The Dinner

by Herman Koch

  The manager had popped up out of nowhere beside our table, he had his hands tucked behind his back and was leaning over slightly; his eyes were caught for a moment by Serge’s collapsed dame blanche, then he looked at each of us enquiringly, in turn.

  I might have been mistaken, but I thought I noted a certain briskness in the manager’s movements and facial expression. That’s how things often go in restaurants like this: as soon as you’ve finished your meal and there is no longer any real chance of you ordering another bottle of wine, you might as well get lost.

  Even if you were going to be the new prime minister in seven months’ time, I thought. There was a time to come and a time to go.

  Serge checked his watch again.

  ‘Well, I think …’ He looked first at Babette, then at Claire. ‘Why don’t we order a cup of coffee at the café?’ he said.

  Ex, I corrected myself. Ex-prime minister. Or no … what did you call someone who had never been prime minister, but decided not to run anyway? Ex-candidate?

  The prefix ‘ex’, in any case, didn’t sound good. Ex-footballers and ex-cyclists know what that’s like. It was doubtful whether my brother, after tomorrow’s press conference, would still be able to reserve a table at this restaurant. On the same day. It seemed more likely that an ex-candidate would be put on the waiting list for three months, at the very least.

  ‘Then would you bring us the check?’ Serge said. Maybe I’d missed something, but I couldn’t remember his having waited to see whether Babette and Claire also thought it was a better idea to move to the café.

  ‘I’d like coffee,’ I said. ‘An espresso,’ I added. ‘And something to go with it.’ I thought about it for a moment, I’d been moderate throughout the evening, I just didn’t know right away what I felt like drinking.

  ‘I’ll have an espresso as well,’ Claire said. ‘And a grappa.’

  My wife. I felt a warmth, I wished I was sitting beside her and could touch her now. ‘A grappa for me too,’ I said.

  ‘And you, sir?’ The manager seemed a bit confused at first, and looked at my brother. But Serge shook his head.

  ‘Just the check,’ he said. ‘My wife and I … we have to …’ He glanced over at his wife – a panicky glance, I could see that even from this angle. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Babette had then ordered an espresso as well.

  But Babette had stopped blubbering, she dabbed at her nose with the tip of her napkin. ‘Nothing for me, thank you,’ she said without looking at the manager.

  ‘So that will be two espressos and two grappas,’ he said. ‘Which grappa would you like? We have seven kinds, from old wood-ripened to young—’

  ‘The ordinary one,’ Claire interrupted him. ‘The clear one.’

  The manager gave a bow barely visible to the naked eye. ‘A young grappa for the lady,’ he said. ‘And what would you like, sir?’

  ‘The same,’ I said.

  ‘And the check,’ Serge repeated.

  After the manager had hurried away, Babette turned to me – with an attempt at a smile. ‘And you, Paul? We haven’t heard from you at all. What do you think?’

  ‘I think it’s ridiculous that Serge has picked our café for this,’ I said.

  The smile, or at least the attempt at one, disappeared from Babette’s face.

  ‘Paul, please,’ Serge said. He looked at Claire.

  ‘Yeah, I think it’s ridiculous,’ I said. ‘We took the two of you to that café. It’s a place where Claire and I go all the time, for the daily special. You can’t just walk in there and hold a press conference.’

  ‘Paul,’ Serge said. ‘I don’t know whether you realize how serious—’

  ‘Let him finish,’ Babette said.

  ‘I was finished,’ I said. ‘Anyone who doesn’t understand something like that, I can’t explain it to him.’

  ‘We thought it was a nice café, too,’ Babette said. ‘We have only pleasant memories of that evening.’

  ‘Spare-ribs!’ Serge said.

  I waited to see if anything else was coming, but they were silent. ‘Precisely,’ I said. ‘Pleasant memories. What kind of memories will Claire and I have after this?’

  ‘Paul, don’t be silly,’ Serge said. ‘We’re talking about our children’s futures here. To say nothing of my own future.’

  ‘But he’s right,’ Claire said.

  ‘Oh no, please,’ Serge said.

  ‘No, no pleases,’ Claire said. ‘What it’s about is the casual way you appropriate everything that’s ours. That’s what Paul is saying. You talk about our children’s futures. But you’re not really interested in them, Serge. You’ve co-opted that future. Just as casually as you co-opt a café as a backdrop to your press conference. Only because that will make it seem more authentic. It doesn’t even occur to you to ask what we think about it.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Babette said. ‘You talk about that press conference as though it’s going to go ahead. I was expecting something more from the two of you, I’d hoped you’d at least try to talk him out of this craziness. Especially from you, Claire. After what you said to me in the garden.’

  ‘Is that what this is all about?’ Serge said. ‘About your café? I didn’t realize it was your café. I thought it was a public establishment, open to one and all. Please forgive me.’

  ‘It’s our son,’ Claire said. ‘And yes, it’s also our café. Maybe we don’t have any control over how it’s used, but that’s the way it feels. But Paul’s right when he says that you can’t explain something like that. You either understand it, or you don’t.’

  Serge pulled his cell phone from his pocket and looked at the screen. ‘Excuse me. I have to take this.’ He held the phone to his ear, slid back his chair and began rising to his feet. ‘Hello, Serge Lohman here … Hello.’

  ‘Holy fuck!’ Babette threw her napkin down on the table. ‘Holy fuck,’ she said again.

  Serge had moved a few steps away from our table, he was bent over at the waist, plugging his other ear with two fingers. ‘No, it’s not that,’ I was able to make out. ‘It’s more complicated than that.’ Then he walked off past the other tables, heading for the toilets or the front entrance.

  Claire took her cell phone from her bag. ‘I need to check with Michel,’ she said, looking at me. ‘What time is it? I don’t want to wake him up.’

  I never wear a watch. Ever since they put me on non-active I’ve tried to live by the position of the sun, the rotation of the earth, the intensity of the daylight.

  Claire knew that I had stopped wearing a watch.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. I felt something, a tingling at the back of my neck, it was because of the way my wife kept looking at me – kept staring at me, that was more like it – that I got the feeling I was being drawn into something, even though at that point I hadn’t the faintest idea what.

  It was better than being drawn into nothing, I thought. It was better than ‘Your father doesn’t know about any of this.’

  Claire leaned over to Babette.

  ‘What is it?’ Babette asked.

  ‘Do you know what time it is?’ Claire asked.

  Babette pulled her cell phone out of her purse and looked at the screen. Then she said the time. She didn’t put her phone back, she put it on the table in front of her. She didn’t say to Claire: But you can see what time it is on your own phone, can’t you?

  ‘The poor darling has been home alone all evening,’ Claire said. ‘He may be almost sixteen, he tries to act grown-up, but still …’

  ‘Some things, though, they’re not too young for,’ Babette said.

  Claire was silent for a moment, she ran the tip of her tongue across her lower lip: she always does that when she’s getting angry. ‘Sometimes I think that’s precisely where we’re mistaken,’ she said. ‘Maybe we don’t take that seriously enough, Babette. How young they are. To the outside world they’re suddenly adults, because they did something that we, as adults, consider a crime. But I fe
el that they’ve responded to it more like children. That’s exactly what I was trying to tell Serge. That we don’t have the right to take away their childhood, simply because, according to our norms, as adults, it’s a crime you should have to pay for for the rest of your life.’

  Babette sighed deeply. ‘I’m afraid you’re right, Claire. There’s something gone, something … his spontaneity. He was always so … well, you two know what Rick was like. But that Rick isn’t there any more. For the last few weeks he’s just stayed in his room. At the table, he barely says a word. It’s something about the way he looks, something miserable, as though he’s worrying all the time. He never used to do that, worry.’

  ‘But it’s really important how you deal with that. How the two of you deal with that. I mean, maybe he’s so worried because he thinks that’s what you expect him to be.’

  Babette remained silent: she laid a hand on the table, fingers flat, and pushed her cell phone half an inch away from her. ‘I don’t know, Claire. His father … I think his father expects him to worry more than I do, although it might not be completely fair for me to say that. But Rick often has a hard enough time as it is, because of who his father is. At school. With friendships. I mean, he’s only fifteen, he’s still very much the son-of. But alongside that he’s also the son of someone whose face everyone sees all the time on TV. He wonders about his friendships, sometimes. He thinks people are nice to him because of his famous father. Or the other way around: that teachers sometimes treat him unfairly because they have a problem with that. I remember it so clearly, when he went to secondary school, he said to me: “Mama, it’s like I get to start all over again!” He was so happy. But after a week everyone at school already knew who he was.’

  ‘And soon the whole school will know something else too. If it’s up to Serge.’

  ‘That’s what I keep telling him. That Rick has already suffered so much for who his father is, more than can be good for him. And now Serge wants to drag him into this mess. He’ll never get over that.’

  I thought about Beau, about the adopted African son who could do no wrong in Babette’s eyes.

  ‘With Michel we’ve noticed that, what you call spontaneity, well, he’s still got that. Of course he doesn’t have a famous father, but still … It doesn’t bother him so much. Sometimes I even worry about that, because it doesn’t seem to have sunk in, what this could all mean for his future. In that way he really does react more like a child. A carefree child, not a worried adult, old before his time. That was the real dilemma for Paul and me. How we could make him aware of his responsibility without, at the same time, damaging his childish innocence.’

  I looked at my wife. For Paul and me … How long ago was it that Claire and I still thought the other one didn’t know a thing? An hour ago? Fifty minutes? I looked at Serge’s untouched dame blanche: technically, just like with the rings of a tree or Carbon-14, it had to be possible to measure the passage of time by the melting of vanilla ice cream.

  I looked into Claire’s eyes, the eyes of the woman who represented happiness to me. Without my wife I would have been nowhere, you hear sentimental men say that sometimes, ‘helpless’ is what they often call themselves: and indeed, all they mean is that their wives have been there to clean up after them all their lives and have kept bringing them cups of coffee at every hour of the day. I wouldn’t go that far; without Claire I wouldn’t have been nowhere, but I would have been somewhere else.

  ‘Claire and I keep telling ourselves that Michel needs to be able to go on with his life. We don’t want to talk him into a guilt complex. I mean, in some ways he is guilty of something, but that isn’t to say that a homeless person who lies down in the way in an ATM cubicle should suddenly become innocence itself. That’s the verdict you’d get soon enough if you left it up to the prevailing sense of justice around here. And that’s what you hear around you all the time too: what’s become of our wayward youth, never a word about wayward vagrants and homeless people who conk out wherever they feel like it. No, they want to set an example, just you wait and see; indirectly, the judges are worried about their own children. Who they maybe can’t control any longer either. We don’t want to hand Michel over to some lynch mob that’s only out for blood, the same lynch mob that’s crying out to reinstate the death penalty. Michel is too precious to us for that, for us to offer him up to that kind of gut reaction. What’s more, he himself is too intelligent for that. He stands head and shoulders above that.’

  Throughout my little speech, Claire kept her eyes on me, the look and the smile she gave me now were part of our happiness. It was a happiness that could survive a lot, that outsiders couldn’t come between so easily.

  ‘Oh, I almost forgot!’ she said, holding up her cell phone now. ‘I was going to call Michel. What time did you say it was again?’ she asked Babette as she punched the first key – but she kept her eyes on me as she said it.

  Once again, Babette checked the screen on her cell phone and told Claire the time.

  I’m not going to say exactly what time it was. Exact times can turn on you later.

  ‘Hi, sweetheart!’ Claire said. ‘How are you doing? You’re not too bored, are you?’

  I looked at my wife’s face. There was always something about that face, her eyes, that began to shine when she talked to our son on the phone. No, she was smiling and talking cheerfully – but she wasn’t shining.

  ‘Okay, we’re just going to drink our coffee, we’ll be home in about an hour. So you have time to clean up your own mess. What did you have for dinner …?’

  She listened, nodded, said yes and no a few times and then, after a final ‘Bye, dearest, love you,’ she hung up.

  Looking back on it, I don’t know if it was because of her face that didn’t shine, or whether it was because she hadn’t referred even once to our having seen our son in the restaurant garden, that I was suddenly certain that we had just witnessed a fine bit of acting.

  But for whom was the act intended? For me? That didn’t seem likely. For Babette? But to what end? On two occasions, Claire had asked Babette emphatically to tell her what time it was – as though to make sure Babette wouldn’t forget later on.

  Your father doesn’t know about any of this.

  And suddenly his father knew.

  ‘The espressos were for …?’ It was one of the serving-girls-in-black. She was carrying a silver tray with two cups of espresso and two weensy little glasses of grappa.

  And it was while she was putting down the cups and glasses in front of us that my wife pursed her lips, as if for a kiss.

  She looked at me – and then kissed the air between us.

  DIGESTIF

  40

  It wasn’t so long ago that Michel had written an essay about capital punishment. An essay for history class. It was prompted by a documentary about murderers who served their sentence, returned to society and often, within almost no time, committed another murder. Advocates and opponents of the death penalty were given their say. There was an interview with an American psychiatrist who argued that some people should never be set free again. ‘We have to accept that there are real monsters out there,’ the psychiatrist said. ‘Monsters who should never, under any condition, be released.’

  A few days later I saw the first few pages of Michel’s essay lying on his desk. As a cover illustration he had downloaded a picture from the Internet, a photograph of the hospital bed on which, in some American states, the lethal injection was administered.

  ‘If I can help with anything …’ I’d said; and a few more days later he had shown me his first, rough draft.

  ‘What I really need to know from you,’ he said, ‘is whether I can do this.’

  ‘Do what?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think things … Then I don’t know whether you’re really allowed to think things like that.’

  I read the rough draft – and I was impressed. For a fifteen-year-old, Michel had a refreshing way of looking at any
number of aspects of crime and punishment. He had thought through several moral dilemmas to their most extreme consequences. I understood what he meant about things you might not be allowed to think.

  ‘Very good,’ I said, handing it back to him. ‘And I wouldn’t worry if I were you. You’re allowed to think whatever you like. There’s no reason to put on the brakes at this point. You’ve written it all down very clearly. Let the others try to poke holes in it first, if they can.’

  From then on he let me read the subsequent versions as well. We discussed the moral dilemmas. I have fond memories of that period: only fond memories.

  Less than a week after he had turned in his essay, I was called into the principal’s office; or, at least, I received a telephone invitation to come in, on a given day, at a certain time, and talk about my son, Michel. On the phone, I asked the principal whether there was anything special I should know. Even though I suspected that it was about his essay on capital punishment, I wanted to hear it from the man’s own mouth – but he brushed the question aside: ‘There are a few things I’d like to talk to you about, but not on the phone,’ he said.

  On the afternoon in question I reported to his office. The principal invited me to sit down in a chair across from his desk.

  ‘I want to talk to you about Michel,’ he started in right away; I crossed my legs, fought back the urge to say, ‘Of course, who else?’ and assumed the pose of a careful listener.

  On the wall behind him was a gigantic poster for an aid organization, I can’t remember whether it was Oxfam Novib or UNICEF: you saw a parched, seemingly barren field; at the bottom left was a child dressed in rags, holding up his skinny little hand.

  The poster put me even more on my guard. The principal was probably against global warming and injustice in general. Perhaps he didn’t eat the flesh of mammals, and was anti-American, or in any case anti-Bush – the latter stance gave people carte blanche not to think about anything any more. Anyone who was against Bush had his heart in the right place, and could behave like a boorish asshole towards anyone around him.