Free Dear Mr. M by Herman Koch

Landzaat tried to start the Volkswagen. It felt like hours passed, but then there was a loud pop and a white cloud of exhaust. I had both arms around Laura and was holding her tight.
    “Sweetheart,” she whispered in my ear. “My love.”
    The car moved a few inches, almost imperceptibly to the naked eye. It took a moment for us to realize that the rear tires were spinning desperately in the fresh snow. Mr. Landzaat turned off the engine and opened the door.
    “No traction,” he said after he’d climbed out. He kicked the rear tire, then took a few careful steps up onto the road. Almost right away, he slipped and fell—or pretended to slip and fall.
    “It’s like a skating rink out here,” he said.
    I felt Laura’s hand under my coat, her fingers under my sweater and T-shirt, her nails against my skin.
    “I’m really sorry about this,” Mr. Landzaat said. “I wanted to leave. You saw me try to leave. But I’m pretty much powerless. Is there a hotel somewhere in the village, maybe?”

After the tunnel, the landscape changes. I won’t try to describe that landscape, I think you can picture it just as clearly as I do. First you have the cranes along the waterfront, the pipes and tubes of the refineries, the little lights blipping on and off at the tops of the power pylons, but after the tunnel everything becomes flatter and emptier.
    White vapor is coming from the cooling towers at the nuclear plant. Stacked up high along the dike are blue sea containers bearing names like HANJIN and CHINA SHIPPING . The road’s surface consists of sloppily laid concrete slabs, as though the road itself were only temporary, as though it could just as easily be somewhere else tomorrow.
    A few curves later and the cooling towers and containers are behind me, in my rearview mirror. In front of me the new landscape opens up—little dikes lined with poplars, pastureland with a few sheep or horses, a brick steeple in the distance.
    As I’ve already noted, one should do one’s best to banish coincidence from a novel—from a made-up story. Coincidence fits better in the real world. The real world is its ideal habitat. Only reality is glued together with coincidence.
    In both
Liberation Year
and
Payback,
nothing is left to coincidence. Coincidence ruins the credibility of a writer and his story, you’re quite aware of that. In your books, therefore, everything has to do almost fastidiously with everything else. The children are able to find their way into the liberated zone of the Netherlands
because
the eldest of the two boys once went there on vacation with his parents. The Wehrmacht officer understands Dutch (something his interrogators don’t know)
because,
in prewar Berlin, he was infatuated with a Dutch girl. Might that Dutch girl, the reader wonders even at that point, be the same one who is now in hiding close to Amsterdam’s Old West Church? And indeed, when they meet later on in the story (under less felicitous circumstances), can you really call that a coincidence?
    Something similar happens in
Payback.
The history teacher, Mr. Landzaat (in your book you call him Ter Brecht—a name that’s a bit too contrived to my tastes) listens to the weather report on the car radio on his way to Terhofstede (Dammerdorp in
Payback
). What you’re suggesting is that he knows it will start snowing later that day. He takes into account the possibility that he may become stranded; you force the reader to suspect this along with you. Still, he drives on. Here the book parts from the truth. The truth, as is so often the case, is much simpler. Mr. Landzaat was probably hoping that Laura would react differently, but I don’t think he ever consciously considered the weather.
    He was standing outside, in the freshly fallen snow. At that point, he really wanted to leave. Today, still, so many years later, I firmly believe that.
    So imagine that it hadn’t started snowing, or that it had been snowing only lightly. Then he actually would