Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (8 page)

Could you do it with this one?
During my days at medical school, we always asked one another that, during autopsy class. Whenever a fresh cadaver was laid on the dissecting table. One time it might be an emaciated old man who had donated his body to medical science, the next time a traffic
fatality whose inside pocket had been found to contain a donor card. It was our way of breaking the tension. The tension that precedes cutting into a human being. “Could you do it with this one?” we whispered to one another, out of earshot of the professor. We mentioned sums of money. “For a hundred grand? For a million? No? What about five million?”

And even then we were already sorting the corpses into categories. “All right” meant just plain ugly. “Attractive” was someone with a friendly or cute face, but with an undercarriage you could smash a bottle of champagne against. “Good-looking” meant that we had nothing short of a fashion model lying on the cutting table, the kind of body that made you bewail the fact that it was so cold and could no longer move.

Caroline looked at me. “What are you laughing about? One of your private jokes, I suppose?”

I shook my head.

“No,” I said, “I was just thinking about Judith. And about Ralph. The way he looked at you. That she probably has no idea what kind of explosives are being planted beneath their twenty-year anniversary when you walk into their house.”

“Marc! I’m not out to ruin their anniversary party.”

“No, I know you’re not. But you have to promise me this: that you’ll stick to my side the whole time.”

Caroline couldn’t help laughing. “Oh, Marc! It’s so marvelous, having a husband like you. A husband who watches over me. Who protects me.”

Now it was my turn to tilt my head to one side and look at her teasingly.

“So what are you going to wear?” I asked.

Any father would rather have a son than a daughter. Any mother would, too, in fact. Our classes in medical biology were taught by Professor Herzl. During our first year at medical school, he lectured us on instinct. “Instinct can’t be eliminated,” he said. “Years of civilization can render instinct invisible. Culture and law and order force us to keep our instincts under control, but instinct is never very far away. It’s simply waiting to pounce as soon as your attention flags.”

Professor Aaron Herzl. Should that name sound slightly familiar to you, this was indeed the same Aaron Herzl who was later drummed out of the university because of his studies of the criminal brain. The conclusions Herzl drew from his research have become widely accepted today, but back then—back during my years at medical school—such opinions could only be expressed in a whisper. Those were the years when people still believed in the good in mankind. The good in
every human being. The fashionable opinion of the day said that a bad person was subject to improvement. All bad people.

“ ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ is in fact much closer to human nature than we dare to publicly admit,” Herzl taught us. “You kill your brother’s murderer, castrate with a butcher’s knife the man who raped your wife, chop off the hands of the burglar who invades your home. The legal system often leads only to endless delays before arriving at much the same verdicts. Dead. Gone. We never want to see the murderers and rapists back on the streets again. When the father dies, the son takes over. He chases the intruders from the house and kills the barbarians who try to rape his mother and his sisters. When a child is born, not only the father but also the mother breathes a sigh of relief to see that the firstborn is a boy. Those are facts that two thousand years of civilization cannot simply eradicate. Two thousand years? What am I saying? This was the status quo until not so long ago. Twenty, maybe thirty years ago at most. It is important that we do not forget where we came from. Sweet, gentle,
kindhearted
men, all well and good, but that is a luxury one must first be able to afford. In a concentration camp, sweet, gentle men are no good to anyone.”

Let me be perfectly clear about this. I love my daughters. More than anything or anyone in this world. I’m only being frank. I wanted a son. I wanted it so far deep down inside me that it almost hurt. A son. A boy. I thought about human instinct as I cut the umbilical cord. Julia. From the day she was born, she was the dearest thing in the world to me. My little girl. It was love at first sight. The kind of love that brings tears to your eyes. But instinct was stronger. Better luck next time, it whispered. Within a year or two you’ll get another chance. When Lisa was born, it was all over. We talked about it a few times,
about having a third child, but my curiosity about having yet another daughter was only theoretical. Things go the way they go. The chance of having a third daughter was a hundred times greater than that of having a son. A man with three or more daughters tends to be a laughingstock.

It was time for me to face up to the facts. To learn to live with it. I began drawing up a list of the advantages and disadvantages, checking them off as I went. The way you might do when deciding whether to move to the country or remain in the big city. In the country you can see more stars, it’s quieter there, the air is cleaner. In the city you have everything you need within arm’s reach. It’s noisier, true, but you don’t have to drive five miles to buy a newspaper. There are movie theaters and restaurants. In the country there are more insects, in the city more buses and taxis. I probably don’t have to explain to you that in my tally the country was a girl and the city was a boy. People who live in the country go to great lengths to present even the disadvantages as advantages. An hour’s drive and I’m in the city, the rural resident says. I can catch a movie there and go out to eat, but I’m always so relieved to get back to the peace and quiet and to nature.

An hour there and an hour back: I don’t know any better metaphor for the distance between having a daughter and having a son. After Lisa was born I resigned myself to country life. I decided to accept the disadvantages and, above all, to enjoy the advantages. Girls are less reckless. Girls are sweeter. A girl’s room smells better than a boy’s. You have to take care of girls more, for the rest of your life. The latest they’re allowed to get home after a school party is a lot earlier than it is with boys. Between school and home lies a warren of darkened cycle paths. On the other hand, all girls are in love with their
fathers. The eternal battle for elbow room is one they fight out with their mothers. For Caroline, that was tough at times. “What was this all about, can somebody please tell me?” she would shout in exasperation when Julia slammed the bedroom door in her face again. “And what are
you
laughing at?” she asked when Lisa went on to roll her eyes and wink at me. “You never do anything wrong,” she said to me. “What am I doing wrong? What do you do that I don’t?”

“I’m their father,” was my reply.

“But what exactly is he in, Dad?” Lisa asked as we were parking the car a few streets away from Ralph Meier’s house. We had driven past first, along a hedge and then past the bushes surrounding a yard in one of our city’s quieter, more exclusive neighborhoods. Through the bushes you could see the guests on the lawn with their glasses and plates of food. There was smoke, probably from a barbecue: Through the open car windows we caught a whiff of grilled meat.

“People know him mostly as a stage actor,” I said. “You don’t see him on TV that often.”

To Lisa, a famous actor played in
movies
, or at the very least in a regular soap opera. An actor was probably young, too, in any case no older than Brad Pitt. Not someone Ralph Meier’s age, throwing a party because he had been married to the same woman for twenty years.

“Can you also get famous from acting in plays?” she asked in astonishment.

“Lisa! Don’t be such an idiot! Of course you can.” Julia had the earbuds of her iPod in, but apparently that didn’t keep her from following the conversation.

“I can ask, can’t I?” Lisa retorted. “Is that possible, Dad? Can you be famous from acting in plays?”

It hadn’t been our plan originally, taking both the girls along to Ralph Meier’s party. But it was a Saturday afternoon, so we asked if they wanted to go. At first neither of them reacted too enthusiastically. But to our surprise, half an hour before it was time for us to leave, they announced that they wanted to go after all. “Why? You two don’t have to, you know,” I said. “Mom and I will be back in a few hours, anyway.”

“Julia says there might be famous people there,” Lisa said.

I looked at Julia.

“What are you looking at?” she said. “It’s possible, isn’t it?”

After we had locked the car, as we were walking past the bushes and the hedge to the front door, I tried to formulate an answer to my younger daughter’s question. Yes, I thought to myself, you can still get famous from acting in plays, but it was a different kind of famous from fifty years ago. Any number of attempts had been made to let Ralph Meier’s talent loose in front of the camera, too—with highly varying degrees of success. I remembered the police series that had been canceled after only eight episodes, and the gravity with which Ralph Meier had spoken the line “Tell it to ’em down at the station, buddy!”—a gravity that only provoked mirth. His role as a resistance fighter in
The Bridge Across the Rhine
, the most expensive Dutch feature film ever made, hadn’t been much of a success, either. What I remembered most from that film was the raid on the registrar’s office in Arnhem and the line “We ought to take that Nazi whore and put a bullet through her fucking head!” Ralph Meier had tried to look grim as he said it, but his expression was mostly one of bewilderment. It was
hard for people to accept a hero of the resistance who weighed more than 220 pounds, so Ralph Meier had gone on a diet. You could see that he had lost a lot of weight, but it didn’t make his body any thinner, at best only emptier. Half an hour before the end of the movie, as he was facing the firing squad, the look on his face had been largely one of relief. He was probably glad that it was all over and that he could finally go to the catering van and get himself a sandwich.

“A lot of people still go to the theater,” I said. “To them, Ralph Meier is famous.”

Lisa turned her face toward me and hit me with her sweetest smile. “Yeah, right, Dad.”

There are times when you run back through your life, to see whether you can locate the point at which it could still have taken a different turn.
There it is!
You say.
Look there …
This is where I say that we’re planning to head more or less in that direction during the summer vacation and that it might (“Sure. Yeah. Why not? Who knows?”) be an idea to pop in on them. That was when we were saying good-bye, all the way at the end of the evening, when it had already been dark for a while and Ralph and Judith had mentioned the summer house for the first time.

You hit Pause, then rewind frame by frame. Here’s Judith throwing her arms around Caroline and kissing her on both cheeks. “We’ll be there from mid-July to mid-August,” she says. “So if the four of you are in the neighborhood …” A little farther back you see Ralph Meier, laughing at some joke you can’t hear—and can’t recall, either. “We’re renting a house
this summer,” he says. “A house with a pool, not far from the beach. If you people feel like it, just drop by. Plenty of room.” He slaps you on the back. “And I bet Alex wouldn’t mind, either.” He winks and looks at my older daughter. At Julia. But Julia turns her back on us and pretends she hasn’t heard.

Alex was their older boy. I was standing there when Alex and Julia were introduced. We were still in the hallway; we had just come in the door. It’s not something you see very often, and precisely because you don’t, you recognize it right away when it’s real. The spark. The spark that literally jumps the gap.

“Would you girls like that?” Caroline asked in the car on the way home. “To drop by and see them during the vacation?”

There was no reply from the backseat. In my rearview mirror I saw Julia staring dreamily out the window. Lisa had the buds of her MP3 player in her ears.

“Julia? Lisa?” Caroline said, turning and laying her arm over the headrest. “I asked you something.”