Herman Koch - Dear Mr. M

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

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

—

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

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

“Look, there,” Herman said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the distance she heard an ambulance howl.

They left the house in midafternoon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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