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.