Herman Koch: Dear Mr. M

Somehow we couldn’t reconcile the two images — the trousers and the beaded bag on the one hand, the corpse hanging out of the car with its neck twisted at a strange angle on the other. As though the halls, the classrooms and auditorium of the Spinoza Lyceum were the worst possible preparation for a violent demise in an American B-movie.

During the traditional moment of silence, I thought about that gas station on the far side of the Atlantic. I saw the bright red TEXACO letters, and the red-and-blue flashing lights of police cars. The policemen were chewing gum and they wore sunglasses, even though it was far past midnight.

I tried to place Harm Koolhaas’s death in some kind of perspective. I went back in my mind to his arrival at Miami Airport, to the moment when he was handed the keys to the white Chevrolet Malibu, to his walk across the parking lot beneath a dazzling canopy of stars…Did he have that beaded bag slung over his shoulder in America too? Had he brought along a few extra packs of Javaanse Jongens, just to be sure?

And while I was thinking about that bag and the packs of rolling tobacco, I realized that I would have to go back much further than that, to the baggage check-in at Schiphol, the flipping through a travel book about Florida at thirty-five thousand feet above the Atlantic, the happy, excited prospect of touching down on American soil. Or maybe it all started much earlier than that, as he put on his shoes and socks the morning he left. Harm Koolhaas standing in front of the mirror in his corduroy trousers, running his fingers through his hair.

In this case too, there was no wife or growing boys to miss him. The social studies teacher was still young and unattached, “in the prime of life,” as Goudeket read aloud from his notes. He could go to the airport on his own and didn’t have to turn and wave to anyone after going through customs. In all probability, he sauntered first past the shops with duty-free goods. After that, the number of people who saw him in real life decreased drastically, until finally he disappeared from sight altogether.

Because the body of our history teacher, Landzaat, was never found, no memorial service was ever held in the auditorium in his honor. In the case of a missing person, after all, there is always the hope that they may pop up somewhere. That someday they may resurface and announce themselves, at a police station, or at some remote farm miles and miles from the spot where they went missing, badly confused and suffering from memory loss, clothes torn and smeared with mud, but — thank God! — unharmed.

As the days and weeks went by, that hope grew scanter. A photograph of him remained hanging in the classroom all year long. Purely out of laziness, because no one ever thought of taking it down (who knows, perhaps it’s hanging there still). Back then it had already begun to curl at the edges and the colors had started going drab. It was a small photo — a Polaroid — showing Mr. Landzaat grinning and baring his characteristically long teeth all the way up to the gums. Where his pupils were, in the whites of his eyes, you could see two red dots from the flash. His hair was wet, probably with sweat from dancing at the school party where the Polaroid picture was taken.

Yes, when it came to dancing at school parties Mr. Landzaat was a real go-getter. Without so much as a how-do-you-do he would grab a girl by the hand and drag her out onto the dance floor. And the girls rarely put up a fight. Jan Landzaat was a popular teacher at the Spinoza Lyceum, perhaps the most popular. The horsey teeth were nothing but a minor shortcoming in his eternally tanned and youthful face. Another minor defect was his own awareness of how popular he was, and of how he made the girls giggle and blush.

—

When our class took a field trip to Paris, he remained at the hotel bar later than the other teachers. He drank his Pernod without water or ice, and told funny stories about back when he had taught at the Montessori Lyceum. Stories that made all of us laugh, including Laura Domènech, a junior like me.

“At the Montessori, they’re completely nuts,” Landzaat said. “Like some holy sect. The smile of beatific certainty. Of faith in that certainty. I’ll tell you, I was so glad to get out of there!”

Then, for the second time, he laid his hand on Laura’s forearm, the only difference being that this time he didn’t remove it again right away. We all saw. We saw that Laura didn’t pull her arm away. We saw how Laura took the elastic band out of her ponytail and shook loose her long, black hair — how she then put a cigarette between her lips and asked Mr. Landzaat for a light.

Jan Landzaat, too, had almost certainly put on his socks and shoes before leaving his temporary rental in Amsterdam’s River District that Boxing Day morning, to spend a few days with “friends in Paris.” And because it was “on my way anyway,” as he told us later that same day, he had swung by Terhofstede, a cluster of houses belonging to the municipality of Sluis, some three miles from the coast of Zeeland Flanders.

His tempestuous affair with Laura Domènech had ended a little less than two months earlier. He tried to be lighthearted about it, but with each passing day his face bore more and more traces of collapse. The color of his skin faded from brown to yellow, he began forgetting to shave, and there were mornings when the smell of alcohol made it to the desks all the way at the back of the classroom. Often he would remain standing at the board for minutes, lost in thought. You’d have to repeat your question a couple of times before he would reply.

But not that one time, not when I raised my hand and asked if there was any truth to the rumor that Napoleon had ordered his sixteen-year-old mistress drowned in the Seine. Mr. Landzaat turned slowly and looked at me. His red-rimmed eyes had dark, heavy bags under them, as though he’d been up weeping all night.

“And why should you suddenly be interested in that?” he asked.

The house in Terhofstede belonged to Laura’s parents, who were spending their own Christmas vacation in New York, giving Laura and me the run of the place. At first, when Laura told him she was dumping him, Jan Landzaat couldn’t believe his ears. And when he heard why and for whom, Laura said he’d looked disgusted.

“With him ?” he said.

The little white house was at the edge of the village. When I woke up in the morning I would lie there and look at Laura’s long, black hair fanning out over her pillow. Sometimes I let her sleep, usually I woke her. The frost made flowers on the windowpanes and there was no heating upstairs, so after that first night we moved the mattress down to the living room and slept in front of the antique coal stove.

In fact, we didn’t get up often. Every once in a while, just to do some shopping in nearby Retranchement, which had one shop. It was too cold to cycle so we walked, holding each other tight the whole time. When we went back to the house we had bottles of cheap wine, beer, eggs, and bread.

The difference between night and day faded to a timeless vacuum in which we had eyes only for each other — for our attempts to get closer and closer together. In the warmth of our zipped-together sleeping bags, on the mattress in front of the coal stove, the world began all over again each day, each hour, each minute.

So in that timeless vacuum it didn’t surprise us much to find, after we had got dressed and walked to Retranchement to replenish our supplies, that it was Boxing Day and everything was closed. We lingered there for a while, before the plate glass window of the closed shop, struggling with the idea that the world actually stuck to something like opening times. It was the coldest day of that whole week, a fine haze of snow was blowing across the paving stones. Night seemed to be falling again already, or else it was already getting light again — on that score, too, there was no longer anything like absolute certainty.