Dear Mr. M

1

Dear Mr. M,

I’d like to start by telling you that I’m doing better now. I do so because you probably have no idea that I was ever doing worse. Much worse, in fact, but I’ll get to that later on.

In your books you often describe faces, but I’d like to challenge you to describe mine. Down here, beside the front door we share, or in the elevator, you nod to me politely, but on the street and at the supermarket, and even just a few days ago, when you and your wife were having dinner at La B., you showed no sign of recognition.

I can imagine that a writer’s gaze is mostly directed inward, but then you shouldn’t try to describe faces in your books. Descriptions of faces are quite obsolete, actually, as are descriptions of landscapes, so it all makes sense as far as that goes. Because you too are quite obsolete, and I mean that not only in terms of age — a person can be old but not nearly obsolete — but you are both: old and obsolete.

You and your wife had a window table. As usual. I was at the bar — also as usual. I had just taken a sip of my beer when your gaze passed over my face, but you didn’t recognize me. Then your wife looked in my direction and smiled, and then you leaned over and asked her something, after which you nodded to me at last, in hindsight.

Women are better at faces. Especially men’s faces. Women don’t have to describe faces, only remember them. They can tell at a glance whether it’s a strong face or a weak one; whether they, by any stretch of the imagination, would want to carry that face’s child inside their body. Women watch over the fitness of the species. Your wife, too, once looked at your face that way and decided that it was strong enough — that it posed no risk for the human race.

Your wife’s willingness to allow a daughter to grow inside her who had, by all laws of probability, a fifty-percent chance of inheriting your face, is something you should view as a compliment. Perhaps the greatest compliment a woman can give a man.

Yes, I’m doing better now. In fact, when I watched you this morning as you helped her into the taxi, I couldn’t help smiling. You have a lovely wife. Lovely and young. I attach no value judgment to the difference in your ages. A writer has to have a young and lovely wife. Or perhaps it’s more like a writer has a right to a lovely, young wife.

A writer doesn’t have to do anything, of course. All a writer has to do is write books. But a lovely, young wife can help him do that. Especially when that wife is completely self-effacing; the kind who spreads her wings over his talent like a mother hen and chases away anyone who comes too close to the nest; who tiptoes around the house when he’s working in his study and only slides a cup of tea or a plate of chocolates through a crack in the doorway at fixed times; who puts up with half-mumbled replies to her questions at the dinner table; who knows that it might be better not to talk to him at all, not even when they go out to eat at the restaurant around the corner from their house, because his mind, after all, is brimming over with things that she, with her limited body of thought — her limited feminine body of thought — could never fathom anyway.

This morning I looked down from my balcony at you and your wife, and I couldn’t help but think about these things. I examined your movements, how you held open the door of the taxi for her: gallant as always, but also overly deliberate as always, so stiff and wooden, sometimes it’s as though your own body is struggling against your presence. Anyone can learn the steps, but not everyone can really dance. This morning, the difference in age between you and your wife could have been expressed only in light-years. When she’s around, you sometimes remind me of a reproduction of a dark and crackly seventeenth-century painting hung beside a sunny new postcard.

In fact, though, I was looking mostly at your wife. And again I noticed how pretty she is. In her white sneakers, her white T-shirt, and her blue jeans she danced before me the dance that you, at moments like that, barely seem to fathom. I looked at the sunglasses slid up on her hair — the hair she had pinned up behind her ears — and everything, every movement she made, spoke of her excitement at her coming departure, making her even prettier than usual.

It was as though, in the clothing she’d chosen, in everything down to the slightest gesture, she was looking forward to going where she was going. And while I watched her from my balcony I also saw, for a fleeting moment, reflected in your wife’s appearance, the glistening sand and the seawater in slow retreat across the shells. The next moment, she disappeared from my field of vision — from our field of vision — in the back of the taxi as it pulled away.

How long will she be gone? A week? Two weeks? It doesn’t matter all that much. You are alone, that’s what counts. A week ought to be enough.

Yes, I have certain plans for you, Mr. M. You may think you’re alone, but as of today I’m here too. In a certain sense, of course, I’ve always been here, but now I’m really here. I’m here, and I won’t be going away, not for a while yet.

I wish you a good night — your first night alone. I’m turning off the lights now, but I remain with you.

2

I went to the bookstore this morning. Copies are still piled up beside the register, but then you probably know that already. You seem to me like the kind of writer who goes into a bookstore and the first thing he does is look to see how many inches his own work takes up on the shelves. I imagine you might also be the kind who’s bold enough to ask the clerk how sales are going. Or have you become more reticent about that in recent years?

In any case, there’s still a big pile of them at the front desk. There was even a potential customer who took one and turned it over and over in his hands, as though trying to measure its importance by weight. I had a hard time not saying anything. Put it back, it’s not worth your time. Or: I highly recommend that one, it’s a masterpiece.

But I couldn’t decide so quickly between such extremes, and so I said nothing at all. It probably had to do with that big pile, which already spoke volumes. Anything piled up high beside the register is, after all, either a masterpiece or anything but — there is no middle ground.

While the customer was standing there with your book in his hands, I caught another glimpse of your photo on the back cover. I’ve always felt that there is something obscene about that expression you wear as you look out into the world. It’s the expression of someone pulling on his swim trunks with unbearable slowness on a busy beach, with no hint of shame, because he doesn’t care whether people see him. You’re not looking at the reader, no, you’re challenging him to look at you — to keep looking at you. It’s like one of those contests to see who’ll avert their eyes first; a contest the reader always loses.

By the way, I still haven’t asked how you slept last night. And what you did with that suddenly empty space beside you in bed? Did you stay on your own side, or did you slide over a little more toward the middle?

Last night you listened to music: that CD you never put on when your wife is home. I heard your footsteps all over the house, as though you were trying to make sure you were really alone — how you opened windows everywhere, then the door to the balcony too. Were you trying to drive something out, to exorcise it? The smell of her, perhaps? People in love, when the object of their affection is not around, will bury their nose in a piece of their sweetheart’s clothing. People whose love has run its course throw open the windows, the way you hang an old suit out in the wind if it’s been in mothballs too long, even if you know full well that you’ll never wear it again.

You were out on the balcony, and I could hear you singing along. It’s not the kind of music I’m fond of myself, but I understand how someone who likes such music might write such books. You had it turned up pretty loud, by the way, just a little short of public nuisance. But I’m not fussy about things like that. I didn’t want to be the killjoy on your first evening alone.

Why, by the way, didn’t you dare to come downstairs yourself that time, to complain about my music being too loud? Why did you send your wife?

“My husband’s a writer,” she said. “He can’t stand noise.”

I invited her in, but she took only a few steps into the hallway, she didn’t want to come any further. I noticed her craning her neck at one point, trying to catch a glimpse of my apartment. I looked at her face, and at the same time I smelled something — something I didn’t want to go away quite yet.

A few hours later, on my way to bed, I passed through the hallway and that scent was still there. I stood there in the dark for a long time, as long as it took for me not to smell it anymore. In any case, I didn’t throw open any doors or windows to drive out her scent. I waited patiently until the scent felt that it was time to go.

As I saw that evening close-up, she is indeed no longer the young girl who came to interview you for the school paper back then. How did you put it? “One day she showed up toting a notebook and a whole list of questions, and to be honest she still isn’t finished asking them.”

What was the first thing she asked you, after she stepped over the threshold? “Why do you write?” A question schoolgirls are prone to ask. And what did you tell her? What answer would you give these days?

At the dinner table you tend to be silent. Not that I would be able to make out the words themselves if you did talk, but the sound of voices comes through the ceiling quite readily. I hear the tick of silverware on the plates and, in summer, when the windows are open, I can even hear the glasses being filled.

While your mouth is busy grinding your food, your head is still in your study. You can’t tell her what’s occupying you. She wouldn’t understand anyway, after all: she’s a woman.

So the meals go by in a silence broken only sparingly by questions. I can’t hear what she’s asking, I only hear that she’s asking a question. Questions to which you must reply with only a nod or a shake of the head.

If I don’t hear you respond, that means you’re moving your head, the head itself is in your study: it can’t speak, only move.

Later, after you get up, she clears the table and puts the glasses and plates in the dishwasher. Then she withdraws to the room on the side facing the street, where she stays until it is time to go to bed.

I still haven’t figured out exactly how your wife passes those hours alone in that room. Does she read a book? Does she watch TV with the volume down low or off?

I often imagine to myself that she just sits there — a woman in a chair, a life that goes by like the hands of a clock, with no one ever looking to see what time it is.

You will have noticed by now that I’ve put on some music of my own. I’m sure it’s not your kind of music. I’ve cranked up the volume on my stereo a little louder, to more or less the same level as on that evening when your wife came down to ask if I could lower it a little.

I know that you, as a matter of principle, will not come down. You have to be able to send someone else, you’re not the kind to come down yourself. Which is why I turn up the volume a little more. The sound of it could now, I believe, rightfully be described as a public nuisance.

I have no fixed plan. In any case, I regret the fact that a pretty young woman like that is condemned to your company, that she withers away by your side.

Now I really do hear the doorbell, you’re quicker than I expected.

“Could you perhaps turn the music down a bit?”

I won’t try to describe your face, describing faces is something I leave completely to you.

“Of course,” I say.

After closing the door in your face — your undescribed face — I turn the music down. Then I gradually turn it back up. My guess is that you won’t come down again.

I guess right.

Tomorrow you have a signing session at the bookstore, I saw the poster in the window. Will the line of people waiting for your signature be long or short? Or will there be no line at all? Sometimes those big piles beside the register don’t mean a thing. Sometimes it rains, sometimes the sun is shining.

“It must be the weather,” the bookstore owner will say when no one shows up.

But someone will show, in any case. I’ll be there.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

3

I sometimes wonder what that must feel like, mediocrity. By which I mean what it feels like from the inside, for the mediocre man himself. To what extent is he aware of his mediocrity? Is he locked up inside his own mediocre mind and does he run around tugging at doors and windows, trying to get someone to let him out? Without anyone ever hearing a thing?

That’s how I often imagine it, as a bad dream, a desperate scream for help. The mediocre intelligence knows that the outside world exists. He can smell the grass, hear the wind rustling through the trees, see the sunlight coming through the windows — but he also knows that he is doomed to stay inside for the rest of his life.

How does the mediocre intelligence deal with that knowledge? Does he try to buck himself up? Does he realize that there are certain boundaries he will never break through? Or does he tell himself that it’s not really all that bad, that this very morning, after all, he finished the crossword puzzle in the newspaper without any noticeable sign of exertion?

If you ask me, there’s only one real rule of thumb, and that rule says that you’ll never hear people of above-average intelligence mention how smart they are. It’s like millionaires. You have millionaires in jeans and scruffy sweaters, and you have millionaires in sports cars with the top down. Anyone can get a catalogue and look up the price of the sports car, but I’ll give you ten-to-one odds that the scruffy sweater guy could leave the same car behind in a restaurant for a tip.

You’re more the kind with the convertible. Even when it’s raining you drive with the top down, past the outdoor cafés down by the beach. “As early as kindergarten, teachers noticed that I was exceptionally intelligent.” It’s a subject that often (too often, to the point of nausea in fact) comes up in your work and in interviews. “My IQ is just a fraction higher than that of Albert Einstein.” I could go on—“When, like me, one possesses an intelligence found among barely two percent of the population”—but why should I? There are women who say out loud that every man turns and looks when they walk past, and there are women who don’t have to say that.

In fact, you should see your face when you’re extolling your own intelligence. Your face, and the look in your eyes. It’s the look in the eyes of a rabbit that has misjudged the distance to the other side of the expressway — and realizes too late that the headlights bearing down on it are already too close to dodge. A look, in other words, that doesn’t believe itself for a moment, that’s paralyzed by the fear that the first tricky question will expose it as a fraud, once and for all.

A mediocre writer serves a life sentence. He has to go on. It’s too late to change professions. He has to go on till the bitter end. Until death comes to get him. Only death can save him from his mediocrity.

His writing is “not without merit,” that’s what we say about the mediocre writer. For him, that’s the pinnacle of achievement, to produce books that are not without merit. You really do have to be mediocre to go on living once you’ve realized that. To go on caring about a life like that, that’s what I should really say — to not prefer death.

—

The line at the bookstore wasn’t so bad after all. It had rained a little earlier in the morning, then the sun came out. The people were lined up to the door, but they were all inside. Not a bestselling author’s kind of line. Not a line out to the street, or all the way around the corner, no, just the normal kind of line you’d expect for a writer in whom interest has been waning for the last decade or so. Lots of middle-aged women. Far past middle age, I’m sorry to say — women no one turns to watch as they go past.

I took a copy of Liberation Year off the pile and went to the back of the line. There was a man in front of me. The only man there, except for me. Everything about him told you that he wasn’t there of his own free will, as they say, but that he’d come along with his wife, the way husbands go with their wives to IKEA or some furniture outlet. At first the man feigns patient interest in an adjustable bed frame or a chest of drawers, but before long his breathing grows labored and he begins tossing increasingly desperate glances toward the checkout counters and the exit, like a dog smelling the woods after a long trip in the car.

And it was his wife who was holding your book, not him. Women have more time than men. Once the vacuuming is done they open a book — your book — and start to read. And that evening in bed they’re still reading. When their husband rolls onto his side and places a hand on their stomach, close to the navel or just below the breasts, they push that hand away. “Leave me alone, okay, I just want to finish this chapter,” they say, then read on. Sometimes women have a headache, sometimes they’re having their period, sometimes they’re reading a book.

Again, I’m not going to attempt to describe your face. The expression you wore when I put my copy of Liberation Year on the table for you to sign. Suffice it to say that you looked at me the way you look at someone you’ve never seen anywhere but on the other side of a counter. Across the counter at the drugstore, for example, the cashier you suddenly run into on the street: you recognize the face, but have no idea where from. Without the context of the counter, the razor blades, and the painkillers, you can’t place the face.

“Is it for someone special?” you asked, the same way you’d asked the people in front of me. Meanwhile, you looked at my face. The face that seemed familiar to you, but that you still couldn’t pin down.

“No, it’s for myself.”

You sign with a fountain pen. A fountain pen you screw the cap back onto after each signature or personal inscription. You’re afraid that otherwise it will dry up. You’re afraid that you yourself are going to dry up; that’s what a dime-store psychologist might conclude, before going on to ask you more about your parents and your childhood.

“And the name is—?” The cap was already off, the fountain pen already poised above the title page, when suddenly I thought about something. I looked at your hand holding the pen, your old hand with the clearly visible veins. As long as you continue to breathe, the blood will keep on transporting oxygen to your hand — that’s also how long you’ll be able to sit at a table in a bookstore and sign books that are not without merit.

What I thought about was this: I thought about your face poised above your wife’s face, your face in the semidarkness of the bedroom, your face as it slowly approaches hers. I thought about it from her perspective, how she sees that face approaching: the bleary old eyes, the whites of them not completely white anymore, the chapped and wrinkled lips, the old teeth, not yellow but mostly gray, the smell that passes between those teeth and reaches her nostrils. It’s the same odor you smell when the sea pulls back, leaving behind it on the beach only algae and empty mussel shells.

The odor is so strong that it overrides the normal, old-man smells: the smell of diapers, of flaking skin, of dying tissue. Yet, a little more than three years ago, there must have been a night when she saw a future in all of that. A night when she decided that having a child by that uncongenial-smelling face could be regarded as an investment.

That your wife was able to see a future, I can almost believe that. But what kind of future did you see? She saw a child that would grow first inside, then outside, her body. But what about you? Did you see yourself waiting at the gate of the elementary school, later, amid all the young mothers? As an admittedly old but famous father? Did your fame, in other words, make you free to bring a child into the world at a ridiculously advanced age?

Because what future awaits her, your daughter? All you have to do is look at the calendar. That future, namely, doesn’t exist. Even if it all goes unexpectedly well, from a point somewhere halfway through high school she’ll have to make do with nothing but the memory of her father. In the middle of those “difficult years.” Those same difficult years during which her mother once knocked on your door in her capacity as reporter for the school paper.

You spoke my name, and once again looked at me with that gaze in which — somewhere far away — something like recognition had begun to dawn. As though you heard a song that sounded vaguely familiar, but you couldn’t come up with the name of the singer.

Your fountain pen scratched across the page. Then you blew softly on the letters before closing the book — and I smelled the odor. You’re almost done for. One signature, one inscription on a title page separates you from the grave and oblivion. That’s another thing we need to talk about: the future, after you’re gone. I could be mistaken, of course, but my impression is that it will go quickly. In southern countries, the dead are buried the very same day. For reasons of hygiene. The pharaohs were wrapped in bandages and buried along with their most prized possessions: their favorite pets, their favorite wives…I think it will look something like that. The Big Forgetting will begin the very same day. You will be buried along with your work. Of course there will be speeches, and the list of speakers will be impressive enough. Full or half pages in the papers will be dedicated to the importance of your oeuvre. That oeuvre will be collected in a leather-bound, seven-volume edition, subscriptions to which are open even as we speak. And that will be that. In no time, separate volumes of the luxury edition will start popping up at secondhand book sales. The people who have subscribed won’t show up to collect the series — or they’ll be dead — on the day it appears.

And your wife? Oh sure, she will go on playing the widow for a while. Maybe she will even play hardball and forbid some biographer to cite from your personal correspondence. But that doesn’t seem like a very realistic scenario to me. Guarding access to correspondence is more the kind of thing the older widows do. The widows with no future. Your wife is young. It won’t be long before she starts thinking about a life without you. She probably already thinks about that with some regularity.

And by the time your daughter turns eighteen and has to apply for an official document (a passport, a driver’s license), the person behind the counter will already be asking her to spell her surname. Perhaps she’ll still say: I’m the daughter of…

Who’s that?

Yes, that’s how it will end. You won’t live on in your work, but in the child you brought into the world in the nick of time — just like everyone else.

Maybe you’ve noticed that, so far, I have been extremely discreet in dealing with your daughter as a private individual. I have not, for example, made any attempt to describe her. In situations where she was physically present, I have left her out of my descriptions. In the tabloids, faces of the children of celebrities are sometimes rendered unrecognizable, in order to protect their privacy. Your daughter’s presence yesterday, for instance, when your wife left in the cab, is something I have not mentioned. I remember how she waved to you through the rear window of the taxi. From my balcony, I could see her little hand waving. I saw her face, too, but I won’t describe it.

And I’ve left her out of your shared dinners, because you yourself always do too. Your wife brings your daughter to bed before you start in. The silent dinner. You are, of course, completely within your rights to feed your daughter beforehand and then put her to bed. There are couples who think that in that way they can keep something alive, something of the old, romantic days when it was just the two of them. With no children. But how is that supposed to work when your daughter grows older? Will she put up with that silence the way her mother does? Or will she, like all children, fire off questions at you? Questions that can only help you out. That could make you a more rounded person — even now, even though she’s not quite four.

There are wars in which only military targets are fired upon, and there are wars in which everyone is a target. You, more than anyone, know exactly which war I’m referring to. You write about it. Too often, to my taste. Your new book, too, harks back once again to that war. As a matter of fact, the war is the only subject you have.

Which brings me straight to today’s sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: What does a war do to a person of mediocre intelligence? Or perhaps: What would that same mediocre intelligence have done without that war?

I could help you out with some new material. The women and children have meanwhile been herded to the air-raid shelters. Nothing prevents me now from handing you the new material on a silver platter. That in doing so I consider you a military target is something you should take as a compliment.

The material, by the way, is perhaps not entirely new. It might be better to speak of old material seen from a fresh perspective.

I am going home now.

The first thing I’ll do is read your book.

4

You’re up unusually early this morning. Especially for a Saturday. The clock beside my bed said nine when I heard you in the bathroom. Judging from the sound of it, you have a stainless steel shower stall and an adjustable showerhead — you have a predilection for the powerful jet, from the sound of it; the noise it makes when you open the tap is, in any event, like an April downpour pounding on an oil drum.

I close my eyes and see you holding out one careful hand to test the water. By then you have probably already undressed, a pair of striped pajamas hangs neatly over the back of a chair. Then you step into the shower. The thrumming of water on the steel floor becomes less loud. All I hear now is the normal splash of water on a naked human body.

Generally speaking, though, you’re more the kind for the tub. For endless soaking, I mean. With scents and bath oils, and afterward a lotion or a cream. Your wife who comes to bring you a glass of wine or port. Your wife who sits on the edge of the tub, lowers her hand into the water, and makes little waves with her fingers. You probably cover yourself with a thick layer of bubble bath — to keep her from thinking the wrong kind of thoughts. Thoughts about mortality, for instance. Or about copyrights passing automatically to the next of kin.

Do you own a toy boat? Or a duck? No, I don’t suppose so. You wouldn’t permit yourself such frivolity, even in the bath your mind keeps thinking about things that leave other people stumped. That’s too bad. A missed opportunity. With mountains of bubble bath and a boat you could reenact the sinking of the Titanic: on that fatal night, the captain turns a deaf ear to all warnings about icebergs and the ship disappears, its stern sticking up at an almost ninety-degree angle, into the icy waters of the North Atlantic.

What I do judge you capable of is farting. A loud fart, with a rush of bubbles that roils up like thunder to burst through an iceberg of bubble bath. But I doubt that makes you laugh. I see an earnest expression. The earnest expression of a writer who takes everything about himself seriously, including his farts.

In any case, this morning you opted for the shower, a rare exception. I’m sure you have your reasons. Perhaps you’re in a hurry, to be on time for an appointment. Maybe it has to do with your being home alone and unable to warn anyone should you become unwell. You wouldn’t be the first writer to be found dead in the tub.

I think about you as the water pours over your body. Not for very long; it’s not a particularly pretty thought. My impression is that older people tend to choose the shower in order not to have to look at their body. Please do correct me if I’m wrong. For you that’s not a problem, apparently. Apparently you can stand that, the sight of a body whose folds and crinkles seem above all to be a foreshadowing, indicators of a near future when that body will no longer be around.

As far as I can tell from here, your wife never takes a bath. Even though she’s the one who has nothing to be ashamed of. Before the mirror, under water, only half covered with a hastily wrapped towel, it doesn’t matter, she can take pleasure in who she is. But she never stays in the shower for more than a couple of minutes.

Personally, I regret that. I’m not made of stone. I am a man. During those two minutes I’ve often thought about her, just as I’m thinking about you now. Hanging over that chair at such moments is no pair of pajamas, but a white towel or bathrobe. She herself is in the shower by now. She closes her eyes and raises her face to feel the jets of water. She welcomes the touch of water on her eyelids like a sunrise, the start of a new day. She shakes her head, briefly but vigorously. Drops of water fly from her wet hair. Somewhere in a corner of the shower stall or close to the bathroom window you can see a little rainbow.

The water pours down her neck. Don’t worry, I won’t go into any greater detail about the thoughts that come next. I won’t defile her beauty; not out of respect for your feelings, but out of respect for her.

So the actual showering lasts barely two minutes. But after that she stays in the bathroom for a long time. To do things, I suspect. Sometimes I fantasize about just what those things might be. Sometimes I wonder whether you still fantasize about things like that on occasion, or whether they are just more annoying details to you.

—

This morning I’m having some doubts about that new material. The new material I could give you. Last night I read your book, hence the doubts. Yes, that’s right, I read Liberation Year in one sitting. I am purposely avoiding terms such as “in one fell swoop” or “at a single stroke”—I simply started around seven in the evening and by midnight I was finished. It wasn’t as though I couldn’t put your book down, or, even worse, that I needed to know how it ended. No, it was something else. That same thing you sometimes have in restaurants: you’ve ordered the wrong dish, but because you’re ashamed to leave too much behind on your plate, you go ahead and eat more than is good for you.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly. In fact, I’ve had the same sensation with all your books. You take a bite and start chewing, but it doesn’t taste like much. It’s hard to swallow. Odds and ends become stuck between your teeth. On the other hand, though, it’s not really bad enough to summon the waiter and demand in a huff that the dish be brought back to the kitchen.

I think it’s far more simple than that: even wolfing down a miserable meal adds to our stockpile of experiences. We’ve eaten absolutely everything on our plate. We feel our stomach bracing itself for a serious bout of indigestion. Perhaps we order a cup of coffee and something on the side to help our stomach out a bit.

And so, around midnight, after having put away Liberation Year, I turned on the TV for a few minutes. Bouncing from channel to channel, I finally arrived at National Geographic. I was in luck, the program that was starting was one I always enjoy. Seconds from Disaster, about aviation catastrophes. You see how the passengers — the unsuspecting passengers — place their luggage in the overhead compartments and fasten their seat belts.

Sometimes it starts earlier than that. During check-in. The passengers put their suitcases on the scales and are handed their boarding passes. They are looking forward to a well-deserved vacation or a reunion with distant relatives. But we, the viewers, know that they can forget all about that vacation and that family reunion. None of that is going to happen.

At the same moment, in another part of the airport, at Gate D14, a Sunny Air Boeing 737 is fueling up and receiving its last-minute inspection. The technicians discover “nothing unusual,” as they will later tell the members of the investigative committee. Most of the parts, broken into tens of thousands of little pieces and spread at great depths over an area of dozens of square miles, have now been recovered with the help of the most modern equipment. In a vacant hangar, investigative committee specialists set about putting the plane back together, using those tens of thousands of pieces of the puzzle. It takes months. When they are finished, the final product still looks more like a jigsaw puzzle than a plane. It will, in any case, never fly again. The only reason for the reassembly is to determine the cause of the disaster. Was it a technical defect, or was it human error? What does the black box tell us? Can we learn anything from the final conversations between the pilot and the air-traffic controllers?

“Left motor has failed…right motor has failed…we are going down to thirty thousand feet…”

Suddenly, the little dot on the radar screen in the control tower ceases to be a dot.

“Hello, Sunny Air 1622…? Do you read me, Flight 1622…??? Hello, Flight 1622?”

This all comes much later. The important thing is the beginning. In the beginning, everything is still in one piece. I usually think even further back in time. I think about the passengers. How they put on their socks and shoes that morning. How they brushed their teeth and then took the taxi or the train to the airport.

“Have we got everything? Do you have the tickets? What about the passports?”

Personally, I’m in favor of a black box that starts registering information much earlier. Not just the last half hour of conversation in the cockpit, but everything. The true extent of a disaster has a tendency to be tucked away in the details. In the note to the neighbor lady who has promised to feed the cat: kitty chow only in the morning, in the evening half a can of cat food or fish, raw heart 1x weekly. Barely twelve hours later, the hand that wrote those words has disintegrated at an altitude of thirty thousand feet. Or become lost amid the wreckage. That morning, that same hand tore a sheet from the roll of toilet paper, folded it three times and carefully wiped his or her backside. It’s partly about the senselessness of it all, in hindsight. Looking back on it, he or she might as well have skipped that wiping, or at least not done it so carefully.

But let’s stick with the hand. During the final hours of its existence, the hand — at an altitude of thirty thousand feet and moving at a speed of almost six hundred miles an hour — flipped through a magazine. The hand reached out and accepted a can of beer offered it by the stewardess, the fingertips registering that the can was, if not icy cold, at least cool enough. In a moment of inattention the hand stuck one finger in a nostril, but found nothing large or solid enough to worm out. The hand was run through a head of hair. The hand was placed on a denim-covered thigh — at that very moment, in the cockpit, the pilot looks over at his copilot. “Do you smell that?” he asks. Any number of little red lights blip on above their heads.

The aircraft banks sharply and quickly loses altitude. The cabin fills with smoke. At home the cat stretches out on its rug by the fire and pricks up its ears: that must be the neighbor lady with the kitty chow! Sometimes the plane explodes at high altitude, at other times the pilots succeed in putting it down, with two stalled engines, on a military airstrip on some coral atoll. A landing strip that is actually far too short for aircraft that size. That evening the cat lies in the neighbor lady’s lap and purrs. If it’s a nice neighbor lady, she will adopt it. It doesn’t matter all that much to the cat, as long as someone keeps buying kitty chow and fish and heart.

Last night I read Liberation Year and this morning I think about you as you take a shower. I have hesitations, as I’ve already mentioned, about the new material. They say that with most writers everything is already fixed in place, that after a certain age no new experiences are added. You’ve said that yourself, in more than one interview. I can hear and see you saying it, most recently on that Sunday-afternoon culture program.

“After that age, there really aren’t any new experiences to have,” you said — and the interviewer was feeling kindly disposed, he pretended it was the first time he’d heard it.

I don’t hear the shower above my head now. You’re drying yourself off, you’ll shave, then you’ll get dressed. With every air disaster, there’s always that one passenger who arrives too late and misses his flight. That passenger, too, put on his socks and shoes that morning. I could have been on that plane, he thinks. His life goes on — that evening, he’s able to simply put his socks in the wash.

What if you had felt drawn to another apartment back then, and not this one? I don’t know, maybe you let your wife decide. It is a lovely street, after all: old trees, lots of shade, barely any traffic, almost no children playing outside. That last point is a bit of a shame for your daughter, you probably should have thought about that a bit more. But it’s certainly the ideal street for a writer who believes that no new experiences are going to come along.

When you moved in, you didn’t bother to introduce yourself personally to your new neighbors. No need to do that. That’s what your wife is for.

“We’re the new neighbors,” she said, and put out her hand.

A small, warm hand.

“Welcome,” I said.

On that occasion, your profession remained unstated. That came later, the time I had my music on too loud.

On Seconds from Disaster, there was an older couple who had never flown before. The plane tickets were a present from their children. Like all the other passengers, the older couple was played by actors. In the reconstruction of the final minutes of Flight 1622, they turned to each other for support. The children, too, were interviewed. The children were not played by actors. The children were real.

I’m not sure, in other words, whether the new material would be of any use to you. So I’ll just give it to you in its most unpolished form. You’re completely free to do whatever you like with it. If you have any questions, just come downstairs.

There are books in which the writer appears as well. As a character. Or there’s a character in the book who enters into a discussion with the writer. I’m sure you know the books I’m talking about. You wrote some of them yourself.

That’s what makes this different. I’m not a character. I’m real.

In high school, something happened that changed the rest of my life. In high school, children spread their wings. They no longer test their boundaries to the point where they’ve been drawn, they go beyond them. They no longer see their parents and teachers as adults who lead them by the hand, but as obstacles on the road to self-fulfillment. They crush an insect, just to see if they can do it, and then feel regret — or not.

The new material starts here. I doubt whether you can do anything with it. But whatever the case: here’s where it starts.

5

It was the year when teachers were dropping like flies. Suddenly, there they went. Not a month passed without the entire Spinoza Lyceum being summoned to the auditorium, where Principal Goudeket would make yet another “sad announcement.” Of course you had to keep your mouth shut and look serious, but what we mostly felt was a sense of justice having been done. The announcements never made us sad. There was something comforting about this massive falling by the wayside. If only by reason of their age, teachers were turning out to be vulnerable. They were not, in any case, immortal, not like we were.

A teacher who that very afternoon had been carping at you about the homework you hadn’t done or about your general lack of enthusiasm might not show up at school at all the next morning. That none of these deaths were preceded by a long sickbed served to amplify the comforting effect. No endless hospitalizations, failed radiotherapy, or other delays — nothing that could have made the dying any more human.

Mr. Van Ruth was our math teacher. Whenever someone’s attention lagged, he would point threateningly out the window at the Rietveld School of Art & Design, a few hundred yards from our school but hidden by the trees, and say: “If you’d rather play with clay and crayons, they’ve got a place for you.”

Suddenly, one morning, he didn’t show up. It was the day after an early autumn storm, the trees had already lost some of their leaves and so, for the first time that year, the tip of a roof at the Rietveld School was visible through the branches. I remember clearest of all the empty space in front of the chalkboard, never again to be filled by his lanky frame.

I thought about the morning of the day before, when Mr. Van Ruth had put on his socks and shoes before cycling as usual to the Spinoza Lyceum.

Mr. Karstens used to sit on an especially high stool behind his desk in the physics lab, which was supposed to make him look less short. “There are some people present in this room who will never understand a thing about physics,” he said on Monday morning, breathing a deep sigh. On Tuesday he was dead.

During the memorial service in the auditorium, Principal Goudeket found it fitting to refer to Mr. Karstens’s family situation. We found out, for example, that the physics teacher did not have a wife, but two “growing boys” he cared for on his own. The principal left out the important details. Was Mr. Karstens’s wife still alive? Or were the two growing boys now completely on their own?

Whatever the case, the detail about the sons added a human twist to the man’s death. Besides being a physics teacher who was ashamed of his own dwarfish stature, and who therefore never dared to come down off his high stool even once during the whole period, he was suddenly also a father with two growing boys who waited for him to come home.

But the sons had never been in the picture before, no one had ever seen them in real life, which served in turn to almost completely undermine the human element. There was even a remote possibility that they were just as relieved as we were. That’s right, maybe the growing boys were above all relieved, because at last they could do whatever they wanted — go to the snack bar for takeout every night and stay up watching TV until far past midnight — and no longer had to walk down the street beside a father who was too short.

But such possibilities invariably went unspoken during the memorial services in the auditorium at the Spinoza Lyceum, so that we were left only with the image of two growing boys sitting in a darkened kitchen, their empty plates in front of them, waiting, because there was no one left to take care of them.

Miss Posthuma lived by herself on the ninth floor of an apartment building close to the road going out of town to Utrecht. I had been to her home once to discuss my reading list for that year’s English lit class. From her living room window you could see the rowers skimming across the mirrored water of the River Amstel. And later, as darkness fell, you saw the lights of cars on the highway crossing the Utrecht Bridge. Somewhere a clock was ticking. Miss Posthuma asked if I wanted another cup of tea. She had hair that she kept short and wore in tight little curls and she had a high voice, without any real bass to it, the kind one often hears in women who have never had an orgasm in all their born days. It was a voice that fluttered around the room like a little bird, without landing anywhere, as though anchored to nothing and not really connected to the earth; just like Miss Posthuma, in fact, in her ninth-floor apartment high above the world and the people in it.

Then, suddenly, I clearly heard that voice ask if perhaps I preferred something other than tea, that she probably had a bottle of beer somewhere in the fridge. I saw too that something broke in her expectant expression when I stood up and said it was time for me to be getting home. Something in her face shifted color almost unnoticeably. Out on the street I looked up one last time at the ninth floor of the building, but there was nothing about the lights along the outside gallery to show which apartment was hers.

It didn’t cause much consternation when Miss Posthuma didn’t show up at the Spinoza Lyceum one morning. Only later did I hear that they’d had to break down the door to her apartment. But Goudeket’s memorial speech never once mentioned the word “crowbars.” It was clear as a bell that the principal had been unable to find anything worthy of note as theme for his little speech. This time there were no growing boys or other pathetic or heartwarming details to make Miss Posthuma, who had been found dead in her own home, a little more human. Goudeket came up with nothing better than “her enormous dedication to our school and her pupils”; under the hard fluorescent lighting of the half-empty auditorium, that sounded like less than nothing, as though the big oblivion might as well get started right then and there.

And then there was that one spectacular finish, a finish that went out with a resounding bang, flying glass, and blood. Harm Koolhaas (“Harm” to the juniors and seniors who had social studies with him) made his mistake less than half an hour after a midnight landing in Miami, when he took a wrong exit in his rental car, a white Chevrolet Malibu, and ended up in “the wrong neighborhood” (thus spake Goudeket).

The two men he asked for directions at the badly lit gas station were never found. It appears that Harm Koolhaas had tried to roll up the window on the driver’s side and back away fast, but that this maneuver ended with a loud smack against a parked car. According to the gas station owner’s testimony, one of the men had just enough time to poke the barrel of his pistol through the crack in the window. Meanwhile, the second man opened fire on the windshield.

Harm Koolhaas wore fairly fashionable corduroy trousers and carried a beaded bag over one shoulder, from which he would invariably produce his pack of Javaanse Jongens rolling tobacco at the end of class. When he walked down the hallway, it was always with a bit of a bounce in his step.

Somehow we couldn’t reconcile the two images — the trousers and the beaded bag on the one hand, the corpse hanging out of the car with its neck twisted at a strange angle on the other. As though the halls, the classrooms and auditorium of the Spinoza Lyceum were the worst possible preparation for a violent demise in an American B-movie.

During the traditional moment of silence, I thought about that gas station on the far side of the Atlantic. I saw the bright red TEXACO letters, and the red-and-blue flashing lights of police cars. The policemen were chewing gum and they wore sunglasses, even though it was far past midnight.

I tried to place Harm Koolhaas’s death in some kind of perspective. I went back in my mind to his arrival at Miami Airport, to the moment when he was handed the keys to the white Chevrolet Malibu, to his walk across the parking lot beneath a dazzling canopy of stars…Did he have that beaded bag slung over his shoulder in America too? Had he brought along a few extra packs of Javaanse Jongens, just to be sure?

And while I was thinking about that bag and the packs of rolling tobacco, I realized that I would have to go back much further than that, to the baggage check-in at Schiphol, the flipping through a travel book about Florida at thirty-five thousand feet above the Atlantic, the happy, excited prospect of touching down on American soil. Or maybe it all started much earlier than that, as he put on his shoes and socks the morning he left. Harm Koolhaas standing in front of the mirror in his corduroy trousers, running his fingers through his hair.

In this case too, there was no wife or growing boys to miss him. The social studies teacher was still young and unattached, “in the prime of life,” as Goudeket read aloud from his notes. He could go to the airport on his own and didn’t have to turn and wave to anyone after going through customs. In all probability, he sauntered first past the shops with duty-free goods. After that, the number of people who saw him in real life decreased drastically, until finally he disappeared from sight altogether.

Because the body of our history teacher, Landzaat, was never found, no memorial service was ever held in the auditorium in his honor. In the case of a missing person, after all, there is always the hope that they may pop up somewhere. That someday they may resurface and announce themselves, at a police station, or at some remote farm miles and miles from the spot where they went missing, badly confused and suffering from memory loss, clothes torn and smeared with mud, but — thank God! — unharmed.

As the days and weeks went by, that hope grew scanter. A photograph of him remained hanging in the classroom all year long. Purely out of laziness, because no one ever thought of taking it down (who knows, perhaps it’s hanging there still). Back then it had already begun to curl at the edges and the colors had started going drab. It was a small photo — a Polaroid — showing Mr. Landzaat grinning and baring his characteristically long teeth all the way up to the gums. Where his pupils were, in the whites of his eyes, you could see two red dots from the flash. His hair was wet, probably with sweat from dancing at the school party where the Polaroid picture was taken.

Yes, when it came to dancing at school parties Mr. Landzaat was a real go-getter. Without so much as a how-do-you-do he would grab a girl by the hand and drag her out onto the dance floor. And the girls rarely put up a fight. Jan Landzaat was a popular teacher at the Spinoza Lyceum, perhaps the most popular. The horsey teeth were nothing but a minor shortcoming in his eternally tanned and youthful face. Another minor defect was his own awareness of how popular he was, and of how he made the girls giggle and blush.

—

When our class took a field trip to Paris, he remained at the hotel bar later than the other teachers. He drank his Pernod without water or ice, and told funny stories about back when he had taught at the Montessori Lyceum. Stories that made all of us laugh, including Laura Domènech, a junior like me.

“At the Montessori, they’re completely nuts,” Landzaat said. “Like some holy sect. The smile of beatific certainty. Of faith in that certainty. I’ll tell you, I was so glad to get out of there!”

Then, for the second time, he laid his hand on Laura’s forearm, the only difference being that this time he didn’t remove it again right away. We all saw. We saw that Laura didn’t pull her arm away. We saw how Laura took the elastic band out of her ponytail and shook loose her long, black hair — how she then put a cigarette between her lips and asked Mr. Landzaat for a light.

Jan Landzaat, too, had almost certainly put on his socks and shoes before leaving his temporary rental in Amsterdam’s River District that Boxing Day morning, to spend a few days with “friends in Paris.” And because it was “on my way anyway,” as he told us later that same day, he had swung by Terhofstede, a cluster of houses belonging to the municipality of Sluis, some three miles from the coast of Zeeland Flanders.

His tempestuous affair with Laura Domènech had ended a little less than two months earlier. He tried to be lighthearted about it, but with each passing day his face bore more and more traces of collapse. The color of his skin faded from brown to yellow, he began forgetting to shave, and there were mornings when the smell of alcohol made it to the desks all the way at the back of the classroom. Often he would remain standing at the board for minutes, lost in thought. You’d have to repeat your question a couple of times before he would reply.

But not that one time, not when I raised my hand and asked if there was any truth to the rumor that Napoleon had ordered his sixteen-year-old mistress drowned in the Seine. Mr. Landzaat turned slowly and looked at me. His red-rimmed eyes had dark, heavy bags under them, as though he’d been up weeping all night.

“And why should you suddenly be interested in that?” he asked.

The house in Terhofstede belonged to Laura’s parents, who were spending their own Christmas vacation in New York, giving Laura and me the run of the place. At first, when Laura told him she was dumping him, Jan Landzaat couldn’t believe his ears. And when he heard why and for whom, Laura said he’d looked disgusted.

“With him?” he said.

The little white house was at the edge of the village. When I woke up in the morning I would lie there and look at Laura’s long, black hair fanning out over her pillow. Sometimes I let her sleep, usually I woke her. The frost made flowers on the windowpanes and there was no heating upstairs, so after that first night we moved the mattress down to the living room and slept in front of the antique coal stove.

In fact, we didn’t get up often. Every once in a while, just to do some shopping in nearby Retranchement, which had one shop. It was too cold to cycle so we walked, holding each other tight the whole time. When we went back to the house we had bottles of cheap wine, beer, eggs, and bread.

The difference between night and day faded to a timeless vacuum in which we had eyes only for each other — for our attempts to get closer and closer together. In the warmth of our zipped-together sleeping bags, on the mattress in front of the coal stove, the world began all over again each day, each hour, each minute.

So in that timeless vacuum it didn’t surprise us much to find, after we had got dressed and walked to Retranchement to replenish our supplies, that it was Boxing Day and everything was closed. We lingered there for a while, before the plate glass window of the closed shop, struggling with the idea that the world actually stuck to something like opening times. It was the coldest day of that whole week, a fine haze of snow was blowing across the paving stones. Night seemed to be falling again already, or else it was already getting light again — on that score, too, there was no longer anything like absolute certainty.

And so, empty-handed, we started in on the trip back to our warm bed in front of the stove. Just outside Retranchement the road makes a slight bend, halfway through which one catches sight of the first houses of Terhofstede, including the white one that belonged to Laura’s parents.

She was the first to see the car parked outside the garden gate. Someone was leaning against the fender, only a vague form at this distance, but still, unmistakably, a person. It was Laura too who immediately recognized the cream-colored Volkswagen Beetle as belonging to our history teacher.

“Oh, no!” she said. She grabbed my arm and tried to pull me back down the road. At this point in the bend there were no houses or trees to hide behind. Our only hope was to backtrack as quickly as we could.

At that moment, though, the figure hoisted itself off the fender and walked up onto the road. He waved.

“Oh, no!” Laura said again. “This is just too horrible!”

I pulled her up close, threw my arms around her. I didn’t ask how Mr. Landzaat knew where we were. His behavior in the last few weeks had become increasingly desperate. First he had accosted Laura in the bicycle shed at school, panting and pleading for a chance to talk. Later there were the phone calls when all Laura could hear was the sound of his breathing.

One night she had woken up with a strange feeling, and when she slid aside the curtain of her bedroom window she saw him there. He was standing under a lamppost, looking up at her. She couldn’t see his features clearly, but she could feel his look of reproach.

For obvious enough reasons, at school she hadn’t dared to complain about our history teacher’s behavior. That would have resulted, at the very least, in the two of them being kicked out of the Spinoza Lyceum. And telling her parents about it was completely out of the question. They were modern, to a certain extent (or at least that’s what they called themselves), and you might even say they were understanding. But between being understanding and actually understanding something yawns an unbridgeable chasm — a chasm so deep that you often can’t see the bottom at all.

And so I had taken Laura in my arms and held her tight. She started sobbing quietly.

“Take it easy, love,” I said. “Take it easy. Everything’s going to turn out fine. I’ll make sure it all turns out fine.”

Then I let go of her and stepped out into the middle of the road. I raised my hand and waved to Mr. Landzaat. I waved as though I was happy to see him.

6

This is the point at which I leave you up in the air about how things went from there, a technique you apply regularly yourself — a digression at a moment of suspense, a story within the story.

In Liberation Year, that story within the story begins when the four children start on their long journey on foot to the part of Holland already freed by the Allies. The trip takes ages and is rarely suspenseful. We, the readers, would rather get back as quickly as possible to the interrogation of the Wehrmacht defector. But for pages on end you make us hop over frozen ditches along with those children. That they dye their hair along the way is, in fact, extremely implausible in that last year of the war, when even the direst necessities were rationed. Implausible and boring. The children are such pains-in-the-ass, the reader doesn’t really give a damn whether they survive the trip or not. You end up hoping they’ll be arrested and spirited away, and the sooner the better. Off! Off with them! Off with this book!

Another reason why I pause here is because I’m curious to hear whether my tale of teacher mortality sounds at all familiar to you. Especially the part about the two high-school students and the teacher who just won’t go away. What I’m wondering is whether you have any idea how it goes after that, but to be honest I have no doubts about that anymore.

At the risk of getting ahead of myself: Isn’t it an ironic twist of fate that your most commercially successful book should be entitled Payback? I’ve always liked that title. You were never particularly in form after that when it came to titles — nor when it came to writing books either, come to think of it — but that’s another story. The story within the story of your life, you might say, of your dwindling writer’s career.

And then, isn’t it a much more ironic twist of fate that Payback should be your only book based on real events (not counting The Hour of the Dog, which was about your first wife — a different genre, if you ask me)?

Suddenly I can’t help thinking about my visit to the bookshop a few days ago. Not the day that you were there signing, but the day before that. The moment when the customer finally put Liberation Year back on the pile beside the register.

After the initial relief, I also felt a certain disappointment. Because, as a matter of fact, I still wish you the best possible sales figures. What could be better than for as many readers as possible to see for themselves that, after a dozen books, two plays, and almost half a lifetime, the writer of Payback no longer cuts the mustard?

That afternoon, by the way, I also noticed that there weren’t a lot of your books on the shelf. Payback is pretty much obligatory, of course, but your other work was thinly sown. I asked the salesperson about The Hour of the Dog (talk about glaring titles), but he informed me that that particular title was “no longer in print.”

No longer in print…There are words, sentences, and phrases that, in all their simplicity, say much more than they seem to at first: two months to live, never heard of it, dead on arrival…For a writer, no longer in print must fall somewhere in that same category.

I saw that Payback is now entering its twenty-seventh print run. I sort of like the new cover, vaguely American with all that red and blue. And that new picture on the back cover — at least you’re not one of those writers who hopes to cheat time’s advance with a single vague and grainy photo.

You try to keep up with the times, even on the backs of your books. That too, though, is a form of mortality. Every five years the cover is rejuvenated, while the writer and his work go on aging for all to see.

I took care to stop and read once again the text on the back cover. There was no significant difference from the text on the back of the first edition I have here at home. I own several editions — three, to be precise. When it comes to covers, I think the movie edition is the ugliest. Those red, dripping letters! What could the publisher have been thinking? A bloodbath? It’s a pity, because a title like Payback already speaks so clearly for itself. Why would you want to add anything to that?

And then, beneath those dripping letters, in a sort of Gone with the Wind setting, the photos of the three stars. That’s the second crucial mistake. An intentional mistake to boot, made only to pump up sales. And indeed, after the movie came out, Payback began its second life, as they say, and made the bestseller list for the second time in five years.

Movie or no, you should never put pictures of the book’s characters on the cover. That only cramps the reader’s fantasy. You force him to keep seeing the faces of the actors in the movie. For someone who has seen the movie first and then, out of curiosity, goes on to read the whole book, that might not be so bad. But anyone who reads the book first is faced with a dilemma. During the reading he sees the faces of all the characters in his mind’s eye. Faces he wants to assemble with his own fantasy. No matter how those faces may be described. Despite your superfluous descriptions of noses, eyes, ears, and hair color, each reader constructs his own faces in his own imagination.

Three hundred thousand readers; that’s three hundred thousand different faces for each character. Three hundred thousand faces that are destroyed at one fell swoop by that one face in the movie. As a reader, it’s pretty tough to remember that imaginary face after seeing the actor on the screen.

Two high school students mastermind their teacher’s perfect murder. That’s the first line of the text on the back cover.

Two factual inaccuracies, in the very first sentence. Because we never masterminded anything — and it was anything but perfect.

There’s no need for me to cite the rest of the text here, you know well enough how it goes. That first sentence wasn’t there on the first eighteen editions, it was added only for the film version. But it’s been on every edition ever since. The book has been molded to fit the movie. A movie that differs from the book on a few essential points. Just as your book differs from reality on a few essential points. From the real events on which it’s based.

Those latter differences are understandable enough. You ran into a few blank spots that your imagination had to fill in. And I must say: Hats off! You got awfully close.

But not close enough.

How would you like to have the chance to fill in those blanks all over again? A revised edition of Payback in which the unsettled questions are settled at last? If I were a writer, I wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation.

It was a little less than a year ago that you moved in upstairs. That would never be possible in a novel. Writer moves into apartment above…well, above what? A character? No, I’m not one of your characters. I’m a flesh-and-blood human being on whom a writer has loosely based a character. In a novel, it would be completely implausible. Too much of a coincidence. Coincidence undermines a story’s credibility.

There’s only one area in which we accept coincidence, and that is in reality. “Such a coincidence!” we say, and then we dish up a juicy anecdote in which coincidence plays a major role.

Conversely, you could say that the coincidence that has made us neighbors is only plausible because it takes place in the real world.

You could never come up with that yourself, people say. At least, a writer never would.

I remember so clearly the afternoon when I went to see the movie version of Payback. There weren’t very many people in the theater, it was a matinee. I remember the moment when the high-school students appeared on screen for the first time. The boy takes the girl by the arm.

“I want you to know that I care about you more than anyone else in the world,” he says, and I couldn’t help laughing at such a totally unnatural and implausible line, spoken by an even more implausible actor — the kind of actor you see only in Dutch feature films. I laughed so loudly that I was hissed at from all corners of the darkened theater.

People read a book and imagine the faces themselves. Then they go to the movie version and the imaginary face is destroyed by the face of the actor on the silver screen.

With me, that was totally different. In both the book and the movie, I kept seeing the same face.

My own.

7

The postcard came this morning. A postcard…there’s something touching about that, something from days gone by. The same days gone by to which you belong, where your roots lie, you might say.

You yourself are all too pleased to make a show of those days gone by. In interviews you never fail to emphasize your lack of confidence in modern inventions. Computers, the Internet, e-mail, cell phones — all things you keep at bay.

“My wife does all my e-mails, I’m too old to start in on that.”

“Sometimes I hear the cell-phone conversations people carry on in the train and I ask myself whether we’ve made any real progress since the days of the Neanderthal.”

“I write the first version in longhand, then I type it over. On an old-fashioned typewriter, yes. I tried it once, writing on a computer, but had the feeling right away that I was checking in passengers at an airport. Or working at the local branch office of a bank.”

Every once in a while you go too far with it, and the coyness shines through. Like when you cast doubt on the sense of electronically amplified guitars.

“Why for God’s sake does a guitar need to be amplified? When I hear it, I always have the sneaking suspicion that the guitarist isn’t really technically competent, that he’s trying to mask that by making as much noise as possible.”

Who are you trying to impress with comments like that? Probably those readers who, like you, grew up during World War II. Those readers who (like you) believe that after a certain age there are no new experiences to be had.

Otherwise, of course, you have every right to do what you do. Writing on a typewriter, why not? It’s not about whether people are right or wrong to live in the past, it’s about whether or who they’re trying to impress.

If you ask me, that’s what you’re out to give your readers: a potbelly stove rather than central heating, a bike with coaster brakes, a teacher you address as “Mr.” and “sir,” rather than a teacher who tries to be just as young as his pupils. Just as young and sexy, I should really say — the latter above all.

As a matter of fact, you’re sort of right to be so naive. Those cell-phone conversations really are completely vacuous, of course, but then so are all conversations. Including those held around the old-time cracker barrel. There’s no reason to wax nostalgic about how those cracker-barrel conversations were more edifying than the ones carried on today in a train that is — per usual — running late (“Hi, it’s me, no, we’re standing still again, where are you?”).

People prefer to talk about nothing at all, it’s been that way for thousands of years and everyone’s fine with that. To say nothing, quite intentionally, of e-mails and text messages. E-mails and text messages facilitate social contact the way a laxative facilitates defecation. But when one takes an overdose of laxative, as we all know, the result is only diarrhea.

You, in fact, are doing the right thing when you write longhand and then type your sentences letter by letter on a blank sheet of paper: that forces one to think slowly. For the sake of convenience, I won’t go into whether a mediocre mind is served at all by thinking slowly. It’s the idea that counts.

The reason your wife sent a postcard is because an e-mail or text message would be a no-no. Her handwriting is cute, it’s — I say this without duplicity — girlish. Handwriting with lots of round shapes in the letters, and with round, open dots over the i’s. Psychologists say that open dots over the i’s are an indication of egocentrism, but when it comes to that, if you ask me, you have to draw a sharp distinction between men and women.

Sometimes I run into the postman while he’s filling the boxes down by the front door. At other times, like this morning, he’s still busy sorting the mail out by his cart.

“Give it here, I’ll do it,” I say.

“Are you sure?”

“Sure. People have to help each other, right?”

That’s the way it goes, all the time. Completely natural. A nice, normal man lends the postman a helping hand. Only in the course of a subsequent reconstruction, in black and white and with an ominous voice-over, might one see something abnormal in it. Only with the advantage of hindsight concerning what happened next, and with the aid of tendentious music, does being handed mail that is not addressed to you take on something sinister.

I always wait until the postman has walked on with his cart before starting to fill the boxes. I look at each package or envelope before slipping it into the appropriate mail slot. For me, it has never been anything but plain old curiosity. Or healthy interest, if you will. On the basis of bank statements, subscriptions, and warning notices, I get to know my neighbors better. I never go too far. I study the blue envelope from the tax service for no longer than a second, then put it in the mailbox of the one to whom it is addressed.

Sometimes I imagine that I am being filmed by someone in a van parked across the street. A nondescript van with the name of a construction or plumbing firm on the side. An undercover operation, with a hole drilled in one of the o’s of “construction,” the glass of the camera’s lens visible perhaps only from up close. A telephoto lens, the images are blurry, grainy — but nothing strange is going on. I don’t take any mail upstairs with me in order to steam open the envelopes at my leisure. I don’t look at the envelopes any longer than is needed to read the name of the recipient. Personal letters are becoming less common, unmistakably so, and postcards only show up during vacations.

That is how I looked this morning at the postcard from your wife. I moved it up closer to my eyes, as though I were having trouble reading the address. Fortunately, girlish handwriting is very easy to read. For the space of a single second, I thought about the van across the street. That’s why I shook my head briefly, as though realizing my mistake a bit too late — as though it had taken me a second to see that the postcard was not intended for me, but for my upstairs neighbor. Then I smiled. I flipped the card over, glanced at the picture on the front, and put it in your mailbox.

They can do all kinds of things these days. They can zoom in on a grainy picture and blow it up a million times. Imagine that there really had been a van parked across the street this morning: by zooming in and blowing up enough they could have seen which postcard I had read in a second and to whom that postcard was addressed.

There was nothing visibly suspicious about it, but still, they could have reconstructed my knowledge of her whereabouts based on the combination of text and picture.

That was the real reason why I shook my head. Why I smiled. I smiled because now I knew where she was. And I shook my head because, of course, I should have figured that out for myself a long time ago.

8

After coming out of the shower last Saturday, you went to the café across from here. When I heard your door shut I walked out onto my balcony, where I can see the street. You don’t know how to make coffee. You don’t know that butter should be kept outside the fridge. You would only burn yourself if you tried to heat some milk.

You took a seat outside and opened the newspaper. After a few minutes you looked around to see if anyone was coming to take your order, but none of the waitstaff had come out yet. You were the only customer. You put down your paper and turned in your chair, the better to peer into the restaurant itself.

It was a lovely day. One of the first sidewalk-café days of the year. Sunlight bounced brightly off the big windows. You shielded your eyes with one hand and peered inside, but you probably couldn’t see a thing. If you had looked up, you would have seen me standing there. If it hadn’t been so far away, you probably could have seen the smile on my face. I felt for you. Really, I did.

The café is a fairly new one. Even before it opened, everyone was saying what an asset it would be for the neighborhood. For this quiet neighborhood. In fact, La B., the restaurant, is the only place around. A normal café where you can drink a cup of coffee in the morning and a beer at the end of the afternoon, we don’t have anything like that.

After about ten minutes, you were clearly fed up. You put your paper down on the table and went inside. You were in there for a long time. I pictured the undoubtedly deserted interior of the café. From somewhere behind a door that was open a crack you heard vague noises, as of someone loading cups and glasses into a dishwasher.

“Hello?”

No response.

“Hello?”

Then, finally, a girl came shuffling out of the kitchen. It was only Saturday morning, but she was already exhausted. You only wanted to order a cup of coffee, but in a café like this that’s never a simple matter.

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” the girl said reproachfully, as though you had tried to barge ahead in line.

Meanwhile, outside, your newspaper was lifted momentarily by the wind, but remained on the table. It would have been too much, you having to chase a runaway newspaper — a needless addition to a scene that was convincing enough as it was.

You came outside again and sat down. You’d obviously had enough of the newspaper for the moment. First that coffee. A good four minutes later, the girl finally appeared at your table in person. She asked what you would like. You looked up and squinted. She was standing with her back to the sun, you couldn’t see her face very clearly. How old might she be? Nineteen? Twenty, tops. The generation that has no idea anymore who you are. You could tell that from her body language. A pain in the neck, that body said. A troublesome old man who shows up at eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning, for God’s sake, to order a cup of coffee. We’ve only been open for an hour, what’s wrong with this guy?

She didn’t quite pull out a memo pad to jot down your order, but almost. Then she disappeared inside, only to come out again three minutes later. Empty-handed, of course: three minutes is not nearly enough time to pour something into a cup. She gestured, she pointed, she shrugged — and you looked up at her, your hand shielding your eyes from the sun. From my balcony I couldn’t make out a word, but I had the feeling I could tell what was going on. I’d experienced it myself once, when I went there for a cup of coffee shortly after the opening. The milk. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, but there was no milk left. I saw the girl point in the direction of the local shops. She would be pleased to go get some milk, but she was alone. She couldn’t leave the café unmanned: this old fussbudget could understand that, surely?

Is it at such moments that you miss your wife? I don’t know whether you thought about her that Saturday morning. I did, in any case. I lowered my eyelids and tried to imagine her on the sun-drenched gravel beach. She was sitting, her arms wrapped around her knees, on a towel she’d spread out on the gravel. Your daughter was just coming out of the water with a bucket and a little shovel. I thought these things because I was still assuming that she had gone somewhere far away, to one of the Canary Islands, or at the very least to some resort on the Mediterranean.

I still have a copy of the women’s magazine from a few months ago with the portrait of her in the section called “Partner Of,” where the wives of famous men are interviewed. About how wonderful and intelligent those men are. About that first meeting at the public reading or film festival, when lightning struck.

You have women who wait in the soccer stadium, beside the underground passage that links the stadium to the training field. They shout things at the players. They ask for an autograph, for the hundredth time. They want to have their picture taken with the player. They have a dream. They have their sights set on a soccer player, and it doesn’t really matter which one. Any player who can make that dream come true is eligible.

The women who cruise the literary evenings, film festivals, and theater cafés are different. Yet their dream is essentially the same as that of the soccer women. A husband with a famous face. To the outside world, they maintain that they’re primarily interested in the substance. In his talent. Still, a writer with a flashier car always has a prettier — younger — wife than the writer with only a public transport pass. The playwright dependent on public grants has to make do with factory seconds from the outlet store. The sculptor sloshed by eleven each morning has to make do with a woman with red-rimmed eyes who, just like him, reeks of wet ashtrays and soured wine.

How did your wife put it again in “Partner Of”?

“I had done a book report on Payback […] It was my senior year at high school. A girlfriend and I mustered up all our courage and called the writer for an interview in the school paper. I still remember how long I spent in front of the mirror that day. I couldn’t decide between my miniskirt with high heels or just a plain old pair of jeans. At the last moment, the other girl couldn’t make it, and I showed up in the skirt […] at first sight, that spark […] never went away again […] older than my father […] hurt my mother the most […] never wanted to see me again.”

What interested me, though, wasn’t so much the interview as the photo that went with it. Your wife, leaning against an ivy-covered wall. In jeans, wearing Adidas sneakers. It’s a white brick wall, the outside wall of a house, in the upper left-hand corner you can see a little bit of a drainpipe, painted green, and a small window — belonging to a bathroom or a shower?

It doesn’t say so in so many words, but it was immediately clear to me where that picture was taken. Probably at the same spot where your wife was interviewed. You yourself have made only sporadic mention of your “place in the country,” as you call it in some interviews. Your “second home,” or more frequently your “second work space,” because of course the work must go on: so that readers won’t think you’re goofing off at that second home, just lolling on the couch beside the fireplace.

In the nearby town of H., they’re oh-so proud to have a famous writer living close by. A real, still-living writer who shows up now and then at a sidewalk café along the market square; who orders fried fish or a dish of mussels at the local seafood restaurant. It doesn’t literally say that either in “Partner Of.” But if you read carefully, it’s in there. The name of the town — H. — is even mentioned outright, as an example of the kind of respectful deference one still finds in the provinces.

“At the supermarket, people let me cut ahead in line, because they know that I’m his wife […] rather embarrassing, really, but on the other hand I still enjoy it. That never happens in Amsterdam, anyway.”

The way she puts it, I think, is rather sweet. I see her face. How it glows with pride. But it’s also glowing a bit with embarrassment. That’s your wife, to a tee. Or perhaps I should say: that’s all the women whose portraits appear in “Partner Of.”

When I flipped over the postcard this morning and looked at the picture on the front, it took about three seconds for the penny to drop. It was a photograph of an old city gate. A gate in the wall of a fortified town. Greetings from H. was printed in red letters at the bottom.

Then I went upstairs to find that women’s magazine. After rereading the whole “Partner Of” interview, I turned my attention to the photo. How many little white houses could there be close to the town of H.? How many little white houses with ivy on the wall? With a drainpipe painted green?

I took an even better look at the photo. Your wife looked good. Rested. Healthy. Her hair pinned up, a few blond locks had come loose and hung down around her ears. Little earrings. Now I saw something else too. To the right of her face, a tile was affixed to the wall. A tile with a number on it. A house number.

The little tile with the number on it was partly hidden from view by her pinned-up hair. It could have been just that one number, or the final cipher of a larger one.

The number was a 1.

9

Once again, I hesitate. We now have two narratives running side by side. Or three, actually. The stories within the story. You yourself love that technique; as we’ve seen already, you make full use of it in both Payback and Liberation Year.

So I’m hesitating. For a moment, I ask myself what you would do if you were in my shoes. Go ahead here with the next day — the day after the postcard arrived — with me driving down our street, after setting the navigation system for the route to H. (“A navigation system?” I hear you say. “What kind of gizmo is that?” I see you shaking your head after I explain. “What’s wrong with a road map?” you ask — and, once again, you’re not completely wrong about that.)

I could, of course, also toss you some new material. The way Laura Domènech, Mr. Landzaat, and I greet each other at the garden gate of the house in Terhofstede — up to the moment when the three of us go inside and the history teacher gradually begins to disappear from sight.

Or I could go on with last Saturday: the third parallel narrative. You got up from the table outside the café. You still hadn’t had your coffee. I raced to take the elevator down and followed you on your walk through town. That’s already a lot less suspenseful — at least for you. After all, you were there too. At most, it might be interesting to your readers. What does a writer do during the weekend? What does he do on a normal Saturday (and Sunday) — a day when his wife is not at home?

But like I said: you know that better than I do.

—

Landzaat threw all his body language into the fray to make clear that something had really changed in his attitude toward Laura. That he was not here to accost her again.

“Laura,” he said quickly when we came close enough for him to see the expression on her face. “Laura, please! Let me…let me explain first. Let me say what I have to say.”

He spread his arms, his palms facing forward. Look, I’ve come unarmed, that expression says in some cultures. Here, with us, it was meant above all to express innocence and helplessness: he would make no attempt to touch her, let alone embrace her.

Laura snorted, it sounded like a sob. I glanced over at her, but saw that she was not crying. The look in her eyes was cold, perhaps even colder than the polar wind that blew fine-powder snow across the paving stones in front of the house.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

First she pointed at the house, then made a broader sweep with her arms, a gesture meant to take in the entire whitened landscape that surrounded us. Our landscape. The history teacher hadn’t looked at me even once.

“I’m here…I’m here to say goodbye, Laura,” Mr. Landzaat said. “I’m here to say that it’s over for me too, now. That’s what I wanted to come and say to you. I won’t bother you anymore.”

I looked at his face. He hadn’t been waiting for us in his car all this time, it seemed, he had been outside, standing by the gate. His cheeks, shaven for a change, were grayish. Under his eyes, or perhaps I should say under the dark-blue bags under his eyes, I could see a few burst blood vessels, purple and red. He tried to smile, but the cold probably clanged against his teeth — those long teeth that appeared for a moment between his lips, which were already a dark blue as well — because he closed his mouth right away.

“I…” He pointed to the cream-colored Volkswagen Beetle—“I’m leaving again right away. I’m on my way to Paris. To see friends.”

“Oh, really?” Laura said. The history teacher was hugging his upper body now with both arms, and rubbing those arms with his black-mittened hands. “I’ll only stay for a minute,” he said, and as he said that he glanced at the front door of the house. “I thought…maybe I could come inside to warm up. I just want to explain. So that we can part as normal…as grown-up individuals. If that’s okay with you, Laura.”

Now, for the first time, he looked at me. I couldn’t see my own eyes, but I knew the look that was in them. You came here of your own free will, I looked. Now you’d better blow out of here right away, of your own free will.

For your own good. I looked then, for good measure — but the history teacher had already taken his eyes off me.

“Laura?” he said quietly. “Laura?”

Laura stamped her boots in the snow.

“For just a minute, then,” she said at last.

And so we went inside. Landzaat took off his coat and mittens and warmed himself by the stove. In front of the stove was our bed — our unmade bed. His shoes were almost touching the mattress. I won’t bother you anymore, he’d told Laura — but here he was anyway. Our history teacher was inside. Inside of something that had at first been only for us.

“There’s almost nothing left in the house,” Laura called from the kitchen. “We just went to do some shopping, but the only store in the village was closed too. And if I make coffee now, we won’t have any tomorrow morning.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Mr. Landzaat called back. “A glass of water is all right.” He rubbed his hands together, cupped them and blew into them. “Wow, it’s so cold,” he said.

Now, from the kitchen, I heard the rattling of bottles.

“We’ve still got…,” I heard Laura say. “Wait a minute, what’s this? Eau-de-vie. There’s still a little left. You want that? A glass of eau-de-vie?”

No, I said in my thoughts. Not eau-de-vie. But Laura couldn’t hear that.

“Well, I wouldn’t say no to that!” Mr. Landzaat shouted. “I still have to drive, but one little glass couldn’t hurt.”

Then he turned to look at me — and winked. He winked, and at the same time he bared those long teeth, all the way up to the purplish gums.

I didn’t look at his face, only at his mouth and his teeth. If I had teeth like that I would keep my smiling to a minimum. In my imagination I saw Mr. Landzaat nibbling at a carrot. Then I imagined him holding an acorn between his fingers. Would he sink those teeth into the acorn right on the spot, or would he save it for the long winter?

You have two kinds of teachers. The first kind behave like adults. They want to be addressed as “sir” or “ma’am,” they don’t put up with backtalk or stupid jokes in their classroom, if you can’t behave then you can stand out in the hall for an hour, or they’ll give you a note to take to the principal’s office. In everything, they emphasize the inequality between themselves and the pupil. The only thing they ask for is respect. And usually, they get it.

The second kind of teacher is mostly scared. He lowers himself out of fear. He pulls a boy’s hair, just as a joke, he plays soccer with the kids at recess, he wears trousers and shoes that bear a distant resemblance to our own trousers and shoes; he wants, above all, to be liked. Sometimes we, the pupils, play along for a while. Mostly out of pity. We act as though we really do like the frightened teacher, we let him believe that he’s popular. Meanwhile, however, the frightened teacher has awakened our animal instincts. Animals can smell fear a mile away. Within the herd, the nice teacher is the straggler. We wait patiently for the right moment. An unguarded moment when the nice teacher stumbles or turns his back on us. Then we pounce on him collectively and tear him limb from limb.

Both the authoritarian and the frightened teacher belong to the most mediocre category of human being. The term “high school,” in fact, is completely misleading: there’s nothing high or mighty about it, it’s the deep rut in the middle of the road. They only make it seem like you’re being taught different things: what it really comes down to is spending six years under the yoke of the most stifling kind of mediocrity. Nowhere is the odor of mediocrity more pervasive than at a high school. It’s a smell that works its way into everything, like the stench of a pan of soup that has been bubbling on the burner too long. Someone turned down the gas and then forgot all about it.

“So, are you two surviving out here in the cold?” Mr. Landzaat asked. He was trying to sound jovial. He did his best to please, to act as though it was indeed all a thing of the past, the desperate overtures in the bicycle shed, the panting phone calls, the shadowing of Laura all the way to beneath her bedroom window. Dead and buried, he was trying to say. You two have nothing to fear from me.

But he was still standing there, warming his hands at the stove. Above all, he was standing too close to our bed. He shouldn’t have come.

Before I could answer him, Laura came in carrying the bottle of eau-de-vie and three glasses. They weren’t shot glasses, they were tumblers. She slid aside the two dirty plates off of which we’d eaten our fried eggs and bacon that morning, and put the glasses on the table.

“How much of this stuff are you supposed to pour?” she asked, twisting the top off the bottle.

“Not very much,” I said.

“All right, looking good,” Mr. Landzaat said. Still rubbing his hands, he stepped away from the coal stove and sat down at the table. Laura lit two candles and put them on the windowsill. It seemed to be just a smidgen darker outside than it had been a few minutes ago — it had started snowing again.

“Well, here’s to you!” Mr. Landzaat said, holding up his glass. But when neither Laura nor I made a move to imitate his toast, he raised the glass to his lips and took a big gulp. “Ah,” he said, “just what the doctor ordered.” He glanced at the dirty plates. “Must be nice, a house like this without your parents around? Able to do whatever you like?”

Laura’s forehead was creased in a frown. She rolled her glass between her long, pretty fingers, but she still hadn’t taken a sip.

“Why are you here?” she asked quietly, without looking at the history teacher.

Mr. Landzaat raised the glass to his lips again, but put it back on the table without drinking. He leaned forward a bit and placed his hand on the table, not far from Laura’s. I shifted my weight and the wooden chair creaked loudly.

“Laura,” he said, “I’ve come to say that I’m sorry. Not about what we…us, the two of us, I’m not sorry about that, but about…afterward. I shouldn’t have…I acted like a schoolboy. I shouldn’t have kept calling you. But I simply couldn’t accept that it was over. Now I can.”

He smiled and bared his long teeth again. The combination of heat from the coal stove and the first slug of eau-de-vie had caused two rosy blushes to appear on his gray cheeks. Like a schoolboy, he’d said. I acted like a schoolboy. I didn’t take it too personally. After all, I wasn’t a schoolboy. A boy, yes, but not a schoolboy. It wasn’t so much insulting as pitiful, this frightened man comparing himself to a schoolboy.

Laura looked at him silently. Mr. Landzaat knocked the rest of his drink back in one go. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His lips were no longer a dark blue either, they were redder.

“I wanted to ask you to forgive me, Laura,” he said. “That’s why I came. To ask your forgiveness.”

“That’s good,” Laura said.

Mr. Landzaat sighed deeply. His eyes were glistening, I saw. I took my first slug of eau-de-vie, then set the glass down on the table a bit too loudly. The history teacher looked over — not at me, only at the glass.

“I hope, when the vacation’s over, that we can go back to how things were in class,” he went on. “That we can act normally toward each other. As friends. That we can stay friends.”

“No,” Laura said.

Mr. Landzaat stared at her.

“Act normal in class, okay,” Laura said. “That’s mostly up to you. But I don’t want to be your friend. You’re not my friend. And you never have been.”

I felt a deep warmth rising up inside me. The heat began somewhere in the pit of my stomach and made its way up. It was not the kind of heat the coal stove gave off. This heat came from inside. A proud warmth that wanted to get out.

“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?”

10

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.

That’s it, it occurs to me then. It’s all in that word “little.” House—little house. Car—little car. The apology is already bound up along with that. You may be a famous writer with money in the bank who can afford a second car and a second house, but by calling that second house and that second car a little house and a little car — a little secondhand Subaru — it’s all smoothed over. With her qualification of “little,” your wife is telling me: It hasn’t all gone to our heads.

“Today we rode our bikes here,” she says. “The weather’s so nice. It was fun, wasn’t it?”

“It was really windy,” your daughter says.

“But on the way home we’ll have the wind at our backs,” your wife says. “It will blow us all the way home.”

She puts her arm around your daughter and gives her a little squeeze. Then she smiles at me again.

“I want to go home now,” your daughter says.

“We’ll go in a minute,” she says. “You haven’t finished your lemonade yet.”

“I’m not thirsty anymore.”

Your wife picks up her wineglass — it’s still half full. I see her glance, before taking a sip, at my almost-empty beer glass.

“Yes, we should be going now,” she says without looking at me.

“I’ll be off too,” I say. I toss back the rest of my beer and look around. I act as though I’m looking for the girl to bring the bill.

By then I already know what I’m going to do. I mustn’t sit around here, I mustn’t foist my company on her any longer, that would only make her nervous. I’m going to walk around the market. I announce that too. I’m going to take a little look around the market. From behind the stalls I can keep an eye on the sidewalk café, without being noticed. About five miles from here, that’s what your wife said. I can follow them in the car, not right behind them the whole time, no, that would be too obvious. Just pass them a couple of times, then wait further along to see which turn they take. 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. A house number ending with a 1—it shouldn’t be too hard.

But coincidence, apparently, isn’t finished with us yet. A shadow suddenly falls over the sidewalk café. When we look up we see the clouds slide across the sun. Gray clouds. Dark gray. Rainclouds.

“Oh, goodness,” your wife says. “We’d better hurry, we don’t want to get wet on the way home.”

Then it’s her turn to look around, but the girl with the serving tray is nowhere to be seen. Now, in the distance, we hear a rumbling. I look at my empty beer glass. Silently, I count to three.

“Looks like a real thunderstorm coming up,” I say. “If you want, I can give you a ride home. No problem at all.”

“You don’t have to do that,” she says.

“Really, it’s no bother.”

“I don’t want to get wet, Mommy,” your daughter says. “I want to go home.”

Your wife bites her lower lip. She looks around again, then up at the sky. Thunder rumbles again. Closer now.

“But what about the bikes?” she says. “No, we better wait here for it to blow over.”

“But I want to go home now, Mommy.”

“You can pick up the bikes later on,” I say. “My hotel’s not too far from here. In K. Later this afternoon. Or tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at your house and bring you back here. No problem.”

A flash, a brief silence, and then a clap, followed by a rolling rumble.

Just like back then, I think now. And the next moment it occurs to me that you would always be sure to say that. Just as it was before. Yes, you’d make it easy for the reader, or rather: you would do everything in your power to keep the reader from missing the correspondence between one event and the other.

What do they call that again, when a narrative motif is repeated in a different form? Long ago, a snowstorm gave a story a different twist — gave someone’s life a different twist. And now, years later, a thunderstorm tosses something my way. An opportunity. Opportunities. A surprising twist.

“My car’s parked just outside the wall,” I say. “I can swing by here and pick you up.”

I point to the curb in front of the café, where at that same moment the first raindrops begin spattering against the pavement. The sky shifts from gray to nearly black, the red-and-white-striped canopy above our heads begins to flap — people slide their chairs back and hurry inside.

“That’s very kind of you,” your wife says. “But I wouldn’t—”

The flash and the boom arrive almost simultaneously. Someone shrieks. From around the corner, somewhere a few streets down, comes a roar — the sound of tiles sliding off a roof, or perhaps more like a truckload of gravel being dumped on the street.

“That was a direct hit,” says a man holding a newspaper over his head. Through a split in the canopy, a fat rivulet of water is now clattering onto one of the tables. Your daughter has stood up. She has both hands pressed against her ears, but she hasn’t started screaming or shrieking. I see the look in her eyes. It’s more like amazement. Maybe even fascination.

I push my way past the tables and out onto the street. Supposedly to see where the lightning has hit, but in fact to get a better look at the sky. To my regret I see, just past the church steeple, the first patch of blue peeking out from behind the clouds.

“I’ll get the car,” I say, once I’ve walked back to where your wife and daughter are standing. “Wait here.”

Before your wife can object, I’ve turned up the collar of my coat and am striding down the street, past the market square where the merchants are still doing their best to pull their wares in and out of the rain.

I look up at the sky again. There’s already more blue up there than a minute ago; white, sunlit clouds are piling up beyond the steeple. I’ve already reached the street that passes through the city walls when I turn around again and take another look up at that steeple.

It’s like I’ve seen it somewhere before — not like a déjà vu, no; really seen it. The steeple is flat on top. You can’t really even call it a spire, somewhere three-quarters of the way up the old part stops and something new begins, something that once, at least, more than sixty years ago I reckon, must have been new. The steeple has been rebuilt. Not restored. Reconstructed. In an architectural style that has aged faster in sixty years than that of the church itself.

Then I suddenly remember it; not literally, not word for word, but I resolve to look it up when I get home — which I did a few days later.

The Spitfire dove and strafed the rooftops. Thin ribbons of fire spouted from its cannons. Then the plane dropped something, something that from this distance looked like a milk can. The children watched the can spin around and around…and the next moment it hit the church steeple. A ball of fire. Stones came raining down. The children ran for shelter in the doorway.

When they came out a few minutes later, the spire was gone. Just a scorched framework at the spot where only recently it had poked so proudly at the sky. Wisps of smoke roiled up, like the smoke from a cigarette laid in an ashtray and then forgotten.

We won’t go into your literary style here. I see how you went about doing it. I look up at the steeple, and I sense how at that moment I am literally standing in your shoes. You have stood here before too. Like me, you looked up at the steeple, blown to pieces and then rebuilt after the war. You let your imagination run wild. Then you decided to use the steeple.

Who knows, maybe the church tower at H. will, in the near or distant future, serve as a stopping-off place in a “literary walk.” In the footsteps of the writer M…The participants in the walk are wearing gray and green jackets. Hiking jackets. They are no spring chickens. They’re not much use to society anymore. Only those with too much time on their hands go on literary walks.

The guide will point at the steeple. “This is the church tower that was bombed in Liberation Year,” he’ll say. “No, ma’am, I see you shaking your head, you’re quite right. In the book, the steeple is located in the eastern Netherlands, the part that was already liberated in 1944. But the author truly did let himself be inspired by this steeple for that evocative scene in Liberation Year. He simply moved the steeple somewhere else. That is the artistic liberty of the writer. He picks up a church — a steeple, a church spire — and sets it down somewhere else, at a spot in his book where it serves him best.”

A little less than fifteen minutes later I park my car in front of the sidewalk café. Meanwhile, the sky has cleared up completely. My heart is pounding. I climb out and, for the second time that day, my gaze sweeps over the tables, but your wife and daughter are no longer there. Most of the bikes are parked at the french-fry stand on the market square. Entire families are seated on the benches around it, eating french-fried potatoes from paper cones. On one of those benches your wife has just handed your daughter a napkin, to wipe the mayonnaise from her lips.

Hands in my pockets, I saunter over to them. “It’s pretty much cleared up now,” I say.

“My daughter is really tired,” your wife says. “If it’s not too much trouble, we’d like to take you up on your offer anyway.”

11

In the movie version of Payback there’s a scene where Laura and I are walking down the beach hand in hand. We’re barefoot. Laura is wearing a dress, I have my jeans rolled up to my knees.

“So what now?” Laura asks.

“What do you mean, what now?” I ask.

A wave washes around our feet. The beach is deserted, yet everything tells you that the director wants this to be a summer scene. Why on earth did you agree to let them move the action from winter to summer? Now something essential is gone: the weather. It was the heavy snowfall, and nothing else, that forced Landzaat to spend the night in Terhofstede. There was no hotel, he had to sleep upstairs, in the attic. We lay downstairs on our mattress in front of the coal stove. That night we barely slept a wink. We lay close together, we kept our clothes on for once. We needed to be prepared for anything, we told ourselves.

This is a point on which the movie departs from the book. Having things happen in summer makes us, however you look at it, more culpable. The man remains the same obtrusive history teacher, but he is at liberty to drive on to his friends in Paris. In the movie, Mr. Landzaat too is more culpable than in reality. The viewer in the theater has prior knowledge. The real story, after all, has already been all over the media. The history teacher disappears without a trace. Why doesn’t he go away? the viewer asks himself. Why doesn’t he leave the boy and girl alone?

Every once in a while we heard the bed creak above our heads. We held our breath. Landzaat must not have slept much that night either. One time he got up, we heard his footsteps on the wooden floor, then he came down the stairs. Laura crept up closer to me. We heard the toilet door and, after a bit, the hissing rush of piss. It sounded very close by — it was like he was pissing all over us, Laura would say later. It was, in any event, something you would rather not hear.

The next morning we awoke to sounds from the kitchen. We stayed in bed and pulled the blankets up even further, so that only our heads were poking out when Mr. Landzaat put his own around the door.

“Coffee’s ready,” he said. “How do you like your eggs?”

At the breakfast table, barely a word was spoken. The coal stove was still warming up, so both Laura and I had blankets draped over our shoulders. I noticed that Laura, too, was doing her best not to watch the history teacher’s long teeth make short work of his fried eggs.

“So, here we go again,” he said, getting up to put on his coat.

But during the night a lot more snow had fallen. Our first glance at the VW, almost buried now beneath a thick, white blanket of it, destroyed any hope of Landzaat’s speedy departure. But we tried anyway. We put on our gloves and did our best to wipe the snow from the windows and hood. We used a shovel I found in the shed to dig out the wheels, but now the car wouldn’t even start. At the very first attempt, the starter seized up and fell silent.

Through the snow-smeared windshield of the Beetle, Laura and I couldn’t get a clear look at the history teacher’s face. We looked at each other. Little white clouds of breath were coming from Laura’s mouth. Then she squeezed her eyes shut tight. It had stopped snowing — the unbroken cloud cover was the color of wet paper and seemed to hang right above our heads, like a suspended ceiling. It felt like ten minutes or more went by before the car door finally opened and Mr. Landzaat climbed out.

“There’s no garage in this village, I guess,” he said. “But do you know if maybe there’s a town or village close by where they’ve got one?”

I remember clearly the way he stood there. His lanky frame in the snow. He had come uninvited. He had finished all our eau-de-vie and eaten the last of our eggs. In the middle of the night he had released a loud, clattering stream of urine into the toilet. But we were young. If he were to leave now, we would have forgotten about him within the hour. In summer he could have left. But not in winter.

“There’s nothing in Retranchement,” I said. “I’m afraid we’ll have to go to Sluis.”

Without thinking about it much, I’d said “we.” I glanced over at Laura, but she had taken off her gloves and was blowing on her fingers to warm them up.

“How far is that?” Mr. Landzaat asked. “Sluis?”

“Three or four miles, I guess. About an hour’s walk, when the weather’s normal. A little more than that now, probably.”

Sooner than I’d imagined, a tacit agreement had been made that I would accompany him — that I would at least show him the way.

Laura had already turned away, her arms clutched around her middle. Lifting her feet up high above the snow at every step, she went back into the house without a word.

“Or do you two know someone here in the village who might let us call a garage?” Mr. Landzaat asked.

“We have to do some shopping anyway,” I told the teacher. “Our supplies are nearly gone. We might as well walk.”

Move the action from winter to summer and you get a different story. It’s not like moving a church steeple — it’s more drastic than that.

—

Your wife is in the passenger seat beside me, giving directions (“At that little road up there, turn left”), your daughter is slouching in the backseat with her head against the door; in the mirror I can see her eyes fall shut now and then — a few more minutes and she’ll be asleep.

For the sake of saying something, I comment on the landscape, on how vast it is, how big and empty — it’s almost as though I’m describing the landscape. Your wife says that’s what attracted you to this place most, it’s a place where you can literally clear your mind.

Then we’re there. I park on the dike in front of the white house. And there the Subaru is too. A blue one. The door to the house is at the back. I help with the shopping bags. She wakes your daughter. I carry the bags down a paved pathway. I see the green drainpipe, the ivy, the little window to the toilet or shower, the house number ending in a 1.

Now we’re inside. A living room with an open kitchen. Your daughter runs to the TV and turns it on. Your wife takes a few things out of one of the shopping bags and puts them in the refrigerator. Then she stops what she’s doing and looks at me.

She could offer me something to drink, but I can tell from her expression that she doesn’t feel like it. Maybe she’s done enough already today, maybe she’s tired. What she wants most now is to be left alone.

But I remain standing. Cartoon figures move across the TV screen, soundlessly for the moment. I take a step toward her, and almost immediately I see something shift in the look in her eyes. This is the downstairs neighbor, I read in her eyes, but how well do I know him, anyway? The house is isolated, from the road one can see or hear nothing of what’s happening inside. It’s sort of like accepting rides from strangers. The realization, too late, of how stupid you’ve been.

I raise my hands slightly — something meant to resemble a reassuring gesture — but I’m aware that reassuring gestures, above all, can be interpreted in any number of ways. No doubt about it, the serial killer you’ve invited inside in good faith would start with a reassuring gesture.

She has closed the door of the fridge and lowered the shopping bags to the floor. She is looking at me wide-eyed.

I need to say something, or else I need to say goodbye and leave. But I stand there. I still don’t say a word.

Then your daughter calls to your wife.

“Mommy?” she calls out. “Mommy, are you coming to watch TV too?”