Sascha Arango - The Truth and Other Lies

The obligatory spell elapsed that women devote to making adjustments in front of the mirror. Honor tore off toilet paper and flushed again. Her cover was perfect. At last she heard the clack of heels and the door close. She let a minute pass, then left the stall, prepared for the possibility that Betty was still there, lying in wait for her at the door. She wouldn’t have put it past her. Honor would have simulated surprise, maybe even exchanged a few words, but not too many. She was, however, alone.

An empty packet of gastric pills was in the plastic bin next to the basin. SAMPLE — NOT FOR RESALE was diagonally printed across it, and beneath that the stamp of a gynecological practice. The information leaflet was missing from the packet. Honor rifled through the bin, but found nothing except fake eyelashes, stained tissues, and empty lipstick tubes.

In the drugstore not far from the hotel, Honor had it explained to her that women in the first trimester of pregnancy are advised not to take antiemetic tablets. But in their desperation, said the pharmacist, with an expression of concern, lots of women took them all the same. She herself had found the nausea of the first months of pregnancy her greatest ordeal in becoming a mother.

Honor Eisendraht took the bus home. She got out one stop earlier than usual so as to walk the last few yards to her apartment. In the hall she put on her felt slippers, gave the parrot some water, lay down on her stomach on her reading couch, buried her face in a cushion, and screamed as loud as she could.

Unshaven and without his incisors, Obradin looked like a jack-o’-lantern with a full beard. He spent most of the day smoking at the open bedroom window above his fish shop, baring the yawning gap in his teeth at every passerby and looking out at the sea hidden behind the houses opposite. By now the entire town was preoccupied with the mysterious cause of his rampage. Helga remained silent, determined not to add grist to the rumor mill. Some reckoned it was schizophrenia; others suspected that something sizeable had burst in his brain. It was all conjecture.

In the days that followed, Obradin still made no move to leave his bedroom and resume work. Helga took over the shop. She never got off the phone, but she did take the opportunity to have a lock put on the cellar door and to peel the silly fish pictures off the window.

On Assumption Day, a glorious day in August, Henry came driving up in the best of spirits, wearing a white panama hat. Two weeks earlier his wife had drowned. You would never have guessed that he was in mourning, but everyone mourns in his own way — who’s to say what mourning looks like? He parked on the pavement in front of the fishmonger’s. He’d brought flowers and Spanish soap for Helga and a badger-hair shaving brush for Obradin.

Helga related the whole story about Obradin to Henry, who already knew most of it. He slipped Helga an envelope containing money for the secret purchase of a new engine for the Drina .

“Wait till the lottery numbers are announced,” he whispered in her ear. “Then fill in a slip with five winning numbers maximum, do you understand?”

Helga understood and kissed both his hands. Henry fetched a cardboard box from the Maserati and climbed up to Obradin’s apartment via the stairs at the back of the shop. Because he had his hands full, he didn’t knock, but pushed down the door handle with his elbow.

“Hey, what’s the matter with you, old pal?” he asked, putting the box and the present on the bed. It didn’t escape Henry’s notice that one half of the double bed was untouched. Helga must be sleeping somewhere else just now. “I’ve brought you something to shave with.”

The Serb was standing beside a pile of cigarette butts about the size of an anthill.

“Wok goo you wonk?”

Henry eyed the gap in Obradin’s teeth with respect. “Wow. You could string a clothesline in there. Now have a look at this.” He took a solar-powered marten deterrent from the cardboard box. “Ultrasound. This is the solution. Listen.”

Henry switched on the device. YEEEEEEK —an ultra-unbearable sound shrilled out. Each man put his fingers in his ears. Henry turned it off.

“And that’s the problem. I don’t know what frequency you need to drive away the marten and not the dog.”

“Wok?” Obradin asked without interest.

“Hey, you know Poncho — he’s sensitive, just like you. He goes crazy when I switch on this infernal machine. Help me adjust it. We’ll set the thing up, scare away the marten, and have a smoke. It’ll never come back. Wok goo you fink?”

Henry chuckled. He’d always been of the opinion that feeling sorry for people only delays their recovery. A little joke helps a sick man back on his feet faster than a sympathy suppository.

Obradin did indeed smile. Henry put out his hand and held his mouth shut. “Don’t say anything, you Serbian bean stew, or you’ll make me laugh again. Come on. Let’s go to the dentist.”

It was the best private practice for miles. Obradin got new teeth. First temporary ones that didn’t look bad at all — just a little rabbit-like. Later an oral surgeon put in implants, two veritable works of art, each one more expensive than a midrange car. The molar was replaced too, and a piece of bone taken from his palate to reconstruct his jaw. It goes without saying that Henry footed the bill and never mentioned it. As we have seen, Henry could be great.

——

Forty miles farther south, Gisbert Fasch was transferred from the intensive care unit to a four-bed ward. Badly mangled but in full possession of his faculties. With his broken legs and one arm dangling in an aluminum sling, he looked like poor Gregor Samsa who woke up one morning to find himself transformed into an insect.

Brown pus flowed out of Fasch’s chest through a tube into a little contraption beside his bed. This pumped out septic fluid, which then gathered in a transparent plastic pouch. The shaft of the headrest that had pierced his chest had been full of bacteria. Once every twelve hours the pouch was emptied by a nurse who seemed to be qualified for only this one task and was correspondingly bad-tempered. She also changed his diapers and washed and moisturized his behind. Her firm fingers on his scrotum were indisputably the highlight of the day.

Every breath hurt. He had a taste in his mouth that was difficult to describe, and a whispering sound in his lung. Something in there had become infected in a big way — he could smell it. A high whistling sound pierced the walls of the ward day and night. No one seemed to hear it but him.

The three other men on the ward all wore diapers. Anyone without a room of his own learns a lot. Such as, for instance, what dirty diapers smell like. Human beings, as Leonardo da Vinci realized long ago, are merely passageways for food and drink; all they leave behind them is a pile of shit.

In the artificial twilight of the ward a fly was buzzing around. Fasch saw it double; he saw everything double since coming around after the anesthesia. Lured by the smell of pus, the fly orbited the patients, alighting here and there. It nibbled at the gangrenous foot of the man in the bed on his left — a nameless diabetic, who only groaned — and then vanished into the gaping maw of the motionless man on his right to lay eggs on his tongue.

Gisbert’s head was fixed in a head clamp on account of his fractured skull. Only with a little pocket mirror was he able to see a back-to-front image of his surroundings. So as not to see everything double, he had to shut one eye. He would have liked a bed at the window and to be able to stretch out his legs. He missed Miss Wong, his long-standing partner, and on top of that his anus itched and he couldn’t scratch himself because he had a venous catheter full of nutrient solution stuck in the back of his right hand. In the mornings the resident doctor dropped in on his rounds, a cluster of medicos surrounding him like bodyguards, and asked Gisbert how we were. Well, how does he think we are, with an itchy ass and no way of scratching ourselves ? It was wretched.