The Insult (2 page)

Not far from where they lived was a big house that stood in a private park. I would ride there on my grandfather’s bicycle, slow down as I passed the gates. Standing on the pedals, I’d turn in an unsteady circle, unwilling to stop, but wanting a second glimpse. There was a driveway leading up to the house between two rows of trees. On winter evenings their branches, black and gleaming, seemed to hoard the gold windows in their fingers. In spring, white blossoms lay scattered on the gravel, each petal curved and pale, eyelid-shaped. Otherwise there was nothing much to see. The house itself was a kilometre away, at least, a faÇade of dark bricks in the distance. Green drainpipes. Chimneys.

When I asked my grandparents about it, they told me it was a sanatorium. That means people who are sick, they said. I was never sure if they meant mad or just ill, and they were dead now, my grandparents; the last time I looked for the sanatorium, I was told it had been pulled down. If I’d been called upon to explain my fascination I don’t know what I would have said. It wasn’t so much
what I saw as what I might see. Part of you recognises a potential. Thinking about it now, I found a cruel irony in it. It occurred to me that, if the boy on the bicycle had looked hard enough, if he’d looked really hard, he might have seen the man he would eventually become.

More than twenty years had passed since then, but just for a moment, lying in my bed in the clinic, I’m that boy again, turning circles on his grandfather’s bicycle. And, looking up, I notice a man moving down the gravel drive towards me. I drop one foot to the ground and stand there, watching. The man’s eyes are bandaged and yet he’s walking in a straight line, as though he can see. And when he reaches the gates he stops and looks at me, right through the bandages, right between the black wrought-iron bars.

‘Martin?’ he says. ‘Is that you?’

My hands tighten on the handlebars.

‘It’s you,’ he says, ‘isn’t it.’

I start pedalling. There’s a hill luckily, it’s steep, the wind roars in my ears. But even when I’m back with my grandparents and everything’s normal again, I can’t be sure that I won’t turn round and see him walk towards me through the house.

Knowing me, despite the bandages.

Knowing my name.

‘Mr Blom?’

It was the nurse, Miss Janssen. She had two detectives with her. One of them, Slatnick, was making noises, strange little squeaks and splashes, which I finally identified as the sound of someone chewing gum. The other man’s name was Munck. Munck did most of the talking. His voice was easy to listen to, almost soporific. I wanted to tell him he was in the wrong job; with a voice like that, he should have been a hypnotist.

He was shocked, he said – they both were – by what had happened. He could only express the deepest sympathy for me in my predicament. If there was anything that they could do …

‘Thank you,’ I said.

Munck talked on. The last ten years had seen a proliferation of firearms in the city. Incidents of the type it had been my misfortune to be involved in had increased a hundredfold. Random violence, seemingly senseless crimes. He had his theories, of course, but now was not the time. He paused. Wind rushed in the trees outside. A window further down the ward blew open; I felt cold air search the room. Munck leaned closer in his chair. The reason they’d come, he said, was to hear my version of the event.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t have a version.’

‘You don’t remember anything?’

‘No, not really.’

‘Did you see anything at all?’

I smiled. ‘Tomatoes.’

Slatnick stopped chewing for a moment.

‘They must’ve spilled out of my bag,’ I said. ‘I suppose I was going to make a salad that night.’

‘I see.’ I heard Munck stand up and start to pace about. ‘Where do you work, Mr Blom?’

‘A bookshop.’ I mentioned the name of it.

‘I know the place. I’m often in there myself.’ Munck walked to the end of the bed. ‘Do you have any enemies?’

I raised my eyebrows.

‘It sounds dramatic, I know,’ Munck said, ‘but we have to ask.’

‘None that I can think of.’

‘You have no idea who might’ve shot at you?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

Slatnick spoke next. ‘Am I correct in assuming therefore that you would not be able to identify your assailant?’

I stared in his direction. What is it about policemen?

‘Slatnick,’ Munck said, ‘I think the answer’s yes.’

‘Yes?’ Slatnick hadn’t understood.

‘Yes, you’d be correct in that assumption.’

There was a silence.

‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Mr Blom,’ Munck said. ‘I have to
say that, in this case, it seems unlikely that justice will be done. All that remains is for us to wish you a speedy recovery. Once again, if there’s anything we can do –’

‘Thank you, Detective.’

I listened to the two men walk away, their footsteps mingling with those of other visitors. One of them sounded like a diver, the soles of his shoes slapping down like flippers on the floor …

Absolute blindness is rare. There’s usually some suggestion of movement, some sense of light and shade. Not in my case. What I ‘saw’ was without texture or definition: it was constant, depthless and impenetrable. Sometimes I thought:
Your eyes are closed. Open them.
But they were already open. Wide open, seeing nothing. I could look straight into the sun and my pupils would contract, but I wouldn’t know it was the sun that I was looking at. Or I could put my head inside a cardboard box. Same thing. There were no gradations in the blankness, no fluctuations of any kind. It was what depression would look like, I thought, if you had to externalise it.

Miss Janssen spent part of every morning at my bedside. It was her job to motivate me, though I found most of her efforts infantile and embarrassing. Take the rubber balls, for instance. She told me to hold one in each hand. I was supposed to ‘squeeze and then relax, squeeze and then relax’.

‘What’s it for?’ I asked.

‘You’d be surprised,’ she said, ‘how quickly muscles atrophy.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes, it is. If you don’t exercise, they just wither away.’

‘Well, in that case,’ I said, ‘there’s one muscle we definitely shouldn’t overlook.’

She brought the session to an abrupt end.

The next morning she was back again, as usual. She made no reference to what I’d said the day before. In what was intended as a gesture of repentance, I asked her for the rubber balls. I lay there, one in each hand, squeezing and relaxing. I behaved. And, since her
voice was all there was, I began to listen to it. Not the words in themselves, but the sound of the words. I tried to work out how old she was, what she did in her spare time, whether she was happy. There were moments when I thought I could picture her, the way you picture strangers on the phone, just from their voices: I saw the colour of her eyes, the shape of her mouth. It was like what happened when the dream I had was over: the gradual assembly of a physical presence. Some mornings I found that I could only see her breasts. Her voice seemed to be telling me that they were large. The curve from the rib-cage to the nipple, for example. That fullness, that wonderful convexity. Not unlike a fruit bowl. But I could never sustain it. Sooner or later the picture always broke up, fell apart, dissolved. And, anyway, they weren’t her breasts. They were just breasts. They could have been anybody’s.

I tried the same thing with the man in the next bed. His name was Smulders. He used to work for the national railways, first as a signalman and, later, as a station announcer. Then he got cataracts in both eyes. They’d operated during the summer, but the results had been disappointing. I asked him the obvious question, just to start him talking: ‘Can you see anything at all?’

‘Sometimes I see dancing girls. They move across in front of me, legs kicking, like they’re on a stage.’ Smulders took a breath. His lungs bubbled.

He must be a smoker, I thought. Forty a day, non-filter. The tips of two of his fingers appeared, stained yellow by the nicotine.

‘Anything else?’ I said.

‘Dogs.’

‘Dogs? What kind of dogs?’

‘Poodles. With ribbons and bows all over them.’

‘No trains?’

‘Once.’ Smulders chuckled. ‘It was the 6.23, I think. Packed, it was.’

He talked on, about his work, his colleagues, his passion for all things connected with the railways; he talked for hours. But nothing came. Nothing except a pair of black spectacles, their lenses stained
the same colour as the fingertips. Then I realised that they belonged to a friend of my father’s, a man who used to work at the post office, in Sorting. I couldn’t seem to picture Smulders at all. Somehow his breathing got in the way, like frosted glass.

These were, in any case, minor entertainments, scant moments of distraction. There were days, whole days, when I lay in bed without moving. Almost without thinking. The TV cackled and muttered, the way a caged bird might. Meals came and went on metal trolleys – hot, damp smells that were lurid, rotten, curiously tropical. My head felt as if it had been wrapped in cloth, layer upon layer of it. I often had to fight for breath. Once I tried to tear the covering from my face, but all I found beneath my fingernails was skin.

My skin.

There was no covering, of course.

Nurse Janssen sat with me each morning, her voice in the air beside me. It was still a kind of seed, yet I could grow nothing from it, no comfort, no desire. I’d lost all my wit, my ingenuity.

‘How’s your face?’ she asked me.

‘You tell me.’

‘It’s looking much better. How does it feel?’

‘Feels all right.’

‘You know, there are three trees outside your window,’ she said, ‘three beautiful trees. They’re pines.’

If this was an attempt at consolation, it was misconceived, hopelessly naive. I stared straight ahead. ‘Pines, you say?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can smell them.’

‘It’s a beautiful smell, isn’t it?’

I scowled. ‘If you like toilet cleaner.’

Later that day I picked up one of my rubber balls and threw it into the blankness in front of me. Now that
was
beautiful, the silence of the ball travelling through the air, an unseen arc, and then the splintering of glass. I hadn’t realised there might be a window
there. I saw the impact as a flower blooming, from tight green bud to petals in less than a second. It was like those programmes on TV where they speed a natural process up.

The next morning Visser put me on a course of medication. I took the drug in liquid form. It was acrid, syrupy in texture, but I didn’t make any fuss. I drank it down and then lay back, waiting for the effect.

What happens is this:

The world shrinks. The world’s a ball of dust. It rolls silently along the bottom of a wall, meaningless and round. You watch it go. You don’t have to think about it any more. It’s got nothing to do with you, nothing whatsoever.

You’d wave goodbye to it if you could lift your arm.

Not long after I surfaced from the anaesthetic, Visser visited me. He told me that he had replaced the missing bone with a piece of precision-engineered titanium. The fit was perfect; he’d checked it with a CT scan. There had been no complications, nor was there any trace of infection – at least not so far. The entire operation had taken less than four hours. The way he described it, he made my head sound like some kind of jigsaw, and there was a note of genuine pride in his voice, as if it had been clever of him to finish it.

‘In short,’ I said, rather drily, ‘it was a success.’

I heard his lips part on his teeth. ‘Oh yes. Most certainly. How do you feel?’

‘Not bad.’ I paused. ‘It’s a strange
idea,
though, a piece of metal in your head –’

‘No stranger than a hip replacement,’ he said.

I didn’t agree. The point was, it was in my head. That’s what made it squeamish.

But Visser would have none of it. ‘You might experience some numbness where the cut nerves are,’ he went on cheerfully, ‘but there shouldn’t be too much discomfort. You’ll be up and about in no time.’

He was right about that. Within a week I’d recovered from the surgery and I was embarking on my rehabilitation. Every afternoon I was taken to the Mobility Training Centre, a special room in the east wing. It was laid out like a surreal, random version of the world outside. There were flights of stairs that stopped in mid-air. There were arbitrary brick walls – some knee-high, others reaching to the ceiling. There were kerbstones, but no roads. This was Dr Kukowski’s domain. Kukowski had a patient, almost weary manner, and his skin smelled of vinegar. I sometimes speculated on the effect his work might have on him. I could imagine him pausing halfway up the stairs at home, for example, unwilling to go further. Or stepping off the pavement into the path of an oncoming car because he had completely forgotten about the possibility of traffic.

Kukowski gave me my first cane. It was lighter than I’d expected. Longer, too, almost shoulder-height. I was supposed to hold it at waist-level and then walk forwards, scanning, rather in the manner of someone with a metal detector. Tap, tap, tap went the toughened nylon tip. There was something ludicrous about the whole process; I wanted to pour scorn on it. But behind Kukowski’s patience there lurked a threat: it was either the cane or it was back to tranquillisers, headaches, isolation. I took the cane.

In the mornings I was still seeing Nurse Janssen. During the afternoons I had to pick my way through the obstacle course that was Kukowski’s world – a world that would be mine, he assured me, as soon as I was discharged. Towards evening Visser would pay me a visit. Sometimes he stayed just long enough to ask after my health. On other occasions we’d talk for an hour or more. He was almost always complimentary.
Bilateral cortical damage is so rare, Martin. It may sound tactless, but it’s a privilege to have you here.
Whenever I was alone I was encouraged to work on what Kukowski called my ‘long-cane technique’. There was the physical manipulation of the cane itself, of course, but there were also various mental skills and disciplines which had to be mastered. I had to learn how to use sound to determine distance and direction. I had to sensitise myself to echoes
(a method known as echolocation). I had to be able to memorise a route. And so on. There seemed to be no end to it. It was the height of summer now, and I spent as much time as I could outdoors. Most days, after supper, I could be found in the clinic gardens, practising.