Dear Mr. M

by Herman Koch

  Sooner than I’d imagined, a tacit agreement had been made that I would accompany him—that I would at least show him the way.

  Laura had already turned away, her arms clutched around her middle. Lifting her feet up high above the snow at every step, she went back into the house without a word.

  “Or do you two know someone here in the village who might let us call a garage?” Mr. Landzaat asked.

  “We have to do some shopping anyway,” I told the teacher. “Our supplies are nearly gone. We might as well walk.”

  Move the action from winter to summer and you get a different story. It’s not like moving a church steeple—it’s more drastic than that.

  —

  Your wife is in the passenger seat beside me, giving directions (“At that little road up there, turn left”), your daughter is slouching in the backseat with her head against the door; in the mirror I can see her eyes fall shut now and then—a few more minutes and she’ll be asleep.

  For the sake of saying something, I comment on the landscape, on how vast it is, how big and empty—it’s almost as though I’m describing the landscape. Your wife says that’s what attracted you to this place most, it’s a place where you can literally clear your mind.

  Then we’re there. I park on the dike in front of the white house. And there the Subaru is too. A blue one. The door to the house is at the back. I help with the shopping bags. She wakes your daughter. I carry the bags down a paved pathway. I see the green drainpipe, the ivy, the little window to the toilet or shower, the house number ending in a 1.

  Now we’re inside. A living room with an open kitchen. Your daughter runs to the TV and turns it on. Your wife takes a few things out of one of the shopping bags and puts them in the refrigerator. Then she stops what she’s doing and looks at me.

  She could offer me something to drink, but I can tell from her expression that she doesn’t feel like it. Maybe she’s done enough already today, maybe she’s tired. What she wants most now is to be left alone.

  But I remain standing. Cartoon figures move across the TV screen, soundlessly for the moment. I take a step toward her, and almost immediately I see something shift in the look in her eyes. This is the downstairs neighbor, I read in her eyes, but how well do I know him, anyway? The house is isolated, from the road one can see or hear nothing of what’s happening inside. It’s sort of like accepting rides from strangers. The realization, too late, of how stupid you’ve been.

  I raise my hands slightly—something meant to resemble a reassuring gesture—but I’m aware that reassuring gestures, above all, can be interpreted in any number of ways. No doubt about it, the serial killer you’ve invited inside in good faith would start with a reassuring gesture.

  She has closed the door of the fridge and lowered the shopping bags to the floor. She is looking at me wide-eyed.

  I need to say something, or else I need to say goodbye and leave. But I stand there. I still don’t say a word.

  Then your daughter calls to your wife.

  “Mommy?” she calls out. “Mommy, are you coming to watch TV too?”

  That’s the way it goes, a writer’s life. He gets up, he showers, he dries himself off—just like the rest of us. But soon afterward, the first problem presents itself: breakfast. He’s on his own today, wife and daughter have gone to their country house, he doesn’t know how to use the coffee machine. Under duress—on the heels of a shipwreck, a nuclear catastrophe, an earthquake—he might be able to wrest it from his memory. A filter. Ground coffee. Boiling water. But today, the end of the world has not arrived. It’s Saturday and the sun is shining. Across the street from his home is a newly opened café with a patio. He closes the door behind him and takes the elevator down.

  The girl who finally comes outside ten minutes later (no, that’s not the way it went, he had to go in and get her!) clearly has no idea who she’s talking to. She mumbles something about milk that they don’t have. She can’t leave the café behind untended, that’s her excuse. “But I’m here, aren’t I?” he says. “I’ll hold down the fort for a few minutes.” But the girl shakes her head. “I can’t do that,” she says. She hasn’t been working here long. Only on Saturdays. She’s only a college student. So what are you studying? he could ask. Instead he stares irritatedly into space. He lays his hand on the flapping pages of the newspaper.

  It’s been happening more often lately, people who fail to recognize him. Young people especially. Entire generations who no longer read his books. He could grouse about how it’s all the school system’s fault. The high schools, after all, don’t even teach literature these days! But deep in his heart he knows that it has nothing to do with the educational system. It’s oblivion that beckons—a finger beckoning to him from a freshly dug grave. Nothing to get hysterical about. The promising talent, the breakthrough at middle age, and finally the forgetting. The forgetting that comes before the ultimate silence. He’s at peace with that. All experience is worthwhile, he tells himself.

  Turning the corner of his own street—he has abandoned the prospect of coffee, black coffee is one thing he can’t handle on an empty stomach—he sees a couple coming toward him. Not a young couple, somewhere in their late fifties he guesses. Their children have probably already flown the coop, they’re out for a walk together, the shared void of a Saturday morning—of an entire weekend! He sees it in their eyes right away: looking, looking away, looking again. As they pass him, they nudge each other. They laugh guiltily and greet him with a nod. He takes a little bow, yes, it’s me, it’s really me, then goes on his way.

  He passes the bookshop window. The poster with his face on it is still stuck to the glass. From 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., your book signed by…He looks at his face on the poster and then at his face reflected in the display window. Find the differences. The face on the poster is younger than the one in the window, true enough, but not blatantly younger. When he gives a reading at a library, he sees it in the expressions of the female librarians who welcome him. All along, they’ve been expecting him to be a pompous ass. A pompous ass who allows only flattering portraits of himself on the backs of his books. Digitally manipulated photos that remove all pimples and moles. It’s amazing, he sees the librarians thinking, in real life he looks almost exactly like the photo. Age becomes him.

  Not like N, he thinks. N who always has them change the lighting on his wrinkled face to make it look like a portrait by a Dutch master. A viceroy. A Roman emperor. A Greek idol. The writer portrayed here, those photos seem to shout, lives in the certainty that most women would still give an arm and a leg to have his almost-octogenarian body perform a low-flying mission over their own. And he’s probably right, M thinks. He glances one last time at both his faces in the display window, then walks on.

  There are writers his age who do things differently. They get caught up in their own rejuvenation. They prance about in cream-colored sneakers. All Stars! They wear flashy red jackets and buy sports cars. They drive the cars from library to library. They see to it that the sports car becomes part of their look, just like the jacket and the All Stars. I may be seventy-eight, but inside my head I’m younger than all of you put together, that’s what they try to communicate with their getup. “The important thing is to stay curious,” they tell the one hundred and twenty middle-aged women gathered around them beneath the harsh fluorescent lighting of the library. “That’s what keeps you young.” When the reading is over, the middle-aged women throng to the table where the author is signing his books. As they help the writer spell their names correctly (“It’s for me: Marianne with two n’s and an e at the end”), they are thinking about only one thing. Not about the stale odor that would probably waft up from the cream-colored All Stars, were this fantasy to pan out. All of them would gladly put up with that, as they would with the endless moaning and groaning and the way the eternally young writer’s tongue tastes of too much red wine. Red wine the morning after a party, a puddle left in a glass with a cigarette butt in it too. He uses that sa
me tongue to lick them all up and down, but it takes a god-awfully long time, it seems like it will never end. The next day they call all their girlfriends. “You’ll never guess who stayed over at my place last night…”

  Today M is fairly lucky. The library where he’s expected to turn up is within walking distance, in a neighborhood at the edge of his own town. The worst thing about giving a reading in Amsterdam is the audiences. The audiences here radiate a certain self-importance, to put it mildly. What they radiate above all is the fact that they could be attending so many other, perhaps even much more interesting performances, matinees, or concerts. Still, on this sunny Saturday, they are here, with you, in the library. They’re raring to go, but make no mistake about it: they’re not about to settle for the same old song and dance, not like those provincial bumpkins who, for lack of a richer cultural agenda, go gladly to see an older, visibly dwindling writer.

  At the door to the library he is welcomed by a woman who introduces herself as Anke or Anneke, or something like that. He didn’t really catch the name, or rather: his hearing picked up the vowels and consonants in a certain sequence and sent them on to his brain, but upon arrival they all fell apart, like some appliance or machine you’ve stripped down despite your better judgment—a toaster, the engine block of a moped—but then can’t put back together for the life of you.

  Anna (Agnes? Anneke? Anke?) extends a hand—it’s a dry hand; he glances down at his fingers to see whether there are flakes of eczema sticking to them.

  What is it with these lady librarians? he asks himself, not for the first time, as he follows her past endless rows of borrowed-to-tatters, dog-eared, and therefore totally unappetizing books. Why do they all wear their hair the same way? He has nothing against women with short hair. On the contrary. Short hair, even a crew cut, can look splendid on a woman. But this isn’t like that. This is easy hair, easy to keep up, like a front yard full of paving stones rather than a lawn.

  The library itself is one of those responsibly renovated buildings, everything dressed in a motley (low-threshold!) newness meant to seduce readers into doing their book-borrowing here; the same way the churches tried, not so very long ago, to draw in unbelievers with pop music during the services. In the olden days libraries were merely dusty, he thinks, introverted. Today they all do their best to look like airport departure halls.

  “Do you have any objection to signing during the intermission, and after the reading?” the librarian asks; they’ve stopped in a corridor hung with posters and bulletin board notices.

  How could he have any objections to that? That’s what he’s here for, isn’t it? Why do they always ask that?

  “And would you like to stand or sit?” she goes on. “We have a table and a rostrum, so you can choose. Do you use a microphone? What would you like to drink during the reading?”

  He looks again at the librarian’s easy hair. When you stop to think about it, it’s simply a slap in the face, walking around like that. There’s no need to have one’s hair cut in the ugliest possible fashion. But “have one’s hair cut” seems the wrong way to put it too. Far more likely that she wields the shears herself. That’s cheaper. What do I care how I look, they say to themselves and the outside world. Then they attack their hair with the scissors.

  Suddenly he feels exhausted. The rest of the afternoon stretches out before him like an empty plot of land without trees or buildings, a vacant lot beyond the reach of any zoning ordinance. The female librarian has asked him a number of questions, one after the other. He’s already forgotten the first and second ones. They usually ask these questions much earlier on. They call you three to five months in advance. He used to answer the questions himself. Microphone. Sit/stand. Drink. Sign. For the last few years, though, his wife has done that for him. They usually call in the evening. At an inconvenient moment. During the eight o’clock news. They have a keen nose for moments when you really shouldn’t be bothering people.

  These days he just stays on the couch in front of the TV and lets his wife answer the phone. He looks at the images of a bombed-out city, of a suburb retaken from rebel hands, he has the volume turned down low.

  “He’d rather stand,” he hears Ana say, “but a table is okay too.”

  “Of course, he’d be happy to sign.”

  “If the room’s not too big, there’s no need for a microphone.”

  “Just plain water. And during the intermission he likes to have a beer.”

  This last comment is perhaps the most important of all. The core of the reading, the pivot, or perhaps more like the tipping point. You can put up with anything as long as you’re allowed to slowly sink back into yourself after fifty minutes. The questions that come after the intermission he answers rather offhandedly. But the beer calls for a separate mention. Experience has made him wiser. They used to ask him during the pause whether he would prefer coffee or tea. Whenever he mentioned beer, they would raise their eyebrows. Then one of the lower-ranking librarians would be sent out on a scavenger hunt. Sometimes she would come back just before the intermission was over with one bottle that had, unfortunately, not been refrigerated. By the time they found a bottle opener, the reading was over.

  “No, it’s not that far, is it?” he hears Ana say. “He’ll walk from the station.”

  That’s right, they always ask that too. Whether he wants to be picked up at the station. No, he doesn’t want that. Nothing is worse than to have the blathering start long before the reading itself has even begun. No, that’s not true, there is one thing that is much worse than being picked up, and that’s when they insist on bringing you to the station after the reading. In a cramped car, the blanket covered in dog hair has to be tossed onto the backseat to make room for you. Normally, the passenger seat slides back further than that, but the handle broke off yesterday. There he sits, the bunch of flowers or bottle of wine in his lap, his knees jammed up against the dashboard. The engine turns over. “There’s one question still on my mind, something I didn’t dare to ask in there…” All the way home on the train, the odor of dog clings to his clothes.

  “Would you like some coffee? Shall I take your coat?”

  He doesn’t want any coffee, he prefers to hold on to his own coat.

  “How many people are you expecting, more or less?” he asks, for the sake of having something to ask. In order not to have to look at the librarian’s haircut, he pretends to examine a poster announcing a comedian who will come here soon to talk about “his profession.” The picture shows the comedian wearing a funny derby, a nutty pair of plastic spectacles, and a fake mustache glued to his upper lip. Anyone who lets themselves be portrayed like that on a poster should be taken out and shot, he thinks. Right here, the moment he gets to the library, or else at home, in his sleep—with a silencer, of course; it would be a pity to wake anyone up with the blast.

  “We have about twenty reservations,” the lady librarian says. “And there are usually about twenty more who show up. But, well, you never know. It’s such nice weather…”

  And what if it had rained? he thinks, trying to imagine how she must have looked as a young girl, long ago. Where did it go wrong? At which age did that face slam shut like a book no one felt like finishing? What would she have said if it had been raining—You never know, it’s raining out?

  “I need to use the restroom,” he says.

  She leads him to a space with a photocopier and a bookcase filled with loose-leaf binders. A coffee machine is sputtering in the corner. This is where the toilet is.

  He tries to fend off the thought that the librarians use this toilet too. Standing at the little sink he takes a few deep breaths and looks in the mirror. The final moments alone—the trick is to make these moments last as long as possible. Sometimes he fantasizes about not coming back at all, about how the librarians would glance at their watches with concern. “He’s been in there for fifteen minutes. I hope nothing’s happened to him? Could you go and sort of knock quietly, Anneke?”

 
It would be a nice addition to his obituary: found dead in the restroom of a library where he was about to read from his own work. And then? What else would the obituary say? He looks in the mirror, and suddenly he can’t help thinking about his mother. What if she could see him like this, he thinks. Would she be proud of him? He suspects she would. Mothers are not hard to please. They’re always proud, even of a writing career that’s nearing its expiration date. Thoughts arise in his mind about her troubled deathbed, her mouth trying to smile at him, trying to reassure him, go on back outside, go have fun with your friends, Mommy’s just a little tired. And with no clear transition, he thinks then about his young wife. About Ana. Instead of a youth full of discos and a new boyfriend every two weeks, she chose him. Sometimes he thinks he stole those boyfriends and discos from her, but that’s not true. She decided of her own free will to share her life with a writer, a writer who was aging rapidly, even then.

  He flushes the toilet for form’s sake, then steps outside.

  The reading begins. He sees about thirty people in the audience, most of them women, not one of them younger than fifty-seven, he guesses. Four or five men, tops. One man is sitting in the front row, he recognizes the type: they often have beards, they come to the reading wearing sandals or hiking boots. This one, for a change, has on a sleeveless khaki vest with a wealth of pockets, zippers and rivets, the kind photographers and cameramen wear; there are marking pens and ballpoints sticking out of a few of the pockets. His broad, hairy, and tanned arms are crossed at his chest, the chairs on both sides of him are unoccupied, and he has a pair of (reading?) glasses pushed up over his peaky, mussed-up hair. The hair of a troublemaker, M knows, a man in bad boy’s clothing who, like the bewhiskered ones in sandals, saves the impertinent questions for after the break. What do you actually think of your own work? What do you get paid, anyway, to come here and read a few bits from your book? Can you give us one good reason why we should read your books?