Dear Mr. M by Herman Koch Page B

later.
The Spitfire dove and strafed the rooftops. Thin ribbons of fire spouted from its cannons. Then the plane dropped something, something that from this distance looked like a milk can. The children watched the can spin around and around…and the next moment it hit the church steeple. A ball of fire. Stones came raining down. The children ran for shelter in the doorway.
    When they came out a few minutes later, the spire was gone. Just a scorched framework at the spot where only recently it had poked so proudly at the sky. Wisps of smoke roiled up, like the smoke from a cigarette laid in an ashtray and then forgotten.
    We won’t go into your literary style here. I see how you went about doing it. I look up at the steeple, and I sense how at that moment I am literally standing in your shoes. You have stood here before too. Like me, you looked up at the steeple, blown to pieces and then rebuilt after the war. You let your imagination run wild. Then you decided to use the steeple.
    Who knows, maybe the church tower at H. will, in the near or distant future, serve as a stopping-off place in a “literary walk.”
In the footsteps of the writer M…
The participants in the walk are wearing gray and green jackets. Hiking jackets. They are no spring chickens. They’re not much use to society anymore. Only those with too much time on their hands go on literary walks.
    The guide will point at the steeple. “This is the church tower that was bombed in
Liberation Year,
” he’ll say. “No, ma’am, I see you shaking your head, you’re quite right. In the book, the steeple is located in the eastern Netherlands, the part that was already liberated in 1944. But the author truly did let himself be inspired by this steeple for that evocative scene in
Liberation Year.
He simply moved the steeple somewhere else. That is the artistic liberty of the writer. He picks up a church—a steeple, a church spire—and sets it down somewhere else, at a spot in his book where it serves him best.”
    A little less than fifteen minutes later I park my car in front of the sidewalk café. Meanwhile, the sky has cleared up completely. My heart is pounding. I climb out and, for the second time that day, my gaze sweeps over the tables, but your wife and daughter are no longer there. Most of the bikes are parked at the french-fry stand on the market square. Entire families are seated on the benches around it, eating french-fried potatoes from paper cones. On one of those benches your wife has just handed your daughter a napkin, to wipe the mayonnaise from her lips.
    Hands in my pockets, I saunter over to them. “It’s pretty much cleared up now,” I say.
    “My daughter is really tired,” your wife says. “If it’s not too much trouble, we’d like to take you up on your offer anyway.”

In the movie version of
Payback
there’s a scene where Laura and I are walking down the beach hand in hand. We’re barefoot. Laura is wearing a dress, I have my jeans rolled up to my knees.
    “So what now?” Laura asks.
    “What do you mean, what now?” I ask.
    A wave washes around our feet. The beach is deserted, yet everything tells you that the director wants this to be a summer scene. Why on earth did you agree to let them move the action from winter to summer? Now something essential is gone: the weather. It was the heavy snowfall, and nothing else, that forced Landzaat to spend the night in Terhofstede. There was no hotel, he had to sleep upstairs, in the attic. We lay downstairs on our mattress in front of the coal stove. That night we barely slept a wink. We lay close together, we kept our clothes on for once. We needed to be prepared for anything, we told ourselves.
    This is a point on which the movie departs from the book. Having things happen in summer makes us, however you look at it, more culpable. The man remains the same obtrusive history teacher, but he is at liberty to drive on to his friends in Paris. In the movie, Mr. Landzaat too is