Dear Mr. M

by Herman Koch

  Sometimes it starts earlier than that. During check-in. The passengers put their suitcases on the scales and are handed their boarding passes. They are looking forward to a well-deserved vacation or a reunion with distant relatives. But we, the viewers, know that they can forget all about that vacation and that family reunion. None of that is going to happen.

  At the same moment, in another part of the airport, at Gate D14, a Sunny Air Boeing 737 is fueling up and receiving its last-minute inspection. The technicians discover “nothing unusual,” as they will later tell the members of the investigative committee. Most of the parts, broken into tens of thousands of little pieces and spread at great depths over an area of dozens of square miles, have now been recovered with the help of the most modern equipment. In a vacant hangar, investigative committee specialists set about putting the plane back together, using those tens of thousands of pieces of the puzzle. It takes months. When they are finished, the final product still looks more like a jigsaw puzzle than a plane. It will, in any case, never fly again. The only reason for the reassembly is to determine the cause of the disaster. Was it a technical defect, or was it human error? What does the black box tell us? Can we learn anything from the final conversations between the pilot and the air-traffic controllers?

  “Left motor has failed…right motor has failed…we are going down to thirty thousand feet…”

  Suddenly, the little dot on the radar screen in the control tower ceases to be a dot.

  “Hello, Sunny Air 1622…? Do you read me, Flight 1622…??? Hello, Flight 1622?”

  This all comes much later. The important thing is the beginning. In the beginning, everything is still in one piece. I usually think even further back in time. I think about the passengers. How they put on their socks and shoes that morning. How they brushed their teeth and then took the taxi or the train to the airport.

  “Have we got everything? Do you have the tickets? What about the passports?”

  Personally, I’m in favor of a black box that starts registering information much earlier. Not just the last half hour of conversation in the cockpit, but everything. The true extent of a disaster has a tendency to be tucked away in the details. In the note to the neighbor lady who has promised to feed the cat: kitty chow only in the morning, in the evening half a can of cat food or fish, raw heart 1x weekly. Barely twelve hours later, the hand that wrote those words has disintegrated at an altitude of thirty thousand feet. Or become lost amid the wreckage. That morning, that same hand tore a sheet from the roll of toilet paper, folded it three times and carefully wiped his or her backside. It’s partly about the senselessness of it all, in hindsight. Looking back on it, he or she might as well have skipped that wiping, or at least not done it so carefully.

  But let’s stick with the hand. During the final hours of its existence, the hand—at an altitude of thirty thousand feet and moving at a speed of almost six hundred miles an hour—flipped through a magazine. The hand reached out and accepted a can of beer offered it by the stewardess, the fingertips registering that the can was, if not icy cold, at least cool enough. In a moment of inattention the hand stuck one finger in a nostril, but found nothing large or solid enough to worm out. The hand was run through a head of hair. The hand was placed on a denim-covered thigh—at that very moment, in the cockpit, the pilot looks over at his copilot. “Do you smell that?” he asks. Any number of little red lights blip on above their heads.

  The aircraft banks sharply and quickly loses altitude. The cabin fills with smoke. At home the cat stretches out on its rug by the fire and pricks up its ears: that must be the neighbor lady with the kitty chow! Sometimes the plane explodes at high altitude, at other times the pilots succeed in putting it down, with two stalled engines, on a military airstrip on some coral atoll. A landing strip that is actually far too short for aircraft that size. That evening the cat lies in the neighbor lady’s lap and purrs. If it’s a nice neighbor lady, she will adopt it. It doesn’t matter all that much to the cat, as long as someone keeps buying kitty chow and fish and heart.

  Last night I read Liberation Year and this morning I think about you as you take a shower. I have hesitations, as I’ve already mentioned, about the new material. They say that with most writers everything is already fixed in place, that after a certain age no new experiences are added. You’ve said that yourself, in more than one interview. I can hear and see you saying it, most recently on that Sunday-afternoon culture program.

  “After that age, there really aren’t any new experiences to have,” you said—and the interviewer was feeling kindly disposed, he pretended it was the first time he’d heard it.

  I don’t hear the shower above my head now. You’re drying yourself off, you’ll shave, then you’ll get dressed. With every air disaster, there’s always that one passenger who arrives too late and misses his flight. That passenger, too, put on his socks and shoes that morning. I could have been on that plane, he thinks. His life goes on—that evening, he’s able to simply put his socks in the wash.

  What if you had felt drawn to another apartment back then, and not this one? I don’t know, maybe you let your wife decide. It is a lovely street, after all: old trees, lots of shade, barely any traffic, almost no children playing outside. That last point is a bit of a shame for your daughter, you probably should have thought about that a bit more. But it’s certainly the ideal street for a writer who believes that no new experiences are going to come along.

  When you moved in, you didn’t bother to introduce yourself personally to your new neighbors. No need to do that. That’s what your wife is for.

  “We’re the new neighbors,” she said, and put out her hand.

  A small, warm hand.

  “Welcome,” I said.

  On that occasion, your profession remained unstated. That came later, the time I had my music on too loud.

  On Seconds from Disaster, there was an older couple who had never flown before. The plane tickets were a present from their children. Like all the other passengers, the older couple was played by actors. In the reconstruction of the final minutes of Flight 1622, they turned to each other for support. The children, too, were interviewed. The children were not played by actors. The children were real.

  I’m not sure, in other words, whether the new material would be of any use to you. So I’ll just give it to you in its most unpolished form. You’re completely free to do whatever you like with it. If you have any questions, just come downstairs.

  There are books in which the writer appears as well. As a character. Or there’s a character in the book who enters into a discussion with the writer. I’m sure you know the books I’m talking about. You wrote some of them yourself.

  That’s what makes this different. I’m not a character. I’m real.

  In high school, something happened that changed the rest of my life. In high school, children spread their wings. They no longer test their boundaries to the point where they’ve been drawn, they go beyond them. They no longer see their parents and teachers as adults who lead them by the hand, but as obstacles on the road to self-fulfillment. They crush an insect, just to see if they can do it, and then feel regret—or not.

  The new material starts here. I doubt whether you can do anything with it. But whatever the case: here’s where it starts.

  It was the year when teachers were dropping like flies. Suddenly, there they went. Not a month passed without the entire Spinoza Lyceum being summoned to the auditorium, where Principal Goudeket would make yet another “sad announcement.” Of course you had to keep your mouth shut and look serious, but what we mostly felt was a sense of justice having been done. The announcements never made us sad. There was something comforting about this massive falling by the wayside. If only by reason of their age, teachers were turning out to be vulnerable. They were not, in any case, immortal, not like we were.

  A teacher who that very afternoon had been carping at you about the homework you hadn’t done or about your general lack of enthusiasm
might not show up at school at all the next morning. That none of these deaths were preceded by a long sickbed served to amplify the comforting effect. No endless hospitalizations, failed radiotherapy, or other delays—nothing that could have made the dying any more human.

  Mr. Van Ruth was our math teacher. Whenever someone’s attention lagged, he would point threateningly out the window at the Rietveld School of Art & Design, a few hundred yards from our school but hidden by the trees, and say: “If you’d rather play with clay and crayons, they’ve got a place for you.”

  Suddenly, one morning, he didn’t show up. It was the day after an early autumn storm, the trees had already lost some of their leaves and so, for the first time that year, the tip of a roof at the Rietveld School was visible through the branches. I remember clearest of all the empty space in front of the chalkboard, never again to be filled by his lanky frame.

  I thought about the morning of the day before, when Mr. Van Ruth had put on his socks and shoes before cycling as usual to the Spinoza Lyceum.

  Mr. Karstens used to sit on an especially high stool behind his desk in the physics lab, which was supposed to make him look less short. “There are some people present in this room who will never understand a thing about physics,” he said on Monday morning, breathing a deep sigh. On Tuesday he was dead.

  During the memorial service in the auditorium, Principal Goudeket found it fitting to refer to Mr. Karstens’s family situation. We found out, for example, that the physics teacher did not have a wife, but two “growing boys” he cared for on his own. The principal left out the important details. Was Mr. Karstens’s wife still alive? Or were the two growing boys now completely on their own?

  Whatever the case, the detail about the sons added a human twist to the man’s death. Besides being a physics teacher who was ashamed of his own dwarfish stature, and who therefore never dared to come down off his high stool even once during the whole period, he was suddenly also a father with two growing boys who waited for him to come home.

  But the sons had never been in the picture before, no one had ever seen them in real life, which served in turn to almost completely undermine the human element. There was even a remote possibility that they were just as relieved as we were. That’s right, maybe the growing boys were above all relieved, because at last they could do whatever they wanted—go to the snack bar for takeout every night and stay up watching TV until far past midnight—and no longer had to walk down the street beside a father who was too short.

  But such possibilities invariably went unspoken during the memorial services in the auditorium at the Spinoza Lyceum, so that we were left only with the image of two growing boys sitting in a darkened kitchen, their empty plates in front of them, waiting, because there was no one left to take care of them.

  Miss Posthuma lived by herself on the ninth floor of an apartment building close to the road going out of town to Utrecht. I had been to her home once to discuss my reading list for that year’s English lit class. From her living room window you could see the rowers skimming across the mirrored water of the River Amstel. And later, as darkness fell, you saw the lights of cars on the highway crossing the Utrecht Bridge. Somewhere a clock was ticking. Miss Posthuma asked if I wanted another cup of tea. She had hair that she kept short and wore in tight little curls and she had a high voice, without any real bass to it, the kind one often hears in women who have never had an orgasm in all their born days. It was a voice that fluttered around the room like a little bird, without landing anywhere, as though anchored to nothing and not really connected to the earth; just like Miss Posthuma, in fact, in her ninth-floor apartment high above the world and the people in it.

  Then, suddenly, I clearly heard that voice ask if perhaps I preferred something other than tea, that she probably had a bottle of beer somewhere in the fridge. I saw too that something broke in her expectant expression when I stood up and said it was time for me to be getting home. Something in her face shifted color almost unnoticeably. Out on the street I looked up one last time at the ninth floor of the building, but there was nothing about the lights along the outside gallery to show which apartment was hers.

  It didn’t cause much consternation when Miss Posthuma didn’t show up at the Spinoza Lyceum one morning. Only later did I hear that they’d had to break down the door to her apartment. But Goudeket’s memorial speech never once mentioned the word “crowbars.” It was clear as a bell that the principal had been unable to find anything worthy of note as theme for his little speech. This time there were no growing boys or other pathetic or heartwarming details to make Miss Posthuma, who had been found dead in her own home, a little more human. Goudeket came up with nothing better than “her enormous dedication to our school and her pupils”; under the hard fluorescent lighting of the half-empty auditorium, that sounded like less than nothing, as though the big oblivion might as well get started right then and there.

  And then there was that one spectacular finish, a finish that went out with a resounding bang, flying glass, and blood. Harm Koolhaas (“Harm” to the juniors and seniors who had social studies with him) made his mistake less than half an hour after a midnight landing in Miami, when he took a wrong exit in his rental car, a white Chevrolet Malibu, and ended up in “the wrong neighborhood” (thus spake Goudeket).

  The two men he asked for directions at the badly lit gas station were never found. It appears that Harm Koolhaas had tried to roll up the window on the driver’s side and back away fast, but that this maneuver ended with a loud smack against a parked car. According to the gas station owner’s testimony, one of the men had just enough time to poke the barrel of his pistol through the crack in the window. Meanwhile, the second man opened fire on the windshield.

  Harm Koolhaas wore fairly fashionable corduroy trousers and carried a beaded bag over one shoulder, from which he would invariably produce his pack of Javaanse Jongens rolling tobacco at the end of class. When he walked down the hallway, it was always with a bit of a bounce in his step.

  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!”