by Herman Koch
“Mr. Mayor…,” they start in, they’ve forgotten my name of course, but I don’t hold that against them. “Robert, call me Robert,” I say and nod toward the balcony doors at the far end of the room. “Want to pop out for a smoke?” I quit smoking twenty years ago, but I always have a pack and a lighter on me, for emergencies.
On our way to the balcony, I catch the eye of one of the waiters walking around with trays of red or white wine, water and fresh-squeezed orange juice.
“Maybe you’d like something else?” I say to the head of state. “Vodka, whiskey? Maybe a little brandy? I’ll have a double vodka,” I tell the waiter, just to help the head of state along a little. “From the freezer, if you’ve got it. Otherwise on the rocks. We’ll be out there, on the balcony.”
No, when it comes to visits from presidents, premiers, lord mayors, and royal families from abroad, I can get along without my wife’s company. Sometimes I give in, though, when she makes it clear that she would actually love to go along. When Barack Obama came to town, for example. “If Obama comes, you have to promise me to take me along,” she said. “And why should I?” I asked, purely for form’s sake, because I knew the answer already. “He just happens to be a good-looking man, darling,” she said. “Women all think he’s good-looking.” “Like George Clooney?” I asked. “Like George Clooney,” my wife said, “although I can’t really feature Barack Obama doing a Nespresso commercial.”
In any case, when members of the royal family come to Amsterdam, I always want to have Sylvia at my side. I don’t know what it is, but I literally dummy up whenever I’m around that white-wine-slurping, beer-guzzling, and chain-smoking family. I start breathing audibly. I start developing itches in places it would be incommodious to scratch. Like having a mosquito bite under a plaster cast. I start sweating, the rings of perspiration form on my shirt, and that realization makes me sweat only harder. I go to the toilet, unbutton my shirt, and, using a few papers towels, do my best to wipe down my chest, armpits, and stomach. I try to stay away as long as possible, I lock myself up in a cubicle and read the news on my iPhone without a single item actually getting through to me. God, I whisper to myself, let this day pass from me, or words to that effect.
It’s the same thing that happens with movies sometimes; after ten minutes you know it’s not going anywhere, you need to get out of there, but you stay in your seat anyway. Maybe it will get better later on, you tell yourself, while every fiber of your being has already tensed for the impending escape. With Sylvia at my side, though, it’s bearable. She’s an easy talker. All her countrymen are easy talkers; it comes as naturally to them as breathing. She asks the princess, who is the queen these days, where she bought her shoes. With the prince, currently our king, she has a good long talk about pheasant hunting. It helps that people in her native culture view hunting differently than we do here. More liberally. In my wife’s country, the fact that the meat on our plates comes from living animals is in sharper focus than it is with us. Probably, I sometimes allow myself to think, because it was less long ago that people there had to hunt in order to eat.
So here’s what happened at the New Year’s reception: I did indeed find myself locked in conversation with the president of Ajax. My wife announced that she was going for a quick look at the hors d’oeuvres. “Can I bring you two something?” she asked before she left, but we both shook our heads.
Less than a minute later—I had just assured the president that any celebration this year would take place downtown, no matter what, regardless of any objections from the other two members of the triad—I looked around and saw her, not close to the table of hors d’oeuvres, but more to the back of the room, close to the door that led to the central corridor of city hall and the toilet blocks. The person she was talking to had his back half-turned to me; a man, I saw, but I couldn’t tell right away who it was. But when Sylvia raised her bottle of beer and clinked it against his, and when the man then turned and glanced around the room, I saw that it was Alderman Maarten van Hoogstraten.
“We, as a club, would of course be delighted if it could all take place downtown again,” I heard the soccer club president saying close to my ear. “And we’ll do all we can to make sure everything proceeds in an orderly fashion. Rioting, of course, is not good advertising for the Ajax brand.”
“The city is what I’m aiming for too,” I said. “Of course we’ll have to wait and see, but this would make it the fifth championship in a row. Special attention will be paid to that. Here, but also abroad. So we don’t want to see footage of a dismal concrete lot, we want to see canals, the Rijksmuseum, the concert hall, the City Theater.”
I counted to three, then took another look at the spot close to the door at the back of the room. At that very moment my wife tossed back her head and laughed; the alderman had his hand on her elbow and was whispering something in her ear.
“Well, now that you mention it,” the president said, “we’ve been talking, because it would indeed be the fifth time, about doing something special. A boat procession through the canals, for instance.” Now Sylvia looked around, her gaze sweeping the crowd. Was she looking for me? Or was she only making sure that no one was watching her and the alderman? For a full half-second I was sure that our gazes crossed, but the next moment Sylvia was already looking away.
“I won’t say that I’d already thought of that,” I said. “But a boat parade is exactly what I had in mind. Thousands of people along the quays. The television viewer in France, Italy, China, and America gets a glorious view of Amsterdam. We want helicopters to fly over and film the city too. But if you’ll excuse me, we can talk more about this later on, right now I really have to—” I pointed to an imaginary someone who wanted to talk to me, somewhere in the vicinity of the hors d’oeuvres, someone who had supposedly caught my eye.
“Of course. Go right ahead. You have other things to see to. I’m already very pleased to hear this. Can I discuss it with the board, or would that be premature?”
“Hold off on that a bit. I want to run it past the triad first, for form’s sake. But I’ll let you know as soon as I can.”
I took a few steps to one side, toward the snack table, then I cut left. Keeping my head down, so that no one would detain me, I edged my way through the crowd.
“Maarten,” I said.
“Robert…”
I had approached my wife and the alderman from an angle; with my last step forward, I placed myself in their field of vision.
“Getting bored?” my wife asked.
I took a good look at her face. I searched for signs of anything you might consider out of the ordinary: a slight blush, a batting of the lashes, or even only an undisguisable irritation at the fact that I had come to interrupt their cozy little tête-à-tête.
“Yes, I’m bored,” I said. “I feel like going home pretty soon.”
“But we just got here!”
Maarten van Hoogstraten looked at me. I was expecting him to look at Sylvia too—but he didn’t.
“I was just leaving…,” the alderman said. “I still have to…I was actually out to get a drink for Lodewijk. I should have gone back to him a long time ago.”
He raised his hand to my wife’s elbow, touched her briefly.
“Sylvia,” he said.
Then he clinked his beer bottle against mine. “Robert.”
And then he was gone. “We’re going,” I said.
“But you can’t just do that, can you?”
“Oh, yes, I can. If you go to the restroom first, then I’ll come five minutes later. Behind the toilet blocks is the service staircase; we go down two flights, and we’re outside.”
“Is something wrong, Robert? Aren’t you feeling well?”
“I feel fine. But I’m fed up. It just isn’t my day. And we’ve done it before, Sylvia. Remember Bernhard and Christine’s wedding?”
“Yes. And the coronatio
n.”
During the reception, after the wedding of my best friend and his third wife, we had first gone to hide in one of the side rooms. Then, five minutes apart, we had snuck out to the street on the canal side. And during Willem-Alexander’s coronation we had found a side door. We ran the first part of the way, then ducked down an alleyway into a café.
The trick was to not say goodbye to anyone. To disappear at one go. The other people in the room simply assumed you were still there. Maybe you were back in the kitchen, or up on the top floor, where the music was playing so loudly.
“See you in five minutes?” I asked my wife.
“Sure,” she said.
3
That night in bed—my wife was still in the bathroom—I played the scene back about ten times in my mind. First from start to finish, then from finish to start. In slow motion. Frame by frame. I tried to stop the action at the moment when my wife looked from me to the alderman. I corrected myself: avoided looking at the alderman.
“Sylvia.” With his free hand, Maarten van Hoogstraten had touched her elbow briefly by way of farewell. Touched it again, I couldn’t help thinking. For the second time already. In his other hand he was holding his bottle of beer. A bottle. Not a glass. So he could use his hands freely, it had occurred to me in a flash. And now, in bed, with my eyes closed, it occurred to me again. To have at least one hand free for touching the ladies. The mayor’s wife. The mayor’s lawfully wedded wife, I thought for just a moment, but pushed the thought away as quickly as it had come.
“Robert.” Now Van Hoogstraten was looking at me; he raised his bottle, clinked the bottom of it against mine.
He was just leaving, he announced. I had barely come up to them, and he already had to leave. With some flimsy excuse that he also laid on a little too thick. Something about a drink he had to fetch for someone. Nothing that couldn’t wait a few minutes.
Something didn’t feel right, but I couldn’t put my finger on it straightaway.
After we left city hall through the front entrance, we had walked up in the direction of Rembrandtplein.
“You think they’ve missed you yet?” my wife asked as we were crossing the Blauwbrug. A completely normal question—too normal, perhaps. We already knew full well; we both knew that we weren’t being missed anywhere. Where were you? People asked sometimes, the day after a party. I didn’t see you around anymore. The best thing was to turn the question back on them. So where were you? I looked for you. On the balcony. In the kitchen. I hung around talking for a while in that little room, where all the coats were. With…oh, what’s her name again…the one with the overbite…
“I don’t think so,” I answered as blandly as I could. “Only people who overestimate their own importance think that everyone is going to miss them.”
A late tour boat motored by beneath the bridge, with candles lit on all the little tables—the passengers were probably being served cheap red wine and cheese cubes with mustard. It was so quiet on the bridge that I thought I could hear my heart pounding. The best thing, just to get it over with, would be to ask Sylvia right away: How long have you two been seeing each other? The more direct the question, the easier it would be for me to judge from my wife’s reaction whether I was right or whether I was mistaken. I could also start in a bit more circumspectly. You two were having an awfully good time together, you and Maarten. What were you talking about? But I knew what I was afraid of. My wife would laugh right in my face. Come on, Robert, grow up! She would laugh so hard that her cheeks would turn all red, so that I couldn’t see whether she was blushing or not.
But she might also react very differently. Offended. You’re not serious, I hope? Please, tell me you’re kidding. Me, with Maarten van Hoogstraten? What kind of person do you think I am? She might start crying. Only a bit: a couple of glistening tears would be enough. I wouldn’t pursue it any further. I’d probably tell her that I was sorry for ever having entertained such a silly thought. She, with Maarten van Hoogstraten! It was a silly thought, and completely unfounded. My wife had had a conversation with one of my aldermen during the New Year’s reception. She had clearly enjoyed herself. My wife had tossed back her head and laughed loudly at something the alderman said to her. Okay, it was hard to imagine, Maarten van Hoogstraten wasn’t really known as a humorist, but theoretically speaking it was not entirely impossible. The alderman had gone out of his way to amuse my wife, and in going out of his way he had outdone himself. He had made an intelligent woman laugh. No mean feat. But what exactly had he said? I caught myself wanting to know. What the hell could have been funny enough to make my wife toss back her head and burst out laughing?
Crossing Rembrandtplein, we came past Café Schiller. As casually as possible, without slowing and without looking at her, I suggested that we pop in for a nightcap. The whole time, though, I was paying keen attention to her reaction. If she were having a secret affair with Alderman Van Hoogstraten, wouldn’t she rather go home as quickly as possible? To bed with a good book, or to catch the tail end of a talk show on TV—anything, as long as she didn’t have to talk, as long as she didn’t have to listen to questions she couldn’t answer without blushing? Besides the possibility of having her laugh in my face or start crying when I asked her straight-out whether she was having an affair with the alderman, there was a very different reaction I feared: that she would admit to the affair without batting an eye. Maybe in the too-familiar words you normally hear only on soap operas and in movies, but—if all goes well—never in real life.
Yes, Robert. Maarten and I are involved. It’s been going on for quite some time now. He hasn’t told his wife yet, but he’s going to leave her. And I am going to leave you. I never thought I would have to say this to you, but it’s true: I love someone else. Maarten and I love each other.
After these sentences had been pronounced, my life would come to an end. My whole life, everything I had. I thought about our daughter, about Diana. She would be graduating from high school this year. I heard myself tell my wife: Shall we wait to tell her until finals are over? She might get really confused.
Yes, my life would end. Our life. Life as we had lived it till then, the three of us. My daughter would lock herself in her room and cry. Her mother might be the main culprit, but she would never look at me in the same way again either. We were her parents, we had made a mess of things together. That was true, wasn’t it? If Sylvia had been happy with me, she never would have fallen in love with someone else, would she? Diana, too, had been happy with us throughout her growing-up years, our unconditional love had given her self-confidence. Our love for each other, and our shared love for her. She had both feet firmly on the ground, so firmly that even during puberty she had never rebelled against us. In the evening she would snuggle up between us on the couch, her head against my shoulder, her legs slung over her mother’s legs. But something of all that would be destroyed for good, retroactively, if my wife were to leave us and move in with the alderman. Maybe Diana would choose sides with me, at first, but in a way no father would ever want: out of pity for the betrayed husband. Poor Daddy. Maybe she would cook for me the first few months, toss my underpants in the washing machine, iron my shirts. She would warn me about my unshaven appearance, the quantity of hard liquor I would knock back in my rage and sorrow. You should look at yourself in the mirror, Daddy. You should smell yourself. You don’t want people to see you like this. Ultimately she would lose respect for me, maybe not stop loving me, but it would be a pitying kind of love at best. The kind of love you might give a pet that’s been run over, a cat with paralyzed hindquarters, an old person who can no longer go to the toilet on their own. After those first few months had passed, she would leave me too. In retrospective effect, she would come to see her entire safe life with her parents as a lie. That’s the way those things went. Even though nothing had gone wrong right up until the end. So maybe, before that, it hadn’t been as perfect as it seemed either. Who k
nows, maybe this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Maybe she had been too young at the time, too naive, too loving to notice a thing. Her parents, her perfect parents, whom she had always bragged about to her friends, a father and a mother who outshone the fathers and mothers of those same boyfriends and girlfriends, fathers and mothers who had broken up long before or who were always arguing. In the end, her parents had proven just as depraved and despicable as the rest.
“Okay, one for the road,” my wife said. “But really only one. I’m tired and I don’t want to get to bed too late.”
We found a table all the way at the back, in a section of the café where no one else was seated. Not a bad spot if someone started crying, I couldn’t help thinking. If one of the two of us started screaming at the other. Don’t look right away, but that table over there in the corner, that’s the mayor. And that woman is probably his wife. Looks like they’re not having a lot of fun. If you ask me, she’s crying.
Sylvia asked for a glass of red wine; I ordered a beer.
“Oh, that was another terrible one,” I said. “I’m really not up to this. During the preselection round, they probably should have asked me: ‘Are you able to stomach receptions where people stand around with glasses in their hand and chitchat? No? Really not? Well then, you’re probably not cut out to be mayor. You’d have to spend three-quarters of your time with a glass in your hand, talking about the weather.’ ”
The look my wife gave me then I can only describe as loving. I had decided to go on acting as normal as possible—or, rather, to apply every fiber of my being to acting precisely as I would have otherwise—but meanwhile, never to take my eye off the ball.
“What is it? What are you laughing about?” I asked.
“Nothing. It’s because I could see it on your face a mile away. That you wanted to get out of there. And you’re still wearing that same look. You just can’t hide it. It’s written all over your face. It’s so funny.”