Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel

by Herman Koch

  Ralph was still hiccuping with laughter. “That was a take, Stanley! You should have filmed that one!”

  “Where’s Julia?” I asked Ralph.

  Stanley felt around in his pockets. “Fuck! I think all my money … Oh no, there we go …” He pulled a few banknotes from his pocket. Soaked banknotes, stuck together. “A blow-dryer!” he shouted. “My kingdom for a blow-dryer!”

  “Where are Julia and Alex?” I asked.

  “They went to that other beach club,” Ralph said. “There …” He pointed. “You can see the lights, up past the bend.”

  “Alone?” I asked. “Just the two of them?”

  I saw the lights Ralph meant. It was hard to tell how far away they were. Half a mile at least, I thought. Maybe a mile. Between this section of beach with its lit restaurants and bonfires and that other club across the bay, there was nothing. Just a long and empty and darkened stretch of beach.

  “Marc, you can’t keep the kids on a leash. The last thing those two want is to hang around here with their parents.”

  “No, I was just wondering … Julia could at least have waited till I got here.”

  I tried to hide my annoyance at how Ralph had given my daughter permission to go to the other beach. Without bothering to ask himself whether I would mind. Was I being childish? I asked myself. Or would I have had less of a problem with it if he’d said, “It’s okay with me, but first we have to wait for your father to see what he says”?

  “What’s with your eye?” Ralph asked.

  “Nothing. Well, there’s something in it. Sand or something.”

  “Beer all around?” Stanley said, holding the wet banknotes aloft.

  Because all the tables were taken, we drank leaning on a bar that had been set up right out on the beach, probably just for this occasion. Judith was gone. Ralph didn’t seem to worry much about losing track of his wife. At least he made no attempt to find her.

  “Goddamn! Is a man supposed to take that lying down?” he said, slapping his beer mug down onto the bar. I followed his gaze and saw three girls in bikinis among the café tables, about five yards away. They had their backs to us and were trying to find an empty table. Ralph shook his head. “Well, Marc, out of sight, out of mind. Oh, I’d be willing to commit a crime to get a little of that. Just a little.” He ran his tongue across his upper lip. He moaned and fiddled with the button on his shorts; his fingers slid down over his zipper. Suddenly I saw the raptor look again—the same look with which he had once undressed Caroline in the theater’s lobby. And this time, too, a film slid down over his eyes as he examined the girls from head to toe, his gaze finally coming to rest on their buttocks.

  “Hey!” Stanley shouted.

  We turned and saw Stanley waving the girls over. “Hey! Come on! Come here!”

  Ralph shook his head, stared into his beer, and then grinned at me. “We think about it, but he does it,” he said.

  The girls seemed to be talking about what they were going to do. They had their heads together. They were giggling. I tried to picture what they saw: three middle-aged men in shorts, holding mugs of beer—the oldest of the three had taken the lead. If I were them, I would have turned and walked away.

  But to my great amazement, after a moment’s hesitation, I saw them coming toward us. Sometimes you misjudge women when you see them from behind. You see long hair falling over bare shoulders, but when they turn to face you, you discover they’re fifteen years older than you’d expected. Here, however, that wasn’t the case: All three of them could have stepped right off the cover of Vogue or Glamour. I tried to guess how old they were. Nineteen? Twenty? No more than twenty-five, in any case, and in fact more girls than young women. I glanced over at Ralph, who took a quick sip from his mug, smacked his lips, and ran his hand over his belly. As though he were hungry. That’s how he looked at the three girls, as though he were at a party where the waiters come by with trays of croquettes, satay, and liverwurst. A tasty morsel was heading his way, and he had already started licking his chops.

  “No flies on them,” he said. “Holy shit, they’re real beauties.”

  “Good evening, ladies. Drinks? What’ll it be? White wine? Margaritas? Cocktails?” Stanley flagged down a waiter and looked at us mischievously. He was a fast worker. Even as he was still checking off the list of possible beverages, he had laid his hand lightly on the bare shoulder of the girl closest to him. They giggled again but didn’t walk away. One by one they held out a hand and introduced themselves. They told us their names and Stanley asked where they were from. Two of them were from Norway, we understood, and the third was Latvian. Then Stanley asked whether they were here on business or on vacation. No, he didn’t use the word vacation. Pleasure, that was the word he used. Business or pleasure? He asked it in a suggestive tone of voice, as though the difference between business and pleasure was of piddling importance. It seemed to me like a last opportunity for the girls to walk away from us. But they just stood there giggling. By now, the two Norwegian ones were sucking on the straws that stuck out of their margaritas. The Latvian girl knocked back her double vodka with ice in one go.

  “So, Marc,” Ralph said out of the girls’ earshot. “You’re the lucky one, with your better half safe at home. And so’s he.” He pointed at Stanley. “But I have to be very careful. Judith would have a fit.” He looked around, and I looked with him. “The short one is completely wrecked,” he said. “Yours for the taking, Marc.”

  He nodded toward the Latvian vodka girl. Then he turned his own gaze back to the legs of the Norwegian girls and smacked his lips again. Meanwhile, Stanley had his arm all the way around the shoulders of the girl closest to him. He acted as though he was trying to wrap his lips around the straw of her margarita, then pretended to stumble and buried his nose in her neck. The girl pushed him away laughingly and said something in Norwegian to her girlfriend, who then took Ralph by the wrist and pulled him toward her.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Ralph said. “Wait a minute! Jesus, they’re hot to trot, Marc. What did we do to deserve this?”

  I saw him glance around quickly once again, then he threw his arm around the girl’s waist and pulled her toward him. Or no, not around her waist: lower, just above the elastic band of her bikini bottoms. Within seconds his fingers were under the elastic. I looked at his hand. At his wrist. It was all completely out of proportion. Ralph’s wrist looked thicker than the girl’s waistline. I saw how he slid his thick fingers down between her buttocks, and I thought about other body parts. Body parts that were also out of proportion. But I didn’t have time to develop this fantasy any further. The girl tried to push Ralph away, not half jokingly the way her girlfriend had just done with Stanley—no, in dead earnest. Ralph couldn’t see her face. I could. Her mouth was twisted, as though she had tasted something filthy or felt a sudden pain, but because Ralph couldn’t see this, he only pulled her up even tighter, trying at the same time to plant his lips on her neck.

  I heard a cry, a curse or term of abuse most probably. A term of abuse in Norwegian that sounded like Varkensfetter! Then she said something else, this time in English with a heavy accent. “Fok of!” she said, and almost simultaneously brought her knee up hard into the crotch of Ralph’s shorts.

  Ralph’s mouth fell open. He gasped for air and clutched at the front of his shorts (with the same hand that had just been under the elastic of the bikini bottoms), the better to cradle his genitals.

  “Aw, fug!” was all he could say.

  Now the girl threw the rest of her margarita, ice cubes and all, in his face. It wasn’t clear whether she really meant to do it or whether she’d just had too much to drink and wasn’t completely steady. In any case, the edge of her glass hit Ralph in the upper lip. Against his teeth. There was the sound of something breaking. A piece of tooth or a piece of glass, it wasn’t clear which. Ralph raised his hand to his mouth. He ran his tongue over his front teeth, then looked at his bloodied fingers.

  “You fucking shit whore!” he howl
ed.

  Before Stanley or I could stop him, he swung. He tried to punch the girl right in the face. But the knee in his crotch had thrown him and the punch narrowly missed its mark.

  “Ralph!” Stanley yelled. “Calm down, man!”

  “Dirty whores!” Ralph screamed. “First you’re the big cock-teasers and then suddenly it’s Mother Teresa in the fucking flesh. Bah! I shit on sluts like you!”

  Now he had the girl by the wrist. He pulled her arm down hard, so that she lost her balance and fell onto the sand. She screamed. I saw Ralph swing his leg back. As though he was about to take a penalty. Just in time, I realized that he was going to kick the girl in the stomach.

  “Ralph!” I shouted. I leaned into him, shoulder to shoulder. At the same time, I kicked him in the knee. As hard as I could. He was at a disadvantage. He was standing on one leg. If he’d been standing on both, I never could have thrown him, but now he stood wobbling in place for a full second. Then he collapsed slowly, like a building demolished by charges in the basement. The back of his head hit the bar with a loud crack. I couldn’t tell whether the crack came from his skull or from the wooden bar top.

  People were coming at us now from all directions. Men, mostly. Men who grabbed Stanley and me. Men who bent to help the Norwegian girl, who was halfway back on her feet. “Hey, take it easy!” I heard Stanley shout, but I couldn’t see him anymore. He was no longer standing at the bar where he had been just a moment before.

  “Stanley!” I shouted. Meanwhile, two men had forced me down onto the sand. A third one was sitting on my chest, letting his full weight rest on my ribs. I could feel the air being pressed out of my lungs. “Calm down!” I peeped now. “Calm down, please …” But I couldn’t get enough air to say it very loudly.

  Out of one corner of my eye I saw the Norwegian girl sitting on top of Ralph. She punched him a few times full in the face, until two strong men came and pulled her off him.

  I was in the men’s room of the restaurant where we had eaten that first evening, looking into the little mirror above the sink. I tried to keep my left eye open and look into it at the same time. I couldn’t get a very clear picture, but what I saw I saw well enough: More than a third of my eyeball was red with blood. An extravasation. Something—a grain of sand, a piece of seashell, a tiny stone—had flown into my eye and hit the cornea. Or who knows, I thought as my breathing quickened and my heart began pounding more laboriously, who knows, maybe the grain of sand or tiny stone had actually punctured the cornea and was now stuck in the fluid substance inside the eyeball itself.

  I’ve got this thing about eyes. I can look at anything—open wounds and fractures, a circular saw applied to a worn-out hip, complete with blood flying against the operating room ceiling, a trapdoor sawn in a skull, exposed brains, a heart pounding on a chrome tray, bloody rolls of gauze propped into a chest cut open from collarbone to navel—I can handle anything, except for things that have to do with eyes. Particularly things that don’t belong in eyes: glass splinters, sand, dust, contact lenses that have slipped halfway behind an eyeball … Because of my oath as a physician, I refer as few patients as possible to a specialist, but patients who sit in my waiting room spastically blinking their eyes don’t even make it into my office. See that man holding the bloodied napkin to his eye? I say to my assistant. Get him out of here. Right away. Send him to emergency. Or write a referral to the ophthalmologist. I haven’t had breakfast yet, I can’t handle that right now.

  I don’t know why; it must have to do with something that happened a long time ago. Some event that I’ve repressed. Most phobias originate in the first four years of life: the fear of spiders, of water, of women, of men, of wide-open spaces or of towering mountain ranges that block out the sun, of toads and grasshoppers, fish heads on your plate with the eyes still in them, giant waterslides, furniture malls, pedestrian tunnels—there’s always something to blame. A traumatic experience, people say, and they make an appointment for an exploratory meeting with a psychiatrist. After years of digging and delving, something finally bobs to the surface: a mother lost in the supermarket, a dripping candle, a snail in your tennis shoe, a “funny” uncle who could blow smoke rings through a rolled-up newspaper but wanted to play with your weenie at night, an aunt with warts and a bristly mustache who kissed you good night … a teacher taking a shower at a high-school summer camp: There is no clear demarcation between lower back and buttocks, and after the tailbone the skin disappears into a dark, clenched crack; he stands there scrubbing at his pale, skinny dick with a pink washcloth—after camp is over you have to do your best not to gag every time he draws an equilateral triangle on the blackboard.

  A wide-open, watery eye reminds me of a fried egg. A fried egg that isn’t nearly done yet; yolk and white are still largely liquid and lie there jiggling in the pan like a jellyfish on the beach.

  Someone was rattling the handle of the restroom door.

  “Go away,” I said in Dutch. “Can’t you see I’m in here?”

  I was able to keep my damaged eye open only for a couple of seconds each time. Not only because it looked so hideous, but also because of the sharp pain. As though someone were stubbing out a cigarette in the white of my eye—in the fried egg, I couldn’t help thinking.

  There was a rattling at the door again. And no longer just a rattling: Someone pounded on it three times. I heard a voice. A man’s voice muttering in a language I couldn’t quite make out.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  I blinked my runny eye a few times. But it was no use. I couldn’t keep it open any longer without feeling an unbearable, stabbing pain. I cursed. I took a length of toilet paper from the roll, wadded it up, and moistened it a bit under the tap. There was a brief moment of coolness and relief when I pressed the wet wad against my eye.

  “Your turn at last,” I said to the man waiting in the half-darkened hallway beyond the men’s room door. He was wearing shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. His cheeks, chin, and upper lip were sweaty and unshaven. I started to walk on, but then I took another look. His face seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. And at the same moment I saw something else. The man looked at me, too, as though he recognized me from somewhere: a slight gleam in his eyes, as if he was trying to connect my face to some memory.

  “I sorry,” he said with a heavy accent. “I hurry.”

  He smiled. My gaze descended to his bare shoulders and upper arms. On one arm he had a tattoo—a bird, an eagle by the looks of it—clutching a dripping red heart in its talons. On his other arm were a few red stripes. As though he’d scratched at an injury. A cut or a mosquito bite.

  He followed my gaze and brushed the wound with his fingertips. He rubbed it. His arm was wet with sweat, and when he took his fingers away, all you could see were a couple of thin red lines. We nodded at each other again, the way distant acquaintances do, then he disappeared into the restroom.

  At the front door of the restaurant I took a good look around before stepping out onto the patio. I looked particularly closely at the beachside bar, where no more than fifteen minutes ago I had been forced down onto the sand by a group of men. But there was no one there anymore. No trace of Ralph or Stanley or the three girls. Still holding the wad of wet toilet paper to my eye, I wormed my way past the tables. I may have been imagining things, but it seemed as though the eye had started to throb—not so much the eye itself, more like the space behind the eye. The place where the muscles and tendons were holding the eye in its socket, I recalled from medical school. From the ophthalmology lectures where I had only pretended to be listening. With each successive slide the professor flashed up on the screen, I sank farther down into my seat. One of the slides showed an eye hanging out of its socket, connected to the skull only by bloodied veins. I had groaned so loudly that the professor had stopped the lecture to ask whether someone was in need of medical assistance.

  Now I could feel the pounding behind my eye, a pounding that meshed seamlessly with the bass rhy
thm from the loudspeakers set up here and there around the patio—so seamlessly that there was no way to separate them.

  Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, or maybe walking around with one eye closed had affected my depth perception; whatever the case, the girl, when she stood up from her chair at the patio’s edge, did so awfully fast and clumsily. Her left shoulder hit me just under my nose. I took a few shaky steps back and almost regained my balance before falling onto the lap of a virtually naked man.

  “Sorry,” I said to the man. I dabbed at my nose and looked at my fingers: no blood.

  “Sorry,” the girl said now as well. She looked worriedly at the hand holding the wad of toilet paper against my eye, but before she could jump to any conclusions, I said, “Okay, it’s okay. No problem.”

  The girl wasn’t big, but she was fat. I took a better look at her now and, for the second time in the space of five minutes, I saw a vaguely familiar face. This time it took only a few moments for me to place her: the girl from the rental agency … The girl who had promised us that the repairman would come by as quickly as possible to solve the water problem.

  Suddenly I also knew who the man was, the one rattling at the men’s room door. The repairman! The repairman who had climbed onto the roof to unblock the blocked water reservoir. Those two were a couple, weren’t they? I looked at her eyes and noticed only then that they were filled with tears. Teary and red. She blinked a few times and sputtered another apology.

  I held up my hand, as if to say No problem. Maybe the repairman had just broken up with her. There were red blotches on her cheeks. She had cried when they broke up. She had wept and rubbed her fingers hard over her eyes and cheeks. Was it unfair that girls who looked like this were dumped all the time? That was the question that flashed through my mind. Or was it something you always took into account? Was it all you expected, and were you pleased enough when some sweaty repairman pressed his lips to your neck for a few weeks (or a few hours) and whispered sweet nothings in your ear?