by Herman Koch
Then the discussion had grown heated. The housewives had begun shifting uneasily in their seats, their eyes flitting back and forth between the sleeveless man and M. “Good and evil,” he had said at a certain point, staring straight at the man, “is far too simplistic, it leads only to generalizations.”
He should have stopped right there, M realizes now. He should have let it go. But he knows himself better than that. Winning by points was too easy, it had to be a knockout.
He has opened the doors to the balcony and is standing outside now, the can of beer still in his hand. It’s coming back again, word for word.
“When you look at the history of the twentieth century,” he’d said, “you can only conclude that those who were committed to the good account for just as many or more victims as those who knew deep in their hearts that they represented evil. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot: all of them, based on their belief in what was good, had millions of people slaughtered. The fascists, the Nazis, though, always did as much as they could on the q.t. They went to great pains to keep the locations of the death camps a secret. When the war was winding down, they did all they could to cover their tracks. Even today, they still deny what they did. But what does denying the Holocaust amount to, except the voice of a conscience? Anyone who denies the Holocaust is in fact saying that it didn’t happen because it’s too horrible for words. They weren’t that evil, the deniers shout. We’re not that evil either, they go on in the same breath. It’s so horrible, we can’t believe people are capable of that.”
Before this point—somewhere halfway through M’s monologue—the sleeveless man had stood up and made for the exit. Even though M hadn’t even started saying what he really thought. He had barely taken the corner of the veil between his fingers. Enough is probably enough, he’d thought. If the troublemakers start leaving the room at the very first jab, perhaps it was better to keep one’s real thoughts to one’s self. A few minutes later, the lady librarian glanced at her watch.
From his balcony he looks at the sidewalk café where he had failed to drink coffee with milk this morning.
He leans forward, not too far; when he stands on a balcony he always has the same fantasy—that you lean over too far and lose your balance. The center of gravity. The upper body is suddenly heavier than the lower part, the feet leave the ground, you try to catch yourself, but it’s too late.
M can see a bit of the balcony that belongs to his downstairs neighbor, a little corner of a white wooden armrest, a flowerpot with only soil in it.
He knocks back the rest of his beer, steps inside, and closes the balcony doors.
Marie Claude Bruinzeel is sitting at a window table in the café across from his house, all the way at the back of the dining room that is otherwise deserted on this Monday morning. She doesn’t get up when M sticks out his hand, but then he realizes why. She’s interviewed him once before, a public interview in a room at some book fair. It had gone uneasily at first, but afterward they had kissed each other three times on the cheeks, like old acquaintances.
He takes her hand and leans across the table. Once she catches his drift, she raises her cheek to him—but remains seated.
“It was sweet of you to call me yesterday,” she said. “It gives me a little more leeway with my deadline.”
Sweet. He lets the word sink in for a moment, he doesn’t remember them being so familiar before. This ice must have been broken as well during the last interview, he suspects.
Today there actually is milk for the coffee. And it’s not the girl from last Saturday who brings it to the table, but a thin man with a shaved head and a fuzzy little beard.
“The cappuccino was for…?” he asks before putting the cup and saucer down in front of M with a slightly too-elegant gesture, causing a bit of foam to spill over the edge. It’s a superfluous question, because Marie Claude Bruinzeel’s nearly full café-au-lait is already in front of her. When the thin man leans across their table, M sees something in his earlobe, an earring, a piercing, or something in between the two, something black in the shape of a snail or a shrimp. Through the wispy beard he now sees a few spots on the man’s face. Not pimples. Spots. It’s not something that can simply be turned on and off, this constant observing of superabundant detail; he is a writer, he tells himself, but the vacuuming up of details is purely obsessive. Often, after a day in the city, or a meal in a crowded restaurant, he comes home exhausted by all those faces and their irregularities.
He watches as a glop of foamy milk runs down the side of the cup, onto the saucer. But he’s not going to say anything about it. In a café like this, run by amateurs, things are what they are. Either there is no milk at all, or else it runs over the edges, there is no middle ground.
Now he looks at Marie Claude Bruinzeel’s face. He had forgotten how pretty she is. A bit too much makeup, perhaps, but not the kind of makeup that’s intended to hide anything, rather to accentuate everything that’s already there. She’s wearing her hair up; he follows a few loose strands all the way down to her neck, then lets his gaze travel back up via her chin and glossy red lips until he is looking her straight in the eye.
One of the rare advantages of an interview: you can keep looking into the interviewer’s eyes for a shamelessly long time, and when that interviewer is a woman, as is now the case, a woman as pretty as Marie Claude Bruinzeel, you can even keep looking for longer than might be good for you.
He’s good at it, at looking. He is never the first to avert his eyes.
“Well, I didn’t have too much going on,” he says. “My wife is out of town. I’m home alone.”
He said it without ulterior motives, but it could easily be interpreted as a pass, he realizes immediately. Oh, but then so what! She’s part of the target group. His target group. He may be old but, after all, she’s here because of his talent. If she had no interest in old men with talent, in babbling on about that talent, she would have picked a different profession.
“I’m all yours, Marie Claude,” he says. That may have been a bit too much, too smarmy, but he says it with a smile. He knows that women like it when you say their first name out loud. Not too often, then it becomes too possessive, but in exactly the right dosage. Casually. Besides, it’s a name he enjoys pronouncing, as though he were ordering something in a French restaurant, a spécialité de la maison that isn’t on the regular menu.
She returns his smile. It’s an agreement that meets with their mutual approval, he knows. During the ninety minutes that the interview takes, he is allowed to keep looking into her brown eyes. By way of quid pro quo, he is expected not to be too stingy with his answers. Besides an inside look at the wellsprings, at the workings of his talent, he must also give her something that has never been made public before. An illegitimate child. A life-threatening illness. A manuscript tossed in the fire. He wonders when she will start in about his mother.
“So,” she kicks off, “have you fallen into the proverbial black hole after finishing Liberation Year? Or not yet? Actually, you don’t seem to me at all like the type for black holes.”
For the first fifteen minutes his answers run on automatic pilot. Not too brief, not too long. He only shifts his eyes away now and then to look outside, to pretend he’s thinking about a question. But there’s not a lot happening outside. He sees his own quiet street, the big old trees and, catty-corner from where they are seated, the entrance to his own building. He can see no further than the corner. Around that corner, the postman has just appeared with his cart.
He hears himself talking. He’s given all these answers before. In fact, he would really like to give very different answers, new answers to old questions, but he knows from experience that that would not be wise. The new answers are seldom better than the old. He used to read over the interviews he’d given, both before and after publication, but he’s stopped that. He can’t stand to be confronted with his own waffling anymore; in print it’s often even worse than in real life.
“The black hole doesn’t e
xist,” he hears himself say. “Nor does writer’s block. Those are the cowardly excuses of writers without talent. Ever heard of a carpenter with hammer’s block? A carpenter who installs a parquet floor and then doesn’t know what kind of floor to put in next?”
He tries to smile as he says this. He tries to seem lively by making gestures to go along with the example of the parquet floor. He raises an imaginary hammer and pounds an imaginary nail into the tabletop beside his cappuccino. I have to make this look as though I’m doing it for the first time, he tells himself, but the look on his face, he suspects, will betray his boredom. So instead he concentrates on Marie Claude Bruinzeel’s eyes and imagines how he would look into those eyes if this wasn’t an interview at all, if he were simply sitting across from a pretty woman whom he would later invite to come to his place for a drink or “something other than coffee.”
What he’s actually waiting for is the moment when she will start to plumb the depths, or rather, the moment when she will step across the border between his public and private lives. He could of course dig in his heels, he could adopt his coldest, most impassive expression and shake his head. Sorry, that’s my own business. But he knows that’s not how it works with Marie Claude Bruinzeel. He only wonders what it’s going to be. His mother? The loss? The other women, both before, during, and after his two official marriages? Or perhaps, after all, the approach of death? His own death. What’s left afterward.
One more time he pulls his gaze away from Marie Claude Bruinzeel’s brown eyes, purportedly to think about yet another question (Are you finished with the war now? Or is there still a book about that subject somewhere inside you?), but in fact to take a little break, to catch his breath, to see something normal. The postman is still one door down from his building, he takes the bundle of mail out of his cart and distributes it in the letterboxes.
Maybe a postman would have been a better example than a carpenter, he thinks. What about the black hole of a postman after he has handed out all his letters? Could he, tomorrow or the day after, when starting another day’s round, suddenly find himself faced with a mail block?
“The question is not whether I’m finished with the war, but when the war will be finished with me,” he replies, not for the first time. “The same applies to the book. Whether there’s another book about the war inside me is not something I decide for myself. The book does that. The book always gets there before I do.”
Then, suddenly, she is at his mother. He does his absolute best not to look out the window again. No visible body language that Marie Claude Bruinzeel might use to jump to a conclusion. The thin man with the wispy beard was at their table only a minute ago, to ask whether everything was satisfactory and if there was anything else he could do for them. She had ordered an espresso, he another cappuccino, but in a café like this one, he knows, an eternity will pass before they arrive.
The “loss”—the word is there already, in her very first question. Whether he thinks there is a connection between the loss of his mother and the war. Or whether the fact that he returns to that war so often in his books has less to do with the war itself than with the fact that his mother fell ill in the middle of it. And whether there is perhaps also a connection between the age he has mentioned so often, the age after which he’s said no new experiences come along, and the fact that his mother died shortly after he reached that same age.
He grimaces. He shouldn’t do that, he thinks. He grimaces in spite of himself. This is all much too private, he should reply. I’d rather not talk about this. He has to hand it to Marie Claude, she’s done her homework. No, it’s more than just homework, she’s taken a few things and added them up, made new connections. Unexpected connections that no one else has made before, as far as he can recall. At least not in this way and all at the same time.
He has written about the war and about sick mothers. About dying mothers and the sense of loss. And about the age at which everything coagulates, the age after which the new experiences are no longer really new and can, at best, only be compared with the old ones—only he’s never done that all in the same book.
“To start with the loss,” he says to gain time, but then he doesn’t know how to go on anymore. He wants to stir his coffee, but his cup is empty. “I miss her,” he says. “I miss my mother, perhaps now more than ever.”
Marie Claude Bruinzeel looks at him expectantly with her big brown eyes. She’s waiting for his next sentence. A next sentence in which he’ll explain himself further.
He clears his throat. I can always take it out of the interview later on, he thinks. Take out the worst of it. But then he mustn’t forget to ask to see it before publication, for just this once, by way of exception.
“At first, it’s mostly the shock,” he says. “Or no, not really a shock, because you’ve seen it coming for months already. The illness. The treatment. The hope of recovery. The relapse. You’re prepared for it. But it’s still strange when it really happens. I kept hoping for a miracle, right up to the very last day. And then it happens anyway. From that moment on, you cross a line, all that’s left is before and after. With each day that you move further away from that line, the things that happened before become more important. Become clearer, take on more portent. You don’t want to forget your mother, but above all you don’t want to forget what it was like before. And then there are emotions you don’t often hear about in connection with death. The first is the novelty. This is real, you think. This is happening to me. No one else can say that. It was in the middle of the war, that fact is not unimportant. Death was hardly an uncommon event. There’s a platitude people still use these days: ‘There are worse things, aren’t there?’ Back then, that was really true. There were worse things happening in the world than the death of someone’s mother. Around the corner from us, a week before my mother died, a collaborator was shot as he cycled down the street, and then finished off with a bullet to the back of the head. Two weeks after my mother died, a British bomber was hit by German antiaircraft fire right above our house. I remember the burning tailpiece, the smoke and flames, the impotent screeching of the propellers as they tried and failed to keep the bomber in the air, the explosions of the ammunition going off in the hold; you hoped, no, you expected to see men jumping out of it, the pilot, the crew, that they would use their parachutes and float to safety. But that didn’t happen. The bomber listed over, cut a huge arc, and crashed in a field a couple of miles away. The first thought that came to me was that I had to tell my mother about it. I had even started formulating a description, in my mind I was describing the bomber’s last few moments in the air. And less than a minute later I realized that I had been living like that for a long time, everything that happened to me in my life, on my way to school, at school, on the way home, I had always shaped it right away into the story I would tell when I got home. To my mother, sometimes to my father, but mostly my mother. The downed bomber was the first story that I experienced all on my own, that I didn’t have to tell to anyone, that didn’t even have to become a story.”
He pauses for a moment—he knows what’s coming, he had set himself up for it, consciously or not.
“Because your father wasn’t there when your mother died?” she says now, indeed. “He wasn’t even in Holland. Was he?”
“Wait, there’s something else I need to say. When someone has been ill for a long time, there’s always a sense of relief when it’s over. Relief on behalf of the sick person who no longer has to suffer, but above all on your own behalf. It’s difficult to admit, especially at the age I was then, but I felt an enormous relief because everything could finally be cleared out of the house. The curtains could be opened again to let in the light. This is where my life begins, I thought to myself. My new life. My life free of sickbeds. But there was also another thought. I want to see even more bombers go down, I thought. In those days, the war was already getting closer, it was the summer of the Normandy invasion, only a matter of time before it would reach us. I hoped it would
come to our town as well. I felt guilty about finding the crash of a bomber more exciting than my mother’s death, but at the same time I could keep that feeling of guilt all to myself. It was my guilt, and I no longer had to make a story out of that for anyone either.”
There he stops. There’s more he could say about liberation and loss, but he decides to keep that to himself. For a book, he has been thinking for the last twenty years, but now he doesn’t even think that anymore.
The sense of loss started about thirty years after his mother’s death, and it has gone on right up to this day. The first years there was only the relief and the liberation, and the feeling of guilt about that—what people called “coping” or, even worse, the “process of grieving.” Sometimes he missed his mother, but more often he didn’t. In some way he couldn’t explain, she had become a part of him. Literally. That’s how it had felt to him on the evening she breathed her last breath. A quiet, whistling breath it had been; after that came complete silence.
