The Truth and Other Lies: A Novel

by Sascha Arango

  “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. H
e 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.

  5

  The long corridor of the courthouse was deserted. Sitting on the wooden bench under the window, Gisbert Fasch clutched his brown briefcase in both hands with no further thought for his toothache. People passed him, some hurriedly, some hesitantly, and then vanished behind gray doors. In a dim recess of the court’s archives, he had found two gray files in a box labeled with question marks. A bureaucrat had scrawled on the files “Please destroy”; after that, they had lain forgotten in this box of delights. A real find—thank goodness for administrative sloth.

  The court files on the Hayden case were meager and at first glance not particularly revealing. The disappearance of Henry’s mother, Charlotte Hayden, née Buntknopf, on the second of December 1979 was related in matter-of-fact terms. Since no one had reported her missing, there had been no attempt to find her. In the next paragraph—the death of the tax collector Martin E. Hayden the same day, late evening, due to a fall down stairs under the influence of alcohol. No connection was implied between the two events; there was no mention of murder. A tragedy, no doubt about it, mysterious and terrible enough to break a nine-year-old boy, make a genius or a criminal out of him, or silence him forever.

  The whereabouts of Henry Hayden were noted only in passing; his fate was to be settled in a separate lawsuit. Since it was obvious that no one suspected the reappearance of his missing mother, Henry was granted the status of an orphan and it was arranged that he be sent to an orphanage.

  A year after the disappearance of Charlotte Hayden, the care and education of little Henry was settled by the family court.

  ———

  So Henry had been lying back then. His father had never been a big-game hunter; he’d been a tax collector in the dog-license department. And little Henry hadn’t been the sole survivor of a shipwreck, fished out of the ice-cold Norwegian Sea. He had simply been left behind. A bed wetter, that’s what he was—a bed wetter, a liar, and an unpredictable psychopath.

  Fasch remembered meeting Henry over thirty years ago in the Catholic orphanage of Saint Renata. Henry had been about eleven years old at the time and not a nice boy. It’s quite possible that the career of every psychopath begins with a tragic event, but often that event is birth itself. Evil is born innocently. It grows up, seeks shape and form, and begins its work playfully. At that time Henry already had a pretty long history of childr
en’s homes behind him; he’d been kicked out of all of them or he’d run away. But he never breathed a word on the subject. It was as if each day that passed were left behind him like a frozen stone.

  When Henry came to Saint Renata he was a precocious, sturdy lad with a shadow of down on his upper lip. He was sporty and cheerful; there was something catlike about him. He was always up for a bit of fun, often at other people’s expense, but never without a certain charm. Henry had more experience with the girls than most of the other boys—and more experience in dealing with the authorities and fighting over the largest helping. That’s why he always ended up with the most. He radiated an almost adult indifference, which made him seem invulnerable and terrifyingly strong. Whether in class or in the children’s home, he never failed to keep an eye out for himself, but he did it so subtly that few actually realized they’d been conned.

  He was especially talented at claiming as his own what was best in others, and he wangled praise and privileges in this way. Conscience presupposes respect, and he had neither. He must have felt pain, but it didn’t bother him, and punishment frightens only the weak. Henry was armored with something that couldn’t be seen.

  In class he always sat next to the top students so he could crib better, but he was sloppy at cribbing and made mistakes. This arrogance could only mean that it was the theft alone he was interested in; the booty bored him as soon as he had it in his hands. On the odd occasion when he was caught, he put the blame on others. No one dared rat on him, for Henry could issue fatwas of limitless effect against anyone at any time. You never know when—that was Henry’s pledge of vengeance. The real threat was unspoken; it stuck fast like a poisoned arrow. Back then, Gisbert was reading Beowulf, the saga of Grendel, that disturbing mythical creature who comes out at night to abduct sleeping men and feast off them in its lair under the swamp. Henry was a replica of that monster. You never knew when he would strike, but you could be sure it would turn out badly.

  His guest performance at the orphanage of Saint Renata lasted a year and three months. Then, one winter’s day, Henry disappeared and with him the director’s cash box. No one knew where or why he’d gone. And no one asked. It was a red-letter day. The echo of the long corridors was as cheerful as fairground music to Gisbert’s ears; even the nuns were relieved. According to the caretaker’s reports, Henry had smashed a small window in the boiler room and crawled out. Blood on the shards of glass indicated nasty gashes. Gisbert suspected him of abducting one of the other boys from the home, but no one was missing. Everyone waited for him to come back, but nobody went to look for him. As far as Gisbert could remember, the police weren’t called in, nor were the authorities informed. First they wanted to wait and see whether he really wasn’t going to come back. As the night lengthened, the boys in the dormitory lay awake listening for a long time. Henry did not return. Grendel had climbed back down to his ugly mother in the abysmal well.