Dear Mr. M (36 page)

In a little while, his car would refuse to start. He would go walking with Herman and Laura, or only with Herman, or completely on his own, to Sluis—he figured he and Herman, just the two of them, was the most likely scenario.

Somewhere along the way he would have to shake Herman, he didn't know how, but it shouldn't be too hard. If need be he could just take off running, yes, that wasn't such a bad idea. “He just took off running,” Herman would report later, it would sound completely unbelievable, so implausible that Herman would only incriminate himself.

Once he had given Herman the slip he would have to find a suitable place. A remote place, a hollow in the dunes close to the bird sanctuary, behind a bush or amid the reeds along a frozen ditch, a place where they wouldn't find him too quickly, at least not before the next day, when the search began.

At that remote place he would use a big stone or a heavy branch (a stone would be best, but he wasn't sure whether there would be any of those along the road or in the fields around here) to hurt himself so badly that he would lose consciousness. Practically speaking, he didn't know whether it was possible to knock yourself out with a big stone (or a heavy branch). In any case, it would have to produce a lot of blood. He figured that he could let the big stone come down a few times on his nose, mouth, and eyes before he passed out. It would have to look like he'd been battered by someone who hated him. And even if he didn't succeed in knocking himself unconscious with a final blow to the temple, that would be no real disaster. The most important thing was not to be found right away, at the earliest in the course of the next day—by which time, at this temperature, conscious or no, he would have frozen to death.

There were a few technical catches: he could leave no fingerprints on the stone (or heavy branch), but he would be wearing mittens anyway, so that was no problem. And then there was the snow, or the footprints in the snow, rather. Only his own footprints would be found, nothing belonging to a possible murderer. In selecting the remote spot, therefore, he would also have to make sure it wasn't all too far from a road or path. A road or path with plenty of footprints from walkers and other passersby. From the path to the spot where the corpse (his corpse!) would be found, he would walk back and forth a few times to wipe out all the tracks. As though the murderer had tried to cover the tracks, he thought with a grin, lying in his cold bed in the attic.

Conclusions would be drawn swiftly enough. Everything would be brought out in the open, but what did that matter? He wouldn't be around to see it.

A teacher visits two students at a house in Zeeland Flanders. He and the girl had once had a brief affair. The next morning his car refuses to start. The boy offers to lead him to a garage in Sluis. But they never get there. The boy returns home alone. His statements seem confused (to say nothing of suspicious).
He just took off running.
The next day (two days, three days, a week later), the teacher's body is found in a ditch or a hollow in the dunes. His head has been battered with a large stone (heavy branch). An autopsy will determine whether he was beaten to death or whether it was the cold that killed him.

The accounts given by the two students sound less than believable. At first, both of them are held for questioning. But after only a few days the detectives assigned to the case will begin to doubt whether the girl is guilty. Because Laura herself, in the best of all possible scenarios, will have started doubting whether Herman has really told her everything. He came back to the house alone that day. The teacher had supposedly taken off on his own. Would Laura, in spite of everything, continue to believe in Herman's innocence? It didn't really matter much anymore. Her life, too, would be largely ruined. It wouldn't be long before people began questioning her version of events as well.

That girl, do you think maybe she put that boy up to murdering the teacher?

After that the suspicions would never be completely dispelled, she would be associated with the murder for the rest of her life—as an accomplice.
We'll never really know the whole truth.
That was enough, nothing else was needed.

It was already almost light in the attic; a gray, cloudy day, he noted after pressing his face against the icy window. The plan made sense, down to the slightest detail, even those details he himself could never have anticipated beforehand.

The teacher, Laura and Herman would claim, had said he'd only made a slight detour before driving on that day, or the next morning, to see friends in Paris. But it wasn't a slight detour at all, you couldn't call it that, not with the best will in the world. Wasn't it strange that someone going to Paris would have no guidebook or map of that city in his car? Or at least a map of France?

Imagine that there was a thorough police investigation and that, besides the evidence already rapidly piling up, they discovered that the car's battery was dead. Run down, because a battery doesn't just go dead. When the battery was charged, the roof light would go on. Aha, so that was it! The car wasn't locked. It would have been easy as pie for one of the students to sneak out during the night and turn on the reading lamp, so that the teacher couldn't leave the next morning.

At that moment he had heard them talking downstairs, very quietly, almost in a whisper, but in this house every sound went straight through the thin wooden walls and floors. What could they be talking about? He had to go downstairs quickly now, he would surprise them by making breakfast. He would pretend to be cheerful. Most people on the verge of suicide were cheerful for the last few days, that's what those closest to them always said afterward. The future suicide smiled a bit more than usual, he played games with the children, he told jokes—and the next day they found him hanging from a beam.

He shivered as he picked up his cold clothes from the chair at the foot of the bed. And as he put on his socks and shoes, he suddenly thought about his two daughters. His little daughters would grow up without a father. What's more, for the rest of their lives they would be the daughters of a murdered father, a father whose life had been taken by brute force. He thought about his wife. In a certain sense, she would be getting her just deserts, she would never recover. She would feel guilty, about what he wasn't quite sure, but he believed it was true: his wife would think she could have prevented his death if she'd been a little more accommodating. If she hadn't threatened him with seeing his daughters less often, perhaps not at all anymore. With a little more compassion, she could have cured him of his obsession with a seventeen-year-old student. She would be consumed with regret at her own stubbornness. She would age quickly. Later, she would have a lot to explain to her growing daughters.
But why did Daddy go away, Mom? Was it really so bad, what he did? Shouldn't you have helped him instead?

And it was there and at that moment, as he pulled on his clammy socks and slid his feet into his ice-cold shoes, that he'd had his second brilliant flash of inspiration.

A modified Plan B.

Yes, he thought. That's how I'll do it. Much better. Better for everyone: not least of all for myself, but in any case better for my girls.

Landzaat and I would walk out to the Zwin. At that moment I didn't know what I was planning to do out there, but whatever happened we were not going to Sluis, not to a garage.

In a certain sense it was all very illogical, I was quite aware of that. The sooner we found a garage, after all, the sooner Landzaat's car could be fixed, and the sooner he could go away too, away, out of our lives.

But that morning I wasn't running on logic anymore. The history teacher had arrived uninvited. He had forced his way into our lives, which had been timeless up till then—ever since he'd arrived, everything was taking too long. He didn't go away, he remained hanging around like a musty, lingering smell.

We might find an open garage in Sluis. A mechanic might come back with us to look at the car, or else they'd send a tow truck to pick it up, a tow truck of the kind that could actually make it through the snow. There was a chance that the repair would take a few days, that they would have to order parts. Would Landzaat volunteer to move to a hotel in Sluis while they waited? Would he go back to Amsterdam?

But even so, what then? Imagine the car could be started today, that they could push him out of the snow—that Jan Landzaat would
finally! finally!
be able to travel on to his friends in Paris. Would we really be rid of him? Would Laura be rid of him? Or would it start all over again after the Christmas vacation?

The teacher may have lost the battle, but he had not lost the war. Landzaat himself had said that once during history class. It was some kind of famous quote, I didn't remember who said it. Jan Landzaat already realized that he had nothing to gain here in Terhofstede, I was convinced of that: he had given up for the moment, he would cut his losses and, if the engine started, he would really leave.

But what about a week from now? A month? Would he give up completely, would he put Laura out of his mind for good, or would he simply start all over again? With other means. With a new tactic.

No, I had to do something to make sure it was over for good. Something that would remove him from our lives forever.

That was why I sent him the wrong way after he crossed the bridge. That was why I filmed him too: as evidence, although at that moment, I didn't know what of.

After the bridge the path widened into a road, a dirt road, or maybe a real one covered in asphalt: the thick layer of snow made it impossible to tell. It didn't really matter, of course, but because the road was so broad we could—at least theoretically—walk beside each other, which was absolutely the last thing I wanted. By then my body literally balked at getting close to the history teacher, and so I slowed down every once in a while, to at least stay a few feet behind him. But then Landzaat would slow down too, forcing me to choose between dawdling even more or coming up alongside him. Maybe he was suspicious, or maybe he was simply on his guard after seeing the movie camera—maybe he wanted to keep me from filming him candidly again.

Up to that point there had been no conversation, not even the start of a conversation. I had resolved not to start talking; first of all because I didn't feel like it, and secondly—

“Have you made movies before with that thing?” Landzaat asked; at that moment he was walking two feet out in front of me, but he slowed so that we could walk beside each other. “I mean, you must make movies. No, what I really mean is: What kind of things do you film?”

I didn't answer right away; I realized that I preferred the silence that had reigned till then. It had not been an uneasy silence—maybe for him, but not for me.

Not answering him at all was out of the question. The teacher would probably only shrug and say something like
If you don't want to talk, fine by me. No skin off my nose.

It would grant him a kind of moral superiority, and we couldn't have that.

“All kinds of things,” I said.

“Really? All kinds of things? Or mostly teachers?”

I had put the camera back in my coat pocket, inside the pocket I weighed it in my hand: it was pretty heavy, but not heavy enough to use for anything but making movies.

“You've developed quite a reputation in the teachers' lounge,” Landzaat said. “You and David. With the things you two do. Playing tricks all over the place. Acting like an idiot in class and then filming the teacher's reaction.”

I said nothing, it felt best to say nothing, to see first where he was trying to go with this.

“Don't misunderstand me, I'm not condemning it right off the bat,” he said. “I was young once too. Playing jokes on teachers, I did that in high school too. But in the teachers' lounge I noticed that one or two of them were really upset about it.”

After the fall vacation I had edited all the films back-to-back. By then, the teacher mortality rate had reached its high-water mark—in hindsight you could even say that it had already passed that point by the start of the Christmas vacation. First Mr. Van Ruth, the math teacher—unfortunately, I didn't have him on film. Then Miss Posthuma, found dead in her apartment less than a week later, and in late November Harm Koolhaas's fatal trip to Miami, which ended in a (botched) holdup. We hadn't done anything with him either, he simply wasn't the right type for it—“too vulnerable by nature” was David's comment, and that said enough already. I did of course have footage of Mr. Karstens, but only of his lifeless body lying in his own classroom, half hidden beneath the desk in front of the chalkboard.

I had mounted all the films back-to-back and given the whole thing the working title
Life Before Death II.
It was perfect, that title: teachers also didn't realize that their lives were empty and senseless, that those lives had ended on the day they decided to make teaching their profession. It was like a nature film of a herd grazing on the savanna, or better yet, of a school of fish in the ocean. Oblivious to almost everything except the water in which it moves, the life of a fish starts somewhere, at a random moment, and ends somewhere else, at perhaps an even more random moment. That end is often both swift and brutal. Another, bigger fish or a bird or a seal waiting patiently beside a hole in the polar ice takes the fish in its jaws, beak, or teeth, bites it in two, and swallows it down.

I had tried to furnish it with English-language narration—nature films are almost always dubbed in English.
Miss Posthuma is seeing something she has never seen before. Mr. Karstens will never teach again.
I thought about the narration I could later dub beneath the footage I'd made of the history teacher.
Mr. Landzaat has followed his instincts; he has followed his dick to the end of the world. Now he is lost in the snow, wondering, “How did I get here?”

What was it Landzaat had just said?
I was young once too.
The horror of it, what emptiness, when you could make that kind of pronouncement about yourself. It reminded me of my father. My father, who had tried to act so casual when I came home drunk one night from an outing with my friends, long past the time we'd agreed on. Paternally casual. My mother's eyes were red and teary.
I was so worried! I thought you'd been in an accident!
The gesture with which my father silenced her…
I used to drink a bit too much too sometimes. That happens when you're young.
After that I had to throw up, I didn't even have the strength to get up off the living room couch, let alone make it to the bathroom: everything came out all at once, a bucket being tossed, a toilet flushing—it spattered all over the wall-to-wall carpet, but at least the room stopped spinning.

They didn't get angry. My mother came and sat beside me and put her arm around me, my father stood beside the TV with his hands in his pockets and winked at me. I felt my mother's fingers in my hair, she had started crying quietly as she spoke reassuring words. Normal parents would have let me clean up my own barf, but they had stopped being normal parents long ago.
I'm going to my room. I need to lie down.
And I stood up, I left them behind with their sense of guilt. Less than a minute later I could hear them fighting, I couldn't understand what they were saying, but I could sort of guess.

I could make
Life Before Death II
end with Jan Landzaat. With Landzaat on the bridge back there, or with a couple of new shots later, out in the Zwin. His face at the moment he realized we had gone in the wrong direction, that we had to walk the whole way back, but that it was probably already too late to reach a garage in Sluis before it closed.
I don't know,
I would say.
I guess I must have been mistaken…

Would he fly into a rage? Or would he remain a teacher under all circumstances? Someone who knows nothing himself, but has been hired to aid and abet others in their ignorance. A grown man barely in his thirties who says of himself that he “was young once too.”
As a teacher, he must repress his natural urges. But so far he hasn't behaved like a proper teacher. Now…he is paying the price for his carelessness…

Yes, I would have to look him straight in the eye, cold as ice, later, when I told him we would no longer make it to Sluis before dark. I would film him, keep on filming him, in his dismay, his despair, perhaps in his rage. But not yet, for the time being I needed to reassure him—we were on our way to Sluis, to a garage, if everything worked out he could drive on to Paris tomorrow morning.

“Come on,” I said. “Really upset about it…I don't believe that. They're grown-up people, right? Who was actually so upset about it?” I asked for form's sake, because of course I already knew; this was meant more to keep our “normal” conversation going.
Mr. Karstens didn't seem particularly upset,
I thought—but I didn't say that.

“What are you laughing about?” Landzaat asked.

“No, I was just thinking about Karstens,” I said; and it was at that moment, that one careless moment when I spoke before thinking, when I said exactly what I had meant not to say from the beginning, that I made up my mind—that I suddenly knew what I was going to do. “At least he didn't seem too upset when I filmed him. On the contrary.”

I could tell right away from the second and a half in which Jan Landzaat didn't reply. The time he took to think it over was what gave him away. I felt a wave of triumph rise up from my collar: it was going to be much easier than I'd thought.

“Do you think that's funny?” he asked. “At least that's how it sounds: as though you think it's really funny. And what do you mean by ‘when I filmed him'? What did you guys do, for Christ's sake?”

Bingo!
I thought.
Gotcha.
You hold a piece of sausage above a dog's head, two feet above its head. You can't let your concentration flag for even a moment, otherwise the dog will take a piece of your finger when it jumps at the sausage.

“Karstens wasn't actually a friend of mine,” he went on after a brief pause, during which he took off his black mittens, rubbed his hands together and stuck them in his pockets. “Just a different kind of teacher than I am. But I don't think that's any way to talk about someone.”

“What do you mean by ‘a different kind of teacher,' Landzaat? Do you mean a teacher who doesn't try right away to stuff his dick into one of his students? Who just does what he was hired to do? I can't imagine Mr. Karstens climbing down off his stool to force himself on one of the girls in the class. Getting down on his knees and begging them to play with his wiener.”

This was fantastic. It
felt
fantastic. It was like being able to throw open the window at last after a long, stuffy day, to let in the fresh air—no, it was more than just fresh air—to let a fresh
wind
blow through. But even more than an open window, it felt like something that was sort of forbidden, but still necessary: busting a pane of glass in order to yank on the emergency brake.

The teacher had stopped in his tracks, he turned halfway around to face me, but I walked on; a few yards further I stopped too and turned around.