by Herman Koch
“I’ll have a beer, thanks,” I say.
I slide the chair back and sink down onto it. Only then do I look straight at her. I smile. She smiles back. There’s no need to describe her face—you see her face in your mind’s eye.
“Who’s that man, Mommy?”
There’s no real need for me to describe your daughter’s face now either, but I can’t leave her out of the story any longer. If I were to leave her out, what follows would be impossible to understand.
“That’s our neighbor,” your wife says. “That’s what he just said. Our downstairs neighbor.”
Then your daughter looks at me for the first time. I look back. I look at her face. In that face, your genes have won the battle. That’s a pity. It’s not an unattractive face, it’s just not a girl’s face. More the face of a man. Not a boy. A man’s face with girlish hair. She has your eyes, your nose, your mouth. Her eyes aren’t watery like yours, the skin on her nose is still white, unmarred by blemishes or hair, when she laughs one sees no brown or grayish teeth, but otherwise she’s simply a copy—a three-year-old, female version of you.
I state my name. Then I ask hers.
She tells me, and I say that I think it’s a pretty name. A little far-fetched, a little affected, maybe a little too special—but of course I say none of that. Who picked this name? You or your wife? I’m betting on you. A daughter of yours, you must have felt, couldn’t have just any old name.
“Well, isn’t that a coincidence!” your wife says to your daughter. “He has the same first name as Papa.”
So now you know my name too. You already knew, of course. Or rather, you should have known—only a few days ago, you wrote my name at the front of your new book. At the front of Liberation Year.
For […], you wrote. Hope you have fun reading this.
Fun reading—yes, that’s what writers sometimes write at the front of their books, you’re not alone in that. Have fun reading this. I don’t know how that works with you, but I rarely have fun while I’m reading. Fun reading makes me think of someone who slaps his knees in mirth as he turns the pages.
A reader reads a book. If it’s a good book, he forgets himself. That’s all a book has to do. When the reader can’t forget himself and keeps having to think about the writer the whole time, the book is a failure. That has nothing to do with fun. If it’s fun you’re after, buy a ticket for a roller coaster.
That we share first names is yet another indication that we find ourselves in the real world. In novels, characters never have the same first name. Never. Only in reality, the real-life reality that takes place in the here and now, do people have the same name. When people have the same first name, you have to state the surname in order to distinguish between them. Or come up with a nickname. Big-mouth Bill, we say, to keep loquacious Bill and quiet Bill separated in our minds.
I have to keep the conversation going, I think, but right then the girl comes back with my beer. I raise my glass in a brief toast, then take a sip. A smaller sip than I’d like.
“We have a house,” your wife says, before I have time to think of anything to say. “About five miles from here. A cottage. It’s at the bottom of a dike; in the distance you can see the ships sailing into the estuary of the W. Heading for A. harbor.”
I look at her. I look her straight in the eye. Don’t hold her gaze too long, I warn myself. How did the two of you get here? I mean, you left in a taxi. But you didn’t take it all the way to H., did you? The taxi must have brought you to the station in Amsterdam. But I noticed yesterday that there’s not even a station here in town. Yesterday, when I was wondering whether to come by car or by train. The closest station is in A.
“We usually take the train to A.,” she says now, answering one of the questions I didn’t ask. “At least, when it’s just the two of us”—she nods at your daughter—“that way, […] still has the car back home. Then we take a taxi from A. We have a car here too. A little secondhand Subaru.”
When she speaks your name, she smiles briefly, and I smile back briefly, as though we’re both realizing at the same moment that she has spoken my name too. Indeed, it’s something you’d never see in a book. At least I’ve never seen it in a book. I find it particularly endearing, in fact, the way she mentions the make of the car. A Subaru…Most people would be ashamed to drive around in a Subaru, but the way she mentions it is off the cuff. A secondhand Subaru. A little car, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a Subaru because it’s only used as a local shopping cart anyway.
That’s it, it occurs to me then. It’s all in that word “little.” House—little house. Car—little car. The apology is already bound up along with that. You may be a famous writer with money in the bank who can afford a second car and a second house, but by calling that second house and that second car a little house and a little car—a little secondhand Subaru—it’s all smoothed over. With her qualification of “little,” your wife is telling me: It hasn’t all gone to our heads.
“Today we rode our bikes here,” she says. “The weather’s so nice. It was fun, wasn’t it?”
“It was really windy,” your daughter says.
“But on the way home we’ll have the wind at our backs,” your wife says. “It will blow us all the way home.”
She puts her arm around your daughter and gives her a little squeeze. Then she smiles at me again.
“I want to go home now,” your daughter says.
“We’ll go in a minute,” she says. “You haven’t finished your lemonade yet.”
“I’m not thirsty anymore.”
Your wife picks up her wineglass—it’s still half full. I see her glance, before taking a sip, at my almost-empty beer glass.
“Yes, we should be going now,” she says without looking at me.
“I’ll be off too,” I say. I toss back the rest of my beer and look around. I act as though I’m looking for the girl to bring the bill.
By then I already know what I’m going to do. I mustn’t sit around here, I mustn’t foist my company on her any longer, that would only make her nervous. I’m going to walk around the market. I announce that too. I’m going to take a little look around the market. From behind the stalls I can keep an eye on the sidewalk café, without being noticed. About five miles from here, that’s what your wife said. I can follow them in the car, not right behind them the whole time, no, that would be too obvious. Just pass them a couple of times, then wait further along to see which turn they take. A cottage. It’s at the bottom of a dike; in the distance you can see the ships sailing into the estuary of the W. A house number ending with a 1—it shouldn’t be too hard.
But coincidence, apparently, isn’t finished with us yet. A shadow suddenly falls over the sidewalk café. When we look up we see the clouds slide across the sun. Gray clouds. Dark gray. Rainclouds.
“Oh, goodness,” your wife says. “We’d better hurry, we don’t want to get wet on the way home.”
Then it’s her turn to look around, but the girl with the serving tray is nowhere to be seen. Now, in the distance, we hear a rumbling. I look at my empty beer glass. Silently, I count to three.
“Looks like a real thunderstorm coming up,” I say. “If you want, I can give you a ride home. No problem at all.”
“You don’t have to do that,” she says.
“Really, it’s no bother.”
“I don’t want to get wet, Mommy,” your daughter says. “I want to go home.”
Your wife bites her lower lip. She looks around again, then up at the sky. Thunder rumbles again. Closer now.
“But what about the bikes?” she says. “No, we better wait here for it to blow over.”
“But I want to go home now, Mommy.”
“You can pick up the bikes later on,” I say. “My hotel’s not too far from here. In K. Later this afternoon. Or tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at your house and bring you back here. No problem.”
A flash, a brief silence, and then a clap, followed by a rolling rumble.
/> Just like back then, I think now. And the next moment it occurs to me that you would always be sure to say that. Just as it was before. Yes, you’d make it easy for the reader, or rather: you would do everything in your power to keep the reader from missing the correspondence between one event and the other.
What do they call that again, when a narrative motif is repeated in a different form? Long ago, a snowstorm gave a story a different twist—gave someone’s life a different twist. And now, years later, a thunderstorm tosses something my way. An opportunity. Opportunities. A surprising twist.
“My car’s parked just outside the wall,” I say. “I can swing by here and pick you up.”
I point to the curb in front of the café, where at that same moment the first raindrops begin spattering against the pavement. The sky shifts from gray to nearly black, the red-and-white-striped canopy above our heads begins to flap—people slide their chairs back and hurry inside.
“That’s very kind of you,” your wife says. “But I wouldn’t—”
The flash and the boom arrive almost simultaneously. Someone shrieks. From around the corner, somewhere a few streets down, comes a roar—the sound of tiles sliding off a roof, or perhaps more like a truckload of gravel being dumped on the street.
“That was a direct hit,” says a man holding a newspaper over his head. Through a split in the canopy, a fat rivulet of water is now clattering onto one of the tables. Your daughter has stood up. She has both hands pressed against her ears, but she hasn’t started screaming or shrieking. I see the look in her eyes. It’s more like amazement. Maybe even fascination.
I push my way past the tables and out onto the street. Supposedly to see where the lightning has hit, but in fact to get a better look at the sky. To my regret I see, just past the church steeple, the first patch of blue peeking out from behind the clouds.
“I’ll get the car,” I say, once I’ve walked back to where your wife and daughter are standing. “Wait here.”
Before your wife can object, I’ve turned up the collar of my coat and am striding down the street, past the market square where the merchants are still doing their best to pull their wares in and out of the rain.
I look up at the sky again. There’s already more blue up there than a minute ago; white, sunlit clouds are piling up beyond the steeple. I’ve already reached the street that passes through the city walls when I turn around again and take another look up at that steeple.
It’s like I’ve seen it somewhere before—not like a déjà vu, no; really seen it. The steeple is flat on top. You can’t really even call it a spire, somewhere three-quarters of the way up the old part stops and something new begins, something that once, at least, more than sixty years ago I reckon, must have been new. The steeple has been rebuilt. Not restored. Reconstructed. In an architectural style that has aged faster in sixty years than that of the church itself.
Then I suddenly remember it; not literally, not word for word, but I resolve to look it up when I get home—which I did a few days later.
The Spitfire dove and strafed the rooftops. Thin ribbons of fire spouted from its cannons. Then the plane dropped something, something that from this distance looked like a milk can. The children watched the can spin around and around…and the next moment it hit the church steeple. A ball of fire. Stones came raining down. The children ran for shelter in the doorway.
When they came out a few minutes later, the spire was gone. Just a scorched framework at the spot where only recently it had poked so proudly at the sky. Wisps of smoke roiled up, like the smoke from a cigarette laid in an ashtray and then forgotten.
We won’t go into your literary style here. I see how you went about doing it. I look up at the steeple, and I sense how at that moment I am literally standing in your shoes. You have stood here before too. Like me, you looked up at the steeple, blown to pieces and then rebuilt after the war. You let your imagination run wild. Then you decided to use the steeple.
Who knows, maybe the church tower at H. will, in the near or distant future, serve as a stopping-off place in a “literary walk.” In the footsteps of the writer M…The participants in the walk are wearing gray and green jackets. Hiking jackets. They are no spring chickens. They’re not much use to society anymore. Only those with too much time on their hands go on literary walks.
The guide will point at the steeple. “This is the church tower that was bombed in Liberation Year,” he’ll say. “No, ma’am, I see you shaking your head, you’re quite right. In the book, the steeple is located in the eastern Netherlands, the part that was already liberated in 1944. But the author truly did let himself be inspired by this steeple for that evocative scene in Liberation Year. He simply moved the steeple somewhere else. That is the artistic liberty of the writer. He picks up a church—a steeple, a church spire—and sets it down somewhere else, at a spot in his book where it serves him best.”
A little less than fifteen minutes later I park my car in front of the sidewalk café. Meanwhile, the sky has cleared up completely. My heart is pounding. I climb out and, for the second time that day, my gaze sweeps over the tables, but your wife and daughter are no longer there. Most of the bikes are parked at the french-fry stand on the market square. Entire families are seated on the benches around it, eating french-fried potatoes from paper cones. On one of those benches your wife has just handed your daughter a napkin, to wipe the mayonnaise from her lips.
Hands in my pockets, I saunter over to them. “It’s pretty much cleared up now,” I say.
“My daughter is really tired,” your wife says. “If it’s not too much trouble, we’d like to take you up on your offer anyway.”
In the movie version of Payback there’s a scene where Laura and I are walking down the beach hand in hand. We’re barefoot. Laura is wearing a dress, I have my jeans rolled up to my knees.
“So what now?” Laura asks.
“What do you mean, what now?” I ask.
A wave washes around our feet. The beach is deserted, yet everything tells you that the director wants this to be a summer scene. Why on earth did you agree to let them move the action from winter to summer? Now something essential is gone: the weather. It was the heavy snowfall, and nothing else, that forced Landzaat to spend the night in Terhofstede. There was no hotel, he had to sleep upstairs, in the attic. We lay downstairs on our mattress in front of the coal stove. That night we barely slept a wink. We lay close together, we kept our clothes on for once. We needed to be prepared for anything, we told ourselves.
This is a point on which the movie departs from the book. Having things happen in summer makes us, however you look at it, more culpable. The man remains the same obtrusive history teacher, but he is at liberty to drive on to his friends in Paris. In the movie, Mr. Landzaat too is more culpable than in reality. The viewer in the theater has prior knowledge. The real story, after all, has already been all over the media. The history teacher disappears without a trace. Why doesn’t he go away? the viewer asks himself. Why doesn’t he leave the boy and girl alone?
Every once in a while we heard the bed creak above our heads. We held our breath. Landzaat must not have slept much that night either. One time he got up, we heard his footsteps on the wooden floor, then he came down the stairs. Laura crept up closer to me. We heard the toilet door and, after a bit, the hissing rush of piss. It sounded very close by—it was like he was pissing all over us, Laura would say later. It was, in any event, something you would rather not hear.
The next morning we awoke to sounds from the kitchen. We stayed in bed and pulled the blankets up even further, so that only our heads were poking out when Mr. Landzaat put his own around the door.
“Coffee’s ready,” he said. “How do you like your eggs?”
At the breakfast table, barely a word was spoken. The coal stove was still warming up, so both Laura and I had blankets draped over our shoulders. I noticed that Laura, too, was doing her best not to watch the history teacher’s long teeth make short work of his
fried eggs.
“So, here we go again,” he said, getting up to put on his coat.
But during the night a lot more snow had fallen. Our first glance at the VW, almost buried now beneath a thick, white blanket of it, destroyed any hope of Landzaat’s speedy departure. But we tried anyway. We put on our gloves and did our best to wipe the snow from the windows and hood. We used a shovel I found in the shed to dig out the wheels, but now the car wouldn’t even start. At the very first attempt, the starter seized up and fell silent.
Through the snow-smeared windshield of the Beetle, Laura and I couldn’t get a clear look at the history teacher’s face. We looked at each other. Little white clouds of breath were coming from Laura’s mouth. Then she squeezed her eyes shut tight. It had stopped snowing—the unbroken cloud cover was the color of wet paper and seemed to hang right above our heads, like a suspended ceiling. It felt like ten minutes or more went by before the car door finally opened and Mr. Landzaat climbed out.
“There’s no garage in this village, I guess,” he said. “But do you know if maybe there’s a town or village close by where they’ve got one?”
I remember clearly the way he stood there. His lanky frame in the snow. He had come uninvited. He had finished all our eau-de-vie and eaten the last of our eggs. In the middle of the night he had released a loud, clattering stream of urine into the toilet. But we were young. If he were to leave now, we would have forgotten about him within the hour. In summer he could have left. But not in winter.
“There’s nothing in Retranchement,” I said. “I’m afraid we’ll have to go to Sluis.”
Without thinking about it much, I’d said “we.” I glanced over at Laura, but she had taken off her gloves and was blowing on her fingers to warm them up.
“How far is that?” Mr. Landzaat asked. “Sluis?”
“Three or four miles, I guess. About an hour’s walk, when the weather’s normal. A little more than that now, probably.”
