Dear Mr. M

41

Jan Landzaat, history teacher at the Spinoza Lyceum, pulls on his socks and shoes. It is the day after Christmas, the radio forecasts are calling for heavy snowfall.

He sits on the edge of his bed, his hair still wet from the shower. He thinks about Laura. Then he tries not to think about her. It works, for five seconds. He sighs, brushes back his wet hair with his fingers. He hasn’t shaved since the start of the Christmas vacation, four days ago — and maybe not before that either, he can’t remember. But this morning everything is different. A new start, at least that’s how it felt as he drew the razor across his soapy cheeks and, with each swipe, saw a bit of his old face reappear.

Of his new face, he corrects himself right away. Last night, as he’d wolfed down his lonely, reheated Christmas dinner, he was still a loser. Someone for whom you could feel only pity. Self-pity — he was home alone after all, there was no one else around to feel anything for him. The magic moment, the turnaround, the insight, took place as he was unscrewing the top from the whiskey bottle. The discovery, in fact, that the bottle was only one-third full: not enough to drink himself into a senseless coma, in any case, not the way he had on the first three nights of the Christmas vacation. A buzzing coma, with no past or future, a test pattern with the volume turned off.

“Here’s what I’ll do,” he said out loud. “Tomorrow I’m going to drive past the house in Zeeland, but I’ll be a different person.”

The sound of his own voice in the otherwise silent room startled him. He hadn’t spoken since five that afternoon, it felt as though something first had to be dislodged at the back of his throat: dried spit and mucus, with a warm nicotine taste from the two packs of cigarettes he had smoked each day for the last couple of months — since the fall vacation.

He had taken the tray with his half-eaten Christmas dinner — a piece of turkey breast in a sauce of walnuts and dark chocolate — from his lap, put it on the couch, and stood up.

“I’ll drive to Paris,” he said, starting to pace the room. “I have friends there. I won’t be staying in Zeeland long, I have to move on. ‘It wasn’t that far out of my way,’ I’ll say. But after that I won’t bother her anymore. That’s how I’ll say it, too: ‘not bother you anymore.’ That way, I’m openly admitting that I did bother her in the past.”

It wasn’t a little ways out of his way, but a big ways, no plausible little detour in any case, but he counted on a boy and girl of seventeen accepting that lie. He had thought about himself at seventeen: how he and a friend had hitchhiked to Rome with no idea of the best route to take, by way of Austria or Switzerland or France; all that mattered was that, about four days later, they actually ended up in Rome.

The friends in Paris, that was something different. They definitely had to be believable, they had to at least sound believable, and so he had come up with two real names for them: Jean-Paul and Brigitte. A couple. A childless couple, he decided quickly enough — if he had to juggle even more names in his mind, he might slip up. To help him remember Jean-Paul and Brigitte he had devised last names for them as well: Jean-Paul Belmondo and Brigitte Bardot.

Maybe he wouldn’t have to mention the names at all, but because he knew them, they existed. “Back in college,” he now replied to the question that had not been posed, pacing back and forth across the room. “For my master’s thesis about Napoleon. I spent a year at the Sorbonne. We were all in line for the same movie, Jean-Paul asked me for a light. After the movie, Zazie dans le Métro”—or did that one come out only much later? — “we went for a beer on Boulevard Saint-Michel. That’s how we got to be friends, and we’ve stayed in contact all these years.”

He felt like a cigarette, cigarettes helped him to think clearly, but his new face, the face of that other person he would be from now on, had stopped smoking — quit completely. He had reached the kitchen by now, where he used his paper napkin to wipe the remains of the turkey into the pedal bin. Then he unscrewed the top from the bottle of whiskey and held it above the sink. “No,” he said then, screwing the cap back on. “I’m not an alcoholic. A non-alcoholic doesn’t have to protect himself from himself. I can control myself. A bottle with a third still in it speaks of more self-control than an empty one.”

But what about the smoking? He looked at the clock on the wall above the kitchen door. A quarter past nine. He needed to think, to think about tomorrow. “At midnight on Christmas Day I quit smoking,” he said. “Forever,” he added after a brief pause.

Lighting up a cigarette, he went back to pacing. There wasn’t a lot of room in his new house: a living room with a sofa bed and a kitchen with a little balcony. Two hundred square feet, the landlord had said. A hundred and eighty, not counting the balcony. “But tomorrow I can take my pick of a hundred college students lined up to have it for this price,” he said, looking Landzaat over from head to toe with almost shameless sarcasm, as though he had long figured out exactly how things stood with this unshaven grown man, “so I’d advise you to decide today.”

He hadn’t shown his children these two hundred (a hundred and eighty) square feet, not yet. He would pick them up at the house, or else his wife brought them to a spot they’d arranged beforehand on the phone — like at the entrance to Artis Zoo this afternoon — and later she would come and pick them up again. This afternoon she hadn’t even stepped out of the car, she simply stayed in the driver’s seat with the engine running, she hadn’t even rolled down the window when he’d walked around to talk to her about what time she would pick them up. She had merely held her hand up to the glass, with all five fingers spread. Five o’clock, he saw her mime with her lips; she waved to their daughters, but didn’t look at him again.

That’s what I’ll do. Still pacing, he had arrived at the glass door in the kitchen, the door to the balcony. He saw his own reflection in the pane, not crystal clear, but just right. A grown man in jeans and a sweater. Unshaven — at the moment, still, but tomorrow not anymore.

—

He looked at his reflection in the kitchen door. “That’s how we’ll do it,” he said. “From now on, I’m above it all.”

The first thing he did on the morning of that day after Christmas was spend half an hour in the shower. He washed his hair three times. Then he lathered his face with shaving cream. His lonely Christmas dinner of the night before already seemed an eternity away, like something from a former lifetime. When he took the turkey breast out of the oven, he had been unable to hold back the tears. Tears of self-pity. He had seen himself as the lonely man he was, from a distance, as in a movie: a man prepares a gourmet meal for his sweetheart: he lights the candles and pours himself a little glass of wine beforehand, but the sweetheart doesn’t show and the audience starts reaching for their hankies — they know she has someone else.

For just a moment, a fraction of a second, as he conjured the first stretch of smoothly shaven skin from beneath the white lather, he felt his eyes start smarting again, but he pulled himself together. He thought about Laura. He thought about her as someone without whom life had a purpose as well. Stand above it, he told himself. That’s how you have to show up there. I just came to say hello and goodbye. I’m on my way to Paris. But we can still be friends, can’t we? No, that was no good, that sounded too much like begging, as though she would be doing him a favor by consenting to be just friends. Ask no questions, he said to himself. Avoid the interrogative completely. They’re expecting me in Paris this evening. We can still be friends. Now, without wanting to, without being able to stop himself, he thought of Herman — and at the same moment the razor slipped sideways across his cheek. It drew blood right away. Not much, just the way that goes with shaving cuts: as soon as the blood gets a whiff of the outside air, it keeps on flowing. “Fuck!” he said — more at the thought of Herman than the blood. What did she see in that skinny kid anyway? You could hardly call that a man, could you? He picked up a towel, carefully wiped away some of the foam, and dabbed at the cut.

Ever since Herman had started going with Laura, he behaved differently in the classroom. He leaned far back in his chair with a pen between his lips, his long legs sticking out from under his desk. But even more than his shiftless posture, it was the look in his eye. I’m with her now, and you’re not, that look said. He should really say something about it, sprawling like that in a classroom wasn’t done, but he held himself in check. He knew the skinny boy’s reputation; he could imagine how he would react. Does it bother you? The bleeding had stopped faster than he’d expected, with great care he shaved around the thin red stripe on his cheek. The reason I sit like this is because what you say doesn’t interest me at all. He had to be careful not to cut himself again. Breathe calmly. What was it Herman had asked him last time? Something about Napoleon…no, now he knew: about Napoleon’s maîtresse. That high-handed tone! The insinuating look on his face as he pronounced the word “maîtresse.” He had tried to ignore the question, but wasn’t able. He had let himself go. And why should you suddenly be so interested in that? he’d asked — the whole class must have seen it, must have heard the tremor in his voice. And then he had looked at Laura, Laura who — ever since the fall vacation — had sat beside Herman at the back of the class. He had looked at her with a helpless gaze, in his mind he counted to ten, by five he was still no less afraid that he would burst into tears right there on the spot. First Laura had lowered her eyes, but when he reached seven she looked at him. For half a moment, eight…she had smiled at him, and then, nine…she shrugged. It was like a beam of sunlight at the close of a rainy day, the hope of a tiny bit of warmth that might dry your soaked clothes. With that smile and that shrug Laura had, if only for the space of a second and a half, distanced herself from her new boyfriend.

After school he cornered her in the bike shed. “I have to talk to you!” he panted, and she glanced around a few times before answering him. “What about? We’ve said all we have to say.” At that moment, from the little tunnel linking the bike shed to the school basement, came the sound of laughter; a few senior boys were walking to their bikes, lighting their cigarettes and roll-ups as they went. “I saw you,” he said quickly. “This afternoon in class, I saw how you smiled at me and shrugged.” He paused for a moment and took a deep breath before asking the next question, the question that had kept him awake night after night, tossing and turning in his bed, for the last few weeks. “Are you happy with him, Laura? Are you really happy? That’s all I need to hear.”

Laura raised the pedal on her bike with the tip of her right shoe — so she could hop on and ride off immediately, he realized. “I smiled at you and shrugged this afternoon because I felt sorry for you, Jan. I thought you were pitiful. I don’t want the whole class to see you like that, I can’t stand it. I mean, look at yourself, the way you look. How you…how you smell. You shouldn’t want to do that to yourself.”

Then she took off on her bike. When she had to pass the smoking seniors, she hopped off, but she didn’t look back.

It was Laura’s words that handed him the key to his current metamorphosis. He would no longer elicit her pity, he would look fresh and well rested, he wouldn’t smell anymore, at least not of alcohol and dried sweat. He was finished shaving, he sprinkled himself with aftershave, not only his cheeks, chin, and neck, but also his chest and belly, armpits and arms. Later on, at the house in Zeeland, when she opened the door for him, he would smell like a fresh start.

A towel around his waist, he made coffee and fried three eggs with ham and melted cheese. I mustn’t ask that anymore, he thought, whether she’s happy with him. I just have to be there—he didn’t know how to formulate it any more clearly than that, but somehow it covered the feel of what he wanted to make happen. Be there. A certain nonchalance. That’s the feeling he would elicit: that he was cured of her. A healthy, clean-shaven, fresh-smelling man who was sufficient unto himself. A grown man. A man who was old enough and stood above it all. Whose knees didn’t start knocking at the sight of a schoolgirl who had dumped him, traded him in for someone her own age. Only in that way could he be a viable alternative for her. The self-assured, grown man who came by only because it happened to be on his way, simply to deliver to her the message that he had moved on. That he wanted to tie up the loose ends, together with her. He wasn’t going to call her anymore. He wasn’t going to stand in front of her bike in the shed to keep her from getting past. He would not — and this was the episode of which he felt most ashamed, he stopped chewing on his omelet and began groaning at the recollection — follow her home and hang around under a streetlight until deep into the night. Yes, he would round it off, close the book, turn a new page and then he would drive on to see his friends in Paris.

Meanwhile, however, the seed of doubt would be sown. Laura would see them beside each other at the table. She would realize again why, not so long ago, she had been attracted to him. Beside the skinny boy he would come out looking good. Anyone would come out looking good next to Herman. How could it be? How could it be, for Christ’s sake? He looked almost like a girl! Around one wrist Herman wore a knotted leather strip, around the other a thin, woven lanyard of beads. And then those rings on his fingers, the flaxen hair on his cheeks. And his teeth! His teeth were too weird to be true. To call them irregular would be putting it mildly. Those front teeth that curved inward and the open spaces between his canines and the molars behind made him look more like a mouse than anything else. A mouse that had been smacked in the teeth by a much bigger mouse. How could a girl be drawn to that? They were teeth that let the wind through, a girl’s tongue would have a hard time not getting lost in there. Granted, when it came to seduction, his own teeth weren’t exactly his ace in the hole. But he had practiced it in front of the mirror, how to smile without his lip pulling back to show his gums and expose the full length of his uppers. Whenever he couldn’t help laughing, a reflex he’d developed made him hold his hand in front of his mouth. Don’t forget to brush your teeth well, later on, he noted to himself. Nothing was as deadly as a chunk of bacon or white bread in the gap between teeth that were too long anyway.

He laid the plate with the knife and fork on it in the sink and turned on the cold water. The frying pan was still on the stove. He looked at his watch, he wanted to leave on time, he didn’t want to run the risk of getting caught in the blizzard. On the other hand, it would be strange for someone who was going to Paris for a couple of days to leave dirty dishes lying around. He’d do them later on. Before he went out the door. First he had to brush his teeth.

He smiled at himself in the mirror above the sink. His hair was almost dry now, he pulled it back and looked. The bags under his eyes, that was a problem, they hadn’t just gone away after one night of not drinking. He sprinkled a little aftershave on a cotton swab and pressed it against the grayish-blue hollows under his eyes. Then he opened the door to the balcony. Atop the railing was a thin layer of fresh snow that had fallen during the night. He swept it together with his fingertips and rubbed his face with it, his eyelids and the bags. As though I went for a long walk this morning, he told himself when he saw the result in the bathroom mirror. The bags were still heavy, but the contrast between them and the rest of his face was already less striking.

He sought out a pair of jeans, his favorite plaid lumberjack shirt and his ankle-high hiking boots. Holding a pair of thick woolen socks and the hiking boots, he went back into the living room and sat down on the edge of the sofa bed.

He thought about Laura, then he tried not to think about her. “I can’t stay long,” he said out loud. “I need to be in Paris by dark.”

Suddenly he couldn’t help thinking of his little daughters. About yesterday at the zoo. The chickens and the geese and the pig at the children’s farm there, the parrots on their perches, the monkeys, the lions, and the crocodiles. All the way at the back of the zoo they had found the polar-bear habitat. Two polar bears were asleep amid the artificial rocks. Carrots and heads of lettuce floated in the water — it had snowed yesterday too, the pointed tips and ridges of the artificial rocks were covered in a thin layer of white. His first thought had been that the polar bears, in any case, would not suffer from the cold, that the difference in temperature must be less pronounced for them than for the monkeys, lions, and parrots. But they were a long way from home. And this habitat, with the dirty water in its cramped swimming hole, was above all claustrophobic. An exercise yard, no more than that. It reminded him of the room he had rented, and at the moment when those two images — his lonely room and the polar-bear habitat — were transposed, the self-pity came roaring up: like gall from a tainted meal it rose from his stomach, through his gullet to the back of his throat.

“What’s wrong, Daddy?” his eldest daughter asked. She took his hand. His younger daughter tossed the bears the last slice of stale brown bread they’d brought with them, but it ended up in the water amid the lettuce and the carrots.

“Nothing, sweetheart,” he said.

He didn’t dare to look at her, he didn’t want to cry when his daughters were around. The hangover from the night before (six cans of beer, two-thirds of a bottle of whiskey), which had till then remained sleeping in its basket like a big hairy dog, now stretched itself slowly, walked up to him and licked his hand.

“You said, ‘What a shitty rotten mess!’ Daddy.”

“Did I say that?”

His daughter didn’t respond.

“I feel sorry for the polar bears,” he said. “That they’re so far from home. That they have so much room to move around at home, but here they have to live on a little rocky shelf.”

“Are we going home now, Daddy?” His younger daughter shook the last of the crumbs from the plastic sandwich bag into the polar-bear habitat.

“How about if we go and get french fries first?” he said.

In the cafeteria, where he ordered three portions of fries with mayonnaise, two colas and two bottles of Heineken, he felt how the cold had crept into his clothing. He stood up, took off his coat first and then his sweater. He had already finished the first bottle of beer. He tried to warm up by swinging his arms back and forth. Much too late, he noticed the worried looks on his daughters’ faces, as though they no longer dared to look straight at him.

That evening his wife called.

“What did you do?” she said before he could speak.

“What?” He had just slid the turkey into the oven and was flipping through the TV guide in search of a suitable program to accompany his dinner.

“They’re all upset. Because you…I hope it’s not true, because they said you were crying, Jan! What were you thinking of, Jan?”

He couldn’t remember doing that, but he had a suspicion that it was probably true.

“It was cold. I had tears in my eyes because of the cold, I told them that too.”

“Please, Jan! I only wish you had the guts to admit it. That you could be honest with me. But no, of course not,” she added after a brief silence.

“Okay, okay…I felt badly. The polar bears…you should have seen those polar bears. It just got to be too much for me.”

He heard his ex-wife sigh — and the next moment he felt surprise at how easily he had admitted that word into his thoughts: “ex-wife.” She wasn’t his ex-wife, not yet, they were living apart for a while only after his ex-wife (wife!) had found an earring behind the toilet. I have no idea, he’d said. Are you sure it’s not one of yours? He was no good with earrings; he wouldn’t swear that he could recognize a pair of his own wife’s earrings if he saw another woman wearing them on the street.

“Don’t go thinking that I’ll start feeling sorry for you when you act like this,” she said to him now on the phone. “Or that you’ll get to see your daughters any more often. In fact, you’ll achieve just the opposite.”

—

A gentle snow starts to fall as he lays his bag on the backseat. In plain sight. That way they can see with their own eyes that he won’t be staying, that he’s only making a brief layover on his way to Paris.

“Don’t come on too strong,” he says out loud and starts the engine, which turns over only after a few tries. “You’ve just come by to say hello. You plant something, a little seed in her mind. Then you leave.”

He twists around in his seat and unzips the bag. The whiskey bottle is on top. He glances around furtively, but at this hour, on Boxing Day, the streets are empty. He unscrews the top and takes a big slug.

“You’ve got the drinking under control, so you can take a little now and then,” he says. “You won’t show up drunk, but you will be loose and easy.”

After the second slug he feels the heat crawling beneath his clothes, he looks at his face in the rearview mirror; he’s looking good, his cheeks are rosy, an open and warm look in his eyes. He screws the top back on the bottle, jams it down between the emergency brake and the seat, and drives slowly down the street and around the corner.

42

We’re sitting in your living room: an Italian designer sofa, a glass coffee table, a chaise longue from the 1960s. Your little daughter is already in bed. Your wife has brought out beer, wine, and nuts.

After I first tried to install the projector on a stool balanced on a pile of books (photo books, art books, books of above-average girth and size), your wife came up with the idea of using the little stepladder. I went with her to get it, from a closet beside the front door, a cupboard containing the electricity and gas meters and a few shelves for cleaning products and other household items.

“Are you sure the timing is okay?” I asked without looking at her — by then I was halfway into the cupboard; I moved aside a vacuum cleaner, a bicycle pump, and a red bucket with a mop in it, so I could lift out the stepladder. “I mean, he doesn’t seem completely himself at the moment.”

“He still complains about being nauseous and seeing flashes of light,” she replied. “And sometimes he goes completely under. It’s not that he falls asleep. No: he goes under. I called the family doctor today and he says those are normal symptoms of a serious concussion. He should just take it easy for a week, the doctor said. And keep waking him up, in any case, when he goes under like that. No TV, no newspapers, no reading for a week.”

No eight-millimeter movies, I almost said — but your wife said it for me.

“You’re right, at first I didn’t think it was such a good idea,” she said. “Maybe these aren’t the ideal circumstances. Are there a lot of them?”

“Two or three. I can also come back some other time.”

But your wife shook her head.

“He’s so excited,” she said. “There’s no talking him out of it now.”

—

You didn’t want to go to the emergency room. We picked up our coats from the checkroom, but it was only when we got outside, on the square in front of the theater, that I realized you were in much worse shape than I’d thought.

My wife. Ana. Ana is still inside.

I assured you that there were only the two of us. That your wife had stayed at home, with your sick daughter. You stopped for a moment and said you felt nauseous. By that time your left eye was swollen shut. We had washed away the blood as best we could in the men’s room, but there were still spatters on your white shirt, just below the bow tie.

People — colleagues, publishers, others who had been invited to the party or not invited at all — looked at us as we made our way to the exit, once, then a second time, yes, that’s M, it’s really him, what could have happened to him, do you think he fell down the stairs?

That was when you started talking about flashes of light. A storm. There’s a thunderstorm coming up. I already suspected that you had a concussion, and tried again to get you to go to the emergency room. I said we could take a cab, that it would be better if someone looked at it — but you didn’t want to hear.

I got in a few good licks, didn’t I? You saw it. I wasn’t finished with him yet. I should have finished it a long time ago.

You grinned and slammed your right fist against the palm of your left hand. I had to promise not to start whining about the emergency room again. You wanted to walk home, but after only a few steps you stopped again.

What’s that noise?

You tilted your head to one side and pressed two fingers against your right ear, as though it was blocked — as though there was water in it. I said nothing, only looked at you.

For a moment there I thought I heard a plane, but now it’s gone.

At the taxi stand I held open the back door of the cab for you to climb in. By then you had forgotten that you were planning to walk home, and you climbed in without protest.

You had, I said, indeed got in a few good licks. I thought the message was clear enough, but you acted as though you had no idea what I was talking about.

Yeah, yeah. We’re going home.

I meant to ask you about the reason for the fight, but it wasn’t the right moment for that. Home first. Your wife would be shocked by the sight of your battered face and bloodied shirt, but maybe she was the one who could convince you to at least see a doctor.

You were slouching down in the seat, your head against the window. I thought you had fallen asleep, but it was something else, your body rocked apathetically to the taxi’s movements, when we went through a curve the back of your head floated free of the door and then bonked against it, without waking you.

I grabbed your arm, I had to shake you hard a few times before you opened your eyes.

Ana! Where are we? We have to go back! Ana’s still in there!

Once I had reassured you, you started in again about the thunderstorm and the flashes of light. I was just about to lean up to the driver to say that he should take us to the emergency room anyway, when I saw that the taxi was already turning into our street.

This is it, I said, here, here it is, third doorway on the right.

You tried to ring the bell, but I stopped you just in time. It’s late, I said, we don’t want to wake anyone and startle them—I took the key out of my pocket and opened the front door.

In the elevator you leaned back against the panel with buttons and shut your eyes. Your left eye was, as noted, already swollen shut, so in fact you closed only your right eye. I had to get you to move aside a little so I could hit the button for the fourth floor.

I think I have to throw up.

Less than a second passed between this announcement and the actual vomiting. I tried to sidestep it, but there wasn’t much room in the elevator. I didn’t dare to look down, I suspected that it had spattered up against my shoes and trouser leg too, and I tried as best I could to breathe only through my mouth.

One thing I always wondered was how that teacher, that Landzaat, how he found out that you two were spending Christmas vacation at that cottage.

You wiped your lips with the back of your hand and looked at me with one bloodshot, watery eye.

I just kept breathing. Keep breathing calmly, I told myself. Meanwhile I looked into that bloodshot eye.

You had said “you” almost in passing. As passingly as you had spoken earlier of the thunderstorm. Of your wife, who you said had remained behind at the party.

I wondered, in short, which part of your brain had addressed me at that moment. The part that no longer knew exactly where you were and with whom, or another part, the one you sometimes hear about with older people: they no longer know where they put their reading glasses a minute before, but the way their mother kissed them good night seventy years earlier is still etched in their memory.

I in turn could have asked you all kinds of things then, but I was afraid that if I did, that part of your brain now meandering through the distant past would shut down on me — and never open again.

That’s why I said, without looking away from your one good eye, that I had sometimes wondered about that too. I said it without looking away from your eye. I said I’d always meant to ask Laura about that, but that I kept forgetting to.

The elevator came to a stop at the fourth floor. I pushed the door open as quickly as I could.

Is it possible? I asked myself that at times. Is it possible that Laura consciously lured that history teacher to the little house? For my book, for Payback, it wasn’t absolutely crucial. But afterward I thought about it a lot. What about you, Herman, what do you think?

You searched for something in your pants pockets, then breathed a deep sigh. This time I was too late. Before I could stop you, you had rung the bell beside the door.

In a moment your wife will open the door, I thought. This was probably my last chance.

I said that I had new material for you.

I know you do. From behind the door came the sound of approaching footsteps, then of a dead bolt being slid aside, a lock being turned. I have new material for you too, Herman. New material that I’m sure will interest you. It’s time to lay our cards on the table. It’s rather late now, but why don’t you come by tomorrow night. Sometime after dinner, for example. Would that suit?

—

I start with the movie of the flower stand. There is no sound, let alone music, only the projector’s rattle.

“That’s right across the street from here,” you say.

“Yes,” I say. “The flower stand used to be right over there, across the street. They only moved to our side of the street later on. And where the café is now there used to be a snack bar, you can’t see it very well in this shot, but it was there. A cornet of fries with mayonnaise cost twenty-five guilder cents, a slightly bigger one was thirty-five.”

I walk onscreen. A lanky boy, hair down to his shoulders, a T-shirt that’s too small for him, jeans, ankle-high (green, but the color you have to imagine for yourself) rubber boots with the tops folded down.

Christ, I was so skinny then! I think; I glance aside, at you and your wife. Your wife is on the couch, you have settled down comfortably in the chaise longue. Playing across your lips is something that can only be an amused smile.

“Watch this,” I say.

I/the lanky boy collapse in front of the flower stand, I use my boots for traction on the paving stones and spin around in a half circle, moving my left arm spastically the whole time. At first the florist and his two customers, a middle-aged woman and a girl, look on in bewilderment, but without intervening. Then the boy gets up, shakes the woman’s hand, and walks off camera, bottom left.

I hear you laugh. I glance over again, but you don’t look back at me, your gaze remains fixed on the wall, on the flickering image. By then David and I are in an elevator, this elevator, the elevator here in our building, making faces in close-up into the camera.

“Fantastic!” you say. “I knew this existed, but of course I’ve never actually seen it.”

Now Miss Posthuma, our English teacher, appears. She is sitting at her desk in front of the chalkboard as David walks toward her. She looks up at him, it looks like he’s going to ask her something, but then he falls to the floor. David does more or less the same thing I did at the flower stand: spastic movements, fits, knocking his head repeatedly against the leg of the desk. Now we pan up slowly and see our teacher’s face, dumb with amazement. Even more than with the florist and his two customers, there is total bafflement here. The camera zooms in, David is spinning on the floor in a much smaller space, barely eighteen inches from her feet under the desk.

“Watch,” I say.

The camera zooms in further on Miss Posthuma’s face. Now she is no longer looking at David and his gyrations, but straight into the lens — at me.

She doesn’t look angry, more like sad, her lips move.

“What is she saying here?” you ask. “Do you remember?”

“No,” I say. “Something like: What do I think I’m doing. What it is I think I’m up to. Something like that.”

I remember it all too well, it has always stuck with me, even long after my visit later that year to her deathly silent apartment out by the bridge, to run through my reading list with her — and long after her death too.

She said something about me, something about which I asked myself in stunned surprise, right there and then, whether it was true. Whether this seemingly sexless woman had perhaps seen something for which I had neither the proper distance nor degree of insight. Later, at her apartment, I wondered whether she would come back to that, it was probably the main reason why I had turned down her offer to drink “something besides tea” with her.

“This got you into a lot of trouble later, didn’t it, Herman?” you ask.

“Yes,” I say.

“I remember,” you say. You pick up the glass of red wine from beside your chair and raise it to your lips — but don’t sip at it yet. “They thought these films were pretty crazy. I mean: that flower stand and the things you two do in the elevator here. In hindsight. That’s the crux of the matter. In hindsight, it takes on a different meaning. Especially this, with the teacher. No respect. That was the conclusion, wasn’t it? Someone with no respect for a teacher won’t find it very difficult to snuff another teacher. “

“Yes,” I say. My throat feels dry, I raise my bottle of beer to my lips, but it’s empty.

“And that film script, I think that was the last straw. About taking hostages at your own school. That you all get together and blow up the place. A ‘normal student’ wouldn’t do that either, would he? But that’s bullshit, of course. In hindsight, all you can say is that you were far ahead of your time.”

“Would you like another beer, Herman?” your wife asks.

I nod. “Love one.”

“All that jabbering after the fact,” you go on as your wife heads to the kitchen. “It’s like with a troubled childhood. Someone mows down fifty people at a high school or a shopping mall. During the investigation, their troubled childhood is always unearthed: divorced parents, an abusive father, an alcoholic mother who moonlighted as a prostitute, the ‘severely withdrawn’ killer who ‘always kept to himself and often acted erratically.’ But for the sake of convenience they forget the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of withdrawn loners who had a childhood at least as troubled as the killer’s but who never hurt a soul, let alone assaulted or murdered anyone.”

“But in Payback, you made that same connection.”

“Only because it was better for the book. Omens. Signs of things to come. Besides the film of the teacher and that screenplay, the main thing was probably that physics teacher. That you went on filming while he was lying dead in his classroom. Anyone who would do that is probably also indifferent toward life, toward the lives of other teachers, that was the way people reasoned back then. At first I went along with that line of reasoning. Once again: for the sake of the book. A book in which a couple of boys make funny movies at a flower stand, fool around with a teacher, and film another teacher who has died on the spot, but who commit no murder later on; who, on the contrary, go on to college, start a family, and end up as head accountant at an insurance company — that’s not interesting to read about. They blend seamlessly into the gray masses of those who perhaps do wild or crazy things when they’re young, but who grow tame as adults. A writer can’t do anything with that. By the way, did you bring that one, the one with the physics teacher?”

Your wife has taken a seat on the couch again; I raise my second bottle of beer to my lips. There is Laura. She is sitting at a table in the cafeteria of the Spinoza Lyceum, forty years ago, she sticks her finger down her throat, she gags, but after that nothing happens. She grimaces, then smiles at the camera and shakes her head.

“What a lovely girl,” your wife says. “What is she doing?”

“I suggested to her that she barf up a pink glacé cake, so she could say she was too ill to take the physics exam,” I say. “She gave it everything she had, but in the end she couldn’t do it.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Karstens’s gleaming black shoes and lower legs can be seen, but the screen is then quickly filled by the table, the rest of the body too is blocked from sight by the men — the hall monitor and two teachers — who are squatting beside him.

Then Laura is back, she is standing beside the door of the physics lab and looking around, then she waves to the camera and starts pushing her way through the crowd of students who have gathered outside the classroom. She looks into the camera, no, this time she looks just past the camera: at me. She says something, wags her finger, almost scoldingly: Don’t! But then we see her laugh. She laughs and shakes her head.

“People should really have looked at it the other way around,” you say. “Or no, not the other way around. Differently. What I mean is: Imagine you’re walking down the street and suddenly you hear something that isn’t quite normal, a plane flying much too low, or in any event something unusual, an unusual sound, a sound that stands out from the normal street noises around you. You look up and you actually do see a plane. A passenger plane. It’s flying right above the rooftops. This isn’t right, that’s your first thought, something’s wrong here, that plane is much too low. You happen to have a movie camera with you. A video camera. You point the camera up in the air, and less than ten seconds later you see that plane slam into the side of a skyscraper. A tower. A building more than a hundred stories tall. You film the plane as it bores its way into the tower. An explosion, a ball of fire, wreckage flying everywhere. Six months later you are charged with a murder. The police search your house and find the film with the passenger plane drilling its way into the tower. Are the detectives allowed to assume that you have always had little respect for human life, because you filmed the deaths of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people? Simply because you happened to be there, on the spot?”

During the film of my parents eating at the table we are mostly silent. Me too, I don’t comment, I realize that it is too bare without music, without Michael’s saxophone. Maybe I shouldn’t have showed it, it occurs to me once it’s almost over.

“Why did you call it Life Before Death, Herman?” your wife asks once I’ve stopped the projector and am threading the next reel.

“Well, that was the thing in those days,” I say. “Pompous titles. It allowed you to make something out of almost nothing. After all, it’s only my parents. I had plans for a sequel, but when my father moved in definitively with his new girlfriend a few months later, I didn’t feel like it anymore.”

In the next movie we are back in Terhofstede. You see us walking, on the road to Retranchement, at the bend in the road to be precise: I had run out in front in order to see them all coming around the curve.

“Lodewijk,” you say. “And the one with the curly hair is Michael. Ron. David, that girl beside him, I always forget about her, his girlfriend, what was her name again?”

“Miriam,” I say.

“Laura,” you say as Laura comes by, walking arm in arm with Stella — but you don’t mention Stella’s name.

Then we’re in the Zwin. I film a thistle, and then the white surf in the distance, David and Miriam who have remained behind on the dike and are kissing.

We see Laura from the back, her long black hair, the prints her boots leave behind in the sand.

I catch up with her and pass her, I film her from the front. Laura has stopped — she’s looking straight into the camera, she brushes the hair out of her face. She looks. She keeps looking.

—

I mount the final reel on the projector. A white landscape, a snowstorm, a blue sign with the name of a place on it — RETRANCHEMENT, CITY OF SLUIS — covered in a ridge of snow, but there’s also snow stuck to the front of it; a red stripe runs diagonally across the sign.

Laura. Laura carrying a plastic shopping bag, a white woolen cap on her head; the camera zooms in — there is snow on her eyebrows, on her lashes — until the screen is filled with her face and goes from out-of-focus to black.

“They never found this movie,” I say. “I had just brought it to the shop to have it developed when they came and took all the others.”

Footprints in the snow, the camera pans up slowly, we see the start of a bridge, the railing of a bridge, ice below — the frozen water of what must be a river or canal.

On the far side of the bridge we see Landzaat, the history teacher. He waves, no, he gestures really: Come on, let’s go, hurry up. He turns around, takes a few steps, then looks back and stops.

It looks like someone has called his name, that that is why he’s stopped. He has turned left after the bridge, now he points straight ahead and raises both arms.

For a moment he stands there like that, he’s a fair distance away, but from his gestures, his body language, you can tell that he is saying something, maybe asking something — little white clouds are coming out of his mouth.

He starts to walk back, comes up onto the bridge a ways, then stops again. He says (or asks) something. He points.

Then he shrugs, turns and walks back to the end of the bridge, heads right.

43

For the first half hour of their trudge through the snow, Jan Landzaat and Herman barely speak. Sometimes they walk beside each other, and then, when the path grows narrower and the snow deeper, in single file.

Landzaat hadn’t slept a wink all night; he had tossed and turned, quietly, not making a sound, but the bed creaked at the slightest movement. With wide open eyes he had stared at the wooden planks on the attic ceiling, the checkered curtain at the window he had left open, the beams and planks illuminated by a streetlamp outside — he was sure that in that light he could also see the clouds of his own breath.

He had pondered, a feverish (there was no other word for it) pondering, his head glowed with all the thoughts tumbling over and scraping past each other. He had to pee, but he remained in bed until it started hurting, only then did he go downstairs.

Step by step, inside his churning, spinning head, the contours of a plan had begun to take shape. A plan which, somewhere around first light, he had christened “Plan B”—he laughed, without making a sound, at the name: Plan B. It sounded like something from an adventure novel, an action film in which the commandos take the island from the rocky north coast rather than crossing the mined beach in the south.

He had in fact already carried out the first part of his plan, without knowing at that point how it had to go. Last night, when the decision had finally been made that he would spend the night here, he had fetched his traveling bag from the car; his traveling bag and the bottle of whiskey, with less than a quarter still left in it.

There was no premeditation. Acting on impulse, he had slid in behind the wheel and screwed the top off the whiskey bottle. Tilting his head back to let the burning liquid flow down his throat as smoothly as possible, he caught sight of the little light built into the car ceiling, just behind the two front seats. In front, beside the rearview mirror, was another little bulb. A light put there to allow one, for example, to read a map at night.

The ceiling light was there for the passengers in the backseat. Sometimes his daughters asked him to turn it on when they were driving home at night, so they could read a magazine or a comic book.

Two or three times in the last year they had forgotten to turn off that light after they got home. The next morning the battery had been dead and he’d had to mess around with jumper cables or call the automobile association.

He took another slug, turned on the light, screwed the top back on the bottle, put it in his bag, and climbed out.

That was the first phase of Plan B. Whatever happened, the car wouldn’t start the next morning. He hadn’t seen a phone in the house. They could always call the automobile association from a house in the village, but he would immediately point out that the road service probably couldn’t get through in weather like this. He would suggest that they go for help at a garage.

He guessed that they wouldn’t send him out alone in the snow, that after some hesitation Herman would go along to show him the way — but Laura wouldn’t, Laura would stay at home.

He had guessed correctly.

—

They arrive at a narrow bridge across a frozen canal; at that point Jan Landzaat is walking out in front. Without thinking about it, he crosses the bridge and turns left on the other side. On Christmas Eve, alone in his pitiful studio apartment, when his initial plan (a plan he could now, in hindsight, refer to as Plan A) began to take shape, he had searched around a little for a road map, but all his maps were at the house, as he in fact already knew.

At that point he had thought about the glove compartment of his car: there were always a few road maps in there, maps from the last summer vacation, perhaps even a map of France, but certainly one of the Netherlands.

He made a mental note to stop at a gas station along the way and buy a map of France, if there wasn’t one in the car already. That would make his “friends in Paris” even more believable.

The next morning he ascertained that, indeed, the glove compartment contained only a map of Holland. He knew more or less how to get to Zeeland Flanders, he had been that way before, to Knokke, where his daughters had driven up and down the boulevard in pedal cars while he and his wife sat at an outdoor café and shared a plate of shrimp croquettes while knocking back a bottle of white wine.

Retranchement was still on the Dutch map, but Terhofstede wasn’t. He didn’t think it would be too difficult to find, though. The best thing would be to drive to Flushing and take the Breskens ferry. Retranchement was only about ten miles from Breskens.

Where is that exactly, Retranchement? I’ve never heard of it. They had been lying close together in their hotel bed, the bed in a hotel along the main road to Utrecht, Laura had leaned across him to take a pack of cigarettes from the nightstand. Their affair had been going on for only two weeks: the first time they did it fast, like in a movie, clothes left behind at the door, underwear and shoes in a hasty trail from door to bed, and then, after a cigarette or two, again, slowly, attentively, waiting for each other. It had been so long since I’d been there, she’d said of her parents’ house in Zeeland. When I was little I thought it was a great adventure, but later on I started getting bored, with only my parents and my little brother. He asked her precisely where that was in Zeeland, just to ask something, not because it really interested him, it was only that, when he heard the funny, un-Dutch name Retranchement, he had thought she was pulling his leg.

It’s not actually in Retranchement itself, it’s in a little village close by, Terhofstede. Last summer we went there with a group of friends. Then it was fun again.

On that last evening at his place, the evening when she had lost her earring in the bathroom, she’d told him that she was going there again with the same friends that fall.

One evening, a few days before the Christmas vacation, he had called her. “Don’t hang up right away!” he said quickly. “I have something important to tell you.” He heard her sigh at the other end; he tried not to think about the last ten times he’d called her and only breathed into the phone.

“Please, Jan,” she said. “Please. Just stop this.”

“You’re right,” he said quickly. “I’m stopping. That’s what I’m calling about. To tell you that I’ve stopped.”

He was drunk, he did his best to keep talking in the hope that she wouldn’t notice, but he felt his words slipping away, struggling to keep their balance — while yet other words kept sticking together.

“Jan, I’m hanging up now. I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Wait! Wait a minute! Let me finish, I’m almost finished. Then you can hang up.”

He was half expecting to hear the dial tone, but she didn’t hang up; she didn’t say anything, but she didn’t hang up either.

I miss you, Laura. I can’t live without you. Without you, I’m not going to go on living either. Before the year is over, I’m going to put an end to it.

Covering the horn with one hand, he reached for the whiskey bottle and raised it to his lips.

“I want to meet you one last time,” he said after the third gulp. “No, it’s not what you think,” he added promptly when he heard her sigh again. “I don’t want anything from you, I promise. You decide where. In a café or something, wherever you like. Tomorrow. Or the day after.”

“I can’t, not tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow I won’t be here anymore. I’m going away.”

He felt an air bubble, somewhere just below his midriff, a bubble that needed to get out now. He covered the horn again and tried to burp, but the only thing that came up was whiskey, whiskey and something else. Where are you going? No, he mustn’t ask that.

“My parents are going to New York,” she said.

“Are you going to New York! That’s great! So you’re leaving the day after tomorrow? Well, maybe we can—” Maybe we can meet up tonight, then? But that was not a good idea, he had no idea what time it was — he’d known what time it was when he called, but meanwhile he’d lost track completely.

“I’m not going along,” she said. “My little brother is.”

And that was the moment when he’d known — despite his drunken, pounding head, he realized that he should ask no further. Her parents were going to New York. With her brother. She had the whole place to herself, there was no reason to go away, but still she was going away, she’d just said so.

With him! He closed his eyes tightly. For three whole seconds he thought about Herman’s unmanly body, his stringy, unwashed hair, the little, beaded bracelet around his wrist, his stinking rubber boots, his malformed teeth. Fucking shit, how can she do that?

“I’ve got an idea,” he said. “I’m going to leave it completely up to you. You don’t want to meet up now. You can’t meet up now. So let’s just agree that you call me. Whenever the time’s right for you. Maybe you think right now that we shouldn’t meet up at all, but that’s not true, Laura. But you decide when. I won’t call you again.”

—

At the gas station where he stopped between Goes and Flushing they didn’t have a French map, but they did have a detailed map of Zeeland province. That morning in the attic, by first light, he examined it. The closest town of any size was Sluis. Terhofstede was on the map too, and he did his best to memorize the route — both there and back again.

That was why, when they reached the bridge over the canal, he had almost automatically turned left. That’s what he thought he remembered seeing on the map. No, not “thought he remembered,” he remembered with one-hundred-percent certainty that this was the way to Sluis. That was also why he hadn’t turned around when Herman called him. For the last fifteen minutes Herman had been lagging a bit, meanwhile they had left behind the last houses of Terhofstede and now only passed the occasional farm, a bit further back from the road. They saw no one at all, only once a growling watchdog that ventured a few steps from its yard but quickly turned back.

“We have to turn right here!” he hears Herman call out for the second time, and this time he does turn around.

Herman is still standing on the other side, at the start of the bridge, he’s holding something up to his eye, a telescope, Landzaat thinks at first, but then he sees it is a camera. A movie camera.

A movie camera! Herman is filming him — maybe he has been filming him for a while, while he was lagging behind. His first impulse is to yank the camera out of Herman’s hands and toss it in the canal. Into the frozen canal. He pictures the way the camera might bounce once and then break into pieces. No, not that. Not a good idea. Silently, he counts to ten.

“Are you sure?” he shouts. “I thought Sluis was in that direction.”

He points. He points toward Sluis, toward the spot beyond the trees and a few more whitened fields and dikes lined with pollard willows, to where he is sure Sluis must be.

“No, here, to the right,” Herman shouts back — Herman is still standing on the other side of the bridge; in the silence that follows Jan Landzaat hears a new sound that he can’t quite place at first, a quiet rattle. The camera! He’s just gone on filming! He’s filming what it is I’m going to do. “I’ve done this before, the fastest way is to the right.”

Slowly, he turns and starts walking back to the bridge. As slowly as possible, to win time, to give himself time to think. He can’t imagine that Herman could be wrong about this. To the right, along the canal, is the opposite direction; it will only take them further and further away from Sluis. And closer to the sea, to the bird sanctuary. The Zwin, that’s what it was called — he’d seen it on the map that morning.

—

His Plan B was every bit as simple as it was elegant, if you asked him. He hadn’t even spent the whole night thinking about it: the initial outline had been there in less than a second, half a second at most, in a clear flash. He lay staring at the plank ceiling in the light of the streetlamp, but the idea was so clear and blinding that the yellowish light on the planks and beams seemed for that half second to turn a fraction of a shade darker.

In a little while, his car would refuse to start. He would go walking with Herman and Laura, or only with Herman, or completely on his own, to Sluis — he figured he and Herman, just the two of them, was the most likely scenario.

Somewhere along the way he would have to shake Herman, he didn’t know how, but it shouldn’t be too hard. If need be he could just take off running, yes, that wasn’t such a bad idea. “He just took off running,” Herman would report later, it would sound completely unbelievable, so implausible that Herman would only incriminate himself.

Once he had given Herman the slip he would have to find a suitable place. A remote place, a hollow in the dunes close to the bird sanctuary, behind a bush or amid the reeds along a frozen ditch, a place where they wouldn’t find him too quickly, at least not before the next day, when the search began.

At that remote place he would use a big stone or a heavy branch (a stone would be best, but he wasn’t sure whether there would be any of those along the road or in the fields around here) to hurt himself so badly that he would lose consciousness. Practically speaking, he didn’t know whether it was possible to knock yourself out with a big stone (or a heavy branch). In any case, it would have to produce a lot of blood. He figured that he could let the big stone come down a few times on his nose, mouth, and eyes before he passed out. It would have to look like he’d been battered by someone who hated him. And even if he didn’t succeed in knocking himself unconscious with a final blow to the temple, that would be no real disaster. The most important thing was not to be found right away, at the earliest in the course of the next day — by which time, at this temperature, conscious or no, he would have frozen to death.

There were a few technical catches: he could leave no fingerprints on the stone (or heavy branch), but he would be wearing mittens anyway, so that was no problem. And then there was the snow, or the footprints in the snow, rather. Only his own footprints would be found, nothing belonging to a possible murderer. In selecting the remote spot, therefore, he would also have to make sure it wasn’t all too far from a road or path. A road or path with plenty of footprints from walkers and other passersby. From the path to the spot where the corpse (his corpse!) would be found, he would walk back and forth a few times to wipe out all the tracks. As though the murderer had tried to cover the tracks, he thought with a grin, lying in his cold bed in the attic.

Conclusions would be drawn swiftly enough. Everything would be brought out in the open, but what did that matter? He wouldn’t be around to see it.

A teacher visits two students at a house in Zeeland Flanders. He and the girl had once had a brief affair. The next morning his car refuses to start. The boy offers to lead him to a garage in Sluis. But they never get there. The boy returns home alone. His statements seem confused (to say nothing of suspicious). He just took off running. The next day (two days, three days, a week later), the teacher’s body is found in a ditch or a hollow in the dunes. His head has been battered with a large stone (heavy branch). An autopsy will determine whether he was beaten to death or whether it was the cold that killed him.

The accounts given by the two students sound less than believable. At first, both of them are held for questioning. But after only a few days the detectives assigned to the case will begin to doubt whether the girl is guilty. Because Laura herself, in the best of all possible scenarios, will have started doubting whether Herman has really told her everything. He came back to the house alone that day. The teacher had supposedly taken off on his own. Would Laura, in spite of everything, continue to believe in Herman’s innocence? It didn’t really matter much anymore. Her life, too, would be largely ruined. It wouldn’t be long before people began questioning her version of events as well.

That girl, do you think maybe she put that boy up to murdering the teacher?

After that the suspicions would never be completely dispelled, she would be associated with the murder for the rest of her life — as an accomplice. We’ll never really know the whole truth. That was enough, nothing else was needed.

It was already almost light in the attic; a gray, cloudy day, he noted after pressing his face against the icy window. The plan made sense, down to the slightest detail, even those details he himself could never have anticipated beforehand.

The teacher, Laura and Herman would claim, had said he’d only made a slight detour before driving on that day, or the next morning, to see friends in Paris. But it wasn’t a slight detour at all, you couldn’t call it that, not with the best will in the world. Wasn’t it strange that someone going to Paris would have no guidebook or map of that city in his car? Or at least a map of France?

Imagine that there was a thorough police investigation and that, besides the evidence already rapidly piling up, they discovered that the car’s battery was dead. Run down, because a battery doesn’t just go dead. When the battery was charged, the roof light would go on. Aha, so that was it! The car wasn’t locked. It would have been easy as pie for one of the students to sneak out during the night and turn on the reading lamp, so that the teacher couldn’t leave the next morning.

At that moment he had heard them talking downstairs, very quietly, almost in a whisper, but in this house every sound went straight through the thin wooden walls and floors. What could they be talking about? He had to go downstairs quickly now, he would surprise them by making breakfast. He would pretend to be cheerful. Most people on the verge of suicide were cheerful for the last few days, that’s what those closest to them always said afterward. The future suicide smiled a bit more than usual, he played games with the children, he told jokes — and the next day they found him hanging from a beam.

He shivered as he picked up his cold clothes from the chair at the foot of the bed. And as he put on his socks and shoes, he suddenly thought about his two daughters. His little daughters would grow up without a father. What’s more, for the rest of their lives they would be the daughters of a murdered father, a father whose life had been taken by brute force. He thought about his wife. In a certain sense, she would be getting her just deserts, she would never recover. She would feel guilty, about what he wasn’t quite sure, but he believed it was true: his wife would think she could have prevented his death if she’d been a little more accommodating. If she hadn’t threatened him with seeing his daughters less often, perhaps not at all anymore. With a little more compassion, she could have cured him of his obsession with a seventeen-year-old student. She would be consumed with regret at her own stubbornness. She would age quickly. Later, she would have a lot to explain to her growing daughters. But why did Daddy go away, Mom? Was it really so bad, what he did? Shouldn’t you have helped him instead?

And it was there and at that moment, as he pulled on his clammy socks and slid his feet into his ice-cold shoes, that he’d had his second brilliant flash of inspiration.

A modified Plan B.

Yes, he thought. That’s how I’ll do it. Much better. Better for everyone: not least of all for myself, but in any case better for my girls.

44

Landzaat and I would walk out to the Zwin. At that moment I didn’t know what I was planning to do out there, but whatever happened we were not going to Sluis, not to a garage.

In a certain sense it was all very illogical, I was quite aware of that. The sooner we found a garage, after all, the sooner Landzaat’s car could be fixed, and the sooner he could go away too, away, out of our lives.

But that morning I wasn’t running on logic anymore. The history teacher had arrived uninvited. He had forced his way into our lives, which had been timeless up till then — ever since he’d arrived, everything was taking too long. He didn’t go away, he remained hanging around like a musty, lingering smell.

We might find an open garage in Sluis. A mechanic might come back with us to look at the car, or else they’d send a tow truck to pick it up, a tow truck of the kind that could actually make it through the snow. There was a chance that the repair would take a few days, that they would have to order parts. Would Landzaat volunteer to move to a hotel in Sluis while they waited? Would he go back to Amsterdam?

But even so, what then? Imagine the car could be started today, that they could push him out of the snow — that Jan Landzaat would finally! finally! be able to travel on to his friends in Paris. Would we really be rid of him? Would Laura be rid of him? Or would it start all over again after the Christmas vacation?

The teacher may have lost the battle, but he had not lost the war. Landzaat himself had said that once during history class. It was some kind of famous quote, I didn’t remember who said it. Jan Landzaat already realized that he had nothing to gain here in Terhofstede, I was convinced of that: he had given up for the moment, he would cut his losses and, if the engine started, he would really leave.

But what about a week from now? A month? Would he give up completely, would he put Laura out of his mind for good, or would he simply start all over again? With other means. With a new tactic.

No, I had to do something to make sure it was over for good. Something that would remove him from our lives forever.

That was why I sent him the wrong way after he crossed the bridge. That was why I filmed him too: as evidence, although at that moment, I didn’t know what of.

After the bridge the path widened into a road, a dirt road, or maybe a real one covered in asphalt: the thick layer of snow made it impossible to tell. It didn’t really matter, of course, but because the road was so broad we could — at least theoretically — walk beside each other, which was absolutely the last thing I wanted. By then my body literally balked at getting close to the history teacher, and so I slowed down every once in a while, to at least stay a few feet behind him. But then Landzaat would slow down too, forcing me to choose between dawdling even more or coming up alongside him. Maybe he was suspicious, or maybe he was simply on his guard after seeing the movie camera — maybe he wanted to keep me from filming him candidly again.

Up to that point there had been no conversation, not even the start of a conversation. I had resolved not to start talking; first of all because I didn’t feel like it, and secondly—

“Have you made movies before with that thing?” Landzaat asked; at that moment he was walking two feet out in front of me, but he slowed so that we could walk beside each other. “I mean, you must make movies. No, what I really mean is: What kind of things do you film?”

I didn’t answer right away; I realized that I preferred the silence that had reigned till then. It had not been an uneasy silence — maybe for him, but not for me.

Not answering him at all was out of the question. The teacher would probably only shrug and say something like If you don’t want to talk, fine by me. No skin off my nose.

It would grant him a kind of moral superiority, and we couldn’t have that.

“All kinds of things,” I said.

“Really? All kinds of things? Or mostly teachers?”

I had put the camera back in my coat pocket, inside the pocket I weighed it in my hand: it was pretty heavy, but not heavy enough to use for anything but making movies.

“You’ve developed quite a reputation in the teachers’ lounge,” Landzaat said. “You and David. With the things you two do. Playing tricks all over the place. Acting like an idiot in class and then filming the teacher’s reaction.”

I said nothing, it felt best to say nothing, to see first where he was trying to go with this.

“Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not condemning it right off the bat,” he said. “I was young once too. Playing jokes on teachers, I did that in high school too. But in the teachers’ lounge I noticed that one or two of them were really upset about it.”

After the fall vacation I had edited all the films back-to-back. By then, the teacher mortality rate had reached its high-water mark — in hindsight you could even say that it had already passed that point by the start of the Christmas vacation. First Mr. Van Ruth, the math teacher — unfortunately, I didn’t have him on film. Then Miss Posthuma, found dead in her apartment less than a week later, and in late November Harm Koolhaas’s fatal trip to Miami, which ended in a (botched) holdup. We hadn’t done anything with him either, he simply wasn’t the right type for it—“too vulnerable by nature” was David’s comment, and that said enough already. I did of course have footage of Mr. Karstens, but only of his lifeless body lying in his own classroom, half hidden beneath the desk in front of the chalkboard.

I had mounted all the films back-to-back and given the whole thing the working title Life Before Death II. It was perfect, that title: teachers also didn’t realize that their lives were empty and senseless, that those lives had ended on the day they decided to make teaching their profession. It was like a nature film of a herd grazing on the savanna, or better yet, of a school of fish in the ocean. Oblivious to almost everything except the water in which it moves, the life of a fish starts somewhere, at a random moment, and ends somewhere else, at perhaps an even more random moment. That end is often both swift and brutal. Another, bigger fish or a bird or a seal waiting patiently beside a hole in the polar ice takes the fish in its jaws, beak, or teeth, bites it in two, and swallows it down.

I had tried to furnish it with English-language narration — nature films are almost always dubbed in English. Miss Posthuma is seeing something she has never seen before. Mr. Karstens will never teach again. I thought about the narration I could later dub beneath the footage I’d made of the history teacher. Mr. Landzaat has followed his instincts; he has followed his dick to the end of the world. Now he is lost in the snow, wondering, “How did I get here?”

What was it Landzaat had just said? I was young once too. The horror of it, what emptiness, when you could make that kind of pronouncement about yourself. It reminded me of my father. My father, who had tried to act so casual when I came home drunk one night from an outing with my friends, long past the time we’d agreed on. Paternally casual. My mother’s eyes were red and teary. I was so worried! I thought you’d been in an accident! The gesture with which my father silenced her…I used to drink a bit too much too sometimes. That happens when you’re young. After that I had to throw up, I didn’t even have the strength to get up off the living room couch, let alone make it to the bathroom: everything came out all at once, a bucket being tossed, a toilet flushing — it spattered all over the wall-to-wall carpet, but at least the room stopped spinning.

They didn’t get angry. My mother came and sat beside me and put her arm around me, my father stood beside the TV with his hands in his pockets and winked at me. I felt my mother’s fingers in my hair, she had started crying quietly as she spoke reassuring words. Normal parents would have let me clean up my own barf, but they had stopped being normal parents long ago. I’m going to my room. I need to lie down. And I stood up, I left them behind with their sense of guilt. Less than a minute later I could hear them fighting, I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but I could sort of guess.

I could make Life Before Death II end with Jan Landzaat. With Landzaat on the bridge back there, or with a couple of new shots later, out in the Zwin. His face at the moment he realized we had gone in the wrong direction, that we had to walk the whole way back, but that it was probably already too late to reach a garage in Sluis before it closed. I don’t know, I would say. I guess I must have been mistaken…

Would he fly into a rage? Or would he remain a teacher under all circumstances? Someone who knows nothing himself, but has been hired to aid and abet others in their ignorance. A grown man barely in his thirties who says of himself that he “was young once too.” As a teacher, he must repress his natural urges. But so far he hasn’t behaved like a proper teacher. Now…he is paying the price for his carelessness…

Yes, I would have to look him straight in the eye, cold as ice, later, when I told him we would no longer make it to Sluis before dark. I would film him, keep on filming him, in his dismay, his despair, perhaps in his rage. But not yet, for the time being I needed to reassure him — we were on our way to Sluis, to a garage, if everything worked out he could drive on to Paris tomorrow morning.

“Come on,” I said. “Really upset about it…I don’t believe that. They’re grown-up people, right? Who was actually so upset about it?” I asked for form’s sake, because of course I already knew; this was meant more to keep our “normal” conversation going. Mr. Karstens didn’t seem particularly upset, I thought — but I didn’t say that.

“What are you laughing about?” Landzaat asked.

“No, I was just thinking about Karstens,” I said; and it was at that moment, that one careless moment when I spoke before thinking, when I said exactly what I had meant not to say from the beginning, that I made up my mind — that I suddenly knew what I was going to do. “At least he didn’t seem too upset when I filmed him. On the contrary.”

I could tell right away from the second and a half in which Jan Landzaat didn’t reply. The time he took to think it over was what gave him away. I felt a wave of triumph rise up from my collar: it was going to be much easier than I’d thought.

“Do you think that’s funny?” he asked. “At least that’s how it sounds: as though you think it’s really funny. And what do you mean by ‘when I filmed him’? What did you guys do, for Christ’s sake?”

Bingo! I thought. Gotcha. You hold a piece of sausage above a dog’s head, two feet above its head. You can’t let your concentration flag for even a moment, otherwise the dog will take a piece of your finger when it jumps at the sausage.

“Karstens wasn’t actually a friend of mine,” he went on after a brief pause, during which he took off his black mittens, rubbed his hands together and stuck them in his pockets. “Just a different kind of teacher than I am. But I don’t think that’s any way to talk about someone.”

“What do you mean by ‘a different kind of teacher,’ Landzaat? Do you mean a teacher who doesn’t try right away to stuff his dick into one of his students? Who just does what he was hired to do? I can’t imagine Mr. Karstens climbing down off his stool to force himself on one of the girls in the class. Getting down on his knees and begging them to play with his wiener.”

This was fantastic. It felt fantastic. It was like being able to throw open the window at last after a long, stuffy day, to let in the fresh air — no, it was more than just fresh air — to let a fresh wind blow through. But even more than an open window, it felt like something that was sort of forbidden, but still necessary: busting a pane of glass in order to yank on the emergency brake.

The teacher had stopped in his tracks, he turned halfway around to face me, but I walked on; a few yards further I stopped too and turned around.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is it?” Jan Landzaat asked.

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

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

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

“I have to piss,” I said.

45

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

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

—

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

I…I lost him, I said.

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then she was beside you, leaning over you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

“Mama.”

At last your wife turned around.

“Catherine!”

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

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

“Daddy’s sleeping,” she said.

46

Daddy’s sleeping—but those are words he no longer hears.

He’s still there: he thinks — his mind thinks its final thoughts — but the sounds have now been banished. He is a writer. He can describe his final moments, the transition from life to death, no longer on paper, but still in words — in a final sentence.

He knows the accounts of people who have “come back from the dead.” Those accounts usually speak of a “very clear, blinding light at the end of a tunnel,” of a “lighted gateway,” of a “sense of peace.” Death is not at all terrible, these revenants say, merely a joy-drenched transition from life to a new phase.

But those who came back from the dead had never been truly dead, that’s the one factor that binds them all, he knows now. In the last few years he has often — increasingly often — thought about his parents. His parents who supposedly were waiting for him on the far side of that “light” and that “gateway.” With open arms. Like on the playground. Yes, he would go running to them like a child after a long day at school, his father would lift him high into the air, his mother would cover him in kisses.

Life was about that long: a boring day at school, the endless hours spent mostly staring out the window.

The greatest advantage, he knows now too, is the disappearance of fear. You don’t have to be afraid of anything once you’re dead. He has, in essence, always been afraid, he at least possesses enough self-knowledge to realize that — he is not the adventuresome type, as they say. There are two kinds of writers. The first kind has to go everywhere himself, he has to experience it all himself in order to write about it. This first category of writer goes big-game hunting in Africa, shark fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, he races out in front of the bulls in Pamplona and dives for cover during a mortar attack in a hot, distant country rife with diarrhea and nasty, stinging insects — a country he would never have visited if there hadn’t been a war on. He needs to experience things, if he doesn’t experience anything, the writing engine will not turn over.

The second category of writer mostly stays at home. When he actually changes his address, he does so at most once or twice in his life. He nurtures constancy. The familiar. At a restaurant he will always order the same dish. And it’s almost always the same restaurant. When he goes on vacation, it’s always to the same country. To the same hotel.

It was like with a story. Like with a book. What is it we look for in a book? That someone goes through a process of maturation — that he achieves insight? But imagine if that process and that insight simply aren’t there? Wouldn’t that, in fact, be much more like life itself? People who actually go through a process of maturation are as rare as hen’s teeth. To say nothing of those who gain insight. No, in the real world we remain the same. We go to the theater and see a movie and decide to change our lives, but the next day we’ve forgotten all about that. We resolve to be kinder, to listen more carefully. We keep that up for the better part of a morning. After that we go back to snarling as usual — snarling is that one old, worn-out housecoat that fits us best.

He wonders how it will go with him, with himself — with his own story. He’s seen it happen to dead colleagues. Suddenly their books are back on the bestseller list. Not for long, a couple of weeks at most, but still…He tries to put himself in the shoes of those who buy a book by a recently deceased author. A book they apparently didn’t own yet. Maybe they had never even heard of the writer in question, maybe it was only the newspaper obituary or the article about the writer’s funeral that gave them the idea. “Hyenas” is what colleague N called that category of readers, that category unto itself, in an interview once. “Vultures.” But that wasn’t true. Such readers had at most heard the hyenas howl in the distance, they had seen the vultures circling and realized there was something there for the taking.

He had only tried to imagine what must have happened. Back then. Forty years ago. He had never written detective novels or thrillers, but he had always enjoyed reading them. Those books brought back something of that old joy in reading, the old, carefree, avid reading: in the same way he’d devoured the books he had stolen from the shop when he was sixteen, without worrying too much about genre. In those days, all books were equally exciting, in the old-fashioned sense that you wanted to find out how they ended.

But somewhere around his eighteenth birthday — a point that coincided more or less with his earliest urges to write — he had been driven out, once and for all, from the paradise of carefree reading. From that moment on a distinction was imposed between literature and the rest: the other books. From then on literature was either good or bad. Bad literature he read with a gnashing of teeth, growling and fidgeting in his easy chair, furious in fact at such pretentiously formulated impotence. But with the good literature too, something of the original pleasure was ruined once and for all. Whenever a book was truly good — very, very good, perhaps even a work of genius, a masterpiece — he kept asking himself how the writer had done it. He would pause after each paragraph, sometimes after each sentence, and then read that paragraph and that sentence over and over before going on. Sometimes he turned the sentence into pabulum by reading it over and over so often that it finally kept as little of its original flair as a meal cooked to death and then warmed up again and again.

There was also another difference between literature and all the other books. It was, in fact, the same food from two different restaurants. On the right you had the restaurant with the Michelin stars, on the left the Burger King or McDonald’s. The point was that you didn’t always feel like nibbling at sophisticated tidbits, didn’t always feel like spearing a minuscule piece of goose liver from an otherwise as-good-as-empty plate. Sometimes you felt more like a hamburger with bacon and melted cheese and a soft, soggy bun that left the grease dripping down your chin — but that was always accompanied by a sense of guilt. A sense of guilt so overpowering that M, whenever he visited a Burger King, kept looking around skittishly to make sure he saw no one he knew. Caught red-handed! Like running into someone outside the door of a whorehouse. After reading a thriller or a detective novel, he had almost the same feeling: a great emptiness. Was that all there was? A few hours after eating that Triple Whopper with bacon and cheese he was hungry again too, as though both stomach and brain had completely repressed the memory of that guilty meal. A detective novel was a furtive visit to a whorehouse, a real book was a conquest each and every time, the woman at the hotel bar in that foreign city, the conversation that consists more of glances than of words — and then the elevator upstairs.

Along with Ana, he sometimes cast a furtive eye at detective series on TV. “The vet did it,” he would shout after ten minutes. “Wait and see, that nice veterinarian who’s helping them search for the body right now.”

“Ssh!” Ana would say. “Don’t do that, otherwise it’s no fun anymore.”

But he was always right. It took a great deal of effort to suppress a triumphant grin whenever “the nice vet” was taken into custody at last.

It was in that same way, forty years ago, that he had looked out over the fields around Terhofstede, had walked back and forth to Retranchement and then followed the canal to Sluis. He had found a room in a simple boardinghouse in Retranchement, and left on foot for the Zwin after breakfast the next day. There, atop the sea dike, he looked out over the thistle and haulm-covered flats of the inlet — it looked like it was low tide. He put himself in the position of his characters. Of Herman. Of Laura. But above all, of the history teacher. Of Jan Landzaat.

Imagine, he thought for the first time there, at that same spot, that the teacher had simply disappeared of his own free will. That he hadn’t been killed by Herman and Laura and then buried in some secret, or at least unfindable, location. He had thought about the detective series, about the most improbable yet still just barely credible scenario — about the nice veterinarian.

He had tried to imagine this same landscape when it was covered with ice and snow. The sun that was already going down by four-thirty on that day after Boxing Day, the day when Jan Landzaat and Herman left on foot together for Sluis to find a garage for his disabled vehicle. Imagine that the history teacher had been planning all along to get rid of Herman somewhere along the way; perhaps not in the literal sense of getting rid of him, not by harming him, but much simpler than that: by disappearing, by giving him the slip when he wasn’t paying attention. That he had waited patiently for such a moment to arrive, and that when Herman withdrew into the bushes along the dike to take a piss — as Herman himself had stated, as he had never stopped stating — Landzaat had seized the opportunity and slipped away quietly.

As a writer, this version of events was inconvenient for M. Inconvenient for the book he had already decided to write, even though he was still unsure which way the plot would go; it would be better if the whole hike to Sluis had been invented by Herman (and by Laura), and if the history teacher was long buried and in the ground two days after Christmas. Unfortunately, though, there was that witness, the to-this-day-unidentified witness who the papers said had seen Herman and the teacher close to the canal, albeit not in the direction of Sluis but out toward the Zwin.

After that, of course, anything could have happened; no new witnesses turned up. Herman could have murdered Jan Landzaat and then buried him at some spot in or close to the Zwin. Then he could have returned to Terhofstede and told Laura that he had “lost” the teacher.

But back then, forty years ago, as M stood on the sea dike, that version of events had suddenly seemed highly improbable. Herman would have had to do it with his bare hands; in a struggle with the healthy, full-grown Jan Landzaat he would definitely have come out on the losing end. He would have had to take him by surprise, from behind, using a stone, or some weapon he’d brought from the house — a hammer, a hatchet, something he could easily hide under his coat — to knock him out. But the more M thought about it, the less likely that seemed. It seemed more premeditated than Herman or Laura was capable of. And even though the witness had stated that he’d seen Herman and Landzaat heading toward the Zwin, that didn’t mean Herman had intentionally lured him out there in order to kill him: after all, Herman could have gotten mixed up too — he may have known the surroundings better than the teacher, but maybe he’d had a hard time getting his bearings in that white landscape.

M had walked from Terhofstede to the canal. There was a bridge there, but no signpost; on the far side of the canal the road split, one side going north toward the Zwin, the other to the south, toward Sluis. From the split in the road you still could not see Sluis, not even on a clear summer’s day: nothing, no steeple or buildings, those came only later, after the canal bent off gently and the old fortified town popped up from behind the trees. Jan Landzaat and Herman, in any event, had never reached Sluis.

Atop the sea dike M had closed his eyes and sniffed at the wind. In the distance, on the horizon, he saw sticking up into the air the cranes of what was probably a harbor. Which way would he himself have gone? he’d asked himself that afternoon.

In the police interviews with Laura and Herman, in what had leaked out about those interviews, the “friends in Paris” came up a number of times. But no one else, not Landzaat’s wife, not his colleagues or former classmates, had ever heard of such Parisian friends. Still, the history teacher had been “on his way to Paris”; at least that’s what he himself claimed — once again, according to Laura and Herman.

M imagined a figure: a lone figure in a pure white landscape, this same landscape in winter, the harbor cranes in the distance.

Had Jan Landzaat gone to Paris? Had he taken the train? And had he then gone into hiding with his real or imaginary friends?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

47

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

48

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Payback,” was M’s reply.

—

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

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

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

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

I fought for you, Mama.

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

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

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

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

There is nothing.