Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel

by Herman Koch

  “That’s right,” I said. “I know exactly what you mean. So what else can I do for you?”

  He sighed deeply. “My prostate,” he said. “It only drips lately, no powerful jet anymore. I thought … well, you know what I thought.”

  I looked at the comedian’s hairy butt on my examining table. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help but think of the words of my professor of medical biology. “I’m only going to say it once,” Aaron Herzl had told us. “If God had meant for a man to introduce his sex organ into the anal opening, he would have made that opening larger. I intentionally use the word ‘God’ here, but I could also have said ‘biology.’ There’s an idea behind everything. A plan. Things we shouldn’t eat stink or taste bad. And then there’s pain. Pain tells us that it’s not a good idea to stick a fountain pen in our eye. The body gets tired and tells us we should take a rest. The heart can only pump out so much oxygen to all the body’s extremities.” Here Professor Herzl took off his glasses; for a full minute he had let his gaze wander over the seats in the auditorium. “I’m not out to pass moral judgment here,” he went on. “Everyone should be able to do what they want in all freedom, but a swollen dick penetrating the anus hurts. Don’t do that, the pain says. Pull it out now, before it’s too late. The body has a tendency to listen to pain. That’s biology. We don’t jump out of a window on the seventh floor, not unless we want to destroy that body.”

  It happened quite suddenly. I guess I must have been repressing it, or maybe I’d simply forgotten, but now, suddenly, I remembered what Herzl had said after that. First I felt my eyes grow misty, then—there was no stopping it—my lower lip began quivering.

  “Everything about a small child is smaller. Everything. That, too, is biology. Little girls can’t get pregnant. As far as that goes, they’re conversely identical to woman over forty. Keep off, biology says. There is no biological sense in having sex with a girl who is not yet sexually mature. Once again, the opening is too small. And then there is the hymen. One of the most wonderful inventions biology has bestowed on us. Almost enough to make you believe in the existence of a god.” There was some chuckling in the auditorium. Most of the students were grinning; a small minority were not.

  “I’d like to once again summon up the image of a big, swollen dick. The male sex organ in erect state. When a dick like that tries to enter the too-narrow opening of a sexually unripe girl, there is, first of all, pain. Don’t do that, the girl herself probably says as well. In our society, the arrangement is that men who try to penetrate little girls, or boys, are locked up. Our moral code in this regard is so pronounced that, even within prison walls, child molesters’ lives are worth nothing. Thieves and murderers consider themselves superior to child molesters. And for good reason. They react elementally. In fact, they react the way all of us should react. The way we reacted once, long, long ago, in the days when biology was still more powerful than the rule of law. Get rid of it! Get rid of that trash! Destroy those freaks!”

  Now the auditorium was deathly silent. The proverbial pin. The breath that was held longer than was good for you.

  “It’s not my intention to advance solutions to this moral dilemma,” Herzl said. “I simply want to get you to think first before you blindly accept the moral codes of your own day as being the only proper moral codes. Therefore, by way of conclusion, here is a simple hypothetical case that I’d like you all to think about for next week.”

  By now I had been standing at the examining table too long. More time had passed than the comedian could be expected to consider normal. I had washed my hands. I had pulled on the rubber gloves. Something had to happen. The examination. The internal examination of the prostate by way of the anus. But I could no longer interrupt my own train of thought. I had to keep going first. All the way to the end. I took a deep breath. To gain time, I placed one hand on a hairy buttock and took a deep breath.

  “We consider an adult who tries to impose himself sexually on a child to be abnormal,” Professor Aaron Herzl had said. “Someone with a deviation. A patient in need of treatment. There begins the dilemma, and the question for next week. Because what treatment is required here? Before going into detail, I first want you to ask yourselves the following: Of those present here today, ninety-one percent feel attracted to members of the opposite sex, nine percent to those of their own sex. Less than one percent feel sexually attracted to children, so fortunately, I can assume that there is no one like that present here today.” Laughter from the auditorium, slightly uneasy laughter that tried to sound relieved. “But let’s turn the whole thing around. Let us, the better to understand this example, imagine that our own sexual proclivity were to be banned. That we would be arrested if caught having sexual intercourse with an adult of the opposite sex. That we would then be locked up for years in a prison or clinic. And that during that period of detention we would be talked to by a psychologist or psychiatrist. We have to convince that psychologist or psychiatrist that we are willing to work on our own cure. In the end, we have to make that other person believe that we have been cured. So that the psychologist can write a report that says we no longer pose a risk to society. That we, as men, have kicked the habit of feeling attracted to women, or as women to men. Meanwhile, however, we know better. We know that that’s impossible. That we cannot be ‘cured.’ All we want is to get out as quickly as possible and once again hook up with women and men.”

  I moved my hand one inch farther over the comedian’s buttock. As though I were going to do something. What came after this was a part of the lecture that I could no longer remember clearly, but that undoubtedly had to do with the “curing” of child molesters. All I could remember was the pan of mussels at the end.

  “Take, for example, a pan of mussels,” Herzl had said. “Before you on the table is a lovely pan of cooked mussels. Healthy mussels. Tasty mussels. But if everything is as it should be, we have learned not to eat those few mussels that don’t open of their own accord. Because they can make us sick. I want you to think about those mussels as you think about next week’s assignment. Those mussels themselves are sick. Some of them are even already dead. Are we going to apply force to break open that mussel and eat it, anyway? Are we going to make it converse with a prison psychologist for two years, and then put it in our mouth, anyway, because the prison psychologist has assured us that the mussel is by now edible? Or do we throw it away? See you next week.”

  The comedian shifted on the exam table. He lifted his head and glanced over his shoulder. At me. I saw the startled look in his eye.

  “Marc,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  I tried to grin, but it hurt somewhere. There was a dry click somewhere at the back of my jaw. “What could be wrong?” I asked.

  But I couldn’t kid myself any longer. I had looked at his hairy backside. I knew that a hairy male ass was not my kind of thing. That an ass like that did indeed induce in me a healthy aversion: a plate of nasty or rotten food that you push away gagging. Don’t eat it! I was “normal.” I thought about women. Not just Caroline or Judith: about women in general. That was biology, Professor Herzl had taught us. A man who doesn’t look at women in general is like a car with the accelerator and the brake held down at the same time. A car like that first starts to smell of burnt rubber; in the end it breaks down or catches fire. Biology dictates that we should impregnate as many women as possible. I made the same mental leap I’d made thirty years earlier during Herzl’s lecture. Could I ever cure myself? Would I be able, if society were to label my own healthy urges as sick, to convince a prison psychologist that I had meanwhile been “cured”? I thought I could. But as soon as I was out on the street, I would fall back into my old ways within twenty-four hours.

  I don’t mean to place myself on a higher moral level than those men who feel drawn to young girls. All men feel drawn to young girls. That, too, is biology. We look at those girls with an eye to future generations: whether they, within the foreseeable future, will be able to guarantee the
continuation of the human species.

  But it was taking things a step too far to actually act on that attraction. Biology had its own warning systems: With little girls, all systems were no-go. Don’t! Keep off! If you go on you will break something.

  “I think it would be better if you returned to a sitting position,” I told the comedian.

  He righted himself, sat with his legs hanging over the edge of the examining table, pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket, and handed it to me.

  “Here,” he said. “Don’t worry, I washed it,” he added with a wink.

  “Sorry,” I said. I tried to blow my nose, but my nose was already empty. “If you could come back … otherwise I’ll give you a referral to emergency.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything, okay?” he said. “But if you feel like it, I’ve got all the time in the world.”

  He spread his arms. I looked at his round, open face. I told him. I told him everything. I left out only a couple of things. With an eye to the future. My plans for the future, that above all.

  “And you still have no idea at all who could have done it?” he asked when I was finished.

  “No.”

  “Shit. Someone who does something like that, you could just …”

  He didn’t finish his sentence, but it wasn’t necessary. I thought about the pan of mussels: about the mussels that didn’t open.

  The shot glass with the lethal cocktail was on the table beside Ralph’s bed. Also on the table was a half-finished container of fruit yogurt with the spoon still in it, that morning’s paper, and a biography of Shakespeare that he’d been reading for the last few weeks. There was a bookmark between the pages, not even halfway through. He had asked Judith and his two sons to leave the room for a moment.

  When they were gone, he gestured to me to come over.

  “Marc,” he said. He took my hand, held it against the blanket, and put his other hand on top of it.

  “I want to tell you that I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t … I should never have …” He fell silent for a moment. “I’m sorry—I guess that’s what I’m trying to say.”

  I looked at his face, emaciated and swollen at the same time: at his eyes that were still seeing me at this point but which, as from a moment between now and an hour from now, at most, would never see anything again.

  “How is it … with her?” he asked.

  I shrugged.

  “Marc,” he said. I felt the pressure of his hand on mine. He tried to tighten his grip, but I could feel how little strength he had left. “Could you tell her … from me … could you tell her what I just said to you?”

  I averted my eyes; effortlessly, I pulled my hand from his grasp.

  “No,” I said.

  He sighed deeply, closed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them again.

  “Marc, I’ve hesitated for a long time about whether to tell you this or not. I thought, Maybe I’m the last person he wants to hear something like this from.”

  I looked at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “About your daughter, Marc. About Julia.”

  Involuntarily, I glanced at the door, then at the shot glass beside his bed. Ralph saw what I was looking at.

  “In the end, I decided that you need to know. It may be a little late, but I haven’t known about it so long myself. Just a couple of weeks, actually.”

  For a split second I thought he was going to say something about Judith: that he knew about the two of us, for example, that she had confessed everything, but that he wanted to wish us all the happiness in the world. The next moment I realized that, no, he had clearly said about your daughter. About Julia.

  “Alex made me swear to keep quiet about it. He knew I wasn’t going to be around for long; that’s why he told me. He had to get it off his chest. He said he would go crazy if he kept it to himself any longer. His mother doesn’t know. He’s the only one. Him and Julia.”

  I thought about that night on the beach. About the way Alex had acted when he came across Judith and me near the other club. He’s hiding something, I’d thought even then. He isn’t telling us everything.

  “Do you remember that repairman who came by a couple of times to fix the tank on the roof? When we didn’t have any running water?”

  I probably blinked my eyes or else I was wearing a blank expression, because Ralph said, “The repairman. From the rental agency. A little guy. Late twenties, early thirties …”

  “Yeah, I remember that … a repairman … for the water. What about him?”

  With difficulty, Ralph drew air into his lungs; it sounded like an air mattress deflating. “Julia had arranged to meet him that evening,” he said. “The repairman. I don’t know when they actually agreed to meet up; I guess one of those times when he came by. Or who knows, maybe in the village or on the beach. Whatever it was, they agreed to meet at that other club on the night of the midsummer party. Alex tried to talk her out of it—he had an uneasy feeling about it. I mean, it was already bad enough for Alex that she wasn’t content with just him. She told Alex that she thought he was still too much of a baby, that she went more for real men. Well, anyway, that evening … that night … Alex finally went along with her. Because he had a bad feeling about it, like I said. And then what happened happened. The guy threatened Alex, Marc. He threatened to do something to Alex if he ever said anything to his parents. Oh, if I’d only known that back then … The bastard wouldn’t have lived to talk about it!”

  “But … but how did Julia …?”

  “Wait a minute, I’m not finished yet. Julia and Alex agreed not to say anything. Actually, she made him swear not to say anything. Back on the beach. After it happened.”

  “But I found her … When I found her …”

  “She was so ashamed, she thought it was all her own fault. She thought you and Caroline would think it was stupid of her and you would never trust her again. That you would never let her go anywhere alone again after that. That’s why she came up with the idea of pretending to be unconscious. So she could tell the two of you that she didn’t remember anything.”

  Half an hour later Judith and I were in the corridor. Alex and Thomas had gone to the hospital cafeteria. Judith had just said that she was so glad I had been there. And I had said that Ralph had gone “with dignity.”

  Then Dr. Maasland came along with his griping about the tissue sample that had never arrived. He’d asked Judith for permission to perform an autopsy.

  “That’s really strange, isn’t it?” Judith said after Dr. Maasland left. “You really can’t remember what happened back then? I remember you telling me that the hospital had said it was nothing serious.”

  “It is strange, that’s right,” I said. “And that arrogant asshole acting as though it was me who lost it, even though they were probably the ones who should have been more careful.”

  “But just now, the first thing you said was that you couldn’t remember. Why did you say that, Marc? I don’t get it, not at all. I thought there was something else going on. Something between you and Ralph. What did Ralph want to talk to you about, anyway, just before? Did that have anything to do with it?”

  “Listen, Judith,” I said. “I think it would be better for both of us if we didn’t see each other for a while. And maybe not just for a while. What I really mean is, for an extended period. I’ve been there for you up till now, but now I have to kind of get my own life into shape. Too much has happened. Things you don’t have a clue about. At this point, I just can’t have you around.”

  Two days later I received a call from Dr. Maasland. I was right in the middle of my daily appointments. I was with a female writer whose excessive consumption of red wine made her look twenty years older than she really was—or at least eighteen years, judging from the Photoshopped portrait on the back of her latest book.

  “Can I call you back in a little while?” I said. “I’m with a patient right now.”

  “I’m afraid not, Dr. Sc
hlosser. This is too serious for that.”

  In the last few years the authoress’s face had aged with increasing speed. Red wine drains the skin from underneath. It’s like with a receding water table. The moisture draws back beneath the skin’s surface. The skin itself becomes a wasteland. All life dies off. Animals go looking for a place where there’s more water. Plants wither and die. The sun and the wind have free rein. Cracks appear in the soil. Erosion. Drifting sand wears away at the surface.

  “Have you people been able to track down that tissue yet?” I asked Dr. Maasland. “The tissue I sent you back then. I mean, it’s awfully strange that something like that could just go missing.”

  There was a loud sigh at the other end. The sort of sigh that specialists breathe when they have to explain something complex to a general physician. Something that’s beyond the ken of a simple family doctor.

  “We haven’t got to that yet, but that’s really not the issue here. We performed an autopsy on Mr. Meier’s body yesterday. It showed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that someone, and we can only assume that someone was you, Dr. Schlosser, removed tissue from Mr. Meier’s thigh—”

  “That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “Please let me finish, Dr. Schlosser. What it’s all about, in fact, is that too much tissue was removed. From much too large a surface. While every doctor ought to know that when there is even the slightest suspicion of such a serious illness, one is better off not removing anything at all. That you first need to look at the white-blood-cell count and only then, perhaps, take a sample. That’s freshman medical school stuff, Dr. Schlosser.”

  “I thought I was dealing with a fat node. In view of Mr. Meier’s eating habits, that was not particularly far-fetched.”

  “Due to your rigorous incision, the cells most probably entered the bloodstream. From that moment on Mr. Meier didn’t stand a ghost of a chance. I therefore reported this immediately to the proper authorities. These things usually take weeks or months, but because of the dire nature of this case and the fact that our hospital’s reputation is also involved, they found a chance to fit this in in the extreme short term.”