by Herman Koch
To me, as a man, a pregnant woman would no longer be interesting. With a pregnant woman I would exchange a few pleasantries and then leave her to the boring prick. The child would grow up in a house where the stench of pipe smoke clung to clothing, furniture, and curtains.
“Some women think they’re not allowed to drink alcohol when they’re pregnant,” I said, “but one glass of red wine really can’t hurt. In fact, it’s better. For the nerves, but also for the unborn child.”
Caroline blushed. For a moment I was afraid that I had guessed right, then she looked over at the prick and back at me.
“I … we … we’re trying,” she said. “To get pregnant. But it hasn’t worked out yet.”
I breathed a deep sigh. It was a sigh of relief.
“Forgive me,” I said. “You’re probably wondering why I think it’s any of my business. It’s sort of a professional quirk. When women say that they’re nauseous, I immediately think … well, I think that.”
She peered at me through her eyelashes. Professional quirk? those eyes asked. What profession is that?
“I’m a general physician,” I said.
Without taking my eyes off her, I ran my fingers through my hair and brushed it back nonchalantly, mussing it even more. Meanwhile, I had stopped looking at the boring prick altogether. I pretended he wasn’t there. That we were alone, just the two of us. Looking back on it, I think that was true, too.
“A general physician,” Caroline said. She smiled. She also did nothing to disguise the brief, assaying glance she gave the rest of my body. Apparently she liked what she saw, for her smile broadened, showing her lovely white teeth.
What were you thinking then? I asked her later. Not just once, but about twice a year. Long after our first kiss, we both still enjoyed reconstructing our first encounter.
I thought, That’s the last thing I would have guessed, Caroline always replied. A general physician! What a cute general physician, I thought. With his tousled hair and his shabby clothes. And you? What did you think?
I thought, What the hell is she doing with that boring prick? What a waste of a beautiful woman. A sweet young thing like that, sitting around breathing pipe smoke.
“If you really don’t feel well, Caroline,” we heard the voice of the pipe-smoking prick say somewhere off-camera, “we should probably go now.”
“I think I’ll stay for a bit,” she replied. “I think I’ll have another glass of red.”
“Look, Daddy! There!” Lisa shouted from the backseat.
“What?” I said, hitting the brakes. “Where?”
“There! That boy walking over there. That’s Alex.”
“More sardines, anyone? There’s plenty.”
Ralph wiped his fingers on his T-shirt and looked at us beseechingly, one by one. “You, Caroline? Emmanuelle, you want some more? You can have it. No, wait, how do you say that in English?” He turned to Stanley with a wink. “She can have it. We’d have to be careful. Marc, you ready for more? Come on, you’re the doctor. Sardines are good for you. Good fats, am I right?”
“Yeah, absolutely,” I said. I rubbed my stomach. “But I’m completely full, Ralph. Thanks.”
We were all sitting on the patio, at two white plastic tables set end to end. The patio was surrounded by a circular, waist-high wall of fake rock, with shells and the fossils of marine animals mortared into it. The barbecue was built into a niche in the wall; it even had a chimney decorated with red roofing tiles. Despite the chimney, however, the odor of grilled sardines hung greasy and thick between us, like smoke from a fire. It was a smell that clung to everything: to our clothes, our hair, to the vines and palm fronds above our heads. I had been hoping for meat. For lamb or pork. Even drumsticks, if need be. I have a total aversion to sardines. Not to tinned sardines, where all the little bones dissolved in the vinegar, but to fresh ones, where the mucking around takes longer than the eating itself. You think you’ve removed all the bones, but with every mouthful about twenty of them seem to slip through. Little bones that then jab cruelly into your gums or the roof of your mouth, or else find a way to stick in your throat. And then there’s the smell. Or should I say, the stench. The stench that warns me, at least, that I’d be better off steering clear of this kind of food. It’s on your fingers for days. Under your nails. Your clothes can go in the laundry right away. And you have to wash your hair. But even when all that has been taken care of, it’s the burps that go on reminding you all night and the next morning of what you had for dinner last night.
“Vera?” Ralph turned now to Judith’s mother. “You’re not going to let me down, I hope?”
It was the first time I’d heard anyone call her by name. She had short gray hair. Practical hair. Vera. I repeated the name to myself. Her hair looked more like a Thea or a Ria. She had a sweet but vacant face, with very few wrinkles for her age. A practical, healthy woman who had, in all probability, lived a cautious life without much in the way of major excesses, and who began to nod off after the first glass of white wine. I expected her to leave the table at any moment, to excuse herself and go up to her room.
Shortly after we arrived, Judith had given us a tour of the summer house. The second and largest floor housed the living and dining rooms, the kitchen, and three bedrooms. Even without Judith’s guided tour, it wouldn’t have been hard to guess whose bedroom was whose. The one with the double bed and the piles of books and magazines on the bedside tables belonged to her and Ralph; the slightly smaller room with two single beds, the floor of which was littered with clothes, shoes, tennis balls, and swimming goggles, was for Alex and Thomas, and the smallest room with one single bed was the mother’s. I don’t know why, but it was in the doorway of that last room that I lingered for a while, after Judith and Caroline had already gone back to the living room. The bedroom was virtually empty, almost like a nun’s cell. Hanging over the back of the only chair was a brown sweater; beneath the chair, neatly side by side, lay a pair of bedroom slippers. On the wall above the bed hung a charcoal drawing of a fishing boat pulled up onto a beach. There was a framed photograph, or at least I assumed it was a photograph—the frame was turned with its back to me—on the bedside table. I listened to the voices of Judith and my wife. I could have done it. I could have taken two steps to see who (or what) was in the photograph, but I refrained. Later, I told myself. Later there’s plenty of time. At the front of the house was a big picture window running across the full length of the living room. It looked out over the hills that marked the coastline in these parts, but you couldn’t actually see the sea. The living-room furniture was mostly ugly. A green couch and two green easy chairs, upholstered in either plastic or leatherette, it was hard to tell. A low rattan table with a smoked-glass top. The dining table was made of heavy, dark wood; the backs of the matching chairs were covered in red velveteen. “The owners are British,” Judith said.
On the ground floor was a garage and a separate apartment with its own entrance. That was where Stanley and Emmanuelle were staying. I vaguely hoped that we would get a tour of the apartment as well, but Judith only opened the door slightly and shouted something, upon which Stanley appeared in the doorway. Around his waist was a white bath towel that reached to just below his knees. “Emmanuelle is taking a shower,” he said. I looked at the naked part of his body. For his age, his belly was tight. Tight and tanned. But the skin itself was dull. The hair on his chest and beneath his navel was almost white. “Are you two coming up for a drink?” Judith asked.
Finally we got a tour of the yard. Beside the house was a roofed-in area with a Ping-Pong table. Above the garage door hung a basketball net. The soil in the parts of the yard that were not covered in paving stones was dry and brown, almost red. From the patio, a tiled flight of steps led down to the pool.
“Or maybe you’d like to go for a dip first?” Judith said. Caroline and I looked at each other. “Well, maybe later,” Caroline said.
The swimming pool was in the shape of a figure eight. In the mid
dle was an island of stone a few feet wide; a thin jet of water sprayed up from it. Air mattresses, rubber tubes, and a green inflatable crocodile with handles on both sides of its head floated in the water. At the far end, the wider circle of the figure eight, was a diving board.
“This is where we spend most of our time,” Judith said. “Getting them to go to the beach is a real ordeal.”
Just then, Lisa and Thomas came running out of the house. Judith’s younger son didn’t even slow down when he reached the edge of the pool. At the last moment it looked as though he couldn’t quite decide between a dive or a cannonball. Half falling, half slipping over the wet tiles, he landed in the pool with a huge splash.
“Thomas!” Judith shouted.
“Come on, Lisa! Come on!” he yelled. He flailed his arms and we had to step back to keep from getting wet. “Lisa! Lisa! Come on!”
And there was my younger daughter. She paused for a moment at the edge, but then tipped over into the water.
“Lisa,” Caroline said. “Lisa, where is Julia?”
Lisa had climbed up onto the crocodile, but Thomas pulled her down right away. “What did you say, Mom?” she asked after she surfaced.
“Where’s Julia?”
“I don’t know. They’re inside, I think.”
After the sardines came the skate. The skate was so big that it almost covered the entire grill. Smoke billowed up. On a little iron table beside the barbecue, Ralph had laid out a platter with even more marine creatures. Mostly squid, from the looks of it. All possible variations on squid: squid with round, white bodies and tentacles on the front, squid with mushroom-shaped bodies from which the legs hung down in a clump, and the more octopus-shaped squid with the familiar suction cups on long tentacles that dangled over the edge of the platter.
“We buy all our fish here from a shop in the village that gets them right off the boat,” Ralph said, fanning the smoke away from his eyes with one hand. “From the outside you can’t even see that it’s a shop. It’s got those rolling steel shutters, you know, that they only open when the catch comes in. You can’t get it any fresher than that.”
As discreetly as I could, I was busy trying to extract a sardine bone that had drilled its way into the roof of my mouth at an impossible spot, behind my front teeth. I only growled to indicate that I had heard him. Sitting closest to the barbecue, I got most of the smoke in my face. The smoke from the skate stank less than that from the sardines, but I’d lost my appetite, anyway. I filled my glass again with white wine and took a big swig. As I swilled the wine around in my mouth, I tried at the same time to use the tip of my tongue to dislodge the sardine bone; the only result was that my tongue was skewered painfully a few times.
“Apparently there will be thirteen episodes,” Ralph was telling Caroline. “Thirteen times fifty minutes. It’s probably going to be the most expensive production in the history of television.”
Caroline and I were sitting beside each other, across from Stanley and Emmanuelle. Emmanuelle had lit a long filter cigarette and tapped the ash onto her plate with the remains of the sardines. Even though darkness had almost fallen, she was still wearing her sunglasses. Their disproportionately large lenses made it impossible to see where she was looking.
“Have you seen The Sopranos?” Stanley asked Caroline. “Or The Wire?”
“We have almost all the seasons of The Sopranos on DVD,” Caroline said. “I think it’s fantastic. Great acting, too. And a lot of people have told me that The Wire is very good. But we haven’t gotten around to that yet. But Desperate Housewives? You know Desperate Housewives? We have a couple of DVD sets of that, too.”
“The Wire is really the best. You have to see it—you’ll be addicted right away. Most of the actors are black. That’s why the ratings are so much lower than The Sopranos. But Desperate Housewives … I’m sorry, but I usually find that a little too far-fetched. A little too ha-ha funny, too. But maybe it’s more of a series for women. Emmanuelle here, for example, thinks it’s great. Don’t you? Emmanuelle? You like Desperate Housewives a lot, right?”
He had to tap her forearm before she realized that he was talking to her. And then he had to repeat the question.
“Desperate Housewives … is nice,” she said at last, to no one in particular.
“Okay, so we’ve got that straight,” Stanley said. He grinned at Caroline. “Anyway, so this series is being produced by HBO, the ones who did The Sopranos and The Wire. The most expensive series ever. Or did I already say that?”
“Yes, you did,” Caroline said. “But that’s okay.”
“It covers the rise of the Roman Empire. The entire golden age, if you know what I mean. From Julius Caesar up to and including Emperor Nero. That’s the only thing that hasn’t been decided yet. What to call it. They can’t decide between Rome and Augustus. But since seven of the thirteen episodes will take place during the reign of Caesar Augustus, I think it’s going to be Augustus.”
“And what about Ralph?” I asked.
“Ralph is going to be the emperor,” Stanley said. “Caesar Augustus.”
“Yeah, I know that. That’s not what I meant. I was wondering how you ended up with Ralph. How you hit on Ralph for the part.”
“I worked with Ralph years ago, when I was still living in Holland. I don’t know, but did you ever see Sweet Darlings?”
I had to think about it. Then I remembered. As far as I could recall, I hadn’t seen it at the theater at the time, but much later, on TV. Sweet Darlings … something about kids hanging around on motor scooters, fairly explicit sex for that day, and equally explicit violence. It had one of those scenes that people keep talking about for years. The kind of scene that can immortalize even a bad movie. A couple of boys string a wire across the road. At neck height. A scooter comes along, racing at high speed. And then the head, rolling across the tarmac. The head that ends up in a drain. No, in a ditch. The head barely rises above the water. You see an amazed-looking eye amid the duckweed. An eye that blinks. Then the point of view changes. We see what the eye was looking at. At a frog sitting on the bank. A shocked frog. A frog that looks at the head in as much amazement as the head does at him. Then the frog croaks and the screen goes blurry, then black. The suggestion was clear. The head severed by the wire was still alive when it landed in the ditch.
“My parents wouldn’t let me see that,” Caroline said.
“Oh, really?” Stanley said, looking amused. “Were you that young?”
“Was Ralph in that?” I asked. “In Sweet Darlings? I don’t remember that at all.”
“My neck still hurts from that scene!” cried Ralph, who had clearly been eavesdropping. “Ha ha ha!”
“Was that him?” I asked Stanley. I turned to Ralph. “Were you the one in that ditch? I never realized that.”
“Good to know that you’re up on your classics, Marc,” Ralph said. “So what do you think, Stanley? Great to hear, isn’t it, that people still remember a scene like that?”
“Oh God, yuck, now I remember!” Caroline said. “That severed head in the ditch! Oh, I was too afraid to look. I realized later on that my parents were right, not to let me go.”
Ralph’s booming laugh rang out. Stanley laughed, too. Emmanuelle raised her head for a moment. A dreamy smile appeared on her face, but she didn’t ask what everyone was laughing at. I couldn’t help thinking about the films Stanley Forbes directed later. The ones he made in Hollywood. I hadn’t seen them all, but in those films, too, the director had relied heavily on explicitness. They were movies that showed everything, as people liked to say. On one hand the severed limbs and bleeding stumps and on the other the sex organs with blue veins standing out on the sides. You forgot what the films were about soon after they were over, but the explicit scenes had become his trademark.
“Where’s Judith?” Ralph said. “I’m dying of thirst.”
And indeed, where was Judith? A few minutes earlier she had stood up from the table to get some more white wine, and sh
e still hadn’t come back. Judith’s mother, who was sitting at the far end of the table, held her hand in front of her mouth and began yawning. “Oh my,” she said. They were the only words she’d spoken in the last half hour.
I leaned back in my chair and looked around. First at the stone steps up to the second floor. Then to the roofed area at the side of the house, where Lisa and Thomas were playing Ping-Pong under the yellowish fluorescent lighting. Their first portion of sardines was enough and they had been allowed to leave the table. As were Julia and Alex. But where those two had got to was beyond me. I looked at the pool, where the underwater lighting was now on. The evening was without even a breath of wind. The green inflatable crocodile lay motionless on its side. While I was fussing around with the sardines, I hadn’t dared to look at Judith. And she, too, seemed to do little to try to establish eye contact with me. On one occasion she had laughed too loudly at a remark Caroline made that wasn’t all that funny, and laid her hand on Caroline’s forearm. I wondered whether I’d missed something. A glance. A gesture. Something that should have told me that I should wait a minute and then follow her into the house. Shall I go see what Judith’s up to? I rehearsed the sentence a few times in my mind, but it remained a line from a bad movie.
Then suddenly there was movement at the top of the steps. First I saw Alex and then Julia coming down, with Judith a few steps behind. Julia’s hair was mussed, I saw when she came closer, and her cheeks were flushed. I hadn’t known Alex long enough to tell if his hair was mussed too.
“Daddy?” said Julia. She had come up and was now standing behind me. She laid her hands on both sides of my neck and gently kneaded my shoulders. That’s what she always did when she wanted something from me: a bonus on her allowance for an expensive sweater she’d seen in town; the “poor little” hamster in the pet shop window that she wanted with all her might to bring home; the school party where “everyone” was going to stay until midnight. “Hmmm?” I replied. I took her left hand in my right and gave it a little squeeze. I also looked over at Caroline. Julia never asked Caroline anything first. She knew that I was a softer touch. Wishy-washier, Caroline always said. You never dare to say no.
