At that point he had thought about the glove compartment of his car: there were always a few road maps in there, maps from the last summer vacation, perhaps even a map of France, but certainly one of the Netherlands.
He made a mental note to stop at a gas station along the way and buy a map of France, if there wasn’t one in the car already. That would make his “friends in Paris” even more believable.
The next morning he ascertained that, indeed, the glove compartment contained only a map of Holland. He knew more or less how to get to Zeeland Flanders, he had been that way before, to Knokke, where his daughters had driven up and down the boulevard in pedal cars while he and his wife sat at an outdoor café and shared a plate of shrimp croquettes while knocking back a bottle of white wine.
Retranchement was still on the Dutch map, but Terhofstede wasn’t. He didn’t think it would be too difficult to find, though. The best thing would be to drive to Flushing and take the Breskens ferry. Retranchement was only about ten miles from Breskens.
Where is that exactly, Retranchement? I’ve never heard of it. They had been lying close together in their hotel bed, the bed in a hotel along the main road to Utrecht, Laura had leaned across him to take a pack of cigarettes from the nightstand. Their affair had been going on for only two weeks: the first time they did it fast, like in a movie, clothes left behind at the door, underwear and shoes in a hasty trail from door to bed, and then, after a cigarette or two, again, slowly, attentively, waiting for each other. It had been so long since I’d been there, she’d said of her parents’ house in Zeeland. When I was little I thought it was a great adventure, but later on I started getting bored, with only my parents and my little brother. He asked her precisely where that was in Zeeland, just to ask something, not because it really interested him, it was only that, when he heard the funny, un-Dutch name Retranchement, he had thought she was pulling his leg.
It’s not actually in Retranchement itself, it’s in a little village close by, Terhofstede. Last summer we went there with a group of friends. Then it was fun again.
On that last evening at his place, the evening when she had lost her earring in the bathroom, she’d told him that she was going there again with the same friends that fall.
One evening, a few days before the Christmas vacation, he had called her. “Don’t hang up right away!” he said quickly. “I have something important to tell you.” He heard her sigh at the other end; he tried not to think about the last ten times he’d called her and only breathed into the phone.
“Please, Jan,” she said. “Please. Just stop this.”
“You’re right,” he said quickly. “I’m stopping. That’s what I’m calling about. To tell you that I’ve stopped.”
He was drunk, he did his best to keep talking in the hope that she wouldn’t notice, but he felt his words slipping away, struggling to keep their balance—while yet other words kept sticking together.
“Jan, I’m hanging up now. I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Wait! Wait a minute! Let me finish, I’m almost finished. Then you can hang up.”
He was half expecting to hear the dial tone, but she didn’t hang up; she didn’t say anything, but she didn’t hang up either.
I miss you, Laura. I can’t live without you. Without you, I’m not going to go on living either. Before the year is over, I’m going to put an end to it.
Covering the horn with one hand, he reached for the whiskey bottle and raised it to his lips.
“I want to meet you one last time,” he said after the third gulp. “No, it’s not what you think,” he added promptly when he heard her sigh again. “I don’t want anything from you, I promise. You decide where. In a café or something, wherever you like. Tomorrow. Or the day after.”
“I can’t, not tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow I won’t be here anymore. I’m going away.”
He felt an air bubble, somewhere just below his midriff, a bubble that needed to get out now. He covered the horn again and tried to burp, but the only thing that came up was whiskey, whiskey and something else. Where are you going? No, he mustn’t ask that.
“My parents are going to New York,” she said.
“Are you going to New York! That’s great! So you’re leaving the day after tomorrow? Well, maybe we can—” Maybe we can meet up tonight, then? But that was not a good idea, he had no idea what time it was—he’d known what time it was when he called, but meanwhile he’d lost track completely.
“I’m not going along,” she said. “My little brother is.”
And that was the moment when he’d known—despite his drunken, pounding head, he realized that he should ask no further. Her parents were going to New York. With her brother. She had the whole place to herself, there was no reason to go away, but still she was going away, she’d just said so.
With him! He closed his eyes tightly. For three whole seconds he thought about Herman’s unmanly body, his stringy, unwashed hair, the little, beaded bracelet around his wrist, his stinking rubber boots, his malformed teeth. Fucking shit, how can she do that?
“I’ve got an idea,” he said. “I’m going to leave it completely up to you. You don’t want to meet up now. You can’t meet up now. So let’s just agree that you call me. Whenever the time’s right for you. Maybe you think right now that we shouldn’t meet up at all, but that’s not true, Laura. But you decide when. I won’t call you again.”
—
At the gas station where he stopped between Goes and Flushing they didn’t have a French map, but they did have a detailed map of Zeeland province. That morning in the attic, by first light, he examined it. The closest town of any size was Sluis. Terhofstede was on the map too, and he did his best to memorize the route—both there and back again.
That was why, when they reached the bridge over the canal, he had almost automatically turned left. That’s what he thought he remembered seeing on the map. No, not “thought he remembered,” he remembered with one-hundred-percent certainty that this was the way to Sluis. That was also why he hadn’t turned around when Herman called him. For the last fifteen minutes Herman had been lagging a bit, meanwhile they had left behind the last houses of Terhofstede and now only passed the occasional farm, a bit further back from the road. They saw no one at all, only once a growling watchdog that ventured a few steps from its yard but quickly turned back.
“We have to turn right here!” he hears Herman call out for the second time, and this time he does turn around.
Herman is still standing on the other side, at the start of the bridge, he’s holding something up to his eye, a telescope, Landzaat thinks at first, but then he sees it is a camera. A movie camera.
A movie camera! Herman is filming him—maybe he has been filming him for a while, while he was lagging behind. His first impulse is to yank the camera out of Herman’s hands and toss it in the canal. Into the frozen canal. He pictures the way the camera might bounce once and then break into pieces. No, not that. Not a good idea. Silently, he counts to ten.
“Are you sure?” he shouts. “I thought Sluis was in that direction.”
He points. He points toward Sluis, toward the spot beyond the trees and a few more whitened fields and dikes lined with pollard willows, to where he is sure Sluis must be.
“No, here, to the right,” Herman shouts back—Herman is still standing on the other side of the bridge; in the silence that follows Jan Landzaat hears a new sound that he can’t quite place at first, a quiet rattle. The camera! He’s just gone on filming! He’s filming what it is I’m going to do. “I’ve done this before, the fastest way is to the right.”
Slowly, he turns and starts walking back to the bridge. As slowly as possible, to win time, to give himself time to think. He can’t imagine that Herman could be wrong about this. To the right, along the canal, is the opposite direction; it will only take them further and further away from Sluis. And closer to the sea, to the bird sanctuary. The Zwin, that’s what it was called—he’d seen it on the m
ap that morning.
—
His Plan B was every bit as simple as it was elegant, if you asked him. He hadn’t even spent the whole night thinking about it: the initial outline had been there in less than a second, half a second at most, in a clear flash. He lay staring at the plank ceiling in the light of the streetlamp, but the idea was so clear and blinding that the yellowish light on the planks and beams seemed for that half second to turn a fraction of a shade darker.
In a little while, his car would refuse to start. He would go walking with Herman and Laura, or only with Herman, or completely on his own, to Sluis—he figured he and Herman, just the two of them, was the most likely scenario.
Somewhere along the way he would have to shake Herman, he didn’t know how, but it shouldn’t be too hard. If need be he could just take off running, yes, that wasn’t such a bad idea. “He just took off running,” Herman would report later, it would sound completely unbelievable, so implausible that Herman would only incriminate himself.
Once he had given Herman the slip he would have to find a suitable place. A remote place, a hollow in the dunes close to the bird sanctuary, behind a bush or amid the reeds along a frozen ditch, a place where they wouldn’t find him too quickly, at least not before the next day, when the search began.
At that remote place he would use a big stone or a heavy branch (a stone would be best, but he wasn’t sure whether there would be any of those along the road or in the fields around here) to hurt himself so badly that he would lose consciousness. Practically speaking, he didn’t know whether it was possible to knock yourself out with a big stone (or a heavy branch). In any case, it would have to produce a lot of blood. He figured that he could let the big stone come down a few times on his nose, mouth, and eyes before he passed out. It would have to look like he’d been battered by someone who hated him. And even if he didn’t succeed in knocking himself unconscious with a final blow to the temple, that would be no real disaster. The most important thing was not to be found right away, at the earliest in the course of the next day—by which time, at this temperature, conscious or no, he would have frozen to death.
There were a few technical catches: he could leave no fingerprints on the stone (or heavy branch), but he would be wearing mittens anyway, so that was no problem. And then there was the snow, or the footprints in the snow, rather. Only his own footprints would be found, nothing belonging to a possible murderer. In selecting the remote spot, therefore, he would also have to make sure it wasn’t all too far from a road or path. A road or path with plenty of footprints from walkers and other passersby. From the path to the spot where the corpse (his corpse!) would be found, he would walk back and forth a few times to wipe out all the tracks. As though the murderer had tried to cover the tracks, he thought with a grin, lying in his cold bed in the attic.
Conclusions would be drawn swiftly enough. Everything would be brought out in the open, but what did that matter? He wouldn’t be around to see it.
A teacher visits two students at a house in Zeeland Flanders. He and the girl had once had a brief affair. The next morning his car refuses to start. The boy offers to lead him to a garage in Sluis. But they never get there. The boy returns home alone. His statements seem confused (to say nothing of suspicious). He just took off running. The next day (two days, three days, a week later), the teacher’s body is found in a ditch or a hollow in the dunes. His head has been battered with a large stone (heavy branch). An autopsy will determine whether he was beaten to death or whether it was the cold that killed him.
The accounts given by the two students sound less than believable. At first, both of them are held for questioning. But after only a few days the detectives assigned to the case will begin to doubt whether the girl is guilty. Because Laura herself, in the best of all possible scenarios, will have started doubting whether Herman has really told her everything. He came back to the house alone that day. The teacher had supposedly taken off on his own. Would Laura, in spite of everything, continue to believe in Herman’s innocence? It didn’t really matter much anymore. Her life, too, would be largely ruined. It wouldn’t be long before people began questioning her version of events as well.
That girl, do you think maybe she put that boy up to murdering the teacher?
After that the suspicions would never be completely dispelled, she would be associated with the murder for the rest of her life—as an accomplice. We’ll never really know the whole truth. That was enough, nothing else was needed.
It was already almost light in the attic; a gray, cloudy day, he noted after pressing his face against the icy window. The plan made sense, down to the slightest detail, even those details he himself could never have anticipated beforehand.
The teacher, Laura and Herman would claim, had said he’d only made a slight detour before driving on that day, or the next morning, to see friends in Paris. But it wasn’t a slight detour at all, you couldn’t call it that, not with the best will in the world. Wasn’t it strange that someone going to Paris would have no guidebook or map of that city in his car? Or at least a map of France?
Imagine that there was a thorough police investigation and that, besides the evidence already rapidly piling up, they discovered that the car’s battery was dead. Run down, because a battery doesn’t just go dead. When the battery was charged, the roof light would go on. Aha, so that was it! The car wasn’t locked. It would have been easy as pie for one of the students to sneak out during the night and turn on the reading lamp, so that the teacher couldn’t leave the next morning.
At that moment he had heard them talking downstairs, very quietly, almost in a whisper, but in this house every sound went straight through the thin wooden walls and floors. What could they be talking about? He had to go downstairs quickly now, he would surprise them by making breakfast. He would pretend to be cheerful. Most people on the verge of suicide were cheerful for the last few days, that’s what those closest to them always said afterward. The future suicide smiled a bit more than usual, he played games with the children, he told jokes—and the next day they found him hanging from a beam.
He shivered as he picked up his cold clothes from the chair at the foot of the bed. And as he put on his socks and shoes, he suddenly thought about his two daughters. His little daughters would grow up without a father. What’s more, for the rest of their lives they would be the daughters of a murdered father, a father whose life had been taken by brute force. He thought about his wife. In a certain sense, she would be getting her just deserts, she would never recover. She would feel guilty, about what he wasn’t quite sure, but he believed it was true: his wife would think she could have prevented his death if she’d been a little more accommodating. If she hadn’t threatened him with seeing his daughters less often, perhaps not at all anymore. With a little more compassion, she could have cured him of his obsession with a seventeen-year-old student. She would be consumed with regret at her own stubbornness. She would age quickly. Later, she would have a lot to explain to her growing daughters. But why did Daddy go away, Mom? Was it really so bad, what he did? Shouldn’t you have helped him instead?
And it was there and at that moment, as he pulled on his clammy socks and slid his feet into his ice-cold shoes, that he’d had his second brilliant flash of inspiration.
A modified Plan B.
Yes, he thought. That’s how I’ll do it. Much better. Better for everyone: not least of all for myself, but in any case better for my girls.
Landzaat and I would walk out to the Zwin. At that moment I didn’t know what I was planning to do out there, but whatever happened we were not going to Sluis, not to a garage.
In a certain sense it was all very illogical, I was quite aware of that. The sooner we found a garage, after all, the sooner Landzaat’s car could be fixed, and the sooner he could go away too, away, out of our lives.
But that morning I wasn’t running on logic anymore. The history teacher had arrived uninvited. He had forced his way into our lives, which had b
een timeless up till then—ever since he’d arrived, everything was taking too long. He didn’t go away, he remained hanging around like a musty, lingering smell.
We might find an open garage in Sluis. A mechanic might come back with us to look at the car, or else they’d send a tow truck to pick it up, a tow truck of the kind that could actually make it through the snow. There was a chance that the repair would take a few days, that they would have to order parts. Would Landzaat volunteer to move to a hotel in Sluis while they waited? Would he go back to Amsterdam?
But even so, what then? Imagine the car could be started today, that they could push him out of the snow—that Jan Landzaat would finally! finally! be able to travel on to his friends in Paris. Would we really be rid of him? Would Laura be rid of him? Or would it start all over again after the Christmas vacation?
The teacher may have lost the battle, but he had not lost the war. Landzaat himself had said that once during history class. It was some kind of famous quote, I didn’t remember who said it. Jan Landzaat already realized that he had nothing to gain here in Terhofstede, I was convinced of that: he had given up for the moment, he would cut his losses and, if the engine started, he would really leave.
But what about a week from now? A month? Would he give up completely, would he put Laura out of his mind for good, or would he simply start all over again? With other means. With a new tactic.
No, I had to do something to make sure it was over for good. Something that would remove him from our lives forever.
That was why I sent him the wrong way after he crossed the bridge. That was why I filmed him too: as evidence, although at that moment, I didn’t know what of.