by Herman Koch
I myself would become bored to death with that, I knew. After a single day. But I wasn’t a woman. I wasn’t a woman like Judith. I wasn’t a bellyacher. A prim bitch. A prim and horny bitch, true enough, but it was rather like all male fantasies about women in positions of authority (stewardesses, schoolmarms, whores), it was above all so terribly transparent. It was this transparency, I knew, that excited me most. Women who complain about everything. About rockets, about making too much noise for the neighbors and making soup pans fly hundreds of yards through the air, about their own husbands acting like little boys, but meanwhile … Meanwhile, they whip it right out of your pants and want you to stuff it in all the way—right up to the hilt.
“It’s just that he treats me with no respect, a lot of the time,” Judith said. “When other people are around, that’s when it annoys me most. He always succeeds in making me look like someone who gripes about everything. And because it makes me so mad, in front of other people, I just go away.”
“Okay,” I said.
Okay, that was the new vogue word. At first I’d objected weakly when I heard my daughters using it so often, but as is often the case with vogue words, it was above all contagious. Its double meaning was precisely what made it so very useful: You were both saying yes and indicating that you understood exactly what the other person meant.
“I started paying attention,” Judith went on. “He doesn’t just do it with me. He does it with all women. I mean, on the one hand he’s extremely charming, but he also just sees women as naturally dumber than men. I don’t know, something in his tone, the way he looks at them …”
“Okay,” I said once again.
“Don’t get me wrong: Ralph is a real ladies’ man. That’s why I fell for him. The way he looks at you, the way he looked at me—as a woman, it just makes you feel attractive. Desirable. That’s wonderful for a woman, to see a man look at you like that. But it takes a while before you realize that a ladies’ man doesn’t just look at you that way, but at all women.”
This time I decided to say nothing at all. I thought about Ralph, the ladies’ man. About how he had slobbered over Caroline.
“Hasn’t Caroline ever said anything to you about that?” Judith asked. “I mean, you have a very pretty wife, Marc. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least.”
“No, not really. I don’t think so. At least I’ve never heard her mention it.”
I stared straight ahead, at the approaching lights of the other club. I was going to have to be quick about it. A few more minutes and it would be too late—but it was the wrong moment. The wrong conversation, that above all.
“And there’s something else,” Judith said. She had stopped walking. That was good. As long as we weren’t moving, time stopped, too. “But you have to promise not to tell anyone else. No one. Not even your wife.”
I looked at her. I couldn’t see her face clearly, just her hair in silhouette against the background of the dark, murmuring sea. Only that, and something that was reflected in her eyes: a little light, a glimmer, no more than a candle’s flame.
“I promise,” I said. The beach was deserted at this point. All I would have to do was take one step forward. One step and I could run my fingers through that hair, press my lips against hers, and then farther down—first we would drop to our knees in the sand, the rest would follow.
“Sometimes—not often but sometimes—he scares me,” Judith said quietly. “We have a fight, for example, and then suddenly I see it in his eyes: Now he’s going to hit me, I think. Listen, he’s never actually laid a finger on me. He’s thrown entire dinner services against the wall, but he’s never hit me. I just see it in his eyes. In his thoughts, he’s hitting me right now, I think. In his thoughts, he’s bouncing me off the walls.”
“Okay,” I said, but suddenly that seemed too meager. “But as long as he only does it in his thoughts, it’s not so terrible, is it?” I added.
Judith sighed deeply. She took me by the wrist. I fought the urge to pull her up against me with one move.
“No, but it makes you uncertain,” she said. “I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that one day it might really happen. That he’ll lose control and suddenly punch me in the face. Sometimes I think he knows that, too. That I think that, I mean. And that that’s why it’s never happened yet.”
“Have the two of you ever talked about this? I mean, mightn’t it be better to talk about it? Before it actually happens, I mean.”
I was shitting through my teeth. And I was very much aware of that. As a matter of fact, I didn’t give a fuck about the whole subject. But I could never let her notice that, of course. I had to go on playing the interested, sympathetic man. To go on feigning sincere interest. Only the sympathetic man would get that to which he had a right.
“What do you think?” Judith asked. “Do you think Ralph could suddenly turn violent, just like that?”
I thought about the Norwegian girl whose wrist he had twisted, a little less than an hour ago, until she fell to the sand, and how he had then tried to kick her in the stomach. In my mind I could hear him shouting You fucking shit whore!
“No, that seems very unlikely to me,” I said, taking Judith’s wrist now. “I mean, Ralph has a lot of surplus energy. People like that can sometimes get very angry. They have to expend their energy. But if you ask me, he makes sure that he expends it in time. With all the things he does, I mean. The way he dives into everything. Violence against women, against his own wife, isn’t part of that, I think.” I caressed her wrist with my thumb. “He’s much too kindhearted for that,” I added, just to sweeten the pot.
“Mom.”
We hadn’t seen or heard Alex coming. Now, suddenly, he was standing a few yards away.
Judith and I let go of each other’s wrists at the same time. Too quickly, I realized right away: caught in the act.
“Hey, Alex,” Judith said.
“Mom …”
He took two steps toward us. A few blond curls were hanging in front of his eyes. It was hard to see in the semidarkness, but there was something glistening on his face. Sweat? Or tears?
“Where’s Julia?” Judith asked.
“Mom …” he said again. I could hear it in his voice now: He was crying. He took a final step toward his mother and threw his arms around her. He was almost as tall as she was. Judith laid her hand on the back of his head and pressed him against her. “Alex, what’s wrong? Where’s Julia?”
Where’s Julia? When I run my life back and hit Play, it usually starts with those words. Running it back any further is no use. You see a beach and a summer house, a swimming pool and rockets, chunks of swordfish hissing on a grill. Normal vacation snapshots. Snapshots with no hidden meaning. With no emotional charge. Starting with Where’s Julia? my life only ran forward. It wasn’t even that the vacation snapshots suddenly took on meaning or an emotional charge after the fact. No, it wasn’t like that: I just didn’t want to see them anymore.
“What’s wrong, Alex?” Judith asked, still pressing her son against her. He didn’t reply, there was only the soft sobbing against his mother’s breast.
I’m not trying to explain anything away. I did what I did. Next time I would do exactly the same thing, people say in order to justify their own hasty actions. I don’t say that. I would do everything differently. Everything.
“Where’s my daughter, goddamn it!” I shouted, grabbing Alex by his upper arm and yanking him roughly from his mother’s embrace. “What have you done with her, you little prick?!”
“Marc!”
Judith took her son by the wrist and tried to pull him to her again.
“You,” I said calmly. “You just shut up.”
She stared at me for a moment, then let go of Alex.
“Sorry,” I said, then I turned to the boy. “Julia. Where is Julia?”
“I … I don’t know,” he stammered.
Then he started telling his story, in snippets and in no fixed sequence. I had to do my best no
t to keep interrupting him. Concentrate, I told myself. Concentrate and try not to miss anything. My attentive ear. My attentive, doctor’s ear. I could do it if I wanted. Deliver a diagnosis in a minute. Draw a conclusion. In one minute, in order to have the remaining nineteen minutes to myself.
They—Alex and Julia—had walked to the other beach club. There they’d had a drink at the bar. “Coke, Mom, I swear,” he told his mother. “And Julia had a Fanta.” They watched people dance for a while. Julia wanted to dance too, but Alex didn’t. She had tugged on his arm a little—he shouldn’t be such a baby, come on, come with me, let’s dance. He hadn’t budged. There were other teenagers there, too, but it was mostly grown-ups. And even the teenagers were older than them. They were really the youngest. He’d been too embarrassed to dance. Come on, let’s go back, he said. They’ll be wondering what’s keeping us. She called him a wimp, said he was too afraid—and then she’d gone out onto the dance floor alone. He had stayed and watched her for a while, alone at the bar, how she pushed her way through the dancing crowd and then started dancing herself. She hadn’t looked over at him at all. She danced. First with a group of girls who were all older than her, but there were also boys who came and danced around her. He’d felt torn. He could have done it: He could have gone to her, he could have danced, and then everything would have been like it was before—but he was afraid she would laugh at him, that she would really think he was a wimp then. The story sounded familiar to me. The story of every man, credible if only for that reason. He had been angry, too, he said. She shouldn’t have left him alone there like that. At a certain point he had walked out of the bar, out onto the beach. He was going to repay her in kind, he figured. In a little while she’d go looking for him and not be able to find him. He had walked all the way down to the waterline. He had stood there for a bit, he didn’t know how long, no more than a couple of minutes. His anger subsided. He walked slowly back to the club, out onto the dance floor. He was going to surprise her. He was going to dance with her. But she wasn’t there. She was gone. He had looked all over the dance floor, front to back and left to right. A few times he was relieved when he thought he saw her, but it turned out to be someone else. A girl who looked like her. Then he had walked all the way around the club. After that he tried looking in the ladies’ room. He’d tried to figure out what could have happened. She’d grown tired of dancing and gone looking for him. And when she couldn’t find him, she had decided to go back. Back to the beach where his parents were. His parents and her father. Didn’t you have your phone with you? Judith interrupted him at this point. So what if? I thought. Was he supposed to call her? After all, Julia didn’t have hers with her … But the next moment I realized that it wasn’t such a dumb question after all. He could have called us. His mother. To ask whether we had seen Julia. No, Alex said. I left it at home, the battery was dead. He had walked around the building one more time. At the back the beach stopped and a stretch of rocky coastline began. He had called her name a few times. Finally he decided that the best thing would be for him to go back, too. He had walked down the beach in this direction for a while, but he soon started having misgivings. Would she have crossed this dark stretch of beach all alone? No, he realized. She never would have done that. Not even if she’d been meaning to make him worried by taking off without saying anything. He went back to the beach club. He went up and asked the barmen. A thirteen-year-old girl? Long blond hair? Wouldn’t they have noticed that? He’d had to shout at the top of his lungs to be heard above the music. The barmen spoke only broken English. But indeed—one of them seemed to remember Julia. At least his description fit perfectly. But then he shook his head. He’d seen her, he said. On the dance floor. But that was a while back. Had she left with someone else, maybe? Alex asked. The barman shrugged. Sorry, he said. I didn’t see her leave. At one point I just noticed that she wasn’t there anymore. Alex had started wondering again. Should he ask other people whether they had seen her? Should he go looking for her again? Or would it be smarter to walk back to the other beach? To us?
My mind was racing. Alex’s story had already been going on too long, I felt. I felt no panic, more like a kind of icy calm. My heart wasn’t racing, but actually pounding more slowly. Action. I was good at acting. At active intervention.
“But didn’t the two of you see her, then?” Alex asked.
I noticed something about him, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it was the tone in which he asked that question, not so much as though it truly interested him, but as if it was a question he logically had to ask.
He didn’t look at me when he asked it, either. He looked only at his mother. He’s afraid to look at me, I thought. He feels guilty because he’s lost something of mine. My daughter. He should have paid more attention. I never should have let my daughter go with him. But I hadn’t! I realized the very next moment.
I had to restrain myself in order not to grab him again and shake him till his teeth rattled. We hadn’t run into Julia. It was possible—theoretically, it wasn’t a hundred percent impossible—that she had walked back alone to the beachside restaurants and that we had missed her. But only theoretically. Judith had been sitting in clear view on the higher part of the beach, watching Lisa and Thomas play soccer. I myself had spent no more than ten minutes in the men’s room at the restaurant. She would have seen us. We would have to have seen her.
Julia was still here, I decided. Here being in or around the beach club, which was only a few hundred yards away. My heart was beating more slowly, but also more heavily. Act now. There’s no time to lose, every second counts—that’s what popped into my mind, and I almost laughed out loud at that line, which seemed more like something from a TV cop show than from life itself—life (my life!) as it was unfolding right now.
Without looking back at Judith or Alex, I started running toward the club.
“Marc!” I heard Judith shouting behind me. “Wait!”
I didn’t turn around; I kept on running. Another ten yards or so. Then I realized that what I was doing wasn’t smart: Three of us could work more efficiently. We had to look for Julia, all three of us.
I stopped for a moment. “Come on!” I gestured. “Hurry up!”
While Judith went to look in the ladies’ room, I had Alex show me the barman he’d asked about Julia. I flagged the man down and shouted in his ear. He screamed something back that I didn’t understand. Then he pointed at the people who were crowding up to the bar to order. I’m her father, I screamed. He looked at me again. Maybe he was doing his best to share my concern, but he only half pulled it off. Little girls grow up, I read in his eyes. They start doing things that Daddy doesn’t have to know about. I elbowed my way through the dancing crowd. Just asking random strangers whether they’d seen a thirteen-year-old girl didn’t seem like a good idea. Beside the dance floor, a couple of aluminum bar stools and tall tables had been set up in the sand. Judith was standing beside one of the tables.
“Where’s Alex?” I asked.
“I sent him back,” she said.
I stared at her.
“I told him to go back as fast as he could,” she went on. “That he should find Ralph, in any case. But who knows, maybe Julia’s there, too.”
I looked at her face, which was lit by the flashing red and yellow disco lights. It was still the same face that I had wanted to take in my hands before pressing my lips to hers, just a few minutes ago, but now what I saw in that face was above all the concerned mother. Concerned not about my daughter, but about her own son. I don’t know whether it occurred to me then or only much later, but there was something about Alex’s story that didn’t make sense. The timing in particular. How long had he actually hung around there before deciding to sound the alarm? He had cried when he met us on the beach. But was he already crying, or did he start only when he caught sight of his mother?
“He could have helped us,” I said. “He could have pointed out someone here. Someone he saw Julia dancing with, fo
r example. Something might have occurred to him all of a sudden.”
“I think he should be with his father right now. He’s completely confused, Marc. You saw how guilty he feels. Toward you.”
To be with his father, I thought, and almost burst out laughing. Indeed, maybe he was better off being with his father. His father could probably show him how to force girls down onto the sand if they put up a fight.
“Does he have good reason to feel guilty, Judith?” I asked, but right away I regretted having posed the question so directly. Even more, I regretted the accusing tone. I had failed to camouflage my doubts about Alex’s version of events, and that wasn’t good. Now his mother was forewarned. That would make it much harder to catch him telling a lie later on.
“Marc, please …” Judith said; she blinked her eyes. “Alex is still a child. He lost Julia. But you heard the way it went. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened to us that way. But Julia is the one who walked away first, not Alex.”
I looked at her. In my mind I counted to ten. I looked at the light from the disco lamps playing across her forehead, cheeks, and mouth. Was this woman simply stupid? Or was she in fact much smarter than I’d supposed? I had to watch what I said, but I could hardly contain myself. You’re a woman, too, you stupid cunt! I felt like shouting. You should know what can happen to women. A man has to protect a woman. Even if he’s only a child!
I took a deep breath. “You’re right,” I said. “We shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”
Fortunately, one always has the clichés. The clichés that toss us the life belt when we’re about to drown in troubled waters. I saw Judith’s face relax. She pulled out her cell phone and slid it open.
“Shall I try Ralph?” she said. “Ask if Alex is already there? So Ralph knows he’s on his way, in any case.”
Yes, do that, I thought. Call Ralph. He can tell you from experience that all women are whores. Then no one will need to feel guilty anymore. I looked past Judith’s head at the white, foamy waves curling and breaking against the beach. What I really felt like doing was leaving her here. Walking away without a word. But that would not be smart, I realized. For all sorts of reasons, that wouldn’t be smart.