Herman came up with the plan.

“We walk to the Zwin and back,” he proposed on the third day. “And we don’t say anything. Not a word. If we want to tell each other something, we do it with sign language. But let’s try to keep that to a minimum too.”

It was around three in the afternoon, they were having a late lunch of bacon and eggs. Miriam Steenbergen, the newcomer to the club, had just a bowl of muesli with fruit.

“And the one who says the least, wins,” she said. “For every word, you get three penalty points.”

Herman didn’t even bother to look at her. “It’s not about points, Miriam. It’s not a contest. It’s about the experience. What happens to you when you’re not allowed to talk? When you walk out of doors and the only thing you hear is the birds? Birds, the wind, and the sound of the waves.”

Miriam had only recently become David’s girlfriend; a week before the fall vacation started, he had called Laura.

“Who is it exactly?” Laura had asked, because she couldn’t connect the name to a face.

“Blond hair, almost to her shoulders,” David said. “She’s in the parallel class. Friends with Karen.”

“Sorry, David,” she said. “I really don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Remember the field trip to Paris? When we were all at the hotel bar. When you and Landzaat…they were both there too. Karen and Miriam.”

Because Laura still couldn’t put a face to the name, and because David couldn’t see her anyway, she shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Oh, her,” she said. “What about her?”

Then David started in on a long story, a story with lots of details—so many details that Laura knew right away that things were serious between David and this faceless girl. First he’d gone to the one café, then to another, and then back to the first one and was just about to go home—when Miriam suddenly wandered in. He had never really noticed her before, he admitted (which helped to explain why Laura had also been unable to link any physical attributes to the name Miriam), but on that particular evening, four days ago now, her face had suddenly been “beaming,” he didn’t know how else to put it—and while she was beaming their eyes had met.

Laura knew exactly what he was talking about. Last summer she had seen Stella beam like that, but she didn’t tell David.

“You always figure it’s a cliché from some romantic movie,” David said. “Until it happens to you. The light had a lot to do with it; she came in out of the darkness into the light of the café, then semidarkness when she came over to me, but the light never left her face, like the heat of a fire, the glowing ashes after the fire is already out, I mean.”

At this point Laura couldn’t suppress a yawn, she covered the mouthpiece with her hand so David wouldn’t hear, but that probably wasn’t even necessary. He was so caught up in his own story—it had already been going on for at least fifteen minutes, Laura reckoned, and seeing as they hadn’t even made it out of the café yet there was no end in sight. Still, she didn’t dare to interrupt her friend or tell him to get on with it; David was a kind and quite handsome boy, but for as long as Laura had known him he had never had a girlfriend. Deep in her heart, she knew why; it had to do with the way David shrank from every form of physical contact. A shock went through his body whenever you simply laid your hand on his forearm; at more intimate moments of contact—an arm around his shoulders, a hug, a kiss on the cheek—he would shudder as though you had dropped an ice cube down the front of his shirt. After that happened a few times you stopped touching David, to keep it from happening. David and a girl together, that thought had never occurred to her before, it was something you almost didn’t dare consider, almost as unimaginable as what your parents did in bed.

“So I was thinking,” David said fifteen minutes later, after the story had ended in Miriam’s room. “It’s up to you, Laura, it’s your house, but I was thinking: it’s all so new, I can’t just leave her alone now.”

Laura didn’t help him, she didn’t say: But there’s no reason to leave her alone, just bring Miriam along. For David’s sake she was pleased, with his infatuation and his new girlfriend, but on the other hand she didn’t feel like it at all, a new face—especially not a face she still couldn’t place. “So what I wanted to ask is whether Miriam could come along to Terhofstede,” David went on, at the moment when the silence between them had started to grow painful.

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Laura said. “I mean, you haven’t known her that long. None of us know her.” She hated herself for being so purposefully obtuse, but on the other hand she wanted nothing more than to hear her best friend thrash about.

“Maybe you’re right,” David said. “Maybe I should just stay here. With Miriam.”

“Don’t be such a jerk,” Laura said, hoping that David wouldn’t hear the shock in her voice. “Of course you’re coming along. And if this Miriam is so important to you, then she’s coming along too.”

Two days later, in the school cafeteria, she saw David and Miriam together for the first time. Miriam was, above all, short, with a round face that could best be described as “open.” And—she had to hand it to David—she really did beam. “Hi!” Miriam said to Laura. “David has told me so much about you, I bet we’re going to be good friends.” And then Miriam leaned over in order to—as Laura realized too late—kiss her on both cheeks.

“Yeah,” Laura said as she—there was no way around it now—kissed Miriam back. “About you too.”

For a moment she wondered whether all the things David had told his new girlfriend about her also included her affair with Landzaat, the history teacher, but the next instant she realized how ridiculous it was to wonder about that. Everybody knew about it, after all, everybody except the teachers. But that was what teachers were there for, to have no idea of what was really going on at a school.

The affair had lent her a certain status, albeit not always in a positive sense. Sometimes she picked up on the things that were being said behind her back. According to some of the boys, she was a “slut,” and some girls called her a “whore,” but most students thought it was pretty much “cool” and “fresh” for a girl to turn up her nose at her contemporaries and seduce a grown, experienced man. A married man at that. A blackmailable man. In fact, no one doubted that it would end that way, that the revelation of Laura’s relationship with Landzaat would destroy his marriage.

From the start, what irritated Laura most about David and Miriam was that they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Here, in the middle of the cafeteria, where at least five hundred students were at that moment sitting or standing to eat their sandwiches, ordering coffee and sweet iced cakes from Arie, the cafeteria manager, David was plucking at the back of Miriam’s purple sweater, then putting his arm around her waist and pulling her up against him. Miriam, in turn, never let go of his sleeve, holding him by the wrist and caressing the palm of his hand with her fingers. Every twenty seconds she turned her head to one side and planted a little kiss on his throat, which was as high up as she could get without standing on tiptoe.

It annoyed the hell out of Laura, she had no desire to be around all this plucking and pecking. It reminded her of a thirsty man coming in from the desert, a castaway who had spent weeks bobbing around on a raft, or, even more, of an emaciated stray, a starving dog that wolfs down two pounds of hamburger, plastic packaging and all, without taking a breath—and vomits it all back up the next minute. She looked at Miriam and asked herself what was with this little, beaming girl, whether she had been out in the cold for too long as well and had a lot of catching up to do, or whether she was just stringing David along. Not much chance that she had ever been with a boy who was as wild about her as he was, Laura decided, and was about to walk away when Herman suddenly joined them.

“Hey,” was all he said as he looked from David to Miriam, and he took a step back when Miriam tried to kiss him on the cheeks too.

“Miriam may be coming with us to Terhofstede,” Laura said, noticing the way Herman’s eyebrows shot up for a moment.

“Well,” he said. “That’s nice…for David.” His gaze crossed Laura’s—more than a meaningful look, it was above all one of desperation. Do something! his eyes begged her. Come up with something!

“We still have to discuss the sleeping arrangements,” Laura said. “I mean, is it…have you talked to your parents about it? Do they know that there will be boys going along?”

“My father’s a gynecologist,” Miriam said, as though that explained everything. “And my mother has already met David, she thinks he’s darling.”

Then they started kissing, not just a little bit, but the whole hog, they pulled out all the stops. Through their cheeks Laura could see their tongues at work, and she in turn tossed a desperate glance back at Herman.

“Can I get you something?” Herman said, nodding toward the counter at the back of the cafeteria. “Coffee? I hear there’s a special on pink glacé cakes today.”

Beside the exit to the bike shed, they found a vacant table.

“Yes, it’s certainly nice for David,” Herman said. “But that’s about all you can say for it.”

“Yeah,” Laura said. She tugged at the plastic wrapper of her glacé cake, but when it didn’t tear right away she laid it unopened on the table.

“Did he drive you nuts too?” Herman asked. “With that story about how he met her?”

Laura burst out laughing. “Yeah! You too?”

“First one café, then the other, then back to the first one…I thought I was going out of my mind. But okay, he’s my friend. When a friend’s talking, you let him finish, even if it’s all a load of bullshit.”

“But still…I’m happy for David, really, but…”

“Maybe he should have shopped around a little longer. Let’s be frank about this, Laura. We’re glad our friend has a girlfriend, but—tell me if I’m out of line—there’s something about this Miriam that is incredibly irritating. I could see it on your face right away, just now, when I came up to you guys.”

“Yeah, I don’t know exactly what it is. Maybe that she tries to act so nice and spontaneous. The way she tries to kiss everyone right away. The way she hangs on David.”

“He hangs on her too. We can’t blame the poor girl for that.”

“No, but right in the middle of the cafeteria? I don’t know, it seems so…so childish.”

She pulled the glacé cake toward her. Herman took hold of the plastic and tugged on it gently. “May I?” he asked.

“Go ahead, I’m really not hungry.”

“No, that’s not what I meant…” He took the plastic packaging between his teeth and tore it open. “Here you go.”

“I don’t feel like having a girl like that around the whole week in Zeeland. But I can’t tell David that, can I? What I don’t get is that he can’t figure it out for himself.”

Herman shrugged. “What do you expect? Love is blind. Young people in love. The most glorious thing there is.”

Laura couldn’t help laughing, but when she looked at him he looked away and pretended to be absorbed in the packaging of his own cake.

“Yum,” he said. “You know, there’s no expiration date on these things anywhere. Maybe they’re timeless cakes. How does yours taste?”

Laura didn’t answer, she waited patiently until he looked at her again.

“I was thinking,” Herman said, laying his cake back on the table. “I talked to David about it a bit, and he thought it was a good idea. But then, in the state he’s in now I don’t know whether he’s any good to me. That’s why I wanted to approach you about it.”

Finally, he looked at her. And Laura looked back.

“What?” she said.

She clasped her hands behind her head, leaned back in her chair, and shook her hair loose. Then she pulled it up into a sort of knot and let it fall again. Meanwhile, she kept looking at Herman—maybe she was imagining it, but it looked as though his face had turned a fraction of a shade darker.

“So I was just thinking,” he said quickly, sliding his cake back toward him. “The last time in Zeeland. In fact, we didn’t do anything then. I mean, not really anything. We made those drawings for Lodewijk’s sick mother, of course, but when we were all doing that together it occurred to me: This is fun, isn’t it, making something together like this? Voluntarily? Doing it for Lodewijk’s mother, after all, was really sort of volunteer work, right?”

Laura was only half paying attention, she wondered whether maybe she should try something else with her hair, but decided to listen anyway.

“But Lodewijk’s mother is dead now,” she said.

“Exactly. That’s what I mean. There’s nothing we have to do. But that’s no reason for us to do nothing. Maybe, in fact, it’s the only real reason to do something.” He pushed the cake away again, to the edge of the table, and then halfway over it, until it was just teetering on the edge. “My idea was this: We don’t take anything along with us to Zeeland. Nothing that isn’t our own. No music, no magazines or newspapers, no books, only our own things. Michael’s saxophone, Ron’s guitar, Lodewijk’s bongo drums if need be, and I’ll bring my movie camera. I bought this really simple camera about six months ago. Eight millimeter, made in East Germany. It doesn’t even have a battery. You have to wind it up. Anyway, here’s the idea: we don’t read anything, we don’t listen to anything, there’s no TV in the house anyway, so that’s easy. We don’t let ourselves be influenced by the outside world. We go shopping and buy enough for three days. And then we see what happens. What happens inside your head when you’re not allowed to do anything. No, wait a minute, I’m putting that wrong: we’re allowed to do anything, we’re just not allowed to fall back on things from outside. People get bored and pick up a book, but isn’t it a lot more interesting to see what happens with you when you don’t pick up a book? Oh yeah, and Lodewijk has a tape recorder. We’ll take that along too. We can record things if we feel like it. Music, conversations, stories. I think it will be great. An experiment. Maybe it will bomb and we won’t do anything at all. But even then you can’t really say that it failed. Then the conclusion of the experiment is simply that, apparently, we don’t do anything.”

Herman brought his finger down hard on the edge of the glacé cake, which shot up high and flipped a few times, but before it could fall he plucked it out of the air.

“Oh!” Laura said.

“That’s a trick,” Herman said with a grin. “You can learn a trick if you practice long enough. But creating something new, you can’t learn that, you only find out about it by doing it.”

He took the cake between his fingers and squeezed it until it was completely flat inside the packaging. “Sorry,” he said, “I don’t mean to sound like someone who knows how it all works. Like a teacher.” He looked straight at her as he spoke those final words, and now it was a struggle for Laura not to blush. “So what do you think? David thought it was a good idea. Back before he fell in love.”

“So what are you going to film?” Laura asked.

“What?”

“What you’re going to film. I didn’t even know you had a camera. I guess you’ve already filmed some stuff.”

“Oh, lots of things. With David. For instance, I went over to the flower stand—there’s a flower stand across the street from my house—and David filmed me from the window. We live on the third floor—and I waited until a couple customers came along and I fell onto the ground in between all those people. It was really great, I’ll show it to you sometime. Those people don’t see the camera, and I act like I’m in a bad way, I have a seizure, a sort of epileptic fit, and then they help me to my feet and I just walk away. You see the people and the man who runs the flower stand talking to each other, like: ‘What was that all about?’ Fantastic!”

Laura tried to picture it, Herman having fits in front of a flower stand. She looked at his twinkling eyes and laughing face and she couldn’t help herself, she started laughing too.

“Oh Jesus!” she said. “You mean you just went and did that?!”

“We did it one time with Miss Posthuma too. During study hall. David went up to her desk, supposedly to ask something. And I sat all the way at the back with the camera. She had no idea at all that she was being filmed. So David acts like he’s going to ask her something, and she looks up at him, and then David slowly sinks to the ground and starts flapping his arms and legs around, having a spaz attack. Oh, it’s so…I keep the camera on David for just a few seconds, then I zoom in on Posthuma’s face. Priceless! That lady is so clueless! No, she’s not even really clueless, it’s something else. It’s the face of someone who has never experienced anything in her whole life, and now all of a sudden she has. And we got that on film. For posterity.”

“Oh, you guys are terrible!” Laura laughed. “It’s pathetic!”

“You’re right. It is pathetic. But not because of what we did. It was already pathetic, even without us. What time is it anyway?”

“What?”

“Next period we’ve got that physics exam, right? Did you work on it?”

Laura felt her face grow hot, while her stomach seemed to fall a few yards, like in a Ferris wheel going down. “Is that today? I thought it was after the fall break!”

Herman looked at her, then put down the glacé cake and laid his hand on hers. “Don’t sweat it. You can call in sick, right? Then just make it up after the vacation.”

“Karstens isn’t going to believe that. I rode into the bike shed this morning at the same time he did. He even said good morning.”

“You could suddenly get sick. Even deathly ill.” He grinned, took his hand off hers, and held up the package with the cake in it. “From eating a glacé cake that was long past its expiration date, for instance?”

Laura tried to laugh, but only half succeeded.

“Oh, I’m such an idiot!” she said. “I wrote down the wrong date in my diary. And it’s not the first time.” She looked at her watch. “Five more minutes…What are you doing, Herman?”

Herman had pulled the plastic wrapper off his cake and was holding it in front of her face. “Take a couple of bites. Then stick your finger down your throat. Throw it all up. Here, on the table. Then I’ll help you down to the concierge’s office, to report that you’re sick. I promise.”

Laura stared at him. He smiled at her, but it was no joke, she could tell by the look on his face, he really meant it.

“But…” But I’m too chicken to do that, she almost said, but that suddenly seemed like a bad idea. “What about you?” she said instead. “Then you’ll be too late for the exam too.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Herman said. “I didn’t study for it either.” He leaned over, picked up his backpack, and put it on the table. “On purpose,” he went on. “I wrote down the right date. But then I thought: of all my exams, this may be the best one not to study for.”

“Oh?” Laura’s expression invited further explanation, or at least tried to, but at that moment she was more concerned about the test and what she was going to do. Karstens, the physics teacher, was a little man; in the bike shed this morning he had remained seated on his bike for as long as possible, he never got off until he thought no one was looking, then he heel-toed it to the classroom, where he hoisted himself up onto his high stool and never came down again. “Leprechaun Karstens” was what the kids called him, but from that stool he exercised a real reign of terror. He laughed openly at the girls for their scant aptitude for the exact sciences, he humiliated them in front of the whole class in order to boost his popularity with the boys. There was no way in hell she could tell Leprechaun Karstens the truth: that she had written the exam down wrong in her diary, and whether she could please make it up at a later date. She could already see his beady little eyes, like those of a squirrel, or more like those of a magpie or crow, an animal that seems to be listening carefully to you but then suddenly pecks you right in the face. That wasn’t very smart of you, young lady…She could already hear him say it, then he would address the whole class. Miss Laura here has failed to study for her exam. Are there any other candidates who would prefer to move right along to the school of domestic sciences? She had heard that Mr. Karstens had children. Unthinkable, that a woman could tolerate this sneaky little man beside her in bed without vomiting.

“What is it?” Herman asked. “What are you laughing about?”

“No, I was just thinking: if I think about Leprechaun Karstens long enough, I might not even have to eat that cake.”

That made Herman laugh too.

“Sure, why work yourself into a lather for a reject like that?” he said. “That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. I’ve had it. I can’t force myself to do it anymore. I have to get out of here. Having mediocrity poured all over you, hour after hour, it’s bad for your mental health. It’s a physical thing with me too. I start itching all over, I break out in a sweat, I start stinking. A classroom, it’s a sickness, bacteria everywhere, and the source of the infection is up at the front of the class.”

In Herman’s face Laura saw something she’d never seen before, something grave, the ironic tone he tended to adopt had almost disappeared.

“But you could leave, right?” she said. “Go to another school, I mean?”

“I wouldn’t do them the favor. No, they’re going to have to send me away. They’ll have to say it right to my face. ‘We hate you, Herman. We’d be glad to get rid of you.’ But of course they don’t dare to do that, it would mean they’ve failed as a school.”

“But how can you do that, make them send you away?”

“You can always do something. I can do something. It’s a sickness, that’s the way you have to look at it. You finish your finals, but by then you’re already contaminated; you graduate, and you’re terminally ill. There are a couple of possibilities. You can blow up the school building, but that wouldn’t help; they’d just rebuild it, here at the same spot or somewhere else. You can also combat the source of the infection. Smoke out the whole mess. With whatever it takes. In a sick body they do it with penicillin, with radiation, or chemicals. First you have to draw up a diagnosis. Maybe it’s going to take insecticide or agricultural pesticides, maybe it requires sterner measures. And even then, the question is whether doing that would solve anything. It’s like being attacked by an army: you can mow them down by the hundreds, but they keep coming. The teaching colleges churn out thousands of new ones each year. But hey, I’m not the one who’s going to take those measures; first of all, I’m no doctor or healer, but what’s more, I’m not going to risk my own future. Under the present legal system, the healers are the ones who go to prison for years, maybe even for the rest of their lives. I don’t want to do them the favor.”

He rummaged around in his bag and pulled something out. A movie camera, Laura saw. A little, flat model without a handgrip. Herman began turning a crank on the side of it, and Laura remembered him talking about the windup mechanism.

“There’s only one thing I ask of you in return,” he said. “I’ll help you with the hall monitor later on and everything. And I’ll tell Karstens that you went home because you were deathly ill. In exchange, I’m asking you for permission to film you as you vomit all over the table. I promise that I won’t do anything with it without asking you first, Laura. You’ll be the first one to see how it turns out. Slap a nice sound track under it, you’ll be amazed.”

She didn’t quite know what to say, how to react.

“The cap,” she said at last, pointing at the lens of the camera that Herman now had pressed against his left eye. “You forgot to take off the lens cap.”

—

At this hour of the day, just before lunch ended, there were usually crowds of students hurrying to their classes, but now the main hall was uncommonly still. The hall monitor was not in his glass booth. Laura glanced at her watch, then at the big clock above the entrance.

“It’s only three minutes before,” she said. “Where is—?”

“Look, there,” Herman said.

He pointed to the corridor to the right of the stairs, where a group of students and a couple of teachers had gathered.

“Karstens,” someone said, when Herman and Laura began edging through toward the physics lab. “Probably fainted,” someone else said.

The classroom door was open. In front of the board, which was covered in equations, was the table and the teacher’s high stool. Of Leprechaun Karstens himself you could see only his legs sticking out from under the table, his legs and a pair of buffed black shoes; one trouser leg had crept up a little to reveal a brown sock and a stretch of pale, hairless shin. The rest of his body was blocked from sight by two men squatting beside the table. “Hello, hello!” they heard one of the men say, and recognized the voice of Joop, the hall monitor. “Are you awake, sir? Can you hear me? Help is on the way. Hello, sir, are you still there?”

She looked over and, because Herman was nowhere in sight, turned all the way around.

There he was, his back pressed up against the wall on the other side of the corridor, the movie camera held up to his left eye and aimed at the door of the physics lab.

“Well there you have it, Laura,” he said when she came over to him. “If you had studied for that exam, it would all have been for naught.”

In the distance she heard an ambulance howl.