Dear Mr. M Read Online Free PDF Page A

crush an insect, just to see if they can do it, and then feel regret—or not.
    The new material starts here. I doubt whether you can do anything with it. But whatever the case: here’s where it starts.

It was the year when teachers were dropping like flies. Suddenly, there they went. Not a month passed without the entire Spinoza Lyceum being summoned to the auditorium, where Principal Goudeket would make yet another “sad announcement.” Of course you had to keep your mouth shut and look serious, but what we mostly felt was a sense of justice having been done. The announcements never made us sad. There was something comforting about this massive falling by the wayside. If only by reason of their age, teachers were turning out to be vulnerable. They were not, in any case, immortal, not like we were.
    A teacher who that very afternoon had been carping at you about the homework you hadn’t done or about your general lack of enthusiasm might not show up at school at all the next morning. That none of these deaths were preceded by a long sickbed served to amplify the comforting effect. No endless hospitalizations, failed radiotherapy, or other delays—nothing that could have made the dying any more human.
    Mr. Van Ruth was our math teacher. Whenever someone’s attention lagged, he would point threateningly out the window at the Rietveld School of Art & Design, a few hundred yards from our school but hidden by the trees, and say: “If you’d rather play with clay and crayons, they’ve got a place for you.”
    Suddenly, one morning, he didn’t show up. It was the day after an early autumn storm, the trees had already lost some of their leaves and so, for the first time that year, the tip of a roof at the Rietveld School was visible through the branches. I remember clearest of all the empty space in front of the chalkboard, never again to be filled by his lanky frame.
    I thought about the morning of the day before, when Mr. Van Ruth had put on his socks and shoes before cycling as usual to the Spinoza Lyceum.
    Mr. Karstens used to sit on an especially high stool behind his desk in the physics lab, which was supposed to make him look less short. “There are some people present in this room who will never understand a thing about physics,” he said on Monday morning, breathing a deep sigh. On Tuesday he was dead.
    During the memorial service in the auditorium, Principal Goudeket found it fitting to refer to Mr. Karstens’s family situation. We found out, for example, that the physics teacher did not have a wife, but two “growing boys” he cared for on his own. The principal left out the important details. Was Mr. Karstens’s wife still alive? Or were the two growing boys now completely on their own?
    Whatever the case, the detail about the sons added a human twist to the man’s death. Besides being a physics teacher who was ashamed of his own dwarfish stature, and who therefore never dared to come down off his high stool even once during the whole period, he was suddenly also a father with two growing boys who waited for him to come home.
    But the sons had never been in the picture before, no one had ever seen them in real life, which served in turn to almost completely undermine the human element. There was even a remote possibility that they were just as relieved as we were. That’s right, maybe the growing boys were above all relieved, because at last they could do whatever they wanted—go to the snack bar for takeout every night and stay up watching TV until far past midnight—and no longer had to walk down the street beside a father who was too short.
    But such possibilities invariably went unspoken during the memorial services in the auditorium at the Spinoza Lyceum, so that we were left only with the image of two growing boys sitting in a darkened kitchen, their empty plates in front of them, waiting, because there was no one left to take care of them.
    Miss Posthuma lived by herself on the ninth floor of