Dear Mr. M Read Online Free PDF Page B

The policemen were chewing gum and they wore sunglasses, even though it was far past midnight.
    I tried to place Harm Koolhaas’s death in some kind of perspective. I went back in my mind to his arrival at Miami Airport, to the moment when he was handed the keys to the white Chevrolet Malibu, to his walk across the parking lot beneath a dazzling canopy of stars…Did he have that beaded bag slung over his shoulder in America too? Had he brought along a few extra packs of Javaanse Jongens, just to be sure?
    And while I was thinking about that bag and the packs of rolling tobacco, I realized that I would have to go back much further than that, to the baggage check-in at Schiphol, the flipping through a travel book about Florida at thirty-five thousand feet above the Atlantic, the happy, excited prospect of touching down on American soil. Or maybe it all started much earlier than that, as he put on his shoes and socks the morning he left. Harm Koolhaas standing in front of the mirror in his corduroy trousers, running his fingers through his hair.
    In this case too, there was no wife or growing boys to miss him. The social studies teacher was still young and unattached, “in the prime of life,” as Goudeket read aloud from his notes. He could go to the airport on his own and didn’t have to turn and wave to anyone after going through customs. In all probability, he sauntered first past the shops with duty-free goods. After that, the number of people who saw him in real life decreased drastically, until finally he disappeared from sight altogether.
    Because the body of our history teacher, Landzaat, was never found, no memorial service was ever held in the auditorium in his honor. In the case of a missing person, after all, there is always the hope that they may pop up somewhere. That someday they may resurface and announce themselves, at a police station, or at some remote farm miles and miles from the spot where they went missing, badly confused and suffering from memory loss, clothes torn and smeared with mud, but—thank God!—unharmed.
    As the days and weeks went by, that hope grew scanter. A photograph of him remained hanging in the classroom all year long. Purely out of laziness, because no one ever thought of taking it down (who knows, perhaps it’s hanging there still). Back then it had already begun to curl at the edges and the colors had started going drab. It was a small photo—a Polaroid—showing Mr. Landzaat grinning and baring his characteristically long teeth all the way up to the gums. Where his pupils were, in the whites of his eyes, you could see two red dots from the flash. His hair was wet, probably with sweat from dancing at the school party where the Polaroid picture was taken.
    Yes, when it came to dancing at school parties Mr. Landzaat was a real go-getter. Without so much as a how-do-you-do he would grab a girl by the hand and drag her out onto the dance floor. And the girls rarely put up a fight. Jan Landzaat was a popular teacher at the Spinoza Lyceum, perhaps
the
most popular. The horsey teeth were nothing but a minor shortcoming in his eternally tanned and youthful face. Another minor defect was his own awareness of how popular he was, and of how he made the girls giggle and blush.
    —
    When our class took a field trip to Paris, he remained at the hotel bar later than the other teachers. He drank his Pernod without water or ice, and told funny stories about back when he had taught at the Montessori Lyceum. Stories that made all of us laugh, including Laura Domènech, a junior like me.
    “At the Montessori, they’re completely nuts,” Landzaat said. “Like some holy sect. The smile of beatific certainty. Of
faith
in that certainty. I’ll tell you, I was so glad to get out of there!”
    Then, for the second time, he laid his hand on Laura’s forearm, the only difference being that this time he didn’t remove it again right away. We all saw. We saw that Laura didn’t pull her arm away. We