Sascha Arango - The Truth and Other Lies

Obradin glanced up. “Tourists,” he declared disparagingly.

“Are you sure?”

“Who looks at my fish pictures? Who does a thing like that?”

“Only tourists.”

“There you are then. They’ve come because of you. You just watch.”

Obradin went and waited behind the fish counter, setting down his cigarette on the bloody chopping board. The bell over the door rang. Two busty women with red cheeks came into the shop. They stood at the counter, contemplating the dead fish without interest. No, it wasn’t the fish they were after. The cigarette smoke bothered them. The older one looked from the fish to Obradin, closed her eyelids, and set them vibrating, as Anglo-Saxon women often do — no one knows why.

“Do you speak English?”

Obradin shook his head. Both women were in white trainers and carrying Gore-Tex backpacks. Their hair was closely cropped, their lips were thin, their skin rosy; the older one’s chin wobbled underneath when she whispered to the younger one. Henry cleared his throat.

“Can I help?”

The younger one smiled shyly at Henry. Her teeth were white as alabaster and perfectly regular. “Perhaps you know Henry Hayden?”

Before Henry could reply, Obradin had answered for him.

“No.”

The Serb leaned his hairy arms on the fish counter. “No here. Here only fish.”

The women looked at one another helplessly. The younger one turned around and bent forward slightly, and the older one took a well-thumbed book out of the pack on her back. It was an English edition of Frank Ellis . She held it out to Obradin. With an immaculately clean fingernail she pointed at Henry’s photograph.

“Henry Hayden. Does he live here?”

“No.”

Henry stamped out his cigarette and strode across to the women. “Allow me.” He held out his hand. Taken aback, the woman put the book in his hand.

“Have you got a pen, Obradin?”

Obradin handed him a pencil smeared with fish gut.

“What’s your name, Ma’am?”

The older woman put her slender hand to her mouth with a start. She had recognized him. “Oh my God…”

“Just Henry, Ma’am.”

Henry loved moments like this. Doing good and feeling good at the same time. Can there be any act more worthwhile and at the same time more delightful? After all, they’d traveled from God knows where just to see him. Such a lot of trouble for a moment’s beneficence.

Henry wrote two brief dedications, Obradin took a photo of the two of them with Henry in the middle, and the women floated out of the fishmonger’s on air. Obradin snarled as he watched them go.

“I’ve been tearing hairs out of my ass so as not to give you away and you come along and say, Here I am .”

“They’ll come back and buy your fish, now they know you’re not going to kill them.”

——

For dinner Henry grilled Obradin’s monkfish medallions a la plancha . He and Martha ate on the veranda in the cool night air that was fragrant with the scent of cut grass, and drank Pouilly-Fumé.

“Should I be worried?” Martha asked, in that inimitably terse way of hers that made any further questions superfluous. Henry knew his wife well enough to know that the unspoken context of this question was: Spare me the details, I don’t want any explanations, and, above all, don’t play dumb.

Henry speared a piece of fish with his fork and spread a little Riesling froth over it with his knife. “Not in the least,” he replied truthfully. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of things.”

With that, the essentials had been said. The telepathic contact that comes with years of marriage is often misinterpreted by outsiders as silence. Before getting married, Henry too had assumed that couples who sit at restaurant tables and eat in silence have nothing to say to one another; he now knew that they make eloquent conversation without exchanging a word, sometimes even telling each other jokes.

Martha went upstairs to work on the final part of the fifty-fourth chapter, which was to conclude the novel. At the veranda door she turned to Henry again.

“Do you really want a change, Henry? Aren’t things all right the way they are?” She didn’t wait for a reply.

Henry did the washing up and fed the dog. Then he withdrew into his studio to watch the sports roundup and stick some more matchsticks onto his drilling rig.

High shelves of unread books stood alongside filing cabinets full of newspaper articles. Everything ever published about him was filed here by date, language, and author. The most important prizes and awards hung on the walls or were displayed in glass-fronted cabinets. Even in early childhood, Henry realized that he had a bent for copying and archiving. With every novel that came out, his collection grew by an entire bookcase. He’d stopped showing it to Martha; the very thought made him blush to his ears in shame.

At the window was his desk. It was here that he answered letters, sorted his expenses for the accountant, and constructed all manner of drilling rigs out of matchsticks. Once finished these were banished to the cellar and later burned on the barbecue when they grilled sausages at their midsummer parties. He’d already stuck over forty thousand matches on the true-to-scale model of the Norwegian Troll A platform, which is, as it happens, the largest Condeep production platform for crude oil in the world. Henry wound up by watching two episodes of Bonanza and went to sleep feeling inspired. He had no dreams that night, but he slept peacefully and soundly like Hoss Cartwright from the Ponderosa, for he now knew what was to be done.

——

He was woken by the whir of the automatic blinds. Sunlight penetrated the room and he flung the duvet aside; the sundial pointer of his morning erection showed a quarter past seven. Poncho was asleep next to the bed. Henry drank coffee, had a long shower, and got his hiking boots out of the cupboard. As soon as Poncho saw the boots he began to twist and turn, prancing up and down at the front door wagging his tail. He ran ahead of Henry to the car and leaped onto the passenger seat. It was the hour of their daily ramble.

To avoid being recognized by the locals on his outings with the dog, Henry always chose remote places within a sixty-mile radius; after all, a novelist is not a rambler. Thanks to a military map on which even the smallest woodland paths were marked, he had, over the last two years, discovered large tracts of meadowland and forest, roamed over picturesque moors and through secluded coastal regions, seen all kinds of rare birds and wild animals, and even lost some weight. There was hardly any danger of getting lost, because the two hundred and twenty million scent-detecting cells in Poncho’s nose always found their way back to the car.

This time Henry picked a tract of forest twenty-five miles west of the small town, an area where he’d roamed with the dog a few times before. He got out at a gloriously shady picnic area. Not far away a cascade was burbling in the bracken. The scent of fresh pine resin hung in the air, and sunlight fell through the treetops, showering radiance on millions of leaves.

From his jacket pocket he pulled out his red telephone and put in the battery. He never called Betty twice from the same place; it was one of the cautionary habits he’d acquired during the years he’d spent lying low in an overpopulated world. He typed in the number and then waited. He never even got bills for this tiny thing, because it was prepaid. You could top it up at any gas station, conveniently, cheaply, and anonymously. Henry loved going incognito.

Betty answered at the first ring. Her voice was husky; she’d been smoking. “Have you told her?”

“I’ll tell you everything this evening. Are you in your office?”