Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (26 page)

I don’t know why; it must have to do with something that happened a long time ago. Some event that I’ve repressed. Most phobias originate in the first four years of life: the fear of spiders, of water, of women, of men, of wide-open spaces or of towering mountain ranges that block out the sun, of toads and grasshoppers, fish heads on your plate with the eyes still in them, giant waterslides, furniture malls, pedestrian tunnels—there’s always something to blame. A traumatic experience, people say, and they make an appointment for an exploratory meeting with a psychiatrist. After years of digging and delving, something finally bobs to the surface: a mother lost in the supermarket, a dripping candle, a snail in your tennis shoe, a “funny” uncle who could blow smoke rings through a rolled-up newspaper but wanted to play with your weenie at night, an aunt with warts and a bristly mustache who kissed you good night … a teacher taking a shower at a high-school summer camp: There is no clear demarcation between lower back and buttocks, and after the tailbone the skin disappears into a dark, clenched crack; he stands there scrubbing at his pale, skinny
dick with a pink washcloth—after camp is over you have to do your best not to gag every time he draws an equilateral triangle on the blackboard.

A wide-open, watery eye reminds me of a fried egg. A fried egg that isn’t nearly done yet; yolk and white are still largely liquid and lie there jiggling in the pan like a jellyfish on the beach.

Someone was rattling the handle of the restroom door.

“Go away,” I said in Dutch. “Can’t you see I’m in here?”

I was able to keep my damaged eye open only for a couple of seconds each time. Not only because it looked so hideous, but also because of the sharp pain. As though someone were stubbing out a cigarette in the white of my eye—
in the fried egg
, I couldn’t help thinking.

There was a rattling at the door again. And no longer just a rattling: Someone pounded on it three times. I heard a voice. A man’s voice muttering in a language I couldn’t quite make out.

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

I blinked my runny eye a few times. But it was no use. I couldn’t keep it open any longer without feeling an unbearable, stabbing pain. I cursed. I took a length of toilet paper from the roll, wadded it up, and moistened it a bit under the tap. There was a brief moment of coolness and relief when I pressed the wet wad against my eye.

“Your turn at last,” I said to the man waiting in the half-darkened hallway beyond the men’s room door. He was wearing shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. His cheeks, chin, and upper lip were sweaty and unshaven. I started to walk on, but then I took another look. His face seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. And at the same moment I saw something else. The man looked at me, too, as though he recognized me from
somewhere: a slight gleam in his eyes, as if he was trying to connect my face to some memory.

“I sorry,” he said with a heavy accent. “I hurry.”

He smiled. My gaze descended to his bare shoulders and upper arms. On one arm he had a tattoo—a bird, an eagle by the looks of it—clutching a dripping red heart in its talons. On his other arm were a few red stripes. As though he’d scratched at an injury. A cut or a mosquito bite.

He followed my gaze and brushed the wound with his fingertips. He rubbed it. His arm was wet with sweat, and when he took his fingers away, all you could see were a couple of thin red lines. We nodded at each other again, the way distant acquaintances do, then he disappeared into the restroom.

At the front door of the restaurant I took a good look around before stepping out onto the patio. I looked particularly closely at the beachside bar, where no more than fifteen minutes ago I had been forced down onto the sand by a group of men. But there was no one there anymore. No trace of Ralph or Stanley or the three girls. Still holding the wad of wet toilet paper to my eye, I wormed my way past the tables. I may have been imagining things, but it seemed as though the eye had started to throb—not so much the eye itself, more like the space
behind
the eye. The place where the muscles and tendons were holding the eye in its socket, I recalled from medical school. From the ophthalmology lectures where I had only
pretended
to be listening. With each successive slide the professor flashed up on the screen, I sank farther down into my seat. One of the slides showed an eye hanging out of its socket, connected to the skull only by bloodied veins. I had groaned so loudly that the professor had stopped the lecture to ask whether someone was in need of medical assistance.

Now I could feel the pounding behind my eye, a pounding that meshed seamlessly with the bass rhythm from the loudspeakers set up here and there around the patio—so seamlessly that there was no way to separate them.

Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, or maybe walking around with one eye closed had affected my depth perception; whatever the case, the girl, when she stood up from her chair at the patio’s edge, did so awfully fast and clumsily. Her left shoulder hit me just under my nose. I took a few shaky steps back and almost regained my balance before falling onto the lap of a virtually naked man.

“Sorry,” I said to the man. I dabbed at my nose and looked at my fingers: no blood.

“Sorry,” the girl said now as well. She looked worriedly at the hand holding the wad of toilet paper against my eye, but before she could jump to any conclusions, I said, “Okay, it’s okay. No problem.”

The girl wasn’t big, but she was fat. I took a better look at her now and, for the second time in the space of five minutes, I saw a vaguely familiar face. This time it took only a few moments for me to place her: the girl from the rental agency … The girl who had promised us that the repairman would come by as quickly as possible to solve the water problem.

Suddenly I also knew who the man was, the one rattling at the men’s room door. The repairman! The repairman who had climbed onto the roof to unblock the blocked water reservoir. Those two were a couple, weren’t they? I looked at her eyes and noticed only then that they were filled with tears. Teary and red. She blinked a few times and sputtered another apology.

I held up my hand, as if to say
No problem
. Maybe the repairman had just broken up with her. There were red blotches
on her cheeks. She had cried when they broke up. She had wept and rubbed her fingers hard over her eyes and cheeks. Was it unfair that girls who looked like this were dumped all the time? That was the question that flashed through my mind. Or was it something you always took into account? Was it all you expected, and were you pleased enough when some sweaty repairman pressed his lips to your neck for a few weeks (or a few hours) and whispered sweet nothings in your ear?

“I … I have to get going,” I said. “Are you okay?”

She nodded. It was hard to tell with all the red blotches on her cheeks, but it looked like she was blushing again. The next moment she slid past me and headed toward the busier part of the restaurant.

When I walked past the beachside bar, no one seemed to notice me. The men who had thrown Ralph and me to the ground had apparently gone looking for fun elsewhere. A few hundred yards farther I found Lisa and Thomas chasing a soccer ball, along with a whole group of children their age. Fortunately, they hadn’t noticed the fracas at the bar. Just before locking myself in the men’s room to look at my eye, I had gone over to talk to Lisa.

“Stay close by, all right?” I’d said. “I’ll be in the restroom over there if you need me.” I pointed at the restaurant, but Lisa didn’t really seem to have heard me. “All right,” she said without looking at me, then ran off across the sand in pursuit of Thomas and three other boys who were kicking the ball out in front of them.

In the end, Ralph had succeeded in freeing himself from the men who were pinning him down. Ranting and cursing, he grabbed the plastic bag of fireworks and strode off toward the sea. By that time they had already let go of me. “Come on,
Marc!” Ralph shouted over his shoulder. “Let these shitheads play pimp to a bunch of whores, if that makes them feel good!” But he didn’t look back to see if I was actually following.

Meanwhile, Stanley’s whereabouts remained unclear. I stood up, brushed the sand off my shorts and shirt, and looked around (with my one good eye).

Right then, the Latvian vodka girl passed out. At first she was standing there beside us, empty glass in hand, the next moment she collapsed. Without a sound. A leaf falling from a tree, no more than that. The men leaned over her. Hands slapped her cheeks. Someone held a pepper mill under her nose. Someone else fetched a wet cloth from the bar and dabbed at her forehead. One eyelid was lifted, but all you could see was the white of her eye. I turned away quickly and dabbed automatically at my own eye.

“A doctor,” someone said. “We need a doctor.”

It was within the realm of possibility. I could have walked away. No one was paying attention to me anymore. I took a deep breath and looked at the sea. The fireworks had almost died down by now; the sea lay black and darkened beneath the black sky studded with stars. In the pauses between the bass notes you could hear the hissing of the surf.

“I’m a doctor,” I said.

I often wondered later on whether things would have turned out differently if the Latvian girl had remained on her feet. Whether I would have been in time. I added and subtracted the minutes, but never really found a clear answer. It was like after you’ve made some remark to someone. A terrible remark. At least that’s what you think: that it was terrible. You lie awake all night, running back through the conversation. But as the hours pass, the words become increasingly vague. The next day you summon up all your courage. Did I say something terrible to you last night? you ask. What on earth are you talking about? is the reply.

The fact is that it took me fifteen minutes to bring the vodka girl back to her senses. I took her pulse, put my ear to her breast to hear whether she perhaps had fluid (vodka!) in her lungs.
Between
her breasts, I should say. It was a matter of life and death—I knew that from bitter experience. Girls her size—she couldn’t have weighed more than eighty-five pounds,
I noted later when I lifted her from the sand—can die almost immediately from an alcohol overdose. The body doesn’t know where to put all that liquor. There’s no room for it. The heart works overtime and pumps the overdose around and around, but the blood only goes on racing desperately through the veins. There’s nowhere for it to go. After a while, the heart gives up. It pumps with less and less force. Finally, it stops. I had no time to wonder what the men leaning over us might think when I placed my ear between her breasts. They were little breasts that barely muffled the sound of the pounding heart. It was pounding slowly and laboriously. The final phase. Within the next five minutes it could stop. I placed my left arm under her head and raised it a little. At the same time I placed my right hand flat on her stomach. When I pressed my mouth against hers, I could taste the vodka. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I hadn’t used it often. One time with a drowned man, the father of three, at a campground. He had come down the giant slide, slammed the back of his head hard against the edge of the pool, then sank to the bottom right away. Another time was with an elderly writer in my office. While I was removing impacted wax from his ears, he lost consciousness. I remember it clearly: One moment I was staring at the metal bowl in my hand, at the black wad of earwax floating in the water, and the next, the writer had fallen on his side on the examining table. At that moment I thought again about the choices I make as a doctor. About who you help first. Sooner or later, every doctor is confronted with choices like that. Even though we would all deny it. In fact, they involve very simple considerations. Considerations you never talk about. The father of three has more right to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation than a writer whose work is more or less finished. Who is “over the hill,” as they say,
without much chance that he’ll come up with anything new. When a ship is sinking, it’s the women and children who go to the boats first. In an ideal world, the old man would offer his place in the lifeboat to the young mother and her child. The old man is at the end of his biological rope. For a pretty young girl, it would be a waste to come all the way from Latvia to die of alcohol poisoning on some distant beach. I knew how it must have looked to the bystanders. They weren’t seeing a physician performing lifesaving maneuvers; they saw a grown man bending over a girl and pressing his lips to hers. His free hand hovers somewhere around her navel …

I pinched her nose shut and blew air into her lungs. At the same time I pressed hard on her stomach. I only had to do it once, and everything came out. I didn’t even have time to take my lips off hers. A wave of vodka rushed into my mouth. And not just vodka. A noxious mixture of vodka, half-digested food, and gastric juices. I yanked her upright, to keep her from choking on her own vomit. I licked my lips and spit a few times in the sand. The rest gushed down over her stomach and legs. But she opened her eyes. She made noises. An indefinable noise at first, a gargling coming from deep down, like a blocked drain that has suddenly come unblocked. Then came sounds and words. Words in her own language, from the sound of it. Latvian. I stood up, took her wrists, and held her arms above her head. Air. Oxygen. What she needed most now was oxygen. A few of the men who had pinned Ralph, Stanley, and me to the ground a bit earlier now began applauding. Normally speaking, that’s always the finest moment. The doctor. The doctor has just saved someone’s life. For a few minutes he stands in the bright spotlight. The father of three came by the next day to give me a bottle of wine.
It could have turned out much worse, they realize in a flash. After that they forget you again.