Herman Koch - Dear Mr. M

“Laura, I realize that I…carried on,” Mr. Landzaat said. “That’s why I’m here to apologize. I lost my way for a while there. My senses. I…I couldn’t think about anything else. But now that you’ve forgiven me, can’t we just be friends? I would really like that. Maybe we should let it go for a while, but after that…I mean, after Christmas we’ll be seeing each other in the classroom a couple of times a week. At school. We’ll see each other in the hallway, on the stairs. It’s not like nothing happened, Laura. You can’t just wipe it out. I’m very fond of you, and that’s something I can’t just wipe out. It would be weird for us to act as though nothing had happened.”

There was a sentence bouncing around in my head. A line from a movie. Maybe you didn’t hear correctly, buddy. Maybe you didn’t hear what the lady said. Then the script would have me stand up as a sign that the conversation was over. It was high time he started the car and drove on to Paris.

But I didn’t say anything. I was sure now that it was better not to say a thing. As we’d come down that last stretch of road into Retranchement, I’d whispered to her a few times that there was nothing to worry about. That I would protect her. But Laura didn’t need protecting. She did it all by herself. Landzaat was flat on his back. He was flat on his back the way a dog lies on its back to expose its soft spot, as a sign of surrender to a stronger opponent.

I have to admit that then, for the first time, I entertained the idea that a person like Mr. Landzaat might not deserve to live. That he was not, so to speak, worthy of living. Back in the olden days, when the gladiators fought and the loser had behaved in a cowardly fashion, the crowd would give the thumbs-down. I gave the thumbs-down to him right then.

Finish him off, Laura, I thought. Once and for all. That’s what he came for.

“I think it would be better if you left,” Laura said quietly. “I really don’t feel like this at all.”

Mr. Landzaat picked up his empty glass, raised it to his mouth, and put it back down. He glanced at the bottle, then looked at Laura.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’ll leave. Maybe I shouldn’t have come.”

But he didn’t get up.

“I…,” he started. Now he picked up the bottle and screwed the top off. “Anyone else?” he asked. Laura shrugged, I didn’t do anything. After he had topped up our drinks, he filled his own glass — almost halfway to the top.

I looked out the window. It was now almost completely dark. In the light of the only streetlight along this stretch of road you could see the snow swirling down in flurries that grew heavier all the time. I thought about the advice parents and other grown-ups would give. Better not to drive in weather like this, especially not when you’ve knocked back a few glasses of eau-de-vie. But we weren’t grown-ups. Mr. Landzaat was the only one here who had passed the age of consent, long ago. He didn’t need anyone else to tell him what was good for him.

For us — for Laura, and certainly for me — the best thing would definitely be if, at a considerable distance from this house, he were to slip off the road and smash into a tree or an embankment.

“If you plan to get to Paris, Mr. Landzaat…,” I said.

“Jan,” he said, “please, call me Jan.” When he looked at me I saw that the eau-de-vie had reached his eyes now — something about the whites of them, something watery that reflected the light from the little candles.

“It’s getting dark,” I said. “If you want to get to Paris tonight, it’s about time you left.”

Mr. Landzaat sighed deeply and took his eyes off me. “Are you happy, Laura?” he asked. “Tell me that you’re happy with…with him . If you don’t dare to say it with him around, I’ll take you along with me to Paris. But if you tell me that you’re really, truly happy, then I’ll be out of here in ten seconds. But I need you to look at me, Laura. Please. That’s the only…the last thing I’ll ask of you.”

“Go away,” Laura said. “Get out of here, you idiot.”

I looked at the bottle of eau-de-vie, it was more like a clay flask than a bottle. I thought about whether it might be heavy enough to crush someone’s skull.

“Look at me, Laura,” Mr. Landzaat said. “Look at me and say it.”

I picked up the bottle and weighed it in my hands. I pretended that I wanted to pour myself some more eau-de-vie, but I was mostly assessing the bottle’s heft.

“I’m happy,” Laura said. “I’ve never been happier than I am with him. Never in my whole life. You look me in the eye, you jerk! Look! You look me in the eye and tell me what you see.”

—

We stood outside by the gate while Mr. Landzaat tried to start the Volkswagen. It felt like hours passed, but then there was a loud pop and a white cloud of exhaust. I had both arms around Laura and was holding her tight.

“Sweetheart,” she whispered in my ear. “My love.”

The car moved a few inches, almost imperceptibly to the naked eye. It took a moment for us to realize that the rear tires were spinning desperately in the fresh snow. Mr. Landzaat turned off the engine and opened the door.

“No traction,” he said after he’d climbed out. He kicked the rear tire, then took a few careful steps up onto the road. Almost right away, he slipped and fell — or pretended to slip and fall.

“It’s like a skating rink out here,” he said.

I felt Laura’s hand under my coat, her fingers under my sweater and T-shirt, her nails against my skin.

“I’m really sorry about this,” Mr. Landzaat said. “I wanted to leave. You saw me try to leave. But I’m pretty much powerless. Is there a hotel somewhere in the village, maybe?”

After the tunnel, the landscape changes. I won’t try to describe that landscape, I think you can picture it just as clearly as I do. First you have the cranes along the waterfront, the pipes and tubes of the refineries, the little lights blipping on and off at the tops of the power pylons, but after the tunnel everything becomes flatter and emptier.

White vapor is coming from the cooling towers at the nuclear plant. Stacked up high along the dike are blue sea containers bearing names like HANJIN and CHINA SHIPPING. The road’s surface consists of sloppily laid concrete slabs, as though the road itself were only temporary, as though it could just as easily be somewhere else tomorrow.

A few curves later and the cooling towers and containers are behind me, in my rearview mirror. In front of me the new landscape opens up — little dikes lined with poplars, pastureland with a few sheep or horses, a brick steeple in the distance.

As I’ve already noted, one should do one’s best to banish coincidence from a novel — from a made-up story. Coincidence fits better in the real world. The real world is its ideal habitat. Only reality is glued together with coincidence.

In both Liberation Year and Payback, nothing is left to coincidence. Coincidence ruins the credibility of a writer and his story, you’re quite aware of that. In your books, therefore, everything has to do almost fastidiously with everything else. The children are able to find their way into the liberated zone of the Netherlands because the eldest of the two boys once went there on vacation with his parents. The Wehrmacht officer understands Dutch (something his interrogators don’t know) because, in prewar Berlin, he was infatuated with a Dutch girl. Might that Dutch girl, the reader wonders even at that point, be the same one who is now in hiding close to Amsterdam’s Old West Church? And indeed, when they meet later on in the story (under less felicitous circumstances), can you really call that a coincidence?