The Truth and Other Lies

4

The small town fronted onto a bay. Low houses, a natural harbor, little shops, and pointless flower beds. No monument, but a small bookshop where a framed picture of Henry hung on the wall — for the tourists who came here on pilgrimage to meet the famous author.

Obradin Basarić, the local Serbian fishmonger, put aside his knife and washed his hands when he heard Henry’s Maserati. As he’d plastered the shop’s window with photographs of fish, he could only guess at what went on in the street. For Obradin, Henry was — since the death of Ivo Andrić—the greatest living writer. The fact that Henry had chosen to settle in this nondescript coastal town couldn’t be a coincidence, because coincidences happen only to atheists. At least once a week Henry came to him to buy fish, smoke unfiltered Bosnian cigarettes with him, and philosophize about life. This most congenial and at the same time most brilliant of all people was a lover of fish — and he, Obradin Basarić, sold fish. Where did coincidence come into that?

Henry had asked Obradin not to tell anyone where he lived, and Obradin had promised. But the secret knowledge weighed on him. When the tourists — most of them women — came into the fishmonger’s to inquire shyly or with shameless directness about Henry, he would lie to their faces, telling them that no one of that name lived there, when all the time he would have given anything to tell them that he was a particular friend of his. At night his wife, Helga, often heard him yelling in his sleep: I know him! He’s my friend!

“You can’t imagine how awful it is to have a secret,” he confessed to Henry when they were out fly-fishing one day. “A secret like this,” he continued, “is a parasite. It feeds on you and grows bigger and bigger. It wants to get out of you, it gnaws its way through your heart, it wants to get out of your mouth, it crawls through your eyes!”

Henry listened in silence. “Do what I do,” he suggested. “Dig a hole and shit your secret into the hole. Then you’ll be rid of it and not full of shit anymore.” Obradin considered this remark unworthy of a serious writer. But Henry just laughed and was pleased with himself for the rest of the day.

Today Henry entered the fishmonger’s looking gloomy. “My friend,” he said to Obradin, “we have a problem in our roof. It’s a marten.”

Obradin kissed Henry on both cheeks in greeting. “I’ll kill it for you.”

“No, best not. Martha wouldn’t like that. How do we go about catching the brute?”

“With a trap. But what will you do with it when you’ve caught it?”

“I’ll set it free somewhere.”

“It’ll come back, because it’ll know you’re not going to kill it.”

“OK. When I’ve caught it, I’ll bring it to you and you can kill it.”

Henry didn’t ask how business was going, because he knew it was going badly. Obradin’s sky-blue fishing cutter, the Drina, was forty years old and beginning to give up the ghost. More and more often, Obradin was having to buy frozen fish from the wholesaler, because her diesel engine had packed up again. Henry had already made him several offers of an interest-free loan for a new cutter, but Obradin had rejected the offers out of hand. He didn’t even want Henry to act as guarantor for him. Friendship should be debt-free, was all he said. And so Henry had started to slip cash to Obradin’s wife on the sly, so that she could settle the most urgent bills. Without Henry’s discreet support, Obradin would long since have gone bust. It would no doubt be the end of their friendship if Obradin found out.

The men lit two Bosnian cigarettes and talked about the weather, and the sea and about literature. Sometimes Obradin talked about the war, the mass shootings in Bratunac and his time in the internment camp at Trnopolje. When he started on the subject, his eyes would grow dark and his voice would harden and he would switch into the present tense, as if everything were happening right then. Listening, Henry was never quite sure whether Obradin had been a victim or a perpetrator. After Chetniks had raped and impaled his daughter, Obradin had driven back to his homeland every weekend to gun down a few of them in the mountains around Sarajevo. Henry couldn’t swear that he wasn’t still doing it on the sly.

“How are you getting on with your novel?”

“Not much to go. Maybe twenty pages.”

“We have to celebrate that. I have a monkfish for you.”

“I’m going to pay for it though.”

“That’s up to you,” Obradin replied. “I saw they want to film Frank Ellis.”

“Yes, awful,” Henry said. “I’m against it.”

“Then why have you allowed it to happen? My Helga says you can’t film literature. I say it’s wrong to film it. Film, do you know what film means?” Obradin rubbed his finger through the fish blood on the chopping board, drew out a transparent thread, and held it under Henry’s nose. “Here, that’s film — gunk, slime, filth.”

“How right you are,” Henry said. “That’s just what Martha always says. But I’m so bad at saying no. Do you understand?”

Obradin swung his hairy index finger to and fro like a pendulum. “I don’t like the way you’re talking today. What’s happened?”

“Nothing. Nothing’s happened.”

“Then don’t be so hard on yourself, Henry. What does fame matter to you anymore? You don’t enjoy it! You hide from it, because you’re a good person. You’re always talking yourself down. Why do you do that?”

“That’s the way I am, Obradin. I’m a thoroughly bad, utterly insignificant person, believe me.”

Obradin narrowed his eyes to slits. “You know what the Jews say: Thoughts become words and words become deeds. I know bad people. I have some in my family. I’ve lived with them, slept with them, eaten with them. You’re not one of them; you’re a good person. That’s why we all love you.”

“You love me because I contribute to the community coffers.”

Henry inhaled the tarry smoke of the tobacco and suppressed a cough, drawing one foot up to his knee like a wading bird.

“Bloody hell, that’s strong. Do you know what the Japanese say, Obradin?”

“Who cares what the Japanese say?”

“They say that being loved is a curse.”

“Maybe they do, Henry. But how do they know that?” Obradin spat on his tiled floor. “You don’t just become a writer, Henry. I know that — you’re destined to it. I can’t do it, my Helga can’t do it, and we thank God for it. It must be a real burden.”

“There’s something in that,” Henry replied and pointed to two silhouettes on the other side of the papered-up windowpane. “I see customers.”

Obradin glanced up. “Tourists,” he declared disparagingly.

“Are you sure?”

“Who looks at my fish pictures? Who does a thing like that?”

“Only tourists.”

“There you are then. They’ve come because of you. You just watch.”

Obradin went and waited behind the fish counter, setting down his cigarette on the bloody chopping board. The bell over the door rang. Two busty women with red cheeks came into the shop. They stood at the counter, contemplating the dead fish without interest. No, it wasn’t the fish they were after. The cigarette smoke bothered them. The older one looked from the fish to Obradin, closed her eyelids, and set them vibrating, as Anglo-Saxon women often do — no one knows why.

“Do you speak English?”

Obradin shook his head. Both women were in white trainers and carrying Gore-Tex backpacks. Their hair was closely cropped, their lips were thin, their skin rosy; the older one’s chin wobbled underneath when she whispered to the younger one. Henry cleared his throat.

“Can I help?”

The younger one smiled shyly at Henry. Her teeth were white as alabaster and perfectly regular. “Perhaps you know Henry Hayden?”

Before Henry could reply, Obradin had answered for him.

“No.”

The Serb leaned his hairy arms on the fish counter. “No here. Here only fish.”

The women looked at one another helplessly. The younger one turned around and bent forward slightly, and the older one took a well-thumbed book out of the pack on her back. It was an English edition of Frank Ellis. She held it out to Obradin. With an immaculately clean fingernail she pointed at Henry’s photograph.

“Henry Hayden. Does he live here?”

“No.”

Henry stamped out his cigarette and strode across to the women. “Allow me.” He held out his hand. Taken aback, the woman put the book in his hand.

“Have you got a pen, Obradin?”

Obradin handed him a pencil smeared with fish gut.

“What’s your name, Ma’am?”

The older woman put her slender hand to her mouth with a start. She had recognized him. “Oh my God…”

“Just Henry, Ma’am.”

Henry loved moments like this. Doing good and feeling good at the same time. Can there be any act more worthwhile and at the same time more delightful? After all, they’d traveled from God knows where just to see him. Such a lot of trouble for a moment’s beneficence.

Henry wrote two brief dedications, Obradin took a photo of the two of them with Henry in the middle, and the women floated out of the fishmonger’s on air. Obradin snarled as he watched them go.

“I’ve been tearing hairs out of my ass so as not to give you away and you come along and say, Here I am.”

“They’ll come back and buy your fish, now they know you’re not going to kill them.”

——

For dinner Henry grilled Obradin’s monkfish medallions a la plancha. He and Martha ate on the veranda in the cool night air that was fragrant with the scent of cut grass, and drank Pouilly-Fumé.

“Should I be worried?” Martha asked, in that inimitably terse way of hers that made any further questions superfluous. Henry knew his wife well enough to know that the unspoken context of this question was: Spare me the details, I don’t want any explanations, and, above all, don’t play dumb.

Henry speared a piece of fish with his fork and spread a little Riesling froth over it with his knife. “Not in the least,” he replied truthfully. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of things.”

With that, the essentials had been said. The telepathic contact that comes with years of marriage is often misinterpreted by outsiders as silence. Before getting married, Henry too had assumed that couples who sit at restaurant tables and eat in silence have nothing to say to one another; he now knew that they make eloquent conversation without exchanging a word, sometimes even telling each other jokes.

Martha went upstairs to work on the final part of the fifty-fourth chapter, which was to conclude the novel. At the veranda door she turned to Henry again.

“Do you really want a change, Henry? Aren’t things all right the way they are?” She didn’t wait for a reply.

Henry did the washing up and fed the dog. Then he withdrew into his studio to watch the sports roundup and stick some more matchsticks onto his drilling rig.

High shelves of unread books stood alongside filing cabinets full of newspaper articles. Everything ever published about him was filed here by date, language, and author. The most important prizes and awards hung on the walls or were displayed in glass-fronted cabinets. Even in early childhood, Henry realized that he had a bent for copying and archiving. With every novel that came out, his collection grew by an entire bookcase. He’d stopped showing it to Martha; the very thought made him blush to his ears in shame.

At the window was his desk. It was here that he answered letters, sorted his expenses for the accountant, and constructed all manner of drilling rigs out of matchsticks. Once finished these were banished to the cellar and later burned on the barbecue when they grilled sausages at their midsummer parties. He’d already stuck over forty thousand matches on the true-to-scale model of the Norwegian Troll A platform, which is, as it happens, the largest Condeep production platform for crude oil in the world. Henry wound up by watching two episodes of Bonanza and went to sleep feeling inspired. He had no dreams that night, but he slept peacefully and soundly like Hoss Cartwright from the Ponderosa, for he now knew what was to be done.

——

He was woken by the whir of the automatic blinds. Sunlight penetrated the room and he flung the duvet aside; the sundial pointer of his morning erection showed a quarter past seven. Poncho was asleep next to the bed. Henry drank coffee, had a long shower, and got his hiking boots out of the cupboard. As soon as Poncho saw the boots he began to twist and turn, prancing up and down at the front door wagging his tail. He ran ahead of Henry to the car and leaped onto the passenger seat. It was the hour of their daily ramble.

To avoid being recognized by the locals on his outings with the dog, Henry always chose remote places within a sixty-mile radius; after all, a novelist is not a rambler. Thanks to a military map on which even the smallest woodland paths were marked, he had, over the last two years, discovered large tracts of meadowland and forest, roamed over picturesque moors and through secluded coastal regions, seen all kinds of rare birds and wild animals, and even lost some weight. There was hardly any danger of getting lost, because the two hundred and twenty million scent-detecting cells in Poncho’s nose always found their way back to the car.

This time Henry picked a tract of forest twenty-five miles west of the small town, an area where he’d roamed with the dog a few times before. He got out at a gloriously shady picnic area. Not far away a cascade was burbling in the bracken. The scent of fresh pine resin hung in the air, and sunlight fell through the treetops, showering radiance on millions of leaves.

From his jacket pocket he pulled out his red telephone and put in the battery. He never called Betty twice from the same place; it was one of the cautionary habits he’d acquired during the years he’d spent lying low in an overpopulated world. He typed in the number and then waited. He never even got bills for this tiny thing, because it was prepaid. You could top it up at any gas station, conveniently, cheaply, and anonymously. Henry loved going incognito.

Betty answered at the first ring. Her voice was husky; she’d been smoking. “Have you told her?”

“I’ll tell you everything this evening. Are you in your office?”

“I’m staying at home today. How did she react?”

Henry paused for effect. This always did the trick in a phone call, whereas face-to-face it was the mysterious smile that carried the day. You simply couldn’t go wrong with it. “Martha’s incredibly brave.”

He heard the metallic snap of Betty’s lighter. She inhaled menthol smoke. “Moreany will fire me when he finds out about us.”

“He won’t find out anything from Martha.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“But she must be incredibly angry with me, right?”

“Yes, she is. Are you worried about your job, Betty?”

“Me? No. I just feel sorry for her. To be honest, I’m a little bit ashamed.”

“Why only now?”

She drew on her cigarette. Henry could positively feel the tip glow. “What are you getting at, Henry? Do you think I don’t care?”

“You haven’t cared so far.”

“I’ve always cared. Now you’re being so cold again. Don’t take it out on me. I understand you— It’s difficult for you, but please don’t blame me.”

“It’s the truth — that’s all.”

“Yup — that’s all. I don’t want to know what’s going on in your head at the moment.”

That, in Henry’s opinion, was for the best. He saw that the dog had picked up a scent and was zigzagging across the dewy, glistening meadow.

“You don’t think I got pregnant on purpose, do you, Henry? Be honest.”

“I’m always honest with you, darling. Always.”

The idea hadn’t crossed his mind. But now that she mentioned it, he thought it was a definite possibility. Betty was almost thirty-five, she’d been waiting a long time, he hadn’t been careful — and now it had happened.

“We’re breaking up, Betty.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m serious. My credit’s running out — I’ve got thirty seconds left. We’ll talk this evening.”

“You gave me a bit of a fright, Henry. Is that what you want?”

“Just a bit. You know me. Wait for me — I’ll be there at eight. And stop smoking. Think of our baby.”

“I will, my darling. Henry…”

“Yes?”

“I love you.”

“You’re wrong.”

“You always say that. Accept it, don’t fight it. I love you, I love you, I love you. Big kiss!”

Henry pulled the battery out of the phone, making himself invisible once again. Betty was afraid that Martha might snitch on her to Moreany. She feared with good reason that she would lose her job as editor in chief, a job that she didn’t know she owed solely to Martha. Moreany would fire her because she was no longer able to do her work objectively. But that was the good thing about Betty — she thought only of herself, and he was part of her plan. Henry liked that. Betty was eccentric; she wanted success and intimacy all at once, wanted, as it were, an adventure in the wilds with central heating. Deep down, she was as spoiled and unconscionable as he was. That made everything easier.

Henry whistled to the dog. He could see him about a hundred paces away. Poncho had gotten his teeth into something. It looked big. Henry walked across the clearing, his boots sinking into the sandy ground. The hovawart was too slow and heavy to chase hares, and whatever was lying there was bigger than a hare. The nearer Henry got, the more resolutely Poncho tore at his prey. About twenty yards away, Henry could see it was a deer. Poncho was pulling a big piece of flesh out of its haunch; its hind leg was waggling in the air.

The deer was still alive. Maybe it had been shot, maybe it was ill. The creature looked at Henry uncomprehendingly as the dog’s teeth sank into its flesh. Trembling, it raised its head, its blue tongue hanging out, breath steaming from its mouth.

“Let go, Poncho, drop it!”

With a bloodred muzzle, the hovawart tore another piece off the deer, and then lay down a few yards away to chew its hand-sized piece of prey. Henry knelt beside the dying animal. The white fur on its belly was torn right open and its guts were hanging out. Everything in this open body wanted to carry on living. Henry patted his pockets. Apart from his phone he had nothing on him. The deer let out a moaning sound. Henry ran his hand over its warm, wildly throbbing neck. Far and wide, there was no stone with which to put the deer out of its misery.

Henry put both hands around the creature’s neck and squeezed. The deer started to twitch; Henry didn’t let go until it was dead. Then he ran his hand over its warm cadaver. Life had already fled the animal; decomposition was setting in. Henry sat down next to the corpse and thought about a parting gift for Betty. She would be angry and disappointed. But doesn’t all deception end in disappointment? It was forecast to rain that night. In ten hours he would tell Betty everything.