I suppressed my initial urge to come back with ‘And what about you?’ Instead, I said: ‘Ever since Opsporing Verzocht.’
She took my hand, exactly as she had done with Michel just now.
‘Oh, honey,’ she said.
I turned slightly, so I could see her face.
‘And you?’ I asked.
Now my wife took my other hand as well. She looked at me and made a sorry attempt at a smile: it was a smile that, while knowing better, wanted to take us back in time.
‘I want you to know that I was thinking of you first and foremost, in all of it, Paul,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want … I thought maybe it would be too much for you. I was afraid … I was afraid it would make you go, all over again … well, you know.’
‘Since when?’ I asked quietly. ‘When did you find out?’
Claire squeezed my fingers.
‘On the night itself,’ she said. ‘The same night they were at the ATM machine.’
I stared at her.
‘Michel called me,’ Claire said. ‘It had just happened. He wanted to know what they should do.’
29
Back when I was still working, one day I stopped in the middle of a sentence about the Battle of Stalingrad and looked around the class.
All these heads, I thought. All these heads into which everything disappears.
‘Hitler had his sights set on Stalingrad,’ I said. ‘Even though, strategically speaking, it would have been wiser for him to press straight on to Moscow. But for him it was all about the name of the town: Stalingrad, the city that bore the name of his great opponent, Joseph Stalin. That city had to be conquered first. Because of the psychological impact that victory would have on Stalin.’
I paused and looked around the classroom again. Some of the students were writing down what I was telling them, others were looking at me; there were both interested and glassy gazes turned on me – more interested ones than glassy ones, I tried to tell myself, realizing at the same time that it no longer made much difference to me.
I thought about their lives, about all their lives that would just go on.
‘It’s on the basis of irrational considerations like that that wars are won,’ I said. ‘Or lost.’
Back when I was still working – it’s still hard for me to say that phrase out loud. I could go on here and explain that once, in a distant past, I’d had other plans for my life, but I’m not going to do that. Those other plans really existed, but precisely what they involved is nobody’s business. ‘Back when I was still working …’ at least appeals to me more than ‘When I was still standing before a class …’ or – the most horrible of all, the favourite phrase of the worst-of-the-worst, the former teachers who say of themselves that teaching is their blood – ‘Back when I was still in education …’
I would have preferred not to mention which subject I taught. That, too, is nobody’s business. It becomes a label so quickly. Oh, he’s a … teacher, people say. That explains a lot. But when you ask what it actually explains, they usually can’t tell you. I teach history. Taught history. These days, not any more. I stopped about ten years ago. Had to stop – although in my case I still believe that both ‘stopped’ and ‘had to stop’ are equally far from the truth. At equal and opposite ends of it, indeed, but the distance between them and the truth is almost the same.
It started in the train, the train to Berlin. The beginning of the end, let’s say: the start of (being forced into) stopping. Counting back, it seems the whole process took barely two or three months. Once it started, it was quick. Like someone who is diagnosed with a malignant illness and is gone six weeks later.
In retrospect, what I feel most is pleasure and relief; my days before a class had lasted long enough. I sat by myself at the window of my otherwise empty compartment and looked outside. The only thing that rolled by for the first half-hour were birch trees, but now we were moving through the outskirts of some town. I looked at the houses and the flats, the houses with their little gardens that often ran all the way up to the rail embankment. In one of those gardens white sheets were hanging out to dry, in another there was a swing. It was November and it was cold. There were no people in the gardens.
‘Maybe you should take a short vacation,’ Claire had said. ‘For a week or so.’ She had noticed something about me, she said: I reacted to everything too quickly and too irritatedly. It had to be the job, the school. ‘Sometimes I wonder how you keep it up,’ she said. ‘There’s really no reason for you to feel guilty.’ Michel was still only three, she could handle things easily enough, he went to daycare three days a week, she had those days all to herself.
I had thought about Rome and Barcelona, about palm trees and outdoor cafés, and finally decided on Berlin, mostly because I had never been there. At first I felt a certain cheerful excitement. I packed a small suitcase. I would take as little with me as possible: travelling light, I told myself. The excitement lasted until I got to the station, where the train to Berlin was waiting at the platform. The first part of the journey went smoothly. Without regret, I watched the housing blocks and industrial estates disappear. And when we got to the first cows, ditches and power masts, my thoughts were still fixed mostly on what lay ahead. On what was to come. But then the cheerfulness made way for something else. I thought about Claire and Michel. About the distance between us, which was growing all the time. I saw my wife at the door of the daycare centre, the child’s bicycle seat into which she lifted Michel, and then her hand sliding the key into the lock of our front door.
By the time the train crossed into German territory I had already been to the buffet a few times for more beer. But it was too late. I had passed a point beyond which there was no return.
It was then that I saw the houses and gardens. People are everywhere, I thought. There are so many of them that they build their houses all the way up to the railroad tracks.
From my hotel room, I called Claire. I tried to make my voice sound normal.
‘What’s wrong?’ Claire said right away. ‘Are you okay?’
‘How’s Michel?’
‘Good. He made an elephant out of clay at the daycare centre. But maybe he should tell you himself. Michel, this is Daddy on the phone …’
No, I tried to say. No.
‘Daddy …’
‘Hi, pal. What’s this I hear from Mama? Did you make an elephant?’
‘Daddy?’
I had to say something. But nothing came out.
‘Have you got a cold, Daddy?’
During the days that followed I did my best to play the part of the interested tourist. I strolled past the remnants of the Wall, I ate in restaurants where the guidebook I’d brought with me said only ordinary Berliners ate. The evenings were the worst. I stood at the window of my hotel room and looked at the traffic and the thousands of little lights and the people who all seemed to be on their way to something.
There were two possibilities for me to choose from: I could stay there at the window and watch, or I could go out and join the other people. I could pretend I was on my way to something too.
‘How was it?’ Claire asked a week later as I pressed her to me again. I pressed harder than I’d been planning to. But, on the other hand, not hard enough.
A few days later it started at school as well. At first I’d been able to tell myself that it had to do with being far away.
But something had happened, and that something I had now brought home with me.
‘You might ask yourself how many people there would be if the Second World War had not taken place at all,’ I said as I wrote the figure 55,000,000 on the board. ‘If everyone had been able to just go on fucking. I want you to do the arithmetic for me, for the next time we meet.’
I was aware that more students than usual were staring at me now, perhaps all of them: from the board to me and then back again. I grinned. I looked out the window. The school building had a central ventilation system. The windows didn’t open.
‘I’m going for a breath of fresh air,’ I said, and walked out of the classroom.
30
I don’t know whether some of the students had already complained at that point, whether parents brought it to the school board’s attention, or whether that happened only later. Whatever the case, one day I was summoned to the principal’s office.
The principal was the kind of man you rarely see these days: hair parted on the side, a brown herringbone suit.
‘I’ve been approached with some complaints about the content of the history lessons,’ he said after having me sit down in the only chair across from his desk.
‘By whom?’
The principal looked at me. On the wall behind his head hung a classroom map of the Netherlands, showing all thirteen provinces.
‘That’s not really relevant,’ he said. ‘The point is—’
‘It is relevant. Did those complaints come from parents or from the students themselves? Parents are always bitching about things that don’t bother the students.’
‘Paul, what this is really about is something you said about victims. Please correct me if I’m wrong. About victims of the Second World War.’
I leaned back, or at least I tried to lean back, but it was a hard, straight-backed chair that didn’t give.
‘It has been said that you have expressed yourself in rather belittling terms about those victims,’ the principal said. ‘You supposedly said that they had only themselves to blame for being victims.’
‘I never put it that way. I only said that not all victims are automatically innocent victims.’
The principal looked at a sheet of paper lying on his desk.
‘It says here …’ he began, but then he shook his head, took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. ‘You must realize, Paul, that these are indeed parents who have complained. Parents always complain. Tell me something I don’t know already about complaining parents. Usually it’s about nothing. About whether their children can get apples in the school cafeteria. What is our policy with regard to gymnastics during menstruation? Trifles. Rarely about the content of the lessons. But this time, that’s what it is. And that is not good for the school. It would be better for all of us if you would simply stick to the curriculum.’
For the first time during our meeting, I felt a slight tingling at the back of my neck. ‘And in what way have I allegedly not stuck to the curriculum?’ I asked calmly.
‘It says here …’ The principal fumbled anew at the paper lying on his desk. ‘But why don’t you tell me yourself? What exactly did you say, Paul?’
‘Nothing special. I let them do some simple arithmetic. In a group of one hundred people, how many assholes are there? How many fathers who humiliate their children? How many morons whose breath stinks like rotten meat but who refuse to do anything about it? How many hopeless cases who go on complaining all their lives about the non-existent injustices they’ve had to suffer? Look around you, I said. How many of your classmates would you be pleased not to see return to their desks tomorrow morning? Think about that one member of your own family, that irritating uncle with his pointless, horseshit stories at birthday parties, that ugly cousin who mistreats his cat. Think about how relieved you would be – and not only you, but virtually the entire family – if that uncle or cousin would step on a landmine or be hit by a five-hundred-pounder dropped from a high altitude. If that member of the family were to be wiped off the face of the earth. And now think about all those millions of victims of all the wars there have been in the past – I never specifically mentioned the Second World War, I only used it as an example because it’s the one that most appeals to their imaginations – and think about the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of victims who we need to have around like we need a hole in the head. Even from a purely statistical standpoint, it’s impossible that all those victims were good people, whatever kind of people that may be. The injustice is found more in the fact that the assholes are also put on the list of innocent victims. That their names are also chiselled into the war memorials.’
I paused for a moment to catch my breath. How well did I know this principal, anyway? He had let me have my say without interruption, but what did that mean? Maybe he had heard enough. Maybe this was all he needed to give me a probationary warning.
‘Paul …’ he began; he had put his glasses back on, but he was not looking at me, he was looking at a point on his desktop. ‘Could I ask you a personal question, Paul?’
I didn’t reply.
‘Have you perhaps reached the end of your rope, Paul?’ the principal asked. ‘When it comes to teaching, I mean? Please understand me, I am not blaming you for anything, it happens to all of us at times, sooner or later. That we don’t feel like it any more. That we start thinking about the senselessness of our profession.’
I shrugged. ‘Oh, well …’ I said.
‘I’ve been through it too. When I was standing before a class myself. It’s a very nasty feeling. It knocks the blocks out from under everything. From under everything you’ve believed in. Is that the kind of thing you’re going through now, Paul? Can you still believe in it?’
‘I have always had the students in mind, first and foremost,’ I answered truthfully. ‘I’ve always tried to make the subject as interesting as possible for them. In doing that, I’ve always used myself as a measuring stick. I have never tried to woo them with wishy-washy, trendy stories. I’ve always thought of what I was like when I was in high school. What really interested me. That’s always been the bottom line for me.’
The principal smiled and leaned back in his office chair. He can lean back, I thought. And I’m sitting here with a straight back.
‘What I remember most about my own high-school history classes are the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans,’ I said. ‘Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Hannibal, the Trojan Horse, the elephants marching across the Alps, the sea battles, the gladiatorial contests, the chariot races, the spectacular murders and suicides, the eruption of Vesuvius, but on the other hand also the beauty, the beauty of all those temples and arenas and amphitheatres, the frescoes, the baths, the mosaics, that’s the kind of beauty that lasts for ever, those are the colours that make us prefer a holiday on the Mediterranean to Manchester or Bremen, even today. But then Christianity comes along and it all begins to crumble and fall. In the end you’re actually glad when the barbarians come and level the whole thing. Those are the things I remember, as clearly as though I learned about them yesterday. And what I also remember most is that, after that, for a long time, there was nothing. The Middle Ages, when you come right down to it, were a disgusting, backward time during which, with the exception of a few violent sieges, very little happened. And then Dutch history! The Eighty Years War, I remember always hoping that the Spanish would finally win. There was a spark of hope when William of Orange was assassinated, but in the end that club of religious fanatics succeeded in seizing the day anyway. And darkness settled in for good across the Low Countries. I also remember how, year after year, our history teacher dangled the prospect of the Second World War in front of our noses, like a fat sausage. “I deal with the Second World War in the sixth form,” he said, but once you got to the sixth form he was still talking about William I and the Belgian secession. At best, he threw in a little bit of trench warfare to keep us interested. But, except for the mass destruction of human lives, the First World War was mostly boring. It had no zing, after a manner of speaking. There was no momentum. Later I was told that it’s always like that. You never get to the Second World War. You never get to the most interesting period in the last fifteen hundred years, even for the Netherlands where, after the Romans decided it was not their kind of place, nothing truly interesting happened until May 1940. I mean, when they talk about Holland in other countries, who do they talk about? About Rembrandt. About Vincent van Gogh. About painters. The only historical Dutch figure who ever had an international breakt
hrough, if you can put it that way, was Anne Frank.’
For what seemed the umpteenth time, the principal began shuffling papers around on his desk and flipping through something that looked vaguely familiar to me. It was a folder, a folder with a clear cover, the kind of folders students use when they hand in their papers.
‘Does the name […] mean anything to you, Paul?’ he asked.
He named one of the female students in my class. I’m not omitting the name here on purpose. I vowed at the time to forget it. And I succeeded.
I nodded.
‘And do you remember what you said to her?’
‘More or less,’ I said.
He closed the folder and laid it back on his desk.
‘You give her a three,’ he said, ‘and when she asks why, you say—’
‘That three was entirely fitting,’ I said. ‘It was complete garbage. Not the kind of thing I expect the students to hand in.’
The principal smiled, but it was a watery smile, a flaky smile, like curdled milk. ‘I have to admit that I am not particularly impressed either, but this is not about that. This is about—’
‘In addition to the Second World War, I also deal with a large part of the history that came afterwards,’ I interrupted again. ‘Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, the Middle East and Israel, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the Palestinians. I deal with all of that during my classes. So then you can’t expect to turn in a paper about the state of Israel in which people mostly pick oranges and dance in sandals around a campfire. Cheerful, happy people everywhere, and all that horseshit about the desert where flowers blossom again. I mean, people are shot and killed there every day, buses are blown up. What’s this all about?’
‘She came in here crying, Paul.’
‘I’d cry too if I turned in garbage like that.’
The principal looked at me. I saw something in his eyes that I hadn’t seen there before: something neutral, or rather, something non-committal, as non-committal as his herringbone suit. He leaned back again, but further back than the first time.