The Dinner

by Herman Koch

  ‘Who’s texting him? What did he/she write?’

  One time I had even stood there with Michel’s cell phone in my hand, knowing that he wouldn’t be coming back from the gym for another hour, that he had simply forgotten it – that was his old phone, a Sony Ericsson without the slide: the display showed ‘1 new message’, beneath an envelope icon. ‘I don’t know what got into me; before I knew it, I had your cell phone in my hand and I was reading your message.’ Maybe no one would ever find out, but then again maybe they would. He wouldn’t say anything, but he would suspect me or his mother nonetheless; a fissure that, with the passing of time, would expand into a substantial chasm. Our life as a happy family would never be the same.

  It was only a few steps to his desk in front of the window. If I leaned forward I would be able to see him in the garden, on the flagstone terrace in front of the kitchen door where he was fixing his inner tube – and if Michel looked up he would see his father standing at the window of his room.

  I picked up his cell phone, a brand-new black Samsung, and slid it open. I didn’t know his pin code, if the phone was locked I wouldn’t be able to do a thing, but the screen lit up almost right away with a fuzzy photo of the Nike swoosh, probably taken from a piece of his own clothing: his shoes, or the black knitted cap he always wore, even at summertime temperatures and indoors, pulled down just above his eyes.

  I scrolled down through the menu, which was roughly the same as the one on my own phone, a Samsung too, but six months old and therefore already hopelessly obsolete. I clicked on My Files and then on Videos. Sooner than expected, I found what I was looking for.

  I looked and felt my head gradually grow cold. It was the sort of coldness you feel when you take too big a bite from an icecream cone or sip too greedily from an ice-cold drink.

  The kind of coldness that hurt – from the inside out.

  I looked again, and then I kept looking: there was more, I saw, but how much more was hard to say.

  ‘Dad?’

  Michel’s voice came from downstairs, but then I heard him coming up the stairs. I snapped shut the slide on the phone and put it back on his desk.

  ‘Dad?’

  It was too late to hurry into our bedroom, to take a shirt or jacket out of the closet and pose with it in front of the mirror; my only option was to come out of Michel’s own room as casually and believably as possible – as though I’d been looking for something.

  As though I’d been looking for him.

  ‘Dad.’ He had stopped at the top of the stairs and was looking past me, into his room. Then he looked at me. He was wearing his Nike cap, his black iPod nano dangled from a cord at his chest and a set of headphones was slung around his neck; you had to give him credit, fashion and status didn’t interest him; after only a few weeks he had replaced the white earbuds with a standard set of headphones, because the sound was better.

  Happy families are all alike: that popped into my mind for the first time that evening.

  ‘I was looking for …’ I began. ‘I was wondering where you were.’

  Michel had almost died at birth. Even these days I often thought back on that blue, crumpled little body lying in the incubator just after the Caesarean: that he was here was nothing less than a gift, that was happiness too.

  ‘I was patching my tyre,’ he said. ‘That’s what I wanted to ask you. Do you know if we’ve got valves somewhere?’

  ‘Valves,’ I repeated. I’m not the kind of person who ever fixes a flat tyre, who would even consider it. But my son – in the face of all evidence – still believed in a different version of his father, a version who knew where the valves were.

  ‘What were you doing up here?’ he asked suddenly. ‘You said you were looking for me. Why were you looking for me?’

  I looked at him, I looked into the clear eyes beneath the black cap, the honest eyes, which, I’d always told myself, formed a not-insignificant part of our happiness.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ I said. ‘I was just looking for you.’

  4

  Of course they weren’t there yet.

  Without revealing too much about the location, I can say that the restaurant was hidden from the street by a row of trees. We were half an hour late already, and as we crossed the gravel path to the entrance, lit on both sides by electric torches, my wife and I discussed the possibility that, for once, just this once, it might be us and not the Lohmans who arrived last.

  ‘Want to bet?’ I said.

  ‘Why should I?’ Claire said. ‘I’m telling you: they’re not there.’

  A girl in a black T-shirt and black floor-length pinafore took our coats. Another girl, in the same black outfit, was flipping through the reservations book lying open on a lectern.

  She was only pretending not to recognize the name Lohman, I saw, and pretending badly at that.

  ‘Lohman, was it?’ She raised an eyebrow and made no effort to hide her disappointment at the fact that it wasn’t Serge Lohman standing there in real life, but two people whose faces meant nothing to her.

  I could have helped out by saying that Serge Lohman was on his way, but I didn’t.

  The lectern-with-book was lit from above by a thin, copper-coloured reading lamp: Art Deco, or some other style that happened to be just in or just out of fashion at the moment. The girl’s hair, black as the T-shirt and pinafore, was tightly tied up at the back in a wispy ponytail, as though it too had been designed to fit in with the restaurant’s house style. The girl who had taken our coats wore her hair in the same tight ponytail. Perhaps it had something to do with regulations, I thought to myself, hygiene regulations, like surgical masks in an operating room: after all, this restaurant prided itself on serving ‘all-organic’ products – the meat came from actual animals, but only animals that had led ‘a good life’.

  Across the top of the tight black hairdos, I glanced at the dining room – or at least at the first two or three visible tables. To the left of the entrance was the ‘open kitchen’. Something was being flambéed at that very moment, from the looks of it, accompanied by the obligatory clouds of blue smoke and dancing flames.

  I didn’t feel like doing this at all, I realized again. My aversion to the evening that lay ahead had become almost physical – a slight feeling of nausea, clammy hands and the start of a headache somewhere behind my left eye – not quite enough, though, for me to actually become unwell or fall unconscious right there on the spot.

  How would the black-pinafore girls react to a guest who collapsed before even getting past the lectern, I wondered. Would they try to haul me out of the way, drag me into the cloakroom – in any case, somewhere where the other guests couldn’t see me? They would probably prop me up on a stool behind the coat racks. Politely but firmly, they would ask whether they could call me a taxi. Off! Off with this man! – how wonderful it would be to let Serge stew, what a relief to be able to put a whole new twist on this evening.

  I thought about what that would mean. We could go back to the café and order a plate of regular-person food, the daily special was ribs with fries, I’d seen on the blackboard above the bar. ‘Spare-ribs with fries €11.50’ – probably less than a tenth of what we’d have to cough up here, each.

  Another alternative would be to head straight for home, with at the very most a little detour past the video shop for a DVD, which we could then watch on the TV in the bedroom, lying on our roomy double bed: a glass of wine, some crackers, a few types of cheese to go with (one more little detour past the all-night shop), and a perfect evening would be complete.

  I would be entirely self-effacing, I promised myself, I would let Claire choose the film: even though that meant it was bound to be some costume drama. Pride and Prejudice, A Room with a View or something Murder on the Orient Express-ish. Yes, that was a possibility, I thought, I could pass out and we could go home. But instead I said: ‘Serge Lohman, the table close to the garden.’

  The girl raised her eyes from the page.

  ‘But
you’re not Mr Lohman,’ she said.

  I cursed it all, right there: the restaurant, the girls in their black pinafores, this evening that was ruined even before it began – but most of all I cursed Serge, for this dinner he’d been so keen to arrange, a dinner for which he couldn’t summon up the common courtesy to arrive on time. The way he never arrived on time anywhere; people in union halls across the country had to wait for him to show up too, the oh-so-busy Serge Lohman was probably just running late; the meeting in the last union hall had run over and now he was caught in traffic somewhere; he didn’t drive himself, no, driving would be a waste of time for someone of Serge’s status, he had a chauffeur to do that for him, so he could spend his precious time judiciously, reading important documents.

  ‘Oh yes I am.’ I said. ‘Lohman is the name.’

  I kept my eyes fixed on the girl, who actually blinked this time, and I opened my mouth for the next sentence. The moment had come to clinch the victory: but it was a victory that smacked of defeat.

  ‘I’m his brother,’ I said.

  5

  ‘The aperitif of the house, which we’d like to offer you today, is pink champagne.’

  The floor manager – or maître d’, or supervisor, the host, the head waiter, or whatever you call someone like that in restaurants like this – wasn’t wearing a black pinafore. He had a three-piece suit on. The suit was pale green with blue pinstripes, and sticking out of the breast pocket was a blue hanky. What they call a pocket square.

  His voice was subdued – almost too subdued to be heard above the hubbub in the dining room; there was something weird about the acoustics in this place, we’d noticed that as soon as we sat down at our table (on the garden side! How did I guess!). If you didn’t speak up, your words drifted away, up to the glass ceiling, which was also much higher than normal for a restaurant. Ridiculously high, you might say, if you didn’t know that the height of the ceiling had everything to do with the building’s former use: a dairy, I thought I’d read somewhere, or a sewage disposal plant.

  The floor manager stuck out his little finger and pointed at something on our table. At the tea-warmer, I thought at first – instead of a candle or two, all the tables here had a tea-warmer – but, no, the little finger was pointing out the plate of olives he had apparently just put there. In any case, I didn’t remember it having been there before, not when he’d pulled back our chairs. When had he put the olives on the table? I was struck by a brief but intense wave of panic. This was happening to me more often lately: suddenly pieces of the puzzle were gone – bites out of time, empty moments during which my thoughts must have been elsewhere.

  ‘These are Greek olives from the Peloponnese, lightly doused in first-pressing, extra-virgin olive oil from Sardinia, and polished off with rosemary from …’

  The floor manager leaned over our table slightly as he spoke, but we could still barely hear him: in fact, the last part of the sentence became completely lost, leaving us in the dark as to the origin of the rosemary. Normally I don’t give a damn about that kind of information – as far as I cared the rosemary could have come from the Ruhr or the Ardennes, but it seemed like far too much fuss over one little plate of olives, and I had no intention of letting him off the hook that easily.

  And then that pinkie. Why would anyone point with their pinkie? Was that supposed to be chic? Did it go with the suit with blue pinstripes, like the light-blue hanky? Or did he simply have something to hide? His other fingers, after all, were hidden the whole time; he kept them folded against the palm of his hand, out of sight – perhaps they were covered with flaky eczema or symptoms of some untreatable disease.

  ‘Polished off?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, polished off with rosemary. Polished off means that they—’

  ‘I know what it means,’ I said cuttingly – and perhaps a bit too loudly as well. A man and a woman at the next table stopped talking for a moment and looked over at us: a man with a beard that was much too big, covering his face almost entirely, and a woman a little too young for him, in her late twenties, I figured; his second wife, I thought, or maybe some piece of fluff he was trying to impress by taking her to a restaurant like this. ‘Polished off,’ I repeated a little more quietly. ‘I know that doesn’t mean that someone “polished off” the olives. As in “getting rid of them” or “blowing them away”.’

  From the corner of my eye I saw that Claire had turned her head and was gazing out the window. Things were not off to a good start; the evening was already ruined, and there was no need for me to ruin it any further, especially not for my wife.

  But then the manager did something I hadn’t expected: I had more or less counted on seeing his mouth fall open, his lower lip start to tremble and perhaps even the start of a blush, after which he would stammer some vague apology – something he’d been taught to rattle off, a protocol for dealing with rude and difficult guests – but instead he burst out laughing. What’s more, it was a real laugh, not a fake or polite laugh.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, raising his hand to his mouth; the fingers were still curled up as they’d been when he pointed at the olives a minute ago, only the pinkie was sticking out. ‘I never thought about it like that.’

  6

  ‘What’s with the suit?’ I asked Claire, after we had both said that we’d like the aperitif of the house and the floor manager had walked away from our table.

  Claire raised her hand and brushed my cheek. ‘Sweetheart …’

  ‘No, listen, it’s weird, he’s wearing it for a reason, right? You’re not going to tell me that it’s not on purpose?’

  My wife gave me a lovely smile, the smile she always bestowed on me when she thought I was getting worked up about nothing – a smile that so much as said that she found all the fuss entertaining at best, but that I mustn’t think for one second that she was going to take it seriously.

  ‘And then the tea-warmer,’ I said. ‘Why not a teddy bear? Why not hold a silent vigil?’

  Claire took a Peloponnesian olive from the plate and put it in her mouth. ‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘Lovely. Too bad, though, you really can taste that the rosemary has had too little sunlight.’

  Now it was my turn to smile; the rosemary, the manager had told us finally, was ‘home-grown’, from a glassed-in herbarium behind the restaurant. ‘Did you notice how he points with his pinkie all the time?’ I said, opening the menu.

  What I was in fact planning to do was look at the prices of the entrées: the prices in restaurants like this always fascinate me. Let me make it clear right away that I’m not stingy by nature, that has nothing to do with it; I’m also not going to claim that money is no object, but I’m light years removed from people who say it’s a ‘waste of money’ to eat in a restaurant while ‘at home you can make things that are so much nicer’. No, people like that don’t understand anything, not about food and not about restaurants.

  My fascination isn’t that kind of fascination; it has to do with what, for the sake of convenience, I’d call the yawning chasm between the dish itself and the price you have to pay for it: as though the two variables – money on one side, food on the other – have nothing to do with each other, as though they inhabit two separate worlds and have no business being side by side on the same menu.

  That was what I was planning to do: I was going to read the names of the dishes, and then the prices that were printed next to them, but my eye was caught by something on the left-hand page.

  I looked, looked again, then peered around the restaurant to see if I could spot the manager’s suit.

  ‘What is it?’ Claire asked.

  ‘Did you see what it says here?’

  My wife looked at me questioningly.

  ‘It says: “Aperitif of the house, ten euros”.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘But that’s insane, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘The man said: “We’d like to offer you the aperitif of the house,” right? “The aperitif of the house is pink champagne.” So what are you sup
posed to think? You think they’re offering you the pink champagne, or am I nuts? If they offer you something, you get it, right? “Can we offer you the this-or-that of the house?” Then it doesn’t cost ten euros, it’s free!’

  ‘No, wait a minute, not always. If the menu says “steak à la maison”, steak of the house in other words, all it means is that it was prepared according to the recipe of the house. No, that’s not a good example … House wine! Wine of the house: that doesn’t mean you get the wine for free, does it?’

  ‘All right, okay, that’s obvious. But this is different. I hadn’t even looked at a menu yet. Someone in a three-piece suit pulls back your chair for you, puts down a lousy little plate of olives and then says something about offering you the aperitif of the house. That’s at least a little confusing, isn’t it? Then it sounds as though you’re getting it, not that you have to pay ten euros for it, right? Ten euros! Ten! Look at it this way: would we have ordered a small glass of bland pink champagne if we’d known that it cost ten euros?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying. They trick you into it with that horseshit about the “aperitif of the house”.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  I looked at my wife, but she looked back earnestly. ‘No, I’m not pulling your leg,’ she said. ‘You’re right. It really is different from steak à la maison or a house wine. It is weird. It’s almost like they do it on purpose, to see if you’ll fall for it.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’