Sascha Arango - The Truth and Other Lies

“True. Where did you hear it?”

Martha indicated a point on the ceiling. “There. Over the bed.”

Henry pulled off his shoes, climbed onto the bed, and pressed his ear against the sloping ceiling. A narrow crawl space ran along the length of the roof between the lining and the rafters. The air it contained provided first-rate insulation. For the space of a few breaths Henry didn’t move. Then he heard it. There was indeed something gnawing in the rafters directly overhead. He could hear the rasp of sharp teeth. Then it stopped; the animal seemed to be aware of him.

Henry got down off the bed with the expression of a concerned expert.

“There’s something there.”

“How big?”

“It’s not moving anymore.”

“A marten?”

“Possibly.”

“Bigger or smaller than a cat?”

“Smaller. Don’t worry yourself. I’ll catch it.”

“But you won’t kill it.”

He put his shoes on. “Of course not. And now I’ll go and buy some fish.”

The small town fronted onto a bay. Low houses, a natural harbor, little shops, and pointless flower beds. No monument, but a small bookshop where a framed picture of Henry hung on the wall — for the tourists who came here on pilgrimage to meet the famous author.

Obradin Basarić, the local Serbian fishmonger, put aside his knife and washed his hands when he heard Henry’s Maserati. As he’d plastered the shop’s window with photographs of fish, he could only guess at what went on in the street. For Obradin, Henry was — since the death of Ivo Andrić— the greatest living writer. The fact that Henry had chosen to settle in this nondescript coastal town couldn’t be a coincidence, because coincidences happen only to atheists. At least once a week Henry came to him to buy fish, smoke unfiltered Bosnian cigarettes with him, and philosophize about life. This most congenial and at the same time most brilliant of all people was a lover of fish — and he, Obradin Basarić, sold fish. Where did coincidence come into that?

Henry had asked Obradin not to tell anyone where he lived, and Obradin had promised. But the secret knowledge weighed on him. When the tourists — most of them women — came into the fishmonger’s to inquire shyly or with shameless directness about Henry, he would lie to their faces, telling them that no one of that name lived there, when all the time he would have given anything to tell them that he was a particular friend of his. At night his wife, Helga, often heard him yelling in his sleep: I know him! He’s my friend!

“You can’t imagine how awful it is to have a secret,” he confessed to Henry when they were out fly-fishing one day. “A secret like this,” he continued, “is a parasite. It feeds on you and grows bigger and bigger. It wants to get out of you, it gnaws its way through your heart, it wants to get out of your mouth, it crawls through your eyes!”

Henry listened in silence. “Do what I do,” he suggested. “Dig a hole and shit your secret into the hole. Then you’ll be rid of it and not full of shit anymore.” Obradin considered this remark unworthy of a serious writer. But Henry just laughed and was pleased with himself for the rest of the day.

Today Henry entered the fishmonger’s looking gloomy. “My friend,” he said to Obradin, “we have a problem in our roof. It’s a marten.”

Obradin kissed Henry on both cheeks in greeting. “I’ll kill it for you.”

“No, best not. Martha wouldn’t like that. How do we go about catching the brute?”

“With a trap. But what will you do with it when you’ve caught it?”

“I’ll set it free somewhere.”

“It’ll come back, because it’ll know you’re not going to kill it.”

“OK. When I’ve caught it, I’ll bring it to you and you can kill it.”

Henry didn’t ask how business was going, because he knew it was going badly. Obradin’s sky-blue fishing cutter, the Drina , was forty years old and beginning to give up the ghost. More and more often, Obradin was having to buy frozen fish from the wholesaler, because her diesel engine had packed up again. Henry had already made him several offers of an interest-free loan for a new cutter, but Obradin had rejected the offers out of hand. He didn’t even want Henry to act as guarantor for him. Friendship should be debt-free, was all he said. And so Henry had started to slip cash to Obradin’s wife on the sly, so that she could settle the most urgent bills. Without Henry’s discreet support, Obradin would long since have gone bust. It would no doubt be the end of their friendship if Obradin found out.

The men lit two Bosnian cigarettes and talked about the weather, and the sea and about literature. Sometimes Obradin talked about the war, the mass shootings in Bratunac and his time in the internment camp at Trnopolje. When he started on the subject, his eyes would grow dark and his voice would harden and he would switch into the present tense, as if everything were happening right then. Listening, Henry was never quite sure whether Obradin had been a victim or a perpetrator. After Chetniks had raped and impaled his daughter, Obradin had driven back to his homeland every weekend to gun down a few of them in the mountains around Sarajevo. Henry couldn’t swear that he wasn’t still doing it on the sly.

“How are you getting on with your novel?”

“Not much to go. Maybe twenty pages.”

“We have to celebrate that. I have a monkfish for you.”

“I’m going to pay for it though.”

“That’s up to you,” Obradin replied. “I saw they want to film Frank Ellis .”

“Yes, awful,” Henry said. “I’m against it.”

“Then why have you allowed it to happen? My Helga says you can’t film literature. I say it’s wrong to film it. Film, do you know what film means?” Obradin rubbed his finger through the fish blood on the chopping board, drew out a transparent thread, and held it under Henry’s nose. “Here, that’s film — gunk, slime, filth.”

“How right you are,” Henry said. “That’s just what Martha always says. But I’m so bad at saying no. Do you understand?”

Obradin swung his hairy index finger to and fro like a pendulum. “I don’t like the way you’re talking today. What’s happened?”

“Nothing. Nothing’s happened.”

“Then don’t be so hard on yourself, Henry. What does fame matter to you anymore? You don’t enjoy it! You hide from it, because you’re a good person. You’re always talking yourself down. Why do you do that?”

“That’s the way I am, Obradin. I’m a thoroughly bad, utterly insignificant person, believe me.”

Obradin narrowed his eyes to slits. “You know what the Jews say: Thoughts become words and words become deeds. I know bad people. I have some in my family. I’ve lived with them, slept with them, eaten with them. You’re not one of them; you’re a good person. That’s why we all love you.”

“You love me because I contribute to the community coffers.”

Henry inhaled the tarry smoke of the tobacco and suppressed a cough, drawing one foot up to his knee like a wading bird.

“Bloody hell, that’s strong. Do you know what the Japanese say, Obradin?”

“Who cares what the Japanese say?”

“They say that being loved is a curse.”

“Maybe they do, Henry. But how do they know that?” Obradin spat on his tiled floor. “You don’t just become a writer, Henry. I know that — you’re destined to it. I can’t do it, my Helga can’t do it, and we thank God for it. It must be a real burden.”

“There’s something in that,” Henry replied and pointed to two silhouettes on the other side of the papered-up windowpane. “I see customers.”