Dear Mr. M

by Herman Koch

  For very different reasons, she couldn’t express her doubts about her father’s behavior to her best friend either. To Stella. Stella would have thought she was crazy. Your father looks at me in such a normal way, Stella had told her. The way you look at a grown-up.

  “I’d really love to go to Paris,” she said. “West Berlin doesn’t appeal to me that much, and the Ardennes would kill me. Do you think it’s possible, you think I have a chance, Jan?”

  And as she was calling her homeroom teacher by his first name for the first time, she placed her left hand on the tabletop, not far from the sheet of paper with the various field-trip destinations on it; not far either from the teacher’s right hand, the fingertips of which rested on the bottom of that sheet of paper. Well-tended fingers, Laura saw, no flaky skin, neatly manicured nails.

  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” Jan Landzaat said. “Like I said, some people deserve it more than others.”

  She gave him only a few moments to let his gaze rest on her hand, then pulled it back from the table. With both hands she now tucked her hair behind her ears, then pulled it all the way back in a ponytail and shook it loose again.

  With most boys, blushing started at the cheeks, but with Mr. Landzaat it was his neck that turned red first. Then it rose quickly from the collar of his burgundy sweater across his chin, around his mouth, and up to his forehead—like a glass being filled with pink lemonade. Maybe the blushing had started even lower, Laura thought, and therefore earlier, somewhere right above or right below his navel.

  Today he would not get to see her hands again. She leaned forward a little and placed them on her thighs, close to her knees, so they were hidden from sight beneath the table. For the time being, Jan Landzaat would have to make do with the memory of the girl’s hand on the tabletop, maybe it would come to mind again when he went to talk to Harm Koolhaas and Miss Posthuma about which students should be exempted from the lottery—which students deserved more than others to go on the field trip to Paris.

  As a matter of fact, Herman really didn’t help with the dishes. And when the table was being cleared he had to be egged on before he finally stood up with a sigh, piled up two or three plates, and took them, along with one single fork, one knife, and one glass, to the kitchen—then sank back down in his chair and lit an unfiltered Gitane.

  There was nothing to be done about it, but the two girls were always the ones who started in on the dishes. Lodewijk usually dried, David was an old hand at cleaning the table; with a wet cloth he wiped and polished until the wooden tabletop gleamed as though it had never held a plate. Meanwhile, Ron and Michael saw to the floor, one of them wielding the dustpan, the other the brush, but that was pretty much it.

  “Your turn, Herman,” Stella said on the third or fourth evening, when Lodewijk, for a change, had lowered himself with a sigh into the easy chair by the fire.

  She was standing in the doorway, holding out a checkered dish towel. Herman glanced left and right, as though checking whether she was talking to someone sitting beside him. “I thought that’s why we brought two women along,” he said. “Why else? Can anyone explain that to me?”

  But when he saw the look on Stella’s face, he slid his chair back anyway. “Only kidding. Ouch, my back!”

  The first couple of days were sunny, but on the third the weather turned. Rain and wind. That evening they even lit the coal stove. Lodewijk had put on a white, knitted sweater and rubbed his hands together to warm them.

  “So what’s wrong with you, anyway?” Herman said to him as he took the dish towel from Stella’s hand. “Are you sick or something?”

  A thick book lay in Lodewijk’s lap, a book with a marker sewed into the binding. Lodewijk had a penchant for Dutch authors from before the war.

  “Are you sick, or just too lazy to dry the dishes?” Herman said when Lodewijk didn’t reply. “I mean, I’m happy to take over for you, but the dishes will never be as dry as when you do it.”

  Laura was still standing at the table with the last few dirty glasses in her hand; she saw Herman wink at her, but looked away quickly.

  “I’ll come and inspect them later on,” Lodewijk said without raising his eyes. “And if I find even one drop on them, I’ll make you start all over again.”

  Michael and Ron, busy applying dustpan and brush to the floor around the coal stove, both laughed. Lodewijk lifted his feet a fraction of an inch, so they could get under them.

  There was a smile on Herman’s face, Laura saw, but his eyes were not smiling along.

  “That sweater of yours, Lodewijk, is that made from sheep?”

  “Baah,” Lodewijk said.

  Laura took a step toward the kitchen, but couldn’t get by, not with Stella and Herman standing in the doorway.

  “Did your mom knit it for you?” Herman asked. “Did she catch that sheep and knit it into a sweater?”

  Laura came a step closer; as though by accident she knocked one of the glasses against Herman’s forearm. When he looked at her she raised her eyebrows and shook her head.

  “Okay,” she said cheerfully. “Shall we get going?”

  —

  “What’s up?” Herman said as he took the first cup from the rack and slowly wrapped it in the dish towel. “Did I accidentally touch on a taboo here? Sheep? Knitting?”

  Laura had closed the kitchen door behind them and held her finger to her lips. “It’s his mother,” she whispered. “She’s ill. Very ill.”

  In a voice close to a whisper, she told Herman the gist of the story. Lodewijk’s mother had an operation six months ago. For a while the prospects had been decent, but now it seemed she had only a few months to live. Lodewijk’s father had died when he was eleven. He had no brothers or sisters. Which means he’s an only child too, Laura almost said, but caught herself just in time. Her main feeling was one of amazement—at herself, for realizing only now that she was here in the same house with two only children.

  “Okay,” he said when she was finished; meanwhile, the plates, glasses, knives, and forks had piled up in the dish rack. Herman was still working on the first cup. “But that’s not good, of course.”

  “No,” Laura said, but then she looked at him. “What do you mean?” she asked. “What’s not good?”

  “That you guys protect him by not talking about his mother. I mean, I didn’t know about it. But if I had, I would have said the same thing just now.”

  Despite herself, Laura felt her face grow hot. “It’s not like that, we don’t avoid talking about his mother,” she said. “We talk about her all the time. We ask him how she’s doing. Before the vacation started we all went to see her in the hospital. We brought her presents. Flowers. Bonbons and things. It turned out that she wasn’t allowed to have most of it, but it was the thought. The whole thing was pretty intense. His mother was all yellow in the face, I mean, I knew her when she was still healthy. All swollen up. Horrible. But we acted as normal as possible. We joked around and Lodewijk’s mother actually laughed with us, even though you could see that it was hard for her. Michael had made this thing for her, from two clothes hangers and a piece of wood, a thing she could put on the bed so she could read a book without having to hold it up.”

  “It turned out she never read books,” Stella said. “Only gossip magazines. But anyway, like Laura said, it’s the thought that counts.”

  “Oh, fuck,” Herman said; he folded open the dish towel. The cup was in it, its handle broken off. “Maybe I made it a little too dry,” Herman said. It was one of her mother’s favorite coffee cups, because it had belonged to her mother before that, but Laura couldn’t help laughing.

  “What is it?” Stella looked over her shoulder. “Herman!” she said when she saw the cup and the broken handle in the dish towel. “What are you doing? Haven’t you ever dried dishes before? Look at this pile. Come on, get a move on.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Herman said; he looked at Laura and made a face. A childish face—like a little boy whose angry neighbor lady has
just seized his soccer ball.

  Laura half expected him to toss the broken cup into the garbage pail under the counter, but he didn’t. He placed the handle carefully in the cup and put it on a shelf above the stove, along with the round canisters of coffee, tea, and sugar. Then he took a plate from the rack and started drying it.

  “What I meant to say was really something else,” he said. “The whole thing about Lodewijk’s mother is terrible, sure. But you shouldn’t make a taboo out of it. You all go to visit her in the hospital. Fine. But if you’re not allowed to joke about things anymore, then in fact you’ve already signed her death certificate. Generally speaking, parents are ridiculous creatures. If all you do is ask Lodewijk politely and worriedly about his mother’s health, then you’re not taking him seriously anymore, as the son of that same mother. What you’re really saying then is that you’ve already given up on her.”

  “Yeah, they say that sometimes,” Stella said. “That it’s better for the survivors to look death in the eye. Not repress it.”

  Laura couldn’t help sighing. Stella had a way of sprinkling conversations with secondhand psychological theories she got from her father. Usually misquoted, and always at the wrong moment.

  “But, Herman,” she said, “you didn’t know that Lodewijk’s mother was seriously ill, but would you still have started in about his knitted sweater even if you had known? Do you mean that, really?”

  Herman looked her straight in the eye; his look was no longer cold or tough, more like amused—naughty.

  “Maybe I would have adapted the text a little,” he said. “I probably would have asked: ‘Lodewijk, who’s going to knit those disgusting sweaters for you when your mom’s not around anymore?’ ”

  Laura held Herman’s eye and didn’t blink. How can you say something like that? That’s what she thought she should say right then, but what she was thinking was quite different. It had to do with what Herman had said earlier. Generally speaking, parents are ridiculous creatures. And also with something else he’d said, a few days ago on the train, when he used the gin to raise a toast to the death of his own parents. “Ridiculous,” that was the key word. Laura had always felt that her parents were nice and friendly. That’s what they were, wasn’t it, nice and friendly? Everyone said so, even her friends. You almost couldn’t ask for nicer parents. But sometimes those nice parents were a pain too. No, not a pain: they were ballast. A weight around your neck that made you walk around a little bent over all the time. Her famous father with his corny jokes at his daughter’s expense. Her mother sticking her head in the sand, so that she could have a glass of red wine with her husband on the couch at night. She couldn’t help it, but suddenly she felt jealous of Herman—jealous of his parents. Normal, tiresome, selfish, failing parents you could be angry at. Parents you could wish dead and forget about with a few slugs of gin. She was even a little jealous of Lodewijk. Lodewijk, who was already a half-orphan, and who would soon be rid of it all, of the never-ending nagging of parents.

  Herman must have seen something in the way she looked. Something, a change in her expression, because he smiled at her, with his lips and with his eyes.

  “They are disgusting, aren’t they, Laura?” he said. “Lodewijk’s sweaters?”

  And she smiled back, it was no effort for her to smile back at Herman with her eyes, she knew that.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Disgusting.”

  On the last day of the trip, Herman surprised them with a meal he had prepared all by himself. Under the guise of a lone bike ride, he had gone to Sluis and secretly done all the shopping. When he came back no one was allowed into the kitchen. Herman said he didn’t need any help.

  “It smells great!” Lodewijk called out from his chair beside the fire, while the girls set the table with glasses and plates Herman handed them through a crack in the kitchen door. “Can you give us any more information? Like what time we’re going to eat? We’re famished!”

  But no answer came from the kitchen. It was almost dark when the door flew open with a bang and Herman came into the room, clutching the handles of a huge pan in his mittened hands. “Hurry up, fast, a trivet!” he said to Stella, the only one who had already pulled up a chair at the table.

  “Come on!” he said. “What are you people waiting for? If it gets cold, it’s ruined.”

  He disappeared back into the kitchen and returned carrying a platter with three smoked sausages, still in their plastic packaging with the brand name UNOX on them. “Scissors?” he asked Laura. “Are there scissors in the house?”

  “Hotchpotch,” said Ron, who had already lifted the lid off the pan.

  “Maybe more of a dish for a winter’s day,” Herman said. “But I figured, the weather being what it is…And the days will be getting shorter again soon anyway,” he added, disappearing back into the kitchen.

  Stella dished it up, Laura cut open the plastic packages, and Herman returned with a frying pan half-filled with a sputtering-hot liquid.

  “Look out, this is hot as hell,” he said. “Has everybody dug their little foxhole? The mustard’s in the kitchen. Michael?”

  “Beautiful!” said Lodewijk, who had already started in. “Really, Herman. Fantastic.”

  The day after Herman had teased Lodewijk about his sweater, they’d all gone for a long walk, first to Retranchement, then along the canal to the Zwin. At one point Herman and Lodewijk fell behind the others, and when Laura turned around she saw Herman put an arm around Lodewijk’s shoulder. Those two had become closer since that walk in a way that was clear to everyone. Herman asked about the books Lodewijk read and, on occasion, Lodewijk sneered at their classmates, “that bunch of illiterates” who barely read at all, or if they did, only the “wrong books,” which would end up on their required reading lists anyway.

  “Be careful not to get any on you,” Herman said now to Lodewijk. “Under the circumstances, we wouldn’t want your mother to have to start knitting again.”

  “You know, I think I will spill something on myself,” Lodewijk said. “Then at least I won’t have to wear this sweater anymore.”

  At first, Laura had been amused by the way Herman and Lodewijk tried to outdo each other with ever-blunter jokes about Lodewijk’s deathly ill mother, but in the end it seemed to take on a strained quality—especially for Lodewijk. It was as though the brusque jokes fit Herman to a tee, like a sweater made to size, not a bit too small or too big, while with Lodewijk it was more like a pair of jeans that were really too tight for him, but that he wore anyway because he thought they made him look slimmer. Lodewijk had always been funny, but his humor was more of the wide-eyed sort, as though he was amazed by everything that happened. Now it was as though Herman had awakened this blunt side of his character.

  “It really is delicious, Herman,” Laura said. “It has something…something…special. Onions?”

  Herman was just in the process of dishing up a second helping, but he was the only one. He jabbed his fork into a big piece of smoked sausage and swung it onto his plate. “Garlic,” he said.

  Laura watched as he cut the chunk of sausage in two, wiped it through the glob of mustard on his plate, and stuck it in his mouth. She had always thought hotchpotch with raw endive was kind of childish. A typical boy’s dish. The kind of thing boys could squeak by with when it came to cooking. Fried eggs, spaghetti and tomato sauce, chili con carne—hotchpotch belonged in that same category. It was the kind of thing that was almost impossible to ruin, but the boys would stand around in the kitchen for hours anyway, acting important, as though they were fixing a three-star meal.

  “It’s one of my mother’s recipes,” Herman said. “With garlic. That’s the way she always made it.”

  “Made?” Ron said.

  “When she was still happy,” Herman said.

  “There’s one of those traditional butchers on our street who makes smoked sausage from pigs that have always lived outside,” Stella said. “You can really taste the difference.”

 
“And what is it you taste, exactly?” Herman asked. “Mud? Shit?”

  “No,” Stella said. “Just meat. Real meat. Not this chemical garbage.”

  “I’ve seen those traditional butchers too,” Herman said. “And I’ve bought smoked sausage from them. Once, but never again. The ‘traditional butcher’ is perhaps the greatest misnomer of our age. And his smoked sausages along with it. That meat has all kinds of things in it: tendons, nerves, bits of crushed bone that get stuck between your teeth. And the whole thing packaged in a thick, tough skin that you end up chewing on for hours. They probably use the hog’s foreskin for that. No, I swear by Unox. Chemical garbage, my ass. It slides right down the gullet, the way smoked sausage should.”

  Laura was half expecting Stella to come back at him with arguments about poison or environmental damage, about toxins that piled up inside the body when one ate factory-made food, but she did something different. She cut off a piece of the Unox sausage, jabbed her fork into it, and stuck it in her mouth.

  “Now close your eyes,” Herman said, “and tell me what you taste.”

  Laura shifted in her chair, she didn’t know exactly what was happening, but something was. Apparently she’d missed out on the fact that Stella had not yet tasted the smoked sausage, not until Herman had started talking about its chemical benefits. Now she watched as Stella chewed slowly, her eyes closed, and saw how Herman looked at Stella. He had never looked at Stella that way before. Laura felt her cheeks tingle, and she reprimanded herself silently. Not now! All week, Herman had treated Stella as though she was a bit naive, a naive and rather unworldly girl who never got further, during their walks and dinner-table conversations, than the deposition of dime-store profundities that she’d picked up from her father. That was all true enough. But Stella was also something else, something that Laura knew she herself was not. Stella was sweet. Perhaps even innocent. Stella could look at you in a certain way…Laura always had to lower her eyes or turn them away when her closest girlfriend looked at her like that. She had tried it in front of the mirror once: she had opened her eyes so wide that the tears came, she had thought about lovely, innocent things—but not in a million years did she come close to looking the way Stella did. No, Laura was not sweet. She was lots of other things—pretty, irresistibly so perhaps, although all too aware of her own irresistibility—but she would never be sweet, or innocent, or “vulnerable” (the fashionable word these days). More like the very opposite. Stella had actually said that to her after Laura told her girlfriend about the blushing history teacher, about how she had wrapped Jan Landzaat around her finger in order to secure a place on the field trip to Paris.