Dear Mr. M (37 page)

“The big mistake teachers like you make is in thinking that they're different,” I said. “Above all, that they're nicer. That's what you think too, that you are above all else a nice teacher. Not strict like Van Ruth and Karstens. Not deathly boring like Posthuma. But we don't care fuck-all about nice teachers. Give us the real thing. Real, instead of artificial. You're pure fake, Landzaat, everyone can see that. Everyone except for you.”

He looked at me, his eyes weren't angry, more like dull: crestfallen. He took a few steps in my direction, but I quickly walked backward, pulling the movie camera out of my pocket and taking the cap off the lens.

I needed to crank it up a little and then turn my back on him. I needed to give him the chance to do something to me, something irreversible, in any case something that left marks; I needed him to lose his self-control and fly off the handle. I was doing this for Laura, I told myself, I was not a born fighter, in a head-on fight with the history teacher I was bound to take a beating. I would have to get him to the point where he knocked out a couple of my teeth or blackened both my eyes. A battered and bloody face, a split lip with two front teeth broken off, that would be the best thing. The footage would speak for itself. Jan Landzaat would be drummed out of the Spinoza Lyceum and slapped with a restraining order at the very least, if he didn't go to jail for six months or so. I thought about his wife, his two young daughters; I imagined them talking to their daddy through a little window in the booth in the prison visiting room. With one of those closed-circuit telephones, like in American movies: the daughters would press their hands against the window, and their father would do the same on the other side. Tears would be shed. His wife might forgive him to a certain extent, but she would never let him share her bed again.

“I bet saying all that makes you think you're pretty tough,” he said, approaching now with somewhat bigger steps—I pressed the viewfinder against my eye and took equally big steps backward. “But I know exactly what kind of petty little man you are, Herman. It's a wonder you could ever get a girl like Laura, that you could get any girl at all with that skinny body and those pitiful teeth of yours.”

I stopped, another possibility was to let him get closer and then unexpectedly hit him in the face with the camera, against his upper lip or the bridge of his nose—but I had to stay calm, I told myself. I mustn't ruin everything now by losing my self-control; I was so close.

“Don't go thinking that a girl like Laura will stick with you for very long,” Landzaat said. “Maybe girls think that's fun for a while, a little boy they can lord it over, who they can make do whatever they want, but they go looking for a real man soon enough.”

The history teacher had stopped less than two feet from me; I looked at his face through the viewfinder, but I didn't start filming.
Not yet, wait just a bit,
I said to myself.

If I got in the first blow, I might have a chance. I could break his nose with the camera, he would grab his nose with both hands while the blood sprayed in all directions, and in that unguarded moment, while his defenses were down, I could kick him in the balls. After that it would be up to me to decide how far to go. Where I would stop. But it would be a mistake, I realized, it would be a victory for Jan Landzaat. A teacher assaulted by a student. Whatever the exact cause, precisely why he was here in Terhofstede would fade into the background. From a culprit, an underage-girl-stalking teacher, he would become a victim. The turncoat is blindfolded and hoisted onto a rail amid a raging crowd. What happens to him after that we still find a bit pitiful, we forget the why behind it, the reason—we forget that this is a collaborator. No, I warded off the thought of getting in the first punch as quickly as it came up. I had to keep my wits about me, I warned myself again—not hand over the reins now, not while I was so close to my objective.

I pushed the button on the camera. I knew what I was going to say, how I would push him over the edge. And I would have it all on film: his face contorted with rage, with a bit of luck also the first swing, and then the consequences.

“You know what it is, Landzaat?” I started in, but at that moment I heard my camera make an all-too-familiar sound.
Fuck!
I thought, but I thought it with such force that it escaped audibly from my lips too. The film roll! The film was finished and unraveling inside the camera. There couldn't have been a worse moment! I hadn't been paying fucking attention, I shouldn't have used the camera back there on the bridge. It had two ORWO-brand reels, manufactured in East Germany; Double-8 was what it was called, two times 8mm, you could film for two and a half minutes, after that you had to open the camera and turn the reel around, preferably in a dark place, for another two and a half minutes of moviemaking. There was no way I could do that here, outside. I had to decide fast. Whether to go ahead now and live with the fact that it wasn't on film, or wait and try later to get him riled up all over again. I knew exactly what I was going to say, the question was whether I'd be able to dish it out later with the same impact. It was something about Landzaat's wife and daughters, something Laura had told me once. I would start with that, and if that wasn't enough to get him to take a swing at me, I would take it a step further. After all, he'd asked for it. I would tell him something Laura had told me about him one evening, a few days after she'd broken off the relationship. I'd always tried to avoid hearing too many details about the affair, whenever Laura started in about it I tried to change the subject as fast as possible: I found it too disgusting to listen to. This was a couple of days after she broke it off. She was sitting on her bed at home, crying; her parents were in the living room watching TV, we had been kissing a bit, and then she told me. It was something physical, something about Landzaat's body that she could never stand, something she'd kept trying to get over during the couple of weeks it had lasted, but never succeeded.
You know from the start that you'll never stick it out too long with someone with…with something like that,
Laura had said.
It's like someone with a shrill voice,
she said,
or a weird odor. At first there are other things that make up for it, but in the end you know that you'd never want to grow old alongside that shrill voice or weird odor.

Then she went on to tell me precisely what it was about Jan Landzaat that had inspired her aversion from the start. She had to repeat it a couple of times, because at first I didn't understand what she was talking about, and after that I didn't believe her. But then she'd started crying and swore that it was really true—and I took her in my arms and pressed her against me, I whispered in her ear that I believed her.

If I were to confront Jan Landzaat with this bodily detail, here and now in the snow, it would be as though I were rubbing his face in his own vomit and forcing him to eat it—but this was worse than vomit.

He'd thought he could insult me with his comments about my appearance and my lack of masculinity, but that didn't get to me. I knew who I was. I knew above all where my strengths lay. I knew enough not to fly in the face of my own nature by trying to play the irresistible macho man; everyone, especially the girls, would see through that right away. Sure, I was too skinny. Physically, I wasn't strong, I didn't have a seductive set of teeth. At the age of ten I had worn braces for a while, at first my teeth had sort of protruded, but after wearing the braces they were pushed too far back; on my way to school once, in a fit of rashness, I had taken the retainer out of my mouth and tossed it under a parked car.

But I was different—or rather, I
had
something different. At thirteen I had my first real girlfriend. She was going with a much older boy at the time. A handsome guy. The athletic type. Biceps, long hairy legs that looked good in shorts. But also yawningly boring, as I noted while a group of us were standing around talking, after the school's annual track and field day. The girl was part of that group too. The boy had his arm around her waist, but I could tell from the way she started looking around whenever he started talking, about the weather, about his baseball team winning the finals, about how hungry he was. And how tired. I could almost
see
the girl sigh. I looked at her, I kept looking at her, for as long as it took for her to look away.
I wouldn't bore you,
my eyes told her.
Never.
Then I said something that made her laugh. She laughed, the handsome boy didn't, he only raised his eyebrows and looked around pensively, as though he suddenly smelled something strange.
It's your eyes,
the girl told me the next afternoon when we were lying on the bed in her room.
The way you looked at me yesterday. And now you're doing it again!
During the fall vacation, Laura had said something along the same lines.
When I look into your eyes for too long, I get all wobbly. You don't hide anything. You can see exactly what you're thinking. Who you are.
Not all the girls felt that way, of course, they didn't all melt when I looked at them. I knew my own limitations. But if those other girls felt like dying of boredom beside some fashion model, that was up to them.

“What is it?” Jan Landzaat asked.

I had stopped in my tracks. I looked around. About ten yards from the path, at the bottom of the embankment sloping down to the canal, there were some bushes, a thicket, no more than that—but exactly right for what I had in mind.

I would turn the film around. I
had
to turn the film around. I needed to get it on film, how the teacher flew off the handle. Without pictures, there was nothing.

With my back to him I would try to turn the reel around under my coat, without letting too much light in. I didn't know what time it was or exactly when we'd left the house, but it seemed like it was already getting dark.

“I have to piss,” I said.

At the moment you lost consciousness I was in mid-sentence, right in the middle of my account of how I came home later that evening, my embrace with Laura in the snow beneath the light of the streetlamp.

Here's how it went: First your daughter came into the living room, in her pajamas. Blinking her eyes in the bright light. “I can't sleep.” You didn't look at her, you looked at your wife right away. “Come on, come with me, we'll go back to bed.” Your wife told me she would be right back, that I didn't have to wait for her to finish my story.

Where's…where is he?
Laura asked, and she stopped kissing me for a moment as she squinted into the darkness, peering up the darkened road I'd just come down.

I…I lost him,
I said.

It had been a while since you'd last mumbled “yes” or “oh,” or even nodded your head. Behind the lenses of your glasses your eyes were still open, like normal, the lid of the swollen left eye had even crept up a little since yesterday and was already revealing a fraction of an inch of eyeball. I was in the midst of that last sentence when I realized you weren't moving
at all
anymore. Total motionlessness. Rigidity. It was not like being asleep. This was a clock. A clock that's been running normally and then you suddenly realize that the hands stopped moving a few minutes ago. There's something you've missed: a train, an appointment. Time has slipped away, time has literally stood still. You, in any case, arrive too late. I spoke your name. I asked whether everything was all right, but in fact I already knew. You weren't going to answer me. I also knew what I had to do. I would have to get up, put a hand on your shoulder, and shake you—or, at the very least, shout for your wife.

But I did none of that. I fell silent. I kept my mouth shut. I looked at you in a way I had never looked before. The way you rarely look at people. Maybe at those closest to you, the woman asleep beside you in bed, your child napping in the crib.

So this is it,
I thought.
This is what the world looks like once you, Mr. M, are no longer around.

The back of your head was leaning against the headrest; at that moment, for those few minutes (or was it more, fifteen minutes, perhaps?), you existed only in your work. In the work you'd left behind; nothing more would be added, the readers would have to make do with this.

“Well, she's back asleep.” I hadn't heard your wife come in. “Would you like another beer, Herman?”

I raised a finger to my lips and nodded at your motionless form in the chaise longue.

“Aw,” your wife said, tiptoeing a few steps in your direction. “He's been so tired. Since yesterday. I wonder whether we shouldn't have called the doctor again.”

Then she was beside you, leaning over you.

“But…” During the brief silence that followed—without a doubt the longest brief silence in my life—during that one moment when she still had her back to me, I took the opportunity to put on my most surprised expression. “His eyes! His eyes! His eyes are still open!”

She started shaking you, first by the arm, then by both shoulders. She called your name a few times—a little too loudly if you asked me: I was just about to say that she should be careful not to wake your daughter, when she turned around to face me.

I don't know if she could tell right away. Maybe I'd adopted the surprised expression a few beats too early, so that now there was only a glimmer of it left, a vague recollection at most of my feigned surprise.

Yes, in hindsight—now—I think she did see it, the color of her eyes shifted slightly, one shade darker, like spilled wine, a wine stain, still glistening at first, that sinks into the carpet the next moment.

I was expecting her to start screaming at me, to blame me for something.
Why are you just sitting there? Do something!

But she didn't scream. She only shook her head. Then she picked up her cell phone from the coffee table and called an ambulance.

Before the ambulance arrived we tried to bring you around. Your wife opened the top buttons of your shirt and slapped your cheeks softly a few times, but there was no reaction. You were still breathing, you were just somewhere else, at a spot where maybe you could still hear us, but from which there was no return. Perhaps you felt your wife's hand against your cheeks, but then as though they were hands from another world, a parallel world where you'd been not so very long ago, watching forty-year-old black-and-white movies.

And then there was the moment when your daughter was suddenly standing in the living room again; I saw her before your wife did, she was staring wide-eyed at her mother as she shook you by your reluctantly earthbound shoulders.

For the second time that evening, I did nothing. I looked. First at your daughter, then at your wife, and then at you. There was nothing left for me to do. I could stay and watch, but I could also go away, it wouldn't make any difference.

“Mama.”

At last your wife turned around.

“Catherine!”

She held her arms out wide, grabbed her, held her tightly to her chest, cuddled her. “It's nothing, there's nothing wrong. Daddy's sleeping. Daddy's just sleeping.”

Then your daughter wriggled her way out of her mother's embrace, took a step to one side, and placed her little hand on your forehead.

“Daddy's sleeping,” she said.