Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (41 page)

But I couldn’t kid myself any longer. I had looked at his hairy backside. I knew that a hairy male ass was not my kind
of thing. That an ass like that did indeed induce in me a healthy aversion: a plate of nasty or rotten food that you push away gagging.
Don’t eat it!
I was “normal.” I thought about women. Not just Caroline or Judith: about women in general. That was biology, Professor Herzl had taught us. A man who doesn’t look at women in general is like a car with the accelerator and the brake held down at the same time. A car like that first starts to smell of burnt rubber; in the end it breaks down or catches fire. Biology dictates that we should impregnate as many women as possible. I made the same mental leap I’d made thirty years earlier during Herzl’s lecture. Could I ever cure myself? Would I be able, if society were to label my own healthy urges as sick, to convince a prison psychologist that I had meanwhile been “cured”? I thought I could. But as soon as I was out on the street, I would fall back into my old ways within twenty-four hours.

I don’t mean to place myself on a higher moral level than those men who feel drawn to young girls. All men feel drawn to young girls. That, too, is biology. We look at those girls with an eye to future generations: whether they, within the foreseeable future, will be able to guarantee the continuation of the human species.

But it was taking things a step too far to actually act on that attraction. Biology had its own warning systems: With little girls, all systems were no-go.
Don’t! Keep off! If you go on you will break something
.

“I think it would be better if you returned to a sitting position,” I told the comedian.

He righted himself, sat with his legs hanging over the edge of the examining table, pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket, and handed it to me.

“Here,” he said. “Don’t worry, I washed it,” he added with a wink.

“Sorry,” I said. I tried to blow my nose, but my nose was already empty. “If you could come back … otherwise I’ll give you a referral to emergency.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything, okay?” he said. “But if you feel like it, I’ve got all the time in the world.”

He spread his arms. I looked at his round, open face. I told him. I told him everything. I left out only a couple of things. With an eye to the future. My plans for the future, that above all.

“And you still have no idea at all who could have done it?” he asked when I was finished.

“No.”

“Shit. Someone who does something like that, you could just …”

He didn’t finish his sentence, but it wasn’t necessary. I thought about the pan of mussels: about the mussels that didn’t open.

The shot glass with the lethal cocktail was on the table beside Ralph’s bed. Also on the table was a half-finished container of fruit yogurt with the spoon still in it, that morning’s paper, and a biography of Shakespeare that he’d been reading for the last few weeks. There was a bookmark between the pages, not even halfway through. He had asked Judith and his two sons to leave the room for a moment.

When they were gone, he gestured to me to come over.

“Marc,” he said. He took my hand, held it against the blanket, and put his other hand on top of it.

“I want to tell you that I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t … I should never have …” He fell silent for a moment. “I’m sorry—I guess that’s what I’m trying to say.”

I looked at his face, emaciated and swollen at the same time: at his eyes that were still seeing me at this point but
which, as from a moment between now and an hour from now, at most, would never see anything again.

“How is it … with her?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“Marc,” he said. I felt the pressure of his hand on mine. He tried to tighten his grip, but I could feel how little strength he had left. “Could you tell her … from me … could you tell her what I just said to you?”

I averted my eyes; effortlessly, I pulled my hand from his grasp.

“No,” I said.

He sighed deeply, closed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them again.

“Marc, I’ve hesitated for a long time about whether to tell you this or not. I thought, Maybe I’m the last person he wants to hear something like this from.”

I looked at him. “What are you talking about?”

“About your daughter, Marc. About Julia.”

Involuntarily, I glanced at the door, then at the shot glass beside his bed. Ralph saw what I was looking at.

“In the end, I decided that you need to know. It may be a little late, but I haven’t known about it so long myself. Just a couple of weeks, actually.”

For a split second I thought he was going to say something about Judith: that he knew about the two of us, for example, that she had confessed everything, but that he wanted to wish us all the happiness in the world. The next moment I realized that, no, he had clearly said
about your daughter. About Julia
.

“Alex made me swear to keep quiet about it. He knew I wasn’t going to be around for long; that’s why he told me. He
had to get it off his chest. He said he would go crazy if he kept it to himself any longer. His mother doesn’t know. He’s the only one. Him and Julia.”

I thought about that night on the beach. About the way Alex had acted when he came across Judith and me near the other club. He’s hiding something, I’d thought even then. He isn’t telling us everything.

“Do you remember that repairman who came by a couple of times to fix the tank on the roof? When we didn’t have any running water?”

I probably blinked my eyes or else I was wearing a blank expression, because Ralph said, “The repairman. From the rental agency. A little guy. Late twenties, early thirties …”

“Yeah, I remember that … a repairman … for the water. What about him?”

With difficulty, Ralph drew air into his lungs; it sounded like an air mattress deflating. “Julia had arranged to meet him that evening,” he said. “The repairman. I don’t know when they actually agreed to meet up; I guess one of those times when he came by. Or who knows, maybe in the village or on the beach. Whatever it was, they agreed to meet at that other club on the night of the midsummer party. Alex tried to talk her out of it—he had an uneasy feeling about it. I mean, it was already bad enough for Alex that she wasn’t content with just him. She told Alex that she thought he was still too much of a baby, that she went more for real men. Well, anyway, that evening … that night … Alex finally went along with her. Because he had a bad feeling about it, like I said. And then what happened happened. The guy threatened Alex, Marc. He threatened to do something to Alex if he ever said anything to
his parents. Oh, if I’d only known that back then … The bastard wouldn’t have lived to talk about it!”

“But … but how did Julia …?”

“Wait a minute, I’m not finished yet. Julia and Alex agreed not to say anything. Actually, she made him swear not to say anything. Back on the beach. After it happened.”

“But I found her … When I found her …”

“She was so ashamed, she thought it was all her own fault. She thought you and Caroline would think it was stupid of her and you would never trust her again. That you would never let her go anywhere alone again after that. That’s why she came up with the idea of pretending to be unconscious. So she could tell the two of you that she didn’t remember anything.”

Half an hour later Judith and I were in the corridor. Alex and Thomas had gone to the hospital cafeteria. Judith had just said that she was so glad I had been there. And I had said that Ralph had gone “with dignity.”

Then Dr. Maasland came along with his griping about the tissue sample that had never arrived. He’d asked Judith for permission to perform an autopsy.

“That’s really strange, isn’t it?” Judith said after Dr. Maasland left. “You really can’t remember what happened back then? I remember you telling me that the hospital had said it was nothing serious.”

“It
is
strange, that’s right,” I said. “And that arrogant asshole acting as though it was
me
who lost it, even though they were probably the ones who should have been more careful.”

“But just now, the first thing you said was that you couldn’t
remember. Why did you say that, Marc? I don’t get it, not at all. I thought there was something else going on. Something between you and Ralph. What did Ralph want to talk to you about, anyway, just before? Did that have anything to do with it?”

“Listen, Judith,” I said. “I think it would be better for both of us if we didn’t see each other for a while. And maybe not just for a while. What I really mean is, for an extended period. I’ve been there for you up till now, but now I have to kind of get my own life into shape. Too much has happened. Things you don’t have a clue about. At this point, I just can’t have you around.”

Two days later I received a call from Dr. Maasland. I was right in the middle of my daily appointments. I was with a female writer whose excessive consumption of red wine made her look twenty years older than she really was—or at least eighteen years, judging from the Photoshopped portrait on the back of her latest book.

“Can I call you back in a little while?” I said. “I’m with a patient right now.”

“I’m afraid not, Dr. Schlosser. This is too serious for that.”

In the last few years the authoress’s face had aged with increasing speed. Red wine drains the skin from underneath. It’s like with a receding water table. The moisture draws back beneath the skin’s surface. The skin itself becomes a wasteland. All life dies off. Animals go looking for a place where there’s more water. Plants wither and die. The sun and the wind have
free rein. Cracks appear in the soil. Erosion. Drifting sand wears away at the surface.

“Have you people been able to track down that tissue yet?” I asked Dr. Maasland. “The tissue I sent you back then. I mean, it’s awfully strange that something like that could just go missing.”

There was a loud sigh at the other end. The sort of sigh that specialists breathe when they have to explain something complex to a general physician. Something that’s beyond the ken of a simple family doctor.

“We haven’t got to that yet, but that’s really not the issue here. We performed an autopsy on Mr. Meier’s body yesterday. It showed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that someone, and we can only assume that someone was you, Dr. Schlosser, removed tissue from Mr. Meier’s thigh—”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“Please let me finish, Dr. Schlosser. What it’s all about, in fact, is that
too much
tissue was removed. From much too large a surface. While every doctor ought to know that when there is even the slightest suspicion of such a serious illness, one is better off not removing anything at all. That you first need to look at the white-blood-cell count and only then, perhaps, take a sample. That’s freshman medical school stuff, Dr. Schlosser.”

“I thought I was dealing with a fat node. In view of Mr. Meier’s eating habits, that was not particularly far-fetched.”

“Due to your rigorous incision, the cells most probably entered the bloodstream. From that moment on Mr. Meier didn’t stand a ghost of a chance. I therefore reported this immediately to the proper authorities. These things usually take weeks or months, but because of the dire nature of this case and the
fact that our hospital’s reputation is also involved, they found a chance to fit this in in the extreme short term.”

“Fit this in?”

“At the Board of Medical Examiners. You are expected there next Tuesday at nine
A.M.”

I flashed a grin at the lady writer, who was beginning to show signs of impatience, shifting back and forth in her chair.

“Next Tuesday …” I said. “But the funeral is this Friday. I thought—”

“Dr. Schlosser, I hope we understand each other clearly. I believe the family would hardly appreciate your presence at the funeral. At least, not after we’ve informed them of the results of our investigation.”

“And when will that be? Is there such a big rush? No verdict has been passed, has it? That can’t happen before Tuesday, right? Or maybe not even then? Maybe the board will want to take its time examining things.”