by Herman Koch
“Goedemiddag!” he said in Dutch, with no trace of an accent. He got to Caroline first, and had hold of her hand before she’d had time to back away.
A Dutchman! Dutch people abroad. Those Dutch people who set up shop abroad. They convert a total ruin into a hotel or pension, open a Dutch pancake restaurant on the loveliest beach along the entire coast, or set up a campground in a quiet stretch of forest. I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that they’re helping themselves to something that actually belongs to the local population. Something that could be done just as well by that same population. Most of them don’t last for very long. The locals either give them the cold shoulder or simply harass them until they leave. The roofing tiles for the pension arrive too late, the permit for the miniature golf course gets lost in the mail, the cooker hood in the Dutch-style pancake restaurant fails to satisfy local fire and safety regulations. The Dutch entrepreneurs complain loudly about the obscure machinations of the bureaucracy in the country in question. “What do they want, anyway?” they ask rhetorically. “No one was doing anything with that ruin. Those woods were completely deserted. No one ever went to that beach. We’re the ones who rolled up our sleeves. We Dutch know how to get things done. So why are they giving us such a hard time? People around here couldn’t organize a pissing contest in a brewery, anyway.” After two or three years of cursing the indigenous population and lazy foreigners in general, they pack their bags and return home in a huff.
As I reached out to shake the hand offered by the campground owner, I tried to read his expression, to establish which phase he was in. It’s like a malignant illness. First you have hope. Then comes denial. And only right at the end is there resignation.
“Welcome, welcome!” the man said. His handshake was firm but contrived. He was clearly making an effort to look at me as openly and cheerfully as he could, but in his eyes I saw the symptoms of a chronic lack of sleep. Little red veins in the whites of the eyes, undoubtedly caused by nights of tossing and turning over debts or goods that had been delivered too late or not at all. I gave him one year, tops. Before next summer he would have the farm animals put to sleep and go back to Holland.
In the little log hut he first began flipping repeatedly through a book that contained a map of the campground. He shook his head and sighed deeply a few times as he ran his index finger over the map, but he was a bad actor.
Once he had assigned us a space, after even more sighing and chin-rubbing, he asked, “Could I ask how you happened to find us? We’ve only been open for two years and we’re not in all the guidebooks.”
Two years. I couldn’t help smiling. I had pinpointed it pretty well. After denial comes resignation. The counting of the days. “We’ve developed a nose for this kind of place,” I said. “For campgrounds where the real outdoor experience is of paramount importance. Camping out under the stars, no frills like pool tables, arcade games, or swimming pools with giant slides.”
Sometimes things simply go too fast. Too fast to really pass for coincidence. I had prepared myself for a few days of peace and quiet. Days marked by no major events. A book. A little game of badminton. A walk. First a vacuum had to be established. The emptiness of the first few days of vacation. After that emptiness, you’re all too pleased when something finally happens. You’re open to new encounters. To change. To new people. That first evening we were going out for shrimp and calamari at a beachside restaurant. We were tired from the trip. We were going to go to bed early. I would lie awake for hours. I would listen to the regular breathing of my sleeping family. But things went differently. Things went, above all, too fast.
With Caroline’s blessing (“Go on. You’d only get in the way here, anyway, right?”) I went for a walk around the campground while she and the girls put up the tent. I took the first path through the trees that I came across. There weren’t many other tents. Not a single trailer. I came past the little wooden building that housed the “environmentally-sound toilets.” That, for me, is the biggest nightmare about camping: that you have to leave the tent at night in order to take a piss. I always postponed it as long as I could. So long that it hurt. Then I would squeeze my feet into my wet shoes. Not even at gunpoint could you have forced me to go to the restrooms in the middle of the night. The restrooms where moths crashed into the outdoor lights, their wings aflutter. Where all exposed parts of your body were stung by insects that never sleep. I would unzip the door of the tent and take a few steps at most. Sometimes there were stars. Sometimes the moon was full. I have to admit that I also had happy moments at times, standing among the trees, hearing my own piss hissing in the grass, against the stalks of stinging nettles. Then I would look up. At thousands of stars. This is it, I thought at moments like that. This is what there is. The rest is bullshit. Nothing came before moments like that. And nothing came after them, either. We bought the tent during our first vacation in America. It was big enough for four. Back then, though, there were just the two of us. We zipped our sleeping bags together and snuggled up close. There was plenty of extra room beside us. Space left over for the future. After pissing I always waited awhile before going back into the tent. I looked at the moon overhead and the moonlight on the grass. Inside, beside my wife, my two daughters were asleep. I was standing outside. Only when the first shiver ran down my back did I crawl back into the warmth of the sleeping bag.
The environmentally-sound toilets consisted of nothing but a few wooden planks with round holes cut in them. Down in the hole it was dark; you couldn’t see the bottom, only smell it. Both inside and outside, the door was covered in fat blue flies that didn’t take off when I flapped my hand at them. I closed the door and walked on. Then I came to the fenced plot where the “farm animals” were kept. I saw a llama, a couple of chickens, and a donkey. There was no grass, only mud. Droppings everywhere. The llama’s dark-brown coat was clotted with feces and mud. The donkey was too skinny. It stood closest to the fence. I could see its ribs; the animal was shivering all over and swinging its tail wildly to chase away the flies. The chickens were huddled together motionlessly in a corner.
I felt a clammy rage rise up in me. I felt like walking right back to where Caroline and the children were putting up the tent, I felt like announcing that we were leaving this very minute, when I felt a soft touch on my left hand.
“Daddy …”
“Lisa.”
My younger daughter had wrapped her fingers around my index and middle fingers. Together, for a moment, we looked in silence at the animals on the other side of the fence.
“Daddy?”
“Yeah?”
“Is that donkey sick?”
I took a deep breath before answering.
“I don’t know, sweetheart. It’s just that there are a lot of flies. The flies bother him, you see that?”
I looked at the shivering donkey; at the same moment, the animal took two shaky steps forward and stuck its head over the fence. I felt my eyes grow moist.
“Can I pet him, Dad?”
I didn’t say anything. I gulped something down. A lump in my throat. That’s what they say at moments like that. But it’s softer than a lump. Softer and more fluid.
Lisa placed her hand on the donkey’s head. A cloud of flies rose up. The donkey blinked its eyes. I looked the other way and bit down hard on my lower lip.
“Daddy?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“Can we buy something for him later? Carrots or something?”
I laid both hands on my daughter’s shoulders and pulled her against me. First I cleared my throat. I didn’t want the sound of my voice to alarm her needlessly.
“That’s a really good idea, sweetheart,” I said. “Carrots, lettuce, tomatoes. You’ll see how much he likes that.”
There was only one restaurant at the beach. The tables and chairs were set up right in the sand. It was crowded, but we were lucky and got the last table. We ordered two beers for Caroline and me, a Fanta for Lisa, and a Cola Light for Julia. The s
un had already gone down behind the rocks, but the air was still warm and pleasant.
“Can we go down to the water?” Lisa asked.
“All right,” Caroline said. “But look at the menu first and choose something. We’ll call you when it gets here.”
They took a quick look at the menu. Lisa wanted macaroni with tomato sauce, Julia only a salad.
“Julia, you have to eat something substantial, too. At least order a hamburger along with it, or Lisa’s macaroni.”
“Don’t need it,” Julia said. She stood up. “You coming?” she asked her little sister.
“Be careful,” Caroline said. “And don’t go into the water when we’re not there. Stay on the beach.”
Julia sighed deeply and rolled her eyes. Lisa had already threaded her way past the other tables and was running onto the beach. Then, holding her flip-flops in one hand, Julia walked off after her little sister. All she was wearing was a T-shirt and the red bikini bottoms she’d bought just before the vacation, and I saw two men a few tables over turn their heads and watch her go.
“She really hasn’t been eating enough lately,” Caroline said. “She has to stop that.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “It’s not that bad. Better too little than too much. Or would you rather have a roly-poly daughter with rolls of fat hanging out everywhere?”
“No, of course not. It’s just that I worry sometimes. She does the same thing at home, too. She eats all the salad first, then says she’s not hungry anymore.”
“It’s her age, I think. She’s imitating the models in the magazines. Kate Moss doesn’t eat much, either. But like I said, better that than the other way around. And this is not the husband speaking, but the doctor.”
We both ordered another beer and a bottle of white wine. The sun had gone down completely by now. Rocks rose up sharply behind the restaurant. There were a couple of villas up there, their lights already on. I could hear the surf, but the beach ran down fairly steeply to the water, so we couldn’t see the girls from our table.
“Shall I go check on them?” Caroline said.
“Let’s wait till the food gets here. What could happen?”
In fact, I was always as worried as she was. This just happened to be our established division of roles. Caroline expressed her concern first, upon which I said that she shouldn’t exaggerate. If I had been here alone with my daughters, I would have been down three times already to see if they hadn’t been washed out to sea.
Caroline took my hand.
“Marc,” she said, “do you think you can handle it, this campground? I mean, it is radical camping, right off the bat. We could have gone to one with a few more amenities.”
“I went down to see the animals this afternoon. They’re malnourished. And probably sick.”
“Do you want to go to another campground? We could spend the night here and go somewhere else tomorrow.”
“What we should really do is sic a health inspector on that bastard. They’d close the place down pronto. But then the animals would probably be put to sleep.”
A boy in a T-shirt and jeans brought the wine. He pulled the cork and put the bottle in a simple cooler on our table. He didn’t ask whether we wanted to taste it first. But that proved unnecessary. The wine was ice-cold and tasted like grapes that had been left to soak in a mountain stream overnight.
“We could leave tomorrow, you know?” Caroline said. “Would you really report that man for a couple of sick animals? It would probably put him out of business.”
“I have a few things with me. Mostly first-aid stuff. But also some antibiotics, that kind of thing. I’ll take a look tomorrow, see what I can do.”
“But, Marc, you’re on vacation. Don’t start in on a project right away, not on the first day. Even though it is a really nice project, of course, helping sick animals.”
This was what Caroline accused me of at times. It was, in fact, the only bone of contention between us: that I always had to have something to do when we were on vacation. Caroline could spend hours reading a book beside the pool. Or lie on a recliner on the beach with her sunglasses on and just gaze into the distance. Whereas after half an hour I needed to do something. On the beach I built dams and castles in the sand; at the summer rental I would weed the path from the front door to the road. Sometimes even my daughters got tired of me. At first they would help dig the canal that would carry off the backwash of high tide and protect our castle, but after an hour they usually gave up. “Time for a rest, Dad,” they said. And Caroline would say, “Marc, come and lie down. It exhausts me just looking at you.”
I was about to object that I considered it my duty as a physician to help sick animals, and that it wouldn’t take much time, when we heard Julia’s voice.
“Dad! Mom!”
Caroline put her glass down on the table with a thud and sprang to her feet. “Julia!” she shouted. “What is it?”
But it was nothing. Julia was walking toward us across the beach. In the light of the patio lanterns we saw her waving. We also saw that she was not alone. Walking beside her was a boy. I had seen him only once before, but still, I knew right away who it was. His blond curls. And even more than that, something in the way he walked: his languid tread, as though walking through sand was simply too hard for him.
“Guess who else is here?” Julia shouted, before they had even reached our table.
Sometimes things just go too quickly.
“Did you know about this?” Caroline asked much later that evening, as we were drinking a final glass of wine in front of the tent. Julia and Lisa were already asleep. “Yes, you knew,” she said without waiting for a reply. It was dark. I was glad I didn’t have to look at her. “Why, Marc? Why?”
I said nothing. I toyed with my glass, then took a quick sip. But the glass was empty. We were sitting in our low folding chairs, our legs stretched out across a bed of pine needles. Every once in a while I felt something tickling my ankles. An ant. A spider. But I didn’t move.
“I thought you wanted to keep Ralph as far away from me as possible,” Caroline said. “I even told you that myself. That I didn’t want to go. And then you choose a campground that’s a stone’s throw away from their summer house.”
Caroline had hung a candle holder on the pole that stuck out from the front of the tent. One of those candle holders with little glass windows. But the candle had died and we were sitting in darkness. Above our heads, thousands of stars sparkled among the treetops. Far below you could hear the soft booming of the surf.
“Yes, I knew,” I said. “But I didn’t think it was any reason not to come to this particular place. Like it was off-limits or something, just because you might run into people you don’t really want to see.”
“But, Marc! There are hundreds of places like this along the coast. Hundreds of other beaches where the Meiers haven’t rented a summer house.”
“I talked to Ralph about it again, later on. Right after the garden party. He told me how beautiful it was here. Still fairly unspoiled. I was sort of curious.”
Caroline sighed deeply. “So what now? What are we going to do? Now we have to go over there tomorrow. It would be really weird if we didn’t.”
“It’s just a dinner. They’ll probably have a barbecue again. If you want, we can leave right after that. Go to some other beach. Some other campground. But if you really don’t want to go to dinner there, we won’t. We’ll make up an excuse. That you weren’t feeling well. Or that I wasn’t. And then we’ll go away, the day after tomorrow.”
Neither of us said a word. I ran the tip of my tongue over my upper lip, which felt dry and hard.
“Is that what you want?” I asked. “Like I said, I don’t mind at all. We’ll come up with some excuse.”
I heard my wife sigh a few times. I heard her swat at something on her bare leg. An insect. A pine needle, fallen from a tree. Or maybe, in fact, nothing at all.
“Oh, well. It doesn’t really matter. It was just that I was lookin
g forward to a couple of days or a week with just the four of us. If it had happened later in the vacation, I wouldn’t have minded nearly as much. Meeting up with other people. But this is so sudden. I don’t feel at all like being around a bunch of people. Like long conversations on the patio with lots of wine.”
I reached out and laid my hand on her thigh.
“I don’t either, really,” I said. “I didn’t feel like being around other people yet, either. I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”
“That’s right, it’s your fault,” she said. “So you can call them and say we’re not coming.”
I closed my eyes. I gulped, but my throat was empty. Except for the surf in the distance, all I could hear was a faint buzzing in my ears. “Okay,” I said.
“I’m only kidding,” Caroline said. “No, it would be ridiculous to cancel now. To be honest, I’m kind of curious. About that house of theirs. And it will be fun for the girls. The boys, I mean. And that pool.”
Earlier that evening on the beach, this is how it went: Julia brought Alex over to our table, followed closely by Lisa and the younger brother, Thomas. Then the rest of the Meier family came strolling up. Ralph and Judith, and the woman in her seventies I had seen at the garden party: Judith’s mother. And two other people. A man in his late fifties with longish gray hair, streaked with a few black locks—a face that seemed familiar, but I couldn’t figure out why, not right away. And a woman. A woman I assumed was with the man, although she was at least twenty years younger.
“What a surprise!” Ralph said. He grabbed Caroline, who was already halfway out of her chair, by the shoulders and kissed her three times on the cheeks.
“Hi,” Judith said. We kissed each other, too. Then we looked at each other. That’s right, I really showed up, I told her with my eyes. Yes, so I see, she looked back.
“Why didn’t you two call to say you were coming?” Ralph said. “We could have had dinner together. We bought a whole suckling pig at the market today. That’s the real thing, suckling pig on a spit!”