Herman Koch - Dear Mr. M

“Made?” Ron said.

“When she was still happy,” Herman said.

“There’s one of those traditional butchers on our street who makes smoked sausage from pigs that have always lived outside,” Stella said. “You can really taste the difference.”

“And what is it you taste, exactly?” Herman asked. “Mud? Shit?”

“No,” Stella said. “Just meat. Real meat. Not this chemical garbage.”

“I’ve seen those traditional butchers too,” Herman said. “And I’ve bought smoked sausage from them. Once, but never again. The ‘traditional butcher’ is perhaps the greatest misnomer of our age. And his smoked sausages along with it. That meat has all kinds of things in it: tendons, nerves, bits of crushed bone that get stuck between your teeth. And the whole thing packaged in a thick, tough skin that you end up chewing on for hours. They probably use the hog’s foreskin for that. No, I swear by Unox. Chemical garbage, my ass. It slides right down the gullet, the way smoked sausage should.”

Laura was half expecting Stella to come back at him with arguments about poison or environmental damage, about toxins that piled up inside the body when one ate factory-made food, but she did something different. She cut off a piece of the Unox sausage, jabbed her fork into it, and stuck it in her mouth.

“Now close your eyes,” Herman said, “and tell me what you taste.”

Laura shifted in her chair, she didn’t know exactly what was happening, but something was. Apparently she’d missed out on the fact that Stella had not yet tasted the smoked sausage, not until Herman had started talking about its chemical benefits. Now she watched as Stella chewed slowly, her eyes closed, and saw how Herman looked at Stella. He had never looked at Stella that way before. Laura felt her cheeks tingle, and she reprimanded herself silently. Not now! All week, Herman had treated Stella as though she was a bit naive, a naive and rather unworldly girl who never got further, during their walks and dinner-table conversations, than the deposition of dime-store profundities that she’d picked up from her father. That was all true enough. But Stella was also something else, something that Laura knew she herself was not. Stella was sweet. Perhaps even innocent. Stella could look at you in a certain way…Laura always had to lower her eyes or turn them away when her closest girlfriend looked at her like that. She had tried it in front of the mirror once: she had opened her eyes so wide that the tears came, she had thought about lovely, innocent things — but not in a million years did she come close to looking the way Stella did. No, Laura was not sweet. She was lots of other things — pretty, irresistibly so perhaps, although all too aware of her own irresistibility — but she would never be sweet, or innocent, or “vulnerable” (the fashionable word these days). More like the very opposite. Stella had actually said that to her after Laura told her girlfriend about the blushing history teacher, about how she had wrapped Jan Landzaat around her finger in order to secure a place on the field trip to Paris.

“When it comes to things like that, you’re a lot cagier than I am,” Stella had said. At first, Laura had objected to that qualification, because most of its connotations seemed negative to her. But later, at home, in front of the bathroom mirror again, she had to admit that Stella was right. She had smiled seductively at her mirror image, and now she saw it herself. “You definitely are a cagey one,” she said to herself out loud — then burst out laughing.

“You’re right, Herman,” Stella said now. She looked at him with her lovely, innocent eyes, Laura saw, and now she saw something else too. Stella beamed —there was no other word for it, it was like she was illuminated from inside by some invisible source of light or heat. “It tastes a lot better than I thought. How can that be?”

“I was just thinking,” Laura said. “When we get home, shall we all go to the hospital and visit Lodewijk’s mother again? Like, the day after tomorrow? Or else early next week?”

She might have been imagining it, but it looked as though Lodewijk froze for a moment inside his knitted sweater. She didn’t have much time to think about that, though. Herman and Stella seemed not to have heard, they were still looking only at each other.

“But school starts again next week,” Ron said.

“Well, so what?” Laura said. “We can go after school, right? When are the visiting hours? We’ll buy some nice things to eat and a book — a whole bunch of magazines,” she corrected herself quickly. “What do you think, Lodewijk? It’s a good idea, isn’t it?”

“She’s not in the hospital anymore,” Lodewijk said.

Now everyone, including Herman and Stella, looked at him.

“She’s at home,” Lodewijk said. “They can’t do anything more for her at the hospital. She told them she wanted to go home.”

“But…,” Laura began.

“The neighbor lady’s taking care of her now,” Lodewijk said. “At first I felt bad about coming along with you guys, obviously, but when I said I’d stay home my mother wouldn’t have it. She said I should just go and enjoy myself.”

“Jesus,” Michael said. “That was big of her.”

“You know what’s funny?” Lodewijk said. “Or no, not funny, more like ironic. That neighbor lady has lived in the apartment next door ever since we moved in, but we always thought she was a horrible old witch. Lived there all that time alone. No husband. No children. About sixty, I guess. And way too tall, maybe that was why, that’s what I always figured. A woman who’s two heads taller than you, no man would go for that. But whatever, right at the start, as soon as my mother fell ill, the neighbor lady offered to help. And she didn’t just offer to help, she was really there whenever you needed her. Since my mom came home, she’s even started cooking for us.”

“You see that sometimes,” Stella said, “that people who you don’t expect it from suddenly turn out to have a really warm heart.”

“And you know what else I think?” Lodewijk said. “It’s so weird. A kind of premonition. When I left last week, the way my mother looked at me. I was already at the door with my backpack on when she asked me to come and give her another kiss. Even though I’d just done that. She’s already so weak, but she threw that skinny, swollen arm of hers around my neck. She squeezed as hard as she could. ‘My sweet boy,’ she said. ‘My sweet, sweet boy.’ It was only when I got to the bus stop on my way to the station that I realized it. She was saying goodbye to me. She won’t be there when I get back. She wanted me to go away so she could die in peace. Like an old cat that crawls under the kitchen counter. So I wouldn’t have to be there when it happened. And at the bus stop I thought: I can still turn around and go back. I can stay with her. But I got on that bus anyway. I’m here with you guys, instead of with her. And so do I feel guilty all the time now? In some ways, yes. In other ways, though, I hope I was right. That she really will be dead when I get home.”

No one said a word. Stella, who was sitting closest to Lodewijk, laid her hand on his, but Lodewijk looked at Michael.

“Have you still got that bottle of gin around somewhere?” he asked. “I think I feel like something stronger than tea tonight.”

What the kitchen counter resembled most was the stadium field after a rock concert. Here there were no empty cans, though, no shards of glass and shredded sheets of black plastic, but filthy pans, plates, cutlery with the caked-on remains of mashed potatoes, scattered butt-ends of endive and globs of dried-up mustard — Herman hadn’t even thrown away the potato peels. But the garbage pail was still pretty much brimming over, Laura saw when she lifted the lid.