by Herman Koch
“Thank you,” the man said. “What I mean is, there’s no reason to be sorry about my wife. I’ve been alone for eighteen months now, but I think about her every day. In my dreams, she’s still alive. We still sit at the table together and walk down the beach side by side. Every time I wake up in the morning, I have to get used to the fact that she’s not there anymore. At first that made me sad, but then I realized that I was mostly feeling sorry for myself. My wife and I were happy together for more than thirty years. That’s what I want to hold on to. Thirty years, that’s tens of thousands of happy moments, almost too many for me to go back and remember during the years I have left. Wherever my wife is now, I’m sure she knows that her absence makes me sad. On the other hand, though, she wouldn’t want me to let that sadness drag me under. At first, right after she died, I tried that, I tried to let it destroy me. I wore the same clothes every day, I stopped shaving, I started drinking, and I started smoking again. Then one afternoon I was lying in bed with the curtains closed, a bottle of whiskey and a full ashtray on the nightstand beside me, when suddenly it was as though I was lifted up out of my own bed, and I saw myself lying there, way down below. And, at the same time, I heard my wife’s voice. ‘Don’t be such a baby, Richard!’ she said. ‘Look at you feeling sorry for yourself. But it’s not just about you, it’s about the two of us. Now that I’m not around anymore, you’re the only one who knows how happy we were together. Think about us, Richard. Think about us every day. And stop acting so pitiful. Come on, get up, take a shower, put on some clean clothes, get started on it this evening, treat yourself to a meal at our favorite restaurant. You can think about us there, about all the happy times we had there together. Wipe your eyes if you need to, but don’t sit there blubbering. You should be thankful and happy that that you can still remember so much about the two of us together.’ ”
During his story my phone had started vibrating again; it didn’t seem fitting to answer it right then. But the man had apparently finished talking, and I pulled the phone out of my pocket quickly.
“Robert, listen,” I heard Bernhard say. “I don’t have much time. Can I talk to you for a minute?”
I made a quick calculation, it was six hours earlier in Boston.
“Bernhard, I’m…I’m standing outside,” I said, glancing quickly at the man. Something in his expression had changed. In his eyes I saw the tired, dull look of someone who realizes that, inevitably, parting and loneliness are waiting at the end of every conversation.
To my relief, though, he raised his hand, nodded to me, and walked away. “Okay, go ahead,” I said to Bernhard. “I can…I’m alone now.”
“You remember what we talked about a while ago, in your garden? About the infinitude of the universe, and also that other mystery, about our own deaths?”
“Mm-hmm,” I said, but Bernhard wasn’t waiting for a reaction from me, he had only paused for half a second—and I was merely interrupting him during the intercontinental, second-and-a-half bounce.
“Well,” he said again, after he had waited for a couple of seconds to see if I was going to say something else. “It may happen sooner than I thought.”
20
I was lying on my back, in my own bed, with my eyes closed; beside me, I could hear my wife’s measured breathing. I had already gone through the whole bag of tricks in an attempt to get to sleep, but it was no use. As a child of eight or nine, when I couldn’t get to sleep, I often lay down on the cold, hard floor beside my bed. I closed my eyes and pretended I was riding a horse on a cold, stormy night. At last, the lights of an inn appeared through the trees in the distance, but the innkeeper shook his head dejectedly. The inn was full. There were about thirty people sleeping in a room big enough only for fifteen, they were bunched up together, every square centimeter was taken. Careful not to wake anyone, I tiptoed over the sleeping people. There! There was one little spot left, on a mattress in between two grown-ups, just enough space for an eight-year-old boy. If I scrunched up as tightly as I could, it ought to work. Then I crawled back into my own bed, thankful for the place to sleep and the warmth of the blankets. I crawled all the way up against the wall, I thought about the cold, about the horse and the rain outside—and after a few seconds I fell fast asleep.
These days I try it by traveling, by reconstructing a trip. Last night I reconstructed, day by day, the trip I took with Sylvia through the western United States more than twenty years ago. Diana wasn’t born yet, during our first happy hour at the hotel in Las Vegas we drank five margaritas each, after that there was the heat of Las Vegas, and the Chinese restaurant in St. George, just over the Nevada–Utah border, where the waitresses started vacuuming the floor while we were still on our appetizers, and the gray, glassy shrimp in hoisin sauce were cooked to death and so tasteless that all we could do was stammer that it was “too much.” The Chinese owners put the remains in a doggie bag (our very first doggie bag, but certainly not the last one on that trip), which we tossed, almost choking with hysterical laughter, into the first dumpster we saw. The next day, in Kanab, there was an electrical blackout in the middle of a thunderstorm. There were two restaurants in town, both of them cooked with electricity. Like St. George, Kanab is in the state of Utah, where the drinking laws remind you more of a Muslim country, rather than anywhere in the West. The Mormons, who call the shots in Utah, drink no alcohol at all, but had come up with a slightly more flexible solution for out-of-state tourists: they were allowed to order beer or wine in a restaurant, but only along with their meals. At the first restaurant we went to, they apologized for not being able to cook for us until the electricity was restored. Oh, but then we’ll just have a beer until the lights come back on, we tried. No, that was impossible. Only along with your meal. We had been driving all day through hot desert country, the area around Kanab had served as backdrop for a lot of Westerns, there was a poster of Clint Eastwood behind the bar of the restaurant, wearing a cowboy hat, holding his horse’s reins loosely in his right hand. To the left of the poster was a floor-to-ceiling refrigerator with a glass door. Behind the glass, which was steamed-up now, we could see the bottles of Budweiser. At the second restaurant it was the same song and dance, there they also had a refrigerator with a glass door behind the bar. Theoretically, it would have been possible to leap over the bar, yank open the door, and make it out onto Kanab’s dusty main street with a six-pack of frosty cold Budweiser. But it would have been a mistake to assume that a restaurant owner in these parts didn’t keep a revolver or a rifle under the bar. A Bonnie and Clyde ending or, even more likely, an ending like in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—the two of us going down amid a hail of bullets. The next morning, we bought a cooler and enough bags of ice and bottles of Budweiser to protect ourselves against prospective lightning bolts and religious lawgiving.
And after that? After that, we drove to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. That is where the fatigue set in. How many landscapes of dry yellow-and-red rock can one see before one starts longing for green pastures, dark forests, and babbling mountain brooks? Standing at the rim, we had taken each other’s hand and decided that we’d looked at enough rocks for the time being.
Ignoring Bryce Canyon National Park and Zion National Park, we drove to Cedar Falls, where we bought a four-person tent at the local Walmart for eighty dollars. I was lying there in bed, trying to remember the name of the little spot on the Utah–Colorado border, beside the Colorado River, where we had set up that tent for the first time, when out of the blue, as though it had suddenly leapt out from a darkened doorway, a very different memory forced itself on me. Or rather, the memory of a memory, one I’d had not so very long ago, earlier that evening in fact, as I was gathering together the garbage bag, the empty bottles, and the old newspapers.
The rabbits…Earlier in the evening I had thought about our rabbits. The pygmy rabbits that had played such a brief role in our family life. And only now did I think about the New Year’s recepti
on, about my wife tossing back her head, that’s how hard she’d laughed at Alderman Maarten van Hoogstraten’s story about the rabbits—or at least how hard she’d wanted me to believe she had, that evening at Café Schiller.
How easy it would have been to make up a story when the ingredients for that story came from her own life, our own life! The rabbits left to run free in the living room (the alderman’s living room, or our own?). The gnawed TV cables. Had our rabbits gnawed through the TV cables, or had they only hidden under the couch? Wasn’t it strange that Sylvia hadn’t even mentioned our own rabbits, that evening at Café Schiller?
I made a mental note of it. Tomorrow I would ask Maarten van Hoogstraten about the rabbits. Not explicitly, but in a roundabout way. We weren’t on close terms, even at lunch or during cocktails we mostly exchanged bits of information about administrative matters. It would, at the very least, be odd—suspicious, I couldn’t help thinking—if I were to suddenly ask the alderman about household matters, about the pets in his family, or the lack thereof.
And at that very same moment I thought of something else. What if I were to find out, tomorrow morning, that Alderman Van Hoogstraten had no rabbits? What then? What other conclusion could I draw but that my wife had made up the whole thing? That she had been lying to me?
I rolled onto my side, my back to her. Do I want to know this? I asked myself. Rabbits? I heard the alderman say. No, we don’t have rabbits, never have had either. But then what had my wife been laughing about so loudly at the reception? And what had made Maarten van Hoogstraten’s apparently hilarious story unsuitable for her to talk about?
How good was she at this? To what extent were they all good at it, there in her home country, I thought then, unable to stop myself. To what extent was lying an inalienable part of their culture—was it in their blood?
In some cultures, lying is a survival tactic, no more and no less than that. The merchants who travel from village to village, prizing their wares, lie just as baldly as their eternally haggling prospects. Sylvia, too, couldn’t buy a piece of worthless antique furniture without talking the price down by 90 percent, not even here in Amsterdam, at the flea market on Waterlooplein. I’ll give you two euros for that toaster, she says to the stallholder who is asking for twenty. At moments like that I always move away a little, not only because I’m the mayor—the mayor with a wife who’s haggling over a toaster at the flea market outside city hall—but because it embarrasses me. I hate rummage sales, including and above all the rummage sale on King’s Day. As far as that goes, though, Sylvia and I are in complete agreement. “A country that celebrates its national holiday with a rummage sale!” she said, the first time the two of us sauntered together along the unregulated street market in our neighborhood. “Really, Robert, isn’t that a bit dismal?”
as with the red rock formations in Utah, after Yellowstone National Park it was the conifer forests and icy mountain streams we became sick of. Getting to the sea, reaching the Pacific, became our sole objective. Soon after Missoula we drove into Idaho, then followed the whole length of the Columbia River, without stopping in Portland, all the way to the coast. There, on the oceanfront boulevard of the town with the fitting name of Seaside, we recorded our happiness for the first time on that trip. Or actually, someone else did; the picture shows both of us, and I’m sure it wasn’t made with the timer. A passerby probably, someone who saw us sitting there with our camera and offered to take a picture of the two of us. I would have done the same. I would have offered too—and if they didn’t have a camera with them, I would at least have stood and watched them from a distance for as long as possible.
We are sitting on a bench together, with the beach and the ocean as background. On the stone balustrade behind the bench, in between our heads, sits a huge seagull. Sylvia is wearing sunglasses, I have on a white New York Yankees baseball cap. What the photo shows is perfect happiness, the married couple who don’t need to smile at the camera, because everything about them, even without the smile, tells you that these two need no one but each other. In fact, they are granting a favor to the one taking the picture: he is allowed to look at them unabashedly for a few seconds, and then to immortalize them on film.
That thought was replaced right away with the memory of another picture, another picture that also portrays happiness without frills or special lighting. It was taken a few hundred kilometers farther south—we stuck to the coast for the rest of our trip—across the state border, in the northernmost part of California. In Redwood National Park.
Sylvia is standing at the side of the road, her hands on her hips, among the huge sequoias. She is wearing a blue dress with white polka dots, her head is tilted slightly to one side, the sunlight is first filtered by the branches and foliage and only then does it touch her. She smiles at the photographer. At me. It’s the look in her eyes, in combination with that smile. It’s a smile that promises everything. About us. About our future together. And the look in her eyes is real, I don’t know how else to put it, she’s not posing, she smiles and looks at me.
A few days later, in our hotel room in Santa Barbara, the water in the glass on my nightstand suddenly started moving. “Look,” I said to Sylvia. At first we thought it was a freight train, or a truck thundering by in the street below, but the streets were almost deserted, the tracks too far away. Then the glass itself began to move, it slid an inch or two closer to the edge. It looked like a scene from a documentary about paranormal phenomena, but at the very same moment we realized what it was. “An earthquake,” Sylvia said without a trace of panic in her voice. Afterward, we talked about it often. Our room was on the fifth floor; if the hotel had collapsed floor-by-floor, like a film in slow motion, it would already have been too late to run outside. It was a good feeling. A good feeling to experience that together. Not fatalism, more like acceptance.
In the twenty years after that, I often told the story about the earthquake. And I always laid it on a bit thickly. In fact, it had been nothing more than a tremor, one of many felt there as regular as clockwork—when we excitedly tried to share our experience with the people at the hotel desk, they acted as though they didn’t understand. The two desk clerks shook their heads pityingly at these naive tourists. Everyday fare this was, a little shaking, nothing to get wound up about. But in our stories at countless dinner tables, at an equal number of boring birthday parties, Sylvia and I turned it into a real earthquake. We glanced at each other conspiratorially when I talked about how the ceiling lamp had swung back and forth, and she finished the story with the water glass falling to the floor and shattering.
For me, the real story we brought home from our six-week vacation was that photograph of Sylvia beneath the sequoias. The only real souvenir. Of course, I could have had the photo enlarged and framed. I could have hung it on the wall. But I didn’t want to do that. In fact, what I didn’t want was for other people to see her like that. I wanted to keep her for myself.
And so it ended up somewhere at the bottom of the box of photos. The same box with all the other pictures of our trip through America, which we went on thinking we would have framed someday. The endless freight train: in a landscape of nothing but dust and thistles, we parked the Chevrolet at the side of the road. The engineer blew the whistle at us by way of a greeting, I waved back, and Sylvia took one picture after the other, three boxcars at a time. Once we got home, we laid them out on the living room floor of the house we lived in then. Most of the photos overlapped each other by an inch or so, but that could be solved with a pair of scissors: the line of photos of that freight train stretched out for more than six meters.
I got out of bed and went downstairs. What I was about to do bore the scent of mortal danger. Maybe it would be wiser not to. But once I pulled the box of photos out of our junk closet, there was no going back.
In the ground floor hallway, I opened the closet door and saw the box almost right away, in the same spot where it had been last tim
e, under the stack of old LPs, half hidden by the stepladder.
Turning on a single light in the living room, I groped around in the box. A vacation in Majorca, Diana wasn’t quite two, her chubby little face beaming at me from the baby carriage; the Mexican restaurant in Santa Barbara where we celebrated my fortieth birthday; a few boxcars…And suddenly there it was, sooner than I’d expected, the photo of Sylvia amid the five-hundred-year-old forest giants in Redwood National Park.
I looked at her, at her face, and then at her eyes—I looked her in the eye. I tried to look at her the way I had looked at her through that viewfinder more than twenty years ago. I read the promise in her eyes, then I looked away and then looked again.
It was like the old photographs of the Manhattan skyline, or more like the old movies in which you catch a glimpse of the Twin Towers. Up to that point, the movie is nothing but an old movie, but suddenly it gives you a glimpse of the future.
That was how I looked at the photograph of my wife—and what happened then was what I had been afraid would happen all along; the irreparable happened, without my being able to stop it.
Once, her eyes had spoken of nothing but the future—it had been there, somewhere between the sequoias and the earthquake, that we had decided to have a baby together—but from here on out it would be a different future from the one I had always counted on.
21
The next afternoon I collared Alderman Van Hoogstraten in the corridor outside the council chambers; it was half an hour before the start of the windmill debate.
“Something else,” I said. “I mean, it’s your territory, after all. The bottle banks. The sorted waste disposal system.”
“Hmm?” The alderman turned his head, bringing his face closer to mine at the same time, as though he was hard of hearing. I looked straight into his blue eyes and tried with all my might not to think about this same face bending toward my wife with puckered lips.