The second kind of teacher is mostly scared. He lowers himself out of fear. He pulls a boy’s hair, just as a joke, he plays soccer with the kids at recess, he wears trousers and shoes that bear a distant resemblance to our own trousers and shoes; he wants, above all, to be liked. Sometimes we, the pupils, play along for a while. Mostly out of pity. We act as though we really do like the frightened teacher, we let him believe that he’s popular. Meanwhile, however, the frightened teacher has awakened our animal instincts. Animals can smell fear a mile away. Within the herd, the nice teacher is the straggler. We wait patiently for the right moment. An unguarded moment when the nice teacher stumbles or turns his back on us. Then we pounce on him collectively and tear him limb from limb.
Both the authoritarian and the frightened teacher belong to the most mediocre category of human being. The term “high school,” in fact, is completely misleading: there’s nothing high or mighty about it, it’s the deep rut in the middle of the road. They only make it seem like you’re being taught different things: what it really comes down to is spending six years under the yoke of the most stifling kind of mediocrity. Nowhere is the odor of mediocrity more pervasive than at a high school. It’s a smell that works its way into everything, like the stench of a pan of soup that has been bubbling on the burner too long. Someone turned down the gas and then forgot all about it.
“So, are you two surviving out here in the cold?” Mr. Landzaat asked. He was trying to sound jovial. He did his best to please, to act as though it was indeed all a thing of the past, the desperate overtures in the bicycle shed, the panting phone calls, the shadowing of Laura all the way to beneath her bedroom window. Dead and buried, he was trying to say. You two have nothing to fear from me.
But he was still standing there, warming his hands at the stove. Above all, he was standing too close to our bed. He shouldn’t have come.
Before I could answer him, Laura came in carrying the bottle of eau-de-vie and three glasses. They weren’t shot glasses, they were tumblers. She slid aside the two dirty plates off of which we’d eaten our fried eggs and bacon that morning, and put the glasses on the table.
“How much of this stuff are you supposed to pour?” she asked, twisting the top off the bottle.
“Not very much,” I said.
“All right, looking good,” Mr. Landzaat said. Still rubbing his hands, he stepped away from the coal stove and sat down at the table. Laura lit two candles and put them on the windowsill. It seemed to be just a smidgen darker outside than it had been a few minutes ago—it had started snowing again.
“Well, here’s to you!” Mr. Landzaat said, holding up his glass. But when neither Laura nor I made a move to imitate his toast, he raised the glass to his lips and took a big gulp. “Ah,” he said, “just what the doctor ordered.” He glanced at the dirty plates. “Must be nice, a house like this without your parents around? Able to do whatever you like?”
Laura’s forehead was creased in a frown. She rolled her glass between her long, pretty fingers, but she still hadn’t taken a sip.
“Why are you here?” she asked quietly, without looking at the history teacher.
Mr. Landzaat raised the glass to his lips again, but put it back on the table without drinking. He leaned forward a bit and placed his hand on the table, not far from Laura’s. I shifted my weight and the wooden chair creaked loudly.
“Laura,” he said, “I’ve come to say that I’m sorry. Not about what we…us, the two of us, I’m not sorry about that, but about…afterward. I shouldn’t have…I acted like a schoolboy. I shouldn’t have kept calling you. But I simply couldn’t accept that it was over. Now I can.”
He smiled and bared his long teeth again. The combination of heat from the coal stove and the first slug of eau-de-vie had caused two rosy blushes to appear on his gray cheeks. Like a schoolboy, he’d said. I acted like a schoolboy. I didn’t take it too personally. After all, I wasn’t a schoolboy. A boy, yes, but not a schoolboy. It wasn’t so much insulting as pitiful, this frightened man comparing himself to a schoolboy.
Laura looked at him silently. Mr. Landzaat knocked the rest of his drink back in one go. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His lips were no longer a dark blue either, they were redder.
“I wanted to ask you to forgive me, Laura,” he said. “That’s why I came. To ask your forgiveness.”
“That’s good,” Laura said.
Mr. Landzaat sighed deeply. His eyes were glistening, I saw. I took my first slug of eau-de-vie, then set the glass down on the table a bit too loudly. The history teacher looked over—not at me, only at the glass.
“I hope, when the vacation’s over, that we can go back to how things were in class,” he went on. “That we can act normally toward each other. As friends. That we can stay friends.”
“No,” Laura said.
Mr. Landzaat stared at her.
“Act normal in class, okay,” Laura said. “That’s mostly up to you. But I don’t want to be your friend. You’re not my friend. And you never have been.”
I felt a deep warmth rising up inside me. The heat began somewhere in the pit of my stomach and made its way up. It was not the kind of heat the coal stove gave off. This heat came from inside. A proud warmth that wanted to get out.
“Laura, I realize that I…carried on,” Mr. Landzaat said. “That’s why I’m here to apologize. I lost my way for a while there. My senses. I…I couldn’t think about anything else. But now that you’ve forgiven me, can’t we just be friends? I would really like that. Maybe we should let it go for a while, but after that…I mean, after Christmas we’ll be seeing each other in the classroom a couple of times a week. At school. We’ll see each other in the hallway, on the stairs. It’s not like nothing happened, Laura. You can’t just wipe it out. I’m very fond of you, and that’s something I can’t just wipe out. It would be weird for us to act as though nothing had happened.”
There was a sentence bouncing around in my head. A line from a movie. Maybe you didn’t hear correctly, buddy. Maybe you didn’t hear what the lady said. Then the script would have me stand up as a sign that the conversation was over. It was high time he started the car and drove on to Paris.
But I didn’t say anything. I was sure now that it was better not to say a thing. As we’d come down that last stretch of road into Retranchement, I’d whispered to her a few times that there was nothing to worry about. That I would protect her. But Laura didn’t need protecting. She did it all by herself. Landzaat was flat on his back. He was flat on his back the way a dog lies on its back to expose its soft spot, as a sign of surrender to a stronger opponent.
I have to admit that then, for the first time, I entertained the idea that a person like Mr. Landzaat might not deserve to live. That he was not, so to speak, worthy of living. Back in the olden days, when the gladiators fought and the loser had behaved in a cowardly fashion, the crowd would give the thumbs-down. I gave the thumbs-down to him right then.
Finish him off, Laura, I thought. Once and for all. That’s what he came for.
“I think it would be better if you left,” Laura said quietly. “I really don’t feel like this at all.”
Mr. Landzaat picked up his empty glass, raised it to his mouth, and put it back down. He glanced at the bottle, then looked at Laura.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’ll leave. Maybe I shouldn’t have come.”
But he didn’t get up.
“I…,” he started. Now he picked up the bottle and screwed the top off. “Anyone else?” he asked. Laura shrugged, I didn’t do anything. After he had topped up our drinks, he filled his own glass—almost halfway to the top.
I looked out the window. It was now almost completely dark. In the light of the only streetlight along this stretch of road you could see the snow swirling down in flurries that grew heavier all the time. I thought about the advice parents and other grown-ups would give. Better not to drive in weather like this, especially not when you’ve knocked back a few
glasses of eau-de-vie. But we weren’t grown-ups. Mr. Landzaat was the only one here who had passed the age of consent, long ago. He didn’t need anyone else to tell him what was good for him.
For us—for Laura, and certainly for me—the best thing would definitely be if, at a considerable distance from this house, he were to slip off the road and smash into a tree or an embankment.
“If you plan to get to Paris, Mr. Landzaat…,” I said.
“Jan,” he said, “please, call me Jan.” When he looked at me I saw that the eau-de-vie had reached his eyes now—something about the whites of them, something watery that reflected the light from the little candles.
“It’s getting dark,” I said. “If you want to get to Paris tonight, it’s about time you left.”
Mr. Landzaat sighed deeply and took his eyes off me. “Are you happy, Laura?” he asked. “Tell me that you’re happy with…with him. If you don’t dare to say it with him around, I’ll take you along with me to Paris. But if you tell me that you’re really, truly happy, then I’ll be out of here in ten seconds. But I need you to look at me, Laura. Please. That’s the only…the last thing I’ll ask of you.”
“Go away,” Laura said. “Get out of here, you idiot.”
I looked at the bottle of eau-de-vie, it was more like a clay flask than a bottle. I thought about whether it might be heavy enough to crush someone’s skull.
“Look at me, Laura,” Mr. Landzaat said. “Look at me and say it.”
I picked up the bottle and weighed it in my hands. I pretended that I wanted to pour myself some more eau-de-vie, but I was mostly assessing the bottle’s heft.
“I’m happy,” Laura said. “I’ve never been happier than I am with him. Never in my whole life. You look me in the eye, you jerk! Look! You look me in the eye and tell me what you see.”
—
We stood outside by the gate while Mr. Landzaat tried to start the Volkswagen. It felt like hours passed, but then there was a loud pop and a white cloud of exhaust. I had both arms around Laura and was holding her tight.
“Sweetheart,” she whispered in my ear. “My love.”
The car moved a few inches, almost imperceptibly to the naked eye. It took a moment for us to realize that the rear tires were spinning desperately in the fresh snow. Mr. Landzaat turned off the engine and opened the door.
“No traction,” he said after he’d climbed out. He kicked the rear tire, then took a few careful steps up onto the road. Almost right away, he slipped and fell—or pretended to slip and fall.
“It’s like a skating rink out here,” he said.
I felt Laura’s hand under my coat, her fingers under my sweater and T-shirt, her nails against my skin.
“I’m really sorry about this,” Mr. Landzaat said. “I wanted to leave. You saw me try to leave. But I’m pretty much powerless. Is there a hotel somewhere in the village, maybe?”
After the tunnel, the landscape changes. I won’t try to describe that landscape, I think you can picture it just as clearly as I do. First you have the cranes along the waterfront, the pipes and tubes of the refineries, the little lights blipping on and off at the tops of the power pylons, but after the tunnel everything becomes flatter and emptier.
White vapor is coming from the cooling towers at the nuclear plant. Stacked up high along the dike are blue sea containers bearing names like HANJIN and CHINA SHIPPING. The road’s surface consists of sloppily laid concrete slabs, as though the road itself were only temporary, as though it could just as easily be somewhere else tomorrow.
A few curves later and the cooling towers and containers are behind me, in my rearview mirror. In front of me the new landscape opens up—little dikes lined with poplars, pastureland with a few sheep or horses, a brick steeple in the distance.
As I’ve already noted, one should do one’s best to banish coincidence from a novel—from a made-up story. Coincidence fits better in the real world. The real world is its ideal habitat. Only reality is glued together with coincidence.
In both Liberation Year and Payback, nothing is left to coincidence. Coincidence ruins the credibility of a writer and his story, you’re quite aware of that. In your books, therefore, everything has to do almost fastidiously with everything else. The children are able to find their way into the liberated zone of the Netherlands because the eldest of the two boys once went there on vacation with his parents. The Wehrmacht officer understands Dutch (something his interrogators don’t know) because, in prewar Berlin, he was infatuated with a Dutch girl. Might that Dutch girl, the reader wonders even at that point, be the same one who is now in hiding close to Amsterdam’s Old West Church? And indeed, when they meet later on in the story (under less felicitous circumstances), can you really call that a coincidence?
Something similar happens in Payback. The history teacher, Mr. Landzaat (in your book you call him Ter Brecht—a name that’s a bit too contrived to my tastes) listens to the weather report on the car radio on his way to Terhofstede (Dammerdorp in Payback). What you’re suggesting is that he knows it will start snowing later that day. He takes into account the possibility that he may become stranded; you force the reader to suspect this along with you. Still, he drives on. Here the book parts from the truth. The truth, as is so often the case, is much simpler. Mr. Landzaat was probably hoping that Laura would react differently, but I don’t think he ever consciously considered the weather.
He was standing outside, in the freshly fallen snow. At that point, he really wanted to leave. Today, still, so many years later, I firmly believe that.
So imagine that it hadn’t started snowing, or that it had been snowing only lightly. Then he actually would have left. He would have spent the rest of that Christmas vacation with his friends in Paris. You would have had no premise for your book. Instead, out of desperation, you might have written yet another book about the war.
—
It’s market day in H. I drive once around the city center and finally park the car outside those same city walls that I saw only yesterday on the postcard.
Here is my plan: I go to a café for a drink. I strike up a conversation with the bartender or the waiter. After a while, I casually mention your name. The writer, yes. He has a country home somewhere around here, doesn’t he? Then I change the subject right away. To the best place in H to buy mussels, for example. With a little luck, I’ll already have an idea of the general direction I need to go in to find the white house with the address that ends with a 1.
But that’s not the way it goes. Coincidence, apparently, has alighted in H long before I arrived. The sidewalk cafés around the market square are chock-full of customers. And while I’m walking around trying to find a seat, I spot her. She has her sunglasses pushed up over her hair like a barrette. On the table in front of her is a half-empty glass of white wine. Beside her glass is another one. A glass of pink lemonade, with a straw. The end of the straw is hidden from sight in a little girl’s mouth.
How could I be anything but thankful for such a fluke? I am grateful to coincidence. I can skip the whole search mission, the way I would probably skip over it in a book. Just like the descriptions of landscapes and faces. If this were a book, with a made-up story, some readers would now definitely be crying out that it’s all awfully coincidental. Maybe they would even stop reading.
But not you, I think. You won’t stop. I act as though I’m scanning the tables at the sidewalk café, like I’m looking for a place to sit. Across from the chairs occupied by your wife and daughter, there is precisely one vacant seat. There are plastic shopping bags lying on the chair, but if you took those away, someone could sit there.
“Excuse me,” I say, “but is this seat taken?”
I look at her. I look at her face as though suddenly something is dawning on me. As though I’m seeing a vaguely familiar face that I can’t quite place yet.
“I…,” I say. “Is…are you…?”
She squints in the sunlight and looks up at me. I move a little to one side, so
that my shadow falls across her face. Now it’s her turn to look up at me as though at someone whose face she can’t immediately place.
“But…,” she says.
“Well, I’ll be,” I say. “It is. You’re…I live downstairs from you. I’m the downstairs neighbor.”
“Right,” she says. “The neighbor. You’re the neighbor.”
“Yeah. I’m…” I point over my shoulder, at the market square—“I was going to do some shopping. I’m not too far from here.”
Then comes the part I learned by heart; the important thing is to make it come out sounding as natural as possible. “I’m staying in K.,” I say. “Close to here. At a bed-and- breakfast. I came here for the nature reserve, the wetlands at S. I’m a photographer. I photograph birds. This is such a coincidence,” I add. “I didn’t know…I mean, are you here on vacation?”
I had thought about this on the drive down. Would it be possible for me to know that you have a country cottage close to H.? Possible, yes, but not absolutely necessary.
“Birds,” your wife says.
“Uh-huh,” I say. “Well, you know, it’s only a hobby. I do other animals too—I photograph other animals too,” I correct myself quickly. “Nature. Everything in nature.”
This is the point at which I look around. Is there another free table somewhere? No. There are other vacant chairs, but that would only mean that I would have to sit down with other people. My hands are already resting on the back of the chair with the shopping bags on it.
It’s a heads-or-tails moment. You’ve tossed the coin, it spins as it falls, it rolls off under a chair or table. You bend down and pick it up.
Heads it’s me: But I won’t bother you any longer. I should be moving on.
Tails it’s her: Oh, how thoughtless of me…Please, sit down.
It’s tails. She leans over, takes one of the shopping bags off the chair, then the other, and places them on the ground beside her own chair.
“Can I take your order?”
Suddenly there’s a girl standing beside me, a girl carrying a wooden tray. I glance at the table, at the glass of lemonade and the glass of white wine.