Sascha Arango - The Truth and Other Lies

He stood like that for an indefinite period. It is well known that situations of this kind feel immeasurably short and endlessly long at the same time. Shyly Henry raised a hand in greeting. The face behind the side window remained expressionless. The fingers felt their way up and down the glass. It seemed to Henry as if there were a weightless, pitch-black cloth covering the missing half of the face. After the shock of the first sight had subsided, Henry closed his eyes and opened them again. The face vanished and then reappeared, together with the groping, handless fingers.

It wasn’t Martha. The apparition was not complete; it didn’t even look like her. It was an illusion and yet seemed as real as the car it was sitting in. Henry steeled himself and walked slowly toward the face in the Saab; it did not shy away. With a jerk he pulled open the driver’s door. The smell of damp plastic rose to meet him. The interior of the car was empty. Poncho pushed his hairy head past Henry’s leg and sniffed. “There’s nothing there,” said Henry softly and shut the door. He looked through the glass again. The face did not reappear. Henry took the ax from the hay-strewn floor and closed the barn door behind him. Just to be sure, he searched the loose soil by the blackberry bushes for footprints, but only found tracks left by Poncho’s big paws.

——

With only a towel wound around her hair in a turban, Sonja stepped out of the guest bathroom naked. She came up behind Henry, who was back at the kitchen counter boning a pheasant. Gleaming on her wrist was the Patek Philippe that Henry had bought as a parting gift for Betty before killing his wife. “Don’t be frightened,” she whispered and wrapped her arms around his hips, pressing her breasts against his back. They had spent a wonderful morning. Together with Obradin they had gone on a short cruise along the coast on the Drina . Obradin had barely spoken.

“Does anyone know what love is?” Sonja purred. “Is there research on it?”

He didn’t reply — just kept on hacking away with the knife.

“I wonder whether you can measure how intense it is, how long it lasts, and what comes afterward?” She drew away when she felt the damp heat of his skin. The shirt on his back was completely drenched. “Goodness, you’re soaked.” His face was covered in sweat too, and an unhealthy gray. “What’s happened?” She wiped his forehead with her hand, which smelled of rose oil. He put the knife down, turned around to look at her.

“My wife’s sitting in the car.”

Instinctively Sonja reached for her saffron-yellow silk scarf that was hanging over a chair back, stood up on tiptoe, and looked apprehensively over his shoulder out the kitchen window.

“Where?”

“In the barn. She’s sitting in the barn in her car.” Henry grasped her upper arm. “You can’t see her.” He could feel her well-developed triceps under the skin of her arm. She’s far too young for all this, he thought. “It’s just half a face and fingers without a hand. It doesn’t look like Martha, but I know it’s her. She’s getting in touch with me.”

“It’s a hallucination, Henry.”

“Call it what you will. I can see her and she sees me.”

Sonja was a whole head shorter than Henry. She looked up at him anxiously. A drop of water fell from a strand of hair under the turban and ran down to her chin like a tear.

“You’re grieving,” she said softly.

How could it have been otherwise? Perhaps grief wasn’t the right word, but he missed Martha. He missed her love. He missed her presence and nothing could replace it. But in all seriousness, can a man talk of grief when he feels the desire for forgiveness and longs only for peace of mind and relief from his guilty conscience? Does a murderer even have the right to grieve for his victim? Betty and the baby were also in a place from which no one returns, and Henry felt no sadness. Shouldn’t he, if he was capable of true mourning, grieve for the two of them as well?

“Come with me.” Henry took Sonja by the hand. “I’ll show you something.”

He pulled aside the heavy chest of drawers that was blocking the stairs to the attic. It didn’t seem to bother him that it left deep scratch marks in the parquet. Sonja had never set foot upstairs. She knew that Martha had lived up there, and she didn’t feel the slightest desire to see her room, particularly as there were two bathrooms with a sauna and various spare rooms downstairs, the wood-paneled living room with the fireplace and the studio with the picture windows.

“Do I have to, Henry?”

He didn’t reply.

“Wait. I’ll just put something on.”

Henry waited on the stairs until she came out of the guest bathroom in a robe. He held out his hand. She took it and followed him up the stairs into the darkness of the second floor.

She clapped both hands to her mouth when she saw the devastation in the attic. The ceiling under the roof had been completely torn open. Strips of blue plastic rippled like seaweed. All the dividing walls had been knocked down or ripped open, power lines and water pipes had been torn out, insulation fiber was bulging out all over the place. Rain had come in through the broken tiles and the cracks in the battens, leaving ugly white stains on the walls and floorboards. There were long lengths of rafter lying around, sawn into pieces.

“The place isn’t quite as stable as it was. Can you hear?” Henry bounced up and down; the floorboards creaked. “They didn’t used to creak.”

“Was all this you? Did you…?”

Henry pointed to the remains of a wooden partition. “This was Martha’s room. He was here first of all. Then he gradually crawled through the roof to the back until… Come on, I’ll show you where he’s hiding now.”

Sonja withdrew her hand. “Where who is hiding?”

“The marten. He’s still there, but I’m going to get him. I’ll skin him and grill him and eat him and shit him into a hole.”

Sonja took two steps backward toward the landing.

“A marten? You’re destroying the whole house because of a marten?”

“Shhh!” Henry held up his hand and listened.

“I can’t hear anything,” she whispered. She saw his strangely altered look, his outstretched hand. The wind rustled a sheet of plastic.

“That’s the wind, Henry.”

Henry nodded. “He’s stopped. He knows we’re here.”

“Let’s go back downstairs, shall we?” Henry looked at her in silence for a while. “I know what you’re thinking. I sometimes think he doesn’t exist too, or else I’d have caught him long since.” He rolled up his shirtsleeves and showed her the bite wound on his wrist. “I almost had him. He bit me.”

Henry pushed aside a timber batten with the tip of his shoe. There was a small pile of reddish-brown droppings with fine tufts of hair. Henry squatted down. “That’s marten shit. Can you smell it, Sonja? Tell me I’m imagining things.”

Sonja saw his lower jaw grinding. “You need help,” she whispered. “You can’t get over this by yourself. No one can. Come on, let’s go back downstairs.”

“Are you scared of me?”

She turned around and walked down the stairs. He watched her go. Sonja slipped off her robe and hastily began to dress. When she came out of the bathroom, Henry pulled the chest of drawers back in front of the stairs. She wanted to help him, to save him, but he went into the kitchen without a word to finish boning the pheasant.

——

The phone woke Henry from his afternoon nap.

It was Fasch calling from his sickbed. “A Mr. Jenssen’s been here. He was sounding me out about you… Hello? Are you still there?” Fasch was suddenly unsure, because he hadn’t heard an affirmative “Mm-hmm” from Henry.