In the elevator you leaned back against the panel with buttons and shut your eyes. Your left eye was, as noted, already swollen shut, so in fact you closed only your right eye. I had to get you to move aside a little so I could hit the button for the fourth floor.
I think I have to throw up.
Less than a second passed between this announcement and the actual vomiting. I tried to sidestep it, but there wasn’t much room in the elevator. I didn’t dare to look down, I suspected that it had spattered up against my shoes and trouser leg too, and I tried as best I could to breathe only through my mouth.
One thing I always wondered was how that teacher, that Landzaat, how he found out that you two were spending Christmas vacation at that cottage.
You wiped your lips with the back of your hand and looked at me with one bloodshot, watery eye.
I just kept breathing. Keep breathing calmly, I told myself. Meanwhile I looked into that bloodshot eye.
You had said “you” almost in passing. As passingly as you had spoken earlier of the thunderstorm. Of your wife, who you said had remained behind at the party.
I wondered, in short, which part of your brain had addressed me at that moment. The part that no longer knew exactly where you were and with whom, or another part, the one you sometimes hear about with older people: they no longer know where they put their reading glasses a minute before, but the way their mother kissed them good night seventy years earlier is still etched in their memory.
I in turn could have asked you all kinds of things then, but I was afraid that if I did, that part of your brain now meandering through the distant past would shut down on me—and never open again.
That’s why I said, without looking away from your one good eye, that I had sometimes wondered about that too. I said it without looking away from your eye. I said I’d always meant to ask Laura about that, but that I kept forgetting to.
The elevator came to a stop at the fourth floor. I pushed the door open as quickly as I could.
Is it possible? I asked myself that at times. Is it possible that Laura consciously lured that history teacher to the little house? For my book, for Payback, it wasn’t absolutely crucial. But afterward I thought about it a lot. What about you, Herman, what do you think?
You searched for something in your pants pockets, then breathed a deep sigh. This time I was too late. Before I could stop you, you had rung the bell beside the door.
In a moment your wife will open the door, I thought. This was probably my last chance.
I said that I had new material for you.
I know you do. From behind the door came the sound of approaching footsteps, then of a dead bolt being slid aside, a lock being turned. I have new material for you too, Herman. New material that I’m sure will interest you. It’s time to lay our cards on the table. It’s rather late now, but why don’t you come by tomorrow night. Sometime after dinner, for example. Would that suit?
—
I start with the movie of the flower stand. There is no sound, let alone music, only the projector’s rattle.
“That’s right across the street from here,” you say.
“Yes,” I say. “The flower stand used to be right over there, across the street. They only moved to our side of the street later on. And where the café is now there used to be a snack bar, you can’t see it very well in this shot, but it was there. A cornet of fries with mayonnaise cost twenty-five guilder cents, a slightly bigger one was thirty-five.”
I walk onscreen. A lanky boy, hair down to his shoulders, a T-shirt that’s too small for him, jeans, ankle-high (green, but the color you have to imagine for yourself) rubber boots with the tops folded down.
Christ, I was so skinny then! I think; I glance aside, at you and your wife. Your wife is on the couch, you have settled down comfortably in the chaise longue. Playing across your lips is something that can only be an amused smile.
“Watch this,” I say.
I/the lanky boy collapse in front of the flower stand, I use my boots for traction on the paving stones and spin around in a half circle, moving my left arm spastically the whole time. At first the florist and his two customers, a middle-aged woman and a girl, look on in bewilderment, but without intervening. Then the boy gets up, shakes the woman’s hand, and walks off camera, bottom left.
I hear you laugh. I glance over again, but you don’t look back at me, your gaze remains fixed on the wall, on the flickering image. By then David and I are in an elevator, this elevator, the elevator here in our building, making faces in close-up into the camera.
“Fantastic!” you say. “I knew this existed, but of course I’ve never actually seen it.”
Now Miss Posthuma, our English teacher, appears. She is sitting at her desk in front of the chalkboard as David walks toward her. She looks up at him, it looks like he’s going to ask her something, but then he falls to the floor. David does more or less the same thing I did at the flower stand: spastic movements, fits, knocking his head repeatedly against the leg of the desk. Now we pan up slowly and see our teacher’s face, dumb with amazement. Even more than with the florist and his two customers, there is total bafflement here. The camera zooms in, David is spinning on the floor in a much smaller space, barely eighteen inches from her feet under the desk.
“Watch,” I say.
The camera zooms in further on Miss Posthuma’s face. Now she is no longer looking at David and his gyrations, but straight into the lens—at me.
She doesn’t look angry, more like sad, her lips move.
“What is she saying here?” you ask. “Do you remember?”
“No,” I say. “Something like: What do I think I’m doing. What it is I think I’m up to. Something like that.”
I remember it all too well, it has always stuck with me, even long after my visit later that year to her deathly silent apartment out by the bridge, to run through my reading list with her—and long after her death too.
She said something about me, something about which I asked myself in stunned surprise, right there and then, whether it was true. Whether this seemingly sexless woman had perhaps seen something for which I had neither the proper distance nor degree of insight. Later, at her apartment, I wondered whether she would come back to that, it was probably the main reason why I had turned down her offer to drink “something besides tea” with her.
“This got you into a lot of trouble later, didn’t it, Herman?” you ask.
“Yes,” I say.
“I remember,” you say. You pick up the glass of red wine from beside your chair and raise it to your lips—but don’t sip at it yet. “They thought these films were pretty crazy. I mean: that flower stand and the things you two do in the elevator here. In hindsight. That’s the crux of the matter. In hindsight, it takes on a different meaning. Especially this, with the teacher. No respect. That was the conclusion, wasn’t it? Someone with no respect for a teacher won’t find it very difficult to snuff another teacher. “
“Yes,” I say. My throat feels dry, I raise my bottle of beer to my lips, but it’s empty.
“And that film script, I think that was the last straw. About taking hostages at your own school. That you all get together and blow up the place. A ‘normal student’ wouldn’t do that either, would he? But that’s bullshit, of course. In hindsight, all you can say is that you were far ahead of your time.”
“Would you like another beer, Herman?” your wife asks.
I nod. “Love one.”
“All that jabbering after the fact,” you go on as your wife heads to the kitchen. “It’s like with a troubled childhood. Someone mows down fifty people at a high school or a shopping mall. During the investigation, their troubled childhood is always unearthed: divorced parents, an abusive father, an alcoholic mother who moonlighted as a prostitute, the ‘severely withdrawn’ killer who ‘always kept to himself and often acted erratically.’ But for the sake of convenience they forget the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of withdrawn
loners who had a childhood at least as troubled as the killer’s but who never hurt a soul, let alone assaulted or murdered anyone.”
“But in Payback, you made that same connection.”
“Only because it was better for the book. Omens. Signs of things to come. Besides the film of the teacher and that screenplay, the main thing was probably that physics teacher. That you went on filming while he was lying dead in his classroom. Anyone who would do that is probably also indifferent toward life, toward the lives of other teachers, that was the way people reasoned back then. At first I went along with that line of reasoning. Once again: for the sake of the book. A book in which a couple of boys make funny movies at a flower stand, fool around with a teacher, and film another teacher who has died on the spot, but who commit no murder later on; who, on the contrary, go on to college, start a family, and end up as head accountant at an insurance company—that’s not interesting to read about. They blend seamlessly into the gray masses of those who perhaps do wild or crazy things when they’re young, but who grow tame as adults. A writer can’t do anything with that. By the way, did you bring that one, the one with the physics teacher?”
Your wife has taken a seat on the couch again; I raise my second bottle of beer to my lips. There is Laura. She is sitting at a table in the cafeteria of the Spinoza Lyceum, forty years ago, she sticks her finger down her throat, she gags, but after that nothing happens. She grimaces, then smiles at the camera and shakes her head.
“What a lovely girl,” your wife says. “What is she doing?”
“I suggested to her that she barf up a pink glacé cake, so she could say she was too ill to take the physics exam,” I say. “She gave it everything she had, but in the end she couldn’t do it.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Karstens’s gleaming black shoes and lower legs can be seen, but the screen is then quickly filled by the table, the rest of the body too is blocked from sight by the men—the hall monitor and two teachers—who are squatting beside him.
Then Laura is back, she is standing beside the door of the physics lab and looking around, then she waves to the camera and starts pushing her way through the crowd of students who have gathered outside the classroom. She looks into the camera, no, this time she looks just past the camera: at me. She says something, wags her finger, almost scoldingly: Don’t! But then we see her laugh. She laughs and shakes her head.
“People should really have looked at it the other way around,” you say. “Or no, not the other way around. Differently. What I mean is: Imagine you’re walking down the street and suddenly you hear something that isn’t quite normal, a plane flying much too low, or in any event something unusual, an unusual sound, a sound that stands out from the normal street noises around you. You look up and you actually do see a plane. A passenger plane. It’s flying right above the rooftops. This isn’t right, that’s your first thought, something’s wrong here, that plane is much too low. You happen to have a movie camera with you. A video camera. You point the camera up in the air, and less than ten seconds later you see that plane slam into the side of a skyscraper. A tower. A building more than a hundred stories tall. You film the plane as it bores its way into the tower. An explosion, a ball of fire, wreckage flying everywhere. Six months later you are charged with a murder. The police search your house and find the film with the passenger plane drilling its way into the tower. Are the detectives allowed to assume that you have always had little respect for human life, because you filmed the deaths of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people? Simply because you happened to be there, on the spot?”
During the film of my parents eating at the table we are mostly silent. Me too, I don’t comment, I realize that it is too bare without music, without Michael’s saxophone. Maybe I shouldn’t have showed it, it occurs to me once it’s almost over.
“Why did you call it Life Before Death, Herman?” your wife asks once I’ve stopped the projector and am threading the next reel.
“Well, that was the thing in those days,” I say. “Pompous titles. It allowed you to make something out of almost nothing. After all, it’s only my parents. I had plans for a sequel, but when my father moved in definitively with his new girlfriend a few months later, I didn’t feel like it anymore.”
In the next movie we are back in Terhofstede. You see us walking, on the road to Retranchement, at the bend in the road to be precise: I had run out in front in order to see them all coming around the curve.
“Lodewijk,” you say. “And the one with the curly hair is Michael. Ron. David, that girl beside him, I always forget about her, his girlfriend, what was her name again?”
“Miriam,” I say.
“Laura,” you say as Laura comes by, walking arm in arm with Stella—but you don’t mention Stella’s name.
Then we’re in the Zwin. I film a thistle, and then the white surf in the distance, David and Miriam who have remained behind on the dike and are kissing.
We see Laura from the back, her long black hair, the prints her boots leave behind in the sand.
I catch up with her and pass her, I film her from the front. Laura has stopped—she’s looking straight into the camera, she brushes the hair out of her face. She looks. She keeps looking.
—
I mount the final reel on the projector. A white landscape, a snowstorm, a blue sign with the name of a place on it—RETRANCHEMENT, CITY OF SLUIS—covered in a ridge of snow, but there’s also snow stuck to the front of it; a red stripe runs diagonally across the sign.
Laura. Laura carrying a plastic shopping bag, a white woolen cap on her head; the camera zooms in—there is snow on her eyebrows, on her lashes—until the screen is filled with her face and goes from out-of-focus to black.
“They never found this movie,” I say. “I had just brought it to the shop to have it developed when they came and took all the others.”
Footprints in the snow, the camera pans up slowly, we see the start of a bridge, the railing of a bridge, ice below—the frozen water of what must be a river or canal.
On the far side of the bridge we see Landzaat, the history teacher. He waves, no, he gestures really: Come on, let’s go, hurry up. He turns around, takes a few steps, then looks back and stops.
It looks like someone has called his name, that that is why he’s stopped. He has turned left after the bridge, now he points straight ahead and raises both arms.
For a moment he stands there like that, he’s a fair distance away, but from his gestures, his body language, you can tell that he is saying something, maybe asking something—little white clouds are coming out of his mouth.
He starts to walk back, comes up onto the bridge a ways, then stops again. He says (or asks) something. He points.
Then he shrugs, turns and walks back to the end of the bridge, heads right.
For the first half hour of their trudge through the snow, Jan Landzaat and Herman barely speak. Sometimes they walk beside each other, and then, when the path grows narrower and the snow deeper, in single file.
Landzaat hadn’t slept a wink all night; he had tossed and turned, quietly, not making a sound, but the bed creaked at the slightest movement. With wide open eyes he had stared at the wooden planks on the attic ceiling, the checkered curtain at the window he had left open, the beams and planks illuminated by a streetlamp outside—he was sure that in that light he could also see the clouds of his own breath.
He had pondered, a feverish (there was no other word for it) pondering, his head glowed with all the thoughts tumbling over and scraping past each other. He had to pee, but he remained in bed until it started hurting, only then did he go downstairs.
Step by step, inside his churning, spinning head, the contours of a plan had begun to take shape. A plan which, somewhere around first light, he had christened “Plan B”—he laughed, without making a sound, at the name: Plan B. It sounded like something from an adventure novel, an action film in which the commandos take the island from the rocky north coast rather than crossing the mined beach in the
south.
He had in fact already carried out the first part of his plan, without knowing at that point how it had to go. Last night, when the decision had finally been made that he would spend the night here, he had fetched his traveling bag from the car; his traveling bag and the bottle of whiskey, with less than a quarter still left in it.
There was no premeditation. Acting on impulse, he had slid in behind the wheel and screwed the top off the whiskey bottle. Tilting his head back to let the burning liquid flow down his throat as smoothly as possible, he caught sight of the little light built into the car ceiling, just behind the two front seats. In front, beside the rearview mirror, was another little bulb. A light put there to allow one, for example, to read a map at night.
The ceiling light was there for the passengers in the backseat. Sometimes his daughters asked him to turn it on when they were driving home at night, so they could read a magazine or a comic book.
Two or three times in the last year they had forgotten to turn off that light after they got home. The next morning the battery had been dead and he’d had to mess around with jumper cables or call the automobile association.
He took another slug, turned on the light, screwed the top back on the bottle, put it in his bag, and climbed out.
That was the first phase of Plan B. Whatever happened, the car wouldn’t start the next morning. He hadn’t seen a phone in the house. They could always call the automobile association from a house in the village, but he would immediately point out that the road service probably couldn’t get through in weather like this. He would suggest that they go for help at a garage.
He guessed that they wouldn’t send him out alone in the snow, that after some hesitation Herman would go along to show him the way—but Laura wouldn’t, Laura would stay at home.
He had guessed correctly.
—
They arrive at a narrow bridge across a frozen canal; at that point Jan Landzaat is walking out in front. Without thinking about it, he crosses the bridge and turns left on the other side. On Christmas Eve, alone in his pitiful studio apartment, when his initial plan (a plan he could now, in hindsight, refer to as Plan A) began to take shape, he had searched around a little for a road map, but all his maps were at the house, as he in fact already knew.