by Herman Koch
The waitress set down two plates on our hot plate, then lifted our platters from the trolley—a whole crab with ginger and spring onions for my mother, char siu for me—and put them beside the plates; she scooped some rice onto them and left.
“It feels weird to me somehow,” my mother said. “To just stop all of a sudden, when there’s no real immediate cause for it.”
I put a dab of sambal on my plate, then jabbed a piece of char siu off the platter and swiped it through the sambal.
“There really isn’t anything wrong, except for the fact that your father seems a little more fatigued than he used to be,” she went on. “But that’s normal, I think, being less energetic at ninety-four than you were ten years ago. Something really has changed. You know, Robert, I’m not sure I’ve ever told you this, but whenever one of us would have a birthday with a zero or a five at the end, your father and I would always drink a toast to the next ten years. We started doing that when we turned thirty; I think that we were thirty when we first started feeling old. ‘To the next ten years,’ we’d say, and clink glasses. But last time he said something different. The last time, when he turned ninety, he said: ‘To the next five years.’ I think he sensed, consciously or unconsciously, that he wouldn’t make it to a hundred.”
“And what about you, Mama? Do you have that same feeling in your bones? I mean: you’re ninety-three, right?” I tried to catch the waitress’s attention. “Would you like some more wine?” I pointed to her half-full glass. “I’m going to have another beer anyway.”
“You know what’s funny about your father? Maybe I’ve told you this already, so if I did, just say so. I have a tendency to tell the same story two or three times. But I’m not demented enough not to know that. Which is why I always ask politely beforehand. So stop me right away if you’ve already heard it. Promise?”
“I promise,” I said. What she said was true, I’d noticed it before. Last time I had my birthday, she called me the next day to ask whether she’d forgotten to wish me a happy birthday. But she never forgot anything important, and she could still remember the minutest details of things that happened a long time ago.
“It was on King’s Day, last year,” my mother said. “Your father and I were taking a walk around the neighborhood. It doesn’t interest me in the slightest, all those children selling all that old garbage, I always find it a little sad that they have to get up so early on their day off, just to get a good spot. But anyway, at one point we decided to stop in for a beer at that café on Middenweg, what’s it called again? You see, it’s that kind of thing…”
“Elsa’s,” I said. “Elsa’s Café.”
“Thank you, sweetheart, Elsa’s Café. Anyway, we had a glass of wine, then another one, and we ran into the people who live across the street, they were there too. At one point I went to the ladies’ room for a minute. Well, not a minute, there was a huge line. I was gone for maybe fifteen minutes. At first, when I came back, I couldn’t find your father outside, there were so many people standing around. But suddenly I saw him, way off in a corner, talking to two girls, they couldn’t have been more than nineteen. There was a band playing, fairly loudly, and I saw that he leaned over to one of the girls and shouted something in her ear. Apparently she didn’t understand him the first time, because she put her ear closer to his mouth and he shouted again, and then she shrieked with laughter. And then she said something to that other girl, who burst out laughing too.”
My mother was holding a crab leg between her fingers and snapped it in two; little pieces of white crabmeat flew everywhere, a few ended up in her hair. There were little particles of white around her mouth and on her cheeks too.
“I wormed my way through all those people, heading for your father and the girls who were laughing so loudly, but suddenly I stopped. Let him go, I thought. I’ll keep my distance. That’s what I did. There weren’t any neighbors or friends around, so I just stood watching calmly from a distance. It was as though your father had forgotten all about me. After maybe half an hour he finally looked around, and then he saw me standing there. He waved, signaled to me that he was coming, but in the end it took another fifteen minutes before we were ready to go home.”
I was about to say something, something about my father and women, both of us knew what he was like on that count. On vacation, back when I was only nine or ten, he had no qualms about turning around in his seat in some foreign restaurant, just to watch an attractive waitress walk by. “My, my, apparently there’s no law against that here either,” he would say. My mother would roll her eyes or wink at me; she had always found his behavior funnier than it was shameful.
“No, wait, I know what you’re going to say,” she said then. “The best is yet to come. After that, when we were walking home.” Meanwhile my mother had arrived at the part of the crab shell without the legs, the part that always reminds me of a spaceship, the black dots of the eyes are the cockpit, where the two pilots operate the legs. She picked up a little spoon and scraped out something green, and I looked away. “We were walking down Hogeweg, and I noticed he was wobbling a little,” my mother went on, “that he had to try really hard just to walk in a straight line. He kept shaking his head and laughing under his breath. ‘Did you see those girls?’ he said then. ‘The two I was talking to? That one girl was absolutely smoldering. The way she looked at me! With those big dark eyes. At first, I thought: What’s she after? But she just kept looking at me.’ And then he started talking about that other girl, about how she was much less attractive, but that’s exactly why he’d done his best to keep her in the conversation, too, and he claimed that that had made the first girl ‘smolder’ even more, the way he put it. I asked him whether he actually believed what he was saying. Whether he realized what age those girls were, whether he remembered how old he was himself. But he said: ‘I can’t help seeing what I see, can I? I’ve got eyes in my head, don’t I?’ We were walking close to the curb right then, he took a wrong step and fell halfway between two parked cars. When we got home I made two grilled-cheese sandwiches for him and put him to bed. ‘The whole room is spinning,’ he said. ‘Just like it used to.’ And then he fell asleep with his glasses on.”
We walked together down Damstraat, to the tram stop on Dam Square. “It’s strange to think about it,” she said. “Having lunch with you like this, I think: Why does this have to end? Why not just go on having lunch at Oriental City every two weeks for the next five years? But there’s also something to it, to stopping at a point when things are still pleasant. Now things are still pleasant, I mean. If you have to spoon-feed your mother pieces of crab later on, that’s going to be a lot less pleasant. For you. Maybe I won’t even notice anymore. Or maybe I will have lost my taste for it. Did he tell you about the new car?”
“New car?”
“He started talking about it about six months ago. That we needed a new car. He came home with all kinds of brochures, don’t ask me what it was, I couldn’t care less. That’s what I told him too. ‘What’s wrong with the car we have?’ I said. ‘It still runs fine, doesn’t it?’ And for a long time, I thought he’d dropped the idea completely. But a little while ago he started in about it again. ‘We’ve got the money,’ he said. ‘So let’s go to France in style this time, for the last time. In a convertible.’ I guess I must have looked at him like he was out of his mind, because he hasn’t brought it up again. But do you know what I mean? First those girls, then this. I don’t begrudge him his little pleasures, but on the other hand I think it’s so incredibly childish. I almost find him sort of pitiful, and I don’t want to think that way about your father.”
The No. 9 tram stopped in front of us. I leaned over to kiss her, and as I did I used my thumb to wipe some of the white crabmeat off her face.
“I know what you mean,” I said. “But I wouldn’t worry about it. Cars, girls: most men have that during their midlife crisis. Maybe it’s only happening to him now. Maybe he�
��s just sort of a slow starter.”
12
A few days later, Sylvia and I left for four days in Paris. It had been a year since we’d gone there together, but that had been an official visit. Now we had all the time in the world, and could do whatever we felt like.
Our hotel was in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, on Rue Saint-Sulpice. We always went for breakfast on the glassed-in patio of a brasserie on Boulevard Saint-Germain. By the third morning, the waiter knew our orders by heart: a croissant for Sylvia, a sandwich au jambon for me, and two cafés crèmes. (On our fourth and final morning I felt like having a croissant, too, but I ordered my usual anyway, because I didn’t want to disappoint the smiling waiter.) Then, after breakfast, we would take off walking. With no plans, no destination, and above all with no city map. First across the Seine, then left past the Louvre, one morning by way of the Rue Saint-Honoré, the next through the Jardin des Tuileries to the Champs-Élysées.
You saw them lying around everywhere. Sometimes in doorways, but more often right in the middle of the sidewalk. Whole crowds of children, most of them between the ages of two and six. A mattress, a few dirty blankets, a couple of garbage bags and plastic sacks with their possessions.
“That’s really going far too far,” my wife said as we passed a sleeping woman with four sleeping children. “See how little those children are? You can’t do that, can you?”
I could have said something about how maybe she had no other choice, I could have said something about the economic malaise in Europe, in the world, but I didn’t.
“It’s like they have no sense of pride,” Sylvia said. “Beggars, okay, you’ve got them everywhere. It’s not pleasant, it shouldn’t even exist in a rich country like France, but this is different. They’re not even begging. You see that? Do you see a hat or a paper cup anywhere? But that’s not necessary, of course. They get their money in other ways.”
I said nothing. We had stopped before the display window of a Louis Vuitton shop. The window held only one bright-red handbag, on a bed of black velvet. From the corner of my eye, I looked at the woman on the mattress. She had just woken up and was rubbing a dirty hand over her face, which was none too clean either. Her hair was covered with a dark-brown checkered scarf, her upper body shrouded in a dark-green vest, it looked like only the top layer of many. The children slept on, three little girls and a boy, it was ten thirty in the morning. For a moment I wondered what time they had gone to bed last night, in order to sleep so late, and shook my head inadvertently.
“Would you like it if I bought you a bag like that?” I asked, just to change the subject. “If I were to give you a fire-engine-red Louis Vuitton bag, would you throw your arms around my neck?”
I was deeply aware of the contrast between the bag in the shopwindow, which probably bore no price tag because it was so screamingly expensive, and the dirty woman with her sleeping children ten meters farther along. If you were to use this in a film script, people would say you were laying it on way too thick. A tendentious scene; haven’t we, here in the West, missed the mark completely when we spend a month’s salary on a handbag while little children are sleeping out on the street? Or was it not the Louis Vuitton bag that was the real symbol of decadence, but this unwashed mother doing this to her own children?
“The women draw your attention,” my wife was saying, “while the children are trained to cut open your bag or ruffle through your pockets with their nimble fingers. And no, sweetheart, you wouldn’t please me with a bag like that. It’s not that it’s ugly, in and of itself, but it’s the brand. You have to ask yourself whether you’re the kind of person who walks around town with a Louis Vuitton bag. And I’m not that kind of person.”
We strolled down the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe, then crossed and strolled all the way back again. At a brasserie in a side street, we went for the menu of the day. I asked for oeufs durs mayonnaise as an appetizer, and the waiter complimented me on that. “An excellent choice,” I understood him to say. Then he said something else: about Parisians or Paris, a complete sentence spoken with a grin, of which I actually understood only the word manger.
“I’ve never understood what’s so special about that,” Sylvia said, once the waiter left. “Eggs boiled for more than five minutes, a glop of mayonnaise on top, and there you have it.”
“I think it’s wonderful. An ice-cold hard-boiled egg, and they make the mayonnaise themselves, don’t forget that.”
“It’s just sort of a childish dish. Like a hotdog or a fish stick. But okay, that’s the way you are too: childish.”
She said it with a smile, raising her glass of beer in a toast, and now she winked at me as well. I raised my own glass too. It was one of those thin glasses on a stem, the kind the French call a demi. It felt ice-cold to my fingertips, it was covered in little drops of dew, and the head on it was impeccable, almost a pity to drink out of, like walking across a lawn covered in fresh snow. I knew my wife was only teasing me about the childish dishes I ordered—she had said nothing yet about the steak tartare I’d chosen for the main course, but I knew that was coming. I saw her teasing (and her smile, her wink) as a reassurance. Would she still tease me (and smile and wink) if she were having an affair with Maarten van Hoogstraten? Wouldn’t the teasing be the first thing she’d stop doing? Or was she only putting on a five-star performance? Was she only trying to act the way she always did, insofar as that was possible? Simply because otherwise it would be the first thing I’d notice: that she no longer teased me about the food I ordered, no longer raised her glass in a toast, smiled, winked?
From the moment we left Amsterdam, I had kept a close eye on her. No, not close: Casual. Nonchalant. In the Thalys on the way down I’d leafed through an issue of Vrij Nederland, without reading a word. Then, with a sigh, I took the marker out of my book: page 170, a hundred and fifty left to go. When you watched a movie, you knew within ten minutes whether it was good or whether it was a piece of shit. With a book, that took a little longer: you gave the author the benefit of the doubt for fifty pages or so, but by page 170 you knew it was hopeless, that things could only get worse.
In order not to be too conspicuous about only pretending to read, I turned a page once in a while. Meanwhile, from the corner of my eye, I watched my wife, who seemed to be completely absorbed in her issue of HELLO! Had she done her hair up in some special way? Had she put on more, or precisely less, makeup? Had she lost weight in the last few weeks? Weight loss, a different hairdo, more lipstick: these, according to all the popular magazines, were the most obvious external symptoms of adultery. But I noticed nothing out of the ordinary, not in her behavior during the train trip either. As far as I could tell, she wasn’t checking her iPhone more frequently, and on one occasion she laughed out loud at a WhatsApp message, from a girlfriend, she said, a fellow countrywoman who had sent her a funny video. I heard trumpets blare, a loud male voice speaking in her native language. Fortunately, she didn’t ask if I wanted to see it, she knows how I detest ostensibly funny videos that people share for want of a sense of humor of their own.
When she went to the restroom, she just left her iPhone on the fold-down table. I could have taken a quick look at it, could have scrolled through the messages in search of one from Maarten van Hoogstraten. I think about you all day, sweetest! What are you wearing? I’m lying in bed, I’m taking off my boxers now while I think about you, will you take off something too?
But it was all purely theoretical. I wasn’t going to look at her phone, of course not. Because I never did that. Because she knew I never did that. You couldn’t just start looking at your wife’s phone all of sudden, just like that. Not because she would notice right away, but simply because it was not done.
And then again: Would Sylvia be foolish enough to put Maarten van Hoogstraten in her list of contacts, under his own name and with his own profile photo? No, my wife was most certainly not that foolish. Unfortunately, n
o. No, he would be in there without a photo and under a different name (a woman’s name!). She would delete all his messages right away. It was even more likely that they would have agreed not to send any messages at all for the duration of her stay in Paris.
But would they be able to keep that up? Can people who are infatuated with each other put up with not hearing anything from the other person for four days? No, that was impossible. One whole day, maybe—half a day, I corrected myself, thinking back on my own infatuations. Despite all the promises not to call and not to send amorous messages, those promises would—within a day and a half, tops—become too much to bear. It was simply too early to verify at that point, I decided, we had been on the train for only ninety minutes. Once we arrived in Paris, I would resume the close surveillance of my wife.
There Sylvia came, walking down the aisle, occasionally reaching out to steady herself on the backrests. Maybe I was imagining it, but she really did look slimmer, I told myself as she sank down into her seat.
“I heard a beep,” I said. “I think you have a new message.”
on our second day in Paris, though, there were still no visible signs of an affair. Perhaps, I reflected once again as the waiter placed my steak tartare in front of me and served Sylvia her faux-filet with pommes dauphine, it was precisely the absence of any visible sign or signal that should confirm my worst suspicions. The completely normal way my wife was acting, the mildly mocking smile and the way she shook her head as she viewed my steak tartare, as she always did when I ordered this particular dish, could be a deliberate tactic. No phone calls, no text messages, no mail. In my mind I saw them whispering it to each other; my wife was naked, her body covered with a sheet only to the navel, her hair fanned out as she rested her head lightly against the alderman’s hairless chest. He would notice right away, I would have to keep my phone with me all the time, even under the shower. When he hears a beep, he’ll ask who the message is from. Yes, that was true, that’s how it always went. My wife’s phone beeped every hour, sometimes more often. At breakfast, at least three times. I didn’t even have to ask, I only glanced up from my newspaper or paused before sipping at my café crème. “My sister,” she would say, or: “My little brother.” There was only one sister who she called “my sister,” and that was the eldest one. Her elder brother, though, she always referred to as “my big brother.” Her younger sister was called “my little sister.” We sat down to breakfast at ten, which was still too early for a message from our daughter, from Diana. Independently of each other, though, we always looked to see what time she had still been online the night before. Last night, that had been a quarter to two. “Isn’t that kind of late?” my wife had asked when she came out of the bathroom. “For a normal school day?”