Dear Mr. M

  “What is it?” Jan Landzaat asked.

  I had stopped in my tracks. I looked around. About ten yards from the path, at the bottom of the embankment sloping down to the canal, there were some bushes, a thicket, no more than that—but exactly right for what I had in mind.

  I would turn the film around. I had to turn the film around. I needed to get it on film, how the teacher flew off the handle. Without pictures, there was nothing.

  With my back to him I would try to turn the reel around under my coat, without letting too much light in. I didn’t know what time it was or exactly when we’d left the house, but it seemed like it was already getting dark.

  “I have to piss,” I said.

  At the moment you lost consciousness I was in mid-sentence, right in the middle of my account of how I came home later that evening, my embrace with Laura in the snow beneath the light of the streetlamp.

  Here’s how it went: First your daughter came into the living room, in her pajamas. Blinking her eyes in the bright light. “I can’t sleep.” You didn’t look at her, you looked at your wife right away. “Come on, come with me, we’ll go back to bed.” Your wife told me she would be right back, that I didn’t have to wait for her to finish my story.

  —

  Where’s…where is he? Laura asked, and she stopped kissing me for a moment as she squinted into the darkness, peering up the darkened road I’d just come down.

  I…I lost him, I said.

  —

  It had been a while since you’d last mumbled “yes” or “oh,” or even nodded your head. Behind the lenses of your glasses your eyes were still open, like normal, the lid of the swollen left eye had even crept up a little since yesterday and was already revealing a fraction of an inch of eyeball. I was in the midst of that last sentence when I realized you weren’t moving at all anymore. Total motionlessness. Rigidity. It was not like being asleep. This was a clock. A clock that’s been running normally and then you suddenly realize that the hands stopped moving a few minutes ago. There’s something you’ve missed: a train, an appointment. Time has slipped away, time has literally stood still. You, in any case, arrive too late. I spoke your name. I asked whether everything was all right, but in fact I already knew. You weren’t going to answer me. I also knew what I had to do. I would have to get up, put a hand on your shoulder, and shake you—or, at the very least, shout for your wife.

  But I did none of that. I fell silent. I kept my mouth shut. I looked at you in a way I had never looked before. The way you rarely look at people. Maybe at those closest to you, the woman asleep beside you in bed, your child napping in the crib.

  So this is it, I thought. This is what the world looks like once you, Mr. M, are no longer around.

  The back of your head was leaning against the headrest; at that moment, for those few minutes (or was it more, fifteen minutes, perhaps?), you existed only in your work. In the work you’d left behind; nothing more would be added, the readers would have to make do with this.

  “Well, she’s back asleep.” I hadn’t heard your wife come in. “Would you like another beer, Herman?”

  I raised a finger to my lips and nodded at your motionless form in the chaise longue.

  “Aw,” your wife said, tiptoeing a few steps in your direction. “He’s been so tired. Since yesterday. I wonder whether we shouldn’t have called the doctor again.”

  Then she was beside you, leaning over you.

  “But…” During the brief silence that followed—without a doubt the longest brief silence in my life—during that one moment when she still had her back to me, I took the opportunity to put on my most surprised expression. “His eyes! His eyes! His eyes are still open!”

  She started shaking you, first by the arm, then by both shoulders. She called your name a few times—a little too loudly if you asked me: I was just about to say that she should be careful not to wake your daughter, when she turned around to face me.

  I don’t know if she could tell right away. Maybe I’d adopted the surprised expression a few beats too early, so that now there was only a glimmer of it left, a vague recollection at most of my feigned surprise.

  Yes, in hindsight—now—I think she did see it, the color of her eyes shifted slightly, one shade darker, like spilled wine, a wine stain, still glistening at first, that sinks into the carpet the next moment.

  I was expecting her to start screaming at me, to blame me for something. Why are you just sitting there? Do something!

  But she didn’t scream. She only shook her head. Then she picked up her cell phone from the coffee table and called an ambulance.

  —

  Before the ambulance arrived we tried to bring you around. Your wife opened the top buttons of your shirt and slapped your cheeks softly a few times, but there was no reaction. You were still breathing, you were just somewhere else, at a spot where maybe you could still hear us, but from which there was no return. Perhaps you felt your wife’s hand against your cheeks, but then as though they were hands from another world, a parallel world where you’d been not so very long ago, watching forty-year-old black-and-white movies.

  And then there was the moment when your daughter was suddenly standing in the living room again; I saw her before your wife did, she was staring wide-eyed at her mother as she shook you by your reluctantly earthbound shoulders.

  For the second time that evening, I did nothing. I looked. First at your daughter, then at your wife, and then at you. There was nothing left for me to do. I could stay and watch, but I could also go away, it wouldn’t make any difference.

  “Mama.”

  At last your wife turned around.

  “Catherine!”

  She held her arms out wide, grabbed her, held her tightly to her chest, cuddled her. “It’s nothing, there’s nothing wrong. Daddy’s sleeping. Daddy’s just sleeping.”

  Then your daughter wriggled her way out of her mother’s embrace, took a step to one side, and placed her little hand on your forehead.

  “Daddy’s sleeping,” she said.

  Daddy’s sleeping—but those are words he no longer hears.

  He’s still there: he thinks—his mind thinks its final thoughts—but the sounds have now been banished. He is a writer. He can describe his final moments, the transition from life to death, no longer on paper, but still in words—in a final sentence.

  He knows the accounts of people who have “come back from the dead.” Those accounts usually speak of a “very clear, blinding light at the end of a tunnel,” of a “lighted gateway,” of a “sense of peace.” Death is not at all terrible, these revenants say, merely a joy-drenched transition from life to a new phase.

  But those who came back from the dead had never been truly dead, that’s the one factor that binds them all, he knows now. In the last few years he has often—increasingly often—thought about his parents. His parents who supposedly were waiting for him on the far side of that “light” and that “gateway.” With open arms. Like on the playground. Yes, he would go running to them like a child after a long day at school, his father would lift him high into the air, his mother would cover him in kisses.

  Life was about that long: a boring day at school, the endless hours spent mostly staring out the window.

  The greatest advantage, he knows now too, is the disappearance of fear. You don’t have to be afraid of anything once you’re dead. He has, in essence, always been afraid, he at least possesses enough self-knowledge to realize that—he is not the adventuresome type, as they say. There are two kinds of writers. The first kind has to go everywhere himself, he has to experience it all himself in order to write about it. This first category of writer goes big-game hunting in Africa, shark fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, he races out in front of the bulls in Pamplona and dives for cover during a mortar attack in a hot, distant country rife with diarrhea and nasty, stinging insects—a country he would never have visited if there hadn’t been a war on. He needs to experience things, if he doesn’t experience anyth
ing, the writing engine will not turn over.

  The second category of writer mostly stays at home. When he actually changes his address, he does so at most once or twice in his life. He nurtures constancy. The familiar. At a restaurant he will always order the same dish. And it’s almost always the same restaurant. When he goes on vacation, it’s always to the same country. To the same hotel.

  It was like with a story. Like with a book. What is it we look for in a book? That someone goes through a process of maturation—that he achieves insight? But imagine if that process and that insight simply aren’t there? Wouldn’t that, in fact, be much more like life itself? People who actually go through a process of maturation are as rare as hen’s teeth. To say nothing of those who gain insight. No, in the real world we remain the same. We go to the theater and see a movie and decide to change our lives, but the next day we’ve forgotten all about that. We resolve to be kinder, to listen more carefully. We keep that up for the better part of a morning. After that we go back to snarling as usual—snarling is that one old, worn-out housecoat that fits us best.

  He wonders how it will go with him, with himself—with his own story. He’s seen it happen to dead colleagues. Suddenly their books are back on the bestseller list. Not for long, a couple of weeks at most, but still…He tries to put himself in the shoes of those who buy a book by a recently deceased author. A book they apparently didn’t own yet. Maybe they had never even heard of the writer in question, maybe it was only the newspaper obituary or the article about the writer’s funeral that gave them the idea. “Hyenas” is what colleague N called that category of readers, that category unto itself, in an interview once. “Vultures.” But that wasn’t true. Such readers had at most heard the hyenas howl in the distance, they had seen the vultures circling and realized there was something there for the taking.

  He had only tried to imagine what must have happened. Back then. Forty years ago. He had never written detective novels or thrillers, but he had always enjoyed reading them. Those books brought back something of that old joy in reading, the old, carefree, avid reading: in the same way he’d devoured the books he had stolen from the shop when he was sixteen, without worrying too much about genre. In those days, all books were equally exciting, in the old-fashioned sense that you wanted to find out how they ended.

  But somewhere around his eighteenth birthday—a point that coincided more or less with his earliest urges to write—he had been driven out, once and for all, from the paradise of carefree reading. From that moment on a distinction was imposed between literature and the rest: the other books. From then on literature was either good or bad. Bad literature he read with a gnashing of teeth, growling and fidgeting in his easy chair, furious in fact at such pretentiously formulated impotence. But with the good literature too, something of the original pleasure was ruined once and for all. Whenever a book was truly good—very, very good, perhaps even a work of genius, a masterpiece—he kept asking himself how the writer had done it. He would pause after each paragraph, sometimes after each sentence, and then read that paragraph and that sentence over and over before going on. Sometimes he turned the sentence into pabulum by reading it over and over so often that it finally kept as little of its original flair as a meal cooked to death and then warmed up again and again.

  There was also another difference between literature and all the other books. It was, in fact, the same food from two different restaurants. On the right you had the restaurant with the Michelin stars, on the left the Burger King or McDonald’s. The point was that you didn’t always feel like nibbling at sophisticated tidbits, didn’t always feel like spearing a minuscule piece of goose liver from an otherwise as-good-as-empty plate. Sometimes you felt more like a hamburger with bacon and melted cheese and a soft, soggy bun that left the grease dripping down your chin—but that was always accompanied by a sense of guilt. A sense of guilt so overpowering that M, whenever he visited a Burger King, kept looking around skittishly to make sure he saw no one he knew. Caught red-handed! Like running into someone outside the door of a whorehouse. After reading a thriller or a detective novel, he had almost the same feeling: a great emptiness. Was that all there was? A few hours after eating that Triple Whopper with bacon and cheese he was hungry again too, as though both stomach and brain had completely repressed the memory of that guilty meal. A detective novel was a furtive visit to a whorehouse, a real book was a conquest each and every time, the woman at the hotel bar in that foreign city, the conversation that consists more of glances than of words—and then the elevator upstairs.

  Along with Ana, he sometimes cast a furtive eye at detective series on TV. “The vet did it,” he would shout after ten minutes. “Wait and see, that nice veterinarian who’s helping them search for the body right now.”

  “Ssh!” Ana would say. “Don’t do that, otherwise it’s no fun anymore.”

  But he was always right. It took a great deal of effort to suppress a triumphant grin whenever “the nice vet” was taken into custody at last.

  It was in that same way, forty years ago, that he had looked out over the fields around Terhofstede, had walked back and forth to Retranchement and then followed the canal to Sluis. He had found a room in a simple boardinghouse in Retranchement, and left on foot for the Zwin after breakfast the next day. There, atop the sea dike, he looked out over the thistle and haulm-covered flats of the inlet—it looked like it was low tide. He put himself in the position of his characters. Of Herman. Of Laura. But above all, of the history teacher. Of Jan Landzaat.

  Imagine, he thought for the first time there, at that same spot, that the teacher had simply disappeared of his own free will. That he hadn’t been killed by Herman and Laura and then buried in some secret, or at least unfindable, location. He had thought about the detective series, about the most improbable yet still just barely credible scenario—about the nice veterinarian.

  He had tried to imagine this same landscape when it was covered with ice and snow. The sun that was already going down by four-thirty on that day after Boxing Day, the day when Jan Landzaat and Herman left on foot together for Sluis to find a garage for his disabled vehicle. Imagine that the history teacher had been planning all along to get rid of Herman somewhere along the way; perhaps not in the literal sense of getting rid of him, not by harming him, but much simpler than that: by disappearing, by giving him the slip when he wasn’t paying attention. That he had waited patiently for such a moment to arrive, and that when Herman withdrew into the bushes along the dike to take a piss—as Herman himself had stated, as he had never stopped stating—Landzaat had seized the opportunity and slipped away quietly.

  As a writer, this version of events was inconvenient for M. Inconvenient for the book he had already decided to write, even though he was still unsure which way the plot would go; it would be better if the whole hike to Sluis had been invented by Herman (and by Laura), and if the history teacher was long buried and in the ground two days after Christmas. Unfortunately, though, there was that witness, the to-this-day-unidentified witness who the papers said had seen Herman and the teacher close to the canal, albeit not in the direction of Sluis but out toward the Zwin.

  After that, of course, anything could have happened; no new witnesses turned up. Herman could have murdered Jan Landzaat and then buried him at some spot in or close to the Zwin. Then he could have returned to Terhofstede and told Laura that he had “lost” the teacher.

  But back then, forty years ago, as M stood on the sea dike, that version of events had suddenly seemed highly improbable. Herman would have had to do it with his bare hands; in a struggle with the healthy, full-grown Jan Landzaat he would definitely have come out on the losing end. He would have had to take him by surprise, from behind, using a stone, or some weapon he’d brought from the house—a hammer, a hatchet, something he could easily hide under his coat—to knock him out. But the more M thought about it, the less likely that seemed. It seemed more premeditated than Herman or Laura was capable of. And even though
the witness had stated that he’d seen Herman and Landzaat heading toward the Zwin, that didn’t mean Herman had intentionally lured him out there in order to kill him: after all, Herman could have gotten mixed up too—he may have known the surroundings better than the teacher, but maybe he’d had a hard time getting his bearings in that white landscape.

  M had walked from Terhofstede to the canal. There was a bridge there, but no signpost; on the far side of the canal the road split, one side going north toward the Zwin, the other to the south, toward Sluis. From the split in the road you still could not see Sluis, not even on a clear summer’s day: nothing, no steeple or buildings, those came only later, after the canal bent off gently and the old fortified town popped up from behind the trees. Jan Landzaat and Herman, in any event, had never reached Sluis.

  Atop the sea dike M had closed his eyes and sniffed at the wind. In the distance, on the horizon, he saw sticking up into the air the cranes of what was probably a harbor. Which way would he himself have gone? he’d asked himself that afternoon.

  In the police interviews with Laura and Herman, in what had leaked out about those interviews, the “friends in Paris” came up a number of times. But no one else, not Landzaat’s wife, not his colleagues or former classmates, had ever heard of such Parisian friends. Still, the history teacher had been “on his way to Paris”; at least that’s what he himself claimed—once again, according to Laura and Herman.

  M imagined a figure: a lone figure in a pure white landscape, this same landscape in winter, the harbor cranes in the distance.

  Had Jan Landzaat gone to Paris? Had he taken the train? And had he then gone into hiding with his real or imaginary friends?