The Truth and Other Lies

13

Unshaven and without his incisors, Obradin looked like a jack-o’-lantern with a full beard. He spent most of the day smoking at the open bedroom window above his fish shop, baring the yawning gap in his teeth at every passerby and looking out at the sea hidden behind the houses opposite. By now the entire town was preoccupied with the mysterious cause of his rampage. Helga remained silent, determined not to add grist to the rumor mill. Some reckoned it was schizophrenia; others suspected that something sizeable had burst in his brain. It was all conjecture.

In the days that followed, Obradin still made no move to leave his bedroom and resume work. Helga took over the shop. She never got off the phone, but she did take the opportunity to have a lock put on the cellar door and to peel the silly fish pictures off the window.

On Assumption Day, a glorious day in August, Henry came driving up in the best of spirits, wearing a white panama hat. Two weeks earlier his wife had drowned. You would never have guessed that he was in mourning, but everyone mourns in his own way — who’s to say what mourning looks like? He parked on the pavement in front of the fishmonger’s. He’d brought flowers and Spanish soap for Helga and a badger-hair shaving brush for Obradin.

Helga related the whole story about Obradin to Henry, who already knew most of it. He slipped Helga an envelope containing money for the secret purchase of a new engine for the Drina.

“Wait till the lottery numbers are announced,” he whispered in her ear. “Then fill in a slip with five winning numbers maximum, do you understand?”

Helga understood and kissed both his hands. Henry fetched a cardboard box from the Maserati and climbed up to Obradin’s apartment via the stairs at the back of the shop. Because he had his hands full, he didn’t knock, but pushed down the door handle with his elbow.

“Hey, what’s the matter with you, old pal?” he asked, putting the box and the present on the bed. It didn’t escape Henry’s notice that one half of the double bed was untouched. Helga must be sleeping somewhere else just now. “I’ve brought you something to shave with.”

The Serb was standing beside a pile of cigarette butts about the size of an anthill.

“Wok goo you wonk?”

Henry eyed the gap in Obradin’s teeth with respect. “Wow. You could string a clothesline in there. Now have a look at this.” He took a solar-powered marten deterrent from the cardboard box. “Ultrasound. This is the solution. Listen.”

Henry switched on the device. YEEEEEEK—an ultra-unbearable sound shrilled out. Each man put his fingers in his ears. Henry turned it off.

“And that’s the problem. I don’t know what frequency you need to drive away the marten and not the dog.”

“Wok?” Obradin asked without interest.

“Hey, you know Poncho — he’s sensitive, just like you. He goes crazy when I switch on this infernal machine. Help me adjust it. We’ll set the thing up, scare away the marten, and have a smoke. It’ll never come back. Wok goo you fink?”

Henry chuckled. He’d always been of the opinion that feeling sorry for people only delays their recovery. A little joke helps a sick man back on his feet faster than a sympathy suppository.

Obradin did indeed smile. Henry put out his hand and held his mouth shut. “Don’t say anything, you Serbian bean stew, or you’ll make me laugh again. Come on. Let’s go to the dentist.”

It was the best private practice for miles. Obradin got new teeth. First temporary ones that didn’t look bad at all — just a little rabbit-like. Later an oral surgeon put in implants, two veritable works of art, each one more expensive than a midrange car. The molar was replaced too, and a piece of bone taken from his palate to reconstruct his jaw. It goes without saying that Henry footed the bill and never mentioned it. As we have seen, Henry could be great.

——

Forty miles farther south, Gisbert Fasch was transferred from the intensive care unit to a four-bed ward. Badly mangled but in full possession of his faculties. With his broken legs and one arm dangling in an aluminum sling, he looked like poor Gregor Samsa who woke up one morning to find himself transformed into an insect.

Brown pus flowed out of Fasch’s chest through a tube into a little contraption beside his bed. This pumped out septic fluid, which then gathered in a transparent plastic pouch. The shaft of the headrest that had pierced his chest had been full of bacteria. Once every twelve hours the pouch was emptied by a nurse who seemed to be qualified for only this one task and was correspondingly bad-tempered. She also changed his diapers and washed and moisturized his behind. Her firm fingers on his scrotum were indisputably the highlight of the day.

Every breath hurt. He had a taste in his mouth that was difficult to describe, and a whispering sound in his lung. Something in there had become infected in a big way — he could smell it. A high whistling sound pierced the walls of the ward day and night. No one seemed to hear it but him.

The three other men on the ward all wore diapers. Anyone without a room of his own learns a lot. Such as, for instance, what dirty diapers smell like. Human beings, as Leonardo da Vinci realized long ago, are merely passageways for food and drink; all they leave behind them is a pile of shit.

In the artificial twilight of the ward a fly was buzzing around. Fasch saw it double; he saw everything double since coming around after the anesthesia. Lured by the smell of pus, the fly orbited the patients, alighting here and there. It nibbled at the gangrenous foot of the man in the bed on his left — a nameless diabetic, who only groaned — and then vanished into the gaping maw of the motionless man on his right to lay eggs on his tongue.

Gisbert’s head was fixed in a head clamp on account of his fractured skull. Only with a little pocket mirror was he able to see a back-to-front image of his surroundings. So as not to see everything double, he had to shut one eye. He would have liked a bed at the window and to be able to stretch out his legs. He missed Miss Wong, his long-standing partner, and on top of that his anus itched and he couldn’t scratch himself because he had a venous catheter full of nutrient solution stuck in the back of his right hand. In the mornings the resident doctor dropped in on his rounds, a cluster of medicos surrounding him like bodyguards, and asked Gisbert how we were. Well, how does he think we are, with an itchy ass and no way of scratching ourselves? It was wretched.

The most painful thing for Gisbert was the lost briefcase. When he came to after the operation, it was his first thought. Like a mother searching for her lost child, he called out for his briefcase. They thought he was hallucinating. He was given sedatives, and in his fitful dreams he continued to search for the briefcase — with no success. Fasch wasn’t told who had rescued him and brought him to the hospital. Only that he’d been driven to the emergency room after a bad car crash.

His hunt for Henry Hayden was over. He’d invested two years of his life in the search and they’d been the best two. Now all the precious evidence, every tiny detail, all the questions without answers, all the irreplaceable documents, were lost. Henry had gotten the better of him with a silly trick. He’d simply lain in wait for him around the corner and then bang, crash, it was over — what a defeat. If Fasch had lost all memory of the accident, as is usually the case with craniocerebral trauma, he could have recovered in peace and been grateful for his second life. But he couldn’t forget. His memory ceaselessly projected the same sequence of images onto his retinas. No sooner had he closed his eyes than he was approaching the bend again, racing straight toward Henry. Over and over again — Henry. Hallucinations arise out of nothing, figments of the imagination, but this was no figment, this was a documentary film on endless loop. It was torture. Over and over again — Henry. If this doesn’t stop, Fasch decided, I’ll kill myself.

And then one day the door opened and in walked Henry Hayden. Not a ghost, waiting around a bend in the road, but the man himself. With the same professional nonchalance as a doctor, he drew up a metal stool for himself and sat down at the bedside. He looked just the same as in the lifestyle magazine. Only now there was no woman or dog at his side. What you might call a pared-down version of perfection.

The diabetic in the next bed let out a soft hissing sound. Otherwise it was absolutely silent on the ward. “How are you?” Hayden asked in a pleasantly matter-of-fact baritone. The question may not have been original, but it was appropriate; they were in a hospital after all, the house of the sick. During the conversation that followed, Fasch kept one eye screwed up, so as not to have to see two of his enemy.

“Who are you?” Fasch asked, after some hesitation.

“I happened to be present when you crashed your car. My name is Henry Hayden.”

The guy’s got a nerve, Fasch thought. Happened to be lying in wait around the bend, happened to disappear from the scene for thirty years, and now just happens to drop in. As if.

“Haydn… like the composer?”

“Something like that. Hayden with an ‘e,’ like the writer.”

“Ah? I know your books. But I’m afraid I have trouble reading just now. As you can see.” Fasch swung the arm in the sling to and fro. “No can do.”

Hayden moved his stool a millimeter closer to the bed. “I’d be happy to get you a few audiobooks if you’d like.”

Fasch wondered why Hayden had visited him. Not to deliver audiobooks, that was for sure. Perhaps Hayden had been expecting to find a human vegetable and was now disappointed. Did he have any idea who he was? Could he have any idea? Fasch tried to sit up a bit, but the iron clamp prevented it. The whistling grew louder.

“Can you hear that?” asked Fasch, to change the subject.

“What?”

“The whistling. There’s a whistling noise here. Something’s whistling. It’s coming through the wall.”

Henry looked about him, listened, shrugged his shoulders.

“Can’t hear a thing.”

Fasch sighed. “So you can’t hear anything either. No one can except me.”

“In that case, it’s a conspiracy.” Henry leaned toward him over the bed. “If I see or hear something and everyone else pretends there’s nothing there, then I know it’s a conspiracy.”

Fasch had to laugh. That hurt, and not just his chest. Most of all it hurt his soul. He didn’t want to laugh. Laughter means reconciliation. It connects people, and undoes grudges. But he had already invested a lot in this grudge of his. He had tended it and watched it grow. Why should he discard it now?

“You saw what happened?” he asked, trying to change the subject again.

Henry nodded. “You took the bend too quickly and rammed into the barrier. Then the car overturned.”

“I don’t remember anything.”

“That’s for the best. It wasn’t pretty. Hardly possible to believe anyone could survive a thing like that.”

“Where was I? How did I look?”

Henry adopted a thoughtful expression. Fasch looked at his manicured hands resting on his thighs. He was wearing an IWC with a brown strap. Must have cost a chunk.

“Your car was lying on its roof. There was broken glass all over the place… You were trapped on the backseat, unconscious. I pulled you free. You were completely out of it.”

“You? You pulled me free?”

Henry gave a cheerful laugh. “Of course. There was no one else around. You looked at me — your eyes were open — but you didn’t notice anything, did you?”

“I can’t remember a thing. Did I say anything?”

“You just gurgled.”

“And then?”

“A few people have asked me that. Well, there was this piece of metal stuck in your chest. Pretty big, about so big.” Henry held up two fingers to show just how big it had been.

With his right hand, Fasch felt the painful spot where the tube disappeared into his chest. “You pulled it out?”

“Yes.”

“Then you saved me.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that! The doctors saved you. I just happened to be there.”

Silent implosion of emotion. Fasch could feel his hatred turning into something else. He was overcome by sadness, but he could do nothing to prevent the transformation from taking place, and he felt sympathy and gratitude toward Henry Hayden. There was no more reason to hate him.

Henry put his head to one side. “I wonder why you didn’t brake?”

“Didn’t I?”

“No, you didn’t brake. You just drove straight on.”

Fasch closed his eyes. Once more he was speeding into the bend with the blazing sea before him… he was shooting toward Henry, light reflecting on his sunglasses, a fleeting glimpse of his mother’s photo, and then… Hayden was right, he really hadn’t braked.

When Fasch opened his eyes, Henry was standing over him with compressed lips, looking at him with cold fascination. There he was again: Grendel, the monster from the swamp.

“Don’t you feel well?” asked Henry. “Should I fetch a doctor?”

“Please don’t!” Fasch replied. “I have enough problems as it is.”

Henry pressed the bell next to his bed.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m leaving you on your own now. You need to sleep.”

The door opened and two male nurses came into the ward. Henry gave them a nod. They fiddled around with the contraptions at the side of the bed. Fasch felt a sense of panic.

“What’s going on? What are you doing?”

One of the nurses bent over him. “Keep calm, we’re just taking you to another room, all right?”

“Why? It’s nice here. I don’t want to leave.”

One story higher, Fasch was wheeled into a room for private patients. It was peaceful and clean. It had a floor-to-ceiling window with white curtains. There were flowers on a round glass table, a plasma screen on the wall, a Kandinsky print over the sink, a brand-new tablet computer on a mobile table. Only the minibar’s missing, Fasch thought, and coughed up a lump of catarrh. His bed was wheeled to the window so that he could see the park. The pus-pumping contraption was plugged in again, and then at last he was left alone. Gisbert Fasch looked out the window and thought of his partner, the silent Miss Wong. She never came to visit.