The Truth and Other Lies (17 page)

Honor had hoped to meet someone who knew a thing or two at the seminar, some spiritual person with whom she could discuss the full significance of the Tower, the sixteenth card of the Major Arcana in the Tarot. The card had come up for her twice already; it had to mean something. But there were only know-it-alls and half-wits in the seminar.

As all initiates are well aware, the Tower is a drastic card. Lightning strikes from a black sky, and a young man and his sweetheart plunge, burning, to their deaths. The card heralds annihilation and rebirth or, equally, solitude and the end of things. It is culpably reckless to ignore it. But sometimes the signs of an imminent event remain hidden, and it is impossible to foresee the full extent of their significance. That is why you have to be prepared for anything, and sharpen your senses to find the vital clue in the shapeless mass of everyday life.

Honor left her coffee and a big tip on the table. She took her handbag and crossed the azure-blue carpet in the direction from which Betty had come. If it’s Moreany, she vowed to herself, then the thing with the Tower card is settled and I shall hand in my resignation.

At the window table in the wood-paneled bar, Henry Hayden was fiddling with his shirtsleeve. The poor thing looked pale and pain-stricken. How unbearable his wife’s death must have been for him. There’s no one who’ll grieve for me when I’m no longer around, and I have only myself to blame, she thought. She wanted to go up to him and hug him, but the waiter approached his table. Henry paid the bill. Honor saw something in his look that stopped her from offering him her condolences.

Of course there’s no connection between the sum of the digits in a phone number and hidden traits of character. On the other hand, there’s no such thing as a chance encounter in a hotel; there are only inattentive observers. In the corner of the Oyster Bar, Honor realized that the fateful turn of events heralded by the Tower card was already under way. Before Hayden could spot her, she returned to the armchair next to the column, from which vantage point she could survey the entire foyer, her face concealed behind a newspaper.

Henry came out of the bar. He shook hands, signed one of his novels at the reception desk, and exchanged a few words with a hotel guest, glancing discreetly toward the restrooms as he did so. Betty didn’t emerge. Shortly afterward he left the hotel alone. He didn’t turn around again.

How energetic he was, Honor thought. His predator’s gait and his athletic, broad-shouldered physique had impressed her from the start.
Heart, yield or break,
she had read in
Aggravating Circumstances
. Until she saw Henry she had always believed that men of letters walked with a stoop, weighed down by the burden of their thoughts, propelled by an inner force or dragged through the world by a dark hostility. The true artist is sick—so thought the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, and he spent all his life waiting for the carriage from the abyss. A blind Borges wrestled with God’s irony in the infinite library of symbols—but Henry Hayden was sporty, disciplined, always in control. And ever the artist. Quite fabulous.

Her tip was still lying next to her coffee cup. She did some quick math to work out how many hours it had taken to earn that much, and exchanged it for a smaller amount.

Gagging noises were coming from the third stall on the left. There was flushing, then more gagging. Honor could smell lily-of-the-valley perfume and saw the hideous bag through the gap at the bottom of the door. She went into the next-door stall, lifted the lid, and pulled up her skirt so as to produce an authentic sound. Between individual gagging attacks she heard a soft sobbing sound—strictly speaking, a whimper.

It was a gift, a sweet reward, this chance to be privy to such an intimate moment with her rival. She nearly forgot to flush. The death of Hayden’s wife could hardly have grieved the hussy to this extent; she wasn’t capable of genuine feelings. Something must have happened between the two of them that was dramatic enough to make her cry and him leave. Honor listened in delight as her rival coughed—blood perhaps—and then left the stall to rinse out her mouth at the sink.

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.

The most painful thing for Gisbert was the lost briefcase. When he came to after the operation, it was his first thought. Like a mother searching for her lost child, he called out for his briefcase. They thought he was hallucinating. He was given sedatives, and in his fitful dreams he continued to search for the briefcase—with no success. Fasch wasn’t told who had rescued him and brought him to the hospital. Only that he’d been driven to the emergency room after a bad car crash.

His hunt for Henry Hayden was over. He’d invested two years of his life in the search and they’d been the best two. Now all the precious evidence, every tiny detail, all the questions without answers, all the irreplaceable documents, were lost. Henry had gotten the better of him with a silly trick. He’d simply lain in wait for him around the corner and then bang, crash, it was over—what a defeat. If Fasch had lost all memory of the accident, as is usually the case with craniocerebral trauma, he could have recovered in peace and been grateful for his second life. But he couldn’t forget. His memory ceaselessly projected the same sequence of images onto his retinas. No sooner had he closed his eyes than he was approaching the bend again, racing straight toward Henry. Over and over again—Henry. Hallucinations arise out of nothing, figments of the imagination, but this was no figment, this was a documentary film on endless loop. It was torture. Over and over again—Henry. If this doesn’t stop, Fasch decided, I’ll kill myself.

And then one day the door opened and in walked Henry Hayden. Not a ghost, waiting around a bend in the road, but the man himself. With the same professional nonchalance as a doctor, he drew up a metal stool for himself and sat down at the bedside. He looked just the same as in the lifestyle magazine. Only now there was no woman or dog at his side. What you might call a pared-down version of perfection.

The diabetic in the next bed let out a soft hissing sound. Otherwise it was absolutely silent on the ward. “How are you?” Hayden asked in a pleasantly matter-of-fact baritone. The question may not have been original, but it was appropriate; they were in a hospital after all, the house of the sick. During the conversation that followed, Fasch kept one eye screwed up, so as not to have to see two of his enemy.