Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel

by Herman Koch

  I’m not prudish; it’s not that. No, let me rephrase that: I am prudish. I’m proud of being prudish when it means that you don’t go flaunting your dick and other spare body parts all over the place in the out-of-doors. I feel, in other words, that a certain circumspection should be observed when bodies are bared. Nude beaches, nudist campgrounds, and other places where the naked-by-principle gather are places I avoid like the plague. Anyone who has ever seen naked people playing volleyball on the beach knows that nudity creates no erotic attraction, to put it mildly. In mass graves, too, people often lie naked on top of one another. The point is to preserve a modicum of human dignity. Nudists don’t understand that. Under the pretext that it is more natural to take off all your clothes, they thrust an unimpeded view of their dangling dicks, jiggling tits, pendulous labia, and dank butt cracks right in your face. They point their fingers in accusation. They say that you are small-minded when you claim that all of this might better go unseen.

  I looked around to see what the others were doing. The two boys had slipped on multicolored swimming shorts. Shorts that reached down over their knees. Caroline had taken off her blouse and was lying in her bikini on a towel she’d spread out on the gravel. My two girls were in bikinis. Lisa, strictly speaking, didn’t yet need a top, but it was understandable that she didn’t want to be one-upped by her older sister.

  Finally I looked at Judith. Judith was squatting in front of the same blue bag from which she had produced Ralph’s flip-flops. She took out a bottle of suntan lotion and began rubbing it on her arms. I saw it all perfectly clearly. She was wearing only her bikini bottoms. I glanced only quickly. I was afraid she would catch me staring at her breasts, and so I averted my gaze right away and turned my attention back to the sea. No sign of Ralph. I took another good look, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. This particular little beach opened onto a cove. Where cove and sea met was an outcropping of rock, across which the waves came crashing in. It would be a strange start to our vacation, it occurred to me, were Ralph to drown on our very first day at the beach. Or maybe not drown completely, but have to be dragged up onto the gravel, coughing and retching and gasping for air. Yes, there was a doctor in the house. I was the obvious candidate to apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. To lay him on his back and massage his stomach, to make him vomit up the seawater he’d swallowed. I thought about my mouth on Ralph’s. It would undoubtedly taste of squid. This is a fish restaurant! I thought, and burst out laughing.

  “Marc! Marc!”

  There he stood, on the highest point of the rocks. He had slid his goggles and snorkel up onto his forehead. He waved.

  I made a decision. It was a decision that would have far-reaching consequences for the rest of our vacation, I realized at the time. I took off my T-shirt, shorts, and underwear. With my back to the beach, as close as possible to the line between land and sea, at the point where the waves rolled in over the gravel. That way, for about five seconds, anyone who wanted to could see my completely naked body, albeit only from behind. The least offensive side, one might hope. I took my swimsuit from my rolled-up towel and bent over to pull it on. It was a simple pair of swimming trunks. The legs came to just above my knees. No bright colors. But with a sort of floral motif. Albeit in black and white. I put them on and tied a bow in the cord that kept them from falling down. That I was putting on my trunks on this first day at the beach meant that from now on I would always wear trunks—even by the pool.

  “Here, Marc. Here, take a look at this.”

  After I had clambered up onto the rocky outcropping, Ralph handed me the snorkel and goggles. “Right down under here, man. Stuck up against the rock, a huge one.” He indicated the dimensions with his hands. “An octopus. A bruiser. That’ll be great on the barbecue tonight.”

  Stanley and Emmanuelle never accompanied us to those remote coves and gravel beaches. They usually remained at the summer house. Stanley sat at a table on the patio and worked on the scripts for Augustus while Emmanuelle did lazy laps in the pool. Or they went off on excursions to local towns and villages, to visit museums, churches, and monasteries. Stanley had a digital camera with a large screen. When they came back he would show us the pictures he’d taken that day. Pictures of church spires, cloisters, and monastic gardens. I tried to feign interest, but it was hard. There were also lots of pictures of Emmanuelle: Emmanuelle hugging her knees on a low wall beside an equestrian statue; Emmanuelle looking kittenish beside a pond with a fountain in the shape of a carp; Emmanuelle at an al fresco table covered in white linen, the neck of a bottle draped in a white napkin and sticking out of a wine cooler beside her; Emmanuelle sucking on the leg of a crab or lobster. The photos of Emmanuelle vastly outnumbered the rest. Sometimes Stanley would pause a little longer when a photo of her appeared on the screen. “Here,” he would say then, a dreamy smile spreading across his face. “Isn’t she gorgeous?” He was right. In front of the camera, something happened to Emmanuelle. She left herself behind. Left behind her physical presence, which mostly emanated lethargy and a lack of interest. I saw how Stanley seemed to forget himself when he looked at the pictures. As though he had torn her out of a magazine. The kind of magazine that an adolescent boy hides under his mattress.

  There were also days when we spent every minute, from morning to evening, beside the pool. Around noon Ralph would light the barbecue and Judith would take the first beers and bottles of white wine out of the fridge. Then we would enjoy a “light meal” on the patio. The rest of the afternoon we spent sacked out in the deck chairs around the pool, where most of us soon drifted off to sleep. The boys had strung a length of rope from the second floor to the diving board. They would climb out of the window and swing hand-over-hand down the rope until they were over the pool, then drop into the water. To loud applause from our girls, whom we had forbidden to use the rope. Ralph kept his shorts on when he was manning the barbecue, but you could tell that he almost couldn’t wait for lunch to be over so that he could take them off again. When he dove into the pool with a loud cry, the water rocked and splashed over the edges. I always observed this first dive with particular interest. I observed it as a physician. Twenty years ago one was always severely warned not to go into the water so soon after eating. That idea has become outdated. The school of thought these days is that you actually shouldn’t wait too long. Digestion only really gets under way after an hour. After an hour there really is a risk. The blood moves to the stomach and intestines. Neural activity decreases. Thought processes slow and eventually come to a halt. Too little blood flows to other parts of the body as well. Too little oxygen. The legs suffer a shortage of oxygen and can no longer apply force. The arms begin to tingle and lose all feeling. Anyone who goes into the sea during digestion runs the risk of becoming a plaything of the waves. Of being pulled out to sea by treacherous currents. But just after eating, there’s not much to worry about. The stomach is full, true enough. It’s not entirely free of risk. Dishes containing melted cheese may suddenly coagulate. The cheese cools too quickly and becomes a solid lump. The opening between the stomach and the duodenum shuts down. The flow to the intestines becomes blocked. Sauces can start rolling, like oil in the hold of a supertanker. The tanker runs into trouble during a storm. It hits the rocks and breaks in two. A sauce may slosh against the stomach walls and rise up through the esophagus. The swimmer runs the risk of choking on his own juices. Vomit flows back into the windpipe. One last time, he raises his hand above the water and cries for help. But on the beach, no one can see him. No one can hear him. He sinks beneath the waves, only to wash up days (sometimes even weeks) later on some beach miles away.

  That’s how I looked at Ralph when he dove into the pool. Every time, I considered the possibility that he might not surface again. Or that he would bash his drunken skull against the bottom and be paralyzed from head to toe. But each time he surfaced again, coughing and sneezing and hawking, and dragged himself up the ladder. Then he would spread a towel over a deck chair and lie down in the
sun to dry. He never covered himself. He lay with his legs spread, his body too large for the deck chair, his feet hanging over the end: Everything lay loose and lazy, tanning in the sun. “Is this a vacation or is this a vacation?” he said, then burped and closed his eyes. A minute later his mouth had dropped open and he was snoring loudly. I looked at his stomach and his legs. At his dick, hanging to one side and resting on his thigh. And then I looked at my two daughters. At Julia and Lisa. They didn’t seem offended at all. They were playing games in the pool. They played tag with Alex and Thomas. Or else Caroline would toss coins into the water and they would dive to retrieve them. I wondered whether perhaps I was, indeed, narrow-minded. Whether it was my own fault that the sight of Ralph Meier’s naked dick so close to my young daughters seemed so filthy. I couldn’t quite decide—and as long as I hadn’t decided, I continued to consider it filthy. I remember one afternoon when a repairman from the rental agency came by. There had been problems with the water pressure: By evening water was only dripping from the shower. Without first putting on his shorts or grabbing a towel, Ralph got up from his deck chair and shook the man’s hand. I saw the way he looked. Or rather, the way he didn’t look. He was at least two feet shorter than Ralph. He was closer to it than someone of normal height would have been. His face couldn’t have been more than ten inches from Ralph’s dangling dick. He would only have had to lower his eyes a fraction of an inch to have an almost full-screen view of it. Ralph stepped into his flip-flops and led the repairman up the steps. They disappeared into the house, and when they returned about fifteen minutes later, Ralph still hadn’t put on pants or wrapped himself in a towel. “It’s the reservoir on the roof,” he said. “It’s blocked. To make things worse, it’s been months since it rained.”

  The next morning, no water at all came from the shower. The taps and the outdoor shower beside the pool had also gone dry. Ralph cursed and picked up his cell phone. “We’re paying a goddamn fortune to rent this place,” he said. “They’re going to have to solve this somehow. No rain, my ass.” But at the agency, no one answered. Ralph put on his flip-flops again, and this time, for a change, he also put on pants. “I’m going down there,” he said. “I’m going to let them know exactly what I think of their water reservoir.”

  It was then that Caroline said that the two of us would be pleased to go to the rental agency. Ralph protested, but she said, “No, listen, Marc and I can do some shopping at the same time. Tonight we’ll make dinner.” As she spoke these words, she looked at me. She was smiling—at least there was that—but I could tell from the look in her eye that she was deadly serious. I mumbled something, then went to the tent to look for the car keys.

  All the way down the hill to the village, Caroline was quiet. As I was getting ready to turn left onto the main road, toward the rental agency office on the outskirts of the next town, she laid her hand on my forearm. “No, first we’re going out for breakfast,” she said. “At the beach.”

  A few minutes later we were on the patio of the same restaurant where we’d run into the Meiers that first evening. Caroline dunked her croissant into a large cup of foamy café au lait.

  “Alone at last,” she said with a sigh. “I was really ready for this.”

  She was right, I couldn’t deny it. Without being able to do much about it, we had become caught up in the typical dynamics of a group holiday rental. That field of forces that sweep you away unnoticed, like a riptide invisible to the naked eye. That field of forces in which you are seldom or never alone. Privacy had been put on the back burner. A few times I had tried to go on my own to buy bread in the village, but there was always someone else who wanted to come along. Usually Ralph. “You going into the village, Marc? Great. Today’s the street market. We can buy fresh fish and fruit while we’re at it.” Then I would find myself standing beside the car for at least half an hour, keys in hand. “The boys are coming along, too,” Ralph would say when he finally appeared at the top of the steps. “They can help us carry the groceries. It’ll only be a minute. Alex is almost done in the shower.”

  “You’re right, I was ready for this, too,” I told Caroline. “This was a good idea.”

  I watched a father flying a kite with his little son. It was one of those kites with two pairs of strings, the kind you can make spin and dive. Every time the father handed the strings to his son, the kite would smack down hard into the sand. Out to sea at this hour you saw only the occasional white sail. A white cruise ship was moving almost imperceptibly from left to right, along the horizon.

  “How long do we have to keep this up?” Caroline asked.

  “Keep what up?”

  “Marc … you know what I’m talking about. It’s fun for Julia and Lisa, but how long do we have to keep it up? How long before we can leave without feeling guilty?”

  “Come on, is it that bad?” I began saying, but then I saw the expression on her face. “No, sorry. You’re right. It is bad. I mean, it’s hard for me, too, sometimes. All those people. Ralph …” I looked at her questioningly. “Is it still bothering you? Does it still bother you, the way he looks at you?”

  “Thanks to our stunning fashion model, not anymore, no.”

  I detected something in her tone, a not entirely clear and uncomplicated undertone as she spoke the words stunning and fashion model. Women think that men find them mysterious, but they are above all very transparent.

  “So Ralph has traded you in for a younger model,” I said, laughing. “And when it comes right down to it, you’re sorry about that. That you, as a woman getting on in years, are no longer whistled at by window washers and famous actors.”

  Caroline flicked her spoon at me; a few drops of foamy milk hit me in the face. “Marc! Don’t get funny! I’m really glad to be off the hook for a while. Really I am. But have you noticed how he looks at Emmanuelle?”

  I shrugged.

  “Yesterday?” Caroline went on. “Before that repairman came by? It’s like he doesn’t care who notices. Stanley was working at his little table and Emmanuelle was lying in her deck chair. You know, when Ralph was going around with the white wine? First he leaned down almost right on top of her to get her glass. And then he just stood there looking as he poured the wine. At everything except her face. He started at her feet, then moved up slowly. And then the same route back again. It was like he didn’t notice what he was doing, or didn’t care. He ran the tip of his tongue over his lips. As though he had some tasty fish on his plate. But then … then. Oh no, it was too terrible!”

  Caroline covered her face with her hands and leaned over till her forehead almost touched the tabletop.

  “What?” I said. “What?”

  “He had the bottle in one hand and the glass in the other. But after he had put the glass back down, he had one hand free. First he rubbed it slowly over his stomach. Around his navel. But then he just moved it down. To his dick. He grabbed it, Marc. He sort of squeezed it. All very casually, as though it were the most normal thing in the world. If anyone had caught him at it, he probably would have pretended he had an itch. Well, believe me, he did! Less than a minute later he put the bottle down on the ground and dove into the pool! You could almost hear the water hiss!”

  I laughed. Caroline couldn’t help laughing, too. But she grew serious again right away.

  “Sure, it’s hilarious,” she said. “But I still find it a nasty idea. A loathsome idea.”

  “Oh listen, I’m sure Emmanuelle kind of summons that up on purpose. I don’t think she really minds. The way she has old Stanley wrapped around her little finger … and she just happens to be a very pretty girl. One mustn’t forget that.”

  Caroline squinted as she looked at me. “Do you think she’s pretty, Marc? Do you think she’s a pretty girl? Do you sometimes sneak a look at her, the way Ralph does?”

  “Yes, I think she’s a pretty girl. Any man would think that she was a pretty girl. And yes, sometimes I look at her. I’m a man, Caroline. It would be almost suspect if I didn’t l
ook at her.”

  “Okay, all right. But that’s not what I mean when I say I find it loathsome, the way Ralph looks at her. You said so yourself. A pretty girl. Emmanuelle is still just a girl. How things are between her and Stanley, I don’t need to know. That’s their business. But there are also other girls around the pool.”

  I stared at her. I’d found it loathsome as well, the proximity of Ralph’s dick to Julia and Lisa playing in the pool, but I hadn’t thought about it in these terms before.

  “I’ve been paying attention,” Caroline said, “and I have to admit that I haven’t really been able to catch him at it. But still … he’s no fool. Maybe he controls himself as long as we’re around. I don’t know how he behaves with them when we’re not.”