by Herman Koch
We took off from home on a Saturday in July, with no real fixed plans. We briefly considered heading north: it was already stiflingly hot in Holland, which made us fear the worst for our southern and eastern destinations. But we had no desire to see boring Scandinavian forests, to visit countries where the food was bad and the alcohol prohibitively expensive.
There were certain advantages associated with our country of origin. Advantages that would disappear if we went north. The farther south we went, the more we towered above the local population. When we went into a café or restaurant, all heads turned in our direction. We were both blond, Bernhard even a tad blonder than me: at one in the afternoon, with the sun straight overhead, the color of his hair almost hurt your eyes. We were aware of the eyes—all eyes!—that were pinned on us until we sank our tall bodies down into our chairs. In those days, the corner of the world in which we found ourselves in was one where very few tourists came. A neck of the woods that I, without giving away too much, will call “the interior.” The blazing interior: the guidebook strongly advised against visiting these parts in July and August. But I found out all of that only later, after I met Sylvia. At which point the travel guide suddenly seemed laden with meaning.
Back in Amsterdam, I stuck my nose into the pages of the book and it was as though I could smell her. Lavender. A whole purple field full of it. The lavender blossoms were motionless, there was not a breath of wind, at most they shimmered in the heat. Honeybees, bumblebees, and other insects with large yellow abdomens, striped in red and black, insects we didn’t have in Holland and whose names we therefore didn’t know, buzzed from flower to flower.
I have no trouble admitting that, of the two of us, Bernhard was the more attractive. About ten centimeters taller than me, but also more muscular, above all broader; on the dance floors of black-light clubs with revolving disco balls, he took the initiative right away. He always went straight for his mark, while I have always been more the sort who hangs back. From a great height he would bend down toward the girl on whom he’d set his sights and shout something in her ear. The most hideous clichés were deployed, clichés I myself could never have used, but he got away with it. The girls thronged around Bernhard and looked up at him—and the simple fact that I was standing beside him made them look at me next.
“The later it gets, the prettier they all become,” he said in Dutch, and winked at me. But then he said it again, this time in English, to the girls! And instead of turning their backs on us, the girls giggled, they came and stood even closer. One afternoon, somewhere in the second week of our trip through the interior, we were sitting with three girls on the lawn beside our hotel swimming pool when Bernhard began first to pat the nonexistent pockets of his swimming trunks, then to feel around under his towel.
“What are you looking for?” asked the girl sitting closest to him, perhaps not even the prettiest of the three, perhaps the one I would finally end up with.
“A smile,” Bernhard said; and when she actually did smile at that, he added: “But I’ve already found it.”
“If you ask me, that little one likes you,” he would say to me, in Dutch again. Or: “The dark one is looking at you the whole time, Robert. You’d be nuts not to strike now.”
“The little one” or “the dark one” was consistently the least attractive of the two (or three, or four) girls who had come to stand around and look up hopefully, imploringly at us, at Bernhard: the second choice, Bernhard’s second choice, the last one you would ask to dance. He himself had set his sights on the main prize, the local Miss Universe, the girls who were just beyond my reach.
The second-choice girls were not necessarily ugly, far from it, at most a little less exceptional beside their blindingly beautiful girlfriend. When you removed Miss Universe from the equation, there was actually nothing to complain about. In principle, those girls had nothing to be ashamed of. They were all little, and they were all dark. “The little one” or “the dark one” was perhaps half a centimeter shorter and a barely perceptible half a shade darker than the first choice.
I had, in other words, no problem with the situation and the division of roles, it was highly tolerable. Happiness, I told myself back then, and I still tell myself today—or perhaps one would do better to speak of satisfaction, rather than happiness—is bound up closely with the acceptance of your own head. Your own body. Your build. There are plenty of things you can do about that body. You can lose weight when you think you’re too fat, you can lift weights when you become embarrassed by the way your ribs stick out. But there’s not much you can change about your head. The head has a mind of its own. It grows bald when it feels like it. It grows fatter, older, spottier, in a way you’d never thought possible. Visible to all, and not least of all to yourself. You can’t hide your head by pulling a T-shirt or a sweater over it. It’s there all the time, every hour of the day and night. It looks at you in the mirror. This is it, it says unblinkingly. You’ll have to make do with this.
I was able, as I’ve said, to get along with my own head. I knew myself well enough to know which category that head put me in. In our own country, both Bernhard and I were nothing more than average, with our blond hair and our height. Or, to put it differently: in Holland there were already too many like us walking around, it was easy enough to pick a better specimen. And here we weren’t at a seaside resort or some other tourist attraction, we were—I can’t emphasize this enough—in the interior. There was no competition from countrymen or other blond gods from the north.
one evening—close to midnight—during the third week of our trip, I was lying on the bed in our hotel room with a headache when Bernhard suggested we take a stroll around the modest little town where we were staying. I groaned quietly. “Do we really have to? There’s nothing happening here anyway.” There were only three restaurants and four or five cafés, we had noted that afternoon, and we planned to travel on to the capital the next morning. “Come on, don’t be such a wimp, Robert.” I can’t remember whether, after that, he said something like “you only live once,” or whether he stuck to the umpteenth repetition of his favorite saying, “The later it gets, the prettier they all become.” I also can’t recall why I finally got up at last and went to the bathroom to hold my head under the cold faucet. The feeling that I might miss something, probably: I had that feeling around the clock back then. A big difference from these days. Which may be the greatest perk of getting older. I’m no longer afraid of missing something. I know that I won’t miss a thing.
I looked at myself in the mirror. At my head, which hurt and pounded gently somewhere at the back of my eyes. I pushed back my wet hair and tried to press it as flat as I could against my skull, but knew it was wasted effort: no one would fancy this head. I didn’t fancy it myself much, so why should anyone else feel differently?
We arrived at a deserted square we had come across earlier that afternoon. In front of a café were three white plastic tables and five or six white plastic chairs, none of them occupied.
“I don’t know,” I said in reply to Bernhard’s questioning look. “Maybe we should look around a bit first?”
Bernhard patted his pants pockets. “Well, I’m going to get a pack of cigarettes anyway,” he said. “You wait here?”
On the other side of the square were a few more empty chairs and tables.
“I’ll head over that way,” I said. “If that’s nothing either, maybe we’d be better off having a drink at the hotel.”
I sauntered across the square. Dirty yellow light was coming through a dusty window; you couldn’t tell if there was anyone inside.
I was standing there between the tables with my hands in my pockets, trying to adopt an air for no one in particular—I’m waiting for a friend. He’s buying cigarettes—when the door of the café swung open and two girls came out. As is usually the case when two girls are out on the town together, one was prettier than the other. It would be going to
o far to say that the other girl was ugly, no, far from it, at most a bit less extraordinary—“unexceptional” was the word that popped into my mind: the girl who would have been meant for me if Bernhard and I had been standing there in front of the café together.
But I was alone. I caught myself taking a longer look at the ordinary girl and, only after that, at the girl Bernhard would normally have snapped up.
They were talking, but when they saw me they slowed and smiled at the tall, blond Dutchman standing there, amid the empty tables with his hands in his pockets.
“Hello,” said the prettier, the bolder, the more self-confident of the two. She held her head tilted a bit to one side, causing her bobbed black curls to hang loosely on one side of her face; a lock fell over one eye on the other side, a lock that she brushed back behind her ear in a single smooth motion. “Are you lost?”
For the course of half a second, I tried to come up with a snappy answer, but it was hopeless. I was lost. I had looked into her black pupils, and into the broad whites around them when she opened her eyes questioningly wide. Are you the one? I felt like asking. That was all I knew right then: that she was it. For all time—that was what flashed through my mind. After this, there will never be another.
At that very moment I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Well, well,” Bernhard said in my ear. “Can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I? So, are you going to introduce me to your new girlfriends?”
And then he said it, or rather, whispered it, although strictly speaking there was no reason to do so at all.
“May I congratulate you, Robert? It is indeed just like they say: the later it gets, the prettier they all become.”
14
“Can I bother you for a moment?” Sylvia asked. I hadn’t heard her come in, she was suddenly standing there at the foot end of the couch where I was lying, reading the newspaper. In her left hand she held an open black book that could only be a Moleskine pocket diary.
“I was just thinking,” my wife went on, without waiting for an answer. “Do you have any appointments on Friday?”
“I don’t know,” I lied. “I’d have to look at my agenda.”
I knew very well, though: I had nothing going on that Friday. But I wanted to keep it that way. I had so much going on already. Days with nothing at the end of them were rare in my profession—but they were the happiest days of all.
“Bernhard and Christine are flying back to Boston on Sunday,” my wife said. “And I’m going out with Miriam and Louise on Saturday. So I thought, maybe we could invite them over for dinner on Friday. At least, if you still want to see Bernhard.”
I very much wanted to see Bernhard, but I wasn’t sure if I felt like having dinner with the four of us. Whenever I met up with Bernhard, I tried to say as little as possible. I talked just enough to hide the fact that I wasn’t saying anything at all. That was how the roles were divided between us. He talked, I listened. I thought that, except for me, he had very few friends who could listen to him so well. And I thought he was perfectly aware of that. Purely for form’s sake, he would ask me a few questions about Sylvia and Diana. About the issues at play in a big city. Then he would bust loose. He needed almost no encouragement. As though you’d held a burning match to a pile of dry twigs.
I wasn’t sure whether I felt like having dinner with the four of us, because maybe I wanted to talk to my best friend alone. On the other hand, though, Bernhard was perhaps the last person I would want to talk to about my suspicions.
I saw it in my mind’s eye: a restaurant. The way I visualized it, it was at Dauphine, across from Amstel Station. That’s where we tended to meet when he was in Holland for a few days. First I would let him go at it, let him blow off steam about his black holes and the distances between stars, his continually expanding universe. Appetizer. Main course. Only after dessert would I suggest that we take something along with our espressos. Grappa. Cognac. Calvados. Bernhard, there’s something I need to talk to you about. Something about Sylvia… And that was where the film broke down.
Of course, in all these years I have asked myself more than once what would have happened if I had been standing on that little square in front of that café on that dark, empty evening with my friend Bernhard. Whether perhaps things would have followed their natural course and I, as always, would have settled for the runner-up. At the most decisive moment in my life—in our lives, Sylvia’s and mine—my bride-to-be had had no material for comparison. She had seen only one tall, blond Dutchman standing there amid the tables, with his hands in his pockets.
She too had looked at me, looked into my eyes, and knew at that same instant that I was the one and only, as she would later swear to me—swear again and again, at least five times a year to this very day.
Sometimes I thought about it this way: You see a house for sale, you are given a tour of the rooms, it’s a rather pretty house, spacious, light, lovely wooden floors, a view of the park. You sign for it. And then—your decision can no longer be reversed—you are given another tour. Of a different house. The rooms are just a little more spacious, a little lighter, there is a fireplace (the other house didn’t have one), but what clinches it is the view: this house is on the beach, blue sea as far as the eye can see, white sails in the distance. You try to recall the house you saw earlier. You liked it, didn’t you? Yes, but then you hadn’t seen this house yet. You know that you could have had this house, too, but now it’s too late. You’ve already signed for the other one. You try with all your might to get the original feeling back, to find the first house as lovely as when you first saw it. But it doesn’t work; for the rest of your life you’ll think only of the fireplace and the endless blue sea.
“But Bernhard’s a handsome guy, isn’t he?” I dared to ask her for the first time, two weeks after we’d met. Bernhard and I had stayed in town a few days longer, then he’d gone on to the capital on his own. “To travel on with a man in love, you don’t want to do that to me, Robert,” he said, and he slapped me on the shoulder, kissed Sylvia and the other girl—her big sister, eighteen months older than her, as it turned out—three times on the cheek and wished us all the luck in the world.
“Yes, he’s a handsome man,” Sylvia said. “But not my type.”
“So what is your type then?” I asked—for the first time; in all the years that followed I’ve asked the same question maybe a hundred times.
“You’re my type, darling. But of course you knew that already. And if you ask me, you knew that already on that first night, when you stood there waiting for me with your hands in your pockets.”
I couldn’t hear that often enough; each time it was a confirmation of what Sylvia and I had seen at the same moment in each other’s eyes.
But I was never entirely sure about it. Sometimes, in bed at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would play the other version of the same film. A version that also began on the little square, but now with two main characters instead of one. If you ask me, the little one likes you, Robert. Then Bernhard stepped up to Sylvia. He acted like he was searching his pockets.
What are you looking for?
The chirping of crickets. Violins soar.
A smile, but I’ve already found it.
15
That Friday evening, I caught myself keeping an even closer eye than usual. On Bernhard and Sylvia. All those years, I had gone on believing firmly in the film version with the happy ending, the one where Bernhard wasn’t Sylvia’s type and she had chosen me 100 percent. I may have been the house without a fireplace, the house with a relatively ordinary view, but I was the house where she felt most at home.
Meanwhile, though, Alderman Van Hoogstraten had appeared on the scene. Nothing more than an apartment along some backstreet, the living room looked out on a brick wall. What type was he? Why would Sylvia suddenly feel like moving into something smaller? A cold-water flat in a dumpy neig
hborhood?
We talked about the usual things. About the children (Bernhard had four from his two previous marriages, and one boy, five years old, with Christine), about living in America, in Boston, about American politics, President Obama, and the civil war in Syria. Sylvia had made her famous casserole, the big hit of her native region, and during dessert—a caramel pudding baked in the oven to give it a thin, fragile crust—talk turned to Amsterdam.
“What strikes us most when we walk around town here, after almost a year in Boston, is all the foreigners,” Christine said.
A brief silence descended; Bernhard didn’t seem to catch the faux pas and merely nodded to confirm his wife’s story, but a broad grin had appeared on Sylvia’s face.
“Oh, God, no, of course I don’t mean it that way!” Christine said, laying her spoon down beside her caramel pudding and taking Sylvia’s hand. “You’re, you’re…different. And besides, how long have you been here anyway? No, I mean the masses of foreign tourists. It wasn’t that way ten years ago. And now you have certain streets…Damstraat! We walked down Damstraat yesterday, you hear almost no one speaking Dutch there anymore. And the canals are really awful too. The line for the Rijksmuseum, the one for the Anne Frank House circles all the way around the Old West Church these days. You added it up, Bernhard,” she said, turning to her husband. “How long do you have to wait in line there?”
“Oh,” Bernhard said, “it was only a rough estimate. But three and a half hours, for sure. Yeah, you have to be pretty determined.”
“What do you think about that, Robert?” Christine asked. “I mean, I imagine that, as mayor, you must be pleased for the city. Pleased about all the revenue those people bring in. But what do you really think about it? You don’t want Amsterdam to turn into a sort of Venice, do you, where all the natives move away and the ones who stay behind have no choice but to work in the tourist industry?”
