Dear Mr. M

by Herman Koch

  “So I was just thinking,” he said quickly, sliding his cake back toward him. “The last time in Zeeland. In fact, we didn’t do anything then. I mean, not really anything. We made those drawings for Lodewijk’s sick mother, of course, but when we were all doing that together it occurred to me: This is fun, isn’t it, making something together like this? Voluntarily? Doing it for Lodewijk’s mother, after all, was really sort of volunteer work, right?”

  Laura was only half paying attention, she wondered whether maybe she should try something else with her hair, but decided to listen anyway.

  “But Lodewijk’s mother is dead now,” she said.

  “Exactly. That’s what I mean. There’s nothing we have to do. But that’s no reason for us to do nothing. Maybe, in fact, it’s the only real reason to do something.” He pushed the cake away again, to the edge of the table, and then halfway over it, until it was just teetering on the edge. “My idea was this: We don’t take anything along with us to Zeeland. Nothing that isn’t our own. No music, no magazines or newspapers, no books, only our own things. Michael’s saxophone, Ron’s guitar, Lodewijk’s bongo drums if need be, and I’ll bring my movie camera. I bought this really simple camera about six months ago. Eight millimeter, made in East Germany. It doesn’t even have a battery. You have to wind it up. Anyway, here’s the idea: we don’t read anything, we don’t listen to anything, there’s no TV in the house anyway, so that’s easy. We don’t let ourselves be influenced by the outside world. We go shopping and buy enough for three days. And then we see what happens. What happens inside your head when you’re not allowed to do anything. No, wait a minute, I’m putting that wrong: we’re allowed to do anything, we’re just not allowed to fall back on things from outside. People get bored and pick up a book, but isn’t it a lot more interesting to see what happens with you when you don’t pick up a book? Oh yeah, and Lodewijk has a tape recorder. We’ll take that along too. We can record things if we feel like it. Music, conversations, stories. I think it will be great. An experiment. Maybe it will bomb and we won’t do anything at all. But even then you can’t really say that it failed. Then the conclusion of the experiment is simply that, apparently, we don’t do anything.”

  Herman brought his finger down hard on the edge of the glacé cake, which shot up high and flipped a few times, but before it could fall he plucked it out of the air.

  “Oh!” Laura said.

  “That’s a trick,” Herman said with a grin. “You can learn a trick if you practice long enough. But creating something new, you can’t learn that, you only find out about it by doing it.”

  He took the cake between his fingers and squeezed it until it was completely flat inside the packaging. “Sorry,” he said, “I don’t mean to sound like someone who knows how it all works. Like a teacher.” He looked straight at her as he spoke those final words, and now it was a struggle for Laura not to blush. “So what do you think? David thought it was a good idea. Back before he fell in love.”

  “So what are you going to film?” Laura asked.

  “What?”

  “What you’re going to film. I didn’t even know you had a camera. I guess you’ve already filmed some stuff.”

  “Oh, lots of things. With David. For instance, I went over to the flower stand—there’s a flower stand across the street from my house—and David filmed me from the window. We live on the third floor—and I waited until a couple customers came along and I fell onto the ground in between all those people. It was really great, I’ll show it to you sometime. Those people don’t see the camera, and I act like I’m in a bad way, I have a seizure, a sort of epileptic fit, and then they help me to my feet and I just walk away. You see the people and the man who runs the flower stand talking to each other, like: ‘What was that all about?’ Fantastic!”

  Laura tried to picture it, Herman having fits in front of a flower stand. She looked at his twinkling eyes and laughing face and she couldn’t help herself, she started laughing too.

  “Oh Jesus!” she said. “You mean you just went and did that?!”

  “We did it one time with Miss Posthuma too. During study hall. David went up to her desk, supposedly to ask something. And I sat all the way at the back with the camera. She had no idea at all that she was being filmed. So David acts like he’s going to ask her something, and she looks up at him, and then David slowly sinks to the ground and starts flapping his arms and legs around, having a spaz attack. Oh, it’s so…I keep the camera on David for just a few seconds, then I zoom in on Posthuma’s face. Priceless! That lady is so clueless! No, she’s not even really clueless, it’s something else. It’s the face of someone who has never experienced anything in her whole life, and now all of a sudden she has. And we got that on film. For posterity.”

  “Oh, you guys are terrible!” Laura laughed. “It’s pathetic!”

  “You’re right. It is pathetic. But not because of what we did. It was already pathetic, even without us. What time is it anyway?”

  “What?”

  “Next period we’ve got that physics exam, right? Did you work on it?”

  Laura felt her face grow hot, while her stomach seemed to fall a few yards, like in a Ferris wheel going down. “Is that today? I thought it was after the fall break!”

  Herman looked at her, then put down the glacé cake and laid his hand on hers. “Don’t sweat it. You can call in sick, right? Then just make it up after the vacation.”

  “Karstens isn’t going to believe that. I rode into the bike shed this morning at the same time he did. He even said good morning.”

  “You could suddenly get sick. Even deathly ill.” He grinned, took his hand off hers, and held up the package with the cake in it. “From eating a glacé cake that was long past its expiration date, for instance?”

  Laura tried to laugh, but only half succeeded.

  “Oh, I’m such an idiot!” she said. “I wrote down the wrong date in my diary. And it’s not the first time.” She looked at her watch. “Five more minutes…What are you doing, Herman?”

  Herman had pulled the plastic wrapper off his cake and was holding it in front of her face. “Take a couple of bites. Then stick your finger down your throat. Throw it all up. Here, on the table. Then I’ll help you down to the concierge’s office, to report that you’re sick. I promise.”

  Laura stared at him. He smiled at her, but it was no joke, she could tell by the look on his face, he really meant it.

  “But…” But I’m too chicken to do that, she almost said, but that suddenly seemed like a bad idea. “What about you?” she said instead. “Then you’ll be too late for the exam too.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Herman said. “I didn’t study for it either.” He leaned over, picked up his backpack, and put it on the table. “On purpose,” he went on. “I wrote down the right date. But then I thought: of all my exams, this may be the best one not to study for.”

  “Oh?” Laura’s expression invited further explanation, or at least tried to, but at that moment she was more concerned about the test and what she was going to do. Karstens, the physics teacher, was a little man; in the bike shed this morning he had remained seated on his bike for as long as possible, he never got off until he thought no one was looking, then he heel-toed it to the classroom, where he hoisted himself up onto his high stool and never came down again. “Leprechaun Karstens” was what the kids called him, but from that stool he exercised a real reign of terror. He laughed openly at the girls for their scant aptitude for the exact sciences, he humiliated them in front of the whole class in order to boost his popularity with the boys. There was no way in hell she could tell Leprechaun Karstens the truth: that she had written the exam down wrong in her diary, and whether she could please make it up at a later date. She could already see his beady little eyes, like those of a squirrel, or more like those of a magpie or crow, an animal that seems to be listening carefully to you but then suddenly pecks you right in the face. That wasn’t very smart of you, young lady…She cou
ld already hear him say it, then he would address the whole class. Miss Laura here has failed to study for her exam. Are there any other candidates who would prefer to move right along to the school of domestic sciences? She had heard that Mr. Karstens had children. Unthinkable, that a woman could tolerate this sneaky little man beside her in bed without vomiting.

  “What is it?” Herman asked. “What are you laughing about?”

  “No, I was just thinking: if I think about Leprechaun Karstens long enough, I might not even have to eat that cake.”

  That made Herman laugh too.

  “Sure, why work yourself into a lather for a reject like that?” he said. “That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. I’ve had it. I can’t force myself to do it anymore. I have to get out of here. Having mediocrity poured all over you, hour after hour, it’s bad for your mental health. It’s a physical thing with me too. I start itching all over, I break out in a sweat, I start stinking. A classroom, it’s a sickness, bacteria everywhere, and the source of the infection is up at the front of the class.”

  In Herman’s face Laura saw something she’d never seen before, something grave, the ironic tone he tended to adopt had almost disappeared.

  “But you could leave, right?” she said. “Go to another school, I mean?”

  “I wouldn’t do them the favor. No, they’re going to have to send me away. They’ll have to say it right to my face. ‘We hate you, Herman. We’d be glad to get rid of you.’ But of course they don’t dare to do that, it would mean they’ve failed as a school.”

  “But how can you do that, make them send you away?”

  “You can always do something. I can do something. It’s a sickness, that’s the way you have to look at it. You finish your finals, but by then you’re already contaminated; you graduate, and you’re terminally ill. There are a couple of possibilities. You can blow up the school building, but that wouldn’t help; they’d just rebuild it, here at the same spot or somewhere else. You can also combat the source of the infection. Smoke out the whole mess. With whatever it takes. In a sick body they do it with penicillin, with radiation, or chemicals. First you have to draw up a diagnosis. Maybe it’s going to take insecticide or agricultural pesticides, maybe it requires sterner measures. And even then, the question is whether doing that would solve anything. It’s like being attacked by an army: you can mow them down by the hundreds, but they keep coming. The teaching colleges churn out thousands of new ones each year. But hey, I’m not the one who’s going to take those measures; first of all, I’m no doctor or healer, but what’s more, I’m not going to risk my own future. Under the present legal system, the healers are the ones who go to prison for years, maybe even for the rest of their lives. I don’t want to do them the favor.”

  He rummaged around in his bag and pulled something out. A movie camera, Laura saw. A little, flat model without a handgrip. Herman began turning a crank on the side of it, and Laura remembered him talking about the windup mechanism.

  “There’s only one thing I ask of you in return,” he said. “I’ll help you with the hall monitor later on and everything. And I’ll tell Karstens that you went home because you were deathly ill. In exchange, I’m asking you for permission to film you as you vomit all over the table. I promise that I won’t do anything with it without asking you first, Laura. You’ll be the first one to see how it turns out. Slap a nice sound track under it, you’ll be amazed.”

  She didn’t quite know what to say, how to react.

  “The cap,” she said at last, pointing at the lens of the camera that Herman now had pressed against his left eye. “You forgot to take off the lens cap.”

  —

  At this hour of the day, just before lunch ended, there were usually crowds of students hurrying to their classes, but now the main hall was uncommonly still. The hall monitor was not in his glass booth. Laura glanced at her watch, then at the big clock above the entrance.

  “It’s only three minutes before,” she said. “Where is—?”

  “Look, there,” Herman said.

  He pointed to the corridor to the right of the stairs, where a group of students and a couple of teachers had gathered.

  “Karstens,” someone said, when Herman and Laura began edging through toward the physics lab. “Probably fainted,” someone else said.

  The classroom door was open. In front of the board, which was covered in equations, was the table and the teacher’s high stool. Of Leprechaun Karstens himself you could see only his legs sticking out from under the table, his legs and a pair of buffed black shoes; one trouser leg had crept up a little to reveal a brown sock and a stretch of pale, hairless shin. The rest of his body was blocked from sight by two men squatting beside the table. “Hello, hello!” they heard one of the men say, and recognized the voice of Joop, the hall monitor. “Are you awake, sir? Can you hear me? Help is on the way. Hello, sir, are you still there?”

  She looked over and, because Herman was nowhere in sight, turned all the way around.

  There he was, his back pressed up against the wall on the other side of the corridor, the movie camera held up to his left eye and aimed at the door of the physics lab.

  “Well there you have it, Laura,” he said when she came over to him. “If you had studied for that exam, it would all have been for naught.”

  In the distance she heard an ambulance howl.

  They left the house in midafternoon.

  “We start as soon as we get past the gate,” Herman said. They were standing in the kitchen waiting for Miriam, who was still on the toilet. “After that, not another word. We walk to the Zwin and back. Only when we’re back inside are we allowed to talk again.”

  On the long, straight road from Terhofstede to Retranchement they were all still a little gigglish, but once past the last houses of the village their expressions grew serious. Lodewijk walked alone out in front, followed by Michael and Ron, and at a little distance by Stella, Herman, and Laura. David and Miriam walked a ways behind the rest, their arms around each other’s waist.

  At first Laura hadn’t been sure what to think of the whole idea—a typical boy idea, she thought, perhaps even a typical Herman idea—but as she climbed the steps up the dike and down the other side into the Zwin, she had to admit to herself that it worked, that something was happening, at least in her. In the distance you could hear the waves break on the beach, a gull dove with a shriek; and then there was the wind, rustling through the bushes and thistles. It was indeed as though, after holding your hands over your ears for a long time, you could suddenly hear again, really hear, each separate sound. Somewhere back on the other side of the dike a church bell tolled and she counted the strokes—four. After the fourth stroke the silence was overtaken again by the waves, still too far from them to see at this point, and she felt flooded by…a feeling of happiness, she thought at first, but that wasn’t it; it was located somewhere lower down, more like in the pit of her stomach. She looked around, wondering whether the others felt the same thing, or at least something similar, but at that point there was no one else close by, no one to look at her and see the joyful—no, that wasn’t it, it was something else for sure—expression on her face. Lodewijk had just disappeared behind a stretch of dune, Michael and Ron were too far away, and David and Miriam were still at the top of the steps across the dike—kissing, Laura saw, and she looked away quickly. Only Herman and Stella were close enough, but Stella was peering into the distance, her arms crossed, and Herman had pulled out his movie camera and was panning slowly, in a full circle.

  The night before, Herman had asked everyone to stay in the top-floor bedrooms for fifteen minutes, until he called them to come down. When they came down, they saw that he had tacked a white sheet to the wall in the living room, and arranged all the available chairs in two rows. “A night at the movies!” he shouted, twisting the knobs of a projector he had set up atop a stepladder. “At home I always play some music in the background, but now you’ll just have to imagine that part.”


  When Ron asked how Herman had smuggled the projector all the way to Terhofstede, Stella said, “He had it in his duffel bag. I wasn’t allowed to say anything. It had to be a complete surprise for everyone.”

  The first movie was the one that showed Herman falling to the ground in front of the flower stand; there was something undeniably comic about it, and they all laughed. Unintentionally comic, to a certain extent, Laura thought: when Herman fell to the pavement in front of the flower vendor and his two customers, then went into a feigned spasm—waving his arms and pedaling in a half circle with his feet against the paving stones—you could see even more clearly how skinny he was; the jeans and short-sleeved T-shirt he wore made his bare arms look like pure skin and bones. As he spun around, the T-shirt crept up and revealed the pale, slightly hairy stomach that Laura had seen the night of David’s party. She couldn’t help but think of spaghetti, spaghetti that stood rigid and upright in the pan at first, before sinking slowly into the boiling water.

  “Look,” Herman said. “Check this out.”

  The flower salesman was watching Herman flounder about from a safe distance, as though unsure how to react to the situation. But the two customers—a middle-aged woman and a girl, a mother and daughter probably—reacted as though he were some poor misfortunate who had taken a nasty fall. The older woman leaned down and touched Herman’s shoulder, upon which he jumped to his feet, shook the woman’s hand, and then calmly walked away from the flower stand. “Watch this,” Herman said. “This is good.” The women turned and consulted with the flower vendor, who took a few steps forward and watched as Herman exited, bottom screen left. “Look, David got this just right,” he said. “He doesn’t follow me with the camera, he keeps it on the people who stayed behind. We didn’t agree on that beforehand. It’s brilliant.”