Herman Koch - Dear Mr. M

But she doesn’t. She stirs her espresso, which arrived along with his cappuccino — even though he didn’t notice it, the moment when the thin man brought their orders has come and gone.

“The Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies recently started a new investigation of the unit your father served in,” she says. “Have you heard about that?”

He grimaces, but he would be better off not grimacing, he warns himself. He has heard about that investigation. He was above all surprised to hear that there were people working at the institute who apparently thought that an investigation like that made any difference. Pretty much everything had already been nosed through, hadn’t it? Maybe they had nothing better to do. Maybe they needed an investigation that no one was interested in anyway, simply to justify the salary they were paid out of taxpayers’ money.

He says that he has heard about it. He sips too hard at his overheated cappuccino — tormentingly slow, a white-hot rivulet slides down his gullet; he feels the tears come to his eyes.

Why is she starting in about this? He’s already tossed her far more material than he was planning to, hasn’t he? He can’t remember ever having revealed so much about his mother’s death.

“The results of the investigation won’t be published for a few months,” she says. “But I have my connections at the institute. The tentative conclusion is that it was no standard army unit your father was in.”

He says nothing, he wipes the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand.

“His unit operated behind the lines,” Marie Claude Bruinzeel continues, keeping her warm brown eyes fixed on his. “Not behind enemy lines, but in the area already taken by the regular army. They carried out special missions there. I don’t think I need to tell you what those special missions involved back then.”

To keep from having to look into her eyes, he shifts his gaze to look outside. The postman’s cart has now stopped in front of the door to his own building, through which a man has just come out. The man pauses and, from the looks of it, is saying something to the postman.

The neighbor, M recognizes him right away. The downstairs neighbor. Whenever he comes across him “in the wild,” he sees a face that seems vaguely familiar, like that last time at the restaurant, at La B. Ana had to tell him that it was the downstairs neighbor sitting at the bar, drinking a beer. Now he recognizes him immediately.

The neighbor and the postman are talking. M sees him shrug, the postman laughs, he leans over his cart and hands the neighbor a pile of letters.

“Well?” he hears Marie Claude Bruinzeel’s voice. “Did you know about that special unit?”

“Do you know what it is, Marie Claude?” he says. “Here in Holland there were millions of people who mostly did nothing at all. The vast majority sat at home on the couch and brooded. Less than one percent joined the resistance, maybe a little more than one percent went looking for adventure in some other way. By joining the army that was moving on to the Russian steppes, for example. I can’t help it, but I’ve always felt more admiration for the people who at least did something. Even if some were on the good side and others perhaps on the wrong side.”

Meanwhile, the postman has walked on with his cart, the downstairs neighbor has started distributing the pile of mail throughout the various letterboxes — he pauses for a moment, he looks at something, something in the mail, and flips it over. From so far away, he can’t make out what it is. An envelope? A postcard? Now the neighbor looks around, flips the letter or card over again, stands there with it in his hand for no longer than three or four seconds, then tosses it in the letterbox at the top, to the left of the door, the boxes for the fourth floor, M’s letterbox.

“But you don’t really mean that, do you?” Marie Claude says. “In fact, what you’re saying is horrible. As though someone who volunteered for a death squad was only looking for a little adventure.”

He breathes a deep sigh. His father never tried to hide anything from him. The uncomfortable details were something he had never withheld. Bit by bit, he had told M everything. The retaliatory measures. The executions. The mass graves. No one is innocent, his father had said. Least of all me. If you don’t want to get your hands dirty, you should stay at home beside the fire.

“I’m tired,” M says. “Actually, I’m drained.”

Only then does he notice the unshaven man standing beside their table. The man’s hair is disheveled in an intentional way; hanging over his shoulder is a bag, a bag that can only contain a camera, M realizes, and he feels his heart sink a few inches, a feeling like hitting an air pocket, an elevator going down too fast. The man has even more bags with him, round bags, cylindrical bags, bags with a number of zippers, and a tripod with an umbrella attached to it. It takes him a few minutes to spread it all out over the four empty chairs at the table beside theirs.

“Are you two more or less finished?” he asks. He looks around, taking in the café interior, peers squintingly at the tables outside. He sighs. “I can’t decide between in here or outside,” he says. “In half an hour, forty-five minutes I’ll have everything set up, then an hour, ninety minutes for the pictures themselves, so if I could get started it would be real nice.”

Then he looks at M for the first time.

“You’re a writer, aren’t you?” he says. “I guess you must have a bookcase at home then. Maybe we could finish up there. A couple of pictures, just so we have those.”

She wasn’t attracted to him right away.

“There’s a boy coming, he’s a junior,” David Bierman had told her. “He might be somebody for you.”

Laura had done her best to look as uninterested as possible.

“Not that he’s quite your type,” David went on. “He’s no one’s type really. But he is one of those people you have a strong opinion of right away. You either think he’s something special, or you think he’s a complete asshole.”

At the party a few days later, David pointed him out across the room. The boy was sitting slouched down in a leather armchair, his green rubber boots crossed casually at the ankles; he was holding a tumbler filled almost to the rim with some clear liquid — it wouldn’t be water, Laura thought.

He was, above all, very thin, thinner in any case than she liked them. She wanted a boy to have some substance to him. Flesh. Warm flesh that gave a little, pliable flesh under soft skin, not bones sticking out everywhere. This one had gone to no trouble to disguise his thinness, she had to give him that. Atop his tight-fitting jeans he wore an even tighter T-shirt that crept up a little to reveal a white section of stomach and a navel surrounded by blond hair.

But the rubber boots were what drew your attention most; they were half-Wellingtons — the boy had turned down the tops to reveal the light-green insides. Who wears rubber boots to a party? was the first thing she thought. But later she would often think back on those green boots.

Laura herself was in the habit of getting up each morning half an hour before her parents and her brother, who was two years younger than she was. Half an hour was what she needed to shower, wash and blow-dry her hair, and put on her makeup. But there were days when she didn’t do the makeup. She would just spend half an hour in the shower, gradually turning down the tap from hot to ice-cold. Then she went to school with her own face — the water treatment kept her cheeks a soft pink all day long — and she saw how people looked at that face of hers.