by Herman Koch
In the distance I saw the three-piece suit flash by, into the open kitchen; I raised my hand and waved, but the only one who noticed was one of the black-pinafore girls. She hurried over to our table.
‘Listen here,’ I said, and as I held up the menu for the girl to see, I glanced over at Claire – for support, for affection, perhaps only for an understanding look; a look that said you couldn’t mess with the two of us, not when it came to so-called aperitifs of the house – but Claire’s eyes were fixed on something a long way behind me: at the entrance to the restaurant.
‘Here they come,’ she said.
7
Usually, Claire always sits facing the wall, but tonight we’d done it the other way around. ‘No, no, now it’s your turn for a change,’ I said when the manager pulled back our chairs and she moved automatically towards the seat that looked out only on the garden.
Usually, I’m the one who sits with my back to the garden (or the wall, or the open kitchen), for the simple reason that I want to be able to see everything. Claire lets me have my way. She knows I don’t like staring at walls or gardens, that I’d rather look at the people.
‘Come now,’ she said as the floor manager stood waiting politely, his hands on the back of the chair, the chair with a restaurant view that he had pulled back for my wife, as a matter of principle, ‘this is where you want to sit, isn’t it?’
It’s not that Claire goes out of her way to appease me. It’s just something she has inside her, a sort of inner calm or depth that makes her content with blank walls and open kitchens. Or, like here, with a few patches of grass between gravel paths, with a rectangular pond and a few low hedges outside a window that stretches from the glass ceiling all the way to the floor. There must have been trees out there too, somewhere, but the combination of falling darkness and reflecting glass made it impossible to tell.
That’s all she seems to need: that, and a view of my face.
‘Not tonight,’ I said. Tonight all I want to see is you, that’s what I was planning to add, but I couldn’t bring myself to say that out loud with the manager standing there in his pinstripes.
That evening all I wanted was to cling to my wife’s familiar face, but there was another, not unimportant reason for me to sit facing the garden: it meant I could allow my brother’s entrance to go unseen: the bustle at the door, the predictable grovelling of the manager and the pinafore girls, the other guests’ reactions – but when the moment finally came, I turned in my chair and looked anyway.
Everyone, of course, had noticed the Lohmans’ arrival. There was even what you might describe as a stifled tumult around the lectern: no less than three girls in black pinafores were fussing over Serge and Babette, the manager was hovering around the lectern too – and there was someone else there as well: a little man with bristly grey hair, dressed not in black from head to toe, but simply in jeans and a white turtleneck. The restaurant owner, I suspected.
Yes, it had to be the owner, for now he stepped forward to extend a personal welcome to Serge and Babette.
‘They know me there,’ Serge had told me a few days ago. He knew the man in the white turtleneck, a man who didn’t emerge from the open kitchen to shake hands with just anyone.
The guests, however, pretended not to notice; in a restaurant where you had to pay ten euros for the aperitif of the house, the rules of etiquette probably didn’t allow for an open display of recognition. They all seemed to lean a few fractions of an inch closer to their plates, all apparently doing their best at the same time to forge ahead with their conversations, to avoid falling silent, because the volume of the general hubbub increased audibly as well.
And while the manager (the white turtleneck had disappeared back into the kitchen) was escorting Serge and Babette past the tables, no more than a barely perceptible ripple ran across the restaurant: a breeze falling across the still-smooth surface of a pond, a breath of wind through a field of grain, no more than that.
Serge smiled broadly and rubbed his hands together, while Babette remained a few paces behind. Judging by the little steps she took, her heels were probably too high for her to keep up with him.
‘Claire!’ He spread his arms, my wife was already out of her chair and they were pecking each other three times on the cheek. There was nothing I could do but stand up: remaining seated would require too many explanations.
‘Babette …’ I said, taking my brother’s wife by the elbow.
In fact, I had counted on her turning her cheek towards me for the obligatory three kisses and then kissing the air beside my own cheek, but instead I felt the soft pressure of her mouth, first on my one cheek, then the other; the third and final time she pressed her lips, no, not exactly to my mouth, but right beside it. Dangerously close to my mouth, one might say. We looked at each other; she was wearing glasses, as usual, but they seemed different from the ones she’d been wearing last time. I, at least, couldn’t remember her glasses having such dark lenses.
Babette, as I mentioned earlier, is one of those women who look good in anything, including glasses. Yet there was something else, something different about her this time, like a room where someone has thrown out all the flowers while you were gone: a change in the interior you don’t even notice at first, not until you see the stems sticking out of the garbage.
To call my brother’s wife a ‘presence’ would be putting it mildly. There were men, I knew, who felt intimidated or even threatened by her figure. She wasn’t fat, no; fatness or thinness had very little to do with it, the proportions of her body were in perfect harmony. Everything about her, though, was big and broad: her hands, her feet, her head – too big and too broad, those men thought, and they went on to make insinuations about the size and breadth of other parts of her body, as if somehow to reduce the threat to human proportions.
In high school I’d had a friend who was two metres tall. I remember how tiring it could be always to stand next to someone who towered head and shoulders above you, as though you were literally standing in his shadow, and as though that shadow kept you from getting enough sunlight. Less sunlight than I deserved, I thought at times. Of course there was the usual stiff neck from looking up all the time, but that was the least of it. In the summer we would go on vacation together; my high-school buddy was not fat either, only tall, but still I experienced every movement of his arms and legs, and the feet that stuck out of the sleeping bag and pressed against the inside of the canvas, as a struggle for more space – a struggle for which I felt in part responsible and which physically drained me. Sometimes, in the morning, his feet would be sticking out of the entrance to the tent, and that made me feel guilty: guilty about the fact that tents weren’t larger, so that people like him could fit in them completely.
When Babette is around I always do my best to make myself bigger, taller than I really am. I stretch, so she can look me straight in the eye: as equals.
‘You’re looking good,’ said Babette, giving my arms a little squeeze. With most people, especially women, a compliment on your appearance means nothing at all, but with Babette it did, I’d found that out in the course of the years. When someone she liked looked bad, she said that too.
‘You’re looking good’ could therefore mean that I did indeed look good, but it could also be an indirect request that I say something about her own appearance – or, in any event, pay more attention to it than usual.
I took another look at her eyes, behind those lenses that reflected almost the entire restaurant: the diners, the white tablecloths, the tea-warmers … Yes, dozens of tea-warmers were glittering in those lenses, which, I saw now, were really dark only at the top. Below that they were only slightly tinted, so I could see Babette’s eyes clearly.
They were red around the edges, and bigger than normal: unmistakable signs of a recent crying jag. Not a crying jag that had happened a few hours ago: no, crying that had happened just now, in the car, on the way to the restaurant.
Maybe she’d stopped in the parking lot and tried to
cover up the worst of it, but it hadn’t really worked. The dark lenses might have fooled the staff in the black pinafores, the floor manager in his three-piece suit and the smart owner in the white turtleneck, but they didn’t fool me.
And, at the same moment, I knew for a certainty that Babette wasn’t trying to fool me at all. She had come closer to me than usual, she had almost kissed me on the lips. I’d had no choice but to look into her damp eyes and draw my own conclusions.
Now she blinked and shrugged, body language that could only mean ‘I’m sorry’.
Before I could say anything, though, Serge forged ahead, almost pushing his wife aside as he seized my hand and shook it forcefully. He never used to have such a powerful handshake, but in the last few years he had realized that ‘the people of this country’ had to be met with a firm grip – that they would never vote for a fishy handshake.
‘Paul,’ he said.
He was still smiling, but there was no feeling behind it. Keep on smiling, you could see him thinking. The smile came from the same carload as the handshake. Together, in seven months’ time, they were going to lead him to electoral victory. Even if this head were to be pelted with rotten eggs, the smile had to remain intact. Even behind the remains of a cream pie pressed into his face by an angry activist, the smile could never, ever fade from the voters’ view.
‘Hi, Serge,’ I said. ‘How you doing?’
Meanwhile, behind my brother’s back, Claire was seeing to Babette. They kissed – that is to say, my wife kissed her sister-in-law’s cheeks – and hugged, then looked into each other’s eyes.
Did Claire see what I had seen? Did she see the same red-rimmed despair behind the tinted lenses? But just then Babette laughed elatedly, and I missed seeing how she kissed the air beside Claire’s cheeks.
We sat down. Serge diagonally across from me, beside my wife, while Babette – with the manager’s assistance – sank into the chair beside me. One of the black-pinafore girls saw to Serge, who stood with one hand in his pocket for a moment, looking around the restaurant, before settling himself down.
‘The aperitif of the house today is pink champagne,’ the manager said.
I took a deep breath, too deep apparently, because the look my wife gave me was trying to tell me something. She rarely rolled her eyes or cleared her throat apropos of nothing, and she never, ever kicked me under the table to warn me that I was about to make a fool of myself or had already done so.
No, it was a very subtle something in her eyes, a shift invisible to the uninitiated, something between mockery and sudden earnest.
Don’t, the look said.
‘Mmm, champagne,’ Babette said.
‘Okay, sounds good,’ Serge said.
‘Wait a minute,’ I said.
APPETIZER
8
‘The crayfish are dressed in a vinaigrette of tarragon and baby green onions,’ said the manager: he was at Serge’s plate now, pointing with his pinkie. ‘And these are chanterelles from the Vosges.’ The pinkie vaulted over the crayfish to point out two brown toadstools, cut lengthwise; the ‘chanterelles’ looked as though they had been uprooted only a few minutes ago: what was sticking to the bottom, I figured, could only be dirt.
It was a well-groomed hand, as I’d established while the manager was uncorking the bottle of Chablis Serge had ordered. Despite my earlier suspicions, there was nothing for him to hide: neat cuticles without hangnails, the nail itself trimmed short, no rings – it looked freshly washed, no signs of anything chronic. For the hand of a stranger, though, I felt as though it was coming too close to our food; it hovered less than an inch above the crayfish, and the pinkie itself came even closer, almost brushing the chanterelles.
I wasn’t sure I would be able to sit still when that hand, with its pinkie, was floating over my own plate, but for the sake of a pleasant evening I knew it would be better to restrain myself.
Yes, that’s exactly what I would do, I decided: I would restrain myself. I would keep a hold of myself, the way you hold your breath under water, and I would act as though there were nothing strange at all about the hand of a perfect stranger waving over the food on my plate.
To be honest, though, there was something that was starting to get on my nerves, and that was how long everything took. Even while opening the bottle of Chablis, the manager mucked around. First as he installed the cooler – one of those buckets with two handles that you hook over the edge of the table, like a child’s seat – then while presenting the bottle, the label: to Serge of course. Serge had asked our permission to choose the wine, at least he’d been civil enough to do that, but all this I-know-everything-about-wine business irritated the hell out of me.
I can’t remember exactly when he first presented himself as a connoisseur; in my memory it seems to have happened quite suddenly. From one day to the next he became the one who picked up the wine list and mumbled something about the ‘earthy aftertaste’ of Portuguese wines from the Alentejo: it had been a sort of coup, really, for from that day on, the wine list automatically ended up in Serge’s hands.
After presenting the label and receiving my brother’s nod of approval, the manager began uncorking the bottle. Operating a corkscrew, it became clear right away, was not his strong suit. He tried to disguise that a bit by shrugging and laughing at his own clumsiness, the whole time with a puzzled air that said this was certainly the first time anything like this had happened to him, but it was precisely that air that gave him away.
‘Well, it doesn’t seem to want to cooperate,’ he said as the top of the cork broke off and the wreckage came out with the corkscrew.
The manager was now faced with a dilemma. Should he try to ease the other half of the cork out of the bottle, here at the table, under our watchful eyes? Or would it be wiser to take the bottle back to the open kitchen for some expert help?
The simplest solution, unfortunately, was unthinkable: to push the stubborn half of the cork down into the bottle with the handle of a fork or spoon. You might find little crumbs of cork in your glass afterwards, but so what? Who cares? How much did this Chablis cost? Fifty-eight euros? The price meant nothing anyway. Or at most it meant that you had an excellent chance of coming across exactly the same wine on the supermarket shelf tomorrow, for €7.95 or less.
‘Excuse me,’ the manager said. ‘I’m going to fetch another bottle for you.’ And before we could say a word he went striding off past the other tables.
‘Ah, well,’ I said. ‘I suppose it’s like a hospital. You’re better off praying that one of the nurses will take your blood, and not the specialist himself.’
Claire laughed out loud. And Babette laughed too. ‘Oh, I felt so bad for him,’ she said.
Serge, though, sat there brooding. The look on his face was almost sorrowful, as though something had been taken away from him: his little toy, his self-important blather about wines and vintages and earthy grapes. Indirectly, the manager’s bumbling reflected on him. He, Serge Lohman, had picked the Chablis with the rotten cork. He had been looking forward to an orderly process: the reading of the label, the approving nod, the thimbleful that the manager would pour into his glass. That last bit, above all. That was, by now, one thing I couldn’t stand to watch any more, couldn’t bear to hear: the sniffling, the gargling, the smacking of the lips, the wine that my brother would roll across his tongue, all the way to his gullet, and then back again. I always had to look the other way.
‘Let’s hope the other bottles don’t have the same problem,’ he said. ‘That would be a pity: it really is an excellent Chablis.’
He was clearly in a bad way. He was the one who had picked out this restaurant, they knew him here, the man in the white turtleneck knew him and had come out of the open kitchen specially to shake his hand. I wondered what would have happened if I had picked the restaurant, a different restaurant, one he’d never been to before, and if the manager or a waiter had failed to uncork the wine at one go: you could bet your life on it that he woul
d have smiled pityingly, then shaken his head – oh yes, I knew my brother well enough by now; he would have given me a look with a message only I could read: that Paul, he always takes us to the weirdest places …
You have big politicos who like to work in the kitchen, who collect old comic books or have a wooden boat they’ve fixed up all by themselves. The hobby they choose usually clashes entirely with the face that goes with it, going completely against the grain of what everyone has made of them till then. The worst stick-in-the-mud, someone with all the charisma of a sheet of cardboard, suddenly turns out to cook splendid French meals at home in his free time; the next weekend supplement of the national newspaper features him in full colour on the cover, his knitted oven mitts holding up a casserole filled with Provençal meat loaf. The most striking thing about the stick-in-the-mud, besides his apron with a reproduction of a Toulouse-Lautrec poster, is his completely implausible smile, meant to convey to his constituency the joy of cooking. Not so much a smile, really, as a fearful baring of the teeth, the sort of smile you wear when you’ve just been rear-ended and have lived to tell the tale, and which above all communicates relief at the simple fact that the Provençal meat loaf has not burned to a crisp in the oven.
What exactly had Serge been thinking when he chose wine as his particular hobby? I’d have to ask him sometime. Maybe this evening. I made a mental note; this wasn’t the right moment, but the night was young.
When we were still living at home all he ever drank was cola, huge amounts of it; he had no problem knocking back an entire king-size bottle at dinnertime. Then he would produce these gigantic belches, for which he was sometimes sent to his room, belches that lasted ten seconds or longer – like subterranean thunder rolling up and exploding from somewhere deep down in his stomach – and for which he enjoyed a certain schoolyard fame: among the boys, that is, for he knew even then that girls were only repulsed by burps and farts.
