Herman Koch - Dear Mr. M

Laura found him behind the shed.

“I’m going to tell her tonight,” he said.

“Tonight, when?” Laura asked.

“Before bed, in any case. It’s painful. It’s going to be real nasty. But still, it would be weird…Anyway, that would just be weird.”

Laura leaned into him. He tasted of tobacco smoke, he was indeed very thin beneath his T-shirt, she could feel the bones sticking out under the skin of his hips and then, when her fingertips reached the front of his body and crept up slowly, his ribs. But his tongue was less clumsy than she’d expected, based on Stella’s detailed reports.

“Come on, let’s go inside.” He pushed her away gently, he was panting. “If someone sees us like this…if they find us out here…” He tugged softly on her hair. “That would not be good,” he said.

—

It was long past midnight. They had gone on chatting for a while about the movie Herman had made of his parents. In the end, Herman agreed with Miriam that Life Before Death was perhaps not the best title after all. Then he had talked a bit about the script he and David were working on, for a longer movie this time. A feature film about a high-school revolt. The uprising would begin after a teacher had wrongly sent a girl out of the class, but unrest had of course been brewing within the student body long before that. At first it was to be a purely idealistic uprising, a revolt against injustice, but as the days and weeks passed — the students had occupied the whole school, the teachers were being held hostage in the gym, the building was surrounded by the police and the army — the leaders of the uprising would be faced with increasingly difficult decisions. To press home their demands, they forced a teacher to stand blindfolded at one of the classroom windows.

“All the other windows have been covered with newspapers,” Herman said. “So then you’ve got a number of possibilities. Either the students have no way of going back and really have to hurt the teacher in order to maintain their credibility, or else the blindfolded teacher is the signal for the army to rush the building. The revolt is brutally crushed.”

And at that point Stella stood up and stretched.

“I think I’ll go upstairs,” she said. “Are you coming up too?” she said to Herman.

“I was thinking…,” Herman began, but then fell silent.

“What?” Stella said.

“Shall we…I don’t know…” He stood up, he didn’t look at Stella. “I actually feel more like taking an evening stroll. Just the two of us.”

“I just wanted to tell you,” you begin — but you stop as a truck turns into our street with rumbling motor and screeching brakes, making further conversation impossible. As we wait for the truck to pass — the white walls of its closed bed are decorated with blue letters: the name of a moving company, a cell-phone number and a website — I look at your face.

We’re standing on the corner by the garbage containers; I had just dropped a bag into one of them, and when I straightened up, suddenly you were standing there. What started as a fretful look, as though you were trying to recall who I was, now made way for something probably meant to look awkward or shy. It doesn’t suit you particularly well, an awkward or shy look, it’s as though all the muscles in your face struggle against it — but maybe it’s the first time they’ve ever tried it, and they just don’t know exactly how.

Huffing and hissing, the moving van comes to a halt in front of the café across the street; two men in blue jeans and white T-shirts, also printed in blue letters with the name of the moving company, hop out of the cab and pull open the back doors of the truck.

“I wanted to thank you,” you say.

I raise my eyebrows and wipe my hands on the back of my jeans. I could ask what you want to thank me for, or I could skip that and show right away that I know what you mean.

“Oh, that was nothing,” I say, choosing the latter. Anyone else would have done the same. But I don’t say that. Besides, it’s not true. Anyone else would have done something different. No, that’s not true either: anyone else would in any case never have done what I did for those reasons.

For the moment there’s nothing else left to say, so we both look at the moving van in front of the café, where the two movers have now gone inside.

“No, really,” you say. “You wouldn’t have had to. My wife is very grateful. And so am I.”

The men come back out with a pile of chairs.

“One time you would go in there and they wouldn’t have any milk, the next time it would take them half an hour to bring you your beer,” I say, “by which time, of course, the head on it had gone completely flat. But that they’d go out of business this quickly, I never expected that.”

“I’ve been thinking,” you say. “About what you asked me last week. Last Saturday. At the library.”

“You said you don’t give interviews anymore. Almost no interviews. Or only by rare exception.”

“That’s right. But I’m prepared to make an exception. For you. What was it again, what did you say it was for?”

“For…” I suddenly can’t remember what I said at the library. For a website? Could be, but I really can’t remember. “As part of a series,” I say. “A series in which writers—”

“Would next Tuesday be all right for you?” you interrupt.

“Tuesday? Tuesday’s fine.”

“It’s a date. We’re going to H. again for a few days, but we’ll be back by Monday at the latest. Tuesday’s the annual Book Ball at the theater. We don’t have to be there till nine. So if you could come by around five…”

We’re in your study: a plain desk, an expensive office chair and bookcases — your wife just brought us some tea and cookies.

Are you dreading the gala this evening?

“Yes and no. I feel a certain reticence, but that always goes away as soon as I’m past the red carpet. Aren’t you going to record this?”

No, that won’t be necessary.

“But you’re not taking notes either.”

No.

“You’ll be able to remember everything?”

Probably not. But that doesn’t matter. It’s about the information as a whole. Didn’t you once say: “A writer shouldn’t want to remember everything, it’s much more important to be able to forget”?

“By that, I mostly meant that you need to be able to separate the useful memories from the useless ones. It’s handy if your memory does that for you. But it almost never works that way. We remember things that are no good to us. Phone numbers. I once read somewhere that when we memorize phone numbers we’re misusing our memory. Phone numbers can be written down. After that we’re allowed to forget them. And that we should use the space then freed in our memories for more important recollections.”

Do you need evenings like this evening?

“What do you mean?”

I mean, are they indispensible? Or could you, for example, just as well stay at home?

“No, not indispensible, certainly not. As I said, they’re a part of the whole thing. You see a few friends. You talk to colleagues you never see anywhere but there. Once a year. And if you go, you have less to explain than if you don’t.”

You mention friends and colleagues. Does that exist, friendship among writers? Or do they mostly remain just colleagues?

“Among writers I have more colleagues than friends, if that’s what you mean. A few of those colleagues also happen to be very good friends.”