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 rel
ease 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.”
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?”
The Truth and Other Lies: A Novel Page 3