Dear Mr. M Read Online Free PDF

an apartment building close to the road going out of town to Utrecht. I had been to her home once to discuss my reading list for that year’s English lit class. From her living room window you could see the rowers skimming across the mirrored water of the River Amstel. And later, as darkness fell, you saw the lights of cars on the highway crossing the Utrecht Bridge. Somewhere a clock was ticking. Miss Posthuma asked if I wanted another cup of tea. She had hair that she kept short and wore in tight little curls and she had a high voice, without any real bass to it, the kind one often hears in women who have never had an orgasm in all their born days. It was a voice that fluttered around the room like a little bird, without landing anywhere, as though anchored to nothing and not really connected to the earth; just like Miss Posthuma, in fact, in her ninth-floor apartment high above the world and the people in it.
    Then, suddenly, I clearly heard that voice ask if perhaps I preferred something other than tea, that she probably had a bottle of beer somewhere in the fridge. I saw too that something broke in her expectant expression when I stood up and said it was time for me to be getting home. Something in her face shifted color almost unnoticeably. Out on the street I looked up one last time at the ninth floor of the building, but there was nothing about the lights along the outside gallery to show which apartment was hers.
    It didn’t cause much consternation when Miss Posthuma didn’t show up at the Spinoza Lyceum one morning. Only later did I hear that they’d had to break down the door to her apartment. But Goudeket’s memorial speech never once mentioned the word “crowbars.” It was clear as a bell that the principal had been unable to find anything worthy of note as theme for his little speech. This time there were no growing boys or other pathetic or heartwarming details to make Miss Posthuma, who had been found dead in her own home, a little more human. Goudeket came up with nothing better than “her enormous dedication to our school and her pupils”; under the hard fluorescent lighting of the half-empty auditorium, that sounded like less than nothing, as though the big oblivion might as well get started right then and there.
    And then there was that one spectacular finish, a finish that went out with a resounding bang, flying glass, and blood. Harm Koolhaas (“Harm” to the juniors and seniors who had social studies with him) made his mistake less than half an hour after a midnight landing in Miami, when he took a wrong exit in his rental car, a white Chevrolet Malibu, and ended up in “the wrong neighborhood” (thus spake Goudeket).
    The two men he asked for directions at the badly lit gas station were never found. It appears that Harm Koolhaas had tried to roll up the window on the driver’s side and back away fast, but that this maneuver ended with a loud smack against a parked car. According to the gas station owner’s testimony, one of the men had just enough time to poke the barrel of his pistol through the crack in the window. Meanwhile, the second man opened fire on the windshield.
    Harm Koolhaas wore fairly fashionable corduroy trousers and carried a beaded bag over one shoulder, from which he would invariably produce his pack of Javaanse Jongens rolling tobacco at the end of class. When he walked down the hallway, it was always with a bit of a bounce in his step.
    Somehow we couldn’t reconcile the two images—the trousers and the beaded bag on the one hand, the corpse hanging out of the car with its neck twisted at a strange angle on the other. As though the halls, the classrooms and auditorium of the Spinoza Lyceum were the worst possible preparation for a violent demise in an American B-movie.
    During the traditional moment of silence, I thought about that gas station on the far side of the Atlantic. I saw the bright red TEXACO letters, and the red-and-blue flashing lights of police cars.