Herman Koch - Dear Mr. M

“I don’t know,” she said again.

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Herman came up with the plan.

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

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

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

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