by Herman Koch
Ralph bent down, stuck the barbecue fork into the piece of swordfish that had fallen to the ground, and put it back on the grill. A broad grin appeared on his face.
“Go take a look in the shed, buddy,” he said. “That door just past the Ping-Pong table. You, too, Alex.”
As the two boys ran to the back of the house, I felt a sudden emptiness. An emptiness somewhere at the back of my heart. Ralph had bought fireworks. And I hadn’t. Yesterday I had gone past one of the little stalls where they sold them. It was made of corrugated iron and stood at the edge of the village. I’d hesitated. I had slowed down. Just take a look at what they’ve got. But there was no place to park, so I drove on.
If I’d had two sons, like Ralph, then I would have parked the car even if I’d had to walk five miles back to the stall, I realized now. But I had two daughters. I remembered a particular New Year’s Eve a few years back. Against my own better judgment I had gone out and bought a packet of rockets and firecrackers. At midnight I set up the first rocket in a wine bottle in front of our door. I tied together the fuses of three firecrackers, lit them, and tossed them in the air. But Julia and Lisa only remained standing in the doorway. At the first explosion they ducked back into the house. Then Caroline appeared in the doorway. The three of them stood there and looked at me. I lit more rockets. I put an empty can on top of a firecracker to make a bigger bang. In the meantime Caroline had given each of the girls a sparkler, but they didn’t really come outside after that. Standing in the doorway, they stretched their arms out as far as possible so the sparks wouldn’t fall on the welcome mat. From there they looked at their father. A father who was, to put it mildly, acting peculiar. Like a twelve-year-old boy. During wartime, the women sew the uniforms. They fill the grenades at the munitions factory. They contribute to the war effort, as they say. But the actual throwing of the grenades they leave to the men.
“Dad, Dad! Can we set one off already?”
Alex and Thomas had come back from the shed carrying two bundles of rockets, some of which were longer than the boys were tall. There were almost too many for them to carry. Two or three rockets fell onto the patio.
“Don’t you think we should wait a bit?” Ralph said. “We’re all going to the beach in about an hour.”
“But the people next door lit one already,” Alex said.
“Aw, come on, Dad,” Thomas said. “Please?”
Ralph shook his head. Laughing, he took an empty bottle from the table. “Okay, but just one,” he said.
I looked at the pile of rockets lying between the boys on the patio. Even the smallest ones were a yard long. Stacked up neatly on the tiles now, they reminded me of a captured arms cache. The secret munitions dump of a guerrilla movement or terrorist cell. The technologically superior foe had tanks and planes. The occupying forces had helicopters that could fire laser-guided missiles, but the primitive Qassam rockets fired at random civilian targets caused more psychological damage.
“No, not here,” Ralph said. “Not so close to the other ones. One spark and we’d all be blown to kingdom come, along with the house. Let’s do it down by the pool.”
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Judith asked.
“Better wait till we get to the beach,” said Caroline.
“I’m going inside,” Judith’s mother said.
But Ralph just laughed. “Come on, it’s not that hard to imagine, is it? These guys can’t wait.”
I looked away from the rocket, which Alex and Thomas were now positioning in the bottle at the pool’s edge, toward my daughters. When the fuse flared they put their fingers in their ears. Julia shrieked when the rocket took off out of the bottle with a loud hiss and the bottle fell over and broke. A few shards ended up in the pool.
The bang came much sooner than expected. Loud and deep, louder and deeper than the one the neighbors had launched just a few minutes earlier. It started beneath the soles of your feet and thundered its way up, used the space inside your chest to achieve its full wingspan, then ended up in your head. There was a brief instant when breathing came to a halt. This time a few car alarms started howling. Dogs began barking hysterically. Julia and Lisa screamed. “Merde!” a woman’s voice said. When we turned around we saw Emmanuelle, holding only the base and the broken stem of her wineglass. The rest lay in shards at her feet. There were big red stains on her white blouse.
“Well, are you satisfied now?” Judith cried.
“Another one! Another one!” Thomas screamed.
“Fucking A!” Alex said, whistling low through his teeth. “Heavy shit!”
“Okay, one more,” Ralph said.
“Don’t even think about it!” Judith said. “Do me a favor, take that stuff down with you to the beach and have fun! Ralph, I suppose you heard me?”
Ralph raised both hands in a gesture of mollification. “Okay, okay, we’re going to the beach.”
I was overtaken again by a deep sense of regret. Regret that I hadn’t bought any rockets of my own. I wouldn’t have given in as quickly as Ralph had. I tried to catch Caroline’s eye. My own wife was perhaps no fan of loud explosions, but I didn’t think—in all the years we’d been together—that I’d ever heard her say, Marc, I suppose you heard me?
And at the same moment we actually did catch each other’s eye. Caroline was standing beside Emmanuelle. She had one hand on Emmanuelle’s shoulder, and with the fingers of her other hand she was brushing at the wine stains on Emmanuelle’s blouse. Then she turned her head and looked at me.
There was no mistaking it: My wife winked at me. I wasn’t completely sure whether the wink had to do only with the wine-stained T-shirt or with the whole situation and Judith’s annoyance, but that didn’t matter much. The important thing was Caroline saw the funny side of it. She absolutely wanted to leave on Monday, so she’d said, but in her mind she had apparently already bid farewell to the Meiers and their summer house. No, not so much bid farewell: She had taken a step back. As I winked back at her, I thought about what had happened in the kitchen earlier that day. About the tip of my tongue against Judith’s teeth, my hand on her butt. I thought about her fingers tugging at my shorts. The rockets were scooped up. Some of the group went inside to get sweaters or jackets, in case it got chilly on the beach later, and then we met at the cars. Emmanuelle announced that she didn’t want to come, and Stanley didn’t try very hard to change her mind. Judith’s mother stayed home, too.
Julia and Lisa wanted to go with Alex and Thomas in the back of Ralph’s car. There was a moment, just before Judith settled into the passenger seat beside Ralph, when she leaned against the open car door and looked at me. I looked back. I maintained eye contact with her the way you maintain eye contact with a woman when you have other motives. Ulterior motives. I saw the light from the lamp above the garage door reflected in her eyes. I thought about the possibilities of the beach. There would be a lot of people around. We could get separated. Some people could get separated. Others could definitely find one another.
“I was just thinking: Maybe I’ll stay here, too.” Caroline had showed up beside me and laid her hand on my arm.
“Really?” I said, turning my head a little to one side, so the light above the garage door no longer lit my face. “Well, there’s no reason for you to go if you don’t want to. I don’t mind. If you don’t feel like it, I’ll go on my own.”
Sometimes you run your life back to see at what point it could have taken a different turn. But sometimes there’s nothing at all to run back—you yourself don’t know it yet, but the only button that’s still working is forward. You wish you could freeze the picture … Here, you tell yourself. If I’d said something else … done something else.
I went to the beach that evening. And when I came back I was a different person. Not for a while, or for a couple of days. No. Forever.
You get a stain on your pants. Your favorite pair of pants. You wash them ten times in a row at 160 degrees. You scrub and scour and rub. You bring in the heavy a
rtillery. Bleaches. Abrasive cleaners. But the spot doesn’t go away. If you scrub and scour too long, it will only be replaced by something else. By a stretch of fabric that is thinner and paler. The paler cloth is the memory. The memory of the spot. Now there are two things you can do. You can throw the pants away, or you can walk around for the rest of your life with the memory of the stain. But the paler cloth reminds you of more than just the stain. It also reminds you of when the pants were still clean.
If you run things back far enough, the clean pants finally show up. By then, you know that they’re not going to stay clean. I know that I will keep running things back for the rest of my life. Was this where it was? I’ll ask myself again and again. Or was it further back? … There? I hit Pause.
Here it’s still clean.
And here, not anymore.
We had barely lurched our way down the dirt drive to the street when Stanley Forbes fished a pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket and held it up in front of my face. Gratefully, I took one.
“Watch out,” he said.
“For what?”
“You’re driving too far to the right—you almost knocked the mirror off that van.”
I belong to that category of men who can barely tolerate criticism when it comes to their driving. Who can’t tolerate it at all, I should say. But, being reasonable, I knew that Stanley was probably right. I knew that in any case I’d drunk too much to be driving a car. There had been a moment of hesitation. Stanley had been about to drive his own rental car to the beach. He was standing there with the keys in his hand, but finally he’d shrugged and gone along as my sole passenger.
“Thanks,” I said. “You keep an eye on the right, I’ll watch the left.”
I shifted down and slowed. About thirty yards in front of us I saw the red taillights of Ralph’s Volvo disappear around a corner. I was careful when I pulled the car over to the side. Even so, I heard the hubcaps scrape against the curb with a sound like the gnashing of teeth.
“What are you doing?” Stanley asked.
“Listen, I was thinking: Today’s a public holiday. There might be police checks on the main road to the beach. I’ve really had a few too many. They’d confiscate my license right away.”
“Okay.”
“But there’s another way to get to the beach. A sandy road. We stayed at a campground the first couple of days, remember? If I can find that campground from here, that’d work, too.”
It wasn’t simple. We drove into a couple of dead-ends first, but finally we found a sandy road I was almost sure led to the campground. There were trees along both sides of the road. I opened my window and turned the headlights on full beam.
“Those are trees on the right side, Marc,” Stanley said. “On the left, too, actually.”
We both burst out laughing and, to show how much I had the situation under control, I stepped on the gas just a little. The wheels spun in the sand and the car swerved and shot forward.
“Yeah!” Stanley said. “Zebra One, we’re on our way!”
That was probably a line from some movie I should have recognized, but I had no idea. And I didn’t feel like asking Stanley about it. In a pinch, however, I did have other things to ask the director. How old is Emmanuelle, really? Does she fuck as lazily as she looks, or is it, as it so often is, a case of appearances deceiving; does she actually burn an old geezer like you down to the ground? Does she wear her sunglasses in bed, too? But those were questions I didn’t ask.
“What was that all about?” I asked instead. “Ralph said something. Just before dinner. That you’d told him something that would probably interest me.”
“Oh, that,” Stanley said.
“You don’t have to tell me now, not if you don’t feel like it. It’ll probably come up some other time.”
Meanwhile, the sandy road had taken a steep downhill turn. Occasionally you could see little lights down below, between the trees, probably from the bars and restaurants along the beach. We were on the right road.
Stanley rolled down his window, too. He tossed his cigarette out and lit another one. “A few months after September 11, the Bush administration invited a few film directors to the White House,” he said. “Mostly science fiction directors. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron. And me. I’ve directed a couple of sci-fi films. One of them was only released in Europe on DVD, but the other one was a real success over here. Tremor. Have you seen it?”
The title sounded familiar, but the last science-fiction film I’d seen was, I think, The Day After Tomorrow. “No, I’m afraid I haven’t.”
“Doesn’t matter. The point is the idea behind the invitation. We sat there in the Oval Office with the whole clique. George Bush himself, of course, and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. George Tenet from the CIA was there, and a few other guys—the national security adviser and a couple of generals. And the directors. They served peanuts and little snacks. And coffee and tea. But also beer and whisky and gin. After all, this was supposed to be about the imagination. About our imaginations.”
The sandy road grew narrower. There were more bends now. Switchbacks that you couldn’t see around. I used the engine to brake, downshifting. Through the open window I could hear pebbles bouncing off the bottom of the car. I smelled warm pine needles. And the sea. I thought about Caroline, who had stayed behind at the summer house. About the moment when we said good-bye and she had pecked me on the cheek. Are you sure you haven’t had too much to drink? Can you still drive?
“The reason why we were invited was that we were supposed to let our imaginations run wild,” Stanley went on. “Our fantasies. I don’t know who came up with the idea, whether it was Bush himself or one of his advisers. Anyway, we started off with coffee and tea, but then switched pretty quickly to beer and whisky. The president did, too. He knocked back two double whiskies. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were working on the gin. Somebody put on some music. First Bob Dylan, then Jimi Hendrix and the Dixie Chicks. Looking back on it now, it was fucking unbelievable. But we did what we were there to do: We fantasized. It had never occurred to anyone before 9/11 that terrorists might use a passenger plane as a weapon. Everything had focused on security on the plane itself. To prevent a bombing or a hijacking. Planes that flew into towers were simply unimaginable. So that’s what they asked us to do: to imagine the unimaginable. Using our imagination, the same imagination we used to make aliens land on earth and avengers from the future appear in the present to settle accounts, they wanted us to imagine what the terrorists of the future might come up with. But there’s something else I forgot to tell you. Tremor was based on a book. A book by an American writer, Samuel Demmer. Ever heard of him?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Okay, doesn’t matter. The point is, I’d read this book. Tremor by Samuel Demmer. And I saw a movie in it right away. I started reading at midnight and I’d finished it by six the next morning. I called Demmer at eight. Myself. I usually have my agent call people for things like that, but I was so enthusiastic that I wanted to express that enthusiasm personally. Demmer had a reputation for being difficult. Never appeared on TV, never gave interviews. That’s the most sympathetic kind of writer, if you ask me. Anyway, at first he was sort of cautious on the phone, he didn’t seem to give a shit that someone wanted to make a movie out of his book. But I also heard something else at the other end of the line. Something you hear more often when you talk to reclusive people. That in their heart, way down deep, they’re glad to have someone call. To be able to talk to someone for a little while, even if it’s someone they don’t know. Or maybe especially if it’s someone they don’t know. I mean, characters like that often have to struggle with their own image. They have to live down their reputation, as they say in the States. He didn’t mind at all, for example, that I’d called him so early in the morning. To make a long story short: it clicked. We gabbed about his book and the possibilities of filming it, and then at one point he asked me something that took me complete
ly by surprise. Something that stopped me in my tracks, and that I’ve never forgotten. In fact, it became my own personal mantra. ‘Why don’t you come up with something yourself?’ he asked. I have to admit, that brought me up short. I didn’t know what to say. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked him. And I heard this deep sigh on the other end of the line. ‘I mean exactly what I said,’ Samuel Demmer said. ‘You sound to me like someone with ideas. Enough ideas of your own, I mean. So why would you want to make a movie based on someone else’s idea? Why don’t you make up your own movie?’ We talked for about half an hour after that. About all kinds of things. About books we both liked. About movies. Later on we met. It was an extremely enjoyable and inspiring collaboration. And Demmer’s question changed my life for good. I made Tremor. But based only loosely on his novel—he thought that was okay. ‘Based on the novel by Samuel Demmer’—that’s what the credits finally said. And after Tremor I never adapted another book. Never. I took what Demmer said seriously and started coming up with things myself.”
