by Herman Koch
She saw me, too. She waved.
“I’ll go see what she’s up to,” I said.
Before going on, I need to say something about my own looks. I’m no George Clooney. My face would not make me eligible for a supporting role in a hospital series. But I do have the air, or more accurately, the look. The look common to all doctors, high or low. A look—I don’t know how else to put it—that undresses. A look that sees the human body for what it is. That body of yours holds no secrets for us, our look says. You can put clothes on it, but underneath them you’re naked. That’s how we look at people. Not even so much as patients, but as the temporary inhabitants of a body that, without periodic maintenance, could simply break down.
I was standing with Judith in front of the sliding glass doors. Music from the house murmured its way into the yard. Something South American: salsa. But no one was dancing. Little groups stood around talking. We weren’t conspicuous, Judith and I. We were a little group, too.
“Have you two been living here for long?” I asked.
We were both holding plastic plates, which we had just filled at the buffet in the living room. I had taken mostly cold cuts, French cheese, and things with mayonnaise on them; she had more tomatoes, tuna, and something grayish-green that looked like artichoke leaves but probably wasn’t.
“It used to be my parents’,” Judith said. “Ralph and I lived on a houseboat for a few years. That was fun, romantic, whatever you want to call it, but when the boys came along, it was only small and cramped. Plus all that water around with two little children … We were so ready for something else. We were completely tired of bobbing up and down on that houseboat.”
Strictly speaking, she hadn’t said anything funny, but I laughed anyway. I knew from experience that this was how it worked: The sooner you laugh during a conversation with a woman, the better. They’re not used to it, women, to making people laugh. They think they’re not funny. They’re right, usually.
“And your parents …?” I allowed the question to hang in the air, at the same time describing a little circle above my plate with my plastic fork. Within the plate: It could only mean that I was asking if her parents were still among us. Among the living.
“My father died a few years ago. My mother felt like the house was too big for her, so she moved to an apartment downtown. I have a brother who lives in Canada. He didn’t mind us getting the house.”
“And does that feel strange?” I asked, gesturing with the fork more broadly. Outside the plate. “Is it strange, living in the house where you grew up? I mean, it must be like going back in time. To when you were a girl.”
When I said the word girl, I lowered my gaze a bit. To look at her mouth. Her mouth, chewing on a lettuce leaf. I gazed unambiguously, the way a man might look at a woman’s mouth. But also the way a doctor does. With the look. Don’t tell me about mouths, the look said. Mouths hold no secrets for us, either.
“It was, at first,” Judith said. “At first it was kind of weird. It was like my parents still lived here. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find them around somewhere—in the bathroom, in the kitchen, here in the yard. My father more than my mother, actually. I mean, my mother comes here all the time, of course, so it’s different. But we had the place redone pretty quickly. Knocked down a few walls, joined a few rooms, put in a new kitchen, that kind of thing. Then that feeling disappeared. Never completely, but still.”
A mouth is a mechanism. An instrument. A mouth inhales oxygen. It chews food and swallows it. It tastes, it senses whether something is too hot or too cold. By now I was looking Judith straight in the eye again. And I kept looking at her while I thought those things about her mouth. A look says more than words alone. That’s a cliché, of course. But a cliché also says more than words alone.
“And your own room?” I said. “I mean, your old bedroom, back when you were a girl? Did you knock down a wall there, too?”
When I said the words “your own room,” I squinted and raised my eyes, as though looking up at the upper floors of the house. It was an invitation. An invitation to have her show me her old bedroom. Right now, or later in the afternoon. In her old bedroom we would look at pictures together. Old pictures, stuck into a photo album. Sitting on the edge of the single bed that had been hers when she was a girl. Judith on the swings. In a swimming pool. Posing for the school photographer on the playground with her classmates. At the right moment I would take the photo album out of her hands and press her gently back onto the bed. She would resist, but only for appearance’s sake. Giggling, she would place both hands against my chest and try to push me away. But the fantasy would win out. It was an old fantasy, as old as the girl’s bedroom itself. The doctor pays a house call. The doctor takes your temperature. The doctor places a hand on your forehead. The doctor sends the worried parents away and remains sitting for a moment on the edge of your bed.
“No,” Judith said. “My old room is Thomas’s room now. He painted the walls himself. Red and black. And, well, if you really want to know, the walls used to be purple and pink.”
“And you had a bed with lots of pink and purple pillows and furry stuffed animals,” I said. “And a poster of”—I was taking a gamble; a rock star or movie idol was too risky, too dated—“a baby seal,” I said. “A cute little baby seal.”
In addition to my looks, I should now also say something about my character. I’m more charming than most men. On those lists of crucial male characteristics you see in the women’s magazines, the majority of women vote for “good sense of humor.” I used to think that was a lie. A lie to cover up the fact that when it comes right down to it, they would always go for George Clooney or Brad Pitt first. Now, though, I know better. By “good sense of humor,” women don’t mean that they want to be bent over double with laughter all the time at the jokes of some cretin. They mean something else. They mean that a man should be “charming.” Not funny. Charming. Deep in their hearts, all women are afraid that in the long run they will get bored with the overly handsome men of this world. That such men spend so much time in front of the mirror that they know how good they look. That they don’t need to make any real effort. Women on tap. But not long after the honeymoon, they run out of things to talk about. Boredom yawns. And it is tiring, spending all day around a man who only admires himself in the mirror. Day in, day out. Time becomes a long, straight road through a beautiful but tedious landscape. An unchanging landscape.
“You’re warm,” said Judith.
“A horse. No, a pony. You read horse books.”
“Yes, sometimes I read horse books. But there wasn’t a horse on that poster. Not a pony, either.”
“Daddy …” I felt a hand on my elbow and turned to look. There stood Julia with the languid boy who had shaken my hand earlier but who I had already forgotten was named Alex. Standing slightly behind them were two other boys and two girls. “Can we go get ice cream?” she asked. “It’s really close.”
In terms of timing it was both a good and a bad moment. There was a chance that the slight sultry edge to our—on the surface—innocent conversation about teenage bedrooms, baby seal posters, and horse books might be lost for good. On the other hand, here I stood with my thirteen-year-old daughter, living proof that this charming man—me—was capable of siring a child. And not just any child, but a dreamy-eyed blonde who threw fifteen-year-old boys’ hormones into overdrive the moment they saw her. I won’t try to deny it: I take pleasure in being with my daughters in places where everyone can see us together. At a sidewalk café, in a department store, on the beach. People look. I see them looking. I also see what they’re thinking. Holy Christ, didn’t those children turn out well! they all think. What a lovely pair of girls! The next instant they’re thinking about their own children. Their children who didn’t turn out quite as well. They become jealous. I feel their begrudging looks. They start searching for defects: teeth that aren’t completely straight, a skin disorder, a shrill voice. But they can’t find any. Then they
get angry. They become angry with the father who has had better luck. Biology is a force to be reckoned with. An ugly child is a child you love with all your heart and soul, too. But it’s different. You’re pleased with your third-floor walk-up, also, until someone invites you over to dinner at a house with a pool in the garden.
“Where?” I ask as calmly as possible. “Where are you going to get ice cream?”
I look at the slow boy the way all fathers look at boys who want to go to buy ice cream with their daughters. If you so much as lay a finger on her, you’re dead. On the other hand, there is also a voice that whispers that you need to let her go. There is a point at which the protective father needs to step back, in the interests of the propagation of the species. That, too, is biology.
“It’s really close,” Judith said. “They only have to cross one busy street to get there, but there are lights.”
I looked at her. I fought back the urge to say “My daughter is thirteen, love, she already cycles to school on her own.” I pretended to think about it. To relent. A nice, worried father. But above all a charming father.
“Okay,” I said, turning to the boy. “Just be sure to bring her back in one piece.”
Then we were alone again, Judith and I. But indeed, the moment was over. It would have been a mistake to try to lead the conversation back to seal posters and horse books. To the teenage bedroom. As a man, it would give me away immediately. Apparently he’s run out of things to talk about, the woman thinks, and she comes up with an excuse to walk away. “Oh, sorry, I’ve got a cake in the oven.”
I looked at her. I held her gaze; that’s more like it. I had seen how Judith had looked at my daughter. Her look, too, was as old as the world itself. A good match, her eyes said. A good match for my son. And now we were looking at each other. I searched for the right words, but my eyes told her already. Judith had no need to be jealous or angry with me. Her son, too, had turned out well. He, too, was a good match. By letting Julia go with him so easily, I had only confirmed what everyone could see with their own eyes. Ninety percent of all women find a married man more attractive than a single man, my professor of medical biology, Aaron Herzl, had taught us back then. A man who already has someone. A man who is married, preferably with children, has already delivered proof. That he can do it. Free-ranging single men are like a house that has been empty too long. There must be something fishy about that house, the woman thinks. Up for sale for six months and it’s still vacant.
That’s the way Judith looked at me now. As a married man. The message was clear. Our children had turned out well. We had, independently, enhanced the species by bringing into the world well-turned-out children who represented solid market value. Our children would never remain vacant.
“Does he already have a girlfriend?” I asked.
Suddenly there was a blush on Judith’s cheeks. She didn’t turn a bright red, but it was unmistakably a blush.
“Alex?” she said. “No.”
It seemed as though she was going to say something else, but she bit it back in time. We looked at each other. We were both thinking the same thing.
When Julia and Lisa were little we sometimes went camping. But eventually we stopped doing that. Camping had mostly been Caroline’s idea. She had done a lot of it before we met, and I didn’t want to disappoint her. When your wife loves opera or ballet, you go along to the opera or ballet, it’s that simple. Caroline loved to sleep in a tent. So I tried to sleep in a tent, too. But what I did most of the time was lie awake. It wasn’t so much the idea that you were completely outside—unprotected and outside, separated from the world only by a stretch of canvas—that caused me to lie staring into the darkness with eyes wide open. And it wasn’t the rain on the canvas, the thunder that seemed to explode inside your earlobes, or the locker-room smell when you woke up too late and the sun had been burning down on the canvas for hours. No, those weren’t the things that kept me awake. It was the others: the humans who were just on the other side of the flimsy tent cloth. I lay awake and I heard things. Things you don’t want to hear coming from other people. It wasn’t the tent that produced my insomnia, but the place where it was pitched: on a campground, amid other tents.
One morning something snapped. I was sitting in my low-slung folding chair in front of the tent, my legs stretched out in front of me on the grass. Julia was pedaling her tricycle back and forth along the path to the restrooms. A few yards away, in the shade of a chestnut tree, Lisa was playing in her foldable playpen. “Daddy, Daddy!” Julia shouted and waved. And I waved back. Caroline had gone to the camping store to buy milk—that morning we had found two fat bluebottle flies floating in the leftover milk from the day before.
A man came walking down the path. He was wearing red shorts. Not normal shorts or Bermudas, but a design that left his white legs bared almost all the way up to his crotch. With every step he took, the wooden clogs he wore slapped with audible pleasure against the undoubtedly snow-white soles of his feet. In his right hand, right out in the open, for all to see, he was carrying a roll of toilet paper.
It was a feeling, nothing more. A loathing. It felt loathsome to me, the fact that this man could be walking only a few steps away from my daughter and her tricycle. I saw Julia stop pedaling for a moment and look up at him. That made it even more loathsome. The idea that my daughter’s barely three-year-old eyes were taking in this far-too-white and exposed human body. It was—I don’t know how else to put it—a befoulment. The man was befouling our view with his bare legs, his wooden clogs, and his loathsome white feet. My child’s view.
As I rose from my folding chair, with some difficulty, and followed him toward the restrooms, I had no idea what I was going to do. “Stay on the path, sweetheart,” I said to Julia as I walked past. I took a quick look at Lisa in her playpen and went into the building. I soon found what I was looking for. All I had to do was follow the noise. The cubicles were the kind that have a large gap between the floor and the bottom of the door. At the top, the cubicles also shared the same public space. They had no ceilings. Anyone climbing up onto the toilet seat could look down into his neighbor’s cubicle. I squatted down, then knelt. The man’s red shorts were down around his ankles. I saw the feet in their wooden sandals, the pale toes large beyond proportion. The nail on one of the big toes had a yellowish tint, like a smoker’s fingertips. A nicotine hue. I took a deep breath. There were treatments for such nail conditions, I knew. There was no reason to walk around like that. On the other hand, sometimes those treatments had no effect. But anyone with even a minimum of decency would spare his fellow humans the sight. Only a stupid shithead, a loathsome, stupid shithead with absolutely no fellow feeling, would leave his sick feet uncovered. Anyone who drew further attention to them by wearing clogs that slapped when he walked had lost all right to clemency—to the mercy of anesthesia during an emergency procedure.
I was still down on my knees in front of the cubicle. Now I was looking through the eyes of a doctor. I thought about what I had to do. Toenails like that are not very tough, I knew. They come away easily as soon as you succeed in putting something underneath them—a pair of pincers, a cotton swab, a used Popsicle stick, it makes no difference; you barely have to apply any pressure. I looked at the big toe and its doomed nail. There was no stopping now. I thought about a hammer. Not the hammer Caroline and I had used to drive the tent stakes into the ground. That was a soft hammer. A hammer with give. You couldn’t do much damage with a rounded rubber hammer like that. No, a real hammer was what was needed. An iron hammer that would pulverize the brittle toenail with one well-aimed blow. That would make it break into a thousand pieces. There was softer tissue beneath, I knew. There would be a bloodbath. Loose bits of toenail would fly in all directions, against the walls and the low doors of the cubicle, like plaque atomized under a dental hygienist’s drill. Everything went hazy. I saw red, people often say, but I was seeing gray: the gray of a gust of rain, or of sudden mist. I could grab the man by his ankles and
pull him out under the high door. But I still didn’t have a hammer.
“Goddamn it …”
Everything was still for a moment, and precisely because I was aware of the silence, I realized that I was the one who had just sworn out loud.
“Hello?” the man’s voice sounded. “Is someone there?”
A fellow countryman. A Dutchman. I should have known. But in fact, of course, I had already known it from the start, from the moment he wandered into my line of sight with the roll of toilet paper under his arm.
“Pervert!” I said. I saw the man’s hands reach for his red shorts and start to pull them up. I stood up. “Dirty pig. You should be ashamed. There are children on this campground. They have to look at your filth, too.”
From the other side of the door came only a total silence. He was probably trying to decide whether to come out or not, or whether it might be wiser to just stay put until I went away.
In the end, that was what I did. As I stepped out into full sunlight, I blinked my eyes—and saw right away that something was wrong. I saw our tent, I saw the playpen with Lisa in it beneath the tree, but Julia and her tricycle were nowhere to be seen.
“Julia?” I shouted. “Julia?”
I knew the feeling. I had lost my older daughter once before. At a carnival. I had pretended to be calm, I had tried to let my voice sound normal, but inside my chest the cold thud of panic was already pounding much louder than the music from the carousel and the shrieks of people on the roller coaster.
“Julia!”
I walked down the path to where it curved and disappeared behind a high hedge. Behind the hedge was another field of tents.
“Julia?”
In front of a little blue tent, two women were squatting as they washed dishes in the bowl before them on the grass. They stopped for a moment and looked at me questioningly, but by then I had already turned away. To the left of the path, a few yards down, I could hear the burbling of the little river, where we often went to swim in the afternoons.