The Book of Other People

The Liar by Aleksandar Hemon

The crowd is whirring in a cloud of brazen afternoon dust; they have waited too long already. Finally, the Procurator steps down to the penultimate stair, spreads his feet and installs his arms akimbo to assume a routine pose of authority. His impressively rotund belly is outlined under the sweaty toga, the shadow of the navel at its center. He scans the crowd with contempt, the eye of the navel following his gaze as he turns a little to the left, a little to the right. The din dies down. With their swords, the soldiers push forward two tattered men – the men’s shackles rattle as they totter – and position them on each side of the Procurator, who doesn’t even glance at them. It all looks like a well-rehearsed performance.

‘People!’ the Procurator shouts. ‘People! Look at me!’

The crowd has been looking at him all along, but now it tightens, as if each man were a blood vessel and the air has just become colder. The dust is slowly settling down, coating their bodies, biting their eyes.

‘These two caitiffs here have violated the laws of the Empire,’ the Procurator thunders. ‘They ought to be punished with the utmost severity. But they are just men and the Empire is merciful – one of them shall live.’

The crowd rumbles with excitement. The Procurator points at the man on the right: he is scrawny, with long, narrow arms and broken teeth, his left eye turgid with blood and pus. ‘This man is a thief,’ the Procurator says. ‘He has robbed men of their sustenance. He has sneaked up on them at night. He has stolen their meager property. Fathers have become destitute, mothers have wept, because of this scoundrel.’

The thief looks at the crowd with as much innocence in his right eye as he can muster. The crowd knows his ilk, they recognize his sinewy greed, but they can also see the bruises on his forearms; they can see the crusty gullies of blood stretching from his nostrils along the curly curve of his mustache to disappear in his beard.

‘People,’ cries the thief with a cracked, screeching voice. ‘I was hungry, my children were hungry. I was hungry!’

A soldier smacks the thief across the face with the back of his hand and a fresh spring of blood sprinkles the thief ’s beard. The crowd mutters, excited by blood promising more blood.

‘This one,’ – the Procurator points at the man on the left – ‘this one is a mountebank, a liar. He has uttered many a humbug. He has spread calumnies, lies, false stories, besmirching honest men and the Empire. For him, nothing is sacred. He has transgressed against the truth, my friends, not just the Empire – the truth. And the truth is the mother of law and order.’

The crowd turns its attention to the man on the left: his hands are tied behind his back; his shoulder blades are sticking out like fins; his kneecaps are as bare as baby skulls; his flocculent beard is sagging with sweat, as if he were shriveling – but he has no bruises, other than the shackle blisters on his ankles. He confessed to the guards whatever they wanted to hear, and then told them what they didn’t ask for, freely embellishing so as to make them agreeable – they just listened, shaking their heads in disbelief, yet unable to stop listening or beat him. The liar looks back at the crowd innocuously: there are the bloodthirsty, law-loving brutes, ever picking their asses in the first row; and there are the handy pick-pockets pilfering their pockets; and over there, safely on the flanks, the citizens of good standing, disgusted and scared by the spectacle, shouting down a drunkard whining about his unfaithful wives. He recognizes the children with pockmarked faces and tawny teeth, who scuttled after him and pulled his donkey’s tail not so long ago; and there is the drunk harlot with her green eyes filling up with tears, as though he were her husband. He spots the spies watching the crowd from within the crowd, pricking up their ears for a nefarious word about the Procurator or the Empire.

He knows he should be calm and dignified and serene. He knows he could turn the crowd and make it love him – he has done it before. He could just look them straight in the eye, lock the harlot’s gaze, or touch the hairy brute, and tell them one of the tales he picked up roaming the land, or a parable Joseph told him, or the story he dreamt up last night. But the Procurator would never let him speak; and, even if he did, the crowd desired blood, not words. A strange panic possesses him, as if his whole being sneezed – a painful, shattering, humiliating desire to live and breathe in this body, now and forever. So he begins twitching his head to the right, throwing his glance at the thief like a tether, saying with his body, because his suffocating voice would not do it, saying: ‘Take him! Take him!’

The crowd is bedeviled by a sudden change in the liar’s demeanor. His face is madly taut; his neck keeps cramping; his eyes are bulging out sideways, as if trying to sneak out of the sockets. They see now that the liar is not just a liar, but that he is overtaken by evil spirits; they can see he is a bad seed. The thief does nothing, conscious that something good for him is beginning to happen.

‘Let the thief go,’ they shout. ‘Let him go.’

‘Let him go,’ the Procurator orders the soldiers.

The liar drops his head to his chest, as if all the neck tendons suddenly snapped, and closes his eyes. The crowd stands in silence for a moment, enjoying the moment of his recognition, but then they start fidgeting and shuffling their feet, and the dust is aroused again, darker this time, as the sun has begun to set.

And the soldiers load a huge wooden cross on the liar’s back – a handful of splinters immediately pierces the skin on his right shoulder, releasing lush blood streams. He drags the cross through narrow streets teeming with people, wiping the sweat off their faces, waiting for him to drop and die. But he keeps on going, and in a hallucinatory moment sees the thief ’s tranquil face in the crowd, as if what has just happened never happened.

The cross slips from his shoulder, scraping off a large swath of skin. The soldier marching next to him lifts the cross and loads it back on, but puts it down on his left shoulder, slowly. ‘There,’ the soldier says. The liar is panting, nearly oblivious to the pain, but still manages to utter a grateful world to the soldier. The crowd thickens around them, so the soldiers have to spread it, beating it back with spears and the flat sides of their swords.

‘This does not bode well,’ says the liar to the soldier.

The soldier says nothing.

‘You know,’ the liar says and coughs up a flock of blood drops, ‘I am the son of God.’

The soldier says nothing.

‘I am,’ the liar says. ‘I have been told.’

‘Verily you are,’ says the soldier. ‘And I am Virgil.’

And the procession moves on, up the hill, on top of which most of the crowd is already waiting. The liar looks up toward it, hoping against hope that the voices in his head have told him the truth.