Read Online Dear Mr. M by Herman Koch - Free Book Online Page A

the table.
    “How much of this stuff are you supposed to pour?” she asked, twisting the top off the bottle.
    “Not very much,” I said.
    “All right, looking good,” Mr. Landzaat said. Still rubbing his hands, he stepped away from the coal stove and sat down at the table. Laura lit two candles and put them on the windowsill. It seemed to be just a smidgen darker outside than it had been a few minutes ago—it had started snowing again.
    “Well, here’s to you!” Mr. Landzaat said, holding up his glass. But when neither Laura nor I made a move to imitate his toast, he raised the glass to his lips and took a big gulp. “Ah,” he said, “just what the doctor ordered.” He glanced at the dirty plates. “Must be nice, a house like this without your parents around? Able to do whatever you like?”
    Laura’s forehead was creased in a frown. She rolled her glass between her long, pretty fingers, but she still hadn’t taken a sip.
    “Why are you here?” she asked quietly, without looking at the history teacher.
    Mr. Landzaat raised the glass to his lips again, but put it back on the table without drinking. He leaned forward a bit and placed his hand on the table, not far from Laura’s. I shifted my weight and the wooden chair creaked loudly.
    “Laura,” he said, “I’ve come to say that I’m sorry. Not about what we…us, the two of us, I’m not sorry about that, but about…afterward. I shouldn’t have…I acted like a schoolboy. I shouldn’t have kept calling you. But I simply couldn’t accept that it was over. Now I can.”
    He smiled and bared his long teeth again. The combination of heat from the coal stove and the first slug of eau-de-vie had caused two rosy blushes to appear on his gray cheeks.
Like a schoolboy,
he’d said.
I acted like a schoolboy.
I didn’t take it too personally. After all, I wasn’t a schoolboy. A boy, yes, but not a
schoolboy.
It wasn’t so much insulting as pitiful, this frightened man comparing himself to a schoolboy.
    Laura looked at him silently. Mr. Landzaat knocked the rest of his drink back in one go. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His lips were no longer a dark blue either, they were redder.
    “I wanted to ask you to forgive me, Laura,” he said. “That’s why I came. To ask your forgiveness.”
    “That’s good,” Laura said.
    Mr. Landzaat sighed deeply. His eyes were glistening, I saw. I took my first slug of eau-de-vie, then set the glass down on the table a bit too loudly. The history teacher looked over—not at me, only at the glass.
    “I hope, when the vacation’s over, that we can go back to how things were in class,” he went on. “That we can act normally toward each other. As friends. That we can stay friends.”
    “No,” Laura said.
    Mr. Landzaat stared at her.
    “Act normal in class, okay,” Laura said. “That’s mostly up to you. But I don’t want to be your friend. You’re not my friend. And you never have been.”
    I felt a deep warmth rising up inside me. The heat began somewhere in the pit of my stomach and made its way up. It was not the kind of heat the coal stove gave off. This heat came from inside. A proud warmth that wanted to get out.
    “Laura, I realize that I…carried on,” Mr. Landzaat said. “That’s why I’m here to apologize. I lost my way for a while there. My senses. I…I couldn’t think about anything else. But now that you’ve forgiven me, can’t we just be friends? I would really like that. Maybe we should let it go for a while, but after that…I mean, after Christmas we’ll be seeing each other in the classroom a couple of times a week. At school. We’ll see each other in the hallway, on the stairs. It’s not like
nothing
happened, Laura. You can’t just wipe it out. I’m very fond of you, and that’s something
I
can’t just wipe out. It would be weird for us to act as though nothing had happened.”
    There was a sentence bouncing around in my head. A line from a movie.
Maybe