Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel

by Herman Koch

  She was already almost upright. She looked at me. I tried to breathe normally. She sat down again.

  “One moment,” I said.

  This time, without so much as a glance at the patients waiting outside the office, I went straight to my assistant’s desk. She was on the phone.

  “Is that only the ointment, or is it the cream, too?” she was saying.

  “Liesbeth,” I said, “could you just …”

  “Just a moment,” she said, placing her hand over the mouthpiece.

  “Could you send all the patients home?” I said. “And call the others to cancel their appointments? Come up with some excuse; it doesn’t matter what. And then I need you to leave, too. Take the rest of the day off. Judith and I have to … It would be better if I had a little more time …”

  “Did you hear what she called you? You can’t just do—”

  “I’m not deaf, Liesbeth,” I interrupted her. “Judith is extremely upset. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. Maybe I underestimated the seriousness of Ralph’s illness. That’s bad enough. First I’m going to … I’m going to do something with her—go out, grab a cup of coffee somewhere. She needs a little extra attention. That’s understandable. But I don’t want the patients to see me going out with her. So send them all home as quickly as possible.”

  When I came back into my office, Judith Meier was still seated.

  She turned her head to look at me. She looked at my empty hands and then, questioningly, at my face.

  “I think that file must be in here somewhere,” I said.

  A medical practice like mine has its drawbacks. You get invited to everything. The patients think you sort of belong—with the emphasis on “sort of.” Vernissages, book launches, movie and stage premieres—not a day goes by without some invitation arriving in the mail. Staying home is not an option. When they send you a book, you can lie and say you’re only halfway through it, that you don’t want to express an opinion without finishing it first. But an opening night is an opening night. And when it’s over, you have to say something. It’s what they expect, for you to say something. But never tell them what you really thought. Never. What you thought is your own business. For a while, I tried to make do with being noncommittal. Things like “I thought there were some really good parts” or “What did the rest of the actors think?” But such inanities aren’t enough, not for them. You have to say that you thought it was amazing, that you’re grateful for the opportunity to have been present at this historic occasion. Movie premieres are usually on a Monday evening. But even so, you can’t just rush off afterward. You have to put in an appearance. You don’t want to make it too late; after all, you’re the only civilian there, the only one who has to start work at a normal time the next morning. You stand with the star or the director and you say that you thought the film was amazing. An excellent alternative is to say that you found it “compelling.” That’s what you say about the end of the movie. You have a glass of champagne in your hand and you look the star or the director straight in the eye. You’ve already forgotten how the film ended, or rather, you’ve succeeded in suppressing any memory of the way it ended. You adopt a serious expression. “I found the ending entirely compelling,” you say. Then you’re allowed to go home.

  I never know what I loathe more: the movie itself, the actual stage performance, or the hanging around afterward. I know from bitter experience that it’s easier for my mind to wander during a movie than it is during a play. At a play you’re more aware of actually being there. Of being there and of the passing of time. Of your watch. I bought myself a watch with a luminous dial, specially for opening nights. Something happens to time during a play. Something I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on. It doesn’t stand still, time, no: It coagulates. You observe the actors and actresses, their movements, you listen to the lines leaving their mouths, and it’s as though you’re stirring some substance that gets thicker and thicker all the time. At a certain point the spoon stops moving altogether. It remains standing upright in the substance. To go on stirring would be impossible. For the first time, I glance at my watch. As surreptitiously as possible, of course. During a play, no one wants to be caught looking at his watch. I draw the sleeve of my jacket up a bit, carefully. I scratch my wrist, as though it’s itching. Then I steal a quick look at the glowing dial. Each time I do that, I witness living proof that real time and stage time are two very different entities. Or rather, two times that run in different, parallel dimensions. You think (you hope, you pray) that half an hour has passed, but your watch tells you that barely twelve minutes have gone by since the lights went down. During a play, you’re not allowed to moan or sigh. By moaning or sighing, you unnecessarily draw attention to yourself. Those who moan or sigh too loudly might just break the actors’ concentration. But not to sigh or moan at all, that’s asking too much. By the same token, that’s also the biggest difference from a movie: You can’t get up and walk out. During a movie you can sneak away in the dark, unnoticed. Even during a premiere. People think, Well, he must have to go to the men’s room pretty badly, and then they forget about you. They don’t notice that you never come back at all. You can do that. It’s possible. I’ve done it more than once during an opening night at the movies. The first time it happened, I actually did go to the men’s room. I spent the last hour of the movie sitting on the toilet seat, my head in my hands, moaning, sighing, and cursing. But also pleased. Pleased and relieved. Anything, anything but the movie itself. In time I got better at slipping away unnoticed. I would saunter toward the exit, casually, my hands in my pockets. Just out for a breath of fresh air, I would say, if I ran into anyone in the lobby. The next thing I knew, I was already outside. The street, trams, scooters, people. People with normal faces, with normal voices. Voices that said normal things to one another. “One more for the road? Or shall we call it a day?” Rather than: “We have to be awfully damned careful, Martha, that Father’s estate doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.” How many sentences like that can a person stand in the space of an hour and a half? “No daughter of mine goes around dressed like a trollop! And if she does, she’s no longer my daughter!” Movies have a soundtrack. They turn the volume up louder each year. You can sigh and moan without anyone hearing. But it’s like when you’re in pain. Your breathing becomes faster and deeper. When a dog’s in pain, it pants with its tongue hanging out of its mouth. Oxygen. The trick is to direct as much oxygen as possible to where it hurts. Oxygen is still the best painkiller around. I’m out on the street. I see the people. I breathe in fresh air. During a stage performance, you can’t do any of that. There’s no escape clause. If you go out, you have to do that before the play begins. You have no choice, even though it’s not without its attendant risks. Because once you’re out on the street, tempting thoughts besiege you. Don’t go back in—that’s the most tempting thought of all. Go home, kick off your shoes, put your feet up, turn on the TV, and watch some old B movie you’ve seen five times already. Anything, anything but the play.

  It also has to do with my profession. In my profession, true relaxation is a necessity. I see and hear things all day long. Things you need to get off your mind at night. The fungal growths. The bleeding warts. The folds of skin between which things have gotten much, much too warm. The three-hundred-pound woman you have to examine in a place you hoped you’d never have to go again. None of this is what you want to think about during a play. But the lights have barely dimmed when these things start taking liberties with you. It’s dark, they figure. Now we’ve got him! The only light now is onstage. And from the luminous dial of your watch. The endless time begins. The Big Clot. During a working day, there’s nothing I look forward to more than an evening of nothing at all. A meal. A beer or a glass of wine. The evening news on TV. A B movie or a soccer match. A working day like that gets off on the right foot. It’s a day with promise. With perspective, I should say. A countryside of hills rolling on and on, and in the distance the glimmer of the sea. But a
day that ends with a play is like a hotel room with a view of a blank wall. That kind of a day can’t breathe. There’s not enough air, but the window is stuck and won’t open. The moaning begins at eight-thirty in the morning, when I think about it for the first time. Normally I only sort of listen to my patients, but on a working day that ends in a play I don’t listen at all. I run through ten possible escape routes in my mind. Illness. Flu. Food poisoning. A relative killing himself by leaping in front of a train. I think about the scene from Misery in which Kathy Bates shatters James Caan’s ankles with a hammer. I feel like doing something drastic to myself. During the siege of Stalingrad, soldiers on both sides shot themselves in the hand or the foot to keep from being sent to the front. Anyone who was caught faced the firing squad. My patient goes on whining about his lower-back pain, but all I can think of are gunshot wounds. In Mexico, the drug cartels’ death squads carve a cross into their bullets to make them spin slower. A bullet that spins slowly causes more damage as it goes through the body. Or doesn’t come out the other side at all. I think about taking drastic steps. No halfway measures. With a broken little finger you can always attend an opening night with your arm in a sling. A hundred-degree fever is seen as a cowardly excuse. No, I think about other things. Like an oyster knife slipping and ramming its way straight through the palm of my hand. The tip of the knife protrudes out of the back. The bleeding only really starts once you pull it out.

  The worst plays are the ones that are “based on improvisation.” There’s always a lot of mumbling. Bits and pieces of narration and dialogue “taken from daily life.” The actors and actresses wear costumes they’ve assembled themselves. Plays based on improvisation tend not to last as long as plays with a regular script, but that’s like the wind-chill factor. Sometimes it feels a lot colder or hotter than the thermometer says. You look at the homemade costumes. According to wind-chill time, half an hour has already passed, but the dial of your watch tells no lies. You raise the watch to your ear. Maybe it’s stopped. But the watch runs on a lithium battery that lasts up to eighteen months. Time passes soundlessly. You have to count to sixty and then look again.

  An oyster knife brings with it the risk of blood poisoning, of course. Normal people are better off going to the emergency room right away. But I have everything I need right on my office shelf. Tetanus. Yellow fever. Hepatitis A. I have little vials here, one drop of which is enough to knock you out for twelve hours. Another drop and you never wake up again at all. Dogs and cats get a shot from the vet, but human beings can drink the poisoned cup themselves. A shot glass. Ninety percent water and flavoring. The chance to bid a dignified farewell to family and loved ones. To make one last witty remark. I’ve been there and seen it often enough. Only rarely do people on their deathbeds fail to take advantage of that last chance to make a witty remark. No one’s ever heard them make a witty remark in their life, but still. You can tell with most of them that they’ve given it some thought beforehand. As though that’s how they want to be remembered. Last words. Flippant last words. Death’s approach demands a little flippancy, they figure. But death doesn’t demand anything. Death simply comes to get you. Death wants you to come along, preferably without too much of a struggle. “And have one on me while you’re at it,” they say, and knock back the contents of the shot glass. A minute later they close their eyes, another minute later they’re dead. The last drink is rarely taken with tears. I’ve never heard anyone say to his wife: “You’re the one I love most in the whole world. I’m going to miss you. And you’ll probably miss me, too.” Never. Instead it’s flippancy. A laughing matter. It’s like with funerals. They are, first and foremost, expected to be fun. There is laughter and drinking and bad language. To keep the whole thing from being too bourgeois. A bourgeois funeral is an artist’s worst nightmare. “This is exactly how Hank would have wanted it,” they say, and smash their whisky bottles against the lid of the coffin. “A real blowout. No weeping and wailing, fuck no!” I figure they started about fifteen years ago: the fun funerals. Pink coffins, white coffins, coffins decorated with dragons and shark’s teeth, coffins from IKEA, plastic coffins or coffins wrapped in garbage bags. I always feel sorry for the children. It’s bad enough whenever there are children involved, but when an artist dies, the children are also expected to keep things fun. To decorate Daddy’s coffin with stickers or poems. To put his favorite coffee mug, the one with FUCK YOU! printed on it, into the coffin along with him. For later. For there. For the end of his long, long journey. So he can drink coffee from his favorite mug, the one with FUCK YOU! printed on it, on the far side, too. Above all, the children are not supposed to cry. Their faces are painted and they get balloons and horns and party hats. Because that was Daddy’s dying wish, that his children should have fun at his funeral. That they should play hide-and-seek amid the gravestones. That there be punch afterward and cake and a big bowl full of candy and Snickers and Mars bars.

  And they all want to go to the same cemetery. The cemetery at the bend in the river. There’s a waiting list for that one. Normal people with a nine-to-five job don’t even make the waiting list. Seeing as the cemetery is at the bend in the river, there are at least four funerals a year in which the dead person arrives by boat. With a boat you have a better chance of making the papers the next day. The boat leaves from the center of town and makes its way over the canals and under the bridges, which makes for some nice pictures. The boat is always decked out like a party boat, too, with flowers and wreaths, men and women in tie-dyed gowns and pointy hats. Women with butterfly wings on their backs, men with mustaches dyed red or green. On the forward deck, dressed in clown costumes, four trumpeters from the Funtime Brass Band are playing a fun tune. By that point, everyone on the funeral boat and the boats behind it is already three sheets to the wind. The normal people stand on the quays and watch the procession go by, but the drunken relatives don’t even give the normal people a second look.

  I have to hand it to Ralph Meier or maybe, in fact, to Judith: His funeral was more or less normal. No boat, just a regular old hearse. There were at least a thousand people there. There were camera crews from a couple of broadcasting companies. When the car bearing the coffin turned up the gravel drive, I only had to take a couple of steps back to avoid the immediate family. Judith was wearing a pair of big sunglasses and a black head scarf with little white dots on it. It was probably the head scarf that reminded me then, more than on other days, of Jackie Kennedy, although I don’t think Jackie Kennedy would have spit in the face of an unwelcome guest in front of a thousand people at a funeral.

  After the incident, I didn’t leave the cemetery right away. I walked back to the gate, then a bit farther, to the river. A scull went past; a man on a bicycle came by clutching a megaphone and shouting directions at the oarsmen. The two swans with cygnets bobbing in their wake underscored the feeling that “life goes on as usual,” as they say. After standing there for a few minutes, I turned and walked back to the cemetery.

  The chapel couldn’t hold a thousand people, so the speeches were delivered outside. The mayor spoke, and so did the minister of culture. Fellow actors and directors talked about Ralph and told juicy anecdotes. There was the occasional volley of laughter. I stood right at the back, half hidden between the bushes, a few yards from the gravel path. A comedian gave a speech in which the central role was reserved for himself. It didn’t sound so much like a speech as a dry run for his next show. There was laughter, but it was uneasy laughter, as though people found it more embarrassing than funny. I thought of Ralph’s final moments, in the hospital, a little less than a week before. The shot glass with the lethal cocktail sat on the night-stand beside his bed, along with a half-eaten pot of fruit yogurt with the spoon still in it, the morning newspaper, and a biography of Shakespeare that he’d been reading for the last few weeks. There was a bookmark in it, no more than halfway through. He asked Judith and his two boys to leave the room for a moment.

  When they were gone, he gestured to me
to come over.

  “Marc,” he said. He took my hand, placed it on the blanket, and put his other hand on top of it.

  “I want to tell you that I’m sorry,” he said.

  I looked at his face. It was a reasonably healthy face, maybe a bit on the skinny side. If you had seen how round and plump it had been just a few months before, only then would you have realized that this was because of the disease. His eyes were clear.

  Every time I see it, I’m amazed. People choose a given date to die on, but on the day itself they suddenly perk up. They talk and laugh more than usual. It’s as though they’re hoping someone will stop them. That someone will actually tell them that it’s nonsense to just put an end to it all like that.

  “I shouldn’t … I should never have …” Ralph Meier said. “I’m sorry—I guess that’s what I’m trying to say.”

  I didn’t say anything. With the right medication and a couple of extremely unpleasant treatments he might have been able to postpone the end for a month or so. But he had opted for the shot glass. A dignified farewell. The shot glass keeps you from having to burden your family with memories that might be hard to forget.

  But still, it was strange. A self-ordained death. A self-ordained date and time. The towel in the ring. Why not tomorrow? Why not a week from now? Why not yesterday?

  “How is it going these days … with her?” he asked. I saw him hesitate, I saw how he gulped back her name just in time. I don’t know what I would have done if Ralph Meier had spoken her name out loud.

  I shrugged. I thought about the vacation we’d taken a little over a year ago. At the summer house.

  “Marc,” he said. I felt the pressure of his hand on mine. He tried to tighten his grasp, but I could feel how little strength he had left. “Could you tell her … from me … could you tell her what I just said to you?”