The Insult

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.

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.

My father drew the blanket over his brother’s face.

Later that morning, before the undertakers arrived, I hid a few objects in the cuffs of Uncle Felix’s trousers, and it seemed odd to think he wouldn’t be coming after us this time. In the left cuff, a small bottle of water from his favourite spring; I had to seal it tight, or it would smell. In the right, the comb he always used when he stood in front of the tin mirror, and a picture postcard of a beautiful woman, which I’d found in the top drawer of his desk. She was standing on a tigerskin rug in a long tight dress, with her face in profile and her head thrown back, a cigarette pointing like a thin white pistol at the ceiling. I wondered whether she was one of the famous theatre actresses he’d talked about. I tried to imagine her naked on the stained red rocks, with her head thrown back, her cigarette alight and pointing at the sky.

We buried Uncle Felix in February, which meant it took pickaxes to dig the hole, and even then it wasn’t nearly deep enough. I wore the dress he’d bought for me the year before — it was still the only dress I owned, though it was softened now by many washes. My father had built the box himself, with cuts of wood left over from the roof. On the lid he carved FELIX HEKMANN and, underneath the name, he carved a pair of dancing shoes. As they lowered Felix into the hole, I glanced at Axel. His face was pale and serious, and someone had parted his hair; I smiled across at him, to comfort him. He held my look and then, still serious, he winked at me with his left eye. Then winked again, three times in succession, very quickly. It was an uncanny imitation. I had to put a hand over my face. My shoulders shook and tears poured from my eyes. Everybody thought I was crying, and they were very gentle with me when the funeral was over.

That night, or one soon after, I saw Felix in a dream. He was standing under the hot spring in his best clothes and he was laughing the way he’d laughed the night we drove home in our truck, knowing nothing of the lightning or the ruined house.

The spring I turned sixteen, Axel took me to the willow tree. I’d always known it was there — I paddled close to its trailing yellow branches every summer — but it was just a tree to me, a tree like all the others.

It was warm for the time of year, and we’d both woken before dawn. Axel whispered in my ear, something about going for a walk, something about the stream, and I nodded in agreement. We eased out of the bed. Karl, who’d slept like a stone ever since I could remember, slept heavily on, one of his arms reaching to the floor, his fingers just touching it, making him seem delicate. My father was also asleep, lying on his back, with his hands folded on the outside of the blanket.

We went out through the back, past the shed where the goats were penned. Their shoe-shaped faces turned; their yellow, devil eyes slit upright at us. We told them to be quiet. Then down into the field below. The sun was still behind the ridge, though the trees up on the crown were coloured with it, as if the bark had been stripped away, as if they were down to naked wood.

The grass licked at my bare legs.

Axel wasn’t wearing any shoes. I watched his heels rise, with something of the mill-wheel in their rhythm. The left one, the right one, the left one — one after the other, they kept rising. I watched his heels, shiny with dew, as I followed him across the field.

A grey bird curved through the air like a flung stone.

We stopped above the stream. There were trees there — poplars, willows, oak and fir. That time of year, the stream was swollen, snow melting further north and running down to us. My brother sat on the bank where it lifted clear of the fast-flowing water. It was a flat place, just mud and tufts of grass.

‘If we wait here,’ he said, ‘the sun’ll come to us.’

I sat beside him. Stared at the water where it swirled around a root. The root arched out of the water and curved back down again in a kind of bow. If you looked at the root and its reflection both at once, as if they were joined, as if they were one completed thing, they made a shape that was exactly like a mouth.

The sun was above the ridge now, to our left, but it hadn’t touched us yet. We were still sitting in the shade.

‘You never kissed anyone, did you?’

I turned to look at him. His head was bent and he was scratching at the mud with a piece of stick he’d sharpened. ‘How do you know?’

‘I just know.’

He was still scratching at the mud. It wasn’t drawings he was doing, just lines that didn’t look like anything.

‘Maybe I did,’ I said.

‘Who with then?’ He looked sideways at me, his lip curling. Then he said the name of a boy who lived in the village.

I laughed in his face. I was like that sun bursting over the curve of the hill and landing on everything in the world at once and turning it a colour suddenly.

His head dipped again.

‘You didn’t do it yet,’ he muttered. ‘I know you didn’t.’

I was strong now. I could say anything I liked. Even the truth.

‘So what if I didn’t.’

His body went still. All of it. The hand with the whittled stick in it stopped moving. Even his head, which wasn’t moving anyway, seemed strangely motionless. It was as if he was listening to himself think.

‘So what,’ I said.

He lay back with his head against the willow’s trunk. He didn’t look at me. He looked up into the tree instead, its pale-yellow waterfall of leaves and branches.

‘Would you like to?’ he said, without moving.

There’s a way of holding on to a moment, of making it last almost indefinitely, but anything you do, you have to do it slowly, and in absolute silence, and you have to separate your mind from it, it’s not you who’s doing it, it’s someone else.

I placed my lips where his were and I pressed. I remember thinking of the school teacher, and the way she held that spongy pale-pink paper against a piece of writing to make it dry.

Then I leaned on one elbow, looking down at him.

He just lay there and smiled. I almost hated him in that moment. His light-brown hair falling forwards, his lazy mouth. A scattering of freckles across his nose.

‘Try it again,’ he said.

There was a bird awake somewhere near by. Its call was like a seesaw. Backwards and forwards, the call went. Backwards and forwards. It was then that I thought of Uncle Felix. I felt he was watching, even though I knew he was dead. If I looked round, he would be there, on the other side of the stream, with his knees drawn up against his chest and his walking-stick beside him. He’d be smiling.

‘What is it?’

But I didn’t look round. I looked into my brother’s eyes instead and saw the black parts widen suddenly. I seemed to be rushing down towards him.

I thought I’d startled him and so I said, ‘It’s nothing.’

Before I could move, he sat up. One of his hands was on my shoulder. Then he covered my mouth with his. I was inside him then. His face so close, it was blurred. I could taste his breath.

‘It’s your mouth that should be open,’ he said, ‘not your eyes.’

I did as he said.

We stayed kissing until the sun reached us. When I opened my eyes again, everything in the world was blue and we had shadows.

That was the morning Axel told me about the trees. He said we’d been born in a house that was made of the wrong wood. Unlucky wood, it was. The kind of wood that if you make railway sleepers out of it, the train crashes. Or if you turn it into matches, girls set fire to their dresses. Some trees were haunted at the core and if you used them to make a house, the haunting spread from the wood into the people, like a disease. Those trees were only good for burning, and even then you had to have your wits about you; a fire built out of that kind of wood might stubbornly refuse to burn, or else it might burn too well and greedily consume whole forests. Our father was a carpenter. He should have known. Which trees helped, which hindered.

‘And this one?’ I remember asking.

Axel looked up into the weeping willow. ‘You might think from its name that it’s sad. It isn’t, though.’

‘What is it then?’

‘It’s a pleasure tree. You don’t find them hardly ever. I’ve looked and looked and this one’s the only one I’ve found.’

‘A pleasure tree?’ I said. ‘What’s that mean?’

He looked across at me. ‘What do you think it means?’

We began to go further. The tree showed our hands new places. Always at dawn, with goats’ eyes watching as we left the house, and then that walk through wet grass to the stream. At dawn, with everybody still asleep.

Summer came. Our shadows followed us, grew longer.

One morning he undid his trousers and pulled down his pants and there was his thing, smooth as stripped wood, blond, too, like a kind of pine, and it grew in the sunlight, faster than any tree, faster than a plant, and it jumped, almost as if it was counting.

I took it in my fingers and it still felt smooth, softer than I’d imagined, it was strange, the softness of the skin and the hardness just beneath, and moving one against the other, and then I put it in my mouth and closed my eyes, and my eyelids burned as the sun lifted over the ridge, reached through the trees, another day.

‘Who else have you been learning from?’ I heard him say.

But because there was admiration in his voice, I didn’t need to answer.

There was a moment just before the juice from him was in my mouth, when I had already the taste of it: I could see his head on the ground, turned sideways, and his left eye narrowed, almost closed, the tip of an arrow drawn in charcoal, and his back arching away from the earth, just shoulderblades and buttocks touching, and as his body twisted, a hollow appeared between the raised muscles of his stomach and the bay where his hip-bone was, and his ribs pushed upwards through his soft, tea-coloured skin.

There never was someone more beautiful than that.

With his light-brown hair slipping down into his eyes, and his body, whippet-lean, and the stories he could tell, such stories, Axel Hekmann could have had any girl he wanted. I saw the way they looked at him — sideways, along their cheeks, or upwards, through their eyelashes, or even over their shoulders as they walked away from him. And yet he chose his sister. His plain sister. There had to be some kind of perversity in him. Maybe it was the sense of doing wrong — or else he somehow knew I’d go along with it. It was a question I never asked. I didn’t dare. There was the fear that I’d be opening his eyes to something he hadn’t seen, and that everything would then, quite suddenly, be over. And I couldn’t imagine that, it being over; I felt raw on the inside if I thought about it, as if I’d been scraped out with a spoon. But I couldn’t imagine the future either. Each time he reached out at night and touched me on my breasts or between my legs, we had my father and my brother lying in the same room with us, and my uncle watching, too, his hair smoothed down with lard and a postcard of an actress in his hand. Certain kinds of secrets, they’re quiet and dead; they can be kept. There are others, though, that are alive and growing, and have a tendency to reveal themselves.

Sometimes he was so rash, so obvious, I thought that what he really wanted was to be found out. There was the time he took my hand and put it inside his pants while we were riding in the back of the truck, with Karl and my father right in front of us, in the cab. If they’d turned round, looked through the narrow pane of glass, they would have seen. But he did it on my hand anyway and then laughed when I tried to work out what to do with it. I let the wind take it in the end and then I spat on my hand and wiped it on a piece of sacking, though I couldn’t get rid of that pale-green smell it had, sweet and salty at the same time, nothing like a girl’s. Another time we were in the grocery store and I was wandering between the shelves of outdoor things. I liked the smells — the green rubber waders, the orange leather work-gloves. He came up behind me and his breath was in my ear. I could feel his thing against my hip.

‘Minkels is deaf. He’ll never know.’

‘What if somebody comes in,’ I hissed, ‘to buy something?’

He grinned. ‘We’d have to be unlucky. It’s only once or twice a week that happens.’

I let him do it, not inside me, but between my thighs, among the hurricane lamps, the leaning towers of hunting-caps (which toppled just before his stuff came out), the knives with dainty deer’s feet for handles, and he was right: Minkels never knew.

I dreaded being caught, though. As the older of the two, I’d be blamed for it. And besides, I was the girl and girls always led boys on; girls were always guilty. Axel didn’t seem to worry. It just never entered his head. Sometimes I think that quality of his rubbed off on me and that, unknowingly, he prepared me for much of what came after. Or maybe it was in our blood and he was simply showing it to me. I often wondered how deep it went, and at what point it would turn into treachery. If we’d been caught, would he have pretended it had nothing to do with him? I could see it, somehow. I could see him smiling at me from some blameless place while I stood there in the sun with fingers pointing at me. He’d be smiling the way he’d smiled that first morning by the stream. Under the yellow leaves. Sometimes it seems to me that what I did was in revenge for this imaginary betrayal. Though there was an actual betrayal, of course. There was that, too, eventually.

When I was seventeen, Karl married the Bohlin girl. I didn’t know much about her, except that she wasn’t the one I’d seen standing in his arms on the back porch like something in need of water. Her name was Eva. She was the only daughter of the people who owned the inn on the edge of the village. They were old for parents, almost the age of grandparents, and they were eager for her to take a husband so they could hand the business over. They already knew Karl on account of the work he and my father had done for them, and they were delighted to have him as a son-in-law. My father was pleased as well, partly because it sealed the bond between the two families and partly because he thought that Karl was bettering himself, marrying not into money, it was true, but into property, which was the next best thing. And, with a hotel, there was always the possibility of wealth.

‘You can make a go of it,’ he told Karl at the wedding party. ‘The place needs work, that’s all.’

He was right. Baskets still hung above the balconies, though they’d been bleached by the weather and most of the geraniums had died. The rooms were bare and gloomy, plagued by mosquitoes in the summer, and by draughts and damp in winter. The natural sulphur pond had filled with fungus and algae. But Karl only nodded and, turning away from his father’s long, excited face, said, ‘Maybe.’

There was dancing in the Bohlins’ garden that evening. Though it had rained earlier in the day, the clouds had blown away and the sky was almost clear by the time dusk fell. There were paper lanterns dangling from the trees and strings of pearly light bulbs and red tin ashtrays in the shape of hearts. I thought of Felix flat on his back in his cheap box, already dressed for the occasion. He would probably have danced with Mrs Bohlin’s widowed sister, a small woman with a fierce gaze and pointed teeth. I could imagine them waltzing together on the damp grass, the bare bulbs silvering his greased black hair, his left eye winking.

‘Uncle Felix should be here,’ I said.

I was dancing with Axel. We were pretending to be brother and sister, keeping a respectable distance between us, even exaggerating it, but every now and then, as we passed through a dark corner of the garden, he drew me close to him and I could feel his thing pressing against my belly.

‘Felix,’ Axel said. ‘Do you remember the time we put yoghurt in his trousers and it spilled all over that woman’s shoes when they were dancing and she thought —’

I was laughing even before he’d finished.

We whirled past our father, who was drinking schnapps with the bride’s uncle. I could tell from the way his jaw swung that he was already drunk.

Axel nudged me. ‘Look, there’s Edwin.’

‘What about it?’ I said.

‘He’s got his eye on you.’

I gave Axel a look. Edwin Bock was the ugliest boy in the village.

Axel grinned. ‘He has. Look.’

I glanced sideways. Bock was sitting on a chair under a tree with his hands wedged between his thighs. When he saw me looking, his eyes slid sideways and he blushed.

‘Bock’s a nobody,’ I said.

‘Why don’t you dance with him?’

‘I don’t want to.’ We’d come to a halt, but I could still feel Axel’s warm hand on the small of my back.

‘Think how embarrassed he’d be.’

‘He’s already embarrassed —’

‘Oh, go on. Dance with him.’ Axel was grinning again. ‘You’d really make his evening.’ The wind gusted suddenly and blew his hair into his eyes.

‘Since when did you care about making Edwin Bock’s evening?’

I let go of Axel’s hand and, turning away, ducked under a string of light bulbs and crossed the grass to the table where the food had been laid out. I saw Eva Bohlin through the crowd. She was a full-breasted, slow-boned girl with dull black hair. She had the curious habit of looking at Karl, no matter who she was talking to. I supposed it must be love that made her behave like that. When Axel came over and stood beside me, I handed him a piece of pumpernickel bread with pickle and smoked cheese on it. I asked him what he thought of Eva.

‘Not my type.’ He bit into the bread and cheese.

‘What is your type?’

He didn’t answer.

‘It’ll be strange for Karl,’ I said, ‘with all Dad’s furniture around. It’ll almost be like still being at home.’

‘It’ll be better than that.’ As Axel glanced up at the inn, his face took on a darkness, a kind of discontent, I hadn’t seen before.

‘Will it?’ I said, staring at him. I didn’t think so, and nor, I thought, should he. We were each other’s reason why.

‘Well,’ he said after a while, ‘at least there’ll be one less in the bedroom,’ and he looked at me and then he began to smile.

I would lie next to Axel with my head on his chest, the stream trickling over stones below us. His body had altered, grown. I couldn’t remember Karl without hair on his face and legs. That summer Axel had it as well, though it wasn’t coarse and black like his brother’s. It was finer, softer — almost coppery. Sometimes he was restless now. His face would shadow over and he would shift suddenly, shake me off like sand. I would sit up with my arms around my knees and watch the shallow water run. But I was happiest with my eyes closed and my cheek against his skin and the smell of it as sunlight touched him, the smell of wood-shavings, sea salt, apricot.

It was almost time to climb back through the field to the house, but as usual I didn’t want to go. I didn’t feel like mopping floors or drawing water from the well or boiling sausage. I couldn’t bear to see my father’s teeth lunging at his fork, or his mouth, glassy with grease. I wished there was somewhere else we could go. Then Axel spoke, and what he said was so close to what I’d been thinking that all of me went still:

‘I’ve heard about a place.’

‘What place?’

He began to describe it for me. The valleys were smooth as dust, and pale-pink or, sometimes, silver-grey. There were no walls or fences, and almost no trees. Everything was open. The people’s faces were yellow and wrinkled, like leaves in autumn. Their eyes were narrow. They wore skirts — not just the women, the men, too — and they rode small horses with thick, black manes. The country was high up, but the mountains were even higher — unimaginably high and jagged and dazzling with snow. Up there the sky was always blue, and the air was so pure and clear it hurt your lungs the first few times you breathed it. The castles in those mountains looked like the castles in fairy-tales. They were real, though. Holy people lived in them. From the battlements you could see halfway round the world. You could see so far, in fact, that in the distance the surface of the land began to bend. It was the curve of the earth itself that you were looking at.

‘If only we could go there,’ I murmured.

His face didn’t alter; he didn’t seem remotely affected by what I’d said. I thought it was probably because he’d taken himself there so many times already, with his knowledge of the place, with his own descriptions. He’d already been.

After that, I was always asking him to describe the place to me so I could be there with him. He never tired of it. Sometimes what he told me could have come from an encyclopaedia — how to avoid altitude sickness, what the local music sounded like, why certain flowers could grow high up. Other times he gave me impressions that were arbitrary and vague, like memories. I asked him how he knew about it. He’d seen some pictures once, he said. They were in a magazine that somebody had left at the inn. When he looked for the magazine again, though, it was gone. It didn’t matter, really; he could still remember it. He found some other magazines from the same series, but there was nothing in them that interested him much.

One morning I asked him what the name of the country was. It was strange I hadn’t thought of asking him before. He said he didn’t know. I watched him as he stared up into the branches of the willow tree.

‘The highest mountain in the world,’ he said, ‘what’s it called?’

‘Mount Everest.’

He nodded. ‘It was somewhere near there.’

It was hot, July or August, with a white sky that hurt to look at, and I came up out of the garden with vegetables for that evening’s meal. From the barn I heard my father sawing and I thought of Uncle Felix and the night he died, but the breathing of the saw was out, not in — out as it cut down into the wood, in as it drew back, out as it cut down again. I stopped in the doorway. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw my father bent over the sawhorse, his right arm moving like one of those rods that drive the wheels on a train. I noticed a square frame behind him, low on the floor, and a wide half-moon of blond wood propped up against the wall.

‘Is that a bed you’re making?’

‘Yes, it’s a bed.’ He didn’t pause in his work; his sweat dropped on to the pine and darkened it.

‘It’s for the inn, I suppose.’ My father had been hired to build some furniture — wardrobes for the bedrooms, chairs and tables for a restaurant. Karl and Eva had taken his advice. They were trying to make something of the place.

‘Didn’t you hear yet?’

‘Hear what?’

‘We’re losing Axel.’

I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.

My father stopped sawing, straightened up. ‘He’s fixing to get married. This bed’s for the wedding night.’ He ran one hand carefully over the headboard, and his long teeth showed.

‘Married?’ I said. ‘Who to?’

‘The Poppel girl. I thought you knew.’

The white sky beat against my neck. Standing on the line between the darkness of the barn and the brilliance outside, I felt caught between two worlds, adrift suddenly, abandoned. I knew Axel had been seeing Eileen Poppel and, though I sometimes wondered why, I certainly never thought it would come to anything. The Poppel family — scrap-dealers from across the valley. And Eileen, their only daughter. Not exactly what you’d call a catch, though, with her mouth too small and her wrists that you could snap in your hands like kindling, if you’d a mind, and that pale-blue vein wriggling through the thin skin at the edge of her left eye. She looked like, if you shouted at her, she’d just lie down and die. I could feel the white sky burning, burning. Married? Certainly I never suspected it would come to that.

‘At least there’ll be some help for you around the place.’ My father spoke to me from the world he belonged to, a dark world, steeped in wood-chips, sweat, and resin.

‘You mean they’re going to live here?’ I stared at him.

‘Only till they get a place of their own.’

I walked back into the glare below the house. Five shrivelled heads of beetroot nodded in my hand. I wanted to start running, but I didn’t know which way to go. I wanted to burst into flame. Instead, I stood at the kitchen sink with a knife against my thumb and the cold tap dripping, and I skinned the beetroots and sliced their wet, violet flesh on to a plate.

The next morning Axel woke me at the usual time. I followed him out of the house, across the clearing. It wasn’t light yet; the goats shuffled in their pen. Past the shed, along the footpath, down into the field.

Then, halfway across, I stopped. I just stopped and watched him walk away from me. His feet rising, falling, rising. He thought I was still behind him. He didn’t realise. The stupidity of those feet of his.

‘I’m not coming,’ I called out.

He looked over his shoulder. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Is it true you’re getting married?’

He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, it’s true.’

‘Why?’

‘She’s going to have a baby.’

‘So what?’

‘It’s my baby.’ He began to walk towards me, not looking at me. Looking at the grass.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Stay there.’

He kept walking until I could see the freckles on his face.

‘One last time,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Edie.’ He grasped my wrist and tried to pull me towards him. My arm was horizontal in the air, but my feet hadn’t moved. ‘One last time.’

‘Didn’t you hear me?’ I shouted. ‘I said no.’

He held on to my wrist with both hands. Then, at last, he let it go. My arm returned to me, like a boat cast loose on dark water.

‘Three days ago,’ I said. ‘That was the last time.’

His face brightened suddenly. ‘You’re jealous.’

In one flowing, almost circular movement I picked up a fallen branch and swung it at his head. He caught the blow on his forearm. It still hurt, though.

‘You’re dead,’ I said.

‘What?’ Holding his forearm, he stared at me. ‘What did you say?’

‘You heard me.’

I threw the branch down in the grass and walked away from him. After a while I looked round. I was surprised how small he was. There was half a field between us and a wind getting up, clouds blowing southwards. If I spoke now, he would hear me.

‘It was your choice,’ I said.

One night I hacked the marriage bed to pieces with my father’s axe. I woke up and lay quite still — shocked, fearful, regretting what I’d done. I put a coat over my nightshirt and crept out to the barn. How was I going to explain it? My father would be furious. All that work.

But when I saw the bed standing on its four legs in the moonlight, not finished yet, but whole, somehow, and beautiful, I changed my mind. I wished I’d done it after all. I stood there, undecided. The axe I’d used in the dream was hanging on the wall; its newly polished steel seemed to beckon me. The axe began to speak. Edith. Take me down. Do it. I turned and ran out of the barn. Ran straight into my father who had heard a noise and come out with his gun.

‘What are you doing up?’

‘The bed — I wanted to make sure it was all right.’

He gave me a look of bewilderment as I moved past him, back into the house.

For most of that week I didn’t talk and no one talked to me. I was out in the vegetable garden every day, planting for the spring. Carrots, I put in. Potatoes, too, and radishes. The wind brought squalls with it. I laboured on as the rain came down, soaked to the skin and shivering. In the barn behind me, the bed took shape, its headboard carved with the names of the bride and groom, and round the names there was fruit — apples and wild figs and grapes — and over them, a canopy of leaves. Axel was hardly there, except to sleep. Either he was working with my father, repairing storm damage, or he was over at the Poppels’ place, a muddle of shacks on a side road, half an hour’s walk from where we lived. I still couldn’t understand it. The Poppel men were a bunch of good-for-nothings, drunks. They passed you in their cart sometimes, horse teeth in their heads and startled, bloodshot eyes, and nothing on the back except some bedsprings, maybe, and a punctured tyre. But that was where he went, to drink with them and play cards and lie down on something with that pale girl.

The wedding was still weeks away and suddenly I could stand it no longer. I asked Karl and Eva if I could move into the hotel. In return, I’d be a chambermaid, a gardener — anything. Karl listened to me as if I was talking to him from somewhere very far away and when I’d finished he just nodded. He didn’t query my decision or my motives. All he said was, ‘We could use another pair of hands round here.’

They gave me a small, north-facing room on the first floor. It had a single bed; the headboard was plain, varnished wood — no fruit on it, no names. I had a wash-basin, too, and a tall wardrobe that leaned forwards, away from the wall, like a waiter taking orders. Standing at the window I could see the pool below me. There were fir trees at one end, to shelter bathers from the wind. A flight of steps led down to the water. The steps had been cut out of the rock and then reinforced with cement. Beyond the pool was a wooden terrace; this was where the famous people must have strolled in the past, with their silk dressing-gowns and their cigars.

I had more contact with Eva than with Karl and, though she could be remote at times, she couldn’t match his almost total lack of interest. Five years older than I was, she would sit me down at the kitchen table and question me. For instance, she wanted to know whether I’d fallen out with my family. I said I hadn’t. I told her that my brother Axel and his wife would be living in our house and I thought that, as newly-weds, they ought to have some privacy.

‘Then what’s that on your arm?’ Eva was pointing at the dark-red, wedge-shaped scar that ran in a straight line from the edge of my right hand towards the inside of my elbow.

‘I did it on the stove,’ I said. ‘I tripped and fell against it.’

‘It must’ve hurt.’ Drawing greedily on a cigarette with her pale, plump lips, she seemed to want it to have hurt.

I nodded.

It had happened the day I told my father I was leaving. Breakfast was finished and I was clearing the plates away. Axel had already left the room.

‘You’re walking out on us?’ My father’s eyes were pewter-coloured in the gloom of the kitchen and his hands lay on the table, red and swollen at the knuckle.

‘I’m going to live at Karl’s. He needs help with the hotel.’

‘There’s plenty of work around here.’

I shrugged. ‘That Poppel girl can do it.’

‘You’re walking out,’ he said, ‘just like your mother.’

‘I thought she died.’

His head turned slightly to one side, as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard me right. He was looking at me all the time, though, his anger rising, slowly rising. It was like watching milk come to the boil.

But I couldn’t stop myself. ‘She wasn’t my mother, anyway,’ I said. ‘I never even knew the woman.’

Through the window I watched Axel cross the clearing, carrying a struggling guinea fowl by its feet.

I said it again. ‘She wasn’t my mother. Your wife, maybe. But not my —’

I didn’t see the hand coming. I thought for a moment that I must have rushed forwards suddenly and hit my face on something. The room spun round and I fell against the stove. My right arm touched it first. I felt the flesh melt. I couldn’t tell if I’d screamed or not. There was a kind of echo of a scream, in the walls of the kitchen, somehow, up near the rafters. And the sweet, rotten smell of my own skin burning. Axel came running in. My father was standing over me. I could see the air between his trouser pocket and his hand.

He pushed Axel across the room. ‘Get some butter.’

‘We haven’t got any.’

‘Fat then.’

Axel came towards me with a scoop of white lard in a spoon. He sat on his haunches in front of me and let a whistle through his lips. ‘Nasty wound.’

Which wound? I almost said. The one you did, or the one done by the stove? But I kept silent. I took the spoon from him and melted the fat on to the burn myself.

‘What happened to your mouth?’ he asked.

‘Must’ve hit it when I slipped.’

My father hadn’t spoken at all. From where I was sitting, on the floor, I saw his right boot shift sideways, scrape at a mark made by the lightning years before.

‘Leaving,’ he muttered. ‘Usually it hurts the ones that stay behind.’

If there was any feeling of triumph in moving out, I don’t remember it. My life at the inn — the Hotel Spa, as it was now called — was lonely. Karl was eight years older than I was. He worked all through the day; in the evening he sat in the parlour with a beer. He rarely spoke to me and when he did, his voice had a kind of distance in it, as if I wasn’t family, but a stranger he felt he had to be civil to. Nights were the hardest, thinking Axel’s hand might reach across, wanting it so much, on my shoulder, in my hair, anywhere — and then remembering. I was eighteen and no one touched me any more. I’d get up before dawn and stand by the window, facing north; I’d watch the steam lift from the pool. Most mornings I was sick in the basin. It occurred to me that I might also be carrying Axel’s child. Then he’d have to marry me as well. I imagined two brides walking up the aisle in the village church. Do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband? I do. I do. I saw my smile in the wardrobe mirror, and it was not a pleasant one. But my blood came halfway through the month, as usual. And anyway, I was losing weight, not gaining it. It got to the point where it didn’t matter whether Karl spoke to me or not. But I only had to think of Axel’s face in the field that morning, his face just before I hit him with the branch, and the anger rose in me until my hands shook so hard that I couldn’t dress. My anger wasn’t unlike my father’s — slow-burning, rarely visible, but almost impossible to put out.

The day before the wedding I left the hotel early, walking along the road that led west out of the village. The leaves were red, and the high, baked grass of summer was beginning to soften with the frost. I passed Miss Poppel’s house. She was the only one of them I had any time for. She lived alone, with three stray cats and a car that had been painted an unusual shade of brown. When she drove down the street, all you could see was its huge, disappointed face and then, dimly, through the windscreen’s milky glass, her spectacles tilted upwards as she peered over the wheel and a headscarf which was actually a pair of old silk stockings. The front of her place was heaped with empty bottles and rusting engine parts the way all the Poppel family’s places were. With her, though, it was character, not squalor. She had chimes made out of door-hinges, each one the size of a man’s hand. She’d strung them together on a piece of wire and hung them from a withered crab-apple tree. They were so heavy, the wind didn’t move them much. But they did clang if a storm got up. I could sometimes hear them through the open window of my room at the hotel.

I crossed the bridge, looking down between the wooden slats at the coating of pale-green scum on the water below. Beyond the bridge, the road ran uphill to the horizon, three kilometres away. I took the first turning on the left, a narrow track of mud and leaf-mould. I passed the plough that had been there for years, half-grown over now. There was a keen edge to the air that quickened my muscles as I walked, and I forgot for a moment that it was anger I was carrying.

I saw the clearing ahead of me, the dun-coloured walls and black windows I knew so well. Instead of entering the house, I circled it, taking a path that struck off through the bracken-skirted trees just to the east. I parted brambles, then scrambled down a steep bank to the stream. There was the willow. And there, beneath it, was the flat place where we used to lie. I reached inside my coat and pulled out the folded manila envelope I’d taken from the hotel office. I began to strip one of the branches of its yellow leaves. When the envelope was full, I sealed it shut. I sat down on the bank and took out a pencil and wrote AXEL & EILEEN HEKMANN on the front, then I put the pencil away and laid the envelope beside me on the ground. I stared at the water for a long time. It ran as it had always run in the autumn, loud and purposeful, tumbling over the stones. You could sit there pretending that nothing had ever changed.

The next day, after the ceremony, the Poppels held a party at their farm. While I was there, one of the men came up to me. He stuck his thumbs in his belt and gave me a slanting look.

‘How come you’re against the marriage?’

It cost me a great effort to be polite, but it was someone’s wedding day and besides, I weighed it up and I decided that, in the end, politeness would be more insulting.

‘I’m not against it.’ I smiled. ‘Who said I was against it?’

‘I heard something.’

‘Rumours,’ I said.

‘What about the yellow leaves?’ He altered the angle of his head. ‘What was all that about?’

‘In our family they mean something special.’

‘That so?’

‘Didn’t he tell you?’

‘No,’ the Poppel man said, ‘he didn’t tell us.’ One of his brothers or cousins had joined him, wearing a brown suit and chewing on a blade of grass.

‘Well, ask him,’ I said.

‘So you’re not against the marriage?’

I sighed. ‘No.’

‘You fancy a dance?’ said the man in the suit.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Excuse me.’

I walked across the yard to where a boy was pouring home-made beer and I asked him for a glass of it. I could feel their eyes on me, like snails. I was glad I’d sent the leaves — especially as they were yellow, and yellow meant what it did …

I looked across at the two men. I nodded, raised my glass.

Then I drank.

It was a Friday afternoon and I’d been working at the inn for almost exactly a year. I was sitting on the front porch, taking a short break before I started to prepare the evening meal. The warm weather had lasted longer than usual, and the trees were only now beginning to lose their foliage. My father wiped the sweat off his forehead as he walked up the road towards me, his trousers fluttering and flapping round his ankles. He looked like a man who was standing still in a high wind. I rose slowly to my feet. I’d been wondering when he would come.

He stood at the bottom of the steps. ‘Axel took the truck at half-past seven this morning and I haven’t seen him since.’

‘Where was he going? The market?’ There was a market every Friday morning in a town a few kilometres to the north.

‘Yes. But it’s three o’clock now.’

‘Maybe he’s driving around. You know how that wife of his likes to drive around.’

My father shook his head. ‘I told him to be back at midday. There was something he had to help me with.’

I felt my heart begin to churn. ‘You think he broke down?’

My father turned and stared into the trees on the other side of the road, one hand twitching against his leg as if his brain was in that hand and it was thinking.

‘Get Karl,’ he said.

Karl had the use of an old four-seater that belonged to Eva’s parents. The two men climbed in the front, with Karl behind the wheel. I sat in the back. First we drove out to the Poppels’ place. The mother was in the yard, feeding her chickens. She stood below us, one arm circling a bowl of corn meal, the veins and tendons showing through her transparent skin.

‘I ain’t seen nobody all day.’

Karl spun the car round, ran it fast across the ruts and potholes, back on to the road, the springs complaining loudly all the way.

‘I told you we should’ve fixed the truck,’ he muttered.

My father just stared out through the windscreen. I noticed how his shoulders curved under his jacket.

I thought of the time I’d met Axel in the village. I was buying candles for the restaurant. Eva said candles would create atmosphere. That’s what people want, she told me. Atmosphere. It must have been early spring because I could remember what my first words were.

‘I hear the baby’s born.’

‘Yeah.’ He scuffed his boots on the floor. ‘It’s a boy.’

‘I heard that, too.’ I paid Minkels for the candles and moved towards the door. ‘What are you naming it?’

‘Michael. I call him Mazey.’ He grinned quickly.

‘Mazey?’

‘I don’t know why. That’s what I call him, though. It just feels right.’

I nodded. ‘You got a place of your own yet?’

‘We’re getting one.’ He told me there was a small homestead out towards the lake. It didn’t have any water, but he knew where they could dig a well. There was some land that came with it. He might try farming. Sheep, most likely.

I was staring at him, thinking of how I used to lay my head against his shoulder, thinking of the sweet, split-wood smell of him as morning sunlight spilled over the ridge, when suddenly I realised that I was still angry. It was like some huge sea-creature surfacing. It startled me. I’d forgotten it was there.

‘It couldn’t have gone on, you know,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You and me.’ He had dropped his voice down low. ‘We couldn’t have gone on like that.’

‘You don’t have to whisper,’ I said. ‘Minkels is deaf, remember? He won’t hear a thing.’

‘Edie —’

‘I hope the property works out.’ I laughed my father’s laugh, one hollow sound and then nothing, because I already knew what I was going to do. I didn’t know how yet, but I knew what.

I walked out of the shop. I heard the bell jangle above the door as he came after me. I turned to face him. His hair seemed to have darkened at the roots. He stood there.

‘Don’t you remember what I told you in the field?’ I said.

He shook his head, but not because he didn’t remember. He looked out into the street. It was a still, grey day. There was nothing to look at. He shook his head again. Then, with his face lowered, and a smile on it, he turned and walked away. Just for a moment the street was not dust and a stray dog and two parked cars, but grass, the coarse grass of the field, and a path was visible, but only to us, and the stream was at the end of it, over a stile and through a copse, and I was following him down …

‘Which way would he have gone?’ Karl said.

I glanced out of the window. We were at a fork in the road. The town where the market was held lay directly ahead of us, but so did the lake. If we turned left, we had to double back along a road that circled the shore. If we turned right, the road climbed up on to the hills that bordered the lake on its south-east side. My father was looking one way then the other, trying to gauge which was the more likely.

‘We’d better try them both,’ he said eventually.

Karl had been staring at him, waiting for an answer. Now he faced the windscreen again and muttered something that I didn’t hear.

‘Left’s quicker,’ I said, ‘if he was in a hurry.’

It was a road with no markings, scarcely wide enough for two cars. On the right and way below, the lake. You could only see bits of it between the trees, smooth as something planed, though I’d seen it in a gale once, with slabs of water lifting clear and flying through the air like houses in a tornado. Some days it was blue, others it was black. That afternoon it was green — the deep, dark green of marrow skin. To the left the ground climbed steeply through beeches that had been there for two hundred years. We drove slowly, heads turning from one side to the other, but we didn’t see the truck. We rounded the south-western corner of the lake, and the trees thinned and the ground levelled out. We stopped at a crossroads.

‘So much for that,’ Karl said. ‘Now what?’

My father said we should drive on into the town.

By the time we reached the market square, it was almost deserted. Traders were packing the last of their goods into the backs of vans. Nobody knew anything. We tried the bars. There was one man who remembered a young couple with a baby. It was because of the baby, he said; his first was due in a month’s time. He thought he’d seen them leave in a dark-red truck.

‘When was that?’ Karl said.

‘Eleven. Maybe twelve.’

Karl looked at my father, but he didn’t say anything.

We headed north, out of the town. The road took us through farm country, then it veered east and began to climb up to a ridge. This was the second route. To the left you could see the bare brow of the hill, all outcrops of rock and windswept grass. On the right, there was a long drop to the lake below — a steep scree-slope which plunged into the water at an angle of seventy-five degrees and kept on going.

There was no sign of the truck.

When we arrived at the fork again, Karl stopped the car in the banked-up leaves at the side of the road and left the engine idling. He sat there, staring through the windscreen.

It was after six o’clock and the sun had almost gone; what was left of it was pink and raw, like part of a skinned animal. We’d been looking for almost three hours. It seemed hopeless. But, without meaning to, I spoke: ‘I think we should try the first route again.’ The two men didn’t say anything, but I could hear their reluctance, their exasperation. ‘I’ll walk it if I have to,’ I added.

Karl was motionless for a moment longer, then he shifted into gear and pulled back on to the road.

We’d only been driving along the lake for a few minutes when I saw it. I shouted at Karl to stop the car, then I opened the door and jumped out. We were on a bend. The road swung left, away from the lake, though it was still just visible about thirty metres below. I ran back to the tree, crouched down. There. A piece of bark had been torn away at bumper-height and the blond wood under it was smeared with plum-coloured paint. I’d only missed it the first time because I’d been looking for the wrong thing. I began to make my way down the slope towards the lake. The ground was so steep, it was hard not to lose control and fall headlong.

I followed the trail of damaged trees, some creaking, as if they were still recovering from what had happened, some scratched or gouged, some split wide open. I saw Eileen Poppel first. She must have been hurled through the windscreen, hurled clean through. You wouldn’t have thought a little thing like that would have weighed enough to break the glass. She lay at the foot of a tree, her arms spread over the roots, her face in profile, like someone worshipping the earth. Her cheek and her forehead were ribboned, crazed with blood. At last they seemed appropriate, those eyes of hers, which had always looked as though someone’s thumbs were pressing at them from the inside. I ran on down the slope.

I found the truck with its radiator grille dipped in the lake, like a cow drinking, its headlamps staring gloomily into the silent, dark-green water. I could see my brother in the cab, his chin resting on his chest. I called his name softly, but he didn’t move. It was then that I noticed the smell of sulphur. I dropped to my knees, put my fingers in the water, tasted it.

I stood up. It didn’t feel as if my feet were quite in contact with the ground. I walked to the door of the truck. My brother seemed thinner. I knew what it was. The steering-wheel had pushed his ribs up against his spine, and the organs had been forced sideways. His face was unmarked, though, and there was no blood on him at all. I wondered when his skin would turn yellow, when his eyes would narrow. I knew he wouldn’t want to look like a foreigner in the land that he was going to. I could imagine him on the battlements already, watching me from halfway across the world, watching me as I stood beside him.

I was aware of everything around me, trees and sky and ground, and I was at the centre of it, and I knew then that it was right, what I had done. I took a deep breath and let it out, and then I heard the two men come trampling through the leaves towards me, and I heard something else, too, not a cry exactly, but a voice, a small voice, and I looked down into the cab and saw the child, not more than six months old, my brother’s child. The wooden drawer he always travelled in was on the floor next to the gear lever and he was lying on his back in it, staring upwards through the shattered windscreen at the trees. He was holding his arms away from his body, moving the inside of his wrists against the air.

‘— I told you it needed work.’

‘I only looked at it a few days ago. I didn’t notice anything —’

‘You didn’t notice anything. When was the last time you noticed anything?’

I rocked the baby in the crook of my elbow. He made no sound. He just stared up into my face the same way he’d stared up into the trees.

‘There, Mazey,’ I whispered. ‘There.’

Five days later I stood beside the grave.

The weather had changed. A cold October wind pulled at the blanket I’d wrapped Mazey in. I folded it more tightly around him. I’d lost a brother and inherited a son. I was nineteen years old.

All I could think of was what I’d said after we found the bodies. In the car, on the way back to the village, I was the only one who’d spoken.

‘That stupid son of a bitch,’ I said. ‘He never could drive.’ Then I burst into tears.

I cried for hours. Most of it was sheer frustration. If only he’d listened to me, none of this would’ve happened. If only he’d thought for once. It was nobody’s fault but his. He’d chosen it.

So there I stood, on that cold October day.

My father had built the box, as he’d built Felix’s seven years before. It took him longer than usual. One evening, shortly after the accident, I walked out to the house. I found him on the back porch, staring into the darkness. I asked him how it was coming, but he didn’t answer. I went and looked in the barn and saw the box lying on trestles, less than half-built. I wondered if he was using the right wood. Axel had said there were different kinds, but he’d never taught me how to tell them apart. Returning to the porch, I took the chair next to my father’s. From where he was sitting he could see the truck, parked next to the goat shed on the far side of the clearing. There were people in the village who thought he should’ve sold it for scrap, but he insisted on keeping it. For parts, he said. It wasn’t morbid, it was practical, and he wouldn’t be persuaded otherwise. I had no idea what he was staring at. Maybe it was the truck. Or maybe it was the small pond glimmering beyond it, among the trees. Or maybe it was nothing. I didn’t know what he was thinking — I’d never known — and he wasn’t about to tell me either. I sat beside him for an hour and we were silent the whole time. When he finally spoke to me, I was almost asleep.

‘You remember your uncle’s box, with the dancing shoes on it?’

I sat up. ‘Yes.’

‘What about Axel?’

That wasn’t difficult.

‘A mountain and a castle,’ I said, ‘and snow, too, because it’s high up where the castle is.’

He turned and looked at me.

‘It’s a place he always dreamed of going,’ I explained.

He was still looking at me, and it was a while before he spoke. ‘I’m not sure I can do snow.’

The two boxes were lowered into the same hole, first Eileen’s, then Axel’s. My father had surpassed himself. He’d carved a range of mountains that stretched the entire width of the lid. He’d also carved the castle, perched high up in a lonely pass. He’d even carved a snowline. I noticed several members of the Poppel family peering suspiciously at Axel’s box, and I thought they were right to be suspicious. That lid, it was a hint. Axel wasn’t with Eileen in the ground at all. Axel had gone to a completely different place.

I glanced down at the child in my arms. He was wide awake and staring up into the sky, a sky filled with racing clouds and frantic autumn leaves. His eyes moved to my face. His mouth opened and his hands moved this way and that in the air, palms upwards, as if he was trying to balance it. He didn’t make a sound, though. Not a sound.

Most people had caught a glimpse of the truck when it was towed back through the village. Others had visited the site of the accident. Some had even seen the bodies of the deceased. No one could believe the child had survived. It was a miracle, they said. Equally miraculous was my eagerness to adopt him — especially to the Poppels. They’d always doubted me and, even now, suspected that I might be up to something. They set their narrow minds to work on the problem, but they got nowhere with it. There wasn’t anywhere to get. I could have told them that.

It was with a querying air that Mrs Poppel came up to me after the service. She offered her condolences. I offered mine.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘at least they’re together.’

I nodded. That’s what you think.

She gave me a look that lasted seconds, then she stooped over the baby and tickled him under his chin. I stared down at her — the reddened eyelids, the dirt under her fingernails.

At last she straightened up. She stepped back, gathering her black shawl around her shoulders. ‘He’s good, isn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He is.’

Not long after the funeral I was preparing supper for my father one evening when I heard the jingling sound of reins outside. Through the window I watched a horse and cart lurch to a standstill in the clearing behind the house, two lanterns swinging from the tail-board. Several people clambered down on to the ground. I saw a woman first and recognised the high, pinched nose on her.

‘It’s the Poppels,’ I told my father.

Five of them had come. Mrs Poppel, her sister, her sister’s daughter (or granddaughter — you never could tell, with the Poppels) and two sons, including the one who’d asked me for a dance at the wedding. They sat against the kitchen wall on straight-backed chairs drinking cherry brandy, which was all we had in the house. The two men took out tobacco pouches and rolled cigarettes that were as thin as matches. They smoked quickly, furtively, their eyes high up in the corners of the room.

Not until Mrs Poppel had drained her glass did she begin to speak. It was about the child. She was grateful to me for having taken him. She thought it was fitting. I was family, after all; I was blood. What’s more, I was the right age — just two years older than her poor Eileen. A tear fattened on her lower eyelid. I watched it burst and spill across her cheek.

‘And it’s one less mouth for you to feed,’ I said.

They bred like rabbits, the Poppels. Like rabbits.

‘Well, yes,’ she said, ‘there is that, of course …’ She looked at my father, who had hardly said a word. ‘And if you should ever think the child might need a father,’ and she glanced at her son, the one sitting across the room, the one who liked dancing, ‘well …’

Her son was staring at the wall. The hand holding the cigarette rested on his thigh, the cigarette pointing inwards, at his wrist. His eyes sprang towards me and then away again, as if the look was attached to a length of elastic.

‘A baby’s one thing,’ I said. ‘A husband’s quite a different matter.’

My father cleared his throat and spat into the fire. The phlegm sizzled. ‘Contributions,’ he said, ‘would always be welcome.’

I wasn’t sure he meant it. I thought he was probably just telling the Poppels that their visit was over. He wasn’t a great one for socialising, Arno Hekmann.

I waited until the cart had disappeared up the track and then I turned to him. ‘Contributions?’ I said.

My father lit his pipe. ‘I don’t see why not.’

As he leaned back in his chair and lifted his eyes to the smoke-blackened ceiling, I thought I saw a smile cross his face.

Later that night, though, he told me he was worried about money. There was less work than there used to be. He wasn’t sure we could afford to keep the child. I reminded him that I was working now. And I would go on working. They didn’t pay me much at the hotel, but it was better than nothing.

‘If all else fails,’ I said, ‘I’ll get married.’

My father contemplated me through coils of blue pipe-smoke.

‘But not to some Poppel,’ I added.

Now that Axel and Eileen were gone and my father was alone, I spent half of every week at the house. In the mornings I would walk into the village with Mazey bound tightly into a blanket on my back. When I reached the hotel I would lay him in a drawer, the same drawer that I’d found him in (it wouldn’t be long before he grew out of it). If I was cleaning, I carried the drawer from room to room with me. If I was sweeping the terrace or scooping leaves out of the pool, I took the drawer outside. If I was cooking, the drawer stood on the kitchen table, among the fruit and vegetables. He was never any trouble. It was only his hands opening and closing in the air above the drawer that told you he was there. Eva didn’t mind my bringing Mazey to work with me. She had two children of her own now, Thomas and Anna, yet she seemed more interested in mine. She thought there was something different about him. She was almost envious.

‘He’s so quiet,’ she said, ‘so,’ and she bit her pale bottom lip, trying to think of the word, ‘so peaceful.’

He had always been quiet. I could only remember him making one sound, and that was when he called out to me from the floor of the truck, to tell me he was there. He’d been quiet ever since. To me, that was normal. Also, it was an absence of something; it would have been hard for me to notice it, this being my first child. He didn’t cry at night; in fact, he seldom cried at all, not even when he cut his teeth. Eva told me this was unheard of. She’d never come across a child who didn’t cry when it was teething.

‘You must be giving him something,’ she said.

‘I’m not.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘You’re not giving him alcohol?’

‘No.’

‘Some kind of herb, then?’

I shook my head.

It was Eva who told me about the rumours that were spreading through the village. People thought Mazey might be a prophet or a saint. That was the reason he’d survived that terrible plunge through the woods. That was the reason he’d been spared the fate of his unfortunate parents. You might almost say that they’d been sacrificed on his behalf. They had died that he might live.

‘That’s absurd,’ I said.

Eva lifted a finger to silence me. ‘I didn’t tell you about the miracle.’

The week before, she’d taken Mazey shopping in the village. It was late afternoon, already dark. Several people were in the grocer’s when she walked in. While she was waiting to be served, her arms grew tired and she sat Mazey on the counter. Suddenly there was a violet flash in the square outside and then a loud crack overhead, like a dry stick being snapped in two, and all the lights went out.

‘He was sitting on the counter,’ she said, ‘and somehow there was this glow around him, I don’t know if it was a reflection or what it was, but anyway, everybody noticed it. And because everybody in the shop was looking at him, they all saw him lift his arms up and at the same moment that he lifted his arms, the lights came on again — but only in the shop. The rest of the village was still in darkness.’ Eva stared at me with eyes that were wide and glistening, mesmerised by her own re-telling of the story.

It sounded like a coincidence to me.

‘I know,’ Eva said, ‘but people are talking.’

The next time I cut Mazey’s hair, she asked me for a lock of it. I gave it to her without thinking. A week later, while I was cleaning the lobby, I found the lock of hair. It had been laid on a square of brown velvet, then sealed into a small gilt box with a glass lid on it. The box had been fixed to the wall above the entrance to the hotel. When I asked her what it was doing there, kinks appeared in both her eyebrows; they could have been about to tie themselves in knots.

‘It’s so there’s calmness in the house,’ she said, as if it was perfectly obvious, ‘his calmness,’ and she sent a glance to the corner of the kitchen, where Mazey lay sleeping. She took me by the arm and led me into the shadows by the cellar door. ‘Tell me, is he talking yet?’

I shook my head.

‘Not even one word? Not even,’ and she lifted her shoulders towards her ears, and smiled a smile that was as small and plump as a ripe plum, ‘not even — Mama?’

‘No. Nothing.’

She frowned for a moment, then her dark eyes widened. ‘Perhaps he’s about to make an utterance. Who knows, perhaps he’ll speak in tongues!’ She moved closer. ‘Don’t mention it to Karl,’ she said. ‘The lock of hair, I mean. If you don’t say anything, he probably won’t notice. Men generally don’t.’

If it had only been Eva who was acting in this manner I would have put it down to one sulphur bath too many and thought little more about it. But one afternoon in February a young couple, recently married, approached me as I was walking home. They wanted me to bring Mazey to their house, so he could bless it. It wasn’t far, they said. Just round the corner.

Was it their eagerness that I succumbed to? Was I reminded of myself and Axel, the way we used to be — the way we could have been? Or was I just too tired after my day’s work to think of an excuse? I don’t know. In any case, I followed them and stood on the threshold of the house with Mazey and he was silent, as usual, and he stared, as usual, then we left. That was the blessing.

Winter moved northwards, leaving the landscape brown and sodden. We visited a rich man who’d been afflicted with a painful and incurable disease. I stood at his bedside, Mazey in my arms. We had only been there for half an hour when the man opened his eyes and said, ‘He just sits there, doesn’t he,’ and then he smiled and died. There was the feeling among the family that the child had lifted the rich man’s suffering and eased his difficult transition from this world to the next. There was the belief that the child had done good. I believed it, too. I was his mother, after all, and I was proud of him.

After that, we were often summoned to the beds of the dying to give them succour. We were summoned to the fields as well so the harvest would be plentiful. We were even summoned by the childless, in the hope that they might conceive. Each time Mazey appeared somewhere, the tales of his mysterious powers were enhanced and multiplied. More miracles were reported. Mazey passed an orchard and all the apples ripened. Mazey touched a sack of flour and when it was opened there was a gold coin in it. Just about the only thing he didn’t do was bring somebody back from the dead — but he was probably saving that for his adolescence. Presents were showered on him: slaughtered animals, fruit and vegetables, alcohol, cigars — even money. Far from not being able to afford to keep him, my father and I found that he was more than paying for himself. I was worried, though. The Poppels were becoming interested again. I knew how their minds worked. I could see them driving through the village and the surrounding countryside with Mazey sitting on a piece of velvet in the back of their cart. There would be giant banners, painted in red and gold: SEE THE HOLY CHILD! TOUCH HIS BLESSED GARMENTS AND BE HEALED! and also, naturally, CONTRIBUTIONS WELCOME! They would grant audiences with him. They would sell locks of his hair. They would guarantee fertility, good fortune, peace of mind. He would make them rich.

The Poppels were stupid people and it would take them time to realise all this, but when they did, it would be hard to convince them of my innocence. They’d remember how swiftly I’d adopted him and suddenly they’d see everything that had happened in a new light: the child was gifted, even sacred, and somehow I’d known it all along. This was the truth they’d been trying to get at during the week of the funeral. This was the knowledge I’d cunningly concealed from them. The Poppels were only a threat if they felt they might have been wronged in some way. Well, they would feel wronged. And, like most stupid people, once they’d got that idea into their heads, it would be almost impossible to dislodge it. Mazey had already become, to some extent, the property of the village: the track to our house was being worn out by the feet of supplicants. How long before the Poppels tried to claim him as their own? He was all I had, but I would lose him if something wasn’t done.

We celebrated Mazey Hekmann’s second birthday. That morning my father had told me that certain people in the village wanted to build a shrine to him. It was to be erected on the shore of the lake, in the place where we had found the truck; people were saying it was the site of his spiritual rebirth. My father was sitting in his chair by the stove, his pipe unlit in his hand.

‘They’ll probably ask me to build it for them.’ He laughed his hollow laugh. ‘Strange thing is, I could use the work.’

I looked up from the cake I was icing and for once I could see we were both thinking the same thought: Where will it end?

Curiously enough, it was the church that saved us.

One night there was a knock on the door. I opened it and peered out into the darkness. The village doctor was standing there.

‘You’ve got the wrong house,’ I told him. ‘There’s no one sick in here.’

‘That’s what I’m here to find out.’ He stepped forwards into the light and removed his hat. ‘I’ve come to see the child. The pastor sent me.’

The doctor was a small bald man with a fragile manner. He always looked to me as if he’d just broken something valuable and was expecting punishment. His name was Holbek, and it was said of him that he wrote poetry at night.

He spent a long time examining Mazey with all kinds of tools and instruments which he produced from his black leather bag. At one point he asked me if Mazey could talk. I shook my head. Not yet, I said. Does he ever smile? the doctor asked. I looked at my father. I don’t know, I said. I can’t remember.

At last the doctor turned to face us, one of his hands clasped in the other.

‘It’s as I thought,’ he said.

I stood beside my father, waiting for the doctor to continue.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘the child may be a saint, for all I know, but he is also,’ and he lowered his eyes for a moment and then lifted them again, ‘he is also retarded.’

‘I knew there was something about him,’ I exclaimed.

Holbek gave me a watchful look. The child’s mind was a seed that would never grow, he said, quoting from a poem he had not yet written. He couldn’t be sure whether the condition was inherited or whether it was the result of the terrible accident that had robbed him of his parents. He simply couldn’t say. However, it would be a great strain on all of us. He hoped we understood.

I tried to conceal my relief. No one would take him from us now.

‘Please assure the pastor that I intended none of this,’ I said. ‘Quite the opposite, in fact. I don’t know how it started, but I’m glad it’s over.’ I moved closer to the doctor, who was looking at me strangely. ‘Please let it be known throughout the village that my child is not a holy child, but a simple one.’

The doctor nodded.

‘His mother was a Poppel,’ I said. ‘That probably explains it.’

I thanked the doctor for coming, then showed him to the door. I stood in the yard and watched him walk away, his short dark figure merging quickly with the night.

During the next few weeks the village turned against us. Doors closed as we walked along the street. Faces looked away. They’d been deceived, not by the child or by me, but by themselves — though that wasn’t how they saw it, of course. They’d put their faith in Mazey, and he’d made fools of them. Their reverence was replaced by wariness at first, and then by fear. His eyes weren’t calm; they were blank. His silence wasn’t serenity, but emptiness. So it is that people are betrayed by their desperate craving for gods. But we lived on, as we had always done, in our house out in the woods — my father, my son, and me.

There came a time when the hotel’s fortunes began to change for the better. Eva was convinced it was because she’d taken the gilt box down from above the door and ceremonially burned the contents, but the fact was, our national economy was booming and the new prosperity could be felt, even in the more remote corners of the country. We had guests most nights. They weren’t the actors and statesmen of half a century before. They were ordinary people who wanted to escape for a weekend: pensioners, businessmen, romantic couples. Over the years, as Karl had started drinking heavily, first at home, then in the nearby town, Eva had come to rely on me. By the time I was twenty-four, I was practically running the place. I worked hard, with only a part-time cook and a chambermaid to help me. I saw less of my father, less of Mazey. It was a condition of my employment, in any case, that Mazey be left at home. As a baby he’d been no trouble, but things were different now that he was five. ‘It’s those eyes of his,’ Eva would say, shivering dramatically. ‘They put people off.’

It was true. Mazey was tall for his age, with pale-blond hair that fell across his forehead, just the way his father’s used to, but if you looked him in the eye you could see that something wasn’t right. He seemed to be looking through the world, rather than at it. For him, the world was like a pane of glass. You couldn’t guess what lay beyond the glass, though. Sometimes people stood in front of him and his gaze seemed to be saying, You’re not there. You don’t exist. They felt like ghosts all of a sudden. He even did it to me now and then. There were times when I felt that his eyes had stopped just behind my eyes, inside my mind, and that they were reading what was written there, a story I had never told, a secret nobody had guessed — the truth. And then I’d have to remind myself of what he was: a simpleton, an idiot, a fool — with only me to care for him, only me to trust. Only one truth counted any more, and that was this: we would never cause each other harm.

While at work I left Mazey with my father. Mazey’s silent staring didn’t disturb my father in the least. If anything, it suited him; he’d never been one to use words when silence would do just as well. He thought Mazey needed something to occupy him, though. Hunting through a drawer of odds and ends, he found an old pen-knife with a dark, bone handle and three blades of differing sizes. He gave it to the boy, began to teach him how to whittle. Mazey caught on quickly — so quickly, in fact, that my father claimed his own carpentering skills had skipped a generation; he saw himself in Mazey, which made the task of looking after him much easier, more of a pleasure. Mazey had a natural talent, he said, and it was a shame he was simple because he could have been a fine craftsman. What Mazey actually produced were strange, smooth shapes that didn’t look like anything, but somehow this seemed right: he was carving what was in his mind. And he would be absorbed for hours, sitting on the ground with that old blunt knife and a few off-cuts from whatever piece of furniture his grandfather happened to be working on. In those days I finished late at the hotel. Walking along the track towards our house, I’d see the stubborn bulk of it, down in the hollow, the whole place in darkness. The only light would be coming from the barn, and as I crossed the yard I’d see the two of them still bent over bits of wood, their figures shadowy, seeming to sway inside the dirty yellow tent of light shed by the hurricane lamp that hung from a beam above their heads.

Something else Mazey did was go off on his own. He’d touch his grandfather on the shoulder or pull at his sleeve, and he’d point away from the house, into the trees. Then he’d be gone. Once, when he was four, I found him on the road that led into the village. Four years old and he was halfway to the bridge! At first it worried me. But as the years went by, I got used to it; that curiosity or restlessness, it was part of his character. By the time he was six or seven, he would often be gone for the entire day. At nightfall he’d walk in through the kitchen door and, dragging a chair over to the sink, he’d climb up on to it and drink from the cold tap. So far as I could tell, he kept out of the village — almost as if he remembered how it had turned against him once.

The closest he would go was Miss Poppel’s place, which was on the edge of the village, across the road from the hotel. It was her front garden that attracted him. It had grown since I was a child. A jungle of broken machinery and appliances: vacuum-cleaners, bits of tractors, bicycle-wheels, refrigerators, ovens, ploughs. Salenko, the local mechanic, donated car-parts, the same way a butcher might give you free bones if you had a dog. She was especially fond of exhaust-pipes, which made excellent wind-chimes, she said. She must have had at least a dozen sets of wind-chimes hanging up outside her house. There were the exhaust-pipes, of course, but there were also hub caps, tin cans, even bottles (strictly for light summer breezes). Mazey’s favourite was the one that had been there the longest, the one made out of door-hinges. Though it took a strong wind to stir them into sound, he was just as happy sitting beneath the crab-apple tree and watching them twist silently on their lengths of copper wire. He could sit there for hours. And Miss Poppel would bring him a glass of fresh goat’s milk or a slice of something she had baked that day. She had promised him that the wind-chimes would be his when she was dead. She was going to mention them specifically in her will.

When I passed Miss Poppel’s house after work, Mazey would often appear from behind some rusting piece of metal and we’d walk home together. I’d tell him what kind of day I’d had; I’d tell him stories, too, like how much Uncle Karl had drunk, or how long Aunt Eva had stayed in the sulphur water. It was like talking to myself, really, because he never said anything; I couldn’t even be sure that he was listening.

On one such evening, when he was six or seven, I happened to mention the chimes. Gusts of wind had been rattling the doors and windows of the hotel all afternoon; I hadn’t heard the chimes myself, but I’d imagined Mazey in Miss Poppel’s garden, entranced. As usual, though, I left no room for him to speak. I’d already started telling him how Eva’s cigarettes had blown into the pool, so I almost missed it.

‘They were singing.’

I stopped in my tracks. Mazey walked on a few steps and then turned round and looked at me.

‘Did you say something?’ I said.

‘They were singing.’

I began to laugh out loud, right there in the middle of the road. He didn’t seem to understand what all the fuss was about. In his head, perhaps, he’d been talking for years.

That night, after I’d put Mazey to bed, I told my father what had happened. My father was cleaning his pipe, chipping at the inside of the bowl with a knife and tapping the scrapings on to the top of the stove. He listened to me, but didn’t stop what he was doing. He waited until I’d finished, then he spoke.

‘I never heard him say anything.’

‘I didn’t either,’ I said, ‘not until today.’

My father was silent for a while, packing tobacco into his pipe. He tamped the tobacco down, then held a lit match above it and bent the flame by sucking hard on the stem of the pipe. When he’d got the smoke moving in clouds towards the ceiling he looked at me. ‘Maybe it’s only you he’ll talk to.’

Towards the end of the month I saw some evidence of this. I passed Miss Poppel’s house on my way home, but there was no sign of Mazey. I thought nothing of it; he wasn’t there every day and, anyway, I was later than usual that evening. But just before I reached the bridge, I heard chanting coming from a field on my right.

I stepped into the ditch. There was still some light in the sky, and through the bushes I could see several children from the village gathered in the field. They seemed to be playing some kind of game. One of them — the leader, presumably — had his right elbow in his left palm and a cigarette between his fingers. There was a cartwheel propped against a tree, and a boy had been tied to it. I couldn’t see his face. I could only see the other children taunting him and their leader pacing up and down, taking quick drags from his cigarette.

‘Now,’ the leader was saying, ‘you’re going to talk.’

‘He ain’t going to talk,’ said one of the others.

‘He’ll talk.’ Smiling, the leader passed his cigarette to the boy who stood beside him. ‘Do his face.’

The boy who was tied to the wheel strained sideways, and it was then that I saw the blond hair falling across his forehead.

I fought my way through the bushes and ran across the field, shouting. The children stood still for a moment, staring at me, then the leader threw his cigarette away, not looking where it landed, and they scattered. I knelt down in front of Mazey and undid the string they’d bound him with. As soon as he was free, he took his right arm in his left hand and cradled it. He looked out across the field with his mouth stretched wide.

‘Did they hurt you?’

When he didn’t answer me, I gently took his shirt-sleeve and rolled it up. There were three round burns in a cluster on the inside of his arm, just below the elbow. I drew him close to me. I could feel his heart beating and his breath coming faster than usual. It may sound strange, but I was proud of him then. He talked — but only to me. He wouldn’t talk to anyone else. Not even if he was tortured.

He moved in my arms and I loosened my hold on him. He walked a few steps to where the cigarette lay in the grass, a thin spiral of blue smoke rising defiantly into the air. With no expression on his face, he put his shoe on the cigarette and crushed it out.

Of course I couldn’t protect him every moment of the day, but I had the feeling, as we walked home that evening, that I’d left him on his own for too long. I ought to be spending more time with him — but what about my work? And if I gave up work, where would the money come from? Maybe, in the back of my mind, I was already beginning to think of taking a husband.

The hotel was frequented not only by strangers but by local people as well and, during the evening, the small bar at the back was one of the few places in the area where you could have a quiet drink. Peter Kroner wasn’t a stranger exactly, but he wasn’t a local either. He came from a village some distance to the east. He was the foreman at a limestone quarry (Edwin Bock worked for him, among others). His family owned a small vineyard, too, producing a red wine that was fruity and sweet. The wine was popular, and Karl made a point of keeping half a dozen bottles in stock. That was Kroner’s excuse (he seemed, even then, like a man who needed excuses). He would call in for a drink on his way home from work, even though the hotel wasn’t on his way home at all, and his first words as he walked through the door were always the same: ‘So how’s it selling?’ He didn’t expect a reply. He didn’t care if it was selling or not. He almost never drank his father’s wine; he said it disagreed with him. It was one of the things I liked him for: though he was still living with his parents, he treated them with a healthy disrespect — or so it seemed to me. He was eleven years older than I was, and still unmarried. He had soft black hair and skin that didn’t take a razor well. Whenever I looked at him, he looked away, which I found flattering. It surprised me that I was flattered, but I was.

He began to come into the bar at lunchtime.

‘Don’t you ever do any work?’ I asked him once, and instantly regretted it because it gave him just the kind of opening he needed.

‘Can’t seem to concentrate,’ he muttered.

His eyes all jittery, his face looking grazed.

Axel was standing at my elbow suddenly, behind the bar, and he was grinning. ‘Why don’t you dance with him?’

Dance with him? There wasn’t even any music.

‘I don’t know,’ and Kroner twisted his glass of whisky on its base, ‘it’s just that I keep thinking about you.’

Dance with him.

‘I could be married,’ I said, ‘for all you know.’

‘You’re not married. I asked.’

‘I’m twenty-six years old. If I’m not married yet, there must be something wrong with me.’

‘Not that I can see.’

Exasperated now, I said, ‘I’ve got a child.’

‘I know,’ and Kroner grinned, ‘but he isn’t yours, is he?’

‘I love him like he’s mine.’

Kroner’s eyes moved across my face, first one way, then the other, not stopping anywhere, just sliding over it. Afterwards he looked into his drink again.

‘Then I’ll love him, too,’ he said in a quiet voice, and nodded to himself. ‘I’ll love him, too.’

Two months later I was wearing a pale-yellow dress down to the floor and he was wearing a dark-blue suit, and there was confetti on his shoulders and in his hair — tiny pale-blue horseshoes, tiny silver bells. His father’s sweet red wine flowed all afternoon and on into the evening. Dr Holbek recited a poem in our honour. He called it ‘A Connubial Epiphany’. We hardly knew what the title meant, let alone the poem, but we both applauded loudly at the end. There was a five-piece band, and we were in each other’s arms. Round and round we went, until my heels blistered.

‘There,’ I said to Axel, who was watching from a castle on the far side of the world. ‘I’m dancing with him. Are you satisfied?’

I never wanted Peter Kroner’s children — that wasn’t the point of the marriage — but he took one from me anyway (if you can have a man put his seed in you and call it taking; I think you can). It was a baby girl and, just after she was born, he came into the bedroom with an armful of pink roses. There were twenty-six of them, and they’d travelled all the way from the city, he said, by special courier.

‘I’m so proud of you.’ His grazed face blurred and I felt his lips on my cheek.

As far as I was concerned, it was like a robber going back to the bank he’d stolen from and congratulating it. I didn’t say anything, though. I couldn’t. The smell of the roses sickened me, their heavy sweetness thickening the air. I had to ask the midwife to stand them by the open window. Kroner didn’t notice. He was holding his baby daughter in both hands and his face had softened like a saint’s.

‘Black hair,’ he said, ‘just like her dad.’

I had given birth at my father’s house, which was where we were living then. Kroner wasn’t happy about it — his parents’ house was bigger — but I’d insisted, not so much for my own sake as for Mazey’s. I didn’t want him to be uprooted from the only place he knew.

It was a hot summer. Every day Kroner would drive over to the quarry, and I would stay in the house and sit by the window and think of the stream all dried up at the bottom of the field and the willow’s branches trailing in the mud. In my head everything was numb. I didn’t feel much for the child. When it lay in my arms and I looked down at its raw, puckered skin, it wasn’t love I felt, or even fondness. I’d loved once and I wasn’t about to be tricked into loving again — especially not by a pink, twitching thing with someone else’s hair. And besides, after loving Axel and then Mazey, there didn’t seem to be anything left over. It was so different from Mazey, too. I remembered how envious Eva had been, and now I understood. This new child cried all the time. There was so much strength in its tiny, swollen body. I heard the crying not with my ears, but my nerves; I felt like wood under a blunt saw, splintering. I’d find myself staring into her mouth, the hard curve of her tongue, dark-red, it was, almost purple-black at times, and then I’d want to hurt her.

I couldn’t get over the feeling that I’d been robbed, somehow, or cheated. Partly it was Kroner himself: the joy he took in the child, the holy face he had when he looked down at her, the lightness in his step — I was sickened by it just as I’d been sickened by the flowers. There were days when he seemed to be looking at me with a kind of crafty pleasure, as if he’d slipped something past me. He’d married me. I’d had his child. He’d got his own way all along, and I was too exhausted to do anything about it.

I was just settling into my chair on the back porch one morning when I heard the sound of an engine in low gear. I couldn’t think who might be visiting — I didn’t have many friends — and though I didn’t feel like company, I was curious to see whose car appeared in the clearing. It was Karl’s, but Eva was driving and she was alone. I watched her open the door. She was wearing a loose blue dress and a pair of bedroom slippers. As she turned towards the house, I saw the bruising on her cheek and around her eye, and then I knew why she had come.

We sat on the porch all morning drinking sweet black coffee. I smoked one of her cigarettes, my first for more than a year, which made the world glass over. She noticed the cushions I’d arranged beneath me.

‘Does it still hurt?’

I nodded.

‘After I had Thomas,’ she said, ‘they sewed me up too tight. They had to cut me open again.’

‘Eva.’

‘Sorry.’ She threw her cigarette into the yard.

She told me Karl had started drinking in the mornings. He had a few before he went out, and by the time he came home at night he was so loud the roof seemed to jump right off the house. The children were frightened. Even the guests were frightened. She tried to smile, but it hurt. I watched her carefully. Her left eye looked like the letter e if you typed it on the hotel typewriter and then went back and typed another e on top of it. She was still talking about Karl. She wondered if I could speak to him. He was my brother, after all. She couldn’t think who else to ask.

I didn’t think it was right of Karl, hitting her like that, but at the same time, knowing him as I did, I could see how she might have driven him to it. Her hair was dry and split, and her skin was turning spongy. There was a slackness about her, a lack of energy, that I knew would infuriate him. He would want to take hold of her and shake her. Wring her out.

‘There’s no point me talking to him,’ I said.

‘Why not?’

‘He doesn’t listen to me. He never has.’

Sighing, Eva lit another cigarette. She looked greedy when she smoked; it was the way her lips reached out for the filter, as if they couldn’t wait to draw the smoke from it.

‘What about your husband?’ she said.

That evening I spoke to Kroner. He knew Karl through his father and the wine business. I persuaded him to have a drink with Karl, though I told him I didn’t think it would do much good.

‘Just try,’ I said. ‘For Eva’s sake.’

Three nights later the door burst open and Kroner stood in the middle of the room, his face more grazed than usual, his clothes dishevelled. He was shouting.

‘He broke my tooth. He broke my fucking tooth.’

The baby started crying.

Kroner touched one hand against his mouth, then took it away and looked at it. ‘Your family,’ he shouted. ‘Your fucking family —’

‘My father’s in the next room —’

‘You, your brother, your crazy fucking child …’ He was circling the room, first one way, then the other. He kept touching his mouth and looking at his hand. There wasn’t much to see. ‘I don’t know why I got into this. I don’t have the first idea …’

I looked at the baby’s hard, curved tongue. I thought of feeding her, but her blunt gums hurt my breasts.

‘I don’t — I just don’t have the first fucking idea —’

‘Nor do I,’ I said in a quiet voice.

He heard me, though, and suddenly his hands flew up into the air and his face creased above his eyebrows, through his chin. ‘Don’t say that, Edith.’

I stared at the window. It had begun to rain.

‘I didn’t mean it,’ Kroner was saying. ‘He hit me, that’s all. Your brother.’

‘Let’s have a look at it.’

He knelt on the floor and lifted his lip. He showed me the tooth.

‘It’s chipped,’ I told him, ‘nothing more. It’ll give you character.’

He looked up at me and the way he looked then, just for a moment, even with the child crying and the rain crawling down the window, I knew why I’d allowed it all to happen.

Winter lasted longer than usual that year, and even in April we had sleet driving almost horizontally across the land, the wind tearing out of the north-east and cutting through your clothes as if they weren’t there. One morning that month I came back from the village to find both Kroner and Mazey gone. They rarely went anywhere together; I couldn’t think where they might be. But the moment I noticed tyre tracks in the yard I guessed.

It was afternoon before Kroner returned, and he returned alone. He was trying to keep his eyes steady as he stepped down out of the truck and saw me waiting outside the back door. He did a poor imitation of a man with right on his side.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I did it.’

‘Did what?’

‘The boy …’ He stood in the mud, one hand outstretched, as if the truth was self-evident.

It was — but I wasn’t about to put it into words for him. I shifted his child higher in my arms. The inside of my head was scorched, charred; I couldn’t have spoken if I’d wanted to.

‘I thought we agreed,’ he said, taking one step towards me. And then, bristling, ‘I’ve done you a favour and that’s all the thanks I get?’

I turned and ran into the barn and snatched a skinning knife down from the wall. Then out into the yard again, the child still in my arms.

Kroner was standing where I’d left him, but all his righteousness, and all the indignation that had followed it, had fled. Just those small, square hands spread in the air and his chin at an angle, justifying. Like most men, he could be hypnotised by sudden, unexpected movement.

My head was black inside, all black. I held the knife just below my jaw, which was the same height as Kroner’s heart.

‘Give me the keys to the truck.’

His Adam’s apple plunged, then climbed again. ‘Not with the child here, Edith. Not with the —’

‘Give me the keys.’

He reached into his pocket. Took the keys out, handed them to me. His eyes were still running backwards and forwards between the aimed blade and my face.

I pushed the child at him and left.

I drove the forty-five kilometres with the knife lying beside me on the seat. It was a cold day, with snow at the edges of the road. Everything was grey: the sky, the trees, the fields. I saw a fire burning in the land behind a house. I couldn’t believe how orange it was; it was the only real colour anywhere.

Kroner had talked to me the week before, when Mazey and my father were asleep. I was tired that night; I couldn’t remember much of what he’d said. He never could say things straight out, anyway. He had to come at you round corners. The long and the short of it was, he’d tried to love the boy; he’d tried, and failed. I thought he should try harder.

Kroner shook his head. ‘He doesn’t belong with us, not now we’ve got a child of our own.’

‘Where do you think he belongs? With the Poppels?’ I laughed scornfully.

‘We’ve got our own family now. It’s just not natural.’

‘Nobody said it was natural. It’s how it is, that’s all.’

Kroner shook his head again. I hadn’t listened. I hadn’t understood. And so he’d been forced to act without me, on my behalf.

That was the trouble with Kroner. He thought he was the clever one. He thought he could get his way. Well, we’d see about that. We’d see. I gripped the steering-wheel so hard, my hands ached for three days afterwards, as if I’d been strangling guinea fowl all afternoon, or scything grass.

The institution was a big building, and it took me almost half an hour to find Mazey. He was in a long room on the second floor. It was something like a church in there, only the smell was different. They’d strapped him to a metal bed, with nothing underneath him but a dark-green rubber sheet. He was almost naked, just a gown on him that was unfastened at the sides, and it was cold in that room, so cold that my breath showed in the air like cigarette smoke. I didn’t bother unfastening the belts. I just worked the skinning knife under the leather and sawed until it frayed and snapped. First one wrist, then the other. Then his ankles. I put his clothes back on, and led him out of the room and down the stairs. There were three men in white overalls who stopped talking when they saw us. We walked right through them and they didn’t move. It was something in my eyes, maybe. Or maybe it was the knife that I was holding upright in my fist.

He sat beside me in the truck and watched the trees go by. His right hand opened and closed on his bare leg. He didn’t seem upset by what had happened. It had happened in the world where his body was, but his mind was somewhere else. There was a gap between the two that most people didn’t have: his body might be in pain, but his mind would be too far away to notice or remember. I asked him if he was hungry. He looked at me with eyes that were the same colour as the weather; he didn’t say anything, though. I stopped at a roadside café and bought him a sausage and some chips on a paper plate. He ate slowly, his head turned sideways, one finger on the window. Sometimes it hurt me just to look at him. There were things that were going to happen and I would never even know.

He only spoke once during the drive, and that was when we passed a house that had a crab-apple tree in front of it. I thought I heard him murmur the word ‘singing’.

I turned to him. ‘You mean chimes? The wind-chimes?’

He didn’t answer. His head was resting against the seat, and his hands, closed into soft fists, were pressed against his thighs.

‘We’ll be home soon.’ I took one hand off the wheel and pushed his hair back from his forehead. ‘I wouldn’t leave you in a place like that. I wouldn’t leave you there.’

It was dusk when we drove into the clearing. A light was on in the barn — my father, working late. He’d taken to spending most of his time in the barn since Kroner had moved in; he even had a bed out there. The house was in darkness. Just the kitchen window glowing, and the sky still pale above. Those yellow panes of glass looked welcoming, but a welcome was the last thing I expected. There was a man in that room, and three hours ago I’d held a knife to him.

Kroner was sitting by the stove with a newspaper spread on his knees. He was pretending to read, but I knew he wasn’t taking in a single word. The baby was lying on a blanket on the table, crying.

‘Baby needs feeding,’ he said.

Some of the fury that had carried me forty-five kilometres across the county still remained. I took Mazey by the shoulder and stood him in front of Kroner. At last Kroner looked up from the paper, his eyes jumping from my face to my hand and back again.

‘See that man?’ I was pointing at Kroner, but looking at Mazey.

Mazey nodded.

‘That man is not your father,’ I said. ‘Do you understand?’

According to Eva, Karl had started drinking two years after he’d got married and he’d been drinking ever since, so when I drove to the town one morning I wasn’t surprised to see his car parked outside a small bar near the railway crossing. What surprised me was what happened next. I was supposed to be buying shoes for Karin that day. Instead, I parked my car next to his and walked into the bar.

It was a fine September day outside, but inside it could have been any time of year at all. Or any year. The air was half smoke, half dust. Men sat alone, their faces propped against their hands. High up, where the walls turned yellow, a deer’s head was mounted on a wooden shield. It had both its antlers, but only one of its glass eyes. Above the bar there was a faded poster of a girl in red shorts and a bikini top. She was advertising tyres. The door to the toilets was ajar and I could smell the disinfectant.

I took the stool next to Karl’s. He didn’t notice me — or, if he did, he gave no sign of it. His glass was almost empty, its tall sides laced with froth. He must have drunk it fast. I bought him another and put it in front of him. I bought myself one, too. When he looked round, there was a slow, knowing smile on his face. I didn’t think he was pleased to see me particularly. I was simply somebody he recognised.

‘Nice place you found,’ I said.

He grunted.

I raised my glass. ‘Your health.’

His shoulders shook once or twice, but if he was laughing, he kept the sound of it inside.

That was the way it began, the two of us just sitting there. The silence was my father’s silence: you didn’t open your mouth until you had something to say — and even then, sometimes, you didn’t. But when an hour had gone and I still hadn’t left, when I ordered more drinks instead of leaving (using the money set aside for Karin’s shoes), he began to talk. It was mostly to himself, though I must’ve been the trigger for it. He was at his wits’ end. There was a business to run, the family as well, and all Eva did was sit in that fucking rock-pool and read from the Apocalypse. Recently she’d started claiming that their guests were agents of the devil, sent to lead her into temptation. Sometimes she told them the hotel was full. Or else she hid bowls of sulphur water underneath their beds, and the smell was so terrible, they always left the next morning. She already smelled bad enough herself. Like hell, in fact. He’d stood it for years, but he didn’t know how much longer he could last. He couldn’t even bring himself to touch her any more. It was hard to believe he’d had two children by her.

‘Are you going to leave her?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know. It’s Tom and Anna …’

I nodded.

‘Sometimes I try and wait it out,’ he said. ‘Mostly that’s what I do. It’ll get better, that’s what I’m thinking. But it doesn’t. And if anyone tries to talk to me about it —’ He broke off, shook his head. ‘Like that time I hit your husband.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘That time he came to see me. I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have hit him.’

‘Ah, fuck it,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ I drank some beer. When Karl looked at me, I shrugged and said, ‘He’s a coward.’

I wasn’t only thinking about the way he drove Mazey to the institution when I wasn’t looking. It was everything that had happened since. At first he tried to separate Mazey from the family by legal means. He wouldn’t allow Mazey to use his name. Mazey was a Hekmann, he said, not a Kroner, and he had a piece of paper from the lawyer’s office to prove it.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘In that case, I’m a Hekmann, too.’

From that time on I used my maiden name, even though we were still married and living in the same house. Even though I didn’t have a piece of paper from the lawyer’s office. But for Kroner that was just the beginning. He wanted Mazey gone, and practised untold cruelties behind my back, hoping to drive him away. He was sly, as always. He hurt Mazey in ways that made it look as if the boy had done it himself. The bruises, the lacerations, the burns — they could have been accidents. Once, Mazey came home smelling of urine and I thought he must have wet himself — he did that sometimes — but I could smell it on his face and hair, and I became suspicious. I couldn’t prove anything, though. Later I heard rumours that Kroner and a couple of his men from the quarry had chained Mazey to a fence and then they all undid their trousers and pissed on him. That kind of treatment didn’t work with Mazey. He knew no other life — why would it make him leave? Added to which, he didn’t understand things that other people took for granted. If you put him in front of a television it was quite possible that he’d use it as a mirror. Kroner never understood that. Someone told me that Kroner had taken Mazey to the bridge one time and pointed out along the road and said, ‘Get out of here. Go on, get.’ Mazey just stared at Kroner’s finger, the way a cat might, and then followed him home.

I nodded to myself. ‘A coward’s all he is. And what you were saying about Eva, well, the same goes for Kroner.’

Karl looked at me across the rim of his glass, but I didn’t want to talk about my husband any more. There were nights when I could feel he was ready and he tried to put it into me, but it had been a long time since I wanted him — in fact, maybe I never had. His white belly lowered over me, his flesh so soft I lost my fingers in it. The way his skin flushed in a wide red collar round his neck. I only had to think of Axel lying by the stream before the sun came up, the colour of his skin in the morning light, the clean wood smell of it …

And anyway, I knew what his game was, as surely as if he’d been wearing a stocking over his head and carrying a sawn-off shot-gun. He’d stolen from my body once, and I wasn’t about to let that happen again. I still dreamed about the roses sometimes, all twenty-six of them, and I always woke up feeling sick.

‘No one in our family knows how to marry,’ Karl said.

‘Maybe Felix got it right,’ I said. ‘He didn’t even try.’

Suddenly I looked at Karl, my brother, and I smiled. I’d just realised. This was the first time we had ever talked.

But there was a moment, later, when everything spread out sideways like melted glass, and Karl turned to me and said, ‘You know, I never did like you very much.’

At first I laughed, treating it as a joke, but his face didn’t change. And suddenly I wasn’t drunk any more. Something like that, it sobers you from one moment to the next. In a way, though, I’d known it was coming. By sitting on the empty stool, I’d asked for it. The truth behind those years of silence.

‘I just never did.’ He was still looking at me with his three-day growth of beard and his sudden, drunken clarity. ‘Know why?’

‘You’re going to tell me, aren’t you.’

‘Oh yeah. I’m going to tell you.’ He turned on his stool so eagerly, so clumsily, I had to smile.

‘You smile,’ he said. ‘But underneath, you’re not smiling.’

‘Oh?’ I said. ‘And what am I doing,’ I said, ‘underneath?’

‘You never let anything out, do you. You fucking never,’ and his hand closed in a tight fist as he fought to explain himself, ‘you never give anything away.’

I was beginning to think I’d made a mistake by walking into the bar. I wished I’d driven right past it. The shoe shop seemed a far better place to be.

‘Maybe that’s why you look the way you do,’ he said.

I asked him what he meant.

‘Our mother, she was beautiful. That’s why she left —’

‘You remember that?’

‘Karin’s got something of her, in a way. But you —’ He looked down at the bar and shook his head. ‘Me, all right, I get drunk,’ he said, ‘I make a fool of myself, I knock people down, sometimes I spend a couple of nights in prison cooling off — but I’m not dangerous.’ He leaned closer to me, one finger lifted, pointing. ‘It’s you. You’re the one who’s dangerous.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘People are terrified.’

But what he was saying tied a string around my heart and pulled it tight. I’d always wondered if anyone knew. If anyone had guessed.

‘I’m right, aren’t I. Aren’t I.’

I was hoping he’d drink enough to forget what he’d said. At the same time I knew it came from deep down, years back. Being drunk was not the source of it. That was just a way of gaining access. And besides, I’d never believed what people said about being so drunk they couldn’t remember anything. Still, I bought him another beer. Just in case it was true.

‘You don’t hit anyone or go to prison,’ Karl said. ‘You just sit there, behind those spectacles of yours, and you could kill us all, one by one, and you wouldn’t feel a thing.’ He reached out for my glasses, but I swayed back on my stool. ‘Ah,’ and he waved a hand past my face, disgusted now, and drank.

I lit a cigarette.

‘You’d do it, wouldn’t you,’ he muttered. ‘Maybe you did it already. Maybe you already killed someone.’

‘Like who?’

‘See? You’re doing it right now. That’s it, right there. The look I’m talking about.’ And he pointed right into my face with a finger that drew unsteady circles, like the shapes flies make in the air. ‘Like who?’ he said, imitating me. ‘Like who?’

I pushed his hand away so hard, he almost fell backwards off his stool. He was right. I could’ve killed him. Right there and then. The anger bursting through me like the rush of hot pus from an abscess.

‘I got to you.’ He sat there, chuckling. ‘You might as well admit it. I got to you.’

‘Yeah, Karl,’ I said. ‘You got to me.’

You stupid son of a bitch.

It was all bluff. Curiosity and bluff. He was no threat to me at all. No threat to anyone. I used the mirror behind the bar to look at him. His damp face, the lids of his eyes inflamed.

‘Karl,’ I said, ‘you’re so fucking drunk, I could pour you into a bottle and put a cork on it.’

‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you.’

‘Anything,’ I said, ‘to shut you up.’

I ordered a whisky, to clean the taste of beer from my mouth. I stared at the girl on the poster. I found myself wondering what my mother had looked like. No one had ever told me. I’d never even seen a photograph. That could be her, for all I knew, in those red shorts. It was six o’clock and the bar was beginning to fill up with men from the nearby building site. I would have to be going.

As I climbed down off the stool, Karl took hold of my sleeve. ‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘Axel’s boy. Why’d you do that?’

‘Do what?’

‘Why’d you take him in?’

I shook myself free. ‘I’m tired of your questions, Karl. I’m going home.’

‘Home?’ He stared into the forest of green and brown bottles on the shelf above the bar. ‘Yeah, there’s always that.’

Outside, it was dark. The street-lights bounced. I’d thought the fresh air would clear my head. It only made things worse. Now I had to drive.

The car didn’t seem to want to move. I had to press down hard on the accelerator. After a few minutes I smelled burning. The handbrake was still on.

I drove slowly, seeing double. Luckily, the roads were empty.

Then, three kilometres from home, I misjudged a bend. I’d known it all my life, but it seemed sharper than usual that evening and before I could do anything the car was sliding sideways into a field. I got out. Water seeped in over the top of my shoes. I found a fence-post and wedged it underneath the wheels. But when I tried to reverse back on to the road, the wheels spun and the wood just fell apart. I looked around. The trees kept gliding away from me, away from me. The sky was made of dots — millions of tiny, busy dots. It didn’t seem very likely that anyone would come along. That was why I’d chosen the route in the first place. I was going to have to walk.

The evening was cool and dry, no sign of any rain. Still. Three kilometres. I spat into the hedgerow, my saliva thick with alcohol. Something Karl said to my father on the day of the accident came back to me. When was the last time you noticed anything? The words spread through me and went on spreading, like something that had spilled out of a bottle. I had the sudden, uneasy feeling that Karl knew more than he was telling. He had asked me why I’d taken Axel’s child, but he already knew the answer. He just wanted me to admit it to him. He wanted to hear me say that it was out of love. A new love, but distilled from a much older one, and all the stronger for it. On the other hand, did it really matter if he knew? He was hardly going to go round telling people. But the secret was his, and he had to carry it. Perhaps that was the source of his disgust with me, the reason for his silence.

At last I turned down the track that led to our house. There was a light mist rising in the hollow; the clearing looked mysterious. As I passed the barn, I called out to my father. He was putting the finishing touches to a miniature chest of drawers, which Dr Holbek would keep his poems in. I pushed too hard on the kitchen door and it crashed against the wall, dislodging something in the room. Kroner looked up from his evening paper.

‘I didn’t hear the car,’ he said.

I had to laugh. ‘That’s because there wasn’t one.’

‘But you went out in it.’

‘It broke down. I left it in a field.’ I sank into a chair, exhausted suddenly.

‘You’re drunk,’ Kroner said.

He was right. When I looked at him, his whole body kept jerking sideways. ‘Is Mazey back yet?’

‘I haven’t seen him.’

The door opened and Karin walked into the room. She looked at me with eyes that seemed too big for her face.

‘Did you get my shoes?’ she asked.

I shook my head. ‘They didn’t have your size.’

The following spring, Karl moved his family away from the village altogether. He’d taken a job as a supermarket manager in an industrial town down south. At first Eva didn’t want to leave, but Karl quoted Revelation 3:8 — Behold I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name — and she went peacefully after that. They rented a small house in the suburbs. Yellow, with brown shutters. Eva sent us a picture later that year. It was the only time we heard from them, apart from a card at Christmas. In some ways, knowing what he knew, I was relieved to have him gone.

They’d asked us to run the hotel for them, though as Karl had told me in the bar, there was nothing much to run. (A glance at the register confirmed this: only thirteen guests in the previous nine months.) It was mostly a question of living there, maintaining it. Kroner was overjoyed. At last we’d have some privacy, he said, some room. He also seemed to think it was romantic, moving into the place where ‘we first met and fell in love’, as he put it. He talked about ‘a brand-new start’. If what I’d wanted was a man with the ability to fool himself, I couldn’t have done better than Peter Kroner. Did he think I didn’t know about the cruelties that he’d inflicted on Mazey? Did he expect me to forget?

The week before the move, he tried to persuade me to leave Mazey behind. He said Mazey would be happier out at the house. He could sit there whittling all day. No one would bother him. And he’d be company for my father. I stared at Kroner in disbelief. Crafty as ever, brazen, too: he was even using my own arguments against me. I wouldn’t hear of it, of course. Mazey was my son. He could visit his grandfather all he wanted, but he would live with us.

Mazey was seventeen now, the same age Axel was when he died. He was taller than Axel, though, and longer-limbed. His mouth was wide. To people who didn’t know him, he might appear to be grinning — but if they looked him in the eyes they realised their mistake. He’d lost none of his restlessness: ‘I’m going out,’ he’d say (he always told me, and only me, beforehand; it was strange how certain fragments of normal behaviour had lodged in him), and then he’d put on his dun-coloured jacket and his cap, and he’d be gone for hours — days, sometimes. I tried not to worry. Now that he was grown, people in the village left him alone. They knew who he was and, more importantly, they remembered what he’d been, and there was a residue of wariness, if not fear, even after fifteen years. The streets he walked along emptied before him. The landscape cleared as he moved across it. Somehow I doubted that he noticed, though, and my heart went out to him in his ignorance. I was often curious about the time he spent away from me, but if I asked him where he’d been, his answers were usually gruff and one word long. Walking or, Around. In some ways, he was typical for his age: the secrecy, the awkwardness, the resistance to questioning — they were all part of adolescence. I was just his mother. I didn’t need to know.

We’d been living at the hotel for about six months when a police van pulled up outside one afternoon. I was by myself that day; Kroner had taken Karin with him to the quarry, and Mazey had gone out two nights before and hadn’t returned. I opened the front door and stood on the porch. The policeman was already standing at the foot of the steps. I recognised him as the constable from the next village. He looked down into his hat, which he was holding in both hands, then squinted up at me. ‘Mrs Kroner?’

I grunted. I no longer used the name.

‘It’s your son. He’s in hospital.’

As we drove towards the town, he told me that Mazey had been found lying in a ditch. His right leg had been broken in two places. They thought he’d been knocked down by a car. It was hard to be sure, of course, because he wouldn’t talk to anyone.

‘He hardly ever talks,’ I said. ‘He’s backward.’

‘I know. They didn’t realise. They thought it was shock.’

When we reached the hospital, I was taken to see the doctor. He wore half-moon glasses with thin gold rims. His lips were too dark, almost purple; it made me think of Felix, when we woke up on that winter morning and he was dead. The doctor explained that the double fracture had not, in itself, been too severe, though it had been complicated by the length of time that had elapsed before the leg received medical attention. It was possible the patient would walk with a limp for the rest of his life.

‘Are you in the habit of letting your son wander the countryside at night?’ He peered at me over his glasses. ‘You’re aware that he’s retarded?’

‘This wasn’t an accident,’ I said. ‘It was deliberate.’

The doctor began to ask me something else, but I interrupted. ‘I’d like to see him now. Alone.’

Lying in his ward, Mazey looked unshaven and exhausted. His leg was in plaster, all the way from the top of his thigh to his ankle, and it was being supported by a system of ropes and pulleys. I sat beside the bed and put my hand on his.

‘Are you all right, Mazey?’

His eyes lifted, fixed on me.

‘It doesn’t hurt too much?’ I said.

He shook his head, two tiny movements. Right, then left. Then still again. He was glad to see me. I could tell.

I gripped his hand. ‘You’ll be out of here in no time,’ I said, ‘don’t worry.’

When I got back to the hotel, Kroner and Karin were eating supper at the kitchen table — just bread and cheese, a glass of milk. I knew they’d stopped talking as soon as they heard the front door open. You can always tell when people have just stopped talking: they seem to be acting suddenly — and they’re not actors so it doesn’t feel natural. I walked across the dark, empty dining-room and into the light of the kitchen. Kroner asked me where I’d been.

‘I’ve been with Mazey.’ I took off my coat and hung it behind the door. ‘Didn’t you hear what happened?’

No, he hadn’t heard.

‘Someone knocked him down with a car. He was lying in a ditch for twenty-four hours with a broken leg.’ I was watching Kroner carefully now. ‘Do you know anything about it?’

No, he didn’t. He was studying his sandwich, as if he couldn’t quite decide what angle to approach it from.

‘Look at me.’

His eyes lifted to my face for a moment, then slid away. ‘I just told you, Edith. I don’t know anything about it. You tell me that there’s been some kind of accident. Well, it’s the first I heard of it. All right?’ He took a deep breath and blew the air out noisily. ‘Jesus Christ.’

I stared at him. ‘You didn’t do it?’

‘No.’

The lights in the kitchen flickered, but stayed on.

‘Is he dead?’ Karin asked.

She lifted her glass of milk to her mouth with both hands and drank from it. Nine years old, with dark-blue eyes and brown hair curling down on to her shoulders. She felt less like mine than ever.

‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s not dead.’

‘Old Miss Poppel’s dead. She —’

‘We’re not talking about Old Miss Poppel.’

Kroner put his sandwich down, only half-eaten. ‘There’s no need to shout at her.’

I went over to the sink, ran the tap and rinsed my hands in the warm water. I noticed my reflection in the window.

‘So you don’t know anything?’ I said, with my back to the room. ‘It’s not another of your little games?’

I heard Kroner’s chair scrape backwards and saw his reflection rise behind my own.

‘Karin,’ he said. ‘I think it’s time you went to bed.’

I stared at my face, then at his. Then I stared into the blackness that was beyond us both. There’s no such thing as an accident, I whispered to myself. There’s no such thing.

One night, when the moon was almost full and Kroner was asleep, I crept into Karin’s room and woke her up. I put my mouth close to her ear. Told her to get dressed.

‘Is it an adventure?’ she asked me.

I nodded. ‘It’s a secret, too.’

I took her by the hand and led her down the stairs. Standing in the passageway outside the dining-room, I could hear Kroner snoring in his bed one floor above. I opened the side door and we walked out into the gravel car-park. Then down the steps, towards the pool. Karin was wide awake now, and too filled with wonder at being out at night to say a word. We moved past the fir trees at the back of the hotel, over some rocks and along a narrow path, into the shadow of the woods. It was half an hour to the main road. I looked at Karin, walking beside me. ‘You’re not tired, are you?’

She shook her head. ‘Where are we going?’

I smiled mysteriously. ‘You’ll see.’ In my right hand I had a bucket and every time it swung, the moon broke into a thousand pieces.

I’d spent the afternoon smashing empty beer bottles and pickle jars behind the shed where the pool equipment and the gardening tools were kept. Everyone was out except for Mazey, who was upstairs, listening to his chimes. (Miss Poppel had been as good as her word: The wind-chimes that hang from the crab-apple tree in my front garden, I hereby bequeath to Mazey Hekmann.) Even if he heard me, though, it didn’t matter. He was hardly going to tell anyone.

When we reached the main road, we crouched down in a shallow ditch. ‘This is the place,’ I whispered.

Karin looked at me. It wasn’t anywhere she knew.

I showed her how the road sloped upwards, dipped, sloped upwards once again, then curved to the left and vanished behind some trees.

‘From here we can see them coming.’

‘Who?’ she said. ‘Who’s coming?’ Her eyes had widened. Maybe she thought it was Holy Jesus, or the Three Wise Men. Christmas was only a few weeks off.

But I didn’t answer. I put one finger to my lips and watched the road. Minutes passed. Then I touched her shoulder, pointed to the west. There was a beam of light in the distance. At first it looked like a triangle, long and golden, lying on its side. But as the car came accelerating round the bend, the triangle turned into circles, two circles, also gold. They were so bright that we had shadows, even though the car was still at least a kilometre away. I tipped the bucket, shook some broken glass on to my hand. I waited until the car was hidden in the dip, then stood up and threw the glass across the road. I ducked down again, one hand braced on my knee.

It was almost frightening — the size of it, the speed, the sudden noise. I saw glass glitter underneath its tyres. But nothing happened. The car hurtled over it and on. Its tail-lights were snuffed out. It was gone.

‘Church-goers,’ I muttered.

I reached for the bucket, and looked round at Karin. She was kneeling beside me, biting her bottom lip.

‘Now it’s your turn.’

I shook the bucket as if it was a game and she could choose any piece she wanted and maybe win a prize. She hesitated, though. The trees above us shifted in the wind.

‘Don’t you love your brother?’ I whispered.

Her eyes looked into mine.

‘Your brother, Mazey. Don’t you love him?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Come on, then. Cup those hands of yours.’

I trickled glass out of the bucket. Her hands were so small, even when they were joined together. I hoped it would be enough.

‘Careful,’ I said. ‘Don’t cut yourself.’

No sooner had I set the bucket down than I heard the sound of an engine again. It came and went in the silence, the way mosquitoes do. Headlights were searching the darkness on the bend. I waited until they disappeared, then took Karin’s arm.

‘Now, girl. Do it now.’

I watched her step out into the road, lightly, almost on tiptoe, as though she was afraid the surface might give way beneath her. She stood still for a moment, then she flung both hands upwards into the air. She might have been releasing something she had caught — an insect, or a butterfly. The glass bounced prettily. But it held her there too long. She’d forgotten all about the car. And now the headlights were rising above the level of the road and bearing down on her, two circles merging into one fierce glare. I reached out, seized her arm and pulled her down into the ditch.

The car howled past us. The hot diesel blast of it.

I heard a tyre blow. As I lifted my head, I saw the car swerve. Then it was rolling, the metal spitting sparks. It hit a tree, bounced off it, turned over half a dozen times. Then it was lying motionless, on its side, two hundred metres down the road.

I stood up. Kicking most of the glass into the ditch, I walked towards the car. One of the headlights pointed into the undergrowth, as if it was trying to show us something. I could smell burnt rubber. Nothing was moving.

Two people were inside. The man wore a suit and a pale hat. His mouth was open. One of his teeth had a green jewel in it; the rest were glistening with blood. There was a woman, too, but she was harder to make out. She was beneath the man, all folded up in what was now the bottom of the car. One of her shoes had fallen off and I could see her stockinged foot, the underside of it. She had high arches. I thought she might be a dancer.

‘Trying to kill my son,’ I said.

I took Karin’s hand and looked down through the windscreen at the ungainly tangle of their bodies.

‘Murderers,’ I said.

Two days later, at the breakfast table, I read a report of the accident in the local paper. The two occupants of the car were named as J. Swanzy, also known as Emerald Joe, on account of the gemstone he wore in his front tooth, and his companion, Kamilla Esztergom, the singer. Both were killed outright. Police were calling it a case of reckless driving, since the levels of alcohol in the blood of both the deceased had been well in excess of the legal limit.

I touched the names with the tip of my finger. Emerald Joe. Kamilla (the singer!). Had they been talking when the car hit that patch of glass? And, if so, what about? What had their lives been like? I couldn’t even begin to imagine. I’d never met people who wore emeralds in their teeth. They reminded me of the stories Felix used to tell. I thought of Mazey, who would walk with a limp until he was dead. Mazey in the ditch, alone, in pain. I brought my eyes back into focus. Only then did I see the misprint: instead of reckless, they’d written wreckless. What had happened had happened — but, at the same time, somehow, it had not. All the accounts were balanced, all grudges cancelled out.

One year I took Mazey to the lake. I wanted to show him the place where I had found him, and I was also curious to see it again for myself. There was nowhere to park on that particular bend in the road, so we drove past it, leaving the car on a farm-track half a kilometre further on, then walked back. Mazey had recovered full use of his leg. From time to time he would reach down and touch it, just above the knee, and there was a slight unevenness to his walk. You wouldn’t have called it a limp, though.

‘Your leg’s mended pretty well,’ I said, ‘hasn’t it?’

He looked at the leg. I did, too. We looked up again, both at the same time, which made me smile.

‘That doctor,’ I said. ‘He was just trying to frighten me.’

I had the sudden feeling I weighed nothing. I could have floated up into the trees.

Nothing had changed on the road, not in twenty years. As I walked along, I had a thought. What if time wasn’t a straight line at all? What if it was more like the wire on a telephone, with loops in it? You seemed to be going forwards, but actually you were going round and back on yourself. There were moments in your life that were far apart, but, at the same time, they almost coincided.

The damage to the tree was old, though. When I bent down, I could see it clearly, a black oblong scar in the wood where the truck had caught it. I took Mazey’s hand and we began to scramble down the slope. The trees had healed. Otherwise everything was identical. It was even the same kind of day — halfway through autumn, leaves falling, blue sky high up between the branches …

We reached the lake. There was nothing to mark the place; the shrine everyone had talked about had never been built. I bent down at the water’s edge, as I’d bent down twenty years before, and dipped my hand in it. I tasted the water. Not the slightest trace of sulphur. Had I imagined it that day? Or was it just that everything had rearranged itself for those few hours? Was it part of the pattern of surprise? I looked around, puzzled by how little I felt; I was almost disappointed. I noticed Mazey tasting the water, as I had done. He put the tips of his fingers in his mouth, then took them out again. His face didn’t alter.

Suddenly I wasn’t sure why I’d brought him or what I wanted him to understand. At first, I just talked around it, anything I could think of. I told him a story I’d been told by Felix. It had happened early in the century, when the hotel was at the height of its popularity. A wealthy shipping magnate and his wife came to stay for a few days. One afternoon they went for an excursion on the lake. Their boat sank and everybody drowned. It was a tragedy, of course, but it was also a mystery: the bodies of the shipping magnate and his wife were never found. The company mounted a search with teams of expert divers, underwater specialists, but the lake defeated them. It was just too deep, too cold. The bodies simply disappeared.

I pointed eastwards, out across the water. ‘They’re still down there somewhere.’

The best part of the story was the end — and, knowing Felix, it was almost certainly untrue. Out boating on the lake once, while still a boy, he looked down into the water and saw something glinting. A long way down, it was. A long, long way. What did you see? I asked him, my eyes all wide. What was it? He claimed it was the diamond on the finger of the shipping magnate’s wife. I begged him to take me out on the lake. Begged him to show me the diamond ring on the dead woman’s hand. But Felix, in his later years, was frightened of deep water. Also, he wasn’t sure he could remember his precise position on the lake. And besides, he said, the sun would have to be shining at the right angle or you wouldn’t see a thing.

I looked across at Mazey. Squatting on his heels, he was whittling another of his unidentifiable shapes. I wondered if he’d been listening. You never could tell with him. Sometimes he’d say something later, though — six months later, or a year — and you’d realise that he’d heard every word. I sat beside him, among the leaves, just watching him. The sun warmed my back. I was glad we’d come.

Before we left, I took hold of his shoulder and looked into his eyes. I thought I’d found the words at last.

‘You see this place?’ I said. ‘Right here?’ I dipped my hand in the water, took it out and shook it. ‘This is where you became my son.’

A cool spring day. Several years had passed. I must have been forty-two or thereabouts. Though I was still married to Peter Kroner, I saw less of him than I used to. His father had died, and he was running the vineyard now, as well as the quarry. Sometimes he’d go drinking, though, and when he came home he’d try and put his hands on me, sweet nothings catching on the tooth that Karl had broken for him, but deep down he knew it was no good and before too long he’d be swaying round the bedroom with his black hair sticking up and his face all red and he’d be calling me foul names.

‘Sticks and stones,’ I’d say. ‘Sticks and stones.’

Karin had just celebrated her fifteenth birthday. I remembered what Karl had said about her inheriting my mother’s looks. The hotel phone was always ringing, and whenever we drove into the town together I could feel the eyes of men on her like postage stamps that were already licked and looking for an envelope. I thought there might be trouble and I mentioned it to Kroner, but he just looked at me in utter scorn and said, ‘What would you know about it?’ I noticed Mazey looking at her, too, with the same damp look, but I wasn’t going to mention it again.

And then, a cool spring day — March, I think it was …

As soon as I saw Karin from the window, standing in the car-park with her dress sticking to her and her hair pasted flat against her neck, I knew what had happened, I just knew, and I felt my heart sink down, like a cow or an ox when it’s been shot, the way their legs just crumple, go from under them.

I walked down the stairs and out through the side entrance. The car-park was empty that day. We had no guests. I listened to my shoes on the gravel as I walked towards her. I could see Miss Poppel’s house, still unsold, the front garden piled with machinery, abandoned wind-chimes jangling. Further down the street the sun was out, but where we were, it was shadows and a chill wind.

I said her name, but she didn’t look at me. I said her name again. This time she twitched as if I’d pulled on something that was attached to her. She was looking at the ground. Water dripped from the hem of her dress. It drew a black circle round her on the gravel. Seemed to be sealing her off.

‘What is it, Karin? What happened?’ Though I knew.

Her head moved one way, then the other; she might have been disagreeing with what I’d said. Her eyes rolled upwards, skywards, then she turned and walked past me, back into the house. I followed her through the door and up the stairs. She was already half-undressed when I reached her bedroom. I saw a bruise on her thigh, just below her hip. There were other bruises on her elbow and her knee. On the inside of her upper arm there were four ghostly mauve-blue fingerprints. She bundled her clothes into a sodden ball and put them on the floor in the corner, then she climbed into bed and pulled the blanket up to her chin. She lay on her back, a chalkiness about her lips and her teeth moving behind them. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.

I put my hand on her shoulder, and she flinched.

‘Tell me what happened,’ I said.

‘Don’t — don’t let him in here.’

‘Who? Mazey?’

She closed her eyes tight shut.

‘Don’t let him in,’ she whispered.

Outside her room, I stood with my hands wedged under my arms, uncertain what to do. She didn’t seem to be hurt, which was something; I didn’t want to involve the doctor. If it was Mazey who’d done it — and I was sure it was — I would take the necessary action myself. I didn’t want any strangers interfering. I didn’t want him taken away from me either; I couldn’t stand the thought of him in an institution. I went downstairs. I made Karin a glass of warm milk with sugar in it and I took it to her. She was sleeping, so I left it on the table beside her bed. Then I sat in the kitchen, waiting for Mazey to return.

I saw him through the window as he came up out of the trees, his hair pale against the dark green of the foliage, his shoulders slightly rounded, his arms hanging loosely at his sides. There was nothing in his face to suggest that anything had happened — but then, I hadn’t expected there to be. He walked into the kitchen, stooped over the sink and, scooping a handful of water from the cold tap, brought it to his mouth. It was almost always the first thing he did when he got home, no matter how long he’d been away. It seemed odd to think of him as a creature of habit, but that was what he was.

‘Mazey?’

He turned round.

‘You did something, didn’t you?’

He stared at me, the tap still running behind him, the water dripping off his chin.

‘Do you know what you’ve done?’

He began to shuffle on the floor. The first time he shuffled like that, it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. It reminded me of what a cat does when it covers up its mess.

‘Well?’

‘I–I did something.’ He wasn’t confessing exactly, but it wasn’t a question either.

‘It was bad what you did, Mazey. It was really bad.’

He turned back to the sink again. He cupped his hand under the running water and drank. But not because he was thirsty.

‘Mazey,’ and I took him by the arm, ‘you can’t do things like that. If you do things like that, people will come and take you away.’ I shook him hard. ‘You remember that place Kroner took you to? That place I had to come and fetch you from?’

His grey eyes fixed on my face, and he nodded.

‘If you do things like that, they’ll take you back again and this time it’ll be for ever. I won’t be able to do a thing about it. Not a thing.’

‘You can fetch me.’

I shook my head. ‘Not this time, Mazey.’

‘You can fetch me. With the knife.’ He was grinning.

I couldn’t explain it to him. It was strange. He could operate my father’s lathe. He could even drive a truck. But there were things you couldn’t make him understand. Simple things, like the fact that we get older. Like the fact we die. Like God. And, who knows, maybe it was better that way, not understanding something that’s beyond our understanding anyway. He had his own way of thinking, which he sometimes made available to me. Sometimes.

I did the only thing I could think of: I put him in the car and drove out to my father’s house. I told him to take his wind-chimes with him; I thought they might be some consolation.

There were dark clouds to the west of us, a great curving bank of blackness in the sky, a kind of overhang, but the wind was coming out of the north and I thought the storm would pass us by. I drove over the bridge, loose boards drumming under the wheels. It was only four-thirty in the afternoon, but it felt later; I even had to switch the headlights on. We turned on to the track, two ruts with a strip of grass down the middle, grass that was long enough to brush against the underside of the car.

I parked in the yard. From where I was sitting I could see my father in the barn. For almost three years he’d been working on a dovecote. It was going to be a replica of the Leaning Tower, in Italy. He’d got the idea from one of Axel’s magazines. He’d torn the page out and pinned it to the wall above his tool-rack. But every time he got the angle right, the tower fell over. And it didn’t even have any doves inside it yet. Sometimes he thought he should have been less ambitious — but it was for Karin; only something out of the ordinary would do. I decided not to tell him what Mazey had done, at least for the time being. It wouldn’t be hard. He’d never had too much curiosity, even about his own family; and now that he was in his late seventies and partly deaf, he had good reason to dispense with it altogether. I opened the door and got out of the car.

When I drove away an hour later, Mazey wasn’t with me. I’d chained him to the truck, the truck that Axel had crashed in all those years ago (it was almost unrecognisable now, most of its paint stripped by the weather, and brambles coiling over the radiator grille and through the broken windscreen like snakes around a skull). Mazey didn’t seem to mind being made a prisoner. He didn’t seem to notice any loss of freedom. I’d hung his string of door-hinges from the roof of the goat shed. If he stood up, he could touch them. Or he could sit with his back against a tyre and whittle at his bits of wood. I told my father to put him in the barn if the temperature dropped — but I insisted on the chain at all times, as much for Mazey’s safety as for Karin’s. I wanted to keep him out of sight. There was no concealing the truth from Kroner and, when he found out, it was quite likely he would want to wreak some kind of vengeance.

I pulled into the hotel car-park. Kroner’s van was there. I sat behind the wheel and stared at it. It had KRONER CONSTRUCTION painted on the side. A new business he’d started up, which tied in with the quarry. Suddenly I wanted to laugh. Those reliable blue letters. I didn’t know what I was going to say. I could’ve sat in the car all night and I still wouldn’t have known.

I found him in the kitchen. He was wearing his work-boots and overalls. He said he’d been up to Karin’s room. The door was locked; she wouldn’t answer. He wanted to know what was wrong. I explained it as best I could. It was only a few words. I felt it should have taken longer, somehow, but I couldn’t think of anything else. I hadn’t been there when it happened. Nobody had told me much.

He sat still for a moment, then he reached out slowly for the broom that was leaning against the wall. He stood up and began to break the kitchen windows, one by one. When he’d broken all the windows, he started on the crockery. Then it was the glasses, the vases, the new electric clock. There was a determined look on his face. Sometimes he blinked. At one point he turned and looked at me, as if trying to decide what I was made of, whether I would smash. Though he was breathing hard, his head was motionless; blood ran from several small cuts on his face and arms. I stepped backwards, towards the door. Still looking at me, he hurled the broom sideways. It landed among the saucepans, knocked them to the floor. There was a movement behind me, and Karin pushed past me, into the room. She went to her father and carefully laid her cheek against his chest. He looked down at her. He seemed surprised to see her there. It was almost as if he’d forgotten she existed. Then his eyes closed.

‘I’m all right,’ she murmured. ‘Really. I’m all right.’

His chest heaved; tears poured down his face.

She kept on murmuring to him. ‘I’m all right, Dad. I’m all right. Really …’

Maybe she was. But he wasn’t. That evening, while I was taping newspaper over the broken windows, Karin ran into the kitchen.

‘It’s Dad,’ she panted. ‘Something’s happening to Dad.’

She took me out to the front of the hotel. The light from the doorway made a kind of V-shape on the grass. Kroner was lying in the darkness just beyond it, his boots lit up, the rest of him invisible. I hurried over. His arms were at strange angles to his body, and they were bent at the elbows; he could have been practising semaphore, communicating with someone in the sky. I felt for the pulse in his wrist. It was faint, irregular, but it was there. I told Karin to stay with him, then I ran to the phone and called Holbek.

In ten minutes the doctor was kneeling on the grass beside us. Kroner’s eyes were open, and saliva was spilling from one side of his mouth. The doctor examined him briefly, then asked if he could use the phone. As I followed him into the hallway to show him where it was, he turned to me.

‘He’s had a stroke. I’m going to call an ambulance.’

When I saw Kroner the next morning, in the hospital, he looked as if he’d aged twenty years. I thought the shock must have done it, the way earthquakes are said to. His hair went white overnight. Close up, though, I realised I’d got it wrong; it was just that he was still covered with limestone dust from the quarry. His eyes were open, but he didn’t seem to know us. He was still very weak, the Sister said. We weren’t allowed to stay for long.

The doctor told me that the stroke had been a major one. A blood vessel in Kroner’s brain had ruptured, resulting in a haemorrhage. It meant one side of his body would be paralysed. It also meant he’d lost the power of speech — temporarily, at least. He would be kept under observation for the next few days. Before too long, however, he’d be sent home, where he’d be in my charge. The doctor wanted to know if I understood the implications of this. I said I did (it was like Mazey, only worse; it was almost funny). According to the doctor, Kroner would have to begin again, from the beginning, like a child. To walk, to talk. To tie a shoelace. Drive a car. This would be more difficult, he thought, because they’d detected a stubborn streak in the patient, an unwillingness to return from where he was.

‘We can only do so much. In the end, it’s up to him.’

Three weeks later Kroner had another stroke. It was less significant, the doctor said, but the date of his release was postponed indefinitely. He stayed in hospital all summer. Two or three afternoons a week I would drive down there, usually alone (the sight of Karin seemed to upset him; once he even wet himself). If the weather was fine, they lifted him into a bath chair and let me push him through the grounds. These days I hardly recognised him. The left half of his face had slipped, and one of the nurses had put a side-parting in his hair and brushed it flat. He looked like a different person. Nobody I knew, though. Sometimes, as I wheeled him round, I found myself believing it: we were strangers, and I was just being neighbourly, doing a good deed. Other days I pitied him, the state he was in, but at the same time I could see the justice of it. What he’d done to Mazey, him and his people up at the quarry, while I was weighed down with his child — or afterwards, when the child was born and my mind was nothing but a misted-over pane of glass. Sometimes the men who seem the most respectable and decent are the worst. There are whole parts of them kept secret. But he’d drunk deep from his own medicine, and the taste of it had altered him for ever.

I was on my way to visit him once when a hub-cap came loose and ran on ahead of the car. I watched it leave the road in a straight line, bouncing across uneven ground, confident but ludicrous. I thought no more about it until I parked outside the hospital. But then I saw the wheel, and I stood there in the sunshine, staring at it. You never know how strong somebody is, and if they’re against you, how long the struggle will last. Looking at the wheel, black instead of silver, blind, somehow, I knew it was over. Kroner had come to the end of the cruelty that was in him, and it hadn’t worked. There were straps to hold him upright in his chair. I remember fingering the leather that afternoon and thinking back: that drive across the county years before, the knife glinting on the seat beside me … There’d be no need for knives, not any more.

I thought of Kroner’s love for me, which I’d spurned. I thought of how he’d lavished it on his little girl instead, his daughter. I thought of how my child had ruined his.

And the truth was worse than any of us knew.

It was while he was in the hospital that we found out she was pregnant.

That summer Karin ran away. She was gone for almost a week and when she came back, she was riding in the front seat of a fast, steel-blue car with number-plates I didn’t recognise. The man behind the wheel had unusual, bright-orange hair.

‘Chromanski’s the name,’ he said, shaking my hand.

He told me where he was from — a large town, about two hours to the west of us. He said he was a lawyer. I thought he was rather young to be a lawyer, but I chose not to question it. He’d met Karin in the lobby of the Hotel Europa one night, while he was having a drink with two associates.

He took me aside. ‘Your daughter’s beautiful. Unfortunately, I’m already engaged to be married.’ He looked up, saw Karin through the window. She was sitting on the porch, twisting a strand of hair around her index finger. ‘And besides,’ he said, with a smile that was faintly conspiratorial, ‘she’s under age, isn’t she?’

‘And pregnant,’ I said.

That put a new expression on his face.

But he seemed honest enough: he hadn’t taken advantage of her, and he’d driven her all the way home, a distance of more than a hundred kilometres. I thanked him for going to such trouble. Trouble’s the word, he said, grinning, and I thought he could well be right about that. Karin was still sitting on the porch when Chromanski left. He smiled at her as he walked away across the grass. She watched him turn his steel-blue car round as if her last chance of happiness was locked in the boot.

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.

‘Sometimes I look into that boy’s eyes,’ my father said, ‘and I feel like I’m in quicksand and I’m —’

‘It’s the baby,’ I said.

‘The baby?’

‘Nina.’

Later that night, when Mazey returned home, I took him into the kitchen and sat him down at the table. I reached for the first-aid tin. The cut wasn’t serious, but I wanted an excuse to keep him close to me while I talked to him. I had to explain that Nina was gone and wouldn’t be coming back, and I had to do this in a way that didn’t make it seem as if it was his fault. I had to find an explanation that would break the bond between them, that would persuade him to let her go. I poured a few drops of iodine on to a ball of cotton-wool and began to clean the cut with it. His arm flinched and I heard the air being drawn in through his teeth, but his face didn’t register any pain.

‘The baby,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Hiding.’

‘No. She’s not hiding. She’s gone.’

He looked at me.

As I dried the skin around the cut, I told him that Karin had taken Nina away. He wanted to know where to. I explained that, when a woman had a baby, the baby came from inside her. From here, I said, and placed one hand over my stomach. He bent down and put his face close to my hand, watching it, as though it was about to change into something else. I wondered how to go on. I decided it would be simpler not to mention fathers. When a woman had a baby, I said, the baby belonged to her. She could take her baby away with her, if she wanted to. She could take her baby anywhere she wanted. It was her baby. He didn’t say anything. I tore off a piece of gauze and taped it over the cut. Nina had come from inside Karin, I said. Nina was Karin’s baby. And Karin had taken Nina away with her. They were gone, maybe for ever.

‘That’s what’s happened,’ I said. ‘That’s why you can’t find them.’

I looked up. Mazey had placed his right hand on his stomach and he was staring down at it.

‘There’s no point looking in cupboards,’ I went on, ‘or in drawers. You won’t find her there. Do you understand?’

But he didn’t answer. He was still staring at his hand.

During the autumn of that year, stories began to circulate. At first people thought there was a bear on the rampage, despite the fact that no bears had been seen in our part of the world for more than a hundred years. Next they thought it was a pack of wolves. Then somebody remembered the circus that had passed through the region that summer. They remembered trailers with no windows, their side walls painted with ferocious beasts and scenes of carnage and mutilation. Supposing one of the animals had escaped from its cage and was now roaming the countryside? It had to be some kind of wild animal, something exotic. Because dogs and chickens were being killed. Not just killed either, but torn apart. But not eaten. Just ripped open and left there, gaping, on the ground. Nobody had seen anything, of course. The stories took a darker twist. There was talk of pagan rituals and devil worship. An article appeared in the local paper: WHO COULD DO SUCH A THING? For a while, suspicion fell on a young couple who had moved into a woodsman’s cottage on a lonely stretch of river north-west of the village. They had dark eyes and dark hair, and the girl wore unusual jewellery. It was enough to keep the fires of rumour stoked up high.

I noticed that Mazey had become restless, as if the talk had affected him as well. I didn’t want to chain him up again, but at the same time I was worried about him wandering too far. After all, what if there was some truth to the rumours? What if he tangled with a wild animal or fell into the clutches of a Satanic cult? I couldn’t warn him; he wouldn’t be able to understand the kind of danger I was talking about. Maybe I could follow him, though. Then, if he got into trouble, I could help. It was an idea. And hadn’t I always been curious about where he went?

I waited on the porch, sitting in a rocking-chair and smoking cigarettes to pass the time. I had a small knapsack on my lap. It had some food in it, and a box of cartridges. Kroner’s rifle leaned against the wall behind me. There was a wind that night, and the trees on the far side of the road roared like a furnace with the door open. I could see the silhouette of Miss Poppel’s house, still uninhabited. I could hear the dull clank of the exhaust-pipes as they swung from the crab-apple tree. I thought of the birthday present I’d given Mazey. It was a tape of his wind-chimes. I’d recorded them one day when he was out. He kept the tape in his pocket at all times, along with his pen-knife; they were his prized possessions. We always played it if we drove somewhere together in the car.

I’d been sitting there for almost an hour when I heard footsteps in the house behind me. We didn’t have any guests that night. With Karin gone and Kroner confined to a wheelchair, it could only mean one thing. I put my cigarette out under my shoe, then I sat back and kept quite still.

The front door opened and Mazey appeared on the porch. He was wearing a long coat; his head was bare. He closed the door quietly, one hand on the handle, the other flat against the wood, so he could feel the lock catch. It was surprising to see what care he put into it. I watched him move down the steps and over the grass. He was heading away from the village, making for the bridge. I waited until he was hidden by the trees before I rose out of my chair. When I reached the road I could see him on the bend in front of me, a tall figure, stoop-shouldered, with hair that was so pale, it was hard to tell if it was fair or grey. He seemed at one with the night and the empty road and the fast clouds high above. He seemed at home.

At the bridge I felt exposed: only one lane each way and thin metal railings on either side. I hid behind an upright while he crossed ahead of me. Thick, silver water below. I watched a duck land and blacken it. Mazey turned his head at the noise, but it was just a reflex; he didn’t stop to look. Once he was over the river, I had to break into a run to catch up. Me, a forty-five-year-old woman, running …

I chose to walk in the grass at the edge of the road, close to the tree-line. Then, if he did happen to turn round, he wouldn’t see me. But I was struck by his purpose, his concentration. He didn’t look behind him, not even once. He didn’t hesitate at all, or dawdle, or meander. Sometimes his head moved from side to side, but I presumed he was just checking his bearings. He had the air of someone who knew exactly where he was going. I was reminded of something Eva had said once, before the sulphur got into her brain and ate everything intelligent. He looks like he could walk all day and all night, too. Like he could walk for ever. Then she’d thought for a moment. He looks like he could walk from this world right into the next.

I’d fallen into a rhythm, I was hypnotised by it, so I almost missed his sudden plunge into the trees. I had to break into a run again. Up the grass bank, across the road and down the bank on the other side, keeping my eyes locked on the place where he had been. I parted low branches, ducked into the undergrowth. The trees closed over me.

In the forest everything was black and silver. Mostly black, though. I stood still, just inside it, listening. I heard the crack of dead wood, bracken hissing. It had to be him. I began to move forwards, following the noise. Something caught on my cheek and tore the skin.

At last I saw a path.

It was quiet now, except for my own feet in the leaves. I walked on, further into the forest. It was quiet, but not peaceful. Once I saw a man’s head float between two trees. Mazey? But it was too high off the ground, even for him. It must have been a bird. Or a piece of pale bark. Or just the fall of moonlight.

All of a sudden, there was a thrashing in the undergrowth ahead of me and to my right. It sounded like horses being ridden in a stream. It sounded wet. A scream lifted out of the darkness. One high note held for three or four seconds. Then it cut out. Darkness poured back into the space it left. Darkness pushing at me, almost too thick to breathe. The scream wasn’t human. But it was pain. It was definitely pain. I gripped the rifle hard. Shock had dropped me into a kind of crouch and I was panting.

I forced myself to go on again, along the path. Towards the scream. I kept low and I whispered to myself, it didn’t matter what, just words, any words. I felt the ground with my foot each time I took a step. I thought of a mother rolling up her sleeve and dipping her elbow in a tub of water, testing it for temperature. Not my mother, though. Someone else’s. And all the time I scanned the forest that massed in front of me. Trees jumped sideways. Moonlight was fog, then snow, then water. Darkness bellied like a black sail with the wind behind it.

Then I saw him.

He was below me. There was a glade, a shallow bowl among the trees. A steep bank rose on the far side of it, casting a shadow. The earth had eroded there, and I could see a tangle of exposed roots. The path I was on circled the edge of the glade, keeping some distance above it.

I stood still, one hand braced against a tree. He was sitting on his haunches with his back to me and, just for a moment, I had the impression that he was washing clothes. I took two silent steps and stopped beside another, larger tree. I could see one side of his face now — half of it, anyway: an ear, part of his cheek, the tip of his nose. In the moonlight his skin shone like bone. He was crouched over something. An animal of some kind. Not a dog or a cat. Larger than that. A deer, perhaps. He seemed to have his hands inside it. His arms were black to the elbow. Though in daylight, I realised, they wouldn’t be black. They’d be red.

That scream, it must have been the animal.

WHO COULD DO SUCH A THING?

Whether I made a noise as I stood there, or whether he just sensed my presence, I couldn’t be sure, but suddenly he was looking over his shoulder, with his head angled in my direction. He didn’t move for at least a minute. I knew he was looking at me, but I didn’t think he knew who I was; I didn’t think he recognised me. And yet I found I couldn’t move. I was hardly even breathing.

At last he stood up. He began to walk towards me. He didn’t hurry, though. His arms didn’t swing at all, or even bend; they just hung at his sides like dead weights. He came up out of the glade in one straight line and for the first time in minutes I was aware of the wind moving in the trees above my head.

He stopped in front of me. I noticed something I’d never noticed before. The colour of his eyes wasn’t a colour at all, not even grey. It was just empty, drained. Or perhaps this was another trick, something moonlight did.

He was staring at me.

I could see dark patches on his clothes and his arms. I could smell the blood. I wasn’t frightened of him, and yet I knew I had to speak first.

‘It’s very late.’

I used my strictest voice with him.

‘You should be in bed.’

His face didn’t alter.

‘No baby,’ he said.

He had looked in the hotel. He had looked in his grandfather’s house as well. He had looked high and low — behind doors, under beds, in drawers. Then, one night, his mother had explained where babies came from. A hand placed over her stomach. In here. And if they came from there, they could go back again. They could hide in there. And so he began to look for the baby in living things. All those dogs and chickens slaughtered and torn open. He was looking for Nina, that was all. He wouldn’t rest until he found her.

I lifted the rifle until it was pointing at his head. He didn’t move. Moonlight down one side of his face, his eyes still searching mine. Pull the trigger. Pull it. I felt my finger tighten. Because I wasn’t sure what else I could do. There was the institution, of course. I could go to Kroner in his wheelchair and I could say, ‘You were right about the boy.’ Kroner. The tension in my finger eased. I lowered the rifle, looked at it. It was Kroner’s rifle. There was his name, etched into the stock. And he was channelling his thoughts through it. I couldn’t believe I’d listened. His mind like cardboard when it’s been rained on. His brain all soggy. And I had listened.

On the way back to the hotel, I threw the rifle into the bushes. If we were broken into, I’d use a hammer to defend myself. A kitchen knife. The broom.

At seven-thirty the next morning I went into Kroner’s room and drew the curtains. He was awake. One eye clear and blinking, the other sloppy.

I put my face close to his. ‘You think that’s going to work, do you? You really think that’s going to work?’

His mouth fell sideways like an ice-cream melting. ‘Dssh —’

‘I suppose you were going to make his death look like an accident,’ I said, ‘or was it suicide you were thinking of?’

‘— Nnnnsshh — Nnnnsshh —’

I picked his glass up from the bedside table and held it above his face. I tilted it very slowly until the water trickled down the outside of the glass, off the end and down, in one thin stream, on to his forehead, into his eyes.

‘Now look what you made me do,’ I said.

He was moving his head from side to side. Some of the water had gathered in the worry lines. Interesting. Some of it had slid into his ears. I reached for a cloth and dabbed his face with it. Then I sat down on the edge of the bed.

‘I’m going to tell you something about accidents.’ I stared at the ceiling for a moment, as if I didn’t know quite where to begin. But I did, of course. I knew exactly. ‘You remember my brother and his wife? They had that terrible accident. The one where their truck went off the road and down that steep slope and they both died —’

He was making his usual soggy sounds. I could tell he was listening, though. His one good eye was fixed on me.

‘It wasn’t an accident at all,’ I said. ‘I killed them.’

I watched the eye move round in its socket, trying to escape. There was nowhere for it to go.

‘I borrowed one of my father’s hacksaws and cut through a track-rod. I only sawed into it a bit. I didn’t have much time, you see.’ I smiled to myself. ‘It’s the kind of thing that might not have worked. Not when I wanted it to, anyway.’ I paused again. ‘I was lucky, I suppose.’

I looked down at him once more.

‘Yes, that’s right, it was me,’ I said when I saw the look in his eye. ‘I did it.’

Outside, it was bright and cool. When I drove into the clearing with Mazey, my father was sitting on the back porch cleaning his rifle. This didn’t strike me as a coincidence at all. It was more like part of what had happened. The fever lifts. You return to normal. Something’s run its course. In daylight the idea of shooting Mazey seemed far-fetched and desperate, the light wind of someone else’s madness blowing through my head.

I said good morning to my father.

He looked up from his gun, his eyes pale, a crop of silver stubble on his cheeks and chin. ‘Any word of Karin?’

I shook my head. I reached into the back of the car and lifted a small battery-operated cassette machine off the seat. It was Kroner’s — he’d bought it just before his stroke; he liked new gadgets — but he would have no further use for it. I carried it across the yard and stood it on the bonnet of the truck. I asked Mazey for his tape. He handed it to me. I put it in the cassette machine, then I pressed the button that said PLAY. My father looked from me to Mazey and back again.

‘We have to chain him up,’ I said, ‘like before.’

This time my father’s eyes rested on Mazey for longer. Mazey didn’t notice. As usual, he was hypnotised by the cassette machine; he still hadn’t got used to the idea that you could hear the wind-chimes even though they were nowhere to be seen. My father studied him for a few moments, then looked down at the gun that lay across his lap.

‘You know where it is,’ he muttered.

I left Mazey in the yard while I walked into the barn. I found the padlocks and the chain on a shelf next to my father’s rack of tools. As I turned away, I noticed the Leaning Tower of Pisa in the corner, propped against the wall, unwanted now, and gathering dust. It seemed a pity he had never finished it. It could have been his masterpiece. I’d always looked forward to the day when doves were roosting in those little arches. Outside in the yard, I ran one end of the chain around Mazey’s ankle and fastened it with a padlock. Then I took the other end and hooked it through the truck’s front bumper. Mazey stood still the whole time, his eyes fixed on the cassette machine. The fact that he was being chained to the truck again made no impression on him. Somehow it would have been easier if he had kicked and screamed. I’d never forgotten that drive back from the institution when he was eight, and how eerily untouched he seemed, and how remote.

My father laid his rifle on a piece of cloth and, rising to his feet, walked slowly towards us. He touched Mazey on the shoulder. ‘Do you have your knife?’

Mazey nodded.

‘Show it to me.’

Mazey took the knife from his trouser pocket and held it out to my father on the flat of his hand. There was blood on the knife, and I knew what blood it was, but my father didn’t remark on it. He snapped one blade out, then the other. Tested both blades with the side of his thumb.

‘I thought so,’ he muttered. ‘Blunt.’

He turned on his heel and walked away from us. I watched him vanish into the darkness of the barn. We waited in the yard, Mazey and I, both facing in different directions. After a while I heard the rasp of a grindstone.

When my father stepped out into the sunlight, he was carrying two or three blocks of wood. He’d cleaned the blood off the knife, and the edges of the blades were bright silver, thinner than before. He handed the knife and the wood to Mazey.

‘Let’s see what you can do with those.’

I drank a glass of water in the kitchen. Out on the porch I said goodbye to my father. He nodded. The gun lay on the cloth in front of him, each piece ready to be oiled. It would be hours before he reassembled it. As I drove away, I saw Mazey in the rear-view mirror. He was sitting on the ground beside the truck, with his head bent, whittling.

All summer Mazey was kept chained to the truck outside my father’s house. All summer he carved the blocks of wood my father gave him. This time it was different, though. No strange, smooth shapes. Nothing you had to puzzle over, or guess at.

All summer he carved babies.

Babies sitting up, babies lying down. Babies on their backs or on their stomachs. Babies sleeping, laughing, kicking, crying (he even carved the tears). My father tried to persuade him to turn his hand to something else, but he wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. Each new block of wood that he was given became another baby, as if that was the only shape the wood contained, as if that was all it could ever be.

One morning in August I sat beside him. I remember counting them. There were thirty-seven — some life-size, others no bigger than your thumb. He put down his knife and picked up a block of wood that was as yet untouched. He held it in the palm of one hand and placed his other hand on top of it, and then he looked at me.

‘Baby,’ he said. ‘In here.’

Many years later, on a warm September morning, a letter arrived. I turned it over in my hands, examined the writing on the envelope. I didn’t recognise it. The postmark was a city in the northwest; I didn’t know anyone who lived there. When I tore the letter open, a photograph fell out and landed on the floor. I bent down, picked it up. There were two people in the picture, a man and a girl. I didn’t recognise either of them. I looked at the envelope again to make sure it was addressed to me. There my name was, on the front. I took the picture out to the porch and stood in the sunlight, studying it. The girl was embracing the man, her right arm passing across his chest, her two hands joining on his left shoulder. Now I thought about it, she looked something like my daughter, Karin. I’d only seen Karin once since she left. It was Kroner she came for — which was just as well because he died a few weeks afterwards. She stayed for less than an hour. She was rude. I turned my attention to the man again and suddenly everything fell into place. It was Jan Salenko, twenty years on. He’d thickened, the way men do, but there was the same strangely grateful look to him, as if he didn’t deserve to be in the picture. My eyes drifted back to the girl. I thought of that cold December night and the baby I’d delivered. I’d even named her. Nina.

Jan Salenko had written a long letter, telling me that he and Karin were separating, a separation that would end, he supposed, in divorce. He poured out his feelings to me — all his misery, his longing, his regret. I thought it odd to be receiving news that was so personal when I hardly knew the man. After all, they’d married in secret, against my will. For the past twenty years I hadn’t even had an address for them. But I knew enough to have told him, even at the beginning, that it wouldn’t last. That much was obvious to anyone. In fact, it was astonishing that it had lasted as long as it had. What did he expect from me now? Sympathy? I read on. Towards the end of the letter he mentioned his daughter. At least he still had her, he wrote. Nina lived in the capital now, but they saw each other every two or three months. They got on well. He was enclosing a picture of the two of them, taken a few weeks back.

After I’d finished the letter, I studied the photograph again. She wasn’t a bad-looking girl, though she didn’t have the fine features of her mother. She looked more like me: headstrong, spirited, but plain. There was also something of Mazey in her — the nose, the upper lip. A Hekmann, not a Kroner. I didn’t answer the letter. There was no point. What would I have said? I left it on a shelf in the kitchen, wedged between two glass jars. I forgot it was even there.

Mazey came to me one morning. At forty-three, the shine in his hair had gone and there were thin lines around his mouth, but otherwise he hadn’t aged at all. I’ve often noticed how backward people look younger than they really are, as if their flesh is somehow backward, too; Mazey could easily have passed for twenty-eight or — nine. He stood in the kitchen that day, and the fingers of his left hand curled and uncurled against his leg. I asked him what was wrong. He wouldn’t say. In his right hand he was holding Jan Salenko’s photograph.

‘Reading my letters now, are you?’

He held the picture up in front of me. ‘The baby,’ he said. ‘Where’s the baby?’

It took me a few moments, then I understood. He thought the girl in the picture was Karin. And if Karin was there, the baby ought to be there as well — even after all these years. I told him that it wasn’t Karin he was looking at but Nina, her daughter. He was looking at the baby, I told him, only the baby had grown up. I could see he didn’t believe me. He had never understood change, especially when it was slow. I took him outside. I picked up an acorn off the ground and then I showed him the oak tree it had come from. I told him the tree had been an acorn once. It was the same with the picture, I said. The girl used to be a baby. He just stared at me as if I was making the whole thing up. He was convinced that the girl in the picture had hidden the baby, and he wanted to know where it was. I tried to explain it to him again, but he turned away from me. He stood in the car-park, staring at the photograph, his left hand curling and uncurling against his leg.

My father had died at around that time, of old age. There were only a few of us at the funeral; he’d lived so long that most of the people who knew him were already gone. My father had two suits, which he kept for Sundays. He was buried in one of them, and I dressed Mazey in the other. At the graveside I stood with Mazey’s arm in mine and watched the box drop into the ground. My father had carved the symbols of his trade on the lid — a hammer, a saw, a handful of nails; I remember thinking that the nails must have taken him a while. I felt Mazey remove his arm from mine and looked to see what he was doing. He’d opened one of the blades on his pen-knife and he was testing it against his thumb, the way my father had taught him. When he disappeared shortly after the funeral, I thought I understood: my father’s death had awakened an old restlessness in him.

But he disappeared every month, returning in clothes that were filthy, often torn and sometimes even spotted with blood. After a year or so, the length of time that he was gone began to grow. Sometimes he would be away for as long as a week. I was worried that he might walk out one day and not come back at all. It was only by chance that I found out where he was going. I was emptying his pockets so I could wash his clothes when I found a ticket stub. It was a tram ticket, and it had the city’s name on it. He’d been going to the capital, more than six hundred kilometres away. Sometimes I found money in his pockets, too, money he hadn’t had on him when he set out. Sometimes there were stains in his underwear, which alarmed me. When I asked him what he did there, in the city, he became sullen and wouldn’t answer. The only way to find out would be to follow him again. Though I was afraid of what I might discover, I felt I had no choice; it was part of my responsibility to him.

The next time he told me he was going out, I was ready. I’d prepared some food and a change of clothing, and I’d made arrangements with Martha, the hired help, to run the place while I was away. I felt like a fool, though, because I was back two hours later. Mazey had hitched a lift on the main road; I’d stood there helplessly while he disappeared into the distance in some stranger’s car. It was at least a month before he left again. This time I borrowed an estate car from one of our neighbours (Mazey would have recognised our truck). I sat behind the wheel and watched him walk away from the house. It was a bright, cold October day. A clear blue sky, dead leaves clattering across the ground.

He walked until he reached a junction a couple of kilometres west of the village, then he turned to the south, along a road that led towards the motorway. After another quarter of an hour, he found a grass verge that was to his liking and began to wait. I had to hide the car behind a tree because that section of the road was straight and whenever he heard the sound of an engine he looked in my direction. He kept his thumb stuck out in the air, I noticed, even when there was nothing coming. It was the middle of the morning before someone stopped for him. I didn’t recognise the car; it wasn’t anyone we knew. I followed the car for an hour and a half. It dropped him at a service station about one hundred and twenty kilometres south-west of the village. There were toilets, petrol pumps. There was a café-restaurant with a red-and-white-striped awning. I parked in the shadow of a removal van and watched Mazey as he walked into the restaurant. He bought a soft drink, then he went and stood next to a man who was sitting at the counter. I saw the man shake his head. I found that my mouth was hanging open. I suppose I’d never imagined Mazey speaking to anyone apart from me. I felt a sudden jealousy of all these strangers. I watched him move along the counter, stopping at the shoulder of every driver. He knew the procedure; obviously he had done it many times before. The way he approached the men, the way he nodded when they turned him down. The way he drank from his Styrofoam cup and then crushed it when it was empty and tossed it in the bin. I’d lost him. I wondered when exactly this had happened.

He was offered a lift by a tall fat man who drove an oil tanker. This was a relief. I’d been dreading something fast; the estate I’d borrowed was a rickety thing, more than ten years old. The tanker would be no problem, though. Also it was silver, which made it impossible to lose in traffic. We travelled south, through flat grey land. It was country I’d never seen before. There were almost no trees. Morning became afternoon and the bright sky clouded over. It began to drizzle.

At last, towards dusk, the driver stopped for something to eat. I parked almost parallel with the tanker, but slightly behind it. From where I was sitting I could see Mazey’s shoulder and his forearm. I watched him climb down out of the cab, his face in profile against the cold sodium lights. He followed the driver into the cafeteria and bought a sandwich. I went to the toilets while I had the chance. There was an attendant eating peanuts out of a tin and watching a black-and-white TV. On the way out I dropped a few small coins into a Tupperware container, but she didn’t even look at me. I hurried to the car. Just then Mazey left the cafeteria. He didn’t go back to the tanker. Instead, he wandered around the car-park. At one point he walked right towards me and I had to duck down, hide under the dashboard. This is madness, I thought, crouching on the floor among sweet-wrappers, dirty tissues, bits of mud from other people’s shoes. I should go home.

When I lifted my head and peered through the bottom half of the windscreen, I saw Mazey hoisting himself up into the tanker’s cab. Over in the cafeteria the driver was just finishing his meal. He wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist, then put on a dark-blue wool hat. I had the feeling he was going to be driving through the night.

I was right. It was two-thirty in the morning before he stopped again, this time in a rest-area. There were no facilities; it was just a section of unmarked road that curved off the motorway and joined it again two hundred metres further on. I parked beyond the tanker, at the far end of the curve, and adjusted my wing-mirror so I could see the tanker from where I was sitting. The drizzle had eased. A rain-mist now. Tiny particles of water drifting in the dark air, floating rather than falling. I got out of the car to stretch my legs. There wasn’t much traffic any more, but if something did go past, it made a sound like someone drawing curtains.

I climbed a grass bank behind the car, and then I walked along the top of it, through some newly planted saplings, until I could look down into the oil tanker’s cab. The driver was still sitting at the wheel. His head was leaning against the window and his eyes were closed. At first I thought he was asleep. But then his mouth opened and his chest swelled; as if he’d just breathed in. It was only then that I saw Mazey. He had his back to me and his head was on the driver’s lap. I could only see his hair, the collar of his shirt and his right elbow. I took a step backwards, turned away. I was thinking of Axel as I stumbled among the saplings. Thinking of the branches of the willow tree, the stream flowing beneath us, his tea-coloured summer skin. It had poisoned us, the pleasure we had taken in each other. It had poisoned all the earth around us, all the air. It had poisoned most of the lives that came after us. They never knew the source of it. They never knew it came from that one tree, on that first morning. Before anybody woke. When I reached my car I suddenly doubled over and vomited a frothy yellow liquid on to the ground. I couldn’t think what I’d eaten to produce such a colour. Trembling, I got into the front seat. I wanted to wash my mouth out. All I could find was a bottle of distilled water, which my neighbour used for topping up the battery.

I hardly slept that night. Every time a lorry started up, my eyes snapped open and I wiped the condensation off the window and looked into the wing-mirror. But the silver tanker never moved. Not until eight in the morning, when the door on the driver’s side slammed shut. The tall fat man spat twice, then turned and climbed the grass bank. He stood among the saplings for a while, just looking out across the landscape, before unbuttoning his trousers. His urine smoked in the cold morning air.

At ten o’clock Mazey was dropped at another service station on the motorway. He stood shivering among the petrol pumps, his hands in his pockets. I watched the tanker pull away without him. I was glad to see the back of it. But because I’d followed it for so many hours, I went on seeing it long after it was gone: a silver disc with banks of tail-lights under it, black mud flaps, giant tyres. I watched Mazey walk from car to car, bending down to speak to each driver, as if he was selling something. Though I was cold, a kind of heat rose through me as it occurred to me that maybe that was exactly what he was doing. The money in his pockets — how else had he got hold of it?

It took him another two lifts to complete his journey. It was a wet day, rain angling across the motorway, but I was grateful for the weather: the cars Mazey travelled in drove slowly, and I was even less likely to be noticed. The last car was a pale-green saloon, which put him down on the outskirts of the city, not far from the main bus terminal. He stood on the pavement for a moment, his mouth set in a straight line as he looked around him. Then he began to walk. I parked, making a note of the name of the street, then followed him on foot. The temperature had dropped into single figures; fog cloaked the tops of the buildings. Mazey walked the same way he walked when he was in the village, as though unaware of his surroundings, as though people were ghosts. His shoulders were drawn in towards his chest and his fists were pushed right to the bottom of his pockets. He only had a thin coat to cover him. It was one of Kroner’s coats — too short in the arm, threadbare, too, not even waterproof. His shoes were worn down at the heels so they tilted sideways and inwards; they moved sloppily on his feet, like moored boats. I saw him as someone who didn’t know him, and it shamed me that I hadn’t clothed him better.

The rain slackened off. Finally it stopped altogether. Mazey was examining the buildings now. We were nearing his destination. I didn’t like the area. The streets were wide and derelict. The apartment blocks were many storeys high, their windows curtained with rags or sheets of newspaper or plain brown cardboard. The shops had all been fortified with metal grilles. They sold newspapers, chewing-gum, cigarettes. Fruit that was almost rotten. Fridges and televisions that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Miss Poppel’s front lawn. There was a bar on almost every corner. They had metal grilles as well. I didn’t see too many people — just tramps, drunks, old women with dogs. Mazey began to fit. His threadbare coat, his worn-down shoes. Is this where he belongs? I wondered. At the end of an alleyway I saw the slick grey surface of a canal.

He stopped in front of a building, looked up, then he pushed through the door and vanished inside. I crossed the road towards it. Through the cracked glass panel in the door I could see a hallway, a row of brown metal letter-boxes along one wall, a narrow flight of stairs. I opened the door, let it swing shut behind me. Then I stood there, listening. I heard Mazey’s footsteps somewhere above me. I heard him knock on a door. I climbed the stairs quickly, then stopped again and listened. He knocked again. I couldn’t see him, but it sounded as though he was on the floor above. The door opened and I heard a voice that wasn’t his. The door closed. I climbed to the next floor. There were only four doors on the landing and I put my ear to each one of them in turn. When I’d worked out which apartment he had entered, I climbed one more flight of stairs and then I sat down on a step and waited.

The building was quiet. Just somebody scraping the bottom of a saucepan with a spoon. And one half of an argument — the woman’s voice. I was sitting by a window. I could see rooftops, factory smoke. And, in the distance, a strip of dull green, which was where the city ended. I hadn’t realised I was so high up. The street must have been built on a hill.

Flies nuzzling the chalky glass.

It was always Axel that I saw, with his eyes narrowed against the sunlight, and the stream running below us, and I couldn’t believe the beauty of those moments forty years before had led to this. A staircase in a dismal, run-down building. A street whose name I didn’t even know. What did I have in mind? I no longer knew.

More than an hour passed.

The door to the apartment opened and, looking down between the metal banisters, I saw the top of Mazey’s head. He was leaving. He was alone. I heard his footsteps fade, the front door shut. From my window I could see him walking back along the street.

After sitting still for so long, it was an effort to move. My knees were cold and stiff; I had to rub the life back into them. At last I stood up. I went back down the stairs and knocked on the apartment door.

A man’s voice called out. ‘Erik? Is that you?’

I knocked again.

The door opened, on a chain. I saw a man who could have been my age. He wore a green sun-visor and his grey hair was cropped close to his head.

‘Yes?’

‘There was someone here,’ I said. ‘Just now.’

‘So?’

‘He’s my son.’

‘That’s funny,’ the man said, ‘because he’s my son, too.’

I stared at him through the narrow gap. There was a cut on the bridge of his nose, the kind of cut Karl used to get when he drank too much and then fell over.

‘Could I come in, please?’

The man studied me for a few moments, then he closed the door. I was about to knock again when I heard him unlatch the chain. This time the door opened wide. The man bent slightly from the waist, and his right hand drifted away from his body. It was a gesture of welcome, but he was mocking me with it.

I walked past him. There were only two rooms. The first was a kitchen. Under the window was a bath that had a wooden board on top of it. The floor was dark-green linoleum. My shoes stuck to it.

The second room wasn’t much larger than the first. There were three single beds in there, each bed pushed against a different wall. All the surfaces were covered with ashtrays, bottles, glasses. Someone had pinned a playing card to the fireplace — the Jack of Hearts. A man sprawled on one of the beds, his head and shoulders propped against the wall, a leather cap wedged on to his curly black hair. He wore a diamond stud in his left ear. Dirt had collected round it.

‘Who are you?’ I said.

The man yawned and looked out of the window. I heard his jawbone creak.

‘I think you’re the one who should be answering questions,’ said the man who’d let me in. He was standing beside me now. Light filtered through his visor, and the upper half of his face had a sickly green tint to it. He smelled of cheap deodorant.

‘I want to know what my son was doing here.’

‘He’s been coming here for a while now.’

I turned and looked at him.

‘Two years. Maybe three.’ The man unscrewed the top off a bottle and drank from it. ‘The first year he only came here twice. Then it got more regular.’

‘This place is filthy,’ I said.

‘That doesn’t bother Erik,’ the man said.

‘That’s right,’ said the man on the bed, still looking out of the window. ‘Erik doesn’t seem to mind at all. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Erik doesn’t even notice.’ He held his hand out for the bottle.

‘Erik’s not exactly clean himself,’ said the man with the visor.

‘Erik shits his pants.’ The man on the bed drank from the bottle, then he looked at the man who was standing just behind me. They both laughed.

‘Erik?’ I said.

‘That’s his name,’ said the man with the visor.

‘His name’s Mazey. His name’s always been Mazey, ever since he was born.’

There was a moment’s silence in the room.

‘Well, it’s Erik when he’s here,’ said the man with the visor.

‘And what’s your name?’ I asked him.

‘Not Erik.’

‘His name’s Ackal,’ said the man on the bed.

‘And that’s Moler,’ said the man with the visor. ‘M-O-L-E-R.’

They both laughed again.

I sat down on one of the beds. Suddenly I could have closed my eyes and slept. Even on that bare, stained mattress, among strangers.

‘You look like you could use a drink.’

The man in the visor gave me a glass and poured some of the clear liquid from his bottle into it.

‘What is it?’ I asked him.

‘Vodka.’

There were flies’ legs floating on the surface. They looked like Chinese writing. I drank half the vodka, wincing at the taste. Then I drank the rest. Was I called something different now? What was my name?

Edith? Is that you?

The man in the visor stood at the window, grey light beyond him. He told me how he’d found Erik sleeping on a park bench one morning. When he sat down next to Erik, Erik showed him a photograph. It wasn’t anyone he recognised. He thought Erik might be hungry so he took him back to his apartment. They’d lived in a different building then. He heated up some old tomato soup, with macaroni. Erik ate as if he hadn’t eaten in days. He stayed with them that night, and the next night, too, and then he left. He didn’t say goodbye or thank you. In fact, it was only after Erik had gone that they realised he hadn’t really spoken to them at all. They didn’t think they’d see him again. Well, at least he hadn’t stolen anything. But three months later, Erik was back.

They talked about him sometimes when he wasn’t there. They saw that he had a different way of doing things to most people. He didn’t need words, for instance. That was fine. Time didn’t mean much to him either. If you gave Erik a clock, he’d sit with it for hours. He’d watch the second-hand go round. Or else he’d put it to his ear and listen to it, the way people used to listen to transistor radios. They could deal with that. They thought Erik needed a home, though. So they adopted him. The man with the visor, Ackal, picked up the bottle and drank from it. He’d adopted Erik legally, he said. He had the documents somewhere. He gestured at a battered metal filing cabinet in the corner of the room. The air moved glassily behind his hand. I thought I might pass out.

‘You can’t do that,’ I muttered.

‘I already did.’ He was almost gloating, his mouth all crooked.

‘But he’s my son. I’ve taken care of him since he was six months old.’ And then I said something I never in my life imagined I would say. Think, maybe. But not say. ‘He’s all I’ve got.’

I saw the two men exchange a glance.

‘If he’s really your son,’ the man in the visor said, ‘then how come the poor bastard was sleeping on a park bench all night, cold and hungry?’

‘He’s forty-three years old,’ I said. ‘What am I supposed to do? Tie him up in the yard?’

That silenced them.

Then I said, ‘I just never realised he’d go so far.’

All the time I’d been talking to Ackal, the other man, the one called Moler, had been staring at me lazily from his bed, lifting a hand every now and then to examine his fingernails or adjust his leather cap. Now he spoke to me.

‘Erik’s a man with a mission.’

I stared at him.

‘It’s something to do with the photograph,’ he said. ‘It’s of a girl. Seems like he’s looking for her. Sometimes we take the piss, saying she’s his girlfriend, but he doesn’t like it when we do that.’ He laughed. ‘He doesn’t like it, does he, Ackal?’

Suddenly I realised which photograph it was that he was talking about. I saw Mazey in the kitchen, with his hand curling and uncurling. Where’s the baby?

‘I don’t know anything about that.’ I stood up. ‘I should be going.’

‘Will we be seeing you again?’ Ackal grinned unpleasantly.

‘Yes,’ said Moler, looking out of the window, ‘you simply must drop by.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

I walked to the door and opened it. Ackal followed me.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘He turns up here, he’s always in good hands.’ His chuckle wasn’t reassuring, but then it wasn’t supposed to be.

Over his shoulder I saw the man in the leather cap. He was yawning. I had the peculiar sense of never having set foot in that room at all. Of never having even entered the apartment. The man in the visor had his hand on the door. I saw him clearly for the first time. His dim round face. Small eyes. A mouth like an owl’s.

‘Does he ever talk to you?’ I asked.

‘Erik?’ he said. ‘No.’

‘Not ever?’

‘No.’

I nodded and, looking down, I smiled to myself.

‘Hey, what do you —’

But I’d already turned away. I was already walking down the stairs.

‘Hey!’ The man in the visor was shouting. ‘What the fuck do you mean by that?’

I didn’t answer. I didn’t even look round. I just kept walking down the stairs. And out through the front door, and back along the street. The weather had changed. The sky was a sandstone colour now, thin silver sunlight reaching through the clouds. I passed the shops with their metal grilles. I passed the tall apartment blocks. The city moved around me, whispering, like a conspiracy. I could imagine walking for days, and finding nothing familiar, recognising no one. I was astonished when I saw my neighbour’s car, astonished when the key I took out of my pocket opened the door. It shouldn’t have been that easy.

Driving home took thirteen hours. In the middle of the night I stopped at the edge of the road and slept for forty-five minutes. In my dream I was driving and Mazey was beside me, dozing. I saw his long nose, his slightly drooping upper lip, his blond hair falling across his forehead. There were no knives anywhere. I was happy.

When I woke up, my heart jumped. I was behind the wheel, exactly as I’d dreamed I was. It took me a while to realise that the car wasn’t moving and I wasn’t going to crash. I rolled the window down. Breathed the cold night air. Then I turned the key in the ignition and drove on. I was still tired, though. My eyes kept trying to close and when I forced them open it felt as if they were revolving in their sockets. All I could find on the radio was static — the noise trains make in tunnels. I had to smoke cigarettes to stay awake.

At dawn I stopped again. I slept for an hour. Waking, I saw a stork standing on one leg in the fast lane. For a moment I just stared at it. That it could be there, in that unlikely place, and look so unconcerned. But I didn’t want a car to run it down. I reached for the door handle, thinking I’d shout or clap my hands, do something that would scare it off. The sound of the door opening was enough. It lifted into the air, legs dangling like bits of a broken deck-chair. The first few wing-beats were ungainly, but by the time it cleared the trees, it had achieved a kind of grace.

A few kilometres south of the village I shifted on the seat and felt something in my coat pocket — a small glass, cold and faintly sticky. I held it up above the steering-wheel so I could look at it. It was the glass I’d drunk vodka from. I must have put it in my pocket without thinking. I could still see the room. It was pale-yellow, and there were beds in it. I could see the man with the diamond pellet in his ear. I could see the other man, too, the upper half of his face bathed in a deep green shadow. They were like someone else’s memories. But the vodka glass was proof of what had happened, it was evidence, and I wasn’t sure I wanted any. I felt as if the glass had been planted.

The next day Mazey came home. He walked in through the back door, as usual. He ran the cold tap, cupped a hand under it and bent his head. In that moment, standing in the kitchen and watching him drink, I realised I would never follow him again. There was nothing more I needed to know — in fact, maybe I already knew too much. I’d tried to guide him, keep him safe, but I’d reached the limits of my power, my influence. He’d invented a kind of freedom for himself.

I remembered the articles they ran in the paper all those years ago. WHO COULD DO SUCH A THING? I could never quite understand why nobody found out about him, why he was never caught. I thought I knew why now. It had to be something to do with the way his mind worked. There were reasons behind the things he did, but they weren’t reasons anyone else would think of. What was a reason for him would be madness for them. He lived in a different dimension. That difference was what protected him.

‘How are you, Mazey?’ I said to him.

Still bent over the sink, he looked at me sideways, the water splashing down into his hand and overflowing. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something else.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Just drink.’