Herman Koch - Dear Mr. M

All they’d really talked about at the last cocktail party was N, who truly had left, suddenly, out of the blue, without whining about it for months beforehand. From one day to the next he was gone, his switch made all the papers, and his next book with his new publisher was an instant bestseller. “I should have done this long ago,” he repeated in almost every interview dealing with the publication of The Garden of Psalms. “I should have traded in that old chicken coop long ago for a house where you’re not bumping your head all the time.” The authors who had remained behind in the chicken coop never spoke their mind about N’s departure. They all agreed, however, that it wasn’t “comme il faut,” the way it had gone, that one “simply doesn’t do that,” at least not in that way — just slipping away with no prior notice, and then “fouling one’s own nest” with sarcastic comments about your former publisher. Amid all of this, M’s publisher moves about the room like a birthday boy at his own party, a birthday boy who can’t really enjoy the party himself because he has to divide his attention among all the guests. A bit of chatting here, a horselaugh there, not in too much of a hurry to talk to the critic from the weekend literary supplement, not lingering too long with the bestselling author; no one must get the feeling that he’s not considered important enough. M’s publisher is a master at the game; when he gets to Ana, he touches her elbow gently.

“Well? How are things at home?” he inquires, but she doesn’t answer right away; she knows that by “home” he doesn’t mean their actual family life. And sure enough: “Is he working on something new?” he asks after that brief silence.

Ana admires him for how skillfully he maneuvers among all those sensitive egos, but in the course of the years she has also grown truly fond of him. A sort of secret understanding has developed between them, an understanding based on the mutual, always unspoken knowledge that it is of course all a bunch of nonsense, these writers and their attention issues, the publisher who — like the soccer trainer — always receives the blame when things don’t turn out as hoped, but rarely or never a compliment when he succeeds in making a book successful. She shows him, indirectly, that she feels for him, and he shows her that he appreciates that.

“Oh well, you know, something new…” She raises her glass of white wine to her lips and takes a sip — the white wine, too, is almost at room temperature; the bottle has probably been on the table beside the peanuts and olives for the last few hours, or else the new trainee forgot to put it in the fridge first. “He never stops working, he’s in the study almost all day, you know that, but he never tells me what he’s working on.”

“It would be too bad if Liberation Year were to drop out of sight too soon,” the publisher says, looking around to see who he’ll talk to next — she doesn’t blame him for that, he has to hurry, there are already people gathering their coats at the door. “I have great expectations for the Antwerp Book Fair. Marie Claude Bruinzeel is going to interview him there, in public. That can really get the discussion about the book off to a good start.”

Ana knows Marie Claude Bruinzeel’s reputation, based on her interviews in the Saturday literary supplement. They’re the kind of interviews that leave no stone unturned. Marie Claude Bruinzeel has the tendency to focus on the vermin that hide beneath those stones; the worms, beetles, and pill bugs that can’t stand the light of day and go scuttling for safety, and she doesn’t put the stone back where she found it, no, she actually holds it up for a while longer. “Do you still dream sometimes about a winning smash, an Olympic gold medal?” she’d asked a diabetic table-tennis star who’d recently had a leg amputated. At first Ana had been shocked, the question seemed impertinent, and tears had actually come to the table-tennis star’s eyes, but later she had realized that it wasn’t such a strange question after all. Do you still dream… Well, why not? Why shouldn’t people with only one leg still dream? Then, right away, she starts wondering what Marie Claude Bruinzeel will ask M at the book fair. Do you still dream of writing a bestseller? A book like Payback ? Do you still dream that you might… She thought about it for a moment; a question about his work or the dream of future successes won’t expose any creepy pill bugs. Do you sometimes dream of being younger? Of living to see your daughter grow up? Even if it’s only to her eighteenth birthday?

“Will you be there too?” the publisher asked. “Will I see you in Antwerp? We could go to that fish restaurant afterward, if you two feel like it.”

She shakes her head. I don’t think so, she feels like saying, I don’t want to leave my daughter alone too often. But there’s a different reason, actually. Antwerp is too close, there are no surprises in store there anymore. In other cities, yes. Rome, Milan, Berlin. Sometimes she went along with M when he traveled abroad. As long as the engagement was still a ways off, he looked forward to it. But as the departure date came closer he grew increasingly nervous.

“I should have canceled,” he’d say, “but it’s too late now.”

“You could always say you’re sick,” she said.

“That would be boorish. They invited me a year ago. If I canceled now, they’d panic.”

“But what if you really were sick,” she tried, for form’s sake. “You couldn’t go then either, could you?”

He looked at her as though she’d suggested that animals might be able to talk.

“But I’m not really sick,” he said — and a few days later they were standing together at the airport check-in. The ladies at the desk recognized him occasionally, if they were older than thirty. They would give him their prettiest smiles — some of them even blushed — and treated them with great respect. “I read your latest book from start to finish, in one night. Have a lovely trip, Mr. M!” The younger girls treated him like the old man that he was. They raised their voices almost to a scream when handing him his boarding pass, and drew a circle around the gate number and boarding time, as though they assumed that he was already hard of hearing. The rudest among them looked at her and then at him and then back again — they made no attempt to disguise their curiosity. Is this his daughter, or some crumpet forty years younger than he is?

M wasn’t fond of flying. In the duty-free zone he always went to the bar and knocked back a couple of beers before boarding.

“Look at that,” he said, pointing at a group of men in long robes and women in veils. “Let’s hope they’re not on our flight. But maybe they’ll blow themselves up here before we leave the ground. How many beers have I had, anyway? Three or four?”

On the plane he always wanted an aisle seat. After flipping through the in-flight magazine from back to front in record time, he would breathe a deep sigh and look at his watch. A book was useless; he couldn’t read on a plane, he said.

“I thought hippos were only allowed to travel in the cargo hold,” he said a bit too loudly when the stewardess, who was indeed rather portly, stood right beside his seat to demonstrate the use of the oxygen mask and life preserver and accidentally brushed his hair with her elbow.

“How many does this make?” he asked, popping the top off his can of Heineken before tearing the cellophane from the double-decker sandwich with cheese spread. “I can’t eat this,” he said after sniffing it. He pushed the button on the console above his head. “We seem to be hitting turbulence,” he said when the fat stewardess came hurrying toward him down the aisle.