The Truth is Dead by Marcus Sedgwick Read Free Book Online

we are blind to it because it is familiar. Don’t you think it is the task, the duty, of the artist to make reality strange? To refresh the way we see it?”
    Addie shrugged. He looked uncomfortable. He has strong views about art, and they differed from this man’s. But he was reluctant to argue with a potential buyer.
    He said, “The task of the artist is to pay the damned rent.”
    The man smiled again. “True. But the artist volunteers for other responsibilities, does he not? He shows his work and says, ‘Here, see through new eyes.’ For example, the trees in your painting are silver birches. But you have given their bark a lilac colour. Now, when I look at birches in the evening, I shall perhaps find that colour in them. Thus, you will have made a change in my way of seeing, which is a change to my life. A small one, perhaps, but a change nonetheless.”
    Addie, for the first time since I’d known him, was stuck for words.
    He was saved by a commotion. An outbreak of shouting and cheering, a crush of people onto the pavement. I was shoved back against the railings by the throng and I only just managed to save my hat. A troop of the Imperial Cavalry had clattered onto the Heldenplatz. My view was blocked by the press of bodies. All I could see, in glimpses between heads and shoulders, was the faces of the troopers, stern and identical below the peaks of their crested helmets, the pennants flying from their lances, the heads of their horses tossing. I found it hard to breathe. Not because of the crowding. It was as if the air had all been sucked away, as if the people all around had inhaled at once and left nothing for me. I could feel their excitement drowning me as real as water.
    There is a desire for war, which I share but do not understand.
    Addie had climbed onto his little stool so as to see over the crowd. He won’t admit it, but he is shorter than I am. I looked up at his face and saw the thrill in it. His blue eyes bright as stars.
    When the cavalry had passed by, the man who had perhaps considered buying Addie’s painting had disappeared.
    “Where’d he go?” I said.
    “Who?”
    “That man. The one who liked your painting.”
    Addie looked at me as though I was speaking a foreign language.
    He shrugged. “To hell with him,” he said. “Did you see the Imperials? Weren’t they magnificent?”
    JULY
    Werner’s twenty schillings didn’t last long. By the end of June we were hard up once again. Addie couldn’t find much work. Besides, he’s been spending more and more time at meetings of what he calls “the group”. When he comes home he spends hours, sometimes half the night, writing furiously in the cheap notebooks he used to do sketches in. When he’s writing he talks and argues with himself as if I’m not there.
    I’m sure that he is a genius. I’m sure that one day he will be really famous. But, in the meantime, we have to eat.
    So, two days ago, in the afternoon, while Addie was out, I tidied myself up a bit and went down to the cafe quarter. A man propositioned me and I went with him into the little alleyway behind Schwartzer’s. With the money he gave me I bought a thick slice of pork belly and some potatoes. I came home and was peeling the spuds when someone knocked on the door. The only person who knocks on our door is the landlord when he wants the rent. I stayed silent, hoping he would go away, but I knew he wouldn’t. So I dried my hands and arranged my face and opened up.
    It wasn’t the landlord. It was a smiling man in a beautiful pale grey suit. I was so surprised I couldn’t speak. He took his hat off and I saw that it was the man from the park, the one who had talked to Addie about his picture before the cavalry came by and I’d lost my breath.
    He didn’t seem to recognize me, though, because he said, “I was told that Herr Hitler lives here. Is that correct?”
    I told him yes, it was, but that Addie wasn’t in. He seemed very disappointed. It was awkward, this