Dear Mr. M

by Herman Koch

As they lounged along the railing on the rear deck, David and Herman held up their half-eaten rolls to the diving gulls. Laura squinted at the water foaming around the hull, and then at the coastline fading into the distance. She thought about her own parents, with whom no one could find fault. On the contrary, all her friends, both boys and girls, agreed that she had the greatest parents in the world. “I wish my father was like yours,” Stella had said to her once. “What do you mean?” Laura asked. “I don’t know,” Stella said. “Your father just has a way of looking at people that’s so…so normal. Yeah, that’s it! Your father looks at me the way he would look at an adult. And he talks to me that way too. My own father always has this pitying look in his eyes, and he always talks in that kind of undertone. ‘Maybe you’ll understand it someday, Stella.’ That’s what he said to me recently. I don’t know what it was about, just something stupid, about what time I had to be home or something. ‘I’m not one of your patients, Daddy!’ I shouted at him. But he didn’t even get mad. He just stood there with that pitying smile on his face.”

  The boys were especially charmed by Laura’s mother. She translated British and American literature into Dutch; the last few years she had also started writing poems that were published from time to time in literary journals. Her first collection was going to appear that fall. But when Laura brought friends home, her mother always stopped working and made the loveliest sandwiches for them. Poppyseed and sesame-seed buns with pickled meat roll, ham, minced beef, herring, and mackerel.

  “You have really nice friends,” she had told her daughter once they’d all gone home. “Well, then?” she went on, after a pause, in a quieter tone. “Any of the boys you like more than the others?”

  “No,” Laura said.

  “That David—his name is David, isn’t it?—he’s very handsome.”

  Upon which Laura said she was going to her room, she had homework to do.

  Laura’s father used to work as an editor for a national newspaper, but for the last eighteen months he had been presenting a popular current-events program on TV. The best part about him, as Stella said, was that he stayed so normal. He had every reason to get a swelled head. People on the street nudged each other when Laura’s father walked by, sometimes they asked him for an autograph, which he always gave without complaint. Even during vacations on faraway foreign beaches, people would come up to him. “We don’t want to bother you,” they would say, “but we saw you in the distance and my wife said to me: ‘Is that who I think it is?’ Look, she’s sitting up there in front of that café, could you just wave to her? Are these your children?” Laura’s father never lost his patience with these kind of encounters, he waved to the woman in front of the café, he squatted down between the children for a photo, he handed out autographs on the backs of beer coasters, napkins, and placemats, sometimes with a big Magic Marker on a T-shirt, and one time even on the inside of someone’s thigh, at a beach resort in southern Spain—the Dutchman in question was covered in tattoos and wore only a pair of swimming trunks, so he had rolled up one of the legs of those trunks, right up to his crotch. “Here, if you would,” he’d said. “I’ll tattoo it on myself, later.” Laughing, Laura’s father complied.

  Not long ago she had gone out to lunch with him at a restaurant that had just opened. When they came through the revolving doors, all the customers looked up. Dozens of pairs of eyes followed as the waitress led them to their table—the best spot in the house, Laura saw, with a view of the canal. During lunch, too, people kept looking at them. Laura saw them lean over to each other and whisper, smile, then look again. But her father bore these gazes too with calm and patience.

  “You know what’s funny?” he said. “You’re seventeen now.”

  She stared at him blankly.

  “You know these people are looking at us and asking each other: ‘Is he there with his daughter, or with some girlfriend thirty years younger than him?’ Two years ago, they wouldn’t have wondered at all. That’s something new. Fantastic!”

  Laura couldn’t help but blush, but her father had risen halfway out of his chair and kissed her on the cheek. “So,” he said. “Now they have even more to whisper about.”

  Ever since her father’s face became a regular feature on TV, her parents’ marriage had been accompanied by a never-ending flow of rumors about extramarital affairs. Photographs sometimes appeared in the gossip magazines, showing him leaving a nightclub or disco with a girl barely older than his own daughter. And there was that time, in one of those magazines, that a fashion model had claimed she’d been having a secret affair with him for almost a year. But her father dismissed it all with a laugh; he even brought the gossip rags home and tossed them on the kitchen table. “Look what they’re writing about me now,” he said. “It’s obviously a slow season for news.”

  And Laura’s mother laughed along with him. In the evening her parents still lay across from each other on the couch with their books, the way they always had, and filled each other’s wineglasses. At school, though, it sometimes made things tough for Laura. Her friends tended not to read those magazines, but some of the teachers did. It was hard to put a finger on it: something pitying about the way Mr. Karstens, their physics teacher, looked when he asked about homework she hadn’t finished; Miss Posthuma, in English, who never looked at her directly and always started shuffling papers around on her desk when Laura came up to ask about some British or American novel on their required list. You couldn’t really know for certain, there might have been other reasons too. Mr. Karstens was short, and short men often don’t like pretty girls. Miss Posthuma, as David once put it, was “clearly a reject, as a specimen of the female sex.” They had all laughed at that. “A specimen that should never have made it out of the factory.” Her homeroom teacher had called her aside one morning and asked if there was anything she wanted to talk about. “Your grades are generally quite good,” he said, “but sometimes you seem a little absentminded in class. Are you doing okay, or is there something you’d like to talk to me about?”

  Her homeroom teacher was also their history teacher. His name was Jan Landzaat, and he had a friendly, not-unhandsome face, but his teeth were a bit too long. He was one of the more easygoing teachers, he would talk to you off the record, as though the two of you were on an equal footing. He was also one of the few teachers who came to class in jeans and a sweater; most of the others preferred sport jackets and ugly gray or light-brown slacks made of some barely definable synthetic material, with a sharp crease down the front of them. Those teachers probably thought this colorless outfit lent them a kind of natural authority in the classroom, but for the students it only undermined their credibility. How could someone who dressed like that, someone obviously so oblivious to the devastatingly ugly, actually have anything interesting to say about distant countries, exotic species, or writers at home or abroad? In class you always tried to look at a spot beside them or above their head, and generally maintained the greatest possible physical distance between yourself and the teacher in question. Whenever that distance was reduced, for example, when you had to come up to the front of the class, you couldn’t help but notice that they emitted a peculiar odor, like wet clothing kept in a bag too long. Some of them had horrible breath too, that smelled like dead flowers in a vase, or, as in the case of Mr. Van Ruth, the math teacher, as though he had mashed a whole cheeseboard between his teeth the night before.

  Laura looked at the fresh, boyish face of her homeroom and history teacher, tanned above the collar of his burgundy fisherman’s sweater, and wondered whether it could really be, whether there was a real possibility that she could trust this man; that she could tell him that her absentmindedness had to do partly with the sport coats, the slacks, and the stench of rotten water in a vase.

  “Is everything all right at home, for instance?” he asked.

  “What do you mean, Mr. Landzaat?” she asked, to win time; she knew exactly what he meant, of course, she was only disappointed to find that her eas
ygoing homeroom teacher apparently read the same magazines as his ugly, stinking colleagues.

  “Listen, why don’t you call me Jan?” he said.

  Was everything all right at home? It was a question she’d asked herself too in recent weeks and months. Yes, her parents were nice. Nice people, that’s what everyone said, from her friends and classmates to the parents of those same friends and classmates—and even some of her teachers. The teachers fell into two categories: those who thought it was rather interesting to have the daughter of a famous TV host in their class, and those who openly broadcast the message that she shouldn’t expect to get better grades just because her father was a celebrity. The former category sometimes had her stay after class, supposedly to talk about her homework or some paper she had to write, but in fact to have her give them a glimpse of the world of television. The second category, understandably enough, hated everything that fell outside the bounds of the middling. Laura sometimes suspected them of giving her bad grades on purpose, but she could never prove it. The magazines talked about what her father earned each year. An annual salary that a teacher would probably have to work for half their life to earn…or their whole life, come to think of it. At the start of the new school year, the geography teacher asked all his students where they had spent their summer vacations. Laura had started in enthusiastically about the trip she and her parents and younger brother had made across America in a camper. From the East Coast to the West Coast. Halfway through her description of the big waves and the surfers off the beach in Malibu, the geography teacher had interrupted her. “Perhaps we should give your classmates a chance to tell us about their vacations, Laura. We haven’t all taken a big, long trip, not like you.” Then he took his eyes off her and looked around the class. “Is there anyone who simply spent the summer in our own, beautiful Holland?”

  Mr. Landzaat smiled with his lips closed. “Only two weeks of school left. You looking forward to the vacation?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “And what’s your family going to do? Where are you going?”

  Earlier in the year her parents had bought a house in France, in addition to the one they already had in Terhofstede. The new house was in the Dordogne. They would spend most of July and August there, but before that they were going to Cuba for two weeks. In the last week of the vacation she would go for the first time with her friends and without her parents to Terhofstede.

  “We’re not really sure yet,” she said. “Maybe we’ll stay in Holland and go camping. Or go to France,” she added quickly, because “stay in Holland and go camping” sounded a little too far-fetched for a family with her father’s income.

  “Oh, yes, France! Now that you mention it: Do you already know which field trip you want to take?”

  In late September, all the junior classes were going on a field trip. You could choose from a week of kayaking in the Ardennes, a week in West Berlin, or a week in Paris. So many students had signed up for Paris that they were going to have to draw lots.

  “Paris,” Laura said. “But I don’t know whether that’ll happen. You know about the lottery, I guess, Mr. Landzaat?”

  “Sure,” he said. “And call me Jan. I have good news for you, actually. I’m one of the three chaperones going along to Paris. The lottery has to be impartial, of course, but there are always a couple of candidates who, in view of their academic performance, might be better off spending a week in the Ardennes, just to whip them into shape.”

  Had he winked? It happened so fast—a barely perceptible fluttering of the eyelid—that Laura thought for a moment she had imagined it, until he winked again.

  “You have to keep this to yourself, Laura,” he went on. “But we select certain students in advance. The lottery comes after that. Are you particularly fond of kayaking?”

  She shook her head. “Not particularly.”

  “Fine, then I’ll make note of that.” He rummaged a bit through a pile of papers on his desk. “The other teachers who are going along are…that woman who teaches English, what’s her name again?”

  “Miss Posthuma.”

  “Right, Posthuma…and the third one is Harm. Harm Koolhaas, social studies. He’s okay. He had no problem whatsoever with giving the lottery a little helping hand.”

  Laura was seventeen now, as her father had rightly noted. Grown men turned their heads and whistled as she walked down the street. It could be. It was possible. Jan Landzaat, history teacher at the Spinoza Lyceum, was openly flirting with her. She barely had to do a thing. It wasn’t like being an actress who tries to get a role in a movie by going to bed with the director. It might’ve seemed that way a little, but only vaguely. It was actually something very different, she told herself. Jan Landzaat was not unattractive, he probably thought so too. There were rumors. He was new here, he’d only started at the Spinoza this year, before that he had taught at the Montessori Lyceum. There was a lot of contact between the students at both schools: friendships, relationships, they went to each other’s school parties. The rumors spread quickly, the way rumors usually do, with a kind of snowball effect. The Montessori had almost six hundred students, the Spinoza more than eight hundred. At the top of the hill the snowball was still very small and fit perfectly in the two hands that formed it and then let it roll; halfway down the slope it had already gathered so much snow that nothing and no one could slow it down. It started with the story that the Montessori Lyceum had suspended Jan Landzaat because he had been involved with one of the senior girls, then the story went on to say that the two of them had had plans to get married: the history teacher, people said, had been about to leave his wife and two little children. Then it was only a small step to Jan Landzaat’s wife coming home and finding the two of them on the couch, to Jan Landzaat’s wife barging into the classroom in tears to confront the teacher with his adultery—in the scene at the teacher’s home, in Laura’s imagination, his pants had been down around his ankles and the girl was the first to see the wife standing in the doorway, while he himself hadn’t noticed a thing. She had tapped him on the shoulder to warn him, but he’d gone on licking her throat for at least another thirty seconds. In the classroom scene the wife was toting a rolling pin, like in a comic strip or a B-movie, Mr. Landzaat had to climb out the window to avoid a beating. The rumors reached their zenith with stories about more than one girl filing complaints against the history teacher for pawing them. That was about a month after he started work at the Spinoza Lyceum. After that, someone—no one could remember exactly who—noted that it would be awfully strange for the Spinoza to simply hire a teacher who had committed such serious offenses at his former school. And just as they had gone from bad to worse, the rumors now turned and went the opposite way. If the worst was unthinkable, then the less worse must be based on falsehood too.

  The snowball did not melt, nor did it explode against a tree trunk; no, from then on it grew only smaller and smaller. Like in a film run back frame by frame, it rolled to the top of the hill again, where it finally ended up in the same hands that had originally formed it.

  In the meantime, did the history teacher’s reputation suffer under all this? Not really. At least not among the students. True or untrue, Jan Landzaat was indeed a more than averagely handsome fellow, or in any case no dirty old man; no one knew exactly how old he was, but he couldn’t have been much more than thirty. Laura had seen him one time with his wife, she had come in the car to pick him up on a Friday afternoon. She remembered how Mr. Landzaat had leaned down to kiss her on the lips. Then his wife had opened the back door of the car and two little children had climbed out, two little girls, whom he picked up and hugged in turn. A nice young teacher with an equally nice young family. What could be more natural than for a teacher like that to feel closer to his students than to his gray-mouse colleagues in their dull slacks and sport coats? The juniors and seniors were allowed to call him by his first name, the way they also did with Harm Koolhaas, the social studies teacher who was Jan Landzaat’s friend. Harm
Koolhaas also acted more like an eternally young adult. But still, it was different with him. Rumors went around about him too, albeit of a very different nature than those concerning Jan Landzaat. Harm Koolhaas, they said, had no wife or girlfriend, and wasn’t looking for a wife or girlfriend either. He was careful not to blatantly favor the boys in his class, but you can smell something like that miles away, David said once. It wasn’t that the social studies teacher was compromised by his predilections: times had changed. But it remained a soft spot—in an emergency situation it was something one could push against or pull on, and keep doing so until something in him broke or tore.

  Jan Landzaat had asked her how she was doing, whether everything was all right at home. For a moment, she had considered confiding in him. Considered telling him something about her father; the history teacher, after all, was an expert in the field of real or fabricated rumors. About the incident at the restaurant, for example, the moment when her father had leaned across the table to kiss her on the cheek. How he had gloated over people’s glances and the whispering—people who were not famous like him, people who had to go through life with an unfamous face. At the moment it happened she had been too bewildered to react, but later, in her room, she had played back the whole scene in her mind, over and over. Her father had enjoyed the fact (he found it fantastic) that those people might think something other than that he was there having a grilled-cheese sandwich with his nearly full-grown daughter. Without asking himself for a moment what Laura thought about it. And she saw the problem with her own attitude right away too. After all, wasn’t it childish of her to make such a big deal out of it? She imagined how her father would respond. Oh, sweetheart, did that bother you? I never meant it that way. But if it bothers you, I promise that from now on I will never make a public display of how much I love my daughter. Then he would laugh it off, the same way he laughed off the stories and pictures in the gossip rags. I’m not allowed to kiss my daughter anymore, he would tell her mother at the table. And then her mother would laugh out loud too.