by Herman Koch
They had all given us as much room and asked as few questions as possible. Judith … After she brought Thomas and Lisa to bed, Judith had come down and asked something. Whether Julia knew anything. She’s still in shock, we answered. She doesn’t know. Her memory is probably blocked, I’d said; it happens often with things like this. We were whispering. And when Julia opened her eyes partway, we stopped. Emmanuelle hadn’t asked any questions. Stanley hadn’t, either, later on. It was quite possible that Judith had told Ralph what she’d heard. But even then … Was it likely that Ralph would have sat down beside me with a bottle of whisky if he knew that it was only a matter of time before Julia identified the man who had attacked her?
Unless … my temples started pounding. Unless Julia was already unconscious at the time … You read about things like that. That they put something in your drink when you’re not looking. A pill that makes girls get drunk faster. That makes them giggly. More accommodating. Or that knocks them out altogether. That makes them throw caution to the wind and go along with a man they shouldn’t go along with. Sometimes the combination of alcohol and pills is too much and they lose consciousness.
I tried not to think about it, but I did, anyway. A man—a grown man probably—who takes advantage of an unconscious thirteen-year-old girl. Sick, people say. A person like that is sick. But that’s not it. It’s not a sickness. Sicknesses can be cured, or at least treated. This was something different. A defect. A design glitch. A bottle of fizzy drink explodes and is taken off the shelves. That’s what should happen to men like that. No treatment. More like a factory recall. The whole batch is destroyed. No burial. No cremation. We wouldn’t want the ash, the residue to mix with the air we breathe.
I blinked my eyes. Only my right eye, I realized right away. I hadn’t stopped to think about it, but after coming back from the beach, I hadn’t been able to open my left eye anymore. It didn’t hurt—no, it was just closed tight. First I tried to raise my eyelid in the normal fashion, but when that didn’t work I pulled carefully on the lashes. I rubbed the closed eyelid, pressed against it with my knuckles, but the eye remained shut. That was not a good sign, I knew. Before we climbed into the car in a couple of hours, I was going to have an unpleasant task on my hands. What’s with your eye? almost everyone had asked me by now. Do you want me to take a look at your eye? Caroline had asked as the one and only. No, I’d snapped.
I looked over at the big body of the actor beside me. He was leaning over now, resting his elbows on his thighs, his head in his hands. The first twenty-four hours are crucial, Caroline had said. I had to do something. Something I couldn’t do later. Later he would have had enough time to think. To choose his answers carefully. Now it was five in the morning and he had downed half a bottle of whisky.
“What was going through your mind, exactly, when you twisted that girl’s arm and put her in the sand?” I asked calmly.
There was a silence for a few seconds.
“Excuse me?” he said. “What did you say?”
“I asked what you were thinking. When you tried to kick that Norwegian girl.”
He snorted loudly. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. I looked back. I held his gaze, as they say. With only one eye, of course, but it was my good eye. I did my best to hold his gaze. I tried not to blink.
“Are you dicking with me, or what?” He grinned, but I didn’t grin back.
“Is that your standard reaction when a woman, or in this case a girl, rejects you? To beat her brains out? Or kick her into the emergency room?”
“Marc! Come on! Who did the kicking around here? I mean, listen to who’s talking! Kick her into the emergency room …” He rubbed his knee again, with a face supposedly contorted with pain. I saw what he was doing. He was trying to turn things around and at the same time laugh it off, but he didn’t entirely succeed. I saw it in his look, in his watery eyes—like a frozen pond with a thin layer of water on top: Beneath the skim of water the ice is as hard as rock. I suddenly knew where I’d seen that look before: during Ping-Pong games, when he tried to smash the ball. And also that time when he had slipped and fallen, during the first few seconds, when no one dared to laugh: All he felt was pain and he hadn’t yet decided how to react.
“Julia told me,” I said. “About what you did.”
I looked him right in the eye as I said it. Through the water, I was looking at the ice. I was testing to see how thick it was.
“What are you talking about?”
“You know very well what I’m talking about, Ralph. I’ve seen how you look at women. At all women, regardless of their age. And tonight I also saw how you react when those women don’t do exactly what you want.”
There was no body language this time. Unless you can call the absence of body language body language, too. He stared at me, unruffled.
“What did Julia tell you?” he asked.
“That you pulled down her bikini bottoms. And that she didn’t like that at all.”
“What? Did she say that? Damn it …” He brought his fist down on his knee. “That was a game, Marc! A game! We were all pulling down each other’s swimsuits. Alex, Thomas, Lisa … Julia, too. She pulled down my trunks. We almost died laughing. The one who got tagged had to dive in the pool and fetch a coin. Jesus Christ! A game. And now she’s saying … Is she saying that I …? Oh, please no, where the hell does that come from?”
Deep inside my chest, my heart had started pounding. Fast and heavy. But I couldn’t let it show. I had to go on.
“Do you think that’s normal, Ralph? Do you think it’s normal when a grown man pulls down little girls’ pants? I mean, maybe a couple of days ago I might have thought it was normal, but after tonight on the beach, not anymore.”
Now something shifted in Ralph’s look. The moisture in his eyes seemed to have dried up just like that. In the whites I saw only the red branches of burst blood vessels.
“What are you trying to say, Marc? Are you trying to make something dirty out of something normal? Just because your daughter’s hormones are starting to act up and she suddenly feels bad about a game that she never, not for a single second, let on that she didn’t like? I swear, I would have stopped immediately as soon as I noticed that it bothered her. I swear.”
I gulped something down. But there was nothing to gulp. My mouth was dry.
“What did you say?” I asked. “What was that about hormones?”
“Anybody can see that! Jesus, Marc! Alex was the first victim. First she teases him for days and finally she drops him, anyway. And then she goes running to Daddy to complain about some innocent game. Come on, you’re her father. You’ve got eyes in your head.”
All I did was store up this new information: Had Julia given Alex the shaft? Since when? Yesterday evening they were still in love. Apparently something had happened at that other beach club that I didn’t know about. But first I had to concentrate on Ralph.
“You keep talking about innocent games,” I said. “But how innocent is it when Julia is actually already a woman? Or at least a girl whose hormones are acting up, as you put it. I mean, let me put it this way: Emmanuelle. Did Emmanuelle take part in your little game, too? Did you pull down her pants, too? Did she have to dive and fetch a coin after you yanked down her bikini bottoms?”
Ralph sprang to his feet. His chair crashed over backward. He took one faltering step and turned. Now he was standing right in front of me, less than two feet away. He pointed a thick finger at me. The fingertip almost touched my nose.
On the one hand, I was afraid. Afraid he was going to do something to me. On the other, I couldn’t have cared less. Ralph was drunk. If he hit me he would knock me out right away, and I wouldn’t notice much after that.
“You know what it is?” he said, and I felt a few drops of saliva hit my face. “You ought to ask yourself who the real degenerate is around here. You’re the one who starts thinking about dirty stuff when we’re talking about a game. Not me. I can see how your daughter plays the
innocent little girl when it suits her. When she goes crying to Daddy. But she already knows exactly how to handle men, Marc. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. How she flirts and gets everyone going with her cute little dance steps on the diving board. With her little smiles. The way she walks around! I mean, who knows exactly what happened at that club. Who knows who she was enticing with her little fashion model tricks. Maybe Daddy’s blind to it, but every man turns his head when your sweet little daughter walks past. Maybe you don’t want to see that. Maybe you want her to stay your little girl forever and ever, but your little girl has already grown up, Marc! And she’s just as crafty as the rest of them!”
Now it was my turn to get up from my chair. Placid on the outside. Calmly, without knocking the chair over. But inside I was ready for anything. Ralph was bigger and stronger than me. I would lose. But I could damage him first. For life. I was no fighter, but I knew the weak spots like no other. I knew how to destroy a human body with a few simple interventions.
“What did you say?” I tried to make my voice sound calm, too, but there was a quiver to it. “What was that about how Julia walks around? Are you trying to say that it’s her own fault, what happened to her? The way it’s ultimately every woman’s own fault? Because of the way they walk around?”
A window slid open above our heads. The kitchen window, we saw when we looked up.
“Could you two keep it down a little?” Judith said. “They can hear you a mile away.”
We drove north. First along the little coastal roads till we reached the highway. Lisa had fallen asleep in the passenger seat, her body hanging limply in the safety belt, her head leaning at an uncomfortable-looking angle against the car window. Caroline and Julia were asleep as well, I saw in the mirror. We had laid Julia on the backseat, under a sleeping bag, with her head in Caroline’s lap. When we lifted her into the car she had woken up for a while, but for the last two hours she’d been sleeping like a log.
It was a Sunday morning, traffic was light. But driving with one eye still took a fair bit of effort. I could see the other cars, but it was hard to tell how far away they were. I knew all about it, I’d read about it, at medical school they’d talked about it: You lost your ability to perceive depth. I had never known exactly what I was supposed to imagine by that, but now I did. It’s not like when you just close one eye for a bit. Then the other eye remembers depth for a while; it takes about half a day for the world to go flat. As flat as a photograph—there’s perspective, but no movement. Experience is all you have to help you get by. You know the dimensions of a car. Experience tells you that a car that’s small at first but quickly becomes bigger is probably coming in your direction.
It was already light out. The sun flared on the road’s white concrete slabs. I longed for my sunglasses, but was afraid my vision would only get worse if I put them on. The next exit had a gas station, and I took it. There was enough in the tank, but I needed to get something into my stomach. A cup of coffee. And a sandwich or a chocolate bar.
Caroline nodded groggily when I stopped the car, then opened her eyes. I gestured to her to climb out. She carefully pulled the sleeping bag off Julia, rolled it up into a pillow, and stuffed it under her head.
“I have to pee,” I said. “And then I’m going to get something to eat and drink. Do you want anything?”
Caroline rubbed the sleep from her eyes. She shook her head.
“I’ve been thinking,” I whispered. “We could drive home in one shot, but maybe that’s not a good idea. I mean, we have to stop somewhere along the way, anyway—I can’t keep this up all day. So I was thinking, aren’t we just making it a whole lot worse by going home right away? We could stop at a hotel somewhere. Along the coast. Or in the mountains. Do something nice first. For later. So she has some good memories, too, not just the nasty ones.”
I had spent the last two hours thinking. In particular about something that happened to me when I was young. I was wondering whether I could keep driving. Whether that was wise, considering the quantity of alcohol still in my blood and the way my head was buzzing from lack of sleep. I had to take care of my family. I couldn’t drive us off the road. But I might fall asleep at the wheel at any moment. I knew the symptoms. You start blinking your eyes and the next moment something has disappeared—a billboard on a hill, a mansion surrounded by cypresses, a skinny donkey behind a stretch of barbed wire. You’ve been asleep. For no more than three seconds, maybe, but you’ve been asleep. From one moment to the next, the billboard and the donkey have vanished. It would get only a short mention in the newspaper. On page two. Dutch family … through the guardrail and into oncoming traffic …
When I was about thirteen, my father gave me my first driving lessons. We started off in a parking lot, but before long we took the car out onto the road. Some people don’t like driving. Under normal circumstances I enjoy it a lot, and I always will. And the foundation for that love of driving, I’m absolutely sure, was established when I was thirteen.
One afternoon we were going down a narrow, winding road through the woods of eastern Holland. I was behind the wheel; my father was sitting next to me and my mother was in the back. We came up to a sharp left-hand bend in the road. By that time I had already reached the point where driving had become completely automatic. That’s the dangerous phase, when concentration flags. A car came from the other direction, but I saw it too late. I yanked on the wheel and we swerved to the right. We went off the road. The shoulder was fairly steep, and I was able to avoid the trees, but finally we came to a halt with a bang against a wooden picnic table. My father climbed out and inspected the damage. Then he took over from me at the wheel and drove the car back up onto the road.
I thought that was it, that he would keep driving, but he stopped and climbed out again.
“It’s all yours,” he said.
“I don’t know …” I squealed; my forehead and the palms of my hands were covered in sweat. There was only one thing I knew for sure, and that was that I never wanted to drive a car again.
“You have to go on now, it’s important,” my father said. “Otherwise you’ll be afraid to later on.”
That was what I had thought about during the first hours after we left the summer house. I thought about Julia and the risks of a vacation cut short halfway through. We had driven more than eighty miles by then; we were far enough away—but it was still a long drive home. At home there were people. Friends and family who would ask questions. Both answering and avoiding those questions would cause a certain degree of damage. Here, there was just the four of us. Maybe it was better to stay with just the four of us for a little while.
“I don’t know,” Caroline said. We were standing beside the car. We looked through the rear door, which was still half open, at our daughter asleep on the backseat. I laid a hand on my wife’s shoulder. I brushed her hair back with my fingers.
“I don’t know, either,” I said. “It was just an idea. A feeling. But to be honest, I really don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you. It’s your call.”
Two hours ago I had woken Caroline gently. “We have to get going,” I’d said. “I’ll explain later.” Caroline went upstairs and got Lisa out of bed. We let Stanley and Emmanuelle sleep on. “The tent will get back to us at some point,” I’d said. “We’re not going to use it now, anyway.” We didn’t see anyone around the house. They were all asleep. Ralph was probably still awake, but he didn’t come out, either, when I started the car and rolled it down the little dirt drive to the road.
I was just about to turn onto the asphalt when I saw something moving in my rearview mirror. I braked and took a good look. Judith’s mother was standing at the top of the outside steps. She was waving. Or rather, she was gesturing with her arm for us to stop. The next moment I saw her, still in my mirror, coming down the steps. I thought I heard her shout something. Then I touched the accelerator and drove away.
The little hotel was beside a mountain stream with a water mill. Farther down in t
he valley, brown cows grazed among the trees. The bells around their necks clanked softly, fat bumblebees zoomed from flower to flower, the stream gurgled across the rocks. Here and there along the mountaintops in the distance you could see white patches of snow.
That first day Julia stayed in her room. Occasionally she woke up, and all she wanted was something to drink: She wasn’t hungry. Caroline and I took turns sitting with her. The first evening, Lisa and I stayed in the dining room together. She asked me what was wrong with her big sister; I told her I would explain it all later, some other time, that it had to do with what girls have sometimes when they grow up.
“Is she going to have her period?” Lisa asked.
When I woke up the next morning, my eye was throbbing. I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Beneath the lid was a bump the size of an egg. The skin on my eyelid was stretched to the limit and had taken on the color of a mosquito bite, with a few dark spots here and there. My eyelashes were clogged shut with dried yellow pus. The whole thing pulsed and pounded—like an abscessed finger. That’s what it was, too, I knew: an abscess. An untreated sore, even on a fingertip, could lead to blood poisoning and amputation. If the pressure on the retina became too great, it would tear. Under great pressure, pus and blood inside the eyeball would search for a way out. By that time, the eye itself would be more or less a write-off.
“I need you to take Julia downstairs in a little while,” I whispered to Caroline. “I don’t want her to stay here.”
I was holding a washcloth to my eye, so my wife couldn’t see anything.
“Do you want me to help?”
