Dear Mr. M

by Herman Koch

  —

  “I have to go to the toilet,” Laura said; she put down her glass of wine beside the plate of peanuts.

  “End of the hallway, second door on the left,” Mr. Landzaat said.

  The toilet turned out to be a full bathroom as well. Before sitting down she inspected her face in the mirror above the sink. This evening she had gone for the no-makeup face, she saw the red blotches on her cheeks, probably from the wine. No personal items were out in the open, she would have to look inside one of the cupboards or drawers to find out which perfumes and creams the history teacher’s wife used. In a glass on the sink was one toothbrush—the toothbrushes belonging to Mrs. Landzaat and the girls were doubtlessly in a glass too at the moment, but in the bathroom of a cottage in the woods.

  Laura hiked up her black leather skirt, lowered the toilet seat, and sat down. She closed her eyes tightly and suddenly wasn’t sure she’d be able to let Mr. Landzaat lead her to the bedroom later on. She stood up, flushed the toilet just for appearances, and looked again at her red, blotchy face in the mirror. She longed intensely for clumsiness, for boys like Erik—like Herman.

  A hair had fallen in the sink, she saw as she opened the tap and splashed cold water on her face. A long, black hair, her own. Mrs. Landzaat was a blonde. After a bit of a struggle, Laura succeeded in sliding the black hair away from the wet bottom of the sink and picking it up between her fingers.

  She was about to toss it into the wastebasket under the sink when she stopped and reconsidered. Actually, it wasn’t so much an act of reconsideration as a flash of inspiration, maybe even a brilliant one.

  Holding the long, black, wet hair between her fingertips, Laura looked around the bathroom. On the inside of the door, two terry cloth kimonos hung on a hook; Mrs. Landzaat had probably figured that the kimono was too bulky for a week’s stay in the woods. When Jan Landzaat entertained underage students here at home, nice girls who thought he was a cool teacher, he probably—after some playing around in the shower—let the underage student put on his wife’s kimono, only to peel it off her again in the bedroom.

  Laura hesitated between the pocket sewn onto the kimono and the collar, then slid the hair under the collar. Sooner or later Mrs. Landzaat would turn up the collar of her kimono and pull out the hair. A pensive look would appear on her face.

  “Laura? Are you all right? Everything okay?”

  His voice outside the door; how long had she been in here, anyway? She stepped over to the sink and turned on the tap.

  “I’m coming,” she said. “Be there in a minute.”

  And then, as she pulled back her hair and looked at her own smile in the mirror, she had another idea—an idea that was perhaps even more brilliant than putting the black hair under the collar.

  She hadn’t put on any makeup, but she had left her earrings in; little earrings, two gleaming gray pearls her mother had given her a few months back, for completing her sophomore year with such solid grades.

  She took off one of the earrings. She leaned down and put it on the floor behind the toilet. Then she stuck a finger down her throat.

  “Laura?” Jan Landzaat called from outside the bathroom door. “Laura?”

  “I’m not feeling very well,” she said when she opened the door at last. “I think I’d better go home.”

  Herman came up with the plan.

  “We walk to the Zwin and back,” he proposed on the third day. “And we don’t say anything. Not a word. If we want to tell each other something, we do it with sign language. But let’s try to keep that to a minimum too.”

  It was around three in the afternoon, they were having a late lunch of bacon and eggs. Miriam Steenbergen, the newcomer to the club, had just a bowl of muesli with fruit.

  “And the one who says the least, wins,” she said. “For every word, you get three penalty points.”

  Herman didn’t even bother to look at her. “It’s not about points, Miriam. It’s not a contest. It’s about the experience. What happens to you when you’re not allowed to talk? When you walk out of doors and the only thing you hear is the birds? Birds, the wind, and the sound of the waves.”

  Miriam had only recently become David’s girlfriend; a week before the fall vacation started, he had called Laura.

  “Who is it exactly?” Laura had asked, because she couldn’t connect the name to a face.

  “Blond hair, almost to her shoulders,” David said. “She’s in the parallel class. Friends with Karen.”

  “Sorry, David,” she said. “I really don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Remember the field trip to Paris? When we were all at the hotel bar. When you and Landzaat…they were both there too. Karen and Miriam.”

  Because Laura still couldn’t put a face to the name, and because David couldn’t see her anyway, she shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Oh, her,” she said. “What about her?”

  Then David started in on a long story, a story with lots of details—so many details that Laura knew right away that things were serious between David and this faceless girl. First he’d gone to the one café, then to another, and then back to the first one and was just about to go home—when Miriam suddenly wandered in. He had never really noticed her before, he admitted (which helped to explain why Laura had also been unable to link any physical attributes to the name Miriam), but on that particular evening, four days ago now, her face had suddenly been “beaming,” he didn’t know how else to put it—and while she was beaming their eyes had met.

  Laura knew exactly what he was talking about. Last summer she had seen Stella beam like that, but she didn’t tell David.

  “You always figure it’s a cliché from some romantic movie,” David said. “Until it happens to you. The light had a lot to do with it; she came in out of the darkness into the light of the café, then semidarkness when she came over to me, but the light never left her face, like the heat of a fire, the glowing ashes after the fire is already out, I mean.”

  At this point Laura couldn’t suppress a yawn, she covered the mouthpiece with her hand so David wouldn’t hear, but that probably wasn’t even necessary. He was so caught up in his own story—it had already been going on for at least fifteen minutes, Laura reckoned, and seeing as they hadn’t even made it out of the café yet there was no end in sight. Still, she didn’t dare to interrupt her friend or tell him to get on with it; David was a kind and quite handsome boy, but for as long as Laura had known him he had never had a girlfriend. Deep in her heart, she knew why; it had to do with the way David shrank from every form of physical contact. A shock went through his body whenever you simply laid your hand on his forearm; at more intimate moments of contact—an arm around his shoulders, a hug, a kiss on the cheek—he would shudder as though you had dropped an ice cube down the front of his shirt. After that happened a few times you stopped touching David, to keep it from happening. David and a girl together, that thought had never occurred to her before, it was something you almost didn’t dare consider, almost as unimaginable as what your parents did in bed.

  “So I was thinking,” David said fifteen minutes later, after the story had ended in Miriam’s room. “It’s up to you, Laura, it’s your house, but I was thinking: it’s all so new, I can’t just leave her alone now.”

  Laura didn’t help him, she didn’t say: But there’s no reason to leave her alone, just bring Miriam along. For David’s sake she was pleased, with his infatuation and his new girlfriend, but on the other hand she didn’t feel like it at all, a new face—especially not a face she still couldn’t place. “So what I wanted to ask is whether Miriam could come along to Terhofstede,” David went on, at the moment when the silence between them had started to grow painful.

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?” Laura said. “I mean, you haven’t known her that long. None of us know her.” She hated herself for being so purposefully obtuse, but on the other hand she wanted nothing more than to hear her best friend thrash about.

  “Maybe you�
��re right,” David said. “Maybe I should just stay here. With Miriam.”

  “Don’t be such a jerk,” Laura said, hoping that David wouldn’t hear the shock in her voice. “Of course you’re coming along. And if this Miriam is so important to you, then she’s coming along too.”

  Two days later, in the school cafeteria, she saw David and Miriam together for the first time. Miriam was, above all, short, with a round face that could best be described as “open.” And—she had to hand it to David—she really did beam. “Hi!” Miriam said to Laura. “David has told me so much about you, I bet we’re going to be good friends.” And then Miriam leaned over in order to—as Laura realized too late—kiss her on both cheeks.

  “Yeah,” Laura said as she—there was no way around it now—kissed Miriam back. “About you too.”

  For a moment she wondered whether all the things David had told his new girlfriend about her also included her affair with Landzaat, the history teacher, but the next instant she realized how ridiculous it was to wonder about that. Everybody knew about it, after all, everybody except the teachers. But that was what teachers were there for, to have no idea of what was really going on at a school.

  The affair had lent her a certain status, albeit not always in a positive sense. Sometimes she picked up on the things that were being said behind her back. According to some of the boys, she was a “slut,” and some girls called her a “whore,” but most students thought it was pretty much “cool” and “fresh” for a girl to turn up her nose at her contemporaries and seduce a grown, experienced man. A married man at that. A blackmailable man. In fact, no one doubted that it would end that way, that the revelation of Laura’s relationship with Landzaat would destroy his marriage.

  From the start, what irritated Laura most about David and Miriam was that they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Here, in the middle of the cafeteria, where at least five hundred students were at that moment sitting or standing to eat their sandwiches, ordering coffee and sweet iced cakes from Arie, the cafeteria manager, David was plucking at the back of Miriam’s purple sweater, then putting his arm around her waist and pulling her up against him. Miriam, in turn, never let go of his sleeve, holding him by the wrist and caressing the palm of his hand with her fingers. Every twenty seconds she turned her head to one side and planted a little kiss on his throat, which was as high up as she could get without standing on tiptoe.

  It annoyed the hell out of Laura, she had no desire to be around all this plucking and pecking. It reminded her of a thirsty man coming in from the desert, a castaway who had spent weeks bobbing around on a raft, or, even more, of an emaciated stray, a starving dog that wolfs down two pounds of hamburger, plastic packaging and all, without taking a breath—and vomits it all back up the next minute. She looked at Miriam and asked herself what was with this little, beaming girl, whether she had been out in the cold for too long as well and had a lot of catching up to do, or whether she was just stringing David along. Not much chance that she had ever been with a boy who was as wild about her as he was, Laura decided, and was about to walk away when Herman suddenly joined them.

  “Hey,” was all he said as he looked from David to Miriam, and he took a step back when Miriam tried to kiss him on the cheeks too.

  “Miriam may be coming with us to Terhofstede,” Laura said, noticing the way Herman’s eyebrows shot up for a moment.

  “Well,” he said. “That’s nice…for David.” His gaze crossed Laura’s—more than a meaningful look, it was above all one of desperation. Do something! his eyes begged her. Come up with something!

  “We still have to discuss the sleeping arrangements,” Laura said. “I mean, is it…have you talked to your parents about it? Do they know that there will be boys going along?”

  “My father’s a gynecologist,” Miriam said, as though that explained everything. “And my mother has already met David, she thinks he’s darling.”

  Then they started kissing, not just a little bit, but the whole hog, they pulled out all the stops. Through their cheeks Laura could see their tongues at work, and she in turn tossed a desperate glance back at Herman.

  “Can I get you something?” Herman said, nodding toward the counter at the back of the cafeteria. “Coffee? I hear there’s a special on pink glacé cakes today.”

  Beside the exit to the bike shed, they found a vacant table.

  “Yes, it’s certainly nice for David,” Herman said. “But that’s about all you can say for it.”

  “Yeah,” Laura said. She tugged at the plastic wrapper of her glacé cake, but when it didn’t tear right away she laid it unopened on the table.

  “Did he drive you nuts too?” Herman asked. “With that story about how he met her?”

  Laura burst out laughing. “Yeah! You too?”

  “First one café, then the other, then back to the first one…I thought I was going out of my mind. But okay, he’s my friend. When a friend’s talking, you let him finish, even if it’s all a load of bullshit.”

  “But still…I’m happy for David, really, but…”

  “Maybe he should have shopped around a little longer. Let’s be frank about this, Laura. We’re glad our friend has a girlfriend, but—tell me if I’m out of line—there’s something about this Miriam that is incredibly irritating. I could see it on your face right away, just now, when I came up to you guys.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know exactly what it is. Maybe that she tries to act so nice and spontaneous. The way she tries to kiss everyone right away. The way she hangs on David.”

  “He hangs on her too. We can’t blame the poor girl for that.”

  “No, but right in the middle of the cafeteria? I don’t know, it seems so…so childish.”

  She pulled the glacé cake toward her. Herman took hold of the plastic and tugged on it gently. “May I?” he asked.

  “Go ahead, I’m really not hungry.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant…” He took the plastic packaging between his teeth and tore it open. “Here you go.”

  “I don’t feel like having a girl like that around the whole week in Zeeland. But I can’t tell David that, can I? What I don’t get is that he can’t figure it out for himself.”

  Herman shrugged. “What do you expect? Love is blind. Young people in love. The most glorious thing there is.”

  Laura couldn’t help laughing, but when she looked at him he looked away and pretended to be absorbed in the packaging of his own cake.

  “Yum,” he said. “You know, there’s no expiration date on these things anywhere. Maybe they’re timeless cakes. How does yours taste?”

  Laura didn’t answer, she waited patiently until he looked at her again.

  “I was thinking,” Herman said, laying his cake back on the table. “I talked to David about it a bit, and he thought it was a good idea. But then, in the state he’s in now I don’t know whether he’s any good to me. That’s why I wanted to approach you about it.”

  Finally, he looked at her. And Laura looked back.

  “What?” she said.

  She clasped her hands behind her head, leaned back in her chair, and shook her hair loose. Then she pulled it up into a sort of knot and let it fall again. Meanwhile, she kept looking at Herman—maybe she was imagining it, but it looked as though his face had turned a fraction of a shade darker.