by Herman Koch
‘Babette?’ Calling my sister-in-law’s name was only a formality, an excuse for being in the doorway of the ladies’ toilet at all, should anyone actually be in one of the stalls, which didn’t seem to be the case.
I walked to the front door, past the cloakroom and the girls at the lectern. It was pleasantly warm outside; a full moon hung between the treetops and it smelled of herbs, a smell I couldn’t quite place but which seemed almost Mediterranean. A little further along, at the edge of the park, I saw the lights of cars, and a passing tram. And further still, through the bushes, the lighted windows of the café where, at this very moment, the regular people were settling down to their spare-ribs.
I walked down the gravel pathway with its electric torches and turned left along a path that cut around the restaurant. To my right was the footbridge across a ditch, which led to the street with its traffic and the café serving spare-ribs; to my left was a rectangular pool. Further back, where the pool dissolved into darkness, I saw something that I took at first to be a wall, but which on closer inspection turned out to be a head-high hedge.
Turning left again, I walked along the edge of the pool; the light from the restaurant was reflected in the dark water, from here you could see the diners at their tables. I went on a bit, then stopped.
There were no more than thirty feet between us, but I could see my brother sitting at our table and he couldn’t see me. As we had waited for the main dish, I had looked outside any number of times, but with the falling of darkness had been able to see less and less; from where I sat, however, I was able to see almost the entire restaurant reflected in the glass. Serge would have to turn around and press his nose up against the window, and then perhaps he would see me standing here, but even then it wasn’t certain he would see anything more than a dark form across the pool.
I looked around; as far as I could tell in the dark the park was deserted. Not a sign of Claire and Babette. My brother had put down his knife and fork and was wiping his mouth with a napkin. From here I couldn’t see his plate, but I would have bet there was nothing left on it: the eating had been done, the feeling of hunger was a thing of the past. Serge raised his glass to his lips and drank. Just at that moment, the man with the beard and his daughter stood up from their table. On their way to the door they paused beside Serge’s table. I saw the man with the beard raise his hand, the daughter smiled at him and Serge raised his glass by way of greeting.
Undoubtedly, they had wanted to thank him again for the ‘meet and greet’. Serge had indeed been the very picture of courtesy; he had passed seamlessly and in an instant from his role as a diner in need of privacy to that of nationally known face: a nationally known face that had always remained itself, a regular person, a person like you and me, someone you could come up and talk to any time and anywhere, because he never placed himself on a pedestal.
I suppose I was the only one who had noticed the wrinkle of irritation on his brow when the man with the beard had come over to him the first time. ‘Please do excuse me, but your … your … this gentleman assured me that it would be no problem if we …’ The wrinkle was there for no more than a second; after that we were shown the Serge Lohman anyone could feel good about voting for, the prime-ministerial candidate who felt at ease among the common people.
‘Of course! Of course!’ he’d cried jovially when the beard showed him the camera and pointed to his daughter. ‘And what’s your name?’ Serge had asked the girl.
She wasn’t a particularly pretty girl, not the kind who produced that naughty glint in my brother’s eye: not a girl for whom he would try to show off, as he had earlier with the clumsy waitress, the Scarlett-Johansson-lookalike. She did have a nice face, though, an intelligent face, I corrected myself – too intelligent in fact to want to have her picture taken with my brother. ‘Naomi,’ she replied.
‘Come sit next to me, Naomi,’ Serge said, and when the girl had settled down in the empty chair he put his arm around her shoulders. The beard took a few steps back.
‘And now one for the scrapbook,’ he said after the camera had flashed once, and he took another one.
The photo moment had caused a certain amount of commotion. The people at the tables next to ours had, it’s true, acted as though there had been no photo moment, but it was just like with Serge’s entrance earlier that evening: even when you act like nothing is happening, something happens, I don’t know how to put it any more clearly. It’s like walking right past an accident because you don’t like the sight of blood, or no, let’s scale it down a bit: like an animal that’s been hit and is lying dead at the side of the road, you see it, you saw the dead animal from a way back already, but you don’t look at it any more. You don’t feel like seeing the blood and guts spilling out. And so you look at something somewhere else, at the sky, for example, or a flowering bush in the field further along – at anything except the side of the road.
Serge had been awfully jovial, putting his arm around her shoulders like that: he had pulled the girl over a little closer and then leaned his head to one side; leaned his head so far that their heads almost touched. The result was probably a wonderful photo, the beard’s daughter probably couldn’t have asked for a better photo, but I had the distinct impression that Serge wouldn’t have been so jovial if it had been Scarlett Johansson (or a Scarlett-Johansson-lookalike) beside him, instead of that girl.
‘We’d like to thank you very much,’ the man with the beard had said. ‘We won’t bother you any more. You’re here in a private capacity.’
The girl – Naomi – hadn’t spoken a word; she pushed her chair back and went to stand beside her father.
But they still didn’t go away.
‘Does this happen often?’ the beard asked, leaning across a little so that his head was just over our table – he was also speaking more quietly, more confidentially. ‘That people just come up to you and ask to have their picture taken with you?’
My brother stared at him, the wrinkle between his eyebrows was back. What more did they want from him? the wrinkle said. The beard and his daughter had had their jovial moment, now they should just fuck off.
For once, I couldn’t blame him. I had seen it happen before, the way people hung around Serge Lohman too long. They couldn’t take their leave of him, they wanted the moment to last longer. Yes, they almost always wanted a little bit more; a photograph or an autograph wasn’t enough, they wanted something exclusive, an exclusive treatment: a distinction had to be made between them and all those others who came up and asked for a photo or an autograph. They were looking for a story. A story they could tell everyone the next day: you know who I met last night? Yeah, that’s the one. So nice, so normal. We thought that after the picture was taken he would want to be left alone. But he didn’t, not at all! He invited us to sit down at his table and insisted we have a drink with him. I don’t think everyone with a famous face would do that. But he did. And it was late by the time we left.
Serge looked at the man with the beard; the wrinkle between his eyebrows had become more pronounced, but an outsider might have mistaken it for the frown of someone whose eyes were pained by looking into the light. He slid his knife across the tablecloth, away from his plate, then back again. I knew the dilemma he was struggling with, I had been there more often, more often than I liked: my brother wanted to be left alone, he had shown the sunniest side of his character, he had let the father immortalize him with his arm around the daughter’s shoulder, he was normal, he was human; anyone who voted for Serge Lohman was voting for a normal and human prime minister.
But now, now that the beard just kept standing there, waiting for even more free chit-chat with which he could show off in front of his colleagues on Monday morning, Serge had to control himself. One cutting or even mildly sarcastic comment could ruin everything, and the entire charm offensive would have been pointless. On Monday the beard would tell his colleagues what an arrogant shit Serge Lohman had turned out to be, a man who put on airs. After all,
the beard and his daughter hadn’t been bothering him; all they did was ask for a picture and then left him to his little private dinner party. Among those colleagues there would be two or three who wouldn’t vote for Serge Lohman after hearing that; in fact, it was quite possible that those two or three colleagues would pass along the story about the arrogant, unapproachable party leader; the so-called ‘snowball effect’. As with all slander, the story would take on increasingly grotesque form every time it was told; the highly reliable gossip would spread like wildfire, telling how Serge Lohman had treated someone with contempt, an ordinary father and his daughter who had asked politely to have their picture taken with him; in a later version, the candidate prime minister would have thrown the two out of the restaurant on their ears.
Even though he had only himself to blame for this, at that moment I felt sorry for my brother. I had always sympathized with the movie stars and rock idols who went after the paparazzi lying in wait for them outside the club and broke their cameras. Had Serge decided to take a swing and smack the beard right in the face, wherever that might be hidden behind those despicably laughable or laughably despicable leprechaun bristles, he could have counted on me one hundred per cent. I would have twisted the beard’s arms behind his back, I thought to myself, so that Serge could concentrate on smashing his face; he would, after all, have to throw a little more weight into the punches in order to damage anything behind all that hair.
Without exaggerating, you could say that Serge was of two minds when it came to public attention. At those moments and on those occasions when he is the public’s sweetheart, during his speeches in provincial union halls, when he answers questions from an audience of the ‘rank and file’, or in front of the TV cameras or radio microphones, when he stands on the street market in a windbreaker handing out campaign flyers and talking to regular people, or when he stands at the lectern and lets the applause roll over him, no, what am I saying: the continuous standing ovation that lasted for minutes at the last party congress (flowers were thrown onto the podium, spontaneously it was, they said, but in fact carefully stage-directed by his campaign manager), at moments like that, he shines. It’s not just a matter of beaming with pride, or self-importance, or because politicians who want to get ahead simply have to beam, because otherwise the campaign might end tomorrow; no, he really shines: he radiates something.
Every time I’ve seen it, it has surprised me, it is surprising and amazing to behold: how my brother, the oaf, the lumpen boor who ‘has to eat now’ and scarfs down his tournedos joylessly in three bites, the easily bored dullard whose eyes start to wander at every subject that doesn’t have to do with him, how this brother of mine on a podium and in the spotlights and on TV literally begins to shine – how, in other words, he becomes a politician with charisma.
‘It’s his magic,’ said the hostess of a young people’s programme, in an interview with a women’s magazine. ‘When you get close to him, something happens.’
I had happened to see that particular episode of the young people’s programme, and it was clear what Serge did. First of all, he never stops smiling; he’s taught himself to do that, though his eyes don’t smile along, which is how you can tell it’s not for real. But still: he smiles, and people like that. For the rest, throughout most of the interview he stood with his hands in his pockets, not bored or blasé, but casual, as though he were standing in a schoolyard (a schoolyard was not far off the mark, actually, because the interview was done in some noisy and poorly lit youth club, after a speech there). He was too old to pass for a schoolboy, but he was the nicest teacher of them all; the teacher you could confide in, who sometimes says ‘shit’ or ‘cool’, the teacher without a tie who, during the field trip to Paris, gets a little tipsy at the hotel bar along with everyone else. Occasionally, Serge took a hand out of his pocket to illustrate with a gesture some point from the party programme, and then it was as though he was going to run that hand through the hostess’s hair, or say that her hair was nice.
But in private, that all changes. Like everyone with a famous face, he also has the look: whenever he goes into some place in a private capacity, he never looks straight at anyone; his eyes dart around without fixing on any living person, he looks at ceilings, at the lamps hanging from those ceilings, at tables, at chairs, at the framed prints on the wall – what he would really like to do is to look at nothing at all. And the whole time, he grins; it’s the grin of someone who knows that everyone is looking at him – or purposely not looking at him, which boils down to the same thing. Sometimes it’s hard for him to keep those two things – the public property and the private circumstances – separate. Then you see him thinking that maybe it’s not such a bad idea to profit a little from the public interest during his private moments; like tonight, in the restaurant.
He looked at the man with the beard and then at me; the wrinkle was gone. He winked, and the next moment he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out his cell phone.
‘Excuse me, would you?’ he said, taking a look at the display. ‘I’m afraid I have to take this.’ He smiled apologetically at the beard, pressed a key and raised the phone to his ear.
There had been no sound, no old-fashioned ringing, no special ringtone with a little tune – but it was possible; there was plenty of background noise that could have prevented the beard and Naomi and me from hearing anything, or who knows, maybe he had the phone set to vibrate.
Who could say? Certainly not the beard. For him the moment had arrived to slink away empty-handed: of course he might have had his doubts about the phone call, he had every reason to think he was being flimflammed – but experience showed that people didn’t do that. It ruined their story; they’d had their picture taken with the future prime minister of the Netherlands, they had talked to him a little, but he was a busy man too.
‘Oh,’ Serge said into the phone. ‘Where?’ He was no longer looking at the beard and his daughter, he was looking outside; as far as he was concerned they had already left. It was, I must admit, a great bit of acting. ‘I’m having dinner at the moment,’ he said and looked at his watch; he mentioned the name of the restaurant. ‘No, I won’t be able to do that before midnight,’ he said.
I felt it was my duty to look at the man with the beard. I was the receptionist who shows the patient to the door, because the doctor himself has to deal with the next patient. I gestured, not an apologetic gesture, but one that more or less said that he and his daughter could now withdraw without suffering any loss of face.
‘These are the times when you ask yourself what you do it for,’ my brother sighed when we were alone again and he had put away his cell phone. ‘Jesus Christ, those are the worst! The ones who just won’t go away. If the girl had at least been a little bit pretty …’ He winked. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Paul, I forgot. You like them like that, the wallflowers.’
He grinned at his own joke, and I grinned along with him, looking towards the door to see if Claire and Babette were on their way back. But then, before I expected it, Serge grew serious again. He put his elbows on the table and formed a little bridge with his fingertips. ‘So what were we talking about?’ he said.
And then they came with the main course.
18
And then? Then I was standing outside, looking from a distance at my brother who was sitting at our table all alone. I was sorely tempted to spend the rest of the evening out here – or at least not go back inside.
I heard an electronic beep that I couldn’t place at first, followed by other beeps that together seemed to form a melody; what it resembled most was the ringtone coming from a cell phone, but not my own.
Still, undeniably, it was coming from the pocket of my own blazer, the right pocket: I’m left-handed, so I always put my cell in my left-hand pocket. I slid my hand – my right hand – into the pocket and felt, in addition to the familiar keyring and something hard, which I knew to be an open pack of Stimorol gum, an object that could only be a phone.
Bef
ore I had time to even pull it out, I realized what was going on. How Michel’s phone had ended up in my pocket was something I couldn’t reconstruct immediately, but I still found myself faced with the simple fact that someone was calling Michel – on his cell phone. Now that it was no longer muffled by the fabric of my blazer, the ringtone was awfully loud, so loud that I was afraid you might hear it all over the park.
‘Fuck,’ I said.
The best thing, of course, would be to let the phone go on ringing until it switched to voicemail. On the other hand, I wanted it to stop making that noise right away.
On the other hand, I was curious about who was calling.
I looked at the display to see whether I might recognize a name, but reading proved unnecessary. The display lit up in the dark, and even though the features were a bit blurry, I had no trouble recognizing my own wife’s face.
Claire, for some reason, was calling her son, and there was only one way to find out what that reason was.
‘Claire?’ I said, after sliding the phone open.
There was no sound.
‘Claire?’ I said again. I looked around a few times; it wasn’t hard to imagine that my wife would suddenly pop out from behind a tree – surprise, it was all a joke, even if it was a joke I didn’t quite get at the moment.
‘Dad?’
‘Michel! Where are you?’
‘At home. I was … I couldn’t … But where are you?’
‘At the restaurant. We told you. But how—’ But how did I get your cell phone, I wanted to say, but suddenly that didn’t seem like a good question to ask.
‘What are you doing with my cell?’ my son asked then; he didn’t sound upset, more surprised, like me.
His room, earlier that evening, his phone on the table … What were you doing up here? You said you were looking for me. Why were you looking for me? Did I have his phone in my hand at that moment? Or had I already put it back on the table? I was just looking for you. Could I really have …? But then I would have had to have my blazer on already. I never wear blazers around the house. I tried to think why I would have gone upstairs wearing my blazer, to my son’s room.
