Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel

by Herman Koch

  I shook my head. “You’d be helping me more if you stayed with Julia.”

  Only much later—days later—did I feel disturbed in retrospect by the way Julia didn’t protest at all when Caroline gently pressured her into getting up and getting dressed. “Come on, we’re going downstairs to have a nice breakfast,” she said cheerfully to both her daughters as she pulled the curtains aside. “It’s a beautiful day.”

  I lay on the bed with the washcloth still over my eye. I watched as Julia went into the bathroom with the little pile of clothes her mother had handed her. After a while I heard the hissing of the shower. Fifteen minutes later it was still hissing.

  “Julia?” Caroline knocked on the door. “Is everything okay? Do you need us to help you with something?”

  We looked at each other. The look of panic in Caroline’s eyes was undoubtedly an exact copy of the panic she was seeing in mine right then. Meanwhile, Lisa had climbed out of her own bed and snuggled up to me. I pressed her against me even closer, I laid my hand over her head while my lips soundlessly formed the words, “The door … try the door.”

  “Julia?” Caroline knocked again, then tried the door handle. She looked at me and shook her head. At the same time her lower lip began to quiver, her eyes suddenly filled with tears. “Don’t do that! Don’t,” my lips were still saying without making a sound.

  “Daddy?” Lisa said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Daddy, is it all right if I call Thomas later on?”

  At that moment the hissing of the shower stopped.

  “Julia?” Caroline quickly wiped the tears from her eyes and knocked on the door again.

  “Mom?” The door opened a crack; from where I was lying I couldn’t see my older daughter’s face. “I’ll be finished in a minute, Mom,” Julia said.

  In Caroline’s travel kit I found a needle that I held over the flame of my lighter. I had everything laid out on the edge of the sink: cotton swabs, gauze, and iodine, as well as a hypodermic with a painkiller—which was only for emergencies. I didn’t want to numb the eye, insofar as that was even possible. Pain here was the only good counsel. The pain would tell me how far I could go. An abscess is sort of like a fort bristling with weaponry. A hostile bridgehead in an otherwise healthy body. Or maybe more like a terrorist cell. A relatively small number of armed militants are holding a large group hostage. Including women and children. The terrorists have equipped themselves with hand grenades and sticks of dynamite that they will set off if attacked. Using the middle finger of my left hand, I pulled the eyelid up a little. I poked carefully with the hot needle. If it went in too far, it could cause permanent damage. Not just the abscess, but also the eye itself would drain. A rescue attempt that results in dozens of dead hostages can only be considered a failure. For the moment, the needle met with little resistance. There was no pain. With my good eye, I was just trying to estimate in the mirror how far in I was, when I suddenly heard sounds. Voices. I looked to one side. The voices were coming from the transom above the toilet. The transom had a frosted-glass pane, and it was open. I recognized Lisa’s voice, even though I couldn’t make out what she was saying. They were probably sitting on the outdoor terrace, just under the window. Carefully, without removing the needle from my eye, I took two steps and quietly closed the window. At that same moment I felt something sticky on my fingers. When I stepped back to the sink, I saw the blood. It was streaming down my face and falling in thick drops on the white porcelain. I pulled the needle back and pressed against the eyelid. More blood. It spattered on my T-shirt. And on my feet on the tiled floor, and between them. But I also saw something else. A substance the color of mustard. Mustard that was way past its sell-by date. Now I smelled it as well. A stench somewhere between old water from a vase and spoiled meat. I gagged, and the next moment a wave of bile came up that I spat into the sink, amid the blood and pus. But meanwhile, I was cheering inside. I increased the pressure on my eyelid. And there at last was the pain. You have two kinds of pain. Pain that warns you not to go any further, and pain that comes as a relief. This pain came as a relief. I opened the tap. I pressed against my eye. I pressed until it was completely drained. I pulled off a yard of toilet paper. Only after I had cleaned the entire area around my eye did I dare to look. It was nothing short of a miracle. From beneath the residue of pus and strands of blood, my eye appeared. Undamaged and clear, gleaming like a pearl in an oyster. It looked at me. It looked grateful, I imagined. It was visibly pleased to see me.

  Ten minutes later I joined my family on the outdoor terrace. On the breakfast table sat a pot of coffee and a jug of warm milk. There was a basket of croissants and French bread. There were little packets of butter and marmalade. The cowbells clanked. A bumblebee disappeared into a flower that sagged beneath the insect’s weight. The sun warmed my face. I smiled. I smiled at the mountains in the distance.

  “Shall we start the day with a walk?” I said. “Shall we try to find out where that stream goes to?”

  And walk we did. Julia did her best. Higher up along the slope the stream vanished into a forest of huge spruce trees. We crossed at a shallows, hopping from stone to stone. Later we came to a waterfall. Lisa wanted to go swimming. Caroline and I both looked at Julia.

  “It’s okay.” She smiled. “I’m fine here.”

  She sat on a big, flat rock with her arms around her knees. There was something wrong with her smile. Something wrong, too, about the way she was doing her best—for us, it seemed. She was doing her best not to ruin the vacation any further.

  “Or would you rather go back to the hotel?” Caroline asked. She asked the question at the same moment I was planning to. Or no, I was actually planning to ask if maybe she would rather go home.

  “No, it’s fine,” she replied.

  Caroline sighed deeply and looked at me. “Maybe you’re tired,” she said to Julia. “Maybe you’d like to take a rest.”

  “I’m perfect here,” Julia said. “Look, that’s so pretty, that light through the trees.”

  She pointed up, to the tops of the spruces. She squinted against the broad bands of sunlight falling through the branches. Meanwhile, Lisa had undressed and plunged into the water. “Whoa, that’s cold!” she shrieked. “Are you coming in, too, Dad? You coming?”

  “Julia?” I said.

  She looked at me. She smiled again. I felt something, a sudden weakness that began in my knees and moved up, to my chest and head. I took a step back and sank down onto a rock.

  “Do you want to go home, sweetheart?” I asked. “If you do, just say so. Then we’ll leave tomorrow.”

  My voice had sounded normal, I thought. At most a little too quiet, perhaps, but I didn’t think anyone had noticed that.

  Julia fluttered her eyelids. The smile was gone. She bit her lower lip.

  “Yeah?” she said. “Could we do that?”

  And that is what we did. We left early in the morning and were home by midnight. Lisa went to her room and played there a bit. Julia took a shower—again, for more than fifteen minutes—then fell asleep almost right away.

  Caroline opened a bottle of wine. With two glasses and the wedges of cheese we’d bought at a convenience store beside the highway, she came and lay down beside me; it was the first time we’d been alone together since we left the summer house.

  “So what do we do now?” she asked.

  In the car we had barely spoken. Julia had slept almost the whole way. Lisa had listened to music on Julia’s iPod. I’d had time enough to think.

  “For the time being, nothing,” I said. “That seems best to me.”

  “But shouldn’t we take her to a hospital, now that we’re here? Or at least to a specialist?”

  Caroline pronounced the last word without emphasis and as casually as possible. She knew how I felt about “specialists.” She also knew how sensitive I could be when aspersions were cast on my own, limited medical knowledge, especially by my own wife.

  “You know what it is?” I said.
“I don’t think that a more thorough examination is going to help her at this point. I’ve looked, and you’ll have to trust me on this: There’s damage, but no lasting damage. As far as the psychological damage goes, it’s too early to say. She doesn’t remember anything. If she goes to a hospital, they’ll start asking questions. A specialist will want to know everything. Here she’s with us. With you and me. With her little sister. I really think complete rest is the best thing right now. Just let time do its work.”

  “But is it normal that she can’t remember anything? I mean, maybe it would be painful if she remembered it all, but ultimately, wouldn’t it be better? How healthy can it be when something stays buried in your unconscious mind forever?”

  “We don’t know. No one knows. There have been cases of people who have gone through something horrible, but repressed it so thoroughly that they were able to lead a normal life. On the other hand, there have been cases of people under hypnosis who dredged up all kinds of misery they couldn’t deal with afterwards.”

  “But we want to know, don’t we? Maybe not right away, but in the end we want to know, right?”

  “Know what?” I held up my empty glass and she filled it.

  “Who it was. Oh, I don’t want to think about it, but I get so furious when I do! About the kind of bastard who would do something like that! They ought to arrest him. They ought to take him off the street for the rest of his life. He should be … he should be …”

  “Of course we want to know. I do, just as much as you. All I’m saying is that we have to be careful not to do more damage. If we try to force everything to the surface, she might experience more damage from that than from leaving things for a while. For the moment.”

  During our hike along the stream I had walked beside Julia for a while. I had brought up the afternoon by the pool as casually as possible. The fashion show on the diving board and getting sprayed by Alex and Thomas: the Miss Wet T-shirt contest. “I was standing at the kitchen window,” I’d said. “I saw you guys. I laughed so hard.” And Julia had frowned, deep in thought. As though she was hearing about this for the first time. “When was that?” she asked.

  “Marc …” Caroline put her glass on the bedside table and grabbed my wrist.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think …? Do you think that …? I mean, we talked about it when we went to the beach. Do you think that Ralph could do something like that?”

  I didn’t answer right away. I acted as though I was thinking about it. I breathed a deep sigh and rubbed my knuckles against my left eye. The eye that didn’t hurt anymore, only itched.

  “I’ve thought about that, too,” I said. “But it doesn’t add up. I was with him most of the time. And when I finally lost sight of him, he went home almost right away. So at one point I sat down and did the arithmetic. Ralph could never have walked to that other beach and back in such a short time. And he was limping, too.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that,” Caroline said. “How did that happen?”

  “We were messing around with those rockets. One of them went off in the waves. Close by. It startled the hell out of him and he fell. Landed badly.”

  I closed both eyes. I heard the edge of the wineglass tick against Caroline’s teeth.

  “But what I asked was whether he could do something like that,” she said. “Whether he’s capable of it.”

  I said nothing.

  “Marc?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I asked you something.”

  “Sorry. What was it?”

  “Whether he’s capable of it. Ralph. Of doing something like that.”

  This time I answered right away.

  “Oh, absolutely,” I said.

  A few days later, Judith called. On my cell phone. She asked how we were doing. And how Julia was doing in particular. I was sitting on the couch in the living room. Julia was lying on the floor, reading a magazine. Lisa was at a girlfriend’s house. Caroline was shopping. I stood up and walked into the kitchen. I said it was going reasonably well, under the circumstances.

  “I keep thinking about the four of you,” Judith said. “Oh, Marc, it’s so horrible for all of you. For Julia. And that it had to happen here. Ralph is completely devastated, too. He sends you all his best. Stanley and Emmanuelle, too. They’re going back to the States tomorrow.”

  In the silence that followed I heard something: a familiar sound.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “I’m sitting by the pool. With my feet in the water.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment. Then I walked over to the kitchen door and looked around the corner. Julia was still lying on her stomach on the floor, immersed in her magazine. I closed the door almost all the way and went back into the kitchen.

  “Thomas keeps asking about Lisa,” Judith said. “He misses her a lot.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I have the same thing. That missing feeling.”

  I said nothing. I turned on the faucet, took a glass from the counter and filled it.

  “I miss you, too, Marc.”

  A week before the end of the school vacation I opened the office again. But the inspiration was gone. Maybe the inspiration was never really there, anyway, but now, in any case, it was gone. Despite my distaste for the human body, I had always done my work well. I almost never had complaints. The serious cases I referred on in plenty of time. The less serious ones received the right prescription. This in contrast to the vast majority of cases: the people who had nothing wrong with them whatsoever. Before the summer vacation, I had listened patiently. For twenty minutes I would wear my most understanding expression. Now I couldn’t even make it through the twenty minutes anymore. After about five, cracks must have started appearing in that understanding expression: Patients would suddenly stop talking after those five minutes—sometimes even in midsentence. “What’s wrong, Doctor?”

  “Nothing. What could be wrong?” “I don’t know, you look as though you don’t believe me.”

  I used to let the patients talk for the full twenty minutes. After that they would go home feeling relieved. The doctor had given them a prescription and urged them to take things a little easier. “See my assistant for a new appointment on the way out,” I said. “In three weeks we’ll see whether there’s been any improvement.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to do that anymore. I lost my patience. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” I told a patient who had come in for the third time to whine about dizzy spells. “Absolutely nothing. Be glad you’re so healthy.”

  “But, Doctor, when I suddenly get up out of a chair—”

  “Did you hear what I said? Apparently not. Otherwise you would have heard me say that there is nothing wrong with you. Nothing! So do me a favor and just go home.”

  A number of patients changed doctors. We would get a letter or an e-mail saying that they had found another general physician “closer to home.” I knew where they lived. I knew they were lying. But I let it go. The appointments stopped arriving back-to-back. A twenty- or forty-minute gap between patients became much more common. I could have gone out during those breaks. To take a walk around the neighborhood. Pick up an espresso or a cheese sandwich at the café around the corner. But I always stayed in, in my office with the door closed. I would lean back in my chair and close my eyes. I tried to work out how many months it would take before I had no more patients at all. It should have been an alarming thought, but it wasn’t. I thought about the natural course of things. People were born. People died. They moved from the country to the big city. The villages emptied out. First the butcher would throw in the towel, then the baker would close up shop. Wild dogs would take over the deserted, darkened streets. Then the last inhabitants died. The wind had free play. Sagging barn doors creaked on their hinges. The sun rose and set, but its rays no longer illuminated and warmed anything.

  Occasionally, during a moment of clarity, I thought about the financial consequences. Not for too long, because the solution w
as obvious. A successful medical practice in a good area was worth a lot of money. Young family doctors just out of medical school would give their eyeteeth for a practice like mine. Astronomical sums were paid for them, usually by private contract, as they put it. A down payment on the barrelhead, so to speak. Officially it wasn’t allowed, but everyone knew that’s how it went. I could place an ad. Purely for show, the young whippersnapper fresh out of medical school would adopt a doubtful expression when I mentioned the astronomical sum I was asking. But his eyes would be unable to lie. His slobbering look would speak volumes. “You’ll have to decide quickly,” I would say. “You’d never believe how keen everybody is to get started here.”

  I myself shouldn’t wait too long, either, I realized during moments of clarity. A practice with a number of patients was a gold mine. A practice with no patients at all was not. I added it up. The four of us should be able to live three or four years on the proceeds. After that, we’d see what came up. Maybe some cushy job. As a company medical officer. Or even something completely different. A radical change. Hotel doctor on one of the Canary Islands. Tourists who had stepped on sea urchins. Been burned by the sun. Had their intestines thrown for a loop by olive oil heated up once too often. Maybe the radical change would be good for Julia, too. Taking her away from her familiar surroundings. A new start. That was what I thought about during my moments of clarity. Sometimes one of those clear moments wasn’t quite over when the next patient came into my office.

  “Why do you think that?” I asked the homosexual TV comedian who thought he’d contracted AIDS. Then came the stories, descriptions of parties I didn’t want to hear about. I tried to think about a beach instead. A golden-yellow beach with a clear blue sea. After my office hours at the hotel I would walk across that beach to the sea. “Did he come in your mouth?” I asked the comedian in the meantime. “And have you been to a dental hygienist recently?” When the gums are inflamed, the infection can go by way of the semen into the bloodstream. By then I was up to my waist in the blue sea. The moment right before the plunge. The lower part of the body is already cold, the torso is still warm. I looked at the comedian’s mouth and tried to imagine his lips wrapped around a dick. For some reason it was a pale dick, a dick like a winter leek, and it was all the way in: in that mouth. The comedian sucked on the leek, nibbled on it teasingly. “Oh Jesus, I’m coming!” the dick’s owner moaned. The floodgates were opened. The first wave of semen hit the roof of the comedian’s mouth. The waves that followed landed on his inflamed gums. It was more effective than a lethal injection. For a brief moment there is the cold when your head disappears beneath a wave. The rush of water in your face. But then you resurface. Your hair hanging in wet strands around your head. Salt stings your eyes. You lick at the snot on your upper lip: the taste of algae and of oysters. You look back at the beach where you just were. Cleansing, that’s the first word that pops into your mind. The comedian was rather tubby, but in another month or so no one would recognize him. Emaciated. There is no better word for it. AIDS destroys the body from the inside out. It presses a jackhammer against a load-bearing wall. The kind of jackhammer road workers use to pry streetcar rails out of the tarmac. The structure begins to creak. Three stories up, fractures appear in the supporting walls. Bits of paint and plaster come raining down from the ceiling. It’s like with an earthquake. Huge buildings sometimes fall before clay huts do. The comedian didn’t stand a ghost of a chance. He should have brushed more thoroughly. He should have gone to the dental hygienist on time. Now the wave of semen against his gums had sounded the death knell.