Herman Koch - Dear Mr. M

You didn’t mention Stella.

“What?”

Stella. You just reeled off the names of their group of friends. But you didn’t mention Stella.

“I didn’t? I didn’t realize that.”

She’s in that class photo too, right? She wasn’t sick that day, was she?

“Yes, I know she’s in the photo. Standing beside Laura. Two best friends. The boys are also all standing together, the way friends do. I have it here in a drawer, but I don’t have to look at it anymore, it’s etched in my memory.”

And do you sometimes take it out and look at it?

“No, that chapter is closed. That book is finished. As I said: I could draw it for you, from memory.”

You don’t mention her in your book.

“Who? You mean Stella? No, that’s right. In fact, I don’t name anyone, it’s fiction, I purposely kept the minor characters vague.”

But there’s a difference between keeping something vague and leaving it out completely. In your depiction of the friends’ club, there’s only one girl, Laura. In Payback she’s called Miranda.

“I felt as though I had to choose. And it definitely was not an easy choice. I had to choose between two storylines. Or rather: this book needed one storyline, and that was enough. A second one would only have weakened it. I chose for the teacher, the boy, and the girl. No other diversions. A tragic love story. A fatal conclusion. Or at least the suspicion of a fatal conclusion. That seemed more powerful to me. A difficult decision. I did start on it. I made an attempt, but it didn’t work. Look at it this way: I didn’t leave her out on purpose. Initially, I didn’t want to leave Stella out at all. On the contrary. There were mornings when I looked at the class photo, and the one I looked at longest was her. I was completely fascinated. She’s one of the only ones who doesn’t look into the camera, although you have to examine it closely to see that. She’s looking straight ahead. No, that’s not right either. She’s looking at herself, it took me weeks to finally see that. Those big eyes, that smile, that sweet face, an open face too; it’s open, but as an outsider you can’t see a thing. At most, you see that the face is dreaming. It’s sufficient unto itself. It’s full of itself.

“You have people, I know a few, certainly among my colleagues, who never actually look at you, they probably don’t even see you, or at least they see you only in relation to themselves. They ring your bell, you open the door and you see it right away in their faces, in their eyes. They’re not happy to see you, let alone do they wonder whether they’ve come at a convenient moment. No, they’re happy they came. They’re happy for you. They’re happy for you that they are now standing there in front of you. That they’ve taken the time and gone to the trouble to ring your doorbell . Here I am, they say with their faces all aglow. Enjoy. That’s the kind of expression Stella is wearing too, right in the middle of that group with all her classmates. There’s no real reason to look into the camera, at the school photographer. No, the school photographer should be pleased to have her in the picture. The way she is. All by herself.

“When I finally figured that out, every morning for weeks I looked almost exclusively at her. Not at her classmates, in the same way she didn’t look at them. I think she never looked at her classmates, at least not the way we, as quote-unquote normal people, look at each other. At most, she gauged the reactions in the faces of others, the way those others reacted to her. She was, of course, a very pretty girl, but pretty in a different way from Laura.

“In the photo, Laura is the prettiest girl in the class, the girl all the boys chase, of whom all the boys dream. She’s completely aware of that, which is at the same time her handicap. When girls are too pretty, they easily become isolated. Without being able to do anything about that themselves. Unapproachable, we think when we see the prettiest girl in the class, she doesn’t even know I exist. And from that moment on we avoid all contact. In order to keep from being disappointed, or even worse: from being completely humiliated. We’re afraid the prettiest girl will look us over from head to toe and then deliver a crushing verdict. A verdict from which we’ll never recover, that we will carry with us for the rest of our lives. Sometimes even literally, in the words literally used by the prettiest girl with regard to your person: You don’t actually think— that’s how the devastating rejection almost always starts— that you stand a ghost of a chance with me, that I even knew you existed before today? I would strongly urge you, as of today, to never — I repeat: never — speak to me again . And so we do all we can to avoid exchanging looks with the prettiest girl. We’re in no hurry to have her point out the category to which we actually belong. Not her category, in any case.

“Stella’s beauty is of a different kind. Precisely because she is so sufficient unto herself, she is beautiful in the way a landscape can be beautiful: a green, rolling landscape with a few sheep grazing on a hillside, a snowy mountain peak at sunset. That landscape doesn’t care whether we enjoy it. It’s always been there, tomorrow it will still be there, and the day after tomorrow too, and a hundred years from now. She gives off light, but at the same time she absorbs it, as something that goes without saying. She’ll never wonder why, it’s just always been that way. She wonders about it as little as the earth’s surface wonders why the sun shines on it. Or better yet: the light of the moon.”

The difference being that a landscape can’t be rejected. You yourself say that a landscape doesn’t care whether we enjoy it. But a landscape also doesn’t care whether we reject it.

“That’s the way I always looked at the class photo too. Every day. I looked at Stella’s face. A boy has declared his love to her, he is standing a few yards away, among his friends. She finds that only natural. At that moment, everything is still fine and dandy. The teacher is sitting at his desk. He is breathing, even though we can’t see that in the photograph. What we can see in the photograph is that the teacher in question is taken with himself. He’s sitting there cheerfully amid his students, in a checkered shirt with the two top buttons open, at a time when teachers still tended to wear jackets and ties. He wants to be one of them, he insists that they call him by his first name, he’s trying to smile with his mouth closed. Standing beside Stella is Laura, her best friend. But Stella probably has no idea that her best friend is the one she should watch out for most. It wouldn’t occur to her; girls like Stella believe unconditionally in the trustworthiness of their best friends, just as she believes in the trustworthiness of her boyfriend. Of Herman. It would never come up in her, in Stella’s, mind that her boyfriend is actually attracted to her best friend, or that in a few weeks’ time that friend is going to hook up with the jovial teacher in order to draw Herman’s attention. What happens in the mind of a girl like Stella when she realizes one day that not she, but someone else, is the chosen one? That she has only been used as a diversionary tactic? She thought it was normal that Herman would want to start something with her, just as she would have thought that was normal for any other boy; what boy, after all, wouldn’t fall for a girl like her? And then, one day, quite unexpectedly, out of the proverbial blue, he breaks up with her. And not only does he break up with her, but he tells her he is trading her in for Laura. For her best friend.”