by Herman Koch
‘Excuse me?’ the manager said.
‘I don’t want this. Please take it back.’
I thought for a moment that she was going to push the bowl away, but instead she leaned far back in her chair, as though to establish the greatest possible distance between her and the washed-out dessert.
‘But this is what you ordered.’
For the first time since the manager had put the desserts down in front of us, she raised her head and looked at him. ‘I know this is what I ordered. But I don’t want it any more. I want you to take it away.’
Serge began to fidget with his napkin, he pressed one corner of it against the corner of his lips and wiped off a nonexistent something: meanwhile, he tried to catch his wife’s eye. Serge himself had chosen the dame blanche. Perhaps Babette’s behaviour embarrassed him; more likely, however, was that he couldn’t stand another delay. He had to eat his dessert now. My brother always chose the most ordinary desserts on the menu. Vanilla ice with whipped cream, crêpes with syrup, and that was about it. I sometimes thought it had to do with his blood sugar level, the same blood sugar level that left him high and dry in the middle of nowhere at the most inopportune moments. But it also had to do with his lack of imagination; as far as that went, the dame blanche was on the same level as the tournedos. In fact, I had been surprised to see such a straightforward dessert on the menu in this place.
‘These are the tastiest blackberries you’ll ever taste,’ the manager said.
‘Christ, man, take the bowl and fuck off with it!’ I said silently.
That was another thing. At any normal place – or, one should actually say, at any restaurant worth its salt anywhere in Europe, with the exception of Holland – waiters and managers didn’t even try to argue, following the motto: ‘Customer not satisfied? Back to the kitchen!’ Of course you had difficult customers everywhere, spoiled scum who wanted a blow-by-blow description of every dish on the menu, unbothered by any actual knowledge of food. ‘What’s the difference between tagliatelle and spaghetti?’ they’ll ask serenely. When it came to people like that a waiter had every right to slam his fist right into their inquisitive, spoiled mouths, knuckles hard against the front teeth, breaking them off close to the root. They should change the law, so that restaurant personnel could claim this as self-defence. Usually, though, it was the other way around. People were afraid to say anything. They excused themselves a thousand times over, even if they were only asking for the salt. Dark-brown green beans that tasted of licorice, stewed meat stuck together with rubbery nerves and chunks of cartilage, a cheese sandwich with stale bread and green spots on the cheese: without a word the Dutch diner grinds it all to a pulp between his teeth and swallows it down. And when the waiter comes by to ask if they are enjoying their meal, they run their tongues over the fibres and moulds stuck between their teeth and nod.
We had returned to our earlier seating arrangement, Babette to my left, across from Serge, and Claire right across from me. All I had to do was raise my eyes from my plate to look at her. Claire looked back and waggled her eyebrows.
‘Oh, it doesn’t really matter,’ Serge said. ‘I can handle those blackberries as well.’ He rubbed his stomach and grinned, first at the manager and then at his wife.
There was a full second of silence. A second during which I let my gaze descend to my plate; for the moment, it seemed wise to look at no one, and so I looked at my plate: at the three wedges of cheese, to be exact, that were still lying there untouched. The manager’s pinkie had hovered over each of the three pieces in turn, I had listened to the names that went with them without letting any of it register. The plate was no more than half the size of those on which the appetizer and main dishes had been served, yet again it was the emptiness that was most striking. The three little wedges had been arranged so they pointed at each other, probably to make the whole thing look like more than it really was.
I had ordered cheese because I don’t like sweet desserts: I never have, even as a child, but as I stared at the plate – mostly at the empty part of it – I was suddenly overcome by the kind of heavy fatigue I had been trying to put off all evening.
What I would have liked best was to go home. With Claire, or maybe even on my own. Yes, I would have paid a king’s ransom to be able to collapse on the couch at home. I can think better in a horizontal position, I would be able to think over this evening’s events, to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, as they say.
‘You keep out of it!’ Babette said to Serge. ‘Maybe we should get Tonio to come over, if it’s so hard to order another dessert.’
Tonio, I took it, was the man in the white turtleneck, the restaurant owner who had greeted them personally at the entrance, because he was so pleased to have people like the Lohmans among his clientele.
‘That won’t be necessary,’ the manager said quickly. ‘I can talk to Tonio myself, and I’m sure the kitchen will be able to offer you an alternative dessert.’
‘Darling …’ Serge said, but apparently had no idea of what to say next, because all he did was grin at the floor manager again and make a helpless gesture with both hands in the air, palms face up, as if to say, ‘Women? Go figure.’
‘What’s that stupid grin all about?’ Babette asked.
Serge lowered his hands, there was something pleading in the way he looked at Babette. ‘Darling …’ he said again.
Michel too had always disliked sweet desserts, I realized: as a child, when waiters tried to win him over by offering him ice cream or a lollipop, he had always shaken his head resolutely. We never tried to influence him, we would have let him have any dessert he liked, so you couldn’t blame it on his upbringing. It was hereditary. Yes, that was only word for it. If heredity existed, if anything was hereditary, then it had to be our shared aversion to sweet desserts.
At long last the manager took the bowl of blackberries from the table. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he mumbled, and hurried off.
‘Christ, what an asshole!’ Babette said; she wiped her hand angrily across the tablecloth, across the spot where her dessert had just been, as though trying to wipe away any traces the bowl of blackberries might have left there.
‘Babette, please,’ Serge begged, but there was genuine irritation in his voice now as well.
‘Did you see the look on his face?’ Babette said, reaching across the table to touch Claire’s hand. ‘Did you see how quickly he backed down when he heard his boss’s name? His master, ha ha!’
Claire laughed too, but not wholeheartedly, I saw.
‘Babette!’ Serge butted in. ‘Please! I think you’re way out of line. I mean, we come here a lot, we’ve never—’
‘Oh, is that what you’re afraid of?’ Babette interrupted him. ‘That next time you suddenly won’t get a table?’
Serge looked at me, but I looked away quickly. What did my brother know about heredity? All right, maybe when it came to his own children, his own flesh and blood. But what about Beau? When did you simply have to admit that something had apparently been inherited from someone else? From the biological parents who had remained behind in Africa? To what extent could Serge, for his part, distance himself from the actions of his adopted son?
‘I’m not afraid of anything,’ Serge said. ‘It just appals me when you go after someone in that patronizing tone of voice. That’s precisely the kind of people we’ve never wanted to be. That man is only doing his job.’
‘Who started with the patronizing tone?’ Babette said. ‘Huh? Who started it?’ Her voice had gone up a few decibels. I looked around; at the neighbouring tables, all heads were turned in our direction. This was, of course, extremely interesting, a woman raising her voice at the table of our future prime minister.
Serge also seemed aware of the looming danger. He leaned across the table. ‘Babette, please,’ he said quietly. ‘Let’s stop. Let’s talk about this later.’
In all domestic arguments – as in all fist fights and armed conflicts, for that matter – there comes a
moment when both or one of the parties can step back and prevent the situation from deteriorating any further. This was that moment. I wondered briefly what it was I was hoping for. As family and table-companions, it was our role to intervene, to speak words that would put things into perspective and so allow the parties to be reconciled.
But did I feel like doing that, to be frank? Did we feel like doing that? I looked at Claire, and at the same moment Claire looked at me. Playing around her lips was something outsiders would not have recognized as a smile, but which was in fact a smile. It was to be found in a quivering at the corners of her mouth, invisible to the naked eye. I knew that invisible quiver well. And I knew what it meant: Claire, too, felt absolutely no urge to referee. No more than I did. We were not going to do anything to intervene. On the contrary, we would do everything in our power to enable things to escalate even further. Because that suited us best at this moment.
I winked at my wife. And she winked back.
‘Babette, please …’ – it wasn’t Serge this time, it was Babette herself. She was imitating him, in an exaggeratedly affected tone, as though he were a snivelling child whining for ice cream. He’s got no reason to whine, I thought to myself, looking at the dame blanche on the table in front of him. He’s already got his ice cream. I almost burst out laughing. Claire must have read it on my face, because she shook her head as she winked at me again. Don’t start laughing now! her eyes said. That will ruin everything. Then we’ll be the ones to blame and the row will blow over.
‘You’re such a coward!’ Babette screamed. ‘You should be supporting me instead of thinking about your own image, about what it might look like. What other people might think about the fact that your wife finds her dessert too disgusting for words. What your little friend might think of you. Tonio! Tony or Anton is probably too common for him! It probably sounds too much like collard greens or split-pea soup!’ She threw her napkin on the table – too forcefully, because it hit her wineglass, which fell over. ‘I never want to come to this place again!’ Babette said. She had stopped screaming, but her voice still carried at least four tables away. People had put down their knives and forks. Their stares had already become less veiled. It would have been almost impossible for them not to stare. ‘I want to go home,’ Babette said, a bit more quietly now, already almost back to normal volume.
‘Babette,’ Claire said, holding out her hand. ‘Sweetheart …’
Claire’s timing was perfect. I grinned – in admiration of my wife. Red wine had spread across the tablecloth, most of it was seeping in Serge’s direction.
My brother got up from his chair. I thought at first that he was afraid of having wine dribble onto his trousers, but he pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘I’m sick and tired of this,’ he said.
All three of us looked at him. He had taken his napkin from his lap and laid it on the table. I saw that the ice cream in his dame blanche was beginning to melt, a thin trickle of vanilla had run over the top of the glass (the vase? the goblet? – what did you call that with a dame blanche?) and reached its base. ‘I’m leaving for a moment,’ he said. ‘I’m going outside.’
He took a step to one side, away from our table, then a step back.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking first at Claire and then at me. ‘I’m sorry this had to happen. I hope that when I come back we can talk calmly about the things we need to talk about.’
I had actually expected Babette to start screaming again. Something like, ‘That’s right, walk away! Just walk away! Take the easy way out!’ But she said nothing – which, to be honest, I felt was too bad. It would have made the scandal more complete: a famous politician leaving the restaurant with his head bowed, while his wife shouts after him that he is an asshole, or a coward – even if it never made the newspapers, the story would spread like wildfire, from mouth to mouth, dozens, hundreds, who knows, maybe even thousands of potential voters would find out that regular guy Serge Lohman also had very regular marital problems. Like everyone else. Like us.
You might even wonder whether the fight between husband and wife, if it leaked out, would actually cost him votes, I realized now, or whether it would in fact attract more voters. A domestic quarrel might make him more human, his unhappy marriage would bring him closer to the electorate. I looked at the dame blanche. A second rivulet of ice cream had now passed the base of the glass and spilled onto the tablecloth.
‘The globe really is warming up,’ I said, pointing at my brother’s dessert; the best thing, I thought, was to say something light-hearted. ‘You see? It’s not just fashionable cant. It’s really true.’
‘Paul …’
Claire looked at me and rolled her eyes in Babette’s direction – following my wife’s gaze, I saw that Babette had started crying:
almost noiselessly at first, all you saw was the shaking of her back and shoulders, but soon enough the first sobs could be heard.
People at a few tables had stopped eating again. A man in a red shirt leaned over to an older woman (his mother?) and whispered something: Don’t look now, but that woman is crying – it had to be something like that – that’s Serge Lohman’s wife …
Meanwhile, Serge still hadn’t left; he was standing there with his hands on the back of the chair, as though, with his wife crying like this, he couldn’t decide whether to suit the action to the word.
‘Serge,’ Claire said without looking at him – without even raising her head, ‘sit down.’ She turned to me, ‘Paul.’ Claire had taken my hand; she tugged on it, and it took a moment before I realized what she was saying: she wanted me to get up, so that we could change places and she could sit beside Babette.
We stood up at the same time. While we were shuffling past each other, Claire grabbed my hand again; her fingers wrapped firmly around my wrist and she gave it a little yank. Our faces were no more than a few inches apart, I’m not much taller than my wife, all I would have had to do was bow my head in order to bury my face in her hair – something I felt more of a need to do at that moment than anything else.
‘We’ve got a problem,’ Claire murmured.
I said nothing, only nodded faintly.
‘With your brother,’ Claire said.
I waited to see if she would say anything else, but she seemed to feel that we had been standing beside the table long enough;
she edged past me and sat down in my chair, beside the weeping Babette.
‘How are things here?’
I turned around and looked into the face of the man in the white turtleneck. Tonio! Serge had slid back his chair and was still busy seating himself again, so the restaurant owner had probably decided to address me first. Whatever the case, it was not merely the difference in our heights – he was a whole head shorter than me – that made me feel he was grovelling; he stood slightly bent over, his hands clasped in front of him, head turned to one side, which left him looking at me obliquely and from below: lower than necessary.
‘I heard there were problems with the choice of desserts,’ he said. ‘We’d like to offer you an alternative dessert of your choice.’
‘The dessert of the house?’ I asked.
‘Excuse me?’
The restaurateur was almost bald, the few grey hairs left around his ears had been coiffed with care, his slightly too-tanned head stuck out of the white neck of his sweater like a tortoise from its shell.
It had occurred to me earlier, when Serge and Babette came in, that he reminded me of something or someone, and now I suddenly knew what it was. Years ago, a few doors down from us, there had lived a man with this same servile air. He was perhaps even smaller than ‘Tonio’, and he had no wife. One evening, Michel, who was about eight at the time, had come home with a pile of LPs and asked whether we still had a turntable somewhere.
‘Where did you get the records?’ I asked.
‘From Mr Breedveld,’ Michel had said. ‘He’s got at least five hundred of them, man! And I get to keep these.’
It took
a moment before I connected the name ‘Breedveld’ to the little single man living a few doors down. They went to his house all the time, Michel told me, a whole bunch of small boys from the neighbourhood, to listen to Mr Breedveld’s old albums.
I remember quite well how my temples began pounding, first in fear, then in rage. Trying to keep my voice as normal as possible, I asked Michel what Mr Breedveld did while the boys were listening to records.
‘Oh, you know. We sit on the couch. He always has peanuts and chips and cola.’
That evening, after dark, I rang Mr Breedveld’s bell. I didn’t ask whether I could come in, I pushed him aside and walked right through to his living room. The curtains, I noted, were already drawn.
Mr Breedveld moved away a few weeks later. The final picture in my mind from that time is of the neighbourhood children rummaging through boxes of shattered LPs, to see whether there were any left intact. Mr Breedveld had put the boxes out on the kerb in front of his house the day before he moved.
I looked at ‘Tonio’, and clenched the arm of the chair with one hand.
‘Get the fuck out of here, you pervert!’ I said. ‘Fuck off, before things really get out of hand.’
37
Serge cleared his throat, placed his elbows on either side of his dame blanche, and formed a tent with his fingers.
‘We all know by now what happened,’ he said. ‘All four of us are familiar with the facts.’ He looked at Claire, then at Babette, who had stopped crying but was still pressing a corner of her napkin to her cheek – just below her eye, behind the tinted lens of her glasses. ‘Paul?’ He turned his head and looked at me: his look was one of concern, but I wondered whether it was the concern of the man or the concern of the politician Serge Lohman.
‘Yes, what is it?’ I said.
‘I take it you are also aware of all the facts?’
All the facts. I couldn’t help smiling: then I looked at Claire, and wiped the smile off my face. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Although it depends on what you mean by facts.’