by Herman Koch
I listened to my wife. I listened to each word. To each sentence. And to the extent that time allowed, I ran each word and each sentence back again in my mind. The first time I listened to her as though nothing was going on: as though we were just sitting there having a nightcap, the mayor and his wife, after running away from a deadly boring New Year’s reception. So sweet, the way they sit there laughing at the memory of it, so pleased that they had actually dared to do it—so happy, the two of them, after so many years together.
The second time, though, I listened to the sentences as though they had a false bottom. As though my wife were only playacting and had to do her utmost to make normal-sounding sentences come out of her mouth. If she was acting, then she was doing a damned good job of it. But wasn’t she laying it on just a little too thick, with that bit about being charmed by my visible boredom at the New Year’s reception?
I could just blurt it out, of course, catch her off-balance when she has her guard down. But no, too soon for that, I decided half a second later. First a little more chitchat; wait until the next beer. I had to be particularly careful about my facial expression. It was true, she was absolutely right, my face reflected everything that went on in my mind. What were you and Maarten van Hoogstraten talking about anyway? You two seemed to be enjoying yourselves. If I adopted the wrong expression, I would ruin everything. The best thing would be to put on a smile first. Not a political smile. A real one. That was already tough enough. All politicians who have ever received media training have worked on their smiles. But you could tell right away when they weren’t real, because their eyes never smiled along with the rest; the smiles were stuck to their faces like a sticker to a bargain-basement DVD.
I have never received media training. I’m what they call “a natural.” You can’t media-train a natural. Cut the baloney, that’s my political message. When a journalist’s question irritates me, you can see that irritation all over my face. When I can’t help laughing about something, I laugh. Generally speaking, I don’t like watching myself on TV, but of course it happens anyway. I see my face on the local news station or the eight o’clock news, and no matter how critically I view myself at such times, I see immediately that I got it right. The proper distance when questions are asked about offensive chanting during a football match; the deep, sincere sigh after the umpteenth liquidation in the month-long power struggle in the underworld; but most of all, perhaps, in the pitch-perfect tone of my short speech last Remembrance Day. Everyone could see that I meant it, because I did mean it—that’s how simple such things can be. And before the speech and the two minutes of silence, perhaps the realest face of all, when I left the palace beside the king and queen, the short walk to the monument on Dam Square. I walked beside them, but you could tell from my face, no, from all my body language, that I was keeping my distance, that I didn’t belong there. I’m only walking beside them because that’s what protocol demands, said my face, said also the literal distance at which my body found itself from the royal couple. If some evening I were to feel lonely or unhappy, these are the last people I would call.
I had finished my beer a long time ago; my wife was still fussing with the wine at the bottom of her glass.
“Shall we go for another one?” I asked.
“You know, this Maarten van Hoogstraten,” my wife said. “I always thought he had no sense of humor at all. You told me that too, once. But he told me a story back at the reception, I almost died laughing. No, really, I never would have expected that from him.”
And while Sylvia started telling me the story and I gestured to the waitress for a second round of beer and red wine, I had to do my best not to laugh too heartily—not to betray my suspicions with a shit-eating grin from ear to ear.
For what else could it mean, the fact that my wife was now telling me in great detail the “funny story” she’d heard from Van Hoogstraten—something about how his children’s pet rabbit had gnawed through the HDMI cable on the TV, but I was only half listening, at moments of great relief we only half listen—other than that I had been getting wound up about nothing at all?
“In the end, I couldn’t tell what was funnier,” she said when the story was finished. “Whether it was the rabbit or the combination of the rabbit and Maarten trying to catch it. I mean, he is sort of stiff. Well, not exactly stiff: more like a straight arrow. Someone who isn’t completely at home in their own body. Anyway, I was trying to visualize it, him crawling under the couch, trying to grab that rabbit but missing every time, and I got the helpless giggles. I saw him looking at me, sort of like: Well, it wasn’t that funny. It really was funny though, the way he told it, too, but part of it was unintentionally funny, of course. But now that I think about it: Do you supposed he realized that I wasn’t just laughing at his story but also partly at him? That I was laughing at him?”
Despite myself, I was probably grinning then anyway, there was no stopping it. My wife and Alderman Van Hoogstraten! Where had I come up with that? Someday, maybe a year from now, I could tell her about it, as an anecdote. You remember that time at the New Year’s reception, when you were talking with Maarten van Hoogstraten? Do you know what crossed my mind for a moment? No, I decided then and there in Café Schiller, I would never tell her about it. Never! She might take it as an insult.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I told her. “He is sort of rectilinear, like you say. People like that only take things at face value. I’ll bet you he’s still beaming with pride at having made you laugh like that.”
A woman like you, I’d almost added. A woman who sees straight through the rectilinear Dutch.
4
As I said, that evening in bed I played the whole scene back in my mind—but in the reassuring knowledge by then that I had been all worked up about nothing. I started at the end, at the moment when we left Café Schiller and Sylvia took my arm as we walked down the street. That’s how we walked those last few hundred meters to our front door, a normal couple of a certain age, walking arm-in-arm. Not to keep each other from falling, but out of love, out of fondness, because both husband and wife enjoy each other’s company.
Had we said anything else? Hardly. The subject of Van Hoogstraten, in any case, had been put to bed earlier, in the café. My memory is one of my strong points; I remember a lot, sometimes more than strictly necessary. A little over twenty years ago we took a trip through the American West; the trip lasted six weeks and I still remember every town and whistle-stop where we spent the night, every motel, every restaurant. That was before Diana was born, we both still smoked, the dashboard of our Chevrolet Lumina rental was littered with used packs of Marlboros. What good is remembering all that, you might ask? But I like it, it calms me: the idea that it doesn’t all just disappear. In bed at night, when I can’t sleep, I take the trip all over again, from the moment we landed in Los Angeles, happy hour at the hotel, the five or six margaritas we drank there, the heat on the following day, the road to Las Vegas, the endless freight trains. A memory like a movie, but with no need of film. No, we weren’t the kind to keep picture albums, no ordering of things, no chronologically pasted-in vacations, no exact dates, no quasi-cute captions; everything we have is kept in boxes and rarely taken out: maybe five times in the last twenty years, I’d figure.
That’s what they call the “long-term memory,” but at my age—I turned sixty last year—the short-term memory is another kettle of fish: Where did I put my reading glasses, my cell phone, the keys to my bike? I’m standing in the bathroom, I came here to get something, to do something, I was probably looking for something. But what?
That’s the way I now reconstructed, step by step, from back to front, the moment when I unlocked the front door downstairs. The streetlights along the canal, the black branches of the trees, a duck between the parked cars who, startled by our approach and quacking loudly, flapped off into the water. I think he’s sort of nice. That’s what my wife said, yes, somewhere
between Rembrandtplein and home we had started talking about our daughter’s new boyfriend. I think it’s nice that he’s not really Dutch.
Maybe “new boyfriend” isn’t quite the right term, “first real boyfriend” might be more like it. The boys came and went, they lined up to go out with our Diana; sometimes she would bring one of them home for dinner and he wouldn’t speak a word, or at most “Thank you very much, ma’am.” Or: “Maybe something like European Studies, sir.” If they had been able to pant like a dog, with their tongues hanging out of their mouths, they would have. They couldn’t believe that they were really here, at the same table with a girl like our Diana. But it rarely lasted longer than a couple of weeks; in any case, we never saw them at the dinner table again.
Two months, though, was a different thing. During those two months, the new boy had come to dinner at least five times. And unlike the boys who languished, he simply joined in the conversation. He didn’t say too much, or too little; he wasn’t the kind of assertive blabbermouth who talks your ear off. He was polite, a tad bit shy perhaps; even after repeated urging to call me by my first name, he kept on saying “sir.” Finally I let it go, I figured he was probably brought up that way and that it made things easier for him—but three days earlier, while we were sitting on the couch watching Expedition Robinson, he suddenly called my wife “Sylvia.” “I think that swimming champ is sort of a loser too, Sylvia,” he said about one of the female contestants. “They should send her home as soon as possible.”
Like my wife, I also thought he was a nice boy. In my case, that’s really saying something. I’ve imagined often enough how I would react if my daughter came home with a boy who wasn’t very nice. I thought about my face. I wouldn’t be able to hide it: I would shake the hand of the boy who wasn’t very nice and adopt an expression like I was sniffing at a suspect carton of milk. Way past expiration, that’s what everyone, but especially my daughter, would be able to read from my expression.
But I had nothing to fear when it came to the new boy, at least nothing to do with my own facial expressions. The first time we shook hands he looked at me openly and candidly and introduced himself—but I had already seen it. Only shy people can look so open and candid, I knew that from experience. I had seen that look often enough in the mirror, when I was practicing it. And indeed, after the initial greeting, the boy lowered his eyes right away, let go of my hand, then looked at me again and smiled. It was a real smile, not candid perhaps, but certainly disarming. He saw it too, then, he let me know with a smile. It’s like the way motorcyclists or runners raise a hand in greeting when they pass each other. Shy people can hide their shyness from the outside world for a long, long time, but never from someone who is just as shy as they are.
It came as a surprise to me, during our short walk home from Café Schiller, when my wife said she liked the boy because he was “not really Dutch.” That was probably understandable, considering that she wasn’t really Dutch either; on the other hand, in her own culture, prejudices about other cultures were much more pronounced. Or let me put that differently: Where she came from, they held no prejudices against holding prejudices. Everything was in the service of preserving one’s own kind. There, what a boy or girl brought home with them was weighed in a much finer balance. Foreign blood was viewed with definite suspicion. Things that came in from outside could weaken one’s own kind.
“You know what Diana told me a while back?” she asked me last night, as we were climbing the last three steps to our front door. “That he always holds the door open for her. At a café. In a restaurant. He even helps her push the chair in closer to the table. And when he’s parked somewhere he always hops out, walks around the car, and opens the door for her.”
What, is he studying to become a cabdriver? The question was on the tip of my tongue, but I gulped it down before it could cross my lips—this was no moment for sarcasm. There, at the threshold of our home, our official residence, Maarten van Hoogstraten crossed my mind for a moment, by then as something that was disappearing farther and farther over the horizon, like after a visit to the dental hygienist: your gums are still tingling but in a pleasant way, rosy, as though they’ve just taken a long walk on the beach.
Maarten van Hoogstraten. They didn’t make them any Dutcher than that. Dutcher than a head of endive brought in after a first night’s frost, Dutcher than a pair of clogs with little windmills painted on the insteps, Dutcher than cheese and milk, bread for breakfast and lunch, Dutcher than a hole in the ice, than that one single cookie to go with your tea before the lid goes back on the tin.
I pushed against our front door, pushed it all the way open, then stepped inside quickly to hold it open for my wife.
“Ladies first,” I said.
5
And then, in bed, as I heard Sylvia turn on her electric toothbrush in the bathroom, then all of a sudden I knew.
I knew what didn’t add up.
Running again through the evening, I had arrived at Café Schiller, not the moment when we came back outside, but before that, when we paused on Rembrandtplein and I suggested we go in for a drink.
And she, after a slight hesitation, agreed.
So far, so good. If my wife had known that I suspected her of having an extramarital affair, that suspicion would only have deepened if she had refused a last drink at Café Schiller.
But during the half second or less that her hesitation lasted, she hadn’t looked at me.
She had tilted her head and turned to look at the front door of the café.
Okay, sounds good. No, she’d said something else, something about being tired and not wanting to stay up late. I’m tired and I don’t want to get to bed too late.
At the little table inside, of course, there was no way we could avoid eye contact. It was there, at that table, that she had dished me up the story about the alderman—about his intentional or unintentional funniness.
But once we were back outside, after taking my arm, she had—as far as I could remember—spent most of the time looking at the ground: at the street, the pavement.
That was all believable enough; it was dark out, in Amsterdam at night you often keep your eyes on the ground in order not to step in something or twist your ankle on a loose paving stone.
But even at home, when I made a gracious display of holding the door open for her, she hadn’t looked at me. She had wiped her feet, she had stamped her boots a few times on the doormat, the way you do when you’ve been walking through the snow and don’t want to track it into the house.
But it wasn’t snowing. The streets were dry.
She had looked at her feet. Then she went upstairs ahead of me.
I rewound it all the way now, skipping a few scenes, until we were back at the New Year’s reception. At the moment when I came up to my wife and the alderman.
Maarten.
Robert…
The brief conversation that followed I could no longer remember word for word. The alderman had taken leave of us within thirty seconds, saying something about someone who was waiting for him to bring them a drink.
He had looked at me for a moment.
But Sylvia had not.
What didn’t add up was this: This was the first time Maarten van Hoogstraten and I had seen each other since the Christmas recess. That made sense, that was entirely possible. The alderman had taken an extra week’s vacation, and so missed the first plenary council meeting.
Ordinarily, after some standard comment about the weather, the quality of the wine or the nightly news, this was the moment when one asked about the children. About the Christmas vacation that was not even three weeks behind us (“Did you all get away at Christmas or New Year’s?”). But none of that happened. My wife and the alderman didn’t look at each other either, I realized, reconstructing as best I could. No, they were both looking at me. Because they didn’t dare to look at each other. Because
they were afraid their glances would give them away. That they would start blushing.
That’s where I hit pause. I tried to take a step back. Because what if my imagination had been running away with me? What if I had been imagining everything? It could be. That was still possible. There was no evidence. No concrete proof. No one had actually started to stammer or blush. All I could do was listen to my senses. And my senses said that it was unusual, to put it mildly, that my wife and Alderman Van Hoogstraten had not spoken a word to each other from the moment I joined them—and then, when we parted, had not even looked at each other.
I could still hear the sound of the electric toothbrush coming from the bathroom. I squeezed my eyes shut even tighter, I concentrated on the sound, the image of my wife standing at the sink. In front of the mirror above the sink. Was she looking at herself at that moment? At her own face? Her guilty face, it occurred to me in a flash. Was she brushing her teeth differently than she did on other evenings? Was she staying in the bathroom longer than normal? To practice the neutral expression she would wear when she came back into the bedroom?
What expression does a woman wear when she’s cheating on her husband? What expression, above all, must she take care not to wear?
I listened closely. Every thirty seconds the toothbrush paused for a moment. Left uppers, right uppers, lower left, lower right. Every evening I try to go on brushing for the full two minutes, but rarely get all the way. Somewhere halfway, but probably much sooner than that, my concentration flags. Toothpaste foam and water drip down over the brush, over my fingers, my hands, my chin. In the mirror, meanwhile, I look like a slobbering old man. I turn off the toothbrush. I’ve already forgotten how many thirty-second rounds I’ve done.
Was Sylvia brushing her teeth more absentmindedly than usual tonight? Or more dreamily? Because she was thinking about him? I moaned quietly. I listened. The toothbrush rattled on for a bit, then all was quiet in the bathroom. I rubbed my eyelids softly with my fingertips and tried to imagine my wife in there. Her reflection in the mirror—how she, in turn, looked at her own reflection.
