Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel

by Herman Koch

  ALSO BY HERMAN KOCH

  The Dinner

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Translation copyright © 2014 by Sam Garrett

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  Originally published in the Netherlands as Zomerhuis met zwembad by Ambo Anthos, Amsterdam, in 2011.

  Copyright © 2011 by Herman Koch.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Koch, Herman, 1953–

  [Zomerhuis met zwembad. English]

  Summer house with swimming pool : a novel / by Herman Koch; translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett.—First edition.

  pages cm

  1. Physicians—Fiction. 2. Medical ethics—Fiction. I. Garrett, Sam, translator. II. Title.

  PT5881.21.O25Z6613 2014

  839.313′64—dc23 2013042805

  ISBN 978-0-8041-3881-9

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-3882-6

  Jacket design by Christopher Brand

  Jacket photograph by George Baier IV/Hand lettering by John Stevens

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  About the Author

  I am a doctor. My office hours are from eight-thirty in the morning to one in the afternoon. I take my time. Twenty minutes for each patient. Those twenty minutes are my unique selling point. Where else these days, people say, can you find a family doctor who gives you twenty minutes?—and they pass it along. He doesn’t take on too many patients, they say. He makes time for each individual case. I have a waiting list. When a patient dies or moves away, all I have to do is pick up the phone and I have five new ones to take their place.

  Patients can’t tell the difference between time and attention. They think I give them more attention than other doctors. But all I give them is more time. By the end of the first sixty seconds I’ve seen all I need to know. The remaining nineteen minutes I fill with attention. Or, I should say, with the illusion of attention. I ask all the usual questions. How is your son/daughter getting along? Are you sleeping better these days? Are you sure you’re not getting too much/too little to eat? I hold the stethoscope to their chests, then to their backs. Take a deep breath, I say. Now breathe out nice and slow. I don’t really listen. Or at least I try not to. On the inside, all human bodies sound the same. First of all, of course, there’s the heartbeat. The heart is blind. The heart pumps. The heart is the engine room. The engine room only keeps the ship going, it doesn’t keep it on course. And then there are the sounds of the intestines. Of the vital organs. An overburdened liver sounds different from a healthy one. An overburdened liver groans. It groans and begs. It begs for a day off. A day to deal with the worst of the garbage. The way things are now, it’s always in a hurry, trying to catch up with itself. The overburdened liver is like the kitchen in a restaurant that’s open around the clock. The dishes pile up. The dishwashers are working full tilt. But the dirty dishes and caked-on pans only pile up higher and higher. The overburdened liver hopes for that one day off that never comes. Every afternoon at four-thirty, five o’clock (sometimes earlier), the hope of that one day off is dashed again. If the liver’s lucky, at first it’s only beer. Beer passes most of the work along to the kidneys. But you always have those for whom beer alone isn’t enough. They order something on the side: a shot of gin, vodka, or whisky. Something they can knock back. The overburdened liver braces itself, then finally ruptures. First it grows rigid, like an overinflated tire. All it takes then is one little bump in the road for it to blow wide open.

  I listen with my stethoscope. I press against the hard spot, just beneath the skin. Does this hurt? If I press any harder, it will burst open right there in my office. Can’t have that. It makes an incredible mess. Blood gushes out in a huge wave. No general practitioner is keen to have someone die in his office. At home, that’s a different story. In the privacy of their own homes, in the middle of the night, in their own beds. With a ruptured liver, they usually don’t even make it to the phone. The ambulance would get there too late, anyway.

  My patients file into my practice at twenty-minute intervals. The office is on the ground floor of my home. They come in on crutches and in wheelchairs. Some of them are too fat, others are short of breath. They are, in any case, no longer able to climb stairs. One flight of stairs would kill them for sure. Others only imagine it would: that their final hour would sound on the first step. Most of the patients are like that. Most of them have nothing wrong with them. They moan and groan, make noises that would make you think they found death staring them in the face every moment of the day, they sink into the chair across from my desk with a sigh—but there’s nothing wrong with them. I let them reel off their complaints. It hurts here, and here; sometimes it spasms down to here … I do my best to act interested. Meanwhile, I doodle on a scrap of paper. I ask them to get up, to follow me to the examination room. Occasionally I’ll ask someone to undress behind the screen, but most of the time I don’t. Human bodies are horrible enough as it is, even with their clothes on. I don’t want to see them, those parts where the sun never shines. Not the folds of fat in which it is always too warm and the bacteria have free rein, not the fungal growths and infections between the toes, beneath the nails, not the fingers that scratch here, the fingers that rub there until it starts to bleed … Here, Doctor, here’s where it itches really badly … No, I don’t want to see. I pretend to look, but I’m thinking about something else. About a roller coaster in an amusement park. The car at the front has a green dragon’s head mounted on it. The people throw their hands in the air and scream their lungs out. From the corner of my eye I see moist tufts of pubic hair, or red, infected bald spots where no hair will ever grow again, and I think about a plane explodi
ng in the air. The passengers still belted to their seats as they begin a mile-long tumble into eternity: It’s cold, the air is thin, far below the ocean awaits. It burns when I pee, Doctor. Like there are needles coming out … A train explodes just before it enters the station. The space shuttle Columbia shatters into millions of little pieces. The second jet slams into the South Tower. It burns, here, Doctor. Here …

  You can get dressed now, I say. I’ve seen enough. I’ll write you a prescription. Some of the patients can barely conceal their disappointment: a prescription? They stand there for a few seconds, staring blankly, their underwear down around their knees. They took a morning off from work, and now they want value for their money, even if that money has actually been coughed up by the community of the healthy. They want the doctor to poke at them at least; they want him to pull on his rubber gloves and take something—some body part—between his knowing fingers. For him to stick at least one finger into something. They want to be examined. They aren’t content only with his years of experience, his clinical gaze that registers at a single glance what’s wrong with a person. Because he’s seen it all 100,000 times before. Because experience tells him that there’s no need on occasion 100,001 to suddenly pull the rubber gloves on.

  Sometimes, though, there’s no getting around it. Sometimes you have to get in there. Usually with one or two fingers, sometimes with your whole hand. I pull on my rubber gloves. If you would just roll onto your side … For the patient, this is the point of no return. Finally, he is being taken seriously, he is about to receive an internal examination, but his gaze is no longer fixed on my face. All he can look at now are my hands. My hands as they pull on the rubber gloves. He wonders why he ever let things get this far. Whether this is really what he wants. Before putting on the gloves, I wash my hands. The sink is across from the exam table, so I stand with my back to him as I soap up. I take my time. I roll up my sleeves. I can feel the patient’s eyes at my back. I let the tap water flow over my wrists. First I wash my hands thoroughly, then my lower arms, all the way up to the elbows. The sound of running water blocks out all other sounds, but I know that once I’ve reached the elbows, the patient’s breathing has quickened. It quickens for a few seconds, or stops altogether. An internal examination is about to take place. The patient—consciously or unconsciously—has insisted on this. He had no intention of letting himself be fobbed off with a prescription, not this time. Meanwhile, though, the doubts arise. Why is the doctor washing and disinfecting his hands and arms all the way up to the elbows? Something in the patient’s body contracts. Even though what he should be doing is relaxing as much as possible. Relaxation is the key to a smooth internal examination.

  Meanwhile, I have turned around and am drying my hands, my forearms, my elbows. Still without looking at the patient, I take a pair of plastic-packed gloves from a drawer. I tear open the bag, press the pedal of the trash can with my foot, and throw the bag away. Only now, as I pull on the gloves, do I look at the patient. The look in his eyes is—how shall I put it—different from what it was before I started washing my hands. Lie down on your side, I say, before he has a chance to express his misgivings. Facing the wall. A naked body is less disgraceful than a body with pants and underwear down around its ankles. Less helpless. Two legs with the shoes and socks still on, and bound together at the ankles by pants and underwear. Like a prisoner in a chain gang. A person with his pants around his ankles can’t run away. You can submit someone like that to an internal examination, but you could also punch him right in the side of the head. Or take a pistol and empty the clip into the ceiling. I’ve listened to these fucking lies long enough! I’m going to count to three … One … two … Try to relax, I say again. Turn on your side. I pull the rubber gloves tighter over my fingers and farther over my wrists. The sound of snapping rubber always reminds me of party balloons. Balloons for a birthday party. You blew them up last night in order to surprise the birthday boy. This may be a little unpleasant, I say. The important thing is to just keep breathing calmly. The patient is all too aware of my presence, right behind his half-naked body, but he can’t see me anymore. This is the moment when I take time to submit that body, or at least the naked part of it, to a further look.

  I have, until now, been assuming that the patient is a man. In the example we are dealing with, a man is lying on the table with his pants and underwear pulled down. Women are a different story; I’ll get to women later. The man in question turns his head slightly in my direction but, as I’ve mentioned, he can no longer get a good look at me. Just relax your head now, I say. All you have to do is relax. Unbeknownst to the patient, I now turn my gaze to the naked lower back. I’ve already told him that what follows may be a bit unpleasant. Between that remark and the unpleasant feeling itself, there is nothing. This is the empty moment. The emptiest moment in the entire examination. The seconds tick by silently, like a metronome with the sound turned off. A metronome on a piano in a silent movie. No physical contact has yet taken place. The bare back bears the mark of the underwear. Red bands left on the skin by the elastic. Sometimes there are pimples or moles. The skin itself is often abnormally pale—it’s one of those places where sunlight rarely reaches. There is, however, almost always hair. Lower down, along the back, the hair only increases. I’m left-handed. I place my right hand on the patient’s shoulder. Through the rubber glove I feel the body stiffen. The entire body tenses and contracts. It would like to relax, but instinct is more powerful. It braces itself. It readies itself to resist invasion from the outside.

  By then my left hand is already where it has to be. The patient’s mouth falls open, his lips part, a sigh escapes as my middle finger goes in. Something between a sigh and a groan. Take it easy, I say. It will be over in a moment. I try to think about nothing, but that’s always difficult. So I think about the night when I dropped my bicycle key in the mud in the middle of a football field. It was a patch of mud no bigger than one square yard, and I knew for sure my key was there. Does this hurt at all? I ask. Now my index finger joins my middle finger. Using both of them will make it easier to find the key. A little … Where? Here …? Or here? It was raining out, a few lights were on around the field, but it was still a bit too dark to see well. Usually it’s the prostate. Cancer, or just an enlargement. Usually there’s not much you can say about it after the first examination. I could have walked home and come back the next day, once it got light. But my fingers were already in there, the mud was already up under my nails, there wasn’t much sense in stopping now. Ow! There, Doctor! Fucking hell! Excuse me … Oh, fucking hell! And then there was that one fraction of a second, my fingers feeling something hard amid the goo. Careful, it could also be a piece of glass … I hold it up to the light, the dim light from a lamppost beside the field, but in fact I already know what it is. It glistens, it gleams, I won’t have to walk home after all. Without looking at my hands, I pull off the gloves and toss them in the step-on trash can. You can sit up now. You can get dressed. It’s too early to draw conclusions, I say.

  It was eighteen months ago when Ralph Meier suddenly appeared in my waiting room. I recognized him right away, of course. He asked whether he could talk to me for just a moment? … It … was nothing urgent, he said. Once we were in my office, he came straight to the point. He wanted to know whether it was true, what so-and-so had told him, that I was fairly accommodating with prescriptions for—Here he looked around somewhat skittishly, as though the place might be bugged. “So-and-so” was a regular patient of mine. In the long run they all tell one another everything, which is how Ralph Meier ended up in my practice. It sort of depends, I said. I’ll have to ask you a few questions about your general health, so we don’t run into any unpleasant surprises later on. But if we do that? he insisted. If everything is okay, would you be willing … I nodded. Yes, I said. That can be arranged.

  Now we’re eighteen months down the road and Ralph Meier is dead. And tomorrow morning I have to appear before the Board of Medical Examiners. Not f
or what I helped him out with that time, but for something else, about six months later. Something you might describe as a “medical error.” I’m not so worried about the Board of Examiners; in the medical profession we all know one another. Often enough, we even went to school together. It’s not like in the States, where a lawyer can ruin a doctor after a misdiagnosis. In this country you really have to have gone too far. And even then: a warning, a few months’ suspension, no more than that.

  All I have to do is make sure the members of the board actually see it as a medical error. I’ll have to keep my wits about me. I have to keep believing in it, one hundred percent—in the medical error.

  The funeral was a couple of days ago. At that lovely, rustic cemetery by the bend in the river. Big old trees, the wind blowing through the branches, rustling the leaves. Birds were twittering. I stayed as far to the back as I could, which seemed prudent enough, but nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.

  “How dare you show your face here!”

  A brief moment of absolute silence, as though even the wind had suddenly died down. The birds went quiet, too, from one moment to the next.

  “You piece of shit! How dare you! How dare you!”

  Judith Meier had a voice like a trained opera singer, a voice that could reach the audience in the very last row of a concert hall. All eyes turned in my direction. She was standing beside the open back of the hearse, into which the pallbearers had just shouldered the coffin containing her husband’s body.

  Then she was trotting toward me, elbowing her way through hundreds of mourners, who stepped aside to let her through. For the next thirty seconds, her high heels on the gravel drive were the only sound in an otherwise breathless silence.

  Right in front of me, she stopped. I was actually expecting her to slap me. Or to start pounding her fists against my lapels. To make, in other words, a scene; something she had always been good at.

  But she didn’t.

  She looked at me. The whites of her eyes were laced with red.

  “Piece of shit,” she said again, much more quietly now.