Dear Mr. M (39 page)

And if so, why? M wondered. In order to disappear? Had he had his fill of life as a teacher? Of his life in general, his family life? Had he hoped to pin the blame for a murder that had never been committed on two innocent students?

And there M's imagination balked, or rather: that was as far as he was willing to think about it. For his book, for the book he was already planning to write, he wanted to focus solely on Herman and Laura. On two students who had bumped off an overly obtrusive teacher. Bumped him off justifiably—this last aside applied only for the discerning listener, for those who could read between the lines. An all-too-intelligent teacher who outfoxed everyone, that was no good to him. It would make the story hard to swallow, to say the very least.

Still, he needed to know for sure. He couldn't have reality suddenly coming along to spoil the broth. Which was why, during an interview on the Sunday afternoon cultural program, when the host asked whether he was working on “something new,” he had said that he was considering writing a book about the affair. A few months had already passed. Herman and Laura had been released on bail, due to a lack of solid evidence. They were even allowed to return to school, to make up for the time they'd missed while awaiting the results of the investigation.

“You mean a sort of
In Cold Blood
?” After posing the question, the host closed his eyes and pursed his lips; he wanted everyone, including M, but above all the viewers at home, to know that he was no slouch, that he had perhaps actually even read Truman Capote's book.

“No, not so much that,” M had replied. “Capote wrote that when the facts of the crime were already widely known. Two men rob a remote farmhouse in Kansas because they think they'll find money there. The final take is quite disappointing. While they're about it they murder, yes, in cold blood, an entire family. What I'm thinking about is something different. I want to let my imagination do the work. After all, we still don't know exactly what happened during those days around Christmas, which proved so fatal to the history teacher. The investigation has reached an impasse. I'm going to look into the affair. In fact, I've been doing so already for a while. I don't pretend that I'll be able to solve the mystery, I'm thinking more along the lines of a reconstruction, up to the point where we no longer have any idea. Making use of the imagination. Fantasy. Maybe we've all overlooked something.”

The next day most of the Dutch daily papers had run the news, some of them even on the front page.
M TO WRITE BOOK ABOUT CASE OF MISSING TEACHER,
was the headline in
Het Vrije Volk.
A WRITER AND HIS IMAGINATION: NEW IMPETUS FOR SOLUTION OF UNSOLVED MURDER?
announced both
De Telegraaf
and
De Courant/Nieuws van de Dag
.

M waited. Meanwhile, he went on writing his book. The writing went quickly; soon he had finished his first rough draft. He and his publisher decided on a publication date in the fall.

About three weeks after the interview, he found a blue airmail envelope in his letterbox. A French stamp, a Paris postmark.

Dear Mr. M,
was the salutation of the letter, written on light blue airmail paper.

Jan Landzaat, history teacher at the Spinoza Lyceum, pulls on his socks and shoes. The shoes are the same ones he was wearing the day after Boxing Day, when he walked by way of the Zwin to Zeebrugge and spent the last of his cash on a train ticket to Paris.

For the first few weeks he had thought about Laura almost every day. No, not
almost
every day: every day, every hour, every minute. Laura's eyes, Laura's mouth, Laura pulling her black hair back into a ponytail and then shaking it loose again. Laura saying
You shouldn't want to do that to yourself,
that time in the bike shed when he had laid both hands on her handlebars to keep her from riding off. At that last memory he groaned quietly and shook his head.
I won't bother you anymore,
he said silently, but sometimes, without realizing it, he said it out loud too.

The final variation on his Plan B meant that he was no longer dead. The morning after Boxing Day, sitting on the edge of the bed, he had worked out the new version down to the minutest details, then thought it through again, checking for blank spots and loose ends, and then approved it as being exceptionally believable—all within the space of five minutes.

He would disappear. Somewhere on the road to Sluis he would shake off Herman, just like in the initial version of Plan B. But now he would no longer withdraw to a remote spot in the dunes and hurt himself badly with a stone (or piece of wood). He would not have to freeze to death. He would no longer be found and buried—it was this final image, above all, the image of his coffin in the auditorium at a cemetery, a coffin on which his daughters would place flowers and drawings (
Isn't Daddy coming back at all anymore? No, not anymore
), that had made him change his mind.

He would only disappear. First Herman would come back to Laura with his dubious story, then both of them would have to explain that story—which would grow more dubious with each passing day—to the police.
Took off? What do you mean, took off? And left his car behind? And all his baggage? Do you really believe that yourselves? Or is there something you two aren't telling us…

Precisely how he would deal with the practical side of it, that was something he could think about later. It didn't seem like it would be too tough, there were so many people who disappeared. He had almost no cash left, he couldn't go to a hotel, he couldn't call anyone: no, he literally had to disappear from the face of the earth. A few months, half a year, a year…He would see how it went. Herman and Laura would be indicted, even though there was no evidence, no body, but still, everything pointed clearly in their direction. From a distance he would follow the course of the investigation, he would have to go somewhere where he could buy Dutch newspapers, no further than Belgium or France—and suddenly he thought of Paris.

For those closest to him (for his daughters—his wife could go fuck herself!), he would only be missing. Everything would seem to indicate that he had been murdered, true, but as long as no body was found the hope—however slim—of a happy ending would remain alive. The proverbial glimmer.

After those six months (or that year) he would come back. He would report in somewhere. Amnesia. He would feign amnesia. Not for too long, he probably wouldn't be able to keep up the act for more than a few days. When he was reunited with his daughters (with his wife, who would tearfully forgive him for everything), his memory would return by fits and starts.
Daddy! Daddy!
He would raise his eyebrows, frown.
Yes, it's coming back to me…something is coming back…

A week later his memory would have returned almost completely. By then he would remember how he and Herman had hiked to Sluis. Then nothing else, not for a long time, until he finally woke up in the snow, half frozen to death, he didn't know what had happened, hit while his back was turned and left behind for dead, perhaps? He really couldn't remember. Then, for a long time again, nothing. He had walked, yes. Walked and walked. Then another huge gap in time, a vague memory of a bridge over the Seine. What do you think, Doctor? What could have happened to me?

Daddy's sleeping
—he feels the little hand on his forehead, the hand of his young daughter, for whom he will be a memory from this evening on. A memory still reasonably clear at first, but which will fade quite quickly. After that comes the gradual forgetting, the life carried forward in a photo album:
Look, this is Daddy holding you on his lap.

They had drunk a cup of coffee together outside a brasserie on the corner of Boulevard Saint-Michel and Saint Germain-des-Prés. The waiter had asked M solicitously whether everything was all right, whether he wasn't being bothered by the unshaven man in his torn, filthy winter coat who stank of stale wine. And M had held out his hand reassuringly above the tabletop,
everything's fine, everything's all right, we'll be leaving in a moment.

From the very start, from the morning when he had opened the airmail letter, there was something M had been unable to stomach. His book was more or less finished: he had always relied on his intuition, he knew when a book was really finished. The teacher showing up out of nowhere, the teacher with (feigned!) amnesia, it was all just a bit too much, a narrative line that was no longer needed. But so as not to scare Jan Landzaat away too quickly, M had pretended to be interested in this new angle.

“When I saw Herman standing at the bridge with his movie camera, I thought for a moment that I was going to have to cancel my whole plan,” Landzaat said. “After all, I couldn't just run away anymore, he'd be sure to film me then. But in the end it turned out to be easier than I'd thought.”

“What makes you think, by the way, that I'll actually keep this to myself?” M asked. “Why shouldn't I go back to Amsterdam tomorrow and go to the police right away?”

“Because you're a writer,” the teacher said. “You can't let something like this go. You want to keep it all to yourself.”

As darkness fell they had walked down to the Seine. Jan Landzaat had showed him the bridge under which he had slept for the last few months. But M was only half listening. It was, above all perhaps, the
news value
that he couldn't stomach. The spectacularity. His book didn't need that at all. The focus would shift far too much to the teacher. He was looking for something else—maybe a more timeless book. A normal story in which two students rid themselves of a teacher. Simply because it's possible. Because the possibility presents itself—the recovery of the natural balance.

It happened without forethought. They had walked down the steps to the quay and were standing under the bridge. In the meantime, M had been thinking about what he was going to do. First he would tell the teacher that he needed to think about it. Then he would never contact him again. He would leave the book precisely the way it was. Jan Landzaat could show up suddenly if he felt like it, but not in M's book.

“I need to get back to my hotel,” M said. “I'll think about it.”

“But not too long,” the teacher said. His eyes gleamed wetly in that face with its filthy, sticky beard. “I miss my daughters. I really miss them.”

Maybe there was something else, M thought at that moment. Maybe it was actually something else he couldn't stomach. He'd always disliked people who came to him with ideas for his books.
I thought about you right away. It's really something for a novel. But, okay, I'm no writer. So if you want to use it, it's yours.

It was completely dark by then, they were standing beside each other at the edge of the quay, looking out over the river at the dancing lights of the bridge reflected in the black water. M glanced around, but the waterfront was deserted. He took a step back, putting Landzaat between him and the edge.

The history teacher must have thought at first that M was reaching out to shake his hand goodbye. But the hand came up and rested against Jan Landzaat's chest.

Spreading his fingers, so he could apply more force, he shoved him hard. The teacher waved his arms wildly, shouted once, then fell backward.

Back in Amsterdam, M waited a month. Closing his eyes, he could see Jan Landzaat's head appear above water once or twice, but with that winter coat and those hiking shoes it was a lost battle; the current was strong, the head was already smaller the second time, and much further away too. In M's memory the man shouted something again and raised his arm.

People on the bridge, or further down along the waterfront, might have seen the drowning man, maybe even tried to help him. Maybe the teacher had actually succeeded in struggling to shore further downstream, under his own power.

But after a month, when M had heard nothing, he called his publisher to say that the book was finished.

“Have you got a title already?” his publisher asked.

“Payback,”
was M's reply.

Now he can't feel the hand anymore either. He is already gone. There is no light, no tunnel, no gateway.
Good thing too,
is his final thought. Imagine if there were. He thinks about the excuses and the pretexts he would have had to come up with, how he had used his parents in his books, had
misused
them—as they could rightly claim if they had actually been able to read those books “up there,” where they had ostensibly been all this time. He had missed his mother more than he had missed his father, it was better to be honest about that. But the thought of spending the rest of his life, no, the rest of his death, of spending all eternity—whatever one was supposed to imagine by that—in her company had always seemed unbearable to him. Better the missing than the presence, he knew that was the way it was, but he doubted whether he could ever explain that to her.

And now? How would it go now, now that things had finally reached that point?

The first thing they would probably notice was his battered face, the black eye, the swollen nose, the bruises.

“What happened?” His mother would squat down in front of him, throw her arms around him, brush the blue-and-yellow spots carefully with her fingertips. “Have you been fighting?”

I fought for you, Mama
.

But instead he would avert his eyes; just like seventy years—an eternity—ago, he would come up with a lie.

“I fell down,” he would say, and just like back then, he would add details to make the lie stick. “Today, on the way home on my bike. My front wheel got stuck in the tram rails, I fell over the handlebars, hit my head on the street.”

The real liberation, as he knows now, as he has in fact known all along, is that his parents aren't around anymore. That they have been gone so long. That was his own liberation year: the year they passed away.

And so his relief is great when he sees that there is no gateway, no light—no playground he has to cross to his father and mother waiting at the fence.

There is nothing.