Herman Koch - Dear Mr. M

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay, sleep tight.”

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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