The Insult (3 page)

And that was when it happened.

One evening I was crossing the lawn, feeling as if I knew each mound, each root, each blade of grass by heart, when I realised that what lay in front of me – what I could ‘see’, as it were – was not the usual grey, featureless and empty.
It was green, and there were shapes in it.
You must be imagining it, I told myself. This is one of the illusions Visser warned you about. You think you’re seeing, but you’re not.

I stood quite still and looked around me.

The shapes in the green were trees. And I could see the lawn, too, reaching away from me, then sloping down. There was a smoothness at the end of it. A lake. I could see a stand of poplars, tapering like rockets as they lifted into the sky.

The sky!

For a moment I didn’t dare to move in case it all cut out and I went blind again. Then I knew what I would do. I chose one tree and slowly began to walk towards it. The tree grew larger. At last I was close enough to touch it. I reached out. There was bark beneath my fingers, ridged and damp. I looked up. Leaves shifting in the evening wind.

This was no illusion. I was seeing the tree, the gardens – everything.
I was seeing.
I stood there with the tips of my fingers touching bark. Leaves turned and turned above my head – the rush of blood through arteries.

I couldn’t move.

At last I set out across the lawn, my cane scanning the blades of grass in front of me, left and right, left and right. I climbed the steps to the entrance, feeling for dimensions, height and width, as I’d been taught. Inside the clinic I followed the corridor that led to my ward. My vision had faded slightly, but I could still make out the pipes massed on the ceiling, the plain wooden chairs against the wall in the visitors’ waiting-room. I had to be careful to ignore the doctor who
was walking towards me. I had to make sure I didn’t move to one side. Suddenly it struck me – an exquisite moment, this – that I was only
pretending
I couldn’t see.

I didn’t say anything about it, though. It was partly excitement, partly disbelief. Partly fear of ridicule as well, no doubt; I didn’t want people thinking I was mad. I felt I ought to explore what was happening for myself, to get the measure of it. I needed to be sure of what I had.

When I got into bed that night I still hadn’t mentioned it to anyone. I lay there in the dark and stared at the ceiling. The paint had cracks in it. I saw the great rivers of the world – the Ganges, the Amazon, the Nile. I saw areas of nothing – the Russian Steppes, the Empty Quarter. My heart was jumping like something on a trampoline. It just kept jumping.

It was hours before I slept.

Bits flying off me.

This time it’s my eyes. I watch them spring out of their sockets (somehow that’s possible). I notice how they bounce on the road behind me. I see them burst.

But I run on.

Then it’s my nose, my ears. Some teeth. The skin of my face peels off like a mask and flaps away into the bright gold distance. A bat, a leaf. A pricked balloon.

I’m still running.

A tiny section of my skull detaches and whirls backwards. Asymmetrical, off-white, it looks like broken china, part of a vase. That priceless missing piece.

As I run I can feel the sockets where my eyes once were. Hollow, smooth, picked clean. My skull’s a flute. The air plays haunting music on it.

When I wake up, it’s morning and I’m blind again.

That day passed more slowly than any day I can remember. To be given back my sight and then deprived of it again – I could imagine
no greater cruelty; it seemed an act worthy of a torturer. Tears slid from the corners of my eyes on to the pillow. I wouldn’t talk to anyone, least of all to Nurse Janssen; I couldn’t bear her kindness, her concern, both of which seemed inexhaustible.

At last, towards evening, I willed myself to sleep.

I heard the clock strike ten. As I raised my head off the pillow I saw the same green that I’d seen the previous night. And there were shapes in it. Only this time they were beds, not trees. Rows of metal beds, each one painted the same colour. The eerie, shiny cream that institutions like so much.

I pushed the covers back and swung my legs on to the floor. I stood up. The lino was cool beneath my feet, and slightly sticky. I could see Smulders in the next bed, one solid curve from his shoulder to his knee; for the first time it occurred to me that Smulders might be fat. I moved out into the ward, stepping delicately through rectangles of moonlight. The night was thick with blind men’s dreams.

Two doors separated the wash-room from the ward. Between the doors was a ventilation area, open to the air at either end. Placing my hands on the railing, I gazed out over the orchard and the vegetable patch. A smell lifted past my face, a smell that was like my childhood distilled: warm asphalt, grass clippings, the skin of plums. Beyond the clinic grounds the land rose up, a replica of Smulders’ sleeping form. I saw lights dart across the sky. I couldn’t tell if they were shooting-stars or aeroplanes. They were too far off.

I passed through the second door, closing it softly behind me. Though I was familiar with every feature of the wash-room, that very familiarity was strange, based as it was on discoveries I’d made while blind. Now I could make the same discoveries again, using my eyes: the tin basins, the window-catches, the spigots on the taps (as bulbous as murderers’ thumbs) – nothing was too ordinary to escape my attention. I was shocked, though, by the dilapidation and neglect I saw around me. There were broken windows high up in the wall, draughts haunting the jagged gaps. There was paint peeling from the ceiling. There was damp. I don’t know how long I’d been in there
when I was startled by the sudden rattle of loose glass panes in the outer wash-room door. I stepped behind the wooden partition that hid the toilet, and waited. The inner door opened and somebody walked in. At first I wasn’t sure who it was. Then I recognised the breathing. Smulders.

Peering round the edge of the partition, I watched intently as he stripped his nightshirt off and let it fall to the stone floor. He stood stark naked for a moment, listening. Then he reached out with both hands. He looked like a ghost – his arms horizontal, his fingers tickling the air. At last he found a tap. He turned it on, began to soap himself. His hands sucked and belched in the fleshy pockets of his armpits. The hair that grew there was matted, long and lank, identical to the hair you might pull from the plughole of a bath. It was like seeing a human being for the first time. We’re ugly, aren’t we? It’s extraordinary how ugly we are. For a moment I was afraid I might vomit. (I hoped I wouldn’t; apart from anything else, I didn’t want Smulders knowing I was there.) I sank down, behind the partition. As I fought the nausea I had a curious thought: what a blessing blindness could be, what a respite from the frightful squalor of the world!

At last I turned back.

There he was, still soaping himself, his breath issuing in ragged gusts and the occasional grunt of satisfaction. I let my eyes course his ample contours. It looked as though handfuls of fat had been attached to him at random. There were creases and folds all over his body, places where one parcel of obesity had collided with another. And what would happen if you opened out those creases? You’d find a sort of melted butter there, mottled and rancid. The smell would be enough to burn out whole banks of olfactory cells. And then there was the ultimate crease, the most elaborate of folds: his foreskin. I balked at the idea of that.

Just then the panes in the outer door rattled for a second time. Smulders jumped, his flesh reverberating – a kind of visual echo. I shrank back into the corner of the toilet stall, between the cistern and the wall, and waited.

‘That’s enough, Smulders.’

It was Visser. His voice gentle but firm, with just a trace of amusement.

‘Come on now. Back to bed.’

Smulders lumbered through the open doorway, his armpit hair still dripping. Visser followed. I saw him for a moment, over the top of the partition. All I got was an impression of his profile – his forehead, nose and chin – and a glimpse of a moustache.

As I lay in bed that night I had one further thought: among the blind there is no tact, no modesty; there doesn’t need to be. It followed that, so long as I stayed in the clinic, I would constantly be assaulted by the most hideous visions. I didn’t belong among the blind. I was in the wrong place. The sooner I got myself discharged, the better. The last image that appeared before I fell asleep was that of Smulders’ penis, apprehensive, cowering beneath his belly, as if terrified that, at any moment, it might be crushed by the great burden of flesh that hung above it.

I sat on a bench outside Visser’s office, waiting for someone to call my name. It was early evening; through the open window I could hear birds settling in the trees. Just before dawn, two of the night-staff had found me hiding (their word) in the broom cupboard. They assumed I was having another of my depressive episodes. They even suspected that I might be harbouring suicidal thoughts, that I might have been about to swallow bleach or some other convenient domestic poison.

The fools!

Almost a week had passed since the revelation in the gardens. I’d spent the time constructively, exploring my condition. In the wash-room first, then in the broom cupboard. There were no windows in the broom cupboard. There was no gap at the bottom of the door. It was here, in absolute darkness, that I was able properly to test my theories. (I also believed – mistakenly, as it turned out – that I might have more privacy.) I would wait until everyone was asleep, then I’d tiptoe down the ward, out through the swing-doors, along the
corridor and left, into the broom cupboard. Once inside, I carried out a series of simple experiments. I read the labels on bottles of disinfectant. I counted the strands on a mop. I tracked the progress of a spider as it crossed the cracked concrete floor and climbed the wall. It didn’t take me long to reach a conclusion: night was my ally and my vision was in some way linked to it. In other words, I could see –
but only in the dark.

My name was called. I tapped my way into Visser’s office.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Martin.’

He was most curious to learn more about what he referred to as my ‘adventure in the cupboard’. He wanted to understand my motivation. What could I tell him, though? I couldn’t think of anything. Also, I was distracted by his physical appearance. My brief glimpse of him in the wash-room had not been misleading. He
did
have a moustache. Thick and brown, it was. Lustrous. And yet, when I asked him to describe himself, he hadn’t mentioned it. Why not? Could it be that he was sensitive about it? (Sometimes it hides a weak upper lip.) My God, a moustache – I’d never have guessed. I thought he looked a bit like a dictator. Not Hitler. It wasn’t that kind of moustache. More like Stalin.

‘Well?’ Visser was still waiting.

Sweat began to accumulate on the inside of my elbows. Then, out of nowhere, inspiration: ‘It must be something to do with not seeing anything.’ I was making it up, but it sounded plausible.

‘Yes?’

‘Maybe,’ I faltered, and then plunged on, ‘maybe I was putting myself in a place where
nobody
could see anything. The kind of place where it doesn’t matter who’s blind and who isn’t. I mean, in a broom cupboard everyone’s blind, right?’ I smiled. ‘Maybe that’s what I was after, the feeling of being the same as everybody else.’

‘That’s why you were in the broom cupboard?’

‘Well, it’s a thought.’

‘See how this sounds.’ Visser paused. ‘You’re finding it hard to deal with the world, to come to terms with it, so you turn your back on it. You isolate yourself. You hide.’

I leaned back. ‘Mmm,’ I said. ‘Interesting.’

The whole premise was a fabrication – and yet Visser had swallowed it. How could I respect the man when I could so effortlessly steer him away from the truth?

And what is the truth? I asked myself later, as I walked out of his office. Each time the sun sets, I begin to see. Each sunrise I go blind.

As yet, I had no explanation for this.

Since becoming nocturnal, I’d learned something else about Smulders: he talked in his sleep. I stayed awake for hours, listening to his monologues. They were exactly like the announcements you hear on station platforms. This was Smulders being nostalgic, I decided. Smulders returning to happier days, when he still worked for the railways. He was particularly keen on departures and arrivals, the times, as always, strangely fastidious, almost neurotic: the 5.44 to somewhere, the 21.16 to somewhere else. And, every now and then, there were warnings, prevarications, excuses – especially excuses. A train had derailed. Points had failed. There was a cow on the line, or a child. Or a leaf.

I became addicted. Smulders sent me on journeys I had never thought of (once I even left the country!). Smulders offered me rail passes. Smulders marooned me on the platforms of obscure provincial stations, then told me that the next train wasn’t due for three hours. I ate terrible food at stainless-steel kiosks. I got indigestion. Chilblains. Flu. Smulders apologised and I forgave him. His announcements took me out of the closed world of the clinic and put me somewhere else, somewhere real. They could often have the same effect as lullabies, long lists of destinations taking the place of sheep.

Then, one night, Smulders didn’t talk. I waited in the darkness, ears cocked. Nothing. Not even a murmur. Somehow I resented it; this was a service I’d come to expect, rely on. How else was I going to get through the night? I wasn’t going to risk another visit to the broom cupboard and I was tired of making maps out of the cracks on the ceiling. I wanted entertaining. I wanted
announcements.

I decided to try something.

I crept across the gap between our beds. I paused. Smulders was asleep, his breathing coarse as someone tearing lettuce. I stooped over him. There was an intriguing shape to Smulders. It was as if his belly was the clumsy packaging for something else. Strip away the blubber and you’d come across it: a large cardboard box, containing some kind of domestic appliance. A TV, maybe. A Jumbo microwave. A tumble-dryer. I stooped lower. Ah yes. The reek. The stench. The butter trapped in trenches that were almost bottomless. I placed my lips as close to his ear as I dared. I composed myself. Then, softly, I began: ‘Ch . . . . . Ch . . . . . Ch . . . . . Ch . . . . Ch . . . Ch . . . Ch . . . Ch . . . Ch . . . Ch . . . Ch . . .’