Dear Mr. M

by Herman Koch

  I always wait until the postman has walked on with his cart before starting to fill the boxes. I look at each package or envelope before slipping it into the appropriate mail slot. For me, it has never been anything but plain old curiosity. Or healthy interest, if you will. On the basis of bank statements, subscriptions, and warning notices, I get to know my neighbors better. I never go too far. I study the blue envelope from the tax service for no longer than a second, then put it in the mailbox of the one to whom it is addressed.

  Sometimes I imagine that I am being filmed by someone in a van parked across the street. A nondescript van with the name of a construction or plumbing firm on the side. An undercover operation, with a hole drilled in one of the o’s of “construction,” the glass of the camera’s lens visible perhaps only from up close. A telephoto lens, the images are blurry, grainy—but nothing strange is going on. I don’t take any mail upstairs with me in order to steam open the envelopes at my leisure. I don’t look at the envelopes any longer than is needed to read the name of the recipient. Personal letters are becoming less common, unmistakably so, and postcards only show up during vacations.

  That is how I looked this morning at the postcard from your wife. I moved it up closer to my eyes, as though I were having trouble reading the address. Fortunately, girlish handwriting is very easy to read. For the space of a single second, I thought about the van across the street. That’s why I shook my head briefly, as though realizing my mistake a bit too late—as though it had taken me a second to see that the postcard was not intended for me, but for my upstairs neighbor. Then I smiled. I flipped the card over, glanced at the picture on the front, and put it in your mailbox.

  They can do all kinds of things these days. They can zoom in on a grainy picture and blow it up a million times. Imagine that there really had been a van parked across the street this morning: by zooming in and blowing up enough they could have seen which postcard I had read in a second and to whom that postcard was addressed.

  There was nothing visibly suspicious about it, but still, they could have reconstructed my knowledge of her whereabouts based on the combination of text and picture.

  That was the real reason why I shook my head. Why I smiled. I smiled because now I knew where she was. And I shook my head because, of course, I should have figured that out for myself a long time ago.

  After coming out of the shower last Saturday, you went to the café across from here. When I heard your door shut I walked out onto my balcony, where I can see the street. You don’t know how to make coffee. You don’t know that butter should be kept outside the fridge. You would only burn yourself if you tried to heat some milk.

  You took a seat outside and opened the newspaper. After a few minutes you looked around to see if anyone was coming to take your order, but none of the waitstaff had come out yet. You were the only customer. You put down your paper and turned in your chair, the better to peer into the restaurant itself.

  It was a lovely day. One of the first sidewalk-café days of the year. Sunlight bounced brightly off the big windows. You shielded your eyes with one hand and peered inside, but you probably couldn’t see a thing. If you had looked up, you would have seen me standing there. If it hadn’t been so far away, you probably could have seen the smile on my face. I felt for you. Really, I did.

  The café is a fairly new one. Even before it opened, everyone was saying what an asset it would be for the neighborhood. For this quiet neighborhood. In fact, La B., the restaurant, is the only place around. A normal café where you can drink a cup of coffee in the morning and a beer at the end of the afternoon, we don’t have anything like that.

  After about ten minutes, you were clearly fed up. You put your paper down on the table and went inside. You were in there for a long time. I pictured the undoubtedly deserted interior of the café. From somewhere behind a door that was open a crack you heard vague noises, as of someone loading cups and glasses into a dishwasher.

  “Hello?”

  No response.

  “Hello?”

  Then, finally, a girl came shuffling out of the kitchen. It was only Saturday morning, but she was already exhausted. You only wanted to order a cup of coffee, but in a café like this that’s never a simple matter.

  “I’ll be with you in a minute,” the girl said reproachfully, as though you had tried to barge ahead in line.

  Meanwhile, outside, your newspaper was lifted momentarily by the wind, but remained on the table. It would have been too much, you having to chase a runaway newspaper—a needless addition to a scene that was convincing enough as it was.

  You came outside again and sat down. You’d obviously had enough of the newspaper for the moment. First that coffee. A good four minutes later, the girl finally appeared at your table in person. She asked what you would like. You looked up and squinted. She was standing with her back to the sun, you couldn’t see her face very clearly. How old might she be? Nineteen? Twenty, tops. The generation that has no idea anymore who you are. You could tell that from her body language. A pain in the neck, that body said. A troublesome old man who shows up at eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning, for God’s sake, to order a cup of coffee. We’ve only been open for an hour, what’s wrong with this guy?

  She didn’t quite pull out a memo pad to jot down your order, but almost. Then she disappeared inside, only to come out again three minutes later. Empty-handed, of course: three minutes is not nearly enough time to pour something into a cup. She gestured, she pointed, she shrugged—and you looked up at her, your hand shielding your eyes from the sun. From my balcony I couldn’t make out a word, but I had the feeling I could tell what was going on. I’d experienced it myself once, when I went there for a cup of coffee shortly after the opening. The milk. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, but there was no milk left. I saw the girl point in the direction of the local shops. She would be pleased to go get some milk, but she was alone. She couldn’t leave the café unmanned: this old fussbudget could understand that, surely?

  Is it at such moments that you miss your wife? I don’t know whether you thought about her that Saturday morning. I did, in any case. I lowered my eyelids and tried to imagine her on the sun-drenched gravel beach. She was sitting, her arms wrapped around her knees, on a towel she’d spread out on the gravel. Your daughter was just coming out of the water with a bucket and a little shovel. I thought these things because I was still assuming that she had gone somewhere far away, to one of the Canary Islands, or at the very least to some resort on the Mediterranean.

  I still have a copy of the women’s magazine from a few months ago with the portrait of her in the section called “Partner Of,” where the wives of famous men are interviewed. About how wonderful and intelligent those men are. About that first meeting at the public reading or film festival, when lightning struck.

  You have women who wait in the soccer stadium, beside the underground passage that links the stadium to the training field. They shout things at the players. They ask for an autograph, for the hundredth time. They want to have their picture taken with the player. They have a dream. They have their sights set on a soccer player, and it doesn’t really matter which one. Any player who can make that dream come true is eligible.

  The women who cruise the literary evenings, film festivals, and theater cafés are different. Yet their dream is essentially the same as that of the soccer women. A husband with a famous face. To the outside world, they maintain that they’re primarily interested in the substance. In his talent. Still, a writer with a flashier car always has a prettier—younger—wife than the writer with only a public transport pass. The playwright dependent on public grants has to make do with factory seconds from the outlet store. The sculptor sloshed by eleven each morning has to make do with a woman with red-rimmed eyes who, just like him, reeks of wet ashtrays and soured wine.

  How did your wife put it again in “Partner Of”?

  “I had done a book report on Payback […] It was my senior year at high sch
ool. A girlfriend and I mustered up all our courage and called the writer for an interview in the school paper. I still remember how long I spent in front of the mirror that day. I couldn’t decide between my miniskirt with high heels or just a plain old pair of jeans. At the last moment, the other girl couldn’t make it, and I showed up in the skirt […] at first sight, that spark […] never went away again […] older than my father […] hurt my mother the most […] never wanted to see me again.”

  What interested me, though, wasn’t so much the interview as the photo that went with it. Your wife, leaning against an ivy-covered wall. In jeans, wearing Adidas sneakers. It’s a white brick wall, the outside wall of a house, in the upper left-hand corner you can see a little bit of a drainpipe, painted green, and a small window—belonging to a bathroom or a shower?

  It doesn’t say so in so many words, but it was immediately clear to me where that picture was taken. Probably at the same spot where your wife was interviewed. You yourself have made only sporadic mention of your “place in the country,” as you call it in some interviews. Your “second home,” or more frequently your “second work space,” because of course the work must go on: so that readers won’t think you’re goofing off at that second home, just lolling on the couch beside the fireplace.

  In the nearby town of H., they’re oh-so proud to have a famous writer living close by. A real, still-living writer who shows up now and then at a sidewalk café along the market square; who orders fried fish or a dish of mussels at the local seafood restaurant. It doesn’t literally say that either in “Partner Of.” But if you read carefully, it’s in there. The name of the town—H.—is even mentioned outright, as an example of the kind of respectful deference one still finds in the provinces.

  “At the supermarket, people let me cut ahead in line, because they know that I’m his wife […] rather embarrassing, really, but on the other hand I still enjoy it. That never happens in Amsterdam, anyway.”

  The way she puts it, I think, is rather sweet. I see her face. How it glows with pride. But it’s also glowing a bit with embarrassment. That’s your wife, to a tee. Or perhaps I should say: that’s all the women whose portraits appear in “Partner Of.”

  When I flipped over the postcard this morning and looked at the picture on the front, it took about three seconds for the penny to drop. It was a photograph of an old city gate. A gate in the wall of a fortified town. Greetings from H. was printed in red letters at the bottom.

  Then I went upstairs to find that women’s magazine. After rereading the whole “Partner Of” interview, I turned my attention to the photo. How many little white houses could there be close to the town of H.? How many little white houses with ivy on the wall? With a drainpipe painted green?

  I took an even better look at the photo. Your wife looked good. Rested. Healthy. Her hair pinned up, a few blond locks had come loose and hung down around her ears. Little earrings. Now I saw something else too. To the right of her face, a tile was affixed to the wall. A tile with a number on it. A house number.

  The little tile with the number on it was partly hidden from view by her pinned-up hair. It could have been just that one number, or the final cipher of a larger one.

  The number was a 1.

  Once again, I hesitate. We now have two narratives running side by side. Or three, actually. The stories within the story. You yourself love that technique; as we’ve seen already, you make full use of it in both Payback and Liberation Year.

  So I’m hesitating. For a moment, I ask myself what you would do if you were in my shoes. Go ahead here with the next day—the day after the postcard arrived—with me driving down our street, after setting the navigation system for the route to H. (“A navigation system?” I hear you say. “What kind of gizmo is that?” I see you shaking your head after I explain. “What’s wrong with a road map?” you ask—and, once again, you’re not completely wrong about that.)

  I could, of course, also toss you some new material. The way Laura Domènech, Mr. Landzaat, and I greet each other at the garden gate of the house in Terhofstede—up to the moment when the three of us go inside and the history teacher gradually begins to disappear from sight.

  Or I could go on with last Saturday: the third parallel narrative. You got up from the table outside the café. You still hadn’t had your coffee. I raced to take the elevator down and followed you on your walk through town. That’s already a lot less suspenseful—at least for you. After all, you were there too. At most, it might be interesting to your readers. What does a writer do during the weekend? What does he do on a normal Saturday (and Sunday)—a day when his wife is not at home?

  But like I said: you know that better than I do.

  —

  Landzaat threw all his body language into the fray to make clear that something had really changed in his attitude toward Laura. That he was not here to accost her again.

  “Laura,” he said quickly when we came close enough for him to see the expression on her face. “Laura, please! Let me…let me explain first. Let me say what I have to say.”

  He spread his arms, his palms facing forward. Look, I’ve come unarmed, that expression says in some cultures. Here, with us, it was meant above all to express innocence and helplessness: he would make no attempt to touch her, let alone embrace her.

  Laura snorted, it sounded like a sob. I glanced over at her, but saw that she was not crying. The look in her eyes was cold, perhaps even colder than the polar wind that blew fine-powder snow across the paving stones in front of the house.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  First she pointed at the house, then made a broader sweep with her arms, a gesture meant to take in the entire whitened landscape that surrounded us. Our landscape. The history teacher hadn’t looked at me even once.

  “I’m here…I’m here to say goodbye, Laura,” Mr. Landzaat said. “I’m here to say that it’s over for me too, now. That’s what I wanted to come and say to you. I won’t bother you anymore.”

  I looked at his face. He hadn’t been waiting for us in his car all this time, it seemed, he had been outside, standing by the gate. His cheeks, shaven for a change, were grayish. Under his eyes, or perhaps I should say under the dark-blue bags under his eyes, I could see a few burst blood vessels, purple and red. He tried to smile, but the cold probably clanged against his teeth—those long teeth that appeared for a moment between his lips, which were already a dark blue as well—because he closed his mouth right away.

  “I…” He pointed to the cream-colored Volkswagen Beetle—“I’m leaving again right away. I’m on my way to Paris. To see friends.”

  “Oh, really?” Laura said. The history teacher was hugging his upper body now with both arms, and rubbing those arms with his black-mittened hands. “I’ll only stay for a minute,” he said, and as he said that he glanced at the front door of the house. “I thought…maybe I could come inside to warm up. I just want to explain. So that we can part as normal…as grown-up individuals. If that’s okay with you, Laura.”

  Now, for the first time, he looked at me. I couldn’t see my own eyes, but I knew the look that was in them. You came here of your own free will, I looked. Now you’d better blow out of here right away, of your own free will.

  For your own good. I looked then, for good measure—but the history teacher had already taken his eyes off me.

  “Laura?” he said quietly. “Laura?”

  Laura stamped her boots in the snow.

  “For just a minute, then,” she said at last.

  And so we went inside. Landzaat took off his coat and mittens and warmed himself by the stove. In front of the stove was our bed—our unmade bed. His shoes were almost touching the mattress. I won’t bother you anymore, he’d told Laura—but here he was anyway. Our history teacher was inside. Inside of something that had at first been only for us.

  “There’s almost nothing left in the house,” Laura called from the kitchen. “We just went to do some shopping, but the only s
tore in the village was closed too. And if I make coffee now, we won’t have any tomorrow morning.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Mr. Landzaat called back. “A glass of water is all right.” He rubbed his hands together, cupped them and blew into them. “Wow, it’s so cold,” he said.

  Now, from the kitchen, I heard the rattling of bottles.

  “We’ve still got…,” I heard Laura say. “Wait a minute, what’s this? Eau-de-vie. There’s still a little left. You want that? A glass of eau-de-vie?”

  No, I said in my thoughts. Not eau-de-vie. But Laura couldn’t hear that.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say no to that!” Mr. Landzaat shouted. “I still have to drive, but one little glass couldn’t hurt.”

  Then he turned to look at me—and winked. He winked, and at the same time he bared those long teeth, all the way up to the purplish gums.

  I didn’t look at his face, only at his mouth and his teeth. If I had teeth like that I would keep my smiling to a minimum. In my imagination I saw Mr. Landzaat nibbling at a carrot. Then I imagined him holding an acorn between his fingers. Would he sink those teeth into the acorn right on the spot, or would he save it for the long winter?

  You have two kinds of teachers. The first kind behave like adults. They want to be addressed as “sir” or “ma’am,” they don’t put up with backtalk or stupid jokes in their classroom, if you can’t behave then you can stand out in the hall for an hour, or they’ll give you a note to take to the principal’s office. In everything, they emphasize the inequality between themselves and the pupil. The only thing they ask for is respect. And usually, they get it.