by Herman Koch
I nodded, my mind was already made up. I did what I thought I had to do as a father: I put myself in my son’s shoes. I put myself in Michel’s position: how he had been on his way home from the school party, along with Rick and Beau. And how they had decided to withdraw some cash – and what they found in the ATM cubicle.
I put myself in his shoes. I formed an idea of how I myself would have reacted to the living creature in the sleeping bag, lying in my way there; to the stench; to the simple fact that someone, a person (I am purposely avoiding words here like homeless person or vagrant), how a person thinks that ATM cubicles are a place to sleep; a person who then reacts indignantly when two boys try to convince her otherwise; a person who becomes tetchy when disturbed in her sleep; a spoiled reaction, in other words, the kind of reaction you see more often from people who think they have a right to something.
Hadn’t Michel told me that the woman had sounded prim? A prim accent, a good family, someone from the upper classes. Until now, little had been revealed about the homeless woman’s background. Perhaps for good reason. Maybe this was the black sheep of a well-to-do family whose members were completely used to ordering around the people who worked for them.
And then there was something else. This was the Netherlands. This was not the Bronx, we were not in the slums of Johannesburg or Rio de Janeiro. In Holland you had a social safety net. No one had to lie around and get in the way in an ATM cubicle.
‘You know what the best thing would be?’ I said. ‘To just forget it for the time being. As long as nothing happens, nothing is happening.’
My son looked at me for a few seconds. Maybe he felt he was too big to say ‘dear old dad’ any more, but beside the fear in his eyes I also saw thankfulness.
‘You think maybe?’ he said.
24
And now, in the restaurant garden, we were standing across from each other again, not speaking a word. Michel slid his cell phone open and closed a few times, then put it in his coat pocket.
‘Michel,’ I began.
He didn’t look at me, he had his head turned to the other side now, towards the darkened park; his face remained in darkness too. ‘I don’t have time for this right now,’ he said. ‘I have to get going.’
‘Michel. Why didn’t you tell me? About those videos? Or at least about that one video. Back then? Back when there was still time?’
He ran his fingers over his nose, scuffed his white tennis shoes in the gravel and shrugged.
‘Michel?’
He looked at the ground. ‘It doesn’t make any difference,’ he said.
For one single moment I thought about the father I could have been, perhaps the one I should have been, the father who would now say, ‘It makes a big difference!’ The time for sermonizing was past, though, that bridge had already been crossed: back then, on the night of the TV broadcast, in his room. Or maybe even before that.
A few days ago, not long after Serge had called me about the get-together at the restaurant, I had watched the episode of Opsporing Verzocht again on the Internet. It seemed like a good idea, it might make me better prepared for the dinner.
‘We need to talk,’ Serge had said.
‘About what?’ I replied. Playing ignorant, that seemed the best thing to me.
At the other end of the line, my brother breathed a deep sigh.
‘I think we’re past the stage of my needing to tell you that,’ he said.
‘Does Babette know?’
‘Yes. That’s why I want to talk about it with the four of us. It has to do with all of us. They’re our children.’
It struck me that he had not asked in turn whether Claire knew. Apparently he assumed she did – or else he didn’t care. After that he had named the restaurant, the restaurant where they knew him; the seven-month waiting list, he said, would pose no obstacle.
Did Claire know too? I thought now, as I looked at my son walking towards his bike, getting ready to leave.
‘Michel, wait a minute,’ I said. We need to talk, that other father would have said, the father I was not.
I had watched the footage again, with this evening in mind, the laughing boys who threw a desk lamp and garbage bags at the invisible homeless person. And finally the flash of exploding gas fumes, the boys running away, the telephone numbers you could call – or the local police you could also alert.
I watched it one more time, especially the last bit, with the jerrycan and the tossing of what I knew by then was a lighter. A Zippo, a lighter with a lid, the kind of lighter that goes out only when you click the lid shut. What were two boys, neither of whom smoked, doing with a lighter? There were questions I hadn’t asked, purely because I didn’t feel the need to know everything, from an urgent need not to know everything, you could also say – but this one I had.
‘To give people a light,’ Michel had replied without hesitation. ‘Girls,’ he added, when I suppose I looked at him a bit blankly. ‘Girls ask you for a light, for a joint or a Marlboro Light, you miss a chance when you don’t have anything in your pocket.’
As I said, I watched that last part twice. After the flash of light the boys disappeared out the glass door. You saw the door shut, then the footage stopped.
The second time, though, I suddenly saw something I hadn’t noticed before. I clicked the video back to the point where Michel and Rick ran out the door. From the moment the door fell shut, I put the player on slow, and then slower, frame by frame.
Do I have to go into detail about the physical symptoms that accompanied my discovery? I believe they should be obvious. The pounding heart, the dry lips and tongue, the icicle inside the head, at the back, its point jamming into the topmost vertebra, into the hollow space without bone or cartilage where the skull starts, at the moment when I froze the very last frame from the security camera.
There, at the bottom right: something white. Something white that no one would notice the first time they saw it, because everyone assumed they had already seen the worst of it. The lamp, the garbage bags, the jerrycan … The time had come to shake one’s head and murmur words of disapproval: young people; the world; defenceless; murder; video clips; computer games; labour camps; stiffer sentences; the death penalty.
The image froze and I stared at the white thing. Outside it was completely dark; in the glass door you could see a reflection of part of the inside of the ATM cubicle: the grey tile floor, the machine itself with its keyboard and screen, and the brand, the logo, I believe one should say, of the bank to which the ATM machine belonged.
In theory, the white thing could just have been a reflection, the reflection of fluorescent lighting off something inside the cubicle itself – off one of the objects with which the boys had pelted the homeless woman, for example.
But that, indeed, was entirely theoretical. The white thing was outside, the camera made it clear that it was outside, on the street. A random viewer would never have noticed, especially not on the broadcast of Opsporing Verzocht. You had to freeze the film, or view it frame by frame, as I had done, and even then …
Even then you had to know what you were seeing. That’s what it boiled down to. I knew what I was seeing, because I had immediately recognized the white thing for what it was.
I clicked on Full Screen. The image was larger now, but also more blurry and formless. I couldn’t help but think of Blow-Up, the Michelangelo Antonioni film in which a photographer, while enlarging a picture, sees a pistol lying under a bush: a murder weapon, as it turns out later. But here, on this computer, enlargement didn’t help at all. I clicked on Minimize and picked up the magnifying glass that was lying on my desk.
With the magnifier, it was only a matter of adjusting the distance. As I moved it in and out in front of the screen, the image became sharper. Sharper and bigger.
Ever-sharper and ever-bigger. I saw confirmed what I had seen correctly the first time I looked: a tennis shoe. A white tennis shoe of the kind countless people wear; countless people like my son and my nephew.
That last thought made me pause for a moment, but no more than a tenth of a second: one tennis shoe could point to tens of thousands of tennis-shoe wearers, but conversely, tens of thousands of tennis shoes would be hard to trace back to one, specific wearer.
No, that wasn’t really what had made me stop and think. It was about the signal being given, or, better yet, the meaning of the white tennis shoe outside the glass door of the cubicle. Or even better yet, the meanings.
I took another close look; I zoomed in and out with the magnifying glass. Upon closer examination, you could see a slight shift in colour above the tennis shoe; the blackness of the street outside was here just a tad less black. That was probably the leg, the trouser leg of the tennis-shoe wearer who was stepping into frame.
They had come back. That was the first meaning. The second meaning was that the police, possibly in collaboration with the makers of Opsporing Verzocht, had decided not to include this final moment in the broadcast.
Anything was possible of course. The tennis shoe might belong to someone other than Michel or Rick, a chance passer-by who happened to arrive thirty seconds after the boys had left the cubicle. But that didn’t seem very likely, not at that hour of the night, on that street, somewhere in an outlying neighbourhood. Besides, that would make this passer-by a witness who might have seen the boys. A material witness, someone the police would have wanted to summon via the broadcast to report what he knew.
All in all, there was only one likely explanation for the white tennis shoe, the one explanation that I had hit upon immediately (all this, the zooming in on the tennis shoe with the magnifying glass and the drawing of the conclusion, had actually taken less than a couple of seconds): they had come back. Michel and Rick had come back to see with their own eyes what they had done.
This was all fairly disturbing, albeit no more than that. The truly frightening thing had to do with how this final footage had been cut from the broadcast of Opsporing Verzocht. I tried to figure out what reason they might have not to show the images. Perhaps there was something there that made Michel or Rick (or both) easier to recognize? But wouldn’t that have been an additional reason to actually show the images?
And what if the footage was simply too unimportant? I thought for all of a hopeful three seconds. A trivial afterthought that wouldn’t help the viewer at all? No, I realized right away. The fact that they had come back was too important to simply omit.
So there was something to be seen there, something that might be kept from the viewer: something only the police and the culprits knew about.
You sometimes read about the police leaving certain facts out of the publicity surrounding an investigation: the precise nature of the murder weapon, or a sign that the murderer had left beside, or on, his victim. To prevent mentally disturbed individuals from claiming a crime – or copying it.
For the first time in weeks I wondered whether Michel and Rick themselves had actually seen the security-camera footage. I had told Michel about it on the evening of the broadcast, I had told him they had been filmed by a security camera, but that they were almost unrecognizable. So for the time being, I’d added, there was nothing to worry about. During the days that followed, we hadn’t touched on the subject of the security camera either. I was acting on the basis that it was better not to come back to any of it, not to rake up our secret.
I was hoping, in fact, that it would blow over, that with the passing of time the interest would fade, that people would be occupied by other, newer news, and that the exploding jerrycan would be erased from their collective memory. A war needed to break out somewhere; a terrorist attack might be even better, plenty of fatalities, lots of civilian casualties over whom people could shake their heads in dismay. Ambulances driving up and away, the twisted steel of train or subway cars, a ten-storey building with the façade blown out – that was the only way the homeless woman in the ATM cubicle could vanish into the background, become an occurrence, a minor incident amid greater incidents.
That was what I had hoped for during those first few weeks. The news would become old news, perhaps not within a month, but definitely within six months – in any case after a year. By that time the police, too, would be occupied with other, more urgent matters. Fewer and fewer detectives would be assigned to the case, as they referred to it, and I was under no illusions about that lone, dogged detective who sinks his teeth into an unsolved crime and doesn’t let go for years: such detectives exist only in TV series.
After those six months, after that year, we would be able to go on living as a happy family. A scar would remain somewhere, true enough, but a scar does not have to get in the way of happiness. In the meantime, I would act as normally as possible. Do normal things. Go out to dinner occasionally, to the movies, take Michel to a soccer match.
At the table, during our evening meals, I kept a close eye on my wife. I was searching for tiny changes in her behaviour, anything that might show that she, in turn, suspected a connection between the images from the security camera and our own happy family.
‘What is it?’ she asked on one of those evenings; apparently I had taken the keeping a close eye a bit too literally. ‘What are you looking at?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Was I looking at something?’
Claire couldn’t help but laugh; she laid her hand on mine and squeezed my fingers gently.
At such moments I meticulously avoided looking at my son. I didn’t want any knowing glances, I wasn’t going to wink at him or show in any other way that we were still sharing a secret. I wanted everything to be normal. A shared secret would have excluded Claire – his mother, my wife – and that would create a greater threat to our happy family than the entire incident in the ATM cubicle.
Without knowing glances – without winks – there was in fact no secret: that was my reasoning. It might be hard for us to put the events in the cubicle out of our minds, but in the course of time they would start to exist outside us – just as they did for other people. But what we did have to forget was the secret. And the best thing was to start forgetting as soon as possible.
25
That was the plan. That had been the plan before I reran the broadcast of Opsporing Verzocht and saw the white tennis shoe.
The next step I took simply on a hunch. Perhaps there was more footage to be found, I thought to myself. Or rather, perhaps the missing footage, accidentally or not, had ended up on another site.
I clicked onto YouTube. The chances were slim, but it was worth a try. In Search I typed the name of the bank to which the ATM machine belonged, and after that the words ‘homeless’ and ‘death’.
No fewer than thirty-four hits appeared. I scrolled down past the little screens. On all of them, the opening frame was more or less the same: the heads and knitted caps of two laughing boys. Only the accompanying titles and the brief description of the clip itself were any different. Dutch Boys [name of the bank] Murder was one of the most straightforward. Don’t Try this at Home – Fire Bomb Kills Homeless Woman was another. Each and every one of the clips was extremely popular – the counter showed that most of them had been viewed thousands of times.
I clicked on one at random and watched again, albeit in a choppier, edited version, the throwing of the desk lamp, the garbage bags and the jerrycan. I looked at a couple more. In one montage entitled [name of the city] Hottest New Tourist Attraction: Set Your Money on Fire!, someone had added canned laughter to the images. Each time a new object was thrown at the homeless woman, a wave of laughter followed. The laughter reached a hysterical climax when the lighter was thrown, and ended with thundering applause.
Most of the videos did not include the shot of the white tennis shoe; they stopped right after the flash of light and the boys running away.
Looking back, I don’t know exactly why I clicked on the next video too. It didn’t look any different from the other thirty-three. The opening shot was roughly the same: two laughing boys in knitted caps, although here they wer
e already picking up the office chair.
Perhaps it was the title, Men in Black III. Not a jokey title for starters, not like most of the others. But it was also the first and, as I found out subsequently, the only title that did not refer to the events shown but indirectly to the culprits themselves.
Men in Black III began with the throwing of the office chair, then came the garbage bags, the lamp and the jerrycan. But there was an essential difference. Whenever both or either of the two boys came into reasonably sharp focus, the film slowed down. And every time that happened you heard ominous music, more a sort of zooming tone, a deep, gurgling noise that is associated primarily with submarine and shipwreck disaster movies. As a result, all attention was focused on Michel and Rick, and less on the throwing of the things they had found beside the tree.
Who are these boys? the slow-motion images, in combination with the doomsday music, seemed to ask. What it is they’re doing, we know by now. But who are they?
The zinger came all the way at the end. After the flash and the slamming door, the screen went black. I was getting ready to click to the next video, but the time line at the bottom of the screen showed that Men in Black III lasted a total of two minutes and fifty-eight seconds, and that we were now only at two minutes and thirty-eight.
As I said, I had almost clicked away. I wasn’t expecting anything more than for the screen to remain black for another twenty seconds – the music had swelled again, the only thing left would probably be credits, I figured, nothing more than that.
How would this evening, our dinner at the restaurant, have proceeded, had I indeed quit right then and there?
In ignorance, that was the answer. At least, in relative ignorance. I could have lived on for a few more days, or maybe a few weeks or months, in my dreams about happy families. I would only have needed to hold my own family up for comparison with my brother’s for the space of one evening; I could have seen how Babette tried to cover up her tears behind her tinted glasses and how joylessly my brother wolfed down his meat in a couple of bites. Then I would have walked home with my wife, I would have placed my arm around her waist and, without looking at each other, we would both have known that the happy families really were all alike.