Dear Mr. M

by Herman Koch

  Later she would remember the whole thing like a movie played in slow motion, frame by frame, without any way to run it back.

  The green car stopping. The window opening. On the passenger side. Two men in the car. Herman leaning down to look through the window. Herman holding up two fingers for all to see.

  “There’s only room for two!” he shouted.

  Here the film stopped completely, with all of them looking at each other.

  “Stella!” Herman shouted. “Stella, don’t just stand there. Come on, let’s go!”

  A little less than a month later, in the last week of September, the junior classes left for their field trips. That whole month Laura had done her best not to let on; not to David, Ron, Michael, and Lodewijk, but especially not to Stella. She did her utmost to remain Stella’s “closest friend,” hard as it was at times for her to listen to Stella’s stories about Herman; how much fun he was, what a great sense of humor he had, which movies and concerts they’d gone to, how their relationship had at first met with disapproval from her parents—who were now separated completely—but how Herman, for example, didn’t let himself be intimidated by her father, the psychologist. One time her father had reluctantly agreed to have Herman come along to dinner at the trendy restaurant where he took his daughter every two weeks, to help her get used to his new girlfriend, twenty years younger than he (and a former patient). At one point the conversation turned to choosing a profession, to what Stella and Herman wanted to do after they finished high school. Stella wasn’t quite sure, but said that in any case she wanted “at least four children,” upon which her father gave her another of his pitying looks.

  “And you know what Herman said?” Stella said to Laura—it was around eleven o’clock, Stella had called her friend right after she came back from the restaurant.

  “No, what?” Laura was sitting on her bed with her knees pulled up, eyes closed, chewing on her thumbnail, but there wasn’t much thumbnail left to chew.

  “He said: ‘Now that’s what I call a clear plan. Large families, I’m all for them.’ And then he started talking about his own parents, about how depressing things were at home, how he couldn’t stand being the only child anymore, stuck in between all the bickering or, even worse, the long silences. He said: ‘When there’s a divorce, when the father goes looking for someone younger, for example, four children can turn to each other for support.’ And then he looked at my father and at Annemarie, that’s her name, Annemarie. I thought I was going to choke. But it was so good of him. Don’t you think? To dare to say something like that?”

  “Yeah,” Laura said. “Ow!” She had bit into the exposed skin under her nail.

  “Later on, Herman started talking about psychologists,” Stella went on. “About how it wasn’t really a profession at all. You don’t become a psychologist, he said, you either are one or you’re not.”

  Laura was only half listening as she sucked on her bleeding thumb. Then Stella began telling her about Herman and kissing. Laura had closed her eyes even tighter when her friend told her that Herman was sort of clumsy in everything he did. “He’s so thin, too,” she said. “You can feel everything. But at the same time, he’s so sweet. You know, a while back we’d been messing around in my room for a long time, we went pretty far, my mother had gone out to see a play with one of her girlfriends and they could come home any moment, every once in a while we lay there and stayed quiet to see if we heard the door, and then I ran my hand over his hair in the dark and over his face and suddenly I felt something wet around his eyes. He’d just been lying there crying, without a sound. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked him, and you know what he said? He said: ‘Nothing. I was just lying here thinking about how happy I am.’ Don’t you think that’s sweet? I almost started crying too. Sometimes he acts tough and cracks those nasty jokes, but he’s really very sensitive.”

  What Laura really felt like now was hanging up; she held her hand in front of her mouth so Stella wouldn’t hear her groan, but Stella just rattled on. That’s the way she always was on the phone: even if you didn’t say anything back, not even “yeah” or “no,” or even little grunts of confirmation, just so the other person knew you were still listening. Anyone but Stella, for example, would have asked if Laura was still there: Hey, are you still there? You still listening? Not Stella. Stella’s own voice—her own story—was enough for her.

  Meanwhile, the story had meandered on to another evening, yet another evening when Herman and Stella had been alone at her mother’s house. How they had watched a movie on the couch, and how they had tried to go further, further than they had before, not just long, wet French kisses and petting, but really far.

  “Sure, okay!” Laura suddenly responded to an imaginary voice. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “He had his hand on my butt,” Stella went on. “And from there he moved his fingers up front. Real sweet, real slow, and I had his…I’d been teasing him there a little with my fingers, not quite tickling him, but I could tell by his breathing, we were probably both thinking that it might happen that night, but then suddenly—I’d move my fingertips up a little—suddenly I felt it, this sort of tremor went through his body, and then I felt it on my fingers…What did you say?”

  “My father,” Laura said. “My father wants me to come down for dessert. I have to go now.”

  “Okay, sleep tight.”

  That was one of the advantages of Stella never listening. She also never objected to what you said: that eleven-thirty, for example, was awfully late for dessert. Sleep tight. She probably hadn’t even heard what Laura said.

  —

  On the fourth day of the Paris trip, after the requisite visits to the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and Versailles, they had dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant in the Quartier Latin and ended up with a little group at the hotel bar. Miss Posthuma hadn’t even gone along to the restaurant: after their endless walk through the gardens at Versailles she had said that she was “worn out,” that tonight she was going to “hit the hay” early—the same way she had the first three nights too. At the hotel entrance Harm Koolhaas had announced that he was going out for a stroll. When Jan Landzaat asked if he wanted him to come along, the social studies teacher said there was no need for that. “Just a little stroll along the Seine,” he said. “A little fresh air.” Laura had seen the two teachers wink at each other.

  The six of them were sitting and standing around the bar; first there had been eight of them, but Lodewijk and Stella had gone upstairs around eleven. Mr. Landzaat ordered a Pernod, David and Herman were drinking beer, and otherwise there were only the two girls from the parallel junior class, Miriam Steenbergen and Karen van Leeuwen, both with a glass of white wine with ice on the bar in front of them. Laura wasn’t sure what to order, not until Jan Landzaat handed her his glass for a taste. Later she could no longer be completely certain what had come first, the glass with the unfamiliar beverage that tasted of a mixture of pears and anise at her lips and then on her tongue, or the thought of the hands of a ten-to-fifteen-years-older man on her body—the mouth with the long teeth against her mouth.

  “I’ll have the same,” she said as she looked into the history teacher’s eyes—a long look, longer than normal in any case; she couldn’t see herself, of course, but she felt her eyes smolder, and Jan Landzaat did not look away. He looked back, long too, longer than might strictly speaking be appropriate for a teacher to look at one of his students.

  “Un Pernod, s’il vous plaît,” he told the barman, without taking his eyes off her. For just a moment his hand rested on her forearm, quite quickly, then he pulled it back, but she knew the others must have seen it. Maybe not Miriam and Karen, who were busy talking to each other, but David and Herman for sure; ever since Stella had gone upstairs, Herman had been looking at her more—maybe she was imagining it, but even when she couldn’t clearly see him, she felt his gaze wander in her direction from time to time.

  She had never thought of Jan Landzaat as a real possibi
lity; he was attractive, the fact that he was married and had two young children formed no moral hindrance for Laura; how he explained or didn’t explain things at home was his own business. There had to be a kernel of truth to those rumors about his behavior at the Montessori Lyceum, otherwise they wouldn’t have existed, she told herself. The history teacher was a womanizer, even if Laura didn’t know the English word for grown men who felt attracted mostly to seventeen-year-old girls.

  Jan Landzaat presented himself. The opportunity presented itself. That, in the end, was the primary but also the only reason why she took the elastic band out of her ponytail and shook her hair free; she would see how far things went, she thought, as she placed a cigarette between her lips and asked the teacher for a light.

  She didn’t have to check to see whether the others had noticed. It was quiet at the bar, the conversations had lulled—between Miriam and Karen, but above all the conversation between David and Herman. All eyes were on her, she knew that.

  The week after they got back from Paris, David suggested that he and Laura stop for a drink at an outdoor café in Vondelpark. “I need to talk to you about something,” he said.

  They were on their way home from school; they often cycled back with a larger group as far as the corner of Stadionweg, where they would split up. David and Stella usually biked the last stretch together: Laura lived at the edge of the park, David in the city center, on Looiersgracht.

  “What’ll you have?” David asked, trying to catch the waitress’s eye.

  “Do they have Pernod here? Probably not.” Laura smiled at him a bit naughtily, but David didn’t smile back.

  “I wanted to talk to you about that too,” he said.

  Finally, they both ordered beer; Laura thought David would start in right away about her affair with the history teacher, but he didn’t.

  “I’ve been thinking about Zeeland,” he said. “Actually, I wanted to ask you something. Ask you first, to hear what you think, and the others after that.”

  “Well?” In two weeks’ time they were planning to go back to the house in Terhofstede, with the same group; this time, though, a few things would be different. Two days after they got back from the field trip to Paris, Lodewijk’s mother had died. And this would be the first time that a “couple” would be there: Herman and Stella.

  “It’s your house,” David said. “Your parents’ house, but still. Mostly your house. However you look at it, it’s up to you to decide who goes along and who doesn’t.”

  Laura didn’t say a thing, just looked around to see if their beers were coming.

  “So what do you think about Herman and Stella?” David asked. “I mean, it was pretty weird, the way it went…at least I thought so. I mean, Herman’s my friend, but I thought the whole thing was out of line. That’s what I told him too.”

  “What did you say to him?” Laura asked, suddenly concerned. She considered David her best friend, the kind of best friend you’d never get involved with romantically, and therefore all the more reliable. David was just a sweet guy, maybe a little too sweet; he always wanted to do the right thing by Laura, but despite all his good intentions it seemed as though he tried to protect her too much, the way a parent might shield a child from shocking or bad news. That made her feel claustrophobic at times, but she never dared say so.

  “I told him he should have waited till we got back to Amsterdam,” David said. “With Stella, I mean. I thought it was out of line to do that in your house. In your parents’ house.”

  “But why? What’s so out of line about hooking up with my best girlfriend?” Laura tried to make it sound as normal as possible—calm, collected, as though it made no difference to her—but there was no way she could get the underlying sarcasm out of it; David must have heard it too.

  “Exactly that: your best girlfriend. I think that’s weird, you don’t do things like that. That’s not being respectful of other people’s feelings.”

  Laura felt a sudden flash of heat at the base of her throat; she had to do her best now to make sure that heat didn’t reach her face. “What feelings? What do you mean?”

  “Laura, I’m your best friend. There’s no need to try to fool me. I saw it with my own eyes. And I probably wasn’t the only one. The way you looked at Herman. How you tried so hard not to let anyone see that you liked him. I watched it happen, the way you completely fell apart when he and Stella—”

  “Fell apart?” Laura felt the tears welling up in the corners of her eyes, she covered her face with her hands in an attempt to hide them from David. “What are you talking about?”

  Then she actually started crying. David rose from his chair, then reconsidered and slid his chair around the table, a little closer to her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want…This is exactly what I didn’t want. Does Stella know what you think about this? How you feel, I mean? Have you two ever talked about it?”

  “Oh, that fucking bitch!” Laura said. It was out before she had even thought about it—but it was precisely what she thought.

  “Yeah,” was all David said; he raised his arm as though to put it around her shoulders, then let it drop.

  “I wish she was dead,” Laura said. It was a thought that had never come up in her before, not that explicitly, but she sensed that some other force—some other voice—was expressing her feelings perfectly, without a single thought beforehand. In any case, it came as a relief, as though she had finally stuck a finger down her throat and vomited; the queasiness was over now. She stopped crying, wiped the tears from her eyes, and smiled at David. “I wished she was dead, for a while there,” she said. “It’s better now, actually.”

  And David smiled back; that was what made him her best friend, Laura realized again, he didn’t say the wrong things, he didn’t say, for example, that you couldn’t say things like that about your best girlfriend.

  “All things considered, it just seems wiser to me if Herman and Stella didn’t go along to Terhofstede this time,” David said. “I already hinted at that to Herman, but I haven’t said anything to Stella. Herman understood, I think. But of course it’s up to you.”

  “What did he understand?” Laura suddenly felt icy inside—her crying jag seemed a thing of the distant past, centuries ago, as though she had never cried in her life.

  “That it might be difficult for you. He hadn’t meant to hurt you, he said. If it bothered you, he was willing to stay home. That’s a possibility too, of course, that Stella goes along but not Herman.”

  “Hurt me?” Laura spoke very quietly, she was completely in control, she told herself. She looked David straight in the eye. David, her “best friend,” but then a best friend who believed too fully in his own goodness—in his own good intentions. There was no way she could get angry at him, he would never understand that, but not being able to get angry at him made her even more furious. “What did you say to him, exactly?”

  “Laura…” David slid his chair back a little, so he could get a better look at her. “Laura, I didn’t tell him anything except what was already clear as a bell. Everyone saw it. Herman’s not blind either. He understood right away, that’s what I thought was so good of him.”

  So this was the price one paid for having a best friend, Laura realized. You also had to accept it when they ruined everything for you. Out of the goodness of their heart. Out of pity. She thought she really might have to vomit at any moment.

  “I have absolutely no problem with Herman and Stella coming along,” she said. “Absolutely no problem whatsoever.”

  “Laura…”

  “Don’t ‘Laura’ me. It’s my house, isn’t that what you just said? My parents’ house? Okay, then Herman and Stella are very welcome there too. End of discussion.” She stood up, their beers still hadn’t arrived. “I’m going. See you at school tomorrow.”

  They were sitting on his living room couch. Landzaat had his arm around her shoulders; on a low table at their feet was a bottle of red wine, two glasses, and
a dish of peanuts.

  “What do you feel like?” he asked. “A movie? Or shall we go get something at that restaurant we went to last time?”

  It was the Friday evening before the fall vacation began. Laura and her friends would be leaving for Terhofstede the next day. That morning the history teacher’s wife had left with their daughters for a holiday park in the woods; he was going to join them there tomorrow.

  “I don’t know,” Laura said.

  It was the first time she’d been to his house, a house that in no way went against her expectations. For, in fact, she’d had no expectations at all. At least none that made a difference now: well-filled bookcases with hefty biographies of Alexander the Great, Napoleon and Adolf Hitler, a stereo installation with tall, black speakers, framed photographs of the Landzaats at a beach somewhere, Jan Landzaat building a sandcastle with a pail and shovel; also a few pictures of older people, their own parents probably, and a photograph of the teacher standing beside his wife on the stairs of some building, he in a suit and bow tie, she in an ankle-length bridal gown, both of them smiling.

  “We don’t have to go anywhere,” he said. “We could just stay here.”

  He hadn’t shown her the rest of the house. The bedrooms. She wondered whether she would get to see them, or whether he would try to limit her presence here to the couch. The bedroom, she decided; she wasn’t going to settle for the couch.

  “I don’t know,” she said again.

  The role of indecisive young thing fit her perfectly; let the older, more experienced male take the initiative. She lifted her legs up and tucked them under her, stuck the tip of her thumb in her mouth for a brief moment. “I’m kind of tired,” she said.

  “You’ve barely had any wine,” the teacher said. “Are you hungry? I could fry some eggs, we can eat them here, then talk a little or watch some TV. Does that sound good?”

  She shrugged. His fingers were toying with her hair now, close to her ear. It wasn’t unpleasant, but at the same time she suspected that he knew all too well what women and seventeen-year-old girls liked and didn’t like—or he’d picked it up from some magazine or book, the erogenous zones and how to tinker with them best. Jan Landzaat was an experienced lover, as she had noted on the two occasions when he had taken her to a hotel along the highway outside Amsterdam. Too experienced, maybe. Studiously experienced. He took his time, he was no slouch. He knew what he was doing, she had nothing specific to complain about, but still, it always felt more like gymnastics than ballet, more like a point-perfect exercise on the balance beam than a dance that drew you in, than movements that could thrill. He was patient, attentive, he waited for her—the first time there had been a few misunderstandings as he looked at her with big, questioning eyes, whether she was there yet, whether he himself could start in on the final cartwheel before the landing. Laura looked at the history teacher’s grimace of effort. She saw everything: a blue vein pounding on his left temple, the glow of the nightlight beside the hotel bed reflecting off the saliva on the long teeth in his half-open mouth, his somewhat-too-large Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as though he were struggling to swallow something—a chunk of meat, a herring—that was stuck in his throat. At such moments, doubt struck. At first she had been curious about the body of a grown man, but after a few times the teacher’s gymnastic routine seemed mostly ridiculous. She thought about Stella’s stories about Herman—about his clumsiness. In her sophomore year Laura had had a boyfriend, Erik, who was now no longer at the Spinoza Lyceum. They were both very young, of course, and one evening—they were sitting beside each other on the bed in her room, Laura had turned off the light and lit two tea warmers—he confessed to her that he was completely ignorant, that she was the first girl he had really kissed, and that he was embarrassed by his inexperience. Laura took his face between her hands and whispered sweet words in his ear. Comforting words. It didn’t make any difference, she thought he was sweet, he should just relax and surrender to her completely, then everything would turn out fine. It was glorious, she thought, Erik’s tender, virginal fumbling; when she closed her eyes she thought of a snowy landscape, a landscape without footsteps, a gentle rise covered in fresh snow where no one had walked before, while she led his hands and fingers to where she wanted them. Other boys had followed, boys like Erik, who all thought that girls like Laura—girls who were much too pretty—would be put off by boys who didn’t know the first thing about sex. And, one by one, she reassured them. Let me do it. Close your eyes. Do you like it when I do this? And this? You don’t have to swill your tongue around like that, it’s not homework, look, just the tip, like this, and real softly, come on, take some of this off, this only gets in the way. She helped them take off their sweaters and T-shirts, to loosen their belts—sometimes it made her feel like a mother undressing a little child, but that only made it more exciting.