Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel

by Herman Koch

  I averted my eyes; effortlessly, I pulled my hand from his grasp—out of the same hands that had once possessed the strength to make other people do things they didn’t want to do. Against their will.

  “No,” I said.

  Half an hour later it happened. I was in the corridor. Both their boys had gone down to the hospital cafeteria to get something to eat. Judith Meier came back from the ladies’ room, where she’d applied some lipstick and fixed her makeup.

  “I’m glad you were there,” she said.

  I nodded. “He went with dignity,” I said. That’s the kind of thing you say. Even if you know better. It’s like saying you thought a play was amazing. Or that the ending of a film was compelling.

  A man came walking up to us, a man in a white doctor’s coat. He stopped right in front of us and held out his hand to Judith. “Mrs. Meier?”

  “Yes?” She shook his hand.

  “My name is Maasland. Dr. Maasland. Do you have a moment?”

  He held a manila folder clutched under one arm. In the upper right-hand corner of it was a sticker with “Mr. R. Meier” written in felt-tip, and beneath that, in smaller, printed letters, the name of the hospital.

  “And you are?” Maasland asked. “A relative?”

  “I’m the family doctor,” I said, holding out my hand. “Marc Schlosser.”

  Maasland ignored my hand.

  “Dr. Schlosser,” he said. “That’s … well, that’s a coincidence. There are a few things I’d like …” He opened the folder and began to leaf through it. “Where was it? Oh, here.”

  Something about Maasland’s body language put me on guard. Like all specialists, he went to no trouble to disguise his profound disdain for general practitioners. Whether it was a surgeon or a gynecologist, an internist or a psychiatrist, they all gave you that same look. Did you get enough of studying back then? that look said. Or were you just too lazy to commit to another four years? Or maybe just too scared of the stuff that really counts? We cut into people, we delve into the organs, the circulation, the brain, the operational center of the human body, we know that body the way a mechanic knows a car engine. All a general practitioner is allowed to do is to peek under the hood—and then shake his head in wonder and amazement at such a miracle of technical ingenuity.

  “Yesterday we ran through Mr. Meier’s full case history with him,” he said. “That’s common practice in a euthanasia case. But if I’m right, it wasn’t you who finally referred Mr. Meier to us, was it, Dr. Schlosser?”

  I pretended I had to think about it. “No, that’s right,” I said.

  Maasland ran his finger back and forth across the sheet of paper he’d removed from the folder. “I ask you that because it says here … yes, here it is.” The finger came to a stop. “Yesterday Mr. Meier stated that in October of last year he came to you for a checkup.”

  “Could be. He didn’t come in often. If he was in doubt about something. Or for a second opinion. I was … I am a friend of the family.”

  “And why did he come to see you in October, Dr. Schlosser?”

  “I couldn’t say. I’d have to look it up.”

  Maasland glanced at Judith, then back at me. “According to Mr. Meier, you told him in October of last year that there was nothing for him to worry about. Even though by then he was already displaying the early symptoms of his illness.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that, not off the top of my head. It’s possible that he asked me about something then. Maybe he already sensed something and just wanted to hear a comforting word.”

  “During that particular consultation in October, Dr. Schlosser, did you remove some tissue from Mr. Meier’s body? And did you then send that tissue to us for analysis?”

  “If I had, I think I would remember.”

  “Yes, I would think so, too. Especially since removing tissue is not entirely devoid of risk. In the worst of cases, it can even accelerate the course of the disease. I trust you’re aware of that, Dr. Schlosser?”

  The hood. I was allowed to peek under the hood, but I should not have touched the hoses and wiring.

  “The odd thing is that Mr. Meier remembered all this quite clearly,” Maasland went on. “That you were going to send the tissue away for testing. And that he was supposed to call you later for the results.”

  Ralph Meier was dead. His body, probably already a good bit cooler by now, was lying only a few yards away from us, behind the green door bearing a sign that read SILENCE. We couldn’t go in and ask him whether he had perhaps made a mistake yesterday when it came to the dates.

  “I can’t recall, not right now,” I said. “I’m very sorry.”

  “Whatever the case, that tissue never arrived here.”

  See? I almost said. You see? On the next-to-last day of his life, Ralph Meier was already getting things mixed up pretty badly! Because of the medication. Because of his weakened state. But I didn’t say anything.

  Then Judith Meier spoke.

  “October,” she said.

  Maasland and I looked at her, but now Judith was looking only at me.

  “Ralph was worried,” she said. “He had to go on a shoot in Italy. It was supposed to last almost two months. He was going to leave in a few days. He told me you thought it wasn’t anything serious, but that you were sending a tissue sample to the hospital just to be sure. For his own peace of mind.”

  “We never received anything here,” Maasland said.

  “Well, that really is very peculiar,” I said. “That’s not something I would easily overlook, I think.”

  “Well, in fact, that’s why I wanted to talk to you, Mrs. Meier,” Maasland said. “We consider this too serious to just pass over. We’d like to take a closer look at the entire case. I wanted to ask your permission for an autopsy.”

  “Oh, no!” Judith said. “An autopsy? Is that really necessary?”

  “It would give all of us, and you, too, Mrs. Meier, in time, more certainty about exactly what happened. We can see, for example, whether a tissue sample was actually taken, and when. Methods have become very sophisticated in the last few years. If a tissue sample was taken, we can determine quite precisely when that was done for the first time. Not only whether it was in October or later, but almost down to the exact day.”

  A little less than three weeks after Ralph Meier suddenly showed up in my office for the first time, about eighteen months ago, an invitation to the first night of Richard II came in the mail. Opening the envelope, I noted the physical symptoms I experienced whenever an invitation arrived. Dry mouth, slackening pulse, clammy fingertips, a sensation of pressure at the back of the eyes, and a feeling like being in a bad dream, a nightmare in which you drive into the low-traffic maze of a home zone in a new residential neighborhood. You turn left, you turn right, but you can’t find your way back out; you are going to have to drive around in circles for the rest of your life.

  “Ralph Meier?” Caroline said. “Really? I didn’t know he was one of your patients.”

  Caroline is my wife. She never comes to opening nights. Nor to book launches, vernissages, or film-festival retrospectives either. She finds them even more burdensome than I do. I rarely press the point. Sometimes, though, I beg her on bended knee to come with me. When I do that she knows it’s serious, and she accompanies me without any further objections. But I don’t abuse that power. I save the begging on bended knee for real emergencies.

  “Richard II,” she said, unfolding the invitation. “Shakespeare … Well, why not? I’ll go with you.”

  We were in the kitchen having breakfast. Both our daughters had already left for school. Lisa, our youngest, to the primary school around the corner, Julia by bike to her secondary school. My first patient would be arriving in ten minutes.

  “Shakespeare. Are you sure? The play’s going to last at least three hours.”

  “Sure, but it’s Ralph Meier. I’ve never seen him perform live.”

  There was something dreamy in my wife’s eyes when she spok
e the actor’s name.

  “What are you looking at?” Caroline asked. “I’m not trying to hide anything. For a woman, Ralph Meier is nice to look at. So three hours is no big deal.”

  And so, two weeks later, we attended the opening night of Richard II in the big old municipal theater. It wasn’t the first time I’d been invited to a Shakespeare. I’d already seen about ten of his plays. A version of The Taming of the Shrew in which all the male roles were played by women, The Merchant of Venice with the actors in diapers and the actresses wearing garbage bags for dresses and shopping bags on their heads, Hamlet with an all-Down-syndrome cast, wind machines, and a (dead) goose that was decapitated onstage, King Lear with Zimbabwean orphans and ex-junkies, Romeo and Juliet in the never-completed tunnel of a subway line, with concentration camp photos projected on the sewage-streaked walls. A Macbeth in which all the female roles were played by naked men—the only clothing they wore was a thong between their buttocks, and they had handcuffs and weights hanging from their nipples—and performed to a soundtrack consisting of artillery barrages, Radiohead tunes, and poems by Radovan Karadžić. Besides the fact that you didn’t dare to look at how the handcuffs and weights were attached to (or through) the nipples, the problem once again was a matter of how slowly the time passed. I can remember delays at airports that must have lasted half a day, easily, but which were over ten times as quickly as any of those plays.

  In Richard II, though, the cast wore period costumes. The set consisted of a throne room in a castle, re-created with the greatest possible authenticity. When Ralph Meier came onstage, something happened; the audience, which had at first been simply quiet, was now hushed. When Richard spoke his first words, everyone held their breath. I looked over at Caroline, but she had eyes only for what was happening onstage. Her cheeks were flushed. Three hours later we were out in the lobby, each with a glass of champagne. Crowding around us were men in blue blazers and women in ankle-length gowns. Lots of jewelry: bracelets, necklaces, and rings. In one corner, a string quartet was playing.

  “Shall we …?” I looked at my watch. For the first time that evening, I realized.

  “Come on, Isis can wait a bit,” Caroline said. “Let’s have another one.”

  Isis was our babysitter back then. She was sixteen, and her parents didn’t like her to come home too late. Julia was thirteen at the time, Lisa eleven. In a couple of years’ time we would have no qualms about leaving our younger daughter with her big sister. But not then, not yet.

  When I came back from the bar carrying two more glasses of champagne, I saw, about ten yards away, Ralph Meier’s head towering above the others. It nodded left and right. It grinned, the way a head grins when it is used to receiving congratulations.

  “There he is,” I said. “I’ll introduce you.”

  “Where?” My wife only comes up to my shoulder; she hadn’t seen the head yet. She quickly adjusted her pinned-up hair and brushed the imaginary crumbs or lint from her blouse.

  “Marc.” He shook my hand. It was a firm handshake, the handshake of someone making it clear that he’s using only ten percent of his strength.

  He turned to Caroline. “And is this your wife? Well, well, you certainly did not exaggerate.” He took her hand, bowed, and kissed it. Then he turned to one side and laid his hand on the shoulder of a woman whose presence I hadn’t noticed, because she was entirely blocked from view by his huge frame. Now she moved, almost literally, out of his shadow and held out her hand.

  “Judith,” she said. She shook Caroline’s hand first, then mine.

  Only much later, when I saw her for the first time by herself, did I realize that Judith Meier was not really a small person. She was only small when standing beside her husband, like a village at the foot of a mountain. But that evening in the lobby of the old municipal theater I looked from Ralph to Judith and then from Judith back to Ralph, and I thought the things I often think when seeing couples together for the first time.

  “So, did the two of you enjoy it?” Judith asked, talking more to Caroline than to me.

  “I thought it was fantastic,” Caroline said. “A fantastic experience.”

  “Maybe I should leave for a bit,” Ralph said. “Then you can say what you really thought.” He laughed his thunderous laugh; a few people turned their heads and laughed along with him.

  As I said earlier, in the line of duty I sometimes have to ask patients to get undressed. When all other alternatives have been exhausted. With only a few exceptions, most of my patients are husbands and wives. I observe their naked bodies. I superimpose the images. I see how the one body approaches the other. I see a mouth, lips pressed against other lips, hands, fingers that search, fingernails across a stretch of bare skin. Sometimes the room is dark, but often it isn’t. Some people have no qualms about leaving the lights on. I have seen their bodies; I know that, in most cases, it would be better to turn the lights off. I look at their feet, their ankles, their knees, their thighs, and then farther up, the area around the navel, the chest or breasts, the neck. The actual sex organs I usually skip over. I look, but the way you might look at a dead animal in the road. My gaze is usually only held for a moment, like a hangnail on a loose thread of clothing—no more than that. And I haven’t even got to the back sides yet. The back sides of bodies are a different story altogether. Buttocks, depending on their shape or shapelessness, can summon up tenderness or blind rage. The nameless spot where the crack between them merges into the lower back. The spine. The shoulder blades. The hairline at the back of the neck. The back side of a human body contains more no-man’s-land than the front does. On the back side of the moon, both capsule and lunar lander lose all radio contact with ground control. I put on my interested expression. Does it also hurt when you lie on your side? I ask, thinking the whole time about couples with the lights on or the lights off, groping at each other’s backsides. All I really want, in fact, is for it to be over quickly. For them to get dressed again. For me to be able to look only at their talking heads. But I never forget the bodies. I connect one face to another. I connect the bodies. I let them become intertwined. Breathing heavily, one head approaches the other. Tongues are stuck into mouths and poke around probingly inside. In big cities there are streets lined with skyscrapers where the sun rarely shines. Between the paving stones grows moss or grass that is almost dead. It is cold and clammy there. Or sometimes even warm and clammy. Little flies everywhere. Or clouds of mosquitoes. You can get dressed. I’ve seen enough. How is your husband doing? Your wife?

  I looked at Ralph Meier, and then at Judith. As I said, she wasn’t so small in and of herself. She was too small for him. I thought about the things. The things people do with each other in the dark. I looked at Ralph’s hand clutching a champagne glass. All things considered, it was a wonder that the glass didn’t break.

  And then, suddenly, there was that moment. The moment I would think back on often, later on—the moment that should have been a warning to me.

  Judith had taken Caroline by the elbow and was introducing her to someone. A woman whose face seemed vaguely familiar, probably one of the actresses in Richard II. That was how Caroline happened to be standing half turned away from us, with her back to Ralph and me.

  “In any case, I was never bored for a moment,” I told Ralph. “It was a unique experience for me, too.”

  It took a couple of seconds before I realized that Ralph Meier was no longer listening to me. He was no longer even looking at me. And, without following his gaze, I knew immediately what he was looking at.

  Now something was happening to the gaze itself. To the eyes. As he examined the back of Caroline’s body from head to foot, a film slid down over his eyes. In nature films, you see that sometimes with birds of prey. A raptor that has located, from somewhere far up, high in the air, or from a tree branch, a mouse or some other tasty morsel. That was how Ralph Meier was regarding my wife’s body: as if it were something edible, something that made his mouth water. Now there was also s
ome movement around his mouth. The lips parted, his jaws churned, I even thought I heard the grinding of teeth—and he breathed a sigh. Ralph Meier was seeing something delicious. His mouth was already anticipating the tasty morsel that he would, if given the chance, wolf down in a few bites.

  The most remarkable thing perhaps was that he did all this without the slightest embarrassment. As though I weren’t even there. He might as well have unzipped his pants and stood there pissing on me. It would have made no real difference.

  Then, from one moment to the next, he was back again. As though someone had snapped their fingers: a hypnotist releasing him from his trance.

  “Marc,” he said. He looked at me as though seeing me for the first time. Then he looked at the empty glass in his hand. “What do you say? Shall we go for one more?”

  Later that evening, in bed, I told Caroline about it. Caroline had just removed the elastic band from her hair and shaken it loose. She seemed more amused than shocked. “Oh really?” she said. “What kind of look was that, exactly? Tell me again …”

  “Like he was looking at a tasty morsel,” I said.

  “Really? So? But I am a tasty morsel, aren’t I? Or don’t you think so?”

  “Caroline, please! I don’t know how to put it any more clearly … I … I thought it was dirty.”

  “Oh, sweetheart. It isn’t dirty, is it, the way men look at women? Or women at men, for that matter? I mean, that Ralph Meier is a real ladies’ man, everything about him. It’s probably not very nice for his wife, but okay, it was her choice. A woman can tell that right away, the kind of man she’s with.”

  “I was standing right beside him. He didn’t give a shit.”

  Now Caroline turned to face me. She slid up a little until she was lying against me and placed a hand on my chest.

  “You’re not jealous, are you? It sort of sounds like it, like a jealous husband.”

  “I’m not jealous! I know exactly how men look at women. But this wasn’t normal. This was … this was dirty. I don’t know how else to put it.”