Dear Mr. M (15 page)

Later—and for years—Laura would think back on this moment, their movie moment beneath the streetlamp, think back on it and ask herself again and again whether she had noticed anything strange in his behavior at that point. Anything unnatural in his voice when he said,
Isn't he…? Isn't he here?

What does someone's voice sound like when they're acting as though they really don't know where someone is? Someone who's pretending that he truly doesn't have the slightest idea what has happened to that other person? The voice of someone you know well—whom you
thought
you knew well, she corrects herself again and again during the days, weeks, months, and years following Jan Landzaat's disappearance.

I lost him.
As though he were talking about a little child who'd disappeared from sight in a busy department store or on a crowded beach. Herman had pulled up a chair and sat down beside the fire, his head in his hands. So that he wouldn't have to look at her? With the passing of time, with the passing of more and more time, this last detail too would take on greater significance. In her memory he remained sitting there, for longer and longer, so long that he finally didn't look at her at all.

“Did he act guilty? Or let me put it differently, did he seem conscience-stricken to you?”

The darker of the two detectives turned a page in his notebook and gave her a friendly look—serious, but still, above all, friendly.

She was sitting between her parents on the living room couch. Her mother had made tea, then poured it into Duralex tumblers. It was easy to see that the detectives, if they drank tea at all, were used to having it served in cups on saucers, or at the very least in sturdy mugs; every time they picked up the glasses they would burn their fingers and then set them down quickly again.

“If you'd like another sugar waffle, help yourself,” her mother said.

Laura looked at the face of the friendly, darker detective. A handsome face, boyish. The other detective was big and solid, a square head with blond, stubbly hair.

“I don't know,” she said. “I really don't know.”

She felt her eyes stinging, and a few seconds later her mother's hand on her shoulder, her fingers softly kneading her shoulder through the material of her sweater.

What exactly was a guilty or conscience-stricken impression? That he didn't seem confused? Not truly upset? All right, he had avoided looking at her as much as possible as he told his story, but did that mean anything?

“You know that clump of woods, a mile or two before Sluis?” he'd said. “They're not really woods, just a clump of trees at that bend in the canal. I had to take a piss. I went into those trees, further than I normally would, I wanted him to be as far away from me as possible. It was freezing, of course, it all took a little longer than normal. When I was finished and I turned around, he was gone.”

She tried to imagine what he was describing, but she'd always had a bad sense of direction, she didn't even know which clump of trees at what bend in the canal he was talking about. Still, she was sorry later that she hadn't asked any questions, that she had let him tell the story from start to finish without interrupting him even once.

“For a moment, I thought he was monkeying around,” he continued. “I mean, that's the kind of teacher he is, Landzaat, right? One of those guys who slaps you on the shoulder and tries to act cool.”

And yes, at that moment he had looked up at her, she suddenly remembered that. After he had said that thing about acting cool, he had paused—for no more than a couple of seconds—and looked her straight in the eye.
That's the kind of teacher he is, right?
he'd said with his eyes (and with that little pause).
The kind of teacher who seduces a girl from his class during the field trip?

Laura had only shrugged.

“Anyway, he was gone. Because I thought he was horsing around at first, I didn't try to call for him right away. Maybe he's off behind a tree or crouched down in a ditch, watching me the whole time, I thought. I didn't feel like having him make a fool of me.”

Was it snowing then?
she could have asked, but didn't. If it had been snowing, that would make it more believable that he had lost sight of their teacher. But it hadn't snowed, she was almost sure of that. All right, she had fallen asleep a couple of times while he was gone, but during the little walk from the front door to the streetlamp she hadn't crossed fresh snow—she would swear to that if she had to, if the dark, handsome detective asked her to.

“The first thing I did was climb up to the highest spot I could find. But when I couldn't see him from up there either, I walked back a ways, along the canal, the way we came. Then I started calling his name.”

But what about his footprints?
she had felt like asking—and once again, she didn't.
His footprints in the snow would have told you which way he went, right?

“It was weird. Suddenly I wasn't sure how to yell for him. ‘Mr. Landzaat' or ‘Sir' sounded way too formal. And I didn't want to shout ‘Jan' either, that would almost make it sound like he was my friend. So the first few times I just shouted ‘Hey!' and ‘Hello?' After that I shouted ‘Landzaat?' and that sounded good. ‘Hey, Landzaat! Stop messing around! Come out where I can see you, man!' I must have shouted that ten times in a row, and the more I shouted, the more I realized what a ridiculous name that is, Landzaat.”

Laura looked at his face, where the aversion was clear to see, as though he were talking about something filthy that he'd stepped in by accident. And then he raised his eyes to meet hers again and repeated the teacher's name.

“
Land
zaat,” he said, placing added stress on the first syllable—and it was true: if you repeated the name often enough, it became just plain ridiculous.

But now she heard something else in that name too. By putting the stress on
land,
he was implying—perhaps unintentionally, but perhaps not—that there was another
zaat,
another seed you could think of besides
Land
zaat.

And not hayseed or birdseed either.

Seed that she, Laura, had let into her body (she was on the Pill, condoms in her view were an annoying interruption and otherwise a lot of messy business), seed that she may on more than one occasion have wiped from between her legs with a T-shirt, a towel, or the corner of a sheet. Yes, that's the way he was looking at her now. His aversion was no longer limited to the history teacher. While in full possession of her senses, she had allowed the teacher with the long teeth to slip his dick inside her and squirt her full of seed.

“Oh, blech!” he shouted, then turned his gaze away from her.

The detective with the square head leaned forward for another sugar waffle, took a big bite of it and, as he chewed, let his gaze travel over the bookshelves covering the walls. Laura's parents rarely watched TV, in the evening they would sit at their respective ends of the couch with a glass of wine and a book. The detective looked at the bookcases the way a child in a deathly still museum might look at an abstract painting, a twelve-by-twenty-foot painting consisting only of smudges and stripes.

“A new witness has turned up,” the darker detective said. “Someone who says they're sure they saw Mr. Landzaat and your friend close to the Zwin.”

Laura looked at him, doing her best to seem inquisitive.

“You're familiar with the Zwin?” the detective asked.

Her mind raced. She couldn't just act dumb. Her parents had bought the house in Terhofstede when she was still a baby. During the summer vacations they had gone to the beach at Cadzand, or driven to Knokke where you could rent pedal cars and ride along the boulevard. In the fall and winter they took long walks, the first few years with her little brother in a carrier on her father's back, atop the old earthen fortifications around Retranchement, along the canal to Sluis, and to the Zwin, a nature reserve, a bird sanctuary: there, when the tide was out, you could hike across the sandy flats where marram grass and thistles grew, but you had to watch out for the water's return. On two occasions they had been caught unawares. Her father had handed over the carrier with her little brother in it to her mother and lifted Laura onto his shoulders. Wading up to their waists, they had safely reached the dunes.

“Sure, the Zwin,” she said.

“What I meant was, whether you know where the Zwin is,” the detective said. “With regard to Sluis. And to Terhofstede, of course.”

She remained silent. She wasn't quite sure what to do; any answer she might give could be the wrong one. She thought of all the American cop shows where suspects only let themselves be interrogated in the presence of an attorney.
I want to call my lawyer,
said the veterinarian who was suspected of murdering his wife, and then you already knew that he must have done it.

When you walked from Terhofstede to Sluis, you didn't go by way of the Zwin. It wasn't even a roundabout way to get there. The Zwin lay in the complete opposite direction.

The square-headed detective had stopped chewing on his waffle. The dark detective tried smiling as he drummed his fingers on his notebook, then he breathed a sigh and shrugged.

“Maybe you would—” he began. “Maybe you'd like to just—”

“It's been a very tiring afternoon for Laura,” her mother interrupted him. “Maybe she's answered enough questions for one day.”

In the last week of summer vacation, she and her friends were going to the house in Zeeland for the first time—the first time, that is, with no parents around. Besides David Bierman, she invited Stella van Huet, Michael Balvers, Ron Vermaas, and Lodewijk Kalf. Stella was the one who had the most trouble getting her parents' permission, she'd had to listen to a long sermon full of warnings and possible doomsday scenarios in which the word “condom” had actually come up a few times. In the end, however, a reassuring phone call from Laura's parents had cinched it.

A few days before they were to leave, Laura got a call from David.

“Remember that guy at my party?” he asked.

For a moment, during the brief silence that fell, Laura thought about asking
Which guy?
but decided against it almost immediately. Somehow she sensed that David would know right away that she was only playing dumb—and this intentional playing dumb would make him think that Laura had developed a particular interest in the boy. That was certainly not the case, she told herself, but she couldn't deny that even now she could see the green, folded-down boots in her mind's eye.

“Yeah?” she said. “What about him?”

“He flunked this year,” David said. “When school starts again, he's going to be in our class.”

Laura could have answered with
Yeah?
again.
Yeah, what about it, what's it to me?
But she knew she could never make that sound believable.

“I've been thinking,” David went on—to her relief—after another brief silence. “He's got some problems at home. His father has had a girlfriend for years. His mother just found out about it. But they're not getting a divorce. They're going to stay together, at least until he's graduated, that's what they told him. He's an only child. He sits at home in the evening, between two parents who have nothing to say to each other. I go hang out with him at his house sometimes. To the outside world, the parents act real cheerful, like nothing's going on. They think his friends don't know about it. That he wouldn't have told anyone. But even if he hadn't said a thing, it's so obvious. The mother with her red-rimmed eyes. The father who wolfs down his supper without tasting it and then gets up from the table as fast as he can. By that time, Mom has almost finished the bottle of wine. ‘I wish they'd get a divorce,' he says so himself, ‘it's just so incredibly awkward.' Whenever one of them is alone with him, they try to get him to take sides. It drives him nuts. Looking at it objectively, of course, it's all his father's fault. His mother's in pain, she sits around crying all the time, she tries to make him feel sorry for her, but he doesn't want to deal with it. Most of all, he doesn't want to be disloyal to his father. ‘You're not really supposed to say this,' he told me, ‘you're not even allowed to think it, but somehow I understand my dad. I understand that after almost twenty years of being married he started getting claustrophobic. You know my mom, David,' he says, ‘you know what I mean.' ”

Laura could tell where David was going with this. A sob story. A story meant to soften her heart toward this boy. After which he would ask whether Herman could come along to Zeeland. It would be good for him to get away from it all. The situation at home was unbearable.

While David was starting in on a character sketch of the boy's mother, in which the phrases “borderline hysterical” and “always moping” came up more than once, Laura thought about it. She wasn't completely opposed to the idea, she admitted to herself. Maybe the boy was simply arrogant and annoying, and there was nothing more to it, but on the other hand there was something about that skinny body and those odd boots that had kept her fascinated over these last few months. And now, suddenly, new information had come up.
He's an only child,
David had said. More than the story about the stifling parents, it was this news that placed the thin boy's attitude and behavior in a different light. There were certain adjectives that were always mentioned in the same breath with being siblingless: “spoiled” and “egocentric” were the most common. Hard on the heels of those came “pitiful” and “lonely.” When you really thought about it, it was hard to come up with any positive adjectives for an only child. “Only” already sounded rather lonely and pitiful—as though, except for that single, only person, nothing else existed and never would.
So you're Laura.
She replayed the sentence in her mind. Already it sounded different. She saw again how he held up the runny wedge of cheese for her to take, then stuffed it into his own mouth, rind and all. Only children were asocial, that's what people said, they got everything their heart desired, they never picked up after themselves, and when you were doing the dishes you had to flap the dish towel at them, or literally force it on them, otherwise they'd just stand there watching while other people stacked the dripping plates and pans on the counter. She thought about the skinny, egocentric, spoiled, pitiful, lonely child in his green rubber boots, in between his silent parents, his father thinking not about his son but about his girlfriend, his mother opening another bottle of wine because there was no future. It was at that moment that Laura made up her mind, and that was precisely how she would remember it later too. But she wasn't going to make it easy for David, if only to keep him from jumping to the wrong conclusion.

“So what do you think?” David asked. “It's your parents' house. I figured I'd better ask you first. I haven't talked to him about it yet, so you can always say no. But I bet he'd love to come along.”

“I don't know…,” Laura said. “I mean, we're such a tight group. Shouldn't we ask the others about it first? They don't even know him.”

She was glad that David couldn't see her face.