Herman Koch - Dear Mr. M

By the way, I still haven’t asked how you slept last night. And what you did with that suddenly empty space beside you in bed? Did you stay on your own side, or did you slide over a little more toward the middle?

Last night you listened to music: that CD you never put on when your wife is home. I heard your footsteps all over the house, as though you were trying to make sure you were really alone — how you opened windows everywhere, then the door to the balcony too. Were you trying to drive something out, to exorcise it? The smell of her, perhaps? People in love, when the object of their affection is not around, will bury their nose in a piece of their sweetheart’s clothing. People whose love has run its course throw open the windows, the way you hang an old suit out in the wind if it’s been in mothballs too long, even if you know full well that you’ll never wear it again.

You were out on the balcony, and I could hear you singing along. It’s not the kind of music I’m fond of myself, but I understand how someone who likes such music might write such books. You had it turned up pretty loud, by the way, just a little short of public nuisance. But I’m not fussy about things like that. I didn’t want to be the killjoy on your first evening alone.

Why, by the way, didn’t you dare to come downstairs yourself that time, to complain about my music being too loud? Why did you send your wife?

“My husband’s a writer,” she said. “He can’t stand noise.”

I invited her in, but she took only a few steps into the hallway, she didn’t want to come any further. I noticed her craning her neck at one point, trying to catch a glimpse of my apartment. I looked at her face, and at the same time I smelled something — something I didn’t want to go away quite yet.

A few hours later, on my way to bed, I passed through the hallway and that scent was still there. I stood there in the dark for a long time, as long as it took for me not to smell it anymore. In any case, I didn’t throw open any doors or windows to drive out her scent. I waited patiently until the scent felt that it was time to go.

As I saw that evening close-up, she is indeed no longer the young girl who came to interview you for the school paper back then. How did you put it? “One day she showed up toting a notebook and a whole list of questions, and to be honest she still isn’t finished asking them.”

What was the first thing she asked you, after she stepped over the threshold? “Why do you write?” A question schoolgirls are prone to ask. And what did you tell her? What answer would you give these days?

At the dinner table you tend to be silent. Not that I would be able to make out the words themselves if you did talk, but the sound of voices comes through the ceiling quite readily. I hear the tick of silverware on the plates and, in summer, when the windows are open, I can even hear the glasses being filled.

While your mouth is busy grinding your food, your head is still in your study. You can’t tell her what’s occupying you. She wouldn’t understand anyway, after all: she’s a woman.

So the meals go by in a silence broken only sparingly by questions. I can’t hear what she’s asking, I only hear that she’s asking a question. Questions to which you must reply with only a nod or a shake of the head.

If I don’t hear you respond, that means you’re moving your head, the head itself is in your study: it can’t speak, only move.

Later, after you get up, she clears the table and puts the glasses and plates in the dishwasher. Then she withdraws to the room on the side facing the street, where she stays until it is time to go to bed.

I still haven’t figured out exactly how your wife passes those hours alone in that room. Does she read a book? Does she watch TV with the volume down low or off?

I often imagine to myself that she just sits there — a woman in a chair, a life that goes by like the hands of a clock, with no one ever looking to see what time it is.

You will have noticed by now that I’ve put on some music of my own. I’m sure it’s not your kind of music. I’ve cranked up the volume on my stereo a little louder, to more or less the same level as on that evening when your wife came down to ask if I could lower it a little.

I know that you, as a matter of principle, will not come down. You have to be able to send someone else, you’re not the kind to come down yourself. Which is why I turn up the volume a little more. The sound of it could now, I believe, rightfully be described as a public nuisance.

I have no fixed plan. In any case, I regret the fact that a pretty young woman like that is condemned to your company, that she withers away by your side.

Now I really do hear the doorbell, you’re quicker than I expected.

“Could you perhaps turn the music down a bit?”

I won’t try to describe your face, describing faces is something I leave completely to you.

“Of course,” I say.

After closing the door in your face — your undescribed face — I turn the music down. Then I gradually turn it back up. My guess is that you won’t come down again.

I guess right.

Tomorrow you have a signing session at the bookstore, I saw the poster in the window. Will the line of people waiting for your signature be long or short? Or will there be no line at all? Sometimes those big piles beside the register don’t mean a thing. Sometimes it rains, sometimes the sun is shining.

“It must be the weather,” the bookstore owner will say when no one shows up.

But someone will show, in any case. I’ll be there.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

I sometimes wonder what that must feel like, mediocrity. By which I mean what it feels like from the inside, for the mediocre man himself. To what extent is he aware of his mediocrity? Is he locked up inside his own mediocre mind and does he run around tugging at doors and windows, trying to get someone to let him out? Without anyone ever hearing a thing?

That’s how I often imagine it, as a bad dream, a desperate scream for help. The mediocre intelligence knows that the outside world exists. He can smell the grass, hear the wind rustling through the trees, see the sunlight coming through the windows — but he also knows that he is doomed to stay inside for the rest of his life.

How does the mediocre intelligence deal with that knowledge? Does he try to buck himself up? Does he realize that there are certain boundaries he will never break through? Or does he tell himself that it’s not really all that bad, that this very morning, after all, he finished the crossword puzzle in the newspaper without any noticeable sign of exertion?

If you ask me, there’s only one real rule of thumb, and that rule says that you’ll never hear people of above-average intelligence mention how smart they are. It’s like millionaires. You have millionaires in jeans and scruffy sweaters, and you have millionaires in sports cars with the top down. Anyone can get a catalogue and look up the price of the sports car, but I’ll give you ten-to-one odds that the scruffy sweater guy could leave the same car behind in a restaurant for a tip.

You’re more the kind with the convertible. Even when it’s raining you drive with the top down, past the outdoor cafés down by the beach. “As early as kindergarten, teachers noticed that I was exceptionally intelligent.” It’s a subject that often (too often, to the point of nausea in fact) comes up in your work and in interviews. “My IQ is just a fraction higher than that of Albert Einstein.” I could go on—“When, like me, one possesses an intelligence found among barely two percent of the population”—but why should I? There are women who say out loud that every man turns and looks when they walk past, and there are women who don’t have to say that.