In the warmth of the flames, Henry could feel the numbness on the right side of his face. It had spread across his cheek as far as his nose. He touched his skin with his fingertips. I’m rotting, he decided. I’m rotting from the inside out. Serves me right.
And then he heard a scratch of sharp teeth above him.
6
“Martha?”
Henry came in from the garden. He took off his rubber boots at the bootjack and listened. He looked at the clock. It was getting to be nine. Really she ought to be asleep still, but—how odd—her bicycle wasn’t where it usually was, leaning beside the door.
The vegetable stew was already cooking on the stove. Henry had just nipped out into the garden to pull up a few shallots. He put them on the kitchen counter next to the Patek Philippe, which he’d gift wrapped. The dog sniffed at his trousers.
“Where’s Martha, Poncho?”
The dog put his head on one side. What do you want from me? he seemed to ask.
“Then I’ll just have to do it myself.”
Henry climbed the stairs to Martha’s room and knocked gently.
“Martha?”
He put his hand on the doorknob and carefully opened the door.
“Darling? Are you awake?”
The standard lamp was on, the bed was untouched, and a book lay open on the pillow. The dog came into the room behind Henry and sniffed. Martha wasn’t in the bathroom either. Henry flung open the window and called out her name, but she didn’t reply. That was odd. But not yet cause for concern. Maybe she was in the barn.
He ran a little faster on the way down, put his boots back on and went out of the house. He opened the back door; her Saab was still there. Maybe she’d just gotten up early, taken her bike, and cycled to the sea.
Henry closed the barn door again. He stopped to think. She knows I’m already awake—she wouldn’t leave without letting me know? No, she wouldn’t. Henry decided to drive to the sea to look for her.
He opened the car door to let Poncho onto the passenger seat; the dog was simply crazy about riding in the car. But he didn’t get in; he lay down and pressed his nose to the ground. He normally did that only when Henry got out the garden hose to shower him down after he’d rolled in something foul. Henry took a piece of dried meat out of his pocket and held it up, but the dog didn’t move. Henry threw him the treat, got in the car, and started the engine. The dog knew everything.
Obradin was just pulling up the shutters in front of the fishmonger’s when Henry stopped outside and lowered his window.
“Obradin, have you seen my wife? Has she come past?”
Obradin shook his head. “I’ve only seen my own wife. I have cod. Do you want some cod?”
“Later.”
“Have you caught the marten?”
“Not yet.”
Henry drove on slowly. In the rearview mirror, he saw that Obradin was watching him. Before the harbor he took the westerly fork and reached the bay a minute later. The wind was coming in from the sea; the red flag that warned of dangerous currents was fluttering wildly. Henry left the key in the ignition, got out of the car, and walked the hundred yards over the shingle beach to the water. Martha’s bike was still propped up against the cliff. But her green parka was no longer hanging on the handlebars. The wind had blown her clothes over the beach; some of them were caught between the rocks. He saw one of Martha’s green rubber sandals lying on the shingle and bent down to pick it up. Shreds of dried seaweed were dancing over the pebbles. The surf was now ash-gray with gleaming white crests.
Right by the water stood Martha in her green parka.
His heart missed a beat when he saw her, his throat fired up, his knees began to tremble. She was standing with her back to him, barefoot, her trousers rolled up. Her hair was concealed beneath her hood. She bent down, picked up a pebble. Henry ran across the shingle to her.
“Martha!”
She turned around in alarm. Henry stood still. No, it wasn’t her. This woman was much younger; her face was pink from the wind. She smiled, startled.
“I’m sorry, I thought you were my wife. That’s her parka.”
The woman pulled the hood down off her head and Henry saw her short, reddish-brown hair. She was young, not yet thirty, and began to undo the parka. If God is another word for nature, Henry thought, then there’s no reason to doubt his existence.
“No, leave it.”
With Martha’s sandal in his hand, he shaded his eyes and looked out to sea. The woman followed his gaze.
“Are you looking for somebody?”
“My wife. She’s about your size and my age.”
Now she too looked around.
“Sorry, I haven’t seen anyone here.” An apologetic smile revealed white teeth set in firm, pink gums.
“How long have you been here?”
“Must be an hour or more.”
Henry pointed at the fissured cliff behind him. “Her bike’s over there. She must be somewhere about.”
Henry set off. He ran along the water’s edge, looking out to sea. The young woman looked around too, walked toward the bicycle, searched the rocks. Henry could see her out of the corner of his eye, stooping to pick up the clothes and gather them together.
Henry ran from one end of the beach to the other, the water lapping over the tops of his boots. He was out of breath when he finally got back to the bicycle. The young woman was sitting on a rock, clutching the clothes she’d gathered on her lap. She saw Henry fall to his knees and cover his face with his hands.
She was still sitting on the rock when the lifeguards pulled their boats down the slopes and launched them into the water. Two hours later a naval helicopter arrived and began to circle. The local fishermen scoured the area around the bay with dogs.
In spite of the noise in the engine room of his old cutter, Obradin heard the thundering of the rotors. He climbed up through the smoke onto the deck of the Drina and saw the heavy naval helicopter circling low over the bay. That could only mean that they were looking for someone who’d drowned, or for a ship in distress. Obradin climbed back down into the smoke and switched off the engine. It wouldn’t hold out much longer. It had lost compression and had started to spew oil. Its time had come. Obradin didn’t know where he was going to get the money for a new engine. Drina was no ocean trawler. Since the herrings no longer came in endless droves, Obradin had been sailing farther and farther out to sea. Even on rough seas, he’d worked the old diesel mercilessly; now it was nearing its end.
When Obradin reached the beach and leaped out of the car, he saw Henry standing in the surf up to his hips; two men had him by the arms and were pulling him out of the water. The men supported him on the short walk to the ambulance. Henry’s face was white; he was staggering. Half the town had already gathered in the bay. No one spoke a word; everyone was thinking the same. Obradin saw Henry’s look; his eyes were as dark as molten quartz that’s been burned into the sand by a bolt of lightning.
Elenor Reens, the mayor, short-haired, petite, and dressed in yellow oilskins, handed Obradin her binoculars and summed up the ineluctable. “There won’t be a funeral. She’s already a long way out.”
Obradin looked through the binoculars out to sea and made the sign of the cross. There was no more he could do.
Toward evening the wind got up. Two trawlers with searchlights tacked up and down, and another coast guard ship arrived with divers, even though everyone had long since given up hope. At midnight the search was called off. One by one, the lights in the town went out. Only in the pub in the harbor did the drinking go on late into the night, as the day’s events were discussed. There was no one who wasn’t convinced that the silent, unprepossessing writer’s wife had been caught by the current while swimming and carried out to sea, where she had eventually drowned. Everyone knew her by sight, but nobody knew her; she’d only ever been the writer’s wife. She had rarely come into town to do the shopping or go for a walk. In all weathers she had cycled to the bay to swi
m, always alone. The sympathy of the locals went out to the lonely man who would be spending the night without his wife, without any consolation, or hope of her return.
7
There is no silence like another person’s absence. Drained of anything familiar, it is a silence that is hostile and reproachful. The shadowy figures of memory surface noiselessly and begin their picture show. Hallucinations mingle with reality; voices call us, and the past returns.
For a long time after he’d closed the door behind him, Henry stood there in the dark and listened. It was no longer the same house. Martha was gone—and he was pitifully alone, locked up with a demon of guilt that was bound to torture him. He’d killed the wrong woman and stripped himself of everything, destroyed it pointlessly in an act of rashness. His punishment had already begun; each day when he awoke, the memory would wake with him and be renewed. To keep a secret, you should never lose concentration; tell nobody and never forget. That was how Martha had begun the first chapter of Aggravating Circumstances. She must have meant him. Who else could she have meant?
His dramatically staged search on the beach had been convincing. His encounter with the young woman was a gift of serendipity, for what can be more authentic than coincidence? An unsuspecting woman is gathering pebbles on the beach and witnesses a tragedy. She scours the area with the man who is out of his mind with grief; she calls the coast guard and gathers up Martha’s orphaned clothes; she cries with him, suffers with him, sees everything in every detail. That is authentic.
The liars among us will know that every lie must contain a certain amount of truth if it’s to be convincing. A dash of truth is often enough, but it’s indispensable, like the olive in the martini.
The idea of going to look for Martha had come to Henry just as he was about to call the police. Clutching the telephone receiver, he had reflected that anything you want to believe in is best experienced firsthand. Made-up stories are soon forgotten; lies need remembering, which requires effort. Eventually every lie becomes an unexploded bomb lurking beneath the surface, rusting away, ready to detonate. You grow careless, inattentive, you forget. But other people don’t forget, so that anyone who no longer knows where the forgotten lies are buried should avoid the whole area. Henry’s biography was full of these dangerous things; his past was a minefield, which is why he never set foot in it. But anything you’ve experienced is stored in your memory for a long time. Trusting this wisdom, Henry had set out in search of his dead wife, in order to re-create the growing distress that any self-respecting husband would surely have felt. And so it came about that he really was in a bad way when he broke down on the beach. He felt real despair; he wept bitterly and from the bottom of his heart. And the young woman saw it all. So far, so good.
Still very touched by himself, Henry sat down on the marten trap and pulled off his sand-filled boots; his wet socks dripped on the wood. He glanced up the stairs. The bottom stairs were visible in the faint moonlight, but higher up they disappeared into the darkness. No one lived up there anymore, except the marten; that was something he’d have to deal with soon enough. From now on he would live with his memories. There would be no more novels.
Henry leaped up from the box. The novel! He had promised Moreany the finished manuscript in August. Where was the manuscript? Had he overlooked it in all the excitement?
Henry took the stairs two at a time. Outside Martha’s closed door lay the dog, its nose pressed to the wooden floor. The manuscript wasn’t on the little table next to the typewriter as it usually was. The wastepaper basket was as empty as ever. Henry threw himself to the floor and looked under the bed; he rummaged through the cupboard and the bed and the bathroom—the manuscript wasn’t there. He opened the window, unbuttoned his shirt—he was unbearably hot—and sat down on Martha’s bed. Poncho trotted into the room and began to groom himself at Henry’s feet.
Martha had known everything. Before driving to Betty’s yesterday she had burned the novel in the fireplace—or no, worse still, she’d sent it to Moreany. Registered, with a little postcard message in her lovely, curvy, feminine hand. Something like this:
Have fun reading, Claus. Henry didn’t write a line of this. He’s never written anything. He can’t even write a school essay. This isn’t a joke; I’m deadly serious. The only thing my husband has produced in the years of our marriage is a bastard. If you of all people, Betty, should happen to edit my last novel, you can be sure that the child in your belly will turn out like its father—a creature of no significance, worthless from the moment it’s born. By the way, Henry killed his father. And ask him where his mother’s buried when you get the chance. Do me a favor, Claus—if I’m no longer alive tomorrow, be so good as to inform the authorities, would you?
Henry got up from Martha’s bed. No. She wouldn’t do that to him; public denunciation wasn’t her style. Resentment and retribution were as alien to her as the desire for fame. Henry wouldn’t even have dreamed of marrying a woman with such base instincts. Martha’s revenge would be the silence that already covered everything like a poisonous dust. And there it was again, that ugly gnawing. You could hear it through the wall. The marten must be directly above him.
Henry searched the house until dawn. There was no paper ash in the fireplace—only little balls from Martha’s melted swimsuit. In the meticulously sorted kitchen rubbish there was nothing to be found either. In the end he gave up and, tired and at a loss, went into his bedroom to lie down. On his pillow he found the manuscript, held together with a rubber seal from a preserving jar. White Darkness, it said in pencil on the title page. Martha had found a title. Henry tore off the rubber band. The last chapter was missing. Darling, Martha had written in pencil on the last page, . . . hang on a little while longer. Can you guess how it ends? Kisses, Martha.
———
Betty didn’t come. Claus Moreany put the latest MRI scan in his desk drawer and locked it. The metastases had already spread from his hip to his spine, but there was still time. In August, Henry’s manuscript would be there. That left enough time for a late-summer honeymoon in Venice before the book was published. Betty loved Venice. She loved Renaissance art, the seaweed-green water of the lagoons, and the Italian sun. If she were his wife, she’d inherit his entire fortune—why would she say no? In return, Moreany wouldn’t expect or demand anything of her except the occasional privilege of having her near him. She didn’t even have to touch him. He could still recall the revulsion of the young at the odors of old age. He’d smelled old age again only recently when he had shared his opera box with a classmate from his last year at school. Her bullish, down-covered neck protruded from her evening dress, and the smell of life that’s slipped away ruined the whole of La Traviata for him. He was particularly troubled by the thought that he too might smell like that without being able to do anything about it.
Moreany was now seventy-one, almost forty years older than Betty. Chemotherapy was out of the question; it would cost him his hair and all that remained of his manliness. He might gain a year that way, but at what cost? Happily, the cancer was carrying out its destructive work with slow deliberation, as if it too wanted to see Venice again before the end. Moreany didn’t believe that he would live to see next summer—let alone father a child. But Betty was young; she could marry again after his death, have children with another man, start a family. Her children would live in Moreany’s house, play in his garden, and grow up in the shade of the maple trees that his father had planted in the middle of the last century. Betty would be financially secure for the rest of her life, and she would run the publishing house and watch over it with the same devotion she now brought to her work. Claus Moreany was quite convinced of that.
The door to his wood-paneled office stood open as usual. It was now ten o’clock. Impatiently, Moreany got up from his desk, fished a sheet of paper out of his wooden inbox, and stepped into the outer office, where his secretary worked.
Honor Eisendraht stopped her proofreading and looked at the meaningless
piece of paper he was holding out to her. She’d been working in Moreany’s outer office for over twenty years. After the early years, the good years, she had witnessed the creeping decline of the publishing house, Moreany’s battle against old age, and falling sales. When the figures turned red, she began to wear brighter clothes and went to the hairdresser to keep Moreany’s hopes up.
She believed in the power of invisible signs that, like hidden markers, guide to their destinations those who seek. One by one, she had replaced the gloomy illustrated calendars in Moreany’s office and removed the non-sellers from the bookshelves—and for years now she had been making decaffeinated mocha with a pinch of cardamom. The relaxing powers of this member of the ginger family are said to have prevented world wars. Moreany seemed not to notice any positive effects, which strengthened Honor in her conviction that she’d gotten the dose just right. He was clearly improved, since the shadowy semidarkness of his office smelled subtly of Maghrebi mint and sandalwood, and the flowers on his desk were no longer left to wilt.
In spite of her gentle interventions, however, insolvency drew nearer. The energy with which Moreany had run the firm for so long began to wane. Honor now dealt with his private correspondence and took control of that holiest of holies, the bookkeeping. An intuitive understanding of numbers and sums is a gift that cannot be learned. Reading the annual accounts like a musical score, Honor could see the dynamic nature of a business; she found sources of income in foreign rights and film options. It did not escape her attention that Moreany had been incurring losses for years. She also noticed that he was already making arrangements for his will and paying regular visits to a doctor. Potential buyers materialized. They had smelled blood and brought their numbers men along on even their first visit. While these vultures were casting an eye over the inventory, Honor served coffee that she’d made out of old flower water, and passed around biscuits. She sat in the outer office and waited. It wasn’t long before the first of them asked for the bathroom. He did not return.
The Truth and Other Lies: A Novel Page 7
