by Herman Koch
The next step had been the conversion of what was formerly a messy walk-in closet into a wine cellar. He bought racks to stack the bottles in, to let the wine age, as he put it. When guests came to dinner he began to deliver lectures about the wine being served. Babette viewed it all with a kind of bemusement; perhaps she was the first to see through him, the first not to completely believe in him and his hobby. I remember calling to talk to Serge one afternoon and getting Babette on the line. Serge wasn’t there.
‘He’s tasting wine in the Loire Valley,’ she said: there was something in her voice, something about the way she said ‘tasting wine’ and ‘Loire Valley’ – the tone a woman uses when she says her husband is working late, even though she’s known for a year that he’s having an affair with his secretary.
Claire, as I noted earlier, is smarter than I am. But she doesn’t blame me for not being her equal. What I mean to say is that she never looks down her nose at me, she doesn’t sigh deeply or roll her eyes when I don’t get something right away. Obviously I have no way of knowing how she talks about me when I’m not around, but I’m very sure, I have absolute faith in the fact, that Claire would never adopt the tone I detected in Babette’s voice when she said: ‘He’s tasting wine in the Loire Valley.’
Babette, in other words, is also much smarter than Serge. That’s not saying a hell of a lot, I might add – but I won’t: some things speak for themselves. All I want to talk about here are the things I heard and saw during our little get-together at the restaurant.
9
‘The lamb’s-neck sweetbread has been marinated in Sardinian olive oil with rocket,’ said the manager, who had by now arrived at Claire’s plate and was pointing with his pinkie at two minuscule pieces of meat. ‘The sun-dried tomatoes come from Bulgaria.’
The first thing that struck you about Claire’s plate was its vast emptiness. Of course I’m well aware that, in the better restaurants, quality takes precedence over quantity, but there are voids and then there are voids. The void here, that part of the plate on which no food at all was present, had clearly been raised to a matter of principle.
It was as though the empty plate was challenging you to say something about it, to go to the open kitchen and demand an explanation. ‘You wouldn’t even dare!’ the plate said, and laughed in your face.
I tried to recall the price; the cheapest appetizer was nineteen euros, the entrées varied from twenty-eight to forty-seven. And then there were three set menus of forty-seven, fifty-eight and seventy-nine euros each.
‘This is warm goat’s cheese with pine nuts and walnut shavings.’
The hand with the pinkie was above my own plate now. I fought back the urge to say, ‘I know, because that’s what I ordered,’ and concentrated on the pinkie.
This was the closest he had come this evening, even when pouring the wine. The manager had finally opted for the easiest solution and returned from the open kitchen with a new bottle, the cork already sticking halfway out of the neck.
After the wine cellar and the trip to the Loire Valley, there had been the six-week wine course. Not in France, but in a classroom at a night school. Serge had hung the diploma in the hallway, somewhere no one could possibly miss it. A bottle with the cork sticking out of it could contain something very different from what was on the label: that must have been dealt with during one of his very first lessons in that classroom. It could have been messed with; a malicious person could have diluted the wine with tap water, or dribbled saliva down the neck.
But after the aperitif of the house and the broken cork, Serge Lohman was apparently not in the mood for any more mucking about. Without looking at the manager, he had wiped his lips with his napkin and mumbled that the wine was ‘excellent’.
At that moment I glanced over at Babette. Her eyes behind the tinted lenses were fixed on her husband; it was almost impossible to tell, but I would almost have sworn that she had raised an eyebrow when he passed his judgement on the pre-uncorked wine. In the car, on the way to the restaurant, he had made her cry, but by now her eyes were looking much less swollen. I hoped she would say something, something to get back at him: she was entirely capable of that, Babette could be very sarcastic when she put her mind to it. ‘He’s tasting wine in the Loire Valley’ had been one of the mildest expressions of that.
In my mind, I egged her on. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. When it came right down to it, that might be the best thing: a huge, knock-down, drag-out fight between Serge and Babette before we moved on to the main course. I would speak soothing words, pretend not to take sides, but she would know that she could count on me.
To my regret, though, Babette said nothing at all. You could almost see the way she gulped back her undoubtedly murderous comment about the cork. But still, something had now taken place that kept alive my hopes of an explosion later in the evening. It’s like a pistol in a stage play: when someone waves a pistol during the first act, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone will be shot with it before the curtain falls. That’s the law of drama. The law that says no pistol must appear if no one’s going to fire it.
‘This is corn salad,’ the manager said; I looked at the pinkie, which was no more than a centimetre away from the three or four curly little green leaves and the melted chunk of goat’s cheese, and then at the entire hand, which was so close that I would only have had to lean forward a little to kiss it.
Why had I ordered this appetizer, when I don’t even like goat’s cheese? To say nothing of corn salad. This time the stingy portions worked in my favour: my plate too was mostly empty, although not as empty as Claire’s; I could have devoured the three leaves in a single bite – or simply left them lying on the plate, which amounted to pretty much the same thing.
Whenever I see corn salad I’m reminded of the little cage with the hamster or guinea pig that stood on the windowsill of our classroom in elementary school. It was there because it was good for us to learn about animals – to learn to take care of animals, I suppose. Whether the little leaves we pushed through the bars of the cage each morning were corn salad, I can’t remember, but they looked a lot like it. The hamster or guinea pig nibbled at the leaves and then spent the rest of the day sitting in one corner of its cage. One morning it was dead, just like the little turtle, the two white mice and the stick insects that had preceded it. What we were supposed to learn from this high mortality rate was never dealt with in the class.
The reason why I now had a plate of warm goat’s cheese with corn salad in front of me was simpler than it seemed. I had been the last to order. We hadn’t really talked beforehand about what we were going to have – or maybe we had, and I’d missed it. Whatever the case, I had settled on the vitello tonnato, but Babette, to my horror, ordered exactly the same thing.
No problem: at that point, I could always switch to my second choice: the crayfish. But the next to last person to order, right after Claire, was Serge. And when Serge ordered the crayfish, I was stuck. I had no desire to order the same appetizer as someone else, but to have the same appetizer as my brother was out of the question. Theoretically speaking I could have switched back to the vitello tonnato, but that was purely theoretical. It didn’t feel right: not only would it look as though I wasn’t original enough to choose an appetizer of my own, but it might, in Serge’s eyes, raise the suspicion that I was trying to close ranks with his wife. Which was true, of course, but I couldn’t be so obvious.
I had already closed the menu and laid it beside my plate. Now I opened it again. Reading like lightning, I skimmed down through the list of appetizers, adopting a thoughtful expression, as though I was only looking for the dish I’d already chosen in order to point it out on the menu, but by then of course it was much too late.
‘And for you, sir?’ the manager asked.
‘The melted goat’s cheese with corn salad,’ I said.
It came out a little too readily, a little too sure-of-myself to sound credible. Serge and Babette didn’t
notice a thing, but across the table I saw the look of bewilderment on Claire’s face.
Would she try to protect me from myself? Would she say, ‘But you don’t like goat’s cheese?’ I wasn’t sure; at that moment too many pair of eyes were on me for me to shake my head at her, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
‘I hear the goat cheese is from an urban farm,’ I said. ‘From goats that live out in the open.’
At last, after he had granted thorough attention to Babette’s vitello tonnato, the vitello tonnato that, in the best of all worlds, could have been my vitello tonnato, the manager left and we were able to resume our conversation. ‘Resume’ was not exactly the right word, though; as it turned out, none of us had the slightest idea what we’d been talking about before the appetizers arrived. That was one of the disadvantages of these so-called top restaurants: all the interruptions, like the exaggeratedly detailed review of every pine nut on your plate, the endless uncorking of wine bottles and the unsolicited topping up of glasses, made you lose track.
As far as that continual topping-up goes, let me say this: I have travelled a bit, I have been to restaurants in many countries, but nowhere – and when I say nowhere I literally mean nowhere – do they top up your wine without you asking for it. They would consider that rude. Only in Holland do they come up to your table all the time; not only do they top up your glass, but they also cast a wistful eye at the bottle when it seems to be getting empty. ‘Isn’t it about time to order another one?’ is what those looks are meant to say.
I know someone, an old friend, who spent a few years working in Dutch ‘top restaurants’. Their tactic, he told me once, is to actually force as much wine as possible down your throat, wine they sell for seven times what the importer charges for it, and that’s why they always wait so long between bringing the appetizer and taking orders for the entrée: people will order more wine out of pure boredom, just to kill time, that’s the way they figure it. The appetizer usually arrives quite quickly, my friend said, because if the appetizer takes too long people start complaining. They start to doubt their choice of restaurant, but after a while, when they’ve had too much drink between appetizer and entrée, they lose track of time. He knew of cases where the entrées had been ready for a long time, but remained on the plates in the kitchen because the people at the table in question weren’t complaining. Only when there was a lull in the conversation and the customers began to look around impatiently were the plates shoved into the microwave.
What had we been talking about before the appetizers came? Not that it really mattered, it couldn’t have been anything important, but that was what made it so irritating. I could remember what we’d said after all the fuss with the cork and the placing of our orders, but I had no idea what had been going on right before our plates arrived.
Babette had joined a new gym, we’d talked about that a bit: about losing weight, the importance of remaining active and which sport was best for which person. Claire was thinking about joining a health club, and Serge had said he couldn’t stand the obtrusive music at most places like that. That’s why he had taken up running, he said, where you could be out on your own in the fresh air, and he acted as though he had come up with the idea all by himself. He conveniently forgot that I had started running years ago, and how he had never missed an opportunity to make snide comments about his ‘little brother out trotting around’.
Yes, that’s what we had talked about at first, for rather too long for my taste, but an innocent subject to be sure, a fairly typical prelude to a standard restaurant evening. But for the rest of the evening? Not if my life depended on it. I looked at Serge, at my wife, and then at Babette. At that moment, Babette jabbed her fork into her vitello tonnato, cut off a slice and raised it to her mouth.
‘But now I’ve completely forgotten,’ she said, the fork poised in the air. ‘Did you say you two have already seen the new Woody Allen, or not?’
10
When the conversation turns too quickly to films, I see it as a sign of weakness. I mean: films are more something for the end of the evening, when you really don’t have much else to talk about. I don’t know why, but when people start talking about films I always get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, like when you wake up after a bad night and find that it’s already getting dark outside.
The worst are those people who describe entire films; they get right into it, they have no qualms about taking up fifteen minutes of your time – fifteen minutes per film, that is. They don’t really care whether you haven’t yet seen the film in question, or whether you saw it a long time ago: such considerations don’t bother them, they’re already right in the middle of the opening scene. To be polite you feign interest at first, but soon you bid farewell to courtesy, you yawn openly, stare at the ceiling and squirm around in your chair. You do everything in your power to make the narrator shut up, but nothing helps; they’re too far gone to notice the signals; above all, they’re addicted to themselves and their own crap about films.
I believe it was my brother who started in about the new Woody Allen.
‘A masterpiece,’ he said, without asking whether we – that is, Claire and I – might have seen it already. Babette nodded emphatically at this; they had seen it together last weekend, they were in agreement about something for a change.
‘A masterpiece,’ she said. ‘Really, you two have to go.’
To which Claire said that we had already been. ‘Two months ago,’ I added, which in fact was unnecessary; it was just something I felt like saying, it wasn’t aimed at Babette but at my brother. I wanted to let him know that he was running pretty far behind with his masterpieces.
At that moment an entire bevy of girls in black pinafores arrived with our appetizers, followed by the manager and his pinkie, and we lost track of where we were – until Babette picked up the thread again with her question about whether or not we had already seen it, the new Woody Allen.
‘I thought it was a great film,’ Claire said as she dipped a sun-dried tomato in the olive oil on her plate and raised it to her lips. ‘Even Paul liked it. Didn’t you, Paul?’
Claire does that all the time: draw me into things in a way that I can’t back out. Now the others already knew that I had liked it, and ‘even Paul’ meant something along the lines of ‘even Paul, who usually doesn’t like any film, especially something by Woody Allen’.
Serge looked at me, a morsel of appetizer still in his mouth, he was chewing on it, but that didn’t stop him from addressing himself to me. ‘A masterpiece, right? No, really, fantastic.’ He went on chewing and then gulped. ‘And that Scarlett Johansson, I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers. Good Lord, what a beauty!’
Hearing your older brother refer to a film you yourself think is pretty good as a ‘masterpiece’ is kind of like having to wear that brother’s old clothes: the hand-me-downs that have become too small for him, but which in your eyes are above all old. My options were limited: admitting that Woody Allen’s film was a masterpiece would be like wriggling into those old clothes, and therefore out of the question; there was no superlative for ‘masterpiece’, so the most I could do was try to prove that Serge hadn’t understood the film, that he considered it a masterpiece for all the wrong reasons, but that would involve a lot of effort; it would be laying it on rather thick for Claire, and probably for Babette as well.
In fact, there was only one option left, and that was to run Woody Allen’s film into the ground. It wouldn’t be too hard: there were enough weaknesses I could point out, weaknesses that don’t really matter when you like a film but that you can make use of in an emergency, in order to dislike the same film. Claire would raise her eyebrows at first, then hopefully realize what I was doing: that my betrayal of our shared appreciation for the film was in the service of the struggle against spineless, show-offy crap about films in general.
I reached for my glass of Chablis, intending first to take a thoughtful sip before carrying out this latter
strategy, when suddenly I saw another way out. What was it my idiot brother had said, anyway? About Scarlett Johansson? ‘Kick her out of bed for eating crackers … a beauty’ – I didn’t know what Babette thought of that kind of crass macho talk, but Claire always got up on her hind legs when men started on about ‘sweet asses’ and ‘nice tits’. I’d been looking at my brother when he said that about the crackers, and had missed her reaction, but that wasn’t really even necessary.
Sometimes, recently, I had had the impression that he was starting to lose touch with reality, that he seriously thought the Scarlett Johanssons of this world would like nothing more than to eat crackers in his bed. I suspected him of viewing women in more or less the same way that he viewed food, his daily hot meal in particular. That was how he used to be, and to be honest it’s never really changed.
‘I need to eat something,’ Serge says when he’s hungry. He’ll say that when you’re out hiking somewhere in a national park, far from civilization, or driving down the highway, between two exits.
‘Sure,’ I say then, ‘but right now we don’t have anything to eat.’
‘But I’m hungry right now,’ Serge will say. ‘I need to eat now.’
There was something pitiful about it, this dumb resolve that would make him forget everything else – his surroundings, the people he was with – and focus on only one objective: sating his own hunger. At moments like this he reminded me of an animal that encounters an obstacle in its path: a bird that doesn’t understand that the glass in the windowpane is made of solid matter and flies into it again and again.
And when we would finally find a place to eat, it was never a pretty sight. He would eat the way one fills the tank with petrol: he would devour his cheese sandwich with white bread or his almond cake quickly and efficiently, to make sure the fuel reached his stomach as soon as possible; without fuel there was no way you could go on. The real fine dining came much later, like his knowledge of wine; at a certain point he decided it was necessary, but the speed and efficiency remained: even these days, he was always the first to empty his plate.