My grandfather lied beautifully. By the time I was ten, I knew that he had flown over the Andes in a borrowed plane, that he had once been mistaken for a Hungarian count in Lisbon, and that he spoke to a particular seagull in the harbour, who answered in a dialect of the south.
My mother said, with the tired patience of a daughter, that none of it was true. I did not mind. A story that was not true had one big advantage over one that was: it did not need to be defended.
When he died, we cleared his flat. In a drawer under the stamps, I found a green ledger. Inside, in a neat clerk's hand, were forty years of entries in the same order: dates, tea, weather, and one line beginning "Today the Ministry...". He had been a clerk in the Ministry of Roads, and the logbook contained the whole truth of his life, which was that nothing in it had happened.
Beneath the ledger was a second notebook, thinner and older. It was a pilot's log. The dates went back to 1951. The flights were detailed, with altitudes and wind speeds and the names of small airfields I had never heard of. Every one of them was impossible. Every one was written with the same careful hand.
I thought for a long time about which of the two books was the lie. I decided that the ledger was a record, and the pilot's log was a portrait. He had spent half of his life in a small office, and the other half drawing the world he would have liked to cross. That is not deception. It is a map, which also reduces the world to the size of a life.
I still tell my children about the seagull. I only change the dialect.
Fiction note: All people, places and events in this text are fictional.