The Insult (43 page)

She lifted her glass of milk to her mouth with both hands and drank from it. Nine years old, with dark-blue eyes and brown hair curling down on to her shoulders. She felt less like mine than ever.

‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s not dead.’

‘Old Miss Poppel’s dead. She –’

‘We’re not talking about Old Miss Poppel.’

Kroner put his sandwich down, only half-eaten. ‘There’s no need to shout at her.’

I went over to the sink, ran the tap and rinsed my hands in the warm water. I noticed my reflection in the window.

‘So you don’t know anything?’ I said, with my back to the room. ‘It’s not another of your little games?’

I heard Kroner’s chair scrape backwards and saw his reflection rise behind my own.

‘Karin,’ he said. ‘I think it’s time you went to bed.’

I stared at my face, then at his. Then I stared into the blackness
that was beyond us both. There’s no such thing as an accident, I whispered to myself. There’s no such thing.

One night, when the moon was almost full and Kroner was asleep, I crept into Karin’s room and woke her up. I put my mouth close to her ear. Told her to get dressed.

‘Is it an adventure?’ she asked me.

I nodded. ‘It’s a secret, too.’

I took her by the hand and led her down the stairs. Standing in the passageway outside the dining-room, I could hear Kroner snoring in his bed one floor above. I opened the side door and we walked out into the gravel car-park. Then down the steps, towards the pool. Karin was wide awake now, and too filled with wonder at being out at night to say a word. We moved past the fir trees at the back of the hotel, over some rocks and along a narrow path, into the shadow of the woods. It was half an hour to the main road. I looked at Karin, walking beside me. ‘You’re not tired, are you?’

She shook her head. ‘Where are we going?’

I smiled mysteriously. ‘You’ll see.’ In my right hand I had a bucket and every time it swung, the moon broke into a thousand pieces.

I’d spent the afternoon smashing empty beer bottles and pickle jars behind the shed where the pool equipment and the gardening tools were kept. Everyone was out except for Mazey, who was upstairs, listening to his chimes. (Miss Poppel had been as good as her word:
The wind-chimes that hang from the crab-apple tree in my front garden, I hereby bequeath to Mazey Hekmann.)
Even if he heard me, though, it didn’t matter. He was hardly going to tell anyone.

When we reached the main road, we crouched down in a shallow ditch. ‘This is the place,’ I whispered.

Karin looked at me. It wasn’t anywhere she knew.

I showed her how the road sloped upwards, dipped, sloped upwards once again, then curved to the left and vanished behind some trees.

‘From here we can see them coming.’

‘Who?’ she said. ‘Who’s coming?’ Her eyes had widened. Maybe she thought it was Holy Jesus, or the Three Wise Men. Christmas was only a few weeks off.

But I didn’t answer. I put one finger to my lips and watched the road. Minutes passed. Then I touched her shoulder, pointed to the west. There was a beam of light in the distance. At first it looked like a triangle, long and golden, lying on its side. But as the car came accelerating round the bend, the triangle turned into circles, two circles, also gold. They were so bright that we had shadows, even though the car was still at least a kilometre away. I tipped the bucket, shook some broken glass on to my hand. I waited until the car was hidden in the dip, then stood up and threw the glass across the road. I ducked down again, one hand braced on my knee.

It was almost frightening – the size of it, the speed, the sudden noise. I saw glass glitter underneath its tyres. But nothing happened. The car hurtled over it and on. Its tail-lights were snuffed out. It was gone.

‘Church-goers,’ I muttered.

I reached for the bucket, and looked round at Karin. She was kneeling beside me, biting her bottom lip.

‘Now it’s your turn.’

I shook the bucket as if it was a game and she could choose any piece she wanted and maybe win a prize. She hesitated, though. The trees above us shifted in the wind.

‘Don’t you love your brother?’ I whispered.

Her eyes looked into mine.

‘Your brother, Mazey. Don’t you love him?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Come on, then. Cup those hands of yours.’

I trickled glass out of the bucket. Her hands were so small, even when they were joined together. I hoped it would be enough.

‘Careful,’ I said. ‘Don’t cut yourself.’

No sooner had I set the bucket down than I heard the sound of an engine again. It came and went in the silence, the way mosquitoes do.
Headlights were searching the darkness on the bend. I waited until they disappeared, then took Karin’s arm.

‘Now, girl. Do it now.’

I watched her step out into the road, lightly, almost on tiptoe, as though she was afraid the surface might give way beneath her. She stood still for a moment, then she flung both hands upwards into the air. She might have been releasing something she had caught – an insect, or a butterfly. The glass bounced prettily. But it held her there too long. She’d forgotten all about the car. And now the headlights were rising above the level of the road and bearing down on her, two circles merging into one fierce glare. I reached out, seized her arm and pulled her down into the ditch.

The car howled past us. The hot diesel blast of it.

I heard a tyre blow. As I lifted my head, I saw the car swerve. Then it was rolling, the metal spitting sparks. It hit a tree, bounced off it, turned over half a dozen times. Then it was lying motionless, on its side, two hundred metres down the road.

I stood up. Kicking most of the glass into the ditch, I walked towards the car. One of the headlights pointed into the undergrowth, as if it was trying to show us something. I could smell burnt rubber. Nothing was moving.

Two people were inside. The man wore a suit and a pale hat. His mouth was open. One of his teeth had a green jewel in it; the rest were glistening with blood. There was a woman, too, but she was harder to make out. She was beneath the man, all folded up in what was now the bottom of the car. One of her shoes had fallen off and I could see her stockinged foot, the underside of it. She had high arches. I thought she might be a dancer.

‘Trying to kill my son,’ I said.

I took Karin’s hand and looked down through the windscreen at the ungainly tangle of their bodies.

‘Murderers,’ I said.

Two days later, at the breakfast table, I read a report of the accident in the local paper. The two occupants of the car were named
as J. Swanzy, also known as Emerald Joe, on account of the gemstone he wore in his front tooth, and his companion, Kamilla Esztergom, the singer. Both were killed outright. Police were calling it a case of reckless driving, since the levels of alcohol in the blood of both the deceased had been well in excess of the legal limit.

I touched the names with the tip of my finger. Emerald Joe. Kamilla (the singer!). Had they been talking when the car hit that patch of glass? And, if so, what about? What had their lives been like? I couldn’t even begin to imagine. I’d never met people who wore emeralds in their teeth. They reminded me of the stories Felix used to tell. I thought of Mazey, who would walk with a limp until he was dead. Mazey in the ditch, alone, in pain. I brought my eyes back into focus. Only then did I see the misprint: instead of
reckless,
they’d written
wreckless
. What had happened had happened – but, at the same time, somehow, it had not. All the accounts were balanced, all grudges cancelled out.

One year I took Mazey to the lake. I wanted to show him the place where I had found him, and I was also curious to see it again for myself. There was nowhere to park on that particular bend in the road, so we drove past it, leaving the car on a farm-track half a kilometre further on, then walked back. Mazey had recovered full use of his leg. From time to time he would reach down and touch it, just above the knee, and there was a slight unevenness to his walk. You wouldn’t have called it a limp, though.

‘Your leg’s mended pretty well,’ I said, ‘hasn’t it?’

He looked at the leg. I did, too. We looked up again, both at the same time, which made me smile.

‘That doctor,’ I said. ‘He was just trying to frighten me.’

I had the sudden feeling I weighed nothing. I could have floated up into the trees.

Nothing had changed on the road, not in twenty years. As I walked along, I had a thought. What if time wasn’t a straight line at all? What if it was more like the wire on a telephone, with loops in it? You
seemed to be going forwards, but actually you were going round and back on yourself. There were moments in your life that were far apart, but, at the same time, they almost coincided.

The damage to the tree was old, though. When I bent down, I could see it clearly, a black oblong scar in the wood where the truck had caught it. I took Mazey’s hand and we began to scramble down the slope. The trees had healed. Otherwise everything was identical. It was even the same kind of day – halfway through autumn, leaves falling, blue sky high up between the branches …

We reached the lake. There was nothing to mark the place; the shrine everyone had talked about had never been built. I bent down at the water’s edge, as I’d bent down twenty years before, and dipped my hand in it. I tasted the water. Not the slightest trace of sulphur. Had I imagined it that day? Or was it just that everything had rearranged itself for those few hours? Was it part of the pattern of surprise? I looked around, puzzled by how little I felt; I was almost disappointed. I noticed Mazey tasting the water, as I had done. He put the tips of his fingers in his mouth, then took them out again. His face didn’t alter.

Suddenly I wasn’t sure why I’d brought him or what I wanted him to understand. At first, I just talked around it, anything I could think of. I told him a story I’d been told by Felix. It had happened early in the century, when the hotel was at the height of its popularity. A wealthy shipping magnate and his wife came to stay for a few days. One afternoon they went for an excursion on the lake. Their boat sank and everybody drowned. It was a tragedy, of course, but it was also a mystery: the bodies of the shipping magnate and his wife were never found. The company mounted a search with teams of expert divers, underwater specialists, but the lake defeated them. It was just too deep, too cold. The bodies simply disappeared.

I pointed eastwards, out across the water. ‘They’re still down there somewhere.’

The best part of the story was the end – and, knowing Felix, it was almost certainly untrue. Out boating on the lake once, while still a
boy, he looked down into the water and saw something glinting. A long way down, it was. A long, long way.
What did you see?
I asked him, my eyes all wide.
What was it?
He claimed it was the diamond on the finger of the shipping magnate’s wife. I begged him to take me out on the lake. Begged him to show me the diamond ring on the dead woman’s hand. But Felix, in his later years, was frightened of deep water. Also, he wasn’t sure he could remember his precise position on the lake. And besides, he said, the sun would have to be shining at the right angle or you wouldn’t see a thing.

I looked across at Mazey. Squatting on his heels, he was whittling another of his unidentifiable shapes. I wondered if he’d been listening. You never could tell with him. Sometimes he’d say something later, though – six months later, or a year – and you’d realise that he’d heard every word. I sat beside him, among the leaves, just watching him. The sun warmed my back. I was glad we’d come.

Before we left, I took hold of his shoulder and looked into his eyes. I thought I’d found the words at last.

‘You see this place?’ I said. ‘Right here?’ I dipped my hand in the water, took it out and shook it. ‘This is where you became my son.’

A cool spring day. Several years had passed. I must have been forty-two or thereabouts. Though I was still married to Peter Kroner, I saw less of him than I used to. His father had died, and he was running the vineyard now, as well as the quarry. Sometimes he’d go drinking, though, and when he came home he’d try and put his hands on me, sweet nothings catching on the tooth that Karl had broken for him, but deep down he knew it was no good and before too long he’d be swaying round the bedroom with his black hair sticking up and his face all red and he’d be calling me foul names.

‘Sticks and stones,’ I’d say. ‘Sticks and stones.’

Karin had just celebrated her fifteenth birthday. I remembered what Karl had said about her inheriting my mother’s looks. The hotel phone was always ringing, and whenever we drove into the town together I could feel the eyes of men on her like postage stamps that were already licked and looking for an envelope. I thought there might be trouble and I mentioned it to Kroner, but he just looked at me in utter scorn and said, ‘What would you know about it?’ I noticed Mazey looking at her, too, with the same damp look, but I wasn’t going to mention it again.

And then, a cool spring day – March, I think it was …

As soon as I saw Karin from the window, standing in the car-park with her dress sticking to her and her hair pasted flat against her neck, I knew what had happened, I just knew, and I felt my heart sink down, like a cow or an ox when it’s been shot, the way their legs just crumple, go from under them.

I walked down the stairs and out through the side entrance. The car-park was empty that day. We had no guests. I listened to my shoes on the gravel as I walked towards her. I could see Miss Poppel’s house, still unsold, the front garden piled with machinery, abandoned wind-chimes jangling. Further down the street the sun was out, but where we were, it was shadows and a chill wind.

I said her name, but she didn’t look at me. I said her name again. This time she twitched as if I’d pulled on something that was attached to her. She was looking at the ground. Water dripped from the hem of her dress. It drew a black circle round her on the gravel. Seemed to be sealing her off.

‘What is it, Karin? What happened?’ Though I knew.