The Insult Read Online Free PDF

sentimentality – and it surprised me to discover that not only Nurse Janssen (predictable, perhaps) but also Visser (Visser!) might be prone to it. And as for the idea of someone holding my hand without me knowing, it suddenly struck me as a violation, an obscenity – even if that someone was my fiancée.
    ‘Aren’t you pleased?’ Nurse Janssen said.
    ‘Where is she?’ I said.
    They led me to a room I’d never known was there. It didn’t seem to belong with the draughty, antiseptic corridors and hallways of the clinic. Smelling of sponge cake, wood-polish and cut flowers, it was more like the drawing-room in a country house. I waited for Claudia in an armchair by the window.
    Before too long she came quietly into the room and sat down in the chair next to mine.
    ‘You look just the same,’ she said.
    I turned to face her. ‘I can’t see you.’
    I was lying, of course. I’d asked them to dim the lamps in the room before they left. They probably thought it was for reasons of modesty or romance. It was nothing of the kind. It was so I could look at her.
    She began to cry.
    I studied her closely. Her narrow knees were pressed together and her head was bowed. She’d altered her hairstyle, drawing it sleekly back behind her ears. She’d fastened it with a piece of dark velvet. The colour was hard to make out against the light, but I imagined it was purple. She’d always liked purple.
    Her shoulders shook inside her cardigan. I felt sorry for her, but in the way you might feel sorry for a stranger you saw crying in a public place – sitting beside a fountain, say, or standing at a bus-stop. There was nothing personal about it. On the contrary, I felt removed from her. Distanced. I felt so distant that I was almost curious to know the reason for her tears.
    At last, she sat up straighter in her chair. She wiped her face with a hand that seemed clumsy; it was as if she’d lost the use of it, as if it had been broken at the wrist. That slender wrist. There was a time when it had meant something.
    She apologised for not visiting me during the past few weeks. She’d had examinations. She reminded me that she was studying to be a lawyer.
    ‘Did you pass?’ I asked her.
    ‘Yes.’ She nodded.
    I congratulated her.
    Outside, it was September. The wasps on the windowsill were drowsy, and there were fires burning in the fields beyond the clinic wall. I saw Visser and Janssen walking through the orchard, among the pear trees, her dark head bent, his moustache mysterious in the half-light.
    After a long silence, and so abruptly that I jumped, Claudia offered to come and live with me. She’d cook, she’d clean. She’d see to my every need. Her face tilted eagerly.
    I tried to conceal my horror.
    ‘What about your career?’
    ‘I’d give it up.’ She lowered her voice. ‘For you.’
    I found myself launching into a speech; it was completely unrehearsed, but the way it flowed from my lips without any prompting or effort, I might have been practising for months. I couldn’t possibly ask such a sacrifice of her, I said. Since the shooting and the operations that followed it, I’d become erratic, demanding – even violent. In short, I’d changed. And I couldn’t bear to burden her with such responsibility. She should leave me now, today, avoiding what wouldonly be a far more painful parting in the future. I had, in any case, never been good enough for her – I held up a hand as she tried to interrupt – my father a post-office clerk in the provinces, now retired, hers a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Education. Leave me now, I told her, while our memories were unblemished, while we still had respect for one another and were free of bitterness and resentment, while we could still avoid recriminations. After all, she had her whole life in front of her (yes, I actually used that line!). She should find some young man who could provide her with the kind of future she deserved. I’d be better off with my