by Herman Koch
And there was something else that played a role. The two were wearing knitted caps, but they were upper-middle-class boys. They were white. It wasn’t easy to say how you could tell, it was hard to put your finger on it: something about their clothing, their movements. The boys down the street. Not the kind of trash who torch cars in order to start a race riot. Comfortably enough off, well-to-do parents. Boys like the ones we all know. Boys like our nephew. Like our son.
Looking back, I can recall the exact moment when I realized that this was not about boys like our nephew or our son, but about our son himself (and about our nephew). It was a cold and deathly quiet moment. Down to the very second, I could still point out the moment in the footage when I tore my eyes away from the TV and looked at Claire’s face in profile. Because the investigation is still under way, I’m not going to talk here about what made me realize, with a shock of recognition, that I was sitting on the couch watching our own son pelt a homeless woman with office chairs and garbage bags. And laughing. I’m not going into it any further, because technically I can still deny everything. Do you recognize this boy as Michel Lohman? At this point in the proceedings I can still shake my head. That’s hard to say … the images are pretty unclear, I couldn’t swear to it.
More images came afterwards: a compilation, the moments when little was happening had been edited out. You saw the two boys come back into the cubicle again and again and throw things.
The worst part came at the end, the key image as it were: the picture that caught the attention of half the world. First you saw the jerrycan being thrown – the empty jerrycan – and then, after they had gone outside again and come back, something else; on film it was hard to see what it was: a lighter? a match? You saw a flash of light, a flash that overexposed everything at once, that blinded you for a few seconds. The screen turned white. When the picture came back you could just see the boys beating a hasty retreat.
They didn’t come back. The final images registered by the security camera didn’t show much at all. No smoke or flames. The explosion of the jerrycan had not been followed by a fire. Yet it was precisely this seeing-nothing that made the images so terrifying. Because the most important thing was happening off-camera, and you had to fill in the rest for yourself.
The homeless woman was dead. Died right then and there, most probably. At the moment the gas vapours from the jerrycan exploded in her face. Or at most a couple of minutes later. Perhaps she had tried to wriggle out of the sleeping bag – perhaps not. Off-camera.
I looked, as I said before, at Claire’s face in profile. If she turned her head and looked at me, I would know. Then she would have seen the same thing I did.
Claire turned her head and looked at me.
I held my breath – or rather, I took a deep breath, so that I could be the first to say something. Something – I didn’t know exactly which words I would use – that would change our lives.
Claire held up the bottle of red wine: there was only a bit left in the bottom, just enough for half a glass.
‘Do you want this?’ she asked. ‘Or should I open another one?’
22
Michel put his hands in his coat pockets: it was hard to tell whether he had gone for my lie. When he turned his head to one side, his face was lit by the glow from the restaurant.
‘Where’s Mama?’ he asked.
Mama. Claire. My wife. Mama had told her son that his father didn’t know about any of this. And that she wanted to keep it that way.
Earlier in the evening, at the regular-people café, my wife had asked whether I too thought our son had been acting strangely of late. Distant, that was the word she’d used. The two of you talk about things Michel and I don’t talk about, she had said. Could it have something to do with a girl?
Had Claire been feigning concern about Michel’s behaviour? Were her questions meant only to get me to reveal how much I knew: whether I had any idea at all what our son and nephew were up to in their spare time?
‘Mama is inside,’ I said. ‘With …’
I started to say ‘with Uncle Serge and Aunt Babette’, but, in the light of recent events, that suddenly sounded so ridiculously childish. ‘Uncle’ Serge and ‘Aunt’ Babette were things of the past: the distant past, when we were still happy, it crossed my mind, and I had to bite my tongue. I had to be careful not to let my lip start trembling, or to let Michel see my wet eyes.
‘… Serge and Babette,’ I finished my sentence. ‘The main course just arrived.’
Was I mistaken, or did I see Michel feeling around for something in his coat pocket? For his cell phone, perhaps? He didn’t wear a watch, he used his phone to tell the time. I’ll make sure we stay away till after midnight, Claire had assured him on his voicemail. So you two have to do it tonight. Did he, at this moment, after my announcement that the main course had just arrived, feel the need to check the time? The amount of time left until ‘after midnight’, to do what they had to do?
When he asked about his mother, the tone that had frightened me only thirty seconds earlier vanished from Michel’s voice. Where’s Mama? ‘Uncle’ and ‘aunt’ were childish, reminiscent of birthday parties and questions like ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ But ‘Mama’ was Mama. Mama would always remain Mama.
Without thinking about it any further, I decided that the moment had arrived. I pulled Michel’s phone out of my pocket. He looked at my hand, then raised his eyes to meet mine.
‘You looked,’ he said; his voice didn’t sound threatening at all any more, more like fatigued – resigned.
‘Yeah,’ I said. I shrugged, the way you shrug over something that can’t be changed any more anyway. ‘Michel …’ I began.
‘What did you look at?’ He took his phone out of my hand, slid it open, then closed it again.
‘Well … the ATM machine … and the vagrant at the subway station …’
I grinned – a fairly stupid grin, I imagined, and completely out of place, but I had decided to do it that way, that this would be my approach: I would act the ignoramus, a rather naive father who didn’t think it was such a big deal that his son beat up vagrants and set fire to the homeless. Yes, naivety was the right way to do it, it shouldn’t be too hard for me to play the naive father; after all, that was what I was: naive.
‘Jackass …’ I said, still with a grin.
‘Does Mama know?’ he asked.
I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said.
What does Mama know about, was what I really wanted to ask, but it was still too soon for that. I thought back to the evening when the footage from that ATM cubicle had first been broadcast. Claire had asked whether I wanted the last of the wine, or whether she should open a new bottle. Then she had gone, that’s right, to the kitchen. Meanwhile, the female presenter of Opsporing Verzocht had made an urgent appeal to viewers to call the number at the bottom of the screen if they had any information that might lead to the arrest of the culprits. ‘You can, of course, also alert your local police,’ she said, turning her noble and offended expression on me. ‘What is the world coming to?’ that expression said.
That evening, after Claire had crawled into bed with a book, I went upstairs to Michel’s room. I saw a strip of light under his door. I remember standing there in the hallway for a full sixty seconds. I asked myself in all seriousness what would happen if I said nothing at all. If I just carried on with my life, like everyone else. I thought about happiness – about happy couples, and about my son’s eyes.
But then I thought about all those other people who had watched the programme: students at Rick and Beau’s high school who had been at that party on the same night – and who may have seen the same thing I had. I thought about the people here in the neighbourhood, here on our street: neighbours and shopkeepers who had seen the somewhat reserved but always-friendly boy traipsing past with his sports bag, his quilted jacket and his knitted cap.
Last of all, I thought about my brother. He was no genius, in a certain sense y
ou could even call him mentally deficient. If the opinion polls were right, after the upcoming elections he would be sworn in as our new prime minister. Had he been watching? And Babette? An outsider would never recognize our children from the security-camera footage, I told myself, but there is something about parents that makes them able to pick their children out of thousands: on a crowded beach, a playground, in fuzzy black-and-white footage …
‘Michel! Are you still up?’ I knocked on his door and he opened it.
‘Jesus, Dad!’ he said when he saw my face. ‘What is it?’
After that it had all gone fairly quickly, at least more quickly than I had expected. In fact, he seemed almost relieved that now there was someone else who knew too.
‘Jesus,’ he said a few times. ‘Jesus, man. This is really weird, you know, to be talking about this now, the two of us.’
He made it sound as though that was all it was, weird: as though, for example, we had been discussing the most intimate details of how he had tried to pick up a girl at a school party. In a way, of course, he was right: I never had tried to bring up things like this before. But the weirdest thing of all was the reticence I noticed in myself from the very start. As though I were giving him the liberty not to tell everything to me, his father, should that prove too painful for him.
‘We didn’t know, right?’ he said. ‘How were we supposed to know that there was still something in that jerrycan? It was empty, I swear it was empty.’
Did it matter whether he and his cousin were actually ignorant of the fact that empty jerrycans can explode too? Or whether they were only feigning ignorance of something that can be assumed to be common knowledge? Gasification, petrol fumes. Never hold a match up to an empty tank. Why else weren’t you allowed to use your cell phone at the pumps? Because of petrol fumes and the danger of an explosion.
Right?
But I didn’t say any of that. As I said before, I didn’t try to refute the arguments with which Michel tried to prove his innocence. After all, how innocent was he, anyway? Are you innocent when you throw a desk lamp at someone’s head, but guilty when you accidentally set that same person on fire?
‘Does Mama know?’ Yes, he had asked me that. Even back then.
I shook my head. And that’s how we stood there for a while in his room, saying nothing, both of us with our hands in our pockets. I didn’t press on. I didn’t, for example, ask what had got into him. What he and his cousin had been thinking when they started pelting the homeless woman with objects.
Looking back on it, in fact, I know for a certainty that, then and there, during those few minutes of silence, as we stood with our hands in our pockets, I had already made up my mind. I couldn’t help thinking about the time Michel had kicked a ball through the window of a bike shop, when he was eight. Together we had gone to the owner to offer to pay for the damage. But the owner wasn’t satisfied with that. He had burst into a tirade about ‘the riff-raff’ who played soccer in front of his store, each and every day, and who kicked the ball against the window ‘on purpose’. Sooner or later it was bound to break, he said, you could count on that. ‘And that’s exactly what those punks are hoping for,’ he added.
I had been holding Michel’s hand as we listened to the owner of the bike shop. My eight-year-old son had looked down at the floor guiltily, and occasionally squeezed my fingers.
It was that combination, the combination of the bitter bike dealer who numbered Michel among the punks and my son who responded so guiltily to his tirade, that threw the switch inside my head.
‘Why don’t you just shut up?’ I said.
The shop owner was standing behind his counter, he seemed at first to think he had misunderstood me. ‘What did you say?’ he asked.
‘You heard me loud and clear, asshole. I came here with my son to offer to pay for your shitty window, not to listen to your crap about kids playing soccer. What’s the big deal, you fucking idiot? A ball through the window. That doesn’t give you any right to call an eight-year-old boy a punk. I came here to pay for the damage, but now you’re not getting a cent. Go figure out for yourself where the money’s coming from.’
‘Excuse me, my good man, but I’m not going to stand here and let myself be insulted,’ he said as he started to come around from behind the counter. ‘Those boys broke my window, I didn’t do it myself.’
Beside the counter was a bicycle pump, an old-fashioned upright model; the pump itself was bolted at the bottom to a wooden plank. I leaned down and picked it up.
‘I’d stay where I was if I were you,’ I said calmly. ‘The only thing that’s been damaged so far is a window.’
There was something about my voice, I still remember, that made the bike dealer stop, then step back behind the counter. It had, indeed, sounded unnaturally calm. I was not on edge, the hand with which I gripped the pump was not shaking in the slightest. The bike dealer had called me a good man, and maybe I looked like one, but I was not a good man.
‘Oh, hold on,’ he said. ‘We’re not going to do anything crazy, are we?’
I felt Michel’s hand around my fingers. He squeezed them again, harder than the first few times. I squeezed back.
‘How much is the window?’
He blinked his eyes. ‘I’ve got insurance,’ he said. ‘It’s just that—’
‘That’s not what I asked. I asked how much it cost.’
‘A hundred … a hundred-and-fifty guilders. Two hundred in total, with labour, etcetera.’
In order to take the money out of my pocket, I had to let go of Michel’s hand. I laid two one-hundred guilder bills on the counter.
‘This is it,’ I said. ‘This is what I came for. Not to listen to your sick bullshit about a couple of kids kicking a ball.’
I let go of the pump as well now. I registered a sense of fatigue. And regret. It was the same fatigue and regret you feel when you miss a tennis ball: you were planning to smash it, but you swing hard and miss, the arm holding the racket meets no resistance and lashes wildly through the air.
I knew for sure, and in the depths of my being I still know, that I was sorry the bike dealer had backed off so quickly. I would have felt less tired had I been able to use the pump.
‘So, we fixed that nicely, didn’t we, buddy?’ I said on the way home.
Michel took my hand again, but said nothing. When I looked over, I saw that there were tears in his eyes.
‘What is it, fella?’ I asked. I stopped and squatted down in front of him. He bit his lower lip, and then he really began to cry.
‘Michel!’ I said. ‘Michel, listen. There’s no reason to be sad. That was a nasty man. I told him that. You didn’t do anything wrong. All you did was kick a ball through a window. It was an accident. Accidents happen, but that’s no reason for him to talk about you like that.’
‘Mama,’ he said now, between sobs. ‘Mama …’
I felt something inside my body stiffen, or perhaps what I felt was the way something nameless and indefinable unfolded: a folding trellis, tent poles, an umbrella – I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stand up straight again.
‘Mama? Do you want to go to Mama?’
He nodded emphatically and wiped his teary cheeks with his fingers.
‘Shall we hurry up and go to Mama then?’ I said. ‘Shall we tell Mama about everything? What the two of us did?’
‘Yeah,’ he peeped.
When I stood up, I really did think that I heard something snap, in my spine, or maybe deeper than that. I took his hand and we set off. At the corner of our street I looked down; his face was still red and wet with tears, but the crying had stopped.
‘Did you see how scared that guy was?’ I said. ‘We almost didn’t have to do a thing. We wouldn’t even have had to pay him for that window. But I don’t think that would have been right. When you break something, even it’s an accident, you have to pay for the damage.’
Michel said nothing until we arrived at the front door.
‘Daddy?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Were you really going to hit that man? With the bicycle pump?’
I had already put the key in the lock, but now I squatted down in front of him again. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘That man is not a good man. That man is just a piece of trash who hates kids who are playing. It doesn’t matter whether I would have hit him over the head with that pump. Besides, if I had, he would only have had himself to blame. No, what matters is that he thought I was going to hit him, and that was enough.’
Michel looked at me earnestly; I had chosen my words carefully, because I didn’t want to make him cry again. But his eyes were already almost dry, he was listening carefully, and then he nodded slowly.
I put my arms around him and hugged him. ‘How about if we don’t tell Mama about the bicycle pump?’ I said. ‘Shall we keep that as our little secret?’
He nodded again.
Later that afternoon he went into town with Claire to buy some clothes. At the table that evening he was quieter and more serious than usual. I winked at him once, but he didn’t wink back.
When his bedtime arrived, Claire had just sat down on the couch to watch a movie she really wanted to see. ‘Sit back and enjoy it, I’ll take him up,’ I said.
And so we lay beside each other on his bed and chewed the fat a little: innocent chit-chat, about soccer and a new computer game he was saving up for. I had resolved not to bring up the incident in the bike shop, not unless he started in about it himself.
I kissed him goodnight and was about to turn off the nightlight when he leaned over and threw his arms around me. He squeezed hard; he had never put that much force behind a hug before, he pressed his head against my chest.
‘Dad,’ he said. ‘Dear old dad.’
23
‘You know what the best thing would be?’ I said that evening in his room, after he had told me the whole story and swore again that he and Rick had never been planning to set anyone on fire.
‘It was a joke,’ he’d said. ‘And it was …’ – he grimaced in disgust – ‘you should have smelled how it stank,’ he said.