by Herman Koch
I said nothing. I blinked my eyes in the bright sunlight reflected from the beach. I saw black spots. Black spots dancing from left to right across my field of vision.
“They’re still only children, our girls,” Caroline said. “At least that’s what we tell ourselves. But look at Julia. How much difference is there between Julia and Emmanuelle? Two years? Four years? A couple of hundred miles south of here, Julia might have been married off by now.”
I suddenly remembered something. A few days ago. Ralph playing Ping-Pong with Alex, Thomas, Julia, and Lisa. Not a real game of old-school Ping-Pong. They all had a paddle in one hand and they were running around the table. You had to knock the ball back to the other side, then it was the next person’s turn, and so on. If you missed the ball, you were out. What I remembered most of all was Ralph. He was wearing shorts for a change, admittedly, but it was a weird sight, that big body running around the Ping-Pong table among those other little bodies that were so much smaller and above all slimmer. A comical sight, if you looked at it that way. He was barefoot, and there was a puddle of water on the ground. He slipped and fell, landing with his full weight on the tiles. I had just stood up from my deck chair and was walking toward the Ping-Pong table with a can of beer in my hand. At the moment when Ralph crashed down onto the tiles you could feel the ground shake. As though a truck was driving down the street outside. “Damn it!” he roared. “Goddamn it! Cuntass! Cock-sucker! Fucking cunt! Ow …! Ow …! Damn …! Goddamn it …” He was sitting with his shorts in the puddle and rubbing his knee. You could see the nasty scrape on it. A scrape with stripes of blood across it where the skin had been dragged across the rough tiles. “Jesus’ fucking whore!” he shouted.
The children had stopped running around the table right away. They stood a little way away from him and looked at the large body on the ground. With a certain awe, but also in amazement, the way one might look at the carcass of a stray whale that has washed up on the beach. But after that last three-word oath, I believe it was Alex who started laughing. Then Thomas yelped and began to giggle. That was the signal for Julia and Lisa to burst out laughing, too. They looked at Ralph one more time, and then surrendered completely to a liberating fit of laughter. It was laughter that wailed, that shrieked the way only girls’ can. Weak-kneed, hysterical laughter. The kind of laughter that sounds as though it will never end. And deadly, too. A deadly laugh for us boys. They slap their hands over their mouths and explode with it, often behind your back, sometimes right in your face. Like now.
It was not only Ralph who was being laughed at, it was all men. The man as species. Normally speaking, that man was big and strong. Stronger than a woman. But sometimes he fell. Due to a force greater than his own. The force of gravity.
“Oh, I’m going to wet myself!” Lisa shrieked, tears running down her cheeks.
I looked at Ralph, his big, clumsy body on the tiles, the scrape on his knee. It was—I don’t know how else to put it—a childlike injury. The injury incurred by a little boy who has fallen from his tricycle. A scraped knee that you run crying to show to your mother, proud on the one hand of so much blood, afraid on the other that she might put iodine on it. That was also what you heard in Julia and Lisa’s laughter—if you listened closely. The laugh of all mothers. The mothers who chuckle at the eternal clumsiness of boys. Ralph inspected the cut on his knee one last time, his face contorted with pain, and shook his head. Then he did the only thing you can do in a situation like that: He started laughing along with them. He laughed along with his sons. With my daughters. He laughed at himself. Or at least it seemed as though he was laughing at himself, as though he had a capacity for self-mockery. In reality, of course, it was above all a laugh to save face. A damage-containment laugh. A grown-up man who falls down hard is laughable. A man who can laugh about it himself is that much less so.
“Goddamn,” Ralph said, laughing as he struggled to his feet. “You scumbags! Laugh at an old man, would you?!”
And then it happened. It was a detail, no more than that. A detail to which you pay no attention at first. That takes on meaning only later. In retrospect.
Ralph Meier rose halfway to his feet, supporting himself on his undamaged knee. He still pretended to be laughing, but it was no longer real—if it ever had been. “And you, you’d really better watch your step!” he said. As he said this he rose farther to his feet and pointed his index finger at my older daughter. At Julia.
Julia shrieked. “No!” she screamed. “No!”
And she grabbed hold of her red bottoms with both hands. Her bikini bottoms.
I saw it quite clearly. The gesture could be explained in only one way. Ralph Meier was threatening my daughter with something. He was threatening to do something. Something he had done before. All as a joke. All with a knowing wink. But still.
It was, as I said, a mere detail. You’ve seen something, but you push it aside. Or rather, something in you pushes it aside. You don’t want to think that way. You don’t want to go looking for things that aren’t there. You’ve been living next door to someone for years. A nice neighbor. A friendly neighbor. A normal neighbor, that above all. That’s exactly what you tell the police detective when he comes for more information about your neighbor. “Quite normal,” you say. “Very nice. No, never noticed anything peculiar.” Meanwhile, inside the neighbor’s house, physical remains have been found. Physical remains that may correspond to fourteen missing women. In his freezer. In his garden. Then you suddenly remember something. The meaningless detail. You saw your neighbor go to his car a few times, carrying garbage bags. Garbage bags that he then placed in the trunk. Not after dark or at some other “suspicious” moment. No, in broad daylight. He didn’t even look around when he put the garbage bags in the car. He did everything out in the open, where everyone could see. Then he would raise his hand and wave to you in greeting. Or come over and talk for a while. About the weather. About the new people across the street. A normal man. “I have the feeling you’ve suddenly remembered something,” the detective says. Then you tell him about the garbage bags.
Julia’s reaction could only mean that Ralph Meier had tried to pull down her bottoms before. During a game, in the pool … I hadn’t thought about it much at the moment, but now, here at the beach with Caroline, I wondered whether I hadn’t passed over it too lightly.
“I have the feeling you’re thinking about something,” Caroline said.
I looked my wife straight in the eye.
“Yeah, I was thinking about what you just said. About Emmanuelle and Ralph. And about Julia.”
Now I was thinking about something else, too. How would Emmanuelle have reacted if Ralph had pulled down her bikini bottoms? Or Stanley? I blinked my eyes again, but the black spots were still there.
“You should know,” Caroline said. “You’re a man. How do you look, Marc? Do you sometimes look at your own daughter as a woman? As the woman she’s going to be?”
I looked at my wife. And I thought about it. She had asked me a question. I didn’t think it was a weird question. In fact, not at all. It seemed to me like the only real question you could ask.
“Yes,” I said. “Not just at Julia. Also at Lisa.”
A man has two daughters. From the time they are little, they sit on his lap. They throw their arms around him and kiss him good night. On Sunday morning they crawl into bed with him, snuggle up against him, under the blankets. They’re girls. Your girls. You’re there to protect them. You can see that, later on, they will be women. That they already are women. But you never look at them the way a man looks at a woman. Never. I’m a doctor. I know what should happen to those who commit incest. There’s only one solution. A solution that’s not open to discussion under a government constrained by law. But it’s the only solution.
“I actually meant something different,” Caroline said. “Are you able to imagine how men other than you, other than their own father, look at our daughters? No, wait, let’s stick to Julia. How does a grown m
an look at Julia?”
“Come on, you know that. You just said so yourself. There are cultures where she might already be married. And look at Alex. Those two are completely in love. What do we know about what they’ll do together later on? Or what they may be doing already? I mean, shouldn’t we talk about that? Alex is fifteen. I hope they’re aware of what could happen.”
“Honey, I’m not talking about fifteen-year-old boys. I think it’s lovely to see the way those two revolve around each other. Yesterday they were holding hands. Under the table, at dinner. I mean, I think Alex is a bit slow, but he’s a handsome boy. I understand completely. I know what I’d do if I was Julia.”
“So what do we call that? Women of a certain age who leer at pretty fifteen-year-old boys? Pederasty? Or is there a nicer name for it?”
I laughed as I said it, but Caroline didn’t laugh back.
“It’s only pederasty when you actually do something,” she said. “I’m not blind. I see pretty fifteen-year-old boys. I enjoy looking at them. But that’s where it stops. I don’t take the next step. And that’s the way men look at girls, of course. Most men. Maybe they fantasize a little more. But they don’t do anything. Right? I mean, normal men don’t do anything. That’s what I’m really trying to ask you. As a man. To what extent do you, as a man, see this Ralph as being normal?”
“I think he’s just as normal as all the men who go off to countries where the entire tourist trade is based on sex with underage girls. And then I’m talking about … what? Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of men?”
“And do you think Ralph is one of those tens or hundreds of thousands? If you think so, then I want to leave here today. I’m not going to expose my daughter—or daughters, who knows how sick he is—to the filthy eyes of a sex tourist any longer. Blecch! Just the thought of it!”
I thought again about Julia’s hands clutching at her bikini bottoms. No! she’d shouted. No! And after that I thought about the raptor look with which Ralph had undressed my wife that time in the lobby of the old municipal theater. How he had worked his jaws. How he had ground his teeth, as though he could already taste her on his tongue. Men look at women. Women look at men. But Ralph looked at women as though he were flipping through a copy of Playboy. He squeezed his dick as he looked. In his thoughts, or for real. He pulled down the pants of thirteen-year-old girls. Or did he? After all, I hadn’t seen him do that with my own eyes. It was always possible, of course, that my daughter only thought he was going to do that. Maybe the four of them, Julia along with Lisa and the boys, had been yanking on one another’s bathing suits in the pool earlier. As part of a game. An innocent game. Innocent among children between the ages of nine and fifteen, culpable for men in their late forties.
Perhaps, I thought now, I had accused Ralph prematurely in my mind. Plus there was something else: Caroline had just said that if Ralph posed a threat to our daughters, she wanted “to leave here today.” Maybe that was rushing things a bit.
“And what do you make of this Stanley, actually?” I asked.
“What?”
“Stanley and Emmanuelle. What are we supposed to make of that? How old do you think she is? Nineteen? Eighteen? Seventeen? I mean, technically speaking, she may be of legal age, but is it normal? Is it healthy?”
“But isn’t that the ultimate, childish fantasy of every man over forty? A teenybopper? Then again … not every man. I don’t think, for example, that that’s a problem for you.”
“It’s not about being a problem. Stanley can just do it. He’s a celebrity. The teenyboppers are waiting in line for him. All he has to do is point. Maybe they get something in return. A minor role in one of his movies. But maybe not. He doesn’t even have to do that. To walk the red carpet with a celebrity, maybe that’s enough for a teenybopper.”
“But is that all it is, Marc? That an ordinary family doctor can’t get the teenage girls? I’ve never had the impression that you were even interested.”
“No, you’re right. It would make me unhappy pretty quickly. I’d be willing to take a girl like that to a playground, but not to the disco, not anymore.”
Caroline started laughing. Then she took my hand.
“You prefer women your own age, right, sweetheart?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. But I didn’t look at her when I said it; I turned my gaze toward the beach and the sea. “That seems fairer to me.”
After a half-hour wait at the rental agency, we were told that the repairman would try to come by that afternoon to fix the water. The girl behind the counter consulted a calendar.
“Today’s Friday,” she said. “We’ll do our best. But we’re closed over the weekend. That would make it Monday.”
She was an extremely ugly girl. About sixty pounds overweight and with scores of pimples and other irregularities on her puffy face. More than irregularities, they were stretches of no-man’s-land where nothing happened, that didn’t move when she spoke, that remained blank when the rest of her face assumed an expression. Maybe she’d been in an accident, it occurred to me. Maybe, as a child, she had slammed her face against the inside of a windshield.
I leaned a little farther over the counter. Before I opened my mouth, I threw a glance, clearly visible to the girl, toward Caroline, who was standing by the door, looking at the photos of other holiday rentals.
“Are you doing anything this weekend?” I asked. “Tonight? Tomorrow?”
The girl blinked her eyes. They were pretty eyes, it’s true. Sweet eyes. She blushed. At least the living parts of her face turned red; the blood beneath the dead sections probably met with too much resistance to reach the skin’s surface.
“I have a boyfriend, sir,” she said quietly.
I winked at her. “Your boyfriend is a lucky man. I hope he realizes just how lucky he is.”
She lowered her eyes. “He … he’s very busy. But I’ll ask him to come by this afternoon, anyway, to check the water at your rental.”
I stared at her. The repairman! The little repairman who had clambered up onto the roof with nude Ralph. Apparently he was a jack of all trades, I reflected; apparently he knew how to unblock more than clogged water reservoirs alone. I tried to bring the two images together, but got no further than the repairman and the girl watching TV together on the couch: They were holding hands, and with his free hand he raised the thirty-two-ounce bottle of Coke to his lips; her free arm was up to the elbow in a family-sized bag of potato chips.
“Marc, take a look at this,” Caroline said. “Isn’t this our house?”
I looked where she was pointing. Pasted to a cardboard square were three photos: one of the house, one of part of the yard, and one of the swimming pool.
FOR SALE
SUMMER HOUSE WITH SWIMMING POOL
Beneath the photos was a summary of the number of bedrooms and the square footage of both house and yard. At the bottom was the price, a cell-phone number, and an e-mail address.
“That seems quite reasonable to me,” Caroline said.
“Well, it’s right in the middle of a residential neighborhood and a couple of miles from the beach. If I was going to buy something here, I would want it to be right on the beach.”
Caroline ran her index finger down over the other ads. “Here you go. This one’s on the beach.”
This house, too, was being offered as a “summer house with swimming pool.” The difference was that it was perched high on a hillside above one of the bays; from the pool one had a view of the sea far below. The asking price was five times that of the house where we had spent the last few days.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” I said.
Caroline took my hand; her expression was grave.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
“Buy that house. After that, we’ll see what happens.”
“No, I mean now. When are we going to leave? I really want to get out of that house, Marc.”
I thought about it. Or rather, I pretended to b
e thinking about it. In fact, I’d already thought about what I’d say when Caroline asked me this.
“Today’s Friday,” I said. “The traffic will be hellish tomorrow. Sunday, too. And it will probably be harder to find a place to stay. At a campground or whatever. So I’d say let’s go on Monday.”
“But then really go, right?”
“Monday we are gone,” I said.
It was that Saturday morning that Lisa found the little bird. It was lying beside our tent and had probably fallen from the olive tree that grew there.
“Daddy!” Lisa tugged on my sleeping bag. “Daddy, come and look. A little bird on the ground.”
The fledgling lay on its side. It shivered and made a fruitless attempt to get to its feet.
“I think it fell out of its nest,” I said, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. I peered up at the branches but couldn’t see a nest.
“I feel sorry for it,” Lisa said. “But you’re a doctor, Daddy. You’ll make him better.”
I picked up the fledgling carefully. It pecked at my hand, but there was almost no force behind its beak. It had no broken legs or other injuries, not from the looks of it. Deep in my heart, I regretted that. A little bird with a broken leg could have been “a project.” I’d done that kind of thing before during vacations. The cat with the pinched-off tail on that Greek island two years ago. While I was disinfecting the bloody stump, the cat had bitten me so hard on the forearm that I had to get a tetanus injection myself and a whole series of painful rabies shots. But it had been worth it. The cat’s gratitude was limitless. Within three days it was eating raw lamb from our hands. When the bandages came off, there was a period of adjustment. The wound had healed neatly, but the cat now had trouble keeping its balance with only about an inch of tail left. It climbed into an almond tree and couldn’t get back down. When I tried to help by climbing into the tree myself, the cat swiped at my face with its paw and tore open my left eyelid. Then it fell, anyway, with a smack, fifteen feet onto the concrete terrace. But it never went away again. It followed us everywhere. In the house, in the yard, to the village, where it waited patiently outside the baker’s or the butcher’s until we had done our shopping—and it always walked with us the mile to the beach as well.