Dear Mr. M

by Herman Koch

  “I was enthusiastic about the revolution in Cuba,” he says. “In fact, I couldn’t understand those who weren’t enthusiastic about it. I visited the island, and I was struck by the aura of excitement there. It was almost electric. People had dislodged a cruel dictator with their own hands. The Cubans were visibly proud of that. Everywhere you went, you saw only happy, smiling faces and thumbs raised in victory.”

  “While a little further away the executions were taking place and the corpses were being bulldozed into mass graves,” the man said. “But I suppose you didn’t take a look over there?”

  “Those were mostly traitors and collaborators. Every revolution has its victims. But it was definitely not the pitiful or the good who were shot there.”

  “And who decides that, whether they were good or bad? Is it you? Or is it all those so-called revolutionaries?”

  If they only knew what he really thought, he thinks. Then he would have to pack his bags and run for it. That would be the end. He doubts whether the reading clubs full of bored housewives would still come to see him at the library after that. Sometimes he fantasizes about an ending like that, a final twist to his writing career: at the last moment, with one foot already in the grave, he would say what he really thought. Then he would jump into the coffin as quickly as possible and pull the lid shut behind him. In his books he let those thoughts shine through dimly at best, for those with ears to hear, for those who could read between the lines. That was what a writer’s freedom was all about, it was in fact perhaps the only freedom: to think things through to their logical conclusion, and then to ease up on the gas. What the reader finally encountered was never more than an echo of those logical conclusions.

  If he were to write down what he really thought, in its rawest and most unabridged form, it would all be over, just like that. The readers would turn their backs on him in disgust. Bookshops would refuse to sell his work. The rare critic would dedicate a final, concluding article to his oeuvre, the main gist of which would be that now everything “must be seen in a different light,” including his earlier, never-renounced love of Communist dictatorships. He would have to turn his Order of Merit back in. A statue, or even a plaque bolted to the wall beside the front door to his house (In this house, from…to…, lived and worked the writer M ), would be out of the question. A future biographer would (if Ana gave him permission—but she would, they’ve already talked about that a few times in a roundabout way) delve into his correspondence and have little trouble finding “the first signs of his later derailment.” In certain circles, though, his popularity would only increase. Circles in which no one, not even he, would want to be popular. Those circles would do all they could to co-opt the writer and his work, but that wouldn’t be too easy, the books were too unruly for that, and their author too elusive. The Netherlands would ask itself out loud whether it is allowable to be proud of an author like him, whether the author and his work should be seen separately. A “national discussion” would ensue, the kind of public brouhaha the Dutch all know and love. As always, the double-standard straightedge would be taken out of the drawer. The same double-standard straightedge a socialist mayor of Amsterdam applied years ago to bar from the city a writer who had visited apartheid South Africa, while the public advocates of leftist dictatorships and left-wing concentration camps, including himself, could simply go on living there.

  No, he thinks then, that’s not how it will go, not at all. He can say whatever he feels like. At most, people will laugh at him. No, not even at most, they will do nothing but laugh at him. Another war would have to come along before he could be relegated to a “right” or “wrong” camp. And it would also depend on who won that war as to whether he would be arrested, liquidated, or simply have his head shaved and be dragged around town atop a manure wagon. Or, in the event of a different winner: the statue, the Order of Merit, and the street named in his honor—the victors are the ones who get to choose between the manure wagon and the statue.

  His gaze sweeps the faces in the audience. At last, he looks at the man in the sleeveless vest. He could do it, he thinks, it’s possible. An experiment. A corner of the veil. He could acquaint them with a glimpse of his real opinions. Maybe it would make Monday’s papers, maybe not. Maybe Marie Claude Bruinzeel would cancel their interview. Or maybe she would be even more eager to talk to him. He clears his throat, coughs into his fist. An experiment.

  “Let me tell you something about good and evil,” he says. “Or better yet, about right and wrong.”

  Barely fifteen minutes later—the librarian has glanced at her watch a few times by then—it is suddenly over. That’s how it goes, there is a time to come and a time to go. What really gets the librarians’ goats are the writers who don’t know when to stop. The writers who would like to hear themselves talk all day. Colleague S is notorious on the circuit. He has no qualms about going on for an hour longer than agreed (“I see another question there at the back…”) and when it’s over they almost have to drag him to his little red sports car in the parking lot.

  Around noon, librarians are eager to escape. Especially on a Saturday or Sunday. They still need to swing by the supermarket, or they have a sick nephew coming over for the weekend—which means they like to stick to the schedule. Organizations that hire you in for a Friday or Saturday evening are a different story, though. There they start off by asking whether you’d like to join them for a bite to eat beforehand, and, if so, if you could arrive no later than two and a half hours before the reading. And afterward they assume you’ll join them in one for the road at the most authentic pub in the village. They tell you stories about your colleagues. Colleagues who helped close down the pub. “Colleague N hung around here till three in the morning.” “It took four of us to drag colleague C up to his hotel room.” “Colleague D fell asleep in the backseat of my car, we just let him lie there.” You know you will only disappoint these people if you head home before midnight. “Colleague P is a real party animal, he got up on this same table and started dancing.” You feel obligated to do something. Something, it doesn’t matter what. Something that will allow the organizers to describe their evening with you as unforgettable too, or at least link it to some juicy anecdote. “He passed out right here, facedown in a bunch of flowers, then he went out on the village square in the pouring rain, stripped, and sang ‘The Internationale.’ ”

  “I need to catch the last train,” he always tells them. “I have to get up early tomorrow, I need to get on with my book.” He sees the disappointment on their faces right away.

  But all he ever wants to do is go home. He’s boring—that’s how they’ll remember him later too. In the car on the way to the station he remains silent, not out of unwillingness, no, the words have simply dried up, he’s said enough for one day.

  The lady librarian has come up and is standing beside him, not too close—she probably finds men scary and dirty. She thanks the writer, she thanks the audience, then she hands him the bouquet of flowers. Applause. He steps down from the podium, sits down at the table with books, and screws the cap off his fountain pen. A little line forms. He can’t make out the first name, the librarian asks if he’d like something to drink, music is suddenly coming from a loudspeaker somewhere. Lame music, with neither head nor tail. When he asks for a beer, the librarian looks worried. A woman places her book on the table in front of him, open to the title page, and hands him a slip of paper with text on it, written in blue ballpoint.

  “Would you write that in it, and then under that your name and ‘have fun reading’ and ‘Amsterdam’ with the date above that?”

  For Els, because you were there for me when the others had already given up, a big kiss from your Thea.

  “Why, of course,” he says.

  The line grows shorter. One last dedication—for Maarten, for your 60th birthday—and it’s over. Beside the door, through which sunlight is streaming, stands his publisher, talking to the lady librarian. M recognizes the pose—the publisher has
his elbow cupped in one hand, with the other hand he supports his chin, the index finger pressing against his cheek. Interested. A listener.

  M is just about to get up when a shadow falls across the table. Standing there is the “young man” from the back row. Once again his face seems familiar to M. His first instinct is to glance at the man’s hands. They usually wait till the very end, till everyone’s gone, the aspiring writers who try to leave him with a copy of their unpublished manuscript. Hundreds of typed pages, often without paragraph breaks, printed in a font that is too small and frequently with even smaller spaces between the lines—all in a wrinkled, dog-eared envelope or bound together with a big rubber band.

  Long ago, he sometimes took those packages home with him and read the first few sentences. Then came the staring at pages packed too full with letters, as though the sentences and characters were fighting for space on the page, as though they were about to be crushed, like people in a heaving crowd on a city square.

  But the man’s hands are empty. M braces himself for a question, a question the man didn’t dare to ask with everyone else around. How one goes about writing a book. How to get started.

  M takes a copy of Liberation Year from the slightly diminished pile (eight copies sold today, he estimates, and then you had the man with a bulging plastic bag from which he produced M’s entire oeuvre, and not only the books he’d written in their entirety in the course of a long writer’s life, but also all the collections, anthologies, and yellowed literary journals to which he’d ever contributed, “if you’d just jot your name down here, and here…,” the man said). He opened it to the title page.

  But this man has still said nothing, asked nothing. He leans across the table of unsold books and looks around a few times, as though making sure no one can hear him.

  “Yes?” M says—looking him straight in the eye. He adopts an interested expression. “What can I do for you?”

  Fifteen minutes later he is sitting with his publisher in a dark and empty old-fashioned pub around the corner from the library. His publisher raises his glass to his lips and nibbles at the foam. M himself has almost finished his first beer.

  “About that interview,” his publisher says. “With Marie Claude Bruinzeel.”

  M sighs. He knows Marie Claude Bruinzeel’s reputation. First she’ll try to lull him to sleep during an ample meal with beer and wine. She will praise his work, as well as his attractive appearance—his pronouncedly masculine features that have become only more irresistible with the passing of time. Then, without warning, she will zoom in on his mother. On “the lack,” on the absence of a mother during his formative years, the years that formed him as a writer. “Do you still think about her often?” Marie Claude Bruinzeel will ask as she orders another bottle of Pouilly-Fumé. Every day, he replies—he should reply, but he doesn’t. He shrugs. “Oh, well, you know…,” he says. Then she moves right on to the childhood photos. From her bag she produces a photograph of him as a boy, sitting on his mother’s lap. “She was a beautiful woman,” Marie Claude says. “You take after her. Did her physical beauty influence you later on, when it came time to choose your own women?” She mentions the names of a few vague relatives whose addresses and phone numbers she had wheedled out of him on a previous occasion. “Your cousin, V, told me that you’ve never been the same after your mother’s death. That you steeled yourself. That your aloofness these days can be traced back to that dramatic event.”

  He tries not to think about the final days, but he can’t help it. The closed curtains, the doctor’s footsteps in the hall, the consoling hand on his cheek. Your mother, it’s over, boy. That sentence. That word. “Over.” A sentence he would carry with him for the rest of his life, he knew that even back then. And then the leave-taking in the bedroom. He had never known that the dead could lie so still. Truly still, not the way a person or an animal sleeps, no, as still as a vase on a table—an empty vase, without flowers. His mother, that which had been his mother until a few hours ago, was already somewhere else, in any case not here. He had heard somewhere that the human body becomes twenty-one grams lighter at death. The faithful attributed the difference to the departure of the soul. But he was not religious, or at least he did not believe in souls that could be weighed on a set of scales.

  He was alone with her for a few minutes, with what was left of her, while in the hallway his father spoke to the doctor in a muted voice. He promised her something, he promised it in a whisper.

  I’ll always carry you with me, he whispered. From now on, you’re here. And he raised his finger to his head and tapped it softly—it is a promise he has always kept.

  Now he thinks about his cousin V. What’s he been doing, shooting his mouth off about aloofness to some journalist he doesn’t know from a bar of soap? Cousin V, with whom he used to play in the sandbox at his parents’ home. After his mother died, his father sold the house and they moved to an apartment in Amsterdam. In one of his books—he doesn’t remember which one—he spoke of the house with the sandbox as “the last house in which I was ever happy.”

  “I’m afraid that an interview with Marie Claude Bruinzeel is not on,” he tells his publisher. “I’ve started on something new, I’m in the middle of it, more chattering about the last one will only disturb my rhythm.”

  His publisher sighs, it’s probably the same sigh he breathes with all his authors when they’re “being impossible.” He’s referred to it before as “the spoiled artist routine,” but then he was talking about a colleague who refused to let his wife appear in “Partner Of.”

  “Working on something new? Already? What’s the hurry?”

  M reads his publisher’s expression: the raised eyebrows, the almost shocked, in any case not happy look in his eyes, the mouth forming a botched smile, the jaws clamped together just a little too tightly.

  “Is that so strange?” he asks. “I just happen to feel better when I’m working on something. Especially in a period when a new book comes out and everyone suddenly has something to say about it.”

  “Sure, sure, whatever works for you. It’s just that I think it would be a pity if Liberation Year were to disappear from the public eye too quickly. Anyway, Marie Claude Bruinzeel is thinking more in terms of a portrait of your entire career. A seven-page spread in the magazine. Lots of pictures.”

  At the mention of pictures, he groans inside. He knows them all too well, the photographers who insist on coming up with “something special” at the expense of his old face and dwindling old body. Photographers with truly original ideas about how that special something should be given form can be counted on the fingers of one hand, that’s his experience. “I was thinking about taking you to a slaughterhouse,” they tell him on the phone. “Or else photographing you in a sauna, with only a towel around your waist.” There are photographers with lamps and umbrellas, photographers who take fifteen Polaroid pictures before getting down to the real stuff, photographers who claim that “two and a half, maybe three hours should be plenty.” When he invites them to his home they poke around in all the rooms, then stand there shaking their head for a long time, and finally, like every photographer he has ever invited to his home, take a picture of him in front of his bookcase. The occasional joker asks him to lie down on his bed. Another requests that he take off his striped shirt and replace it with a white one, only to start biting his lower lip half an hour later and breathe a big sigh. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to try it one more time with the striped shirt.” After that the photographers go out onto the balcony and stay there, sunk in thought, for a long time, or slide a table over to the window. “I don’t know what’s with me today,” they sigh, shaking their head again.

  “I’ll think about it,” he tells his publisher.

  “Okay, but not too long. They have a deadline. We have to jump on it by Monday at the latest, otherwise they’ll ask someone else.”

  M opens the front door of his apartment house and takes the elevator up. As he passes the third floor
, he can’t suppress a smile.

  “Who was that you were talking to, there at the end,” his publisher had asked in the café.

  “Oh, just some fellow,” M replied. “Just someone who wanted to know how you get to be a writer. You know the type.”

  When he gets out on the fourth floor, he is still smiling. He thinks about what he needs to do. He could call Ana, no, he must call Ana, but he can do that later too, he thinks, tonight or tomorrow morning.

  Once he’s inside he walks straight through to the kitchen, takes a beer from the fridge, opens it, and raises it to his lips. In the living room he puts on some music—the CD he often listens to when he’s home alone. He thinks back on the final part of the reading, the moment when the man in the multifunctional vest stood up and stomped out of the room.

  “I’m not going to listen to any more of this!” the man had shouted.

  M tries to recall exactly what it was that prompted that—he seems to have pretty much forgotten it already. It started with Cuba. M felt no desire to admit being wrong about Cuba. He still found it all a bit too smug, all these people who suddenly turn out, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, to have predicted long ago that there could never be any future in Communism.

  “Do you know the great thing about revolutions?” he’d asked the man in the vest. “The essence? The essence is that first everything has to be torn down in order to actually start all over again. Right down to the ground. Barricades, burning cars and buildings, a statue roped and pulled from its pedestal. It is, to start with, a celebration. The laughing faces, the bearded revolutionaries atop a captured personnel carrier, the thumbs raised, the fingers making the victory sign. ‘If it can happen without bloodshed, why not?’ you might say. There are examples of revolutions in which no one was killed. Nonviolent resistance, peaceful revolutions, soldiers with a rose stuck in the barrel of their rifle, cheering women with carnations in their hair. But there is also something unjust about nonviolence. The soldiers who put down their guns, who refuse to shoot at the crowd, are we really supposed to accept them all with open arms? Can there really be forgiveness for the secret-police informers, the collaborators, the dictator’s sweethearts who fed human flesh to his crocodiles? Or should they all be finished off as quickly as possible, without trial? Their guilt, after all, has already been established. No lengthy legal proceedings are needed, are they? A revolution is a blackboard wiped clean with a wet sponge. Cleaned completely. But the teacher is still standing at the blackboard. Are we supposed to give him a second chance? Should he be allowed to once again cover the blackboard with his explanation of how things work? Or is it our blackboard now?”