Herman Koch - Dear Mr. M

“Herman,” he said.

When he got to Laura, he smiled. “Hello,” he said. “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” She thought he was only pretending not to remember her. He reached out to shake her hand, and his left hand joined the right. He laid it atop hers and gave it a little squeeze. “I just want to say that I’m so happy you invited me to join you,” he said. “I mean, the only person I really know here is David. Thank you, Laura.”

She looked into his eyes, which were more gray than blue, but with something glistening behind that gray, something much lighter, a winter sun appearing for a moment from behind gray cloud cover — it wasn’t easy to hold his gaze for long.

“Of course,” she said, releasing her breath for the first time since he’d taken her hand. So he’s not a complete asshole, she thought. A complete asshole doesn’t say things like that.

They found an empty compartment and, with a little shifting and squeezing, they all fit in. None of them had much in the way of luggage; no suitcases at least, suitcases were for old people. Michael was the only one who hadn’t yet tossed his duffle bag up onto the rack. He unzipped it and pulled out a squarish bottle of Dutch gin.

“Anyone up for a shot?” he asked.

The bottle went around. David was the first to raise it to his lips, then Ron and Michael. Lodewijk, Laura, and Stella shook their heads. “It’s only ten o’clock!” Lodewijk said. “Please!”

As last, the bottle arrived at the thin boy — at Herman. He took a slug; Michael was already holding out his hand for the bottle when Herman tilted his head all the way back, without removing the bottle from his lips. They watched breathlessly as little bubbles rose through the liquid, bubbles roiling to the surface like in an aquarium. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down a few times, the train rattled and lurched as it crossed a switch, and the mouth of the bottle came loose from Herman’s lips, spilling gin down his chin and neck. He rested the bottle on his thigh and screwed the cap back on.

“So, now my parents are dead and gone,” he said.

For a few seconds it was very quiet in the compartment — only the sound of the iron wheels on the tracks. Herman wiped his mouth and handed the bottle back to Michael.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you guys,” he said, looking at them one by one. “My parents are still alive. Unfortunately. All I did was erase them, I needed to do that.”

He laughed loudly, David was the only one who laughed along with him, but not from the bottom of his heart, Laura noticed.

“Do you…want to talk about it?” Stella asked.

Stella’s father was a psychologist, but more than that: her father too had traded in his wife six months ago for one of his female patients, twenty years his junior.

“If I started talking about my parents, I’d bore all of you all the way to Flushing,” Herman said. “That’s part of it. The other thing is that they don’t deserve it. They’re basically a couple of losers who should never have had children.”

Another silence.

“But don’t worry,” Herman laughed. “I’m not a total downer. I’m really happy to be here. Really.” He waggled his head a few times, then closed his eyes. “Well, almost,” he said.

“If you ask me, you’re just really pissed off at your parents,” Stella said.

Herman opened his eyes again and looked at her. “Not pissed off, no. Just disappointed.”

—

On the boat from Flushing to Breskens they bought gravy-roll sandwiches. David, Ron, Michael, and Herman had a can of beer along with theirs, Lodewijk had coffee, Stella a glass of mineral water. Laura drank tea.

As they lounged along the railing on the rear deck, David and Herman held up their half-eaten rolls to the diving gulls. Laura squinted at the water foaming around the hull, and then at the coastline fading into the distance. She thought about her own parents, with whom no one could find fault. On the contrary, all her friends, both boys and girls, agreed that she had the greatest parents in the world. “I wish my father was like yours,” Stella had said to her once. “What do you mean?” Laura asked. “I don’t know,” Stella said. “Your father just has a way of looking at people that’s so…so normal. Yeah, that’s it! Your father looks at me the way he would look at an adult. And he talks to me that way too. My own father always has this pitying look in his eyes, and he always talks in that kind of undertone. ‘Maybe you’ll understand it someday, Stella.’ That’s what he said to me recently. I don’t know what it was about, just something stupid, about what time I had to be home or something. ‘I’m not one of your patients, Daddy!’ I shouted at him. But he didn’t even get mad. He just stood there with that pitying smile on his face.”

The boys were especially charmed by Laura’s mother. She translated British and American literature into Dutch; the last few years she had also started writing poems that were published from time to time in literary journals. Her first collection was going to appear that fall. But when Laura brought friends home, her mother always stopped working and made the loveliest sandwiches for them. Poppyseed and sesame-seed buns with pickled meat roll, ham, minced beef, herring, and mackerel.

“You have really nice friends,” she had told her daughter once they’d all gone home. “Well, then?” she went on, after a pause, in a quieter tone. “Any of the boys you like more than the others?”

“No,” Laura said.

“That David — his name is David, isn’t it? — he’s very handsome.”

Upon which Laura said she was going to her room, she had homework to do.

Laura’s father used to work as an editor for a national newspaper, but for the last eighteen months he had been presenting a popular current-events program on TV. The best part about him, as Stella said, was that he stayed so normal. He had every reason to get a swelled head. People on the street nudged each other when Laura’s father walked by, sometimes they asked him for an autograph, which he always gave without complaint. Even during vacations on faraway foreign beaches, people would come up to him. “We don’t want to bother you,” they would say, “but we saw you in the distance and my wife said to me: ‘Is that who I think it is?’ Look, she’s sitting up there in front of that café, could you just wave to her? Are these your children?” Laura’s father never lost his patience with these kind of encounters, he waved to the woman in front of the café, he squatted down between the children for a photo, he handed out autographs on the backs of beer coasters, napkins, and placemats, sometimes with a big Magic Marker on a T-shirt, and one time even on the inside of someone’s thigh, at a beach resort in southern Spain — the Dutchman in question was covered in tattoos and wore only a pair of swimming trunks, so he had rolled up one of the legs of those trunks, right up to his crotch. “Here, if you would,” he’d said. “I’ll tattoo it on myself, later.” Laughing, Laura’s father complied.

Not long ago she had gone out to lunch with him at a restaurant that had just opened. When they came through the revolving doors, all the customers looked up. Dozens of pairs of eyes followed as the waitress led them to their table — the best spot in the house, Laura saw, with a view of the canal. During lunch, too, people kept looking at them. Laura saw them lean over to each other and whisper, smile, then look again. But her father bore these gazes too with calm and patience.

“You know what’s funny?” he said. “You’re seventeen now.”

She stared at him blankly.

“You know these people are looking at us and asking each other: ‘Is he there with his daughter, or with some girlfriend thirty years younger than him?’ Two years ago, they wouldn’t have wondered at all. That’s something new. Fantastic!”