Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel

by Herman Koch

A trip might not “heal” Julia, but it could have a healing effect, we reasoned. Cathartic. Purging. Maybe, after a trip like that, we could start with a clean slate.

  We flew to Chicago. We rode the elevator to the top of the Sears Tower and looked out over the city and Lake Michigan. We took a downtown tour in an open double-decker bus. We had breakfast at a Starbucks. At night we ate at restaurants where they served Julia’s favorite food. Italian. Pasta. But even at the table she kept the white pods of her iPod in. It wasn’t that she shut herself off completely: She smiled gratefully when the plate of ravioli was put down in front of her and the waiter sprinkled grated cheese over it. She laid her head on Caroline’s shoulder and stroked her mother’s arm. The only thing was, she barely spoke. Sometimes she hummed along with a song on her iPod. Normally speaking, we would have said something. “We’re at the table now, Julia. You can listen to music later.” But we didn’t. She should do whatever she feels like, we thought. Apparently it’s still too early for that clean slate.

  We drove west in our rental car, a white Chevrolet Malibu. We saw the countryside grow barer and emptier. In the backseat, Lisa shrieked in excitement when we saw our first cowboy and our first bison. But Julia kept her earbuds in. To make contact, we had to shout. “Look, Julia!” we shouted. “Up on that rock. A vulture.” Then she would pull one bud out of her ear. “What did you say?” “A vulture. Over there. Oh, no, he flew away.” At Badlands National Park we saw signs warning about rattlesnakes. At Mount Rushmore we took pictures of the sculpted heads of the four American presidents. That is to say, Lisa took the pictures. She was the one with the camera. I’ve never had the patience to take pictures, Caroline took photos when the kids were little, but stopped after that. Lisa enjoyed it. She started taking photographs when she was about nine. At first mostly vacation snapshots of butterflies and flowers, but later our family began appearing more often in her pictures.

  Julia did her best. She summoned up a smile for each photo. But it was as though she was doing it for us. As though she felt guilty about her own gloominess. At Custer State Park, where we rented a log cabin for a few days, she actually apologized. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m probably not the best company.” We were sitting outside the log cabin, at a picnic table beside the barbecue, where the steaks and hamburgers were hissing and steaming. “Don’t be silly, Julia,” Caroline said. “You’re the sweetest, nicest daughter we have. All you have to do is what you really feel like doing. Come on, we’re on vacation.”

  Lisa was standing at the barbecue, flipping the meat. “And what about me?” she shouted. “Am I the sweetest and the nicest, too?”

  “Of course,” Caroline said. “You, too. Both of you. Together you’re the loveliest thing I’ve got.”

  I looked at my wife. She bit her lower lip and rubbed her eyes. After a few moments she stood up. “I’ll go see whether there’s any more wine,” she said.

  “There’s wine here, Mom!” Lisa shouted. “It’s right here on the table!”

  In Deadwood we ate at Jakes, Kevin Costner’s restaurant. All through the meal a pianist played loudly on the grand piano, making a normal conversation almost impossible. Julia kept her earbuds in, took two bites, then pushed her plate away. In Cody we went to a rodeo. At Yellowstone National Park we saw even more bison, as well as moose and different types of deer. We climbed out at a spot where a lot of cars had parked along the side of the narrow road. People with binoculars were pointing at the hill on the far side of a stream. “A bear,” a man said. “But he just disappeared behind those trees.” We parked at Old Faithful, the geyser that blows its white, foamy plume into the air every fifty minutes. “Ooooh!” Lisa cried when the geyser blew. Julia smiled and swayed her head to the music from her iPod.

  We headed south. We saw our first Indians. We drove through Monument Valley and stopped at an almost-deserted parking lot where there was an American flag and a silvery trailer where they sold Indian bric-a-brac. “Don’t you want to come out and take a look?” Caroline asked Julia, who had remained in the backseat. But Julia just shook her head and rubbed her eyes. “Shall I come and sit with you?” Caroline asked.

  At Kayenta we were told that the entire Navajo Indian reservation was dry; you couldn’t get a drop of alcohol anywhere. Not with dinner, but also not at the supermarket. “It’s like Iran,” Caroline said, taking a sip of her Coke. “But right in the middle of America.”

  At the first lookout point along the Grand Canyon, Julia began crying. I was alone with her just then. Caroline and Lisa had disappeared into a brick restroom. We were standing at the edge, on a little, unfenced promontory, far away from the larger groups of tourists. “Look at that,” I said, pointing to a bird of prey, an eagle probably, that had come soaring by within five yards of us, silently, on motionless wings. “Do you want to go back to the car?” I asked. I looked over, and only then did I see that Julia had taken out her earbuds. She wasn’t making a sound, the tears were simply running down her cheeks.

  “I can’t even see how beautiful it is anymore,” she said.

  I felt a cold shiver down my spine. I stepped toward her and held out my hand. I did it very carefully—I tried to get hold of only her wrist. Ever since the last time I’d examined her, about eight months before, she had done her best to avoid all physical contact with me. I thought it would go away by itself after a while, but it didn’t. Whenever I held out my hand to her, she turned away immediately—during this trip, we hadn’t touched each other even once. “That’s okay, you don’t have to,” I said. “You don’t have to think it’s beautiful now.”

  I took her hand. We stood there like that for a moment, then she looked down, at her father’s hand holding hers, and shook it off. She turned around and walked back up the path, toward the restrooms, where Caroline and Lisa were just coming out. When she saw her mother, Julia quickened her pace. The last bit she ran. Then she threw herself into Caroline’s arms.

  That evening we stopped for the night in Williams, a town along old Route 66. We ate outside, on the patio of a Mexican restaurant. Caroline and I drank margaritas. While we were having appetizers, a cowboy came out onto the patio with a guitar. A few yards from our table he put down a soapbox and climbed onto it. I looked at Julia as the cowboy started in on his first song. Her enchilada was still lying untouched on her plate. She had taken out her earbuds and was looking at the cowboy. In her eyes I saw the same look as the one with which she had viewed the Grand Canyon that afternoon.

  The hotel was close to the railroad tracks. I lay awake in the dark and listened to the freight trains that passed every half hour. You could hear them coming from a distance, first the whistle: a wailing sound like the call of an owl, or of an animal lost in the night. The trains were endlessly long. I tried to count the cars, but with every train that passed I forgot to keep counting halfway through. I thought about the Grand Canyon and the singing cowboy. About Julia’s fit of weeping and the look in her eyes, back at the Mexican restaurant.

  “Marc?” I felt Caroline’s hand on the back of my neck. “What is it?”

  “Are you still awake? You should try to get some sleep.”

  Caroline’s hand had reached my face by then; her fingers touched my cheeks. “Marc, what’s wrong?”

  I had to clear my throat to make my voice sound normal. “Oh, nothing. I was just lying here listening to the trains. Hear that? Here comes another one …”

  Caroline moved up against my back. She placed one arm under my head and put the other around my chest. “You don’t have to be sad. I mean, of course you can be sad. I’m sad, too. But have you seen that she doesn’t have her iPod in all the time anymore? She’s starting to look around again. Just this evening, in the restaurant. There really is something changing, Marc.”

  I don’t believe it for a minute, I felt like saying. But I didn’t. I lay there for a while, completely quiet, and counted the boxcars. “I think I can probably go back to sleep now,” I said.

  In Las Vegas we spen
t most of the time in the deck chairs beside one of the many pools at the Hotel Tropicana. Caroline and I drank even more margaritas. During happy hour we sometimes ordered as many as four in a row. We threw a few dollar coins into the one-armed bandits. In the evening we strolled the neon-lit streets, past the casinos. We looked at the fountains in front of the Bellagio Hotel, as they performed a water ballet to music. By that time the margaritas had worn off; I listened to the pounding in my head and didn’t dare look over at my older daughter. Caroline held Julia’s hand. Lisa cried “Oooh” and “Aaah” at every new flourish of water, and took photos. I bought us all ice cream and Coke at a sidewalk stand, but even the Coke couldn’t make my tongue any less dry.

  “Maybe we should do something different,” Caroline said later, in bed. The girls had a room of their own beside ours. I was staring at a poker tournament on TV.

  “Oh yeah?” I said. I raised the little can of Budweiser I’d taken from the minibar and emptied it in one swig.

  “Something restful,” Caroline said. “Maybe it was a bad idea, taking this trip. Maybe there are just too many new impressions for her, all at the same time.”

  I suddenly felt my eyes sting. “Oh, damn it,” I said.

  “Marc! Is that the only way you can deal with it, to sit around knocking them back all day? This is about our daughter. About her sorrow. Not about ours.”

  “What?” I said, much louder than I’d planned. I wiped the tears from my face. “Listen, who’s knocking them back around here? You haven’t quite been avoiding those margaritas yourself. Even though you can’t hold your liquor at all. Not at all! You should see yourself. And hear yourself! That fake, cheerful tone of yours. Lisa winked at me this afternoon, when you were sitting there in your deck chair giggling again, when you knocked over that whole fucking bowl of popcorn. I mean, Julia doesn’t say anything, but do you think it’s fun for her to have to see her mother sloshed all day long?”

  “Me? Me sloshed? Marc, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Julia is old enough by now. She knows damn well that her mother sometimes acts a little giddy when she’s had a few. Why else would she always walk beside me and hold my hand? With you it’s different. You undergo a personality change when you’ve been drinking. She’s really scared of you then.”

  I felt the air disappear from my lungs, as though my chest had suddenly imploded. “If she’s scared of me, then it’s because of you!” I climbed off the bed and hurled the empty beer can at the wall. “Because you can’t come up with anything except to play the nice mother. The nice mother who’s oh so understanding of her little girl who’s been raped. You know as well as I do that before last summer she could hardly stand you, you with your constant harping about what time she had to be home. That she always thought I was a lot nicer than you. Jesus Christ, that kind of behavior makes me puke. Sometimes, deep down inside, I think you’re happy to finally be able to play mother hen to your poor, miserable raped daughter. But she’s not a little girl anymore, Caroline, you’re not doing her a favor by mothering her. All you’re doing is pushing her down deeper into her own mire!”

  Someone pounded on the wall. We both covered our mouths with our hands and looked at each other in horror.

  “Quiet over there!” we heard Lisa shout. “We can’t sleep!”

  During the last week we rented an apartment in Goleta, a seaside suburb of Santa Barbara. We ate crab at the pier. Lisa photographed the huge seagulls that swooped down brazenly onto the wooden tables and made off with the leftovers. We sauntered down the shopping streets. Julia bought herself a blouse. Then she bought a pair of Nikes. Sometimes I would wait outside after she had grabbed her mother’s hand and pulled her into yet another boutique.

  But every once in a while she laughed, too. More and more often. Real laughter now. At the apartment she spent a long time in front of the mirror, then came to show us her new purchases. “Yeah, does it really look good on me?” she asked. “Isn’t it a little too tight around the shoulders?”

  Lisa took pictures of Julia posing on the balcony in one of her new outfits. She raised her leg and rested her heel against one of the low iron railings. She put on her new sunglasses, then slid them up onto her hair like a barrette. Lisa squatted down, the camera glued to her left eye. “Now look into the sun,” she said. “And now look back at me … Right, like that … that look … Just keep looking like that.”

  On one of our last days there we went out for Mexican one last time, at a restaurant with a patio dotted with palms and cacti, not far from the beach.

  “A margarita?” I asked Caroline.

  “I guess one couldn’t hurt,” my wife replied, winking at me.

  Later there was a parade down the main street of town. Our daughters elbowed their way through the crowd to get a better look, while we stayed back a bit, on the sidewalk—without losing sight of them for a moment.

  “You’re right, it was a bad idea,” I said.

  My wife tilted her head to one side and laid it against my shoulder. I felt the warmth of her hair against my cheek.

  “It sure was,” she said.

  One Sunday, a few weeks after we got home, I looked at the photos Lisa had taken in America. I had transferred the entire contents of the camera to the hard drive of my laptop. Then I clicked through them, from back to front. The most recent photos first, and then further and further back to the start of our trip.

  Let me say right now that it was no accident, my going through them in that order. There was something I feared—I didn’t quite dare to admit it to myself—but what I feared were the photos from the beginning of the vacation. Or rather, the photos taken around the time Julia had wept at the Grand Canyon.

  I clicked a little more quickly past the pictures of the illuminated casinos on the Strip in Las Vegas. There was one of the singing cowboy on the patio of the Mexican restaurant in Williams. There were pictures of Caroline and me drinking our margaritas through straws and waving cheerfully at the photographer. In the next picture, Julia stared straight into the lens. On the plate in front of her lay her enchilada, untouched. I forced myself to look my older daughter straight in the eye. I saw what I was afraid to see. But I also saw something else. Before what happened at the summer house, Julia had had a different look in her eye. Uninhibited. Undamaged, I corrected myself right away. That was how I viewed the damaged look in my daughter’s eyes, while I tried to think about nothing. I knew I would be lost as soon as I thought about anything.

  I closed my eyes and pressed my fingertips hard against my eyelids. For thirty seconds, maybe longer. Then I opened my eyes again. I looked again. And now I saw something different. It was impossible not to see it.

  Julia had always been a pretty girl. An uninhibited, pretty girl, that’s right, a girl some grown-up men turned their heads to watch when she walked by. But on the patio of that Mexican restaurant she looked anything but uninhibited. It wasn’t even a sad look that I saw in my daughter’s eyes. It was a grave look. Julia was fourteen now. She no longer looked into the camera as a girl, but as a young woman. A young woman with eyes that had seen things. That knew things. It made her even prettier. She had changed from a normal, pretty girl into a dazzling beauty.

  I clicked further back in time. I saw dry, empty landscapes with cacti. Gas stations and Burger Kings. Endless freight trains. There was a photograph of Caroline, Julia, and me sitting at a wooden picnic table at the viewpoint on the Grand Canyon. It must have been taken just before Julia’s crying jag. I can’t even see how beautiful it is anymore—that’s what she’d said. But in her face I already saw the first signs of the change that had become definitive by the time of the patio in Williams. Even further back, posing in front of the presidential profiles at Mount Rushmore, she had looked at the camera almost searchingly. Really searchingly, as though she were looking for something. Maybe she was looking for herself, it occurred to me now.

  The photo series ended with the skyscrapers of Chicago, the view of Lake Michigan from
the Sears Tower. At least I thought it did. But there was more. After a photo of a departures screen at Schiphol, zoomed in on our destination (KL 0611–Chicago–11.35–C14), there was suddenly a picture of a flower. Some kind of flower, not one I knew the name of myself, taken from very close up. At the bottom of the screen I saw that this was photograph number sixty-nine. Sixty-eight more to go before the first … I clicked again: a picture of a butterfly on a white wall, and then a portrait of a cow. It was a brown cow, with a thick copper ring through its nose.

  I knew it even before I clicked further back. I could tell by the way I was breathing. It was a camera with a memory large enough for more than a thousand pictures. Lisa had taken at least three hundred in America. Plus another sixty-nine during our vacation before that. At the summer house. And apparently not a single photograph in the entire year between the two summer vacations.

  A few photos back in time I saw my own face at a breakfast table. The breakfast table at the little hotel in the mountains. My half-open, bloodshot eye on the morning that I had operated on myself in front of the mirror. I hesitated for a moment about clicking further back. These were the pictures I had never wanted to see. Or, to put it more accurately, the pictures whose existence I had denied. I had never wanted to look at them: at normal vacation pictures that would never be normal again because you knew what had happened afterward. Carefree vacation pictures in which everything, as they say, is peachy-keen. Your own thirteen-year-old daughter on a green inflatable crocodile in a pool. Your laughing daughter—back then, still.

  But now everything was different, because of what I’d seen in the pictures taken in America. Now I wanted to see with my own eyes whether it was true: whether one year ago Julia had still been a girl, but now wasn’t anymore. So I kept clicking back. I saw Julia sharing a deck chair with Alex, each of them with one white earbud. I saw Ralph chopping the fish into pieces. Ralph and Alex and Thomas at the Ping-Pong table. Julia and Alex up to their waists in the sea at one of the remote beaches, Julia waving at the camera, Alex with his arm around her. Caroline lying on her stomach, asleep on a beach blanket, Judith posing with a tray full of glasses and a pitcher of red lemonade. I saw myself as well, down on my knees, digging a trench in the sand; I wasn’t even looking at the photographer, that’s how absorbed I was in my work. Then came the pictures of the hosing-down at the pool: the afternoon of the Miss Wet T-shirt contest. I spent a bit more time looking at a picture of Julia on the diving board. She had adopted the pose of the consummate fashion model, looking into the lens with eyes closed to slits while the water from the garden hose spattered against her stomach. Consummate was indeed the right word for it. Professional. But it was a make-believe professionalism. One year ago she only did a very good imitation of the models in magazines. Now, one year later, she “did” nothing at all. Nothing extra.