The Truth and Other Lies

2

Henry had often wondered what course his life would have taken if he hadn’t met Martha. The answer he gave himself never varied — the same as before. He would not have become a significant author, would not, as a result, have been able to live a free and prosperous life, certainly wouldn’t drive an Italian sports car — and no one would know his name. Henry was quite straight with himself on the matter. He would have remained invisible — an art in itself. Of course, the struggle for survival is exciting. It is, after all, only scarcity that gives things their value; money loses all meaning as soon as there’s plenty of it. No denying any of that. But aren’t apathy and indifference a reasonable price to pay for a life of wealth and luxury, and better than hunger and suffering and bad teeth any day? You don’t have to be famous to be happy, especially as popularity is all too often confused with significance. But ever since Henry had stepped out of the shadows of anonymity into the light of a particular existence, his life had been incomparably more comfortable. And so for years now his sole concern had been to preserve the status quo. There was no more for him to achieve. In that he remained a realist. Even if it was boring.

The manuscript of Frank Ellis was his discovery. It was lying wrapped in greaseproof paper under a stranger’s bed. Henry found it, his head throbbing with pain, as he hunted for his left sock so that he could steal out of the stranger’s room as he’d stolen out of so many others. He couldn’t remember the woman lying next to him in bed, and he felt no desire to get to know her now. He could only see her foot and the feminine silhouette running from the dip of her pelvis up to her fine, chestnut-brown hair, and he investigated no further. The stove was cold; the room was dark. It smelled of dust and bad breath. Time to make himself scarce.

Henry was hideously thirsty because he’d drunk a particularly large amount of alcohol the night before. It had been the eve of his thirty-sixth birthday. Nobody had wished him any happy returns. How could they? Nobody knew. Who could possibly know? Drifters don’t form close friendships, and his parents had been dead for a long time.

He had no apartment of his own, no fixed income, and no idea what he was to do next in life. Why should he? The future is uncertain. Anyone who says he knows what the future holds is a liar. The past is nothing but memory and thus pure fabrication — the present alone is certain, gives us space to evolve, and is over again in an instant. What tormented Henry far more than uncertainty was the thought of certainty. Knowing what lay in store for him was tantamount to the pendulum over the pit. What was there left to hope for except remorse, death, and decay? In keeping with this entirely clear-eyed outlook, Henry defined his life as a cumulative process, to be judged by historians only after his death. And happy is he who leaves nothing behind; he need fear no judgment.

Keeping silent goes against human nature. Thus the opening sentence of Martha’s manuscript. It might easily, Henry thought, be something he would say. Absolutely to the point and so simple. He read the next sentence, and then on and on. His left sock stayed off; he didn’t creep out of the little apartment; nor did he, as was his wont, walk off with whatever cash or items of value that happened to be lying around in order to buy himself something to eat.

From the first paragraph he had the impression that the story was not unlike his own. He read the whole manuscript in a sitting, turning the pages as quietly as he could, so as not to wake up the unknown woman gently snoring beside him. There were no corrections on the densely typed pages as far as he could make out, and no typos either — not a comma out of place. Every now and then Henry stopped reading for a moment to take a closer look at the sleeping woman. Was it possible they’d met before? Had he told her about himself and then forgotten they’d ever met? What was her name again? Had she even mentioned it? She hadn’t talked much, that was for sure. She was unprepossessing, delicate, with long eyelashes that now shielded her closed eyes.

——

When Martha awoke in the early afternoon, Henry had already lit the stove, solved the mystery of the dripping tap, fixed the shower curtain, cleared up the kitchen, and made fried eggs. He had oiled the small typewriter that stood on the kitchen table and straightened out a jammed key over the gas flame. Martha’s manuscript was lying wrapped up under the bed again. She sat down at table and devoured the fried eggs.

He suggested they live together and she said nothing, which he took for a yes.

They spent the entire day together. She told him how he had carried on the night before, declaring that he was insignificant in every way. Henry agreed with this, but could no longer remember anything.

In the afternoon they ate ice cream and sauntered through the botanical garden, where Henry told her a bit more about his past. He spoke of his childhood, which had ended with his mother walking out and his father falling down the stairs. He didn’t mention the years he’d spent in hiding.

Martha didn’t interrupt him once, nor did she ask any questions. She held his arm tight as they walked through the tropical hothouse, and at some point she laid her head on his shoulder. Until that day Henry had never told anyone so much about himself, and most of what he said was actually true. He left out nothing important, didn’t gloss over anything, and made almost none of it up. It was a happy afternoon in the botanical garden, the first of many happy afternoons with Martha.

The next night too they slept in Martha’s bed near the stove. He was tender and sober this time, gentle and almost shy. And she was completely silent, her breath hot and quick. Later, when he was fast asleep, Martha got up and sat down at the typewriter in the kitchen. Henry was woken by the clatter of the keys. Steady, with short breaks, a period. Then the ringing of the little bell at the end of the line. Period, new line, period, paragraph. A high-pitched rasping sound as she pulled the typed paper out of the typewriter, and several short rasping sounds as she put in the new sheet. So that’s how literature is born, he thought. The clatter went on all night until morning.

The next thing Henry did was to mend the bed. Then he got hold of a rubber mat for the typewriter to stand on, procured two new kitchen chairs, and bored open the electricity meter to save on heating costs. While he was getting all that done, he reflected on the possibilities of creating a home without any capital and wondered to what extent he was cut out for it.

He tidied and cleaned. Martha didn’t comment on his domestic activities. She didn’t ever comment on anything; Henry admired that. He didn’t, however, have the feeling that she was indifferent or devoid of opinion — no, she was quite simply content and could find no fault with him. It was as if she had foreseen everything.

It struck Henry that Martha never read her stories herself. She never talked about them; she wasn’t proud of them. When she finished one, she started on the next, like a tree shedding its leaves in the autumn. The story must have taken shape in her mind even as she was working on the previous one, for there was no pause for inspiration. For a long time it remained unclear to Henry what she lived off. She had studied, but did not reveal what. She must have had some savings, but only rarely went to the bank. If there was nothing to eat, she ate nothing. In the afternoon she regularly left the apartment to go swimming at the municipal pool. Henry followed her once; she really did just go swimming.

In the cellar Henry found a suitcase filled with rotting manuscripts, hastily buried like children’s corpses beneath moldy rat droppings. The pages had clumped together into a pulp; only the odd phrase was still legible. Lost stories. The manuscript of Frank Ellis would have rotted too, or have been turned into a brief blast of heat in the stove on a cold day, if Henry hadn’t hidden it. He was to thank for that. As he would later tell his conscience, even if he hadn’t created Frank Ellis, he had at least rescued it. That had to count for something.

“I’m not interested in literature,” Martha said on the subject. “I just want to write.” Henry made a mental note of the sentence for later. Where Martha in her hermetically sealed world got hold of the ideas for creating such illustrious characters remained a mystery to him. She wasn’t well traveled, and yet she knew the whole world. He cooked for her; they talked, were silent, made love. At night she got up to write; in the early afternoon he made them something to eat, and then he read what she’d written. He kept every single page of her writing safe; she never asked about it. In this way their love grew quietly, as a matter of course. They took pleasure in doing things together and profited from one another; Henry could not imagine ever being happier. It was just up to him not to destroy the harmony.

Henry sent the manuscript of Frank Ellis in his own name to four publishers he’d looked up in the phone book. First he had had to make a solemn vow to Martha that he would under no circumstances reveal who had written it. It was to remain a lifelong secret, and if anything actually got published, it could only be under his name. Henry thought that was all right and swore not to tell. In his own way, he kept his word.

——

For a long time, there was no reply. Henry forgot he’d sent it off, and if he’d known how infinitesimal the chances of an unsolicited manuscript are, he wouldn’t have invested in the postage. But ignorance often proves to be a true blessing.

Meanwhile, Henry worked at the fruit market. He got up at two in the morning and came home toward midday, dead tired and reeking of vegetables, to tidy up and cook something for Martha.

Martha introduced Henry to her parents. She had hesitated for a long time, and Henry understood why when he met her father. Throughout their first meeting, Martha’s father, a fireman who’d taken early retirement, eyed Henry with smoldering ill will from his velour armchair. Rheumatism was gnawing away at his joints and had already claimed his thumb. Martha’s mother was a cashier at a supermarket, a cheerful woman, warm and sensitive, just the way a mother ought to be.

They drank coffee with cardamom in the upholstered landscape of the living room and chatted about trivialities. Henry saw yellow birds in a cage on the sideboard, waiting for death. The father’s pride and joy was his collection of historic firemen’s helmets, which he kept in an illuminated glass-fronted cabinet. He told Henry all about every one of them, specifying date, place of origin, and function, while his eyes scrutinized Henry’s face for signs of weariness or indifference. But Henry endured the ordeal with unflagging stoicism and even interrupted him to ask interested questions.

There was a cold winter. Henry got hold of a new door and two fabulous electric blankets, and he insulated the windows. He had spotted the door in a Dumpster full of scrap timber. He climbed into the Dumpster in thick, driving snow to salvage the heavy door, which he shouldered and lugged home on his back like a leaf-cutter ant. He took the plane to it here and there, added a piece at the bottom, and hung it. Now a cold draft no longer came in. Martha was delighted. Henry’s handyman’s skills had always turned women on. DIY and hobbies drive away the demons of boredom and negative thoughts. Henry simply liked mending things — not in order to impress, but because it was fun and because there was nothing better to do.

The following spring Henry killed his father-in-law. He bought him a historic helmet once worn in the Vienna fire brigade, which is, as it happens, the oldest professional fire brigade in the world. The aging collector’s surprise and pleasure were so great that his aneurysm ruptured and he fell down dead. Henry had carried off the perfect tyrannicide without either knowing what he was doing or meaning to do it. As a result he had no guilty conscience, because, as Henry said to himself, the insidious blood vessel in the old man’s brain could have burst when he was taking a shit. Everyone was pleased and no one suspected anything.

The entire helmet collection disappeared into the earth along with the dead fireman. Martha’s mother blossomed; she gave away the yellow birds and emigrated a year later with an American businessman to Wisconsin, where she was struck by lightning. From then on she wrote long (now only ever left-handed) letters about her new life in America.

Then Moreany’s call came. Henry cycled to the publisher’s. If he had had any idea what a fateful course the whole affair would take, he might perhaps not have gone.

——

Betty was waiting for him in the lobby. They got into the elevator together and went up to the fourth floor. Her lily-of-the-valley perfume filled the elevator. She saw that he had handyman’s hands; he spotted a small hole in her earlobe and the constellation of the Big Dipper mapped out on her throat in ravishing freckles. On the regrettably short journey up he could intuit her sizing up his DNA. When the elevator doors opened, the essentials between them had been settled.

Moreany came around the side of his publisher’s desk and touched Henry with both hands, as you might greet a long-lost friend. His desk was laden with books and manuscripts. Right on top was the manuscript of Frank Ellis. This was pretty much what Henry had imagined a publisher would look like.

Henry kept his promise to Martha and introduced himself as the author. This turned out to be quite straightforward. He didn’t have to say or prove anything special, because everyone knows an author can’t do anything except write, and anyone can write. You don’t need any particular knowledge or skill, or have to say anything particular about yourself. Apart from a modicum of life experience, you don’t require any education to speak of; there’s no need to produce a diploma, only a manuscript. You leave the final judgment to your critics and readers, because the less you speak about your work the more radiant your aura. He wasn’t interested in literature, Henry explained. He just wanted to write. That hit the spot.

The novel sold fantastically well. When the first royalty check arrived, he and Martha moved into a larger, warmer apartment and got married. The money kept on pouring in, heaps of it. Money didn’t trigger any kind of buying reflex or wasteful impulses in Martha. She carried on writing undeterred while Henry went on shopping sprees. He bought himself costly suits, expensive moments with beautiful women, and an Italian car. Moreany gave Henry a share in the profits that were now raining down on Moreany Publishing House. Henry felt like a gangster who had pulled off the perfect crime, and he drove Martha all the way across Europe to Portugal in the Maserati. They stayed in good hotels; otherwise nothing much changed. Martha continued to write at night; Henry played tennis and saw to everything else. He did the shopping, wrote shopping lists, and learned to cook Asian food.

Every afternoon he would read the new pages. No one except him got to see a single line before the book was finished. He only ever said whether he liked it or not. Mostly he did like it. Finally he would take the finished manuscript in person to Moreany. Betty and Moreany would read it simultaneously in Moreany’s wood-paneled office, while Henry lay on the sofa in the adjoining room and read the Adventures of the Grand Vizier Iznogoud, which are, as it happens, the best comics in the world.

For hours, absolute silence would reign in the publishing house, until Betty and Moreany had finished reading. Then Moreany would summon the sales manager. “We have a book!” he would shout. Eight weeks later the press campaign would be launched. Only selected journalists were allowed a look at a proof copy in Moreany’s office. They had to sign confidentiality agreements, because although they were expected to hype up the novel they were also to torment the public by withholding information.

Martha never accompanied Henry to public appearances. When he went to writers festivals or public readings it was Betty who went with him. A lot of people took her for his wife, which to all appearances made complete sense, because they looked like the perfect couple.

Wherever he went, Henry was greeted with applause, smiled at, shown around, and congratulated. He didn’t look particularly happy on such occasions, because he didn’t enjoy the tours. This, however, strengthened the general delight at his modesty, especially among women. Henry’s shy, understated manner was purely precautionary, for he never forgot that he wasn’t a writer, but a mere fraud, a frog in a snake’s territory.

Besides, he had trouble remembering all the friendly faces and new names. Whenever he stood still, knots of people formed. Cameras flashed, greedy eyes drank him in without letting up, and he was always being shown something he wasn’t interested in or having something explained to him he didn’t really understand. He gave short interviews, but refused to discuss his working methods. The feeling of unreality intensified; reality began to blur like a watercolor in the rain — first at the edges, then altogether. Martha had warned him that success was a mere shadow that shifts with the moving sun. The day will come, Henry thought, when the sun will set and they’ll realize I don’t exist.

It was from his critics that Henry learned how his work was to be interpreted. He knew himself that the novels were good — after all, he was the one who’d discovered them. But just how good they were, and why exactly, came as a surprise to him. He felt sorry for all those poor artists who aren’t discovered until after they’ve perished from nutritional edema. He would have liked to have read Martha some of the most flattering reviews, but she didn’t want to know anything about them. She was already at work on the next novel. Fame meant nothing to her. She read no reviews on principle, while he read every single one, underlining the most flattering passages with a ruler, cutting them out and sticking them in a scrapbook, a habit he’d always been praised for at school. Every sentence a stronghold. He particularly liked that phrase. It was in bold type in the blurb and had been penned by a certain Peffenkofer who wrote for the literary supplement of one of the big dailies. It was so wonderfully pithy, Henry thought, it might have been something he would say. But it wasn’t. Nothing was his.