Dear Mr. M by Herman Koch Page A

to three.
    “Looks like a real thunderstorm coming up,” I say. “If you want, I can give you a ride home. No problem at all.”
    “You don’t have to do that,” she says.
    “Really, it’s no bother.”
    “I don’t want to get wet, Mommy,” your daughter says. “I want to go home.”
    Your wife bites her lower lip. She looks around again, then up at the sky. Thunder rumbles again. Closer now.
    “But what about the bikes?” she says. “No, we better wait here for it to blow over.”
    “But I want to go home
now,
Mommy.”
    “You can pick up the bikes later on,” I say. “My hotel’s not too far from here. In K. Later this afternoon. Or tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at your house and bring you back here. No problem.”
    A flash, a brief silence, and then a clap, followed by a rolling rumble.
    Just like back then,
I think now. And the next moment it occurs to me that you would always be sure to say that.
Just as it was before.
Yes, you’d make it easy for the reader, or rather: you would do everything in your power to keep the reader from missing the correspondence between one event and the other.
    What do they call that again, when a narrative motif is repeated in a different form? Long ago, a snowstorm gave a story a different twist—gave someone’s life a different twist. And now, years later, a thunderstorm tosses something my way. An opportunity. Opportunities. A surprising twist.
    “My car’s parked just outside the wall,” I say. “I can swing by here and pick you up.”
    I point to the curb in front of the café, where at that same moment the first raindrops begin spattering against the pavement. The sky shifts from gray to nearly black, the red-and-white-striped canopy above our heads begins to flap—people slide their chairs back and hurry inside.
    “That’s very kind of you,” your wife says. “But I wouldn’t—”
    The flash and the boom arrive almost simultaneously. Someone shrieks. From around the corner, somewhere a few streets down, comes a roar—the sound of tiles sliding off a roof, or perhaps more like a truckload of gravel being dumped on the street.
    “That was a direct hit,” says a man holding a newspaper over his head. Through a split in the canopy, a fat rivulet of water is now clattering onto one of the tables. Your daughter has stood up. She has both hands pressed against her ears, but she hasn’t started screaming or shrieking. I see the look in her eyes. It’s more like amazement. Maybe even fascination.
    I push my way past the tables and out onto the street. Supposedly to see where the lightning has hit, but in fact to get a better look at the sky. To my regret I see, just past the church steeple, the first patch of blue peeking out from behind the clouds.
    “I’ll get the car,” I say, once I’ve walked back to where your wife and daughter are standing. “Wait here.”
    Before your wife can object, I’ve turned up the collar of my coat and am striding down the street, past the market square where the merchants are still doing their best to pull their wares in and out of the rain.
    I look up at the sky again. There’s already more blue up there than a minute ago; white, sunlit clouds are piling up beyond the steeple. I’ve already reached the street that passes through the city walls when I turn around again and take another look up at that steeple.
    It’s like I’ve seen it somewhere before—not like a déjà vu, no; really seen it. The steeple is flat on top. You can’t really even call it a spire, somewhere three-quarters of the way up the old part stops and something new begins, something that once, at least, more than sixty years ago I reckon, must have been new. The steeple has been rebuilt. Not restored. Reconstructed. In an architectural style that has aged faster in sixty years than that of the church itself.
    Then I suddenly remember it; not literally, not word for word, but I resolve to look it up when I get home—which I did a few days