Free Dear Mr. M by Herman Koch Page B

moment. You’ve tossed the coin, it spins as it falls, it rolls off under a chair or table. You bend down and pick it up.
    Heads it’s me:
But I won’t bother you any longer. I should be moving on.
    Tails it’s her:
Oh, how thoughtless of me…Please, sit down.
    It’s tails. She leans over, takes one of the shopping bags off the chair, then the other, and places them on the ground beside her own chair.
    “Can I take your order?”
    Suddenly there’s a girl standing beside me, a girl carrying a wooden tray. I glance at the table, at the glass of lemonade and the glass of white wine.
    “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