by Herman Koch
“Hmm, but it’s Friday, she doesn’t have a class until the third period,” I replied. I always kept better track of those things than Sylvia did—or no, I didn’t keep track at all, I just knew them. I also knew Diana’s average for German at the moment.
We’re not going to send a single message. It’s only four days, Maarten.
My wife laughed and began cutting her faux-filet. “It’s a miracle you’ve never come down with a salmonella infection,” she said. That’s what she said whenever I ordered steak tartare. And maybe it really was a miracle. How many kilos of raw meat had I gobbled down in the last half-century, without ever ending up in a hospital? I’d had food poisoning, I knew what that felt like. Oysters, mayonnaise, meatloaf: all dishes that had, at some point in my life, produced in me a near-death experience. But steak tartare had never made me sick.
My wife’s teasing remark today could, as it had at many points in the last few months, mean precisely one of two things: either she had decided to act as normally as possible and was pulling it off extremely well, or she wasn’t acting at all and was truly behaving normally. Squinting slightly, I examined her face in profile (we were sitting beside each other at the little round table, so we could both look outside) as she chewed intently on a piece of faux-filet. There was nothing amiss, I told myself. Everything was what it was. I had been imagining the whole thing. We were alone together in Paris, the way we’d been alone together so often in a foreign city, in Madrid, in Rome, in Berlin, in New York. We were doing what we always did, what we enjoyed doing so much together, lunch with beer and wine, and later perhaps a glass of calvados along with the coffee.
I had seen them during this trip, too, the Dutch people you could always pick out right away, their length, their far-too-blond children, even in Paris they stuck to a sandwich or a slice of pizza for lunch, washed it down with cola or water. They didn’t live. They didn’t know that you could also enjoy life in the middle of the day. From five o’clock on, it’s okay, then the Dutchman promptly drinks himself into a corner. After the fifth glass it’s not about enjoyment anymore, with a certain fury he drinks himself as quickly as possible into an exuberant, uninhibited, and noisy version of himself. The locals give a wide berth to clusters of screaming Dutchmen. The Dutch people who make you ashamed to be Dutch.
“What’s wrong?” Sylvia asked. “Doesn’t it taste good?”
At that very moment, her telephone beeped. She laid her knife and fork beside her plate and opened the red case. I kept looking at her as she peered at the screen. Her expression didn’t change; she seemed lost in thought, as though she couldn’t quite place the message or its sender.
“I have to handle this right away,” she said. “I have to make a call.” She slid back her chair. “It’s too noisy here. I’m going outside for a moment.”
This time she’d said nothing about “my little sister” or “my big brother.” I had to get up, too, to let her pass. I looked at her questioningly; it was only normal to look questioningly at my own wife when she received a message that seemed to demand a quick response.
“A girlfriend,” she said as she wormed past me. “A girlfriend, but you don’t know her.”
I kept looking at her, trying with all my might to suppress any glimmer of disbelief or suspicion, as far as one can consciously suppress something like that. “I’ll explain in a minute,” she said.
And then she was gone. A few seconds later I saw her out on the street, at first it looked like she was going to turn left, but then she seemed to change her mind: if she moved to the left she would end up right in front of our table. She was holding the phone to her ear. I was still standing, I had to lean down to see her. To the right of the brasserie, around the corner, there was another sidewalk restaurant with a sunporch. She talked. She paced back and forth, but it was just a little too far away, I couldn’t see whether she was smiling, whether she was agitated. Then she stopped and looked straight in my direction. I didn’t know whether she could see me, I waved to her, but she didn’t react. I sat back down. I looked at my own plate, the half-eaten steak tartare, then at hers. I told you not to text me here. But still, darling, it’s nice to hear your voice. Sylvia hadn’t finished even a third of her faux-filet, hadn’t even touched her pommes dauphine. Her lunch was getting cold, fast. What could be so important that it couldn’t wait until after the main course? I tried to remember whether she had ever mentioned a girlfriend I didn’t know, or whether in our shared life, in which we knew almost everything about each other, there was even room for an unknown girlfriend. My wife always called her friends by their names. No, I was certain of it now. Never, not once, had she said, I’m going to meet up this afternoon with a girlfriend, someone you don’t know. I rose halfway to my feet again. My wife was standing there. She was no longer pacing back and forth. A truck was just turning the corner; she held the phone in one hand and pressed the other against her right ear to block out the noise. As far as I could tell from this distance, she looked serious. Focused. I sank back in my chair. What was Maarten van Hoogstraten saying to her? I can’t stand to be without you this long. I had to hear your voice. I looked at my half-eaten steak tartare, then at my wife’s plate of tepid faux-filet and cold pommes dauphine, and felt an enormous rage rise up inside. Where did Alderman Van Hoogstraten get off, coming in from five hundred kilometers away like this to ruin our lunch? I felt tears welling up. Don’t! I told myself. That’s the last thing you should do, make a pitiable, ridiculous figure of yourself. A cuckold trying to make his own wife pity him, what could be more disgusting than that? But it was hard to stop. Suddenly a picture loomed up before me, a picture of Maarten van Hoogstraten lying on a bed. His own bed. He was wearing white boxers. He held the phone to his ear; his other hand was in his underpants. What are you wearing? he asked my wife. All I have on are my underpants. I’m thinking about you now. I’m thinking about you with no clothes on, the way you came out of the shower that last time in the hotel. I thought I was going to explode. Shall I take off my underpants? Shall I tell you where my hand is? What I’m doing with it now?
No tears came, the rage had won out. No sentimental tomfoolery! “Fucking hell,” I said. Out loud, apparently, for the waiter who was walking past the table right then stopped and looked at me.
“Monsieur?”
I pointed to my empty beer glass and mumbled something that might or might not have been proper French. There was really no need for me to express myself clearly, though, the waiter understood. “Encore un demi, monsieur,” he said, and hurried off.
Suddenly, Sylvia was back; this time she squeezed her way between the table and the plate-glass window and dropped down into her chair.
“Oh, oh,” she said. “What a mess.” She picked up her glass and took a sip. Then it was empty. She looked around, but the waiter was somewhere outside our field of vision.
“I just ordered a beer,” I said. “He’ll be back in a minute.”
Then she looked at me for the first time since she’d come back. I searched her eyes for a clue; not just her eyes, but also her cheeks—a blush that might betray the provocative nature of her phone call.
“What’s with you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Your eyes…” She moved her face up closer to mine. “They’re all red. Have you…have you been crying, Robert? At least, that’s what it looks like.”
I raised my hand to my eyes, squeezed the bridge of my nose. “I…There was something…” I nodded at my plate of half-eaten steak tartare. “There was something in my steak. A really hot little pepper, I bit into it and it brought tears to my eyes.”
She shifted her gaze questioningly from my left to my right eye and back again. She looked at me doubtfully, then smiled; it was a pitying smile. How can you come up with such a stupid lie? her look and her smile said. Did you really think I’d fall for that?
“So what was that al
l about?” I asked quickly, to draw attention from my teary eyes. “I mean, what was with this girlfriend? I don’t know her, that’s what you said.”
I had been planning not to ask about any of this. I had been planning to let a silence fall, once Sylvia had come back. I had hoped to examine her closely as she became entangled in her own lies. Watch her pretend to have carried on a phone conversation with an unknown girlfriend, instead of having helped Maarten van Hoogstraten—with a few whispered, titillating words—to cream his boxers with a little shriek.
And even as I was thinking that, I wondered for the first time whether I could distinguish between the two, whether I would really be able to tell the difference between my wife’s made-up version of the phone call and the actual facts. Between an imaginary girlfriend and a girlfriend of flesh and blood.
Sylvia narrowed her eyes to slits, sighed deeply, and looked away from me.
“You don’t know her,” she said, picking up her knife and fork and cutting into her cold faux-filet. “But what a story!”
She started telling me. She had met this girlfriend of hers at the Dutch conversation lessons she’d been going to for the last six months or so. That much was true. She wanted to perfect her Dutch even further. “I make too many mistakes with the simple things,” she’d said. “De and het, die and deze, what a terrible language you people have! Anyone can learn English in six weeks, but you can keep on doing this your whole life, and even then: after one word, you people already know that you’re dealing with some idiotic foreigner.”
The girlfriend’s name was Sadako, she was from Japan. She and her Japanese husband had been living in Amstelveen for the last year. The husband was almost never around, his company sent him all over the world. And now, recently, Sadako had the strong impression that he wasn’t always traveling alone. Something about a photograph, my wife said; he had sent her a picture of a dinner party in San Francisco. A table at a restaurant, about eight people, men and women. Everyone in the picture was looking into the camera; the chair beside Sadako’s husband was vacant. He also sent another picture, one he’d apparently taken himself, because he wasn’t in it. In that one his chair was empty, but the one beside it was now occupied by a woman. A real beauty. Sort of Asiatic, too, although Sadako couldn’t make out what country she was from. Not Japan, in any case, maybe Thailand or Vietnam. But it was actually something in the picture itself that aroused her suspicions. The first photo, the one with her husband in it, had been taken so that you could see the entire group; in the second photo, though, the one Sadako’s husband had taken, three of the faces on the right side of the table were out of frame. As a result, the woman in the chair beside the one where Sadako’s husband had been sitting was in the exact center of the picture. Her husband had sent them right after each other, first the one he was in, then the picture with the woman in it. Sadako had not been able to avoid the impression that the second photo was sent by accident, that he hadn’t been paying attention, she told Sylvia. But that wasn’t all. Two days later, her husband sent her another photo. This one showed him in a seat in an airplane, an aisle seat, on a flight from San Francisco to Dallas. He was going to a conference there, he told Sadako in the message. The window seat was occupied, but the one in the middle was vacant. Sadako had uploaded the photo from her phone to her laptop and used photo-editing software to blow it up as large as she could. Her husband wore glasses, he was smiling, the eyes behind the lenses smiled along with him—the unsuspecting eye would assume that he was smiling at her, at Sadako, his wife back in Amstelveen. But in fact, of course, he was smiling at the person (the woman!) taking the picture. Meanwhile, Sadako had zoomed in so far on her laptop that one lens of his spectacles filled the entire screen; it was no longer completely in focus, but sharp enough to see the reflection in the lens, the reflection of a woman, a woman taking a picture of Sadako’s husband with his own telephone. The face reflected in the lens was too small to recognize, of course, but according to Sadako it was clear enough to see that it was a woman—a woman with her black hair hanging loose, just like the woman who’d sat beside him at the table the night before. It was that loose hair that put an end to Sadako’s hesitation. Stewardesses, after all, never wore their hair loose, always in a bun or ponytail, and often enough tucked away completely beneath an airline company cap.
As I listened to my wife—with one ear, for I was actually paying more attention to how she told the story than to the story itself—I wondered whether she could possibly make up something like this on the spot. Whether she could possibly have dreamed up this story between the time she broke the connection with her lover and the time she returned to our table. It seemed improbable to me, it was too detailed for that. It was always possible, of course, that the story itself was true, that she’d heard it somewhere else, and that she had decided in a blind panic to use it now in order to allay any suspicions I might have. But even so. It also had to do with the details about the girlfriend. The girlfriend I didn’t know had now become a Japanese girlfriend. A Japanese girlfriend with a name. Sadako. Why would my wife, if she were to make up a girlfriend, make up a Japanese girlfriend?
“It’s so horrible,” Sylvia concluded her story. “And I feel so sorry for her. Her husband is coming home in two days. She knows almost no one in Holland. That’s why she called me.”
More significant, perhaps, than this story that would have been almost impossible to make up, more significant than the unnecessary detail of the girlfriend’s nationality, was the improbability of my wife making up a story precisely about an adulterous spouse. A story about an incurable disease would have been more like it: a girlfriend I didn’t know who failed to respond to one course of treatment after another. Or was this an essential part of her strategy? With a juicy story about a faithless Japanese husband, she didn’t have to dodge the subject. A real adulterer, after all, would avoid this particular subject at all costs. For fear of giving themselves away with a blush, fluttering eyelids, or other body language.
I looked at my wife. She looked back at me without batting an eye, a slightly mocking smile playing at her lips—perhaps the mocking smile of a woman amused by her husband’s gullibility.
“I would notice it right away,” she said.
“What?”
“If you did that. If you cheated on me like Sadako’s husband. I would be able to see it on your face, you wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret for more than a couple of hours.”
I said nothing. She smiled, no longer mockingly, more like tenderly, as though she had caught a child telling an innocent fib.
“Did you really bite into a pepper, is that why you had tears in your eyes? Or are you going to tell me the truth?”
I didn’t quite blush, but if I didn’t say something fast I was going to turn red as a beet.
“I was thinking about us,” I said. “About how happy I am. With you. How happy I am to be here with you, in Paris.”
As I said it I thought about Maarten van Hoogstraten, his hand in his underpants, his sticky fingers.
“Me too, darling,” my wife said. “I’m always happy when I’m with you. Every minute of the day.”
Part
II
13
In the mid-1980s my best friend Bernhard and I went on a trip through a few countries, countries I won’t mention here by name. Suffice it to say that they lie to the south, east, and southeast of Belgium—past Paris, in any case. One of those countries is the one where my wife was born.
I don’t mean to bore anyone with a load of autobiographical detail. With what you might call my “political career”—although at that particular point in my life there was hardly anything like a career. If anyone’s interested, you’ll find it all on my Wikipedia page. Student union chairman, political party member, alderman, state secretary, mayor. The Wikipedia page, by the way, also mentions my wife’s nationality. Her name, her real name, is misspelled, with an
e in there somewhere where there should actually be an a. The first time I noticed it I resolved to change it—to have it changed—but that never happened. In fact, I never thought about it again until this very moment. How many times in your life, after all, do you look at your own Wikipedia page?
Back then, Bernhard Langer was already the most brilliant Dutch physicist and astronomer of his generation. In his field of expertise—black holes, the Big Bang, the rapidly expanding universe—his only competition was from the likes of Stephen Hawking. In fact, though, there was no real competition: Bernhard was good friends with Hawking, who was ten years his senior. They visited each other regularly, and in scientific publications they were often mentioned in the same breath. At thirty-two, Bernhard could have become the youngest rector magnificus ever at the Delft University of Technology, but he opted for adventure and accepted a position in the United States, first at Princeton, later at Harvard.