Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel by Herman Koch Page A

meant I would have to give up my resistance to taking the tent along. And the sooner the better.
    “You know,” I said, “it’s been a few years. Sometimes I miss it, too: a little camping. Let’s give it another try. But I don’t want any messing around with pans and gas burners. We’re going out to dinner every night.”
    Now it was my wife’s turn to look at me dubiously, as though I might be joking. But the next moment she threw her arms around me.
    “Marc?” she said. “That is so, so sweet of you!”
    I held her tight. I couldn’t help it, though; I was thinking about the last half hour of that garden party. I had looked everywhere and finally found Judith in a corner of the yard, where she was picking up glasses and half-empty bowls of chips and peanuts.
    I took her by the wrist. She turned to me with a start. But when she saw that it was me an almost dreamy smile appeared on her face.
    “Marc …” she said.
    “I have to see you again,” I said.

We left on a Saturday. The first night we spent at a hotel. The second one, too. As usual, we had no fixed plans. Or, I should really say, to all appearances, we had no fixed plans. To an observer we would have looked like an ordinary couple with two daughters. A family with no fixed plans, making their way south. In reality, we were edging almost imperceptibly toward the summer house where Ralph and Judith Meier were spending their vacation.
    On the third morning, still lying in the hotel bed, I flipped through the camping guide we’d brought along with us at the last minute. There were three campgrounds in the immediate vicinity of the summer house, all within a six-mile radius.
    “So what do you guys think?” I said. “Shall we pitch the tent somewhere?”
    “Yeaaah!” Julia and Lisa cheered, in unison.
    “But only if the weather’s nice,” Caroline said with a wink.
    That was the plan. My plan. We were going camping. We would spend a few days, a week if need be, at the same campground. Somewhere—on the beach, at the supermarket, in a sidewalk café in the nearest town—we would run into the Meiers, entirely by accident.
    A few weeks before we left I had visited a travel bookshop and bought a detailed map of the area. So detailed that it showed each individual house. I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure, but using the address and directions Judith had e-mailed us a few days after the party, I thought I could tell which house on the map was the Meiers’. I went to ViaMichelin and typed in the address. Then on Google Earth I zoomed in so close that I could see the blue of the pool, and even the diving board.
    Of the three campgrounds, one lay along the same road to the beach as Ralph and Judith Meier’s summer house. But to my horror I saw that the guidebook referred to it as a “green” campground. A campground with “farm animals,” “environmentally-sound toilets,” and “simple facilities for the true nature lover.” I could almost smell the stench. But a collateral plus of a campground where detergents and deodorant were presumably taboo was that it would make the contrast with the summer house all the greater. One dive in the Meiers’ pool and Julia and Lisa would never want to leave.
    In her e-mail, Judith had sent me both her phone numbers. A week after the garden party I tried to reach her cell phone a few times, but only got the voice mail. At first no one answered the landline, either. I thought about leaving a message but decided against it.
    Three days later—I had, in fact, already given up and was about to hang up—a woman with a voice I didn’t recognize answered the landline.
    I gave her my name and asked to speak to Ralph or Judith.
    “They’re not in the country right now,” the voice said—not a very young voice, I registered. “And at this point I’m afraid I can’t say when they’ll be coming back.”
    I asked where they had gone.
    “And who are you?” the voice asked.
    “I’m the family