The Truth and Other Lies

3

Death of an author on a wet road. A lurch, one’s entire life flashing past, then eternity. Such were Henry’s thoughts as he drove home from the cliffs past luminous yellow rape fields. Could any death be more tragic and at the same time more unjust than that inflicted by the cold hand of chance? And so fitting for him. Camus had died such a death, and Randall Jarrell and Ödön von Horváth — no, not him, poor thing. He was killed by a branch falling from a tree on the Champs-Élysées.

Henry was now forty-four. The sun of success was beating down on him; death would immortalize him, and the secret was safe with Martha. She would carry on writing after his death and leave all the manuscripts to rot in the cellar. Henry found that very reassuring, even if he didn’t intend to die before his wife. In this instant, however, he wished he could. Anything was easier than to confess to her that he was father to a child with another woman. And with Betty of all people.

Henry saw the two women standing at his grave. Martha, the hidden source of his fame, so delicate and unfathomable, side by side with Betty, the freckled Venus, the mother of his child. He hoped that the two of them would get along and not wage war on one another; they were after all so very different. And between them his child. Martha would spot the child’s resemblance to Henry straightaway. Would she ever be able to forgive him? Did Betty have what it takes to make a good mother? Not really. But what did it matter to him now? A lot of people would weep at his grave, some indeed would suffer, others would be very pleased. But the best thing was that he wouldn’t be available for anyone; he’d no longer have to be ashamed of himself, or put on an act, or be afraid of anything. Terrific.

Unfortunately the road was dry and there wasn’t a tree in sight. Henry’s dark blue Maserati had every conceivable safety gimmick, ABS and EPS, and all the rest of it. The air bag would cushion his head, the explosive charge would tighten his seat belt. The car wouldn’t let him die — and Henry saw himself joining the undead, dwindling on a heart-lung machine. A ghastly thought. Henry cranked up the speed. At one hundred and twenty miles an hour even the best safety system would be no use if a tree came along now.

His phone rang. It was Moreany. Henry took his foot off the accelerator.

“Henry, where are you?”

“On page three hundred.”

“Oh, how splendid. How splendid!” Moreany liked to say anything gratifying twice over. Quite unnecessarily, in Henry’s opinion.

“Can I read some?”

“Soon. I’m still twenty pages short, I reckon.”

“Twenty? That’s fantastic, fantastic. How much longer do you need?”

“Twenty minutes.”

Moreany laughed.

“Then I’ll be home and can get back down to it.”

“Listen, Henry, I’ve decided we’ll come out with two hundred and fifty thousand copies.”

Henry knew that Moreany didn’t borrow any money from the bank. He didn’t want to. Moreany liked to deploy his entire personal wealth in financing the printing and marketing of Henry’s books.

“Don’t you want to read it first, before you mortgage your house again?”

“I’ll mortgage my house when it suits me, old boy, and never more willingly than today. Just imagine — Peffenkofer is asking for an advance reader’s copy. He begged me. What do you think of that?”

Peffenkofer, the man behind Every sentence a stronghold, was a magnet among the critics. In this capacity he drew everything bad out of literary production and left only the good things. There was little that impressed him, nothing that surprised him, and nothing original he didn’t already know about. But, whatever one might think of him, he had an eye for what mattered and he revealed beauty, making it shine. He worked out of the public eye; no one knew what he looked like and whether he didn’t perhaps still live with his mother.

“Let him wait till you’ve read it.”

“Of course! Do you have a title?”

“Not yet.”

“We’ll think of one. Tell me, when can I read it?”

Henry saw a deer standing in the rape field. He reduced his speed some more. “You’ve gone and done it again, Claus. You weren’t going to put pressure on me. You might be disappointed.”

“Let me worry about that.”

Henry stopped the car at the side of the road. “Claus, I still haven’t decided how the story’s going to end.”

“You’ve always made the right decision so far.”

“This time it’s going to be hard.”

“Have you discussed it with Betty?”

“No.”

“Talk to her. Give her a ring. Arrange to meet her.”

“All in good time, Claus.”

“Only twenty pages to go. I’m thrilled, thrilled. Shall we say… mid-August?”

“Mid-August sounds good.”

——

Martha and Henry’s property stood on a hill, surrounded by seventy-five acres of fields and meadows, which they leased to farmers. It was a classic half-timbered manor house, with barns built on fieldstone foundations, and its own chapel. Symmetrically planted poplars ran in a straight line to the house. There was no fence enclosing the overgrown garden with its old trees, no sign to keep trespassers out, no name at the door. And yet all the locals knew who lived here.

The black hovawart came bounding toward Henry, twisting energetically in the air. Poncho’s joy, untroubled by any knowledge of human nature, never failed to touch Henry. The Maserati rolled on its gently grinding wheels up to the house. Martha hadn’t yet returned from her daily swim in the sea; otherwise her folding bicycle would have been propped up next to the front door, which was, as always, open. For almost a year the screen door had been hanging in shreds because Poncho had simply run through it. Henry had often mended Martha’s folding bicycle, and he was always patching up the tires. Her Saab was parked in the barn, but she almost never used it. She could have had a plane or a yacht, but she was content with a folding bike.

Henry stroked the cashmere-like coat of the dog, and let it give the back of his hand a good lick. Then he took a stone and threw it far out into the meadow. He watched Poncho vanish into the long grass to look for it, as if released from a catapult. Fortunate dog — only needs a stone.

As soon as Martha’s back from her swim, Henry decided, I shall tell her everything.

Six typed pages lay on the oak surface of the kitchen island, neatly arranged after the other. The third part of chapter fifty-four. Martha had finished it the night before; Henry had heard the typewriter tapping away into the early hours of the morning. He flung the car key onto the counter, took a carrot out of a wooden dish, bit into it, and began to read. Clear and in quick succession, Martha’s words followed one upon another; no word could be added, no word removed, without wrecking her trademark style. The chapter fell seamlessly into line with the previous one; the story flowed toward its climax with such assurance that it was as if, instead of having been thought up, it had emerged from itself, like a plant from a seed. Incomprehensible, Henry thought. Just where did this knowledge come from? What was this voice that spoke to her and was so inaudible to him?

When he’d finished reading, Henry opened the selection of fan mail that was forwarded to him by his publisher every day. He signed a few copies of Frank Ellis, most of them sent by women. Some of the copies he signed turned up later on eBay at prices that were, in Henry’s opinion, completely ridiculous. Some women enclosed photographs of themselves, or pressed flowers, and quite often kiss prints. Henry regularly found locks of hair too, and there were even proposals of marriage, although all the media broadcast the fact that he was already married.

Where should he begin? Start with the worst, the thing about the baby? Or better to leave that out — not everything at once? It wasn’t love he felt for Betty; it was more like a cyclical urge such as comes over every man, regardless of the object of his desire. How long had it been going on with her now? Should he count their first meeting or only the exchange of bodily fluids in the Sea Breeze beach motel? When had that been, anyway? Martha would ask. The correct answer called for meticulous checks — Henry owed that to his wife. He took the mail with him into his study to look through his papers and find out how long he’d been cheating on his wife. If it had to be the truth, then make it the whole truth.

But first he sat down in his wing armchair and leafed through the Forensic Journal—an extraordinarily informative periodical about evil. Anyone planning a crime or in the process of committing one should read specialist literature. It provides information on the risks of discovery consequent upon developments in forensic technology. At the same time it makes clear the futility of battling against human evil, for no science or punishment can contend with the bloodthirstiness innate in us all. From a historicocultural point of view, greed, vengefulness, and stupidity are all natural causes of death, just one facet of the human condition.

Henry awoke when the automatic blinds went up at the picture windows. It must already be early evening. He had told Martha everything. Unsparingly and comprehensively, just as he had planned. He had gone for the hard-hearted version, to make the break easier for his wife.

Listen, my love, he had begun, I’m going to leave you, because I desire another woman and no longer desire you. I can’t stand this woman, but that’s beside the point just now. I love you, but you’re not a stranger to me anymore, and for that reason our love is only friendship. It always was. I never could despise you enough to desire you — there’s no thrill between us anymore, never really was, in fact. Besides, the other woman’s younger and more beautiful than you. We’ve known each other for a while, this woman and I. You know her — it’s Betty. Yes, Betty, of all people. She is my trophy, my muse, my slave — and I despise her. We are accomplices. My base instincts arouse her, I idolize her feet, and I’m to tell you from her that she’s sorry. I’m really sorry too. Please don’t get me wrong, I have the fondest of feelings for you. I worship you as if you were a saint. I’ve always wanted to protect you, and I have protected you, as best I could, but now matters have become somewhat complicated. Betty’s expecting my child. You didn’t want one. I don’t want one either. Bringing up a child’s the last thing I want to do — you know how much screaming babies get on my nerves, and it’s bound to scream all the time — but that’s just the way things are. Thank you for all you’ve done — I’m going to feel bad for the rest of my life, I can promise you.

Martha had quietly cried out his name when he’d mentioned the baby. Then the sea had poured into the house and swept her away.

Henry got up from the leather sofa, his right foot still asleep. He massaged it until the blood returned to his toes, and looked dazedly through the glass out onto the fields. The sea had vanished.

He hobbled into the kitchen to make himself a ristretto. The damned sea should have carried him away, not her. He was really sorry about what he’d said to Martha, and it was all so completely wrong! Why hadn’t he spoken of respect and gratitude, of admiration and of love, which he felt for her like no other man could? But no, he had torn out her heart like a weed. She’d never get over the pain, that was for certain.

He stood on one leg next to the coffee machine, waiting for the water to get hot. It was clear that the whole thing had to be broken to her more gently; it would be better if he didn’t mention the baby at all; it might drive her clean out of her senses. But if he kept that quiet, why confess to anything at all? Wasn’t everything in fact fine just as it was? The longer Henry pondered, the clearer it became to him that he must spare his wife and tell Betty the whole truth instead. Betty was tough; she’d come to terms with it more easily than Martha. She could start a new life, find a new man for the baby; she was made for survival.

With an elegant creak of the cherrywood floorboards, Martha came down the stairs. She was wearing her silk pajamas and Japanese straw sandals; her dark hair was pinned up with an ebony hair slide. As always, she beamed at Henry when she saw him. Martha hardly made a sound when she walked; she was still as petite and light-footed as ever. In the past years she hadn’t put on a single ounce. For a long time now they had been sleeping and working separately, Martha upstairs, Henry downstairs. She still only ever wrote at night, and slept, as she had always done, until the afternoon. He saw to everything else. They could have had servants, chauffeurs, and gardeners, but Martha wouldn’t tolerate anyone except Henry around her. While he watched the late-night news or sat up until dawn working on his enormous matchstick drilling rig, he would hear her walking round in circles upstairs. Then he would go into the kitchen and make chamomile tea. He would carry the teapot up and put it down outside her door. Sometimes he listened at the door without touching it. Then he went quietly back down again. At some point the typewriter would begin to clatter. The demon inside her had started its dictation.

Henry had never seen his wife writing. Quite possible that her loins turned to marble as she wrote and that snakes flickered their tongues in her hair. He’d never dared to look.

“Henry, we’ve got a marten in the roof.”

“A what?”

“A marten. It’s making gray lines.”

“Gray lines?”

“Gray stripes that turn into long lines.”

“Like squirrels?”

“Longer and parallel.”

That did indeed suggest a marten. If Martha saw short, gray stripes, it normally meant a small rodent; if the stripes were longer and parallel, it was bound to be a larger animal.

Martha was a synesthete from birth. Every smell and every noise had her seeing colors and patterns. Even in school, when she was learning to form her first letters, she saw photisms coloring the words, usually the same shade as the initial letter. She thought it was normal. It wasn’t until she was nine that she realized that not everyone saw these wondrous emanations, which was really rather a shame. She told her mother, and was taken straight to the doctor. The doctor was old-school and color-blind. He prescribed drugs whose sole effect was to make her fat and sluggish. Martha retched up the tablets and never mentioned the colorful apparitions again. It remained her secret until she met Henry.

“Can you come upstairs, please, and have a look?”

Oh, darling, I’m afraid I’m a worthless wretch, Henry wanted to say, not worthy of you at all. I deserve to die — why can’t you release me from my suffering? Take pity on me and see me for who I am at last.

“What do you say to fish for supper tonight?”

“Henry, this animal gives me the creeps.”

“Come here, darling.” He hugged her, kissed her hair. Martha laid her head on his chest, drinking in the scent of his skin.

“You smell a little bit orange today,” she said. “Is it anything serious?”

“I have to tell you something.”

“What?”

He couldn’t bring himself to say it. He mumbled something, incomprehensible even to himself, and laughed nervously. When he laughed, Martha saw deep blue spirals leap out of his mouth. No other man in the world laughed pure ultramarine with dancing star-shaped splashes.

Martha kissed Henry on the lips.

“If it’s a woman, keep it to yourself. And now let’s go and look for the marten, shall we?”

She took his hand and pulled him up the stairs behind her. Henry followed her, pleased. So she already knew and wasn’t cross. The way she understood his failings was something he particularly valued in her, and so whenever Henry saw other women he did it discreetly and tactfully. He was often ashamed of himself; he frequently made up his mind to reform. But every time he came home after an affair, he was wreathed in telltale patterns; Martha could read the X-ray images of his guilty conscience. Only in Betty did Martha see a serious threat, not entirely without reason, as we know. And yet the two women had only met once, at a cocktail party in Moreany’s garden.

It had been a remarkably mild evening; the night-flowering plants had opened their calyxes, luring the moths to pollinate. Betty stood at the buffet, her low-cut, backless dress exposing her dimples of Venus; she was poking around with a fork in a bowl of strawberries. “Not her, Henry,” Martha had said quietly, as she caught the gaze of her husband swinging toward Betty’s magnetic dimples like a compass needle. Henry knew at once who Martha was talking about, and that he’d never give Betty up. He promised he’d never see her again. From then on he only ever saw Betty in out-of-the-way places. He bought himself a mobile phone with a prepaid card, and paid for motels and candlelit dinners in cash. All the same it remained a liaison of hasty fondlings, accompanied by a constant sense of sad foreboding.

——

Martha’s room was not big, and was done out in creamy white. She didn’t like rooms with high ceilings; they reminded her of her time in the psychiatric clinic. Her small desk and swivel stool stood under the sloping roof at the dormer; her bed, with its white covers, stood between the dormer and the bathroom door. Henry had really wanted to buy a French château with the first million from Frank Ellis, but Martha thought castles were too big and cold, and she insisted on something more modest. While she was working on the next novel, Henry had discovered the old manor house on the coast, fucked the estate agent, and set about restoring the property straightaway.

Henry looked around Martha’s study, listening. There was a blank sheet of paper in the typewriter. There were no crumpled-up pages lying around; the small wastepaper basket was empty; there were no notes, nothing that suggested rough drafts or corrections. The cataract of words poured out of her brain and straight through the machine onto the paper; not a single word got spilled.

“Can you hear it?”

“I can’t hear anything.”

“Maybe it’s asleep.”

They both listened in silence. Now was the moment, he thought. Now he had to tell her. But his thoughts didn’t turn into words.

“It was a stork on the roof.”

“There aren’t storks at night, Henry.”

“True. Where did you hear it?”

Martha indicated a point on the ceiling. “There. Over the bed.”

Henry pulled off his shoes, climbed onto the bed, and pressed his ear against the sloping ceiling. A narrow crawl space ran along the length of the roof between the lining and the rafters. The air it contained provided first-rate insulation. For the space of a few breaths Henry didn’t move. Then he heard it. There was indeed something gnawing in the rafters directly overhead. He could hear the rasp of sharp teeth. Then it stopped; the animal seemed to be aware of him.

Henry got down off the bed with the expression of a concerned expert.

“There’s something there.”

“How big?”

“It’s not moving anymore.”

“A marten?”

“Possibly.”

“Bigger or smaller than a cat?”

“Smaller. Don’t worry yourself. I’ll catch it.”

“But you won’t kill it.”

He put his shoes on. “Of course not. And now I’ll go and buy some fish.”