The letter came home in Sanne’s schoolbag on Thursday, folded into eight, at the bottom, under a squashed apple core.
Beste ouder(s)/verzorger(s), (Dear parent(s)/guardian(s),)
Graag nodigen wij u uit voor het tienminutengesprek over uw kind.
(We would like to invite you to the ten-minute meeting about your child.)
Under that, in blue biro, in Juf Annemiek’s round handwriting: Sanne Brouwer.
Maandag 17 september, 19.40 uur.
Lokaal 4.
(Sanne Brouwer.
Monday 17 September, 7.40 pm.
Room 4.)
At the bottom was a strip to cut off and return, with a box to tick for ja, wij komen (yes, we’re coming) and a line for the signature.
Max ticked the box, wrote H.
Brouwer on the line in the slanting hand he’d been doing since he was twelve, cut it off with the kitchen scissors and put it in Sanne’s lunchbox for the morning.
“You’re going to go yourself,” Otto said.
Who else?
“I’m not arguing.
I’m noting that the letter says ‘ouders’, and you are not one.”
I’ve been to every one of these since she was in groep 3.
“Have you?”
Max thought about it.
The first time round, he had.
Every one, from fourteen to twenty.
He had sat on the tiny chairs and listened to the teachers talking about times tables and reading levels and nodded and gone home and done whatever they’d said.
Some of them had looked at him oddly.
Most of them had been too busy to ask.
Mostly.
“Eighty-five percent,” said Otto.
“I’m rounding in your favour.”
* * *
On Monday evening he gave Sanne her bath early, put her in clean jeans and the sweater with the horse on it, and wet her hair and combed it flat until she complained.
Then he put on his own good trousers, the ones that were too tight round the middle now and too long in the leg, and a shirt of Henk’s that fitted him like a tent everywhere except the belly.
They walked.
It was ten minutes.
The school was lit up in the dark like a ship, every window yellow, and parents were standing outside under the bike shed smoking and talking in pairs.
In the corridor there were chairs along the wall, and on the walls above the chairs were drawings.
Groep 6 had done Mijn Gezin (My Family) in wax crayons.
Thirty families, all in a row, stuck up with Pritt.
Mothers with yellow hair and triangles for skirts.
Fathers with moustaches.
Dogs.
Sanne’s was third from the end.
It was the same drawing as the one at the kitchen table, more or less, but bigger.
The house.
The shed.
The fat boy with lines coming out of his head.
The girl with the sandwich.
In the corner of the page the blue patch of sea, and on it, not a platform this time, but a boat, a small brown boat with a man in it.
The man was waving.
He’s waving, Max thought.
“She’s upgraded him,” Otto said.
“From a structure to a vehicle.
That’s progress.”
Sanne stood next to him, not looking at the drawing, looking at her shoes.
“Juf said he had to be in the house,” she said quietly.
“So I put him on a boat.
Boats can come back.”
Further down the corridor a woman in a leather jacket was sitting with her legs crossed, flicking through a Libelle without reading it.
Next to her, kicking the chair leg, was the boy with the buzz cut from the bike rack.
Bas Koster saw Sanne and grinned, and then he saw Max, and stopped kicking the chair.
His mother didn’t look up.
“Noted,” said Otto.
* * *
At twenty to eight the door of lokaal 4 opened and a couple came out, holding hands, smiling.
Juf Annemiek was behind them, in her long cardigan, with a sheet of paper in her hand.
She looked at Max and Sanne, and at the empty chair beside them, and Max watched her work out what she was seeing.
“Sanne,” she said.
“Hello.
And…
you’re Max?”
“Yes.”
“Is your father coming?”
“He’s on the platform.
In the North Sea.
He’s back in October.”
“Ah.” Juf Annemiek looked at her sheet.
“And your mother…?”
Max said nothing.
Sanne looked at her shoes harder.
“Right,” said the juf.
She was in her late twenties, with a soft voice and tired eyes and a sticker of a smiley face on the back of her hand that one of the kids must have put there.
She looked at Max, really looked, at the tent shirt and the combed hair of the small girl beside him.
She went softer, and sadder, and more careful, all at once.
“Max,” she said.
“I’m sorry.
I really am.
But I can’t do the gesprek with you.
It needs to be a parent.
Or a guardian.
Somebody who’s…
somebody over eighteen.
It’s the rules, not me.
If something’s said in there, and I have to write it down, it has to be said to an adult.”
“I do everything at home.”
“I believe you,” Juf Annemiek said.
“I do.
That’s not the point.
Is there anyone you can call?”
* * *
There was a phone in the staffroom, a beige one on the wall by the coffee machine.
Max dialled Oma’s number from memory, with his back to two teachers eating speculaas (spiced biscuits) out of a packet.
She answered on the fourth ring.
“Brouwer.”
“Oma.
It’s Max.”
“What’s happened?”
“Nothing’s happened.
I’m at Sanne’s school.
It’s the tienminutengesprek (ten-minute parent meeting) and the juf says she can’t talk to me, she needs a grown-up.”
There was a silence on the line.
Then the sound of Oma putting something down.
A cup, probably.
“Which school?”
“The Regenboog.
On the…”
“I know where it is,” said Oma.
“Tell her twenty minutes.”
It was twenty-five.
She came on the bus, the number 3, and walked from the stop, in her good grey coat and her Sunday hat with the little feather on the side, carrying her handbag in front of her with both hands like a shield.
She was seventy-two and her knees were bad, and she’d come out after dark, which she never did.
She came down the corridor.
The parents on the chairs looked up.
Oma nodded at them as if she’d known them all for years, and walked straight past them to the door of lokaal 4, and knocked on it, and opened it before anybody said come in.
“Mevrouw,” she said to Juf Annemiek.
“I’m the grandmother.
I’ve got ten minutes, and so have you.”
* * *
They sat on the tiny chairs in a row.
Oma in the middle, her handbag on her knees.
Sanne on one side, swinging her legs.
Max on the other, his knees up by his chin, the chair creaking under him.
Juf Annemiek had a folder with Sanne’s name on it.
Reading: very good.
Above the level for groep 6.
She read books from the groep 8 shelf at break, and the juf had had to start hiding them.
Sums: good.
She knew her tables.
Better since the summer.
Juf Annemiek looked at Max when she said that, and Max looked at the floor.
Drawing: very good.
Juf Annemiek smiled at this one.
“And socially,” she said, and stopped, and turned a page in the folder.
“Sanne’s quieter than she was last year.
She’s on her own a lot at break.
She sits on the step by the bike shed and reads.”
“She’s always liked reading,” said Oma.
“She has.
I’m not worried about the reading.” Juf Annemiek hesitated.
“There’s a boy in the class.
Bas Koster.
He’s…
a bit of a handful.
He’s been saying things to some of the girls.
I’ve spoken to him.
I’ve spoken to his mother.”
“What sort of things?” Max said.
Juf Annemiek glanced at Oma, then back at him.
“Boys that age,” she said.
“Silly things.
Sanne’s legs had stopped swinging.
“What has he said to Sanne?” said Oma, in the voice she used for the man at the Postbank.
“He says Pap isn’t real,” Sanne said, very quietly, to her knees.
“He says I made him up.
Because he never comes to anything.”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
In the corridor, somebody laughed at something, and a chair scraped.
“I’ll speak to him again,” Juf Annemiek said, softly.
“I’ll keep an eye on it.”
“You’ll do more than keep an eye on it,” Oma said.
“With respect.” She stood up.
The gesprek was over, apparently, because Oma had decided so.
She held her hand out to the juf, who stood up too, slightly surprised, and shook it.
“She’s a lovely girl,” Juf Annemiek said, to Oma, and then, after a second, to Max.
“You’re doing a good job with her.
Really.”
Max didn’t know what to say to that.
In twenty-eight years, the first time round, nobody had said it.
He’d never thought he needed anybody to.
So he said, “Thank you,” and his voice came out about an octave too high, like the fourteen-year-old’s voice it was.
* * *
They walked Oma to the bus stop.
It was cold, and the streetlights were orange, and Sanne walked between them holding a hand on each side, which she hadn’t done in about a year.
At the stop, while they waited, Oma opened her handbag and took out her purse and took out a folded banknote.
“Here,” she said.
“For the sweaty place.”
It was a red twenty-five, the new one with the robin on it.
Max stared at it.
“Oma, no.
You’re not…”
“Your grandfather went to a boxing club once,” Oma said.
“Before the war.
He was sick on the floor and he never went back, and he talked about it for fifty years.
How he could have been something.” She pressed the note into his hand and closed his fingers over it.
“He couldn’t have.
But he should have gone back and found out.
His mother wouldn’t give him the money for a second week.
His mother was a cow.”
Sanne giggled.
Oma pretended not to hear.
The bus came.
Oma climbed up, holding the rail, and sat by the window, and didn’t wave, because she wasn’t a waver.
The bus pulled out.
“Twenty-nine guilders,” Otto said.
“October’s fee covered.
Four over.”
Four over.
“I’d like to note that that’s still not enough for a new 6116.”
Max put the note in his pocket.
Sanne was looking up at him.
“Is Oma cross?”
“Not with you.”
“With Bas?”
“Very.”
Sanne seemed to like that.
She took his hand again for the walk home.
At the front door, with the key in the lock, she stopped and dug in her coat pocket and pulled out an envelope.
It was crumpled and had been folded several times.
She held it out to him without looking at him.
“Juf gave everyone one,” she said.
“Last week.
I forgot.”
He opened it under the light over the door.
Schoolreisje groep 6: De Efteling.
Woensdag 3 oktober.
Bijdrage: f 32,50.
Graag uiterlijk vrijdag 28 september meegeven in een envelop met naam.
(School trip year 6: De Efteling.
Wednesday 3 October.
Contribution: f 32.50.
Please send in by Friday 28 September at the latest, in an envelope with name.)
“I don’t have to go,” Sanne said quickly.
“Lotte’s not going either.
Probably.”
Max looked at the letter.
Then at the twenty-five guilders in his hand.
“Thirty-two fifty,” Otto said, very quietly.
I know.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk