Dear Mr. M

19

She wasn’t attracted to him right away.

“There’s a boy coming, he’s a junior,” David Bierman had told her. “He might be somebody for you.”

Laura had done her best to look as uninterested as possible.

“Not that he’s quite your type,” David went on. “He’s no one’s type really. But he is one of those people you have a strong opinion of right away. You either think he’s something special, or you think he’s a complete asshole.”

At the party a few days later, David pointed him out across the room. The boy was sitting slouched down in a leather armchair, his green rubber boots crossed casually at the ankles; he was holding a tumbler filled almost to the rim with some clear liquid — it wouldn’t be water, Laura thought.

He was, above all, very thin, thinner in any case than she liked them. She wanted a boy to have some substance to him. Flesh. Warm flesh that gave a little, pliable flesh under soft skin, not bones sticking out everywhere. This one had gone to no trouble to disguise his thinness, she had to give him that. Atop his tight-fitting jeans he wore an even tighter T-shirt that crept up a little to reveal a white section of stomach and a navel surrounded by blond hair.

But the rubber boots were what drew your attention most; they were half-Wellingtons — the boy had turned down the tops to reveal the light-green insides. Who wears rubber boots to a party? was the first thing she thought. But later she would often think back on those green boots.

Laura herself was in the habit of getting up each morning half an hour before her parents and her brother, who was two years younger than she was. Half an hour was what she needed to shower, wash and blow-dry her hair, and put on her makeup. But there were days when she didn’t do the makeup. She would just spend half an hour in the shower, gradually turning down the tap from hot to ice-cold. Then she went to school with her own face — the water treatment kept her cheeks a soft pink all day long — and she saw how people looked at that face of hers.

That’s right, I can get away with it. She looked back. I don’t need it, the mascara, the eye shadow and lip gloss. Even after a shipwreck, after months of bobbing around on a wooden raft in the burning sun, I’ll still be irresistible.

The thin boy with the rubber boots broadcast a similar message. Not exactly the same message, because even with the best will in the world you couldn’t call him irresistible, but like Laura he knew that the other people’s eyes were on him.

She couldn’t deny that she was curious — if only for the space of a few seconds — about how the boy in the green rubber boots kissed. Then she forgot about him.

—

The party was almost over when Laura suddenly found herself standing beside him, at the table where earlier in the evening there had been wooden planks with cheeses, baskets of French bread, and dishes of peanuts and raisins, and where at this hour of the night, except for a single flattened and melting triangle of brie or Camembert, there were only some bread crumbs and peanut shells left.

The boy looked at her. No, it wasn’t just looking: he was sizing her up. Not from head to toe, it’s true, but from a point on her forehead, somewhere above her eyebrows, down to her neck. She saw his eyes, which were an almost translucent blue.

On his thin, well-nigh emaciated face — his jaw and cheekbones seemed ready to poke through the skin — was the same blond down she had seen before around his navel. Soft hair, not bristles. He hasn’t started shaving yet, she could tell.

“So you’re Laura,” he said.

He grinned, peeled the triangle of cheese off of his paper plate, and held it up for her. She shook her head vigorously, not so much because she wasn’t hungry, but because of his self-satisfied tone.

So you’re Laura. As she watched him stick the cheese, rind and all, into his mouth in one bite, she suddenly realized what that sentence meant, and she felt her cheeks start to glow.

So you’re Laura could only mean that David had talked to him about her beforehand too. In her mind she heard David’s voice: This girl I know…she could be right for you. You’ll either like her immediately, or think she’s a huge bitch.

That next Monday she saw David in German class, first thing in the morning.

“Well, what did you think of him?” he asked.

“You were right,” she said. “He really is a complete asshole.”

—

Now, on this day after the day after Christmas, as she waited in her parents’ house in Terhofstede for him to come back, she thought about that first meeting.

After tossing some more coal on the fire, she lay down on the mattress. Every once in a while she got up and went to the window. Hours seemed to have gone by since he and Landzaat had left for Sluis; there was no clock in the house, and at his insistence they had left their watches at home too. “We’re going for total timelessness,” he’d said. “When the sun comes up, then it’s light. And when it’s dark, it’s dark.”

At some point she must have fallen asleep: outside now, except for the glow of the streetlight, there was total darkness. She got up and opened the front door. The snow had stopped, there was no wind, it felt like the air was frozen too, as though you could break it into tiny pieces and then crumble it between your fingers.

She pulled on her boots and walked out to the road, through snow that came up almost to her knees, past the history teacher’s car and on to the crossing in the middle of the village where the streetlight stood. Here, in the hard white light, the sight of the snow hurt her sleepy eyes. She halted. A few houses further up on the left lived a farmer from whom her parents sometimes bought potatoes and onions. The farmer also kept an eye on the house when they were gone; one time he had replaced a pane of glass that broke during a storm. She thought she remembered the farmer having a telephone — but who would she call? Her parents in New York? Somewhere in one of the pockets of her traveling bag was a slip of paper with the numbers her parents had handed her on the day they left. The number of the hotel, but also the numbers of her aunt and uncle in Amsterdam, and the neighbor lady. She tried to figure out what time it was in New York, but she wasn’t sure. A six-hour time difference, she remembered her father saying, but here in this stock-still, frozen landscape, beneath the light of the streetlamp, the concept of time seemed to have lost all meaning.

And what would she say, anyway? Don’t be startled, nothing really terrible has happened, but…She vaguely remembered the farmer’s living room, where she had been maybe two or three times. Dark, heavy furniture, she recalled, a table with a plastic floral tablecloth. The farmer himself was so big and broad that he barely seemed to fit in the living room and had to duck under every doorway. His face was red, probably from working outside so much, she thought.

She imagined him standing there as she called her parents in New York: he would only be able to hear her side of the conversation (I don’t know exactly how long ago…A couple of hours, for sure…It’s dark here now) and he would draw his own conclusions. He would take his coat down off the rack, put on his cap, and help her look — or he would immediately call the police. She turned around and walked back to her house.

She had already passed the teacher’s car and was just about to lay her hand on the garden gate when she heard someone shout her name. And even before she turned around she felt something warm, something warm inside, so warm that the cold air no longer had a grip on her.

She slipped a few times as she started running toward him, as fast as the snow allowed. She had already seen it, and later she would often remember it that way too: that they would meet right under the light of the streetlamp, that they would embrace, cover each other’s cold cheeks, eyes, lips with kisses—like in a movie, that was what she was thinking when, only a few yards from him now, she realized that he was alone. For a moment she focused on a spot somewhere behind him, the point where the snow-covered willow stumps on both sides of the road dissolved into darkness.

He himself wasn’t running; he stumbled toward her, it looked as though he was limping. The next moment they had hold of each other. The kisses, the tears — there was snow, or ice, in his lashes she saw after they had stopped kissing for a moment to look into each other’s eyes.

“Sweetness,” she said. “My sweetheart.”

He was crying too, or at least something wet and shiny was running from the corners of his eyes down to his upper lip.

“Where’s…?” She looked again at the road behind him, disappearing into the darkness.

“Isn’t he…?” He nodded toward the house. “Isn’t he here?”

She looked straight into his eyes, then shook her head slowly.

“I lost him,” he said.

20

Later — and for years — Laura would think back on this moment, their movie moment beneath the streetlamp, think back on it and ask herself again and again whether she had noticed anything strange in his behavior at that point. Anything unnatural in his voice when he said, Isn’t he…? Isn’t he here?

What does someone’s voice sound like when they’re acting as though they really don’t know where someone is? Someone who’s pretending that he truly doesn’t have the slightest idea what has happened to that other person? The voice of someone you know well — whom you thought you knew well, she corrects herself again and again during the days, weeks, months, and years following Jan Landzaat’s disappearance.

I lost him. As though he were talking about a little child who’d disappeared from sight in a busy department store or on a crowded beach. Herman had pulled up a chair and sat down beside the fire, his head in his hands. So that he wouldn’t have to look at her? With the passing of time, with the passing of more and more time, this last detail too would take on greater significance. In her memory he remained sitting there, for longer and longer, so long that he finally didn’t look at her at all.

“Did he act guilty? Or let me put it differently, did he seem conscience-stricken to you?”

The darker of the two detectives turned a page in his notebook and gave her a friendly look — serious, but still, above all, friendly.

She was sitting between her parents on the living room couch. Her mother had made tea, then poured it into Duralex tumblers. It was easy to see that the detectives, if they drank tea at all, were used to having it served in cups on saucers, or at the very least in sturdy mugs; every time they picked up the glasses they would burn their fingers and then set them down quickly again.

“If you’d like another sugar waffle, help yourself,” her mother said.

Laura looked at the face of the friendly, darker detective. A handsome face, boyish. The other detective was big and solid, a square head with blond, stubbly hair.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t know.”

She felt her eyes stinging, and a few seconds later her mother’s hand on her shoulder, her fingers softly kneading her shoulder through the material of her sweater.

What exactly was a guilty or conscience-stricken impression? That he didn’t seem confused? Not truly upset? All right, he had avoided looking at her as much as possible as he told his story, but did that mean anything?

“You know that clump of woods, a mile or two before Sluis?” he’d said. “They’re not really woods, just a clump of trees at that bend in the canal. I had to take a piss. I went into those trees, further than I normally would, I wanted him to be as far away from me as possible. It was freezing, of course, it all took a little longer than normal. When I was finished and I turned around, he was gone.”

She tried to imagine what he was describing, but she’d always had a bad sense of direction, she didn’t even know which clump of trees at what bend in the canal he was talking about. Still, she was sorry later that she hadn’t asked any questions, that she had let him tell the story from start to finish without interrupting him even once.

“For a moment, I thought he was monkeying around,” he continued. “I mean, that’s the kind of teacher he is, Landzaat, right? One of those guys who slaps you on the shoulder and tries to act cool.”

And yes, at that moment he had looked up at her, she suddenly remembered that. After he had said that thing about acting cool, he had paused — for no more than a couple of seconds — and looked her straight in the eye. That’s the kind of teacher he is, right? he’d said with his eyes (and with that little pause). The kind of teacher who seduces a girl from his class during the field trip?

Laura had only shrugged.

“Anyway, he was gone. Because I thought he was horsing around at first, I didn’t try to call for him right away. Maybe he’s off behind a tree or crouched down in a ditch, watching me the whole time, I thought. I didn’t feel like having him make a fool of me.”

Was it snowing then? she could have asked, but didn’t. If it had been snowing, that would make it more believable that he had lost sight of their teacher. But it hadn’t snowed, she was almost sure of that. All right, she had fallen asleep a couple of times while he was gone, but during the little walk from the front door to the streetlamp she hadn’t crossed fresh snow — she would swear to that if she had to, if the dark, handsome detective asked her to.

“The first thing I did was climb up to the highest spot I could find. But when I couldn’t see him from up there either, I walked back a ways, along the canal, the way we came. Then I started calling his name.”

But what about his footprints? she had felt like asking — and once again, she didn’t. His footprints in the snow would have told you which way he went, right?

“It was weird. Suddenly I wasn’t sure how to yell for him. ‘Mr. Landzaat’ or ‘Sir’ sounded way too formal. And I didn’t want to shout ‘Jan’ either, that would almost make it sound like he was my friend. So the first few times I just shouted ‘Hey!’ and ‘Hello?’ After that I shouted ‘Landzaat?’ and that sounded good. ‘Hey, Landzaat! Stop messing around! Come out where I can see you, man!’ I must have shouted that ten times in a row, and the more I shouted, the more I realized what a ridiculous name that is, Landzaat.”

Laura looked at his face, where the aversion was clear to see, as though he were talking about something filthy that he’d stepped in by accident. And then he raised his eyes to meet hers again and repeated the teacher’s name.

“Landzaat,” he said, placing added stress on the first syllable — and it was true: if you repeated the name often enough, it became just plain ridiculous.

But now she heard something else in that name too. By putting the stress on land, he was implying — perhaps unintentionally, but perhaps not — that there was another zaat, another seed you could think of besides Landzaat.

And not hayseed or birdseed either.

Seed that she, Laura, had let into her body (she was on the Pill, condoms in her view were an annoying interruption and otherwise a lot of messy business), seed that she may on more than one occasion have wiped from between her legs with a T-shirt, a towel, or the corner of a sheet. Yes, that’s the way he was looking at her now. His aversion was no longer limited to the history teacher. While in full possession of her senses, she had allowed the teacher with the long teeth to slip his dick inside her and squirt her full of seed.

“Oh, blech!” he shouted, then turned his gaze away from her.

The detective with the square head leaned forward for another sugar waffle, took a big bite of it and, as he chewed, let his gaze travel over the bookshelves covering the walls. Laura’s parents rarely watched TV, in the evening they would sit at their respective ends of the couch with a glass of wine and a book. The detective looked at the bookcases the way a child in a deathly still museum might look at an abstract painting, a twelve-by-twenty-foot painting consisting only of smudges and stripes.

“A new witness has turned up,” the darker detective said. “Someone who says they’re sure they saw Mr. Landzaat and your friend close to the Zwin.”

Laura looked at him, doing her best to seem inquisitive.

“You’re familiar with the Zwin?” the detective asked.

Her mind raced. She couldn’t just act dumb. Her parents had bought the house in Terhofstede when she was still a baby. During the summer vacations they had gone to the beach at Cadzand, or driven to Knokke where you could rent pedal cars and ride along the boulevard. In the fall and winter they took long walks, the first few years with her little brother in a carrier on her father’s back, atop the old earthen fortifications around Retranchement, along the canal to Sluis, and to the Zwin, a nature reserve, a bird sanctuary: there, when the tide was out, you could hike across the sandy flats where marram grass and thistles grew, but you had to watch out for the water’s return. On two occasions they had been caught unawares. Her father had handed over the carrier with her little brother in it to her mother and lifted Laura onto his shoulders. Wading up to their waists, they had safely reached the dunes.

“Sure, the Zwin,” she said.

“What I meant was, whether you know where the Zwin is,” the detective said. “With regard to Sluis. And to Terhofstede, of course.”

She remained silent. She wasn’t quite sure what to do; any answer she might give could be the wrong one. She thought of all the American cop shows where suspects only let themselves be interrogated in the presence of an attorney. I want to call my lawyer, said the veterinarian who was suspected of murdering his wife, and then you already knew that he must have done it.

When you walked from Terhofstede to Sluis, you didn’t go by way of the Zwin. It wasn’t even a roundabout way to get there. The Zwin lay in the complete opposite direction.

The square-headed detective had stopped chewing on his waffle. The dark detective tried smiling as he drummed his fingers on his notebook, then he breathed a sigh and shrugged.

“Maybe you would—” he began. “Maybe you’d like to just—”

“It’s been a very tiring afternoon for Laura,” her mother interrupted him. “Maybe she’s answered enough questions for one day.”

21

In the last week of summer vacation, she and her friends were going to the house in Zeeland for the first time — the first time, that is, with no parents around. Besides David Bierman, she invited Stella van Huet, Michael Balvers, Ron Vermaas, and Lodewijk Kalf. Stella was the one who had the most trouble getting her parents’ permission, she’d had to listen to a long sermon full of warnings and possible doomsday scenarios in which the word “condom” had actually come up a few times. In the end, however, a reassuring phone call from Laura’s parents had cinched it.

A few days before they were to leave, Laura got a call from David.

“Remember that guy at my party?” he asked.

For a moment, during the brief silence that fell, Laura thought about asking Which guy? but decided against it almost immediately. Somehow she sensed that David would know right away that she was only playing dumb — and this intentional playing dumb would make him think that Laura had developed a particular interest in the boy. That was certainly not the case, she told herself, but she couldn’t deny that even now she could see the green, folded-down boots in her mind’s eye.

“Yeah?” she said. “What about him?”

“He flunked this year,” David said. “When school starts again, he’s going to be in our class.”

Laura could have answered with Yeah? again. Yeah, what about it, what’s it to me? But she knew she could never make that sound believable.

“I’ve been thinking,” David went on — to her relief — after another brief silence. “He’s got some problems at home. His father has had a girlfriend for years. His mother just found out about it. But they’re not getting a divorce. They’re going to stay together, at least until he’s graduated, that’s what they told him. He’s an only child. He sits at home in the evening, between two parents who have nothing to say to each other. I go hang out with him at his house sometimes. To the outside world, the parents act real cheerful, like nothing’s going on. They think his friends don’t know about it. That he wouldn’t have told anyone. But even if he hadn’t said a thing, it’s so obvious. The mother with her red-rimmed eyes. The father who wolfs down his supper without tasting it and then gets up from the table as fast as he can. By that time, Mom has almost finished the bottle of wine. ‘I wish they’d get a divorce,’ he says so himself, ‘it’s just so incredibly awkward.’ Whenever one of them is alone with him, they try to get him to take sides. It drives him nuts. Looking at it objectively, of course, it’s all his father’s fault. His mother’s in pain, she sits around crying all the time, she tries to make him feel sorry for her, but he doesn’t want to deal with it. Most of all, he doesn’t want to be disloyal to his father. ‘You’re not really supposed to say this,’ he told me, ‘you’re not even allowed to think it, but somehow I understand my dad. I understand that after almost twenty years of being married he started getting claustrophobic. You know my mom, David,’ he says, ‘you know what I mean.’ ”

Laura could tell where David was going with this. A sob story. A story meant to soften her heart toward this boy. After which he would ask whether Herman could come along to Zeeland. It would be good for him to get away from it all. The situation at home was unbearable.

While David was starting in on a character sketch of the boy’s mother, in which the phrases “borderline hysterical” and “always moping” came up more than once, Laura thought about it. She wasn’t completely opposed to the idea, she admitted to herself. Maybe the boy was simply arrogant and annoying, and there was nothing more to it, but on the other hand there was something about that skinny body and those odd boots that had kept her fascinated over these last few months. And now, suddenly, new information had come up. He’s an only child, David had said. More than the story about the stifling parents, it was this news that placed the thin boy’s attitude and behavior in a different light. There were certain adjectives that were always mentioned in the same breath with being siblingless: “spoiled” and “egocentric” were the most common. Hard on the heels of those came “pitiful” and “lonely.” When you really thought about it, it was hard to come up with any positive adjectives for an only child. “Only” already sounded rather lonely and pitiful — as though, except for that single, only person, nothing else existed and never would. So you’re Laura. She replayed the sentence in her mind. Already it sounded different. She saw again how he held up the runny wedge of cheese for her to take, then stuffed it into his own mouth, rind and all. Only children were asocial, that’s what people said, they got everything their heart desired, they never picked up after themselves, and when you were doing the dishes you had to flap the dish towel at them, or literally force it on them, otherwise they’d just stand there watching while other people stacked the dripping plates and pans on the counter. She thought about the skinny, egocentric, spoiled, pitiful, lonely child in his green rubber boots, in between his silent parents, his father thinking not about his son but about his girlfriend, his mother opening another bottle of wine because there was no future. It was at that moment that Laura made up her mind, and that was precisely how she would remember it later too. But she wasn’t going to make it easy for David, if only to keep him from jumping to the wrong conclusion.

“So what do you think?” David asked. “It’s your parents’ house. I figured I’d better ask you first. I haven’t talked to him about it yet, so you can always say no. But I bet he’d love to come along.”

“I don’t know…,” Laura said. “I mean, we’re such a tight group. Shouldn’t we ask the others about it first? They don’t even know him.”

She was glad that David couldn’t see her face.

22

Three days later, on Friday morning, they met up at Central Station. The first leg of the trip would take them to Flushing, then they’d go by ferry to Breskens, and after that take the bus — which ran only once every two hours — to Terhofstede.

As was to be expected, the thin boy showed up wearing his rubber boots. David introduced him to the others. The boy shook hands all around, starting with Stella.

“Hi, I’m Stella,” she said. From her cheery tone and the way the others were acting, it was clear that they had all been filled in on the boy’s painful situation at home.

“Herman,” he said.

When he got to Laura, he smiled. “Hello,” he said. “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” She thought he was only pretending not to remember her. He reached out to shake her hand, and his left hand joined the right. He laid it atop hers and gave it a little squeeze. “I just want to say that I’m so happy you invited me to join you,” he said. “I mean, the only person I really know here is David. Thank you, Laura.”

She looked into his eyes, which were more gray than blue, but with something glistening behind that gray, something much lighter, a winter sun appearing for a moment from behind gray cloud cover — it wasn’t easy to hold his gaze for long.

“Of course,” she said, releasing her breath for the first time since he’d taken her hand. So he’s not a complete asshole, she thought. A complete asshole doesn’t say things like that.

They found an empty compartment and, with a little shifting and squeezing, they all fit in. None of them had much in the way of luggage; no suitcases at least, suitcases were for old people. Michael was the only one who hadn’t yet tossed his duffle bag up onto the rack. He unzipped it and pulled out a squarish bottle of Dutch gin.

“Anyone up for a shot?” he asked.

The bottle went around. David was the first to raise it to his lips, then Ron and Michael. Lodewijk, Laura, and Stella shook their heads. “It’s only ten o’clock!” Lodewijk said. “Please!”

As last, the bottle arrived at the thin boy — at Herman. He took a slug; Michael was already holding out his hand for the bottle when Herman tilted his head all the way back, without removing the bottle from his lips. They watched breathlessly as little bubbles rose through the liquid, bubbles roiling to the surface like in an aquarium. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down a few times, the train rattled and lurched as it crossed a switch, and the mouth of the bottle came loose from Herman’s lips, spilling gin down his chin and neck. He rested the bottle on his thigh and screwed the cap back on.

“So, now my parents are dead and gone,” he said.

For a few seconds it was very quiet in the compartment — only the sound of the iron wheels on the tracks. Herman wiped his mouth and handed the bottle back to Michael.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you guys,” he said, looking at them one by one. “My parents are still alive. Unfortunately. All I did was erase them, I needed to do that.”

He laughed loudly, David was the only one who laughed along with him, but not from the bottom of his heart, Laura noticed.

“Do you…want to talk about it?” Stella asked.

Stella’s father was a psychologist, but more than that: her father too had traded in his wife six months ago for one of his female patients, twenty years his junior.

“If I started talking about my parents, I’d bore all of you all the way to Flushing,” Herman said. “That’s part of it. The other thing is that they don’t deserve it. They’re basically a couple of losers who should never have had children.”

Another silence.

“But don’t worry,” Herman laughed. “I’m not a total downer. I’m really happy to be here. Really.” He waggled his head a few times, then closed his eyes. “Well, almost,” he said.

“If you ask me, you’re just really pissed off at your parents,” Stella said.

Herman opened his eyes again and looked at her. “Not pissed off, no. Just disappointed.”

—

On the boat from Flushing to Breskens they bought gravy-roll sandwiches. David, Ron, Michael, and Herman had a can of beer along with theirs, Lodewijk had coffee, Stella a glass of mineral water. Laura drank tea.

As they lounged along the railing on the rear deck, David and Herman held up their half-eaten rolls to the diving gulls. Laura squinted at the water foaming around the hull, and then at the coastline fading into the distance. She thought about her own parents, with whom no one could find fault. On the contrary, all her friends, both boys and girls, agreed that she had the greatest parents in the world. “I wish my father was like yours,” Stella had said to her once. “What do you mean?” Laura asked. “I don’t know,” Stella said. “Your father just has a way of looking at people that’s so…so normal. Yeah, that’s it! Your father looks at me the way he would look at an adult. And he talks to me that way too. My own father always has this pitying look in his eyes, and he always talks in that kind of undertone. ‘Maybe you’ll understand it someday, Stella.’ That’s what he said to me recently. I don’t know what it was about, just something stupid, about what time I had to be home or something. ‘I’m not one of your patients, Daddy!’ I shouted at him. But he didn’t even get mad. He just stood there with that pitying smile on his face.”

The boys were especially charmed by Laura’s mother. She translated British and American literature into Dutch; the last few years she had also started writing poems that were published from time to time in literary journals. Her first collection was going to appear that fall. But when Laura brought friends home, her mother always stopped working and made the loveliest sandwiches for them. Poppyseed and sesame-seed buns with pickled meat roll, ham, minced beef, herring, and mackerel.

“You have really nice friends,” she had told her daughter once they’d all gone home. “Well, then?” she went on, after a pause, in a quieter tone. “Any of the boys you like more than the others?”

“No,” Laura said.

“That David — his name is David, isn’t it? — he’s very handsome.”

Upon which Laura said she was going to her room, she had homework to do.

Laura’s father used to work as an editor for a national newspaper, but for the last eighteen months he had been presenting a popular current-events program on TV. The best part about him, as Stella said, was that he stayed so normal. He had every reason to get a swelled head. People on the street nudged each other when Laura’s father walked by, sometimes they asked him for an autograph, which he always gave without complaint. Even during vacations on faraway foreign beaches, people would come up to him. “We don’t want to bother you,” they would say, “but we saw you in the distance and my wife said to me: ‘Is that who I think it is?’ Look, she’s sitting up there in front of that café, could you just wave to her? Are these your children?” Laura’s father never lost his patience with these kind of encounters, he waved to the woman in front of the café, he squatted down between the children for a photo, he handed out autographs on the backs of beer coasters, napkins, and placemats, sometimes with a big Magic Marker on a T-shirt, and one time even on the inside of someone’s thigh, at a beach resort in southern Spain — the Dutchman in question was covered in tattoos and wore only a pair of swimming trunks, so he had rolled up one of the legs of those trunks, right up to his crotch. “Here, if you would,” he’d said. “I’ll tattoo it on myself, later.” Laughing, Laura’s father complied.

Not long ago she had gone out to lunch with him at a restaurant that had just opened. When they came through the revolving doors, all the customers looked up. Dozens of pairs of eyes followed as the waitress led them to their table — the best spot in the house, Laura saw, with a view of the canal. During lunch, too, people kept looking at them. Laura saw them lean over to each other and whisper, smile, then look again. But her father bore these gazes too with calm and patience.

“You know what’s funny?” he said. “You’re seventeen now.”

She stared at him blankly.

“You know these people are looking at us and asking each other: ‘Is he there with his daughter, or with some girlfriend thirty years younger than him?’ Two years ago, they wouldn’t have wondered at all. That’s something new. Fantastic!”

Laura couldn’t help but blush, but her father had risen halfway out of his chair and kissed her on the cheek. “So,” he said. “Now they have even more to whisper about.”

Ever since her father’s face became a regular feature on TV, her parents’ marriage had been accompanied by a never-ending flow of rumors about extramarital affairs. Photographs sometimes appeared in the gossip magazines, showing him leaving a nightclub or disco with a girl barely older than his own daughter. And there was that time, in one of those magazines, that a fashion model had claimed she’d been having a secret affair with him for almost a year. But her father dismissed it all with a laugh; he even brought the gossip rags home and tossed them on the kitchen table. “Look what they’re writing about me now,” he said. “It’s obviously a slow season for news.”

And Laura’s mother laughed along with him. In the evening her parents still lay across from each other on the couch with their books, the way they always had, and filled each other’s wineglasses. At school, though, it sometimes made things tough for Laura. Her friends tended not to read those magazines, but some of the teachers did. It was hard to put a finger on it: something pitying about the way Mr. Karstens, their physics teacher, looked when he asked about homework she hadn’t finished; Miss Posthuma, in English, who never looked at her directly and always started shuffling papers around on her desk when Laura came up to ask about some British or American novel on their required list. You couldn’t really know for certain, there might have been other reasons too. Mr. Karstens was short, and short men often don’t like pretty girls. Miss Posthuma, as David once put it, was “clearly a reject, as a specimen of the female sex.” They had all laughed at that. “A specimen that should never have made it out of the factory.” Her homeroom teacher had called her aside one morning and asked if there was anything she wanted to talk about. “Your grades are generally quite good,” he said, “but sometimes you seem a little absentminded in class. Are you doing okay, or is there something you’d like to talk to me about?”

Her homeroom teacher was also their history teacher. His name was Jan Landzaat, and he had a friendly, not-unhandsome face, but his teeth were a bit too long. He was one of the more easygoing teachers, he would talk to you off the record, as though the two of you were on an equal footing. He was also one of the few teachers who came to class in jeans and a sweater; most of the others preferred sport jackets and ugly gray or light-brown slacks made of some barely definable synthetic material, with a sharp crease down the front of them. Those teachers probably thought this colorless outfit lent them a kind of natural authority in the classroom, but for the students it only undermined their credibility. How could someone who dressed like that, someone obviously so oblivious to the devastatingly ugly, actually have anything interesting to say about distant countries, exotic species, or writers at home or abroad? In class you always tried to look at a spot beside them or above their head, and generally maintained the greatest possible physical distance between yourself and the teacher in question. Whenever that distance was reduced, for example, when you had to come up to the front of the class, you couldn’t help but notice that they emitted a peculiar odor, like wet clothing kept in a bag too long. Some of them had horrible breath too, that smelled like dead flowers in a vase, or, as in the case of Mr. Van Ruth, the math teacher, as though he had mashed a whole cheeseboard between his teeth the night before.

Laura looked at the fresh, boyish face of her homeroom and history teacher, tanned above the collar of his burgundy fisherman’s sweater, and wondered whether it could really be, whether there was a real possibility that she could trust this man; that she could tell him that her absentmindedness had to do partly with the sport coats, the slacks, and the stench of rotten water in a vase.

“Is everything all right at home, for instance?” he asked.

“What do you mean, Mr. Landzaat?” she asked, to win time; she knew exactly what he meant, of course, she was only disappointed to find that her easygoing homeroom teacher apparently read the same magazines as his ugly, stinking colleagues.

“Listen, why don’t you call me Jan?” he said.

Was everything all right at home? It was a question she’d asked herself too in recent weeks and months. Yes, her parents were nice. Nice people, that’s what everyone said, from her friends and classmates to the parents of those same friends and classmates — and even some of her teachers. The teachers fell into two categories: those who thought it was rather interesting to have the daughter of a famous TV host in their class, and those who openly broadcast the message that she shouldn’t expect to get better grades just because her father was a celebrity. The former category sometimes had her stay after class, supposedly to talk about her homework or some paper she had to write, but in fact to have her give them a glimpse of the world of television. The second category, understandably enough, hated everything that fell outside the bounds of the middling. Laura sometimes suspected them of giving her bad grades on purpose, but she could never prove it. The magazines talked about what her father earned each year. An annual salary that a teacher would probably have to work for half their life to earn…or their whole life, come to think of it. At the start of the new school year, the geography teacher asked all his students where they had spent their summer vacations. Laura had started in enthusiastically about the trip she and her parents and younger brother had made across America in a camper. From the East Coast to the West Coast. Halfway through her description of the big waves and the surfers off the beach in Malibu, the geography teacher had interrupted her. “Perhaps we should give your classmates a chance to tell us about their vacations, Laura. We haven’t all taken a big, long trip, not like you.” Then he took his eyes off her and looked around the class. “Is there anyone who simply spent the summer in our own, beautiful Holland?”

Mr. Landzaat smiled with his lips closed. “Only two weeks of school left. You looking forward to the vacation?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“And what’s your family going to do? Where are you going?”

Earlier in the year her parents had bought a house in France, in addition to the one they already had in Terhofstede. The new house was in the Dordogne. They would spend most of July and August there, but before that they were going to Cuba for two weeks. In the last week of the vacation she would go for the first time with her friends and without her parents to Terhofstede.

“We’re not really sure yet,” she said. “Maybe we’ll stay in Holland and go camping. Or go to France,” she added quickly, because “stay in Holland and go camping” sounded a little too far-fetched for a family with her father’s income.

“Oh, yes, France! Now that you mention it: Do you already know which field trip you want to take?”

In late September, all the junior classes were going on a field trip. You could choose from a week of kayaking in the Ardennes, a week in West Berlin, or a week in Paris. So many students had signed up for Paris that they were going to have to draw lots.

“Paris,” Laura said. “But I don’t know whether that’ll happen. You know about the lottery, I guess, Mr. Landzaat?”

“Sure,” he said. “And call me Jan. I have good news for you, actually. I’m one of the three chaperones going along to Paris. The lottery has to be impartial, of course, but there are always a couple of candidates who, in view of their academic performance, might be better off spending a week in the Ardennes, just to whip them into shape.”

Had he winked? It happened so fast — a barely perceptible fluttering of the eyelid — that Laura thought for a moment she had imagined it, until he winked again.

“You have to keep this to yourself, Laura,” he went on. “But we select certain students in advance. The lottery comes after that. Are you particularly fond of kayaking?”

She shook her head. “Not particularly.”

“Fine, then I’ll make note of that.” He rummaged a bit through a pile of papers on his desk. “The other teachers who are going along are…that woman who teaches English, what’s her name again?”

“Miss Posthuma.”

“Right, Posthuma…and the third one is Harm. Harm Koolhaas, social studies. He’s okay. He had no problem whatsoever with giving the lottery a little helping hand.”

Laura was seventeen now, as her father had rightly noted. Grown men turned their heads and whistled as she walked down the street. It could be. It was possible. Jan Landzaat, history teacher at the Spinoza Lyceum, was openly flirting with her. She barely had to do a thing. It wasn’t like being an actress who tries to get a role in a movie by going to bed with the director. It might’ve seemed that way a little, but only vaguely. It was actually something very different, she told herself. Jan Landzaat was not unattractive, he probably thought so too. There were rumors. He was new here, he’d only started at the Spinoza this year, before that he had taught at the Montessori Lyceum. There was a lot of contact between the students at both schools: friendships, relationships, they went to each other’s school parties. The rumors spread quickly, the way rumors usually do, with a kind of snowball effect. The Montessori had almost six hundred students, the Spinoza more than eight hundred. At the top of the hill the snowball was still very small and fit perfectly in the two hands that formed it and then let it roll; halfway down the slope it had already gathered so much snow that nothing and no one could slow it down. It started with the story that the Montessori Lyceum had suspended Jan Landzaat because he had been involved with one of the senior girls, then the story went on to say that the two of them had had plans to get married: the history teacher, people said, had been about to leave his wife and two little children. Then it was only a small step to Jan Landzaat’s wife coming home and finding the two of them on the couch, to Jan Landzaat’s wife barging into the classroom in tears to confront the teacher with his adultery — in the scene at the teacher’s home, in Laura’s imagination, his pants had been down around his ankles and the girl was the first to see the wife standing in the doorway, while he himself hadn’t noticed a thing. She had tapped him on the shoulder to warn him, but he’d gone on licking her throat for at least another thirty seconds. In the classroom scene the wife was toting a rolling pin, like in a comic strip or a B-movie, Mr. Landzaat had to climb out the window to avoid a beating. The rumors reached their zenith with stories about more than one girl filing complaints against the history teacher for pawing them. That was about a month after he started work at the Spinoza Lyceum. After that, someone — no one could remember exactly who — noted that it would be awfully strange for the Spinoza to simply hire a teacher who had committed such serious offenses at his former school. And just as they had gone from bad to worse, the rumors now turned and went the opposite way. If the worst was unthinkable, then the less worse must be based on falsehood too.

The snowball did not melt, nor did it explode against a tree trunk; no, from then on it grew only smaller and smaller. Like in a film run back frame by frame, it rolled to the top of the hill again, where it finally ended up in the same hands that had originally formed it.

In the meantime, did the history teacher’s reputation suffer under all this? Not really. At least not among the students. True or untrue, Jan Landzaat was indeed a more than averagely handsome fellow, or in any case no dirty old man; no one knew exactly how old he was, but he couldn’t have been much more than thirty. Laura had seen him one time with his wife, she had come in the car to pick him up on a Friday afternoon. She remembered how Mr. Landzaat had leaned down to kiss her on the lips. Then his wife had opened the back door of the car and two little children had climbed out, two little girls, whom he picked up and hugged in turn. A nice young teacher with an equally nice young family. What could be more natural than for a teacher like that to feel closer to his students than to his gray-mouse colleagues in their dull slacks and sport coats? The juniors and seniors were allowed to call him by his first name, the way they also did with Harm Koolhaas, the social studies teacher who was Jan Landzaat’s friend. Harm Koolhaas also acted more like an eternally young adult. But still, it was different with him. Rumors went around about him too, albeit of a very different nature than those concerning Jan Landzaat. Harm Koolhaas, they said, had no wife or girlfriend, and wasn’t looking for a wife or girlfriend either. He was careful not to blatantly favor the boys in his class, but you can smell something like that miles away, David said once. It wasn’t that the social studies teacher was compromised by his predilections: times had changed. But it remained a soft spot — in an emergency situation it was something one could push against or pull on, and keep doing so until something in him broke or tore.

Jan Landzaat had asked her how she was doing, whether everything was all right at home. For a moment, she had considered confiding in him. Considered telling him something about her father; the history teacher, after all, was an expert in the field of real or fabricated rumors. About the incident at the restaurant, for example, the moment when her father had leaned across the table to kiss her on the cheek. How he had gloated over people’s glances and the whispering — people who were not famous like him, people who had to go through life with an unfamous face. At the moment it happened she had been too bewildered to react, but later, in her room, she had played back the whole scene in her mind, over and over. Her father had enjoyed the fact (he found it fantastic) that those people might think something other than that he was there having a grilled-cheese sandwich with his nearly full-grown daughter. Without asking himself for a moment what Laura thought about it. And she saw the problem with her own attitude right away too. After all, wasn’t it childish of her to make such a big deal out of it? She imagined how her father would respond. Oh, sweetheart, did that bother you? I never meant it that way. But if it bothers you, I promise that from now on I will never make a public display of how much I love my daughter. Then he would laugh it off, the same way he laughed off the stories and pictures in the gossip rags. I’m not allowed to kiss my daughter anymore, he would tell her mother at the table. And then her mother would laugh out loud too.

For very different reasons, she couldn’t express her doubts about her father’s behavior to her best friend either. To Stella. Stella would have thought she was crazy. Your father looks at me in such a normal way, Stella had told her. The way you look at a grown-up.

“I’d really love to go to Paris,” she said. “West Berlin doesn’t appeal to me that much, and the Ardennes would kill me. Do you think it’s possible, you think I have a chance, Jan?”

And as she was calling her homeroom teacher by his first name for the first time, she placed her left hand on the tabletop, not far from the sheet of paper with the various field-trip destinations on it; not far either from the teacher’s right hand, the fingertips of which rested on the bottom of that sheet of paper. Well-tended fingers, Laura saw, no flaky skin, neatly manicured nails.

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Jan Landzaat said. “Like I said, some people deserve it more than others.”

She gave him only a few moments to let his gaze rest on her hand, then pulled it back from the table. With both hands she now tucked her hair behind her ears, then pulled it all the way back in a ponytail and shook it loose again.

With most boys, blushing started at the cheeks, but with Mr. Landzaat it was his neck that turned red first. Then it rose quickly from the collar of his burgundy sweater across his chin, around his mouth, and up to his forehead — like a glass being filled with pink lemonade. Maybe the blushing had started even lower, Laura thought, and therefore earlier, somewhere right above or right below his navel.

Today he would not get to see her hands again. She leaned forward a little and placed them on her thighs, close to her knees, so they were hidden from sight beneath the table. For the time being, Jan Landzaat would have to make do with the memory of the girl’s hand on the tabletop, maybe it would come to mind again when he went to talk to Harm Koolhaas and Miss Posthuma about which students should be exempted from the lottery — which students deserved more than others to go on the field trip to Paris.

23

As a matter of fact, Herman really didn’t help with the dishes. And when the table was being cleared he had to be egged on before he finally stood up with a sigh, piled up two or three plates, and took them, along with one single fork, one knife, and one glass, to the kitchen — then sank back down in his chair and lit an unfiltered Gitane.

There was nothing to be done about it, but the two girls were always the ones who started in on the dishes. Lodewijk usually dried, David was an old hand at cleaning the table; with a wet cloth he wiped and polished until the wooden tabletop gleamed as though it had never held a plate. Meanwhile, Ron and Michael saw to the floor, one of them wielding the dustpan, the other the brush, but that was pretty much it.

“Your turn, Herman,” Stella said on the third or fourth evening, when Lodewijk, for a change, had lowered himself with a sigh into the easy chair by the fire.

She was standing in the doorway, holding out a checkered dish towel. Herman glanced left and right, as though checking whether she was talking to someone sitting beside him. “I thought that’s why we brought two women along,” he said. “Why else? Can anyone explain that to me?”

But when he saw the look on Stella’s face, he slid his chair back anyway. “Only kidding. Ouch, my back!”

The first couple of days were sunny, but on the third the weather turned. Rain and wind. That evening they even lit the coal stove. Lodewijk had put on a white, knitted sweater and rubbed his hands together to warm them.

“So what’s wrong with you, anyway?” Herman said to him as he took the dish towel from Stella’s hand. “Are you sick or something?”

A thick book lay in Lodewijk’s lap, a book with a marker sewed into the binding. Lodewijk had a penchant for Dutch authors from before the war.

“Are you sick, or just too lazy to dry the dishes?” Herman said when Lodewijk didn’t reply. “I mean, I’m happy to take over for you, but the dishes will never be as dry as when you do it.”

Laura was still standing at the table with the last few dirty glasses in her hand; she saw Herman wink at her, but looked away quickly.

“I’ll come and inspect them later on,” Lodewijk said without raising his eyes. “And if I find even one drop on them, I’ll make you start all over again.”

Michael and Ron, busy applying dustpan and brush to the floor around the coal stove, both laughed. Lodewijk lifted his feet a fraction of an inch, so they could get under them.

There was a smile on Herman’s face, Laura saw, but his eyes were not smiling along.

“That sweater of yours, Lodewijk, is that made from sheep?”

“Baah,” Lodewijk said.

Laura took a step toward the kitchen, but couldn’t get by, not with Stella and Herman standing in the doorway.

“Did your mom knit it for you?” Herman asked. “Did she catch that sheep and knit it into a sweater?”

Laura came a step closer; as though by accident she knocked one of the glasses against Herman’s forearm. When he looked at her she raised her eyebrows and shook her head.

“Okay,” she said cheerfully. “Shall we get going?”

—

“What’s up?” Herman said as he took the first cup from the rack and slowly wrapped it in the dish towel. “Did I accidentally touch on a taboo here? Sheep? Knitting?”

Laura had closed the kitchen door behind them and held her finger to her lips. “It’s his mother,” she whispered. “She’s ill. Very ill.”

In a voice close to a whisper, she told Herman the gist of the story. Lodewijk’s mother had an operation six months ago. For a while the prospects had been decent, but now it seemed she had only a few months to live. Lodewijk’s father had died when he was eleven. He had no brothers or sisters. Which means he’s an only child too, Laura almost said, but caught herself just in time. Her main feeling was one of amazement — at herself, for realizing only now that she was here in the same house with two only children.

“Okay,” he said when she was finished; meanwhile, the plates, glasses, knives, and forks had piled up in the dish rack. Herman was still working on the first cup. “But that’s not good, of course.”

“No,” Laura said, but then she looked at him. “What do you mean?” she asked. “What’s not good?”

“That you guys protect him by not talking about his mother. I mean, I didn’t know about it. But if I had, I would have said the same thing just now.”

Despite herself, Laura felt her face grow hot. “It’s not like that, we don’t avoid talking about his mother,” she said. “We talk about her all the time. We ask him how she’s doing. Before the vacation started we all went to see her in the hospital. We brought her presents. Flowers. Bonbons and things. It turned out that she wasn’t allowed to have most of it, but it was the thought. The whole thing was pretty intense. His mother was all yellow in the face, I mean, I knew her when she was still healthy. All swollen up. Horrible. But we acted as normal as possible. We joked around and Lodewijk’s mother actually laughed with us, even though you could see that it was hard for her. Michael had made this thing for her, from two clothes hangers and a piece of wood, a thing she could put on the bed so she could read a book without having to hold it up.”

“It turned out she never read books,” Stella said. “Only gossip magazines. But anyway, like Laura said, it’s the thought that counts.”

“Oh, fuck,” Herman said; he folded open the dish towel. The cup was in it, its handle broken off. “Maybe I made it a little too dry,” Herman said. It was one of her mother’s favorite coffee cups, because it had belonged to her mother before that, but Laura couldn’t help laughing.

“What is it?” Stella looked over her shoulder. “Herman!” she said when she saw the cup and the broken handle in the dish towel. “What are you doing? Haven’t you ever dried dishes before? Look at this pile. Come on, get a move on.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Herman said; he looked at Laura and made a face. A childish face — like a little boy whose angry neighbor lady has just seized his soccer ball.

Laura half expected him to toss the broken cup into the garbage pail under the counter, but he didn’t. He placed the handle carefully in the cup and put it on a shelf above the stove, along with the round canisters of coffee, tea, and sugar. Then he took a plate from the rack and started drying it.

“What I meant to say was really something else,” he said. “The whole thing about Lodewijk’s mother is terrible, sure. But you shouldn’t make a taboo out of it. You all go to visit her in the hospital. Fine. But if you’re not allowed to joke about things anymore, then in fact you’ve already signed her death certificate. Generally speaking, parents are ridiculous creatures. If all you do is ask Lodewijk politely and worriedly about his mother’s health, then you’re not taking him seriously anymore, as the son of that same mother. What you’re really saying then is that you’ve already given up on her.”

“Yeah, they say that sometimes,” Stella said. “That it’s better for the survivors to look death in the eye. Not repress it.”

Laura couldn’t help sighing. Stella had a way of sprinkling conversations with secondhand psychological theories she got from her father. Usually misquoted, and always at the wrong moment.

“But, Herman,” she said, “you didn’t know that Lodewijk’s mother was seriously ill, but would you still have started in about his knitted sweater even if you had known? Do you mean that, really?”

Herman looked her straight in the eye; his look was no longer cold or tough, more like amused — naughty.

“Maybe I would have adapted the text a little,” he said. “I probably would have asked: ‘Lodewijk, who’s going to knit those disgusting sweaters for you when your mom’s not around anymore?’ ”

Laura held Herman’s eye and didn’t blink. How can you say something like that? That’s what she thought she should say right then, but what she was thinking was quite different. It had to do with what Herman had said earlier. Generally speaking, parents are ridiculous creatures. And also with something else he’d said, a few days ago on the train, when he used the gin to raise a toast to the death of his own parents. “Ridiculous,” that was the key word. Laura had always felt that her parents were nice and friendly. That’s what they were, wasn’t it, nice and friendly? Everyone said so, even her friends. You almost couldn’t ask for nicer parents. But sometimes those nice parents were a pain too. No, not a pain: they were ballast. A weight around your neck that made you walk around a little bent over all the time. Her famous father with his corny jokes at his daughter’s expense. Her mother sticking her head in the sand, so that she could have a glass of red wine with her husband on the couch at night. She couldn’t help it, but suddenly she felt jealous of Herman — jealous of his parents. Normal, tiresome, selfish, failing parents you could be angry at. Parents you could wish dead and forget about with a few slugs of gin. She was even a little jealous of Lodewijk. Lodewijk, who was already a half-orphan, and who would soon be rid of it all, of the never-ending nagging of parents.

Herman must have seen something in the way she looked. Something, a change in her expression, because he smiled at her, with his lips and with his eyes.

“They are disgusting, aren’t they, Laura?” he said. “Lodewijk’s sweaters?”

And she smiled back, it was no effort for her to smile back at Herman with her eyes, she knew that.

“Yeah,” she said. “Disgusting.”

24

On the last day of the trip, Herman surprised them with a meal he had prepared all by himself. Under the guise of a lone bike ride, he had gone to Sluis and secretly done all the shopping. When he came back no one was allowed into the kitchen. Herman said he didn’t need any help.

“It smells great!” Lodewijk called out from his chair beside the fire, while the girls set the table with glasses and plates Herman handed them through a crack in the kitchen door. “Can you give us any more information? Like what time we’re going to eat? We’re famished!”

But no answer came from the kitchen. It was almost dark when the door flew open with a bang and Herman came into the room, clutching the handles of a huge pan in his mittened hands. “Hurry up, fast, a trivet!” he said to Stella, the only one who had already pulled up a chair at the table.

“Come on!” he said. “What are you people waiting for? If it gets cold, it’s ruined.”

He disappeared back into the kitchen and returned carrying a platter with three smoked sausages, still in their plastic packaging with the brand name UNOX on them. “Scissors?” he asked Laura. “Are there scissors in the house?”

“Hotchpotch,” said Ron, who had already lifted the lid off the pan.

“Maybe more of a dish for a winter’s day,” Herman said. “But I figured, the weather being what it is…And the days will be getting shorter again soon anyway,” he added, disappearing back into the kitchen.

Stella dished it up, Laura cut open the plastic packages, and Herman returned with a frying pan half-filled with a sputtering-hot liquid.

“Look out, this is hot as hell,” he said. “Has everybody dug their little foxhole? The mustard’s in the kitchen. Michael?”

“Beautiful!” said Lodewijk, who had already started in. “Really, Herman. Fantastic.”

The day after Herman had teased Lodewijk about his sweater, they’d all gone for a long walk, first to Retranchement, then along the canal to the Zwin. At one point Herman and Lodewijk fell behind the others, and when Laura turned around she saw Herman put an arm around Lodewijk’s shoulder. Those two had become closer since that walk in a way that was clear to everyone. Herman asked about the books Lodewijk read and, on occasion, Lodewijk sneered at their classmates, “that bunch of illiterates” who barely read at all, or if they did, only the “wrong books,” which would end up on their required reading lists anyway.

“Be careful not to get any on you,” Herman said now to Lodewijk. “Under the circumstances, we wouldn’t want your mother to have to start knitting again.”

“You know, I think I will spill something on myself,” Lodewijk said. “Then at least I won’t have to wear this sweater anymore.”

At first, Laura had been amused by the way Herman and Lodewijk tried to outdo each other with ever-blunter jokes about Lodewijk’s deathly ill mother, but in the end it seemed to take on a strained quality — especially for Lodewijk. It was as though the brusque jokes fit Herman to a tee, like a sweater made to size, not a bit too small or too big, while with Lodewijk it was more like a pair of jeans that were really too tight for him, but that he wore anyway because he thought they made him look slimmer. Lodewijk had always been funny, but his humor was more of the wide-eyed sort, as though he was amazed by everything that happened. Now it was as though Herman had awakened this blunt side of his character.

“It really is delicious, Herman,” Laura said. “It has something…something…special. Onions?”

Herman was just in the process of dishing up a second helping, but he was the only one. He jabbed his fork into a big piece of smoked sausage and swung it onto his plate. “Garlic,” he said.

Laura watched as he cut the chunk of sausage in two, wiped it through the glob of mustard on his plate, and stuck it in his mouth. She had always thought hotchpotch with raw endive was kind of childish. A typical boy’s dish. The kind of thing boys could squeak by with when it came to cooking. Fried eggs, spaghetti and tomato sauce, chili con carne — hotchpotch belonged in that same category. It was the kind of thing that was almost impossible to ruin, but the boys would stand around in the kitchen for hours anyway, acting important, as though they were fixing a three-star meal.

“It’s one of my mother’s recipes,” Herman said. “With garlic. That’s the way she always made it.”

“Made?” Ron said.

“When she was still happy,” Herman said.

“There’s one of those traditional butchers on our street who makes smoked sausage from pigs that have always lived outside,” Stella said. “You can really taste the difference.”

“And what is it you taste, exactly?” Herman asked. “Mud? Shit?”

“No,” Stella said. “Just meat. Real meat. Not this chemical garbage.”

“I’ve seen those traditional butchers too,” Herman said. “And I’ve bought smoked sausage from them. Once, but never again. The ‘traditional butcher’ is perhaps the greatest misnomer of our age. And his smoked sausages along with it. That meat has all kinds of things in it: tendons, nerves, bits of crushed bone that get stuck between your teeth. And the whole thing packaged in a thick, tough skin that you end up chewing on for hours. They probably use the hog’s foreskin for that. No, I swear by Unox. Chemical garbage, my ass. It slides right down the gullet, the way smoked sausage should.”

Laura was half expecting Stella to come back at him with arguments about poison or environmental damage, about toxins that piled up inside the body when one ate factory-made food, but she did something different. She cut off a piece of the Unox sausage, jabbed her fork into it, and stuck it in her mouth.

“Now close your eyes,” Herman said, “and tell me what you taste.”

Laura shifted in her chair, she didn’t know exactly what was happening, but something was. Apparently she’d missed out on the fact that Stella had not yet tasted the smoked sausage, not until Herman had started talking about its chemical benefits. Now she watched as Stella chewed slowly, her eyes closed, and saw how Herman looked at Stella. He had never looked at Stella that way before. Laura felt her cheeks tingle, and she reprimanded herself silently. Not now! All week, Herman had treated Stella as though she was a bit naive, a naive and rather unworldly girl who never got further, during their walks and dinner-table conversations, than the deposition of dime-store profundities that she’d picked up from her father. That was all true enough. But Stella was also something else, something that Laura knew she herself was not. Stella was sweet. Perhaps even innocent. Stella could look at you in a certain way…Laura always had to lower her eyes or turn them away when her closest girlfriend looked at her like that. She had tried it in front of the mirror once: she had opened her eyes so wide that the tears came, she had thought about lovely, innocent things — but not in a million years did she come close to looking the way Stella did. No, Laura was not sweet. She was lots of other things — pretty, irresistibly so perhaps, although all too aware of her own irresistibility — but she would never be sweet, or innocent, or “vulnerable” (the fashionable word these days). More like the very opposite. Stella had actually said that to her after Laura told her girlfriend about the blushing history teacher, about how she had wrapped Jan Landzaat around her finger in order to secure a place on the field trip to Paris.

“When it comes to things like that, you’re a lot cagier than I am,” Stella had said. At first, Laura had objected to that qualification, because most of its connotations seemed negative to her. But later, at home, in front of the bathroom mirror again, she had to admit that Stella was right. She had smiled seductively at her mirror image, and now she saw it herself. “You definitely are a cagey one,” she said to herself out loud — then burst out laughing.

“You’re right, Herman,” Stella said now. She looked at him with her lovely, innocent eyes, Laura saw, and now she saw something else too. Stella beamed—there was no other word for it, it was like she was illuminated from inside by some invisible source of light or heat. “It tastes a lot better than I thought. How can that be?”

“I was just thinking,” Laura said. “When we get home, shall we all go to the hospital and visit Lodewijk’s mother again? Like, the day after tomorrow? Or else early next week?”

She might have been imagining it, but it looked as though Lodewijk froze for a moment inside his knitted sweater. She didn’t have much time to think about that, though. Herman and Stella seemed not to have heard, they were still looking only at each other.

“But school starts again next week,” Ron said.

“Well, so what?” Laura said. “We can go after school, right? When are the visiting hours? We’ll buy some nice things to eat and a book — a whole bunch of magazines,” she corrected herself quickly. “What do you think, Lodewijk? It’s a good idea, isn’t it?”

“She’s not in the hospital anymore,” Lodewijk said.

Now everyone, including Herman and Stella, looked at him.

“She’s at home,” Lodewijk said. “They can’t do anything more for her at the hospital. She told them she wanted to go home.”

“But…,” Laura began.

“The neighbor lady’s taking care of her now,” Lodewijk said. “At first I felt bad about coming along with you guys, obviously, but when I said I’d stay home my mother wouldn’t have it. She said I should just go and enjoy myself.”

“Jesus,” Michael said. “That was big of her.”

“You know what’s funny?” Lodewijk said. “Or no, not funny, more like ironic. That neighbor lady has lived in the apartment next door ever since we moved in, but we always thought she was a horrible old witch. Lived there all that time alone. No husband. No children. About sixty, I guess. And way too tall, maybe that was why, that’s what I always figured. A woman who’s two heads taller than you, no man would go for that. But whatever, right at the start, as soon as my mother fell ill, the neighbor lady offered to help. And she didn’t just offer to help, she was really there whenever you needed her. Since my mom came home, she’s even started cooking for us.”

“You see that sometimes,” Stella said, “that people who you don’t expect it from suddenly turn out to have a really warm heart.”

“And you know what else I think?” Lodewijk said. “It’s so weird. A kind of premonition. When I left last week, the way my mother looked at me. I was already at the door with my backpack on when she asked me to come and give her another kiss. Even though I’d just done that. She’s already so weak, but she threw that skinny, swollen arm of hers around my neck. She squeezed as hard as she could. ‘My sweet boy,’ she said. ‘My sweet, sweet boy.’ It was only when I got to the bus stop on my way to the station that I realized it. She was saying goodbye to me. She won’t be there when I get back. She wanted me to go away so she could die in peace. Like an old cat that crawls under the kitchen counter. So I wouldn’t have to be there when it happened. And at the bus stop I thought: I can still turn around and go back. I can stay with her. But I got on that bus anyway. I’m here with you guys, instead of with her. And so do I feel guilty all the time now? In some ways, yes. In other ways, though, I hope I was right. That she really will be dead when I get home.”

No one said a word. Stella, who was sitting closest to Lodewijk, laid her hand on his, but Lodewijk looked at Michael.

“Have you still got that bottle of gin around somewhere?” he asked. “I think I feel like something stronger than tea tonight.”

25

What the kitchen counter resembled most was the stadium field after a rock concert. Here there were no empty cans, though, no shards of glass and shredded sheets of black plastic, but filthy pans, plates, cutlery with the caked-on remains of mashed potatoes, scattered butt-ends of endive and globs of dried-up mustard — Herman hadn’t even thrown away the potato peels. But the garbage pail was still pretty much brimming over, Laura saw when she lifted the lid.

“That’s what you get when boys try to cook…,” she said, fishing a wooden spoon out of the garbage.

Stella had already pulled on the rubber gloves. “Oh well, it was a sweet thought,” she said. “What’ll we do, just start anywhere?”

After the boys had polished off the rest of the gin, Ron got his guitar and Michael came down with his saxophone. Herman had been sitting in the easy chair by the stove the whole time, his legs wide, smoking one Gitane after the other.

“I did the cooking,” he said. “Tonight I’m exempt from kitchen duty.”

At the first notes from Michael’s saxophone, Laura caught Stella’s eye and gestured to her to come into the kitchen.

“Did you really like that Unox sausage, or were you just pretending to?” Laura asked. She was standing behind Stella, a little to the left, so that she didn’t have to look her friend straight in the eye; she did her best to make her voice sound normal, but didn’t quite succeed.

“What do you mean, ‘just pretending to’?” Stella had moved all the plates and cutlery from the sink onto the counter and sprayed a stream of green detergent into the tub of hot water.

“You should have seen yourself,” Laura said. “And heard yourself. ‘Oh, that’s delicious!’ I mean, I know how you always look at every can and jar to see how much artificial flavoring has been added. Everyone knows that. No one believed you. Only Herman, maybe.”

“I was just trying to be nice.” Stella started in on the first plate — according to the same method as always, Laura knew: first she scrubbed off the caked-on remains with the scouring pad, then ran the dishwashing brush over the plate, and finally she rinsed off the suds under the cold tap that she left running beside the dishpan the whole time; glasses she held up to the light before putting them in the rack. “He doesn’t help out much, okay. He’s lazy, but he’s also not used to it, you can tell that. If you just ask him to help out, he does it, really. And cooking tonight, that was all his own idea. So then why sit around and whine about a Unox sausage.”

Laura took the first plate from the rack. She raised it to right in front of her eyes, examining it for a spot of endive or mashed potato that Stella might have missed — but found nothing.

“But there’s a big difference between not whining and acting as though you’re being served haute cuisine, I guess. And the look on your face when you said it…It was really too bad you couldn’t see yourself.”

Stella was running the brush slowly round and round the next plate, but now she stopped. She turned halfway and looked at Laura.

“Can I ask you something, Laura?”

It was one of those moments when you cross a certain line unawares, Laura realized only too late. Suddenly you’re on the other side and can’t go back. Laura would think back on this moment often, later, the moment when she, without knowing exactly how it had happened, found herself somewhere she didn’t want to be.

She could feel her face growing hot, and cursed herself. It had all gone too quickly. She knew the question that was coming next, and she knew that she could never lie as long as she was looking straight at Stella.

“Do you like Herman, Laura?”

Straight through the dish towel, Laura pressed her fingers hard against the edge of the plate she was still drying, but when nothing broke off, she dropped it instead.

“Oh, shit!” she said.

The plate didn’t break into dozens of shards on the tile floor, not the way she’d hoped. Instead, it broke neatly into three fairly even pieces, which remained lying at her feet.

“He’s too skinny for me,” she said, bending down to pick up the pieces. “And those rubber boots. I don’t know, but somehow I always find myself hoping that I won’t be there if he ever takes them off.”

She stood up, and now she did look Stella in the eye.

“He’s just not a boy for girls,” she said. “Not obviously, I mean. Not the first one you think of when you think about boys.” She didn’t blush when she said this — because it was the truth. “He’s not my type,” she added. “Maybe he’s yours. As far as I’m concerned, you can have him. Enjoy yourself.”

And then she really did have to turn away. She turned her back completely, then tried to take as long as she could to stuff the broken pieces of plate into the packed garbage pail.

26

As soon as they had gathered at the bus stop the next afternoon with their bags and duffels, it started raining softly. Only a drizzle at first, but a few minutes later they saw the rain rolling in curtains across the fields from the direction of Retranchement. There was no shelter for them to huddle beneath, they did their best to keep dry under the trees on the deserted village square. Laura closed her eyes and listened to the rain rustle through the leaves. She had gone upstairs early the night before, but barely slept a wink all night. Downstairs in the living room she’d heard Michael on his saxophone and Ron playing his guitar, punctuated occasionally by laughter, and also the sound of someone throwing up into a bucket in the little hallway between the kitchen and living room. At breakfast that morning Lodewijk had been quieter than usual, and after pushing away the plate of bacon and eggs David had made for them, he stood up with a groan and said, almost in a whisper, that he was going out for a breath of fresh air.

“Do you want me to go with you?” Stella asked.

Lodewijk closed his eyes and shook his head — a shake barely perceptible to the naked eye, followed by more groaning, as though the slightest movement caused him pain. “No, just leave me,” he whispered.

The attic was divided into three bedrooms, separated only by thin wooden walls. In other words, you could hear everything: snores, sighs, farts — and the friends always left the doors open till way past midnight in order to go on talking. The girls had a room to themselves; David, Michael, Ron, and Herman slept in the big room in two beds and on two mattresses on the floor. Lodewijk had the smallest room all to himself. It was only big enough for a single bed. Sometimes he would complain loudly that the others were making too much noise.

“Maybe there are people here who would kind of like to sleep!” he shouted — but he didn’t actually close his door.

It was almost light out when the others finally came upstairs. Laura turned to face the wall and heard Stella — or at least she assumed it was Stella — come into the bedroom, then the sound of a zipper: a drawn-out sound, the sound of someone doing their utmost to open a bag as quietly as possible.

Somewhere in the hallway or outside the door there was whispering, but she couldn’t make out what was being said — let alone by whom.

“She’s asleep,” Stella whispered back.

The zipper was closed again, the planks in the wooden floor creaked softly when Stella took the few steps that brought her to the doorway. Now Laura heard a soft squeaking, a sound she hadn’t heard that whole week, but she knew immediately what it was.

They’re closing the door! Except for the soft squeaking, she heard only the pounding of her own heart beneath the blankets. They’re closing the door so I can’t hear what they’re going to do…

With a short, dry click, the door closed.

Laura counted to ten, her heart pounding faster and louder, then rolled over slowly — the bed, too, creaked at the slightest movement.

Gray daylight was coming through the red-and-white checkered curtains of the attic window, touching the floor — and Stella’s bed, where her travel bag lay atop the blankets. Without making a sound, Laura lowered her feet to the floor. A few seconds later she was at the door and pressing her ear against the wood.

At first she could make out no distinct noises, then came a shuffling and the sound of one of the other doors opening and closing again.

“You want to take your bag with you, Lodewijk?” The voice was Herman’s, he didn’t seem to be trying to speak softly at all. “Maybe you still want to brush your teeth or something?”

“Shh!” That was Stella. Laura pressed her ear to the wood so hard it hurt; for a long time there was nothing, until suddenly she heard David’s voice.

“The bed all the way at the back, Lodewijk. The one that’s still all messed up, that’s Herman’s. Are you feeling any better, or do you want a bucket beside the bed?”

But there was no reply; a little later still the two doors closed, one right after the other, and then everything was still.

Laura remained with her ear to the door for another half hour, then went to the window and pushed aside the checkered curtains. It was fully light out now, over the garden lay a thin mist; in the distance, beyond the branches of the apple tree, the sky was turning pink and purple. Laura felt her eyes sting. Don’t, she said to herself, but her lower lip had already begun to tremble.

“Oh, goddamn it!” she said. “God, god, god, goddamn it!”

—

“You think that bus is really going to come?” Herman asked. “Or is it the way it always is with public transport, that they think: Aw, who’s going to take a bus on a day like today? You know what, let’s just stay in the garage.”

Laura watched as Herman wandered over to the bus stop, his hands in the pockets of his jeans; then she looked at Stella, who was acting as though she hadn’t heard Herman.

They were putting up a good front. At breakfast, too, Laura had watched for signals, for outward signs like blushing or bags under their eyes, or something much clearer than that, scratch marks or hickeys. But there was nothing. They acted normal — everyone was acting normal. Maybe that was it, she’d thought, that they were all doing their very best to act normal.

They were hushing it up. They were keeping it under wraps. It had been tacitly agreed that no one would talk about it. A tacit agreement among all those present, except for Laura. David had not given her even one meaningful or conspiratorial glance when she finally came down to breakfast, the last one to appear — a role usually reserved for him. In fact, he hadn’t looked at her at all, he had gone on much longer than necessary with smearing his slice of brown bread, first with butter, then with peanut butter. Laura heard the wood in her chair creak when she sat down — that’s how quiet it was — until Michael asked David to pass the butter. The silence and the acting normal could mean only one thing, and that was the conclusion Laura quickly drew: they were sparing her, at least they were trying to spare her, but precisely by sparing her they were confirming exactly what Laura was afraid of.

Or wasn’t that it at all? Here on the village square, doubt suddenly struck. Were the others all standing together, had they all moved away from her, or had Laura herself gone and stood a few yards from the biggest tree, the better to see Herman as he walked through the rain to the bus stop? She’d had less than two hours’ sleep, her eyes were half shut, and in the pit of her stomach something zoomed, an empty, hungry feeling, even though she’d eaten a bigger breakfast than usual. Could she be imagining the whole thing? Were her senses in a tizzy from lack of sleep, was she seeing things that weren’t there? After all, everyone had acted normal, at the breakfast table Herman and Stella had exchanged no more glances. Or did the absence of such glances point to the very worst? She didn’t know what to think. After breakfast everyone had gone to pack their bags, she had straightened up the house and mopped the floor, even Herman had helped out: he had carried the dishes the others had dried to the living room and spent a lot of time neatly arranging things in the crockery cupboard with the glass doors.

“Laura?” he had called out at one point.

And when she approached, her heart pounding, he held up a coffee cup for her to see; she had tried to look straight at him without lowering her eyes or averting her gaze — without bursting into tears.

“Hmm?” she said.

“The cup I broke while I was drying it? The cup that used to belong to your grandma?”

“Hmm?” she said again, because she hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about.

“I glued it. Good as new, isn’t it?”

—

Now Laura looked at her friends as they huddled under the tree. At Stella. Did Stella know about the cup? Or had Herman kept it a secret from her?

“What day is it today?” Herman shouted from the bus stop. “Saturday, right?”

Everyone turned to look at him. Everyone but Laura, because she had already been keeping an eye on him for the last five minutes. “On Saturday, the bus only comes once every three hours,” Herman shouted. “We’ve been standing here like idiots for half an hour.”

And then it happened. A car came from the direction of Retranchement. A green car, Laura had no idea what make it was, but that didn’t matter anyway, because Herman was already holding up his hand. He raised his thumb.

Later she would remember the whole thing like a movie played in slow motion, frame by frame, without any way to run it back.

The green car stopping. The window opening. On the passenger side. Two men in the car. Herman leaning down to look through the window. Herman holding up two fingers for all to see.

“There’s only room for two!” he shouted.

Here the film stopped completely, with all of them looking at each other.

“Stella!” Herman shouted. “Stella, don’t just stand there. Come on, let’s go!”

27

A little less than a month later, in the last week of September, the junior classes left for their field trips. That whole month Laura had done her best not to let on; not to David, Ron, Michael, and Lodewijk, but especially not to Stella. She did her utmost to remain Stella’s “closest friend,” hard as it was at times for her to listen to Stella’s stories about Herman; how much fun he was, what a great sense of humor he had, which movies and concerts they’d gone to, how their relationship had at first met with disapproval from her parents — who were now separated completely — but how Herman, for example, didn’t let himself be intimidated by her father, the psychologist. One time her father had reluctantly agreed to have Herman come along to dinner at the trendy restaurant where he took his daughter every two weeks, to help her get used to his new girlfriend, twenty years younger than he (and a former patient). At one point the conversation turned to choosing a profession, to what Stella and Herman wanted to do after they finished high school. Stella wasn’t quite sure, but said that in any case she wanted “at least four children,” upon which her father gave her another of his pitying looks.

“And you know what Herman said?” Stella said to Laura — it was around eleven o’clock, Stella had called her friend right after she came back from the restaurant.

“No, what?” Laura was sitting on her bed with her knees pulled up, eyes closed, chewing on her thumbnail, but there wasn’t much thumbnail left to chew.

“He said: ‘Now that’s what I call a clear plan. Large families, I’m all for them.’ And then he started talking about his own parents, about how depressing things were at home, how he couldn’t stand being the only child anymore, stuck in between all the bickering or, even worse, the long silences. He said: ‘When there’s a divorce, when the father goes looking for someone younger, for example, four children can turn to each other for support.’ And then he looked at my father and at Annemarie, that’s her name, Annemarie. I thought I was going to choke. But it was so good of him. Don’t you think? To dare to say something like that?”

“Yeah,” Laura said. “Ow!” She had bit into the exposed skin under her nail.

“Later on, Herman started talking about psychologists,” Stella went on. “About how it wasn’t really a profession at all. You don’t become a psychologist, he said, you either are one or you’re not.”

Laura was only half listening as she sucked on her bleeding thumb. Then Stella began telling her about Herman and kissing. Laura had closed her eyes even tighter when her friend told her that Herman was sort of clumsy in everything he did. “He’s so thin, too,” she said. “You can feel everything. But at the same time, he’s so sweet. You know, a while back we’d been messing around in my room for a long time, we went pretty far, my mother had gone out to see a play with one of her girlfriends and they could come home any moment, every once in a while we lay there and stayed quiet to see if we heard the door, and then I ran my hand over his hair in the dark and over his face and suddenly I felt something wet around his eyes. He’d just been lying there crying, without a sound. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked him, and you know what he said? He said: ‘Nothing. I was just lying here thinking about how happy I am.’ Don’t you think that’s sweet? I almost started crying too. Sometimes he acts tough and cracks those nasty jokes, but he’s really very sensitive.”

What Laura really felt like now was hanging up; she held her hand in front of her mouth so Stella wouldn’t hear her groan, but Stella just rattled on. That’s the way she always was on the phone: even if you didn’t say anything back, not even “yeah” or “no,” or even little grunts of confirmation, just so the other person knew you were still listening. Anyone but Stella, for example, would have asked if Laura was still there: Hey, are you still there? You still listening? Not Stella. Stella’s own voice — her own story — was enough for her.

Meanwhile, the story had meandered on to another evening, yet another evening when Herman and Stella had been alone at her mother’s house. How they had watched a movie on the couch, and how they had tried to go further, further than they had before, not just long, wet French kisses and petting, but really far.

“Sure, okay!” Laura suddenly responded to an imaginary voice. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

“He had his hand on my butt,” Stella went on. “And from there he moved his fingers up front. Real sweet, real slow, and I had his…I’d been teasing him there a little with my fingers, not quite tickling him, but I could tell by his breathing, we were probably both thinking that it might happen that night, but then suddenly — I’d move my fingertips up a little — suddenly I felt it, this sort of tremor went through his body, and then I felt it on my fingers…What did you say?”

“My father,” Laura said. “My father wants me to come down for dessert. I have to go now.”

“Okay, sleep tight.”

That was one of the advantages of Stella never listening. She also never objected to what you said: that eleven-thirty, for example, was awfully late for dessert. Sleep tight. She probably hadn’t even heard what Laura said.

—

On the fourth day of the Paris trip, after the requisite visits to the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and Versailles, they had dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant in the Quartier Latin and ended up with a little group at the hotel bar. Miss Posthuma hadn’t even gone along to the restaurant: after their endless walk through the gardens at Versailles she had said that she was “worn out,” that tonight she was going to “hit the hay” early — the same way she had the first three nights too. At the hotel entrance Harm Koolhaas had announced that he was going out for a stroll. When Jan Landzaat asked if he wanted him to come along, the social studies teacher said there was no need for that. “Just a little stroll along the Seine,” he said. “A little fresh air.” Laura had seen the two teachers wink at each other.

The six of them were sitting and standing around the bar; first there had been eight of them, but Lodewijk and Stella had gone upstairs around eleven. Mr. Landzaat ordered a Pernod, David and Herman were drinking beer, and otherwise there were only the two girls from the parallel junior class, Miriam Steenbergen and Karen van Leeuwen, both with a glass of white wine with ice on the bar in front of them. Laura wasn’t sure what to order, not until Jan Landzaat handed her his glass for a taste. Later she could no longer be completely certain what had come first, the glass with the unfamiliar beverage that tasted of a mixture of pears and anise at her lips and then on her tongue, or the thought of the hands of a ten-to-fifteen-years-older man on her body — the mouth with the long teeth against her mouth.

“I’ll have the same,” she said as she looked into the history teacher’s eyes — a long look, longer than normal in any case; she couldn’t see herself, of course, but she felt her eyes smolder, and Jan Landzaat did not look away. He looked back, long too, longer than might strictly speaking be appropriate for a teacher to look at one of his students.

“Un Pernod, s’il vous plaît,” he told the barman, without taking his eyes off her. For just a moment his hand rested on her forearm, quite quickly, then he pulled it back, but she knew the others must have seen it. Maybe not Miriam and Karen, who were busy talking to each other, but David and Herman for sure; ever since Stella had gone upstairs, Herman had been looking at her more — maybe she was imagining it, but even when she couldn’t clearly see him, she felt his gaze wander in her direction from time to time.

She had never thought of Jan Landzaat as a real possibility; he was attractive, the fact that he was married and had two young children formed no moral hindrance for Laura; how he explained or didn’t explain things at home was his own business. There had to be a kernel of truth to those rumors about his behavior at the Montessori Lyceum, otherwise they wouldn’t have existed, she told herself. The history teacher was a womanizer, even if Laura didn’t know the English word for grown men who felt attracted mostly to seventeen-year-old girls.

Jan Landzaat presented himself. The opportunity presented itself. That, in the end, was the primary but also the only reason why she took the elastic band out of her ponytail and shook her hair free; she would see how far things went, she thought, as she placed a cigarette between her lips and asked the teacher for a light.

She didn’t have to check to see whether the others had noticed. It was quiet at the bar, the conversations had lulled — between Miriam and Karen, but above all the conversation between David and Herman. All eyes were on her, she knew that.

28

The week after they got back from Paris, David suggested that he and Laura stop for a drink at an outdoor café in Vondelpark. “I need to talk to you about something,” he said.

They were on their way home from school; they often cycled back with a larger group as far as the corner of Stadionweg, where they would split up. David and Stella usually biked the last stretch together: Laura lived at the edge of the park, David in the city center, on Looiersgracht.

“What’ll you have?” David asked, trying to catch the waitress’s eye.

“Do they have Pernod here? Probably not.” Laura smiled at him a bit naughtily, but David didn’t smile back.

“I wanted to talk to you about that too,” he said.

Finally, they both ordered beer; Laura thought David would start in right away about her affair with the history teacher, but he didn’t.

“I’ve been thinking about Zeeland,” he said. “Actually, I wanted to ask you something. Ask you first, to hear what you think, and the others after that.”

“Well?” In two weeks’ time they were planning to go back to the house in Terhofstede, with the same group; this time, though, a few things would be different. Two days after they got back from the field trip to Paris, Lodewijk’s mother had died. And this would be the first time that a “couple” would be there: Herman and Stella.

“It’s your house,” David said. “Your parents’ house, but still. Mostly your house. However you look at it, it’s up to you to decide who goes along and who doesn’t.”

Laura didn’t say a thing, just looked around to see if their beers were coming.

“So what do you think about Herman and Stella?” David asked. “I mean, it was pretty weird, the way it went…at least I thought so. I mean, Herman’s my friend, but I thought the whole thing was out of line. That’s what I told him too.”

“What did you say to him?” Laura asked, suddenly concerned. She considered David her best friend, the kind of best friend you’d never get involved with romantically, and therefore all the more reliable. David was just a sweet guy, maybe a little too sweet; he always wanted to do the right thing by Laura, but despite all his good intentions it seemed as though he tried to protect her too much, the way a parent might shield a child from shocking or bad news. That made her feel claustrophobic at times, but she never dared say so.

“I told him he should have waited till we got back to Amsterdam,” David said. “With Stella, I mean. I thought it was out of line to do that in your house. In your parents’ house.”

“But why? What’s so out of line about hooking up with my best girlfriend?” Laura tried to make it sound as normal as possible — calm, collected, as though it made no difference to her — but there was no way she could get the underlying sarcasm out of it; David must have heard it too.

“Exactly that: your best girlfriend. I think that’s weird, you don’t do things like that. That’s not being respectful of other people’s feelings.”

Laura felt a sudden flash of heat at the base of her throat; she had to do her best now to make sure that heat didn’t reach her face. “What feelings? What do you mean?”

“Laura, I’m your best friend. There’s no need to try to fool me. I saw it with my own eyes. And I probably wasn’t the only one. The way you looked at Herman. How you tried so hard not to let anyone see that you liked him. I watched it happen, the way you completely fell apart when he and Stella—”

“Fell apart?” Laura felt the tears welling up in the corners of her eyes, she covered her face with her hands in an attempt to hide them from David. “What are you talking about?”

Then she actually started crying. David rose from his chair, then reconsidered and slid his chair around the table, a little closer to her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want…This is exactly what I didn’t want. Does Stella know what you think about this? How you feel, I mean? Have you two ever talked about it?”

“Oh, that fucking bitch!” Laura said. It was out before she had even thought about it — but it was precisely what she thought.

“Yeah,” was all David said; he raised his arm as though to put it around her shoulders, then let it drop.

“I wish she was dead,” Laura said. It was a thought that had never come up in her before, not that explicitly, but she sensed that some other force — some other voice — was expressing her feelings perfectly, without a single thought beforehand. In any case, it came as a relief, as though she had finally stuck a finger down her throat and vomited; the queasiness was over now. She stopped crying, wiped the tears from her eyes, and smiled at David. “I wished she was dead, for a while there,” she said. “It’s better now, actually.”

And David smiled back; that was what made him her best friend, Laura realized again, he didn’t say the wrong things, he didn’t say, for example, that you couldn’t say things like that about your best girlfriend.

“All things considered, it just seems wiser to me if Herman and Stella didn’t go along to Terhofstede this time,” David said. “I already hinted at that to Herman, but I haven’t said anything to Stella. Herman understood, I think. But of course it’s up to you.”

“What did he understand?” Laura suddenly felt icy inside — her crying jag seemed a thing of the distant past, centuries ago, as though she had never cried in her life.

“That it might be difficult for you. He hadn’t meant to hurt you, he said. If it bothered you, he was willing to stay home. That’s a possibility too, of course, that Stella goes along but not Herman.”

“Hurt me?” Laura spoke very quietly, she was completely in control, she told herself. She looked David straight in the eye. David, her “best friend,” but then a best friend who believed too fully in his own goodness — in his own good intentions. There was no way she could get angry at him, he would never understand that, but not being able to get angry at him made her even more furious. “What did you say to him, exactly?”

“Laura…” David slid his chair back a little, so he could get a better look at her. “Laura, I didn’t tell him anything except what was already clear as a bell. Everyone saw it. Herman’s not blind either. He understood right away, that’s what I thought was so good of him.”

So this was the price one paid for having a best friend, Laura realized. You also had to accept it when they ruined everything for you. Out of the goodness of their heart. Out of pity. She thought she really might have to vomit at any moment.

“I have absolutely no problem with Herman and Stella coming along,” she said. “Absolutely no problem whatsoever.”

“Laura…”

“Don’t ‘Laura’ me. It’s my house, isn’t that what you just said? My parents’ house? Okay, then Herman and Stella are very welcome there too. End of discussion.” She stood up, their beers still hadn’t arrived. “I’m going. See you at school tomorrow.”

29

They were sitting on his living room couch. Landzaat had his arm around her shoulders; on a low table at their feet was a bottle of red wine, two glasses, and a dish of peanuts.

“What do you feel like?” he asked. “A movie? Or shall we go get something at that restaurant we went to last time?”

It was the Friday evening before the fall vacation began. Laura and her friends would be leaving for Terhofstede the next day. That morning the history teacher’s wife had left with their daughters for a holiday park in the woods; he was going to join them there tomorrow.

“I don’t know,” Laura said.

It was the first time she’d been to his house, a house that in no way went against her expectations. For, in fact, she’d had no expectations at all. At least none that made a difference now: well-filled bookcases with hefty biographies of Alexander the Great, Napoleon and Adolf Hitler, a stereo installation with tall, black speakers, framed photographs of the Landzaats at a beach somewhere, Jan Landzaat building a sandcastle with a pail and shovel; also a few pictures of older people, their own parents probably, and a photograph of the teacher standing beside his wife on the stairs of some building, he in a suit and bow tie, she in an ankle-length bridal gown, both of them smiling.

“We don’t have to go anywhere,” he said. “We could just stay here.”

He hadn’t shown her the rest of the house. The bedrooms. She wondered whether she would get to see them, or whether he would try to limit her presence here to the couch. The bedroom, she decided; she wasn’t going to settle for the couch.

“I don’t know,” she said again.

The role of indecisive young thing fit her perfectly; let the older, more experienced male take the initiative. She lifted her legs up and tucked them under her, stuck the tip of her thumb in her mouth for a brief moment. “I’m kind of tired,” she said.

“You’ve barely had any wine,” the teacher said. “Are you hungry? I could fry some eggs, we can eat them here, then talk a little or watch some TV. Does that sound good?”

She shrugged. His fingers were toying with her hair now, close to her ear. It wasn’t unpleasant, but at the same time she suspected that he knew all too well what women and seventeen-year-old girls liked and didn’t like — or he’d picked it up from some magazine or book, the erogenous zones and how to tinker with them best. Jan Landzaat was an experienced lover, as she had noted on the two occasions when he had taken her to a hotel along the highway outside Amsterdam. Too experienced, maybe. Studiously experienced. He took his time, he was no slouch. He knew what he was doing, she had nothing specific to complain about, but still, it always felt more like gymnastics than ballet, more like a point-perfect exercise on the balance beam than a dance that drew you in, than movements that could thrill. He was patient, attentive, he waited for her — the first time there had been a few misunderstandings as he looked at her with big, questioning eyes, whether she was there yet, whether he himself could start in on the final cartwheel before the landing. Laura looked at the history teacher’s grimace of effort. She saw everything: a blue vein pounding on his left temple, the glow of the nightlight beside the hotel bed reflecting off the saliva on the long teeth in his half-open mouth, his somewhat-too-large Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as though he were struggling to swallow something — a chunk of meat, a herring — that was stuck in his throat. At such moments, doubt struck. At first she had been curious about the body of a grown man, but after a few times the teacher’s gymnastic routine seemed mostly ridiculous. She thought about Stella’s stories about Herman — about his clumsiness. In her sophomore year Laura had had a boyfriend, Erik, who was now no longer at the Spinoza Lyceum. They were both very young, of course, and one evening — they were sitting beside each other on the bed in her room, Laura had turned off the light and lit two tea warmers — he confessed to her that he was completely ignorant, that she was the first girl he had really kissed, and that he was embarrassed by his inexperience. Laura took his face between her hands and whispered sweet words in his ear. Comforting words. It didn’t make any difference, she thought he was sweet, he should just relax and surrender to her completely, then everything would turn out fine. It was glorious, she thought, Erik’s tender, virginal fumbling; when she closed her eyes she thought of a snowy landscape, a landscape without footsteps, a gentle rise covered in fresh snow where no one had walked before, while she led his hands and fingers to where she wanted them. Other boys had followed, boys like Erik, who all thought that girls like Laura — girls who were much too pretty — would be put off by boys who didn’t know the first thing about sex. And, one by one, she reassured them. Let me do it. Close your eyes. Do you like it when I do this? And this? You don’t have to swill your tongue around like that, it’s not homework, look, just the tip, like this, and real softly, come on, take some of this off, this only gets in the way. She helped them take off their sweaters and T-shirts, to loosen their belts — sometimes it made her feel like a mother undressing a little child, but that only made it more exciting.

—

“I have to go to the toilet,” Laura said; she put down her glass of wine beside the plate of peanuts.

“End of the hallway, second door on the left,” Mr. Landzaat said.

The toilet turned out to be a full bathroom as well. Before sitting down she inspected her face in the mirror above the sink. This evening she had gone for the no-makeup face, she saw the red blotches on her cheeks, probably from the wine. No personal items were out in the open, she would have to look inside one of the cupboards or drawers to find out which perfumes and creams the history teacher’s wife used. In a glass on the sink was one toothbrush — the toothbrushes belonging to Mrs. Landzaat and the girls were doubtlessly in a glass too at the moment, but in the bathroom of a cottage in the woods.

Laura hiked up her black leather skirt, lowered the toilet seat, and sat down. She closed her eyes tightly and suddenly wasn’t sure she’d be able to let Mr. Landzaat lead her to the bedroom later on. She stood up, flushed the toilet just for appearances, and looked again at her red, blotchy face in the mirror. She longed intensely for clumsiness, for boys like Erik — like Herman.

A hair had fallen in the sink, she saw as she opened the tap and splashed cold water on her face. A long, black hair, her own. Mrs. Landzaat was a blonde. After a bit of a struggle, Laura succeeded in sliding the black hair away from the wet bottom of the sink and picking it up between her fingers.

She was about to toss it into the wastebasket under the sink when she stopped and reconsidered. Actually, it wasn’t so much an act of reconsideration as a flash of inspiration, maybe even a brilliant one.

Holding the long, black, wet hair between her fingertips, Laura looked around the bathroom. On the inside of the door, two terry cloth kimonos hung on a hook; Mrs. Landzaat had probably figured that the kimono was too bulky for a week’s stay in the woods. When Jan Landzaat entertained underage students here at home, nice girls who thought he was a cool teacher, he probably — after some playing around in the shower — let the underage student put on his wife’s kimono, only to peel it off her again in the bedroom.

Laura hesitated between the pocket sewn onto the kimono and the collar, then slid the hair under the collar. Sooner or later Mrs. Landzaat would turn up the collar of her kimono and pull out the hair. A pensive look would appear on her face.

“Laura? Are you all right? Everything okay?”

His voice outside the door; how long had she been in here, anyway? She stepped over to the sink and turned on the tap.

“I’m coming,” she said. “Be there in a minute.”

And then, as she pulled back her hair and looked at her own smile in the mirror, she had another idea — an idea that was perhaps even more brilliant than putting the black hair under the collar.

She hadn’t put on any makeup, but she had left her earrings in; little earrings, two gleaming gray pearls her mother had given her a few months back, for completing her sophomore year with such solid grades.

She took off one of the earrings. She leaned down and put it on the floor behind the toilet. Then she stuck a finger down her throat.

“Laura?” Jan Landzaat called from outside the bathroom door. “Laura?”

“I’m not feeling very well,” she said when she opened the door at last. “I think I’d better go home.”

30

Herman came up with the plan.

“We walk to the Zwin and back,” he proposed on the third day. “And we don’t say anything. Not a word. If we want to tell each other something, we do it with sign language. But let’s try to keep that to a minimum too.”

It was around three in the afternoon, they were having a late lunch of bacon and eggs. Miriam Steenbergen, the newcomer to the club, had just a bowl of muesli with fruit.

“And the one who says the least, wins,” she said. “For every word, you get three penalty points.”

Herman didn’t even bother to look at her. “It’s not about points, Miriam. It’s not a contest. It’s about the experience. What happens to you when you’re not allowed to talk? When you walk out of doors and the only thing you hear is the birds? Birds, the wind, and the sound of the waves.”

Miriam had only recently become David’s girlfriend; a week before the fall vacation started, he had called Laura.

“Who is it exactly?” Laura had asked, because she couldn’t connect the name to a face.

“Blond hair, almost to her shoulders,” David said. “She’s in the parallel class. Friends with Karen.”

“Sorry, David,” she said. “I really don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Remember the field trip to Paris? When we were all at the hotel bar. When you and Landzaat…they were both there too. Karen and Miriam.”

Because Laura still couldn’t put a face to the name, and because David couldn’t see her anyway, she shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Oh, her,” she said. “What about her?”

Then David started in on a long story, a story with lots of details — so many details that Laura knew right away that things were serious between David and this faceless girl. First he’d gone to the one café, then to another, and then back to the first one and was just about to go home — when Miriam suddenly wandered in. He had never really noticed her before, he admitted (which helped to explain why Laura had also been unable to link any physical attributes to the name Miriam), but on that particular evening, four days ago now, her face had suddenly been “beaming,” he didn’t know how else to put it — and while she was beaming their eyes had met.

Laura knew exactly what he was talking about. Last summer she had seen Stella beam like that, but she didn’t tell David.

“You always figure it’s a cliché from some romantic movie,” David said. “Until it happens to you. The light had a lot to do with it; she came in out of the darkness into the light of the café, then semidarkness when she came over to me, but the light never left her face, like the heat of a fire, the glowing ashes after the fire is already out, I mean.”

At this point Laura couldn’t suppress a yawn, she covered the mouthpiece with her hand so David wouldn’t hear, but that probably wasn’t even necessary. He was so caught up in his own story — it had already been going on for at least fifteen minutes, Laura reckoned, and seeing as they hadn’t even made it out of the café yet there was no end in sight. Still, she didn’t dare to interrupt her friend or tell him to get on with it; David was a kind and quite handsome boy, but for as long as Laura had known him he had never had a girlfriend. Deep in her heart, she knew why; it had to do with the way David shrank from every form of physical contact. A shock went through his body whenever you simply laid your hand on his forearm; at more intimate moments of contact — an arm around his shoulders, a hug, a kiss on the cheek — he would shudder as though you had dropped an ice cube down the front of his shirt. After that happened a few times you stopped touching David, to keep it from happening. David and a girl together, that thought had never occurred to her before, it was something you almost didn’t dare consider, almost as unimaginable as what your parents did in bed.

“So I was thinking,” David said fifteen minutes later, after the story had ended in Miriam’s room. “It’s up to you, Laura, it’s your house, but I was thinking: it’s all so new, I can’t just leave her alone now.”

Laura didn’t help him, she didn’t say: But there’s no reason to leave her alone, just bring Miriam along. For David’s sake she was pleased, with his infatuation and his new girlfriend, but on the other hand she didn’t feel like it at all, a new face — especially not a face she still couldn’t place. “So what I wanted to ask is whether Miriam could come along to Terhofstede,” David went on, at the moment when the silence between them had started to grow painful.

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Laura said. “I mean, you haven’t known her that long. None of us know her.” She hated herself for being so purposefully obtuse, but on the other hand she wanted nothing more than to hear her best friend thrash about.

“Maybe you’re right,” David said. “Maybe I should just stay here. With Miriam.”

“Don’t be such a jerk,” Laura said, hoping that David wouldn’t hear the shock in her voice. “Of course you’re coming along. And if this Miriam is so important to you, then she’s coming along too.”

Two days later, in the school cafeteria, she saw David and Miriam together for the first time. Miriam was, above all, short, with a round face that could best be described as “open.” And — she had to hand it to David — she really did beam. “Hi!” Miriam said to Laura. “David has told me so much about you, I bet we’re going to be good friends.” And then Miriam leaned over in order to — as Laura realized too late — kiss her on both cheeks.

“Yeah,” Laura said as she — there was no way around it now — kissed Miriam back. “About you too.”

For a moment she wondered whether all the things David had told his new girlfriend about her also included her affair with Landzaat, the history teacher, but the next instant she realized how ridiculous it was to wonder about that. Everybody knew about it, after all, everybody except the teachers. But that was what teachers were there for, to have no idea of what was really going on at a school.

The affair had lent her a certain status, albeit not always in a positive sense. Sometimes she picked up on the things that were being said behind her back. According to some of the boys, she was a “slut,” and some girls called her a “whore,” but most students thought it was pretty much “cool” and “fresh” for a girl to turn up her nose at her contemporaries and seduce a grown, experienced man. A married man at that. A blackmailable man. In fact, no one doubted that it would end that way, that the revelation of Laura’s relationship with Landzaat would destroy his marriage.

From the start, what irritated Laura most about David and Miriam was that they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Here, in the middle of the cafeteria, where at least five hundred students were at that moment sitting or standing to eat their sandwiches, ordering coffee and sweet iced cakes from Arie, the cafeteria manager, David was plucking at the back of Miriam’s purple sweater, then putting his arm around her waist and pulling her up against him. Miriam, in turn, never let go of his sleeve, holding him by the wrist and caressing the palm of his hand with her fingers. Every twenty seconds she turned her head to one side and planted a little kiss on his throat, which was as high up as she could get without standing on tiptoe.

It annoyed the hell out of Laura, she had no desire to be around all this plucking and pecking. It reminded her of a thirsty man coming in from the desert, a castaway who had spent weeks bobbing around on a raft, or, even more, of an emaciated stray, a starving dog that wolfs down two pounds of hamburger, plastic packaging and all, without taking a breath — and vomits it all back up the next minute. She looked at Miriam and asked herself what was with this little, beaming girl, whether she had been out in the cold for too long as well and had a lot of catching up to do, or whether she was just stringing David along. Not much chance that she had ever been with a boy who was as wild about her as he was, Laura decided, and was about to walk away when Herman suddenly joined them.

“Hey,” was all he said as he looked from David to Miriam, and he took a step back when Miriam tried to kiss him on the cheeks too.

“Miriam may be coming with us to Terhofstede,” Laura said, noticing the way Herman’s eyebrows shot up for a moment.

“Well,” he said. “That’s nice…for David.” His gaze crossed Laura’s — more than a meaningful look, it was above all one of desperation. Do something! his eyes begged her. Come up with something!

“We still have to discuss the sleeping arrangements,” Laura said. “I mean, is it…have you talked to your parents about it? Do they know that there will be boys going along?”

“My father’s a gynecologist,” Miriam said, as though that explained everything. “And my mother has already met David, she thinks he’s darling.”

Then they started kissing, not just a little bit, but the whole hog, they pulled out all the stops. Through their cheeks Laura could see their tongues at work, and she in turn tossed a desperate glance back at Herman.

“Can I get you something?” Herman said, nodding toward the counter at the back of the cafeteria. “Coffee? I hear there’s a special on pink glacé cakes today.”

Beside the exit to the bike shed, they found a vacant table.

“Yes, it’s certainly nice for David,” Herman said. “But that’s about all you can say for it.”

“Yeah,” Laura said. She tugged at the plastic wrapper of her glacé cake, but when it didn’t tear right away she laid it unopened on the table.

“Did he drive you nuts too?” Herman asked. “With that story about how he met her?”

Laura burst out laughing. “Yeah! You too?”

“First one café, then the other, then back to the first one…I thought I was going out of my mind. But okay, he’s my friend. When a friend’s talking, you let him finish, even if it’s all a load of bullshit.”

“But still…I’m happy for David, really, but…”

“Maybe he should have shopped around a little longer. Let’s be frank about this, Laura. We’re glad our friend has a girlfriend, but — tell me if I’m out of line — there’s something about this Miriam that is incredibly irritating. I could see it on your face right away, just now, when I came up to you guys.”

“Yeah, I don’t know exactly what it is. Maybe that she tries to act so nice and spontaneous. The way she tries to kiss everyone right away. The way she hangs on David.”

“He hangs on her too. We can’t blame the poor girl for that.”

“No, but right in the middle of the cafeteria? I don’t know, it seems so…so childish.”

She pulled the glacé cake toward her. Herman took hold of the plastic and tugged on it gently. “May I?” he asked.

“Go ahead, I’m really not hungry.”

“No, that’s not what I meant…” He took the plastic packaging between his teeth and tore it open. “Here you go.”

“I don’t feel like having a girl like that around the whole week in Zeeland. But I can’t tell David that, can I? What I don’t get is that he can’t figure it out for himself.”

Herman shrugged. “What do you expect? Love is blind. Young people in love. The most glorious thing there is.”

Laura couldn’t help laughing, but when she looked at him he looked away and pretended to be absorbed in the packaging of his own cake.

“Yum,” he said. “You know, there’s no expiration date on these things anywhere. Maybe they’re timeless cakes. How does yours taste?”

Laura didn’t answer, she waited patiently until he looked at her again.

“I was thinking,” Herman said, laying his cake back on the table. “I talked to David about it a bit, and he thought it was a good idea. But then, in the state he’s in now I don’t know whether he’s any good to me. That’s why I wanted to approach you about it.”

Finally, he looked at her. And Laura looked back.

“What?” she said.

She clasped her hands behind her head, leaned back in her chair, and shook her hair loose. Then she pulled it up into a sort of knot and let it fall again. Meanwhile, she kept looking at Herman — maybe she was imagining it, but it looked as though his face had turned a fraction of a shade darker.

“So I was just thinking,” he said quickly, sliding his cake back toward him. “The last time in Zeeland. In fact, we didn’t do anything then. I mean, not really anything. We made those drawings for Lodewijk’s sick mother, of course, but when we were all doing that together it occurred to me: This is fun, isn’t it, making something together like this? Voluntarily? Doing it for Lodewijk’s mother, after all, was really sort of volunteer work, right?”

Laura was only half paying attention, she wondered whether maybe she should try something else with her hair, but decided to listen anyway.

“But Lodewijk’s mother is dead now,” she said.

“Exactly. That’s what I mean. There’s nothing we have to do. But that’s no reason for us to do nothing. Maybe, in fact, it’s the only real reason to do something.” He pushed the cake away again, to the edge of the table, and then halfway over it, until it was just teetering on the edge. “My idea was this: We don’t take anything along with us to Zeeland. Nothing that isn’t our own. No music, no magazines or newspapers, no books, only our own things. Michael’s saxophone, Ron’s guitar, Lodewijk’s bongo drums if need be, and I’ll bring my movie camera. I bought this really simple camera about six months ago. Eight millimeter, made in East Germany. It doesn’t even have a battery. You have to wind it up. Anyway, here’s the idea: we don’t read anything, we don’t listen to anything, there’s no TV in the house anyway, so that’s easy. We don’t let ourselves be influenced by the outside world. We go shopping and buy enough for three days. And then we see what happens. What happens inside your head when you’re not allowed to do anything. No, wait a minute, I’m putting that wrong: we’re allowed to do anything, we’re just not allowed to fall back on things from outside. People get bored and pick up a book, but isn’t it a lot more interesting to see what happens with you when you don’t pick up a book? Oh yeah, and Lodewijk has a tape recorder. We’ll take that along too. We can record things if we feel like it. Music, conversations, stories. I think it will be great. An experiment. Maybe it will bomb and we won’t do anything at all. But even then you can’t really say that it failed. Then the conclusion of the experiment is simply that, apparently, we don’t do anything.”

Herman brought his finger down hard on the edge of the glacé cake, which shot up high and flipped a few times, but before it could fall he plucked it out of the air.

“Oh!” Laura said.

“That’s a trick,” Herman said with a grin. “You can learn a trick if you practice long enough. But creating something new, you can’t learn that, you only find out about it by doing it.”

He took the cake between his fingers and squeezed it until it was completely flat inside the packaging. “Sorry,” he said, “I don’t mean to sound like someone who knows how it all works. Like a teacher.” He looked straight at her as he spoke those final words, and now it was a struggle for Laura not to blush. “So what do you think? David thought it was a good idea. Back before he fell in love.”

“So what are you going to film?” Laura asked.

“What?”

“What you’re going to film. I didn’t even know you had a camera. I guess you’ve already filmed some stuff.”

“Oh, lots of things. With David. For instance, I went over to the flower stand — there’s a flower stand across the street from my house — and David filmed me from the window. We live on the third floor — and I waited until a couple customers came along and I fell onto the ground in between all those people. It was really great, I’ll show it to you sometime. Those people don’t see the camera, and I act like I’m in a bad way, I have a seizure, a sort of epileptic fit, and then they help me to my feet and I just walk away. You see the people and the man who runs the flower stand talking to each other, like: ‘What was that all about?’ Fantastic!”

Laura tried to picture it, Herman having fits in front of a flower stand. She looked at his twinkling eyes and laughing face and she couldn’t help herself, she started laughing too.

“Oh Jesus!” she said. “You mean you just went and did that?!”

“We did it one time with Miss Posthuma too. During study hall. David went up to her desk, supposedly to ask something. And I sat all the way at the back with the camera. She had no idea at all that she was being filmed. So David acts like he’s going to ask her something, and she looks up at him, and then David slowly sinks to the ground and starts flapping his arms and legs around, having a spaz attack. Oh, it’s so…I keep the camera on David for just a few seconds, then I zoom in on Posthuma’s face. Priceless! That lady is so clueless! No, she’s not even really clueless, it’s something else. It’s the face of someone who has never experienced anything in her whole life, and now all of a sudden she has. And we got that on film. For posterity.”

“Oh, you guys are terrible!” Laura laughed. “It’s pathetic!”

“You’re right. It is pathetic. But not because of what we did. It was already pathetic, even without us. What time is it anyway?”

“What?”

“Next period we’ve got that physics exam, right? Did you work on it?”

Laura felt her face grow hot, while her stomach seemed to fall a few yards, like in a Ferris wheel going down. “Is that today? I thought it was after the fall break!”

Herman looked at her, then put down the glacé cake and laid his hand on hers. “Don’t sweat it. You can call in sick, right? Then just make it up after the vacation.”

“Karstens isn’t going to believe that. I rode into the bike shed this morning at the same time he did. He even said good morning.”

“You could suddenly get sick. Even deathly ill.” He grinned, took his hand off hers, and held up the package with the cake in it. “From eating a glacé cake that was long past its expiration date, for instance?”

Laura tried to laugh, but only half succeeded.

“Oh, I’m such an idiot!” she said. “I wrote down the wrong date in my diary. And it’s not the first time.” She looked at her watch. “Five more minutes…What are you doing, Herman?”

Herman had pulled the plastic wrapper off his cake and was holding it in front of her face. “Take a couple of bites. Then stick your finger down your throat. Throw it all up. Here, on the table. Then I’ll help you down to the concierge’s office, to report that you’re sick. I promise.”

Laura stared at him. He smiled at her, but it was no joke, she could tell by the look on his face, he really meant it.

“But…” But I’m too chicken to do that, she almost said, but that suddenly seemed like a bad idea. “What about you?” she said instead. “Then you’ll be too late for the exam too.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Herman said. “I didn’t study for it either.” He leaned over, picked up his backpack, and put it on the table. “On purpose,” he went on. “I wrote down the right date. But then I thought: of all my exams, this may be the best one not to study for.”

“Oh?” Laura’s expression invited further explanation, or at least tried to, but at that moment she was more concerned about the test and what she was going to do. Karstens, the physics teacher, was a little man; in the bike shed this morning he had remained seated on his bike for as long as possible, he never got off until he thought no one was looking, then he heel-toed it to the classroom, where he hoisted himself up onto his high stool and never came down again. “Leprechaun Karstens” was what the kids called him, but from that stool he exercised a real reign of terror. He laughed openly at the girls for their scant aptitude for the exact sciences, he humiliated them in front of the whole class in order to boost his popularity with the boys. There was no way in hell she could tell Leprechaun Karstens the truth: that she had written the exam down wrong in her diary, and whether she could please make it up at a later date. She could already see his beady little eyes, like those of a squirrel, or more like those of a magpie or crow, an animal that seems to be listening carefully to you but then suddenly pecks you right in the face. That wasn’t very smart of you, young lady…She could already hear him say it, then he would address the whole class. Miss Laura here has failed to study for her exam. Are there any other candidates who would prefer to move right along to the school of domestic sciences? She had heard that Mr. Karstens had children. Unthinkable, that a woman could tolerate this sneaky little man beside her in bed without vomiting.

“What is it?” Herman asked. “What are you laughing about?”

“No, I was just thinking: if I think about Leprechaun Karstens long enough, I might not even have to eat that cake.”

That made Herman laugh too.

“Sure, why work yourself into a lather for a reject like that?” he said. “That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. I’ve had it. I can’t force myself to do it anymore. I have to get out of here. Having mediocrity poured all over you, hour after hour, it’s bad for your mental health. It’s a physical thing with me too. I start itching all over, I break out in a sweat, I start stinking. A classroom, it’s a sickness, bacteria everywhere, and the source of the infection is up at the front of the class.”

In Herman’s face Laura saw something she’d never seen before, something grave, the ironic tone he tended to adopt had almost disappeared.

“But you could leave, right?” she said. “Go to another school, I mean?”

“I wouldn’t do them the favor. No, they’re going to have to send me away. They’ll have to say it right to my face. ‘We hate you, Herman. We’d be glad to get rid of you.’ But of course they don’t dare to do that, it would mean they’ve failed as a school.”

“But how can you do that, make them send you away?”

“You can always do something. I can do something. It’s a sickness, that’s the way you have to look at it. You finish your finals, but by then you’re already contaminated; you graduate, and you’re terminally ill. There are a couple of possibilities. You can blow up the school building, but that wouldn’t help; they’d just rebuild it, here at the same spot or somewhere else. You can also combat the source of the infection. Smoke out the whole mess. With whatever it takes. In a sick body they do it with penicillin, with radiation, or chemicals. First you have to draw up a diagnosis. Maybe it’s going to take insecticide or agricultural pesticides, maybe it requires sterner measures. And even then, the question is whether doing that would solve anything. It’s like being attacked by an army: you can mow them down by the hundreds, but they keep coming. The teaching colleges churn out thousands of new ones each year. But hey, I’m not the one who’s going to take those measures; first of all, I’m no doctor or healer, but what’s more, I’m not going to risk my own future. Under the present legal system, the healers are the ones who go to prison for years, maybe even for the rest of their lives. I don’t want to do them the favor.”

He rummaged around in his bag and pulled something out. A movie camera, Laura saw. A little, flat model without a handgrip. Herman began turning a crank on the side of it, and Laura remembered him talking about the windup mechanism.

“There’s only one thing I ask of you in return,” he said. “I’ll help you with the hall monitor later on and everything. And I’ll tell Karstens that you went home because you were deathly ill. In exchange, I’m asking you for permission to film you as you vomit all over the table. I promise that I won’t do anything with it without asking you first, Laura. You’ll be the first one to see how it turns out. Slap a nice sound track under it, you’ll be amazed.”

She didn’t quite know what to say, how to react.

“The cap,” she said at last, pointing at the lens of the camera that Herman now had pressed against his left eye. “You forgot to take off the lens cap.”

—

At this hour of the day, just before lunch ended, there were usually crowds of students hurrying to their classes, but now the main hall was uncommonly still. The hall monitor was not in his glass booth. Laura glanced at her watch, then at the big clock above the entrance.

“It’s only three minutes before,” she said. “Where is—?”

“Look, there,” Herman said.

He pointed to the corridor to the right of the stairs, where a group of students and a couple of teachers had gathered.

“Karstens,” someone said, when Herman and Laura began edging through toward the physics lab. “Probably fainted,” someone else said.

The classroom door was open. In front of the board, which was covered in equations, was the table and the teacher’s high stool. Of Leprechaun Karstens himself you could see only his legs sticking out from under the table, his legs and a pair of buffed black shoes; one trouser leg had crept up a little to reveal a brown sock and a stretch of pale, hairless shin. The rest of his body was blocked from sight by two men squatting beside the table. “Hello, hello!” they heard one of the men say, and recognized the voice of Joop, the hall monitor. “Are you awake, sir? Can you hear me? Help is on the way. Hello, sir, are you still there?”

She looked over and, because Herman was nowhere in sight, turned all the way around.

There he was, his back pressed up against the wall on the other side of the corridor, the movie camera held up to his left eye and aimed at the door of the physics lab.

“Well there you have it, Laura,” he said when she came over to him. “If you had studied for that exam, it would all have been for naught.”

In the distance she heard an ambulance howl.

31

They left the house in midafternoon.

“We start as soon as we get past the gate,” Herman said. They were standing in the kitchen waiting for Miriam, who was still on the toilet. “After that, not another word. We walk to the Zwin and back. Only when we’re back inside are we allowed to talk again.”

On the long, straight road from Terhofstede to Retranchement they were all still a little gigglish, but once past the last houses of the village their expressions grew serious. Lodewijk walked alone out in front, followed by Michael and Ron, and at a little distance by Stella, Herman, and Laura. David and Miriam walked a ways behind the rest, their arms around each other’s waist.

At first Laura hadn’t been sure what to think of the whole idea — a typical boy idea, she thought, perhaps even a typical Herman idea — but as she climbed the steps up the dike and down the other side into the Zwin, she had to admit to herself that it worked, that something was happening, at least in her. In the distance you could hear the waves break on the beach, a gull dove with a shriek; and then there was the wind, rustling through the bushes and thistles. It was indeed as though, after holding your hands over your ears for a long time, you could suddenly hear again, really hear, each separate sound. Somewhere back on the other side of the dike a church bell tolled and she counted the strokes — four. After the fourth stroke the silence was overtaken again by the waves, still too far from them to see at this point, and she felt flooded by…a feeling of happiness, she thought at first, but that wasn’t it; it was located somewhere lower down, more like in the pit of her stomach. She looked around, wondering whether the others felt the same thing, or at least something similar, but at that point there was no one else close by, no one to look at her and see the joyful — no, that wasn’t it, it was something else for sure — expression on her face. Lodewijk had just disappeared behind a stretch of dune, Michael and Ron were too far away, and David and Miriam were still at the top of the steps across the dike — kissing, Laura saw, and she looked away quickly. Only Herman and Stella were close enough, but Stella was peering into the distance, her arms crossed, and Herman had pulled out his movie camera and was panning slowly, in a full circle.

The night before, Herman had asked everyone to stay in the top-floor bedrooms for fifteen minutes, until he called them to come down. When they came down, they saw that he had tacked a white sheet to the wall in the living room, and arranged all the available chairs in two rows. “A night at the movies!” he shouted, twisting the knobs of a projector he had set up atop a stepladder. “At home I always play some music in the background, but now you’ll just have to imagine that part.”

When Ron asked how Herman had smuggled the projector all the way to Terhofstede, Stella said, “He had it in his duffel bag. I wasn’t allowed to say anything. It had to be a complete surprise for everyone.”

The first movie was the one that showed Herman falling to the ground in front of the flower stand; there was something undeniably comic about it, and they all laughed. Unintentionally comic, to a certain extent, Laura thought: when Herman fell to the pavement in front of the flower vendor and his two customers, then went into a feigned spasm — waving his arms and pedaling in a half circle with his feet against the paving stones — you could see even more clearly how skinny he was; the jeans and short-sleeved T-shirt he wore made his bare arms look like pure skin and bones. As he spun around, the T-shirt crept up and revealed the pale, slightly hairy stomach that Laura had seen the night of David’s party. She couldn’t help but think of spaghetti, spaghetti that stood rigid and upright in the pan at first, before sinking slowly into the boiling water.

“Look,” Herman said. “Check this out.”

The flower salesman was watching Herman flounder about from a safe distance, as though unsure how to react to the situation. But the two customers — a middle-aged woman and a girl, a mother and daughter probably — reacted as though he were some poor misfortunate who had taken a nasty fall. The older woman leaned down and touched Herman’s shoulder, upon which he jumped to his feet, shook the woman’s hand, and then calmly walked away from the flower stand. “Watch this,” Herman said. “This is good.” The women turned and consulted with the flower vendor, who took a few steps forward and watched as Herman exited, bottom screen left. “Look, David got this just right,” he said. “He doesn’t follow me with the camera, he keeps it on the people who stayed behind. We didn’t agree on that beforehand. It’s brilliant.”

The woman, the girl, and the flower man looked like they were still in a quandary about what they’d just witnessed. The camera had now zoomed in further, you could clearly see the flower vendor’s shrug and his arms lifted in the universal gesture for Don’t ask me. “This is beautiful,” Herman said. “You toss a stone into a pond. All we’re seeing now are the ripples that the stone caused. In a full-length movie you would have to go on until the water was completely calm again. The woman buys her flowers and pays for them. She goes home with a question in her mind. She can’t stop thinking about it. But then I guess the roll was finished, right, David?”

What came next were shaky, unfocused images, shot in an elevator from the looks of it, in which Herman and David shook their fists in close-up, then took turns giving the camera the finger and shouting. “What are you guys saying here?” Lodewijk wanted to know, but no one answered him. “Wait,” Herman said. “Watch this.” Now David appeared on the screen. He walked casually down the aisle in a classroom, until he got to the teacher’s desk. “Posthuma!” Michael said. “Oh, Christ!”

“Wait,” Herman said. “Watch this.” David leaned down over Miss Posthuma’s desk, as though he was going to ask her something, then slid slowly to the floor. First the camera remained briefly on David, who was trying to simulate an epileptic fit by spastically moving his arms and legs, then it zoomed in on Miss Posthuma. “Watch this,” Herman said. “Watch, watch, watch…” By now Miss Posthuma’s face filled the entire screen, she was looking down at David, who was presumably still flopping around on the floor, but then suddenly she looked straight ahead — straight into the camera too. Initially it was hard to tell whether she saw the camera and Herman; she just stared into space a bit, almost in a kind of trance, her slightly watery eyes seemed to look right past the camera, but then her lips started moving, they formed words, a sentence. There was no sound, they couldn’t hear what the English teacher was saying, but there was no longer any doubt that she was speaking directly to the camera. To the cameraman. To Herman.

“You never stopped filming!” Michael said, and there was both amazement and admiration in his voice. “What’s she saying here, Herman? What did she say to you?”

“Wait!” Herman said. “I want you to look. At that face. Do you see it? Can you see it happening?”

Miss Posthuma’s lips were no longer moving, the camera zoomed out very slowly. David, who had apparently stood up in the meantime, crossed the screen on his way back to his desk. Then the camera stopped moving, Herman didn’t zoom out any further. Miss Posthuma was still sitting motionless at her desk.

“This is it,” Herman said. “This is the moment. A grown woman who has never experienced anything, suddenly experiences something. Only she doesn’t realize yet what it is.”

“And didn’t she say anything else?” Ron asked. “I mean, you kept filming her the whole time. Didn’t she send you to Goudeket or something?”

“That’s the whole trick,” Herman said. “Don’t stop too soon. If I had stopped filming after David got up again, it would have been nothing. We would have had nothing. Now we have the image of a woman in all her astonishment at life. Both her own life and the lives of others.”

“How old are you two, anyway?” Miriam asked.

“Do you remember that old game?” Herman said, as though Miriam hadn’t spoken. “Ringing doorbells, but then not running away? I did that with my friends when I was eight or nine. You ring somebody’s doorbell, and when they open it you say: ‘Oh, that was stupid of me! I forgot to run away.’ It’s sort of like that. The same astonishment. The same expressions. The only difference being that we didn’t have a camera back then. Afterward I realized that doing that was actually a pity, I mean with Posthuma. I bet her amazement at the mystery of life would have been much greater if we hadn’t filmed it. Now it’s sort of like a nature film. Animals drinking. A giraffe at the watering hole thinks it hears something, or sees something. That’s how Posthuma looks. As though she’s seen something moving in the water. But she doesn’t realize that it’s a crocodile floating there, she still thinks it’s a log.”

“Did you really use to do that?” Michael laughed. “Ring doorbells and then just stand there?”

“I bet you two think you’re really funny, don’t you?” Miriam said. “Tormenting the poor woman like that.”

“You see it all the time,” Herman said. “The giraffe thinks it was mistaken and goes on drinking, and suddenly the crocodile spurts forward and drags it underwater. Sorry, Miriam, I wasn’t finished yet. Did you have a question? Was it for the director or for the actor?”

The only thing projected on the sheet now was a bundle of white light, the reel spun wildly, the film came loose and began looping over the projector, then over the floor. Herman stopped the reel with his hand and turned off the projector.

“No, I was only wondering what you two think you’re doing,” Miriam said. “If you want to act like idiots in front of a flower stand, okay. But Miss Posthuma, she’s an awfully easy victim, isn’t she?”

David, who was sitting beside his girlfriend on the couch, laid his hand on her forearm, but she pushed it off right away. “Miriam…,” David said. “Miriam, maybe you shouldn’t take it so seriously.”

“David, my dear, I don’t take you seriously at all,” Miriam said. “Don’t worry about that. But Miss Posthuma…The way she looked…so, so…helpless. I think that’s taking things too far, that’s all.”

“But that’s precisely it,” Herman said. “Like you said: helpless. Those animals in the nature films are always helpless too. It’s not the strongest animal in the herd, but the young gazelle that is pulled underwater by the crocodile or mauled by the lion. So pitiful! But still, we keep watching.”

“But it’s not a nature film, Herman!” Miriam said. “Miss Posthuma isn’t an animal. I think you talk about it too easily, like it’s suddenly not a person anymore but some animal in a nature film.”

“We’re animals too, of course,” Ron said. “That’s what we are, whether we like it or not.”

“Miriam,” David said. “It’s just a joke, don’t take it so personally.”

“You can also look at it from a different perspective,” Herman said. “Why, in fact, is Miss Posthuma so helpless? She’s a teacher. Are all teachers helpless? Not if you ask me. What we’re seeing is someone who has lost their way, an old, weak creature that has wandered away from the herd. Like you said: an awfully easy target. Is that also what you say when you watch lions or crocodiles tearing apart that old buffalo? ‘Come on, guys, that’s a bit too easy, isn’t it?’ Things have to eat. It’s natural selection. Teachers aren’t helpless. It’s more like a herd, a herd consisting of individuals of an extremely mediocre species, true enough. A school of gray fish: as long as they stick together they’re better armed against attacks. Inside a school building they don’t have to worry much and can just go on talking through their hats with their boring stories, hour after hour, they don’t give a shit that everyone fell asleep a long time ago or has already died of boredom. Outside, in the wild, you can cut one off from the herd. Then, all of a sudden, their blathering doesn’t mean a thing. They’d probably shit their pants right away if you drove them into a corner. In real life, all that bullshit about physics equations won’t get you anywhere. And that lousy English Miss Posthuma tries to teach us is even worse. How do you do? My name is Hurman. Give me a break! What if you were attacked on the street in some slum in Chicago or Los Angeles. What do you say then, Miss Posthuma? How do you do? Or do you say something else? Something that fits the situation a little better? Shut the fuck up, you sick fuck! Go fuck yourself! Which syllable receives the main stress in the word ‘motherfucker’? Hello, Miss Posthuma? Hello? Shit, she fainted. Oh, no, she’s dead.”

First David started laughing, then Michael did too. Lodewijk glanced at Laura and raised his eyebrows. “How are you doing otherwise, Herman?” he said.

Then everyone had to laugh, Herman almost harder than the rest — everyone, that is, except for Miriam. It took something like thirty seconds before Laura saw it: Miriam was crying.

“Miriam?” she asked. “Miriam, what’s wrong?”

She was weeping almost soundlessly, only sniffing now and then and wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater. “Don’t you hear it?” she said quietly. “Don’t you guys hear what he’s saying?”

David put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her up against him. “Miriam…”

“And you too!” she shouted, so loudly and so suddenly that it startled everyone else. “Shut your face with that ‘Miriam’ shit!” She pushed David’s arm off her shoulders and stood up — in two attempts, the first time she didn’t push hard enough and landed back on the couch. “Fuck! Cunt!” she screamed: two words Laura hadn’t expected to hear coming from this round, open face that wanted to kiss you on the cheeks all the time. “Go fuck yourselves, all of you!” She was already at the door, she yanked it open and slammed it so hard behind her that a candle fell from its candlestick on the mantel and landed on the floor; right after that came the sound of hiking boots pounding up the stairs to the attic, where another door slammed with a loud bang.

Laura looked at David; like everyone else, probably, she expected him to get up and run up the stairs after his girlfriend. But David remained seated.

“Well,” he said, “I guess that’s clear enough.”

The one who did get up was Stella.

“Where are you going?” Herman asked — his voice didn’t sound threatening, perhaps, but there was something about it that made Stella blink.

“Just up to her,” she said. “I don’t…I don’t like this at all.”

“Sit down,” Herman said.

Stella’s jaw didn’t quite drop, Laura noticed, but almost. “What did you say?” she asked.

“What I’m saying is that you should sit down for a bit before maybe going up to her. And in fact, I don’t think you should go up to her at all.”

Laura glanced over at David, but he had his head down and was pretending to pluck at a piece of lint or something on the thigh of his jeans.

“When someone’s hysterical, you have to let them calm down first,” Herman went on. “During the initial phase, you can’t get through to them.”

No one said a word for quite a while after that. Laura caught herself staring at something on her lap too.

“Well, shall I go then?” Lodewijk said. “Then it’s not so clearly a girl coming to comfort another girl.”

They all had to laugh at that, a laugh that broke the tension and brought relief, and they looked at each other again; even Stella, who was still standing at the door, laughed a little.

“I wish you all the success in the world, Lodewijk,” Herman said. “But I don’t give you much of a chance. No, really, I think it would be better if we waited a bit.”

In the silence that followed, Laura pricked up her ears, but didn’t hear anything from the attic.

“Maybe I overdid things a little,” Herman said. “I completely realize that not everyone thinks those films are funny, but you can talk about that without getting hysterical about it right away, can’t you? I mean, did we fight like this last summer? Or at school, the last few months? That’s what I’m trying to say. In fact, I don’t think we ever argued at all before that cow came along.”

Laura glanced quickly at David again. David was no longer staring at real or imaginary bits of lint on his trousers, but at a spot somewhere on the floor; when Laura followed his gaze she saw, close to one of the table legs, the candle that had fallen from the mantelpiece.

“Aw, well,” he said, “maybe we should just let her calm down a little.”

Without meaning to, Laura looked over at Stella, her best friend, who was still standing with her hand on the doorknob — her former best friend, she corrected herself. After what happened during the summer vacation, the most you could say was that their friendship had normalized. Stella had stopped keeping Laura on the line with lengthy accounts of all-too-intimate details of her relationship with Herman, and Laura in turn had tried to do everything in her power to act normal. Laura hoped that one day they could be best friends again, maybe after Stella broke up with Herman, but deep in her heart she didn’t believe that anymore. It was like getting a spot on your dress, or on your favorite blouse; you pour salt on it right away, you wash the blouse at two hundred degrees and the spot is gone. But the colors have faded too — you hang it in the closet and never wear it again.

Now, however, Laura and Stella looked at each other almost like they used to, and Stella rolled her eyes, breathed an inaudible sigh, and nodded toward David, who was still slouching on the couch. And Laura nodded back, to show that she agreed with her friend. What a wimp, not to stand up for his girlfriend. Cow or no cow, any kind of man would have gone after her right away.

Lodewijk stood up. “Shall we do it then?” he said to Stella. “You can take care of the girl things and I’ll represent the ‘practical boys’ standpoint.”

“Maybe someone should go who’s a bit more neutral,” Michael said. “Ron or me. Or Ron and me. I mean, you’re Herman’s girlfriend, Stella. And you, Lodewijk…yeah, how shall I put this…”

“Yes?” Lodewijk said, grinning broadly. “Do tell. What was it you were going to say, Michael?”

“I don’t have to explain that to you, do I?” said Michael, grinning back. “At least, I hoped I wouldn’t have to explain that to you.”

“I’ll go with Stella,” Laura said. She got up. “Better that way. Just girls. Women…I almost said ‘woman to woman,’ but that reminds me too much of my mother.”

“And then?” Herman said. “What are you two going to say?”

“You don’t even want to know, sweetheart,” Stella said. “Just be glad you’re not there. Right, Laura?”

—

Miriam was sitting on the edge of the bed, her head in her hands, her suitcase open at her feet; there were clothes in it that looked as though they had been pitched in there in a hurry. Yes, Miriam was the only one of them who brought a suitcase; that too said something about who she was, Laura knew, even though she wouldn’t venture to say exactly what.

Stella and Laura did the things one does in such cases. They sat down on the bed, on either side of Miriam. Stella put an arm around her. Laura said: “I think you shouldn’t take it so hard. It was nothing personal. Herman never means it personally. Right?”

At that final Right? she leaned forward a little to look at Stella. But Stella had just put her head up against Miriam’s and didn’t look back.

“I figured, I’m going home,” Miriam said through her hands, which were still in front of her face. “I wasn’t going to stay here another minute. But then I thought about how late it is. There’s probably no bus at this time of night, I figured.”

“But that’s nonsense, isn’t it?” Stella said. “To go away because of something like that. It’s nothing personal, it never is with Herman.”

It took a full second before Laura realized that Stella hadn’t even heard what she, Laura, had just said. Miriam was sitting up now, she’d taken her hands away from her face.

“That’s me, Miss Practical,” Miriam said. “I want to go away, but the first thing I do is think about the bus schedules. That’s what makes me so different from you, that’s why you all think I’m a cow.”

Laura knew that one of them — Stella or she — should now say something like Hey, where did you come up with that? We don’t think you’re a cow at all! But she knew how contrived it would sound, so she waited for Stella to say it.

“You people don’t even see it,” Miriam said, before the silence became too painful. “I’m probably the only one who does. That’s why he hates me. And because of him, you all hate me too. No, no, you don’t have to say anything, don’t bother, I wouldn’t believe you if you did. Tomorrow I’ll be gone. Then you can all go back to your happy-go-lucky little lives without a practical cow like me around to get in your way.”

Miriam hadn’t bothered to wipe the tears off her face — maybe she had just forgotten, or maybe she simply didn’t care, Laura thought. The wet spots that gleamed under her eyes and on her cheeks did not make her round face any prettier, and that was putting it mildly. Laura was reminded of the little boy who lived upstairs in their building, she babysat for him sometimes to earn a little pocket money. He was about six, a spoiled little six-year-old boy who started crying whenever he didn’t get his way. Laura never let him have his way, at least not right away. She would watch him as he started to cry and stamp his feet, for as long as it took to make her wonder how anyone could love an ugly child like him. Only then did she give him the lollipop or the extra spoonful of sugar on his yogurt that he’d been whining for the whole time.

“What makes us happy-go-lucky?” she asked. “And why shouldn’t you be that way too?”

Now Miriam finally used the sleeve of her sweater to wipe her face; the wet spots became red smudges. “I don’t really know if you want to hear that,” she said. “And whether I feel like telling you about it. Besides, Stella’s with Herman. No, it’s not a good idea.”

For the first time since they’d sat down here on the edge of the bed, Stella looked at Laura. “That doesn’t matter,” she said, rolling her eyes a bit. “Really, it doesn’t, Miriam. Even I don’t like everything about Herman. I think those films are funny, but I know exactly what you mean. That sometimes it seems like they don’t take it into account, David and Herman, how nasty the experience can be for someone else.”

“Aw, David…,” Miriam said: it seemed like she was planning to say more, but she only wiped two fingertips across the spots under her eyes.

“What?” Stella asked. “What were you going to say?”

“I don’t know,” Miriam said. “I mean, I think David is really sweet, but when I’m here I also see how spineless he is. I don’t know if I really wanted to see that. Whether I can go on with him now that I’ve seen that side of him, I mean. And then I see him in that movie with Miss Posthuma and I think: That’s not the way you are, you only do that to act cool around…around…Oh, just listen to me! Who am I to say that’s not the way he is! I’ve only known him for about a week.”

And what about us? Laura thought. Do you think we’re spineless too? She looked at the girl’s round, teary face and suddenly she found it unbearable to think that this Miriam, who — it was true, she’d said so herself, hadn’t she? — had known them for barely a week, was already equipped with judgments about who was spineless and who wasn’t. She braced herself, in her thoughts she stood up from the bed and said something. Something like Well figure it out for yourself, Miriam. You really are a cow. It was more fun last time, when you weren’t with us. But she didn’t get up.

They hadn’t heard the footsteps on the stairs, there was only a little knock and the next moment the door opened. Herman was standing there.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I hope I’m not intruding, but before things get completely out of control, I want to say something too.” He took a step forward. “To you, Miriam.” There wasn’t much space in the bedroom, Herman’s legs were almost touching Miriam’s knees, she had to tilt her head all the way back to look at him.

“I want to tell you that I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not going to say that I’m sorry about the movies, because David and I really had fun making them, but maybe I ranted on a bit about Miss Posthuma. I think you’re right, Miriam. After all, they’re people too, teachers. I went too far. I’m sorry about that.”

“Okay,” Miriam said.

And then Herman leaned down, he took Miriam’s head in his hands and laid his own head on her hair. “So will you come downstairs and make us happy? David’s a bit confused too, but I know he’d be very glad if you came down.”

Herman had turned his head to one side, his cheek against Miriam’s hair, his face turned to Laura, not to Stella.

As he was saying that Miriam should come downstairs and make them happy, he looked at Laura and winked.

32

When Herman came over and walked beside her on the beach, Laura couldn’t help thinking about that wink. They had left the thistles and the tidal creeks behind; David, Miriam, and Stella had almost reached the waterline. Ron, Michael, and Laura paused to wait for Herman, but he gestured to them to walk on, without taking the camera from his eye. In the distance, in the direction of Knokke, they saw a dot that could only be Lodewijk.

When Ron and Michael walked on to meet the others by the water, Laura slowed without really intending to. Herman still had the camera held up to his left eye, he kept his right eye shut. Above the sound of the surf and wind, Laura could hear a rattling from inside the camera, a toilsome rattle like an old, un-oiled clock.

First Herman filmed the beach — literally the beach, the lens pointed down at the sand. Then he walked past Laura and turned around. Standing with his back to the sea and walking backward, he slowly panned up until he reached her face.

“I’m going to tell you something now,” he said. “You don’t have to say anything back if you don’t want, but then at least I have it for later. On film.”

He had spoken very quietly, but Laura still glanced up past Herman at the others. They were too far away to hear anything above the sound of the waves, she thought. She looked back at the lens, and at Herman’s closed right eye.

“You’re the only one I’ve ever wanted, Laura,” he said. “Ever. I thought maybe it would go away, but it only gets worse. You don’t have to say anything, it’s enough if you just keep looking. I see it, I can see it.”

He halted, less than ten feet from her. There were two things she could do, Laura realized. She could keep on walking, past Herman and the camera, out of the picture. Out of his picture, out of their picture — forever. Or she could stand still.

She took three more steps, then stopped. She looked straight into the lens. She didn’t say anything, she thought what she wanted to say.

“With me, it happened right away,” Herman said. “At David’s party, the first time I met you. Was it like that right away for you too, Laura? At that party?”

She didn’t answer, she didn’t nod or shake her head. She kept looking straight into the lens.

Yes, she thought, for me too.

33

After dinner that evening, Herman set up the projector on the stepladder again and tacked the sheet in front of the window.

“There’s one more little film I’d like to show you,” he said. “Something we didn’t get to yesterday…” He glanced over at Miriam and smiled. “But I promise, no more nasty jokes, Miriam. And definitely not at the expense of others.”

They were all sitting or slouching on the couch, in the easy and less-easy chairs around the table. “It’s not a very long film,” Herman said, to explain why he hadn’t set them up in a semicircle this time. “But I’m very curious to hear what all of you think.”

First a flickering white light appeared on the sheet, then a title, written in capitals with black Magic Marker on a piece of cardboard: LIFE BEFORE DEATH.

“Michael…,” Herman said, and Michael picked up his saxophone, moistened the reed with his tongue, and stuck the mouthpiece between his lips.

Then a dinner table appeared on the sheet, a man and a woman eating across from each other, above the table was an antique hanging lamp. “My parents,” Herman said. “That’s all I’m going to say. I just want you all to watch.”

The man and woman at the table didn’t look at each other, they used their knives and forks to cut the food on the plates in front of them. In the foreground was a third plate. That plate was empty.

At a snail’s pace, the camera moved closer. Michael began to play, a simple, rather sad melody line that seemed vaguely familiar to Laura, but she didn’t know why — something from a movie, she thought.

The camera angle lowered, the cameraman had taken a seat on the remaining chair, now he zoomed in on the empty plate, then panned up to the man, to Herman’s father.

For a moment the man kept chewing, then he raised his napkin to his lips, wiped them and looked to the right, into the camera. There was something in the way he looked, Laura saw, as though he was doing his best to look amused, but his eyes were empty and dull. The corners of his mouth curled up in a failed attempt at a smile. Still looking into the lens, he said something, there was no sound, they couldn’t hear anything, but the lips moved as they spoke a short sentence. Panning quickly, the camera moved to the far side of the table and the woman was on screen. Herman’s mother. She too looked straight into the lens. She was wearing glasses with black frames that curled up slightly on top, which gave her a catlike look. She too smiled at her son — a dejected smile it was, sad, but it was real. Then you saw a hand holding a wineglass. Herman’s mother took a sip, then quickly another, now she was no longer looking into the lens but straight ahead, at the spot across the table where Herman’s father was seated. It wasn’t really a look, more a sort of gaze, the way you gaze at a fire that is slowly going out. The camera started moving again, apparently the cameraman had stood up and was backing off slowly, until the dinner table with the two parents eating at it once again filled the entire frame.

“I recognize it,” Lodewijk said, once Herman had turned off the projector and Michael had stopped playing. “That music.”

“Why’s it called Life Before Death?” Ron asked.

“You tell me, Lodewijk,” Herman said.

“It’s what they play at military funerals,” Lodewijk went on. “In America. At Arlington! Now I remember, one of those military cemeteries, outside Washington, DC, I think, with all those rows of white crosses. I saw it on TV a while ago, some documentary about Vietnam. A coffin with an American flag draped over it, and then a soldier with a trumpet. Damn, it was a trumpet, not a saxophone! But that was good, Michael. If I’d known you were so good, I would have asked you to play that at my mom’s funeral.”

They were quiet for a moment, probably all thinking about Lodewijk’s mother’s funeral a few months back, Laura supposed. It had been at a hilly cemetery somewhere close to the dunes. And because his father wasn’t around anymore either, Lodewijk, as the only child, had organized the whole thing himself: from the color of the mourning cards (a purple border instead of the customary black) to the music (two French chansons, his mother’s favorite music: “Les Feuilles Mort” sung by Yves Montand, and “Sous le Ciel de Paris” by Juliette Greco). Lodewijk had followed his mother’s wishes to a tee. Just before the summer vacation, a few weeks before she died, a sound had woken him in the middle of the night. He went to see what it was and found his mother in the big recliner in the parlor, in front of the window; by then she could barely move on her own, it was little less than a miracle that she’d been able to get from her hospital bed to the chair. The bed was a real hospital bed, as Lodewijk had explained to his friends, one of those with a motor-driven head and foot end and metal rails along the sides. It had a metal bar with a cord and a handle, so she could pull herself up, and an alarm button that sounded a buzzer you could hear in the parlor of their own house and in the house of the helpful neighbor lady.

On that particular night his mother was sitting at the window in her white peignoir, a notepad on her lap, the curtains open; she hadn’t turned on the lamp, she was writing by the faint light that came from outside.

“Oh, Lodewijk,” his mother said when she saw her son in the doorway; she had trouble breathing, Lodewijk could see her chest move up and down in the semidarkness. “Oh, my sweet boy.”

On the notepad she had jotted down the last instructions for her funeral, and the names of those who were to be invited. It wasn’t all that much: the way her name should be noted on the mourning card, that she wanted to be cremated, and that the coffin was to be closed.

“Sometimes they make a little window in the coffin,” Lodewijk told his friends. “So you can catch a last glimpse of the person’s face. She didn’t want that. During those final weeks her face had turned all yellow. And swollen. She didn’t want people to see her that way; those last few weeks before she died she stopped receiving visitors too, and she wanted people to remember her real face.”

That’s the way she’d written it down, it all fit on one page of the notepad. First her name: her first name, her husband’s surname, a hyphen, and then her maiden name; beneath that the word Cremation, and then below that the two words concerning the little window: Closed coffin.

The rest of the little page was filled with the names of those who could come to the funeral. All the way at the bottom she had written Lodewijk’s friends: he could decide that for himself, who and how many (or how few) of his friends he wanted to invite.

Lodewijk had pulled up a chair and sat beside her. At first they sat there in silence, but then his mother suddenly said that what she really regretted was that she wouldn’t get to see Lodewijk’s back.

She spoke very softly, Lodewijk had to lean over closer to her lips to make out the words.

“What did you say?” he asked. “What is it about my back?”

It must have taken a minute before his mother answered.

“That I won’t get to see you go out the door and into the world,” she said at last. “That I won’t be around anymore.”

They were already past the stage of lying to each other, the stage when his mother still regularly asked Lodewijk whether he thought she looked horrible, and when he replied each time that it really wasn’t that bad — because he still assumed that that was what she wanted to hear. One afternoon she’d asked him to fetch a mirror for her, the little mirror in her makeup bag, and Lodewijk had pretended to search long and hard in the bathroom (he had found the makeup bag right away, in a little drawer among the lipsticks and eyebrow pencils his mother had stopped using long ago), then came back to say that he couldn’t find it; fortunately, his mother had fallen asleep while he was gone. And when she woke up an hour later she had forgotten about the mirror, or at least she didn’t mention it anymore.

No, that phase was far behind them. Which is why Lodewijk didn’t say, What are you talking about? I’m going to graduate next year. You’ll be there for that, in any case. He didn’t say anything at all, just laid his hand on hers, clasped her thin wrist with his fingers.

“I’m actually very happy,” she said. “I’m pleased you have such nice friends. That makes me happy. That you have your friends to fall back on, later on.”

A few months earlier, before the summer vacation, when his mother could still walk, they had gone one Saturday afternoon to buy herring from the fish stand around the corner. She walked one step at a time, and had to stop every few steps to catch her breath. Lodewijk had had plans to go with his friends that afternoon to a rock concert in the Amsterdamse Bos, and he was just putting on his jacket to leave when his mother called him. “I suddenly feel so much like having a herring,” she’d said. Lodewijk offered to pop out and buy her one, but then he saw the look in his mother’s eyes. When they got to the herring stand she no longer had the strength to stay on her feet; from the back of his stall the fishmonger brought out a plastic chair for her. “It’s so nice to be able to do this,” she’d said. “To do this with you, while we still can.” It was the last time they went to the herring stand together.

“I want to tell you just one last thing, sweetheart,” his mother said now. “And I want you to keep it in mind. You are who you are. Always keep being yourself.”

Lodewijk waited, expecting her to say more, but the only sound was his mother’s labored breathing in the dark. After school tomorrow, he thought, he would bring her a herring. Two herrings, so they could eat them together. After a few minutes he lifted his mother in his arms and carried her back to her bed, she weighed almost nothing these days, no more than a full bag of groceries.

Another thing Lodewijk had arranged for the funeral was that, after the French chansons were over, the coffin was not to be lowered through the floor. But that was the way they always did it, the funeral home people tried to explain to him: after the final piece of music or the last speech, the coffin disappears. It sinks into the ground, down one level, to where the ovens are. But that seemed too dramatic to Lodewijk. “No, not even dramatic,” he said. “Completely kitschy.” He was reminded of what his mother had said about him being who he was. Himself. There were no speeches. After the final notes of “Sous le Ciel de Paris” they all shuffled slowly past the coffin, then outside. It was a lovely day, everyone was happy to be out in the fresh air again, Laura recalled. The trees around the cemetery were big and old, and birds were singing. Somewhere just outside the cemetery they heard the clang of a railway crossing, and then the hiss of a train passing at high speed. There was food and something to drink in the auditorium, but most of them soon took their glasses or coffee cups back outside. They stood there for a while, talking beneath the trees. Here and there people were laughing again. Beside Lodewijk’s group of friends there were a few of his mother’s more distant family members, plus her sister and a few cousins, a few colleagues from the office at the music school where she had worked for the last six years after her husband died.

Laura couldn’t help but notice the way people glanced furtively at her father. As always, the famous face gave no sign that it noticed the glances; it was only eleven-thirty, and Laura’s mother and he were the only ones who had already poured themselves a glass of red wine. She heard her father telling Lodewijk that the music was lovely, then he started in about a woman he’d had as a guest on his show, a university professor who had written a book about coping with bereavement.

The original idea had been that Lodewijk would move in with his mother’s sister, who had a house in Arnhem, a city where, he said, “no one should ever want to live.” If he moved to Arnhem he would have to start over at a new school, and what was maybe even worse, he would be too far from his friends. Friends who, as the aunt also understood by now, were very important to Lodewijk at this difficult moment in his life, and who could perhaps do more for him than some vague family member he had visited only on four Sunday afternoons a year throughout his youth. For a very short time the aunt had considered moving temporarily to Amsterdam, but — to his great relief — had finally abandoned the idea (which Lodewijk referred to as the “worst-case scenario”) as too impractical.

At the very end of the funeral, when almost everyone was getting ready to drive back to Amsterdam, Laura and Lodewijk were standing together when the aunt came to say goodbye. She was a little woman, just like Lodewijk’s mother: she had to stand on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheeks.

She had barely turned away when Lodewijk wiped both cheeks with the back of his hand and made an ugly face at Laura.

“Blech,” he said quietly, but in Laura’s mind still a little too loudly. “At least we’ve got that out of the way.”

Laura burst out laughing. “So what now?” she asked. “What are you going to do now?”

Lodewijk stepped up and put his arms around her. “I’m a poor little orphan now, Laura. Will you take good care of me?” He had laid his head on her shoulder as he hugged her, but then he pulled back and looked at her. He was grinning broadly — looking relieved, mostly, Laura saw.

“You can always come and live with us, you know,” she said. “Meals, a room, there’s plenty of space.”

“Thanks. But first I want to see how it goes on my own. Throw open the windows. The first thing is to get that hospital smell out of the house.”

Laura went by Lodewijk’s house a few days later, and was struck by how light it was, so much lighter than when his mother was still alive. There were empty pizza boxes on the parlor table, and dozens of garbage bags lined up in the hall.

“What’s all that?” she asked.

“My mom’s clothes, mostly. And all those sweaters and vests she knitted for me.”

Laura looked at him, she wanted to say something, but didn’t know quite what.

“I need to do it now,” he said. “Later on I might grow sentimental. Get attached to all the wrong things. I want to make a new start. Can you still smell it?”

“What?”

“That hospital odor. It had seeped into everything. Into the curtains, the bedding, even my clothes. But I sponged down the whole house, and I kept all the windows open for three nights.”

Laura sniffed, she smelled something, but it wasn’t a hospital, more like cleaning products and soap — and a vague, oniony smell, probably from the pizza boxes.

“You still can’t get that Herman off your mind, can you?” Lodewijk asked suddenly.

“What?” Laura said. “What are you talking about?” Don’t blush, she told herself. Don’t blush, not now.

“Laura, sweetheart, you don’t have to play make-believe with me. I saw the way you looked at him at the funeral. How you looked at him the whole time. And I can’t blame you. He is a bit skinny, and he’s certainly no Mick Jagger, but I know what I would do if I were you. I know what I would do myself. That type. Not really masculine. Wonderful! I can stare at that for hours.”

Laura looked into Lodewijk’s eyes and saw something she had never seen before: the new Lodewijk, a Lodewijk who would no longer wear knitted sweaters, who would be who he was from now on, the way his mother had made him promise, who had chased away the hospital smell and would be himself.

—

“Ron asked why you named that movie Life Before Death,” Miriam said. “I’m curious about that too.”

“I’m glad you mentioned it,” Herman replied. He was back at the dinner table now, and at first it seemed as though he was teasing Miriam as he put on a mock earnest expression and closed his eyes for a moment, but when he opened them again he smiled at her. “That you both asked. No, but seriously. Life before death. Because that’s what it is, because that’s what we’re seeing. Two adults who have nothing more to say to each other just go on living. They stay together ‘for the children’s sake,’ as they say. But the only child in the house is me. They didn’t ask me a thing. That’s too bad. I can see their situation from a greater distance. I could provide them with advice.”

“But your father’s got someone else, doesn’t he?” Miriam said. “It could be that he’d rather be with that other woman, but that he doesn’t dare to go away. Precisely because he has a child. Because he has you.”

Laura saw how Herman’s expression suddenly stiffened; it lasted less than a second perhaps, Laura looked around at the others, but she was almost certain that she was the only one who’d seen it.

“If my father were to ask my opinion, I would strongly urge him to buzz off as fast as possible to that cute new girlfriend of his,” Herman said. “I would tell him that he’s not doing me a favor by sitting at the table with that bored, deadpan face of his. But maybe your parents are nice, Miriam? I don’t know. Maybe you do have parents like that. They do exist. I know a couple. Laura, for example, has nice parents.”

Laura was startled to hear her name, she didn’t dare to look at Herman, but then she did anyway. And Herman looked back. She counted to three, then lowered her eyes. Right away she felt the heat rising to her cheeks; she rubbed her fingers over them in the hope that no one else had seen. The way he had looked at her! She’d never been looked at that way by a boy. She was used to a whole spectrum of other looks: languorous looks, yearning looks, hopelessly infatuated looks — thwarted looks, above all, yes, if there was one thing that all those looks had in common it was the realization that permeated them: that they didn’t stand a chance. That she, Laura, was simply a bridge too far for most boys.

Herman’s look was different: as a matter of fact, he had never tossed her a losing glance, she realized now for the first time. Never once. From the moment he had spoken to her beside the ransacked table at David’s party (So you’re Laura) up to his declaration of love in the midst of silence, just a few hours ago on the beach.

If we were here alone now, he said during the whole three seconds in which he held her gaze, we’d know what to do. We’ve had to wait for months, Laura, we have a lot of catching up to do.

“Still, when I hear Life Before Death, I tend to think of something positive,” Miriam said. “Not that you’re already dead and just go on living, but that you get everything out of life before you die. You know what I mean?”

Herman looked at her, and this time his expression didn’t harden; an amused smile appeared on his face.

“See how easy that was?” he had said to Stella and Laura the night before, after he apologized to Miriam. They were standing at the foot of the attic stairs, Miriam had gone to the bathroom to wash away the worst traces of her crying jag. “She’s not very smart,” he said. “She’s just oversensitive, I think that’s sweet.”

Later that evening Miriam settled down on the couch with a book of crossword puzzles. Herman raised his eyebrows, then poked Michael and then Lodewijk and Ron too.

“What have we here, Miriam?” he’d asked, when he could apparently contain himself no longer.

Miriam was concentrating so closely on her crossword puzzle that she didn’t hear Herman the first time around.

Laura remembered the tense silence that had come over the group then, when Herman called out in a sarcastic tone: “A crossword puzzle!” And then again, but this time with a slightly different stress: “A crossword puzzle!”

“Well, what’s wrong with that?” Miriam had asked.

“Nothing,” Herman had answered. “Nothing at all. One has crossword puzzles, and that’s a fact we have to live with. As long as no one feels the need to solve them, there’s not much of a problem.”

“What kind of self-inflated bullshit is this, Herman? Is this off limits too? Like all the rest? TV, newspapers, the — what do you call it again? — ‘non-self-made music’? Are we only allowed to read really impressive books? Well, I don’t happen to like reading, and there’s no TV here. So maybe I can do something for myself, so that I don’t get bored? Or would I be better off sitting still and thinking deeply?”

Laura glanced at Herman, then at the others. David was busy again examining something on the thigh of his jeans, Ron and Michael were sitting on either side of Herman, their arms crossed; they were looking at her almost reprovingly, as though she had done something that really could not be tolerated around here. Lodewijk was in the easy chair by the fire, reading, or pretending to. Stella was at the table writing, a letter probably, every two days she wrote a long letter to her mother.

The way Herman looked at Miriam, though, was anything but a rebuke; he seemed, above all, amused.

“Miriam,” he said, “you shouldn’t take things so personally right away. Yet you brought it up yourself. Listen, as far as I’m concerned, you don’t have to do anything. But apparently, when you think you get bored. At least that’s what you said. Is that right? Do you feel bored when you think?”

Miriam let the book of puzzles fall to her lap, she took a deep breath and tapped her pen against her front teeth.

“What’s wrong with crossword puzzles, Herman? You still haven’t successfully explained that to me.”

“Nothing, in principle, but I said that already. I only wonder what goes on in the mind of someone who is searching for another word for ‘sailboat.’ With seven letters. I can’t help but think that it’s mostly a way to kill time. And time doesn’t need killing. Time is our friend. As long as we learn to experience it.”

At that point Miriam surprised Laura, and everyone else too probably, by bursting into laughter. “Oh, Herman,” she said. “How lovely! Are you going to give us yoga lessons? Or is it meditation? What exercises must we do precisely in order to experience time? Our friend time?”

Even more surprising perhaps was Herman’s reaction; he stared at Miriam, speechless, for half a second, then started laughing too. “Sorry,” he said laughing. “Yeah, now I hear myself too. I hear myself talking. I’m going to try it one more time, if you’ll permit me, Miriam. What goes on in your head while you’re solving a crossword puzzle?”

Once again, Laura thought she was the only one who had seen it, but this time she was less certain: the half second of total panic in Herman’s eyes when Miriam laughed at him. He had regained his footing with lightning speed though, it’s true, within that half second he had found the emergency exit.

“I think about things,” Miriam said. “Or maybe I’m fretting about something. Then I start on a crossword puzzle. Ten minutes later I’ve forgotten what I was thinking about, what I was worrying about. I’m busy solving something. Something outside myself. Something that has nothing to do with myself and my own, limited way of thinking. One hour later I’ve finished the whole puzzle. And I’ve totally forgotten what I was fretting about. I can recommend it to everyone.”

“Okay,” Herman said. “That’s clear enough. At least it’s clear enough to me.” There was still a bit of doubt and hesitation in his voice, but his tone was no longer sarcastic — he smiled at Miriam. “I won’t keep you from it any longer.”

That had been last night. Laura remembered that she hadn’t liked it much, this sudden mutual respect between Herman and Miriam. Above all, things mustn’t get too cozy between those two. She wondered whether Miriam was really as stupid as Herman had thought — and whether he himself realized now that he had been mistaken.

All in all, Laura would rather have seen it end in a new clash and a crying jag, she’d even considered trying to steer it in that direction — but decided against it, it would have been too obvious.

Now she was glad she’d kept her mouth shut. Miriam had changed from the “dumbest” girl in the group to an ally within the space of a single evening. That could prove handy later on, when Herman told Stella how things stood. She didn’t have much to worry about as far as the others went, she figured. Michael and Ron always sought confirmation from Herman before doing or saying anything. David was still solidly Herman’s best friend, albeit a friend without a backbone. Lodewijk, in fact, was the only free agent in the group. Lodewijk always spoke his mind right away; there was no doubt about it, he had become stronger since his mother’s death.

Laura looked at Stella sitting beside Herman, her arm slung around his shoulders. Right after dinner Herman had announced that he was going to the garden to smoke a cigarette. Laura was just heading into the kitchen with a pile of dirty dishes, and as he passed he brushed her forearm gently.

Laura found him behind the shed.

“I’m going to tell her tonight,” he said.

“Tonight, when?” Laura asked.

“Before bed, in any case. It’s painful. It’s going to be real nasty. But still, it would be weird…Anyway, that would just be weird.”

Laura leaned into him. He tasted of tobacco smoke, he was indeed very thin beneath his T-shirt, she could feel the bones sticking out under the skin of his hips and then, when her fingertips reached the front of his body and crept up slowly, his ribs. But his tongue was less clumsy than she’d expected, based on Stella’s detailed reports.

“Come on, let’s go inside.” He pushed her away gently, he was panting. “If someone sees us like this…if they find us out here…” He tugged softly on her hair. “That would not be good,” he said.

—

It was long past midnight. They had gone on chatting for a while about the movie Herman had made of his parents. In the end, Herman agreed with Miriam that Life Before Death was perhaps not the best title after all. Then he had talked a bit about the script he and David were working on, for a longer movie this time. A feature film about a high-school revolt. The uprising would begin after a teacher had wrongly sent a girl out of the class, but unrest had of course been brewing within the student body long before that. At first it was to be a purely idealistic uprising, a revolt against injustice, but as the days and weeks passed — the students had occupied the whole school, the teachers were being held hostage in the gym, the building was surrounded by the police and the army — the leaders of the uprising would be faced with increasingly difficult decisions. To press home their demands, they forced a teacher to stand blindfolded at one of the classroom windows.

“All the other windows have been covered with newspapers,” Herman said. “So then you’ve got a number of possibilities. Either the students have no way of going back and really have to hurt the teacher in order to maintain their credibility, or else the blindfolded teacher is the signal for the army to rush the building. The revolt is brutally crushed.”

And at that point Stella stood up and stretched.

“I think I’ll go upstairs,” she said. “Are you coming up too?” she said to Herman.

“I was thinking…,” Herman began, but then fell silent.

“What?” Stella said.

“Shall we…I don’t know…” He stood up, he didn’t look at Stella. “I actually feel more like taking an evening stroll. Just the two of us.”