by Herman Koch
‘And that’s precisely where the racist hook comes in, in those prejudices,’ Claire had said. ‘The black people that the parents know about, from TV and the neighbourhoods where they’re afraid to go, are poor and lazy and violent criminals. But their future son-in-law, fortunately, is a well-adapted black man who has put on the white man’s neat, three-piece suit. In order to look as much like the white man as he can.’
Serge gazed at my wife with the look of an interested listener, but his body language betrayed the fact that he found it hard to listen to any woman he couldn’t immediately place in simple categories like ‘tits’, ‘nice ass’ or ‘wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers’.
‘It wasn’t until much later that the first unadapted blacks appeared in movies,’ Claire said. ‘Blacks who wore baseball caps and drove flashy cars: violent blacks from the worst neighbourhoods. But at least they were themselves. They were no longer some watered-down version of a white man.’
At that point my brother coughed and cleared his throat. He sat up straight, then leaned over the table – as though he were searching for the microphone. That’s exactly what it looked like, I thought to myself; in all his movements he was suddenly the national politician again, the shoo-in to be our country’s next leader, and he was about to put in her place a woman in the audience in some provincial union hall.
‘And what’s so bad about adapted black people, Claire?’ he said. ‘I mean, to hear you tell it, you’d rather have them remain themselves, even if that means they go on killing each other in their ghettoes over a few grams of crack. With no prospect of improvement.’
I looked at my wife. In my thoughts I egged her on, to deliver my brother the coup de grâce; he had set it up and she could knock it in, as they say. It was just too ghastly, the way he tried to inject his own party platform into a normal discussion about people and the differences between them. Improvement … a word, nothing more: crap dished up for the constituency.
‘I’m not talking about improvement, Serge,’ Claire said. ‘I’m talking about the way we – Dutch people, white people, Europeans – look at other cultures. The things we’re afraid of. If a group of dark-skinned men was coming towards you down the sidewalk, wouldn’t you feel a stronger urge to cross the street if they were wearing baseball caps, rather than neat clothing? Like yours and mine? Or like diplomats? Or office clerks?’
‘I never cross the street. I believe we should approach everyone as equals. You mentioned the things we’re afraid of. I agree with you about that. If we would just stop being afraid, then we could go on to cultivate more understanding for each other.’
‘Serge, I’m not some debating partner you need to wow with hollow terms like improvement and understanding. I’m your sister-in-law, your brother’s wife. It’s just the four of us here now. As friends. As family.’
‘What it’s about is the right to be a prick,’ I said.
A brief silence fell, the proverbial silence in which you could hear a pin drop, had that not been ruled out already by the noise of the busy restaurant. It would be going too far to claim that all heads turned in my direction, the way you read sometimes. But attention was being paid. Babette giggled. ‘Paul …!’ she said.
‘No, but I was suddenly reminded of a TV programme that was on years ago,’ I said. ‘I can’t remember the name of it any more.’
I remembered very well, but had no desire to mention the name of the programme; that would only be a distraction. The name of the programme might prompt my brother to make some sarcastic comment, to try to take the edge off my real message before I even had a chance to deliver it. I didn’t know you watched things like that … That kind of comment.
‘It was about homos. They interviewed an older lady who lived downstairs from two homosexual men, two young men who lived together and took care of her cats sometimes. “Such sweet boys!” the lady said. What she really meant to say was that even though her two neighbours were homosexual, the way they took care of her cats when she was gone showed that they were still people like you and me. That lady sat there beaming smugly, because now everyone could see how tolerant she was. Her upstairs neighbours were sweet boys, even if they did do dirty things to each other. Objectionable things, actually, unhealthy and unnatural. Perversions, in other words, that were nonetheless mitigated by the boys’ selfless care for her cats.’
I paused for a moment. Babette smiled. Serge had raised his eyebrows a couple of times. And Claire, my wife, looked amused – the look she gave me when she knew where things were going from here.
‘In order to understand what this lady was saying about her upstairs neighbours,’ I went on, because no one else was saying anything, ‘you have to turn the situation around. If the two sweet homosexuals hadn’t fed the cats at all, but instead had pelted them with stones or tossed poisoned pork chops down to them from their balcony, then they would have been just plain dirty faggots. I think that’s what Claire meant about Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?: that the friendly Sidney Poitier was a sweet boy too. That the person who made that movie was absolutely no better than the lady in that programme. In fact, Sidney Poitier was supposed to serve as a role model. An example for all those other, nasty Negroes, the uppity Negroes. The dangerous Negroes, the muggers and the rapists and the crack dealers. When you people put on a good-looking suit like Sidney’s and start behaving like the perfect son-in-law, we white folks will be your friends.’
14
The man with the beard was drying his hands. I pulled up my zipper, as a sign that I was finished peeing, even though it had produced no sound, and made straight for the exit. My hand was already on the stainless-steel door handle when I heard the man with the beard say: ‘Isn’t it difficult for that friend of yours sometimes, going to a restaurant when he has such a familiar face?’
I stopped. Without letting go of the handle, I turned and looked at him. The man with the beard was still drying his hands with a clump of paper towels. Within the abundant growth of his beard, his mouth had once again twisted itself into a grin – but not a triumphant grin this time, more like a cowardly baring of the teeth. I have no bad intentions, the grin was saying.
‘He’s not my friend,’ I said.
The grin vanished. The hands stopped their drying as well. ‘Oh, excuse me,’ he said. ‘I just saw you sitting there. We, my daughter and I, we figured: just keep acting normal, let’s not gawk at him.’
I said nothing. The revelation about the daughter had done me more good that I cared to admit. The beard, despite his unabashed jet, had not succeeded in hooking a woman thirty years his junior. He tossed the wet clump of paper into a stainless-steel trash bin; it was one of those bins with a spring-loaded lid, which made it hard for him to get it all in in one shot.
‘I was wondering,’ he said. ‘I was wondering whether perhaps it was possible, my daughter and I, we both feel that our country is in need of a change. She’s studying political science, I was wondering whether maybe she could have her picture taken with Mr Lohman, later on?’
He had pulled a flat, shiny camera from the pocket of his jacket.
‘It would take only a second,’ he said. ‘I realize that it’s a private dinner for you and everything, and I don’t want to bother him. My daughter … my daughter would never forgive me if she knew I’d even dared to ask this. She was the one who said it wasn’t right to stare at a famous politician in a restaurant. That you should leave him alone, during his few private moments. And that you absolutely shouldn’t try to have your picture taken with him. But on the other hand, I know how wonderful it would be for her. To have her picture taken with Serge Lohman, I mean.’
I looked at him. I wondered what it would be like to have a father whose face you couldn’t see. Whether a day would finally come when, as the daughter of a father like that, you simply lost patience – or whether you got used to it, like a bad carpet.
‘No problem at all,’ I said. ‘Mr Lohman is always pleased to come in contact
with his supporters. We’re in the middle of an important discussion right now, but just keep your eye on me. When I give you the sign, that will be the right moment for a photo.
15
The first thing I noticed when I came back from the men’s room was the silence at our table: the kind of tense silence that tells you right away that you’ve missed something important.
I had come back into the dining room along with the beard; he was in front of me, so I noticed the silence only once I was already close to our table.
Or no, there was something else that I noticed first: my wife’s hand, reaching out diagonally across the tablecloth, holding Babette’s. My brother was staring at his empty plate.
And it was only after I settled down in my chair that I realized Babette was crying. A soundless weeping, a barely perceptible shaking of the shoulders, a tremble in her arm – the arm attached to the hand that Claire was holding.
I sought and made eye contact with my wife. Claire raised her eyebrows and tossed a meaningful glance in the direction of my brother. At that same moment, Serge raised his head, looked at me sheepishly and shrugged. ‘Well, Paul, you’re in luck,’ he said. ‘Maybe you should have stayed in the bathroom a little longer.’
Babette yanked her hand away from Claire’s, seized her napkin from her lap and tossed it on her plate.
‘You are such an unbelievable shithead!’ she said to Serge, sliding back her chair. The next moment she was walking past the other tables, heading for the toilets – or the exit, I thought. But it didn’t seem likely that she would leave us. Her body language, the subdued pace at which she moved past the tables, told me she was hoping one of us would come after her.
And, indeed, my brother began getting up from his chair. Claire laid a hand on his forearm. ‘Let me go to her for a moment, Serge,’ she said, and stood up. She too hurried off past the other tables. By now Babette had disappeared from view, so I couldn’t tell whether she had gone to the toilets or for a breath of fresh air.
My brother and I looked at each other. He made an attempt at a feeble smile, but it didn’t really work. ‘It’s …’ he began. ‘She has …’ He looked around, then brought his head closer to mine. ‘This isn’t what you think,’ he said, so quietly that I could barely understand him.
There was something about his head. About his face. It was still the same head (and the same face), but it was like it was suspended in air, with no clear link to a body, without even a coherent thought. He reminded me of a cartoon character who has just had a chair kicked out from under him. The cartoon character remains hanging in space for a moment before he realizes that the chair is no longer there.
If he wore this face while passing out flyers on the street, I thought, flyers calling upon ordinary, everyday people to be sure and vote for him in the coming elections, no one would give him a second look. The face made you think of a brand-new car, fresh from the showroom, that rounds the first corner, swipes a lamppost and gets a big scratch down the side. No one would want a car like that.
Serge got up and moved to the chair across from me. The chair was Claire’s, it belonged to my wife. Without a doubt, he could now feel her body heat, left behind on the seat, right through the cloth of his trousers. The thought of it made me furious.
‘Okay, that makes it easier for us to talk,’ he said.
I didn’t say a thing. I won’t deny that this was how I liked to see my brother: floundering. I wasn’t about to throw him a lifebuoy.
‘She’s been having a hard time lately with, well, you know, I’ve always hated that word,’ he said. ‘The menopause. It sounds like something that would never happen to our wives.’
He paused. The pause was probably meant for me to say something about Claire. About Claire and the menopause. ‘Our wives’: that’s what he’d said. But it was none of his business. Whatever was wrong or right with Claire, that was private.
‘It’s the hormones,’ he went on. ‘First the room’s too warm and all the windows have to be opened, the next moment she’s suddenly all weepy.’ He turned his head, his still visibly shaken head, towards the restrooms, the door, and then back to me. ‘Maybe it’s good for her to talk about it with another woman. You know what I mean, girl talk. At moments like this I can’t do anything right anyway.’
He grinned. I didn’t grin back. He raised his arms from the tabletop and flapped his wrists. Then he leaned his elbows on the table and pressed his fingertips together. He looked over his shoulder again.
‘There’s something else we should really talk about, though, Paul,’ he said.
I felt something cold and hard inside me – something cold and hard that had been there all evening – grow a little colder and harder.
‘We need to talk about our children,’ said Serge Lohman.
I nodded. I looked across the aisle and nodded again. The man with the beard had already looked our way a few times. For clarity’s sake, I nodded a third time. The man with the beard nodded back.
I saw him put down his knife and fork, lean over to his daughter and whisper something to her. The daughter grabbed her handbag and began rummaging through it. Meanwhile, her father pulled the camera out of his coat pocket and rose from his chair.
MAIN COURSE
16
‘Grapes,’ said the manager.
His pinkie was hovering less than a quarter of an inch over a minuscule bunch of fruitlets that I thought at first were berries: white currants or something. I didn’t know anything about berries really, except that most types were inedible to humans.
The ‘grapes’ were lying beside a deep purple piece of lettuce, full two inches of empty plate away from the actual main course, ‘fillet of guinea fowl wrapped in paper-thin, sliced German bacon’. Serge’s plate featured the tiny cluster and the shred of lettuce too, but my brother had ordered the tournedos. There’s not a whole lot you can say about a tournedos except that it’s a piece of meat, but because something had to be said, the manager provided a brief account of where the tournedos came from. Of the ‘organic farm’ where the animals ‘lived in freedom’, until they were butchered.
I could see Serge’s impatience; he was hungry in the way only Serge can be hungry. I recognized the symptoms: the tip of his tongue sweeping across his upper lip like the tongue of a ravenous dog in a cartoon, the rubbing together of the hands that an outsider could take for delighted anticipation, but which was absolutely anything but. My brother was not delighting in anticipation; there was a tournedos on his plate and that tournedos had to be wolfed down as quickly as possible: he needed to eat – now!
The only reason I had asked the manager about the grapes was to torment my brother.
Babette and Claire weren’t back yet, but what did he care. ‘They’ll be here any minute now,’ he’d said when no less than four girls in black pinafores had showed up with our main courses, trailing the manager in their wake. The manager asked whether we would like them to wait with this course until our wives had returned, but Serge quashed that immediately. ‘Please, just put it down,’ he said. His tongue was already moving across his upper lip, and the hand-rubbing was beyond his control.
The manager’s little finger pointed first to my guinea-hen fillet rolled in German bacon, and then at the side dishes: a little heap of ‘lasagna slices with eggplant and ricotta’, held together with a toothpick, which reminded me of a miniature club sandwich, and an ear of corn impaled at both ends on a spring. The spring was probably meant to enable you to pick up the corn without getting your fingers greasy, but it had above all something laughable about it: or no, not laughable, more like something intended to be funny, an ironic nod from the chef, something like that. The spring was chrome-plated and stuck out about an inch from either end of the corn cob, which glistened with butter. I’m not particularly fond of corn that way, gnawing at an ear of corn I’ve always found disgusting; you get too little to eat and too much remains stuck between your teeth, while the butter goes dripping down your chin.
Besides, I’ve never been able to shake the idea that corn cobs, first and foremost, are pig feed.
After the manager had described the organic conditions on the farm, the farm where Serge’s tournedos had been cut from a cow, and promised that he would come back in a bit to elucidate the contents of our wives’ plates, I pointed to the little bunch of berries. ‘Are those by any chance white currants?’ I asked.
Serge had already plunged his fork into the tournedos. He was poised to cut off a piece, his right hand with the steak knife was hovering over his plate. The manager had already turned to walk away, but now he turned back. As his pinkie approached the bunch of grapelets, I looked at Serge’s face.
That face radiated impatience, that above all. Impatience and irritation at this new delay. He’d had no qualms about starting in on his little fillet of beef in the absence of Babette and Claire, but he couldn’t stand the idea of sinking his teeth into it with a stranger hanging around.
‘What was all that about berries?’ he asked, after the manager had finally walked away and we were alone at last. ‘Since when are you interested in berries?’
He cut off a large chunk of his tournedos and stuck it in his mouth. The chewing took ten seconds, at the very most. After swallowing he stared into space for a few moments; it looked as though he were waiting for the meat to hit his stomach. Then he applied his knife and fork to the plate again.
I got up.
‘What is it now?’ Serge asked.
‘I’m going to see what’s taking them so long,’ I said.
17
I tried the ladies’ room first. Carefully, so I wouldn’t startle anyone, I pushed the door open a crack.
‘Claire …?’
Except for the absence of a peeing wall, the room was identical to the men’s. Stainless steel, granite and piano music. The only difference was the vase of white daffodils positioned between the two sinks. I thought about the owner of the restaurant, about his white turtleneck.
