Dear Mr. M (35 page)

“Yes,” I say. My throat feels dry, I raise my bottle of beer to my lips, but it's empty.

“And that film script, I think that was the last straw. About taking hostages at your own school. That you all get together and blow up the place. A ‘normal student' wouldn't do that either, would he? But that's bullshit, of course. In hindsight, all you can say is that you were far ahead of your time.”

“Would you like another beer, Herman?” your wife asks.

I nod. “Love one.”

“All that jabbering after the fact,” you go on as your wife heads to the kitchen. “It's like with a troubled childhood. Someone mows down fifty people at a high school or a shopping mall. During the investigation, their troubled childhood is always unearthed: divorced parents, an abusive father, an alcoholic mother who moonlighted as a prostitute, the ‘severely withdrawn' killer who ‘always kept to himself and often acted erratically.' But for the sake of convenience they forget the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of withdrawn loners who had a childhood at least as troubled as the killer's but who never hurt a soul, let alone assaulted or murdered anyone.”

“But in
Payback,
you made that same connection.”

“Only because it was better for the book. Omens. Signs of things to come. Besides the film of the teacher and that screenplay, the main thing was probably that physics teacher. That you went on filming while he was lying dead in his classroom. Anyone who would do that is probably also indifferent toward life, toward the lives of other teachers, that was the way people reasoned back then. At first I went along with that line of reasoning. Once again: for the sake of the book. A book in which a couple of boys make funny movies at a flower stand, fool around with a teacher, and film another teacher who has died on the spot, but who commit no murder later on; who, on the contrary, go on to college, start a family, and end up as head accountant at an insurance company—that's not interesting to read about. They blend seamlessly into the gray masses of those who perhaps do wild or crazy things when they're young, but who grow tame as adults. A writer can't do anything with that. By the way, did you bring that one, the one with the physics teacher?”

Your wife has taken a seat on the couch again; I raise my second bottle of beer to my lips. There is Laura. She is sitting at a table in the cafeteria of the Spinoza Lyceum, forty years ago, she sticks her finger down her throat, she gags, but after that nothing happens. She grimaces, then smiles at the camera and shakes her head.

“What a lovely girl,” your wife says. “What is she doing?”

“I suggested to her that she barf up a pink glacé cake, so she could say she was too ill to take the physics exam,” I say. “She gave it everything she had, but in the end she couldn't do it.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Karstens's gleaming black shoes and lower legs can be seen, but the screen is then quickly filled by the table, the rest of the body too is blocked from sight by the men—the hall monitor and two teachers—who are squatting beside him.

Then Laura is back, she is standing beside the door of the physics lab and looking around, then she waves to the camera and starts pushing her way through the crowd of students who have gathered outside the classroom. She looks into the camera, no, this time she looks just past the camera: at me. She says something, wags her finger, almost scoldingly:
Don't!
But then we see her laugh. She laughs and shakes her head.

“People should really have looked at it the other way around,” you say. “Or no, not the other way around. Differently. What I mean is: Imagine you're walking down the street and suddenly you hear something that isn't quite normal, a plane flying much too low, or in any event something unusual, an unusual sound, a sound that stands out from the normal street noises around you. You look up and you actually do see a plane. A passenger plane. It's flying right above the rooftops.
This isn't right,
that's your first thought,
something's wrong here, that plane is much too low.
You happen to have a movie camera with you. A video camera. You point the camera up in the air, and less than ten seconds later you see that plane slam into the side of a skyscraper. A tower. A building more than a hundred stories tall. You
film
the plane as it bores its way into the tower. An explosion, a ball of fire, wreckage flying everywhere. Six months later you are charged with a murder. The police search your house and find the film with the passenger plane drilling its way into the tower. Are the detectives allowed to assume that you have always had little respect for human life, because you filmed the deaths of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people? Simply because you happened to be there, on the spot?”

During the film of my parents eating at the table we are mostly silent. Me too, I don't comment, I realize that it is too bare without music, without Michael's saxophone. Maybe I shouldn't have showed it, it occurs to me once it's almost over.

“Why did you call it
Life Before Death,
Herman?” your wife asks once I've stopped the projector and am threading the next reel.

“Well, that was the thing in those days,” I say. “Pompous titles. It allowed you to make something out of almost nothing. After all, it's only my parents. I had plans for a sequel, but when my father moved in definitively with his new girlfriend a few months later, I didn't feel like it anymore.”

In the next movie we are back in Terhofstede. You see us walking, on the road to Retranchement, at the bend in the road to be precise: I had run out in front in order to see them all coming around the curve.

“Lodewijk,” you say. “And the one with the curly hair is Michael. Ron. David, that girl beside him, I always forget about her, his girlfriend, what was her name again?”

“Miriam,” I say.

“Laura,” you say as Laura comes by, walking arm in arm with Stella—but you don't mention Stella's name.

Then we're in the Zwin. I film a thistle, and then the white surf in the distance, David and Miriam who have remained behind on the dike and are kissing.

We see Laura from the back, her long black hair, the prints her boots leave behind in the sand.

I catch up with her and pass her, I film her from the front. Laura has stopped—she's looking straight into the camera, she brushes the hair out of her face. She looks. She keeps looking.

I mount the final reel on the projector. A white landscape, a snowstorm, a blue sign with the name of a place on it—
RETRANCHEMENT, CITY OF SLUIS
—covered in a ridge of snow, but there's also snow stuck to the front of it; a red stripe runs diagonally across the sign.

Laura. Laura carrying a plastic shopping bag, a white woolen cap on her head; the camera zooms in—there is snow on her eyebrows, on her lashes—until the screen is filled with her face and goes from out-of-focus to black.

“They never found this movie,” I say. “I had just brought it to the shop to have it developed when they came and took all the others.”

Footprints in the snow, the camera pans up slowly, we see the start of a bridge, the railing of a bridge, ice below—the frozen water of what must be a river or canal.

On the far side of the bridge we see Landzaat, the history teacher. He waves, no, he gestures really:
Come on, let's go, hurry up.
He turns around, takes a few steps, then looks back and stops.

It looks like someone has called his name, that that is why he's stopped. He has turned left after the bridge, now he points straight ahead and raises both arms.

For a moment he stands there like that, he's a fair distance away, but from his gestures, his body language, you can tell that he is saying something, maybe asking something—little white clouds are coming out of his mouth.

He starts to walk back, comes up onto the bridge a ways, then stops again. He says (or asks) something. He points.

Then he shrugs, turns and walks back to the end of the bridge, heads right.

For the first half hour of their trudge through the snow, Jan Landzaat and Herman barely speak. Sometimes they walk beside each other, and then, when the path grows narrower and the snow deeper, in single file.

Landzaat hadn't slept a wink all night; he had tossed and turned, quietly, not making a sound, but the bed creaked at the slightest movement. With wide open eyes he had stared at the wooden planks on the attic ceiling, the checkered curtain at the window he had left open, the beams and planks illuminated by a streetlamp outside—he was sure that in that light he could also see the clouds of his own breath.

He had pondered, a feverish (there was no other word for it) pondering, his head glowed with all the thoughts tumbling over and scraping past each other. He had to pee, but he remained in bed until it started hurting, only then did he go downstairs.

Step by step, inside his churning, spinning head, the contours of a plan had begun to take shape. A plan which, somewhere around first light, he had christened “Plan B”—he laughed, without making a sound, at the name: Plan B. It sounded like something from an adventure novel, an action film in which the commandos take the island from the rocky north coast rather than crossing the mined beach in the south.

He had in fact already carried out the first part of his plan, without knowing at that point how it had to go. Last night, when the decision had finally been made that he would spend the night here, he had fetched his traveling bag from the car; his traveling bag and the bottle of whiskey, with less than a quarter still left in it.

There was no premeditation. Acting on impulse, he had slid in behind the wheel and screwed the top off the whiskey bottle. Tilting his head back to let the burning liquid flow down his throat as smoothly as possible, he caught sight of the little light built into the car ceiling, just behind the two front seats. In front, beside the rearview mirror, was another little bulb. A light put there to allow one, for example, to read a map at night.

The ceiling light was there for the passengers in the backseat. Sometimes his daughters asked him to turn it on when they were driving home at night, so they could read a magazine or a comic book.

Two or three times in the last year they had forgotten to turn off that light after they got home. The next morning the battery had been dead and he'd had to mess around with jumper cables or call the automobile association.

He took another slug, turned on the light, screwed the top back on the bottle, put it in his bag, and climbed out.

That was the first phase of Plan B. Whatever happened, the car wouldn't start the next morning. He hadn't seen a phone in the house. They could always call the automobile association from a house in the village, but he would immediately point out that the road service probably couldn't get through in weather like this. He would suggest that they go for help at a garage.

He guessed that they wouldn't send him out alone in the snow, that after some hesitation Herman would go along to show him the way—but Laura wouldn't, Laura would stay at home.

He had guessed correctly.

They arrive at a narrow bridge across a frozen canal; at that point Jan Landzaat is walking out in front. Without thinking about it, he crosses the bridge and turns left on the other side. On Christmas Eve, alone in his pitiful studio apartment, when his initial plan (a plan he could now, in hindsight, refer to as Plan A) began to take shape, he had searched around a little for a road map, but all his maps were at the house, as he in fact already knew.

At that point he had thought about the glove compartment of his car: there were always a few road maps in there, maps from the last summer vacation, perhaps even a map of France, but certainly one of the Netherlands.

He made a mental note to stop at a gas station along the way and buy a map of France, if there wasn't one in the car already. That would make his “friends in Paris” even more believable.

The next morning he ascertained that, indeed, the glove compartment contained only a map of Holland. He knew more or less how to get to Zeeland Flanders, he had been that way before, to Knokke, where his daughters had driven up and down the boulevard in pedal cars while he and his wife sat at an outdoor café and shared a plate of shrimp croquettes while knocking back a bottle of white wine.

Retranchement was still on the Dutch map, but Terhofstede wasn't. He didn't think it would be too difficult to find, though. The best thing would be to drive to Flushing and take the Breskens ferry. Retranchement was only about ten miles from Breskens.

Where is that exactly, Retranchement? I've never heard of it.
They had been lying close together in their hotel bed, the bed in a hotel along the main road to Utrecht, Laura had leaned across him to take a pack of cigarettes from the nightstand. Their affair had been going on for only two weeks: the first time they did it fast, like in a movie, clothes left behind at the door, underwear and shoes in a hasty trail from door to bed, and then, after a cigarette or two, again, slowly, attentively, waiting for each other.
It had been so long since I'd been there,
she'd said of her parents' house in Zeeland.
When I was little I thought it was a great adventure, but later on I started getting bored, with only my parents and my little brother.
He asked her precisely where that was in Zeeland, just to ask something, not because it really interested him, it was only that, when he heard the funny, un-Dutch name Retranchement, he had thought she was pulling his leg.

It's not actually in Retranchement itself, it's in a little village close by, Terhofstede. Last summer we went there with a group of friends. Then it was fun again.

On that last evening at his place, the evening when she had lost her earring in the bathroom, she'd told him that she was going there again with the same friends that fall.

One evening, a few days before the Christmas vacation, he had called her. “Don't hang up right away!” he said quickly. “I have something important to tell you.” He heard her sigh at the other end; he tried not to think about the last ten times he'd called her and only breathed into the phone.

“Please, Jan,” she said. “Please. Just stop this.”

“You're right,” he said quickly. “I'm stopping. That's what I'm calling about. To tell you that I've stopped.”

He was drunk, he did his best to keep talking in the hope that she wouldn't notice, but he felt his words slipping away, struggling to keep their balance—while yet other words kept sticking together.

“Jan, I'm hanging up now. I don't want to talk to you.”

“Wait! Wait a minute! Let me finish, I'm almost finished. Then you can hang up.”

He was half expecting to hear the dial tone, but she didn't hang up; she didn't say anything, but she didn't hang up either.

I miss you, Laura. I can't live without you. Without you, I'm not going to go on living either. Before the year is over, I'm going to put an end to it.

Covering the horn with one hand, he reached for the whiskey bottle and raised it to his lips.

“I want to meet you one last time,” he said after the third gulp. “No, it's not what you think,” he added promptly when he heard her sigh again. “I don't want anything from you, I promise. You decide where. In a café or something, wherever you like. Tomorrow. Or the day after.”

“I can't, not tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow I won't be here anymore. I'm going away.”

He felt an air bubble, somewhere just below his midriff, a bubble that needed to get out now. He covered the horn again and tried to burp, but the only thing that came up was whiskey, whiskey and something else.
Where are you going?
No, he mustn't ask that.

“My parents are going to New York,” she said.

“Are you going to New York! That's great! So you're leaving the day after tomorrow? Well, maybe we can—”
Maybe we can meet up tonight, then?
But that was not a good idea, he had no idea what time it was—he'd known what time it was when he called, but meanwhile he'd lost track completely.

“I'm not going along,” she said. “My little brother is.”

And that was the moment when he'd known—despite his drunken, pounding head, he realized that he should ask no further. Her parents were going to New York. With her brother. She had the whole place to herself, there was no reason to go away, but still she was going away, she'd just said so.

With him!
He closed his eyes tightly. For three whole seconds he thought about Herman's unmanly body, his stringy, unwashed hair, the little, beaded bracelet around his wrist, his stinking rubber boots, his malformed teeth.
Fucking shit, how can she do that?

“I've got an idea,” he said. “I'm going to leave it completely up to you. You don't want to meet up now. You
can't
meet up now. So let's just agree that you call
me.
Whenever the time's right for you. Maybe you think right now that we shouldn't meet up at all, but that's not true, Laura. But you decide when. I won't call you again.”

At the gas station where he stopped between Goes and Flushing they didn't have a French map, but they did have a detailed map of Zeeland province. That morning in the attic, by first light, he examined it. The closest town of any size was Sluis. Terhofstede was on the map too, and he did his best to memorize the route—both there and back again.

That was why, when they reached the bridge over the canal, he had almost automatically turned left. That's what he thought he remembered seeing on the map. No, not “thought he remembered,” he remembered with one-hundred-percent certainty that this was the way to Sluis. That was also why he hadn't turned around when Herman called him. For the last fifteen minutes Herman had been lagging a bit, meanwhile they had left behind the last houses of Terhofstede and now only passed the occasional farm, a bit further back from the road. They saw no one at all, only once a growling watchdog that ventured a few steps from its yard but quickly turned back.

“We have to turn right here!” he hears Herman call out for the second time, and this time he does turn around.

Herman is still standing on the other side, at the start of the bridge, he's holding something up to his eye, a telescope, Landzaat thinks at first, but then he sees it is a camera. A movie camera.

A movie camera! Herman is filming him—maybe he has been filming him for a while, while he was lagging behind. His first impulse is to yank the camera out of Herman's hands and toss it in the canal. Into the frozen canal. He pictures the way the camera might bounce once and then break into pieces. No, not that. Not a good idea. Silently, he counts to ten.

“Are you sure?” he shouts. “I thought Sluis was in that direction.”

He points. He points toward Sluis, toward the spot beyond the trees and a few more whitened fields and dikes lined with pollard willows, to where he is sure Sluis must be.

“No, here, to the right,” Herman shouts back—Herman is still standing on the other side of the bridge; in the silence that follows Jan Landzaat hears a new sound that he can't quite place at first, a quiet rattle.
The camera! He's just gone on filming! He's filming what it is I'm going to do.
“I've done this before, the fastest way is to the right.”

Slowly, he turns and starts walking back to the bridge. As slowly as possible, to win time, to give himself time to think. He can't imagine that Herman could be wrong about this. To the right, along the canal, is the opposite direction; it will only take them further and further away from Sluis. And closer to the sea, to the bird sanctuary. The Zwin, that's what it was called—he'd seen it on the map that morning.

His Plan B was every bit as simple as it was elegant, if you asked him. He hadn't even spent the whole night thinking about it: the initial outline had been there in less than a second, half a second at most, in a clear flash. He lay staring at the plank ceiling in the light of the streetlamp, but the idea was so clear and blinding that the yellowish light on the planks and beams seemed for that half second to turn a fraction of a shade darker.