Sascha Arango - The Truth and Other Lies

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.

——

To stick to the facts, Travis Forster was a pseudonym. Everyone has the right to assume a more melodious name than Gisbert Fasch, but nobody has the right to steal other people’s lives and call himself a writer if he isn’t one. Gisbert Fasch had created his nom de plume out of the names of two idols and had it entered in his passport. He chose the first name because of the fictional figure Travis Bickle, whose struggle for recognition and respect he had greatly admired ever since watching Scorsese’s Taxi Driver . He chose the surname because of the adventurer Georg Forster, a figure who has received too little attention in world history.

Gisbert Fasch, as we shall call him for the sake of simplicity, looked back from the wooden bench of the criminal court at the stuffy dormitory of Saint Renata, which in those days was studded with small portholes like the bowels of a ship. Saint Renata was a gulag; the most brutal individuals held sway over the weak, and Henry was the worst of them all. On his first day, he’d knocked out two of Gisbert’s front teeth because he wanted the upper bunk. He was not entitled to the upper bunk; as a new boy, Henry had to sleep on the bottom. Two dozen boys listened to the goings-on in the dark. After lights-out, Henry came climbing into Gisbert’s bed like the terrible Grendel and set on him without warning. He laid hold of him and dragged him onto the lower bunk. Nobody laughed; they were all terrified. Gisbert never forgot that night. He lay awake with his mouth full of blood, while the psychopath in the bunk above him screamed in his sleep and wet the bed.

When, decades later, Fasch saw the name Henry Hayden in a literary supplement, he thought it must be just a coincidence. The review spoke of his great success, then delivered a paean to his style and vigor — there was no way it could be referring to Henry. But there was a photograph portraying the author. It was him. The same gray-green eyes, the same malicious winner’s smile. Grendel was back. The gap in Gisbert’s teeth had long since been closed with two post crowns, but the memory still hurt. He bought the novel shrink-wrapped in the bookshop on the corner, ripped it open, and began to read, walking along.

Frank Ellis was indeed a no-nonsense thriller, really well written, spare, and precise down to the smallest detail — by no means the novel of the century, but that’s of no relevance here. Every sentence a stronghold read the critic’s praise on the cover. Millions had bought and read it. Fasch felt his teeth ache. He couldn’t work out how that unfeeling monster had managed to write a bestseller on his own. But if he hadn’t written the novel, then who had? And what had he done in all those years between the children’s gulag and getting published? He’d left no clues. No high school diploma, not a single publication, not so much as a minor contribution to an anthology. One would assume that a psychopath would at least have a criminal record, but nothing like that was to be found. Hayden hadn’t studied — no trace of him as a budding author anywhere, no sign of friends or fellow writers. Had he perhaps published under a pseudonym? And if so, what? Don’t even the most secretive writers reveal themselves through their lives? Aren’t they always in search of a readership? Not Henry Hayden. After escaping from the children’s home he’d gone straight underground, only to burst into prominence decades later, a comet in the literary sky.

Gisbert began his investigations secretly, as with everything he did — at least in the realm of art. With age, his dream of becoming a writer was beginning to fade. He’d long since stopped sending off manuscripts. The white nights of stapling paper in copy shops were a thing of the past, as were all those pointless readings to audiences of literary pedants, their index fingers yellow from smoking, crumbs of tobacco between their teeth. Fasch spent eleven years working on his novel about Stone Age nomads. In the end, after receiving nothing but pro forma letters of rejection, he published his life’s work himself under the pseudonym Travis Forster. That plunged him straight into bankruptcy. For another six years he led a miserable existence under the heel of the bankruptcy court. Copies of the book stood piled up unread in his small apartment; in the end he had them made into insulating fiber. After this purge of his literary self he stopped writing. His short stories, plays, and radio dramas stayed in the drawer. He went back to calling himself Gisbert Fasch and had his pseudonym removed from his passport. Basta.

Now Fasch was teaching German as a second language, mostly to Africans. He helped them create a new existence. These people cross the Atlantic in a rowboat, fleeing drought and war and poverty, and then find they have no right to residence in the land of Cockaigne without a language certificate. Gisbert’s work was right and good, and he enjoyed it. A decent job. As a hobby he wrote book reviews on Amazon. Only positive ones, mind you; he thought negative reviews were about as unproductive as the black stuff under his toenails. He wrote them under his old pseudonym, Travis Forster. For old times’ sake. But he wasn’t satisfied with himself.

Fasch followed Henry through all the European capitals, listening to him at various festivals, studying his rather skimpy interviews, analyzing all his quotations. Several times they came face-to-face but, even when their eyes met, Henry didn’t recognize Fasch. For such a discerning connoisseur of human nature, he had an incredibly bad memory for faces.