The Insult (47 page)

I looked down at him once more.

‘Yes, that’s right, it was me,’ I said when I saw the look in his eye. ‘I did it.’

Outside, it was bright and cool. When I drove into the clearing with Mazey, my father was sitting on the back porch cleaning his rifle. This didn’t strike me as a coincidence at all. It was more like part of what had happened. The fever lifts. You return to normal. Something’s run its course. In daylight the idea of shooting Mazey seemed far-fetched and desperate, the light wind of someone else’s madness blowing through my head.

I said good morning to my father.

He looked up from his gun, his eyes pale, a crop of silver stubble on his cheeks and chin. ‘Any word of Karin?’

I shook my head. I reached into the back of the car and lifted a small battery-operated cassette machine off the seat. It was Kroner’s – he’d bought it just before his stroke; he liked new gadgets – but he would have no further use for it. I carried it across the yard and stood it on the bonnet of the truck. I asked Mazey for his tape. He handed it to me. I put it in the cassette machine, then I pressed the button that said PLAY. My father looked from me to Mazey and back again.

‘We have to chain him up,’ I said, ‘like before.’

This time my father’s eyes rested on Mazey for longer. Mazey didn’t notice. As usual, he was hypnotised by the cassette machine; he still hadn’t got used to the idea that you could hear the wind-chimes even though they were nowhere to be seen. My father studied him for a few moments, then looked down at the gun that lay across his lap.

‘You know where it is,’ he muttered.

I left Mazey in the yard while I walked into the barn. I found the padlocks and the chain on a shelf next to my father’s rack of tools. As I turned away, I noticed the Leaning Tower of Pisa in the corner, propped against the wall, unwanted now, and gathering dust. It seemed a pity he had never finished it. It could have been his masterpiece. I’d always looked forward to the day when doves were roosting in those little arches. Outside in the yard, I ran one end of the chain around Mazey’s ankle and fastened it with a padlock. Then I took the other end and hooked it through the truck’s front bumper. Mazey stood still the whole time, his eyes fixed on the cassette machine. The fact that he was being chained to the truck again made no impression on him. Somehow it would have been easier if he had kicked and screamed. I’d never forgotten that drive back from the institution when he was eight, and how eerily untouched he seemed, and how remote.

My father laid his rifle on a piece of cloth and, rising to his feet,
walked slowly towards us. He touched Mazey on the shoulder. ‘Do you have your knife?’

Mazey nodded.

‘Show it to me.’

Mazey took the knife from his trouser pocket and held it out to my father on the flat of his hand. There was blood on the knife, and I knew what blood it was, but my father didn’t remark on it. He snapped one blade out, then the other. Tested both blades with the side of his thumb.

‘I thought so,’ he muttered. ‘Blunt.’

He turned on his heel and walked away from us. I watched him vanish into the darkness of the barn. We waited in the yard, Mazey and I, both facing in different directions. After a while I heard the rasp of a grindstone.

When my father stepped out into the sunlight, he was carrying two or three blocks of wood. He’d cleaned the blood off the knife, and the edges of the blades were bright silver, thinner than before. He handed the knife and the wood to Mazey.

‘Let’s see what you can do with those.’

I drank a glass of water in the kitchen. Out on the porch I said goodbye to my father. He nodded. The gun lay on the cloth in front of him, each piece ready to be oiled. It would be hours before he reassembled it. As I drove away, I saw Mazey in the rear-view mirror. He was sitting on the ground beside the truck, with his head bent, whittling.

All summer Mazey was kept chained to the truck outside my father’s house. All summer he carved the blocks of wood my father gave him. This time it was different, though. No strange, smooth shapes. Nothing you had to puzzle over, or guess at.

All summer he carved babies.

Babies sitting up, babies lying down. Babies on their backs or on their stomachs. Babies sleeping, laughing, kicking, crying (he even carved the tears). My father tried to persuade him to turn his hand to
something else, but he wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. Each new block of wood that he was given became another baby, as if that was the only shape the wood contained, as if that was all it could ever be.

One morning in August I sat beside him. I remember counting them. There were thirty-seven – some life-size, others no bigger than your thumb. He put down his knife and picked up a block of wood that was as yet untouched. He held it in the palm of one hand and placed his other hand on top of it, and then he looked at me.

‘Baby,’ he said. ‘In here.’

Many years later, on a warm September morning, a letter arrived. I turned it over in my hands, examined the writing on the envelope. I didn’t recognise it. The postmark was a city in the northwest; I didn’t know anyone who lived there. When I tore the letter open, a photograph fell out and landed on the floor. I bent down, picked it up. There were two people in the picture, a man and a girl. I didn’t recognise either of them. I looked at the envelope again to make sure it was addressed to me. There my name was, on the front. I took the picture out to the porch and stood in the sunlight, studying it. The girl was embracing the man, her right arm passing across his chest, her two hands joining on his left shoulder. Now I thought about it, she looked something like my daughter, Karin. I’d only seen Karin once since she left. It was Kroner she came for – which was just as well because he died a few weeks afterwards. She stayed for less than an hour. She was rude. I turned my attention to the man again and suddenly everything fell into place. It was Jan Salenko, twenty years on. He’d thickened, the way men do, but there was the same strangely grateful look to him, as if he didn’t deserve to be in the picture. My eyes drifted back to the girl. I thought of that cold December night and the baby I’d delivered. I’d even named her. Nina.

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.