Dear Mr. M (7 page)

Once again, I hesitate. We now have two narratives running side by side. Or three, actually. The stories within the story. You yourself love that technique; as we've seen already, you make full use of it in both
Payback
and
Liberation Year.

So I'm hesitating. For a moment, I ask myself what you would do if you were in my shoes. Go ahead here with the next day—the day after the postcard arrived—with me driving down our street, after setting the navigation system for the route to H. (“A navigation system?” I hear you say. “What kind of gizmo is that?” I see you shaking your head after I explain. “What's wrong with a road map?” you ask—and, once again, you're not completely wrong about that.)

I could, of course, also toss you some new material. The way Laura Domènech, Mr. Landzaat, and I greet each other at the garden gate of the house in Terhofstede—up to the moment when the three of us go inside and the history teacher gradually begins to disappear from sight.

Or I could go on with last Saturday: the third parallel narrative. You got up from the table outside the café. You still hadn't had your coffee. I raced to take the elevator down and followed you on your walk through town. That's already a lot less suspenseful—at least for you. After all, you were there too. At most, it might be interesting to your readers. What does a writer do during the weekend? What does he do on a normal Saturday (and Sunday)—a day when his wife is not at home?

But like I said: you know that better than I do.

Landzaat threw all his body language into the fray to make clear that something had really changed in his attitude toward Laura. That he was not here to accost her again.

“Laura,” he said quickly when we came close enough for him to see the expression on her face. “Laura, please! Let me…let me explain first. Let me say what I have to say.”

He spread his arms, his palms facing forward.
Look, I've come unarmed,
that expression says in some cultures. Here, with us, it was meant above all to express innocence and helplessness: he would make no attempt to touch her, let alone embrace her.

Laura snorted, it sounded like a sob. I glanced over at her, but saw that she was not crying. The look in her eyes was cold, perhaps even colder than the polar wind that blew fine-powder snow across the paving stones in front of the house.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

First she pointed at the house, then made a broader sweep with her arms, a gesture meant to take in the entire whitened landscape that surrounded us. Our landscape. The history teacher hadn't looked at me even once.

“I'm here…I'm here to say goodbye, Laura,” Mr. Landzaat said. “I'm here to say that it's over for me too, now. That's what I wanted to come and say to you. I won't bother you anymore.”

I looked at his face. He hadn't been waiting for us in his car all this time, it seemed, he had been outside, standing by the gate. His cheeks, shaven for a change, were grayish. Under his eyes, or perhaps I should say under the dark-blue bags under his eyes, I could see a few burst blood vessels, purple and red. He tried to smile, but the cold probably clanged against his teeth—those long teeth that appeared for a moment between his lips, which were already a dark blue as well—because he closed his mouth right away.

“I…” He pointed to the cream-colored Volkswagen Beetle—“I'm leaving again right away. I'm on my way to Paris. To see friends.”

“Oh, really?” Laura said. The history teacher was hugging his upper body now with both arms, and rubbing those arms with his black-mittened hands. “I'll only stay for a minute,” he said, and as he said that he glanced at the front door of the house. “I thought…maybe I could come inside to warm up. I just want to explain. So that we can part as normal…as grown-up individuals. If that's okay with you, Laura.”

Now, for the first time, he looked at me. I couldn't see my own eyes, but I knew the look that was in them.
You came here of your own free will,
I looked.
Now you'd better blow out of here right away, of your own free will.

For your own good.
I looked then, for good measure—but the history teacher had already taken his eyes off me.

“Laura?” he said quietly. “Laura?”

Laura stamped her boots in the snow.

“For just a minute, then,” she said at last.

And so we went inside. Landzaat took off his coat and mittens and warmed himself by the stove. In front of the stove was our bed—our unmade bed. His shoes were almost touching the mattress.
I won't bother you anymore,
he'd told Laura—but here he was anyway. Our history teacher was inside. Inside of something that had at first been only for us.

“There's almost nothing left in the house,” Laura called from the kitchen. “We just went to do some shopping, but the only store in the village was closed too. And if I make coffee now, we won't have any tomorrow morning.”

“Don't worry about it,” Mr. Landzaat called back. “A glass of water is all right.” He rubbed his hands together, cupped them and blew into them. “Wow, it's so cold,” he said.

Now, from the kitchen, I heard the rattling of bottles.

“We've still got…,” I heard Laura say. “Wait a minute, what's this? Eau-de-vie. There's still a little left. You want that? A glass of eau-de-vie?”

No,
I said in my thoughts.
Not eau-de-vie.
But Laura couldn't hear that.

“Well, I wouldn't say no to that!” Mr. Landzaat shouted. “I still have to drive, but one little glass couldn't hurt.”

Then he turned to look at me—and winked. He winked, and at the same time he bared those long teeth, all the way up to the purplish gums.

I didn't look at his face, only at his mouth and his teeth. If I had teeth like that I would keep my smiling to a minimum. In my imagination I saw Mr. Landzaat nibbling at a carrot. Then I imagined him holding an acorn between his fingers. Would he sink those teeth into the acorn right on the spot, or would he save it for the long winter?

You have two kinds of teachers. The first kind behave like adults. They want to be addressed as “sir” or “ma'am,” they don't put up with backtalk or stupid jokes in their classroom, if you can't behave then you can stand out in the hall for an hour, or they'll give you a note to take to the principal's office. In everything, they emphasize the inequality between themselves and the pupil. The only thing they ask for is respect. And usually, they get it.

The second kind of teacher is mostly scared. He lowers himself out of fear. He pulls a boy's hair, just as a joke, he plays soccer with the kids at recess, he wears trousers and shoes that bear a distant resemblance to our own trousers and shoes; he wants, above all, to be liked. Sometimes we, the pupils, play along for a while. Mostly out of pity. We act as though we really do like the frightened teacher, we let him believe that he's popular. Meanwhile, however, the frightened teacher has awakened our animal instincts. Animals can smell fear a mile away. Within the herd, the nice teacher is the straggler. We wait patiently for the right moment. An unguarded moment when the nice teacher stumbles or turns his back on us. Then we pounce on him collectively and tear him limb from limb.

Both the authoritarian and the frightened teacher belong to the most mediocre category of human being. The term “
high
school,” in fact, is completely misleading: there's nothing high or mighty about it, it's the deep rut in the middle of the road. They only make it seem like you're being taught different things: what it really comes down to is spending six years under the yoke of the most stifling kind of mediocrity. Nowhere is the odor of mediocrity more pervasive than at a high school. It's a smell that works its way into everything, like the stench of a pan of soup that has been bubbling on the burner too long. Someone turned down the gas and then forgot all about it.

“So, are you two surviving out here in the cold?” Mr. Landzaat asked. He was trying to sound jovial. He did his best to please, to act as though it was indeed all a thing of the past, the desperate overtures in the bicycle shed, the panting phone calls, the shadowing of Laura all the way to beneath her bedroom window.
Dead and buried,
he was trying to say.
You two have nothing to fear from me.

But he was still standing there, warming his hands at the stove. Above all, he was standing too close to our bed. He shouldn't have come.

Before I could answer him, Laura came in carrying the bottle of eau-de-vie and three glasses. They weren't shot glasses, they were tumblers. She slid aside the two dirty plates off of which we'd eaten our fried eggs and bacon that morning, and put the glasses on the table.

“How much of this stuff are you supposed to pour?” she asked, twisting the top off the bottle.

“Not very much,” I said.

“All right, looking good,” Mr. Landzaat said. Still rubbing his hands, he stepped away from the coal stove and sat down at the table. Laura lit two candles and put them on the windowsill. It seemed to be just a smidgen darker outside than it had been a few minutes ago—it had started snowing again.

“Well, here's to you!” Mr. Landzaat said, holding up his glass. But when neither Laura nor I made a move to imitate his toast, he raised the glass to his lips and took a big gulp. “Ah,” he said, “just what the doctor ordered.” He glanced at the dirty plates. “Must be nice, a house like this without your parents around? Able to do whatever you like?”

Laura's forehead was creased in a frown. She rolled her glass between her long, pretty fingers, but she still hadn't taken a sip.

“Why are you here?” she asked quietly, without looking at the history teacher.

Mr. Landzaat raised the glass to his lips again, but put it back on the table without drinking. He leaned forward a bit and placed his hand on the table, not far from Laura's. I shifted my weight and the wooden chair creaked loudly.

“Laura,” he said, “I've come to say that I'm sorry. Not about what we…us, the two of us, I'm not sorry about that, but about…afterward. I shouldn't have…I acted like a schoolboy. I shouldn't have kept calling you. But I simply couldn't accept that it was over. Now I can.”

He smiled and bared his long teeth again. The combination of heat from the coal stove and the first slug of eau-de-vie had caused two rosy blushes to appear on his gray cheeks.
Like a schoolboy,
he'd said.
I acted like a schoolboy.
I didn't take it too personally. After all, I wasn't a schoolboy. A boy, yes, but not a
schoolboy.
It wasn't so much insulting as pitiful, this frightened man comparing himself to a schoolboy.

Laura looked at him silently. Mr. Landzaat knocked the rest of his drink back in one go. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His lips were no longer a dark blue either, they were redder.

“I wanted to ask you to forgive me, Laura,” he said. “That's why I came. To ask your forgiveness.”

“That's good,” Laura said.

Mr. Landzaat sighed deeply. His eyes were glistening, I saw. I took my first slug of eau-de-vie, then set the glass down on the table a bit too loudly. The history teacher looked over—not at me, only at the glass.

“I hope, when the vacation's over, that we can go back to how things were in class,” he went on. “That we can act normally toward each other. As friends. That we can stay friends.”

“No,” Laura said.

Mr. Landzaat stared at her.

“Act normal in class, okay,” Laura said. “That's mostly up to you. But I don't want to be your friend. You're not my friend. And you never have been.”

I felt a deep warmth rising up inside me. The heat began somewhere in the pit of my stomach and made its way up. It was not the kind of heat the coal stove gave off. This heat came from inside. A proud warmth that wanted to get out.