by Herman Koch
How does the mediocre intelligence deal with that knowledge? Does he try to buck himself up? Does he realize that there are certain boundaries he will never break through? Or does he tell himself that it’s not really all that bad, that this very morning, after all, he finished the crossword puzzle in the newspaper without any noticeable sign of exertion?
If you ask me, there’s only one real rule of thumb, and that rule says that you’ll never hear people of above-average intelligence mention how smart they are. It’s like millionaires. You have millionaires in jeans and scruffy sweaters, and you have millionaires in sports cars with the top down. Anyone can get a catalogue and look up the price of the sports car, but I’ll give you ten-to-one odds that the scruffy sweater guy could leave the same car behind in a restaurant for a tip.
You’re more the kind with the convertible. Even when it’s raining you drive with the top down, past the outdoor cafés down by the beach. “As early as kindergarten, teachers noticed that I was exceptionally intelligent.” It’s a subject that often (too often, to the point of nausea in fact) comes up in your work and in interviews. “My IQ is just a fraction higher than that of Albert Einstein.” I could go on—“When, like me, one possesses an intelligence found among barely two percent of the population”—but why should I? There are women who say out loud that every man turns and looks when they walk past, and there are women who don’t have to say that.
In fact, you should see your face when you’re extolling your own intelligence. Your face, and the look in your eyes. It’s the look in the eyes of a rabbit that has misjudged the distance to the other side of the expressway—and realizes too late that the headlights bearing down on it are already too close to dodge. A look, in other words, that doesn’t believe itself for a moment, that’s paralyzed by the fear that the first tricky question will expose it as a fraud, once and for all.
A mediocre writer serves a life sentence. He has to go on. It’s too late to change professions. He has to go on till the bitter end. Until death comes to get him. Only death can save him from his mediocrity.
His writing is “not without merit,” that’s what we say about the mediocre writer. For him, that’s the pinnacle of achievement, to produce books that are not without merit. You really do have to be mediocre to go on living once you’ve realized that. To go on caring about a life like that, that’s what I should really say—to not prefer death.
—
The line at the bookstore wasn’t so bad after all. It had rained a little earlier in the morning, then the sun came out. The people were lined up to the door, but they were all inside. Not a bestselling author’s kind of line. Not a line out to the street, or all the way around the corner, no, just the normal kind of line you’d expect for a writer in whom interest has been waning for the last decade or so. Lots of middle-aged women. Far past middle age, I’m sorry to say—women no one turns to watch as they go past.
I took a copy of Liberation Year off the pile and went to the back of the line. There was a man in front of me. The only man there, except for me. Everything about him told you that he wasn’t there of his own free will, as they say, but that he’d come along with his wife, the way husbands go with their wives to IKEA or some furniture outlet. At first the man feigns patient interest in an adjustable bed frame or a chest of drawers, but before long his breathing grows labored and he begins tossing increasingly desperate glances toward the checkout counters and the exit, like a dog smelling the woods after a long trip in the car.
And it was his wife who was holding your book, not him. Women have more time than men. Once the vacuuming is done they open a book—your book—and start to read. And that evening in bed they’re still reading. When their husband rolls onto his side and places a hand on their stomach, close to the navel or just below the breasts, they push that hand away. “Leave me alone, okay, I just want to finish this chapter,” they say, then read on. Sometimes women have a headache, sometimes they’re having their period, sometimes they’re reading a book.
Again, I’m not going to attempt to describe your face. The expression you wore when I put my copy of Liberation Year on the table for you to sign. Suffice it to say that you looked at me the way you look at someone you’ve never seen anywhere but on the other side of a counter. Across the counter at the drugstore, for example, the cashier you suddenly run into on the street: you recognize the face, but have no idea where from. Without the context of the counter, the razor blades, and the painkillers, you can’t place the face.
“Is it for someone special?” you asked, the same way you’d asked the people in front of me. Meanwhile, you looked at my face. The face that seemed familiar to you, but that you still couldn’t pin down.
“No, it’s for myself.”
You sign with a fountain pen. A fountain pen you screw the cap back onto after each signature or personal inscription. You’re afraid that otherwise it will dry up. You’re afraid that you yourself are going to dry up; that’s what a dime-store psychologist might conclude, before going on to ask you more about your parents and your childhood.
“And the name is—?” The cap was already off, the fountain pen already poised above the title page, when suddenly I thought about something. I looked at your hand holding the pen, your old hand with the clearly visible veins. As long as you continue to breathe, the blood will keep on transporting oxygen to your hand—that’s also how long you’ll be able to sit at a table in a bookstore and sign books that are not without merit.
What I thought about was this: I thought about your face poised above your wife’s face, your face in the semidarkness of the bedroom, your face as it slowly approaches hers. I thought about it from her perspective, how she sees that face approaching: the bleary old eyes, the whites of them not completely white anymore, the chapped and wrinkled lips, the old teeth, not yellow but mostly gray, the smell that passes between those teeth and reaches her nostrils. It’s the same odor you smell when the sea pulls back, leaving behind it on the beach only algae and empty mussel shells.
The odor is so strong that it overrides the normal, old-man smells: the smell of diapers, of flaking skin, of dying tissue. Yet, a little more than three years ago, there must have been a night when she saw a future in all of that. A night when she decided that having a child by that uncongenial-smelling face could be regarded as an investment.
That your wife was able to see a future, I can almost believe that. But what kind of future did you see? She saw a child that would grow first inside, then outside, her body. But what about you? Did you see yourself waiting at the gate of the elementary school, later, amid all the young mothers? As an admittedly old but famous father? Did your fame, in other words, make you free to bring a child into the world at a ridiculously advanced age?
Because what future awaits her, your daughter? All you have to do is look at the calendar. That future, namely, doesn’t exist. Even if it all goes unexpectedly well, from a point somewhere halfway through high school she’ll have to make do with nothing but the memory of her father. In the middle of those “difficult years.” Those same difficult years during which her mother once knocked on your door in her capacity as reporter for the school paper.
You spoke my name, and once again looked at me with that gaze in which—somewhere far away—something like recognition had begun to dawn. As though you heard a song that sounded vaguely familiar, but you couldn’t come up with the name of the singer.
Your fountain pen scratched across the page. Then you blew softly on the letters before closing the book—and I smelled the odor. You’re almost done for. One signature, one inscription on a title page separates you from the grave and oblivion. That’s another thing we need to talk about: the future, after you’re gone. I could be mistaken, of course, but my impression is that it will go quickly. In southern countries, the dead are buried the very same day. For reasons of hygiene. The pharaohs were wrapped in bandages and buried along with their most prized possessions: their favorite pets, their favor
ite wives…I think it will look something like that. The Big Forgetting will begin the very same day. You will be buried along with your work. Of course there will be speeches, and the list of speakers will be impressive enough. Full or half pages in the papers will be dedicated to the importance of your oeuvre. That oeuvre will be collected in a leather-bound, seven-volume edition, subscriptions to which are open even as we speak. And that will be that. In no time, separate volumes of the luxury edition will start popping up at secondhand book sales. The people who have subscribed won’t show up to collect the series—or they’ll be dead—on the day it appears.
And your wife? Oh sure, she will go on playing the widow for a while. Maybe she will even play hardball and forbid some biographer to cite from your personal correspondence. But that doesn’t seem like a very realistic scenario to me. Guarding access to correspondence is more the kind of thing the older widows do. The widows with no future. Your wife is young. It won’t be long before she starts thinking about a life without you. She probably already thinks about that with some regularity.
And by the time your daughter turns eighteen and has to apply for an official document (a passport, a driver’s license), the person behind the counter will already be asking her to spell her surname. Perhaps she’ll still say: I’m the daughter of…
Who’s that?
Yes, that’s how it will end. You won’t live on in your work, but in the child you brought into the world in the nick of time—just like everyone else.
Maybe you’ve noticed that, so far, I have been extremely discreet in dealing with your daughter as a private individual. I have not, for example, made any attempt to describe her. In situations where she was physically present, I have left her out of my descriptions. In the tabloids, faces of the children of celebrities are sometimes rendered unrecognizable, in order to protect their privacy. Your daughter’s presence yesterday, for instance, when your wife left in the cab, is something I have not mentioned. I remember how she waved to you through the rear window of the taxi. From my balcony, I could see her little hand waving. I saw her face, too, but I won’t describe it.
And I’ve left her out of your shared dinners, because you yourself always do too. Your wife brings your daughter to bed before you start in. The silent dinner. You are, of course, completely within your rights to feed your daughter beforehand and then put her to bed. There are couples who think that in that way they can keep something alive, something of the old, romantic days when it was just the two of them. With no children. But how is that supposed to work when your daughter grows older? Will she put up with that silence the way her mother does? Or will she, like all children, fire off questions at you? Questions that can only help you out. That could make you a more rounded person—even now, even though she’s not quite four.
There are wars in which only military targets are fired upon, and there are wars in which everyone is a target. You, more than anyone, know exactly which war I’m referring to. You write about it. Too often, to my taste. Your new book, too, harks back once again to that war. As a matter of fact, the war is the only subject you have.
Which brings me straight to today’s sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: What does a war do to a person of mediocre intelligence? Or perhaps: What would that same mediocre intelligence have done without that war?
I could help you out with some new material. The women and children have meanwhile been herded to the air-raid shelters. Nothing prevents me now from handing you the new material on a silver platter. That in doing so I consider you a military target is something you should take as a compliment.
The material, by the way, is perhaps not entirely new. It might be better to speak of old material seen from a fresh perspective.
I am going home now.
The first thing I’ll do is read your book.
You’re up unusually early this morning. Especially for a Saturday. The clock beside my bed said nine when I heard you in the bathroom. Judging from the sound of it, you have a stainless steel shower stall and an adjustable showerhead—you have a predilection for the powerful jet, from the sound of it; the noise it makes when you open the tap is, in any event, like an April downpour pounding on an oil drum.
I close my eyes and see you holding out one careful hand to test the water. By then you have probably already undressed, a pair of striped pajamas hangs neatly over the back of a chair. Then you step into the shower. The thrumming of water on the steel floor becomes less loud. All I hear now is the normal splash of water on a naked human body.
Generally speaking, though, you’re more the kind for the tub. For endless soaking, I mean. With scents and bath oils, and afterward a lotion or a cream. Your wife who comes to bring you a glass of wine or port. Your wife who sits on the edge of the tub, lowers her hand into the water, and makes little waves with her fingers. You probably cover yourself with a thick layer of bubble bath—to keep her from thinking the wrong kind of thoughts. Thoughts about mortality, for instance. Or about copyrights passing automatically to the next of kin.
Do you own a toy boat? Or a duck? No, I don’t suppose so. You wouldn’t permit yourself such frivolity, even in the bath your mind keeps thinking about things that leave other people stumped. That’s too bad. A missed opportunity. With mountains of bubble bath and a boat you could reenact the sinking of the Titanic: on that fatal night, the captain turns a deaf ear to all warnings about icebergs and the ship disappears, its stern sticking up at an almost ninety-degree angle, into the icy waters of the North Atlantic.
What I do judge you capable of is farting. A loud fart, with a rush of bubbles that roils up like thunder to burst through an iceberg of bubble bath. But I doubt that makes you laugh. I see an earnest expression. The earnest expression of a writer who takes everything about himself seriously, including his farts.
In any case, this morning you opted for the shower, a rare exception. I’m sure you have your reasons. Perhaps you’re in a hurry, to be on time for an appointment. Maybe it has to do with your being home alone and unable to warn anyone should you become unwell. You wouldn’t be the first writer to be found dead in the tub.
I think about you as the water pours over your body. Not for very long; it’s not a particularly pretty thought. My impression is that older people tend to choose the shower in order not to have to look at their body. Please do correct me if I’m wrong. For you that’s not a problem, apparently. Apparently you can stand that, the sight of a body whose folds and crinkles seem above all to be a foreshadowing, indicators of a near future when that body will no longer be around.
As far as I can tell from here, your wife never takes a bath. Even though she’s the one who has nothing to be ashamed of. Before the mirror, under water, only half covered with a hastily wrapped towel, it doesn’t matter, she can take pleasure in who she is. But she never stays in the shower for more than a couple of minutes.
Personally, I regret that. I’m not made of stone. I am a man. During those two minutes I’ve often thought about her, just as I’m thinking about you now. Hanging over that chair at such moments is no pair of pajamas, but a white towel or bathrobe. She herself is in the shower by now. She closes her eyes and raises her face to feel the jets of water. She welcomes the touch of water on her eyelids like a sunrise, the start of a new day. She shakes her head, briefly but vigorously. Drops of water fly from her wet hair. Somewhere in a corner of the shower stall or close to the bathroom window you can see a little rainbow.
The water pours down her neck. Don’t worry, I won’t go into any greater detail about the thoughts that come next. I won’t defile her beauty; not out of respect for your feelings, but out of respect for her.
So the actual showering lasts barely two minutes. But after that she stays in the bathroom for a long time. To do things, I suspect. Sometimes I fantasize about just what those things might be. Sometimes I wonder whether you still fantasize about things like that on occasion, or whether they are just more annoying details to you.
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This morning I’m having some doubts about that new material. The new material I could give you. Last night I read your book, hence the doubts. Yes, that’s right, I read Liberation Year in one sitting. I am purposely avoiding terms such as “in one fell swoop” or “at a single stroke”—I simply started around seven in the evening and by midnight I was finished. It wasn’t as though I couldn’t put your book down, or, even worse, that I needed to know how it ended. No, it was something else. That same thing you sometimes have in restaurants: you’ve ordered the wrong dish, but because you’re ashamed to leave too much behind on your plate, you go ahead and eat more than is good for you.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly. In fact, I’ve had the same sensation with all your books. You take a bite and start chewing, but it doesn’t taste like much. It’s hard to swallow. Odds and ends become stuck between your teeth. On the other hand, though, it’s not really bad enough to summon the waiter and demand in a huff that the dish be brought back to the kitchen.
I think it’s far more simple than that: even wolfing down a miserable meal adds to our stockpile of experiences. We’ve eaten absolutely everything on our plate. We feel our stomach bracing itself for a serious bout of indigestion. Perhaps we order a cup of coffee and something on the side to help our stomach out a bit.
And so, around midnight, after having put away Liberation Year, I turned on the TV for a few minutes. Bouncing from channel to channel, I finally arrived at National Geographic. I was in luck, the program that was starting was one I always enjoy. Seconds from Disaster, about aviation catastrophes. You see how the passengers—the unsuspecting passengers—place their luggage in the overhead compartments and fasten their seat belts.
