“Something else occurs to me now. Because we were just talking about September 11. There is a fifteen-minute gap, a naive eternity, between the first plane and the second. Witnesses all thought it was a horrible accident. The dime only drops when the second plane hits. ‘Oh, my God!’ you hear them all shouting. But, as a writer, I’m much more interested in those minutes in between the two planes. In the accident. The belief that there are no evil intentions at play. We all look at it differently now. Now we see the footage of the first plane, and we already know. The accident is gone completely. It was there once, but it has disappeared for good. It’s the writer’s task to bring back that naive belief in the accident. To let us relive those minutes between the first and second planes. Today we sometimes see the Twin Towers in movies or TV series from before September 11, 2001, and you know right away that this is a fairly old movie, if you couldn’t tell already from the clothes and the cars. But those towers in a feature film also remind me of the old archive footage of German cities. A German city in 1938. You see streetcars and crowded cafés, mothers pushing prams, men playing chess in a park, and you know: This will all be laid to waste. Later, all this will be gone completely.
“In the same way, with the same perspective, I often looked at that school photo tacked up above my desk. A normal school photo. There are thousands, hundreds of thousands of photos like that. They’re all different, in that there are other people in each of those photos, yet they still all look alike. There are more similarities than differences. A teacher, a man or a woman, is posing with his or her students for the school photographer, the clothing and hairstyles usually tell you roughly when the picture was taken. Everyone is posing, everyone is looking straight into the camera, except perhaps that one student who doesn’t want to be there, the eternal troublemaker who would like to leave school as quickly as possible, and often there are also one or two jokers who are sticking out their tongues or holding up their fingers in a V behind the head of a fellow student, but those exceptions too are what make the school photos look alike. Sometimes though, with the passing of time, the photos take on more significance. That boy with the pale face and the greasy hair is now a famous writer; that girl with the round cheeks and pigtails is now an anchorwoman on the eight o’clock news; that handsome boy with the sunglasses pushed up on his forehead rose quickly through the ranks of the underworld and was shot and killed a few years ago in the parking lot of the Hilton Hotel. And then of course you have the class photos charged with portent, photos of classes in which more than half the students will not survive the war. But in those photos, too, the tone is largely set by innocence. The faith in a future. Every morning, before I started writing, that’s how I looked at the photo of Class 5A at the Spinoza Lyceum.
“These days there’s a program, it’s called Classmates; it didn’t exist back when I started on my book, but I thought about it later on. That you would bring together that whole class and let each of them tell their version of that school year. They’re all in that picture. Herman and Laura of course, first of all, and the teacher, Mr. Landzaat. Obviously I changed all the names, but Mr. Landzaat is an improbable name for a book anyway, sounds a bit too suspect, too unbelievable. You always start by changing the names, then come the facts, at least insofar as they’re available.
“But to come back to that photo: I always looked at the protagonists first, then at the bit players, the other members of that group of friends. David, Lodewijk, Michael, Ron. I looked them in the eye, one by one, and I tried to figure out what they were thinking, what they knew, only later of course. The class picture was taken at that empty moment of innocence, the vacant space between the first and second planes, just after the summer vacation. Of course I asked about that, about when those pictures were usually taken: it was shortly after the start of the school year, after that same summer vacation when they went together to the house in Terhofstede, but still before the three protagonists came into alignment. Laura only hooked up with Mr. Landzaat during the junior-class field trip in late September; Herman and Laura became a couple during the fall vacation in October. In December, on Boxing Day, Mr. Landzaat visits Laura and Herman at the house in Terhofstede and disappears. None of that can be seen in the class photo, there are no signs; most of the students look serious, a few are smiling, many of the boys have their hands in their pockets: on the one hand they want to show their indifference to the fact that a class photo is being taken, on the other they want to be sure they look good in the picture. A class photo doesn’t show just a single individual, not like a passport photo or vacation snapshots. You can throw away a passport photo and have another one taken, as often as it takes to satisfy you, or perhaps I should say as often as it takes to be passable. We can dispose discreetly of vacation snapshots that aren’t flattering, or at least not glue them into a photo album. We stuff them into a shoebox that we run across every couple of years. ‘Oh, no, not that one! I look so terrible in that!’ and we try to yank the picture away from the person with whom we’re delving through photos on the couch. Then it disappears again for years. A class photo is a very different thing. We can’t allow ourselves to look bad in it, because later, a few weeks later, everyone in the class will see it. Hence all the serious expressions, the stiff poses, the mortal fear of looking stupid, laughable. The photo can’t be secreted away somewhere, because the whole class has it. ‘Look at that expression on Henry’s face, he looks like he had to pee so badly!’ ‘Oh, Yvonne’s teeth! Oh, I feel so sorry for her!’ ‘Theo, did you wash your hair before you came to school that day? Never do that again!’ You take the class photo home with you, you can hide it from your parents, but then parents aren’t likely to say that it makes you look like a retard: their love ruins their eyesight. You wish you could destroy the photo, tear it into little bits, or even better, burn it. But you know it’s no use. You have twenty-eight classmates, twenty-eight copies of your ugly face are in circulation for all eternity.”
You didn’t mention Stella.
“What?”
Stella. You just reeled off the names of their group of friends. But you didn’t mention Stella.
“I didn’t? I didn’t realize that.”
She’s in that class photo too, right? She wasn’t sick that day, was she?
“Yes, I know she’s in the photo. Standing beside Laura. Two best friends. The boys are also all standing together, the way friends do. I have it here in a drawer, but I don’t have to look at it anymore, it’s etched in my memory.”
And do you sometimes take it out and look at it?
“No, that chapter is closed. That book is finished. As I said: I could draw it for you, from memory.”
You don’t mention her in your book.
“Who? You mean Stella? No, that’s right. In fact, I don’t name anyone, it’s fiction, I purposely kept the minor characters vague.”
But there’s a difference between keeping something vague and leaving it out completely. In your depiction of the friends’ club, there’s only one girl, Laura. In Payback she’s called Miranda.
“I felt as though I had to choose. And it definitely was not an easy choice. I had to choose between two storylines. Or rather: this book needed one storyline, and that was enough. A second one would only have weakened it. I chose for the teacher, the boy, and the girl. No other diversions. A tragic love story. A fatal conclusion. Or at least the suspicion of a fatal conclusion. That seemed more powerful to me. A difficult decision. I did start on it. I made an attempt, but it didn’t work. Look at it this way: I didn’t leave her out on purpose. Initially, I didn’t want to leave Stella out at all. On the contrary. There were mornings when I looked at the class photo, and the one I looked at longest was her. I was completely fascinated. She’s one of the only ones who doesn’t look into the camera, although you have to examine it closely to see that. She’s looking straight ahead. No, that’s not right either. She’s looking at herself, it took me weeks to finally see that. Those big eyes, that smile, that s
weet face, an open face too; it’s open, but as an outsider you can’t see a thing. At most, you see that the face is dreaming. It’s sufficient unto itself. It’s full of itself.
“You have people, I know a few, certainly among my colleagues, who never actually look at you, they probably don’t even see you, or at least they see you only in relation to themselves. They ring your bell, you open the door and you see it right away in their faces, in their eyes. They’re not happy to see you, let alone do they wonder whether they’ve come at a convenient moment. No, they’re happy they came. They’re happy for you. They’re happy for you that they are now standing there in front of you. That they’ve taken the time and gone to the trouble to ring your doorbell. Here I am, they say with their faces all aglow. Enjoy. That’s the kind of expression Stella is wearing too, right in the middle of that group with all her classmates. There’s no real reason to look into the camera, at the school photographer. No, the school photographer should be pleased to have her in the picture. The way she is. All by herself.
“When I finally figured that out, every morning for weeks I looked almost exclusively at her. Not at her classmates, in the same way she didn’t look at them. I think she never looked at her classmates, at least not the way we, as quote-unquote normal people, look at each other. At most, she gauged the reactions in the faces of others, the way those others reacted to her. She was, of course, a very pretty girl, but pretty in a different way from Laura.
“In the photo, Laura is the prettiest girl in the class, the girl all the boys chase, of whom all the boys dream. She’s completely aware of that, which is at the same time her handicap. When girls are too pretty, they easily become isolated. Without being able to do anything about that themselves. Unapproachable, we think when we see the prettiest girl in the class, she doesn’t even know I exist. And from that moment on we avoid all contact. In order to keep from being disappointed, or even worse: from being completely humiliated. We’re afraid the prettiest girl will look us over from head to toe and then deliver a crushing verdict. A verdict from which we’ll never recover, that we will carry with us for the rest of our lives. Sometimes even literally, in the words literally used by the prettiest girl with regard to your person: You don’t actually think—that’s how the devastating rejection almost always starts—that you stand a ghost of a chance with me, that I even knew you existed before today? I would strongly urge you, as of today, to never—I repeat: never—speak to me again. And so we do all we can to avoid exchanging looks with the prettiest girl. We’re in no hurry to have her point out the category to which we actually belong. Not her category, in any case.
“Stella’s beauty is of a different kind. Precisely because she is so sufficient unto herself, she is beautiful in the way a landscape can be beautiful: a green, rolling landscape with a few sheep grazing on a hillside, a snowy mountain peak at sunset. That landscape doesn’t care whether we enjoy it. It’s always been there, tomorrow it will still be there, and the day after tomorrow too, and a hundred years from now. She gives off light, but at the same time she absorbs it, as something that goes without saying. She’ll never wonder why, it’s just always been that way. She wonders about it as little as the earth’s surface wonders why the sun shines on it. Or better yet: the light of the moon.”
The difference being that a landscape can’t be rejected. You yourself say that a landscape doesn’t care whether we enjoy it. But a landscape also doesn’t care whether we reject it.
“That’s the way I always looked at the class photo too. Every day. I looked at Stella’s face. A boy has declared his love to her, he is standing a few yards away, among his friends. She finds that only natural. At that moment, everything is still fine and dandy. The teacher is sitting at his desk. He is breathing, even though we can’t see that in the photograph. What we can see in the photograph is that the teacher in question is taken with himself. He’s sitting there cheerfully amid his students, in a checkered shirt with the two top buttons open, at a time when teachers still tended to wear jackets and ties. He wants to be one of them, he insists that they call him by his first name, he’s trying to smile with his mouth closed. Standing beside Stella is Laura, her best friend. But Stella probably has no idea that her best friend is the one she should watch out for most. It wouldn’t occur to her; girls like Stella believe unconditionally in the trustworthiness of their best friends, just as she believes in the trustworthiness of her boyfriend. Of Herman. It would never come up in her, in Stella’s, mind that her boyfriend is actually attracted to her best friend, or that in a few weeks’ time that friend is going to hook up with the jovial teacher in order to draw Herman’s attention. What happens in the mind of a girl like Stella when she realizes one day that not she, but someone else, is the chosen one? That she has only been used as a diversionary tactic? She thought it was normal that Herman would want to start something with her, just as she would have thought that was normal for any other boy; what boy, after all, wouldn’t fall for a girl like her? And then, one day, quite unexpectedly, out of the proverbial blue, he breaks up with her. And not only does he break up with her, but he tells her he is trading her in for Laura. For her best friend.”
But you didn’t do anything with that. In Payback, Stella isn’t mentioned at all. As though she never existed.
“There was nothing I could do with it. I mean, there was nothing I could with it because of the way things went. Because of what happened afterward. I did try. In the first draft, I still had two girls. But it didn’t work. I realized that I needed to focus on one thing and one thing alone. The teacher’s disappearance. What Stella…What she did…That would distract readers too much from the essence of my story. It might throw the whole book out of balance. You read books sometimes that give you the impression that the writer was trying to sweeten the pot. That he thought that one central premise wasn’t enough. It’s quite understandable too. Every writer has that urge, you work on a book for months, often years, you’re sick and tired of it, the story is starting to bore you, and to combat that boredom you toss another element into it, a surprising twist, something spectacular. But there’s a very real chance that adding that element will destroy the book’s balance right away. Maybe the writer is bored, but the reader isn’t. Not yet. The writer forgets that the reader doesn’t spend months or years with a book. Only a couple of days, or a week at most. He doesn’t get enough time to become bored. Payback is not some five-hundred-page doorstop, I knew from the start that half that would be enough. Stella would have been a new narrative line. That would have made it a very different book. There was a very real chance that that one new narrative line wouldn’t have been enough. That happens often. Two storylines can be confusing, while three or five aren’t, then it’s simply that kind of a book. But I didn’t feel like writing that kind of a book. I felt that the teacher, the boy, and the girl were enough.”
But in reality we also make do with any number of storylines, don’t we? Why is it that writers are always so afraid of that?
“Because one expects a certain degree of order in a novel; a clearer, more compact reality. Actual reality doesn’t worry about that compaction. A writer has to chop into reality. For example: an acquaintance of mine was recently hit by a garbage truck. The ambulance took him to the hospital with a broken leg, and there he was told that his wife had just been admitted to that same hospital: one hour earlier she had fallen off her bike and broken her arm. That’s a true story. The kind you would never make up. In the book version, only one of the two remains: either the husband with the broken leg or the wife with the broken arm. It’s up to the writer to decide which one gets cut out of the book.”
In Payback, of course, you already made that decision by giving your imagination free rein. In your book, the boy and the girl finish the teacher off and hide the body in an ingenious fashion. While in real life there was never any solid evidence to indicate that. The teacher no longer disappears in the literal sense of the word. The reader knows how it went.
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“Yes, I thought that was fascinating. What might have happened? That question, in fact, remains interesting. We still don’t know how it went.”
But don’t you ever have the feeling that you, as a writer, have a certain responsibility with regard to reality? There is no Stella. The teacher is murdered in cold blood. It may all be your own imagination, of course, but little is left to the reader’s imagination.
“Maybe I was unconsciously hoping for a reaction, who can say?”
You mean a reaction from the murderers? From the suspects, I should say?
“First of all that, yes. As I’ve already said: I myself never tried to make contact, to the extent that they would have allowed me to; I didn’t want any explanation on their part to get in the way of my imagination. But afterward…Once the book was published, I noticed that I started asking myself whether they were going to read it. Whether they would feel like refuting my solution. And whether their refutation might expose them. Maybe even betray them. Please note: morally speaking, it didn’t interest me at all. They were right in whatever they did. But still, one remains curious. We’re always curious about the fate of someone who disappears from the face of the earth. But I wasn’t thinking only about Herman and Laura, I also thought about the others, about what they knew. Within close groups of friends like that, nothing remains a secret for long. You confide in each other. The way I imagined it, Herman and Laura would have wanted to tell someone their story. In fact, I was sure of it. You can’t walk around with something like that for years, or even weeks. One day you simply have to try to tell someone. David was very close to both Herman and Laura. So was Lodewijk. My speculation was that one of the others from that group of friends might want to react to the book. That they would approach me, anonymously or not, with their version of things.”