by Herman Koch
Further back, toward the middle of the room, he sees two other men. Colorless men. Men in sport jackets and striped shirts who apparently could think of nothing more pleasant to do on this Saturday afternoon than accompany their wives to a reading. Deep in his heart, he feels an almost nauseating contempt for men like these. He’s a man too. Would he ever attend a reading at a library—a reading by a writer like him? No, never. Not even if all other options had been exhausted.
Startled, he sees a familiar face in the audience: his publisher. He vaguely recalls a phone call from him about a week ago. “There are a couple of things I need to talk to you about,” his publisher had said. “Maybe I’ll pop by the library.” Were they planning to dump him? he’d wondered during the phone call. No, that wasn’t likely. His sales might be dwindling, but his name is still one everyone would be pleased to have in their stable. He could find another publisher at the drop of a hat. It seems more likely that they just want to discuss that interview Marie Claude Bruinzeel asked about, the one he’s succeeded in putting off till now. “Please!” M had said. “Don’t do that to me!”
All the way at the rear, in the backmost, almost empty row of chairs, is another man. A young man. Well, youngish…about thirty years younger than he is, that’s for sure. The man’s face looks familiar to him somehow, but he can’t quite place it. Might be a journalist, you always have to watch out for those. It wouldn’t be the first time that his own remarks, made in the familiar hominess of a library reading room, would end up twisted around completely in the pages of some free local paper, torn out of context and then drawn to his attention by his publisher’s publicity department. I never knew you felt this way about racism/the environmental movement/home birthing, someone—the publicity assistant on duty that day, or else his editor—would scribble at the bottom of the clipping. No, neither did he. More or less that way, but not exactly that way.
When he opens Liberation Year to the first page, he is struck by a mild dizziness. It’s a dilemma each time: the longer he reads, the less blather he has to listen to, both from the audience and from himself. Where did you come up with the idea for the book? Do you write in the morning, or in the afternoon? Do you use a computer, or do you write longhand? What do you think about the rise of right-wing radicalism in Europe? Does your wife read your books before they go to the publisher?
The answers, too, he knows almost by heart. He always remains polite. He smiles. He lets his gaze roam over the faces of his audience. Lately he has started fantasizing about a flatbed truck showing up about halfway through the reading and rounding them all up. Calm down everyone, stay calm, there’s nothing to worry about. It’s only a drill, you’re being evacuated for your own safety. Then the tailgate closes and the truck drives out of town. At a clearing in the woods, the audience has to climb down. Take it easy, people, don’t look back, just walk on quietly until you’re out of the woods. Only when they catch sight of the freshly dug pit do they realize what is about to happen.
“I write longhand,” he says. “I need to feel the words flow down my arm.” He hears himself talking, as though someone else were giving these answers. A spokesman or press officer. He starts reading. From the first sentence, he has the feeling that the text is not his own, that it was written by someone else. He has that feeling more often lately, but it usually overcomes him in his own study: he rereads the things he wrote months ago, and suddenly each word is new. In fact, he can’t remember ever writing this text. That’s one of the advantages of old age. The forgetting. Something old will sometimes look new the very next morning. But this is different. He reads the words about the resistance group, pinned down behind the railway embankment by an ambush, the description of the landscape, the sunrise, a duck quacking in the distance, and not only does it seem like the work of another writer, but like text from a writer he wishes he had nothing to do with. What a load of tripe, he thinks, there we go with that war again. The Dutch resistance, what a bunch of schmaltz.
At first he doesn’t notice that he has stopped reading. He looks at his hands, his fingers on the page of his own book. These fingers will probably never freeze off, not in the years still allotted to him, he thinks, but they will disappear. He looks at the faces in the audience. A few of them may already be walking around with some disease, but will only get the diagnosis next week. Only a couple of months left, ma’am…six months at most. He shakes his head.
“Could I ask how many of you have already read my book?” he asks, trying to win time. A few fingers are raised.
“I had hoped to read your book before coming here this afternoon,” a woman in the second row says. “But the library has it lent out all the time. I’m on the waiting list.”
He looks at her, no, not really, he looks at her face, at everything except her eyes. He has never understood why people would want to borrow a book. All right, maybe because they don’t have a lot of money, but there are so many things you might choose to deny yourself for lack of money. He himself finds it filthy, a borrowed book. Not as filthy as sleeping in a hotel where the sheets haven’t been changed and you’re forced to lie among the last guest’s hair and flakes of skin. A book with wine spots and a crushed insect between the pages, with the grains of sand from the last reader’s holiday falling out as you read.
“So why don’t you buy my book?” he asks; he tries to smile, but only succeeds halfway. He can’t see his own face—if it’s a smile, then it’s a fairly contemptuous one, he suspects.
“Excuse me?”
The woman is staring at him, startled. He hears someone chuckle, but otherwise the room is mostly silent.
“Are you that poor? Can’t you afford a book that costs less than twenty euros?”
He is still looking at her face, then at her hair—it has a wave to it and is obviously dyed: a color like that is biologically impossible at her age.
“I—” the woman starts in, but he beats her to it.
“How much did you have to pay the beautician who did your hair this morning?” he asks. “Four times the price of my book, I estimate. But still, you’d never cut corners on that beauty parlor. You would never want to be seen with a head full of gray ends just to save enough money to buy my book.”
Now the room is truly, completely still, no one is chuckling anymore.
He sees the librarian glance at her watch. What’s this? Then he realizes: it’s time for the intermission. During a reading, time fades away. Or no, it becomes something else, time does: outside, people are walking around in the sunshine, a van misses a motor scooter by a hair, a waitress’s hand takes a glass of wine from a tray and places it on the table of the sidewalk café. But here in the library, time has followed a different logic, like that of water seeking the shortest route to the sea—or to the drain, rather. It is, literally, lost time: time you’ll never get back again. An intermission has been imposed. A commercial break. “We’ll be right back with more stories and anecdotes from M, the writer. Don’t go away. Feel free to remain seated.” Most of those present don’t even need to be encouraged. Now they are being entertained; when this is over there gapes the chasm of a Saturday afternoon, the panicky fear of boredom.
“Would you like coffee or tea?” the librarian asks.
“Longhand, first. Then I type it all out on the machine.”
“Do you write in the morning or in the evening?”
“I start early in the morning. Nine o’clock. Not at ten to nine, and not at ten past nine. Nine o’clock on the dot. I don’t wait for inspiration. I made a pact once with my subconscious mind: If you prompt me with ideas, I’ll keep up my end of the bargain. I’ll make sure I’m at my desk every morning at nine. You can count on me.”
There is some muted snickering from the audience. They think it’s a good joke, but he’s serious. It may be the only thing about his writing practice that isn’t a joke, it occurs to him.
“Do people ever recognize themselves in one of your characters?”
“That happe
ns, yes. The opposite happens more often, though. That people whose face and body I’ve described most accurately don’t recognize themselves at all. There are simple tricks for that. Changing the person’s profession, for example. Or turning a man into a woman. The more precise you are in describing faces and personalities and objectionable traits, the less people realize that it’s about them. No one sees themselves the way others do. And then there’s something else: they simply don’t believe it’s possible. They can’t believe that you, the writer, would be ruthless enough to portray them in such a terrible way. Even if it’s a perfectly accurate portrayal. But there is no other choice. As a writer you have to approach the truth as closely as possible, even if there’s collateral damage. ‘Never marry a writer,’ my first wife’s mother once said. ‘Before you know it, you’ll find your whole life in some book.’ ”
Suddenly he falls silent. How did he arrive at this, for God’s sake? His first wife? Her mother turned out to be right. In The Hour of the Dog, he had painted a merciless portrait of her. After the divorce. A reprisal, pure and simple. And as recognizably as he could. She had left him. For someone else. For more than a year she’d had something going with Willem R, the eternally drunken painter. Willem R had visited their home, eaten dinner at their table, and he—the cuckold—had suspected nothing. He had labored under the mistaken impression that his first wife was not at all charmed by the painter’s drunken gibberish. He’d had no qualms about them going off on jaunts into town together, meeting up for lunches or dinners. R poured red wine down his gullet without really tasting it. He stank a little, there were spots on his shirts and holes in his black turtlenecks. At the table he used his napkin to dab at his forehead, his sweat smelled of wine too, it was simply unimaginable to him that his wife would even allow the painter to touch her with his fingertips, which were undoubtedly covered with an invisible layer of stale sweat too. That she—and here the imagination reeled and all M could do was groan quietly, his eyes clamped shut—would tolerate Willem R’s chapped, perennially purple lips on hers…
He wrote The Hour of the Dog in six weeks. In a fury, growling and writhing in his desk chair. When it was finished, his publisher tried to warn him. Only for form’s sake, he realized later—so much later that it was far too late already. No publisher could pass up a book like that one. The readers couldn’t either. The Hour of the Dog became his second bestseller, after Payback. Most critics thought it went too far, all that dirty laundry and overly intimate detail. An embarrassing display. And they were right. It started when he read aloud a passage from it on the Sunday afternoon culture program, and the interviewer let a brief silence fall when he was finished. He had almost snorted with pleasure as he’d read that excerpt, laughter had risen now and then from the studio audience, but now the silence was total.
“It’s almost as though you’d beat her to death if you ran into her tomorrow on the street,” the interviewer said. “Or am I mistaken?”
“Beat her to death?” he’d replied. “Beat her, no, of course not…”
Back at the house, he had started reading. Starting at page one. It hurt right away. Each sentence, each word caused him pain—in a deep, dark, and previously vacant spot between his heart and midriff. How could he ever have let it come to this? What had he been thinking, for Christ’s sake? What business did readers have knowing that his first wife had cheated on him with that smelly, shoddy painter, R? The details were the worst of it. Her physical imperfections, her bizarre habits, how she scratched at the mole above her lip when she lied to him about where she had been and with whom. The same mole he had called one of her “seven beauties” and which he had always made her vow never to have removed. Now he had shared that scratching at the mole with tens of thousands of readers. Just like her habit of wanting to show up everywhere—dinner dates, birthdays, train stations and airports—far too early, because she was afraid they would otherwise come too late or miss their train (or plane). Having arrived at the dinner address or birthday party, they were always forced to walk around the block a few times, at airports they spent hours nosing through the duty-free shops. He had always found that endearing too, but now he used it against her. In The Hour of the Dog he had blamed it on “her bourgeois fear of being caught red-handed,” and called her “a whore who feels guilty about her profession.”
He had tried to call her that same afternoon, after the broadcast, but the phone was answered by the painter, who announced that he must have a pretty good idea why she didn’t want to talk to him anymore. A few minutes after they hung up, the phone rang. He picked it up on the second ring, but it was a girl—a girl’s voice, asking whether he might consider doing an interview for her school paper.
Less than a year later, the drunken painter died. M felt no glee when he heard about it. Regret was what he felt, mostly. He never looked at The Hour of the Dog again, and when his publisher started talking about an inexpensive paperback edition he said he needed time to think about it. In the last few years he had seen his first wife a few times in the café of the artists’ club. She tended to sit on the glassed-in porch, and she always had a glass of white wine in her hand. One time he watched as she let her head sink down into the lap of an old poet. By then Ana was no youngster anymore, yet at such moments M still felt ashamed. Another time he had been very close, he had already slid back his chair and was about to walk up to her and apologize. But just at that moment his first wife, who was sitting at the bar beside an octogenarian concert pianist, tossed back her head and laughed loudly. The laugh was much too loud, dry, and without resonance—the laugh of someone who wants everyone to know that she’s doing fine. He sat back down again. For the first time he felt sincere compassion for her, and the next moment he was disgusted by that feeling all over again. Compassion. It was almost worse than the things he’d written about in The Hour of the Dog.
He looks up at the audience, but in fact he’s not looking at all; he lets his gaze wander over the faces in the group, afraid as he is to establish eye contact with any one person in particular.
A woman raises her finger.
Do you ever see your first wife anymore? Have you ever had the chance to explain to her why you did what you did?
“Do you have any advice for Dutch teachers who use your books in their classes?” is what the woman really asks.
He breathes a sigh of relief. When he smiles, he feels the skin on his lips stretch painfully.
“I remember quite well how that used to go at school,” he says. “We had a teacher of Dutch literature who would just start reading aloud from something. Outside the sun was shining, from the windows of our classroom you could see the ducks floating in the canal. The teacher read, and after that he talked about what was so special about that particular book. Why it was that the writer had created nothing less than a masterpiece. My Dutch teacher was what they call an ‘inspired teacher,’ he sincerely loved literature. He tried to communicate his enthusiasm to us. But the whole misunderstanding lay precisely in that enthusiasm, for how can you love literature and then decide to read it aloud in front of a classroom? That’s the last thing books are for, isn’t it? Or, to put it differently, those who love literature keep those books at home. They don’t take them along to a high school. And they certainly don’t read aloud from them. That misunderstanding continues, right up to this very day.”
“But then how are we supposed to do it?” the woman asks—she’s not so very old, in any case a few years younger than the average person present here today, he thinks. “How are we supposed to get young people to read?”
He sighs deeply.
“You yourself work in education, I suppose?”
“I teach Dutch at a secondary school.”
“I was afraid of that. In your question I detect that other major misunderstanding. Namely, that young people—or invalids, or vegetarians—should ‘have to read.’ That’s completely unnecessary. We shouldn’t want to force anyone to read, just as little as we should want
to force people to go to the movies, listen to music, have sex, or consume alcoholic beverages. Literature doesn’t belong in a secondary school. No, it belongs more on the list of things I just mentioned. The list that includes sex and drugs, all the things that give us pleasure without any external coercion. A required reading list? How dare we!”
Then, in the front row, the man in the sleeveless vest raises his hand.
“In Liberation Year, you wrote about a sympathetic Nazi and an evil Jew,” the man says. “Did you have a particular reason for that?”
“No,” he answers. “Except that sometimes I feel the need to show that stereotypes should be seen through. Not every Nazi is just a Nazi, and not everyone in hiding is automatically a good person.”
“You talk about stereotypes,” the man says. “But wasn’t it precisely the stereotypes about Jews that led to the Holocaust?”
“That’s true, I’m very aware of that. But in my book, the Jewish man in hiding is not a stereotype. He is a man of flesh and blood, with good and bad traits.”
“But as a writer you must know how careful you have to be about that. There are plenty of readers who will be all too pleased to read about an unsympathetic Jew. And that group of readers will only see their own prejudices confirmed in your portrayal of the Jew in hiding.”
“First of all, I never think in terms of groups of readers. And even if I wanted to, I could never help the prejudiced to rid themselves of their prejudices, to the extent that those people read my books at all.”
“But you did once write an extremely enthusiastic pamphlet about Fidel Castro. About Castro and Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution. And you have never distanced yourself from that. You even refused to sign a petition calling for the release of political prisoners in Cuba.”
He suddenly feels flushed. Here we go again! It’s become a bothersome habit, the way they remind him at every opportunity about his pamphlet on Cuba and Fidel Castro. He’s already addressed that sufficiently on more than one occasion, hasn’t he?