Dear Mr. M (18 page)

On the last day of the trip, Herman surprised them with a meal he had prepared all by himself. Under the guise of a lone bike ride, he had gone to Sluis and secretly done all the shopping. When he came back no one was allowed into the kitchen. Herman said he didn't need any help.

“It smells great!” Lodewijk called out from his chair beside the fire, while the girls set the table with glasses and plates Herman handed them through a crack in the kitchen door. “Can you give us any more information? Like what time we're going to eat? We're famished!”

But no answer came from the kitchen. It was almost dark when the door flew open with a bang and Herman came into the room, clutching the handles of a huge pan in his mittened hands. “Hurry up, fast, a trivet!” he said to Stella, the only one who had already pulled up a chair at the table.

“Come on!” he said. “What are you people waiting for? If it gets cold, it's ruined.”

He disappeared back into the kitchen and returned carrying a platter with three smoked sausages, still in their plastic packaging with the brand name
UNOX
on them. “Scissors?” he asked Laura. “Are there scissors in the house?”

“Hotchpotch,” said Ron, who had already lifted the lid off the pan.

“Maybe more of a dish for a winter's day,” Herman said. “But I figured, the weather being what it is…And the days will be getting shorter again soon anyway,” he added, disappearing back into the kitchen.

Stella dished it up, Laura cut open the plastic packages, and Herman returned with a frying pan half-filled with a sputtering-hot liquid.

“Look out, this is hot as hell,” he said. “Has everybody dug their little foxhole? The mustard's in the kitchen. Michael?”

“Beautiful!” said Lodewijk, who had already started in. “Really, Herman. Fantastic.”

The day after Herman had teased Lodewijk about his sweater, they'd all gone for a long walk, first to Retranchement, then along the canal to the Zwin. At one point Herman and Lodewijk fell behind the others, and when Laura turned around she saw Herman put an arm around Lodewijk's shoulder. Those two had become closer since that walk in a way that was clear to everyone. Herman asked about the books Lodewijk read and, on occasion, Lodewijk sneered at their classmates, “that bunch of illiterates” who barely read at all, or if they did, only the “wrong books,” which would end up on their required reading lists anyway.

“Be careful not to get any on you,” Herman said now to Lodewijk. “Under the circumstances, we wouldn't want your mother to have to start knitting again.”

“You know, I think I
will
spill something on myself,” Lodewijk said. “Then at least I won't have to wear this sweater anymore.”

At first, Laura had been amused by the way Herman and Lodewijk tried to outdo each other with ever-blunter jokes about Lodewijk's deathly ill mother, but in the end it seemed to take on a strained quality—especially for Lodewijk. It was as though the brusque jokes fit Herman to a tee, like a sweater made to size, not a bit too small or too big, while with Lodewijk it was more like a pair of jeans that were really too tight for him, but that he wore anyway because he thought they made him look slimmer. Lodewijk had always been funny, but his humor was more of the wide-eyed sort, as though he was amazed by everything that happened. Now it was as though Herman had awakened this blunt side of his character.

“It really is delicious, Herman,” Laura said. “It has something…something…special. Onions?”

Herman was just in the process of dishing up a second helping, but he was the only one. He jabbed his fork into a big piece of smoked sausage and swung it onto his plate. “Garlic,” he said.

Laura watched as he cut the chunk of sausage in two, wiped it through the glob of mustard on his plate, and stuck it in his mouth. She had always thought hotchpotch with raw endive was kind of childish. A typical boy's dish. The kind of thing boys could squeak by with when it came to cooking. Fried eggs, spaghetti and tomato sauce, chili con carne—hotchpotch belonged in that same category. It was the kind of thing that was almost impossible to ruin, but the boys would stand around in the kitchen for hours anyway, acting important, as though they were fixing a three-star meal.

“It's one of my mother's recipes,” Herman said. “With garlic. That's the way she always made it.”

“Made?” Ron said.

“When she was still happy,” Herman said.

“There's one of those traditional butchers on our street who makes smoked sausage from pigs that have always lived outside,” Stella said. “You can really taste the difference.”

“And what is it you taste, exactly?” Herman asked. “Mud? Shit?”

“No,” Stella said. “Just meat. Real meat. Not this chemical garbage.”

“I've seen those traditional butchers too,” Herman said. “And I've bought smoked sausage from them. Once, but never again. The ‘traditional butcher' is perhaps the greatest misnomer of our age. And his smoked sausages along with it. That meat has all kinds of things in it: tendons, nerves, bits of crushed bone that get stuck between your teeth. And the whole thing packaged in a thick, tough skin that you end up chewing on for hours. They probably use the hog's foreskin for that. No, I swear by Unox. Chemical garbage, my ass. It slides right down the gullet, the way smoked sausage should.”

Laura was half expecting Stella to come back at him with arguments about poison or environmental damage, about toxins that piled up inside the body when one ate factory-made food, but she did something different. She cut off a piece of the Unox sausage, jabbed her fork into it, and stuck it in her mouth.

“Now close your eyes,” Herman said, “and tell me what you taste.”

Laura shifted in her chair, she didn't know exactly what was happening, but something was. Apparently she'd missed out on the fact that Stella had not yet tasted the smoked sausage, not until Herman had started talking about its chemical benefits. Now she watched as Stella chewed slowly, her eyes closed, and saw how Herman looked at Stella. He had never looked at Stella that way before. Laura felt her cheeks tingle, and she reprimanded herself silently.
Not now!
All week, Herman had treated Stella as though she was a bit naive, a naive and rather unworldly girl who never got further, during their walks and dinner-table conversations, than the deposition of dime-store profundities that she'd picked up from her father. That was all true enough. But Stella was also something else, something that Laura knew she herself was not. Stella was
sweet.
Perhaps even innocent. Stella could look at you in a certain way…Laura always had to lower her eyes or turn them away when her closest girlfriend looked at her like that. She had tried it in front of the mirror once: she had opened her eyes so wide that the tears came, she had thought about lovely, innocent things—but not in a million years did she come close to looking the way Stella did. No, Laura was not sweet. She was lots of other things—pretty, irresistibly so perhaps, although all too aware of her own irresistibility—but she would never be sweet, or innocent, or “vulnerable” (the fashionable word these days). More like the very opposite. Stella had actually said that to her after Laura told her girlfriend about the blushing history teacher, about how she had wrapped Jan Landzaat around her finger in order to secure a place on the field trip to Paris.

“When it comes to things like that, you're a lot cagier than I am,” Stella had said. At first, Laura had objected to that qualification, because most of its connotations seemed negative to her. But later, at home, in front of the bathroom mirror again, she had to admit that Stella was right. She had smiled seductively at her mirror image, and now she saw it herself. “You definitely are a cagey one,” she said to herself out loud—then burst out laughing.

“You're right, Herman,” Stella said now. She looked at him with her lovely, innocent eyes, Laura saw, and now she saw something else too. Stella
beamed
—there was no other word for it, it was like she was illuminated from inside by some invisible source of light or heat. “It tastes a lot better than I thought. How can that be?”

“I was just thinking,” Laura said. “When we get home, shall we all go to the hospital and visit Lodewijk's mother again? Like, the day after tomorrow? Or else early next week?”

She might have been imagining it, but it looked as though Lodewijk froze for a moment inside his knitted sweater. She didn't have much time to think about that, though. Herman and Stella seemed not to have heard, they were still looking only at each other.

“But school starts again next week,” Ron said.

“Well, so what?” Laura said. “We can go after school, right? When are the visiting hours? We'll buy some nice things to eat and a book—a whole bunch of magazines,” she corrected herself quickly. “What do you think, Lodewijk? It's a good idea, isn't it?”

“She's not in the hospital anymore,” Lodewijk said.

Now everyone, including Herman and Stella, looked at him.

“She's at home,” Lodewijk said. “They can't do anything more for her at the hospital. She told them she wanted to go home.”

“But…,” Laura began.

“The neighbor lady's taking care of her now,” Lodewijk said. “At first I felt bad about coming along with you guys, obviously, but when I said I'd stay home my mother wouldn't have it. She said I should just go and enjoy myself.”

“Jesus,” Michael said. “That was big of her.”

“You know what's funny?” Lodewijk said. “Or no, not funny, more like ironic. That neighbor lady has lived in the apartment next door ever since we moved in, but we always thought she was a horrible old witch. Lived there all that time alone. No husband. No children. About sixty, I guess. And way too tall, maybe that was why, that's what I always figured. A woman who's two heads taller than you, no man would go for that. But whatever, right at the start, as soon as my mother fell ill, the neighbor lady offered to help. And she didn't just offer to help, she was really there whenever you needed her. Since my mom came home, she's even started cooking for us.”

“You see that sometimes,” Stella said, “that people who you don't expect it from suddenly turn out to have a really warm heart.”

“And you know what else I think?” Lodewijk said. “It's so weird. A kind of premonition. When I left last week, the way my mother looked at me. I was already at the door with my backpack on when she asked me to come and give her another kiss. Even though I'd just done that. She's already so weak, but she threw that skinny, swollen arm of hers around my neck. She squeezed as hard as she could. ‘My sweet boy,' she said. ‘My sweet, sweet boy.' It was only when I got to the bus stop on my way to the station that I realized it. She was saying goodbye to me. She won't be there when I get back. She wanted me to go away so she could die in peace. Like an old cat that crawls under the kitchen counter. So I wouldn't have to be there when it happened. And at the bus stop I thought:
I can still turn around and go back. I can stay with her.
But I got on that bus anyway. I'm here with you guys, instead of with her. And so do I feel guilty all the time now? In some ways, yes. In other ways, though, I hope I was right. That she really will be dead when I get home.”

No one said a word. Stella, who was sitting closest to Lodewijk, laid her hand on his, but Lodewijk looked at Michael.

“Have you still got that bottle of gin around somewhere?” he asked. “I think I feel like something stronger than tea tonight.”

What the kitchen counter resembled most was the stadium field after a rock concert. Here there were no empty cans, though, no shards of glass and shredded sheets of black plastic, but filthy pans, plates, cutlery with the caked-on remains of mashed potatoes, scattered butt-ends of endive and globs of dried-up mustard—Herman hadn't even thrown away the potato peels. But the garbage pail was still pretty much brimming over, Laura saw when she lifted the lid.

“That's what you get when boys try to cook…,” she said, fishing a wooden spoon out of the garbage.

Stella had already pulled on the rubber gloves. “Oh well, it was a sweet thought,” she said. “What'll we do, just start anywhere?”

After the boys had polished off the rest of the gin, Ron got his guitar and Michael came down with his saxophone. Herman had been sitting in the easy chair by the stove the whole time, his legs wide, smoking one Gitane after the other.

“I did the cooking,” he said. “Tonight I'm exempt from kitchen duty.”

At the first notes from Michael's saxophone, Laura caught Stella's eye and gestured to her to come into the kitchen.

“Did you really like that Unox sausage, or were you just pretending to?” Laura asked. She was standing behind Stella, a little to the left, so that she didn't have to look her friend straight in the eye; she did her best to make her voice sound normal, but didn't quite succeed.

“What do you mean, ‘just pretending to'?” Stella had moved all the plates and cutlery from the sink onto the counter and sprayed a stream of green detergent into the tub of hot water.

“You should have seen yourself,” Laura said. “And heard yourself. ‘Oh, that's
delicious
!' I mean, I know how you always look at every can and jar to see how much artificial flavoring has been added. Everyone knows that. No one believed you. Only Herman, maybe.”

“I was just trying to be nice.” Stella started in on the first plate—according to the same method as always, Laura knew: first she scrubbed off the caked-on remains with the scouring pad, then ran the dishwashing brush over the plate, and finally she rinsed off the suds under the cold tap that she left running beside the dishpan the whole time; glasses she held up to the light before putting them in the rack. “He doesn't help out much, okay. He's lazy, but he's also not used to it, you can tell that. If you just ask him to help out, he does it, really. And cooking tonight, that was all his own idea. So then why sit around and whine about a Unox sausage.”

Laura took the first plate from the rack. She raised it to right in front of her eyes, examining it for a spot of endive or mashed potato that Stella might have missed—but found nothing.

“But there's a big difference between not whining and acting as though you're being served haute cuisine, I guess. And the look on your face when you said it…It was really too bad you couldn't see yourself.”

Stella was running the brush slowly round and round the next plate, but now she stopped. She turned halfway and looked at Laura.

“Can I ask you something, Laura?”

It was one of those moments when you cross a certain line unawares, Laura realized only too late. Suddenly you're on the other side and can't go back. Laura would think back on this moment often, later, the moment when she, without knowing exactly how it had happened, found herself somewhere she didn't want to be.

She could feel her face growing hot, and cursed herself. It had all gone too quickly. She knew the question that was coming next, and she knew that she could never lie as long as she was looking straight at Stella.

“Do you
like
Herman, Laura?”

Straight through the dish towel, Laura pressed her fingers hard against the edge of the plate she was still drying, but when nothing broke off, she dropped it instead.

“Oh, shit!” she said.

The plate didn't break into dozens of shards on the tile floor, not the way she'd hoped. Instead, it broke neatly into three fairly even pieces, which remained lying at her feet.

“He's too skinny for me,” she said, bending down to pick up the pieces. “And those rubber boots. I don't know, but somehow I always find myself hoping that I won't be there if he ever takes them off.”

She stood up, and now she did look Stella in the eye.

“He's just not a boy for girls,” she said. “Not obviously, I mean. Not the first one you think of when you think about boys.” She didn't blush when she said this—because it was the truth. “He's not my type,” she added. “Maybe he's yours. As far as I'm concerned, you can have him. Enjoy yourself.”

And then she really did have to turn away. She turned her back completely, then tried to take as long as she could to stuff the broken pieces of plate into the packed garbage pail.