Herman Koch - Dear Mr. M

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

Laura tried to laugh, but only half succeeded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That made Herman laugh too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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