The Dinner

by Herman Koch

  I would have paid a fortune to see and hear just once how things went in the bedroom between him and Babette. On the other hand, there is a part of me that would actually resist that with every fibre of my being, that would pay an equally great fortune never to have to find out.

  ‘I need to fuck.’ And then Babette saying she has a headache, that she’s having her period or that this evening she doesn’t even want to think about it, about his body, his arms and legs, his head, his smell. ‘But I need to fuck right now.’ I bet my brother fucks the way he eats, that he stuffs himself into a woman in the same way he stuffs a beef croquette into his mouth – and that his hunger is then stilled.

  ‘So you were mostly sitting there looking at Scarlett Johansson’s tits,’ I say, much more crudely than I’d planned. ‘Or do you mean something else when you say “a masterpiece”?’

  A miraculous kind of silence fell then, the kind you hear only in restaurants: a sudden, raised awareness of the presence of others, the buzzing and the click of cutlery on plates at thirty other tables, the one or two becalmed seconds when background noises become foreground noises.

  The first thing to break the silence was Babette’s laughter; I glanced up at my wife, who was staring at me in dismay, and then back at Serge; he was trying to laugh too, but his heart wasn’t in it – what’s more, he still had food in his mouth.

  ‘Come, come, Paul, not so holier-than-thou!’ he said. ‘She just happens to be a babe, a man has eyes in his head, doesn’t he?’

  ‘A babe,’ Claire wouldn’t like that one either, I knew that. She would always say ‘a good-looking man’, never ‘tasty’, let alone ‘nice ass’. ‘All that fashionable talk about “nice asses”, it’s too contrived for me, when women start talking like that,’ she’d said once. ‘It’s like when women suddenly start smoking pipes or spitting on the ground.’

  Through and through, Serge had remained a yokel, a boorish lout: the same boorish lout who used to get sent from the table for farting.

  ‘I also think Scarlett Johansson is a very attractive woman,’ I said. ‘But it sounded sort of like you thought that was the most significant thing about the film. Do correct me if I’m wrong.’

  ‘Well, things go completely wrong with that, what’s his name, that Englishman, the tennis teacher, because he can’t get her off his mind. He even has to shoot her just to get what he wants.’

  ‘Hey!’ Babette said. ‘Don’t say that, that ruins it if you haven’t seen it yet!’ Another brief silence descended, during which Babette looked from Claire to me. ‘Oh shit, I think I must have been asleep, you two did see it already!’

  11

  We all laughed, all four of us, a moment of release – but too much release was not good, one had to remain on one’s toes. The simple truth was that Serge Lohman had a nice ass himself, you heard women say it often enough. He was all too aware that they found him attractive, and there was nothing wrong with that; he was photogenic, he possessed a certain – again, loutish – attractiveness: a bit too in your face and a bit too much rough timber, if you asked me, but of course there are women who prefer plain furnishings, tables or chairs made from ‘authentic materials’: scrap wood from old stall doors in northern Spain or Piedmont.

  Serge’s girlfriends had usually given up on him after a few months; there was a boring, matter-of-fact side to that attractiveness, so they soon tired of his ‘pretty face’. Babette was the only one who had stuck longer with him, about eighteen years now, which in itself was something of a miracle – they had been squabbling for eighteen years; it was pretty clear that they didn’t really suit each other at all, but you often see that: couples for whom constant friction is the real engine of their marriage, every fight the foreplay to the moment when they can make up in bed.

  But sometimes I couldn’t help think that it was all much simpler than that, that Babette had merely signed up for something, for a life at the side of a successful politician, and that it would have been a waste of all the time she’d invested to stop now: the way you don’t put aside a bad book when you’re halfway through it, you finish it reluctantly; that’s the way she’d stayed with Serge – perhaps the ending would make up for some of it.

  They had two children of their own: Rick, who was Michel’s age, and Valerie, a slightly autistic thirteen-year-old with an almost translucent, mermaid-like beauty. And then there was Beau, exact age unknown, but probably somewhere between fourteen and seventeen. Beau came from Burkina Faso and had ended up with Serge and Babette via a ‘development project’: one of those where you support schoolchildren in the Third World by buying them books and other necessities, and then ‘adopt’ them: at a distance to start with, by means of letters and photographs and postcards, but later in real life as well. The chosen child then lives with the Dutch foster family for a while, and if that goes well, they are allowed to stay. A sort of hire purchase agreement, in other words. Or like a cat you bring home from the animal shelter; if the cat scratches the sofa to bits or pisses all over the house, you take it back.

  I remember a few of the photographs and postcards Beau had sent from faraway Burkina Faso. In the photo that stayed with me the longest you saw him standing in front of a red-brick building with a corrugated-iron roof, a pitch-black boy in a striped pyjama top that reached to just below his knees, like a nightgown, his bare feet in rubber sandals.

  ‘Merci beaucoup mes parents pour notre école’ was written beneath it in a graceful, schoolboy hand.

  ‘Isn’t he darling?’ Babette had said when she showed it to us. They had travelled to Burkina Faso and lost their hearts, as Serge and Babette themselves put it.

  A second trip followed, forms were filled in, and a few weeks later Beau landed at Schiphol Airport.

  ‘Do you two know what you’re getting into?’ Claire had asked them once, back in the days when the whole adoption was still at the postcard stage. They had reacted indignantly. They were helping someone, weren’t they? A child who would never have the opportunities in his own country that he would in Holland? Yes, they knew very well what they were getting into; there were already far too many people in the world who thought only about themselves.

  You couldn’t accuse them of outright egotism. Rick was three at the time, Valerie was only a few months old; they weren’t like most adoptive parents who couldn’t have children of their own. In completely selfless fashion they were taking a third child into their home, not their own flesh and blood, but a needy child who was being offered a new life in Holland.

  So then, what was it? What, indeed, were they getting into?

  Serge and Babette made it clear to us that this question was not to be posed, so we didn’t pose the other questions either. Did Beau still have parents of his own? Or was he an orphan? Parents who consented to their child going away, or an orphan alone in the world? I have to say that Babette was more fanatical about the adoption than Serge was; it was her ‘project’ from the start, something she planned to carry out successfully no matter what the cost. She did everything she could to give her adopted child just as much love as her own children.

  In the end, the word ‘adoption’ itself became taboo. ‘Beau is our son, that’s all,’ she said. ‘There is no difference.’

  At such moments, Serge would nod in agreement. ‘We love him just as much as we do Rick and Valerie,’ he said.

  There’s a possibility, of course, that he knew even then – I wouldn’t want to pass judgement or accuse him of having acted with forethought – but later on it worked to his advantage: that black child from Burkina Faso whom he loved as one of his own. It was a different sort of thing from his knowledge of wine, but it had the same effect. It gave him a face: Serge Lohman, the politician with the adopted African son.

  He began to pose more frequently for family photographs; it looked good, Serge and Babette on the couch with the three children at their feet. Beau Lohman became living proof that there was one politician who didn’t act purely out of self-interest; tha
t he, at least at one point in his life, had not acted out of self-interest. His other two children, after all, had been conceived in standard fashion, so it hadn’t been an act of desperation, this adoption of a child from Burkina Faso. That was the message: on other issues as well, perhaps, Serge Lohman would not act purely out of self-interest.

  A waitress topped up Serge’s glass, then mine; Babette’s and Claire’s were still half full. The waitress was a pretty girl, as golden blonde as Scarlett Johansson. It took her a long time, filling the glasses; it was clear that she was fairly new at it and probably hadn’t been working here long. First she took the bottle from the cooler and dried it completely with the white napkin draped over the bottleneck and the edge of the bucket; the pouring itself didn’t go too smoothly either: she stood beside Serge’s chair at such an angle that she accidentally elbowed Claire in the head.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ she said, and blushed deeply. Of course Claire said right away that it was no problem, but the girl was now so flustered that she filled Serge’s glass all the way to the top. No problem there either – except for a wine connoisseur.

  ‘Hey, hey, hey,’ my brother said. ‘Are you trying to get me drunk or something?’ He slid his chair back a couple of feet, as though the girl hadn’t filled his glass too full but had actually spilled half the bottle over his pants. Now she blushed even more deeply, she blinked, and for a moment I thought she was going to burst into tears. Like the other girls in black pinafores, she had her hair tied up tightly in a regulation ponytail, but its golden blondeness made it look less severe than the others’.

  She had a sweet face. I couldn’t help myself, I thought about the moment when she would pull the elastic band from her ponytail and shake her hair loose, later tonight when her day at the restaurant was over – her terrible day, as she would tell a girlfriend (or maybe a boyfriend): ‘You know what happened to me today? So stupid, just like me! You know how I hate all that stiff etiquette stuff with the wine bottles? Well, tonight I completely lost it. That wouldn’t even be so bad, but you know who was at the table?’

  The girlfriend or boyfriend would look at the golden-blonde hair hanging loose and say: ‘No, tell me. Who was at the table?’

  For maximum effect, the girl would pause for a moment. ‘Serge Lohman!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Serge Lohman! That cabinet minister! Or maybe he’s not a real minister, but you know who I mean, he was on the news yesterday, the one who’s going to win the election. It was so dumb, there was a woman at the table too, and I smacked her in the head with my elbow.’

  ‘Oh, him … Jesus! And what happened then?’

  ‘Well, nothing, he was really nice, but I could have curled up and died!’

  Really nice … Yes, Serge had been really nice, after he’d slid his chair back a couple of feet and then raised his head and seen the girl for the first time. In a hundredth of a second, too fast to be seen by the naked eye, I saw his expression change: from feigned dismay and annoyance at the unskilled handling of his Chablis to totally empathetic friendliness. How he melted, in short; the resemblance to the only recently discussed Scarlett Johansson could not have escaped even him. He saw a ‘sweet thing’, a blushing and stammering sweet thing, and completely at his mercy. He gave her his most charming smile.

  ‘But that’s okay,’ he said, lifting his glass and causing a substantial slug of white wine to land on his half-empty plate of crayfish. ‘I should be able to finish it anyway.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, sir,’ the girl said again.

  ‘Nothing to worry about. How old are you? Are you old enough to vote?’

  At first I thought my ears were playing tricks on me. Was I actually hearing this? But just at that point my brother turned his head in my direction and gave me a big, fat wink.

  ‘I’m nineteen, sir.’

  ‘Okay, tell you what. If you vote for the right party when the elections come up, we’ll do our best to overlook your wine-pouring abilities.’

  The girl blushed again, the skin on her face turned an even darker red than before – and, for the second time within a couple of minutes, I thought she was going to burst into tears. I looked over at Babette, but there was nothing to suggest that she disapproved of her husband’s behaviour. In fact, she seemed rather amused by it: the nationally famous politician Serge Lohman, leader of the largest opposition party, a shoo-in for prime minister, openly flirting with nineteen-year-old waitresses and making them blush – maybe this was cute, maybe this only confirmed his irresistible charm, or maybe she, Babette, just happened to like being married to a man like my brother. In the car on the way here, or in the parking lot, he had made her cry. But what did that amount to, anyway? Was she suddenly going to leave him in the lurch, now, after eighteen years? Six or seven months before the elections?

  I tried to re-establish eye contact with Claire, but she seemed engrossed by Serge’s brimming wineglass and the waitress’s stammering. She ran her hand over the back of her head, over the place where the girl’s elbow had hit her – who knows, maybe harder than it had appeared, then asked: ‘Are you two going to France again this summer? Or don’t you have any plans yet?’

  12

  Every year Serge and Babette went to their house in the Dordogne with the children. They belonged to that class of Dutch people who think everything French is ‘great’: from croissants to French bread with Camembert, from French cars (they themselves drove one of the top-end Peugeots) to French chansons and French films. At the same time, they failed to see that the local French population of the Dordogne fairly retched at the sight of Dutch people. Anti-Dutch slogans had been scrawled on the walls of many résidences secondaires, but according to my brother this was the work of ‘a tiny minority’ – after all, wasn’t everyone nice to you when you went to a shop or a restaurant?

  ‘Uh … that depends,’ Serge said. ‘It’s still a bit up in the air.’

  We had visited them there for the first time a year ago, the three of us, on our way to Spain – the first time and the last, as Claire put it after we resumed our trip three days later. My brother and his wife had insisted so often that we drop by that it was becoming almost embarrassing to put it off any longer.

  The house was in a lovely location, on a hill, tucked away amid the trees. Glinting in the distance through the branches, in the valley below, you could see a bend in the Dordogne River. It was muggy the whole time we were there, not a breath of wind. Huge beetles and blowflies, of a size never seen in the Netherlands, buzzed loudly amid the leaves, or flew against the windows with smacks so hard they made the glass rattle in its sashes.

  We were introduced to the ‘mason’ who had built the open kitchen for them, to the ‘madame’ who ran the bakery, and to the owner of a ‘completely ordinary little restaurant’ along a tributary of the Dordogne, ‘where all the locals go’. Serge introduced me to everyone as ‘mon petit frère’. He seemed at ease among the French, each and every one of them just regular people, after all: regular people were his specialty in Holland, so why not here as well?

  What barely seemed to register with him was that those regular people were earning large sums of money off of him, off the Dutchman with his summer home and his money, and it was in part for that reason that they continued to exercise a modicum of courtesy.

  ‘So kind,’ Serge said. ‘So normal. Where would you find that in Holland these days?’

  He failed to notice, or maybe he just shut his eyes to it, how the ‘mason’ hocked a green tendril of chewing tobacco onto their tiled patio after mentioning the price of a shipment of authentic, rural roofing tiles for the lean-to above their outdoor kitchen. How the madame at the bakery actually wanted to go on serving her customers, but stood waiting while Serge introduced his petit frère, and how those same customers exchanged knowing nods and winks: nods and winks that spoke volumes concerning the despicable boorishness of these Dutch people. How the jovial owner of the little restaurant squatted beside our table and sa
id in a conspiratorial tone that he had, that very day, received a bag of escargots from a local farmer who normally kept them for himself. This time he had been able to buy some, though, and the owner wanted to offer them exclusively to Serge and his ‘sympathetic family’ at a ‘special price’; the taste was something we would encounter nowhere else. Meanwhile, Serge overlooked the fact that the French customers were all handed a simple menu showing the relais du jour, an inexpensive three-course menu at less than half the price of a single helping of snails. And concerning the wine-tasting in that little restaurant, I prefer to say nothing at all.

  Claire and I stayed for three days. During those three days we also visited a chateau, where we had to stand in line in front of a house with hundreds of other foreigners, mostly Dutch, before being guided through twelve swelteringly hot rooms with old poster beds and tub chairs. The rest of the time we spent largely in the airless garden. Claire tried to do some reading; it was too hot for me to even open a book, the white of the pages hurt your eyes – but it was difficult to do nothing at all: Serge was always busy with something; there were things around the house he did himself, things for which he did not have a local craftsman at his beck and call.

  ‘The people here start to respect you when you work on your own house,’ he said. ‘You notice that after a while.’

  And so he pushed his wheelbarrow forty times back and forth between the outdoor kitchen and the provincial highway, where the rural roofing tiles had been dropped. It never occurred to him for a moment that his do-it-yourselfing might be cheating the local mason out of a considerable chunk of his paid working hours.

  He sawed his own wood for the fireplace as well; sometimes it looked almost like a publicity shot for his election campaign: Serge Lohman, the people’s candidate, with a wheelbarrow, a saw and burly blocks of wood, a regular man like any other, the only difference being that few regular men could afford a summer home in the Dordogne. Perhaps that was the real reason why he never allowed a camera crew onto his ‘property’, as he referred to it. ‘This is my place,’ he himself said. ‘My place, for me and my family. It’s no one else’s business.’