Sascha Arango - The Truth and Other Lies

Henry took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He spun the hat between his fingers.

“My wife didn’t drown on the beach.”

Obradin jumped up and raised both arms imploringly. The Drina started to rock.

“Don’t tell me, Henry. I don’t want to know. You’re my friend — I don’t care. It’s better you keep it to yourself.”

Henry stood up too and stretched out his hands to him.

“Calm down, Obradin, you have to know. The night Martha disappeared I drove to the bay.”

Obradin put his hands over his ears. “Don’t tell me any more. Please.”

“I’m not leaving until you know what happened that night. I saw Martha’s bike and her swimming things on the beach, but she wasn’t there.”

Troubled, Obradin sat down again, kneading his hairy hands together. Henry saw tears in his dark eyes.

“I know. I saw you, Henry. You drove to the bay at night with your lights off and I saw you drive back again.”

“And what did you think?” asked Henry, taken aback. “Come on, tell me, what did you think?”

“I didn’t think anything. You can do whatever you like.” Obradin shook his bull’s neck. A tremor racked his huge body. His shirt straining over his belly, he squirmed like a recalcitrant child. “I don’t know what I thought. It’s your business, nobody’s business but yours.”

“There’s a woman,” Henry said softly, and sat down next to his friend again. “Another woman. A wicked woman. She’s called Betty and works at the publisher’s. She’s been pursuing me for years — claims she’s going to have a baby by me. She’s using it to blackmail me. She wants my money, but most of all she wants me.”

And then Henry told his friend, the fishmonger Obradin, what had really gone on at the cliffs that night. The Drina pitched and rolled, wavelets sloshed against the seaweed-covered side of the boat, miniature fish passed by in little schools. Obradin listened with closed eyes; he didn’t interrupt Henry once. Only his hirsute index finger moved, playing over the seam of his trousers, as if he were taking notes.

“She told me Martha went to visit her in order to confront her,” Henry concluded, “but Martha’s car’s still in the barn. Martha didn’t come back from the meeting. I looked for her everywhere. Betty’s car has disappeared. She’s reported it stolen. This woman’s even started using my credit cards. She’s spreading it around that she’s pregnant by me. In court she’ll say I did it. I’ll be locked up for murder and she’ll get the lot — the house, the rights to the novels, the whole lot.”

Obradin opened his eyes and blinked into the sun. “Why don’t you just send her away?”

Henry peered into Obradin’s face. “Send her where?”

“Send her to a place from which no one returns.”

“And where might that be?”

“It’s quite simple,” Obradin replied quietly. “Believe me.”

Henry shook his head violently. “I couldn’t bring myself to do that. I’ve often thought about it, I admit, but I’m too soft.”

“Not in your novels.”

“That’s different. That’s imagination, pure invention. In real life I can’t even kill a marten. You were in the war, Obradin. You lost your daughter. You know how to hate. I don’t know how to hate.”

“You don’t have to hate a fish to kill it. It’s quite simple.”

“A person’s not a fish, Obradin.” Henry slapped his thighs and got up. “Martha was the love of my life. I miss her. The house is too empty without her. I can’t write anymore. My friend, in a year or two you might get a postcard. From a stranger. That’ll be me. Until then…”

Henry reached into his pocket and took out a key.

“This opens my safe. If you ever fall on hard times, if you’re ever at your wits’ end, then use it. You’ll find the bank on page 363 of Frank Ellis . Farewell, my friend.”

The Old Harbor was the only restaurant in the region with a Michelin star. The sweeping terrace made of revamped ship decking rose up above the sea on tarred struts. From here — afloat, as it were — you could enjoy the sunset. Initiates could enjoy one of the house’s signature cocktails at the same time.

Henry parked his Maserati next to an open-topped Bentley in Tudor Grey and walked across the meticulously raked white gravel of the parking lot, past other landmarks in automobile history. He had his sleeves rolled up and his jacket flung casually over his shoulder. He’d just had a shower, he was hungry, and he could smell his own aftershave. With a spring in his heel he took the steps two at a time and entered the sandalwood-lined lobby of the Old Harbor. Anyone who, like Henry, can reach this lobby after passing the gleaming chrome of those status symbols, without any feelings of envy or inferiority, can be said to have made it, to be one of the club.

Although Henry was wearing dark glasses, he was recognized by the headwaiter and led to the table pour deux at the side of the terrace. It was the corner table right up against the balustrade, which offered the best view of the sun disappearing into the sea and of new guests appearing in the restaurant. There was enough room to stretch out your legs or to make an easy getaway. Henry had a quick look around him. The concept of informal dining requires only a casual dress code. Most of the male guests were wearing canvas shoes like him, sunglasses like him, and expensive watches like him. Here one could mingle with a like-minded crowd — the young-at-heart fifty-plus, as they say nowadays. The balustrade tables were in high demand and booked months in advance. On his table was a white cloth, two long-stemmed water glasses, two sets of cutlery, two little hors d’oeuvre dishes, and two discreetly patterned, laundered napkins. He glanced at his watch: 6:46 p.m. He’d come a quarter of an hour early.

——

Betty had been reading all day. The blinds of her office were drawn. She had only made one brief sortie into the staff kitchen to make herself some peppermint tea. When she turned the last page, she paused, baffled. “That’s not possible,” she said out loud to herself. “That’s just not possible.” The end of the novel was missing. It didn’t say “The end” underneath either; it simply wasn’t there.

White Darkness was an unbearably gripping novel. Betty had turned the pages with clammy fingers — now it had to happen! — and then the book just stopped. Betty stared at the large blank space on the last page as if there were a microdot hidden there that contained the secret of the ending. But there was only a speck of brown fly dirt.

Chekhov was famous for reducing his stories to the bare minimum. He would lop the beginning and the end off each one because he thought they weren’t necessary to the plot. There is an unconfirmed rumor that his friends wanted to break into his study to rescue these endings. Countless readers of ‘The Lady with the Dog” have realized with horror… just as the tormented love of two lonely people is about to overcome convention, undo their endless Russian hesitancy, send them into raptures, and finally set them free… that suddenly it’s over, and they’ve turned the last page. The fiercely longed-for ending is no longer part of the story. It’s ghastly, but you have to accept it.

Betty suppressed the urge to call Henry immediately. It was after all conceivable that he had simply forgotten to append the missing pages. “The novel’s finished,” he had said to her, smiling mysteriously. Had he by any chance withheld the end in order to torment her? How irrational would that be? This novel was different from its predecessors. It was more passionate and more emphatic in every detail, but without the missing pages it was nothing but a torso. Incredible, the intuitive power with which Henry could develop his characters from within his armor of indifference, thought Betty, as she drank the remains of the cold peppermint tea. She put the manuscript down beside her.