Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel

by Herman Koch

  You have it sometimes with a book you’ve left on the table. You go out of the room for a minute, and when you come back there’s something different. In that same way, I knew for sure that Judith had left the kitchen door slightly ajar when she came back. Not closed, no, slightly ajar.

  I remembered, in any case, that the door had been open a crack at the moment when I first pulled her up against me, and that now it was open just a fraction more. Still a crack, but a bigger crack.

  At that same moment I saw something move on the other side of the crack. A shadow on the floor, nothing more than that. There was no sound. Sometimes seconds stretch out into a new unit of time. A unit that corresponds exactly with your heartbeat. I stared at the door. Maybe I was imagining things. But then the shadow moved again. There could be no mistake about it. Someone was behind the door.

  I pulled my hand out of Judith’s bottoms and placed it against her stomach. I pushed her away gently, removing my hand from her hair at the same time.

  Apparently Judith thought it was all part of a teasing sort of foreplay, that I was simply trying out a new variation. Attracting. Repelling. Delaying. She made a little sound, somewhere between a moan and a sigh. She smiled and wrapped her own hand around mine, which was pressing against her stomach.

  But she did open her eyes. She looked at my mouth. At my lips, which soundlessly formed the words: The door. There’s someone behind the door.

  Judith was still standing on tiptoes. Now she slowly sank back down until she was three inches shorter again. She looked up at me and I saw her pupils, dilating and then contracting. She let go of my hand and pushed me away.

  “Would you like another beer, Marc?” she asked. “I’ll take a look. I hope we still have some.”

  Her voice sounded normal. Too normal. The way a voice sounds when it’s doing its utmost to sound normal. She used both hands to arrange her hair. I pulled my shirt back down over my pants and buttoned it.

  And so we stood there, like two teenagers caught in the act. I saw the blush on Judith’s cheeks. My face had undoubtedly changed color, too. Our hair might be neatly arranged, our clothing straightened as much as possible, but it was the blushing that would give us away.

  Judith took a few steps back toward the door. At the same time she gestured to me: Open the fridge.

  But that isn’t what I did. I did something else. Later I would often ask myself why. A premonition, people say, but it was stronger than that. A shiver. A pounding heart. Or more like a heart that skips a beat. A moment in a horror movie: The bloodied sheet is pulled back and, indeed, there is someone underneath. A corpse. A corpse with a crushed skull. The arms and legs have been expertly sawn off and divided among various garbage bags.

  I stepped to the window and looked out. There was no one by the pool anymore. The deck chair where Alex and Julia had just been lying was empty.

  “Mom?”

  I turned around and saw Judith push open the kitchen door. “Mom?”

  I leaned out the window, but it was one of those with a low frame; I leaned out so far that I almost lost my balance. The pounding of my heart was growing louder all the time. Panic. Adrenaline. The heart is preparing for flight, I knew that as a doctor. For flight or a fight. It pumps at full speed to get oxygen out to all parts of the body as quickly as possible. The parts where the oxygen is needed most: the legs for running, the hands to enable fists to be planted as hard as possible in the opponent’s face.

  I saw no one. I listened. I pricked up my ears, as they say, but only animals can prick up their ears. I didn’t hear anything. There wasn’t a breath of wind. The leaves hung still and limp on the trees. You often heard crickets on hot days like this, but apparently it was too hot even for the crickets.

  There was something missing, although at first I didn’t know exactly what. A sound in the silence. A sound that had been there just a little while ago.

  Ping-Pong balls! The sound of bouncing Ping-Pong balls.

  I held my breath. But I wasn’t mistaken. Behind the house, where the Ping-Pong table stood, everything was silent, too.

  “Mom?” Judith had now gone through the doorway and was standing in the living room. “Mom?”

  Now it was my turn to walk to the kitchen door. As calmly as possible. As normally as possible. Nothing had happened, I told myself. Not yet. I tried to smile. A lighthearted smile. But my lips were so dry they hurt.

  I slipped past Judith and made a beeline for the front door.

  “Marc …”

  She was standing at the bathroom door, trying to open it, but it was locked. “Mom? Are you in there?”

  “I’ll take a look outside first,” I said, and I was gone, out the front door, down the stairs and the tiled path to the pool.

  A little too quickly, I realized just in time. Nothing was wrong. Nothing unseemly had happened. If my daughters were still in the yard, it was important that I not seem alarmed. A panting, red-faced father would give the wrong signal. What’s wrong, Daddy? Your face is all red! You’re panting! You look like you’ve seen a ghost.

  I slowed down. Beside the deserted swimming pool, I stopped. For the space of one indivisible second I stared into the water. The glistening water that reflected the treetops and the bright blue sky. Squinting, I examined the bottom of the pool. But there was nothing there. No motionless body with hair fanning out from its head. Only the blue tiles.

  I walked on, around the back of the house. There was no one at the Ping-Pong table, either. The paddles lay on either side of the net. One of them was resting on the ball.

  The tent. The zipper was closed. I didn’t want to surprise or startle my daughters. So I coughed.

  “Julia …? Lisa …?”

  I squatted down and opened the zipper, but the tent was empty. I walked farther, all the way around the house, till I finally got back to the front steps. Again I had to force myself not to take the steps two at a time.

  “My mother’s taking a shower,” said Judith, who was still standing at the bathroom door.

  “And the kids? Have you seen the kids?”

  Without waiting for her reply, I walked into the hall where the bedrooms were. I knocked on the door of the room Alex and Thomas shared. There was no answer, but I did hear something: a vague murmur, as though a radio were playing very softly.

  I opened the door. Alex, Thomas, Lisa, and Julia were lying on the two single beds, which had been slid together. Thomas, in the middle, had a notebook computer on his lap.

  “Hi, hello!” I said cheerfully—much too cheerfully, I realized right away, but by then it was too late. “Is this where you guys are?” I went on. What I felt like most was slamming my fist against my face. The way you slam your hand against the TV when the picture goes on the blink. I wanted to knock the false cheerfulness out of my voice.

  Lisa glanced at me. Julia acted as though no one had come into the room. Only Alex shifted a little against the pillows, so that his arm hung a bit more loosely around the shoulders of my older daughter.

  Thomas laughed at something on the screen. Alex, Julia, and Lisa didn’t laugh with him.

  “What are you watching?” I asked.

  I had to repeat my question before anyone answered. It was Alex. “South Park, Mr. Schlosser.”

  Had he ever called me Mr. Schlosser before? Not that I knew of. Not that I could remember. He always called Caroline “ma’am,” even though we’d told him any number of times that that wasn’t necessary.

  I took a deep breath. No more cheeriness! “Do you kids feel like playing Ping-Pong later? A tournament? All of us?”

  Once again, at first, there was no answer.

  “Maybe,” Alex said at last.

  I looked at Lisa and Julia. I might have been imagining it, but it seemed as though Julia in particular wasn’t really interested in the computer screen. As though she was doing her best to ignore me as completely as possible.

  “Julia?” My heart started pounding again. I moistened my lips with th
e tip of my tongue. The guilty tip of my tongue, it occurred to me at that same moment. I tried to obliterate the thought, but only half succeeded. At all costs, I had to make sure nothing went shaky. My voice. My lower lip. My arms and legs. My whole body.

  “Julia!”

  Now, finally, she looked up at me. Listlessly. A neutral look.

  “Julia, I’m talking to you!”

  She held my gaze. “I can hear that,” she said. “And what was it you wanted to say?”

  Indeed, what was it I wanted to say? I had no idea. Something about a Ping-Pong tournament. No, I’d already done that. I looked my daughter right in the eye. I saw nothing. No accusation. No sadness. Maybe she simply found it annoying that I was still standing there in the doorway.

  “Are you getting enough liquids, Julia?” I said. “I mean, it’s very hot out. You have to watch out that you don’t become dehydrated. All of you. Do you want me to make you a big jug of lemonade?”

  It was way too much, all this crap I was spouting. Too obvious. Julia looked back at the computer screen.

  “Whatever,” she said.

  “Yes, please, Mr. Schlosser,” Alex said. “Or else maybe you could just bring us some Coke.”

  I remained standing there for a couple of seconds. I could say something. I could raise my voice. That’s no way to talk to your father! But something inside me whispered that this was not the right moment. That I didn’t have the right … This was the other voice that was whispering to me, the voice of the guilty tongue.

  I walked back to the hallway, where Judith’s mother was just coming out of the bathroom. She was wearing a white bathrobe and had a towel wrapped around her head.

  “Hello, Marc,” she said. She looked at me for a moment and smiled. Then she walked past me to her room.

  I looked at Judith. Judith shrugged and gestured with her hands. A gesture meant to say I don’t know, either. At the same moment, we heard a car door slam outside. And then another. Four car doors in total.

  “Jesus!” Judith said. “They didn’t waste any time.”

  I went to her. I put my hand on her arm.

  “Take it easy,” I said. “We just act normal. Nothing happened.”

  I walked to the front door and opened it. At the bottom of the steps, Caroline, Stanley, and Emmanuelle were standing beside Ralph’s car. Ralph was leaning over the open trunk.

  “Hello there,” I said. Cheerful again, but at least this time it sounded natural. I welcomed them with a wave of my hand. Only Caroline looked up at me.

  “Marc!” Ralph said. “Give us a hand. You and Stanley. This is way too heavy.”

  He pulled something halfway out of the trunk. I saw the tailfin of a fish. A gigantic fish.

  “A swordfish, Marc!” Ralph shouted. “There was no way we could pass this one up. It’s going on the coals tonight. This is the real thing, buddy!”

  That Saturday evening the village was celebrating midsummer’s eve, with fireworks and bonfires on the beach. You could hear the explosions all day long. The fireworks weren’t like the ones at home. No rockets that blew apart in dozens of colors—only dark, heavy detonations. It sounded less like fireworks than like an artillery barrage or bombardment. Thuds you felt deep down in your chest. Beneath your ribs. Behind your heart.

  The plan was that we would all go to the beach together. But first, of course, we had to eat. Ralph chopped the swordfish into pieces. With a hatchet, right on the patio tiles. At first the children found it fascinating, but with every blow of the hatchet they moved a few steps back. Organs appeared: the liver, bits of hard roe, the swim bladder, and a glistening, dark-brown organ the size of a rugby ball that no one recognized. On occasion Ralph chopped right through the fish and tile splinters flew in all directions.

  “Be a little careful, dear,” Judith said. “We still have to reclaim the security deposit from the rental agency.”

  But Ralph was taking such obvious pleasure in the chopping that he didn’t seem to hear her. He was down on his haunches and had kicked off his flip-flops. I looked at his bare feet; from time to time the hatchet came down awfully close to his toes on the tiles. I looked on as a physician. Just to be safe, I tried to work out what I would have to do first. If kept cool, toes and fingers could be put back on at the hospital. If Ralph planted the hatchet in one or more of his toes, someone would have to keep a level head. There was a doctor in the house. It would be up to the doctor to stanch the flow of blood and wrap the toes in a wet towel with ice cubes. Women and children might faint; the doctor was perhaps the only one who would be able to keep cool. Judith, ice from the freezer! And a wet towel! Caroline, help me apply a tourniquet to his calf——he’s losing too much blood! Stanley, start the car and fold down the backseat! Julia, Lisa, Alex, Thomas, go inside, you’re only getting in the way. Leave Emmanuelle where she is. Just put a pillow under her head—she’ll come around in a bit … It would be my opportunity to shine in a leading role, the role for which I was perfectly suited, but the hatchet came down only once within a fraction of an inch of Ralph’s big toe. After that he became more cautious.

  “What are you looking at, Marc?” he said. “Ah, starting to get hungry already, are you? Listen, do me a favor and get me another beer.”

  Darkness fell. Every now and then the flames under the grill shot up high. We were sitting around the patio, working on the beer and white wine. Judith had laid out plates of olives, anchovies, and spicy little sausages. Chunks of swordfish hissed on the barbecue. Whenever I looked at Judith, at her face cast in a yellow-golden light by the fire, she lowered her eyes. Caroline stared straight ahead and took little sips of her wine. She also seemed to be doing her best not to look at me. I’m sitting here, her body language said. I’m sitting here, but I’d rather be somewhere else.

  Thomas and Lisa were playing Ping-Pong. Alex and Julia were back in the deck chair by the pool. They each had a white earbud from Julia’s iPod in one ear. In the last few hours I had tried a few times to establish direct contact with my older daughter, but to no avail. Whenever I asked her a question she would shrug and breathe a deep sigh. “Are you looking forward to the beach later on?” I asked, just for the sake of asking something. “To seeing the fireworks?” And she shrugged. And sighed. “Listen, if you guys don’t feel like it, we can stay here,” I said, feeling my face start to flush. “We can play Risk or something … Monopoly …” Julia pulled her hair up onto the top of her head and let it fall again. “We’ll see,” she said, and then turned around and walked away. Without giving me so much as a look. It was as though all the women were making a game out of not looking at me. The only exceptions were Lisa and Judith’s mother. While the meal was being prepared, Vera smiled at me a few times. And while Ralph was whacking away at the swordfish, she had even shaken her head as she smiled at me. And Lisa? Lisa still looked at me the way eleven-year-old daughters look at their fathers. As though looking at the ideal man. The one they want to marry when they grow up.

  I had to try to catch Julia’s eye, I told myself. Her eyes couldn’t lie. One glimpse would be enough. In my daughter’s eyes I would be able to read the awful truth. Or not. It was still possible, of course, that I was imagining the whole thing. Maybe something had happened between her and Alex. Maybe she had gone through a rapid process of “growing up,” as they call it, and no longer felt any desire for the obnoxious presence of a whining father. That was biology. There was no getting around biology.

  “I thought that was pretty interesting, what you told us this afternoon, Stanley,” Ralph said as he distributed the first chunks of grilled swordfish. “In the car. I think Marc would be interested, too.”

  I looked at Stanley, more out of politeness than interest. If I noticed the slightest disinclination in his expression, I would pursue it no further. He stabbed his fork into the swordfish, producing a puddle of water on his plate, then cut off a good-sized chunk and put it in his mouth.

  “Well, yeah,” he said.

  At that very
moment, in a neighboring yard, a rocket took off. We had seen rockets taking off before, but never from so close by. Everyone held their breath while the projectile drilled its way into the sky with a hiss and a luminous trail of sparks. Then came the explosion. The explosion and the flash. Or actually, the other way around. The light traveled faster than the sound. Directly above our heads the rocket blew apart. Our faces lit up white in the explosion, while the blast took a little more time to reach us. It was a blast like the earlier ones. Heavy and hard. A lightning bolt. A direct hit from a mortar shell. A car bomb. But so close this time that it seemed to fill your whole body. From the inside out. It started in the pit of your stomach, surged like rolling thunder along the inside of your ribs, only to leave the body at last through the jaws and eardrums. Women and children shrieked. Men and boys cursed. A bottle fell over and shattered on the patio. Somewhere down the street a car alarm went off. “Holy fuck!” said Ralph, who had dropped an entire hunk of swordfish on the tiles. The blast echoed back and forth between the hills a few times. Then faded.

  “Wow!” That was Alex. He and Julia had pulled the white buds from their ears and climbed out of the deck chair. Julia was looking around in fright. She looked at her mother. At Ralph. At Judith. Even at Stanley and Emmanuelle. At pretty much everyone except me.

  “Dad, Dad! Can we get some of those rockets, too?” Thomas came running up from the Ping-Pong table. “Dad! Are we gonna blast ’em like that, too?”

  “This is absolutely abnormal,” Judith said. “What kind of pleasure can anyone get from that?”

  I looked at Judith’s face. It radiated sincere indignation. Caroline placed a hand on her chest and breathed in and out deeply a few times. At that moment I thought about the differences between men and women. The irreconcilable differences. The differences you can never explain.

  Men go for the loudest bang. The louder, the better. In women’s eyes, that makes them more boyish. More childish. So boyish and childish that it makes women smile pityingly. They never grow up, they tell one another. And they’re right. I remember how, as a boy of sixteen, I flouted all the rules when setting off fireworks. I never used a punk. Always an open flame. A real flame. The flame from a match or a lighter. Fire was what I wanted to see, not some pussy glowing punk. I didn’t put the rockets in an empty bottle at a safe distance. I lit them in my hand. I wanted to feel the power of the rocket between my fingers. That way, something of that power became your own. The first time I held the rocket so tightly that splinters from the wooden stick bored into my fingers when the rocket yanked free of my grasp and raced for the sky. Later I learned the right way to do it. To hold it loosely. You had to give the rocket as little resistance as possible. The rocket had a will of its own. It wanted to go up. At moments like that I never thought about the evening’s festive nature. Let alone about the new year that was on its way. I thought about war. About missiles and antiaircraft guns. About rebel movements shooting the helicopters and transport planes of a technologically superior foe out of the air with portable, shoulder-launched, surface-to-air missiles. Often I couldn’t resist the temptation and aimed the rocket at an angle more oblique than might be considered strictly prudent. Then it would explode against the windows of the neighbors across the street. “Sorry!” I would shout when a window opened and a startled neighbor leaned out. “Sorry, it went completely in the wrong direction.” I would adopt my most hypocritical expression. The expression of the soccer player who slides into his opponent with his leg stretched out in front of him and cripples him for life. Sorry, I guess I kind of slipped … I aimed the next rocket at a group of partygoers farther down the street. It was war. You’re better off winning a war than losing it. History teaches us that. And biology. You’re better off beating someone to death than being beaten to death. From time immemorial, the man has guarded the entrance to the cave. Intruders are sent packing. People. Animals. A persistent intruder can’t say later that he hasn’t been warned. “A man avoids a fight only when the odds are stacked against him,” Professor Herzl taught us in medical biology. “When the opponent is his equal or weaker, he weighs his chances. He clenches his fists. He weighs the heft of the sword in his hand. Of the pistol. He turns the turret of his tank just a fraction of a second faster than the enemy. He aims and fires. He survives.”