The Insult (45 page)

Later that day, she told me she’d gone to the town to find a father for her child. Each morning she sat in the lobby of the largest hotel, the Europa, and waited for the right man to appear. Her plan was to let the man make love to her, and then pretend the child was his. Her condition didn’t show yet. She’d studied herself from every angle in the mirror. There was a slight curve to her belly, but nothing a man would notice. At last, one evening, she met Alexander Chromanski. He was a little drunk. Her eyes were beautiful, he told her. Brown and silver, like loose change. ‘Not worth much then,’ she replied, her bitterness surprising her. ‘On the contrary,’ he said.
On the contrary.
Those were his exact words. She’d never met anyone who spoke that way, and it seemed beautiful to her, at least as beautiful as her eyes were to him. She thought he must be the man she’d been looking for.

‘You were going to deceive him,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘He would’ve been happy.’

I moved to the window. ‘Sly,’ I said, ‘just like your father.’

She joined me, staring at the place where Chromanski’s car had been. ‘Did he say anything to you?’

‘Nothing much. He said he was engaged.’

‘And what did you tell him?’

‘The truth.’

After that, Karin didn’t want to see anyone. I arranged for her to live at my father’s house outside the village. On the same day I freed Mazey from his chains and brought him home to the hotel. He moved into my old room on the first floor, at the back. I screwed a hook into the ceiling near the window and hung his wind-chimes from it. The weeks went by. Then, towards the end of June, Karin asked for me. She was worried about the brown line that ran from her belly-button to the triangle of new dark hair between her legs. I told her it was normal. She couldn’t get used to it, she said. It was as if someone had been drawing on her in the night. Her body was not her own. She said she’d thought of throwing herself off the roof of the Hotel Europa. If she got three lines in the paper she’d be satisfied. Then she looked at me, and I could tell from her eyes that she hadn’t forgotten Emerald Joe and that singer, Esztergom. She wasn’t threatening me, though. She didn’t have that kind of nature. Later, she lay on her bed and wept at the thought of her death, the smallness of the article, her own insignificance. I knew she wouldn’t do it – her vanity would prevent her – but, at the same time, it was too late to dream of husbands.

When Kroner was discharged, in September of that year, I moved him into the room next to Mazey’s. I saw that his broken tooth had blackened; it must have happened gradually, over the last few months, but I felt as if I’d only just noticed. He had partial use of the left side of his body, and he could make noises that were almost words (they were like words with all the hard sounds taken out), which was the best that could be expected. He spent his days upstairs in a wheelchair. I had run a piece of string out of his window, down the outside wall and in through the back door, and I’d attached a bell
to the end of it; if he needed something, he could pull the string with his good hand.

One day I was standing in the kitchen by myself when a cup dropped from my hands. It landed on the floor and didn’t break, it just rolled about, and suddenly I found that I was laughing. I didn’t know why I was laughing, but it was very funny and I couldn’t stop. I laughed so hard, my stomach ached, and I didn’t even know the cause of it. If anyone had seen me then, they would have thought I’d lost my mind. But maybe that wouldn’t have been such a surprise, not when you looked at the rest of the family.

The baby, a girl, was born in the early hours of a December morning. Outside, it was dark and cold, sleet falling silently, slanting behind the black glass of the bedroom window. It was an easy birth. The contractions started just after midnight. By dawn both mother and child were sleeping peacefully.

During the first few days Karin couldn’t seem to decide what she felt about the baby. One moment she’d be bending over it, holding it against her breast and soothing it, the way any mother would; then she’d remember who the father was and how the baby had been conceived, and she’d push it away. At the end of the month, when the time came for the baby to be christened, she told me I could call it whatever I liked.
Call it whatever you like
– this was exactly what I’d said to Kroner sixteen years before. Some families are condemned to repeat themselves, it seems, old tragedies giving birth to new ones. I suggested Nina, after my father’s mother. When Karin heard the name, she laughed harshly and said, ‘Why? Was she born of a halfwit, too?’ The next time I looked at her, her cheek had reddened where I’d slapped it.

She was still frightened of Mazey and what he might do. She wouldn’t eat at the same table or sleep under the same roof. Under no circumstances would she let him touch the baby. She carried on living at my father’s house, partly to avoid Mazey, but also, I thought, because she felt embarrassed and ashamed. Everyone in the village
had heard that she’d had a baby, but no one knew who the father was. Rumours started flying. People don’t like to be left out, and that’s one way of getting revenge. There was a lot of mocking talk about a virgin birth. Not that my father noticed. He was almost eighty by then, so silent and so withdrawn that it seemed possible that Mazey’s inability to speak wasn’t a defect at all but a trait, inherited from him, along with a love of whittling. And besides, he’d always liked having Karin there. Apart from anything else, she could keep an eye on his progress with the dovecote. He was experimenting with lead weights, using them as ballast in the base of the tower. He only hoped he’d live long enough to finish it.

When she told him that the baby girl was going to be christened Nina, after his own mother, he turned away from her, his eyes watering, a man whose life had been empty of consideration for so long that he could now be moved by it. Of course he knew she wasn’t happy, but he chose to ignore it. He understood about forgetting; he’d done it himself half a century before. In the evenings they sat together on the porch, the sun setting behind the trees, bats flickering in the dark air of the yard. I don’t know what they talked about, or even if they talked at all, but they seemed to find solace in each other’s company. She wanted to distance herself from what had happened – her baby was reminder enough; she didn’t need any more reminding than that – and staying in the woods outside the village was distance of a sort, though Mazey would still appear from time to time. The house had been his home for most of his life, and was embedded in his memory. When he went walking, it was a station on his way, just as Miss Poppel’s garden used to be. So Karin lived in an almost permanent state of dread. If a twig snapped, for example, or the leaves rustled, or if there were footsteps on the track, she’d call her grandfather, or else she’d snatch her baby up and run back into the house. In her dreams the man with orange hair would come and take her away in his fast car. But the man with orange hair did not come. Jan Salenko came instead. Jan Salenko, the mechanic’s son.

Something I noticed early on was Mazey’s quiet obsession with the child. He had never showed much interest in Karin when she was born; he’d been too busy with his wind-chimes and his pen-knife. With Nina it was different. Whenever he found himself in the same room, which wasn’t often, his eyes didn’t stray from her, not for a moment. He didn’t try and touch her. If anything, he kept away, standing against the wall or over by the window. He seemed content just so long as he could watch. I wondered if there might be a part of him that understood he’d fathered her.

Once, while Karin was visiting the doctor, she left Nina in my care and I let Mazey pick her up. Perhaps it was a mistake, but somehow I couldn’t refuse him. He took the baby in his hands as if she was made of glass and held her in a shaft of sunlight. When Nina blinked, he touched her eyelashes gently with his fingers, and he had a way of clicking his tongue that seemed to fascinate her. Later, though, she started crying, and that frightened him. I didn’t see it in his eyes, but it was there, I felt it, his panic bent the air between us, and then I saw him put his hand over her face. If I hadn’t taken Nina away from him, he would’ve smothered her. I didn’t mention it to Karin when she came home.

There was another time. I was driving back towards the village one evening in April when I saw a girl running along the road ahead of me. She was wearing a nightdress and she had nothing on her feet. Only as I passed the girl did I realise she was my daughter. I stopped the car. Karin clung to the open window, panting.

‘Nina’s gone. He’s taken her.’

I reached across and pushed the door open. ‘Come on, get in. We can’t have people seeing you like this.’

She sat beside me in the car. Her face was orange in the light of the setting sun. Black, too, where she had tried to wipe away the tears. ‘If he does anything to her –’

‘He won’t do anything,’ I said. ‘He loves her.’ Though I remembered that huge hand of his descending, and all of a sudden I wasn’t sure.

‘Love? What does someone like him know about love?’

‘Haven’t you noticed the way he looks at her?’

Karin turned to me. ‘You never did care about me, did you? You always cared about him more.’ When I didn’t answer her, she said, ‘I think you wanted this to happen.’

I wasn’t certain what she meant by that. We crossed the narrow bridge into the village.

‘I think maybe you even planned it,’ she said.

I shook my head. ‘You’re all worked up about nothing.’

When we reached the hotel, Karin opened the door and ran into the house. There was no sign of Mazey in any of the rooms. Then, through the kitchen window, I heard a child’s laughter.

‘Did you hear that?’ I said.

Karin was already disappearing through the back door. I followed her across the car-park and down the steps to the pool. At first I couldn’t see anything. It was a cool evening, and steam rose off the water in white, swirling clouds. Then the shape of a man emerged: Mazey. He was holding Nina over the water. Dipping her feet in it, lifting her clear, then dipping her feet again. She was laughing.

I watched as Karin ran round the edge of the pool. Mazey was watching her as well, with Nina still suspended in mid-air. I thought for a moment that he might drop her in alarm. But then Karin snatched her from him and turned away, muttering into her hair. Mazey had surrendered the baby with such calmness, such a lack of comprehension that Karin appeared to be the one who was in the wrong. Her violence seemed exaggerated. Her relief, too. Suddenly, she annoyed me.

‘You see?’ I said. ‘I told you there was nothing to worry about.’

Mazey straightened up and stepped away from the pool. From his trouser pocket he brought out the old blunt pen-knife my father had given him. He felt in the other pocket, found a piece of dowel. Then he sat down on the terrace, his long legs sticking out in front of him, his big shoes pointing at the sky, and, bending his head, began to whittle. He didn’t expect anything in particular from life; he’d be
happy with whatever he was given. I wanted to take his head and hold it close against me, but I knew this would only have infuriated Karin, who thought he was guilty and who was standing at the bottom of the steps, staring at him, her mouth drawn tight, her eyes accusing.

Not long afterwards – in May or June, it would have been – she went south with the Salenko boy. I never knew exactly where.

There was nothing memorable about Jan Salenko – nothing, that is, except his memory: he won a village competition when he was eight, and all the children used to tease him about it. I’d noticed him watching Karin for years, his eyes full of her as we crossed the street or drove by in the car, but he wasn’t the only one, and he was shy, too, so I didn’t think it would come to anything. I suppose she must have become aware of how he felt and then realised he could be of use to her – especially when she found out that he wasn’t frightened off by the mysterious arrival of a child. There’s not much a man won’t do when he’s besotted. Nobody suspected an elopement, though, not even me.

Strangely, it was Mazey who felt the loss most keenly. In fact, he seemed to be expressing it for all of us. Like a lightning conductor, he drew all the bad feelings down upon himself. He wouldn’t eat. He wouldn’t sleep. He wouldn’t even listen to his wind-chimes any more. There were nights when he walked through the hotel opening every door to every room, every cupboard, every drawer. In the morning it always looked as if we’d been broken into. I asked him what was wrong, but he wouldn’t speak to me at all. Not one word.

My father came to visit me one evening. It was rare to see him in the village, even rarer to see him upset. He stood in front of me with his face lowered and the muscles shifting in his jaw. He told me that he’d been working in the barn as usual, building a linen chest for the Minkels family, when he heard sounds coming from the house. Thinking it might be someone who was up to no good, he took his gun off the wall and went to have a look. The whole place had been turned upside-down. Cupboards had been opened, drawers pulled
out and tipped on to the floor, curtains torn off their rails. It looked as though a hurricane had just passed through. A movement in the window caught his eye. Something outside, in the yard.

‘Mazey,’ I said.

My father’s long jaw swung towards me. I’d startled him. Yes, it was Mazey. He called to the boy, who was moving in the shadows at the edge of the clearing where he could not be seen. He called again. Mazey stepped out into the sunlight, blinking.

He walked up to Mazey, and Mazey just watched him coming with that empty face of his. Mazey was sweating, and there was blood trickling from a cut on his wrist.

My father pointed at the house. ‘Was it you?’

Mazey took a step backwards. The shade on his face like a birthmark, the blood sliding silently between his knuckles.

‘Why did you do it?’

He held Mazey’s gaze until he felt the edges of his vision blackening. But Mazey was the first to turn away. He walked into the trees, the light and shadow dappling his back, and my father noticed once again how Mazey moved in straight lines, ignoring paths and bridleways. As the crow flies, he remembered thinking to himself. He watched Mazey fade into the gloom of the wood and found that he could breathe more easily.