Herman Koch - Dear Mr. M

I could make Life Before Death II end with Jan Landzaat. With Landzaat on the bridge back there, or with a couple of new shots later, out in the Zwin. His face at the moment he realized we had gone in the wrong direction, that we had to walk the whole way back, but that it was probably already too late to reach a garage in Sluis before it closed. I don’t know, I would say. I guess I must have been mistaken…

Would he fly into a rage? Or would he remain a teacher under all circumstances? Someone who knows nothing himself, but has been hired to aid and abet others in their ignorance. A grown man barely in his thirties who says of himself that he “was young once too.” As a teacher, he must repress his natural urges. But so far he hasn’t behaved like a proper teacher. Now…he is paying the price for his carelessness…

Yes, I would have to look him straight in the eye, cold as ice, later, when I told him we would no longer make it to Sluis before dark. I would film him, keep on filming him, in his dismay, his despair, perhaps in his rage. But not yet, for the time being I needed to reassure him — we were on our way to Sluis, to a garage, if everything worked out he could drive on to Paris tomorrow morning.

“Come on,” I said. “Really upset about it…I don’t believe that. They’re grown-up people, right? Who was actually so upset about it?” I asked for form’s sake, because of course I already knew; this was meant more to keep our “normal” conversation going. Mr. Karstens didn’t seem particularly upset, I thought — but I didn’t say that.

“What are you laughing about?” Landzaat asked.

“No, I was just thinking about Karstens,” I said; and it was at that moment, that one careless moment when I spoke before thinking, when I said exactly what I had meant not to say from the beginning, that I made up my mind — that I suddenly knew what I was going to do. “At least he didn’t seem too upset when I filmed him. On the contrary.”

I could tell right away from the second and a half in which Jan Landzaat didn’t reply. The time he took to think it over was what gave him away. I felt a wave of triumph rise up from my collar: it was going to be much easier than I’d thought.

“Do you think that’s funny?” he asked. “At least that’s how it sounds: as though you think it’s really funny. And what do you mean by ‘when I filmed him’? What did you guys do, for Christ’s sake?”

Bingo! I thought. Gotcha. You hold a piece of sausage above a dog’s head, two feet above its head. You can’t let your concentration flag for even a moment, otherwise the dog will take a piece of your finger when it jumps at the sausage.

“Karstens wasn’t actually a friend of mine,” he went on after a brief pause, during which he took off his black mittens, rubbed his hands together and stuck them in his pockets. “Just a different kind of teacher than I am. But I don’t think that’s any way to talk about someone.”

“What do you mean by ‘a different kind of teacher,’ Landzaat? Do you mean a teacher who doesn’t try right away to stuff his dick into one of his students? Who just does what he was hired to do? I can’t imagine Mr. Karstens climbing down off his stool to force himself on one of the girls in the class. Getting down on his knees and begging them to play with his wiener.”

This was fantastic. It felt fantastic. It was like being able to throw open the window at last after a long, stuffy day, to let in the fresh air — no, it was more than just fresh air — to let a fresh wind blow through. But even more than an open window, it felt like something that was sort of forbidden, but still necessary: busting a pane of glass in order to yank on the emergency brake.

The teacher had stopped in his tracks, he turned halfway around to face me, but I walked on; a few yards further I stopped too and turned around.

“The big mistake teachers like you make is in thinking that they’re different,” I said. “Above all, that they’re nicer. That’s what you think too, that you are above all else a nice teacher. Not strict like Van Ruth and Karstens. Not deathly boring like Posthuma. But we don’t care fuck-all about nice teachers. Give us the real thing. Real, instead of artificial. You’re pure fake, Landzaat, everyone can see that. Everyone except for you.”

He looked at me, his eyes weren’t angry, more like dull: crestfallen. He took a few steps in my direction, but I quickly walked backward, pulling the movie camera out of my pocket and taking the cap off the lens.

I needed to crank it up a little and then turn my back on him. I needed to give him the chance to do something to me, something irreversible, in any case something that left marks; I needed him to lose his self-control and fly off the handle. I was doing this for Laura, I told myself, I was not a born fighter, in a head-on fight with the history teacher I was bound to take a beating. I would have to get him to the point where he knocked out a couple of my teeth or blackened both my eyes. A battered and bloody face, a split lip with two front teeth broken off, that would be the best thing. The footage would speak for itself. Jan Landzaat would be drummed out of the Spinoza Lyceum and slapped with a restraining order at the very least, if he didn’t go to jail for six months or so. I thought about his wife, his two young daughters; I imagined them talking to their daddy through a little window in the booth in the prison visiting room. With one of those closed-circuit telephones, like in American movies: the daughters would press their hands against the window, and their father would do the same on the other side. Tears would be shed. His wife might forgive him to a certain extent, but she would never let him share her bed again.

“I bet saying all that makes you think you’re pretty tough,” he said, approaching now with somewhat bigger steps — I pressed the viewfinder against my eye and took equally big steps backward. “But I know exactly what kind of petty little man you are, Herman. It’s a wonder you could ever get a girl like Laura, that you could get any girl at all with that skinny body and those pitiful teeth of yours.”

I stopped, another possibility was to let him get closer and then unexpectedly hit him in the face with the camera, against his upper lip or the bridge of his nose — but I had to stay calm, I told myself. I mustn’t ruin everything now by losing my self-control; I was so close.

“Don’t go thinking that a girl like Laura will stick with you for very long,” Landzaat said. “Maybe girls think that’s fun for a while, a little boy they can lord it over, who they can make do whatever they want, but they go looking for a real man soon enough.”

The history teacher had stopped less than two feet from me; I looked at his face through the viewfinder, but I didn’t start filming. Not yet, wait just a bit, I said to myself.

If I got in the first blow, I might have a chance. I could break his nose with the camera, he would grab his nose with both hands while the blood sprayed in all directions, and in that unguarded moment, while his defenses were down, I could kick him in the balls. After that it would be up to me to decide how far to go. Where I would stop. But it would be a mistake, I realized, it would be a victory for Jan Landzaat. A teacher assaulted by a student. Whatever the exact cause, precisely why he was here in Terhofstede would fade into the background. From a culprit, an underage-girl-stalking teacher, he would become a victim. The turncoat is blindfolded and hoisted onto a rail amid a raging crowd. What happens to him after that we still find a bit pitiful, we forget the why behind it, the reason — we forget that this is a collaborator. No, I warded off the thought of getting in the first punch as quickly as it came up. I had to keep my wits about me, I warned myself again — not hand over the reins now, not while I was so close to my objective.