The Insult (33 page)

‘How come you never asked her?’ I said eventually.

‘I just never did.’ He shook the reins again and muttered something at the horse. ‘The most I ever asked her was to dance. She wouldn’t.’ There was a long silence. Then he cleared his throat and spat. ‘Most people, they steer clear of her now.’

‘She seems friendly enough,’ I said.

He didn’t talk much after that.

At last I heard the boards of a bridge rattle as we passed over it, and I thought it had to be the same bridge that Loots and I had crossed on Saturday evening. On the far side, the man climbed down on to the road and began to walk. All of a sudden, he let out a cry. Haunting, it was – more animal than human; I almost jumped out of my skin. A few moments later he cried out again, only this time I realised what it was: he was a rag-and-bone man. The cry was repeated every few paces, and it had no effect whatsoever on our surroundings. He didn’t seem unduly troubled. Probably he was used to the indifference; it was part of his trade.

When we stopped outside the hotel, I thanked him again.

‘I was coming through here anyway,’ he said.

‘Still,’ I said, ‘I appreciate it.’

I crossed the patch of grass and climbed the steps to the hotel. Behind me, his cry grew fainter as he moved on down the street. I felt for the front door.

‘Siding with the enemy now, are we?’

I turned round. ‘Mrs Hekmann?’ She must have been standing on the porch the whole time, watching me.

‘That man you got a lift with,’ she said, ‘you know who he was?’

‘He didn’t tell me his name.’

‘That was Jonas Poppel. One of the Poppel family.’

I didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘If it hadn’t been for him,’ I said irritably, ‘I’d still be wandering the fields.’

‘You missed dinner.’

‘I know. I went for a walk. I got lost.’

‘Have you been out all night?’

I nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Did you sleep at all?’

‘I tried to. Under a tree.’

‘We used to sleep outside,’ she said, almost dreamily, ‘my brother and I. But we were young then and it was in the summer.’ She was sitting in her rocking-chair. I could hear the creak of it now, like breathing. ‘You should see yourself.’

I smiled faintly.

‘You know what would do you good?’ she said. ‘One of our special baths.’ There was a pump-room in the basement, she explained. Nobody had used it in a while, but she was sure that Mr Kanter could get it working. Mr Kanter was a part-time masseur. He’d learned some interesting techniques when he was abroad. It was just what I needed, in her opinion.

‘Maybe later,’ I said. ‘When I’ve slept a little.’

Upstairs in my room I drew the curtains. I took off my trousers and left them soaking in the basin, then climbed into bed. I was too tired to call Klaus; it would have to wait a few hours. The sheets were cold and the mattress sagged, but I could feel myself falling, sinking down – that long, parabolic drop into unconsciousness. Somewhere far away I heard the sound of spoons in cups and knives and forks on plates, as delicate and mysterious as an oriental language. The old people would be eating breakfast in the dining-room below.

Since there was no phone in my room, I used the one in the corridor. I called Directory Enquiries and they gave me a number. I sat there, with the receiver in my hand. It was Monday, a few minutes after six. Klaus Wilbrand always worked late. It was a good time to try him.
When I dialled the broadcasting company, a woman answered. I asked for Klaus and she put me through.

‘Hello?’

‘Klaus, is that you?’

‘Who’s this?’

‘It’s Martin Blom.’

There was a shocked sound on the other end. It must’ve been at least two years since we’d spoken to each other.

‘Martin. Jesus. How are you?’

‘I’m fine. Listen, I want to –’

‘You were shot, weren’t you?’ His voice had incredulity in it, regret as well, and a kind of awe. It’s a special voice. People use it when they’re speaking to someone something bad has happened to.

‘That’s right. I was.’

‘Someone said you –’

‘Yes, yes. But listen, Klaus. I want to ask you something. It’s about television.’

‘OK …’ He sounded doubtful. Or perhaps it was just that I’d interrupted him. Well, I didn’t have all day, and this was important.

‘Say I was in a room,’ I said, ‘and I wanted to stop TV signals from coming in. How would I do it?’

‘Well, you’d have to insulate the room somehow.’

This was better. He was alert suddenly. Excited. It was his work we were talking about. I thought he was probably relieved, too, not to have to discuss the shooting, all that awkwardness.

‘How would I insulate it?’ I said.

He told me there were several ways. I would have to use a conductive material. Wire-mesh would do – though not just any wire-mesh, since the holes had to relate to the frequency of the signals.

‘And I attach it to the walls or what?’

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘The ceiling and the floor as well.’

There was also something called metallic foil plaster-board, he went on. You could buy it at any do-it-yourself shop. Or I could
even use plain old aluminium foil. If I covered the room in foil and then earthed it, that would work just fine.

‘How do you mean, earth it?’

He explained that all the panels of silver foil would have to be taped together, so they overlapped. Then I’d have to fix a screw into each panel and run a wire from the screws down to a plug in the wall. Or, better still, into a metal pipe embedded in the ground. I could use a meter to check that the flow of electrical current was continuous.

‘It wouldn’t be very sightly, of course,’ he said. ‘That’s why I suggested a metal cage of some kind. But the silver-foil method would be cheaper.’

‘And that would block the signals?’

‘Nothing would get through. Nothing at all.’

‘Klaus,’ I said, ‘you’re brilliant.’

He laughed. ‘When am I going to see you?’

‘Well, I’m up north at the moment …’ I promised to call when I got back, though I didn’t think I would. I thanked him for the information (that, at least, was perfectly sincere) and said goodbye.

I put the phone down and then I held my cane in both hands, parallel to the ground, and did a little dance in the corridor, just like they used to in the old musicals. I hummed a tune to go along with it. I could already imagine the scene in Walter Sprankel’s shop – the jangle of the bell, his eyes fidgeting above the till …

I would build myself a room out of aluminium foil and bits of wire and screws. It would be a silver room, and I’d live in it, insulated and at peace, spared all forms of interference. I’d see what I wanted to see. My thoughts would be my own.

I was still dancing when someone coughed behind me.

‘Mr Blom?’

‘Yes?’

‘Your sulphur bath is ready. Down in the pump-room. If you’d like to follow me …’

I glanced round. At the top of the stairs I saw a short, wooden
looking man with ginger hair and a mole in the middle of his cheek. Mr Kanter, presumably. The masseur.

I beamed at him. ‘I’d be delighted to.’

That night I sat at the same round table, under the same pale-pink china lampshade. Nothing would ever be different in that room, no matter how long I stayed. I couldn’t imagine another guest, for instance. I couldn’t imagine it in summer.

The old people had eaten earlier, and I was alone with Mrs Hekmann. I thought she’d forgiven me for siding with the enemy, as she called it; in fact, she seemed to have forgotten all about it. I could feel her suspicion lifting with each minute that went by. Her hand moved forwards, into the light; her index-finger tapped her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray. She smelled of alcohol already; she must’ve started earlier than usual. I could see the kitchen doorway over her shoulder, a rectangle of yellow that was interrupted, every now and then, as the silhouette of Martha, her hired girl, passed through it.

‘And how was it,’ she said, ‘with Mr Kanter?’

I had to smile. ‘I’ve never come across anything quite like it.’

‘There’s nothing like it in that city of yours, I’m sure.’

‘Not that I know of.’ Like most people who live in the country, she wanted to be told that there was nowhere better, and I was quite happy to oblige.

‘I didn’t think so,’ she said.

It had been an unusual experience, to say the least. I’d followed Kanter down a flight of stairs, into the basement. Though he hardly spoke, there was an air of ritual about the whole procedure. In the pump-room two enamel baths stood side by side on a floor of wooden slats. He’d already filled one for me. The water was hot, he said, naturally hot, and sprang from almost directly underneath the building. It was beneficial for the joints, the muscles and, most of all, the skin. You could drink it, too, though the taste was, how should he put it, acquired. The water also fed the pool. People said it was red, but actually it was more of a brown colour.

‘It’s quite a smell,’ I said.

He chuckled and tugged absent-mindedly at one of his ears. ‘I’ve lived here so long, I don’t notice it.’

He left me alone while I took off my clothes and lowered myself into the bath. I was surprised at how quickly I became accustomed to the smell. I was surprised at the texture as well, until I remembered what Loots had said on our first night.

When I’d soaked for about fifteen minutes, Kanter told me it was time to take a shower. After the shower he dried my shoulders and my back, then asked me to lie down in a small, wood-panelled room, under a sheet. I was supposed to relax, he said. He was an awkward man, not talkative at all, not tactile either, and yet his work demanded a certain intimacy with strangers. You’d think he would have become less awkward as the years went by, but he hadn’t; instead, he’d grown so used to his awkwardness that, like the smell of sulphur, it was something he was no longer aware of.

I ‘relaxed’. In fifteen minutes Kanter was back again. He led me into another room. I lay face-down on a bed that was narrow, high and padded, like the bed in a doctor’s surgery. Kanter opened a bottle and worked some perfumed oil into his hands. Then he began.

Towards the end of the massage I felt him place one forearm lengthways across the small of my back. Leaning all his weight on it, he drove it repeatedly up my spine towards my neck. He grunted a little with the effort. I had the feeling I was being crushed.

At last he stood back, panting. I sat up. He handed me my shirt.

‘Was that one of your special techniques?’ I asked him.

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I bet you feel good now, don’t you?’

I could hardly deny it.

I smiled at Edith Hekmann. ‘What’s for supper?’

‘It’s stew.’ She lifted the lid on a cast-iron pot. ‘You walking all night like that,’ she said, ‘it’s just like something my son would do.’

‘Really?’

‘There’s something about you reminds me of him.’ She looked at me carefully. ‘I think it’s your eyes. You’ve got the same eyes.’

I watched her ladle a generous helping of stew on to my plate. I put my face above it and breathed in.

‘Smells good,’ I said, wanting to seal myself in her favour.

I began to eat.

She rose from her chair and crossed the crooked floorboards to the kitchen. I heard her talking to Martha. The collision of cutlery and dishes, the murmur of voices underneath. I remembered something that had happened when I woke that evening. For a few moments I was aware of TV signals. I didn’t get any pictures, though. Just a million white fast-moving molecules on a black backdrop – a blizzard, violent and quiet. It was Visser, trying to get through. How apt the image was! How perfectly it captured his frustration and his impotence! And just think. Soon I’d have my silver room. Then I’d be free of him for ever, out of reach, immune.

Mrs Hekmann returned. She brought the smell of alcohol with her, stronger than before. I ate; she smoked a cigarette. There was the sense that things could not be otherwise.

I could hear the wind in the yard outside. I felt a storm was on its way: leaves shifting like chicken feathers, something metal falling over – it was as if the air itself was changing shape. When Edith Hekmann began to speak, her words were so much a part of it that I knew she’d felt it, too.

‘It was a day like this my brother died.’ She paused, the wind rising to fill the silence. ‘North of here, it was. Down by the lake.’

Carving Babies

Chapter 1

Some sulphur water got into the lake that year. There are springs everywhere under the earth and one of them must have burst sideways, found a new path to the surface. I remember that was the first thing I did when I saw the truck. I bent down at the water’s edge and put my hand in it. I touched my fingers to my tongue. The taste was faint, but it was there. Like gas.

I stood up.

There was a creaking in the woods around me, the sound of doors opening. I wasn’t scared, though. I wasn’t scared. I saw a bird go catapulting through the trees, a red line high up in the green. There was a wind up there, too, the leaves and branches all tumultuous, but that was far away. Where I was, everything was still.

My eyes came down.

The crashed truck on the lakeshore with its headlamps staring stupidly into the water. And two bodies, neither of them moving. One with its arms and legs spread crooked on the roots of a tree. The other sitting behind the wheel, chin on chest, no sign of any hands.

The forest creaking and that smell lifting off the lake. Smell of the devil, smell of health – people were always saying one thing or another. To me it wasn’t anything like that. To me it was the smell
of something that was unexpected, out of place. I couldn’t argue with it, though. In fact, it made a kind of sense to me.

My mother left us when I was too young to remember. The story was, she’d died of a fever, but there was no stone in the cemetery, at least none that I could find. When I was older I asked my father about it.

‘Where’s the stone?’ I said.

He sat at the kitchen table for longer than it takes to boil a kettle. He was tall, Arno Hekmann, even when he was seated. A stiff-jointed, thick-skinned man, with sharp bones to his elbows. Words came slowly to him at the best of times, though he could explode with anger, if provoked. I remember looking at his hand, which was driven deep into his hair, and thinking of a spade left in the ground when the day’s work is over – but this was work that had scarcely begun.