by Herman Koch
“Julia?”
I twisted my ankle on a big, round stone. A thorny branch tore across my cheek, just below my eye. In three, no more than four, stumbling steps, I reached the riverbank.
The tricycle was standing in a sort of shallow cove, its front wheel in the water.
I started to run through the water, slipped and landed hard on my ass on the stony riverbed, in a fountain of droplets.
There stood Julia. Not in the river but up on the shore. She was tossing pebbles, but when she saw me sitting wide-legged in the water, she began laughing loudly.
“Daddy!” she shouted, raising her arms above her head. “Daddy!”
Within a split second I was back on my feet. Another one and I was standing beside her.
“Goddamn it!” I said, grabbing her roughly by the wrist. “What did I fucking tell you? Stay on the path! Stay on the path, goddamn it!”
For what must have been a full second my daughter looked at me with eyes that seemed to suggest she thought it was all a joke—Daddy fell in the water just to be funny, now Daddy is being angry just to be funny—but then something in her expression broke. Her face twisted in pain as she tugged at her wrist.
“Daddy …”
For years afterward I would think back on that look, and every time I did, tears came to my eyes.
“Marc! Marc! What are you doing?” Caroline was standing up there, in the trees. She was holding a bottle of milk. She looked from me to Julia and back. “Marc!” she shouted again.
“I can’t take it anymore,” I said half an hour later, once Julia had calmed down and was rolling up and down the path again on her tricycle as though nothing had happened.
Caroline looked at me. She took both my hands in hers and said, “You know that little hotel we saw in the village? Close to the market? Shall we go there for a couple of days?”
From that day on we only stayed at hotels. Or we rented a small house somewhere. At the hotels and houses, too, there were sometimes swimming pools where you saw the uncovered parts of other people, but at least you could get away from them. The looking was able to take a couple of hours off. A couple of hours lying on the bed in your own room, with your eyes closed. The human filth was no longer forced down your throat twenty-four/seven. After a few of those vacations in houses and hotels, we sometimes dawdled around the windows of the real-estate agents. We looked at the pictures and the prices. For Caroline, a second home abroad would have been a consolation prize for having to give up camping. We could afford it. As long as you stayed away from the coast, most of those houses cost almost nothing. But even as we gazed misty-eyed at a photo of an old water mill with its own pear orchard, we also started thinking out loud about the drawbacks. It might be a shame that one only visited during vacation, we told each other. We spent a long time in front of a photo of a renovated farmhouse with a pool. You’d have to have someone for that pool, we said. Someone to take care of it. The yard, too. Otherwise you’d spend your entire vacation cutting grass and weeding nettles.
We kept putting off our dream of a second home abroad, pushing it ahead of us little by little. Occasionally we would let a local real-estate agent show us around. We ducked under low, sagging doorways; we caught the smell of stagnant water from a pool covered in algae and full of croaking frogs; we ducked to avoid spiderwebs in what had once been the pigpen; we saw a bend in the river glistening in the valley far below; we ducked down to inspect an old outdoor oven and watched the swallows flying back and forth from their nests beneath the eaves of the main house.
Too windy—that was often Caroline’s verdict during those viewings. Too hot. Too cold. Not much of a view. Too exposed. Too close to the neighbors. Too remote.
“We’ll call you,” I told the real-estate agent. “My wife and I need to think it over for a few days.”
And so I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw the tent in the trunk of the car the morning before we left for our summer vacation. It was tucked in all the way at the back, maybe so that I wouldn’t see it. But just then Caroline appeared in the doorway, carrying two rolled-up sleeping bags.
“Aha,” I said. “And what is this supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. It’s just that I thought sometimes you find a pretty place where the only possibility is to camp out. Where there’s no hotel, I mean.”
“Aha,” I said again. A lighthearted approach seemed best, to approach the matter as though my wife was really only sort of joking. “And I suppose that means I’ll have to commute from the hotel to the campground every morning?”
Caroline put the sleeping bags in the trunk, up against the tent.
“Marc,” she said, “I know how you feel about camping. I won’t try to force you into anything. But it’s such a waste to stay in a hotel sometimes. I looked around on the Internet. They have campgrounds there with all the trimmings. With restaurants. And you’re only a hundred yards from the beach.”
“Hotels have restaurants, too,” I said, but I knew I was fighting a losing battle. Caroline missed camping. I could come up with arguments. I could say that the tent and sleeping bags took up half the room in the trunk, but then I would be ignoring the simple fact that my wife longed to hammer stakes into the ground, to tighten ropes and wake up in the morning in a sleeping bag covered in dew.
And there was something else I realized. After the garden party at Ralph and Judith Meier’s, I had asked Caroline if she had talked to Ralph. And more specifically, whether he had made a pass at her.
“You were completely right,” she’d said.
“About what?”
“About him being a dirty old man.”
“Really?” We were lying in bed, the reading lamps on, but we weren’t looking at each other. I don’t know what expression I would have had to wear if we had been.
“Yeah, you were right. I don’t know, I guess I started paying attention after you said that: about the way he looked at me. Something in his eyes … He licked his lips while he was looking at me. He smacked his lips. As though I were a hamburger. We were standing beside the barbecue. He was stabbing his fork into the meat to see if it was done and flipping the hamburgers. Then he lowered his eyes. Like a bad actor in a movie that’s meant to be funny. He rolled his eyes a little when he looked at my breasts. Don’t get me wrong: That can be nice. Sometimes a woman likes it when a man admires her body. But this … this was different. This was … what did you call it again? Filthy? Yeah, that’s it. A filthy look. I didn’t know what to do with myself. And then he started telling a joke. I don’t remember how it went, but it was dirty. Not funny-dirty, dirty-dirty. And you should have seen the look on his face as he was telling it! You know how some people, when they tell a joke, they laugh as though they just made it up themselves? Well, that’s the way he laughed.”
“And now I suppose you don’t want to go by and visit them at their summer house,” I said a little too quickly.
“Marc! How could you even consider that? No, thank you very much, no. I’m not really into that, anyway, visiting other people while I’m on vacation, but now there’s no way. I wouldn’t get a moment’s rest there beside that pool with Ralph around.”
“But when we left you acted like you thought it was such a great idea. At the door, when we said good-bye. And in the car you even asked Julia and Lisa about it. About what they thought.”
Caroline sighed. “So we’d all had a little bit too much to drink, all right?” she said. “Then you don’t really say that you have no intention of visiting their summer house. And in the car I was only thinking of Julia. About that boy she liked. It’s a good thing she wasn’t too enthusiastic, either.”
“Well, we’ll see,” I said. “There’s no real obligation.”
And now we were standing beside the open trunk of our car. I sensed an opportunity, but it meant I would have to give up my resistance to taking the tent along. And the sooner the better.
“You know,” I said, “it’s been a few years. Sometimes I miss it
, too: a little camping. Let’s give it another try. But I don’t want any messing around with pans and gas burners. We’re going out to dinner every night.”
Now it was my wife’s turn to look at me dubiously, as though I might be joking. But the next moment she threw her arms around me.
“Marc?” she said. “That is so, so sweet of you!”
I held her tight. I couldn’t help it, though; I was thinking about the last half hour of that garden party. I had looked everywhere and finally found Judith in a corner of the yard, where she was picking up glasses and half-empty bowls of chips and peanuts.
I took her by the wrist. She turned to me with a start. But when she saw that it was me an almost dreamy smile appeared on her face.
“Marc …” she said.
“I have to see you again,” I said.
We left on a Saturday. The first night we spent at a hotel. The second one, too. As usual, we had no fixed plans. Or, I should really say, to all appearances, we had no fixed plans. To an observer we would have looked like an ordinary couple with two daughters. A family with no fixed plans, making their way south. In reality, we were edging almost imperceptibly toward the summer house where Ralph and Judith Meier were spending their vacation.
On the third morning, still lying in the hotel bed, I flipped through the camping guide we’d brought along with us at the last minute. There were three campgrounds in the immediate vicinity of the summer house, all within a six-mile radius.
“So what do you guys think?” I said. “Shall we pitch the tent somewhere?”
“Yeaaah!” Julia and Lisa cheered, in unison.
“But only if the weather’s nice,” Caroline said with a wink.
That was the plan. My plan. We were going camping. We would spend a few days, a week if need be, at the same campground. Somewhere—on the beach, at the supermarket, in a sidewalk café in the nearest town—we would run into the Meiers, entirely by accident.
A few weeks before we left I had visited a travel bookshop and bought a detailed map of the area. So detailed that it showed each individual house. I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure, but using the address and directions Judith had e-mailed us a few days after the party, I thought I could tell which house on the map was the Meiers’. I went to ViaMichelin and typed in the address. Then on Google Earth I zoomed in so close that I could see the blue of the pool, and even the diving board.
Of the three campgrounds, one lay along the same road to the beach as Ralph and Judith Meier’s summer house. But to my horror I saw that the guidebook referred to it as a “green” campground. A campground with “farm animals,” “environmentally-sound toilets,” and “simple facilities for the true nature lover.” I could almost smell the stench. But a collateral plus of a campground where detergents and deodorant were presumably taboo was that it would make the contrast with the summer house all the greater. One dive in the Meiers’ pool and Julia and Lisa would never want to leave.
In her e-mail, Judith had sent me both her phone numbers. A week after the garden party I tried to reach her cell phone a few times, but only got the voice mail. At first no one answered the landline, either. I thought about leaving a message but decided against it.
Three days later—I had, in fact, already given up and was about to hang up—a woman with a voice I didn’t recognize answered the landline.
I gave her my name and asked to speak to Ralph or Judith.
“They’re not in the country right now,” the voice said—not a very young voice, I registered. “And at this point I’m afraid I can’t say when they’ll be coming back.”
I asked where they had gone.
“And who are you?” the voice asked.
“I’m the family doctor.”
There was a two-second silence.
“Ralph got an offer all of a sudden,” the voice resumed. “From America. A part in a new TV series. That’s where he’s gone, and my daughter liked the idea of going along, so I’m taking care of the boys for the moment.”
Judith’s mother. I vaguely remembered a woman in her seventies wandering around at the party, looking rather lost. The fate of all elderly parents. Your children’s friends exchange a few words with you for courtesy’s sake, then try to shake you off as quickly as they can.
“Can I …” Judith’s mother said. “Can I take a message?”
I fought back the urge to say, “I’m sorry, but I’m bound by professional confidentiality.” Instead I said, “I have some test results here on my desk. Your daughter was in to see me a few weeks ago. It’s nothing serious, but it would be good if she could contact me. I’ve been trying to reach her on her cell, but she doesn’t answer.”
“Oh yes, that, too. Judith called to tell me. That she forgot her cell phone. I’m in the kitchen now. I can see it from where I’m standing.”
Early the next morning, Judith called. My first patient of the day had just settled down across from me at my desk. A man with thin gray hair and burst blood vessels in his face. He was suffering from erectile dysfunction.
“I can’t talk for long,” she said. “What is it?”
“Where are you exactly in America?” I asked, looking at my patient’s face. He had a face like a vacant lot, a lot where nothing would ever be built again.
“We’re in California right now. In Santa Barbara. It’s after midnight here. Ralph’s in the bathroom. I talked to my mother. She thought it was kind of weird. She may be old, but she remembered that my own doctor is a woman. I had to come up with an excuse really quickly, that I’d gone to you for a second opinion. But that only upset her even more.”
I imagined Ralph Meier in the bathroom. His big body without clothes. The jets of water from the showerhead. The drops that spatter as they strike that body: his shoulders, his chest—his stomach, which hung like a lean-to over his genitals. I tried to summon up an image of Ralph’s stomach, from that first time he’d come in to see me and I’d asked him to take off his shirt. I wondered whether he could see anything when he looked down or whether it was all hidden from sight by that belly.
“I can’t talk too long now, either,” I said. “I just wanted to hear how you were doing. And when the two of you are coming back.”
As I said this, I looked directly at the man with erectile dysfunction. There are pills to combat erectile disorders. But they remain a ruse. Those pills simply make it stand upright regardless, whether it’s for a sick horse or an empty trash can or the window display at a shop selling stationery. If I were a woman, I at least wouldn’t want to know when my partner was using medication.
“I don’t know,” Judith said. “Ralph still has to do a couple of screen tests. It would be great if it actually worked out. It’s going to be a huge series. On HBO. They did The Sopranos. And The Wire. Thirteen episodes. About ancient Rome in the days of Caesar Augustus. They want Ralph to play the lead. To be the emperor.”
“I got your mail,” I said. “With the address of your summer house.”
“Marc, I really have to go now. We may be going down there in early July. That depends on how things go here. We may even fly straight from here. And then my mother can come down with the boys later on. Once the summer vacation starts.”
I wanted to say something else. An innuendo. A flirtation. Something that would make Judith remember right away what a charming man I really was. But the presence of the dead mouse on the other side of the desk kept me from anything but platitudes.
“We’ll be in the neighborhood,” I said. “I mean, we’re heading that way, anyway. It would be fun if we …”
“Bye, Marc.”
For five seconds or so I sat there with the receiver pressed to my ear. The receiver that was not producing a busy signal but simply static. I thought about the day that lay ahead. It was as though that day was filled with static now, too.
“You can go into the examination room and drop your pants,” I said at last to my patient, putting down the phone. “I’ll be right with you.”
The green campground was perfect beyond my wildest dreams. I have to admit, it was in a lovely, shady spot surrounded by pine trees. In the distance, through the trees, you could see a narrow blue strip of sea. But I smelled something strange. The smell of sick animals. Caroline breathed in deeply through her nose a few times. Julia and Lisa looked doubtful. And we were no farther than the barrier gate at the entrance. We could still turn around and leave. The gate itself was fashioned from a simple, unpainted tree trunk. A trunk that wasn’t entirely straight, just the way things are in nature. Beside it sat a log-cabinish kind of office. We had climbed out of our car and were leaning against it a bit indecisively. I knew, of course, that this campground was nearest to the summer house, but there are limits to what one can take. The sick-animal smell was already stirring up a dull rage inside me. It was an odor I sometimes smelled in my office, too. Coming from patients who were “living at one with nature,” as they themselves put it. Patients who refused to have body hair removed from places where no body hair belonged; who preferred to wash themselves with water from a well or a ditch, and who refused “as a matter of principle” to use chemical or cosmetic products for their personal hygiene. If one could even speak of hygiene in such cases. From all their pores and orifices came the smell of stagnant water. Water mixed with dirt and dead leaves in a blocked gutter. When they undressed, the smell was worse. Like taking the lid off a pan. A pan that’s been forgotten at the back of the fridge. I am a doctor. I took an oath. I treat one and all, regardless. But nothing or no one could compare with the degree of rage and disgust I felt at the ecologically sound stench of so-called nature lovers.
“So what do you guys think?” I asked my family. “There are other campgrounds around.”
“I don’t know …” Caroline said.
Julia shrugged. Lisa asked whether they had a pool. I was just about to tell her no when a man stepped out of the log-cabin booth. He glanced at our license plate, then came toward us, holding out his hand.