The Insult (39 page)

‘You must be giving him something,’ she said.

‘I’m not.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘You’re not giving him alcohol?’

‘No.’

‘Some kind of herb, then?’

I shook my head.

It was Eva who told me about the rumours that were spreading through the village. People thought Mazey might be a prophet or a saint. That was the reason he’d survived that terrible plunge through the woods. That was the reason he’d been spared the fate of his unfortunate parents. You might almost say that they’d been sacrificed on his behalf. They had died that he might live.

‘That’s absurd,’ I said.

Eva lifted a finger to silence me. ‘I didn’t tell you about the miracle.’

The week before, she’d taken Mazey shopping in the village. It was late afternoon, already dark. Several people were in the grocer’s when she walked in. While she was waiting to be served, her arms grew tired and she sat Mazey on the counter. Suddenly there was a violet flash in the square outside and then a loud crack overhead, like a dry stick being snapped in two, and all the lights went out.

‘He was sitting on the counter,’ she said, ‘and somehow there was this glow around him, I don’t know if it was a reflection or what it was, but anyway, everybody noticed it. And because everybody in the shop was looking at him, they all saw him lift his arms up and at the same moment that he lifted his arms, the lights came on again —
but only in the shop.
The rest of the village was still in darkness.’ Eva stared at me with eyes that were wide and glistening, mesmerised by her own re-telling of the story.

It sounded like a coincidence to me.

‘I know,’ Eva said, ‘but people are talking.’

The next time I cut Mazey’s hair, she asked me for a lock of it. I gave it to her without thinking. A week later, while I was cleaning the lobby, I found the lock of hair. It had been laid on a square of brown velvet, then sealed into a small gilt box with a glass lid on it. The box had been fixed to the wall above the entrance to the hotel. When I asked her what it was doing there, kinks appeared in both her eyebrows; they could have been about to tie themselves in knots.

‘It’s so there’s calmness in the house,’ she said, as if it was perfectly obvious,
‘his
calmness,’ and she sent a glance to the corner of the
kitchen, where Mazey lay sleeping. She took me by the arm and led me into the shadows by the cellar door. ‘Tell me, is he talking yet?’

I shook my head.

‘Not even one word? Not even,’ and she lifted her shoulders towards her ears, and smiled a smile that was as small and plump as a ripe plum, ‘not even – Mama?’

‘No. Nothing.’

She frowned for a moment, then her dark eyes widened. ‘Perhaps he’s about to make an utterance. Who knows, perhaps he’ll speak in tongues!’ She moved closer. ‘Don’t mention it to Karl,’ she said. ‘The lock of hair, I mean. If you don’t say anything, he probably won’t notice. Men generally don’t.’

If it had only been Eva who was acting in this manner I would have put it down to one sulphur bath too many and thought little more about it. But one afternoon in February a young couple, recently married, approached me as I was walking home. They wanted me to bring Mazey to their house, so he could bless it. It wasn’t far, they said. Just round the corner.

Was it their eagerness that I succumbed to? Was I reminded of myself and Axel, the way we used to be – the way we could have been? Or was I just too tired after my day’s work to think of an excuse? I don’t know. In any case, I followed them and stood on the threshold of the house with Mazey and he was silent, as usual, and he stared, as usual, then we left. That was the blessing.

Winter moved northwards, leaving the landscape brown and sodden. We visited a rich man who’d been afflicted with a painful and incurable disease. I stood at his bedside, Mazey in my arms. We had only been there for half an hour when the man opened his eyes and said, ‘He just sits there, doesn’t he,’ and then he smiled and died. There was the feeling among the family that the child had lifted the rich man’s suffering and eased his difficult transition from this world to the next. There was the belief that the child had done good. I believed it, too. I was his mother, after all, and I was proud of him.

After that, we were often summoned to the beds of the dying to
give them succour. We were summoned to the fields as well so the harvest would be plentiful. We were even summoned by the childless, in the hope that they might conceive. Each time Mazey appeared somewhere, the tales of his mysterious powers were enhanced and multiplied. More miracles were reported. Mazey passed an orchard and all the apples ripened. Mazey touched a sack of flour and when it was opened there was a gold coin in it. Just about the only thing he didn’t do was bring somebody back from the dead – but he was probably saving that for his adolescence. Presents were showered on him: slaughtered animals, fruit and vegetables, alcohol, cigars – even money. Far from not being able to afford to keep him, my father and I found that he was more than paying for himself. I was worried, though. The Poppels were becoming interested again. I knew how their minds worked. I could see them driving through the village and the surrounding countryside with Mazey sitting on a piece of velvet in the back of their cart. There would be giant banners, painted in red and gold: SEE THE HOLY CHILD! TOUCH HIS BLESSED GARMENTS AND BE HEALED! and also, naturally, CONTRIBUTIONS WELCOME! They would grant audiences with him. They would sell locks of his hair. They would guarantee fertility, good fortune, peace of mind. He would make them rich.

The Poppels were stupid people and it would take them time to realise all this, but when they did, it would be hard to convince them of my innocence. They’d remember how swiftly I’d adopted him and suddenly they’d see everything that had happened in a new light: the child was gifted, even sacred, and somehow I’d known it all along. This was the truth they’d been trying to get at during the week of the funeral. This was the knowledge I’d cunningly concealed from them. The Poppels were only a threat if they felt they might have been wronged in some way. Well, they would feel wronged. And, like most stupid people, once they’d got that idea into their heads, it would be almost impossible to dislodge it. Mazey had already become, to some extent, the property of the village: the track to our house was being worn out by the feet of supplicants. How long before
the Poppels tried to claim him as their own? He was all I had, but I would lose him if something wasn’t done.

We celebrated Mazey Hekmann’s second birthday. That morning my father had told me that certain people in the village wanted to build a shrine to him. It was to be erected on the shore of the lake, in the place where we had found the truck; people were saying it was the site of his spiritual rebirth. My father was sitting in his chair by the stove, his pipe unlit in his hand.

‘They’ll probably ask me to build it for them.’ He laughed his hollow laugh. ‘Strange thing is, I could use the work.’

I looked up from the cake I was icing and for once I could see we were both thinking the same thought: Where will it end?

Curiously enough, it was the church that saved us.

One night there was a knock on the door. I opened it and peered out into the darkness. The village doctor was standing there.

‘You’ve got the wrong house,’ I told him. ‘There’s no one sick in here.’

‘That’s what I’m here to find out.’ He stepped forwards into the light and removed his hat. ‘I’ve come to see the child. The pastor sent me.’

The doctor was a small bald man with a fragile manner. He always looked to me as if he’d just broken something valuable and was expecting punishment. His name was Holbek, and it was said of him that he wrote poetry at night.

He spent a long time examining Mazey with all kinds of tools and instruments which he produced from his black leather bag. At one point he asked me if Mazey could talk. I shook my head. Not yet, I said. Does he ever smile? the doctor asked. I looked at my father. I don’t know, I said. I can’t remember.

At last the doctor turned to face us, one of his hands clasped in the other.

‘It’s as I thought,’ he said.

I stood beside my father, waiting for the doctor to continue.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘the child may be a saint, for all I know, but he is also,’ and he lowered his eyes for a moment and then lifted them again, ‘he is also retarded.’

‘I knew there was something about him,’ I exclaimed.

Holbek gave me a watchful look. The child’s mind was a seed that would never grow, he said, quoting from a poem he had not yet written. He couldn’t be sure whether the condition was inherited or whether it was the result of the terrible accident that had robbed him of his parents. He simply couldn’t say. However, it would be a great strain on all of us. He hoped we understood.

I tried to conceal my relief. No one would take him from us now.

‘Please assure the pastor that I intended none of this,’ I said. ‘Quite the opposite, in fact. I don’t know how it started, but I’m glad it’s over.’ I moved closer to the doctor, who was looking at me strangely. ‘Please let it be known throughout the village that my child is not a holy child, but a simple one.’

The doctor nodded.

‘His mother was a Poppel,’ I said. ‘That probably explains it.’

I thanked the doctor for coming, then showed him to the door. I stood in the yard and watched him walk away, his short dark figure merging quickly with the night.

During the next few weeks the village turned against us. Doors closed as we walked along the street. Faces looked away. They’d been deceived, not by the child or by me, but by themselves – though that wasn’t how they saw it, of course. They’d put their faith in Mazey, and he’d made fools of them. Their reverence was replaced by wariness at first, and then by fear. His eyes weren’t calm; they were blank. His silence wasn’t serenity, but emptiness. So it is that people are betrayed by their desperate craving for gods. But we lived on, as we had always done, in our house out in the woods – my father, my son, and me.

There came a time when the hotel’s fortunes began to change for the better. Eva was convinced it was because she’d taken the gilt box
down from above the door and ceremonially burned the contents, but the fact was, our national economy was booming and the new prosperity could be felt, even in the more remote corners of the country. We had guests most nights. They weren’t the actors and statesmen of half a century before. They were ordinary people who wanted to escape for a weekend: pensioners, businessmen, romantic couples. Over the years, as Karl had started drinking heavily, first at home, then in the nearby town, Eva had come to rely on me. By the time I was twenty-four, I was practically running the place. I worked hard, with only a part-time cook and a chambermaid to help me. I saw less of my father, less of Mazey. It was a condition of my employment, in any case, that Mazey be left at home. As a baby he’d been no trouble, but things were different now that he was five. ‘It’s those eyes of his,’ Eva would say, shivering dramatically. ‘They put people off.’

It was true. Mazey was tall for his age, with pale-blond hair that fell across his forehead, just the way his father’s used to, but if you looked him in the eye you could see that something wasn’t right. He seemed to be looking through the world, rather than at it. For him, the world was like a pane of glass. You couldn’t guess what lay beyond the glass, though. Sometimes people stood in front of him and his gaze seemed to be saying,
You’re not there. You don’t exist.
They felt like ghosts all of a sudden. He even did it to me now and then. There were times when I felt that his eyes had stopped just behind my eyes, inside my mind, and that they were reading what was written there, a story I had never told, a secret nobody had guessed – the truth. And then I’d have to remind myself of what he was: a simpleton, an idiot, a fool – with only me to care for him, only me to trust. Only one truth counted any more, and that was this: we would never cause each other harm.

While at work I left Mazey with my father. Mazey’s silent staring didn’t disturb my father in the least. If anything, it suited him; he’d never been one to use words when silence would do just as well. He thought Mazey needed something to occupy him, though. Hunting through a drawer of odds and ends, he found an old pen-knife with a dark, bone handle and three blades of differing sizes. He gave it to the
boy, began to teach him how to whittle. Mazey caught on quickly – so quickly, in fact, that my father claimed his own carpentering skills had skipped a generation; he saw himself in Mazey, which made the task of looking after him much easier, more of a pleasure. Mazey had a natural talent, he said, and it was a shame he was simple because he could have been a fine craftsman. What Mazey actually produced were strange, smooth shapes that didn’t look like anything, but somehow this seemed right: he was carving what was in his mind. And he would be absorbed for hours, sitting on the ground with that old blunt knife and a few off-cuts from whatever piece of furniture his grandfather happened to be working on. In those days I finished late at the hotel. Walking along the track towards our house, I’d see the stubborn bulk of it, down in the hollow, the whole place in darkness. The only light would be coming from the barn, and as I crossed the yard I’d see the two of them still bent over bits of wood, their figures shadowy, seeming to sway inside the dirty yellow tent of light shed by the hurricane lamp that hung from a beam above their heads.

Something else Mazey did was go off on his own. He’d touch his grandfather on the shoulder or pull at his sleeve, and he’d point away from the house, into the trees. Then he’d be gone. Once, when he was four, I found him on the road that led into the village. Four years old and he was halfway to the bridge! At first it worried me. But as the years went by, I got used to it; that curiosity or restlessness, it was part of his character. By the time he was six or seven, he would often be gone for the entire day. At nightfall he’d walk in through the kitchen door and, dragging a chair over to the sink, he’d climb up on to it and drink from the cold tap. So far as I could tell, he kept out of the village – almost as if he remembered how it had turned against him once.