Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel

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Authors: Herman Koch
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come along. Usually ugly children. Highly gifted and socially handicapped. Children who actually
like
going to school. Who skip a few grades but are always the ones who get bullied. Later on, when the only jobs they can find are shoveling stalls for an organic dairy farmer, it’s mostly society’s fault. Meanwhile, Wilma’s friends wonder what she could ever have seen in that guy with the motor skills of a wooden clothespin. But they understand. What it is they understand exactly they never say to Wilma. But they say it to one another. “I mean, it’s really nice for her that she at least has
someone
,” they say. “Maybe it sounds weird, but in some strange way they’re actually a pretty good match.”
    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 trafficfatality 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 inevery 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.

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