Herman Koch - Dear Mr. M

At first she could make out no distinct noises, then came a shuffling and the sound of one of the other doors opening and closing again.

“You want to take your bag with you, Lodewijk?” The voice was Herman’s, he didn’t seem to be trying to speak softly at all. “Maybe you still want to brush your teeth or something?”

“Shh!” That was Stella. Laura pressed her ear to the wood so hard it hurt; for a long time there was nothing, until suddenly she heard David’s voice.

“The bed all the way at the back, Lodewijk. The one that’s still all messed up, that’s Herman’s. Are you feeling any better, or do you want a bucket beside the bed?”

But there was no reply; a little later still the two doors closed, one right after the other, and then everything was still.

Laura remained with her ear to the door for another half hour, then went to the window and pushed aside the checkered curtains. It was fully light out now, over the garden lay a thin mist; in the distance, beyond the branches of the apple tree, the sky was turning pink and purple. Laura felt her eyes sting. Don’t, she said to herself, but her lower lip had already begun to tremble.

“Oh, goddamn it!” she said. “God, god, god, goddamn it!”

—

“You think that bus is really going to come?” Herman asked. “Or is it the way it always is with public transport, that they think: Aw, who’s going to take a bus on a day like today? You know what, let’s just stay in the garage. ”

Laura watched as Herman wandered over to the bus stop, his hands in the pockets of his jeans; then she looked at Stella, who was acting as though she hadn’t heard Herman.

They were putting up a good front. At breakfast, too, Laura had watched for signals, for outward signs like blushing or bags under their eyes, or something much clearer than that, scratch marks or hickeys. But there was nothing. They acted normal — everyone was acting normal. Maybe that was it, she’d thought, that they were all doing their very best to act normal.

They were hushing it up. They were keeping it under wraps. It had been tacitly agreed that no one would talk about it. A tacit agreement among all those present, except for Laura. David had not given her even one meaningful or conspiratorial glance when she finally came down to breakfast, the last one to appear — a role usually reserved for him. In fact, he hadn’t looked at her at all, he had gone on much longer than necessary with smearing his slice of brown bread, first with butter, then with peanut butter. Laura heard the wood in her chair creak when she sat down — that’s how quiet it was — until Michael asked David to pass the butter. The silence and the acting normal could mean only one thing, and that was the conclusion Laura quickly drew: they were sparing her, at least they were trying to spare her, but precisely by sparing her they were confirming exactly what Laura was afraid of.

Or wasn’t that it at all? Here on the village square, doubt suddenly struck. Were the others all standing together, had they all moved away from her, or had Laura herself gone and stood a few yards from the biggest tree, the better to see Herman as he walked through the rain to the bus stop? She’d had less than two hours’ sleep, her eyes were half shut, and in the pit of her stomach something zoomed, an empty, hungry feeling, even though she’d eaten a bigger breakfast than usual. Could she be imagining the whole thing? Were her senses in a tizzy from lack of sleep, was she seeing things that weren’t there? After all, everyone had acted normal, at the breakfast table Herman and Stella had exchanged no more glances. Or did the absence of such glances point to the very worst? She didn’t know what to think. After breakfast everyone had gone to pack their bags, she had straightened up the house and mopped the floor, even Herman had helped out: he had carried the dishes the others had dried to the living room and spent a lot of time neatly arranging things in the crockery cupboard with the glass doors.

“Laura?” he had called out at one point.

And when she approached, her heart pounding, he held up a coffee cup for her to see; she had tried to look straight at him without lowering her eyes or averting her gaze — without bursting into tears.

“Hmm?” she said.

“The cup I broke while I was drying it? The cup that used to belong to your grandma?”

“Hmm?” she said again, because she hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about.

“I glued it. Good as new, isn’t it?”

—

Now Laura looked at her friends as they huddled under the tree. At Stella. Did Stella know about the cup? Or had Herman kept it a secret from her?

“What day is it today?” Herman shouted from the bus stop. “Saturday, right?”

Everyone turned to look at him. Everyone but Laura, because she had already been keeping an eye on him for the last five minutes. “On Saturday, the bus only comes once every three hours,” Herman shouted. “We’ve been standing here like idiots for half an hour.”

And then it happened. A car came from the direction of Retranchement. A green car, Laura had no idea what make it was, but that didn’t matter anyway, because Herman was already holding up his hand. He raised his thumb.

Later she would remember the whole thing like a movie played in slow motion, frame by frame, without any way to run it back.

The green car stopping. The window opening. On the passenger side. Two men in the car. Herman leaning down to look through the window. Herman holding up two fingers for all to see.

“There’s only room for two!” he shouted.

Here the film stopped completely, with all of them looking at each other.

“Stella!” Herman shouted. “Stella, don’t just stand there. Come on, let’s go!”

A little less than a month later, in the last week of September, the junior classes left for their field trips. That whole month Laura had done her best not to let on; not to David, Ron, Michael, and Lodewijk, but especially not to Stella. She did her utmost to remain Stella’s “closest friend,” hard as it was at times for her to listen to Stella’s stories about Herman; how much fun he was, what a great sense of humor he had, which movies and concerts they’d gone to, how their relationship had at first met with disapproval from her parents — who were now separated completely — but how Herman, for example, didn’t let himself be intimidated by her father, the psychologist. One time her father had reluctantly agreed to have Herman come along to dinner at the trendy restaurant where he took his daughter every two weeks, to help her get used to his new girlfriend, twenty years younger than he (and a former patient). At one point the conversation turned to choosing a profession, to what Stella and Herman wanted to do after they finished high school. Stella wasn’t quite sure, but said that in any case she wanted “at least four children,” upon which her father gave her another of his pitying looks.

“And you know what Herman said?” Stella said to Laura — it was around eleven o’clock, Stella had called her friend right after she came back from the restaurant.

“No, what?” Laura was sitting on her bed with her knees pulled up, eyes closed, chewing on her thumbnail, but there wasn’t much thumbnail left to chew.

“He said: ‘Now that’s what I call a clear plan. Large families, I’m all for them.’ And then he started talking about his own parents, about how depressing things were at home, how he couldn’t stand being the only child anymore, stuck in between all the bickering or, even worse, the long silences. He said: ‘When there’s a divorce, when the father goes looking for someone younger, for example, four children can turn to each other for support.’ And then he looked at my father and at Annemarie, that’s her name, Annemarie. I thought I was going to choke. But it was so good of him. Don’t you think? To dare to say something like that?”