Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (33 page)

When I was about thirteen, my father gave me my first driving lessons. We started off in a parking lot, but before long we took the car out onto the road. Some people don’t like driving. Under normal circumstances I enjoy it a lot, and I always will. And the foundation for that love of driving, I’m absolutely sure, was established when I was thirteen.

One afternoon we were going down a narrow, winding road through the woods of eastern Holland. I was behind the wheel; my father was sitting next to me and my mother was in the back. We came up to a sharp left-hand bend in the road. By that time I had already reached the point where driving had become completely automatic. That’s the dangerous phase, when concentration flags. A car came from the other direction, but I saw it too late. I yanked on the wheel and we swerved to the right. We went off the road. The shoulder was fairly steep, and I was able to avoid the trees, but finally we came to a halt with a bang against a wooden picnic table. My father climbed out and inspected the damage. Then he took over from me at the wheel and drove the car back up onto the road.

I thought that was it, that he would keep driving, but he stopped and climbed out again.

“It’s all yours,” he said.

“I don’t know …” I squealed; my forehead and the palms of my hands were covered in sweat. There was only one thing I knew for sure, and that was that I never wanted to drive a car again.

“You have to go on now, it’s important,” my father said. “Otherwise you’ll be afraid to later on.”

That was what I had thought about during the first hours after we left the summer house. I thought about Julia and the risks of a vacation cut short halfway through. We had driven more than eighty miles by then; we were far enough away—but it was still a long drive home. At home there were people. Friends and family who would ask questions. Both answering and avoiding those questions would cause a certain degree of damage. Here, there was just the four of us. Maybe it was better to stay with just the four of us for a little while.

“I don’t know,” Caroline said. We were standing beside the car. We looked through the rear door, which was still half open, at our daughter asleep on the backseat. I laid a hand on my wife’s shoulder. I brushed her hair back with my fingers.

“I don’t know, either,” I said. “It was just an idea. A feeling. But to be honest, I really don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you. It’s your call.”

Two hours ago I had woken Caroline gently. “We have to get going,” I’d said. “I’ll explain later.” Caroline went upstairs and got Lisa out of bed. We let Stanley and Emmanuelle sleep on. “The tent will get back to us at some point,” I’d said. “We’re not going to use it now, anyway.” We didn’t see anyone around the house. They were all asleep. Ralph was probably
still awake, but he didn’t come out, either, when I started the car and rolled it down the little dirt drive to the road.

I was just about to turn onto the asphalt when I saw something moving in my rearview mirror. I braked and took a good look. Judith’s mother was standing at the top of the outside steps. She was waving. Or rather, she was gesturing with her arm for us to stop. The next moment I saw her, still in my mirror, coming down the steps. I thought I heard her shout something. Then I touched the accelerator and drove away.

The little hotel was beside a mountain stream with a water mill. Farther down in the valley, brown cows grazed among the trees. The bells around their necks clanked softly, fat bumblebees zoomed from flower to flower, the stream gurgled across the rocks. Here and there along the mountaintops in the distance you could see white patches of snow.

That first day Julia stayed in her room. Occasionally she woke up, and all she wanted was something to drink: She wasn’t hungry. Caroline and I took turns sitting with her. The first evening, Lisa and I stayed in the dining room together. She asked me what was wrong with her big sister; I told her I would explain it all later, some other time, that it had to do with what girls have sometimes when they grow up.

“Is she going to have her period?” Lisa asked.

When I woke up the next morning, my eye was throbbing. I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Beneath the
lid was a bump the size of an egg. The skin on my eyelid was stretched to the limit and had taken on the color of a mosquito bite, with a few dark spots here and there. My eyelashes were clogged shut with dried yellow pus. The whole thing pulsed and pounded—like an abscessed finger. That’s what it was, too, I knew: an abscess. An untreated sore, even on a fingertip, could lead to blood poisoning and amputation. If the pressure on the retina became too great, it would tear. Under great pressure, pus and blood inside the eyeball would search for a way out. By that time, the eye itself would be more or less a write-off.

“I need you to take Julia downstairs in a little while,” I whispered to Caroline. “I don’t want her to stay here.”

I was holding a washcloth to my eye, so my wife couldn’t see anything.

“Do you want me to help?”

I shook my head. “You’d be helping me more if you stayed with Julia.”

Only much later—days later—did I feel disturbed in retrospect by the way Julia didn’t protest at all when Caroline gently pressured her into getting up and getting dressed. “Come on, we’re going downstairs to have a nice breakfast,” she said cheerfully to both her daughters as she pulled the curtains aside. “It’s a beautiful day.”

I lay on the bed with the washcloth still over my eye. I watched as Julia went into the bathroom with the little pile of clothes her mother had handed her. After a while I heard the hissing of the shower. Fifteen minutes later it was still hissing.

“Julia?” Caroline knocked on the door. “Is everything okay? Do you need us to help you with something?”

We looked at each other. The look of panic in Caroline’s eyes was undoubtedly an exact copy of the panic she was
seeing in mine right then. Meanwhile, Lisa had climbed out of her own bed and snuggled up to me. I pressed her against me even closer, I laid my hand over her head while my lips soundlessly formed the words, “The door … try the door.”

“Julia?” Caroline knocked again, then tried the door handle. She looked at me and shook her head. At the same time her lower lip began to quiver, her eyes suddenly filled with tears. “Don’t do that! Don’t,” my lips were still saying without making a sound.

“Daddy?” Lisa said.

“Yeah?”

“Daddy, is it all right if I call Thomas later on?”

At that moment the hissing of the shower stopped.

“Julia?” Caroline quickly wiped the tears from her eyes and knocked on the door again.

“Mom?” The door opened a crack; from where I was lying I couldn’t see my older daughter’s face. “I’ll be finished in a minute, Mom,” Julia said.

In Caroline’s travel kit I found a needle that I held over the flame of my lighter. I had everything laid out on the edge of the sink: cotton swabs, gauze, and iodine, as well as a hypodermic with a painkiller—which was only for emergencies. I didn’t want to numb the eye, insofar as that was even possible. Pain here was the only good counsel. The pain would tell me how far I could go. An abscess is sort of like a fort bristling with weaponry. A hostile bridgehead in an otherwise healthy body. Or maybe more like a terrorist cell. A relatively small number of armed militants are holding a large group hostage. Including women and children. The terrorists have equipped themselves
with hand grenades and sticks of dynamite that they will set off if attacked. Using the middle finger of my left hand, I pulled the eyelid up a little. I poked carefully with the hot needle. If it went in too far, it could cause permanent damage. Not just the abscess, but also the eye itself would drain. A rescue attempt that results in dozens of dead hostages can only be considered a failure. For the moment, the needle met with little resistance. There was no pain. With my good eye, I was just trying to estimate in the mirror how far in I was, when I suddenly heard sounds. Voices. I looked to one side. The voices were coming from the transom above the toilet. The transom had a frosted-glass pane, and it was open. I recognized Lisa’s voice, even though I couldn’t make out what she was saying. They were probably sitting on the outdoor terrace, just under the window. Carefully, without removing the needle from my eye, I took two steps and quietly closed the window. At that same moment I felt something sticky on my fingers. When I stepped back to the sink, I saw the blood. It was streaming down my face and falling in thick drops on the white porcelain. I pulled the needle back and pressed against the eyelid. More blood. It spattered on my T-shirt. And on my feet on the tiled floor, and between them. But I also saw something else. A substance the color of mustard. Mustard that was way past its sell-by date. Now I smelled it as well. A stench somewhere between old water from a vase and spoiled meat. I gagged, and the next moment a wave of bile came up that I spat into the sink, amid the blood and pus. But meanwhile, I was cheering inside. I increased the pressure on my eyelid. And there at last was the pain. You have two kinds of pain. Pain that warns you not to go any further, and pain that comes as a relief. This pain came as a relief. I opened the tap. I pressed against my eye.
I pressed until it was completely drained. I pulled off a yard of toilet paper. Only after I had cleaned the entire area around my eye did I dare to look. It was nothing short of a miracle. From beneath the residue of pus and strands of blood, my eye appeared. Undamaged and clear, gleaming like a pearl in an oyster. It looked at me. It looked grateful, I imagined. It was visibly pleased to see me.

Ten minutes later I joined my family on the outdoor terrace. On the breakfast table sat a pot of coffee and a jug of warm milk. There was a basket of croissants and French bread. There were little packets of butter and marmalade. The cowbells clanked. A bumblebee disappeared into a flower that sagged beneath the insect’s weight. The sun warmed my face. I smiled. I smiled at the mountains in the distance.

“Shall we start the day with a walk?” I said. “Shall we try to find out where that stream goes to?”

And walk we did. Julia did her best. Higher up along the slope the stream vanished into a forest of huge spruce trees. We crossed at a shallows, hopping from stone to stone. Later we came to a waterfall. Lisa wanted to go swimming. Caroline and I both looked at Julia.

“It’s okay.” She smiled. “I’m fine here.”

She sat on a big, flat rock with her arms around her knees. There was something wrong with her smile. Something wrong, too, about the way she was doing her best—
for us
, it seemed. She was doing her best not to ruin the vacation any further.

“Or would you rather go back to the hotel?” Caroline asked. She asked the question at the same moment I was planning to.
Or no, I was actually planning to ask if maybe she would rather go home.

“No, it’s fine,” she replied.

Caroline sighed deeply and looked at me. “Maybe you’re tired,” she said to Julia. “Maybe you’d like to take a rest.”

“I’m perfect here,” Julia said. “Look, that’s so pretty, that light through the trees.”

She pointed up, to the tops of the spruces. She squinted against the broad bands of sunlight falling through the branches. Meanwhile, Lisa had undressed and plunged into the water. “Whoa, that’s cold!” she shrieked. “Are you coming in, too, Dad? You coming?”

“Julia?” I said.

She looked at me. She smiled again. I felt something, a sudden weakness that began in my knees and moved up, to my chest and head. I took a step back and sank down onto a rock.

“Do you want to go home, sweetheart?” I asked. “If you do, just say so. Then we’ll leave tomorrow.”

My voice had sounded normal, I thought. At most a little too quiet, perhaps, but I didn’t think anyone had noticed that.

Julia fluttered her eyelids. The smile was gone. She bit her lower lip.

“Yeah?” she said. “Could we do that?”

And that is what we did. We left early in the morning and were home by midnight. Lisa went to her room and played there a bit. Julia took a shower—again, for more than fifteen minutes—then fell asleep almost right away.

Caroline opened a bottle of wine. With two glasses and the wedges of cheese we’d bought at a convenience store beside the highway, she came and lay down beside me; it was the first time we’d been alone together since we left the summer house.