by Herman Koch
The space on the floor was not fully occupied by dominoes. There were toys everywhere, toys had been slung all over the room, perhaps that’s more like it, there was almost no place to put a foot down. To say that Michel’s room was a mess would be an understatement, I saw that myself, now that I looked at it through Babette’s eyes. There was the explosion of toys, of course, but that wasn’t all. The two chairs, the couch and Michel’s bed were all covered in clothing, both clean and dirty clothing, and on his little desk and on the stool beside his (unmade) bed were plates with crumbs and half-empty glasses of milk and soda pop. Worst of all, perhaps, was the apple core that wasn’t on a plate at all, but lying on an Ajax football jersey with the name Kluivert on it. The apple core, like all apple cores exposed for more than a few minutes to sunlight and air, was a dark brown. I remembered having given Michel an apple and a glass of soda pop that very afternoon, but now you couldn’t tell that the apple core had been there for only a couple of hours, like all apple cores it looked as though it had been lying on top of that jersey for days, rotting away.
I also recalled having said to Michel that morning that later in the day we would clean up his room together. But for a variety of reasons, or rather, due to the comforting thought that there was plenty of time to clean up later on, it hadn’t happened.
As she stood there, still holding my son and running one hand affectionately over his back, I looked at Babette’s eyes and again I saw that special look. I’ll clean it up! I felt like screaming at her. If you had come by tomorrow, you could have eaten off the floor in this room. But I didn’t, I only looked at her and shrugged. It’s a bit of a mess, my shoulders said, but who cares? There are more important things to think about at the moment than a messy or tidy room.
Again, that need to explain! I didn’t want to explain, no explanations were needed, I told myself. They had dropped in without calling first. Let’s turn this around, I thought to myself, let’s turn this thing around and imagine what would happen if I suddenly showed up at my brother and sister-in-law’s door, while Babette was shaving her legs, for example, or while Serge was clipping his toenails. Then I would also see something that was essentially private, that normally wasn’t meant for the eyes of outsiders. I shouldn’t have let them in, I thought then. I should have said it was a bad moment.
On the way downstairs, after Babette had promised Michel that later, when he was finished, she would come back and watch the dominoes fall, and after I had told him that dinner was almost ready, that we were going to eat in a minute, we walked past the bathroom and the bedroom, Claire’s and my bedroom. Babette glanced at each of them quickly, she barely tried to disguise those glances, particularly at the overflowing laundry basket and the unmade bed strewn with newspapers. This time she didn’t look at me, though – and that was perhaps even more painful, more humiliating, than the special look. I had been very clear in saying to Michel, and only to Michel, that we were going to eat in a minute, I wanted to broadcast the unambiguous signal that my brother and his wife would not be invited to eat with us. They had come at a bad moment, and it was high time for them to leave.
Downstairs, in the living room, Serge was standing in front of the television with his hands in his pockets; the weekly sports news had already begun. More than anything else – more than the brazen way my brother stood there, hands in his pockets, his feet planted squarely on the carpet, as though it were his living room and not mine; more than my sister-in-law’s special looks at Michel’s room, at our room, at the laundry basket – it was the footage on the sports news, of a group of football players running laps around a sunny pitch, that told me now that my plan for the evening was about to fall to pieces; no, that it had already fallen to pieces. My evening together with Michel in front of the TV, our plates of macaroni alla carbonara on our laps, a normal evening, without his mother of course, without my wife, but a festive evening nonetheless.
‘Serge …’ Babette had walked over to my brother and laid her hand on his shoulder.
‘Yeah,’ Serge said, turned and looked at me without taking his hands out of his pockets. ‘Paul …’ he began. He stopped and looked helplessly at his wife.
Babette breathed a deep sigh. Then she took my hand and held it between her lovely, long and elegant fingers. She no longer had that special look in her eyes. Her gaze was friendly now, but resolute, as though I were no longer the initiator of the total chaos here in the house, but myself an overflowing laundry basket or unmade bed, a laundry basket that she, in no time, would empty into the washing machine, a bed she would make in the twinkling of an eye, neater than it had ever been before: a bed in a hotel, in the royal suite.
‘Paul,’ she said. ‘We know how hard this is for you. You and Michel. With Claire in the hospital and all. Of course we all hope for the best, but at this point no one knows how long this could take. And that’s why we thought that, for you, but also for Michel, it might be a good idea for him to come and stay with us for a while.’
I felt something, a white-hot rage, an ice-cold wave of panic. Whatever it was, it was probably written all over my face, because Babette squeezed my hand gently and said: ‘Take it easy, Paul. We’re only here to help.’
‘That’s right,’ Serge said. He took a step forward, for a moment it looked as though he was going to take hold of my other arm, or lay a hand on my shoulder, but decided against it.
‘You have enough on your mind with Claire,’ Babette said with a smile, as she started running a finger over the back of my hand. ‘If Michel could come with us for a little while, you’d be able to relax. And it would be a break for Michel too. He puts up a brave front, a child may not say some things out loud, but they really do notice everything.’
I took a few deep breaths, the most important thing now was not to let my voice waver.
‘I’d love to be able to invite the two of you to eat with us,’ I said, ‘but I’m afraid I wasn’t counting on visitors.’
Babette’s finger came to a halt on the back of my hand, the smile remained suspended on her face, but it was as though it had been disconnected from the emotion behind it – if there ever had been any emotion behind it. ‘We weren’t planning on eating with you, Paul,’ she said. ‘We just thought, with Claire being operated on tomorrow and all, that it would be best for Michel to come with us tonight—’
‘I was just about to sit down to dinner with my son,’ I said. ‘Your visit has come at a bad moment. So I’d like to ask the two of you to just leave now.’
‘Paul …’ Babette squeezed my hand, the smile had vanished now, replaced by something more entreating, a facial expression that didn’t suit her at all.
‘Paul,’ my brother echoed. ‘I’m sure you realize that these aren’t the most ideal conditions for a child of four.’
I yanked my hand out of Babette’s grasp. ‘What did you say?’ I asked. My voice didn’t waver at all, it sounded calm – too calm, probably.
‘Paul!’ Babette sounded alarmed, maybe she saw something I couldn’t see myself. Maybe she considered me capable of doing something rash, of doing something to Serge, but I would never have given him the satisfaction. True, the cold wave of panic had definitively given way to white-hot rage, but the fist I would have loved to plant squarely right in his noble face, so full of concern for me and my son, would have been decisive proof that I could no longer control my emotions. And a person who can’t control his emotions is not the most suitable person to run a (temporary) single-parent family. Within the last minute, I had heard my own first name repeated – how often? – five times. It’s my experience that when people go on repeating your first name, they want something from you, and it’s usually not something you want to give.
‘Serge is only trying to say that maybe it’s all a bit too much for you, Paul,’ – six times – ‘we, of all people, know that you’re doing your very best to make things seem as normal as possible for Michel. But it’s not normal. The situation isn’t normal. You need to be with Cl
aire, and with your son. In a situation like that, you can’t expect anyone to run a normal household’ – her arm was raised, her hands and fingers pointed flutteringly upstairs: at the strewn toys, the laundry basket and the messy bed covered in newspapers – ‘right now, for Michel, his father is the most important thing he has. His mother is ill. He mustn’t get the impression that his father can’t handle things any more.’
I was just about to start cleaning up around the house, I wanted to say. If you two had come an hour later … But I didn’t say it. I wasn’t going to be put on the defensive. Michel and I clean up around the house when we damn well feel like it.
‘I really do have to ask the two of you to leave now,’ I said. ‘Michel and I were going to eat fifteen minutes ago. I attach a lot of importance to regularity in such things. In this situation,’ I added.
Babette sighed, for a moment I thought she was going to say ‘Paul …’ again, but she looked from me to Serge, and then back at me. From the television came the theme tune that announced the end of the weekly sports news, and suddenly I was overcome by a deep sadness. My brother and sister-in-law had come by at a bad moment, to stick their noses into the way I ran my household, but now something had happened that could never be undone. It seems like nonsense, it is nonsense, but the simple conclusion that my son and I would not watch the sports news that evening almost brought tears to my eyes.
I thought about Claire in her room in the hospital. For the last few days, thankfully, she’d had a room to herself; before that she had shared a room with some flatulent old cow who blew great rumbling farts. All through visiting hours the two of us did our best to pretend not to hear, but after a few days Claire had got so sick of it that every time the woman farted she began spraying aerosol deodorant around in the air. It made you feel like laughing and crying, all at the same time, but after visiting hours that day I went to the head nurse and insisted that Claire be given a room of her own. The new room looked out onto a side-wing of the hospital; when it was dark and the lights went on you could see the patients in that wing lying in their beds, wriggling up against their pillows to start in on the evening meal. We had agreed that tonight, the night before the operation, I would not come to visit, but would stay at home with Michel. Everything as normal as possible. But now I thought about Claire, about my wife alone in her room, about darkness falling and the view of the lit windows and the other patients, and I wondered whether we had done the right thing; maybe I should have called our babysitter so that this evening, on this of all evenings, I could be with my wife.
I resolved to call her as soon as I could, later on. Later on, after Serge and Babette had left and Michel had gone to bed. It really was time for them to bugger off, so that Michel and I could finally start our dinner together, our evening, which was now completely ruined anyway.
And then, suddenly, a new thought dawned. A nightmarish thought. A thought from which you awaken in a sweat, the quilt is lying on the floor, the pillow is soaked with your own perspiration, your heart is pounding – but there’s light coming through the bedroom window, it didn’t really happen, it was all just a dream.
‘Did the two of you visit Claire today, by any chance?’ I asked – I had adopted a friendly and nonchalant, a cheerful tone; whatever the cost, I had to keep them from seeing the kind of shape I was in.
Serge and Babette looked at me; the expressions on both their faces told me that my question had come as a surprise. But that didn’t mean anything, maybe they were surprised by the sudden mood swing; a few moments before, after all, I had been ordering them to leave.
‘No,’ Babette said. ‘I mean …’ Her eyes sought my brother’s for support. ‘I talked to her, though, this afternoon.’
So it really had happened. The unthinkable had actually happened. It was not a dream. The idea of taking Michel away from here had come from my own wife. She had talked to Babette on the phone that afternoon, and the idea had come up then. Maybe it hadn’t been Claire herself, maybe Babette had brought up the idea, but Claire, weakened perhaps by her condition, just to put an end to the harping, had agreed. Without talking to me about it first.
In that case I’m worse off than I figured, I thought. If my wife thinks it’s a good idea to make important decisions about our son without consulting me, I’ve probably given her reason to think so.
I should have tidied up Michel’s room, I thought. I should have emptied the laundry basket, the washing machine should have been running when Serge and Babette rang the bell, I should have put the newspapers on the bed into plastic bags, and the plastic bags should have been lined up in the hall, beside the front door, as though I were just about to take them out to the litter bin.
But it was too late for that. I realized that it would probably have been too late no matter what, that Serge and Babette had come by with a plan in mind; even if Michel and I had been sitting at the table in three-piece suits, with a damask tablecloth and sterling-silver cutlery, they would have come up with some other excuse to take my son away from me.
And did the two of you, this afternoon, happen to talk about Michel? I didn’t actually pose the question, I left it hanging in the air as it were. The silence I let fall gave Babette the chance to fill in the missing pieces.
‘Why doesn’t Michel ever go with you to the hospital?’ Babette asked.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Why doesn’t Michel ever go to visit his mother? How long has Claire been in there already? That’s not normal, a son who doesn’t want to see his mother.’
‘Claire and I have talked about that. She was the one who didn’t want him to, at first. She didn’t want Michel to see her like that.’
‘That was at first. But later. Later there must have been a moment, right? What I’m saying is that Claire herself doesn’t understand any more. She thinks her child has already forgotten her.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course Michel hasn’t forgotten his mother. He’s …’ I was going to say ‘He’s always talking about her,’ but that simply wasn’t true – ‘He just doesn’t want to see her. He doesn’t want to go to the hospital. I ask him often enough. “Shall we go to the hospital tomorrow and see Mama?” I say. And then he starts looking doubtful. “Maybe …” he says, and when I ask him again, the next day, he shakes his head. “Maybe tomorrow,” he says. I mean, I can’t force him, can I? No, that’s not it: I don’t want to force him. Not in this situation. I’m not going to drag him to the hospital against his will. It seems to me that that would be the wrong memory for him to have later on. I’m sure he has his reasons. He’s four, maybe he knows for himself the best way to deal with all this. If he wants to repress the fact that his mother is in the hospital, at this moment, then let him. That’s what I figure. It seems very grown-up to me. Grownup people repress everything too.’
Babette sniffed a few times and raised her eyebrows.
‘Isn’t that …?’ she said. And at the same moment I smelled it too. As soon as I spun around and ran for the kitchen, I could see the smoke hanging in the hallway.
‘Goddam it!’ As I turned off the gas under the macaroni and opened the door to the garden, I felt tears coming to my eyes. ‘Goddam it! Goddam it! Goddam it!’ I waved my arms, but the smoke only drifted around the kitchen without going away.
With moist eyes, I stared into the pan. I picked up the wooden spoon from the counter and tried to stir the hard, black goo.
‘Paul …’
The two of them were standing in the doorway. Serge with one foot in the kitchen, Babette with her hand on his shoulder.
‘Aw, look at that!’ I screamed. ‘Look at that, would you!’
I smacked the wooden spoon down on the counter. I was fighting against more tears, but it wasn’t really working.
‘Paul …’ My brother had put his other foot in the kitchen now, I saw a hand held out and ducked to one side.
‘Paul,’ he said. ‘It all makes a lot of sense. First your job, and now Claire. There’s no
reason for you not to admit that to yourself.’
The way I remember it, there was an audible hiss when I grabbed the glowing handles of the pan and the skin on my fingers began to burn. I felt no pain, at least not at that point.
Babette screamed. Serge tried to duck, but the bottom edge of the pan hit him square in the face. He staggered back and, when I hit him the second time, he sort of fell against Babette. There was a cracking sound, and blood now as well: it spattered across the white tiles on the kitchen wall and the little jars in the spice rack beside the oven.
‘Daddy.’
By then Serge was sprawled on the kitchen floor, the area around his mouth and nose a mushy, bloody mess. I was already poised, pan in the air: ready to bring it down again against the mushiest, bloodiest part of his face.
Michel was standing in the doorway, he wasn’t looking at his uncle on the floor, but at me.
‘Michel,’ I said. I tried to smile, I let the pan drop. ‘Michel,’ I said again.
DESSERT
36
‘The blackberries are from our own garden,’ said the manager. ‘The parfait is made from home-made chocolate, and these are shaved almonds, mixed with grated walnuts.’
His little finger pointed to a few irregularities in the brown sauce, a sauce that in my opinion was much too thin – in any case thinner than what one thought of as a ‘parfait’ – and had leaked down between the blackberries to the bottom of the bowl.
I saw the way Babette looked at the bowl. At first only in disappointment – a disappointment that gave way over the course of the manager’s explanation to unadulterated disgust.
‘I don’t want this,’ she said when he had finished.