The Truth and Other Lies

by Sascha Arango

  The next thing Henry did was to mend the bed. Then he got hold of a rubber mat for the typewriter to stand on, procured two new kitchen chairs, and bored open the electricity meter to save on heating costs. While he was getting all that done, he reflected on the possibilities of creating a home without any capital and wondered to what extent he was cut out for it.

  He tidied and cleaned. Martha didn’t comment on his domestic activities. She didn’t ever comment on anything; Henry admired that. He didn’t, however, have the feeling that she was indifferent or devoid of opinion—no, she was quite simply content and could find no fault with him. It was as if she had foreseen everything.

  It struck Henry that Martha never read her stories herself. She never talked about them; she wasn’t proud of them. When she finished one, she started on the next, like a tree shedding its leaves in the autumn. The story must have taken shape in her mind even as she was working on the previous one, for there was no pause for inspiration. For a long time it remained unclear to Henry what she lived off. She had studied, but did not reveal what. She must have had some savings, but only rarely went to the bank. If there was nothing to eat, she ate nothing. In the afternoon she regularly left the apartment to go swimming at the municipal pool. Henry followed her once; she really did just go swimming.

  In the cellar Henry found a suitcase filled with rotting manuscripts, hastily buried like children’s corpses beneath moldy rat droppings. The pages had clumped together into a pulp; only the odd phrase was still legible. Lost stories. The manuscript of Frank Ellis would have rotted too, or have been turned into a brief blast of heat in the stove on a cold day, if Henry hadn’t hidden it. He was to thank for that. As he would later tell his conscience, even if he hadn’t created Frank Ellis, he had at least rescued it. That had to count for something.

  “I’m not interested in literature,” Martha said on the subject. “I just want to write.” Henry made a mental note of the sentence for later. Where Martha in her hermetically sealed world got hold of the ideas for creating such illustrious characters remained a mystery to him. She wasn’t well traveled, and yet she knew the whole world. He cooked for her; they talked, were silent, made love. At night she got up to write; in the early afternoon he made them something to eat, and then he read what she’d written. He kept every single page of her writing safe; she never asked about it. In this way their love grew quietly, as a matter of course. They took pleasure in doing things together and profited from one another; Henry could not imagine ever being happier. It was just up to him not to destroy the harmony.

  Henry sent the manuscript of Frank Ellis in his own name to four publishers he’d looked up in the phone book. First he had had to make a solemn vow to Martha that he would under no circumstances reveal who had written it. It was to remain a lifelong secret, and if anything actually got published, it could only be under his name. Henry thought that was all right and swore not to tell. In his own way, he kept his word.

  ———

  For a long time, there was no reply. Henry forgot he’d sent it off, and if he’d known how infinitesimal the chances of an unsolicited manuscript are, he wouldn’t have invested in the postage. But ignorance often proves to be a true blessing.

  Meanwhile, Henry worked at the fruit market. He got up at two in the morning and came home toward midday, dead tired and reeking of vegetables, to tidy up and cook something for Martha.

  Martha introduced Henry to her parents. She had hesitated for a long time, and Henry understood why when he met her father. Throughout their first meeting, Martha’s father, a fireman who’d taken early retirement, eyed Henry with smoldering ill will from his velour armchair. Rheumatism was gnawing away at his joints and had already claimed his thumb. Martha’s mother was a cashier at a supermarket, a cheerful woman, warm and sensitive, just the way a mother ought to be.

  They drank coffee with cardamom in the upholstered landscape of the living room and chatted about trivialities. Henry saw yellow birds in a cage on the sideboard, waiting for death. The father’s pride and joy was his collection of historic firemen’s helmets, which he kept in an illuminated glass-fronted cabinet. He told Henry all about every one of them, specifying date, place of origin, and function, while his eyes scrutinized Henry’s face for signs of weariness or indifference. But Henry endured the ordeal with unflagging stoicism and even interrupted him to ask interested questions.

  There was a cold winter. Henry got hold of a new door and two fabulous electric blankets, and he insulated the windows. He had spotted the door in a Dumpster full of scrap timber. He climbed into the Dumpster in thick, driving snow to salvage the heavy door, which he shouldered and lugged home on his back like a leaf-cutter ant. He took the plane to it here and there, added a piece at the bottom, and hung it. Now a cold draft no longer came in. Martha was delighted. Henry’s handyman’s skills had always turned women on. DIY and hobbies drive away the demons of boredom and negative thoughts. Henry simply liked mending things—not in order to impress, but because it was fun and because there was nothing better to do.

  The following spring Henry killed his father-in-law. He bought him a historic helmet once worn in the Vienna fire brigade, which is, as it happens, the oldest professional fire brigade in the world. The aging collector’s surprise and pleasure were so great that his aneurysm ruptured and he fell down dead. Henry had carried off the perfect tyrannicide without either knowing what he was doing or meaning to do it. As a result he had no guilty conscience, because, as Henry said to himself, the insidious blood vessel in the old man’s brain could have burst when he was taking a shit. Everyone was pleased and no one suspected anything.

  The entire helmet collection disappeared into the earth along with the dead fireman. Martha’s mother blossomed; she gave away the yellow birds and emigrated a year later with an American businessman to Wisconsin, where she was struck by lightning. From then on she wrote long (now only ever left-handed) letters about her new life in America.

  Then Moreany’s call came. Henry cycled to the publisher’s. If he had had any idea what a fateful course the whole affair would take, he might perhaps not have gone.

  ———

  Betty was waiting for him in the lobby. They got into the elevator together and went up to the fourth floor. Her lily-of-the-valley perfume filled the elevator. She saw that he had handyman’s hands; he spotted a small hole in her earlobe and the constellation of the Big Dipper mapped out on her throat in ravishing freckles. On the regrettably short journey up he could intuit her sizing up his DNA. When the elevator doors opened, the essentials between them had been settled.

  Moreany came around the side of his publisher’s desk and touched Henry with both hands, as you might greet a long-lost friend. His desk was laden with books and manuscripts. Right on top was the manuscript of Frank Ellis. This was pretty much what Henry had imagined a publisher would look like.

  Henry kept his promise to Martha and introduced himself as the author. This turned out to be quite straightforward. He didn’t have to say or prove anything special, because everyone knows an author can’t do anything except write, and anyone can write. You don’t need any particular knowledge or skill, or have to say anything particular about yourself. Apart from a modicum of life experience, you don’t require any education to speak of; there’s no need to produce a diploma, only a manuscript. You leave the final judgment to your critics and readers, because the less you speak about your work the more radiant your aura. He wasn’t interested in literature, Henry explained. He just wanted to write. That hit the spot.

  The novel sold fantastically well. When the first royalty check arrived, he and Martha moved into a larger, warmer apartment and got married. The money kept on pouring in, heaps of it. Money didn’t trigger any kind of buying reflex or wasteful impulses in Martha. She carried on writing undeterred while Henry went on shopping sprees. He bought himself costly suits, expensive moments with beautiful women, and an Italian car. Moreany gave Henry a share in the profits tha
t were now raining down on Moreany Publishing House. Henry felt like a gangster who had pulled off the perfect crime, and he drove Martha all the way across Europe to Portugal in the Maserati. They stayed in good hotels; otherwise nothing much changed. Martha continued to write at night; Henry played tennis and saw to everything else. He did the shopping, wrote shopping lists, and learned to cook Asian food.

  Every afternoon he would read the new pages. No one except him got to see a single line before the book was finished. He only ever said whether he liked it or not. Mostly he did like it. Finally he would take the finished manuscript in person to Moreany. Betty and Moreany would read it simultaneously in Moreany’s wood-paneled office, while Henry lay on the sofa in the adjoining room and read the Adventures of the Grand Vizier Iznogoud, which are, as it happens, the best comics in the world.

  For hours, absolute silence would reign in the publishing house, until Betty and Moreany had finished reading. Then Moreany would summon the sales manager. “We have a book!” he would shout. Eight weeks later the press campaign would be launched. Only selected journalists were allowed a look at a proof copy in Moreany’s office. They had to sign confidentiality agreements, because although they were expected to hype up the novel they were also to torment the public by withholding information.

  Martha never accompanied Henry to public appearances. When he went to writers festivals or public readings it was Betty who went with him. A lot of people took her for his wife, which to all appearances made complete sense, because they looked like the perfect couple.

  Wherever he went, Henry was greeted with applause, smiled at, shown around, and congratulated. He didn’t look particularly happy on such occasions, because he didn’t enjoy the tours. This, however, strengthened the general delight at his modesty, especially among women. Henry’s shy, understated manner was purely precautionary, for he never forgot that he wasn’t a writer, but a mere fraud, a frog in a snake’s territory.

  Besides, he had trouble remembering all the friendly faces and new names. Whenever he stood still, knots of people formed. Cameras flashed, greedy eyes drank him in without letting up, and he was always being shown something he wasn’t interested in or having something explained to him he didn’t really understand. He gave short interviews, but refused to discuss his working methods. The feeling of unreality intensified; reality began to blur like a watercolor in the rain—first at the edges, then altogether. Martha had warned him that success was a mere shadow that shifts with the moving sun. The day will come, Henry thought, when the sun will set and they’ll realize I don’t exist.

  It was from his critics that Henry learned how his work was to be interpreted. He knew himself that the novels were good—after all, he was the one who’d discovered them. But just how good they were, and why exactly, came as a surprise to him. He felt sorry for all those poor artists who aren’t discovered until after they’ve perished from nutritional edema. He would have liked to have read Martha some of the most flattering reviews, but she didn’t want to know anything about them. She was already at work on the next novel. Fame meant nothing to her. She read no reviews on principle, while he read every single one, underlining the most flattering passages with a ruler, cutting them out and sticking them in a scrapbook, a habit he’d always been praised for at school. Every sentence a stronghold. He particularly liked that phrase. It was in bold type in the blurb and had been penned by a certain Peffenkofer who wrote for the literary supplement of one of the big dailies. It was so wonderfully pithy, Henry thought, it might have been something he would say. But it wasn’t. Nothing was his.

  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.”

&
nbsp; “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.