Dear Mr. M (25 page)

At the very end of the funeral, when almost everyone was getting ready to drive back to Amsterdam, Laura and Lodewijk were standing together when the aunt came to say goodbye. She was a little woman, just like Lodewijk's mother: she had to stand on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheeks.

She had barely turned away when Lodewijk wiped both cheeks with the back of his hand and made an ugly face at Laura.

“Blech,” he said quietly, but in Laura's mind still a little too loudly. “At least we've got that out of the way.”

Laura burst out laughing. “So what now?” she asked. “What are you going to do now?”

Lodewijk stepped up and put his arms around her. “I'm a poor little orphan now, Laura. Will you take good care of me?” He had laid his head on her shoulder as he hugged her, but then he pulled back and looked at her. He was grinning broadly—looking relieved, mostly, Laura saw.

“You can always come and live with us, you know,” she said. “Meals, a room, there's plenty of space.”

“Thanks. But first I want to see how it goes on my own. Throw open the windows. The first thing is to get that hospital smell out of the house.”

Laura went by Lodewijk's house a few days later, and was struck by how light it was, so much lighter than when his mother was still alive. There were empty pizza boxes on the parlor table, and dozens of garbage bags lined up in the hall.

“What's all that?” she asked.

“My mom's clothes, mostly. And all those sweaters and vests she knitted for me.”

Laura looked at him, she wanted to say something, but didn't know quite what.

“I need to do it now,” he said. “Later on I might grow sentimental. Get attached to all the wrong things. I want to make a new start. Can you still smell it?”

“What?”

“That hospital odor. It had seeped into everything. Into the curtains, the bedding, even my clothes. But I sponged down the whole house, and I kept all the windows open for three nights.”

Laura sniffed, she smelled something, but it wasn't a hospital, more like cleaning products and soap—and a vague, oniony smell, probably from the pizza boxes.

“You still can't get that Herman off your mind, can you?” Lodewijk asked suddenly.

“What?” Laura said. “What are you talking about?”
Don't blush,
she told herself.
Don't blush, not now.

“Laura, sweetheart, you don't have to play make-believe with me. I saw the way you looked at him at the funeral. How you looked at him
the whole time.
And I can't blame you. He
is
a bit skinny, and he's certainly no Mick Jagger, but I know what I would do if I were you. I know what I would do
myself.
That type. Not really masculine. Wonderful! I can stare at that for hours.”

Laura looked into Lodewijk's eyes and saw something she had never seen before: the new Lodewijk, a Lodewijk who would no longer wear knitted sweaters, who would be who he was from now on, the way his mother had made him promise, who had chased away the hospital smell and would be himself.

“Ron asked why you named that movie
Life Before Death,
” Miriam said. “I'm curious about that too.”

“I'm glad you mentioned it,” Herman replied. He was back at the dinner table now, and at first it seemed as though he was teasing Miriam as he put on a mock earnest expression and closed his eyes for a moment, but when he opened them again he smiled at her. “That you
both
asked. No, but seriously. Life before death. Because that's what it is, because that's what we're seeing. Two adults who have nothing more to say to each other just go on living. They stay together ‘for the children's sake,' as they say. But the only child in the house is me. They didn't ask me a thing. That's too bad. I can see their situation from a greater distance. I could provide them with advice.”

“But your father's got someone else, doesn't he?” Miriam said. “It could be that he'd rather be with that other woman, but that he doesn't dare to go away. Precisely because he has a child. Because he has you.”

Laura saw how Herman's expression suddenly stiffened; it lasted less than a second perhaps, Laura looked around at the others, but she was almost certain that she was the only one who'd seen it.

“If my father were to ask my opinion, I would strongly urge him to buzz off as fast as possible to that cute new girlfriend of his,” Herman said. “I would tell him that he's not doing me a favor by sitting at the table with that bored, deadpan face of his. But maybe your parents are nice, Miriam? I don't know. Maybe you do have parents like that. They do exist. I know a couple. Laura, for example, has nice parents.”

Laura was startled to hear her name, she didn't dare to look at Herman, but then she did anyway. And Herman looked back. She counted to three, then lowered her eyes. Right away she felt the heat rising to her cheeks; she rubbed her fingers over them in the hope that no one else had seen. The way he had looked at her! She'd never been looked at that way by a boy. She was used to a whole spectrum of other looks: languorous looks, yearning looks, hopelessly infatuated looks—thwarted looks, above all, yes, if there was one thing that all those looks had in common it was the realization that permeated them: that they didn't stand a chance. That she, Laura, was simply a bridge too far for most boys.

Herman's look was different: as a matter of fact, he had never tossed her a losing glance, she realized now for the first time. Never once. From the moment he had spoken to her beside the ransacked table at David's party (
So you're Laura
) up to his declaration of love in the midst of silence, just a few hours ago on the beach.

If we were here alone now,
he said during the whole three seconds in which he held her gaze,
we'd know what to do. We've had to wait for months, Laura, we have a lot of catching up to do.

“Still, when I hear
Life Before Death,
I tend to think of something positive,” Miriam said. “Not that you're already dead and just go on living, but that you get everything out of life before you die. You know what I mean?”

Herman looked at her, and this time his expression didn't harden; an amused smile appeared on his face.

“See how easy that was?” he had said to Stella and Laura the night before, after he apologized to Miriam. They were standing at the foot of the attic stairs, Miriam had gone to the bathroom to wash away the worst traces of her crying jag. “She's not very smart,” he said. “She's just oversensitive, I think that's sweet.”

Later that evening Miriam settled down on the couch with a book of crossword puzzles. Herman raised his eyebrows, then poked Michael and then Lodewijk and Ron too.

“What have we here, Miriam?” he'd asked, when he could apparently contain himself no longer.

Miriam was concentrating so closely on her crossword puzzle that she didn't hear Herman the first time around.

Laura remembered the tense silence that had come over the group then, when Herman called out in a sarcastic tone: “A crossword puzzle!” And then again, but this time with a slightly different stress: “A
cross
word puzzle!”

“Well, what's wrong with that?” Miriam had asked.

“Nothing,” Herman had answered. “Nothing at all. One has crossword puzzles, and that's a fact we have to live with. As long as no one feels the need to solve them, there's not much of a problem.”

“What kind of self-inflated bullshit is this, Herman? Is this off limits too? Like all the rest? TV, newspapers, the—what do you call it again?—‘non-self-made music'? Are we only allowed to read really impressive books? Well, I don't happen to like reading, and there's no TV here. So maybe I can do something for myself, so that I don't get bored? Or would I be better off sitting still and thinking deeply?”

Laura glanced at Herman, then at the others. David was busy again examining something on the thigh of his jeans, Ron and Michael were sitting on either side of Herman, their arms crossed; they were looking at her almost reprovingly, as though she had done something that really could not be tolerated around here. Lodewijk was in the easy chair by the fire, reading, or pretending to. Stella was at the table writing, a letter probably, every two days she wrote a long letter to her mother.

The way Herman looked at Miriam, though, was anything but a rebuke; he seemed, above all, amused.

“Miriam,” he said, “you shouldn't take things so personally right away. Yet you brought it up yourself. Listen, as far as I'm concerned, you don't have to do anything. But apparently, when you think you get bored. At least that's what you said. Is that right? Do you feel bored when you think?”

Miriam let the book of puzzles fall to her lap, she took a deep breath and tapped her pen against her front teeth.

“What's wrong with crossword puzzles, Herman? You still haven't successfully explained that to me.”

“Nothing, in principle, but I said that already. I only wonder what goes on in the mind of someone who is searching for another word for ‘sailboat.' With seven letters. I can't help but think that it's mostly a way to kill time. And time doesn't need killing. Time is our friend. As long as we learn to experience it.”

At that point Miriam surprised Laura, and everyone else too probably, by bursting into laughter. “Oh, Herman,” she said. “How lovely! Are you going to give us yoga lessons? Or is it meditation? What exercises must we do precisely in order to experience time? Our
friend
time?”

Even more surprising perhaps was Herman's reaction; he stared at Miriam, speechless, for half a second, then started laughing too. “Sorry,” he said laughing. “Yeah, now I hear myself too. I hear myself talking. I'm going to try it one more time, if you'll permit me, Miriam. What goes on in your head while you're solving a crossword puzzle?”

Once again, Laura thought she was the only one who had seen it, but this time she was less certain: the half second of total panic in Herman's eyes when Miriam laughed at him. He had regained his footing with lightning speed though, it's true, within that half second he had found the emergency exit.

“I think about things,” Miriam said. “Or maybe I'm fretting about something. Then I start on a crossword puzzle. Ten minutes later I've forgotten what I was thinking about, what I was worrying about. I'm busy solving something. Something
outside myself.
Something that has nothing to do with myself and my own, limited way of thinking. One hour later I've finished the whole puzzle. And I've totally forgotten what I was fretting about. I can recommend it to everyone.”

“Okay,” Herman said. “That's clear enough. At least it's clear enough to
me.
” There was still a bit of doubt and hesitation in his voice, but his tone was no longer sarcastic—he smiled at Miriam. “I won't keep you from it any longer.”

That had been last night. Laura remembered that she hadn't liked it much, this sudden mutual respect between Herman and Miriam. Above all, things mustn't get too cozy between those two. She wondered whether Miriam was really as stupid as Herman had thought—and whether he himself realized now that he had been mistaken.

All in all, Laura would rather have seen it end in a new clash and a crying jag, she'd even considered trying to steer it in that direction—but decided against it, it would have been too obvious.

Now she was glad she'd kept her mouth shut. Miriam had changed from the “dumbest” girl in the group to an ally within the space of a single evening. That could prove handy later on, when Herman told Stella how things stood. She didn't have much to worry about as far as the others went, she figured. Michael and Ron always sought confirmation from Herman before doing or saying anything. David was still solidly Herman's best friend, albeit a friend without a backbone. Lodewijk, in fact, was the only free agent in the group. Lodewijk always spoke his mind right away; there was no doubt about it, he had become stronger since his mother's death.

Laura looked at Stella sitting beside Herman, her arm slung around his shoulders. Right after dinner Herman had announced that he was going to the garden to smoke a cigarette. Laura was just heading into the kitchen with a pile of dirty dishes, and as he passed he brushed her forearm gently.

Laura found him behind the shed.

“I'm going to tell her tonight,” he said.

“Tonight, when?” Laura asked.

“Before bed, in any case. It's painful. It's going to be real nasty. But still, it would be weird…Anyway, that would just be weird.”

Laura leaned into him. He tasted of tobacco smoke, he was indeed very thin beneath his T-shirt, she could feel the bones sticking out under the skin of his hips and then, when her fingertips reached the front of his body and crept up slowly, his ribs. But his tongue was less clumsy than she'd expected, based on Stella's detailed reports.

“Come on, let's go inside.” He pushed her away gently, he was panting. “If someone sees us like this…if they find us out here…” He tugged softly on her hair. “That would not be good,” he said.

It was long past midnight. They had gone on chatting for a while about the movie Herman had made of his parents. In the end, Herman agreed with Miriam that
Life Before Death
was perhaps not the best title after all. Then he had talked a bit about the script he and David were working on, for a longer movie this time. A feature film about a high-school revolt. The uprising would begin after a teacher had wrongly sent a girl out of the class, but unrest had of course been brewing within the student body long before that. At first it was to be a purely idealistic uprising, a revolt against injustice, but as the days and weeks passed—the students had occupied the whole school, the teachers were being held hostage in the gym, the building was surrounded by the police and the army—the leaders of the uprising would be faced with increasingly difficult decisions. To press home their demands, they forced a teacher to stand blindfolded at one of the classroom windows.