The Insult (22 page)

She’d told me there were always taxis on the seafront. I flagged one down. All the way to the train station there was that smell. The smell of things wedged under rocks. Things in shells.

I left the voucher on the seat. There’d be someone who’d appreciate it. Who knows, maybe they’d even get lucky.

I’m on my way to Nina’s apartment. It’s not far from the flower market. When I reach the street, it’s dawn and people are unloading vans. The stalls are open, colourful. The cool morning air has seams of fragrance running through it.

I walk into a courtyard, pass beneath an archway. I climb a narrow winding staircase. It’s on the third floor. A dark wooden door on an even darker landing. Part of me’s excited.
So this is where she lives.
Her house-keys are warm, almost illicit in my hand. And yet I feel as if I know the place, as if I’ve climbed these stairs before, with her, after a dinner out somewhere, or a party, our arms around each other, drunk.

Then I’m in her bed. The pillow smells just like her skin. I lift my head. She’s standing by the window.

She’s wearing a long, dark-blue dress; her arms are bare. There’s an expression on her face I can’t decipher. It’s not surprise at seeing me in her apartment, or anger. It’s not even curiosity.

‘Nina?’ I say.

She’s standing by the window, looking down into the street. The wall behind her is plaster: grey and cream and pale-pink. A slab of bright, white sunlight falls across it.

‘Nina?’

‘I used to be,’ she says.

I’m crying out as I wake up. There were two people in the compartment with me before I fell asleep. I begin to apologise.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘a nightmare –’

Then I look around and realise I’m talking to myself. The compartment’s empty.
By the time I reached the Kosminsky it was almost two in the morning. Three messages were waiting for me at hotel reception, all of them from Munck. Upstairs in my room I dialled his number at police headquarters. It didn’t surprise me when the switchboard put me through. I’d already identified Munck as a man who worked late into the night. Either he’d never been married or he’d been married too long. He’d forgotten how to go home.

‘Munck,’ I said.

‘Ah, Blom,’ he said. ‘Feeling better?’

‘Much better, thank you.’

Two youths had been arrested, he told me. They were to be charged with the theft of Nina Salenko’s car. He described them for me. They were both fourteen years old. One wore a denim jacket with the arms cut off. His hair was light-brown, shoulder-length. The other one was thin, with cropped hair and a speech impediment, a kind of lisp.

They didn’t sound like anyone I knew.

Munck described part of the interrogation. Both youths were shown a photograph of Nina. The one in the denim jacket took a long, close look.

‘Wouldn’t mind a bit of that,’ he said.

Munck asked him if he’d seen her before.

The youth grinned. ‘Didn’t know we was here to talk about girls.’

Slatnick came up behind the youth and clouted him on the head with the back of his hand.

‘You should’ve seen Slatnick,’ Munck said. ‘Like the shadow of a cloud, he was, the way he came up behind that boy.’ He chuckled. ‘The boy never knew what hit him.’

‘I can imagine,’ I said.

Munck described how the youth bellowed, as much in shock as pain, and clamped one hand over his ear.

‘You’ve never seen her before?’ Munck asked the youth again.

‘I told you. No.’

He turned to the friend, the thin one with the lisp. ‘You?’

‘No.’

The story that emerged was simple. The two youths had been in the city centre, drinking. It was a Wednesday night and they were bored. When they saw a car with the keys left in the ignition, they couldn’t believe it. It was like an invitation, a gift. How could they say no?

I interrupted. ‘The keys were in it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did they see anybody on the street?’

‘Nobody. It was late. Two-thirty in the morning.’

‘You believe them, don’t you.’

‘Yes, I do.’ Munck sounded gloomy.

It was a breakthrough, but it took him backwards. Nina had disappeared – but not in the car. That was all he knew. Or anybody knew. There were fewer facts than ever.

‘Would you mind coming in tomorrow?’ he said. ‘I need to talk to you.’

I went to bed early. It had been a long night and I was tired. As I lay on my side, waiting for sleep, I thought of Karin Salenko – her lacquered hair, that lazy voice of hers, the tall drinks. I would never have guessed that she was Nina’s mother. I remembered what she’d said about looking like her daughter. She’d said something else, too, something unusual.
Inside, we’re not alike at all.
I could only think one thing: it must have been the inside that I was looking at.

The next evening, just after sunset, I left the hotel. The police headquarters was located in the 2nd district, on the west bank of the river. I took the most direct route, over one of the city’s famous bridges. There were old-fashioned street-lamps, which gave the stonework a deceptive warmth, and on the balustrades there were statues of nineteenth-century statesmen and generals. I was thinking of Visser as I walked along. He hadn’t shown his face since that evening with Munck in the suburbs. He was following me, though. I knew that much. What else would he have been doing on that lonely piece of waste-ground at six o’clock on a Tuesday evening? Halfway
across the bridge I stopped and leaned on the parapet. I looked down. Currents twisted like muscle in the slow green body of water. Weeds floated by in clumps. Broken branches, plastic bags. Was Visser watching me now? And, if so, what would be going through his mind? Did he think I was suffering? Did he think I might jump? I glanced over my shoulder. Stranger after stranger walking past.

When I arrived at the police headquarters I was told to wait. It was a grim eight-storey block, with metal grilles fixed like cages over the ground-floor windows. The radiator next to the front entrance had been covered with a piece of carpet. I thought it was probably because the police didn’t want to hurt offenders accidentally on their way into the building. They’d rather hurt them deliberately, in a room with no windows, somewhere higher up. From where I was sitting I could see an officer in dark-green fatigues, with his back against the wall and his legs on a bench. He was reading a comic-book that Victor sometimes read. A man walked in off the street and sat down opposite me.

‘All right?’ he said.

I nodded. ‘How are you?’

He wore a soiled check jacket and trainers, and he had a deep cut on his forehead.

I waited almost half an hour. At last a metal door scraped open and Munck emerged. It could only have been Munck. Each step he took, his foot flicked at the air, then slapped down on the floor. The way he walked, it always sounded as if the floor was wet. But there was someone with him, someone I didn’t recognise.

Munck shook my hand. ‘I’m sorry to have kept you, Martin.’ He turned to include the other man. ‘This is Jan Salenko. Nina’s father.’

Salenko took my hand awkwardly and shook it for too long. ‘I just arrived in the city this morning,’ he said, ‘by bus.’

He was one of those people who say too much, either out of nervousness or a desire to please.

‘I thought we’d go round the corner for a drink,’ Munck said. ‘Mr Salenko?’

‘Yes. A quick one, maybe. Thank you.’

I asked Munck if Slatnick was coming.

‘No,’ Munck said. ‘He’s off sick.’

Psychological problems, I imagined. That stone-age buckle of bone above his eyes, that shot-gun nose. It couldn’t be easy.

Munck took us to a place called Smoltczyk. He liked it, he said, because it was entirely without character. There was nothing to look at. No pictures, no hunting-horns, no china donkeys. It was just a bar, with drinks in it. I nodded. Salenko nodded, too. We ordered three brandies.

‘That should keep the chill out,’ Munck said.

As soon the drinks came, Salenko leaned forwards, both hands round his glass. ‘I understand from the detective here that you were the last person to see …’ He hesitated. ‘To see my daughter.’ He couldn’t bring himself to say her name.

‘So they tell me.’ I stared at him, but I couldn’t establish any physical resemblance. Then I remembered what Karin had said. Of course. Why would Salenko resemble Nina?

‘That’s what I’m told,’ I said.

‘How was she? Did she seem,’ and his hands opened, showing me his glass, ‘upset?’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Actually, it was me who was upset.’

My answer seemed to take Salenko by surprise. It took me by surprise as well. But I’d been asked the same question so many times. There was what I’d felt, and I was tired of walking round it.

‘I’d been going out with her for about six weeks,’ I went on. ‘That was the night she told me it was over.’

I wasn’t looking at Munck, but I knew his eyebrows were halfway to his hairline. This was the first he’d heard of my rejection.

‘I’m sorry,’ Salenko said.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I was sorry, too.’ I sipped at my brandy, felt the warmth spread through me. ‘Strictly speaking,’ I said, ‘you’re not her father, are you?’

‘Not strictly speaking, no.’

‘You know who is?’

‘No. I never asked.’

I watched Salenko carefully. The silence seemed to embarrass him.

‘I just treated her like my own,’ he went on, ‘and she grew up believing it. She was only a few months old when we were married, her mother and me. Not even talking yet.’ He paused, thinking back. ‘First word she ever learned was Dad.’ He smiled sadly, looked down into his drink.

Then he roused himself. ‘Karin, she never told me anything. She didn’t like to talk about the past. If it ever came up, she’d throw things. Or she’d drink. Or leave the house.’ He tilted his glass on the table and watched the brandy climb the side. ‘I didn’t want to lose her, I suppose.’

‘But you did,’ I said.

‘Did what?’

‘Lose her.’

‘In the end I did,’ he said, ‘but that was later.’

He took a deep breath. When he breathed out, I could hear his heartbeat in it.

‘Something you’ve got to understand,’ he said. ‘I didn’t deserve her. That’s what I felt when I first set eyes on her, and I never stopped feeling it the whole time we were married.’

There was a river outside the village where he lived and one day he was standing on the bridge. A truck was parked at the far end, facing away from him. He saw a girl climb into the back of it, over the tailboard. Her dress looked handed-down – too big for her, anyway; it swirled around her skinny legs, made climbing difficult. She was about eight years old. Then a man walked out of the field and up the grass bank, and the truck lurched with his weight as he got in. The girl was standing in the back, both hands on the metal rail that ran along behind the cab. The man shouted something from the window, probably,
Hold on,
then the engine caught and the truck set off down the road, heading west, and that was all there was to remember, think of, dream about: that girl clinging to the rail as
distance claimed the truck, her brown hair loose and streaming against the shoulders of her ill-fitting, pale-blue dress. Afterwards he was still standing on the bridge, only the road was empty now, and the wires that linked one telegraph pole to the next, the sun was shining through them, and the way their shadows fell across the tar, it looked as though a car had braked hard, as though there’d been some kind of accident.

By the time she was fifteen – the age he’d been that morning on the bridge – she was the prettiest girl in the county. She didn’t seem to know it either; it was as if she’d never looked in a mirror, or even in a window, or a pond. He was nothing special, though. He won a memory contest once by reciting an entire page of the local telephone directory, not one name out of order either, but where would that get him with a girl who could turn his stomach over like a ploughed field just by looking at him? And besides, his memory was something people mocked him with. There was a rhyme that everybody in the village knew:

Jan Jan

The Memory Man

Remember remember

As much as you can

Remember you’re ugly

Remember you’re weak

Remember that rubbish

Comes out when you speak

With his memory, of course, it was impossible for him to forget the rhyme – and verses existed that were far less innocent.

Jan Salenko smiled ruefully into his drink. He didn’t think Karin had ever called him ‘Memory’, as the others did, nor had she ever chanted those rhymes at him. When she saw him in the village she’d say, ‘Hello, Jan Salenko,’ as if the sound of his name said all at once
amused her. She was always friendly, but somehow that was worse than if she hadn’t noticed him at all.

Then something happened. Nobody knew for sure what it was, only that Karin wasn’t seen around any more. The autumn he was twenty-three and the whole of the winter that came after. She just disappeared. And when she appeared again, in the spring, she had a baby. But there was no mention of a husband. And nobody could say who the father was. There were jokes, of course – immaculate conception, virgin birth; there was even some sarcastic talk about the second coming (the trouble was, the baby was a girl). The year before, Karin had been courted by half the boys in the county. Now they stayed away, every single one of them.

He gathered his courage. One morning towards the end of April he walked out to old man Hekmann’s place. It was a fine day, clouds running in the sky, trees with their new leaves. He found Karin crouching in the shadows on the back porch. She had her baby with her. No one else was about.