The Insult (34 page)

I said it again. ‘Where’s her stone?’

He didn’t have an answer. He didn’t even have a decent lie. He could have said we were too poor to buy a stone. He could have said it wasn’t a stone at all, it was wood, and he’d carved the name on it himself – but it had rotted, or it had been washed away by floods, or undergrowth had buried it. Or it was marble, the best that money could buy, and somebody had stolen it. He could’ve said any number of things to lay my curiosity to rest. But he didn’t.

And that was the most I ever got from him – a silence stubborn as an animal’s. Eventually he would push me away with the flat of his hand, shout at me to do a chore that didn’t need doing, but when I looked at him upside-down, through a crack in the kitchen door, his face was the shape of the stone I was asking about, the shape of stones I’d seen on other people’s graves, and I knew then that he was keeping things from me. Uncle Felix knew something, he was fidgety with knowledge, but he was too cowardly to part with it. If he so much as mentioned her name, he said, my father would cut him into pieces with his chisels and his saw and drop him down between the walls of whatever house he happened to be building. (In our family, Uncle Felix was the one with the stories.) Karl, my older brother, was
just as silent on the subject. If I asked him where the stone was, he stared at me until I felt his eyes had passed right through my head and stuck in the wall behind me. Once, he tried denying she had ever lived, his eyebrows gathering into one dark line across his forehead.

‘We must’ve come from something,’ I said.

‘Think what you like,’ was his reply.

Axel, the youngest, was the only one who wasn’t hiding anything. He didn’t have anything to hide: there could hardly have been time for him to be born before she left.

Years later someone told me that she’d run off with another man. You’d never have guessed it, though, not from looking at my father. He didn’t seem to miss her at all, nor did I ever hear him curse her memory. Instead, his pride solidified. Stood thick and still in him, like dripping or cold grease; there were days when you could almost touch the thick white shape of it. He believed in himself the more because his wife had not. When lightning blew a hole in the roof of our house, he paid no heed. Maybe he thought it was a test of his fortitude, his patience. Maybe he thought he answered the lightning by building the roof back on. I don’t know. I always felt he should have listened, should have moved us on. West, to where the water in the ground was clear and had no smell. Or south, into the pastureland. Maybe that would have been the end of it then, instead of just the beginning.

My Uncle Felix bore no resemblance to my father, not in his build nor in his nature. He was altogether more excitable, more harmless, too – a frothy man with a left eye that winked without him meaning it to and a smell to his skin like sour milk. He never married, though he considered himself a ladies’ man. I loved to watch him getting ready for a dance. He would stand in front of the tin mirror in the kitchen, legs apart and slightly bent, flattening his wild hair with lard. Then he’d step back, turn one cheek to the mirror, then the other, and he’d shoot air through the gaps in his teeth, a kind of whistle that was like a rocket going off. He always wore his Sunday trousers, which were wide at the thigh, but much wider by the time they reached his ankles.
The turn-ups were so roomy, we used to hide things in there – dead frogs, cigar stubs, empty sardine tins – knowing he’d discover them later, in the middle of a waltz, perhaps, or even, though I couldn’t quite imagine it, an embrace. The next morning he’d come after us with a belt, the buckle coiled around his fist, the rest of it licking at the air. A threat was all it was. We didn’t have to run too fast to stay out of his way; his right leg had been withered by polio when he was a boy. That was also the reason that he never worked much, relying on my father and Karl to bring in the money while he stayed at home and split wood, or swept the floors, or boiled bones for soup.

Once, when it was autumn and my brothers were gone for the day, helping my father with a job, Uncle Felix took me walking through the forest to a spring he knew. It was historical, the water. Centuries old. You could tell by looking at the rock, which was stained a strange red colour, as if tea had been drunk from it. Some famous theatre actresses had bathed there naked once. Or were they ballerinas? He couldn’t remember now. It was difficult for him to climb down the steep steps with his bad leg, but he seemed determined. There was a place that was his favourite, out of sight of the footpath and screened by trees. He told me I should bathe there. If I bathed, I’d grow into a woman. I’d be beautiful.

I wasn’t sure.

‘It smells bad,’ I said, wrinkling my nose.

He grinned. ‘So does medicine,’ he said, ‘but it makes you better, doesn’t it.’

I looked at him, sitting on a shoulder of rock, with his knees drawn up tight against his chest and his walking-stick beside him.

‘Don’t you want to bathe?’ I said.

He stuck his lips out and shook his head. ‘It’s too late for me.’

‘Didn’t you do it when you were young?’

He smiled, but didn’t answer. He told me to hurry or else the sun would drop behind the hill and I’d catch cold. I took off all my clothes and handed them to him. He placed them next to his walking-stick in a neat pile. I walked over the rock, part of it red, as he’d promised it
would be, part still white and crystalline. I stepped down into the pool, which was only knee-deep, and stood under the rush of sulphur water. It crashed on to my shoulders, exploded, sprayed out sideways. And all the time Uncle Felix was sitting above me, where it was dry, just watching me and smiling.

It didn’t seem unnatural to me at the time, but later, when I thought about it, it gave me a strange feeling. Whenever I was naked, I’d look round, expecting him to be there, staring at me. I’d be alone and yet I’d feel as if I wasn’t. Even years afterwards, when he was dead.

I could never tell anyone about it – not even Axel, during the time when I was closest to him. It wasn’t because it was a secret (Uncle Felix didn’t ever use the word). It was because it was too delicate a thing to find words for. If I told it to someone else, they’d turn it into something far more obvious; they’d turn it into something that it wasn’t.

He never actually touched me, you see. He just watched.

There’s love and everybody talks about it, but not all of us come close to it – or, if we do, it’s not in the expected way.

What Uncle Felix said about becoming a woman, becoming beautiful, it didn’t mean much to me. In our house we were all treated the same. I was still being passed off as a boy, even when I was twelve or thirteen. It was easier for everyone to pretend that I was just like them rather than to start thinking about what I was really like. I understood that, somehow. I understood that it might also make life easier for me. I kept my hair cut short. I swore, and spat, and kicked at stones and car tyres and empty cans. I shared my brothers’ clothes – Axel’s usually, or Karl’s when he grew out of them. My body seemed to play along. My blood, for instance: it came late, as if worried it might upset things. I didn’t learn grace or guile or any of the tricks girls played with make-up; there wasn’t anyone to learn it from. Not that they were coarse men particularly; they behaved the way they’d behave in a bar or any other place where there were men together and no women. If I’d been pretty, with a soft, red mouth and
honey curls, maybe it would’ve been different. Maybe they would’ve put me up high like something holy, trod silently around me with faces raised in fear and awe. But the most that anyone ever said of me was,
She’s got something,
and that was Uncle Felix. I didn’t know what he meant by that either. If I look at the only photograph of me that still exists – I’m at a country fair, aged nine – I can see that my spine had a certain straightness to it and there was something steady in my eyes. Maybe that’s what he meant. Or maybe it was just that he’d seen me naked one September, under that hot, rust-coloured water.

The first time I put on a dress, nobody knew where to look. They all seemed to lose something, all at the same time. Their eyes searched the rafters, the fireplace, the gloom beneath the kitchen table. Or ran along the mantelpiece, the skirting-board. Or just rested on their boots. Uncle Felix had bought it for me off a van that came through the village every Tuesday, creaking under the weight of household goods and new clothes wrapped in cellophane. It was harvest festival, a dance at the church hall, and I sat with my back against the wall all night. I couldn’t even down a few glasses, the way I might have done at home – I was a girl, and girls couldn’t be seen to drink, at least not in public. My green-and-purple dress was too new; it wouldn’t lie against my skin, but stuck out as stiffly as washing when it freezes on the line in winter. I watched my uncle crawl past me like a crab, some toothless woman nailed to him by the hands and feet. From a distance there seemed to be a monstrous creature loose in the room. My head ached with the music, a bow pitching on the strings of a violin like a ship’s deck in a storm. I began to feel sick. Nobody paid me any heed. I saw Karl with a brown bottle upside-down in his mouth, his Adam’s apple jumping as he drained it dry. I sat there so long, my legs grew into the floor. If anyone had come to me then, it would’ve been too late. I’d have shaken my head, my brushed-out hair catching on the foolish lace collar of my dress, my body made of the same wood as the walls, the chairs, the door.

They were all drunk on the way home, boasting about how they’d danced with this one, then with that one, and the moon rolled among the bare branches of the trees like the woman I’d seen outside the hall,
falling from one man’s arms into another’s. The truck lurched and swayed on the dirt track, and my uncle hit his head on the window, and when he touched his fingers to the place, they came away black, as if they’d been dipped in ink.

‘I’m hurt,’ he cried, ‘I’m hurt,’ but he was laughing.

It was Karl driving, his eyes splayed on his face, his hands bouncing on the wheel, he couldn’t seem to get a grip on it, and all the others shouting, their voices loud against the hard curve of the roof, lifted by the alcohol.

Then we saw the house.

A hole blown clean through the roof, scorched walls and, when we moved closer, lines burned all the way across the floor, as though some great cat had stretched out, leaning on its claws, and done its scratching there.

‘Jesus,’ Karl said. ‘Jesus Christ.’

I could only whisper, ‘Who did it?’

My father stood in the blackened house with one hand wrapped over the back of his neck. People in the village often said Arno Hekmann was a good man in a crisis because he didn’t rise too fast. Just one word came out of him that night and we waited minutes for it.

‘Lightning,’ he said at last.

Though he looked at me in my stiff dress, as if it wasn’t lightning he was thinking of, but women. His laughter was one hollow sound and then nothing.

I looked down at my hands, with their hard palms and their broken nails, a boy’s hands on a girl’s dress, and I remembered the pretty little thing that Karl had brought home the year before and how one kiss on the porch had left her drained, like a flower needing water, her head drooping, her eyes half-closed.

We slept under the firs and pines that night. The air still felt astonished; I could smell the hole the lightning had made, not just in the timbers of the house, but in the sky. I curled around a tree-trunk and when I woke, the cold had poured into all my joints and set. My brother Axel was the only one who’d slept in a straight line on the
ground. The rest were huddled, crooked, folded-up. Opening slowly as they came round. Old pen-knives, almost rusted solid.

October, that was. After a night of watching people dance.

It was a small village, even in those days, population three hundred and fifty or so, but out in the hollow, which was where our house was, it was population five – my two brothers, my father, my uncle and me.

By the following spring, that was no longer true.

It was a bitter winter. The first snows fell at the beginning of November, before the roof was mended, and lasted till the middle of January. At dawn I’d have to shovel snow off the kitchen floor while the others worked above me (some of it I used for making tea). We had no money coming in. Two of our goats died. We lived on potato soup and boiled white beans. The only luxury was that hot spring Uncle Felix had taken me to. For three days I tunnelled through the drifts with Axel. At last we reached the place and, shivering, stripped off our clothes. We stood for what seemed like hours under that stream of strange, rusty-looking water, and we were so warm suddenly, we couldn’t stop laughing. During the summer Uncle Felix had often asked me to go down to the spring with him, but I always said no. If he’d come with us that day, I wouldn’t have minded. But he was in bed, with a chill.

Over the New Year storms descended on us. The new roof held. Then, towards the end of January, the wind suddenly sank out of the world like the last of the water running from a bath and there was a night of perfect silence. You couldn’t even hear a dog bark or a car cross the bridge, and the air was clear all the way from the cold crust of the earth to the surface of the moon. That was the night we listened to Uncle Felix breathe. It was the breathing-in we heard, a thin, urgent sound, almost plaintive, like someone straining repeatedly to lift a weight, and failing.

Karl murmured, ‘Maybe we should get a doctor.’

‘In the morning,’ I heard my father say.

But Uncle Felix kept us awake for much of the night and we slept later than usual. When we woke up he was dead, his mouth open, as if he’d thought about saying something and then decided against it.

‘I told you.’ Karl was leaning against the window, staring out. ‘I told you we should’ve got a doctor.’

My father shook his head. ‘It would’ve been too late. There was nothing we could have done.’

I thought he was probably right. Felix had gone to bed in his Sunday jacket and his wide trousers that grew wider as they reached the floor. His hair was greased flat and there was a dried rose in his lapel. He had prepared himself as thoroughly as he would have done for any dance.