The Insult Read Free

anything?’
    ‘No, not really.’
    ‘Did you see anything at all?’
    I smiled. ‘Tomatoes.’
    Slatnick stopped chewing for a moment.
    ‘They must’ve spilled out of my bag,’ I said. ‘I suppose I was going to make a salad that night.’
    ‘I see.’ I heard Munck stand up and start to pace about. ‘Where do you work, Mr Blom?’
    ‘A bookshop.’ I mentioned the name of it.
    ‘I know the place. I’m often in there myself.’ Munck walked to the end of the bed. ‘Do you have any enemies?’
    I raised my eyebrows.
    ‘It sounds dramatic, I know,’ Munck said, ‘but we have to ask.’
    ‘None that I can think of.’
    ‘You have no idea who might’ve shot at you?’
    ‘I’m afraid not.’
    Slatnick spoke next. ‘Am I correct in assuming therefore that you would not be able to identify your assailant?’
    I stared in his direction. What is it about policemen?
    ‘Slatnick,’ Munck said, ‘I think the answer’s yes.’
    ‘Yes?’ Slatnick hadn’t understood.
    ‘Yes, you’d be correct in that assumption.’
    There was a silence.
    ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Mr Blom,’ Munck said. ‘I have tosay that, in this case, it seems unlikely that justice will be done. All that remains is for us to wish you a speedy recovery. Once again, if there’s anything we can do –’
    ‘Thank you, Detective.’
    I listened to the two men walk away, their footsteps mingling with those of other visitors. One of them sounded like a diver, the soles of his shoes slapping down like flippers on the floor …
    Absolute blindness is rare. There’s usually some suggestion of movement, some sense of light and shade. Not in my case. What I ‘saw’ was without texture or definition: it was constant, depthless and impenetrable. Sometimes I thought: Your eyes are closed. Open them. But they were already open. Wide open, seeing nothing. I could look straight into the sun and my pupils would contract, but I wouldn’t know it was the sun that I was looking at. Or I could put my head inside a cardboard box. Same thing. There were no gradations in the blankness, no fluctuations of any kind. It was what depression would look like, I thought, if you had to externalise it.
    Miss Janssen spent part of every morning at my bedside. It was her job to motivate me, though I found most of her efforts infantile and embarrassing. Take the rubber balls, for instance. She told me to hold one in each hand. I was supposed to ‘squeeze and then relax, squeeze and then relax’.
    ‘What’s it for?’ I asked.
    ‘You’d be surprised,’ she said, ‘how quickly muscles atrophy.’
    ‘Is that so?’
    ‘Yes, it is. If you don’t exercise, they just wither away.’
    ‘Well, in that case,’ I said, ‘there’s one muscle we definitely shouldn’t overlook.’
    She brought the session to an abrupt end.
    The next morning she was back again, as usual. She made no reference to what I’d said the day before. In what was intended as a gesture of repentance, I asked her for the rubber balls. I lay there, one in each hand, squeezing and relaxing. I behaved. And, since hervoice was all there was, I began to listen to it. Not the words in themselves, but the sound of the words. I tried to work out how old she was, what she did in her spare time, whether she was happy. There were moments when I thought I could picture her, the way you picture strangers on the phone, just from their voices: I saw the colour of her eyes, the shape of her mouth. It was like what happened when the dream I had was over: the gradual assembly of a physical presence. Some mornings I found that I could only see her breasts. Her voice seemed to be telling me that they were large. The curve from the rib-cage to the nipple, for example. That fullness, that wonderful convexity. Not unlike a fruit bowl. But I could never sustain it. Sooner or later the picture always broke up, fell apart, dissolved. And, anyway, they weren’t her breasts. They were just breasts. They could