by Herman Koch
Caroline shrugged and looked at me.
“Really, we only just got here,” I said. “We weren’t planning to … we’re staying at the campground.”
“At the campground!” Ralph roared, as though this was the funniest thing he’d heard in days. At that point, the gray-haired man stepped forward. “Oh, excuse me,” Ralph said. “I forgot to introduce you. Stanley, this is Marc. He’s my doctor. And this is his delectable wife, Caroline.”
The man Ralph had introduced as “Stanley” shook Caroline’s hand first. “Stanley Forbes,” he said. “Stanley,” he repeated, only his first name, as he shook mine. I suddenly knew why his face looked familiar. Stanley Forbes wasn’t his real name. He’d had a different one when he left Holland for America about twenty-five years ago. Jan? Hans? Hans Jansen? One of those basic Dutch names, in any case; I just couldn’t remember it right away. For the first few years you heard very little about him, but then the Dutch film director who by then called himself Stanley Forbes suddenly made a name for himself in Hollywood.
“And this is Stanley’s girlfriend,” Ralph said. “Emmanuelle.” He rested his hand lightly on the young woman’s shoulder. “Emmanuelle, these are some friends of ours from Holland. Marc and Caroline.”
It would be an understatement to say that Emmanuelle was a real beauty. She shook Caroline’s hand, then mine—it was like having someone reach out to you from the cover of Vogue. A small, fragile hand, almost that of a child. From close up I now saw that she couldn’t be much more than five years older than Julia. Seventeen? Eighteen? Not a day older than twenty, for sure. I looked from her face to that of the gray-haired man. I had been wrong about their ages. She wasn’t twenty years younger than Stanley Forbes, she was forty years younger. Had she secured a role in his next film by accommodating him between the sheets? I looked at the director’s face, forty years older than hers. At his forty-year-older body, draped in a pair of white, almost transparent linen drawstring pants and a shirt of the same material. Luxurious gray chest hair curled up from his open collar.
For a few seconds I visualized how he forced that old body on her. How he crawled up beside her and let his hand slide down over her belly. Till it reached her navel. How he would run his index finger in a circle around her navel, then go lower. The smell of old man beneath the sheets. The flaking skin. About how she had to think about other things while it happened. About the role she’d been promised, that above all. Was this what Hans (?) Jansen (?) had dreamed of when he left Holland? Of young girls who, out of admiration for his talent or in exchange for a role in one of his movies, were willing to play with his dick?
Now, last in line, Judith’s mother stepped forward. As I shook her hand I took a good look at her face, but I didn’t get the impression that she made a direct connection between me and the conversation I’d had with her a few weeks earlier on the phone.
“Mr. Schlosser,” she repeated, after her daughter had introduced us.
“Marc,” I said.
I looked around to see whether a table had become available while we were talking, but there were only a few empty chairs. At that same moment, the boy in jeans came back with our order.
“Ah, you folks still have to eat,” Ralph said.
“We could …” I said. “Maybe there will be a table in a while. Or a couple of chairs.”
“Let’s leave these people to eat in peace,” Judith said. “Besides, Mama is tired. If you three want to stay,” she said to Ralph and Stanley Forbes, repeating everything in English for Emmanuelle. “I think it’s better for my mother to go home now. She’s very tired.”
What followed was a brief moment of indecision. Ralph looked around now, too, in search of vacant tables or chairs. Caroline glanced over at me, then lowered her eyes. Julia leaned over to Alex, who was sitting across from her in Lisa’s chair, and whispered something in his ear. Thomas ran after Lisa down the beach. Stanley Forbes had his arm around Emmanuelle’s waist and pulled her up against him. Judith’s mother stood between the tables as though none of it had anything to do with her.
“You’ll be staying a few days, won’t you?” Judith asked. “Why don’t you come to dinner tomorrow?”
It was Professor Aaron Herzl who first explained to us why a man’s biological clock works differently from a woman’s. About how the hands of the clock show the same time, but that it means something different. “It’s just like with real time,” he lectured. “Sometimes a quarter to seven can be early. And sometimes six-twenty is already rather late.”
Every week we had two hours of medical biology, which in those days was still an elective. There were usually more women in the auditorium than there were male students. Aaron Herzl was approaching sixty, but the girls always began to giggle and blush when he addressed them directly. In that respect, he was the living proof of his own theories. The same theories for which, a few years later, he would be run out of town on a rail.
“What I’m going to tell you now is probably not very pleasant for my female students,” he said, peering into the lecture hall. “On the other hand, it’s simply the way it is. Nothing can be done about it. It is perhaps unfair, but a long and happy life lies in store for those women who are able to accept this injustice rather than resist it.”
A little muffled giggling could already be heard coming from around the hall. We, the male students, had feelings of our own concerning our professor of medical biology. Mixed feelings, that above all. The fact that most of the girls found this bald old man attractive threw certain biological principles for a loop. We were young. We had young sperm. The chance of having a healthy child was eight hundred times greater when sperm was young—we had already learned that during the lectures on gynecology. But we recognized it nonetheless. We recognized Professor Aaron Herzl as a serious rival. Whenever the girls were around, we tried to ridicule the professor by alluding to his undoubtedly wrinkled and age-spotted genitals, but there was something about him—an aura, or better yet, a charismatic vibe—that put the girls’ hormone receptors on red alert. At our expense.
Professor Herzl coughed a few times and cleared his throat. He was wearing jeans and a gray turtleneck sweater. No jacket. Before moving to the lectern, he rolled up his sleeves. Then he ran his hands through the gray hair that now grew only at the sides of his head.
“First of all, we have to accept that everything is oriented toward preserving the human race. Or at least keeping it from extinction. And when I say everything, I mean everything. The attraction between the sexes, infatuation, horniness, whatever you choose to call it. Pleasure. The orgasm. Taken together, all this is what sees to it that we are attracted to the other. That we like to touch that other. That we want to merge with that other. Creation is much, much more perfect than some progressive thinkers these days would like us to believe. Food smells nice. Shit stinks. The stench serves as a warning to us not to eat our own feces. Piss stinks, too, but less so, because in an extreme emergency—a shipwreck, a crash landing in the desert—we have to be able to drink our own urine. Nine percent of the population is homosexual, nine percent is left-handed. Throughout the course of fifty thousand years of evolution, those percentages have never changed. Why? Because that’s what’s tolerable. Higher percentages would endanger the continuation of the species. As a matter of fact, a homosexual is nothing more than a walking contraceptive. To say nothing of left-handed homosexuals, a category not included in the statistics.” Laughter in the auditorium, this time perhaps more from the boys than from the girls. “The continuation of the species. That is what it is all about. I’m not talking now about why the species should continue to exist. Bacteria, too, struggle to survive. Cancer cells reproduce to their hearts’ content. Survival is the single motor behind creation. But why should that be so? In other words, what value judgment should we attach to this? Humans have already landed on the moon. Nothing grows there. No life has ever been detected there. But what’s wrong with a barren moon? A moon without plants and animals and
traffic jams? And what would be wrong with a barren earth? Or, once again, what value judgment would one attach to a barren earth like that?” Here Professor Herzl paused to take a sip of water from the glass on the lectern. “Anyone wishing to reflect on the purpose of creation, the purpose of life, if you will, should first pause to consider the dinosaur,” he went on. “The dinosaurs inhabited our planet for one hundred and sixty million years. Then they died out quite suddenly. A few million years later, humans came on the scene. I’ve always wondered why. What was the purpose of that one hundred and sixty million years? What a waste of time! No direct evolutionary link has ever been shown between the dinosaur and the human species. If humanity and the continuation of the human race were really so important, what was the point of those dinosaurs? And why did they stay around so long? Not a thousand years, or a million, no: one hundred and sixty million years! Why not the other way around? Why not the humans first? Why didn’t things start with the evolution of fish to mammals and on to bipedal humans? And then, in a few tens of thousands of years, from the cave dweller to the inventor of the wheel, of movable type, of the transistor radio and the hydrogen bomb? And then have that go on for a few thousand years, or even a few million, as far as I’m concerned, until suddenly, as suddenly as he arrived, mankind dies out. Because of a meteorite, a solar eruption, or a nuclear winter, whatever. The human race dies out. Its bones are buried beneath a thick layer of dust, along with its cities, its cars, its thoughts, its memories, its hopes and desires. Everything gone. And then, after another twenty million years, the dinosaurs come along. They have all the time they need. It no longer matters, we’re not around anymore. They are given a hundred and sixty million years. Dinosaurs are not excavators, they’re not interested in the past. They were never awarded a degree in archaeology. They don’t go out to investigate that layer of dust, not the way we would. And so they find no vanished cities. No four-lane highways, television sets, typewriters. No mint-condition, ready-to-drive Mercedes buried beneath the dust. They find, at most, by accident, a human skull. A skull they sniff at and then, because it no longer contains anything edible, toss away as far as they can. Dinosaurs are not curious about who roamed the earth before they did. They live in the present. That’s something we might do well to learn from the dinosaurs. To live in the present. Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it, we’re told ad nauseam. But isn’t the essence of existence found precisely in repetition? Birth and death. The sun that comes up each morning and goes down each evening. Summer, fall, winter, spring. A new spring, we say. But there’s nothing new about it. We talk about the first snow, but it’s the same snow that fell a year ago. The men go out hunting. The women keep the cave warm. In one day, a man can impregnate several women. But for nine whole months, a pregnant woman is no longer available to perpetuate the human race. These days we can calculate how many times a woman can give birth before she is worn out. The answer is: twenty. After that the risks become too great. The woman becomes less attractive. In this way, the man is warned not to impregnate the woman again. Soon afterwards, fertility comes to a halt. That’s how intelligently the world is put together. A man’s sperm remains viable for much longer. The health risks for a child born to an old father are negligible. These days we tend to laugh at a seventy-five-year-old man siring a child with a twenty-year-old woman. But in fact, there’s nothing funny about it. A child is a child. One more child. A child that otherwise would not have been there. A man ages, but his attractiveness barely declines. That, too, is the ingenuity of nature. Fresh food smells good. Rotten food stinks. We sniff at a carton of milk to determine whether the sell-by date has been exceeded. That’s the way we view one another as well. Not that one, we say. That one’s too old. God, not in a thousand years. A woman who is past her sell-by date is no longer desirable to us, because there is no reason for her to be. She does nothing to promote the continuation of the species. I’d like to stop for a moment to consider the injustice. I sympathize with those women who feel that this is all unfair. Women are the soccer stars of creation. At thirty-five, they’re ready for retirement. They have to make sure they’re home and dry before then. A roof over their head, a husband, children. Women are quicker to bind themselves to a man. Any man at all. You see this with women who are approaching the dangerous age. Beautiful women, who could have any man they like, suddenly opt for an ugly, boring prick. Instinct is stronger. The continuation of the species. An ugly, boring prick with a car and a fixed-term mortgage. The roof over one’s head. Not even so much for themselves, but for the child. The cradle must be in a dry, easily heated space. The boring prick provides a better guarantee that the mortgage will be paid each month than the handsome man who knows that he can pick and choose. The handsome, tomcatting man may suddenly pack up his bags and leave. Instinct is so powerful that the woman isn’t even acting out of self-interest. She, too, would prefer to cuddle up to that handsome man each night. But the handsome man has different plans. To impregnate as many women as possible and so pass on his powerful and healthy genes, that is item number one on his agenda. It’s the biological clock. The hands of the clock tell the same time. For the woman, it’s time to settle down. The man feels that it’s still too early for that. And then, by way of conclusion: There are cultures that provide for women who are left high and dry. We tend to look down on those cultures. Here, in the West, an abandoned woman pines away in loneliness. Yet we consider ourselves superior. Those same cultures I’m talking about also make sure that girls are set up with a husband while they are still very young. You might think it’s unfair that a man cannot get pregnant. But you’ll never hear a man complain about that. We’re all too relieved not to have to walk around for nine months with a huge belly. A belly that would only get in the way of what our instinct tells us we should be doing. You people are young. Do what you want to do. And do it as much and as often as you like. Don’t think about the future. Make sure you have something to look back on. And let injustice stew in its own juices. That will be all for today.”
The summer house was on a hillside amid other summer houses, a little less than three miles from the beach. Less than two from our campground. Too far to walk, though, so we took the car.
“Huh, I was expecting something different,” Caroline said. We had the windows rolled down and were trying to read the house numbers, which wasn’t easy because most were either missing or completely covered by ivy or other climbers.
“First it was fifty-three, then fifty-five, but now the numbers are going down again,” I said. I touched the brakes and stuck my head out the window. “Thirty-two, damn it! What do you mean, something different?”
“I don’t know. Something a little more arty, perhaps?”
When we got to the top of the dead-end street, I turned the car around. From here you could see a blue strip of sea and the road as it zigzagged its way to the beach. I looked over at my wife. Years ago, she, too, had been about to marry a boring prick. The first time I saw her was at a party. Just a friend’s birthday party. Caroline and the birthday boy’s wife had been friends since childhood. The boring prick had no friends. The boring prick was with her. “I don’t know anyone else here,” he told me. We were standing by the hors d’oeuvres. He put down his glass of Coke and pulled out a pipe. “I came with my girlfriend.” I looked at his fingers as he filled the pipe with tobacco. What kind of woman would want a man who smoked a pipe? I wondered. The next moment, Caroline showed up at his side. “Shall we get going?” she asked the boring prick. “I don’t feel so great.” Sometimes the contrast between a man and woman is so huge that you start wondering whether there might be other factors at play. Financial factors, for example. Or factors of status and fame. The twenty-year-old fashion model with the sixty-year-old millionaire. The devastating beauty with the ugliest soccer player you could imagine. Not a third-division player, not even a third-division player with the looks of David Beckham. No, an international star. An international star with thin, greasy hai
r and a smile that shows more gum than teeth. It’s an agreement. The model looks good in the spotlights. She can shop till she drops in Milan and New York. The ugly soccer player and the old millionaire can let everyone know that they have snagged the most beautiful women in the world. But sometimes the agreement isn’t immediately obvious. How can this be, for Christ’s sake? you think. What does she see in this boring prick?
“Oh, excuse me,” Caroline said, and held out her hand.
“Marc,” I said, taking her hand. At first I had to fight back the urge to hold that hand a little longer than might be considered respectable. After that I suppressed the urge to say something “charming.” I glanced over at the boring prick, who had meanwhile stoked up his pipe and exhaled a couple of thick clouds of smoke. It was pure intuition. I didn’t have to say anything “charming.” I was charming. In any case, I was a lot more charming than this boring prick.
I’ve already mentioned my looks. What I should add is that, at a first glance, I don’t look like a doctor. At least not at birthday parties. Is there a doctor in the house? people shout when someone has fainted or cut his hand on a broken glass. They always look right past me, or over my head. A man wearing sneakers that are none too new, jeans that are none too clean, and a T-shirt hanging over his belt. His hair carefully mussed. I have the kind of hair you can do that with. Before a birthday party, I stand in front of the mirror. I lay my fingers alongside my head and move them briefly up and down. Then it looks just the way it should.
I looked at the woman who had introduced herself as Caroline. I suddenly realized why she was with the boring prick. The biological clock. She had looked at the clock and decided time was running out. But it would be such a waste. I glanced at the boring prick again. I saw weak genes. Perhaps even ugly children. Ugly children whose pipe-smoking father would pick them up from school. She’d said she wasn’t feeling “too great,” and my heart suddenly started pounding. What if I was too late? The thought was so horrendous that I skipped all the formalities and cut right to the crux.