The Dinner

by Herman Koch

  He’s distancing himself, I thought. Not distancing himself, I corrected myself right away: he’s saying goodbye.

  ‘Paul, you simply can’t say things like that to a fifteen-year-old girl,’ he said. A more neutral tone had come into his voice as well. He was not going to enter into a discussion with me; he was delivering his judgement. I knew for certain that if I had asked him at that moment why you couldn’t say things like that, his reply would have been: ‘Because you can’t.’

  For a brief moment, I thought about the girl. She had a sweet, but too-cheerful face. Cheerful for no good reason. A happy but sexless cheer was what it was, just as happy and sexless as the page and a half she had dedicated in her paper to the picking of oranges.

  ‘Things like that may be something you shout from the stands at a soccer match,’ the principal went on, ‘but not at a high school. At least, not at our school, and certainly not by a teacher.’

  Exactly what I said to that girl doesn’t matter here, let me be clear about that. It would only distract us from the real issue. It would add nothing. Sometimes things come out of your mouth that you regret later on. Or no, not regret. You say something so razor-sharp that the person you say it to carries it around with them for the rest of their life.

  I thought about her cheerful face. When I had said to her what I said, it broke down the middle. Like a vase. Or like a glass that shatters at a high-pitched note.

  I looked at the principal and felt my hand curling into a fist. I couldn’t help it, I had no desire to continue with the discussion. What’s the phrase again … Our positions had become irreconcilable. That was what was happening. A chasm was yawning. Sometimes talk comes to an end.

  I looked at the principal and imagined planting my fist right in the middle of that grey face of his. Just below the nose, the knuckles against that blank area between nostrils and upper lip. Teeth would break, blood would spurt from his nose, my position would be made clear. But I doubted whether that would help to resolve our differences. I wouldn’t have to stop after that first punch, of course, I could rebuild that bland face in its entirety, but at best into something equally bland. My position at school would become untenable, as they put it, although that was the least of my worries at that moment. In all frankness, my position had been untenable for a long time. From the very first day that I walked through the front door of this school, one could have spoken of an untenable position. The rest was a temporary reprieve. All the hours that I had stood in front of classes here: they had never been anything but a reprieve.

  The question was whether I should do the principal the favour of giving him a beating. Whether I should make him a victim. Someone for whom people would feel pity later on. I pictured the students crowding to the window as he was taken away in the ambulance. Yes, an ambulance would have to be called; I would not stop before the job was finished. In the end, the students would feel pity for him.

  ‘Paul?’ the principal said, shifting his weight in his chair. He could smell something. He smelled danger. He was looking for a stance in which to roll with the first blow as well as he could.

  And if the ambulance were to drive away without the lights flashing? I thought to myself. I took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. I had to decide quickly now, otherwise it would be too late. I could beat him to death. With my bare fists. It would be a dirty job, admittedly, but no dirtier than field-dressing a wild animal. Dressing a turkey, I corrected myself. He had a wife at home, I knew that, and some older children. Who knows, maybe I would be doing them a service. It was quite possible that they had grown tired of that bland face of his. At the funeral they would display their grief, but after that, in the entrance hall, relief would quickly gain the upper hand.

  ‘Paul?’

  I looked at the principal. I smiled.

  ‘Could I ask you a personal question?’ he asked. ‘I thought, perhaps there’s something … I mean, I’m only asking. How are things at home, Paul? Is everything all right at home?’

  At home. I kept smiling, but I was thinking about Michel the whole time. Michel was almost four. In the Netherlands, for beating to death a fellow human, you might receive eight years, I figured. It wasn’t much. With a little good behaviour, a little raking around the prison grounds, you would be out the gates within five. Michel would be nine by then.

  ‘How are things with your wife … with Carla?’

  Claire, I corrected the principal soundlessly. Her name is Claire.

  ‘Wonderful,’ I said.

  ‘And the kids? How are they?’

  The kids. Even that was too much for this asshole to remember! It was impossible to remember everything about everyone, of course. That the French teacher lived with her girlfriend was an exception. Because it stood out. But all the others? The others did not stand out. They all had a husband or a wife and children. Or no children. Or only one child. Michel’s bike still had training wheels. If I were in prison, I wouldn’t get to see the moment when the training wheels were taken off. Only hear about it.

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Sometimes it’s amazing how quickly it all goes. How quickly they grow up.’

  The principal folded his hands and placed them on his desktop, ignorant of the fact that he had just crept through the eye of the needle.

  For Michel. For Michel, I would keep my hands to myself.

  ‘Paul. You may not like my saying this, I know, but I have to say it anyway. I think it would be good if you made an appointment with Van Dieren. With the school psychologist. And if you were to take a short break from teaching, just for a while. So you can recharge your batteries. I think you need it. We all need it from time to time.’

  I was remarkably calm. Calm and fatigued. There would be no violence. It was like a storm coming up: the café chairs are carried inside, the awnings are rolled up, but nothing happens. The storm passes over. And, at the same time, that’s too bad. After all, we would all rather see the roofs ripped from the houses, the trees uprooted and tossed through the air; documentaries about tornados, hurricanes and tsunamis have a soothing effect. Of course it’s terrible, we’ve all been taught to say that we think it’s terrible, but a world without disasters and violence – be it the violence of nature or that of muscle and blood – would be the truly unbearable thing.

  The principal could go home later, undamaged. In the evening he would sit at the table with his wife and children. With his bland presence he would fill the chair that would otherwise have remained vacant. No one would be going to intensive care or to the funeral home, quite simply because it had just been decided that way.

  Actually, I’d known from the very start. From the moment he started talking about home. How are things at home? It’s another way of saying that they want to get rid of you, that they’re going to dump you. It’s nobody’s business how things are at home. It’s like ‘Did you enjoy your meal?’ That’s nobody’s business either.

  When I agreed without further ado to talk to the school psychologist, the principal looked genuinely surprised. Pleasantly surprised. No, I was not going to give him the slightest reason to push me aside without a struggle. I stood up, to indicate that, as far as I was concerned, our meeting was over.

  At the door, I held out my hand. And he shook it. He shook the hand that could have added a new twist to his life – or ended it completely.

  ‘I’m glad you’re taking it so …’ he said; he didn’t finish his sentence. ‘And please give my warmest regards to … to your wife,’ he said.

  ‘To Carla,’ I said.

  31

  And so, a few days later, I went to the school psychologist. To Van Dieren. At home, I told the truth. I told Claire that I wanted to take things a bit easier for a while. I told her about the medication the psychologist had prescribed, by way of the family doctor. This was after a first appointment that had lasted barely thirty minutes.

  ‘And oh yeah,’ I said to Claire. ‘He advised me to wear sunglasses.’

  ‘Sunglasses?’


  ‘He said too many things were getting to me and that it might help to reduce the stimuli.’

  I was keeping back only a small part of the truth, I reasoned. By keeping back only a small part, I could avoid having to tell a barefaced lie.

  The psychologist had mentioned a name. A German-sounding name. It was the surname of the neurologist who’d had this particular disorder named after him.

  ‘With therapy, I can influence it a little,’ Van Dieren had said, looking at me earnestly, ‘but you should see it primarily as a neurological matter. With the right medication, it can be kept under control quite effectively.’

  Then he had asked me whether, as far as I knew, there were other members of my family with a similar complaint or symptoms. I thought about my parents, then about my grandparents. I ran through the whole laundry list of uncles and aunts and cousins, trying to keep in mind what Van Dieren had said, namely, that the syndrome was often hard to detect: people tended to function normally, they were at most a little withdrawn, he said. In a social setting they were either the ones with the biggest mouths, or they said nothing at all.

  At last, I shook my head. I couldn’t think of anyone.

  ‘But you asked about my family,’ I said. ‘Does that mean it’s hereditary?’

  ‘Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. We always try to take family histories into account. Do you have children?’

  It took a moment for the full implications to sink in. Until that point I had been thinking only about where my genes had come from. Now, for the first time, I thought about Michel.

  ‘Mr Lohman?’

  ‘Just a moment.’

  I thought about my son, who was almost four. About the floor of his bedroom, littered with toy cars. For the first time in my life I thought about the way he played with those cars. The next moment I wondered whether, from now on, I would ever be able to see it any differently.

  And what about the daycare centre? Hadn’t they noticed anything at the daycare centre? I racked my brains, trying to remember whether anything had ever been said, a passing remark about Michel withdrawing from the group or displaying other aberrant behaviour – but I couldn’t come up with anything.

  ‘Is it taking you so long to figure out whether you have children?’ the psychologist asked with a smile.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s just that …’

  ‘Maybe you’re thinking about having them.’

  To this day, I’m sure I didn’t even blink when I answered.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Would you advise against it? In my case?’

  Van Dieren leaned his elbows on the desk and folded his hands beneath his chin. ‘No. That is to say, these days, it’s quite possible to identify defects like that before birth. With a pregnancy test or amniocentesis. Of course, you have to be aware of what you’re getting into. Terminating a pregnancy is no trifling matter.’

  A number of things flashed through my mind then. One by one, I held them up to the light. I could only deal with them one by one. I hadn’t lied when I answered the psychologist’s question by saying that we were thinking about having children. At most, I had omitted to say that we already had one. It had been a very trying birth. The first few years after Michel was born, Claire had refused to even consider getting pregnant again, but lately it had come up more often. We both realized that we would have to decide soon, otherwise the difference in age between Michel and a little brother or sister would be too great – if it wasn’t already.

  ‘So a test like that could show whether a child has inherited this disorder?’ I asked; my mouth was drier than it had been a few minutes earlier, I noticed, and I had to moisten my lips with the tip of my tongue before I could talk normally.

  ‘Well, I should probably correct myself there. What I just said was that the illness could be identified even in the amniotic fluid, but it’s not quite like that. At best, it’s the other way around. The amniocentesis can show that something’s not right, but precisely what is something only further testing can tell us.’

  It had already become an illness, I noted. We had started with a defect and then, by way of a disorder and a syndrome, ended up with an illness.

  ‘But in any case, it’s reason enough for an abortion,’ I said. ‘Even without further testing?’

  ‘Listen. With Down’s Syndrome, for example, or what they call spina bifida, we can see clear signs in the amniotic fluid. In those cases we always advise the parents to terminate the pregnancy. With this illness, though, we find ourselves in a grey area. But we always warn the parents. In actual practice, most people decide not to run the risk.’

  Van Dieren had started using the word ‘we’. As though he represented the entire medical profession. But he was only a plain old psychologist. And a school psychologist at that. That was about as low on the totem pole as you could get.

  Had Claire ever had an amniotic fluid test? The stupid thing was, I didn’t know. I had gone along with her almost every time: to the first ultrasound, the first prenatal exercise class – only the first one, thank God; Claire had found it even more ridiculous than I did that the husband was expected to pant and puff along – the first visit to the midwife, which was also immediately the last visit. ‘I don’t want any midwives pawing me!’ she had said.

  But Claire had also gone to the hospital alone a few times. There was no sense in me missing half a day’s work for a routine visit to her gynaecologist at the hospital, she had said.

  I was about to ask Van Dieren whether all pregnant woman were given an amniotic fluid test, or only a particular high-risk group, but gulped back the question right away.

  ‘Were there amniotic fluid tests thirty or forty years ago?’ I asked instead.

  The school psychologist thought about it for a moment. ‘I don’t believe so. No, now that you mention it. In fact, I’m a hundred per cent sure. That was definitely not something they did back then, no.’

  We looked at each other; at that moment, I was also a hundred per cent sure that Van Dieren and I were thinking the same thing.

  But he didn’t say it. He probably didn’t dare to say it, so I said it for him.

  ‘In other words, the inadequate state of medical science forty years ago is the only reason I’m sitting here across from you today?’ I said. ‘That I’m here at all,’ I added; it was a superfluous thing to add, but I felt like hearing it from my own mouth.

  Van Dieren nodded slowly, a smile of amusement appeared on his face.

  ‘If you put it that way,’ he said. ‘Had this test been available back then, it’s not entirely unimaginable that your parents would have decided to be safe rather than sorry.’

  32

  I took the pills. For the first few days nothing happened. But I’d been told that beforehand: that nothing would happen, that the effects would become noticeable only after a couple of weeks. Still, it struck me that Claire had started looking at me differently from the very beginning.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked, several times a day.

  ‘Fine,’ was my stock answer.

  And it was actually true. I felt quite fine, I relished the change, above all I relished the fact that I didn’t have to get up in front of the classroom every day: all those faces looking at me, for a full hour, and then other faces that came in for the next hour, and on and on, one hour after the next; if you’ve never stood in front of a class, you don’t know what it’s like.

  After a little less than a week, earlier than predicted, the medication began to take effect. I hadn’t expected it to be like that. I had been dreading it; I especially dreaded the thought that it would kick in without my noticing. Personality change, that was my biggest fear: that my personality would be affected, that I would become, though more bearable to those around me, lost to myself. I had read the information leaflets, and they included absolutely alarming contraindications. ‘Nausea’, ‘dry skin’ and a ‘decreased appetite’ were things you could live with, but they also talked about ‘feelings
of fear’, ‘hyperventilation’ and ‘memory loss’.

  ‘This is really potent stuff,’ I told Claire. ‘I’m going to take it, I don’t have any choice, but I want you to promise that you’ll warn me if it goes wrong. If I start forgetting things or acting weird, you have to tell me. Then I’ll stop.’

  But my fears proved unfounded. It was on a Sunday afternoon, about five days after I had gulped down the first pills, I was lying on the couch in the living room with the big, fat Saturday newspaper on my lap. Through the sliding glass doors I looked out at the garden, where it had just started to rain. It was one of those days of fluffy white clouds and patches of blue in between, the wind was blowing hard.

  I should mention right away that in the months that went before all of this, my own house, my own living room, and along with it, above all, my own presence in that house and in that living room had often frightened me. The fear was directly connected to the existence of so many other people in similar houses and living rooms. Especially in the evening, after dark, when most people were ‘at home’, this fear would quickly take over. From where I lay on the couch I could see, through the bushes and trees, the light from windows across the street. I rarely saw actual people, but those lit windows betrayed their presence – just as my own lit window betrayed my presence. I don’t want to give the wrong impression, I wasn’t afraid of people themselves, of people as a species. I don’t suffer from panic attacks in big crowds, and I’m also not the antisocial guest at parties, the loner no one wants to talk to, whose body language itself announces nothing more loudly than his desire to be left alone. No, it’s something else. It had to do with the provisional status of all those people in their living rooms, in their houses, their housing blocks, their neatly laid-out neighbourhoods of streets, each of which directly leads to another, each square connected by streets to the next square.