‘Until now, we have always been quite pleased with Michel,’ the principal said.
I smelled something peculiar, it wasn’t what you’d call a sweaty smell, more like the odour of garbage that’s been separated for collection – or, to be precise, the separated garbage that usually ends up in the green container. I couldn’t escape the impression that the odour was coming from the principal himself; maybe he didn’t use deodorant, in order to spare the ozone layer, or else his wife washed his clothes in environmentally friendly detergent; as everyone knows, detergents like that turn white clothes grey after a while – clean is one thing they will never be again.
‘But recently, he wrote an essay for his history class that we find rather alarming,’ the principal went on. ‘Or at least, it caught the eye of our history teacher, Mr Halsema, who then came to me with the paper in question.’
‘About capital punishment,’ I said, just to put an end to this beating around the bush.
The principal looked at me for a moment; his eyes had something dull about them, expressionless, the bored look of a mediocre intelligence that wrongly supposes it has ‘seen it all before’.
‘Indeed,’ he said; he picked up something from his desk and began leafing through it. Capital punishment, I saw in familiar white letters against a black background, and below that the picture of the hospital bed.
‘It’s mostly these passages,’ the principal said. ‘Here: “… given the inhumanity involved in capital punishment as practised by the state, one might wonder whether, for some offenders, it wouldn’t be better if they – at a much earlier stage—”’
‘You don’t have to read it out loud, I know what it says.’
The look on the principal’s face said that he was not accustomed to being interrupted. ‘Indeed,’ he said again. ‘So, you’re familiar with the contents?’
‘Not only that, I helped my son here and there. Little bits of advice, but of course he wrote the lion’s share of it himself.’
‘But apparently you didn’t see any need to advise him concerning the section about what I will refer to as “taking the law into one’s own hands”?’
‘No. But I protest against the phrase “taking the law into one’s own hands”.’
‘So what would you call it? This is clearly about applying the death penalty before a trial has taken place.’
‘But it’s also about the inhumanity of capital punishment. The cold, clinical capital punishment carried out by the state. With a hypodermic needle, or the electric chair. About all those grisly details of the last meal that the condemned man is allowed to choose for himself. Your favourite dish, one last time, whether that’s caviar with champagne or a Double Whopper from Burger King.’
The dilemma I was faced with was one every parent faces sooner or later: you want to defend your child, of course, you step up for your child, but you mustn’t do it too vehemently, and above all not too eloquently – you mustn’t drive anyone into a corner. The educators, the teachers will let you have your say, but afterwards they’ll take revenge on your child. You may come up with better arguments – it’s not too hard to come up with better arguments than the educators, the teachers – but in the end your child is going to pay for it, their frustration at being shown up is something they’ll take out on the student.
‘We all see it that way,’ the principal said. ‘Normal people with healthy minds see capital punishment as inhuman. That’s not what I’m talking about, Michel has presented that extremely well. I’m only talking about the section in which he tries to justify the liquidation of suspects, accidentally or otherwise, before they have had their day in court.’
‘I consider myself normal and healthy. And I also consider capital punishment to be inhuman. But unfortunately, we also share this world with inhuman humans. Should those inhuman humans be allowed, after deducting a few years for good behaviour, to re-enter society? I think that’s what Michel is talking about.’
‘So then you should simply be allowed to shoot them or, how does he put it?’ – he leafed through the essay again – ‘“throw them out the window”? The tenth-floor window of police headquarters, I believe. That is, to say the least, hardly the way things go under the rule of law.’
‘No, but now you’re taking it out of context. This is about the worst kind of human beings; Michel is talking about men who rape children, who hold them prisoner for years. And there are other factors that play a role as well. During a trial, all that filth has to be dredged up again in the name of a “fair legal process”. But who’s actually waiting for that to happen? Those children’s parents? That’s the crucial point you’re sort of skipping over now. No, civilized people don’t throw other people out the window. And they also don’t let a pistol go off by accident on the way from a police station to a jail. But we’re not talking here about civilized people. These are people everyone would be relieved not to have around any more.’
‘Yes, that was it. Shooting a suspect in the head, supposedly by accident. In the back of the police van, now I remember.’ The principal put the paper back down on his desk. ‘Was that one of your “little bits of advice”, Mr Lohman? Or did your son come up with that all by himself?’
Something about his tone of voice made the hair stand up on the back of my neck; at the same time, I felt a tingling in my fingertips or, to put it more precisely, my fingertips went numb. I was on my guard. I wanted to give Michel all due credit for his essay – he was, in any case, more intelligent than the moronic heap of compost sitting across the desk from me – but on the other hand, I needed to protect him from being harassed in the future. They could suspend him, it occurred to me, they could kick him out of school. Michel felt at home here, this was where his friends were.
‘I have to admit that he may have let himself be somewhat swayed by my own opinions on such matters,’ I said. ‘I have rather outspoken ideas of my own about what should happen to those suspected of certain crimes. Consciously or unconsciously perhaps, I may have sort of pressed those ideas on him.’
The principal looked at me inquisitively, in so far as you can call a sub-intelligent look inquisitive. ‘But you just said that your son wrote the lion’s share of it himself.’
‘That’s right. By “lion’s share”, I mostly meant the passages in which state-implemented capital punishment is referred to as inhuman.’
When faced with lower intelligences, the most effective strategy in my opinion is to tell a barefaced lie: with a lie, you give the pin-heads a chance to retreat without losing face. And what’s more, did I really remember any more which parts of the essay had been my idea, and which had been Michel’s? I could recall a conversation, a conversation at the dinner table, about a murderer on probationary release, a murderer who had been out only a few days and who had most probably already killed someone else.
‘They should never let someone like that go again,’ Michel had said.
Never let him go, or never put him back in prison? I’d asked; Michel was fifteen, we talked to him about everything, he was interested in everything: the war in Iraq, terrorism, the Middle East – at school they hardly dealt with all that, he claimed, they just talked around it.
‘What do you mean by “never put him back in prison”?’ he asked.
‘Well, just that,’ I said. ‘Exactly what I said.’
I looked at the principal. This gob of slime, who believed in global warming and the total eradication of all war and injustice, probably also subscribed to the belief that you could cure rapists and serial killers; that, after years of gabbing with a psychiatrist, they could be allowed to take their first, shaky steps back into the real world.
The principal, who so far had been leaning back slightly in his chair, now leaned forward and placed both forearms – palms down, fingers spread – on his desk.
‘If I’m not mistaken, you once worked in teaching yourself?’ he said.
The little hairs on the back of my neck and my tingling fingers had not bet
rayed me: when the lower intelligences are about to lose an argument, they grasp at other straws in order to justify themselves.
‘I taught for a few years, yes,’ I said.
‘That was at […], wasn’t it?’ He mentioned the name of the school, a name that still produced mixed feelings in me, like the name of a disease of which you have been officially cured, but which you know could turn up any moment again in some other part of the body.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And you were placed on non-active.’
‘Not exactly. I was the one who suggested that I take it a bit easier for a while. That I would come back later, when everything had calmed down a little.’
The principal cleared his throat and looked at a piece of paper that was lying in front of him. ‘But in fact, you didn’t go back. In fact, you’ve been unemployed for almost ten years.’
‘On non-active. I could go back to work tomorrow, somewhere else.’
‘According to my information though, the information […] sent me, that depends on a psychiatric report. Whether or not you can go back to work. That decision, in other words, is not up to you.’
Again, the name of that school! I felt the muscles beneath my left eye start to twitch, it was nothing, but others might interpret it as a tic. That’s why I acted as though I had something in my eye, I rubbed it with my fingers, but the twitching only seemed to get worse.
‘Oh, that doesn’t really mean much,’ I said. ‘I assure you, I don’t need a psychiatrist’s signature in order to exercise my profession.’
The principal looked at the piece of paper again. ‘That’s not what it says here … here it says—’
‘Could I look at what you’ve got there in front of your face?’ My voice was sharp, commanding, and left no room for misunderstanding. Still, the principal didn’t do what I said right away.
‘If you would let me finish,’ he said. ‘A few weeks ago I happened to run into a former colleague who works at […] these days. I don’t remember exactly how it came up, we were talking, I believe, about the pressure on teachers in general. About burnouts and nervous collapses. He mentioned a name that sounded familiar to me. I didn’t know why at first, but then I thought of Michel. And then you.’
‘I’ve never had a burn-out. That’s just a trendy term. And I’ve absolutely never suffered a nervous collapse.’
Now it was the principal’s turn to blink, I saw, and even though it wasn’t what you would have called a tic, not by any stretch of the imagination, still it was a sign of sudden weakness. Or, in fact, of fear. I wasn’t aware of it myself, but perhaps there was something about my voice – I had spoken those last few sentences quite slowly, more slowly than before, in any case – something that made the warning lights start to flash in the principal’s mind.
‘But I didn’t say that you’d had a burn-out,’ he said.
He drummed with his fingers on the desk. And he blinked his eyes again! Yes, something had changed, the pedantic tone in which he’d tried to sell me his wishy-washy theories about capital punishment had disappeared as well.
I could smell it clearly now, above the odour of compost: fear. The way a dog can smell when someone is afraid, I detected a vague, sourish smell that hadn’t been there before.
I believe that was the moment when I started to get up from my chair, I don’t remember exactly, there’s a blank in there somewhere, a gap in time. I don’t remember whether anything else was said. Whatever the case: suddenly I was on my feet. I had stood up from my chair and was looking down at the principal.
What happened after that had everything to do with the difference in elevation, with the fact that the principal was still sitting and I was looking down on him – towering over him, that might be more like it. It’s a sort of unwritten law, the way water runs to the lowest level or, to employ a canine analogy, the fact that the principal was at a disadvantage in his chair, that he found himself as it were in a position of submissive vulnerability. Dogs do the same thing: for years they let their owners feed and pet them, they’re as gentle as lambs, they are really lovely animals, but then one day the owner suddenly loses his balance, he trips and falls. Within seconds the dogs are on him, they sink their teeth into his neck and bite him to death, sometimes they even tear him completely to pieces after that. It’s instinct: that which falls is weak, that which lies on the ground is prey.
‘I insist that you show me that,’ I said, purely for the sake of formality, pointing at the piece of paper that was lying in front of the principal, and which he now covered with both hands. Purely a formality, because it was too late now to put anything right.
‘Mr Lohman,’ he said. Then I punched him squarely in the nose. Right away there was blood, lots of blood: it sprayed from his nostrils and spattered across his shirt and the desktop, and then on the fingers with which he pawed at his nose.
By that time I had come around the desk and hit him in the face again, lower down this time, his teeth hurt my knuckles as they broke off. He screamed, he shouted something unintelligible, but I had already pulled him up out of his chair. Undoubtedly, people would be alarmed by the principal’s scream, within thirty seconds the door to his office would fly open, but in thirty seconds you can do a lot of damage, thirty seconds seemed like enough to me.
‘You dirty, filthy, stinking pig,’ I said, before simultaneously planting a fist in his face and a knee in his gut. But then I made a mistake. I hadn’t thought it was possible that the principal would have any strength left; I thought I could calmly take him apart before the teachers burst in and put an end to the performance.
With great speed, he swung up his head and butted me on the chin, then wrapped his arms around my calves and pulled, causing me to lose my balance and fall over backwards. ‘Fucking shit!’ I yelled.
The principal ran, not to the door, but to the window. He had it open before I could get to my feet. ‘Help!’ he screamed out the window. ‘Help!’
But I was already on him. I grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head back, then brought it down hard on the windowsill. ‘We’re not done yet!’ I shouted in his ear.
There were a lot of people in the schoolyard, most of them students, it must have been lunch break. They all looked up – at us.
I picked the boy in the black cap out of the crowd almost immediately; there was something comforting, something reassuring, about seeing a familiar face amid all those other faces. He was standing in a little group, off to one side, close to the steps that led to the front entrance, along with a couple of girls and a boy on a scooter. The boy in the black Nike cap had a pair of headphones slung around his neck.
I waved. I remember that clearly. I waved to Michel, and I tried to smile. The wave and the smile were meant to show that, from out there, it probably looked worse than it was. That I’d had an argument with the principal about his, Michel’s, essay, but that in the meantime everything had come closer to being sorted out.
41
‘That was the prime minister,’ Serge said returning to the table; he sat down and put his cell phone back in his pocket. ‘He wanted to know what the press conference was going to be about tomorrow.’
Any one of the three of us could have asked at that point: ‘Well? What did you tell him?’ But no one at the table spoke a word. Sometimes people allow silences like that to fall: when they don’t feel like saying the obvious. If Serge had told a joke, a joke that started with a question (Why can’t two Chinamen go to the barber at the same time?), a comparable silence would probably have ensued.
My brother looked at his dame blanche, which, probably out of courtesy, still had not been removed. ‘I told him that I didn’t want to tell him anything about it, not yet, not this evening. He hoped it was nothing serious. Like me withdrawing from the race. Those were his exact words: “It would bitterly disappoint me, on both our behalves, were you to throw in the towel at this point, seven months before the elections.”’ Serge made an attempt to imitate the prime mini
ster’s accent, but so poorly that it seemed more like a crudely drawn version, a political cartoon badly traced, rather than the cartoon itself. ‘I told him the truth, that I’m still talking to my family. That I’m keeping a number of options open.’
When the prime minister was only newly elected, the jokes had never stopped: about his appearance, his wooden way of speaking in public, his numerous – often literal – slip-ups. Since then, however, a process of habituation had taken place. You got used to it, like a stain on the wallpaper. A stain that seemed simply to belong there, and which could surprise you only by one day not being there at all.
‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ Claire said. ‘So you’re keeping your options open. I thought it was all cut and dried for you. For all of us.’
Serge tried to make eye contact with his wife, but she acted as though she were more interested in the cell phone on the table in front of her. ‘Yes, I’m keeping my options open,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I want us to do this together. As … as a family.’
‘The way we’ve always done things,’ I said. I thought about the scorched macaroni alla carbonara, the pan I’d smashed in his face when he tried to take my son away, but apparently Serge’s memory was not as keen as mine, because he actually smiled warmly.
‘Yes,’ he said – he looked at his watch – ‘I have to … we really have to go now. Babette … What’s taking so long with that check?’
Babette got up.
‘Yes, let’s go,’ she said; she turned to Claire. ‘Are the two of you coming?’
Claire held up her half-full glass of grappa. ‘Go ahead, both of you. We’ll be there in a bit.’
Serge held out his hand to his wife. I thought Babette was going to ignore him, but she didn’t. She even offered Serge her arm.
‘We can …’ he said. He was smiling, yes, almost beaming as he took his wife by the elbow. ‘We’ll talk more about this later. We can have another at the café, and then we’ll talk about it some more.’