by Herman Koch
Yes, those eyes said back to me. I could with you, too.
Respectable is not the right word. Respectable belongs in sentences you’d rather not hear yourself say out loud. Sentences like “I thought we were going to at least keep things here to a minimum of respectability.” No, respectability is not something I can claim for myself. I look at women that way because I have no idea how to look at women any other way. It may be too bad for the “likable” women, for the “really rather nice” women, but to be safe I never look at them for too long. I’m not rude. I’ll launch into an animated conversation if I have to, but my body language leaves no room for misinterpretation. Not with you, my body language writes in big block letters on my forehead. I don’t even want to think about it. Not with a ten-foot pole. Likable women compensate for their lack of physical attractiveness with talents natural or unnatural in other areas. At meetings attended by more than a hundred people, for example, they make all the sandwiches themselves. Or they go out and hire party hats and masks for all the guests. Or they arrive on a delivery bike carrying more firewood for the braziers. “She’s so lovely, Wilma,” everyone says. “Such a lovely person! Who else would come up with something like that? Who else would even think of that?” Wilma, of course, is plainly too pale or too thin or just too ugly, but at the same time she does so many lovely things out of the goodness of her heart that you’d have to be a complete asshole to say anything negative about her. In the end, at one of those meetings of more than a hundred people, there is always some man who remains hovering around Wilma. Often literally. It’s the same man whom we saw hanging around at the edge of the dance floor. He was trying to make the moves along with the dancers but never stepped out onto the floor itself. The bottle of beer in his hand was rocking to the beat of the music. But that was the only thing about him that moved rhythmically. “Remember that guy?” people ask one another later. “That guy at the party? Did you know that he and Wilma …?” From that day on he’s the one who buys the two hundred whole-wheat buns from the bakery and chops wood for the braziers. Wilma takes a break from years of being “lovely.” And who can blame her? Then the children come along. Usually ugly children. Highly gifted and socially handicapped. Children who actually like going to school. Who skip a few grades but are always the ones who get bullied. Later on, when the only jobs they can find are shoveling stalls for an organic dairy farmer, it’s mostly society’s fault. Meanwhile, Wilma’s friends wonder what she could ever have seen in that guy with the motor skills of a wooden clothespin. But they understand. What it is they understand exactly they never say to Wilma. But they say it to one another. “I mean, it’s really nice for her that she at least has someone,” they say. “Maybe it sounds weird, but in some strange way they’re actually a pretty good match.”
Could you do it with this one? During my days at medical school, we always asked one another that, during autopsy class. Whenever a fresh cadaver was laid on the dissecting table. One time it might be an emaciated old man who had donated his body to medical science, the next time a traffic fatality whose inside pocket had been found to contain a donor card. It was our way of breaking the tension. The tension that precedes cutting into a human being. “Could you do it with this one?” we whispered to one another, out of earshot of the professor. We mentioned sums of money. “For a hundred grand? For a million? No? What about five million?”
And even then we were already sorting the corpses into categories. “All right” meant just plain ugly. “Attractive” was someone with a friendly or cute face, but with an undercarriage you could smash a bottle of champagne against. “Good-looking” meant that we had nothing short of a fashion model lying on the cutting table, the kind of body that made you bewail the fact that it was so cold and could no longer move.
Caroline looked at me. “What are you laughing about? One of your private jokes, I suppose?”
I shook my head.
“No,” I said, “I was just thinking about Judith. And about Ralph. The way he looked at you. That she probably has no idea what kind of explosives are being planted beneath their twenty-year anniversary when you walk into their house.”
“Marc! I’m not out to ruin their anniversary party.”
“No, I know you’re not. But you have to promise me this: that you’ll stick to my side the whole time.”
Caroline couldn’t help laughing. “Oh, Marc! It’s so marvelous, having a husband like you. A husband who watches over me. Who protects me.”
Now it was my turn to tilt my head to one side and look at her teasingly.
“So what are you going to wear?” I asked.
Any father would rather have a son than a daughter. Any mother would, too, in fact. Our classes in medical biology were taught by Professor Herzl. During our first year at medical school, he lectured us on instinct. “Instinct can’t be eliminated,” he said. “Years of civilization can render instinct invisible. Culture and law and order force us to keep our instincts under control, but instinct is never very far away. It’s simply waiting to pounce as soon as your attention flags.”
Professor Aaron Herzl. Should that name sound slightly familiar to you, this was indeed the same Aaron Herzl who was later drummed out of the university because of his studies of the criminal brain. The conclusions Herzl drew from his research have become widely accepted today, but back then—back during my years at medical school—such opinions could only be expressed in a whisper. Those were the years when people still believed in the good in mankind. The good in every human being. The fashionable opinion of the day said that a bad person was subject to improvement. All bad people.
“ ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ is in fact much closer to human nature than we dare to publicly admit,” Herzl taught us. “You kill your brother’s murderer, castrate with a butcher’s knife the man who raped your wife, chop off the hands of the burglar who invades your home. The legal system often leads only to endless delays before arriving at much the same verdicts. Dead. Gone. We never want to see the murderers and rapists back on the streets again. When the father dies, the son takes over. He chases the intruders from the house and kills the barbarians who try to rape his mother and his sisters. When a child is born, not only the father but also the mother breathes a sigh of relief to see that the firstborn is a boy. Those are facts that two thousand years of civilization cannot simply eradicate. Two thousand years? What am I saying? This was the status quo until not so long ago. Twenty, maybe thirty years ago at most. It is important that we do not forget where we came from. Sweet, gentle, kindhearted men, all well and good, but that is a luxury one must first be able to afford. In a concentration camp, sweet, gentle men are no good to anyone.”
Let me be perfectly clear about this. I love my daughters. More than anything or anyone in this world. I’m only being frank. I wanted a son. I wanted it so far deep down inside me that it almost hurt. A son. A boy. I thought about human instinct as I cut the umbilical cord. Julia. From the day she was born, she was the dearest thing in the world to me. My little girl. It was love at first sight. The kind of love that brings tears to your eyes. But instinct was stronger. Better luck next time, it whispered. Within a year or two you’ll get another chance. When Lisa was born, it was all over. We talked about it a few times, about having a third child, but my curiosity about having yet another daughter was only theoretical. Things go the way they go. The chance of having a third daughter was a hundred times greater than that of having a son. A man with three or more daughters tends to be a laughingstock.
It was time for me to face up to the facts. To learn to live with it. I began drawing up a list of the advantages and disadvantages, checking them off as I went. The way you might do when deciding whether to move to the country or remain in the big city. In the country you can see more stars, it’s quieter there, the air is cleaner. In the city you have everything you need within arm’s reach. It’s noisier, true, but you don’t have to drive five miles to buy a newspaper. There are movie th
eaters and restaurants. In the country there are more insects, in the city more buses and taxis. I probably don’t have to explain to you that in my tally the country was a girl and the city was a boy. People who live in the country go to great lengths to present even the disadvantages as advantages. An hour’s drive and I’m in the city, the rural resident says. I can catch a movie there and go out to eat, but I’m always so relieved to get back to the peace and quiet and to nature.
An hour there and an hour back: I don’t know any better metaphor for the distance between having a daughter and having a son. After Lisa was born I resigned myself to country life. I decided to accept the disadvantages and, above all, to enjoy the advantages. Girls are less reckless. Girls are sweeter. A girl’s room smells better than a boy’s. You have to take care of girls more, for the rest of your life. The latest they’re allowed to get home after a school party is a lot earlier than it is with boys. Between school and home lies a warren of darkened cycle paths. On the other hand, all girls are in love with their fathers. The eternal battle for elbow room is one they fight out with their mothers. For Caroline, that was tough at times. “What was this all about, can somebody please tell me?” she would shout in exasperation when Julia slammed the bedroom door in her face again. “And what are you laughing at?” she asked when Lisa went on to roll her eyes and wink at me. “You never do anything wrong,” she said to me. “What am I doing wrong? What do you do that I don’t?”
“I’m their father,” was my reply.
“But what exactly is he in, Dad?” Lisa asked as we were parking the car a few streets away from Ralph Meier’s house. We had driven past first, along a hedge and then past the bushes surrounding a yard in one of our city’s quieter, more exclusive neighborhoods. Through the bushes you could see the guests on the lawn with their glasses and plates of food. There was smoke, probably from a barbecue: Through the open car windows we caught a whiff of grilled meat.
“People know him mostly as a stage actor,” I said. “You don’t see him on TV that often.”
To Lisa, a famous actor played in movies, or at the very least in a regular soap opera. An actor was probably young, too, in any case no older than Brad Pitt. Not someone Ralph Meier’s age, throwing a party because he had been married to the same woman for twenty years.
“Can you also get famous from acting in plays?” she asked in astonishment.
“Lisa! Don’t be such an idiot! Of course you can.” Julia had the earbuds of her iPod in, but apparently that didn’t keep her from following the conversation.
“I can ask, can’t I?” Lisa retorted. “Is that possible, Dad? Can you be famous from acting in plays?”
It hadn’t been our plan originally, taking both the girls along to Ralph Meier’s party. But it was a Saturday afternoon, so we asked if they wanted to go. At first neither of them reacted too enthusiastically. But to our surprise, half an hour before it was time for us to leave, they announced that they wanted to go after all. “Why? You two don’t have to, you know,” I said. “Mom and I will be back in a few hours, anyway.”
“Julia says there might be famous people there,” Lisa said.
I looked at Julia.
“What are you looking at?” she said. “It’s possible, isn’t it?”
After we had locked the car, as we were walking past the bushes and the hedge to the front door, I tried to formulate an answer to my younger daughter’s question. Yes, I thought to myself, you can still get famous from acting in plays, but it was a different kind of famous from fifty years ago. Any number of attempts had been made to let Ralph Meier’s talent loose in front of the camera, too—with highly varying degrees of success. I remembered the police series that had been canceled after only eight episodes, and the gravity with which Ralph Meier had spoken the line “Tell it to ’em down at the station, buddy!”—a gravity that only provoked mirth. His role as a resistance fighter in The Bridge Across the Rhine, the most expensive Dutch feature film ever made, hadn’t been much of a success, either. What I remembered most from that film was the raid on the registrar’s office in Arnhem and the line “We ought to take that Nazi whore and put a bullet through her fucking head!” Ralph Meier had tried to look grim as he said it, but his expression was mostly one of bewilderment. It was hard for people to accept a hero of the resistance who weighed more than 220 pounds, so Ralph Meier had gone on a diet. You could see that he had lost a lot of weight, but it didn’t make his body any thinner, at best only emptier. Half an hour before the end of the movie, as he was facing the firing squad, the look on his face had been largely one of relief. He was probably glad that it was all over and that he could finally go to the catering van and get himself a sandwich.
“A lot of people still go to the theater,” I said. “To them, Ralph Meier is famous.”
Lisa turned her face toward me and hit me with her sweetest smile. “Yeah, right, Dad.”
There are times when you run back through your life, to see whether you can locate the point at which it could still have taken a different turn. There it is! You say. Look there … This is where I say that we’re planning to head more or less in that direction during the summer vacation and that it might (“Sure. Yeah. Why not? Who knows?”) be an idea to pop in on them. That was when we were saying good-bye, all the way at the end of the evening, when it had already been dark for a while and Ralph and Judith had mentioned the summer house for the first time.
You hit Pause, then rewind frame by frame. Here’s Judith throwing her arms around Caroline and kissing her on both cheeks. “We’ll be there from mid-July to mid-August,” she says. “So if the four of you are in the neighborhood …” A little farther back you see Ralph Meier, laughing at some joke you can’t hear—and can’t recall, either. “We’re renting a house this summer,” he says. “A house with a pool, not far from the beach. If you people feel like it, just drop by. Plenty of room.” He slaps you on the back. “And I bet Alex wouldn’t mind, either.” He winks and looks at my older daughter. At Julia. But Julia turns her back on us and pretends she hasn’t heard.
Alex was their older boy. I was standing there when Alex and Julia were introduced. We were still in the hallway; we had just come in the door. It’s not something you see very often, and precisely because you don’t, you recognize it right away when it’s real. The spark. The spark that literally jumps the gap.
“Would you girls like that?” Caroline asked in the car on the way home. “To drop by and see them during the vacation?”
There was no reply from the backseat. In my rearview mirror I saw Julia staring dreamily out the window. Lisa had the buds of her MP3 player in her ears.
“Julia? Lisa?” Caroline said, turning and laying her arm over the headrest. “I asked you something.”
“Yeah,” Julia said. “What was it?”
My wife sighed. “I asked if you would like it if we went by to visit them during the summer vacation.”
“Whatever,” Julia said.
“Oh … I thought you sort of liked that boy of theirs. We didn’t see you for most of the afternoon and evening.”
“Mom …”
“Okay, I’m sorry. I just thought maybe you’d like to see him again. During the vacation.”
“Whatever,” Julia said.
“What about you, Lisa?” my wife asked. She almost had to shout to get Lisa to remove her earbuds. “How would you like that, to drop by and see them during the vacation? They’re renting a house near the beach. A house with a pool.”
Lisa had gone with Alex’s younger brother and a few other kids to a corner of the living room, where they had watched DVDs and played with the PlayStation on a huge plasma screen on the wall. Thomas! Extraordinary that I could remember his name right away. Thomas. Alex and Thomas. Thomas seemed to me to be about Lisa’s age, but Alex was probably a year or so older than Julia. Fourteen or fifteen. He was a fairly good-looking boy with curly blond hair and a voice that was quite deep for his age. In all his movements, both in the way he
walked and the way he turned his head to look at you, there was a kind of studied languor, as though he were trying to play a more sluggish, slow-motion version of himself. Thomas was more the ADHD type: boisterous, loud. Glasses and bowls of potato chips were knocked over regularly in the corner by the plasma screen, and the other children roared with laughter at his jokes.
“Yeah, a pool!” Lisa said.
I had spent the first few minutes after our arrival wandering aimlessly around the living room and kitchen, then I strolled out into the yard. There were lots of people I recognized vaguely, without knowing why. A few of my patients were there, too. Most of them were seeing me for the first time in my natural state, probably, in normal clothes and with my hair mussed up, which explained why they looked at me as though they recognized me vaguely, too, but couldn’t quite put a name to the face. I made no effort to help them out. I simply nodded and walked on.
Ralph was standing at the barbecue, wearing an apron that said I LOVE NY. He was poking at sausages, flipping hamburgers, and ladling chicken wings onto a platter. “Marc!” He bent down, stuck his arm into a blue cool box, and pulled out a sixteen-ounce can of Jupiler. “And your wife? You did bring your ravishing wife along, I hope?”
He handed me the ice-cold can of beer. I looked at him. I couldn’t help myself: I had to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” he asked. “You’re not going to tell me that you had the bloody gall to come here all alone?”
I looked around the yard, as though trying to find Caroline. But I was looking for someone else. And I found her almost right away. She was standing beside the sliding glass doors I’d come through just a few minutes earlier.