by Herman Koch
When he wasn’t lugging roofing tiles or sawing wood, he was out picking blackberries or blueberries. Blackberries and blueberries from which Babette then made jam: with her hair up in a kerchief, she spent days ladling out hot, sickly-sweet substances into hundreds of canning jars. Claire had no choice but to ask if she needed help, just as I felt obliged to help Serge with his roofing tiles.
‘Can I give you a hand?’ I asked after the seventh barrowful went by.
‘Well, now that you mention it,’ was his reply.
‘When can we leave?’ Claire asked me that night in bed, when we were finally alone and could cuddle up close – not too close, though, it was too hot for that. The berries had turned her fingers blue; a darker version of the blue was in her hair and streaked across her cheeks.
‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Oh, no, I mean the day after tomorrow.’
On our last night, Serge and Babette invited friends and acquaintances over for dinner in the garden. They were Dutch friends and acquaintances, to a man, and they all had summer homes close by. ‘Nothing special,’ Serge said. ‘Just a little group of friends. Nice people, all of them, really.’
Seventeen Dutch people, not counting the three of us, stood around the garden that evening with plates and glasses. There was an ageing actress (‘With no work and no husband,’ Claire filled me in the next morning), and a skinny choreographer who drank only Vittel water from half-litre bottles he had brought himself, and a pair of married homosexual writers who spent the whole evening carping at each other.
On the table Babette had laid out a buffet of salads, French cheeses, little sausages and bread. Meanwhile, Serge turned his attention to the barbecue; he was wearing a red-and-white checked apron and he was grilling hamburgers and shish kebabs with bell peppers and onions. ‘The secret of a good barbecue is to build a good fire,’ he’d told me a few hours before the dinner with the little circle of friends. ‘The rest is a piece of cake.’
My job was to collect dry twigs. Serge was drinking more than usual; a wicker bottle of wine stood beside him in the grass next to the barbecue, so maybe he was more nervous about how the evening would go than he was letting on.
‘In Holland they’re all sitting down to potatoes and gravy right now,’ he said. ‘Can you imagine it? This is the life, man!’ He waved his fork at the trees and bushes that kept the garden hidden from prying eyes.
All the Dutch people I spoke to that evening told more or less the same story, often in the very same words. They didn’t envy their countrymen who were forced, by financial considerations or other obligations, to stay behind in Holland. ‘Around here, we’re as happy as God in France,’ said a woman, who told me she had worked for years in the ‘diet industry’. I thought she was joking, until I realized that she had uttered the phrase entirely in earnest, as though she had come up with it herself.
I looked around at the other figures cradling their wineglasses in the golden-yellow glow from the braziers and torches positioned strategically around the garden, and in my mind I heard the voice of the old actor who figured in that TV commercial ten – or was it twenty? – years ago: ‘Yes, that’s right, you too can be as happy as God in France. With a good glass of cognac and real French cheese …’
The mere thought brought with it a whiff of Boursin, as though someone had spread a slice of toast with that filthiest of all fake French cheeses and shoved it under my nose. It was the combination of the lighting and the odour of Boursin that kept me from seeing my brother and sister-in-law’s garden party as anything but an old, outdated TV commercial from twenty years ago or longer. As imitation cheese that had nothing whatsoever to do with French cheese, just like here, in the heart of the Dordogne, where everyone was only playing at being in France, while the French themselves were most conspicuous by their absence.
Whenever I mentioned the anti-Dutch graffiti, they all shrugged it off. ‘Juvenile delinquents!’ was the verdict of the unemployed actress, while a copywriter who had sold his ad agency ‘lock, stock and barrel’ in order to settle in the Dordogne assured me that the slogans were mostly aimed at Dutch campers, who brought all their groceries from Holland in their trailers and didn’t spend a cent in the local shops.
‘We’re not like that,’ he said. ‘We eat in their restaurants, have a Pernod in their cafés and read their newspapers. Without people like Serge, and a lot of others, there would be plenty of masons and plumbers around here without work.’
‘And let’s not forget the local winemakers!’ said Serge, raising his glass. ‘Cheers!’
Back in the shadows, in the darkest part of the garden beside the hedge, the skinny choreographer was making out with the younger member of the writer couple. I saw a hand slip inside a shirt and looked the other way.
But what if the slogan-scrawlers didn’t stop at mere slogans? I asked myself. It probably wouldn’t take much to scare off this band of cowards. The Dutch had a tendency to shit in their pants at the mere threat of real violence. You could start off by throwing rocks through windows, and if that didn’t work you could burn down a couple of résidences secondaires. Not too many, because the real objective was to let those houses pass back into the hands of people who had first claim on them: the young French newly-weds who for years now had been forced by skyrocketing property prices to live with their parents. The Dutch had ruined the housing market for the local people; astronomical sums were being paid even for ruins. With the help of relatively inexpensive French masons, the ruin was then rebuilt, only to remain uninhabited for most of the year. When you looked at it that way, in a clear, cold light, it was a miracle that there had been so few real incidents, that the native population had been content merely to scrawl a little graffiti.
I let my gaze travel over the lawn. Someone had put on a CD by Edith Piaf. Babette, who had chosen a flowing, translucent black dress for the party, was executing a few unsteady, tipsy dance steps to the tune of ‘Non, je ne regrette rien …’. If broken windows and arson didn’t do it, you could always take things up a notch, I thought to myself. You could lure one of these Dutch pussies away from his home under the pretence that you knew where there was another, even cheaper winemaker, then pound him to a pulp in some cornfield – not just slap him up against the side of the head, no; sterner stuff, baseball bats and flails.
Or if you saw one out walking on his own, at a bend in the road, coming back from the supermarket with a carrier bag full of baguettes and red wine, you could let your car go into a little skid. Almost by accident. ‘He was suddenly right there, right in front of my bumper,’ you could say later – or you could say nothing at all, you could leave the Dutchman lying on the edge of the road like roadkill, and when you got home you could wash any telltale traces off the bumper and fender. All was fair, as long as the message got across: you people don’t belong here! Fuck off back to where you came from! Go home and play at being in France in your own country, with your baguettes and red wine, but not here, not where we come from!
‘Paul …! Paul …!’ From the middle of the lawn, with her flapping gown dangerously close to the flame of one of the braziers, Babette was holding out her arms to me. ‘Milord’ was booming from the loudspeakers. Dancing. To dance on the grass with my brother’s wife. Happy as God in France. I looked around and saw Claire standing at the table with the cheeses – and at that same moment she saw me.
She was talking to the unemployed actress and threw me a desperate glance. At parties back in Holland, that meant ‘Can’t we go home, please?’ But we couldn’t go home, we were doomed to press on to the bitter end. Tomorrow. Tomorrow we would be allowed to go away. Help, was all Claire’s look was saying now.
I gestured to my sister-in-law, a gesture that said something like ‘I can’t right now’, but that later I would be sure to come and dance with her across the lawn, and I walked towards the table with the cheeses. ‘Allez riez! Milord … Allez chantez! Milord!’ Edith Piaf sang. There were, of course, stubborn characters among all those hundr
eds of Dutch people with summer homes in the Dordogne, I thought to myself. Characters who closed their eyes to the truth, who simply wouldn’t admit the fact that they were unwanted foreigners around here. Who, despite all evidence to the contrary, kept insisting that it was all the work of a ‘tiny minority’, the smashed windows and the acts of arson and the battered and run-over countrymen. Perhaps those last bullheads would have to be freed from their illusions with a little more force.
I thought about Straw Dogs and Deliverance, films that come to mind whenever I am out in the sticks, but never more than here, in the Dordogne, on the hilltop where my brother and his wife had created what they called their ‘little French paradise’. In Straw Dogs, the local population – after limiting themselves at first to a little badgering – take horrible revenge on the newcomers who think they’ve bought a cute house in the Scottish countryside. In Deliverance, it’s the American hillbillies who rudely interrupt a group of city slickers on a canoeing trip. Rape and murder feature prominently in both films.
The actress looked me over from head to toe before speaking. ‘Your wife tells me you will be leaving us tomorrow.’ Her voice had something artificially sweet to it, like the substance in Cola Light, or the filling they use in diabetic chocolates, which say on the package that they won’t make you fat. I looked at Claire, who rolled her eyes slightly, up at the star-studded sky. ‘And that you’re going to Spain, of all places.’
I thought about one of my favourite scenes from Straw Dogs. What would this artificial voice sound like if its owner were to be dragged into a barn by a pair of drunken French bricklayers? So drunk they could no longer tell the difference between a woman and the ruins of a cottage with only the walls still standing. Would she still be shooting her mouth off when the bricklayers set about rectifying her foundation? Would the voice come loose of its own accord once it was being peeled off, layer by layer?
At that very moment, a commotion arose at the edge of the garden, not the darkened edge with bushes where the choreographer had been groping the younger of the two writers, but closer to the house, along the pathway leading to the paved road.
It was a group of about five men. Frenchmen, I saw right away, although I’d be hard pressed to say why: their clothes probably, which had something rural about them without being as emphatically sloppy and dishevelled as these Dutch people playing at being in France. One of the men had a shotgun slung over his shoulder.
Perhaps the children really had said something, maybe they actually had asked permission to leave the party and go ‘into the village’, as our Michel continued to insist the following day. On the other hand, I hadn’t really noticed that they had been gone for the last few hours. Serge’s daughter, Valerie, had been in the kitchen for most of the evening, watching TV; at a certain point she had come out and said goodnight to all of us, and given her Uncle Paul two pecks on the cheek.
Now Michel was standing between two Frenchmen, his head bowed. His black hair, which he had let grow to shoulder-length that summer, hung lankly along his face, and one of the two men was holding him by the upper arm. Serge’s son, Rick, was being held too, albeit a bit more loosely; one of the Frenchmen had his hand resting lightly on his shoulder, as though he no longer posed a threat.
It was, in fact, Beau – the adopted son from Burkina Faso who had arrived here among the Dutch people in the Dordogne by way of the relief project for his corrugated-iron school building and his new parents, with a layover in Holland – who had to be held tight. He was kicking and flailing; two other Frenchmen had twisted his arms up behind his back and finally got him onto the ground, face down in the grass of my brother’s garden.
‘Messieurs …! Messieurs!’ I heard Serge call out as he hurried with giant steps towards the group. But he had already knocked back quite a bit of the local red and was clearly having a hard time walking straight at all. ‘Messieurs! Qu’est-ce qu’il se passe?’
13
I went to the men’s room, but when I came back the main course still hadn’t arrived. A new bottle of wine, however, was already on the table.
The furnishings of the men’s room had been thought about a bit too much; one could even wonder whether terms like ‘men’s room’ or ‘toilet’ quite fitted the bill. Water was gurgling everywhere, not only along the stainless-steel peeing wall, but also down the full-length mirrors in their granite frames. You could say – rightly – that it was all consistent parts of a whole: consistent with the waitresses’ tight ponytails, their black pinafores, the Art Deco lamp on the lectern, the organic meat and the manager’s pinstripe suit – the only problem being that it was never exactly clear what that whole might boil down to. It was sort of like certain designer glasses, glasses that add nothing to the personality of the person wearing them; on the contrary, they draw attention first and foremost to themselves: I am a pair of glasses, and don’t you ever forget it!
It wasn’t that I’d really needed to go to the toilet, I just had to get away for a moment, away from our table and all the gabbing about movies and holiday destinations. But when I took up position at the stainless-steel urinal, purely for form’s sake, and opened my fly, the gurgling water and the tinkling of piano music in the background suddenly made me have to go really badly.
It was at that moment that I heard the door open and a new visitor enter the men’s room. Now I’m not one of those men who suddenly can’t pee any more when someone else is in the room, but it does take longer: it takes longer, above all, for me to get going. I cursed myself for having gone to the urinal and not into a stall.
The new visitor cleared his throat a couple of times; he was also humming something that sounded vaguely familiar, a melody I recognized only a second later as ‘Killing Me Softly’.
‘Killing Me Softly with His Song’ … by … goddam it, what was that woman’s name again? Roberta Flack! Bingo! I prayed to God that the man would go and find a toilet of his own, but from the corner of my eye I saw him step up to the peeing wall barely a metre away from me. He made the usual motions, and after only a few seconds I heard the sound of a steady, powerful jet of urine clattering against the water streaming down the wall.
It was the sort of jet that seems particularly pleased with itself, that wants nothing more than to demonstrate its own boundless good health and which probably, once, back in primary school, belonged to the little boy who could pee further than anyone else, all the way across the ditch.
I looked up and saw that the owner of the jet was the man with the beard, the man with the beard who had been sitting with his objectionably young girlfriend at the table next to ours. Just then, the man looked over too. We both nodded vaguely, as is customary when two men stand three feet apart to take a piss. From within the beard, the man’s mouth twisted into a grin. A triumphant grin, I couldn’t help thinking, the typical grin of a man with a powerful jet, a grin that was amused by men who had more trouble peeing than he did.
After all, wasn’t a powerful jet also a sign of manliness? Didn’t it, perhaps, give its owner right of primacy when it came to the available women? And, conversely, wasn’t a cowardly dribble an indication that there were probably other things that didn’t flow right down there? Indeed, that the survival of the species would be endangered were women to shrug indifferently at such dribbling and no longer let themselves be drawn to the healthy sound of a powerful jet?
There were no partitions between us; all I would have had to do was lower my eyes to catch sight of the dick that went along with the bearded man. Judging from the clatter, it had to be a big dick, I thought to myself, a big cock of the shameless variety, with thick blue veins right below the surface of darkish-grey skin that was ruddily healthy yet still rather rough: the sort of dick that might tempt a man to spend his holidays at a nudist camp, or in any event to purchase the smallest model slip de bain, of the flimsiest material possible.
The reason why I had excused myself and gone to the men’s room was because it was all becoming too much for
me. By way of holiday destinations and the Dordogne, we had ended up at racism. My wife had supported me in my position that muffling away racism and pretending it wasn’t there only made the problem worse. Out of the blue, and without even looking at me, she came to my aid. ‘I think that what Paul means is …’
That was how she started: by putting into words what she thought I was trying to say. Coming from anyone but Claire, it could have sounded denigrating, or patronizing, or condescending, as though I were unable to express my own opinions in words another person could understand. But coming from Claire, ‘I think that what Paul means is …’ meant nothing more and nothing less than that the others were too slow on the uptake, too thick to grasp a point that her husband was holding up before their eyes in an extremely clear and obvious fashion – and that she was starting to lose patience.
After that we went back to films for a little bit. Claire said that Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? was ‘the most racist movie ever’. Everyone knows the story. The daughter of a wealthy white couple (played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) brings her new fiancé home to meet her parents. To their great dismay, the fiancé (played by Sidney Poitier) turns out to be black. During dinner, the truth gradually becomes clear: the black man is a good black man, an intelligent black man in a nice suit, a university professor. In intellectual terms, he is far superior to the white parents of his fiancée, who are mediocre, upper-middle-class types chock-full of prejudices concerning blacks.
