards the end of the letter he mentioned his daughter. At least he still had her, he wrote. Nina lived in the capital now, but they saw each other every two or three months. They got on well. He was enclosing a picture of the two of them, taken a few weeks back.

After I’d finished the letter, I studied the photograph again. She wasn’t a bad-looking girl, though she didn’t have the fine features of her mother. She looked more like me: headstrong, spirited, but plain. There was also something of Mazey in her — the nose, the upper lip. A Hekmann, not a Kroner. I didn’t answer the letter. There was no point. What would I have said? I left it on a shelf in the kitchen, wedged between two glass jars. I forgot it was even there.

Mazey came to me one morning. At forty-three, the shine in his hair had gone and there were thin lines around his mouth, but otherwise he hadn’t aged at all. I’ve often noticed how backward people look younger than they really are, as if their flesh is somehow backward, too; Mazey could easily have passed for twenty-eight or — nine. He stood in the kitchen that day, and the fingers of his left hand curled and uncurled against his leg. I asked him what was wrong. He wouldn’t say. In his right hand he was holding Jan Salenko’s photograph.

‘Reading my letters now, are you?’

He held the picture up in front of me. ‘The baby,’ he said. ‘Where’s the baby?’

It took me a few moments, then I understood. He thought the girl in the picture was Karin. And if Karin was there, the baby ought to be there as well — even after all these years. I told him that it wasn’t Karin he was looking at but Nina, her daughter. He was looking at the baby, I told him, only the baby had grown up. I could see he didn’t believe me. He had never understood change, especially when it was slow. I took him outside. I picked up an acorn off the ground and then I showed him the oak tree it had come from. I told him the tree had been an acorn once. It was the same with the picture, I said. The girl used to be a baby. He just stared at me as if I was making the whole thing up. He was convinced that the girl in the picture had hidden the baby, and he wanted to know where it was. I tried to explain it to him again, but he turned away from me. He stood in the car-park, staring at the photograph, his left hand curling and uncurling against his leg.

My father had died at around that time, of old age. There were only a few of us at the funeral; he’d lived so long that most of the people who knew him were already gone. My father had two suits, which he kept for Sundays. He was buried in one of them, and I dressed Mazey in the other. At the graveside I stood with Mazey’s arm in mine and watched the box drop into the ground. My father had carved the symbols of his trade on the lid — a hammer, a saw, a handful of nails; I remember thinking that the nails must have taken him a while. I felt Mazey remove his arm from mine and looked to see what he was doing. He’d opened one of the blades on his pen-knife and he was testing it against his thumb, the way my father had taught him. When he disappeared shortly after the funeral, I thought I understood: my father’s death had awakened an old restlessness in him.

But he disappeared every month, returning in clothes that were filthy, often torn and sometimes even spotted with blood. After a year or so, the length of time that he was gone began to grow. Sometimes he would be away for as long as a week. I was worried that he might walk out one day and not come back at all. It was only by chance that I found out where he was going. I was emptying his pockets so I could wash his clothes when I found a ticket stub. It was a tram ticket, and it had the city’s name on it. He’d been going to the capital, more than six hundred kilometres away. Sometimes I found money in his pockets, too, money he hadn’t had on him when he set out. Sometimes there were stains in his underwear, which alarmed me. When I asked him what he did there, in the city, he became sullen and wouldn’t answer. The only way to find out would be to follow him again. Though I was afraid of what I might discover, I felt I had no choice; it was part of my responsibility to him.

The next time he told me he was going out, I was ready. I’d prepared some food and a change of clothing, and I’d made arrangements with Martha, the hired help, to run the place while I was away. I felt like a fool, though, because I was back two hours later. Mazey had hitched a lift on the main road; I’d stood there helplessly while he disappeared into the distance in some stranger’s car. It was at least a month before he left again. This time I borrowed an estate car from one of our neighbours (Mazey would have recognised our truck). I sat behind the wheel and watched him walk away from the house. It was a bright, cold October day. A clear blue sky, dead leaves clattering across the ground.

He walked until he reached a junction a couple of kilometres west of the village, then he turned to the south, along a road that led towards the motorway. After another quarter of an hour, he found a grass verge that was to his liking and began to wait. I had to hide the car behind a tree because that section of the road was straight and whenever he heard the sound of an engine he looked in my direction. He kept his thumb stuck out in the air, I noticed, even when there was nothing coming. It was the middle of the morning before someone stopped for him. I didn’t recognise the car; it wasn’t anyone we knew. I followed the car for an hour and a half. It dropped him at a service station about one hundred and twenty kilometres south-west of the village. There were toilets, petrol pumps. There was a café-restaurant with a red-and-white-striped awning. I parked in the shadow of a removal van and watched Mazey as he walked into the restaurant. He bought a soft drink, then he went and stood next to a man who was sitting at the counter. I saw the man shake his head. I found that my mouth was hanging open. I suppose I’d never imagined Mazey speaking to anyone apart from me. I felt a sudden jealousy of all these strangers. I watched him move along the counter, stopping at the shoulder of every driver. He knew the procedure; obviously he had done it many times before. The way he approached the men, the way he nodded when they turned him down. The way he drank from his Styrofoam cup and then crushed it when it was empty and tossed it in the bin. I’d lost him. I wondered when exactly this had happened.

He was offered a lift by a tall fat man who drove an oil tanker. This was a relief. I’d been dreading something fast; the estate I’d borrowed was a rickety thing, more than ten years old. The tanker would be no problem, though. Also it was silver, which made it impossible to lose in traffic. We travelled south, through flat grey land. It was country I’d never seen before. There were almost no trees. Morning became afternoon and the bright sky clouded over. It began to drizzle.

At last, towards dusk, the driver stopped for something to eat. I parked almost parallel with the tanker, but slightly behind it. From where I was sitting I could see Mazey’s shoulder and his forearm. I watched him climb down out of the cab, his face in profile against the cold sodium lights. He followed the driver into the cafeteria and bought a sandwich. I went to the toilets while I had the chance. There was an attendant eating peanuts out of a tin and watching a black-and-white TV. On the way out I dropped a few small coins into a Tupperware container, but she didn’t even look at me. I hurried to the car. Just then Mazey left the cafeteria. He didn’t go back to the tanker. Instead, he wandered around the car-park. At one point he walked right towards me and I had to duck down, hide under the dashboard. This is madness, I thought, crouching on the floor among sweet-wrappers, dirty tissues, bits of mud from other people’s shoes. I should go home.