by Herman Koch
Sylvia’s older brother was called what he was called, I don’t know how else to put it. He is his name, just as Jesus Christ, John F. Kennedy, and Mick Jagger are their names. They can never be called anything else. Conversely, no one else can ever bear their names. We would probably start giggling nervously and adopt an incredulous expression if someone were to introduce themselves by one of those names.
So, until I come up with something better, I will call him “her brother.”
Before I go on to tell you how all of them there, without exception, pronounced my name wrong—not only did they place the stress on the wrong syllable, it actually sounded as though they needed more air in order to pronounce the unfamiliar vowels and the consonants that cluster together so tightly in our language—and how they also spoke that name with a certain irony, in thinly disguised disbelief, as though they didn’t want to accept that a name like mine could really exist, I should first say that I have given myself a different name here too. That seems only fair to my wife and daughter. And you will all agree that it was not badly chosen. Everyone knows my real name, all you have to do is superimpose my alias on my real name. So now think about my real name and try to imagine how that would be pronounced by a foreigner in whose language consonants serve only as a bridge between vowels. A language in which the consonants are the screws that hold words and sentences together: without the screws the words would fall apart, but screws should never draw too much attention to themselves. They shouldn’t stick out. A word with two vowels and five consonants, three of which are also huddled together in fright, is a poor excuse for a word—or at least it will make anyone who doesn’t speak Dutch laugh out loud.
“Robert…”
He sat down on a stone. I clambered back up. We sat together like that at the edge of the dry ditch, its bottom hidden in darkness. From a crumpled pack of the popular local brand—tobacco that smelled like asphalt and literally took your breath away at the first drag—he offered me a cigarette. He lit mine, then held his lighter under his own.
During the second and a half that it took, I looked at his face in the light of the flame. Like all men in that country, and perhaps even more in this part of that country, in this town, he looked at least ten years older than his age. It was hard to say why. It was not simply the sum total of more grooves and wrinkles, of a few more blemishes and moles than in the average Dutch face, of the generally less-well-tended teeth, one of which was missing already. It was also not because these faces were more bronzed than our own, more weathered by life out of doors and the strength of a sun unfiltered by clouds or mist. These men actually did their utmost never to expose their faces directly to the sun. They stayed in the shade as much as possible, meals here were always eaten indoors, the tables on the restaurant patios were there exclusively for tourists. A casual glance might make you think that their faces aged more quickly than ours, that they had been through more, seen more. In comparison with most Dutch faces, that might be right. The uninhibited good cheer with which the average Dutchman viewed the world was something you wouldn’t find around here. Unmarked faces, faces without a history, like the ones you saw in Holland, were found here only among children, but even they often had more grown-up faces, so you could see exactly what they would look like when they grew older. No, I would have tended to say—and by then I had the right to an opinion, eight months had passed between first meeting Sylvia and our wedding day—that these faces were above all tired. Worn-out. Not only from working too hard, or from a life lived too hard, but perhaps tired of life itself. Of the passing of time. Even at an early age—Sylvia’s brother had not yet reached thirty-five—life and time had etched an old man’s face over the top of his own. Time here had taken an advance on the future, and made the faces years older than they actually were.
Could it be, perhaps—I asked myself this back then, and I go on asking myself to this very day—that we consider people with faces like that more capable of anything? Or less, when it comes to feelings of compassion, mercy, general courtesy? Wasn’t I simply the milquetoast, here in these surroundings, in this unrelenting heat amid the boulders and the thistles? The kind man from the Far North who would be of no use to anyone in times of war? Who wasn’t much use anyway, in this hard world of the interior. A tall, gentle blond man, a sissy who helped the women clear the table, carry the plates to the kitchen. Who, God help us, picked up a dish towel and helped to dry the glasses and plates? What had gotten into this man anyway? Had he come here to be a good example to these weathered men?
I’ve asked myself that often enough, and I’m very much aware that preconceptions raise their heads here too. For a man who considers it only natural to cut an animal’s throat (as efficiently as possible, by the way, with no unnecessary cruelty) as something that goes with life itself, like love, birth, and death, would it constitute a smaller step for him to place that blade against the throat of a fellow human, a smaller step than for us—for me, a grown man who would start to gag if they asked me to pluck a chicken? In all these years, no one at Sylvia’s parental home has ever asked me to do that: they probably sense quite astutely that I dry plates and glasses, but that you shouldn’t ask me to do something as rudimentary as plucking a chicken. In the same way you don’t send a child out to disarm a landmine.
And wasn’t that same gentleness (that milquetoast air, that sissified behavior) the principal reason Sylvia had fallen for me? Because she preferred a man who would help her with the dishes to a man from her own village who would have her serve him at the table, and boss her around like a barnyard animal—even if he probably wouldn’t cut her throat?
A man with a face too old for his body, short and squat, often too fat as well, the kind of man a woman couldn’t really get excited about (Sylvia’s words). Admittedly, you saw it there much more often than here: an unsightly man with short legs and a fat belly beside a local beauty queen. “Can you believe it?” Sylvia would say whenever we passed a couple like that. “I could have ended up that way. I don’t even want to think about it.”
“Are you glad, Robert?” her brother asked, blowing smoke from his nostrils and laying a hand on my shoulder. “No, sorry, I am using the wrong word. I meant ‘happy.’ Are you happy, Robert?”
Her brother’s English was better than anyone else’s in the family, including Sylvia’s. He had asked whether I was ‘glad’ but corrected himself immediately. Are you happy, Robert? They had trouble pronouncing the h around here, it always came out as a long, guttural ch, making “happy” sound like chèppie, but this was not the moment to correct someone’s pronunciation.
“Yes, I am happy,” I replied. “Very happy.” I caught myself pronouncing the h as a guttural g both times, as though not to embarrass my new brother-in-law. In the same way that I, a man who grew up on the south side of Amsterdam and therefore spoke standard educated Dutch, would catch myself putting on a slight Amsterdam snarl when addressing the catcalling Ajax supporters from that windy podium in the parking lot—to reduce the distance, I suspect, to try to be “one of the guys.” Not really on purpose, mind you, I actually thought it was a bit ridiculous; I did it without meaning to.
There had been language problems with Sylvia’s parents too; from the start of our relationship, Sylvia and I had spoken a grab bag of fractured French and English. But her parents spoke nothing but their own language. A common language, in fact, wasn’t even necessary. When Sylvia had first stood across from her parents in their little living room with this tall, gangly Dutchman at her side, she had taken my hand. I saw it on their faces, read it in their eyes. Disappointment. They really did their best; her father slid back a chair from the kitchen table and gestured to me to take a seat, meanwhile barking something at his wife, upon which Sylvia’s mother placed an opened bottle of wine and four glasses on the table.
It was eleven o’clock in the morning. I took little sips of wine and smiled until my jaws hurt. Now that we were seated, the dif
ference in height was less apparent. Standing in the living room doorway I had felt ashamed of my height, I ducked automatically when I entered the room, but most of all I towered two or three heads above both her parents. Sylvia is not tall either, but she’s certainly not short, she was at least a head taller than her father and mother. It was definitely humiliating, especially for her parents, for her father who had to tilt his head back all the way to look me in the eye, her mother who didn’t even dare to do that and so kept her eyes fixed on a spot no higher than my knees.
But it was humiliating for me, too, in the way that you can carry your own discomfort around with you like an almost visible physical defect. When someone has a hunched back or an ugly scar, people later tend to remember mostly the hump and the scar. Hump and scar take on meaning in retrospect. One realizes that one could not expect much good, after all, from someone with a hump or a scar.
What was I doing here with my excessively tall Dutch body, for Christ’s sake, in this house, in this country where I had no business being? Of course, I had come to carry off their daughter, their pretty daughter. All the foreigners, after all, went gaga over the women here. They didn’t have them at home, women like this. Real women, with femininity oozing out of every pore. In Holland they had become extinct long ago.
Later, Sylvia would tell me that her parents had above all viewed me as someone who was “different.” What they regretted most was that she was not going to marry a man from her own region. After that, they had admitted that it wouldn’t have been so bad if I had at least shared their daughter’s nationality or background.
“He seems nice,” her mother had said. “But he’s awfully foreign.”
And what, in turn, had their daughter seen in me? Why had she chosen this beanpole, instead of a real man from the village? The fact that I wasn’t a real man was written all over me: that stupid smile, above all, and the way he takes those little, hurried sips of wine. You’ll see, next thing he’ll take all the glasses into the kitchen himself and insist on helping with the dishes.
“I am glad to hear that,” Sylvia’s brother said, kneading my shoulder gently with his fingers. “I can see that you have a good heart. That you will be a good husband for her. But I want to tell you one thing, Robert,” he added after a brief silence. “If you ever do anything to hurt her,” he said—his fingers had stopped kneading and tightened their grip on my shoulder—“if you ever do anything to her, then I know where to find you. Then you’ll have me to deal with.”
“basically, there are two major issues our brains can’t cope with,” Bernhard said. “The first one is the universe. The coming into being of that universe, and its finitude. Or rather, its infinitude. When it comes to that, science really has no answers. They never get further than some new theory about the dawn of the cosmos. That it all went a lot faster than we’d assumed till now, that the universe itself is therefore expanding much more rapidly than we’d thought, that first there was this huge clump of matter, which then blew apart. And so forth and so on. But the most important question is the one that’s always skipped over: the why of it. In other words: What was there before the universe came into being? Where did that matter come from, all of a sudden? Why does science always start counting from the moment of the Big Bang, and never before that? And why does that same science never look farther than the boundaries of the universe? Why doesn’t science look beyond the boundaries? If the universe is finite, what comes after that? Outside of that? Simply more of the same? Or nothing at all? And what are we supposed to imagine by ‘nothing at all’? Those are the two mysteries which our brains are simply too limited to cope with. Here, we’re like the deaf people who can’t imagine what hearing is like.
“It’s precisely that same vacuum that religion fills,” Bernhard went on. “The universe stops at the same point our understanding does. What lies beyond the borders of the universe? What happens to us after we’re dead? In essence, it’s the same question. It’s beyond our comprehension, we say. And that’s exactly it. What we can’t get to with our comprehension, we fill in with our imagination. With a hereafter. Or with a scientific explanation, like with the universe. Scientists laugh about the Creation story. About a God who created the world in seven days. Ridiculous, they say, but they forget that their own scientific explanations never begin with nothing either. There’s always matter, out of the blue. But for the sake of convenience we don’t bother ourselves about what came before that. Before the Big Bang, and before matter came along. Meanwhile, we’ve grown accustomed to thinking in terms of billions of years, in billions of light-years. But we don’t worry our heads about the time before the universe came into being. Because we don’t even know if there’s anything there to worry our heads about. In fact, we don’t know anything. The universe is infinite. Infinitely empty, that above all. The distances can’t be expressed in miles. Again, you can ask yourself: What’s the point of it, of all that space? I’ve never been religious, I wasn’t brought up that way either, you know that. But do you remember that time—what was it, twenty years ago?—when we drove through Death Valley? We headed north out of Los Angeles, and then you had the exit with that big sign warning you that the next service station was a hundred and fifty miles down the road.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And those two jets dogfighting, way up in the sky.”
“Yeah, that. I remember that too. Then there was this huge salt flat, and that was it. No houses. No other cars. I think we didn’t see another soul for the rest of the afternoon.”
“Right. We even got kind of scared. We thought: What if the car breaks down out here?”
“That was completely realistic, that fear. It still happens. Just a couple of years ago. A mother and her little boy. Camping out at Zabriskie Point, but then the car wouldn’t start. And that family in the camper in Montana. It was fall and they were going from the city to their house in the woods when all of a sudden it started snowing. They found the camper the next spring, when the thaw set in.”
Now I remembered something else from that trip across the salt flat. We had talked about God, about how it was easier in a desolate spot like that to understand why people believed in a God. And after that we switched from God to guns. To the right to bear arms. In Holland, people always laughed about the Americans and all their guns. All those pistols and rifles you could buy anywhere, even at the supermarket. But those same Dutch people must never have driven into Death Valley from the southwest. There is nothing there. No houses, no trees, no bushes. Just a dirty-white cracked plain and the bare mountains in the distance, without a soul in them either. Dusk was already falling, and everything changed color slowly, from a soft pink to a deep purple. If there wasn’t a God, then there wasn’t anything at all, we both thought. And then we realized that we would feel a lot more comfortable driving into that deep, deeply hostile landscape with at least one gun in the car.
And now I thought back on Sylvia’s brother. The moment when he had stopped kneading my shoulder and made me promise never to do anything to hurt his sister. I had looked at his face, at his eyes in the dark, at the glowing tip of his cigarette. For half a second I wondered whether maybe he was joking, whether the brother of my wife—the woman I had married only a few hours before—might be pretending to be serious. That I was the object of a practical joke, and that I would be the laughingstock of the family for the rest of my days if I took his threat seriously. I took a couple of deep breaths; I waited for the moment when he would start kneading my shoulder again and burst out laughing. Hey, I had you by the balls for a minute there, didn’t I, Robert? Come on, admit it. You really believed me.
But there was no laughter. I might have been imagining it, but it felt as though his fingers dug into my shoulder with renewed strength.
“I would never do anything to hurt her,” I said. “Never. Sylvia is the love of my life. It would be absolutely impossible for me.”
I clearly remember what I thou
ght at that moment. On the one hand, this confirmed all the preconceptions at a single blow (that’s the way these people are, it’s in their blood); on the other, I was thankful to Sylvia’s brother. I had started something new, a new phase in my life in which the waffling was over once and for all. I had not just married the love of my life; it also really mattered. This was no marriage with a wink and a nudge.
“I’m glad to hear that, Robert,” he said quietly—and almost right away his fingers began kneading my shoulder again.
17
I didn’t really know what I wanted. No, that’s not completely true: I knew, above all, what I didn’t want.
What I didn’t want was to go snooping around, gathering evidence. That’s the way things usually went in real life. Betrayed husband goes snooping around. He tries to crack the password to her computer (daughter’s name, pet’s name plus the last two digits of her year of birth). For the moment at least, his wife’s e-mails don’t provide a clue. Maybe she has a second, secret e-mail account. Or, at an unguarded moment, when she leaves her iPhone lying around the house the way she so often does, he can thumb back through her WhatsApp logs. But will he actually find anything? Wouldn’t she have taken the necessary precautions long ago, wouldn’t she have deleted the damning e-mails and text messages as soon as she read them?
I remembered that movie where the journalist punches in the last route recorded by his murdered colleague’s car navigation system. But my wife didn’t even have a driver’s license. In any case, that wasn’t what I wanted, I realized then, a couple of weeks after our dinner with Bernhard and Christine. I would keep my eyes open, I promised myself. From behind my newspaper I would go on watching her. During our shared meals, around the family dinner table or, like recently, with the three of us at Café Schiller, I would join in the innocent patter and meanwhile register the intonation in my wife’s stories, the way a seismologist records the first vibrations of the earth’s crust.
