Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel

by Herman Koch

  “I … I have to get going,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded. It was hard to tell with all the red blotches on her cheeks, but it looked like she was blushing again. The next moment she slid past me and headed toward the busier part of the restaurant.

  When I walked past the beachside bar, no one seemed to notice me. The men who had thrown Ralph and me to the ground had apparently gone looking for fun elsewhere. A few hundred yards farther I found Lisa and Thomas chasing a soccer ball, along with a whole group of children their age. Fortunately, they hadn’t noticed the fracas at the bar. Just before locking myself in the men’s room to look at my eye, I had gone over to talk to Lisa.

  “Stay close by, all right?” I’d said. “I’ll be in the restroom over there if you need me.” I pointed at the restaurant, but Lisa didn’t really seem to have heard me. “All right,” she said without looking at me, then ran off across the sand in pursuit of Thomas and three other boys who were kicking the ball out in front of them.

  In the end, Ralph had succeeded in freeing himself from the men who were pinning him down. Ranting and cursing, he grabbed the plastic bag of fireworks and strode off toward the sea. By that time they had already let go of me. “Come on, Marc!” Ralph shouted over his shoulder. “Let these shitheads play pimp to a bunch of whores, if that makes them feel good!” But he didn’t look back to see if I was actually following.

  Meanwhile, Stanley’s whereabouts remained unclear. I stood up, brushed the sand off my shorts and shirt, and looked around (with my one good eye).

  Right then, the Latvian vodka girl passed out. At first she was standing there beside us, empty glass in hand, the next moment she collapsed. Without a sound. A leaf falling from a tree, no more than that. The men leaned over her. Hands slapped her cheeks. Someone held a pepper mill under her nose. Someone else fetched a wet cloth from the bar and dabbed at her forehead. One eyelid was lifted, but all you could see was the white of her eye. I turned away quickly and dabbed automatically at my own eye.

  “A doctor,” someone said. “We need a doctor.”

  It was within the realm of possibility. I could have walked away. No one was paying attention to me anymore. I took a deep breath and looked at the sea. The fireworks had almost died down by now; the sea lay black and darkened beneath the black sky studded with stars. In the pauses between the bass notes you could hear the hissing of the surf.

  “I’m a doctor,” I said.

  I often wondered later on whether things would have turned out differently if the Latvian girl had remained on her feet. Whether I would have been in time. I added and subtracted the minutes, but never really found a clear answer. It was like after you’ve made some remark to someone. A terrible remark. At least that’s what you think: that it was terrible. You lie awake all night, running back through the conversation. But as the hours pass, the words become increasingly vague. The next day you summon up all your courage. Did I say something terrible to you last night? you ask. What on earth are you talking about? is the reply.

  The fact is that it took me fifteen minutes to bring the vodka girl back to her senses. I took her pulse, put my ear to her breast to hear whether she perhaps had fluid (vodka!) in her lungs. Between her breasts, I should say. It was a matter of life and death—I knew that from bitter experience. Girls her size—she couldn’t have weighed more than eighty-five pounds, I noted later when I lifted her from the sand—can die almost immediately from an alcohol overdose. The body doesn’t know where to put all that liquor. There’s no room for it. The heart works overtime and pumps the overdose around and around, but the blood only goes on racing desperately through the veins. There’s nowhere for it to go. After a while, the heart gives up. It pumps with less and less force. Finally, it stops. I had no time to wonder what the men leaning over us might think when I placed my ear between her breasts. They were little breasts that barely muffled the sound of the pounding heart. It was pounding slowly and laboriously. The final phase. Within the next five minutes it could stop. I placed my left arm under her head and raised it a little. At the same time I placed my right hand flat on her stomach. When I pressed my mouth against hers, I could taste the vodka. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I hadn’t used it often. One time with a drowned man, the father of three, at a campground. He had come down the giant slide, slammed the back of his head hard against the edge of the pool, then sank to the bottom right away. Another time was with an elderly writer in my office. While I was removing impacted wax from his ears, he lost consciousness. I remember it clearly: One moment I was staring at the metal bowl in my hand, at the black wad of earwax floating in the water, and the next, the writer had fallen on his side on the examining table. At that moment I thought again about the choices I make as a doctor. About who you help first. Sooner or later, every doctor is confronted with choices like that. Even though we would all deny it. In fact, they involve very simple considerations. Considerations you never talk about. The father of three has more right to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation than a writer whose work is more or less finished. Who is “over the hill,” as they say, without much chance that he’ll come up with anything new. When a ship is sinking, it’s the women and children who go to the boats first. In an ideal world, the old man would offer his place in the lifeboat to the young mother and her child. The old man is at the end of his biological rope. For a pretty young girl, it would be a waste to come all the way from Latvia to die of alcohol poisoning on some distant beach. I knew how it must have looked to the bystanders. They weren’t seeing a physician performing lifesaving maneuvers; they saw a grown man bending over a girl and pressing his lips to hers. His free hand hovers somewhere around her navel …

  I pinched her nose shut and blew air into her lungs. At the same time I pressed hard on her stomach. I only had to do it once, and everything came out. I didn’t even have time to take my lips off hers. A wave of vodka rushed into my mouth. And not just vodka. A noxious mixture of vodka, half-digested food, and gastric juices. I yanked her upright, to keep her from choking on her own vomit. I licked my lips and spit a few times in the sand. The rest gushed down over her stomach and legs. But she opened her eyes. She made noises. An indefinable noise at first, a gargling coming from deep down, like a blocked drain that has suddenly come unblocked. Then came sounds and words. Words in her own language, from the sound of it. Latvian. I stood up, took her wrists, and held her arms above her head. Air. Oxygen. What she needed most now was oxygen. A few of the men who had pinned Ralph, Stanley, and me to the ground a bit earlier now began applauding. Normally speaking, that’s always the finest moment. The doctor. The doctor has just saved someone’s life. For a few minutes he stands in the bright spotlight. The father of three came by the next day to give me a bottle of wine. It could have turned out much worse, they realize in a flash. After that they forget you again.

  The crowd parted when I made for the restaurant, my left eye still closed tight. A few people along the way patted me on the shoulder. Someone gave me the thumbs-up and winked. Words of praise were murmured in various languages. But what I felt most was a gnawing sense of discomfort. Maybe I had taken it all far too lightly, I realized now: the fact that my thirteen-year-old daughter had gone off to a beach club a mile away with a fifteen-year-old boy. I hadn’t wanted to be petty. True enough, I was irritated that Ralph hadn’t waited for me but simply given Alex and Julia permission. But I forgot about it again, right away. I’d had—and it was only with difficulty that I admitted this to myself—other things on my mind. Those other things had pushed into the background the fact that a thirteen-year-old girl had walked across a darkened stretch of beach to a club farther along. I tried not to let my imagination get the best of me. I did my utmost to make my imagination stop right there. Take care of this eye first, I told myself. With a painful, pounding, and swollen-shut eye, I was nothing but a semi-invalid. But once I had gone into that restroom and made a first attempt to look in the mirror, there was no stopping it. I thought the thin
gs every father thinks sooner or later. Every father with a daughter, that is. The dark stretch of beach. The dark stretch of park between school and home after the school party. There were a lot of drunken men walking around tonight. I thought about Alex. My daughter probably didn’t have much to worry about on that score. Alex was a sweet, rather sluggish boy who liked to hold her hand—and who knows: maybe more than that. But much too sweet and sluggish to be of much use when the drunken, nasty men tried to force themselves on my daughter. Somewhere along that dark stretch of beach or at the other club. I didn’t think about anything else. It didn’t seem likely to me that Julia would let herself go like the Latvian vodka girl. When we were on vacation and went to a restaurant, she was allowed to take a sip of our wine or beer. But it didn’t really interest her much. She would raise the glass to her lips and make a face, almost as though she was doing it more to please us than to please herself. No, I was thinking mostly of drunken, nasty men who would see a thirteen-year-old girl as easy prey. Dirty men. Like Ralph, it flashed through my mind.

  And I also thought about something else. I thought about Caroline. I’ve already talked about how I often play the role of the pushover father, the father with whom everything is allowed—well, maybe not everything, but in any case more than by the always-much-too-worried mother. That role suits me very well, as long as Caroline and I are both there. As soon as I’m on my own, though, panic descends. At an outdoor restaurant or in a department store, at a beach!—wherever there are lots of people, or perhaps even too few, or places that are too dimly lit, I keep looking around to make sure I haven’t lost them. A bit less often these days than when the girls were little, but still … That panic had two faces. The first face was the straightforward fear that something might happen at any moment: a ball rolling out onto a busy street, a child molester, a big wave that drags them out to sea. The second was Caroline’s face. Or rather, her voice. Why didn’t you take better care of them? the voice said. How could you leave them alone there with all that traffic? On occasion I’ve wondered whether I would be so panicky if I’d had to do it all alone. Really alone, I mean. A single father. A widower. But whenever that word popped up, the whole newsreel ground to a halt. My imagination would simply balk. Mustn’t think about that, I’d tell myself—and the fantasy fizzled and died.

  This time, too, I heard Caroline’s voice. How could you have let her go off alone with that boy to that beach club? I looked in the restroom mirror. Into my eye full of blood. I couldn’t do anything about it—that was how I formulated my answer in my thoughts. They were gone when I got there. Ralph and Judith said they could …

  It was way too spineless an answer, I knew that. A flimsy excuse for an answer.

  And even before Caroline’s voice had a chance to pronounce the next sentence—If I’d been there, none of this would have happened—I had made up my mind.

  The first thing I did, of course, was try her cell phone. When she’d started secondary school a year ago, we gave Julia a cell phone. For safety’s sake, we told ourselves. So she can always call us. And we can call her—we thought. But from the very start Julia showed great skill in turning her phone on only when it suited her. It was in my purse—I guess that’s why I didn’t hear it, she would say. Or: My battery was run down.

  So it didn’t surprise me at all when her phone, after ringing three times, switched directly to voice mail. Leaving a message was useless, I knew. She never, ever listened to her voice mail. It didn’t surprise me at all, but on the other hand, it didn’t really worry me, either. It was entirely possible that she hadn’t brought her cell phone with her, that she’d left it behind at the summer house. And if she did happen to have it with her, well then, this was the evening of all evenings not to turn it on. Out with a cute boy on the beach beneath the stars … What thirteen-year-old girl would want to be called by chronically nagging parents on a night like this?

  “Have you seen Judith?” I asked Lisa after I’d finally caught her attention and she came walking over to me with a sigh.

  “Who?” She wasn’t really listening; she never took her eyes off the boys playing soccer.

  “Judith. Thomas’s mother.”

  There was no reply. Her face was sweaty. She brushed a few strands of hair from in front of her eyes.

  “Lisa …”

  “What?”

  “I asked you something.”

  “Sorry, what was it?” Now she looked at me for the first time. “What’s with your eye, Dad?”

  I pinched my eye shut, then tried to open it. But it was no use. It started watering right away.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I have a … a thingamabob flew into it, a bug or something …”

  “Thomas’s mother is over there,” Lisa said, pointing across the stretch of beach they were using as a soccer field. There, where the beach sloped up right off the shoreline, Judith was sitting in the sand with her knees pulled up to her chest. She didn’t see me at first when I waved, but then she waved back.

  Go back to your game, I was about to say to Lisa, but she had already run off. I walked through the swarm of players to the other side.

  “Well, well,” she said. “Did you get to shoot off a lot of rockets?”

  She was smoking a cigarette. I put my hand in my pocket and fished out my own pack. I leaned down so she could give me a light.

  “I’m going over to the other club for a look,” I said. “See where Alex and Julia are.”

  I tried to adopt the most lighthearted tone possible, but maybe there was still a little anxiety in my voice.

  “Do you want me to come, too?” Judith asked.

  I took a drag of my cigarette. Less than five yards away from us the waves were pounding against the sand. Fine drops of seawater were atomized in my face. “I don’t know …” I nodded back over my shoulder, to where our younger two were playing soccer.

  “Oh, they’re not really paying any attention to us. There are so many people around. As long as they stay put …” She stood up. “I’ll go tell Thomas we’ll be right back. What’s with your eye?”

  The dark stretch of beach was less dark than I had imagined. Here and there, behind and on top of the dunes, were summer houses, their patios lit. After about ten minutes the drumbeats behind us faded and the sound of the beach club ahead grew louder. Different music: salsa, or in any case something South American. Judith had taken off her flip-flops and was carrying them in one hand.

  My fretfulness of a few minutes earlier had vanished just like that. I’d been worrying again for no reason, I told myself. What could happen here, for God’s sake? Little groups of people came past us every now and then, walking in the other direction; young people mostly, teenagers in bikinis and knee-length swimming trunks, the occasional closely intertwined couple who stopped to kiss every five yards or so.

  “Sorry I just walked away like that,” Judith said. “But I can’t stand it when Ralph acts that way. He’s like a big baby. Sometimes he forgets that he has children of his own. It makes me so angry when he acts that way around them.”

  I said nothing. I walked a little closer to her, so that our forearms brushed. I smelled something vague: sea air mixed with a hint of perfume or deodorant. It was only a matter of time, I knew. Or rather, a matter of timing. To grab her around the waist already would be taking things too fast. I estimated the distance to the lights of the other beach club. Ten minutes. Within ten minutes she would be all mine. But then I would have to be subtle about it. Not really subtle, of course: only subtle in her eyes.

  “I can’t help laughing sometimes, actually,” I said. “The way Ralph can completely lose himself in things. Whether he’s snorkeling or chopping a swordfish into pieces, he does it with the same kind of enthusiasm. The same kind of energy. Sometimes it almost makes me jealous. I don’t have that kind of energy.”

  Women complain about their men. All women. Sometimes they just need to air their grievances. But you should never join them in that. Never. You mustn’t
make them feel that they made the wrong choice. On the contrary. You have to defend the man who’s being criticized. By defending the man who is being criticized, you indirectly compliment the woman on her good taste.

  “Do you really feel that way?” Judith said. “Sometimes I find it so tiring. All that energy.”

  On the beach a little while back, after blasting the copper pan into the air, Ralph had called his wife a bellyacher. If you asked me, he was absolutely right. Judith was a bellyacher. Even back when they shot off the rockets in the yard at the summer house she had nagged and bitched about nothing. But she was pretty and she smelled nice. It wasn’t a good idea to marry a woman like Judith. If you did, you’d have to take your feet off the table every time she came in the house. You’d have to mow the lawn on time and not drink beer in bed. When you burped or farted she would adopt the same serious expression she’d worn when the pan was launched. But I wasn’t married to her. Fortunately. I had her only for this evening. Or at most for a few times after this, when we were all back from vacation.

  It was hard to admit it, even to myself—it may even have been half unconscious—but something about her bellyaching excited me. A woman who can’t laugh when men fart. Who, if she had the chance, would send those men out of the classroom. We would have to wait in the hall until we were called back in again. I could feel my cock in my shorts searching for space at this fantasy. I fought back the urge to grab her right then and there and toss her onto the sand without further ado. To take the initiative. A half rape—women always like that. All women.

  “I can imagine you might get tired of it,” I said. “On the other hand, you probably don’t get bored often with a husband like Ralph. I mean, he’s always coming up with something new.”