Dear Mr. M
After the bridge the path widened into a road, a dirt road, or maybe a real one covered in asphalt: the thick layer of snow made it impossible to tell. It didn’t really matter, of course, but because the road was so broad we could—at least theoretically—walk beside each other, which was absolutely the last thing I wanted. By then my body literally balked at getting close to the history teacher, and so I slowed down every once in a while, to at least stay a few feet behind him. But then Landzaat would slow down too, forcing me to choose between dawdling even more or coming up alongside him. Maybe he was suspicious, or maybe he was simply on his guard after seeing the movie camera—maybe he wanted to keep me from filming him candidly again.
Up to that point there had been no conversation, not even the start of a conversation. I had resolved not to start talking; first of all because I didn’t feel like it, and secondly—
“Have you made movies before with that thing?” Landzaat asked; at that moment he was walking two feet out in front of me, but he slowed so that we could walk beside each other. “I mean, you must make movies. No, what I really mean is: What kind of things do you film?”
I didn’t answer right away; I realized that I preferred the silence that had reigned till then. It had not been an uneasy silence—maybe for him, but not for me.
Not answering him at all was out of the question. The teacher would probably only shrug and say something like If you don’t want to talk, fine by me. No skin off my nose.
It would grant him a kind of moral superiority, and we couldn’t have that.
“All kinds of things,” I said.
“Really? All kinds of things? Or mostly teachers?”
I had put the camera back in my coat pocket, inside the pocket I weighed it in my hand: it was pretty heavy, but not heavy enough to use for anything but making movies.
“You’ve developed quite a reputation in the teachers’ lounge,” Landzaat said. “You and David. With the things you two do. Playing tricks all over the place. Acting like an idiot in class and then filming the teacher’s reaction.”
I said nothing, it felt best to say nothing, to see first where he was trying to go with this.
“Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not condemning it right off the bat,” he said. “I was young once too. Playing jokes on teachers, I did that in high school too. But in the teachers’ lounge I noticed that one or two of them were really upset about it.”
After the fall vacation I had edited all the films back-to-back. By then, the teacher mortality rate had reached its high-water mark—in hindsight you could even say that it had already passed that point by the start of the Christmas vacation. First Mr. Van Ruth, the math teacher—unfortunately, I didn’t have him on film. Then Miss Posthuma, found dead in her apartment less than a week later, and in late November Harm Koolhaas’s fatal trip to Miami, which ended in a (botched) holdup. We hadn’t done anything with him either, he simply wasn’t the right type for it—“too vulnerable by nature” was David’s comment, and that said enough already. I did of course have footage of Mr. Karstens, but only of his lifeless body lying in his own classroom, half hidden beneath the desk in front of the chalkboard.
I had mounted all the films back-to-back and given the whole thing the working title Life Before Death II. It was perfect, that title: teachers also didn’t realize that their lives were empty and senseless, that those lives had ended on the day they decided to make teaching their profession. It was like a nature film of a herd grazing on the savanna, or better yet, of a school of fish in the ocean. Oblivious to almost everything except the water in which it moves, the life of a fish starts somewhere, at a random moment, and ends somewhere else, at perhaps an even more random moment. That end is often both swift and brutal. Another, bigger fish or a bird or a seal waiting patiently beside a hole in the polar ice takes the fish in its jaws, beak, or teeth, bites it in two, and swallows it down.
I had tried to furnish it with English-language narration—nature films are almost always dubbed in English. Miss Posthuma is seeing something she has never seen before. Mr. Karstens will never teach again. I thought about the narration I could later dub beneath the footage I’d made of the history teacher. Mr. Landzaat has followed his instincts; he has followed his dick to the end of the world. Now he is lost in the snow, wondering, “How did I get here?”
What was it Landzaat had just said? I was young once too. The horror of it, what emptiness, when you could make that kind of pronouncement about yourself. It reminded me of my father. My father, who had tried to act so casual when I came home drunk one night from an outing with my friends, long past the time we’d agreed on. Paternally casual. My mother’s eyes were red and teary. I was so worried! I thought you’d been in an accident! The gesture with which my father silenced her…I used to drink a bit too much too sometimes. That happens when you’re young. After that I had to throw up, I didn’t even have the strength to get up off the living room couch, let alone make it to the bathroom: everything came out all at once, a bucket being tossed, a toilet flushing—it spattered all over the wall-to-wall carpet, but at least the room stopped spinning.
They didn’t get angry. My mother came and sat beside me and put her arm around me, my father stood beside the TV with his hands in his pockets and winked at me. I felt my mother’s fingers in my hair, she had started crying quietly as she spoke reassuring words. Normal parents would have let me clean up my own barf, but they had stopped being normal parents long ago. I’m going to my room. I need to lie down. And I stood up, I left them behind with their sense of guilt. Less than a minute later I could hear them fighting, I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but I could sort of guess.
I could make Life Before Death II end with Jan Landzaat. With Landzaat on the bridge back there, or with a couple of new shots later, out in the Zwin. His face at the moment he realized we had gone in the wrong direction, that we had to walk the whole way back, but that it was probably already too late to reach a garage in Sluis before it closed. I don’t know, I would say. I guess I must have been mistaken…
Would he fly into a rage? Or would he remain a teacher under all circumstances? Someone who knows nothing himself, but has been hired to aid and abet others in their ignorance. A grown man barely in his thirties who says of himself that he “was young once too.” As a teacher, he must repress his natural urges. But so far he hasn’t behaved like a proper teacher. Now…he is paying the price for his carelessness…
Yes, I would have to look him straight in the eye, cold as ice, later, when I told him we would no longer make it to Sluis before dark. I would film him, keep on filming him, in his dismay, his despair, perhaps in his rage. But not yet, for the time being I needed to reassure him—we were on our way to Sluis, to a garage, if everything worked out he could drive on to Paris tomorrow morning.
“Come on,” I said. “Really upset about it…I don’t believe that. They’re grown-up people, right? Who was actually so upset about it?” I asked for form’s sake, because of course I already knew; this was meant more to keep our “normal” conversation going. Mr. Karstens didn’t seem particularly upset, I thought—but I didn’t say that.
“What are you laughing about?” Landzaat asked.
“No, I was just thinking about Karstens,” I said; and it was at that moment, that one careless moment when I spoke before thinking, when I said exactly what I had meant not to say from the beginning, that I made up my mind—that I suddenly knew what I was going to do. “At least he didn’t seem too upset when I filmed him. On the contrary.”
I could tell right away from the second and a half in which Jan Landzaat didn’t reply. The time he took to think it over was what gave him away. I felt a wave of triumph rise up from my collar: it was going to be much easier than I’d thought.
“Do you think that’s funny?” he asked. “At least that’s how it sounds: as though you think it’s really funny. And what do you mean by ‘when I filmed him’? What did you guys do, for Christ’s sake?”
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Bingo! I thought. Gotcha. You hold a piece of sausage above a dog’s head, two feet above its head. You can’t let your concentration flag for even a moment, otherwise the dog will take a piece of your finger when it jumps at the sausage.
“Karstens wasn’t actually a friend of mine,” he went on after a brief pause, during which he took off his black mittens, rubbed his hands together and stuck them in his pockets. “Just a different kind of teacher than I am. But I don’t think that’s any way to talk about someone.”
“What do you mean by ‘a different kind of teacher,’ Landzaat? Do you mean a teacher who doesn’t try right away to stuff his dick into one of his students? Who just does what he was hired to do? I can’t imagine Mr. Karstens climbing down off his stool to force himself on one of the girls in the class. Getting down on his knees and begging them to play with his wiener.”
This was fantastic. It felt fantastic. It was like being able to throw open the window at last after a long, stuffy day, to let in the fresh air—no, it was more than just fresh air—to let a fresh wind blow through. But even more than an open window, it felt like something that was sort of forbidden, but still necessary: busting a pane of glass in order to yank on the emergency brake.
The teacher had stopped in his tracks, he turned halfway around to face me, but I walked on; a few yards further I stopped too and turned around.
“The big mistake teachers like you make is in thinking that they’re different,” I said. “Above all, that they’re nicer. That’s what you think too, that you are above all else a nice teacher. Not strict like Van Ruth and Karstens. Not deathly boring like Posthuma. But we don’t care fuck-all about nice teachers. Give us the real thing. Real, instead of artificial. You’re pure fake, Landzaat, everyone can see that. Everyone except for you.”
He looked at me, his eyes weren’t angry, more like dull: crestfallen. He took a few steps in my direction, but I quickly walked backward, pulling the movie camera out of my pocket and taking the cap off the lens.
I needed to crank it up a little and then turn my back on him. I needed to give him the chance to do something to me, something irreversible, in any case something that left marks; I needed him to lose his self-control and fly off the handle. I was doing this for Laura, I told myself, I was not a born fighter, in a head-on fight with the history teacher I was bound to take a beating. I would have to get him to the point where he knocked out a couple of my teeth or blackened both my eyes. A battered and bloody face, a split lip with two front teeth broken off, that would be the best thing. The footage would speak for itself. Jan Landzaat would be drummed out of the Spinoza Lyceum and slapped with a restraining order at the very least, if he didn’t go to jail for six months or so. I thought about his wife, his two young daughters; I imagined them talking to their daddy through a little window in the booth in the prison visiting room. With one of those closed-circuit telephones, like in American movies: the daughters would press their hands against the window, and their father would do the same on the other side. Tears would be shed. His wife might forgive him to a certain extent, but she would never let him share her bed again.
“I bet saying all that makes you think you’re pretty tough,” he said, approaching now with somewhat bigger steps—I pressed the viewfinder against my eye and took equally big steps backward. “But I know exactly what kind of petty little man you are, Herman. It’s a wonder you could ever get a girl like Laura, that you could get any girl at all with that skinny body and those pitiful teeth of yours.”
I stopped, another possibility was to let him get closer and then unexpectedly hit him in the face with the camera, against his upper lip or the bridge of his nose—but I had to stay calm, I told myself. I mustn’t ruin everything now by losing my self-control; I was so close.
“Don’t go thinking that a girl like Laura will stick with you for very long,” Landzaat said. “Maybe girls think that’s fun for a while, a little boy they can lord it over, who they can make do whatever they want, but they go looking for a real man soon enough.”
The history teacher had stopped less than two feet from me; I looked at his face through the viewfinder, but I didn’t start filming. Not yet, wait just a bit, I said to myself.
If I got in the first blow, I might have a chance. I could break his nose with the camera, he would grab his nose with both hands while the blood sprayed in all directions, and in that unguarded moment, while his defenses were down, I could kick him in the balls. After that it would be up to me to decide how far to go. Where I would stop. But it would be a mistake, I realized, it would be a victory for Jan Landzaat. A teacher assaulted by a student. Whatever the exact cause, precisely why he was here in Terhofstede would fade into the background. From a culprit, an underage-girl-stalking teacher, he would become a victim. The turncoat is blindfolded and hoisted onto a rail amid a raging crowd. What happens to him after that we still find a bit pitiful, we forget the why behind it, the reason—we forget that this is a collaborator. No, I warded off the thought of getting in the first punch as quickly as it came up. I had to keep my wits about me, I warned myself again—not hand over the reins now, not while I was so close to my objective.
I pushed the button on the camera. I knew what I was going to say, how I would push him over the edge. And I would have it all on film: his face contorted with rage, with a bit of luck also the first swing, and then the consequences.
“You know what it is, Landzaat?” I started in, but at that moment I heard my camera make an all-too-familiar sound. Fuck! I thought, but I thought it with such force that it escaped audibly from my lips too. The film roll! The film was finished and unraveling inside the camera. There couldn’t have been a worse moment! I hadn’t been paying fucking attention, I shouldn’t have used the camera back there on the bridge. It had two ORWO-brand reels, manufactured in East Germany; Double-8 was what it was called, two times 8mm, you could film for two and a half minutes, after that you had to open the camera and turn the reel around, preferably in a dark place, for another two and a half minutes of moviemaking. There was no way I could do that here, outside. I had to decide fast. Whether to go ahead now and live with the fact that it wasn’t on film, or wait and try later to get him riled up all over again. I knew exactly what I was going to say, the question was whether I’d be able to dish it out later with the same impact. It was something about Landzaat’s wife and daughters, something Laura had told me once. I would start with that, and if that wasn’t enough to get him to take a swing at me, I would take it a step further. After all, he’d asked for it. I would tell him something Laura had told me about him one evening, a few days after she’d broken off the relationship. I’d always tried to avoid hearing too many details about the affair, whenever Laura started in about it I tried to change the subject as fast as possible: I found it too disgusting to listen to. This was a couple of days after she broke it off. She was sitting on her bed at home, crying; her parents were in the living room watching TV, we had been kissing a bit, and then she told me. It was something physical, something about Landzaat’s body that she could never stand, something she’d kept trying to get over during the couple of weeks it had lasted, but never succeeded. You know from the start that you’ll never stick it out too long with someone with…with something like that, Laura had said. It’s like someone with a shrill voice, she said, or a weird odor. At first there are other things that make up for it, but in the end you know that you’d never want to grow old alongside that shrill voice or weird odor.
Then she went on to tell me precisely what it was about Jan Landzaat that had inspired her aversion from the start. She had to repeat it a couple of times, because at first I didn’t understand what she was talking about, and after that I didn’t believe her. But then she’d started crying and swore that it was really true—and I took her in my arms and pressed her against me, I whispered in her ear that I believed her.
If I were to confront Jan Landzaat with this bodily detail, here and now in the snow, it w
ould be as though I were rubbing his face in his own vomit and forcing him to eat it—but this was worse than vomit.
He’d thought he could insult me with his comments about my appearance and my lack of masculinity, but that didn’t get to me. I knew who I was. I knew above all where my strengths lay. I knew enough not to fly in the face of my own nature by trying to play the irresistible macho man; everyone, especially the girls, would see through that right away. Sure, I was too skinny. Physically, I wasn’t strong, I didn’t have a seductive set of teeth. At the age of ten I had worn braces for a while, at first my teeth had sort of protruded, but after wearing the braces they were pushed too far back; on my way to school once, in a fit of rashness, I had taken the retainer out of my mouth and tossed it under a parked car.
But I was different—or rather, I had something different. At thirteen I had my first real girlfriend. She was going with a much older boy at the time. A handsome guy. The athletic type. Biceps, long hairy legs that looked good in shorts. But also yawningly boring, as I noted while a group of us were standing around talking, after the school’s annual track and field day. The girl was part of that group too. The boy had his arm around her waist, but I could tell from the way she started looking around whenever he started talking, about the weather, about his baseball team winning the finals, about how hungry he was. And how tired. I could almost see the girl sigh. I looked at her, I kept looking at her, for as long as it took for her to look away. I wouldn’t bore you, my eyes told her. Never. Then I said something that made her laugh. She laughed, the handsome boy didn’t, he only raised his eyebrows and looked around pensively, as though he suddenly smelled something strange. It’s your eyes, the girl told me the next afternoon when we were lying on the bed in her room. The way you looked at me yesterday. And now you’re doing it again! During the fall vacation, Laura had said something along the same lines. When I look into your eyes for too long, I get all wobbly. You don’t hide anything. You can see exactly what you’re thinking. Who you are. Not all the girls felt that way, of course, they didn’t all melt when I looked at them. I knew my own limitations. But if those other girls felt like dying of boredom beside some fashion model, that was up to them.