Dear Mr. M (27 page)

“Deep in his heart, what the frustrated teacher hopes for is that the goaded student will explode. You can go on tormenting a prisoner until he finally stabs a guard to death. In the barracks, the recruit who has been provoked will yank the machine gun out of the sergeant's hands and open fire. The employee who has been sacked returns to his former place of work and kills the personnel manager and his secretary before taking his own life. But that still happens only rarely at high schools. Whenever one or more of the students finally settles accounts, it's automatically front-page news. We are shocked by it. We are conditioned to have it shock us. A high school! What's become of the world when high schools are no longer safe? But we see no further than the ends of our noses. What has always surprised me, in fact, is that it doesn't happen much more often.

“For years, a student is made a fool of by a teacher—by an inferior, mediocre intelligence. One day the provoked student comes into the classroom to get even. He restores the natural order of things. Sometimes a student like that will go wild and wreak vengeance on the whole school. On the innocent. Innocent in the objective sense, perhaps, but seen from a broader perspective those are the stooges who are now getting a taste of their own medicine. The obedient students, the eager beavers who have spent all those years trying to cull favor with their teachers. The weaklings who have lowered themselves. During the nightly news shows after a massacre, all the attention focuses on the culprits. People say that they had been acting peculiar for years. They had watched violent films, of course, and played even more violent games on their PlayStations. The ‘wrong' books were found in their bookcases and desk drawers. Biographies of Hitler and Mussolini. They also dressed weirdly or extravagantly, of course, and were severely withdrawn because they didn't take part in all kinds of school social activities. But then you can still wonder: Who is more disturbed? The student who wants to be left in peace, or the student who takes part voluntarily in all kinds of idiotic activities meant to develop his or her ‘social skills'? In an army, it's always the socially skilled who volunteer first for an over-the-top suicide charge. Those who function well in a group will find it easier to herd the villagers together onto the village square. To torch the houses and then separate the men from the women.”

In your book you chose to use the perpetrators' perspective. For the moment, let's leave aside the question of whether they were actually perpetrators in the usual sense of the word. Did you ever consider trying to meet with them? To ask them what happened? Or what might have happened, I suppose I should say.

“Of course I considered that. I would have been interested to find out more. On the other hand, though, I realized right away that it would curtail my freedom. My freedom as a novelist. As it was, the teacher's disappearance was only a pretext. I could fill in the rest myself. What do they call that: ‘based loosely on the facts'? I was afraid that, if I actually succeeded in meeting the boy or the girl, I would hear things that would endanger my novel, the way I saw it in my mind's eye.”

So you already had it planned out? Before you started?

“No, no, absolutely not. All I'm trying to say is that I didn't want to risk curtailing my freedom by being confronted all too abruptly with the facts. My imagination had to do the work. I've already told you about my premise. The relationship between the two of them. Pretty girl, a somewhat less handsome but still reasonably attractive boy. Who has the power over whom? As far as that goes, that teacher wasn't interesting. He is only the victim. No one deserves to be bumped off for something like that: stalking a female student. But you can never completely shake the feeling that he, at least in part, brought it down on himself. That's what we read back then in the first newspaper reactions, that's what we heard in the conversations, both on TV and in the cafés. A grown man, a teacher who does something like that, can't count on much sympathy. But I wasn't interested in his motives anyway. Grown man falls for young girl, you can be sure he wasn't the first man to have that happen. He is rejected, can't take that and goes crazy. He turns into a bothersome stalker. Our sympathy rarely focuses on men who pant on the telephone, men who follow young girls all the way to their doorstep, who stand guard under their bedroom window at night. From that moment on, in fact, the girl becomes the victim. If she had gone downstairs, walked outside and kicked him hard in the balls, we would all have applauded.”

You talk about the novelist's freedom. About his imagination, which could be obstructed by too much knowledge of the facts. But the reader is very much familiar with the facts. Of the most important facts, in any case. One reads your entire book knowing how it will end: with the teacher's disappearance.

“That's true. As a writer you're free to use that, I think. It's about the imagination, how do you as a writer fill in the blank spots: Could it have gone this way or that way? The real facts, the ones everyone knows, I should say, serve only as the perspective within which the narrative takes place. There are plenty of examples of that: you write about a Jewish family in Germany in 1938; everyone knows then that something is going to happen, that the sinister shadow of the future is already looming over the characters. These days a lot of writers—especially American writers—have their story begin on the morning of September 11. Or one week before. One day. Six months. It makes you read that story differently. Throughout the entire book you're waiting, as it were, for the first plane to slam into the North Tower. That's also the way I started on
Payback.
A teacher, a boy, and a girl. A high school. A holiday home in the snow. All the ingredients are laid out on the counter. The only thing left is to prepare the meal itself.”

The only difference being that everyone knows roughly when World War II started. The same way everyone knows—now, in hindsight—that neither of those planes flew into the Twin Towers by accident. But in
Payback,
you fantasize blithely about exactly what might have happened in that holiday cottage. Using what you call your imagination, you saddle the suspects with a theoretical murder.

“Something else occurs to me now. Because we were just talking about September 11. There is a fifteen-minute gap, a naive eternity, between the first plane and the second. Witnesses all thought it was a horrible accident. The dime only drops when the second plane hits. ‘Oh, my God!' you hear them all shouting. But, as a writer, I'm much more interested in those minutes in between the two planes. In the accident. The belief that there are no evil intentions at play. We all look at it differently now. Now we see the footage of the first plane, and we already know. The accident is gone completely. It was there once, but it has disappeared for good. It's the writer's task to bring back that naive belief in the accident. To let us relive those minutes between the first and second planes. Today we sometimes see the Twin Towers in movies or TV series from before September 11, 2001, and you know right away that this is a fairly old movie, if you couldn't tell already from the clothes and the cars. But those towers in a feature film also remind me of the old archive footage of German cities. A German city in 1938. You see streetcars and crowded cafés, mothers pushing prams, men playing chess in a park, and you know: This will all be laid to waste. Later, all this will be gone completely.

“In the same way, with the same perspective, I often looked at that school photo tacked up above my desk. A normal school photo. There are thousands, hundreds of thousands of photos like that. They're all different, in that there are other people in each of those photos, yet they still all look alike. There are more similarities than differences. A teacher, a man or a woman, is posing with his or her students for the school photographer, the clothing and hairstyles usually tell you roughly when the picture was taken. Everyone is posing, everyone is looking straight into the camera, except perhaps that one student who doesn't want to be there, the eternal troublemaker who would like to leave school as quickly as possible, and often there are also one or two jokers who are sticking out their tongues or holding up their fingers in a V behind the head of a fellow student, but those exceptions too are what make the school photos look alike. Sometimes though, with the passing of time, the photos take on more significance. That boy with the pale face and the greasy hair is now a famous writer; that girl with the round cheeks and pigtails is now an anchorwoman on the eight o'clock news; that handsome boy with the sunglasses pushed up on his forehead rose quickly through the ranks of the underworld and was shot and killed a few years ago in the parking lot of the Hilton Hotel. And then of course you have the class photos charged with portent, photos of classes in which more than half the students will not survive the war. But in those photos, too, the tone is largely set by innocence. The faith in a future. Every morning, before I started writing, that's how I looked at the photo of Class 5A at the Spinoza Lyceum.

“These days there's a program, it's called
Classmates
; it didn't exist back when I started on my book, but I thought about it later on. That you would bring together that whole class and let each of them tell
their
version of that school year. They're all in that picture. Herman and Laura of course, first of all, and the teacher, Mr. Landzaat. Obviously I changed all the names, but Mr. Landzaat is an improbable name for a book anyway, sounds a bit too suspect, too unbelievable. You always start by changing the names, then come the facts, at least insofar as they're available.

“But to come back to that photo: I always looked at the protagonists first, then at the bit players, the other members of that group of friends. David, Lodewijk, Michael, Ron. I looked them in the eye, one by one, and I tried to figure out what they were thinking, what they
knew,
only later of course. The class picture was taken at that empty moment of innocence, the vacant space between the first and second planes, just after the summer vacation. Of course I asked about that, about when those pictures were usually taken: it was shortly after the start of the school year, after that same summer vacation when they went together to the house in Terhofstede, but still before the three protagonists came into alignment. Laura only hooked up with Mr. Landzaat during the junior-class field trip in late September; Herman and Laura became a couple during the fall vacation in October. In December, on Boxing Day, Mr. Landzaat visits Laura and Herman at the house in Terhofstede and disappears. None of that can be seen in the class photo, there are no signs; most of the students look serious, a few are smiling, many of the boys have their hands in their pockets: on the one hand they want to show their indifference to the fact that a class photo is being taken, on the other they want to be sure they look good in the picture. A class photo doesn't show just a single individual, not like a passport photo or vacation snapshots. You can throw away a passport photo and have another one taken, as often as it takes to satisfy you, or perhaps I should say as often as it takes to be
passable.
We can dispose discreetly of vacation snapshots that aren't flattering, or at least not glue them into a photo album. We stuff them into a shoebox that we run across every couple of years. ‘Oh, no, not that one! I look so terrible in that!' and we try to yank the picture away from the person with whom we're delving through photos on the couch. Then it disappears again for years. A class photo is a very different thing. We can't allow ourselves to look bad in it, because later, a few weeks later, everyone in the class will see it. Hence all the serious expressions, the stiff poses, the mortal fear of looking stupid, laughable. The photo can't be secreted away somewhere, because the whole class has it. ‘Look at that expression on Henry's face, he looks like he had to pee so badly!' ‘Oh, Yvonne's teeth! Oh, I feel so sorry for her!' ‘Theo, did you wash your hair before you came to school that day? Never do that again!' You take the class photo home with you, you can hide it from your parents, but then parents aren't likely to say that it makes you look like a retard: their love ruins their eyesight. You wish you could destroy the photo, tear it into little bits, or even better, burn it. But you know it's no use. You have twenty-eight classmates, twenty-eight copies of your ugly face are in circulation for all eternity.”

You didn't mention Stella.

“What?”

Stella. You just reeled off the names of their group of friends. But you didn't mention Stella.

“I didn't? I didn't realize that.”

She's in that class photo too, right? She wasn't sick that day, was she?

“Yes, I know she's in the photo. Standing beside Laura. Two best friends. The boys are also all standing together, the way friends do. I have it here in a drawer, but I don't have to look at it anymore, it's etched in my memory.”

And do you sometimes take it out and look at it?

“No, that chapter is closed. That book is finished. As I said: I could draw it for you, from memory.”

You don't mention her in your book.

“Who? You mean Stella? No, that's right. In fact, I don't name anyone, it's fiction, I purposely kept the minor characters vague.”

But there's a difference between keeping something vague and leaving it out completely. In your depiction of the friends' club, there's only one girl, Laura. In
Payback
she's called Miranda.

“I felt as though I had to choose. And it definitely was not an easy choice. I had to choose between two storylines. Or rather: this book needed one storyline, and that was enough. A second one would only have weakened it. I chose for the teacher, the boy, and the girl. No other diversions. A tragic love story. A fatal conclusion. Or at least the suspicion of a fatal conclusion. That seemed more powerful to me. A difficult decision. I did start on it. I made an attempt, but it didn't work. Look at it this way: I didn't leave her out on purpose. Initially, I didn't
want
to leave Stella out at all. On the contrary. There were mornings when I looked at the class photo, and the one I looked at longest was
her.
I was completely fascinated. She's one of the only ones who doesn't look into the camera, although you have to examine it closely to see that. She's looking straight ahead. No, that's not right either. She's looking at
herself,
it took me weeks to finally see that. Those big eyes, that smile, that sweet face, an
open
face too; it's open, but as an outsider you can't see a thing. At most, you see that the face is
dreaming.
It's sufficient unto itself. It's full of itself.