Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel

by Herman Koch

  At the next photo, my heart suddenly began to race. There I was at the kitchen window, beside Judith. We weren’t looking at the photographer, we were looking at each other. In the background you could vaguely see a third person. Her mother. During what must have been about five seconds, my finger hovered above the delete key. Then I decided that this would not be a good idea. Who knows who might have seen these pictures already. Lisa, in any case; perhaps she had already copied them to the computer she shared with Julia. A deleted photo would probably be more conspicuous than one in which you couldn’t actually see that much. I took a good look now. The picture was taken from too far away: You couldn’t see how Judith and I were looking at each other.

  There was one photo of the little bird that had fallen from the tree, in its cardboard box. It was huddled up in a corner, against the water dish and the washcloth. It was a picture, a still image, but I could almost see it shiver. Next came a few photos that seemed to have been taken at night, in the tent, when Caroline and I were already asleep. In the beam of light, probably from a flashlight, Julia was making shadow figures on the canvas with her fingers. A rabbit. A snake. I’d been able to hold it back till now, but suddenly I felt my eyes growing wet. I clicked on quickly.

  More pictures from beside the pool. Julia, her knees pulled up, on a deck chair. Julia sitting on the edge of the pool. In one picture she was wearing her bikini; in the next she had a towel slung over one shoulder in a way that made it look more like an article of clothing (a vest, a shawl) than a towel. There were a number of photos like that. It took a few seconds before I realized what I was looking at.

  Julia was posing. She was posing with different articles of clothing, or at least she was pretending to be posing with different articles of clothing. But in none of the pictures was she looking into the lens. Not at the photographer. Not at Lisa.

  Julia was looking at something else. At someone outside the frame of the photo.

  I quickly clicked further back. At last, in the final three photos, you could see who she was posing for. He was squatting in front of her while she stood under the shower beside the pool. She had one leg raised in an unmistakable pose, her sunglasses pushed up onto her wet hair, and she was looking provocatively at the photographer squatting in front of her. He held his camera pressed against his eye, just like in the next two photos.

  Stanley Forbes was grinning broadly as he photographed my daughter in the shower. In the next two photos he just looked as though he was concentrating deeply. In one of them Julia had dropped the top of her bikini and was holding her hands in front of her breasts in mock shame. In the other she was smoking a cigarette. She blew the smoke into the photographer’s face in close-up.

  “Lisa, could you come here?”

  My younger daughter was lying on the bed in our room, watching a South Park DVD. She gestured to me to be quiet, until she saw my face. She picked up the remote, hit Pause, and got up off the bed.

  “What were you two doing here?” I asked, letting the poolside photos pass one by one. I was doing my best not to sound alarmed, but I could almost hear my own heart pounding.

  “That’s Stanley,” Lisa said.

  “Yes, I can see that. But what were you doing? What was he doing?”

  “He took pictures of Julia. He told her she could work as a fashion model, no problem. He was going to make a whole series of her and then send them around in America. To Vogue, I think that’s what he said. He took pictures of me, too.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “What are you telling me, Lisa?”

  “Daddy, what’s wrong? Why do you look like that? He made a whole series of me, too. He said that fashion magazines are always looking for pretty young girls. He said that was how Emmanuelle got started. That he’d made a whole bunch of photos of her first, and that then she got famous.”

  “Lisa, I want you to look at me. And I don’t want you to lie to me. What kind of pictures did he take?”

  “Don’t be weird, Dad. Julia and I are both friends with Stanley on Facebook. We sent those last pictures to him, too. He asked us to.”

  “Wait a minute. Last pictures? Which last pictures?”

  “The ones from America, Dad. He asks us all the time whether we have new pictures of ourselves, so we sent him the vacation pictures. The ones with us in them, of course. Well, it’s mostly Julia, because I took most of them. Stanley’s really famous. He says we just have to be patient, but that later maybe both of us can be models. In America, Daddy. In America!”

  I waited. But I didn’t wait too long. The time difference with California was nine hours. Stanley had given me his number back at the summer house. If I was ever in the neighborhood of Santa Barbara, I should give him a ring, he’d said. A few months ago I had indeed been in the neighborhood of Santa Barbara. But by then things had already happened. It had seemed to me better for Julia, for all of us, not to get in touch with the film director.

  At five P.M. Dutch time I dialed his number. It was eight A.M. in Santa Barbara. For the element of surprise, the best thing was to wake Stanley Forbes with my call.

  “Stanley …” He’d answered almost immediately, and he sounded far from sleepy, I noted to my regret.

  “This is Marc,” I said. “Marc Schlosser.”

  “Marc! Where are you? Long time no see. Are you in town? Are you coming by?”

  “I know about the pictures, Stanley. The pictures you took of my daughters.”

  There was a few seconds’ silence. A fraction longer than the normal silences that always punctuate an international call.

  “Aw, that’s too bad,” he said. “They wanted it to be a surprise for the two of you. Especially Julia.”

  Now it was my turn to be silent for a second longer.

  “Marc? You still there? Listen, now that you know, anyway, take a look at my website. I put a selection on there. A selection from the series I made beside the pool.”

  “Actually, I’m calling about something else, Stanley. I’m calling because I’d really like to know where you were that night, at the midsummer party. After Ralph tried to beat up that girl. I lost track of you after that. Until you came back to the summer house, really late. Did you go wandering around the beach that evening, Stanley? Did you perhaps go looking for one of your models?”

  I was taking it too fast, I realized too late. I shouldn’t have accused him right away. I should have given him more rope. Stanley Forbes was a grown man—a dirty old grown man, I heard myself think—who took pictures of young girls and made vague promises about modeling careers. For that alone he could be arrested these days and put behind bars for a long time.

  “Marc, come on!” he said. “I really can’t believe you’d think that about me!”

  I said nothing. I waited for him to say too much. Maybe I should have been taping this conversation, I realized now.

  “Listen, Marc. I realize you’re all confused because of what happened to Julia. But everything’s taking a turn for the better now. Julia and Lisa sent me those last pictures just a few days ago. The ones from America. I’d already signed them up with a modeling agency here. They were definitely interested, but now, with these new pictures, especially the ones of Julia, they’re going completely nuts. There are couple of them … I guess you’ve seen them. Julia on the patio at some restaurant. It’s the look in her eyes … Those pictures at the pool were missing something. But the way she looks at you in that one … And then that other one, beside the Grand Canyon. She looks … how should I put it … she looks the way she looks, Marc. I sent her an e-mail a couple of days ago. She should really come over here for a new shoot. I could do it in Holland, too, but it’s about the light. The light here’s different—I could never fake that in a studio. If you ask me, she’s afraid to talk to you about it. She’s afraid you won’t let her come. But she’s in good hands with me, Marc. And otherwise, just come along with her for a few days. You and Caroline. Or all four of you. My house is big enough. It’s not right
on the Pacific, but you can hear it from here. And I’ve got a pool. And by the way, why didn’t you come by this summer? You guys were right here—I saw that in the pictures the girls sent. That parade through Santa Barbara? Emmanuelle and I were there, too.”

  I wanted to ask Stanley again exactly where he’d been between midnight and two on that particular night, but suddenly I didn’t believe in it anymore. Stanley had talked about the pictures at the Grand Canyon and on the patio of the Mexican restaurant in Williams. He’d seen the same thing I had.

  “And what about Lisa?” I heard myself ask.

  “Oh yeah, sure. Lisa. You guys should bring Lisa along, too. But just between the two of us, she’s going to have to wait for another year or so. It’s different. She’s still so young. A different thing, if you know what I mean.”

  One by one, I looked at the pictures on Stanley’s website. The pictures of my older daughter. There were ten of them in total. Lovely pictures. Especially the one of Julia under the shower with her sunglasses slid up onto her head: In the spray of droplets above her wet hair you could see a miniature rainbow.

  There were other photographs as well. Not only of Julia, also of other girls. Teen Models was the title Stanley had given the series. There was a picture of a girl in a Jacuzzi, somewhere outside in a yard with palm trees and cacti in the background. On the edge of the Jacuzzi was a bottle of champagne and two glasses. There were fluffs of foam on the water, only partly covering the girl’s torso. She was looking straight into the lens. The picture could only have been taken from that angle if the photographer himself was in the Jacuzzi as well.

  Only when I looked again did I recognize Emmanuelle. A younger Emmanuelle. Younger than she was now, in any case. No older than fifteen, I guessed.

  There were even more photo series on the site. Series with titles like Deserts, Sunsets, Water, and Travel. I clicked past some photos of camels and pyramids, and then a whole row of sunsets. The Travel series was categorized according to place and year. There was also a photo series under the name of the coast where we had spent our vacation at the summer house a year ago. I clicked past a few pictures I’d seen before: monasteries and castles, things Stanley had shown me back then on his camera’s display. Emmanuelle posing on a wall or beside a statue. Some of the photographs were new to me: lobsters, rays, and shrimp on display at a street market; shells and jellyfish in the sand; a white tablecloth with bread crumbs—and then I suddenly saw myself. And not just me: We were all in this one, sitting at a richly covered table in the yard of the summer house. Ralph, Judith, Caroline, Emmanuelle, Alex, Thomas, Judith’s mother, Julia, Lisa, and I: We were looking at the photographer and raising our glasses in a toast.

  Then came more photos from the summer house. Ralph chopping the swordfish into pieces on the patio; Lisa leaning over the cardboard box containing the little bird; Judith in a deck chair beside the pool; and one in the yard, of a man I didn’t recognize, a man in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. His arms folded across his chest, he was looking into the camera with a grin. In the next photo the unknown man was holding the garden hose in his hand, a jet of water spouting straight into the air. After that came a photo of the same man standing between my two daughters: He had his arms around their shoulders and was beaming at the camera. In this picture you could clearly see how small he was; he was a good inch shorter than Julia.

  I clicked back to the first photo. For the second time that day, I called for Lisa.

  “That’s the guy who came to fix the water,” Lisa said.

  We looked at the photos together. In all three of them you could clearly see the tattoo on his upper arm: an eagle clutching a bleeding heart in its talons.

  “He was really nice,” Lisa said. “He joked with us. About him being so little. He kept going up and standing beside Julia and shaking his head and laughing. We couldn’t understand everything he was saying, but he said something about Dutch girls, about them being so much taller than the men there.”

  I counted back. On Friday morning Caroline and I had gone to the rental agency. The girl behind the counter had said that the repairman would try to come by that afternoon. The unattractive girl, who was also his girlfriend. Then Caroline and I went shopping. We’d stayed away much longer than usual, because neither of us felt like going back to the house right away. We had wandered around the market and before that we went to have lunch somewhere. I couldn’t remember whether the water was already fixed when we got back, but the Saturday after that the boys had been spraying the girls on the diving board, so it was by then, in any case.

  Then I thought about that Saturday evening. About the night on the beach. In front of the men’s room in the restaurant I had run into the repairman. I remembered the tattoo on his sweaty arm. On his other arm he had a cut. Three red stripes … His ugly girlfriend was crying out on the patio. Maybe they’d just had a fight. Perhaps he’d been feeding her some line about why he’d been away for so long. Who knows, maybe she’d smelled it on him. Maybe she’d seen the cuts on his arm. And maybe, because after all she was a woman, too, she had immediately recognized them as scratches that could only be inflicted by a woman’s nails.

  A girl’s nails, I corrected myself.

  The Monday morning after I’d looked at the site, I suddenly saw the TV comedian sitting in my waiting room again. The same comedian who had said a year ago that I could stuff it up my ass and that he would never come back here again. I hadn’t taken a good look at the list of patients my assistant had drawn up for that morning—or rather, I had stopped looking over the list in advance months ago; I “took things as they came,” as they say.

  “I went to another doctor for a while,” he said, once he was sitting across from me in my office. “But I found him—how shall I put it—just a bit too chummy. More chummy than you are, in any case.”

  I looked at his round, not-unhandsome face. He looked healthy. The AIDS infection had apparently been a false alarm.

  “Well, I’m pleased that you—”

  “And there was something else,” he interrupted. “Something about the way he acted made alarm bells ring. I don’t know whether you’ve ever experienced it—I’m sure you have—but there are people who go to great lengths to show how terribly tolerant they are of homosexuals. That they think it’s all completely normal. Even though it’s not normal at all. I mean, if it’s so normal, why did it take me five years to work up the nerve to tell my parents? That was what irritated me about that new doctor. He started in one time, for no good reason, talking about Gay Pride, how fantastic it was that all that was allowed in this town. Even though, as a homosexual, the one thing that disgusts me most are all those pumped-up male bodies dancing on a boat with only a shoestring between their buttocks. But that never occurs to some people, some tolerant people, that you as a homosexual might not think that’s so great.”

  I said nothing, just nodded and worked my face into a smile. The clock across from my desk said that five minutes had already gone by, but it made no difference: I had plenty of time.

  “Listen,” the comedian went on. “It’s great that we all have equal rights these days, sure. On paper. But that doesn’t mean you have to think it’s charming. People make that mistake. They’re afraid to be discriminating. That’s why they laugh even more loudly when an invalid in a wheelchair tells a joke. The joke isn’t funny, and besides, you can barely understand it. The invalid has an untreatable progressive illness. When he laughs at his own joke, the drool runs down his chin. But we laugh along with him. What was it again, Marc—you have a son and a daughter, don’t you?”

  “Two daughters.”

  “So would you think it was charming if one of your two daughters, or both of them, turned out to be lesbian?”

  “As long as they’re happy.”

  “Marc, come on! Don’t try clichés like that on me. That’s exactly the reason why I came back to you. Because you’ve never tried to hide it. Your aversion. Well, maybe ‘aversion’ is putting it t
oo strongly. But you know what I mean. Am I right or not?”

  I smiled again: a real smile this time.

  “See?!” the comedian said. “I knew it. But why is it, then, that I feel so much more comfortable with you than with people who try so hard to find homosexuals charming?”

  “Maybe because you don’t find them charming yourself,” I said.

  The comedian began laughing loudly, then grew serious again.

  “I guess ‘charming’ is the key word here,” he said. “It wasn’t particularly easy for my parents to accept that from me. To accept my boyfriend. To, as you said before, only care about my happiness. But they really don’t think it’s charming. No parent thinks it’s charming. Have you ever heard a father or mother say that about their son or daughter, that they found it so charming when they heard about it? That they were so pleased and relieved to find out that their son or daughter, thank God, at least wasn’t heterosexual? I mean, I’m a comedian. In my shows I’ve always tried to deal with that side of it, too. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to take myself seriously. Well, seriously … you know what I mean.”