Dear Mr. M by Herman Koch

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