Herman Koch - Dear Mr. M

“We still have to discuss the sleeping arrangements,” Laura said. “I mean, is it…have you talked to your parents about it? Do they know that there will be boys going along?”

“My father’s a gynecologist,” Miriam said, as though that explained everything. “And my mother has already met David, she thinks he’s darling.”

Then they started kissing, not just a little bit, but the whole hog, they pulled out all the stops. Through their cheeks Laura could see their tongues at work, and she in turn tossed a desperate glance back at Herman.

“Can I get you something?” Herman said, nodding toward the counter at the back of the cafeteria. “Coffee? I hear there’s a special on pink glacé cakes today.”

Beside the exit to the bike shed, they found a vacant table.

“Yes, it’s certainly nice for David,” Herman said. “But that’s about all you can say for it.”

“Yeah,” Laura said. She tugged at the plastic wrapper of her glacé cake, but when it didn’t tear right away she laid it unopened on the table.

“Did he drive you nuts too?” Herman asked. “With that story about how he met her?”

Laura burst out laughing. “Yeah! You too?”

“First one café, then the other, then back to the first one…I thought I was going out of my mind. But okay, he’s my friend. When a friend’s talking, you let him finish, even if it’s all a load of bullshit.”

“But still…I’m happy for David, really, but…”

“Maybe he should have shopped around a little longer. Let’s be frank about this, Laura. We’re glad our friend has a girlfriend, but — tell me if I’m out of line — there’s something about this Miriam that is incredibly irritating. I could see it on your face right away, just now, when I came up to you guys.”

“Yeah, I don’t know exactly what it is. Maybe that she tries to act so nice and spontaneous. The way she tries to kiss everyone right away. The way she hangs on David.”

“He hangs on her too. We can’t blame the poor girl for that.”

“No, but right in the middle of the cafeteria? I don’t know, it seems so…so childish.”

She pulled the glacé cake toward her. Herman took hold of the plastic and tugged on it gently. “May I?” he asked.

“Go ahead, I’m really not hungry.”

“No, that’s not what I meant…” He took the plastic packaging between his teeth and tore it open. “Here you go.”

“I don’t feel like having a girl like that around the whole week in Zeeland. But I can’t tell David that, can I? What I don’t get is that he can’t figure it out for himself.”

Herman shrugged. “What do you expect? Love is blind. Young people in love. The most glorious thing there is.”

Laura couldn’t help laughing, but when she looked at him he looked away and pretended to be absorbed in the packaging of his own cake.

“Yum,” he said. “You know, there’s no expiration date on these things anywhere. Maybe they’re timeless cakes. How does yours taste?”

Laura didn’t answer, she waited patiently until he looked at her again.

“I was thinking,” Herman said, laying his cake back on the table. “I talked to David about it a bit, and he thought it was a good idea. But then, in the state he’s in now I don’t know whether he’s any good to me. That’s why I wanted to approach you about it.”

Finally, he looked at her. And Laura looked back.

“What?” she said.

She clasped her hands behind her head, leaned back in her chair, and shook her hair loose. Then she pulled it up into a sort of knot and let it fall again. Meanwhile, she kept looking at Herman — maybe she was imagining it, but it looked as though his face had turned a fraction of a shade darker.

“So I was just thinking,” he said quickly, sliding his cake back toward him. “The last time in Zeeland. In fact, we didn’t do anything then. I mean, not really anything. We made those drawings for Lodewijk’s sick mother, of course, but when we were all doing that together it occurred to me: This is fun, isn’t it, making something together like this? Voluntarily? Doing it for Lodewijk’s mother, after all, was really sort of volunteer work, right?”

Laura was only half paying attention, she wondered whether maybe she should try something else with her hair, but decided to listen anyway.

“But Lodewijk’s mother is dead now,” she said.

“Exactly. That’s what I mean. There’s nothing we have to do. But that’s no reason for us to do nothing. Maybe, in fact, it’s the only real reason to do something. ” He pushed the cake away again, to the edge of the table, and then halfway over it, until it was just teetering on the edge. “My idea was this: We don’t take anything along with us to Zeeland. Nothing that isn’t our own. No music, no magazines or newspapers, no books, only our own things. Michael’s saxophone, Ron’s guitar, Lodewijk’s bongo drums if need be, and I’ll bring my movie camera. I bought this really simple camera about six months ago. Eight millimeter, made in East Germany. It doesn’t even have a battery. You have to wind it up. Anyway, here’s the idea: we don’t read anything, we don’t listen to anything, there’s no TV in the house anyway, so that’s easy. We don’t let ourselves be influenced by the outside world. We go shopping and buy enough for three days. And then we see what happens. What happens inside your head when you’re not allowed to do anything. No, wait a minute, I’m putting that wrong: we’re allowed to do anything, we’re just not allowed to fall back on things from outside. People get bored and pick up a book, but isn’t it a lot more interesting to see what happens with you when you don’t pick up a book? Oh yeah, and Lodewijk has a tape recorder. We’ll take that along too. We can record things if we feel like it. Music, conversations, stories. I think it will be great. An experiment. Maybe it will bomb and we won’t do anything at all. But even then you can’t really say that it failed. Then the conclusion of the experiment is simply that, apparently, we don’t do anything.”

Herman brought his finger down hard on the edge of the glacé cake, which shot up high and flipped a few times, but before it could fall he plucked it out of the air.

“Oh!” Laura said.

“That’s a trick,” Herman said with a grin. “You can learn a trick if you practice long enough. But creating something new, you can’t learn that, you only find out about it by doing it.”

He took the cake between his fingers and squeezed it until it was completely flat inside the packaging. “Sorry,” he said, “I don’t mean to sound like someone who knows how it all works. Like a teacher.” He looked straight at her as he spoke those final words, and now it was a struggle for Laura not to blush. “So what do you think? David thought it was a good idea. Back before he fell in love.”

“So what are you going to film?” Laura asked.

“What?”

“What you’re going to film. I didn’t even know you had a camera. I guess you’ve already filmed some stuff.”

“Oh, lots of things. With David. For instance, I went over to the flower stand — there’s a flower stand across the street from my house — and David filmed me from the window. We live on the third floor — and I waited until a couple customers came along and I fell onto the ground in between all those people. It was really great, I’ll show it to you sometime. Those people don’t see the camera, and I act like I’m in a bad way, I have a seizure, a sort of epileptic fit, and then they help me to my feet and I just walk away. You see the people and the man who runs the flower stand talking to each other, like: ‘What was that all about?’ Fantastic!”