Dear Mr. M (17 page)

“Is everything all right at home, for instance?” he asked.

“What do you mean, Mr. Landzaat?” she asked, to win time; she knew exactly what he meant, of course, she was only disappointed to find that her easygoing homeroom teacher apparently read the same magazines as his ugly, stinking colleagues.

“Listen, why don't you call me Jan?” he said.

Was everything all right at home? It was a question she'd asked herself too in recent weeks and months. Yes, her parents were nice. Nice people, that's what everyone said, from her friends and classmates to the parents of those same friends and classmates—and even some of her teachers. The teachers fell into two categories: those who thought it was rather interesting to have the daughter of a famous TV host in their class, and those who openly broadcast the message that she shouldn't expect to get better grades just because her father was a celebrity. The former category sometimes had her stay after class, supposedly to talk about her homework or some paper she had to write, but in fact to have her give them a glimpse of the world of television. The second category, understandably enough, hated everything that fell outside the bounds of the middling. Laura sometimes suspected them of giving her bad grades on purpose, but she could never prove it. The magazines talked about what her father earned each year. An annual salary that a teacher would probably have to work for half their life to earn…or their whole life, come to think of it. At the start of the new school year, the geography teacher asked all his students where they had spent their summer vacations. Laura had started in enthusiastically about the trip she and her parents and younger brother had made across America in a camper. From the East Coast to the West Coast. Halfway through her description of the big waves and the surfers off the beach in Malibu, the geography teacher had interrupted her. “Perhaps we should give your classmates a chance to tell us about their vacations, Laura. We haven't all taken a big, long trip, not like you.” Then he took his eyes off her and looked around the class. “Is there anyone who simply spent the summer in our own, beautiful Holland?”

Mr. Landzaat smiled with his lips closed. “Only two weeks of school left. You looking forward to the vacation?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“And what's your family going to do? Where are you going?”

Earlier in the year her parents had bought a house in France, in addition to the one they already had in Terhofstede. The new house was in the Dordogne. They would spend most of July and August there, but before that they were going to Cuba for two weeks. In the last week of the vacation she would go for the first time with her friends and without her parents to Terhofstede.

“We're not really sure yet,” she said. “Maybe we'll stay in Holland and go camping. Or go to France,” she added quickly, because “stay in Holland and go camping” sounded a little too far-fetched for a family with her father's income.

“Oh, yes, France! Now that you mention it: Do you already know which field trip you want to take?”

In late September, all the junior classes were going on a field trip. You could choose from a week of kayaking in the Ardennes, a week in West Berlin, or a week in Paris. So many students had signed up for Paris that they were going to have to draw lots.

“Paris,” Laura said. “But I don't know whether that'll happen. You know about the lottery, I guess, Mr. Landzaat?”

“Sure,” he said. “And call me Jan. I have good news for you, actually. I'm one of the three chaperones going along to Paris. The lottery has to be impartial, of course, but there are always a couple of candidates who, in view of their academic performance, might be better off spending a week in the Ardennes, just to whip them into shape.”

Had he winked? It happened so fast—a barely perceptible fluttering of the eyelid—that Laura thought for a moment she had imagined it, until he winked again.

“You have to keep this to yourself, Laura,” he went on. “But we select certain students in advance. The lottery comes after that. Are you particularly fond of kayaking?”

She shook her head. “Not particularly.”

“Fine, then I'll make note of that.” He rummaged a bit through a pile of papers on his desk. “The other teachers who are going along are…that woman who teaches English, what's her name again?”

“Miss Posthuma.”

“Right, Posthuma…and the third one is Harm. Harm Koolhaas, social studies. He's okay. He had no problem whatsoever with giving the lottery a little helping hand.”

Laura was seventeen now, as her father had rightly noted. Grown men turned their heads and whistled as she walked down the street. It could be. It was possible. Jan Landzaat, history teacher at the Spinoza Lyceum, was openly flirting with her. She barely had to do a thing. It wasn't like being an actress who tries to get a role in a movie by going to bed with the director. It might've seemed that way a little, but only vaguely. It was actually something very different, she told herself. Jan Landzaat was not unattractive, he probably thought so too. There were rumors. He was new here, he'd only started at the Spinoza this year, before that he had taught at the Montessori Lyceum. There was a lot of contact between the students at both schools: friendships, relationships, they went to each other's school parties. The rumors spread quickly, the way rumors usually do, with a kind of snowball effect. The Montessori had almost six hundred students, the Spinoza more than eight hundred. At the top of the hill the snowball was still very small and fit perfectly in the two hands that formed it and then let it roll; halfway down the slope it had already gathered so much snow that nothing and no one could slow it down. It started with the story that the Montessori Lyceum had suspended Jan Landzaat because he had been involved with one of the senior girls, then the story went on to say that the two of them had had plans to get married: the history teacher, people said, had been about to leave his wife and two little children. Then it was only a small step to Jan Landzaat's wife coming home and finding the two of them on the couch, to Jan Landzaat's wife barging into the classroom in tears to confront the teacher with his adultery—in the scene at the teacher's home, in Laura's imagination, his pants had been down around his ankles and the girl was the first to see the wife standing in the doorway, while he himself hadn't noticed a thing. She had tapped him on the shoulder to warn him, but he'd gone on licking her throat for at least another thirty seconds. In the classroom scene the wife was toting a rolling pin, like in a comic strip or a B-movie, Mr. Landzaat had to climb out the window to avoid a beating. The rumors reached their zenith with stories about more than one girl filing complaints against the history teacher for pawing them. That was about a month after he started work at the Spinoza Lyceum. After that, someone—no one could remember exactly who—noted that it would be awfully strange for the Spinoza to simply hire a teacher who had committed such serious offenses at his former school. And just as they had gone from bad to worse, the rumors now turned and went the opposite way. If the worst was unthinkable, then the less worse must be based on falsehood too.

The snowball did not melt, nor did it explode against a tree trunk; no, from then on it grew only smaller and smaller. Like in a film run back frame by frame, it rolled to the top of the hill again, where it finally ended up in the same hands that had originally formed it.

In the meantime, did the history teacher's reputation suffer under all this? Not really. At least not among the students. True or untrue, Jan Landzaat was indeed a more than averagely handsome fellow, or in any case no dirty old man; no one knew exactly how old he was, but he couldn't have been much more than thirty. Laura had seen him one time with his wife, she had come in the car to pick him up on a Friday afternoon. She remembered how Mr. Landzaat had leaned down to kiss her on the lips. Then his wife had opened the back door of the car and two little children had climbed out, two little girls, whom he picked up and hugged in turn. A nice young teacher with an equally nice young family. What could be more natural than for a teacher like that to feel closer to his students than to his gray-mouse colleagues in their dull slacks and sport coats? The juniors and seniors were allowed to call him by his first name, the way they also did with Harm Koolhaas, the social studies teacher who was Jan Landzaat's friend. Harm Koolhaas also acted more like an eternally young adult. But still, it was different with him. Rumors went around about him too, albeit of a very different nature than those concerning Jan Landzaat. Harm Koolhaas, they said, had no wife or girlfriend, and wasn't looking for a wife or girlfriend either. He was careful not to blatantly favor the boys in his class, but
you can smell something like that miles away,
David said once. It wasn't that the social studies teacher was compromised by his predilections: times had changed. But it remained a soft spot—in an emergency situation it was something one could push against or pull on, and keep doing so until something in him broke or tore.

Jan Landzaat had asked her how she was doing, whether everything was all right at home. For a moment, she had considered confiding in him. Considered telling him something about her father; the history teacher, after all, was an expert in the field of real or fabricated rumors. About the incident at the restaurant, for example, the moment when her father had leaned across the table to kiss her on the cheek. How he had gloated over people's glances and the whispering—people who were not famous like him, people who had to go through life with an unfamous face. At the moment it happened she had been too bewildered to react, but later, in her room, she had played back the whole scene in her mind, over and over. Her father had enjoyed the fact (he found it fantastic) that those people might think something other than that he was there having a grilled-cheese sandwich with his nearly full-grown daughter. Without asking himself for a moment what Laura thought about it. And she saw the problem with her own attitude right away too. After all, wasn't it childish of her to make such a big deal out of it? She imagined how her father would respond.
Oh, sweetheart, did that bother you? I never meant it that way. But if it bothers you, I promise that from now on I will never make a public display of how much I love my daughter.
Then he would laugh it off, the same way he laughed off the stories and pictures in the gossip rags.
I'm not allowed to kiss my daughter anymore,
he would tell her mother at the table. And then her mother would laugh out loud too.

For very different reasons, she couldn't express her doubts about her father's behavior to her best friend either. To Stella. Stella would have thought she was crazy.
Your father looks at me in such a normal way,
Stella had told her.
The way you look at a grown-up.

“I'd really love to go to Paris,” she said. “West Berlin doesn't appeal to me that much, and the Ardennes would kill me. Do you think it's possible, you think I have a chance, Jan?”

And as she was calling her homeroom teacher by his first name for the first time, she placed her left hand on the tabletop, not far from the sheet of paper with the various field-trip destinations on it; not far either from the teacher's right hand, the fingertips of which rested on the bottom of that sheet of paper. Well-tended fingers, Laura saw, no flaky skin, neatly manicured nails.

“That shouldn't be a problem,” Jan Landzaat said. “Like I said, some people deserve it more than others.”

She gave him only a few moments to let his gaze rest on her hand, then pulled it back from the table. With both hands she now tucked her hair behind her ears, then pulled it all the way back in a ponytail and shook it loose again.

With most boys, blushing started at the cheeks, but with Mr. Landzaat it was his neck that turned red first. Then it rose quickly from the collar of his burgundy sweater across his chin, around his mouth, and up to his forehead—like a glass being filled with pink lemonade. Maybe the blushing had started even lower, Laura thought, and therefore earlier, somewhere right above or right below his navel.

Today he would not get to see her hands again. She leaned forward a little and placed them on her thighs, close to her knees, so they were hidden from sight beneath the table. For the time being, Jan Landzaat would have to make do with the memory of the girl's hand on the tabletop, maybe it would come to mind again when he went to talk to Harm Koolhaas and Miss Posthuma about which students should be exempted from the lottery—which students deserved more than others to go on the field trip to Paris.

As a matter of fact, Herman really didn't help with the dishes. And when the table was being cleared he had to be egged on before he finally stood up with a sigh, piled up two or three plates, and took them, along with one single fork, one knife, and one glass, to the kitchen—then sank back down in his chair and lit an unfiltered Gitane.

There was nothing to be done about it, but the two girls were always the ones who started in on the dishes. Lodewijk usually dried, David was an old hand at cleaning the table; with a wet cloth he wiped and polished until the wooden tabletop gleamed as though it had never held a plate. Meanwhile, Ron and Michael saw to the floor, one of them wielding the dustpan, the other the brush, but that was pretty much it.

“Your turn, Herman,” Stella said on the third or fourth evening, when Lodewijk, for a change, had lowered himself with a sigh into the easy chair by the fire.

She was standing in the doorway, holding out a checkered dish towel. Herman glanced left and right, as though checking whether she was talking to someone sitting beside him. “I thought that's why we brought two women along,” he said. “Why else? Can anyone explain that to me?”

But when he saw the look on Stella's face, he slid his chair back anyway. “Only kidding. Ouch, my back!”

The first couple of days were sunny, but on the third the weather turned. Rain and wind. That evening they even lit the coal stove. Lodewijk had put on a white, knitted sweater and rubbed his hands together to warm them.

“So what's wrong with you, anyway?” Herman said to him as he took the dish towel from Stella's hand. “Are you sick or something?”

A thick book lay in Lodewijk's lap, a book with a marker sewed into the binding. Lodewijk had a penchant for Dutch authors from before the war.

“Are you sick, or just too lazy to dry the dishes?” Herman said when Lodewijk didn't reply. “I mean, I'm happy to take over for you, but the dishes will never be as dry as when you do it.”

Laura was still standing at the table with the last few dirty glasses in her hand; she saw Herman wink at her, but looked away quickly.

“I'll come and inspect them later on,” Lodewijk said without raising his eyes. “And if I find even one drop on them, I'll make you start all over again.”

Michael and Ron, busy applying dustpan and brush to the floor around the coal stove, both laughed. Lodewijk lifted his feet a fraction of an inch, so they could get under them.

There was a smile on Herman's face, Laura saw, but his eyes were not smiling along.

“That sweater of yours, Lodewijk, is that made from sheep?”

“Baah,” Lodewijk said.

Laura took a step toward the kitchen, but couldn't get by, not with Stella and Herman standing in the doorway.

“Did your mom knit it for you?” Herman asked. “Did she catch that sheep and knit it into a sweater?”

Laura came a step closer; as though by accident she knocked one of the glasses against Herman's forearm. When he looked at her she raised her eyebrows and shook her head.

“Okay,” she said cheerfully. “Shall we get going?”

“What's up?” Herman said as he took the first cup from the rack and slowly wrapped it in the dish towel. “Did I accidentally touch on a taboo here? Sheep? Knitting?”

Laura had closed the kitchen door behind them and held her finger to her lips. “It's his mother,” she whispered. “She's ill. Very ill.”

In a voice close to a whisper, she told Herman the gist of the story. Lodewijk's mother had an operation six months ago. For a while the prospects had been decent, but now it seemed she had only a few months to live. Lodewijk's father had died when he was eleven. He had no brothers or sisters.
Which means he's an only child too,
Laura almost said, but caught herself just in time. Her main feeling was one of amazement—at herself, for realizing only now that she was here in the same house with two only children.

“Okay,” he said when she was finished; meanwhile, the plates, glasses, knives, and forks had piled up in the dish rack. Herman was still working on the first cup. “But that's not good, of course.”

“No,” Laura said, but then she looked at him. “What do you mean?” she asked. “What's not good?”

“That you guys protect him by not talking about his mother. I mean, I didn't know about it. But if I had, I would have said the same thing just now.”

Despite herself, Laura felt her face grow hot. “It's not like that, we don't avoid talking about his mother,” she said. “We talk about her all the time. We ask him how she's doing. Before the vacation started we all went to see her in the hospital. We brought her presents. Flowers. Bonbons and things. It turned out that she wasn't allowed to have most of it, but it was the thought. The whole thing was pretty intense. His mother was all yellow in the face, I mean, I knew her when she was still healthy. All swollen up. Horrible. But we acted as normal as possible. We joked around and Lodewijk's mother actually laughed with us, even though you could see that it was hard for her. Michael had made this thing for her, from two clothes hangers and a piece of wood, a thing she could put on the bed so she could read a book without having to hold it up.”

“It turned out she never read books,” Stella said. “Only gossip magazines. But anyway, like Laura said, it's the thought that counts.”

“Oh, fuck,” Herman said; he folded open the dish towel. The cup was in it, its handle broken off. “Maybe I made it a little too dry,” Herman said. It was one of her mother's favorite coffee cups, because it had belonged to
her
mother before that, but Laura couldn't help laughing.

“What is it?” Stella looked over her shoulder. “Herman!” she said when she saw the cup and the broken handle in the dish towel. “What are you doing? Haven't you ever dried dishes before? Look at this pile. Come on, get a move on.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Herman said; he looked at Laura and made a face. A childish face—like a little boy whose angry neighbor lady has just seized his soccer ball.

Laura half expected him to toss the broken cup into the garbage pail under the counter, but he didn't. He placed the handle carefully in the cup and put it on a shelf above the stove, along with the round canisters of coffee, tea, and sugar. Then he took a plate from the rack and started drying it.

“What I meant to say was really something else,” he said. “The whole thing about Lodewijk's mother is terrible, sure. But you shouldn't make a taboo out of it. You all go to visit her in the hospital. Fine. But if you're not allowed to joke about things anymore, then in fact you've already signed her death certificate. Generally speaking, parents are ridiculous creatures. If all you do is ask Lodewijk politely and worriedly about his mother's health, then you're not taking him seriously anymore, as the son of that same mother. What you're really saying then is that you've already given up on her.”

“Yeah, they say that sometimes,” Stella said. “That it's better for the survivors to look death in the eye. Not repress it.”

Laura couldn't help sighing. Stella had a way of sprinkling conversations with secondhand psychological theories she got from her father. Usually misquoted, and always at the wrong moment.

“But, Herman,” she said, “you didn't know that Lodewijk's mother was seriously ill, but would you still have started in about his knitted sweater even if you
had
known? Do you mean that, really?”

Herman looked her straight in the eye; his look was no longer cold or tough, more like amused—naughty.

“Maybe I would have adapted the text a little,” he said. “I probably would have asked: ‘Lodewijk, who's going to knit those disgusting sweaters for you when your mom's not around anymore?' ”

Laura held Herman's eye and didn't blink.
How can you say something like that?
That's what she thought she should say right then, but what she was thinking was quite different. It had to do with what Herman had said earlier.
Generally speaking,
parents are ridiculous creatures.
And also with something else he'd said, a few days ago on the train, when he used the gin to raise a toast to the death of his own parents. “Ridiculous,” that was the key word. Laura had always felt that her parents were nice and friendly. That's what they were, wasn't it, nice and friendly? Everyone said so, even her friends. You almost couldn't ask for nicer parents. But sometimes those nice parents were a pain too. No, not a pain: they were ballast. A weight around your neck that made you walk around a little bent over all the time. Her famous father with his corny jokes at his daughter's expense. Her mother sticking her head in the sand, so that she could have a glass of red wine with her husband on the couch at night. She couldn't help it, but suddenly she felt jealous of Herman—jealous of his parents. Normal, tiresome, selfish, failing parents you could be angry at. Parents you could wish dead and forget about with a few slugs of gin. She was even a little jealous of Lodewijk. Lodewijk, who was already a half-orphan, and who would soon be rid of it all, of the never-ending nagging of parents.

Herman must have seen something in the way she looked. Something, a change in her expression, because he smiled at her, with his lips and with his eyes.

“They are disgusting, aren't they, Laura?” he said. “Lodewijk's sweaters?”

And she smiled back, it was no effort for her to smile back at Herman with her eyes, she knew that.

“Yeah,” she said. “Disgusting.”