The Truth and Other Lies

20

Henry saw the figure from the kitchen window as he was carving the pheasant. It darted through the half shadow of the blackberry bushes to the barn. One of the double doors was shut but the other stood wide-open. Poncho was lying next to him on the cool kitchen floor, perfectly still. He didn’t seem to have noticed. Henry put aside the carving knife and climbed backward over the prostrate dog.

It was the third time in a week that he’d seen the intruder. A few days ago he’d spotted him in the distance, walking across the fields that belonged to his seventy-five-acre estate. Henry had taken him for someone out for a walk who hadn’t realized that he was trespassing on private land, as there was no fence or sign to bar the way. When he noticed that the walker was pacing up and down parallel to the house, he fetched his binoculars from the studio. But by then the walker had disappeared. Two days later he was on the drive, standing between the poplars only a hundred yards from the house. He was leaning against a tree and looking across at Henry as if he wanted to establish contact with him. It wasn’t Obradin and it didn’t look like that policeman Jenssen either; he was broader in the shoulders and blond. Nor could it be that poor soul Fasch, who was still in the hospital. Henry waved to the figure, but it remained propped against the poplar and didn’t wave back. Once again Henry fetched his binoculars, once again the figure disappeared.

Now it was in the garden.

Henry opened the door to the broom cabinet, took out the short ax, left the house by the veranda door on the west side, which was still in shade at that time of day, and crept toward the back of the barn. Poncho followed him, panting. Keeping his head down, Henry stole along the wall of the house and sought cover behind the stack of arm-length pieces of oak wood.

Swarms of midges danced over half-empty water butts that were quietly stagnating against the back wall of the barn. Henry clambered onto a rusty threshing machine that was covered in bird droppings with a scattering of rotten straw like a strange kind of wig. He swung himself through an opening into the barn. Poncho stayed put, wagging his tail, then tore around the barn, seized with hunting fever.

An old lamp swayed on a wire. Swallows had left their nests and were circling agitatedly beneath the wooden rafters. Now Poncho came running through the open door, stopped and panted, raised his muzzle and sniffed. Henry waited, the ax in his fist. Without much interest, Poncho began to run to and fro, but in the end he cocked a leg and marked a post. Henry lowered the ax.

“Hello?”

There was only the will-o’-the-wisp fluttering of the swallows. Henry stretched out his arm and stilled the swaying lamp. The beat of the birds’ wings must have set it moving. To Henry’s right was Martha’s white Saab. The paw marks of a cat showed up in the fine dust on the hood. Henry noticed that the driver’s door wasn’t quite shut. Half of Martha’s face and the fingers of her right hand were visible through the side window. Her pale fingers were moving. Henry dropped the ax and backed away a couple of steps. The half face opened its mouth and shut it without any sound coming out. Henry could feel thousands of little muscles pushing up every hair on his skin.

He stood like that for an indefinite period. It is well known that situations of this kind feel immeasurably short and endlessly long at the same time. Shyly Henry raised a hand in greeting. The face behind the side window remained expressionless. The fingers felt their way up and down the glass. It seemed to Henry as if there were a weightless, pitch-black cloth covering the missing half of the face. After the shock of the first sight had subsided, Henry closed his eyes and opened them again. The face vanished and then reappeared, together with the groping, handless fingers.

It wasn’t Martha. The apparition was not complete; it didn’t even look like her. It was an illusion and yet seemed as real as the car it was sitting in. Henry steeled himself and walked slowly toward the face in the Saab; it did not shy away. With a jerk he pulled open the driver’s door. The smell of damp plastic rose to meet him. The interior of the car was empty. Poncho pushed his hairy head past Henry’s leg and sniffed. “There’s nothing there,” said Henry softly and shut the door. He looked through the glass again. The face did not reappear. Henry took the ax from the hay-strewn floor and closed the barn door behind him. Just to be sure, he searched the loose soil by the blackberry bushes for footprints, but only found tracks left by Poncho’s big paws.

——

With only a towel wound around her hair in a turban, Sonja stepped out of the guest bathroom naked. She came up behind Henry, who was back at the kitchen counter boning a pheasant. Gleaming on her wrist was the Patek Philippe that Henry had bought as a parting gift for Betty before killing his wife. “Don’t be frightened,” she whispered and wrapped her arms around his hips, pressing her breasts against his back. They had spent a wonderful morning. Together with Obradin they had gone on a short cruise along the coast on the Drina. Obradin had barely spoken.

“Does anyone know what love is?” Sonja purred. “Is there research on it?”

He didn’t reply — just kept on hacking away with the knife.

“I wonder whether you can measure how intense it is, how long it lasts, and what comes afterward?” She drew away when she felt the damp heat of his skin. The shirt on his back was completely drenched. “Goodness, you’re soaked.” His face was covered in sweat too, and an unhealthy gray. “What’s happened?” She wiped his forehead with her hand, which smelled of rose oil. He put the knife down, turned around to look at her.

“My wife’s sitting in the car.”

Instinctively Sonja reached for her saffron-yellow silk scarf that was hanging over a chair back, stood up on tiptoe, and looked apprehensively over his shoulder out the kitchen window.

“Where?”

“In the barn. She’s sitting in the barn in her car.” Henry grasped her upper arm. “You can’t see her.” He could feel her well-developed triceps under the skin of her arm. She’s far too young for all this, he thought. “It’s just half a face and fingers without a hand. It doesn’t look like Martha, but I know it’s her. She’s getting in touch with me.”

“It’s a hallucination, Henry.”

“Call it what you will. I can see her and she sees me.”

Sonja was a whole head shorter than Henry. She looked up at him anxiously. A drop of water fell from a strand of hair under the turban and ran down to her chin like a tear.

“You’re grieving,” she said softly.

How could it have been otherwise? Perhaps grief wasn’t the right word, but he missed Martha. He missed her love. He missed her presence and nothing could replace it. But in all seriousness, can a man talk of grief when he feels the desire for forgiveness and longs only for peace of mind and relief from his guilty conscience? Does a murderer even have the right to grieve for his victim? Betty and the baby were also in a place from which no one returns, and Henry felt no sadness. Shouldn’t he, if he was capable of true mourning, grieve for the two of them as well?

“Come with me.” Henry took Sonja by the hand. “I’ll show you something.”

He pulled aside the heavy chest of drawers that was blocking the stairs to the attic. It didn’t seem to bother him that it left deep scratch marks in the parquet. Sonja had never set foot upstairs. She knew that Martha had lived up there, and she didn’t feel the slightest desire to see her room, particularly as there were two bathrooms with a sauna and various spare rooms downstairs, the wood-paneled living room with the fireplace and the studio with the picture windows.

“Do I have to, Henry?”

He didn’t reply.

“Wait. I’ll just put something on.”

Henry waited on the stairs until she came out of the guest bathroom in a robe. He held out his hand. She took it and followed him up the stairs into the darkness of the second floor.

She clapped both hands to her mouth when she saw the devastation in the attic. The ceiling under the roof had been completely torn open. Strips of blue plastic rippled like seaweed. All the dividing walls had been knocked down or ripped open, power lines and water pipes had been torn out, insulation fiber was bulging out all over the place. Rain had come in through the broken tiles and the cracks in the battens, leaving ugly white stains on the walls and floorboards. There were long lengths of rafter lying around, sawn into pieces.

“The place isn’t quite as stable as it was. Can you hear?” Henry bounced up and down; the floorboards creaked. “They didn’t used to creak.”

“Was all this you? Did you…?”

Henry pointed to the remains of a wooden partition. “This was Martha’s room. He was here first of all. Then he gradually crawled through the roof to the back until… Come on, I’ll show you where he’s hiding now.”

Sonja withdrew her hand. “Where who is hiding?”

“The marten. He’s still there, but I’m going to get him. I’ll skin him and grill him and eat him and shit him into a hole.”

Sonja took two steps backward toward the landing.

“A marten? You’re destroying the whole house because of a marten?”

“Shhh!” Henry held up his hand and listened.

“I can’t hear anything,” she whispered. She saw his strangely altered look, his outstretched hand. The wind rustled a sheet of plastic.

“That’s the wind, Henry.”

Henry nodded. “He’s stopped. He knows we’re here.”

“Let’s go back downstairs, shall we?” Henry looked at her in silence for a while. “I know what you’re thinking. I sometimes think he doesn’t exist too, or else I’d have caught him long since.” He rolled up his shirtsleeves and showed her the bite wound on his wrist. “I almost had him. He bit me.”

Henry pushed aside a timber batten with the tip of his shoe. There was a small pile of reddish-brown droppings with fine tufts of hair. Henry squatted down. “That’s marten shit. Can you smell it, Sonja? Tell me I’m imagining things.”

Sonja saw his lower jaw grinding. “You need help,” she whispered. “You can’t get over this by yourself. No one can. Come on, let’s go back downstairs.”

“Are you scared of me?”

She turned around and walked down the stairs. He watched her go. Sonja slipped off her robe and hastily began to dress. When she came out of the bathroom, Henry pulled the chest of drawers back in front of the stairs. She wanted to help him, to save him, but he went into the kitchen without a word to finish boning the pheasant.

——

The phone woke Henry from his afternoon nap.

It was Fasch calling from his sickbed. “A Mr. Jenssen’s been here. He was sounding me out about you… Hello? Are you still there?” Fasch was suddenly unsure, because he hadn’t heard an affirmative “Mm-hmm” from Henry.

“Yes, I’m still here,” Henry replied.

“This detective is from the homicide squad,” Fasch continued. “He wanted to know if it was pure chance that you were at the accident — and why we know each other. I’m afraid you’re in trouble.”

After Henry had sat down at his bedside, Fasch resumed the conversation. “You know I followed you.” The curtains were drawn; books and newspapers were piled up on the bedside table. “You waited for me around the bend, didn’t you?”

Henry’s expression remained amiably vacant. “Why didn’t you brake?” he retorted.

Fasch laughed uncertainly. “You’ve already asked me that. I don’t know. Perhaps because everything has to come to an end at some point. Be that as it may, we’d met before. You won’t remember.” Fasch noticed Henry shift his weight and cross his legs.

“Saint Renata,” Henry said softly. “You had the top bed.”

Touched, Fasch screwed up his eyes. “Only until you came along. But let’s not talk about those dark times.” He reached for the lifestyle magazine photo. “I know you lost your wife.”

Henry nodded.

“I’m sorry. It must be hard for you. She looks so nice and intelligent. Your dog’s well?”

Henry considered the portrait, made no comment on the circle drawn around his head, and laid the picture back on the bed again. “Poncho. He’s in great shape.”

Fasch felt for the switch to raise the head end of his electric bed a little. “I don’t know how I can ever thank you for this room and all that you’ve done for me.” Henry wanted to reply, but Gisbert waved him aside. “There was a woman killed recently who edited your novels, Jenssen tells me. He’s trying to find a link between my accident, your wife’s death, and the death of this other woman.”

“There is no link.”

“I can well believe it. But he thinks there is. When the police start looking, they always find something. I had a brown briefcase in the car. In it was everything I’d collected to do with you. This picture”—Fasch placed his hand on the photo—“was in the brown briefcase with my documents. Jenssen returned it to me and claims not to have found any bag. It’s my belief the police have everything.”

“What did you collect about me?”

“Your past. Legal documents concerning your parents, all the children’s homes, and then everything about your career as a writer. Whatever I could find.”

“What for?” asked Henry without a trace of indignation in his voice.

Fasch bent his upper body even farther forward. The splints on his legs cracked softly. “To destroy you, Henry. Because I was envious. Because I was a pathetic little loser out for revenge. Because I’d done nothing with my life, because I wanted to be like you, because everyone wants to be something, has to do something. I was so lonely that I spent the last years living with Miss Wong, a woman made of silicon.” Fasch coughed, laughing, and reached for the water. Henry got up and handed it to him. Fasch drained the glass.

“I was so terribly envious of your success. Envy is worse than cancer. I’ve suffered, if that’s any consolation to you. I wanted to harm you and to prove”—he had trouble getting out the last grain of truth—“that you hadn’t written the novels yourself. Can you forgive me?”

Fasch sank back onto the bed. Now it was out. He closed his eyes in exhaustion and counted silently to three. But he wasn’t speeding into the bend toward Henry; he saw only soothing darkness. When he opened his eyes, Henry was standing at the window looking out over the park.

“Was Miss Wong pretty at least?” he asked.

“Pretty? She was fantastic. And her IQ was off the graph! Not anymore though — she got burned.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Oh, forget it. We hadn’t had anything to say to each other for a long time. Speaking of which, I still have to pay off a loan on her.” During the fit of laughter that followed, a plug of catarrh came loose in Gisbert’s affected lung tissue and got into his windpipe. He turned blue. Henry rang for the nurse. The young woman with the pageboy haircut rushed into the room, put an oxygen mask on Fasch, and lowered the electric bed again.

“You’re supposed to lie flat, Mr. Fasch,” the woman scolded her private patient, and she smoothed his bedclothes. Henry looked at her shapely bottom as she bent over the bed. She must have noticed his gaze, because she stood up and smoothed her smock. “Do you need anything else, Mr. Fasch?” Before Fasch could reply, she cast a glance of curiosity at Henry and walked to the door.

The two men waited in silence until she had left. “Every time she comes in I have a near-death experience. Miss Wong was a country bumpkin compared with her,” said Fasch and sighed. “But at least she listened.”

“Gisbert,” said Henry, sitting down again on the chair at his bedside. “What do you know about me?”