Summer House with Swimming Pool

Herman Koch

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782390732
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2015 IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD A doctor to the rich and famous goes to extreme lengths to protect his daughter in this dark and addictive novel from the author of the million-copy bestseller The Dinner. Marc Schlosser is a doctor to the rich and famous. When his most famous patient, the actor Ralph Meier, invites him and his family on holiday, Marc finds that he can't refuse. But by the time the suntans fade, Ralph Meier is dead. The medical board accuses Marc of negligence. Ralph's wife, however, accuses him of murder...

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Note on the Author

1

I am a doctor. My office hours are from eight-thirty in the morning to one in the afternoon. I take my time. Twenty minutes for each patient. Those twenty minutes are my unique selling point. Where else these days, people say, can you find a GP who gives you twenty minutes? – and they pass the information along. He doesn’t take on too many patients, they say. He makes time for each individual case. I have a waiting list. When a patient dies or moves away, all I have to do is pick up the phone and I have five new ones to take their place.

Patients can’t tell the difference between time and attention. They think I give them more attention than other doctors. But all I give them is more time. By the end of the first sixty seconds I’ve seen all I need to know. The remaining nineteen minutes I fill with attention. Or, I should say, with the illusion of attention. I ask all the usual questions. How is your son/daughter getting along? Are you sleeping better these days? Are you sure you’re not getting too much/too little to eat? I hold the stethoscope to their chests, then to their backs. Take a deep breath, I say. Now breathe out nice and slow. I don’t really listen. Or at least I try not to. On the inside, all human bodies sound the same. First of all, of course, there’s the heartbeat. The heart is blind. The heart pumps. The heart is the engine room. The engine room only keeps the ship going; it doesn’t keep it on course. And then there are the sounds of the intestines. Of the vital organs. An overburdened liver sounds different from a healthy one. An overburdened liver groans. It groans and begs. It begs for a day off. A day to deal with the worst of the rubbish. The way things are now, it’s always in a hurry, trying to catch up with itself. The overburdened liver is like the kitchen in a restaurant that’s open around the clock. The dishes pile up. The dishwashers are working full tilt. But the dirty dishes and caked-on pans only pile up higher and higher. The overburdened liver hopes for that one day off that never comes. Every afternoon at four-thirty, five o’clock (sometimes earlier), the hope of that one day off is dashed again. If the liver’s lucky, at first it’s only beer. Beer passes most of the work along to the kidneys. But you always have those for whom beer alone isn’t enough. They order something on the side: a shot of gin, vodka or whisky. Something they can knock back. The overburdened liver braces itself, then finally ruptures. First it grows rigid, like an overinflated tyre. All it takes then is one little bump in the road for it to blow wide open.

I listen with my stethoscope. I press against the hard spot, just beneath the skin. Does this hurt? If I press any harder, it will burst open right there in my office. Can’t have that. It makes an incredible mess. Blood gushes out in a huge wave. No general practitioner is keen to have someone die in his office. At home, that’s a different story. In the privacy of their own homes, in the middle of the night, in their own beds. With a ruptured liver, they usually don’t even make it to the phone. The ambulance would get there too late anyway.

My patients file into my practice at twenty-minute intervals. The office is on the ground floor. They come in on crutches and in wheelchairs. Some of them are too fat, others are short of breath. They are, in any case, no longer able to climb stairs. One flight of stairs would kill them for sure. Others only imagine it would: that their final hour would begin on the first step. Most of the patients are like that. Most of them have nothing wrong with them. They moan and groan, make noises that would make you think they see death staring them in the face every moment of the day, they sink into the chair across from my desk with a sigh – but there’s nothing wrong with them. I let them reel off their complaints. It hurts here, and here, sometimes it spasms down to here… I do my best to act interested. Meanwhile, I doodle on a scrap of paper. I ask them to get up, to follow me to the examination room. Occasionally I’ll ask someone to undress behind the screen, but most of the time I don’t. Bodies are horrible enough as it is, even with their clothes on. I don’t want to see them, those parts where the sun never shines. Not the folds of fat in which it is always too warm and the bacteria have free rein, not the fungal growths and infections between the toes, beneath the nails, not the fingers that scratch here, the fingers that rub there until it starts to bleed… Here, Doctor, here’s where it itches really badly… No, I don’t want to see. I pretend to look, but I’m thinking about something else. About a roller-coaster in an amusement park, the car at the front has a green dragon’s head mounted on it; the people throw their hands in the air and scream their lungs out. From the corner of my eye I see moist tufts of pubic hair, or red, infected bald spots where no hair will ever grow again, and I think about a plane exploding in the air, the passengers still belted to their seats as they begin a mile-long tumble into eternity: it’s cold, the air is thin, far below the ocean awaits. It burns when I pee, Doctor. Like there are needles coming out… A train explodes just before it enters the station, the space shuttle Columbia shatters into millions of little pieces, the second jet slams into the South Tower. It burns, here, doctor. Here…

You can get dressed now, I say. I’ve seen enough. I’ll write you a prescription. Some of the patients can barely conceal their disappointment: a prescription? They stand there for a few seconds, staring blankly, their underwear down around their knees. They took a morning off from work, now they want value for money, even if that money has come out of the pockets of healthy taxpayers. They want the doctor to poke at them at least, they want him to pull on his rubber gloves and take something – some body part – between his knowing fingers. For him to stick at least one finger into something. They want to be examined; they aren’t content only with his years of experience, his clinical gaze that registers at a single glance what’s wrong with a person. Because he’s seen it all a hundred thousand times before. Because experience tells him that there’s no sudden need on occasion one hundred thousand-and-one to pull the rubber gloves on.

Sometimes, though, there’s no getting around it. Sometimes you have to get in there. Usually with one or two fingers, sometimes with your whole hand. I pull on my rubber gloves. If you would just roll onto your side… for the patient, this is the point of no return. Finally, he is being taken seriously, he is about to receive an internal examination, but his gaze is no longer fixed on my face. All he can look at now are my hands. My hands as they pull on the rubber gloves. He wonders why he ever let things get this far. Whether this is really what he wants. Before putting on the gloves, I wash my hands. The sink is across from the examining table, so I stand with my back to him as I soap up. I take my time. I roll up my sleeves. I can feel the patient’s eyes at my back. I let the tap water flow over my wrists. First I wash my hands thoroughly, then my lower arms: all the way up to the elbows. The sound of running water blocks out all other sounds, but I know that once I’ve reached the elbows the patient’s breathing has quickened. It quickens for a few seconds, or stops altogether. An internal examination is about to take place, the patient – consciously or unconsciously – has insisted on this. He had no intention of letting himself be fobbed off with a prescription, not this time. Meanwhile, though, the doubts arise. Why is the doctor washing and disinfecting his hands and arms all the way up to the elbows? Something in the patient’s body contracts. Even though what he should be doing is relaxing as much as possible. Relaxation is the key to a smooth internal examination.

Meanwhile I have turned around and am drying my hands, my forearms, my elbows. Still without looking at the patient, I take a pair of plastic-packed gloves from a drawer. I tear open the bag, press the pedal of the rubbish bin with my foot and throw the bag away. Only now, as I pull on the gloves, do I look at the patient. The look in his eyes is, how shall I put it, different from what it was before I started washing my hands. Lie down on your side, I say, before he has a chance to express his misgivings. Facing the wall. A naked body is less disgraceful than a body with trousers and underpants down around its ankles. Less helpless. Two legs with the shoes and socks still on, and bound together at the ankles by trousers and underpants. Like a prisoner in a chain gang. A person with his pants around his ankles can’t run away. You can submit someone like that to an internal examination, but you could also punch him right in the side of the head. Or take a pistol and empty the clip into the ceiling. I’ve listened to these fucking lies long enough! I’m going to count to three… One… two… Try to relax, I say again. Turn on your side. I pull the rubber gloves tighter over my fingers and further over my wrists. The sound of snapping rubber always reminds me of party balloons. Balloons for a birthday party, you blew them up last night in order to surprise the birthday boy. This may be a little unpleasant, I say. The important thing is just to keep breathing calmly. The patient is all too aware of my presence, right behind his half-naked body, but he can’t see me any more. This is the moment when I take time to submit that body, or at least the naked part of it, to a further look.

I have, until now, been assuming that the patient is a man. In the example we are dealing with, a man is lying on the table with his trousers and underpants pulled down. Women are a different story; I’ll get to women later. The man in question turns his head slightly in my direction, but, as I’ve mentioned, he can no longer get a good look at me. Just relax your head now, I say. All you have to do is relax. Unbeknown to the patient, I now turn my gaze to the naked lower back. I’ve already told him that what follows may be a bit unpleasant. Between that remark and the unpleasant feeling itself, there is nothing. This is the empty moment. The emptiest moment in the entire examination. The seconds tick by silently, like a metronome with the sound turned off. A metronome on a piano in a silent film. No physical contact has yet taken place. The bare back bears the mark of the underpants. Red bands left on the skin by the elastic. Sometimes there are pimples or moles. The skin itself is often abnormally pale; it’s one of those places where sunlight rarely reaches. There is, however, almost always hair. Lower down, along the back, the hair only increases. I’m left-handed. I place my right hand on the patient’s shoulder. Through the rubber glove I feel the body stiffen. The entire body tenses and contracts. It would like to relax, but instinct is more powerful, it braces itself, it readies itself to resist invasion from the outside.

By then my left hand is already where it has to be. The patient’s mouth falls open, his lips part, a sigh escapes as my middle finger goes in. Something between a sigh and a groan. Take it easy, I say. It will be over in a moment. I try to think about nothing, but that’s always difficult. So I think about the night when I dropped the padlock key for my bicycle in the mud in the middle of a football field. It was a patch of mud no bigger than one yard square, and I knew for sure my key was there. Does this hurt at all? I ask. Now my index finger joins my middle finger, using both of them will make it easier to find the key. A little… Where? Here…? Or here? It was raining, a few lights were on around the field, but it was still a bit too dark to see well. Usually it’s the prostate. Cancer, or just an enlargement. Usually there’s not much you can say about it after the first examination. I could have walked home and come back the next day, once it got light. But my fingers were already in there, the mud was already up under my nails, there wasn’t much sense in stopping now. Ow! There, Doctor! Fucking hell! Excuse me… Oh, fucking hell! And then there was that one fraction of a second, my fingers feeling something hard amid the goo. Careful, it could also be a piece of glass… I hold it up to the light, the dim light from a lamppost beside the field, but in fact I already know what it is. It glistens, it gleams, and I won’t have to walk home after all. Without looking at my hands I pull off the gloves and toss them in the pedal bin. You can sit up now. You can get dressed. It’s too early to draw conclusions, I say.

It was eighteen months ago when Ralph Meier suddenly appeared in my waiting room. I recognised him right away, of course. Could he talk to me for just a moment? It was nothing urgent, he said. Once we were in my office, he came straight to the point. Was it true, what so-and-so had told him, that I was fairly accommodating with prescriptions for…? here he looked around somewhat skittishly, as though the place might be bugged. ‘So-and-so’ was a regular patient of mine. In the long run they all tell each other everything, which is how Ralph Meier ended up in my practice. It sort of depends, I said. I’ll have to ask you a few questions about your general health, so we don’t run into any unpleasant surprises later on. But if we do that? he insisted. If everything is OK, would you be willing… I nodded. Yes, I said. That can be arr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents