Dear Mr. M (8 page)

“Laura, I realize that I…carried on,” Mr. Landzaat said. “That's why I'm here to apologize. I lost my way for a while there. My senses. I…I couldn't think about anything else. But now that you've forgiven me, can't we just be friends? I would really like that. Maybe we should let it go for a while, but after that…I mean, after Christmas we'll be seeing each other in the classroom a couple of times a week. At school. We'll see each other in the hallway, on the stairs. It's not like
nothing
happened, Laura. You can't just wipe it out. I'm very fond of you, and that's something
I
can't just wipe out. It would be weird for us to act as though nothing had happened.”

There was a sentence bouncing around in my head. A line from a movie.
Maybe you didn't hear correctly, buddy. Maybe you didn't hear what the lady said.
Then the script would have me stand up as a sign that the conversation was over. It was high time he started the car and drove on to Paris.

But I didn't say anything. I was sure now that it was better not to say a thing. As we'd come down that last stretch of road into Retranchement, I'd whispered to her a few times that there was nothing to worry about. That I would protect her. But Laura didn't need protecting. She did it all by herself. Landzaat was flat on his back. He was flat on his back the way a dog lies on its back to expose its soft spot, as a sign of surrender to a stronger opponent.

I have to admit that then, for the first time, I entertained the idea that a person like Mr. Landzaat might not deserve to live. That he was not, so to speak, worthy of living. Back in the olden days, when the gladiators fought and the loser had behaved in a cowardly fashion, the crowd would give the thumbs-down. I gave the thumbs-down to him right then.

Finish him off, Laura,
I thought.
Once and for all. That's what he came for.

“I think it would be better if you left,” Laura said quietly. “I really don't feel like this at all.”

Mr. Landzaat picked up his empty glass, raised it to his mouth, and put it back down. He glanced at the bottle, then looked at Laura.

“You're right,” he said. “I'll leave. Maybe I shouldn't have come.”

But he didn't get up.

“I…,” he started. Now he picked up the bottle and screwed the top off. “Anyone else?” he asked. Laura shrugged, I didn't do anything. After he had topped up our drinks, he filled his own glass—almost halfway to the top.

I looked out the window. It was now almost completely dark. In the light of the only streetlight along this stretch of road you could see the snow swirling down in flurries that grew heavier all the time. I thought about the advice parents and other grown-ups would give. Better not to drive in weather like this, especially not when you've knocked back a few glasses of eau-de-vie. But we weren't grown-ups. Mr. Landzaat was the only one here who had passed the age of consent, long ago. He didn't need anyone else to tell him what was good for him.

For us—for Laura, and certainly for me—the best thing would definitely be if, at a considerable distance from this house, he were to slip off the road and smash into a tree or an embankment.

“If you plan to get to Paris, Mr. Landzaat…,” I said.

“Jan,” he said, “please, call me Jan.” When he looked at me I saw that the eau-de-vie had reached his eyes now—something about the whites of them, something watery that reflected the light from the little candles.

“It's getting dark,” I said. “If you want to get to Paris tonight, it's about time you left.”

Mr. Landzaat sighed deeply and took his eyes off me. “Are you happy, Laura?” he asked. “Tell me that you're happy with…with
him
. If you don't dare to say it with him around, I'll take you along with me to Paris. But if you tell me that you're really, truly happy, then I'll be out of here in ten seconds. But I need you to look at me, Laura. Please. That's the only…the last thing I'll ask of you.”

“Go away,” Laura said. “Get out of here, you idiot.”

I looked at the bottle of eau-de-vie, it was more like a clay flask than a bottle. I thought about whether it might be heavy enough to crush someone's skull.

“Look at me, Laura,” Mr. Landzaat said. “Look at me and say it.”

I picked up the bottle and weighed it in my hands. I pretended that I wanted to pour myself some more eau-de-vie, but I was mostly assessing the bottle's heft.

“I'm happy,” Laura said. “I've never been happier than I am with him. Never in my whole life. You look me in the eye, you jerk! Look! You look me in the eye and tell me what you see.”

We stood outside by the gate while Mr. Landzaat tried to start the Volkswagen. It felt like hours passed, but then there was a loud pop and a white cloud of exhaust. I had both arms around Laura and was holding her tight.

“Sweetheart,” she whispered in my ear. “My love.”

The car moved a few inches, almost imperceptibly to the naked eye. It took a moment for us to realize that the rear tires were spinning desperately in the fresh snow. Mr. Landzaat turned off the engine and opened the door.

“No traction,” he said after he'd climbed out. He kicked the rear tire, then took a few careful steps up onto the road. Almost right away, he slipped and fell—or pretended to slip and fall.

“It's like a skating rink out here,” he said.

I felt Laura's hand under my coat, her fingers under my sweater and T-shirt, her nails against my skin.

“I'm really sorry about this,” Mr. Landzaat said. “I wanted to leave. You saw me try to leave. But I'm pretty much powerless. Is there a hotel somewhere in the village, maybe?”

After the tunnel, the landscape changes. I won't try to describe that landscape, I think you can picture it just as clearly as I do. First you have the cranes along the waterfront, the pipes and tubes of the refineries, the little lights blipping on and off at the tops of the power pylons, but after the tunnel everything becomes flatter and emptier.

White vapor is coming from the cooling towers at the nuclear plant. Stacked up high along the dike are blue sea containers bearing names like
HANJIN
and
CHINA SHIPPING
. The road's surface consists of sloppily laid concrete slabs, as though the road itself were only temporary, as though it could just as easily be somewhere else tomorrow.

A few curves later and the cooling towers and containers are behind me, in my rearview mirror. In front of me the new landscape opens up—little dikes lined with poplars, pastureland with a few sheep or horses, a brick steeple in the distance.

As I've already noted, one should do one's best to banish coincidence from a novel—from a made-up story. Coincidence fits better in the real world. The real world is its ideal habitat. Only reality is glued together with coincidence.

In both
Liberation Year
and
Payback,
nothing is left to coincidence. Coincidence ruins the credibility of a writer and his story, you're quite aware of that. In your books, therefore, everything has to do almost fastidiously with everything else. The children are able to find their way into the liberated zone of the Netherlands
because
the eldest of the two boys once went there on vacation with his parents. The Wehrmacht officer understands Dutch (something his interrogators don't know)
because,
in prewar Berlin, he was infatuated with a Dutch girl. Might that Dutch girl, the reader wonders even at that point, be the same one who is now in hiding close to Amsterdam's Old West Church? And indeed, when they meet later on in the story (under less felicitous circumstances), can you really call that a coincidence?

Something similar happens in
Payback.
The history teacher, Mr. Landzaat (in your book you call him Ter Brecht—a name that's a bit too contrived to my tastes) listens to the weather report on the car radio on his way to Terhofstede (Dammerdorp in
Payback
). What you're suggesting is that he knows it will start snowing later that day. He takes into account the possibility that he may become stranded; you force the reader to suspect this along with you. Still, he drives on. Here the book parts from the truth. The truth, as is so often the case, is much simpler. Mr. Landzaat was probably hoping that Laura would react differently, but I don't think he ever consciously considered the weather.

He was standing outside, in the freshly fallen snow. At that point, he really wanted to leave. Today, still, so many years later, I firmly believe that.

So imagine that it hadn't started snowing, or that it had been snowing only lightly. Then he actually would have left. He would have spent the rest of that Christmas vacation with his friends in Paris. You would have had no premise for your book. Instead, out of desperation, you might have written yet another book about the war.

It's market day in H. I drive once around the city center and finally park the car outside those same city walls that I saw only yesterday on the postcard.

Here is my plan: I go to a café for a drink. I strike up a conversation with the bartender or the waiter. After a while, I casually mention your name.
The writer, yes. He has a country home somewhere around here, doesn't he?
Then I change the subject right away. To the best place in H to buy mussels, for example. With a little luck, I'll already have an idea of the general direction I need to go in to find the white house with the address that ends with a 1.

But that's not the way it goes. Coincidence, apparently, has alighted in H long before I arrived. The sidewalk cafés around the market square are chock-full of customers. And while I'm walking around trying to find a seat, I spot her. She has her sunglasses pushed up over her hair like a barrette. On the table in front of her is a half-empty glass of white wine. Beside her glass is another one. A glass of pink lemonade, with a straw. The end of the straw is hidden from sight in a little girl's mouth.

How could I be anything but thankful for such a fluke? I am grateful to coincidence. I can skip the whole search mission, the way I would probably skip over it in a book. Just like the descriptions of landscapes and faces. If this were a book, with a made-up story, some readers would now definitely be crying out that it's all awfully coincidental. Maybe they would even stop reading.

But not you,
I think.
You won't stop.
I act as though I'm scanning the tables at the sidewalk café, like I'm looking for a place to sit. Across from the chairs occupied by your wife and daughter, there is precisely one vacant seat. There are plastic shopping bags lying on the chair, but if you took those away, someone could sit there.

“Excuse me,” I say, “but is this seat taken?”

I look at her. I look at her face as though suddenly something is dawning on me. As though I'm seeing a vaguely familiar face that I can't quite place yet.

“I…,” I say. “Is…are you…?”

She squints in the sunlight and looks up at me. I move a little to one side, so that my shadow falls across her face. Now it's her turn to look up at me as though at someone whose face she can't immediately place.

“But…,” she says.

“Well, I'll be,” I say. “It is. You're…I live downstairs from you. I'm the downstairs neighbor.”

“Right,” she says. “The neighbor. You're the neighbor.”

“Yeah. I'm…” I point over my shoulder, at the market square—“I was going to do some shopping. I'm not too far from here.”

Then comes the part I learned by heart; the important thing is to make it come out sounding as natural as possible. “I'm staying in K.,” I say. “Close to here. At a bed-and- breakfast. I came here for the nature reserve, the wetlands at S. I'm a photographer. I photograph birds. This is such a coincidence,” I add. “I didn't know…I mean, are you here on vacation?”

I had thought about this on the drive down. Would it be possible for me to know that you have a country cottage close to H.? Possible, yes, but not absolutely necessary.

“Birds,” your wife says.

“Uh-huh,” I say. “Well, you know, it's only a hobby. I do other animals too—I
photograph
other animals too,” I correct myself quickly. “Nature. Everything in nature.”

This is the point at which I look around. Is there another free table somewhere? No. There are other vacant chairs, but that would only mean that I would have to sit down with other people. My hands are already resting on the back of the chair with the shopping bags on it.

It's a heads-or-tails moment. You've tossed the coin, it spins as it falls, it rolls off under a chair or table. You bend down and pick it up.

Heads it's me:
But I won't bother you any longer. I should be moving on.

Tails it's her:
Oh, how thoughtless of me…Please, sit down.

It's tails. She leans over, takes one of the shopping bags off the chair, then the other, and places them on the ground beside her own chair.

“Can I take your order?”

Suddenly there's a girl standing beside me, a girl carrying a wooden tray. I glance at the table, at the glass of lemonade and the glass of white wine.

“I'll have a beer, thanks,” I say.

I slide the chair back and sink down onto it. Only then do I look straight at her. I smile. She smiles back. There's no need to describe her face—you see her face in your mind's eye.

“Who's that man, Mommy?”

There's no real need for me to describe your daughter's face now either, but I can't leave her out of the story any longer. If I were to leave her out, what follows would be impossible to understand.

“That's our neighbor,” your wife says. “That's what he just said. Our downstairs neighbor.”

Then your daughter looks at me for the first time. I look back. I look at her face. In that face, your genes have won the battle. That's a pity. It's not an unattractive face, it's just not a girl's face. More the face of a man. Not a boy. A man's face with girlish hair. She has your eyes, your nose, your mouth. Her eyes aren't watery like yours, the skin on her nose is still white, unmarred by blemishes or hair, when she laughs one sees no brown or grayish teeth, but otherwise she's simply a copy—a three-year-old, female version of you.

I state my name. Then I ask hers.

She tells me, and I say that I think it's a pretty name.
A little far-fetched, a little affected, maybe a little too special
—but of course I say none of that. Who picked this name? You or your wife? I'm betting on you. A daughter of yours, you must have felt, couldn't have just any old name.

“Well, isn't that a coincidence!” your wife says to your daughter. “He has the same first name as Papa.”

So now you know my name too. You already knew, of course. Or rather, you should have known—only a few days ago, you wrote my name at the front of your new book. At the front of
Liberation Year.

For […],
you wrote.
Hope you have fun reading this
.

Fun reading
—yes, that's what writers sometimes write at the front of their books, you're not alone in that.
Have fun reading this.
I don't know how that works with you, but I rarely have fun while I'm reading.
Fun reading
makes me think of someone who slaps his knees in mirth as he turns the pages.

A reader reads a book. If it's a good book, he forgets himself. That's all a book has to do. When the reader can't forget himself and keeps having to think about the writer the whole time, the book is a failure. That has nothing to do with fun. If it's fun you're after, buy a ticket for a roller coaster.

That we share first names is yet another indication that we find ourselves in the real world. In novels, characters never have the same first name. Never. Only in reality, the real-life reality that takes place in the here and now, do people have the same name. When people have the same first name, you have to state the surname in order to distinguish between them. Or come up with a nickname.
Big-mouth Bill,
we say, to keep loquacious Bill and quiet Bill separated in our minds.

I have to keep the conversation going,
I think, but right then the girl comes back with my beer. I raise my glass in a brief toast, then take a sip. A smaller sip than I'd like.

“We have a house,” your wife says, before I have time to think of anything to say. “About five miles from here. A cottage. It's at the bottom of a dike; in the distance you can see the ships sailing into the estuary of the W. Heading for A. harbor.”

I look at her. I look her straight in the eye. Don't hold her gaze too long, I warn myself.
How did the two of you get here? I mean, you left in a taxi. But you didn't take it all the way to H., did you? The taxi must have brought you to the station in Amsterdam. But I noticed yesterday that there's not even a station here in town. Yesterday, when I was wondering whether to come by car or by train. The closest station is in A.

“We usually take the train to A.,” she says now, answering one of the questions I didn't ask. “At least, when it's just the two of us”—she nods at your daughter—“that way, […] still has the car back home. Then we take a taxi from A. We have a car here too. A little secondhand Subaru.”

When she speaks your name, she smiles briefly, and I smile back briefly, as though we're both realizing at the same moment that she has spoken my name too. Indeed, it's something you'd never see in a book. At least
I've
never seen it in a book. I find it particularly endearing, in fact, the way she mentions the make of the car. A Subaru…Most people would be ashamed to drive around in a Subaru, but the way she mentions it is off the cuff. A secondhand Subaru. A little car, and it doesn't matter if it's a Subaru because it's only used as a local shopping cart anyway.