Dear Mr. M (28 page)
Authors: Herman Koch
“You have people, I know a few, certainly among my colleagues, who never actually look
at you,
they probably don't even see you, or at least they see you only in relation to themselves. They ring your bell, you open the door and you see it right away in their faces, in their eyes. They're not happy to see you, let alone do they wonder whether they've come at a convenient moment. No, they're happy they came. They're happy
for you.
They're happy for you that they are now standing there in front of you. That they've taken the time and gone to the trouble to ring your doorbell
. Here I am,
they say with their faces all aglow.
Enjoy.
That's the kind of expression Stella is wearing too, right in the middle of that group with all her classmates. There's no real reason to look into the camera, at the school photographer. No, the school photographer should be pleased to have her in the picture. The way she is. All by herself.
“When I finally figured that out, every morning for weeks I looked almost exclusively at
her.
Not at her classmates, in the same way she didn't look at them. I think she
never
looked at her classmates, at least not the way we, as quote-unquote normal people, look at each other. At most, she gauged the reactions in the faces of others, the way those others reacted
to her.
She was, of course, a very pretty girl, but pretty in a different way from Laura.
“In the photo, Laura is the prettiest girl in the class, the girl all the boys chase, of whom all the boys dream. She's completely aware of that, which is at the same time her handicap. When girls are too pretty, they easily become isolated. Without being able to do anything about that themselves.
Unapproachable,
we think when we see the prettiest girl in the class,
she doesn't even know I exist.
And from that moment on we avoid all contact. In order to keep from being disappointed, or even worse: from being completely humiliated. We're afraid the prettiest girl will look us over from head to toe and then deliver a crushing verdict. A verdict from which we'll never recover, that we will carry with us for the rest of our lives. Sometimes even literally, in the words literally used by the prettiest girl with regard to your person:
You don't actually thinkâ
that's how the devastating rejection almost always startsâ
that you stand a ghost of a chance with me, that I even knew you existed before today? I would strongly urge you, as of today, to neverâI repeat: neverâspeak to me again
. And so we do all we can to avoid exchanging looks with the prettiest girl. We're in no hurry to have her point out the category to which we actually belong. Not
her
category, in any case.
“Stella's beauty is of a different kind. Precisely because she is so sufficient unto herself, she is beautiful in the way a landscape can be beautiful: a green, rolling landscape with a few sheep grazing on a hillside, a snowy mountain peak at sunset. That landscape doesn't care whether we enjoy it. It's always been there, tomorrow it will still be there, and the day after tomorrow too, and a hundred years from now. She gives off light, but at the same time she absorbs it, as something that goes without saying. She'll never wonder why, it's just always been that way. She wonders about it as little as the earth's surface wonders why the sun shines on it. Or better yet: the light of the moon.”
The difference being that a landscape can't be rejected. You yourself say that a landscape doesn't care whether we enjoy it. But a landscape also doesn't care whether we reject it.
“That's the way I always looked at the class photo too. Every day. I looked at Stella's face. A boy has declared his love to her, he is standing a few yards away, among his friends. She finds that only natural. At that moment, everything is still fine and dandy. The teacher is sitting at his desk. He is breathing, even though we can't see that in the photograph. What we can see in the photograph is that the teacher in question is taken with himself. He's sitting there cheerfully amid his students, in a checkered shirt with the two top buttons open, at a time when teachers still tended to wear jackets and ties. He wants to be one of them, he insists that they call him by his first name, he's trying to smile with his mouth closed. Standing beside Stella is Laura, her best friend. But Stella probably has no idea that her best friend is the one she should watch out for most. It wouldn't occur to her; girls like Stella believe unconditionally in the trustworthiness of their best friends, just as she believes in the trustworthiness of her boyfriend. Of Herman. It would never come up in her, in Stella's, mind that her boyfriend is actually attracted to her best friend, or that in a few weeks' time that friend is going to hook up with the jovial teacher in order to draw Herman's attention. What happens in the mind of a girl like Stella when she realizes one day that not she, but someone else, is the chosen one? That she has only been used as a diversionary tactic? She thought it was normal that Herman would want to start something with her, just as she would have thought that was normal for any other boy; what boy, after all,
wouldn't
fall for a girl like her? And then, one day, quite unexpectedly, out of the proverbial blue, he breaks up with her. And not only does he break up with her, but he tells her he is trading her in for Laura. For her best friend.”
But you didn't do anything with that. In
Payback,
Stella isn't mentioned at all. As though she never existed.
“There was nothing I
could
do with it. I mean, there was nothing I could with it because of the way things went. Because of what happened afterward. I did try. In the first draft, I still had two girls. But it didn't work. I realized that I needed to focus on one thing and one thing alone. The teacher's disappearance. What Stellaâ¦What she didâ¦That would distract readers too much from the essence of my story. It might throw the whole book out of balance. You read books sometimes that give you the impression that the writer was trying to sweeten the pot. That he thought that one central premise wasn't enough. It's quite understandable too. Every writer has that urge, you work on a book for months, often years, you're sick and tired of it, the story is starting to bore you, and to combat that boredom you toss another element into it, a surprising twist, something spectacular. But there's a very real chance that adding that element will destroy the book's balance right away. Maybe the writer is bored, but the reader isn't. Not yet. The writer forgets that the reader doesn't spend months or years with a book. Only a couple of days, or a week at most. He doesn't get enough time to become bored.
Payback
is not some five-hundred-page doorstop, I knew from the start that half that would be enough. Stella would have been a new narrative line. That would have made it a very different book. There was a very real chance that that one new narrative line wouldn't have been enough. That happens often. Two storylines can be confusing, while three or five aren't, then it's simply that kind of a book. But I didn't feel like writing that kind of a book. I felt that the teacher, the boy, and the girl were enough.”
But in reality we also make do with any number of storylines, don't we? Why is it that writers are always so afraid of that?
“Because one expects a certain degree of order in a novel; a clearer, more compact reality. Actual reality doesn't worry about that compaction. A writer has to chop into reality. For example: an acquaintance of mine was recently hit by a garbage truck. The ambulance took him to the hospital with a broken leg, and there he was told that his wife had just been admitted to that same hospital: one hour earlier she had fallen off her bike and broken her arm. That's a true story. The kind you would never make up. In the book version, only one of the two remains: either the husband with the broken leg
or
the wife with the broken arm. It's up to the writer to decide which one gets cut out of the book.”
In
Payback,
of course, you already made that decision by giving your imagination free rein. In your book, the boy and the girl finish the teacher off and hide the body in an ingenious fashion. While in real life there was never any solid evidence to indicate that. The teacher no longer disappears in the literal sense of the word. The reader knows how it went.
“Yes, I thought that was fascinating. What might have happened? That question, in fact, remains interesting. We still don't know how it went.”
But don't you ever have the feeling that you, as a writer, have a certain responsibility with regard to reality? There is no Stella. The teacher is murdered in cold blood. It may all be your own imagination, of course, but little is left to the reader's imagination
.
“Maybe I was unconsciously hoping for a reaction, who can say?”
You mean a reaction from the murderers? From the suspects, I should say?
“First of all that, yes. As I've already said: I myself never tried to make contact, to the extent that they would have allowed me to; I didn't want any explanation on their part to get in the way of my imagination. But afterwardâ¦Once the book was published, I noticed that I started asking myself whether they were going to read it. Whether they would feel like refuting my solution. And whether their refutation might expose them. Maybe even betray them. Please note: morally speaking, it didn't interest me at all. They were right in whatever they did. But still, one remains curious. We're always curious about the fate of someone who disappears from the face of the earth. But I wasn't thinking only about Herman and Laura, I also thought about the others, about what they knew. Within close groups of friends like that, nothing remains a secret for long. You confide in each other. The way I imagined it, Herman and Laura would have wanted to tell someone their story. In fact, I was sure of it. You can't walk around with something like that for years, or even weeks. One day you simply have to try to tell someone. David was very close to both Herman and Laura. So was Lodewijk. My speculation was that one of the others from that group of friends might want to react to the book. That they would approach me, anonymously or not, with their version of things.”
And did that happen?
“I don't knowâ¦I could simply say that I never received a direct reaction from anyone involved, and be finished with it. But on the other handâ¦by now it must have passed the statute of limitations. But you have to promise me that this will remain completely off the record. I wouldn't want to get anyone into trouble, forty years after the fact.”
Perhaps you could tell me first whether it changed your view of what happened. Whether the new information made you think differently about precisely what went on in that house in Terhofstede.
“Yes, it did.”
And then there is a knock at the door. You say “yes” again, but this time with a question mark behind it. The door opens and your wife comes in. In a little over an hour the two of you have to be at the book ball; you might expect that she has come to ask what you think of her dress, that she has come to ask you to close the zipper on the back of her dress, that she would be at least half or three-quarters of the way dressed for the party, but she is still wearing her jeans and white sneakersâthe untucked tails of a white shirt (a man's shirt, I can't help but notice, maybe one of yours?) are hanging loosely over the jeans.
She's holding a thermometer.
“We're almost finished,” you sayâapparently you haven't noticed the thermometer, or at least you ask no questions about it.
“[â¦] hasn't been feeling well all afternoon,” your wife says; she mentions your daughter's name, the name I'm still leaving out; you know her name anyway, and it is indeed no one else's business. “But now she's really running a fever.” She takes a few steps toward you and holds out the thermometer, but you are looking only at her. “I don't like the idea of going away while she's sick in bed.”
“But Charlotte's coming in a bit, isn't she?”
“I don't know,” she says. “I'd rather not leave her alone with Charlotte. I would just feel much more comfortable staying with her myself.”
You stare at her. I think I know more or less what is going on in your mind. Without your wife, without your much-younger wife, you won't be complete at a party like this. As though you were being forced to show up in the nude; no, not in the nude, in just your boxer shorts.
“Butâ¦,” you start in, but your wife is too fast for you.
“You don't have to go by yourself,” she saysâand then she looks at me for the first time.
The last two times it had been more than she could take. She couldn't stand it anymore. That was why she held the thermometer up to the lightbulb. It was, in fact, a completely ridiculous and unnecessary thing to do. As if M would actually check the thermometer! Still, the black digits made it somehow more
real
: 101 degrees. Thermometer in hand, she knocked on the door of his study.
The last couple of years she had started dreading it a week beforehand. Like a visit to the gynecologist. A hollow feeling between navel and abdomen. It started with wondering what to wear this year. A different dress each year. Bare shoulders. Bare arms. And most important of all, of course: the décolleté. How much to show off. In her experience, it was the women whose shelf life had expired long ago who also sported the deepest décolletés. The same went for women who were too fat, for women who smoked, for the redheads. The women with faces on which two packs of Gauloises and two bottles of red wine a day for twenty years had left their mark. Pits and craters and stretches of dead skinâa face like a polluted river in which the last fish had bobbed to the surface years ago. But with a deep décolleté they could draw attention away from that face. The skin there was none too young either, usually too red or too tanned, but the men's gazes often remained hanging there. First they looked at the bared no-man's-land, and only then at the face.
After that the program began. The male and female authors gathered in the big theater. They looked at each other, said hello with a nod of the head or waved to each other from a distance. What they paid particular attention to was the seating arrangement, to who sat where. A moment of suspense, each year anew. Not for her and her husband. They knew beforehand, of course, where they would be seated. That never changed. Second row from the front, in the middle. But most colleagues had no fixed place. They could end up somewhere else each year. Those who sat all the way at the top, up in the second balcony, didn't even count. The same went for the side balconies. Writer L hadn't put a word on paper for years; these days he sat behind a pillar where no one could see him. G had been at the top of the bestseller list for three months, hence her spot in the front row of the lower balcony. And then of course there were the old hands who never failed to show up. A couple more of them dead each year. The spots they vacated in the middle of the theater were assumed by other aged men and wrinkled women. The policy was to be accommodating toward literary widows. During their first two years of bereavement they were allowed to keep their regular seats. After that they were quietly banished to the second balcony, or simply not invited anymore.
Most publishers organized a dinner for their authors before the ball started. The lucky ones went to a real restaurant, but in recent years the buffet dinner had becoming increasingly popular. Her husband's publisher (“subpar results,” “recession,” “sector-wide structural malaise”) had switched to the buffet last year. She remembered the long line waiting to be served by the college-aged temps, who ladled casserole and mashed potatoes onto their paper plates. The hot plates were silver, but the line of hungry faces reminded her of a soup kitchen. Of breadlines in a region struck by natural disaster.
Before the actual show began, a few speeches were given. No one was anxious to hear them. The speakers were always gray-haired men in suits, who said right at the start that they would “keep it short.” For the last decade or so the whole event had been sponsored by the Dutch Railways, and while the representative from that organization was giving his speech she wondered whether she was the only one thinking of delayed departures, frozen switches, and stranded passengers. After the show, which usually featured a hand-me-down nightclub performer or a singer-songwriter whose career was on the rocks, orâeven worse, if that was possibleâa writer who thought he was funnier than his colleagues, the big loitering beganâ¦the endless mingling in the catacombs of the theater.
Thermometer in hand, she went to her daughter's room. Catherine had been mopey all day, complaining of a headache and nausea, but there was nothing wrong with her appetite; after finishing two pieces of toasted white bread, she had asked for a third.
“Drink your milk first,” Ana told her. “If you're still hungry after that, you can have another one.”
That was when the prospect presented itself to her: an evening at home with her “sick” daughter, beneath a blanket on the couch, watching a DVD of some animated film she and Catherine had already seen a hundred times before. Anything was better than the theater corridors, the predictable conversations, the publishers, the journalists, the “nutty” decorations on the walls and ceilings, even in the restrooms. And last, but definitely not least, the writers themselvesâ¦
Put a hundred writers together in one space for a party and you get something very differentâin any case, not a party. With M she usually stuck to one round of the corridors, a nod here, the briefest possible conversation there, a photographer asking them to look into the camera for just a moment, their heads
a little closer together, yes, that's it, now smile, you look so serious, it's a party isn't it?
After that one round they settled down on the stairs to the right of the second-floor men's room. Before long, the others would join them there. M's colleagues, writers whose greatest similarity was that none of them had long to live. The oeuvre would soon be complete, the folio edition of collected works was ready to go, the obituaries had mostly all been written, the lucky ones (or unlucky ones, depending on how you looked at it) already had a biographer who had established a bond of trust with the prospective widow.
N always snapped at his girlfriend. Or ridiculed her to her face. She, too, was much younger than he was, but no more than twenty years or soânot nearly as big a difference as between M and herself. Unlike most writers' wives, N's girlfriend also did something herself, though Ana could never remember exactly what. Something with websites, she thought. Something that required no skills.
And then you had C, who was somewhere in his eighties too by now but tried to wear his seniority as boyishly as possible, like a pair of worn-out sneakers, ripped jeans, and safety pins; he liked to be seen in recalcitrant clothing: no sport coat, let alone a tuxedo; just a T-shirt with V-neck that revealed a landscape of sagging sinews, razor burns, and three or four snow-white chest hairs. Halfway through this landscape, which shifted from red to dark purple on its way down, C's Adam's apple looked as though it were trying to break out through the skin, like an oversized preyâa marmot, a rabbitâthat has been gulped down by an overly rapacious python and become stuck in its gullet. Behind the lenses of his spectacles his dilated pupils floated in the whites of eyes that were no longer completely white, trashed as they were by any number of broken capillaries; they reminded her most of some raw dish, something on a half shell, an oyster, something you had to slurp down without looking.
And each and every one of the old writers looked at her, Ana, like children waiting for their favorite dessert at a birthday party. N literally licked his lips, he didn't care that his girlfriend was standing beside him, when they said hello he first kissed her on each cheek, then let the third and final kiss land just a little too close to the corner of her lips, almost as though by accident. But it was no accident. Meanwhile he did something with his fingers, something right above her buttocks, his thick fingertips pressed softly against the spot where the zipper of her dress started, right over her tailbone, then slipped down a fraction of an inch.
“You're looking lovely as always, Ana,” he said. Then he stepped back: before letting her go completely, his hand slid to the front, by way of her buttock and hip to her abdomen, before he pulled it back. “We should go for coffee sometime. Just the two of us. Sometime when M is traveling abroad.” This latter remark was always accompanied by a big wink, he wanted to be sure she saw it only as a compliment and not a serious come-on, but his eyes traveled downward right away, resting on her lips for a few moments before descending further, to her breasts. “No, really, if I didn't have Liliane, I know what I'd be doing,” he saidâand this time he didn't wink.
The other old men were less forward, but they all looked. They looked when they thought she didn't see them; C's oyster eyes had a predilection for her buttocks, and she always felt the gaze of D, the travel writer, somewhere around her left ear, as though he wished he could clamp her earlobe in his doggy, wine-stained lips, then use the tip of his tongue to fiddle loose her earring and swallow it. Van E, the artist, had eyes like a mole, or some other animal that spends more time in darkness than in light; he always kept them squeezed in a tight squint behind his glasses and probably thought she couldn't tell where he was looking: at her legsâfirst her thighs, then lower and lower, by way of her calves to her ankles.
A recent addition to their little club on the stairs was K, who was about thirty years younger than the rest. K was what people called a modest writer. “Modest writers are the worst kind,” M had said once, referring to K. “In actual fact, of course, they're not modest at all. They only act modest because, in their hearts, they consider themselves better than the rest.
I can act normal,
the modest writer figures.
I can act normal because my greatness is beyond any shadow of a doubt. I'm like the queen, who can ride a bike like a
normal
person might, because everyone already knows she's the queen.
For readers, too, the modest writer is a delight.
So normal!
they tell each other.
You can talk to him like a
normal
person. He didn't act as though he was one whit better than the rest of us normal people. Not arrogant like M, not aloof and cerebral like N.
”
In interviews, K had more than once expressed a certain disdain for M's work (“a writer from the past, a writer whose work will quickly be forgotten once he's gone”), but whenever they met he always pooh-poohed the critique: “I hope you didn't mind. It wasn't really that bad. I didn't mean anything by it, you know I admire your work as a whole.”
K looked at Ana differently than most of M's aging colleagues who gathered on the stairs beside the gents'. Or rather, he didn't look at all. No randy perusal from head to toe, no suggestive kisses on the cheek, not even raised eyebrows or the faintest trace of flirtation. They were closer to each other in age, amid the fogies K could have considered himself the most likely of the lot, but he was the only one in the group who acted as though there was no pretty woman within a few feet of him. Once, when Ana had complimented K on his latest bookâa village history smeared out over three generationsâshe had at some point used the word “special.” She remembered the sentence in which she'd done that, word for word: “I'm only halfway through the first section, at the point where that priest drowns. I can't say a lot about it yet, but in any case it's really special.” She had lied about where she was in the book, she wasn't anywhere near halfway through the first section, after ten pages she had decided that it wasn't her cup of teaâbut the drowned priest was mentioned in the blurb.
“I don't think I'm special at all,” K had replied grimly, fixing her with his cold gaze; a neutral gaze above all, as though he wasn't talking to an attractive woman his own age but to a postal clerk or a bailiff. “Just because I happen to be a writer doesn't make me any more special than anyone else.”
Ana had said something about his book, not about his personâand at that moment she suddenly understood M's aversion to modest writers.
“What do you want to watch?
Dumbo,
or the real movie about the two dogs and that cat?”
She sat down on the edge of Catherine's bed and showed her daughter the thermometer again. “A hundred and one, Papa thought it was a good idea too, for me to stay with you. How are you feeling now?” she asked, touching Catherine's forehead with her fingertipsâit wasn't warm, or at least no warmer than usual.