Herman Koch - Dear Mr. M

But that morning I wasn’t running on logic anymore. The history teacher had arrived uninvited. He had forced his way into our lives, which had been timeless up till then — ever since he’d arrived, everything was taking too long. He didn’t go away, he remained hanging around like a musty, lingering smell.

We might find an open garage in Sluis. A mechanic might come back with us to look at the car, or else they’d send a tow truck to pick it up, a tow truck of the kind that could actually make it through the snow. There was a chance that the repair would take a few days, that they would have to order parts. Would Landzaat volunteer to move to a hotel in Sluis while they waited? Would he go back to Amsterdam?

But even so, what then? Imagine the car could be started today, that they could push him out of the snow — that Jan Landzaat would finally! finally! be able to travel on to his friends in Paris. Would we really be rid of him? Would Laura be rid of him? Or would it start all over again after the Christmas vacation?

The teacher may have lost the battle, but he had not lost the war. Landzaat himself had said that once during history class. It was some kind of famous quote, I didn’t remember who said it. Jan Landzaat already realized that he had nothing to gain here in Terhofstede, I was convinced of that: he had given up for the moment, he would cut his losses and, if the engine started, he would really leave.

But what about a week from now? A month? Would he give up completely, would he put Laura out of his mind for good, or would he simply start all over again? With other means. With a new tactic.

No, I had to do something to make sure it was over for good. Something that would remove him from our lives forever.

That was why I sent him the wrong way after he crossed the bridge. That was why I filmed him too: as evidence, although at that moment, I didn’t know what of.

After the bridge the path widened into a road, a dirt road, or maybe a real one covered in asphalt: the thick layer of snow made it impossible to tell. It didn’t really matter, of course, but because the road was so broad we could — at least theoretically — walk beside each other, which was absolutely the last thing I wanted. By then my body literally balked at getting close to the history teacher, and so I slowed down every once in a while, to at least stay a few feet behind him. But then Landzaat would slow down too, forcing me to choose between dawdling even more or coming up alongside him. Maybe he was suspicious, or maybe he was simply on his guard after seeing the movie camera — maybe he wanted to keep me from filming him candidly again.

Up to that point there had been no conversation, not even the start of a conversation. I had resolved not to start talking; first of all because I didn’t feel like it, and secondly—

“Have you made movies before with that thing?” Landzaat asked; at that moment he was walking two feet out in front of me, but he slowed so that we could walk beside each other. “I mean, you must make movies. No, what I really mean is: What kind of things do you film?”

I didn’t answer right away; I realized that I preferred the silence that had reigned till then. It had not been an uneasy silence — maybe for him, but not for me.

Not answering him at all was out of the question. The teacher would probably only shrug and say something like If you don’t want to talk, fine by me. No skin off my nose.

It would grant him a kind of moral superiority, and we couldn’t have that.

“All kinds of things,” I said.

“Really? All kinds of things? Or mostly teachers?”

I had put the camera back in my coat pocket, inside the pocket I weighed it in my hand: it was pretty heavy, but not heavy enough to use for anything but making movies.

“You’ve developed quite a reputation in the teachers’ lounge,” Landzaat said. “You and David. With the things you two do. Playing tricks all over the place. Acting like an idiot in class and then filming the teacher’s reaction.”

I said nothing, it felt best to say nothing, to see first where he was trying to go with this.

“Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not condemning it right off the bat,” he said. “I was young once too. Playing jokes on teachers, I did that in high school too. But in the teachers’ lounge I noticed that one or two of them were really upset about it.”

After the fall vacation I had edited all the films back-to-back. By then, the teacher mortality rate had reached its high-water mark — in hindsight you could even say that it had already passed that point by the start of the Christmas vacation. First Mr. Van Ruth, the math teacher — unfortunately, I didn’t have him on film. Then Miss Posthuma, found dead in her apartment less than a week later, and in late November Harm Koolhaas’s fatal trip to Miami, which ended in a (botched) holdup. We hadn’t done anything with him either, he simply wasn’t the right type for it—“too vulnerable by nature” was David’s comment, and that said enough already. I did of course have footage of Mr. Karstens, but only of his lifeless body lying in his own classroom, half hidden beneath the desk in front of the chalkboard.

I had mounted all the films back-to-back and given the whole thing the working title Life Before Death II. It was perfect, that title: teachers also didn’t realize that their lives were empty and senseless, that those lives had ended on the day they decided to make teaching their profession. It was like a nature film of a herd grazing on the savanna, or better yet, of a school of fish in the ocean. Oblivious to almost everything except the water in which it moves, the life of a fish starts somewhere, at a random moment, and ends somewhere else, at perhaps an even more random moment. That end is often both swift and brutal. Another, bigger fish or a bird or a seal waiting patiently beside a hole in the polar ice takes the fish in its jaws, beak, or teeth, bites it in two, and swallows it down.

I had tried to furnish it with English-language narration — nature films are almost always dubbed in English. Miss Posthuma is seeing something she has never seen before. Mr. Karstens will never teach again. I thought about the narration I could later dub beneath the footage I’d made of the history teacher. Mr. Landzaat has followed his instincts; he has followed his dick to the end of the world. Now he is lost in the snow, wondering, “How did I get here?”

What was it Landzaat had just said? I was young once too. The horror of it, what emptiness, when you could make that kind of pronouncement about yourself. It reminded me of my father. My father, who had tried to act so casual when I came home drunk one night from an outing with my friends, long past the time we’d agreed on. Paternally casual. My mother’s eyes were red and teary. I was so worried! I thought you’d been in an accident! The gesture with which my father silenced her… I used to drink a bit too much too sometimes. That happens when you’re young. After that I had to throw up, I didn’t even have the strength to get up off the living room couch, let alone make it to the bathroom: everything came out all at once, a bucket being tossed, a toilet flushing — it spattered all over the wall-to-wall carpet, but at least the room stopped spinning.

They didn’t get angry. My mother came and sat beside me and put her arm around me, my father stood beside the TV with his hands in his pockets and winked at me. I felt my mother’s fingers in my hair, she had started crying quietly as she spoke reassuring words. Normal parents would have let me clean up my own barf, but they had stopped being normal parents long ago. I’m going to my room. I need to lie down. And I stood up, I left them behind with their sense of guilt. Less than a minute later I could hear them fighting, I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but I could sort of guess.