The Insult (32 page)

When I woke up, it was dark but I thought I had time to stretch my legs before dinner so I put on my overcoat and a pair of gloves, and went downstairs. The hallway was deserted. I opened the front door and stood on the porch. Smoke blew past my face from a chimney somewhere not too far away. The wood they burned in the village had a sweet edge to it and, for a moment, I had the feeling that I’d travelled back in time, that I’d been returned to some much earlier part of my life.

I crossed the road and ducked between the rails of a fence, then climbed down a steep grass bank into a field. Edith Hekmann had told me there was a river at the end of it. I took a few steps, stopped and listened. I thought I could hear the water, though it could have been the wind in the trees. And besides, if that stream the cow was drinking from had frozen over, then maybe the river was frozen, too.

As I wandered through the long grass, the city came to me, the city as it had been when I moved back to it – those first few weeks of freedom. Night after night I’d walked down empty shopping streets, through parks, over bridges: a process of reacquaintance, a new life laid over the old one. In the red-light district the whores would hiss and whistle as I passed their ultraviolet doors. Some of them even learned my name, I walked that way so often. To them I wasn’t blind or strange; I was just a man, like any other. Who else knew me? Gregory, brooding over a schnapps in Leon’s. Loots on his bicycle, juggling unlikely objects with his feet. And then there was Nina, whose appearance was no less magical.
Can I kiss you?
What kind of opening line was that? In some ways, I felt like Jan Salenko: I could remember every time I’d ever seen her – from the first moment, in the Bar Sultan, to the last, outside the Kosminsky. I could remember every motel and every drink. I could remember every drive. She was the only person I’d ever told my secret to in its entirety. I didn’t think I’d frightened her, whatever Candy said. I thought Munck had it
right. It was a family crisis. She’d had to sever all connections, I understood that now. I understood. The city would look after me.

But Visser had ruined it. He found me and everything began to fall apart. I had to leave my hotel room, my home. I had to hide like some kind of criminal or refugee. I had to start again, from scratch. I couldn’t forgive him for that. A thought went through my head, as random as a bird across the sky.
Suppose I killed him.
Not for revenge, but for relief. I’d be acting in self-defence. You couldn’t call it murder. Not after the way he’d persecuted me. Manslaughter, maybe. But not murder. So. Say Visser was dead. What would happen then? Would there be somebody waiting to step into his shoes, some Visser-worshipper, some eager protégé? Or would the entire project be shelved, its secret files stored in dusty vaults under the clinic, ignored, forgotten and even, in the end, destroyed? There was no way of knowing. It was an idea, though. To do away with him. To liberate myself.

The ground sloped downwards suddenly. I had to be careful; it would’ve been easy to turn an ankle. Still, I thought, I was free of Visser for the time being. The far north-east of the country, a place most people had never even heard of. Of course it was tempting fate to think that way. Visser was master of the surprise appearance: like a tragedy or a natural disaster, he always struck when you were least expecting it. I stopped and looked around. Looked for his face floating in the darkness of the field. Looked for that earnest, condescending face. But there was nothing. Only grass sloping downwards, combed by the wind. Only trees huddled in a grove and a hard cold sky above.

At last I reached the river. It wasn’t frozen; it slid below me, almost motionless. There wasn’t much to look at. A narrow footpath wound its way along the bank. Up ahead, a bend to the right, the river’s elbow silver where the moonlight landed on it. In the distance I could see a bridge of wooden trestles. Was that the bridge Jan Salenko had spoken of? The place where he first saw his future wife, then only eight years old?

To liberate myself.

I sat down on the river bank. I took out a pen and a blank page which I’d torn out of the back of the hotel bible. I wrote,
Kill Visser.
The words looked good together, sounded good. They had some kind of natural affinity. I would move back into my old room at the Kosminsky. Arnold would be his usual miserable self (maybe he would even remind me not to loiter on the second floor!). Would the lift be working? I doubted it. The first priority was to get hold of a gun. Loots would know someone who knew someone. Or Gregory. Someone would know. Then I’d simply wait for Visser to appear …

One night, I hear him walking up the corridor in his highly polished shoes. I know it’s him: I recognise his footsteps from the clinic. I’m not sure how many shots I’m going to fire. That stranger in the supermarket car-park only fired once and look at me. I’m not dead. So two, then. Maybe even three. Do I want him to confess before I kill him? Does that really matter any more? The door opens cautiously. Some light spills in around him, but it’s not enough to make any difference.

‘Stop right there,’ I say.

He stops. ‘Martin?’ He always uses my Christian name. It’s a technique. It’s supposed to make me treat him as a friend, and trust him. Or treat him as a parent, and obey him. I’m not sure which. ‘Is that a gun?’

‘I wouldn’t try anything,’ I say.

‘I wouldn’t dare,’ he says. ‘A blind man with a gun?’ It’s his own joke, but he laughs at it anyway. Well, someone’s got to.

I quieten my voice right down and give it metal edges. ‘That’s right, I’m blind,’ I say, ‘but I can hear the outlines of your body. I can hear where your body ends and the air begins …’

He hesitates. I tell him that it’s true what people say about enhancement of the senses. Your eyes go, and the efficiency of your nose and ears and all the rest instantly increases by hundreds of per cent.

‘For instance,’ I say, ‘I can hear your heart beating. It’s a bit faster
than usual, and no wonder. It’s a tense situation.’ I pause. ‘I can hear your liver purifying what you drank last night. I can hear your bowels. There’s turbulence down there …’

He takes a step backwards, into the corridor. He’s about to make a run for it. I fire. He cries out, crumples in the doorway.

‘Oh, don’t go,’ I say.

He’s on the floor. ‘You shot me.’

‘Is it serious?’

‘It’s my leg.’

‘Well,’ I say, ‘I did warn you.’ I shift in my chair. The moulded plastic one. ‘I could shoot you again,’ I say. ‘I might get you in the balls this time. It wouldn’t be deliberate. I mean, how could it be? I’m blind.’ I raise the gun.

‘No. No, it’s all right. I’ll tell you everything.’

I stand over him. I’m smiling.

‘You’re lucky,’ I say.

‘Am I?’ he whispers. He’s not so sure.

‘Yes. No one’s ever seen my room before.’ I bend over him. ‘So,’ I say, ‘how do you like it?’

The wind plucked at my piece of paper. I smoothed it down. Slowly I drew a line through what I’d written. I couldn’t even kill Visser in my head. What chance would I have in real life?

I stood up and walked on, along the river bank. Wednesday. There was no avoiding it. But surely there was something I could do. Here, in the mountains, I was free of Visser’s signals. No housewives, no game-show hosts, no pornography – nothing. Wasn’t there some man-made way of reproducing that effect? There had to be. I thought of a friend of mine, who worked in broadcasting. We’d never been particularly close, but I knew him well enough to call him. His name was Klaus – Klaus Wilbrand. He’d be able to advise me. It was crossing the line drawn by the bullet, it was stepping back into the past, but I could see no alternative.

I looked up. The bridge didn’t seem to be any nearer. Suddenly I wearied and a chill went through me. I didn’t think I could make it to
the bridge. Maybe some other night. I should go back. I left the footpath, climbing a slope into what I took to be the field I’d crossed not long before. But I walked for several minutes and still I couldn’t see the lights of the hotel. An owl startled me, swooping through the air just overhead. I saw its flattened face, the smudges around its eyes. I heard the beat of its wings, stirring the heavy air, the same speed as my breathing. I stood there in the middle of the field. I couldn’t see any lights at all. I couldn’t see where the road might be either. Was I lost?

I felt I should go back the way I’d come, but the thought exhausted me. Instead, I cut diagonally across the field. At the end of it, there was no grass bank, no road, only a barbed-wire fence and another field beyond. I stood still. I could hear a dog barking in the distance. Away to my right I could see lights, small yellow squares in the great mass of darkness that surrounded me. They looked like windows. A farm, perhaps. They appeared, disappeared. Appeared again. As if someone was signalling. I thought it had to be the trees between us, shifting in the wind. I didn’t believe they were the lights of the hotel, but I decided to make my way towards them.

I crossed the field, climbed through another fence, and found myself in a kind of pasture. The ground was rougher here, more uneven. Though I tried to watch where I was putting my feet, I stumbled several times.

After a while I looked up and noticed that the lights were gone. I waited for them to appear again, but they didn’t. The darkness was absolute and unrelenting. I could only think of one explanation: the people must have gone to bed. I was tired now, and my trousers were cold and slippery with mud. I was in country I didn’t know. No landmarks, and nobody to ask for guidance. It had been foolish of me to think I could just go out for a walk. I wasn’t in the city.

I wondered how much time had passed. An hour at least, maybe two. People would be going to sleep soon, if they weren’t asleep already. There was nothing for it but to try and get some sleep myself. When dawn came, I could begin again. With luck I’d find somebody who could tell me where I was.

I was standing at the entrance to a wood. I followed one edge of it, hoping to find a hut, a lean-to, some kind of shelter. I quickly gave that up. Instead, I walked in among the tall trunks and the undergrowth. Here, at least, I might be able to escape the wind. I found a tree that I thought would give me some protection. Its roots were raised above the level of the forest floor; they reached out like fingers from the base. I gathered sprays of bracken and a few dead branches, then I stacked leaves in one of the gaps between the roots. I arranged some bracken over me and weighed it down with the branches I’d collected. I lay there with my eyes shut and my knees drawn up against my chest. Sleep wouldn’t come, though. The cold had already found its way into my bones, and there were sounds all around me – the sound of the woodland shifting, straining, groaning; I could have been lying on the deck of some huge old-fashioned sailing ship. I opened my eyes, looked up into the intricate bare branches of the tree. If only Visser knew what lengths I’d gone to, just to avoid his TV programmes! I smiled, but it was a smile that stayed inside me. I pulled the collar of my coat up around my ears and closed my eyes again.

I must have slept, if only in snatches, because I remember having a conversation with my sister, Gabriela. We were standing in the garden at home. We were both excited, talking as though we knew each other, as though we were friends. I had no memory of what we said. I only remember watching her run down the garden to where my mother and my father were. Their three faces turned towards me, small and round and blank, like plates. I stayed where I was – the house in the distance, the warm summer air, the almost golden grass.

I sat up. There were leaves in my mouth, my hair. My body was stiff with cold. It surprised me that I’d slept at all. I slowly pushed the bracken and dead branches away from me and stood up. One of my knees had stiffened during the night, but I thought I could walk on it. It would be best to try and return the way I’d come, though in
daylight, of course, that wouldn’t be easy. I was a blind man in a strange country. I might just get lost in a different kind of way.

I’d been walking for half an hour or so, a light drizzle falling, when I heard a noise I hadn’t heard before. I stood still, listened. Grating, clinking, grinding. The sound of wheels. No engine, though. It had to be a horse and cart. I started shouting and waving. There was no reply, but I noticed that all the noise had stopped; a new silence had descended. I hurried towards it. Suddenly the ground disappeared in front of me and I fell forwards. A hand reached down and hauled me to my feet.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thanks very much.’

I must have been an odd sight, with my dark glasses and my white stick, and standing in a field with mud all over me, at dawn.

‘I’m lost,’ I said.

‘I thought so.’ It was a man’s voice, and there wasn’t a trace of irony in it.

I told him the name of the village where I was staying, the name of the hotel.

‘You’re a long way from there,’ he said.

‘Am I?’

His thoughts came one at a time, and they were scarce, like cars on a motorway at night. There was a gap between everything he said, a time-delay, which made it feel as if nothing was happening. But I was already grateful to him, grateful just for the sound of his voice.

‘Which way do I go?’ I asked him.

‘You’re in luck. Just so happens, I’m going there myself.’

He helped me up on to the cart and told me to sit on the side of it, as he was, with my legs dangling over the edge, then he clacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and shook the reins and we moved off. The drizzle had slackened; the air was still damp and I could hear the trees and bushes dripping. The man had a strong smell to him, a smell that was like old butter, but peppery as well.

‘That’s Mrs Hekmann’s place,’ he said, after a few minutes.

‘That’s right. You know her?’

‘I thought of marrying her once.’

I looked in his direction. ‘Really? What happened?’

‘Nothing.’ He paused. ‘I never asked.’

Though I was curious, I didn’t speak just yet; I brushed at the mud on my coat instead. It seemed natural to slow down, talk at his pace.