The Dinner - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Herman Koch (Начало книги) #1

First published in the Netherlands in 2009 by Ambo Anthos, Amsterdam.

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

The moral right of Herman Koch to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

The moral right of Sam Garrett to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The publishers gratefully acknowledge the support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 84887 382 7

OME ISBN: 978 0 85789 720 6

E-Book ISBN: 978 1 84887 386 5

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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THE DINNER

CONTENTS

APERITIF

APPETIZER

MAIN COURSE

DESSERT

DIGESTIF

APERITIF

We were going out to dinner. I won’t say which restaurant, because next time it might be full of people who’ve come to see whether we’re there. Serge made the reservation. He’s always the one who arranges it, the reservation. This particular restaurant is one where you have to call three months in advance – or six, or eight, don’t ask me. Personally, I’d never want to know three months in advance where I’m going to eat on any given evening, but apparently some people don’t mind. A few centuries from now, when historians want to know what kind of crazies people were at the start of the twenty-first century, all they’ll have to do is look at the computer files of the so-called ‘top’ restaurants. That information is kept on file, I happen to know that. If Mr L was prepared to wait three months for a window seat last time, then this time he’ll wait for five months for a table beside the men’s room – that’s what restaurants call ‘customer relations management’.

Serge never reserves a table three months in advance. Serge makes the reservation on the day itself, he says he thinks of it as a sport. You have restaurants that reserve a table for people like Serge Lohman, and this restaurant happens to be one of them. One of many, I should say. It makes you wonder whether there isn’t one restaurant in the whole country where they don’t get faint right away when they hear the name Serge Lohman on the phone. He doesn’t make the call himself, of course, he lets his secretary or one of his assistants do that. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he told me when I talked to him a few days ago. ‘They know me there, I can get us a table.’ All I’d asked was whether it wasn’t a good idea to call, in case they were full, and where we would go if they were. At the other end of the line, I thought I heard something like pity in his voice. I could almost see him shake his head. It was a sport.

There was one thing I didn’t feel like that evening. I didn’t feel like being there when the owner or on-duty manager greeted Serge Lohman as though he were an old friend; or seeing how the waitress would lead him to the nicest table on the side facing the garden, or how Serge would act as though he had it all coming to him, that deep down he was still an ordinary guy and that was why he felt entirely comfortable among other, ordinary people.

Which was precisely why I’d told him we would meet in the restaurant itself and not, as he’d suggested, at the café around the corner. It was a café where a lot of ordinary people went. How Serge Lohman would walk in there like a regular guy, with a grin that said that all those ordinary people should above all go on talking and act as though he wasn’t there – I didn’t feel like that, either.

The restaurant is only a few blocks from our house, so we walked. That also took us past the café where I hadn’t wanted to meet Serge. I had my arm around my wife’s waist, her hand was tucked somewhere inside my coat. The sign outside the café was lit with the warm, red and white colours of the brand of beer they had on tap.

‘We’re still too early,’ I said to my wife. ‘What I mean is: if we went to the restaurant now, we’d be right on time.’

My wife: I should stop calling her that. Her name is Claire. Her parents named her Marie Claire, but in time Claire didn’t feel like sharing her name with a magazine. Sometimes I call her Marie, just to tease her. But I rarely refer to her as my wife – on official occasions sometimes, or in sentences like ‘My wife can’t come to the phone right now,’ or ‘My wife is very sure she asked for a room with a sea view.’

On evenings like this, Claire and I make the most of the moments when it’s still just the two of us. Then it’s as though everything is still up for grabs, as though the dinner date was only a misunderstanding, as though it’s just the two of us out on the town. If I had to give a definition of happiness, it would be this: happiness needs nothing but itself, it doesn’t have to be validated. ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,’ is the opening sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. All I could hope to add to that is that unhappy families – and within those families, in particular the unhappy husband and wife – can never get by on their own. The more validators the merrier. Unhappiness loves company. Unhappiness can’t stand silence – especially not the uneasy silence that settles in when it is all alone.

So when the bartender at the café put our beers down in front of us, Claire and I smiled at each other, in the knowledge that we would soon be spending an entire evening in the company of the Lohmans: in the knowledge that this was the finest moment of that evening, that from here on it would all be downhill.

I didn’t feel like going to the restaurant. I never do. A fixed appointment for the immediate future is the gates of hell, the actual evening is hell itself. It starts in front of the mirror in the morning: what you’re going to wear, and whether or not you’re going to shave. At times like these, after all, everything is a statement, a pair of torn and stained jeans as much as a neatly ironed shirt. If you don’t scrape off the day’s stubble, you were too lazy to shave; two days’ beard immediately makes them wonder whether this is some new look; three days or more is just a step from total dissolution. ‘Are you feeling all right? You’re not sick, are you?’ No matter what you do, you’re not free. You shave, but you’re not free. Shaving is a statement as well. Apparently you found this evening significant enough to go to the trouble of shaving, you see the others thinking – in fact, shaving already puts you behind 1–0.

And then I always have Claire to remind me that this isn’t an evening like every other. Claire is smarter than I am. I’m not saying that out of some half-baked feminist sentiment or in order to endear women to me. You’ll never hear me claim that ‘women in general’ are smarter than men. Or more sensitive, more intuitive, or that they are more ‘in touch with life’, or any of the other horseshit that, when all is said and done, so-called ‘sensitive’ men try to peddle more often than women themselves.

Claire just happens to be smarter than I am, I can honestly say that it took me a while to admit that. During our first years together I thought she was intelligent, I guess, but intelligent in the usual sense: precisely as intelligent, in fact, as you might expect my wife to be. After all, would I settle for a stupid woman for any longer than a month? In any case, Claire was intelligent enough for me to stay with her even after the first month. And now, almost twenty years later, that hasn’t changed.

So Claire is smarter than I am, but on evenings like this she still asks my opinion about what she should wear, which earrings, whether to wear her hair up or leave it down. For women, earrings are sort of what shaving is for men: the bigger the earrings, the more significant, the more festive, the evening. Claire has earrings for every occasion. Some people might say it’s not smart to be so insecure about what you wear. But that’s not how I see it. The stupid woman is the one who thinks she doesn’t need any help. What does a man know about things like that? the stupid woman thinks, and proceeds to make the wrong choice.

I’ve sometimes tried to imagine Babette asking Serge whether she’s wearing the right dress. Whether her hair isn’t too long. What Serge thinks of these shoes. The heels aren’t too flat, are they? Or maybe too high?

But whenever I do, I realize there’s something wrong with the picture, something that seems unimaginable. ‘No, it’s fine, it’s absolutely fine,’ I hear Serge say. But he’s not really paying attention, it doesn’t actually interest him, and besides: even if his wife were to wear the wrong dress, all the men would still turn their heads as she walked by. Everything looks good on her. So what’s she moaning about?

This wasn’t a hip café, the fashionable types didn’t come here – it wasn’t cool, Michel would say. Ordinary people were by far in the majority. Not the particularly young or the particularly old, in fact a little bit of everything all thrown together, but above all ordinary. The way a café should be.

It was crowded. We stood close together, beside the door to the men’s room. Claire was holding her beer in one hand, and with the fingers of the other she was gently squeezing my wrist.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but I’ve had the impression recently that Michel is acting strange. Well, not really strange, but different. Distant. Haven’t you noticed?’

‘Oh yeah?’ I said. ‘I guess it’s possible.’

I had to be careful not to look at Claire, we know each other too well for that, my eyes would give me away. Instead, I behaved as though I was looking around the café, as though I were deeply interested in the spectacle of ordinary people involved in lively conversation. I was relieved that I’d stuck to my guns, that we wouldn’t be meeting the Lohmans until we reached the restaurant; in my mind’s eye I could see Serge coming through the swinging doors, his grin encouraging the café regulars above all to go on with what they were doing and pay no attention to him.

‘He hasn’t said anything to you?’ Claire asked. ‘I mean, you two talk about other things. Do you think it might have something to do with a girl? Something he’d feel easier telling you about?’

Just then the door to the men’s room opened and we had to step to one side, pressed even closer together. I felt Claire’s beer glass clink against mine.

‘Do you think it has something to do with girls?’ she asked again.

If only that were true, I couldn’t help thinking. Something to do with girls … wouldn’t that be wonderful, wonderfully normal, the normal adolescent mess.

‘Can Chantal/Merel/Rose spend the night?’

‘Do her parents know? If Chantal’s/Merel’s/Rose’s parents think it’s okay, it’s okay with us. As long as you remember … as long as you’re careful when you … ah, you know what I mean, I don’t have to tell you about that any more. Right? Michel?’

Girls came to our house often enough, each one prettier than the next, they sat on the couch or at the kitchen table and greeted me politely when I came home.

‘Hello, Mr Lohman.’

‘You don’t have to call me Mr Lohman. Just call me Paul.’

And so they would call me ‘Paul’ a few times, but a couple of days later it would be back to ‘Mr Lohman’ again.

Sometimes I would get one of them on the phone, and while I asked if I could take a message for Michel, I would shut my eyes and try to connect the girl’s voice at the other end of the line (they rarely mentioned their names, just plunged right in: ‘Is Michel there?’) with a face. ‘No, that’s okay, Mr Lohman. It’s just that his cell phone is switched off, so I thought I’d try this number.’

A couple of times, when I came in unannounced, I’d had the impression that I’d caught them at something, Michel and Chantal/Merel/Rose: that they were watching The Fabulous Life on MTV less innocently than they wanted me to think: that they’d been fiddling with each other, that they’d rushed to straighten their clothes and hair when they heard me coming. Something about the flush on Michel’s cheeks – something heated, I told myself.

To be honest, though, I had no idea. Maybe nothing was going on at all, maybe all those pretty girls just saw my son as a good friend: a nice, rather handsome boy, someone they could show up with at a party – a boy they could trust, precisely because he wasn’t the kind who wanted to fiddle with them right away.

‘No, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with a girl,’ I said, looking Claire straight in the eye now. That’s the oppressive thing about happiness, the way everything is out on the table like an open book: if I avoided looking at her any longer, she’d know for sure that something was going on – with girls, or worse.

‘I think it’s more like something with school,’ I said. ‘He’s just done those exams, I think he’s tired. I think he underestimated it a little, how tough his sophomore year would be.’

Did that sound believable? And above all: did I look believable when I said it? Claire’s gaze shifted quickly back and forth between my right and my left eye; then she raised her hand to my shirt collar, as though there were something out of place there that could be dealt with now, so I wouldn’t look like an idiot when we got to the restaurant.

She smiled and placed the flat of her hand against my chest. I could feel two fingertips against my skin, right where the top button of my shirt was unbuttoned.

‘Maybe that’s it,’ she said. ‘I just think we both have to be careful that at a certain point he doesn’t stop talking about things. That we get used to that, I mean.’

‘No, of course. But at his age he kind of has a right to his own secrets. We shouldn’t try to find out everything about him, otherwise he might clam up altogether.’

I looked Claire in the eye. My wife, I thought at that moment. Why shouldn’t I call her my wife? My wife. I put my arm around her and pulled her close. Even if only for the duration of this evening. My wife and I, I said to myself. My wife and I would like to see the wine list.

‘What are you laughing about?’ Claire said. My wife said. I looked at our beer glasses. Mine was empty, hers was still three-quarters full. As usual. My wife didn’t drink as fast as I did, which was another reason why I loved her, this evening perhaps more than other evenings.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I was thinking … I was thinking about us.’

It happened quickly: one moment I was looking at Claire, looking at my wife, probably with a loving gaze, or at least with a twinkle, and the next moment I felt a damp film slide down over my eyes.

Under no circumstances was she to notice anything strange about me, so I buried my face in her hair. I tightened my grip around her waist and sniffed: shampoo. Shampoo and something else, something warm – the smell of happiness, I thought.

What would this evening have been like if, no more than an hour ago, I had simply waited downstairs until it was time to go, rather than climb the stairs to Michel’s room?

What would the rest of our lives have been like?

Would the smell of happiness I inhaled from my wife’s hair still have smelled only like happiness, and not, as it did now, like some distant memory – like the smell of something you could lose just like that?

‘Michel?’

I was standing in the doorway to his room. He wasn’t there. But let’s not beat around the bush: I knew he wasn’t there. He was in the garden, fixing the back tyre of his bike.

I acted as though I hadn’t noticed that, I pretended I thought he was in his room.

‘Michel?’ I knocked on the door, which was half open. Claire was rummaging through the closets in our room; we would have to leave for the restaurant in less than an hour, and she was still hesitating between the black skirt with black boots or the black pants with the DKNY pumps.

‘Which earrings?’ she would ask me later. ‘These, or these?’ The little ones looked best on her, I would reply, with either the skirt or the pants.

Then I was in Michel’s room. I saw right away what I was looking for.

I want to stress the fact that I had never done anything like that before. Never. When Michel was chatting with his friends on the computer, I always stood beside him in such a way, with my back half turned towards the desk, that I couldn’t see the screen. I wanted him to be able to tell from my posture that I wasn’t spying or trying to peek over his shoulder at what he’d typed on the screen. Sometimes his cell phone made a noise like pan pipes, to announce a text message. He had a tendency to leave his cell phone lying around. I won’t deny that I was tempted to look at it sometimes, especially when he had gone out.

‘Who’s texting him? What did he/she write?’

One time I had even stood there with Michel’s cell phone in my hand, knowing that he wouldn’t be coming back from the gym for another hour, that he had simply forgotten it – that was his old phone, a Sony Ericsson without the slide: the display showed ‘1 new message’, beneath an envelope icon. ‘I don’t know what got into me; before I knew it, I had your cell phone in my hand and I was reading your message.’ Maybe no one would ever find out, but then again maybe they would. He wouldn’t say anything, but he would suspect me or his mother nonetheless; a fissure that, with the passing of time, would expand into a substantial chasm. Our life as a happy family would never be the same.

It was only a few steps to his desk in front of the window. If I leaned forward I would be able to see him in the garden, on the flagstone terrace in front of the kitchen door where he was fixing his inner tube – and if Michel looked up he would see his father standing at the window of his room.

I picked up his cell phone, a brand-new black Samsung, and slid it open. I didn’t know his pin code, if the phone was locked I wouldn’t be able to do a thing, but the screen lit up almost right away with a fuzzy photo of the Nike swoosh, probably taken from a piece of his own clothing: his shoes, or the black knitted cap he always wore, even at summertime temperatures and indoors, pulled down just above his eyes.

I scrolled down through the menu, which was roughly the same as the one on my own phone, a Samsung too, but six months old and therefore already hopelessly obsolete. I clicked on My Files and then on Videos. Sooner than expected, I found what I was looking for.

I looked and felt my head gradually grow cold. It was the sort of coldness you feel when you take too big a bite from an icecream cone or sip too greedily from an ice-cold drink.

The kind of coldness that hurt – from the inside out.

I looked again, and then I kept looking: there was more, I saw, but how much more was hard to say.

‘Dad?’

Michel’s voice came from downstairs, but then I heard him coming up the stairs. I snapped shut the slide on the phone and put it back on his desk.

‘Dad?’

It was too late to hurry into our bedroom, to take a shirt or jacket out of the closet and pose with it in front of the mirror; my only option was to come out of Michel’s own room as casually and believably as possible – as though I’d been looking for something.

As though I’d been looking for him.

‘Dad.’ He had stopped at the top of the stairs and was looking past me, into his room. Then he looked at me. He was wearing his Nike cap, his black iPod nano dangled from a cord at his chest and a set of headphones was slung around his neck; you had to give him credit, fashion and status didn’t interest him; after only a few weeks he had replaced the white earbuds with a standard set of headphones, because the sound was better.

Happy families are all alike: that popped into my mind for the first time that evening.

‘I was looking for …’ I began. ‘I was wondering where you were.’

Michel had almost died at birth. Even these days I often thought back on that blue, crumpled little body lying in the incubator just after the Caesarean: that he was here was nothing less than a gift, that was happiness too.

‘I was patching my tyre,’ he said. ‘That’s what I wanted to ask you. Do you know if we’ve got valves somewhere?’

‘Valves,’ I repeated. I’m not the kind of person who ever fixes a flat tyre, who would even consider it. But my son – in the face of all evidence – still believed in a different version of his father, a version who knew where the valves were.

‘What were you doing up here?’ he asked suddenly. ‘You said you were looking for me. Why were you looking for me?’

I looked at him, I looked into the clear eyes beneath the black cap, the honest eyes, which, I’d always told myself, formed a not-insignificant part of our happiness.

‘Oh, nothing,’ I said. ‘I was just looking for you.’

Of course they weren’t there yet.

Without revealing too much about the location, I can say that the restaurant was hidden from the street by a row of trees. We were half an hour late already, and as we crossed the gravel path to the entrance, lit on both sides by electric torches, my wife and I discussed the possibility that, for once, just this once, it might be us and not the Lohmans who arrived last.

‘Want to bet?’ I said.

‘Why should I?’ Claire said. ‘I’m telling you: they’re not there.’

A girl in a black T-shirt and black floor-length pinafore took our coats. Another girl, in the same black outfit, was flipping through the reservations book lying open on a lectern.

She was only pretending not to recognize the name Lohman, I saw, and pretending badly at that.

‘Lohman, was it?’ She raised an eyebrow and made no effort to hide her disappointment at the fact that it wasn’t Serge Lohman standing there in real life, but two people whose faces meant nothing to her.

I could have helped out by saying that Serge Lohman was on his way, but I didn’t.

The lectern-with-book was lit from above by a thin, copper-coloured reading lamp: Art Deco, or some other style that happened to be just in or just out of fashion at the moment. The girl’s hair, black as the T-shirt and pinafore, was tightly tied up at the back in a wispy ponytail, as though it too had been designed to fit in with the restaurant’s house style. The girl who had taken our coats wore her hair in the same tight ponytail. Perhaps it had something to do with regulations, I thought to myself, hygiene regulations, like surgical masks in an operating room: after all, this restaurant prided itself on serving ‘all-organic’ products – the meat came from actual animals, but only animals that had led ‘a good life’.

Across the top of the tight black hairdos, I glanced at the dining room – or at least at the first two or three visible tables. To the left of the entrance was the ‘open kitchen’. Something was being flambéed at that very moment, from the looks of it, accompanied by the obligatory clouds of blue smoke and dancing flames.

I didn’t feel like doing this at all, I realized again. My aversion to the evening that lay ahead had become almost physical – a slight feeling of nausea, clammy hands and the start of a headache somewhere behind my left eye – not quite enough, though, for me to actually become unwell or fall unconscious right there on the spot.

How would the black-pinafore girls react to a guest who collapsed before even getting past the lectern, I wondered. Would they try to haul me out of the way, drag me into the cloakroom – in any case, somewhere where the other guests couldn’t see me? They would probably prop me up on a stool behind the coat racks. Politely but firmly, they would ask whether they could call me a taxi. Off! Off with this man! – how wonderful it would be to let Serge stew, what a relief to be able to put a whole new twist on this evening.

I thought about what that would mean. We could go back to the café and order a plate of regular-person food, the daily special was ribs with fries, I’d seen on the blackboard above the bar. ‘Spare-ribs with fries €11.50’ – probably less than a tenth of what we’d have to cough up here, each.

Another alternative would be to head straight for home, with at the very most a little detour past the video shop for a DVD, which we could then watch on the TV in the bedroom, lying on our roomy double bed: a glass of wine, some crackers, a few types of cheese to go with (one more little detour past the all-night shop), and a perfect evening would be complete.

I would be entirely self-effacing, I promised myself, I would let Claire choose the film: even though that meant it was bound to be some costume drama. Pride and Prejudice, A Room with a View or something Murder on the Orient Express-ish. Yes, that was a possibility, I thought, I could pass out and we could go home. But instead I said: ‘Serge Lohman, the table close to the garden.’

The girl raised her eyes from the page.

‘But you’re not Mr Lohman,’ she said.

I cursed it all, right there: the restaurant, the girls in their black pinafores, this evening that was ruined even before it began – but most of all I cursed Serge, for this dinner he’d been so keen to arrange, a dinner for which he couldn’t summon up the common courtesy to arrive on time. The way he never arrived on time anywhere; people in union halls across the country had to wait for him to show up too, the oh-so-busy Serge Lohman was probably just running late; the meeting in the last union hall had run over and now he was caught in traffic somewhere; he didn’t drive himself, no, driving would be a waste of time for someone of Serge’s status, he had a chauffeur to do that for him, so he could spend his precious time judiciously, reading important documents.

‘Oh yes I am.’ I said. ‘Lohman is the name.’

I kept my eyes fixed on the girl, who actually blinked this time, and I opened my mouth for the next sentence. The moment had come to clinch the victory: but it was a victory that smacked of defeat.

‘I’m his brother,’ I said.

‘The aperitif of the house, which we’d like to offer you today, is pink champagne.’

The floor manager – or maître d’, or supervisor, the host, the head waiter, or whatever you call someone like that in restaurants like this – wasn’t wearing a black pinafore. He had a three-piece suit on. The suit was pale green with blue pinstripes, and sticking out of the breast pocket was a blue hanky. What they call a pocket square.

His voice was subdued – almost too subdued to be heard above the hubbub in the dining room; there was something weird about the acoustics in this place, we’d noticed that as soon as we sat down at our table (on the garden side! How did I guess!). If you didn’t speak up, your words drifted away, up to the glass ceiling, which was also much higher than normal for a restaurant. Ridiculously high, you might say, if you didn’t know that the height of the ceiling had everything to do with the building’s former use: a dairy, I thought I’d read somewhere, or a sewage disposal plant.

The floor manager stuck out his little finger and pointed at something on our table. At the tea-warmer, I thought at first – instead of a candle or two, all the tables here had a tea-warmer – but, no, the little finger was pointing out the plate of olives he had apparently just put there. In any case, I didn’t remember it having been there before, not when he’d pulled back our chairs. When had he put the olives on the table? I was struck by a brief but intense wave of panic. This was happening to me more often lately: suddenly pieces of the puzzle were gone – bites out of time, empty moments during which my thoughts must have been elsewhere.

‘These are Greek olives from the Peloponnese, lightly doused in first-pressing, extra-virgin olive oil from Sardinia, and polished off with rosemary from …’

The floor manager leaned over our table slightly as he spoke, but we could still barely hear him: in fact, the last part of the sentence became completely lost, leaving us in the dark as to the origin of the rosemary. Normally I don’t give a damn about that kind of information – as far as I cared the rosemary could have come from the Ruhr or the Ardennes, but it seemed like far too much fuss over one little plate of olives, and I had no intention of letting him off the hook that easily.

And then that pinkie. Why would anyone point with their pinkie? Was that supposed to be chic? Did it go with the suit with blue pinstripes, like the light-blue hanky? Or did he simply have something to hide? His other fingers, after all, were hidden the whole time; he kept them folded against the palm of his hand, out of sight – perhaps they were covered with flaky eczema or symptoms of some untreatable disease.

‘Polished off?’ I said.

‘Yes, polished off with rosemary. Polished off means that they—’

‘I know what it means,’ I said cuttingly – and perhaps a bit too loudly as well. A man and a woman at the next table stopped talking for a moment and looked over at us: a man with a beard that was much too big, covering his face almost entirely, and a woman a little too young for him, in her late twenties, I figured; his second wife, I thought, or maybe some piece of fluff he was trying to impress by taking her to a restaurant like this. ‘Polished off,’ I repeated a little more quietly. ‘I know that doesn’t mean that someone “polished off” the olives. As in “getting rid of them” or “blowing them away”.’

From the corner of my eye I saw that Claire had turned her head and was gazing out the window. Things were not off to a good start; the evening was already ruined, and there was no need for me to ruin it any further, especially not for my wife.

But then the manager did something I hadn’t expected: I had more or less counted on seeing his mouth fall open, his lower lip start to tremble and perhaps even the start of a blush, after which he would stammer some vague apology – something he’d been taught to rattle off, a protocol for dealing with rude and difficult guests – but instead he burst out laughing. What’s more, it was a real laugh, not a fake or polite laugh.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, raising his hand to his mouth; the fingers were still curled up as they’d been when he pointed at the olives a minute ago, only the pinkie was sticking out. ‘I never thought about it like that.’

‘What’s with the suit?’ I asked Claire, after we had both said that we’d like the aperitif of the house and the floor manager had walked away from our table.

Claire raised her hand and brushed my cheek. ‘Sweetheart …’

‘No, listen, it’s weird, he’s wearing it for a reason, right? You’re not going to tell me that it’s not on purpose?’

My wife gave me a lovely smile, the smile she always bestowed on me when she thought I was getting worked up about nothing – a smile that so much as said that she found all the fuss entertaining at best, but that I mustn’t think for one second that she was going to take it seriously.

‘And then the tea-warmer,’ I said. ‘Why not a teddy bear? Why not hold a silent vigil?’

Claire took a Peloponnesian olive from the plate and put it in her mouth. ‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘Lovely. Too bad, though, you really can taste that the rosemary has had too little sunlight.’

Now it was my turn to smile; the rosemary, the manager had told us finally, was ‘home-grown’, from a glassed-in herbarium behind the restaurant. ‘Did you notice how he points with his pinkie all the time?’ I said, opening the menu.

What I was in fact planning to do was look at the prices of the entrées: the prices in restaurants like this always fascinate me. Let me make it clear right away that I’m not stingy by nature, that has nothing to do with it; I’m also not going to claim that money is no object, but I’m light years removed from people who say it’s a ‘waste of money’ to eat in a restaurant while ‘at home you can make things that are so much nicer’. No, people like that don’t understand anything, not about food and not about restaurants.

My fascination isn’t that kind of fascination; it has to do with what, for the sake of convenience, I’d call the yawning chasm between the dish itself and the price you have to pay for it: as though the two variables – money on one side, food on the other – have nothing to do with each other, as though they inhabit two separate worlds and have no business being side by side on the same menu.

That was what I was planning to do: I was going to read the names of the dishes, and then the prices that were printed next to them, but my eye was caught by something on the left-hand page.

I looked, looked again, then peered around the restaurant to see if I could spot the manager’s suit.

‘What is it?’ Claire asked.

‘Did you see what it says here?’

My wife looked at me questioningly.

‘It says: “Aperitif of the house, ten euros”.’

‘Oh?’

‘But that’s insane, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘The man said: “We’d like to offer you the aperitif of the house,” right? “The aperitif of the house is pink champagne.” So what are you supposed to think? You think they’re offering you the pink champagne, or am I nuts? If they offer you something, you get it, right? “Can we offer you the this-or-that of the house?” Then it doesn’t cost ten euros, it’s free!’

‘No, wait a minute, not always. If the menu says “steak à la maison”, steak of the house in other words, all it means is that it was prepared according to the recipe of the house. No, that’s not a good example … House wine! Wine of the house: that doesn’t mean you get the wine for free, does it?’

‘All right, okay, that’s obvious. But this is different. I hadn’t even looked at a menu yet. Someone in a three-piece suit pulls back your chair for you, puts down a lousy little plate of olives and then says something about offering you the aperitif of the house. That’s at least a little confusing, isn’t it? Then it sounds as though you’re getting it, not that you have to pay ten euros for it, right? Ten euros! Ten! Look at it this way: would we have ordered a small glass of bland pink champagne if we’d known that it cost ten euros?’

‘No.’

‘That’s what I’m saying. They trick you into it with that horseshit about the “aperitif of the house”.’

‘You’re right.’

I looked at my wife, but she looked back earnestly. ‘No, I’m not pulling your leg,’ she said. ‘You’re right. It really is different from steak à la maison or a house wine. It is weird. It’s almost like they do it on purpose, to see if you’ll fall for it.’

‘It is, isn’t it?’

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.

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

‘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 would 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.

The next step had been the conversion of what was formerly a messy walk-in closet into a wine cellar. He bought racks to stack the bottles in, to let the wine age, as he put it. When guests came to dinner he began to deliver lectures about the wine being served. Babette viewed it all with a kind of bemusement; perhaps she was the first to see through him, the first not to completely believe in him and his hobby. I remember calling to talk to Serge one afternoon and getting Babette on the line. Serge wasn’t there.

‘He’s tasting wine in the Loire Valley,’ she said: there was something in her voice, something about the way she said ‘tasting wine’ and ‘Loire Valley’ – the tone a woman uses when she says her husband is working late, even though she’s known for a year that he’s having an affair with his secretary.

Claire, as I noted earlier, is smarter than I am. But she doesn’t blame me for not being her equal. What I mean to say is that she never looks down her nose at me, she doesn’t sigh deeply or roll her eyes when I don’t get something right away. Obviously I have no way of knowing how she talks about me when I’m not around, but I’m very sure, I have absolute faith in the fact, that Claire would never adopt the tone I detected in Babette’s voice when she said: ‘He’s tasting wine in the Loire Valley.’

Babette, in other words, is also much smarter than Serge. That’s not saying a hell of a lot, I might add – but I won’t: some things speak for themselves. All I want to talk about here are the things I heard and saw during our little get-together at the restaurant.

‘The lamb’s-neck sweetbread has been marinated in Sardinian olive oil with rocket,’ said the manager, who had by now arrived at Claire’s plate and was pointing with his pinkie at two minuscule pieces of meat. ‘The sun-dried tomatoes come from Bulgaria.’

The first thing that struck you about Claire’s plate was its vast emptiness. Of course I’m well aware that, in the better restaurants, quality takes precedence over quantity, but there are voids and then there are voids. The void here, that part of the plate on which no food at all was present, had clearly been raised to a matter of principle.

It was as though the empty plate was challenging you to say something about it, to go to the open kitchen and demand an explanation. ‘You wouldn’t even dare!’ the plate said, and laughed in your face.

I tried to recall the price; the cheapest appetizer was nineteen euros, the entrées varied from twenty-eight to forty-seven. And then there were three set menus of forty-seven, fifty-eight and seventy-nine euros each.

‘This is warm goat’s cheese with pine nuts and walnut shavings.’

The hand with the pinkie was above my own plate now. I fought back the urge to say, ‘I know, because that’s what I ordered,’ and concentrated on the pinkie.

This was the closest he had come this evening, even when pouring the wine. The manager had finally opted for the easiest solution and returned from the open kitchen with a new bottle, the cork already sticking halfway out of the neck.

After the wine cellar and the trip to the Loire Valley, there had been the six-week wine course. Not in France, but in a classroom at a night school. Serge had hung the diploma in the hallway, somewhere no one could possibly miss it. A bottle with the cork sticking out of it could contain something very different from what was on the label: that must have been dealt with during one of his very first lessons in that classroom. It could have been messed with; a malicious person could have diluted the wine with tap water, or dribbled saliva down the neck.

But after the aperitif of the house and the broken cork, Serge Lohman was apparently not in the mood for any more mucking about. Without looking at the manager, he had wiped his lips with his napkin and mumbled that the wine was ‘excellent’.

At that moment I glanced over at Babette. Her eyes behind the tinted lenses were fixed on her husband; it was almost impossible to tell, but I would almost have sworn that she had raised an eyebrow when he passed his judgement on the pre-uncorked wine. In the car, on the way to the restaurant, he had made her cry, but by now her eyes were looking much less swollen. I hoped she would say something, something to get back at him: she was entirely capable of that, Babette could be very sarcastic when she put her mind to it. ‘He’s tasting wine in the Loire Valley’ had been one of the mildest expressions of that.

In my mind, I egged her on. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. When it came right down to it, that might be the best thing: a huge, knock-down, drag-out fight between Serge and Babette before we moved on to the main course. I would speak soothing words, pretend not to take sides, but she would know that she could count on me.

To my regret, though, Babette said nothing at all. You could almost see the way she gulped back her undoubtedly murderous comment about the cork. But still, something had now taken place that kept alive my hopes of an explosion later in the evening. It’s like a pistol in a stage play: when someone waves a pistol during the first act, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone will be shot with it before the curtain falls. That’s the law of drama. The law that says no pistol must appear if no one’s going to fire it.

‘This is corn salad,’ the manager said; I looked at the pinkie, which was no more than a centimetre away from the three or four curly little green leaves and the melted chunk of goat’s cheese, and then at the entire hand, which was so close that I would only have had to lean forward a little to kiss it.

Why had I ordered this appetizer, when I don’t even like goat’s cheese? To say nothing of corn salad. This time the stingy portions worked in my favour: my plate too was mostly empty, although not as empty as Claire’s; I could have devoured the three leaves in a single bite – or simply left them lying on the plate, which amounted to pretty much the same thing.

Whenever I see corn salad I’m reminded of the little cage with the hamster or guinea pig that stood on the windowsill of our classroom in elementary school. It was there because it was good for us to learn about animals – to learn to take care of animals, I suppose. Whether the little leaves we pushed through the bars of the cage each morning were corn salad, I can’t remember, but they looked a lot like it. The hamster or guinea pig nibbled at the leaves and then spent the rest of the day sitting in one corner of its cage. One morning it was dead, just like the little turtle, the two white mice and the stick insects that had preceded it. What we were supposed to learn from this high mortality rate was never dealt with in the class.

The reason why I now had a plate of warm goat’s cheese with corn salad in front of me was simpler than it seemed. I had been the last to order. We hadn’t really talked beforehand about what we were going to have – or maybe we had, and I’d missed it. Whatever the case, I had settled on the vitello tonnato, but Babette, to my horror, ordered exactly the same thing.

No problem: at that point, I could always switch to my second choice: the crayfish. But the next to last person to order, right after Claire, was Serge. And when Serge ordered the crayfish, I was stuck. I had no desire to order the same appetizer as someone else, but to have the same appetizer as my brother was out of the question. Theoretically speaking I could have switched back to the vitello tonnato, but that was purely theoretical. It didn’t feel right: not only would it look as though I wasn’t original enough to choose an appetizer of my own, but it might, in Serge’s eyes, raise the suspicion that I was trying to close ranks with his wife. Which was true, of course, but I couldn’t be so obvious.

I had already closed the menu and laid it beside my plate. Now I opened it again. Reading like lightning, I skimmed down through the list of appetizers, adopting a thoughtful expression, as though I was only looking for the dish I’d already chosen in order to point it out on the menu, but by then of course it was much too late.

‘And for you, sir?’ the manager asked.

‘The melted goat’s cheese with corn salad,’ I said.

It came out a little too readily, a little too sure-of-myself to sound credible. Serge and Babette didn’t notice a thing, but across the table I saw the look of bewilderment on Claire’s face.

Would she try to protect me from myself? Would she say, ‘But you don’t like goat’s cheese?’ I wasn’t sure; at that moment too many pair of eyes were on me for me to shake my head at her, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

‘I hear the goat cheese is from an urban farm,’ I said. ‘From goats that live out in the open.’

At last, after he had granted thorough attention to Babette’s vitello tonnato, the vitello tonnato that, in the best of all worlds, could have been my vitello tonnato, the manager left and we were able to resume our conversation. ‘Resume’ was not exactly the right word, though; as it turned out, none of us had the slightest idea what we’d been talking about before the appetizers arrived. That was one of the disadvantages of these so-called top restaurants: all the interruptions, like the exaggeratedly detailed review of every pine nut on your plate, the endless uncorking of wine bottles and the unsolicited topping up of glasses, made you lose track.

As far as that continual topping-up goes, let me say this: I have travelled a bit, I have been to restaurants in many countries, but nowhere – and when I say nowhere I literally mean nowhere – do they top up your wine without you asking for it. They would consider that rude. Only in Holland do they come up to your table all the time; not only do they top up your glass, but they also cast a wistful eye at the bottle when it seems to be getting empty. ‘Isn’t it about time to order another one?’ is what those looks are meant to say.

I know someone, an old friend, who spent a few years working in Dutch ‘top restaurants’. Their tactic, he told me once, is to actually force as much wine as possible down your throat, wine they sell for seven times what the importer charges for it, and that’s why they always wait so long between bringing the appetizer and taking orders for the entrée: people will order more wine out of pure boredom, just to kill time, that’s the way they figure it. The appetizer usually arrives quite quickly, my friend said, because if the appetizer takes too long people start complaining. They start to doubt their choice of restaurant, but after a while, when they’ve had too much drink between appetizer and entrée, they lose track of time. He knew of cases where the entrées had been ready for a long time, but remained on the plates in the kitchen because the people at the table in question weren’t complaining. Only when there was a lull in the conversation and the customers began to look around impatiently were the plates shoved into the microwave.

What had we been talking about before the appetizers came? Not that it really mattered, it couldn’t have been anything important, but that was what made it so irritating. I could remember what we’d said after all the fuss with the cork and the placing of our orders, but I had no idea what had been going on right before our plates arrived.

Babette had joined a new gym, we’d talked about that a bit: about losing weight, the importance of remaining active and which sport was best for which person. Claire was thinking about joining a health club, and Serge had said he couldn’t stand the obtrusive music at most places like that. That’s why he had taken up running, he said, where you could be out on your own in the fresh air, and he acted as though he had come up with the idea all by himself. He conveniently forgot that I had started running years ago, and how he had never missed an opportunity to make snide comments about his ‘little brother out trotting around’.

Yes, that’s what we had talked about at first, for rather too long for my taste, but an innocent subject to be sure, a fairly typical prelude to a standard restaurant evening. But for the rest of the evening? Not if my life depended on it. I looked at Serge, at my wife, and then at Babette. At that moment, Babette jabbed her fork into her vitello tonnato, cut off a slice and raised it to her mouth.

‘But now I’ve completely forgotten,’ she said, the fork poised in the air. ‘Did you say you two have already seen the new Woody Allen, or not?’

When the conversation turns too quickly to films, I see it as a sign of weakness. I mean: films are more something for the end of the evening, when you really don’t have much else to talk about. I don’t know why, but when people start talking about films I always get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, like when you wake up after a bad night and find that it’s already getting dark outside.

The worst are those people who describe entire films; they get right into it, they have no qualms about taking up fifteen minutes of your time – fifteen minutes per film, that is. They don’t really care whether you haven’t yet seen the film in question, or whether you saw it a long time ago: such considerations don’t bother them, they’re already right in the middle of the opening scene. To be polite you feign interest at first, but soon you bid farewell to courtesy, you yawn openly, stare at the ceiling and squirm around in your chair. You do everything in your power to make the narrator shut up, but nothing helps; they’re too far gone to notice the signals; above all, they’re addicted to themselves and their own crap about films.

I believe it was my brother who started in about the new Woody Allen.

‘A masterpiece,’ he said, without asking whether we – that is, Claire and I – might have seen it already. Babette nodded emphatically at this; they had seen it together last weekend, they were in agreement about something for a change.

‘A masterpiece,’ she said. ‘Really, you two have to go.’

To which Claire said that we had already been. ‘Two months ago,’ I added, which in fact was unnecessary; it was just something I felt like saying, it wasn’t aimed at Babette but at my brother. I wanted to let him know that he was running pretty far behind with his masterpieces.

At that moment an entire bevy of girls in black pinafores arrived with our appetizers, followed by the manager and his pinkie, and we lost track of where we were – until Babette picked up the thread again with her question about whether or not we had already seen it, the new Woody Allen.

‘I thought it was a great film,’ Claire said as she dipped a sun-dried tomato in the olive oil on her plate and raised it to her lips. ‘Even Paul liked it. Didn’t you, Paul?’

Claire does that all the time: draw me into things in a way that I can’t back out. Now the others already knew that I had liked it, and ‘even Paul’ meant something along the lines of ‘even Paul, who usually doesn’t like any film, especially something by Woody Allen’.

Serge looked at me, a morsel of appetizer still in his mouth, he was chewing on it, but that didn’t stop him from addressing himself to me. ‘A masterpiece, right? No, really, fantastic.’ He went on chewing and then gulped. ‘And that Scarlett Johansson, I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers. Good Lord, what a beauty!’

Hearing your older brother refer to a film you yourself think is pretty good as a ‘masterpiece’ is kind of like having to wear that brother’s old clothes: the hand-me-downs that have become too small for him, but which in your eyes are above all old. My options were limited: admitting that Woody Allen’s film was a masterpiece would be like wriggling into those old clothes, and therefore out of the question; there was no superlative for ‘masterpiece’, so the most I could do was try to prove that Serge hadn’t understood the film, that he considered it a masterpiece for all the wrong reasons, but that would involve a lot of effort; it would be laying it on rather thick for Claire, and probably for Babette as well.

In fact, there was only one option left, and that was to run Woody Allen’s film into the ground. It wouldn’t be too hard: there were enough weaknesses I could point out, weaknesses that don’t really matter when you like a film but that you can make use of in an emergency, in order to dislike the same film. Claire would raise her eyebrows at first, then hopefully realize what I was doing: that my betrayal of our shared appreciation for the film was in the service of the struggle against spineless, show-offy crap about films in general.

I reached for my glass of Chablis, intending first to take a thoughtful sip before carrying out this latter strategy, when suddenly I saw another way out. What was it my idiot brother had said, anyway? About Scarlett Johansson? ‘Kick her out of bed for eating crackers … a beauty’ – I didn’t know what Babette thought of that kind of crass macho talk, but Claire always got up on her hind legs when men started on about ‘sweet asses’ and ‘nice tits’. I’d been looking at my brother when he said that about the crackers, and had missed her reaction, but that wasn’t really even necessary.

Sometimes, recently, I had had the impression that he was starting to lose touch with reality, that he seriously thought the Scarlett Johanssons of this world would like nothing more than to eat crackers in his bed. I suspected him of viewing women in more or less the same way that he viewed food, his daily hot meal in particular. That was how he used to be, and to be honest it’s never really changed.

‘I need to eat something,’ Serge says when he’s hungry. He’ll say that when you’re out hiking somewhere in a national park, far from civilization, or driving down the highway, between two exits.

‘Sure,’ I say then, ‘but right now we don’t have anything to eat.’

‘But I’m hungry right now,’ Serge will say. ‘I need to eat now.’

There was something pitiful about it, this dumb resolve that would make him forget everything else – his surroundings, the people he was with – and focus on only one objective: sating his own hunger. At moments like this he reminded me of an animal that encounters an obstacle in its path: a bird that doesn’t understand that the glass in the windowpane is made of solid matter and flies into it again and again.

And when we would finally find a place to eat, it was never a pretty sight. He would eat the way one fills the tank with petrol: he would devour his cheese sandwich with white bread or his almond cake quickly and efficiently, to make sure the fuel reached his stomach as soon as possible; without fuel there was no way you could go on. The real fine dining came much later, like his knowledge of wine; at a certain point he decided it was necessary, but the speed and efficiency remained: even these days, he was always the first to empty his plate.

I would have paid a fortune to see and hear just once how things went in the bedroom between him and Babette. On the other hand, there is a part of me that would actually resist that with every fibre of my being, that would pay an equally great fortune never to have to find out.

‘I need to fuck.’ And then Babette saying she has a headache, that she’s having her period or that this evening she doesn’t even want to think about it, about his body, his arms and legs, his head, his smell. ‘But I need to fuck right now.’ I bet my brother fucks the way he eats, that he stuffs himself into a woman in the same way he stuffs a beef croquette into his mouth – and that his hunger is then stilled.

‘So you were mostly sitting there looking at Scarlett Johansson’s tits,’ I say, much more crudely than I’d planned. ‘Or do you mean something else when you say “a masterpiece”?’

A miraculous kind of silence fell then, the kind you hear only in restaurants: a sudden, raised awareness of the presence of others, the buzzing and the click of cutlery on plates at thirty other tables, the one or two becalmed seconds when background noises become foreground noises.

The first thing to break the silence was Babette’s laughter; I glanced up at my wife, who was staring at me in dismay, and then back at Serge; he was trying to laugh too, but his heart wasn’t in it – what’s more, he still had food in his mouth.

‘Come, come, Paul, not so holier-than-thou!’ he said. ‘She just happens to be a babe, a man has eyes in his head, doesn’t he?’

‘A babe,’ Claire wouldn’t like that one either, I knew that. She would always say ‘a good-looking man’, never ‘tasty’, let alone ‘nice ass’. ‘All that fashionable talk about “nice asses”, it’s too contrived for me, when women start talking like that,’ she’d said once. ‘It’s like when women suddenly start smoking pipes or spitting on the ground.’

Through and through, Serge had remained a yokel, a boorish lout: the same boorish lout who used to get sent from the table for farting.

‘I also think Scarlett Johansson is a very attractive woman,’ I said. ‘But it sounded sort of like you thought that was the most significant thing about the film. Do correct me if I’m wrong.’

‘Well, things go completely wrong with that, what’s his name, that Englishman, the tennis teacher, because he can’t get her off his mind. He even has to shoot her just to get what he wants.’

‘Hey!’ Babette said. ‘Don’t say that, that ruins it if you haven’t seen it yet!’ Another brief silence descended, during which Babette looked from Claire to me. ‘Oh shit, I think I must have been asleep, you two did see it already!’

We all laughed, all four of us, a moment of release – but too much release was not good, one had to remain on one’s toes. The simple truth was that Serge Lohman had a nice ass himself, you heard women say it often enough. He was all too aware that they found him attractive, and there was nothing wrong with that; he was photogenic, he possessed a certain – again, loutish – attractiveness: a bit too in your face and a bit too much rough timber, if you asked me, but of course there are women who prefer plain furnishings, tables or chairs made from ‘authentic materials’: scrap wood from old stall doors in northern Spain or Piedmont.

Serge’s girlfriends had usually given up on him after a few months; there was a boring, matter-of-fact side to that attractiveness, so they soon tired of his ‘pretty face’. Babette was the only one who had stuck longer with him, about eighteen years now, which in itself was something of a miracle – they had been squabbling for eighteen years; it was pretty clear that they didn’t really suit each other at all, but you often see that: couples for whom constant friction is the real engine of their marriage, every fight the foreplay to the moment when they can make up in bed.

But sometimes I couldn’t help think that it was all much simpler than that, that Babette had merely signed up for something, for a life at the side of a successful politician, and that it would have been a waste of all the time she’d invested to stop now: the way you don’t put aside a bad book when you’re halfway through it, you finish it reluctantly; that’s the way she’d stayed with Serge – perhaps the ending would make up for some of it.

They had two children of their own: Rick, who was Michel’s age, and Valerie, a slightly autistic thirteen-year-old with an almost translucent, mermaid-like beauty. And then there was Beau, exact age unknown, but probably somewhere between fourteen and seventeen. Beau came from Burkina Faso and had ended up with Serge and Babette via a ‘development project’: one of those where you support schoolchildren in the Third World by buying them books and other necessities, and then ‘adopt’ them: at a distance to start with, by means of letters and photographs and postcards, but later in real life as well. The chosen child then lives with the Dutch foster family for a while, and if that goes well, they are allowed to stay. A sort of hire purchase agreement, in other words. Or like a cat you bring home from the animal shelter; if the cat scratches the sofa to bits or pisses all over the house, you take it back.

I remember a few of the photographs and postcards Beau had sent from faraway Burkina Faso. In the photo that stayed with me the longest you saw him standing in front of a red-brick building with a corrugated-iron roof, a pitch-black boy in a striped pyjama top that reached to just below his knees, like a nightgown, his bare feet in rubber sandals.

‘Merci beaucoup mes parents pour notre école’ was written beneath it in a graceful, schoolboy hand.

‘Isn’t he darling?’ Babette had said when she showed it to us. They had travelled to Burkina Faso and lost their hearts, as Serge and Babette themselves put it.

A second trip followed, forms were filled in, and a few weeks later Beau landed at Schiphol Airport.

‘Do you two know what you’re getting into?’ Claire had asked them once, back in the days when the whole adoption was still at the postcard stage. They had reacted indignantly. They were helping someone, weren’t they? A child who would never have the opportunities in his own country that he would in Holland? Yes, they knew very well what they were getting into; there were already far too many people in the world who thought only about themselves.

You couldn’t accuse them of outright egotism. Rick was three at the time, Valerie was only a few months old; they weren’t like most adoptive parents who couldn’t have children of their own. In completely selfless fashion they were taking a third child into their home, not their own flesh and blood, but a needy child who was being offered a new life in Holland.

So then, what was it? What, indeed, were they getting into?

Serge and Babette made it clear to us that this question was not to be posed, so we didn’t pose the other questions either. Did Beau still have parents of his own? Or was he an orphan? Parents who consented to their child going away, or an orphan alone in the world? I have to say that Babette was more fanatical about the adoption than Serge was; it was her ‘project’ from the start, something she planned to carry out successfully no matter what the cost. She did everything she could to give her adopted child just as much love as her own children.

In the end, the word ‘adoption’ itself became taboo. ‘Beau is our son, that’s all,’ she said. ‘There is no difference.’

At such moments, Serge would nod in agreement. ‘We love him just as much as we do Rick and Valerie,’ he said.

There’s a possibility, of course, that he knew even then – I wouldn’t want to pass judgement or accuse him of having acted with forethought – but later on it worked to his advantage: that black child from Burkina Faso whom he loved as one of his own. It was a different sort of thing from his knowledge of wine, but it had the same effect. It gave him a face: Serge Lohman, the politician with the adopted African son.

He began to pose more frequently for family photographs; it looked good, Serge and Babette on the couch with the three children at their feet. Beau Lohman became living proof that there was one politician who didn’t act purely out of self-interest; that he, at least at one point in his life, had not acted out of self-interest. His other two children, after all, had been conceived in standard fashion, so it hadn’t been an act of desperation, this adoption of a child from Burkina Faso. That was the message: on other issues as well, perhaps, Serge Lohman would not act purely out of self-interest.

A waitress topped up Serge’s glass, then mine; Babette’s and Claire’s were still half full. The waitress was a pretty girl, as golden blonde as Scarlett Johansson. It took her a long time, filling the glasses; it was clear that she was fairly new at it and probably hadn’t been working here long. First she took the bottle from the cooler and dried it completely with the white napkin draped over the bottleneck and the edge of the bucket; the pouring itself didn’t go too smoothly either: she stood beside Serge’s chair at such an angle that she accidentally elbowed Claire in the head.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ she said, and blushed deeply. Of course Claire said right away that it was no problem, but the girl was now so flustered that she filled Serge’s glass all the way to the top. No problem there either – except for a wine connoisseur.

‘Hey, hey, hey,’ my brother said. ‘Are you trying to get me drunk or something?’ He slid his chair back a couple of feet, as though the girl hadn’t filled his glass too full but had actually spilled half the bottle over his pants. Now she blushed even more deeply, she blinked, and for a moment I thought she was going to burst into tears. Like the other girls in black pinafores, she had her hair tied up tightly in a regulation ponytail, but its golden blondeness made it look less severe than the others’.

She had a sweet face. I couldn’t help myself, I thought about the moment when she would pull the elastic band from her ponytail and shake her hair loose, later tonight when her day at the restaurant was over – her terrible day, as she would tell a girlfriend (or maybe a boyfriend): ‘You know what happened to me today? So stupid, just like me! You know how I hate all that stiff etiquette stuff with the wine bottles? Well, tonight I completely lost it. That wouldn’t even be so bad, but you know who was at the table?’

The girlfriend or boyfriend would look at the golden-blonde hair hanging loose and say: ‘No, tell me. Who was at the table?’

For maximum effect, the girl would pause for a moment. ‘Serge Lohman!’

‘Who?’

‘Serge Lohman! That cabinet minister! Or maybe he’s not a real minister, but you know who I mean, he was on the news yesterday, the one who’s going to win the election. It was so dumb, there was a woman at the table too, and I smacked her in the head with my elbow.’

‘Oh, him … Jesus! And what happened then?’

‘Well, nothing, he was really nice, but I could have curled up and died!’

Really nice … Yes, Serge had been really nice, after he’d slid his chair back a couple of feet and then raised his head and seen the girl for the first time. In a hundredth of a second, too fast to be seen by the naked eye, I saw his expression change: from feigned dismay and annoyance at the unskilled handling of his Chablis to totally empathetic friendliness. How he melted, in short; the resemblance to the only recently discussed Scarlett Johansson could not have escaped even him. He saw a ‘sweet thing’, a blushing and stammering sweet thing, and completely at his mercy. He gave her his most charming smile.

‘But that’s okay,’ he said, lifting his glass and causing a substantial slug of white wine to land on his half-empty plate of crayfish. ‘I should be able to finish it anyway.’

‘I’m so sorry, sir,’ the girl said again.

‘Nothing to worry about. How old are you? Are you old enough to vote?’

At first I thought my ears were playing tricks on me. Was I actually hearing this? But just at that point my brother turned his head in my direction and gave me a big, fat wink.

‘I’m nineteen, sir.’

‘Okay, tell you what. If you vote for the right party when the elections come up, we’ll do our best to overlook your wine-pouring abilities.’

The girl blushed again, the skin on her face turned an even darker red than before – and, for the second time within a couple of minutes, I thought she was going to burst into tears. I looked over at Babette, but there was nothing to suggest that she disapproved of her husband’s behaviour. In fact, she seemed rather amused by it: the nationally famous politician Serge Lohman, leader of the largest opposition party, a shoo-in for prime minister, openly flirting with nineteen-year-old waitresses and making them blush – maybe this was cute, maybe this only confirmed his irresistible charm, or maybe she, Babette, just happened to like being married to a man like my brother. In the car on the way here, or in the parking lot, he had made her cry. But what did that amount to, anyway? Was she suddenly going to leave him in the lurch, now, after eighteen years? Six or seven months before the elections?

I tried to re-establish eye contact with Claire, but she seemed engrossed by Serge’s brimming wineglass and the waitress’s stammering. She ran her hand over the back of her head, over the place where the girl’s elbow had hit her – who knows, maybe harder than it had appeared, then asked: ‘Are you two going to France again this summer? Or don’t you have any plans yet?’

Every year Serge and Babette went to their house in the Dordogne with the children. They belonged to that class of Dutch people who think everything French is ‘great’: from croissants to French bread with Camembert, from French cars (they themselves drove one of the top-end Peugeots) to French chansons and French films. At the same time, they failed to see that the local French population of the Dordogne fairly retched at the sight of Dutch people. Anti-Dutch slogans had been scrawled on the walls of many résidences secondaires, but according to my brother this was the work of ‘a tiny minority’ – after all, wasn’t everyone nice to you when you went to a shop or a restaurant?

‘Uh … that depends,’ Serge said. ‘It’s still a bit up in the air.’

We had visited them there for the first time a year ago, the three of us, on our way to Spain – the first time and the last, as Claire put it after we resumed our trip three days later. My brother and his wife had insisted so often that we drop by that it was becoming almost embarrassing to put it off any longer.

The house was in a lovely location, on a hill, tucked away amid the trees. Glinting in the distance through the branches, in the valley below, you could see a bend in the Dordogne River. It was muggy the whole time we were there, not a breath of wind. Huge beetles and blowflies, of a size never seen in the Netherlands, buzzed loudly amid the leaves, or flew against the windows with smacks so hard they made the glass rattle in its sashes.

We were introduced to the ‘mason’ who had built the open kitchen for them, to the ‘madame’ who ran the bakery, and to the owner of a ‘completely ordinary little restaurant’ along a tributary of the Dordogne, ‘where all the locals go’. Serge introduced me to everyone as ‘mon petit frère’. He seemed at ease among the French, each and every one of them just regular people, after all: regular people were his specialty in Holland, so why not here as well?

What barely seemed to register with him was that those regular people were earning large sums of money off of him, off the Dutchman with his summer home and his money, and it was in part for that reason that they continued to exercise a modicum of courtesy.

‘So kind,’ Serge said. ‘So normal. Where would you find that in Holland these days?’

He failed to notice, or maybe he just shut his eyes to it, how the ‘mason’ hocked a green tendril of chewing tobacco onto their tiled patio after mentioning the price of a shipment of authentic, rural roofing tiles for the lean-to above their outdoor kitchen. How the madame at the bakery actually wanted to go on serving her customers, but stood waiting while Serge introduced his petit frère, and how those same customers exchanged knowing nods and winks: nods and winks that spoke volumes concerning the despicable boorishness of these Dutch people. How the jovial owner of the little restaurant squatted beside our table and said in a conspiratorial tone that he had, that very day, received a bag of escargots from a local farmer who normally kept them for himself. This time he had been able to buy some, though, and the owner wanted to offer them exclusively to Serge and his ‘sympathetic family’ at a ‘special price’; the taste was something we would encounter nowhere else. Meanwhile, Serge overlooked the fact that the French customers were all handed a simple menu showing the relais du jour, an inexpensive three-course menu at less than half the price of a single helping of snails. And concerning the wine-tasting in that little restaurant, I prefer to say nothing at all.

Claire and I stayed for three days. During those three days we also visited a chateau, where we had to stand in line in front of a house with hundreds of other foreigners, mostly Dutch, before being guided through twelve swelteringly hot rooms with old poster beds and tub chairs. The rest of the time we spent largely in the airless garden. Claire tried to do some reading; it was too hot for me to even open a book, the white of the pages hurt your eyes – but it was difficult to do nothing at all: Serge was always busy with something; there were things around the house he did himself, things for which he did not have a local craftsman at his beck and call.

‘The people here start to respect you when you work on your own house,’ he said. ‘You notice that after a while.’

And so he pushed his wheelbarrow forty times back and forth between the outdoor kitchen and the provincial highway, where the rural roofing tiles had been dropped. It never occurred to him for a moment that his do-it-yourselfing might be cheating the local mason out of a considerable chunk of his paid working hours.

He sawed his own wood for the fireplace as well; sometimes it looked almost like a publicity shot for his election campaign: Serge Lohman, the people’s candidate, with a wheelbarrow, a saw and burly blocks of wood, a regular man like any other, the only difference being that few regular men could afford a summer home in the Dordogne. Perhaps that was the real reason why he never allowed a camera crew onto his ‘property’, as he referred to it. ‘This is my place,’ he himself said. ‘My place, for me and my family. It’s no one else’s business.’

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 hundreds 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?’

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.

‘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.’

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.

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

‘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.

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.

‘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.

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.

Before 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.

‘I have no idea,’ I said meanwhile, sounding as casual as I could. ‘I’m just as surprised as you are. I mean, they sort of look alike, our cell phones, but I can hardly imagine that I—’

‘I couldn’t find it anywhere,’ Michel butted in. ‘So I called my own number to see if I could hear it ring somewhere.’

His mother’s picture on the screen. He had called from home; the screen on his phone showed a picture of his mother when anyone called him from our land line. Not a picture of his father, it flashed through my mind. Or of the two of us. At the same moment I realized how ridiculous that would be, a picture of his parents on the couch in the living room, smiling with their arms around each other: a happy marriage. Daddy and Mummy are calling. Daddy and Mummy want to talk to me. Daddy and Mummy love me more than anyone else in the world.

‘I’m sorry, guy. I guess I was stupid enough to put your cell phone in my pocket. Your father must have had a senior moment.’ Home was Mama. Home was Claire. I didn’t feel left out, I noted, somehow it was actually a comfort. ‘We won’t be home late. You’ll have it back in a couple of hours.’

‘Where are you guys? Oh yeah, you went to dinner, you said that already. Isn’t that the restaurant in that park, across from …’ Michel mentioned the name of the regular-people café. ‘That’s not very far.’

‘Don’t bother. You’ll have it back before you know it. An hour or so, max.’ Did I still sound light-hearted? Cheerful? Or could you tell from my voice that I didn’t really want him to come to the restaurant and pick up his phone?

‘I can’t wait that long. I’ve got … I need some numbers, I have to call someone.’ Did I actually hear him hesitate there, or was it just that the connection was lost for a moment?

‘I’ll look for you if you want. If you tell me which number you need …’

No, that was completely the wrong tone. I had no desire to be that kind of easygoing, fun-to-be-around dad: a father who’s allowed to poke around in his son’s cell phone because father and son, after all, ‘having nothing to hide from each other’. I was already so grateful that Michel still called me ‘Dad’ and not ‘Paul’. There was something about that first-name-basis business that had always appalled me: children of seven who called their father ‘George’ or their mother ‘Wilma’. It was freeness and easiness of the wrong sort, and at the end of the day it always backfired on the all too free and easy parents. It was only a small step from ‘George’ and ‘Wilma’ to ‘But I said I wanted peanut butter, didn’t I, George?’ After which the sandwich with chocolate sprinkles is sent back to the kitchen and disappears into the garbage.

I’ve seen them often enough in my own surroundings, parents who laugh rather sheepishly when their children speak to them in that tone of voice. ‘Oh, you know, these days they hit adolescence a lot earlier,’ is how they try to smooth it over, but they are too short-sighted, or simply too cowardly, to realize that they have called this reign of terror down upon themselves. In their heart of hearts, of course, what they hope is that their children will go on liking them for longer as George and Wilma than they would as Dad and Mum.

A father who looked at the contents of his fifteen-year-old son’s cell phone was getting too close. He could see right away how many girls were in the contacts, or which raunchy photos had been downloaded as screen wallpaper. No, my son and I did have things to hide, we respected each other’s privacy, we knocked on the door of the other’s room when it was closed. And we did not, for example, walk in and out of the bathroom naked without towels around our waists, simply because there was nothing to hide, as was common in George-and-Wilma families – no, not that, not that at all!

But I had already snooped around in Michel’s cell phone. I had seen things that weren’t meant for me. From Michel’s point of view, it was mortally dangerous for me to hold onto his phone any longer than was absolutely necessary.

‘No, that’s okay, Dad. I’m coming right now to get it.’

‘Michel?’ I said, but he had already hung up. ‘Fuck!’ I shouted for the second time that evening, and at that moment I saw Claire and Babette emerging from behind the tall hedge. My wife had her arm around her sister-in-law’s shoulder.

It took only a few blinks of an eye: during those blinks I thought about stepping back and making myself fade into the shrubbery. But then I remembered why I had gone into the garden in the first place: to find Claire and Babette. It could have been worse. Claire could have seen me using Michel’s cell phone. She could have wondered who I was calling, here, outside the restaurant – in secret!

‘Claire!’ I waved. Then I walked towards them.

Babette was still holding a hanky to her nose, but there were no more tears to be seen. ‘Paul …’ my wife said.

She looked straight at me as she spoke my name. First she rolled her eyes, then breathed an imaginary sigh. I knew what that meant, because I had seen her do it before – the time, for example, when her mother tried to take an overdose of sleeping pills at the rest home.

It’s a lot worse than I thought, the eyes and the sigh said.

Now Babette looked at me as well, and took the hanky away from her face. ‘Oh, Paul,’ she said. ‘Dear, sweet, Paul …’

‘The … the main course has arrived,’ I said.

There was no one in the men’s room.

I tried all three cubicles: they were unoccupied.

You two go ahead, I’d said to Claire and Babette when we reached the entrance. Go ahead and start, I’ll be there in a minute.

I went into the cubicle furthest from the door and locked it behind me. For appearances’ sake, I pulled my trousers down around my ankles and sat: my underpants I kept on.

I took Michel’s cell phone out of my pocket and slid it open.

On the display I saw something I hadn’t seen before – at least, something I hadn’t noticed out in the garden.

At the bottom of the screen, a little white box had appeared:

Two missed calls

Faso

Faso? Who the hell was Faso?

It sounded like a made-up name, a name that couldn’t really belong to anyone …

And suddenly I knew. Of course! Faso! Faso was the nickname Michel and Rick had given their adopted half-brother and half-cousin. Beau. Because of the country where he was born. And because of his first name: Beau.

Beau Faso. B. Faso from Burkina Faso.

They had started it a couple of years back: at least that was the first time I’d heard them use the nickname, at Claire’s birthday party. ‘You want some, Faso?’ I heard Michel say as he held up to Beau a red plastic bowl of popcorn.

And Serge, who was standing close by, heard it too. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Cut that out. His name is Beau.’

Beau himself seemed to be the last person to be bothered by his nickname. ‘It’s okay, really, Dad,’ he said to my brother.

‘No, it’s not okay,’ Serge said. ‘Your name is Beau. Faso! I don’t know, I just think it’s … I think it’s not nice.’

Serge had probably meant to say, ‘I just think it’s discrimination,’ but had bitten his tongue at the last moment.

‘Everyone’s got a nickname, Dad.’

Everyone. That was what Beau wanted. He wanted to be like everyone.

After that I had rarely heard Michel and Rick use the nickname when other people were around. But apparently it had lived on: all the way to Michel’s list of contacts.

What had Beau/Faso been calling Michel about?

I could listen to the voicemail, if he’d left a message, but then Michel would see right away that I’d been poking around in his phone. We were both on Vodafone, and I could have recited the voicemail lady’s message in my sleep. ‘You have ONE new message’ changed, after the first time it was listened to, into ‘You have ONE old message.’

I pushed the Select button, clicked on through to File Manager and then to Videos.

A drop-down menu appeared: 1. Videos, 2. Downloaded videos and 3. Favourite videos.

Just as I had a few hours (an eternity) ago in Michel’s room, I clicked on 3. Favourite videos; even more than an eternity, it had been a turning point: a turning point as in before the war or after the war.

The still of the most recent video was outlined in blue; this was the film clip I had already watched an eternity ago. I clicked back one video, pushed Options, then Play.

A station. The platform at a station, a subway station by the looks of it. Yes, an above-ground subway station out in one of the suburbs, judging from the high-rise apartments in the background. Maybe the south-east side of town, or else Slotervaart.

I might as well be frank. I recognized the subway station. I knew right away which subway station it was, and where, and along which line – only I’m not going to shout it from the rooftops; at this point there’s no one who would benefit from me mentioning the name of the station.

The camera panned down and began following the heels of a pair of white sneakers that were moving down the platform with a certain degree of haste. After a while the camera swung up again and you saw a man, an older man, around sixty I figured, although with people like him it’s always hard to tell: it was clear in any case that this was not the owner of the white sneakers. When the camera moved in closer you could see his unshaven, rather spotty face. A panhandler, probably, a homeless person. Something like that.

I felt the same cold that I had felt earlier that evening in Michel’s room, the cold that came from inside.

Beside the homeless person’s head, Rick’s face appeared. My brother’s son grinned at the camera. ‘Take one,’ he said. ‘Action!’

Then, with no warning, he struck the man on the side of his head with the palm of his hand, on the ear. It was a real rabbit punch; the head lurched to the side, the man winced and raised his hands to cover his ears, as though to ward off the next blow.

‘You’re a piece of shit, motherfucker!’ Rick screamed in English, with a hint of that giveaway accent, like a Dutch actor in a British or American movie.

The camera moved in even closer, the homeless man’s unshaven face filled the little screen. He blinked his watery, red eyes, his lips mumbled something incomprehensible.

‘Say “Jackass”,’ said another voice off-camera, a voice I immediately recognized as my son’s.

The homeless man’s head disappeared, and there was Rick again. My nephew looked into the camera and put on an intentionally stupid grin. ‘Don’t try this at home,’ he said, and took another swing, or at least his arm made a punching movement; the actual blow landed off-camera.

‘Say “Jackass”,’ said Michel’s voice.

The homeless man’s head appeared on screen again, this time, judging from the camera angle – there were no longer apartment blocks in the background, only a stretch of grey concrete along the platform and rails behind – lying on the ground. His lips trembled, his eyes were closed.

‘Jack … jack … ass,’ he said.

There the frame froze. In the ensuing silence I heard only the sound of water rushing down the peeing wall.

‘We need to talk about our children,’ Serge had said – how long ago? An hour? Two?

What I really felt like was staying here until tomorrow morning: until the cleaners found me.

I got up.

At the entrance to the dining room, I hesitated.

Michel could arrive any moment to pick up his cell phone (he hadn’t yet, in any case, I saw as I took a few steps forward, then stopped: the only people at our table were Claire, Babette and Serge).

I ducked behind a large potted palm. Peeking through the foliage, I didn’t have the impression that they’d seen me.

By far the best thing, I reflected, would be to intercept Michel. Here in the entranceway, or at the cloakroom; even better, of course, would be outside in the garden. Yes, I needed to go to the garden, that way I could walk up and meet Michel partway, give him his cell phone there. Not hindered by the looks and possible questions from his mother, uncle and aunt.

I turned and walked outside, past the girl at the lectern. I had no fixed plan. I would have to say something to my son. But what? I decided to wait and see whether he would bring anything up himself – I would pay close attention to his eyes, I resolved, his honest eyes that had always been so bad at lying.

Following the path with the electric torches, I took the turn to the left, just as I had earlier in the evening. The most obvious thing would be for Michel to take the same route we had, across the footbridge opposite the regular-people’s café. There was another entrance to the park, in fact that was the main entrance, but then he would have to cycle a lot further in the dark.

When I reached the bridge, I stopped and looked around. There was no one in sight. The light from the restaurant’s torches was no more than a weak yellowish glow here, no brighter than a pair of candles.

The darkness had an advantage too. In the dark, when we couldn’t see each other’s eyes, Michel might be more willing to speak the truth.

And then what? What was I going to do with that ‘truth’? I rubbed my eyes. I needed to appear lucid, in any case, later. Cupping a hand in front of my mouth, I exhaled and sniffed. Yes, my breath smelled of alcohol, of beer and wine. But until now, I calculated, I had had a total of no more than five drinks. I’d resolved beforehand to remain in control; I didn’t want to give Serge the chance to score off me this evening just because I was sloppy. I knew myself well enough, I knew that a dinner out had a certain, limited curve of concentration, and that by the end of that curve I would no longer have the oomph to come back at him if he started in about our children again.

I looked at the other side of the bridge and the lights of the café behind the bushes, on the far side of the street. A tram rode past the stop without slowing down, after that it was silent again.

‘Hurry up, now!’ I said out loud.

And it was there and at that precise moment, as I heard the sound of my own voice – was jolted awake by the sound of my own voice, I should perhaps say – that I suddenly knew what I had to do.

I took Michel’s cell phone out of my pocket and slid it open.

I pressed Show.

I read both text messages: the first one contained a phone number, and the comment that no message had been left; the second said that the same number had left ‘one new message’.

I compared the times under the two texts. Between the first and the second there had been only two minutes. Both had arrived just a little more than fifteen minutes ago: while I was talking to my son on the phone, in this same park, just a little way from here.

I pressed Options twice, then hit Delete.

Then I called the number on the voicemail.

When Michel got his phone back later, there would be no missed calls listed on the display, I reasoned, and therefore no reason for him to consult his voicemail – at least not for the time being.

‘Yo!’ I heard then, after the voicemail lady had announced that there was one new message (and two old ones). ‘Yo! You gonna call me back, or what?!’

Yo! About six months ago, Beau had started adopting the Afro-American look, with a New York Yankees cap and matching lingo. He had been taken from Africa and brought here, and until a short while ago he had always spoken proper, standard Dutch. Not the Dutch spoken by ordinary people, but the Dutch of the circles surrounding my brother and his wife: supposedly quite neutral, but in fact with the accent recognizable among thousands as that of the elite; the Dutch you hear on the tennis court and in the canteen at the hockey club.

There must have been a day when Beau had looked in the mirror and decided that Africa was synonymous with pitiful and needy. But despite his prim diction, he would never be a Dutchman either. So it was perfectly understandable for him to go looking for his identity elsewhere, on the far side of the Atlantic, in the black neighbourhoods of New York and Los Angeles.

From the very beginning, though, there had been something about this act that annoyed me terribly. It was the same thing that had always annoyed me about my brother’s adopted son: something about his aura of sainthood, if you could call it that, the shrewdness with which he exploited his differentness from his adoptive parents, his adoptive brother, his adoptive sister and cousin.

As a little boy he had climbed onto ‘Mother’s’ lap much more often than Rick or Valerie did – usually in tears. Babette would caress his little black head and speak comforting words, but she was already looking around to find whom to blame for Beau’s sorrow.

The guilty party was usually not far away.

‘What happened to Beau?’ she would demand accusingly of her biological son.

‘Nothing, Mama,’ I heard Rick say once. ‘All I did was look at him.’

‘In fact,’ Claire had said when I aired my dislike of Beau, ‘you’re a racist.’

‘No I’m not!’ I said. ‘I would be a racist if I liked that little hypocrite simply for the colour of his skin or where he comes from. Positive discrimination. I would only be a racist if our adopted nephew’s hypocrisy made me draw conclusions about Africa in general, or Burkina Faso in particular.’

‘I was only kidding,’ said Claire.

A bicycle was coming across the bridge. A bicycle with a headlight. I could see the rider only in silhouette, but I could have picked my own boy out of a crowd of thousands, even in the dark. The way he sat hunched down over the handlebars like a racing cyclist, the supple nonchalance with which he let the bike sway left and right while the body itself barely moved: these were the ways and moves of … of a predator. The thought popped into my mind without my being able to stop it. ‘Of an athlete’ was what I had meant to say – to think. A sportsman.

Michel played soccer and tennis, and six months ago he had joined a gym. He didn’t smoke, was very moderate with alcohol, and he had on more than one occasion expressed his disdain for drugs, both soft and hard. ‘Those losers’ was what he called the potheads in his class, and we, Claire and I, were all too pleased to hear it. Pleased to have a son who was not a delinquent, who rarely skipped school and always did his homework. He was not an exceptionally good student, he never went out of his way to excel, in fact he barely did more than the bare minimum, but on the other hand there were never any complaints. His marks and exam scores were usually ‘average’, it was only for gym that he ever received an A+.

‘Old message,’ the voicemail lady said.

I realized only then that I was still holding his cell phone to my ear. Michel was already halfway across the bridge. I turned my back to him and began walking towards the restaurant; whatever happened, I had to break the connection as quickly as possible and stuff the phone back into my pocket.

‘Tonight’s okay,’ Rick’s voice said. ‘We’ll do it tonight. Call me. Ciao.’

After that the voicemail lady announced the time and date that the message had been left.

I heard Michel behind me, his bike tyres crunching on the gravel.

‘Old message,’ she said again.

Michel cycled past me. What did he see? A man rambling through the park all alone? Holding a cell phone to his ear? Or did he see his father? With or without the cell phone?

‘Hi, love,’ I heard Claire’s voice say now, at the same moment that my son went by. He cycled onto the lit gravel path and climbed off the bike. He looked around quickly, then walked his bike to the rack to the left of the entrance. ‘I’ll be home in an hour. Your father and I are going to the restaurant at seven, I’ll make sure we stay away till after midnight. So you two have to do it tonight. Your father doesn’t know about any of this, and I want to keep it that way. Bye, love. See you in a bit. Big smooch.’

Michel had locked his bike and was walking towards the door. The voicemail lady mentioned the date (today) and the time (two in the afternoon) that this last message had been left.

Your father doesn’t know about any of this.

‘Michel!’ I shouted. I slid the cell phone into my pocket. He stopped and looked around. I waved.

And I want to keep it that way.

My son came towards me along the gravel. We met precisely at the top of the path. It was awfully well lit. But maybe I was going to need this much light, I thought.

‘Hi,’ he said. He was wearing his black knitted cap with the Nike logo, the headphones were slung around his neck, the cable running down the collar of his jacket. A green, quilted Dolce & Gabbana jacket he had bought with his own clothes allowance only recently, after which there was no money left for socks and underpants.

‘Hi, guy,’ I said. ‘I figured I’d walk up a bit and meet you.’

My son looked at me. His honest eyes. Frank, that was how you would have to describe his gaze. Your father doesn’t know about any of this.

‘You were talking on the phone,’ he said.

I said nothing.

‘Who were you talking to?’

He was trying to sound as casual as possible, but there was an urgent undertone to his voice. It was a tone I had never heard there before, and I could feel the hairs standing up on the back of my neck.

‘I was trying to call you,’ I said. ‘I was wondering what was taking you so long.’

This is what happened. These are the facts.

One night, about two months ago, three boys were on their way home from a party. It was a party in the canteen of the high school two of the three boys attended. Those two were brothers. One of them was adopted.

The third boy went to a different school. He was their cousin.

Although the cousin never drank alcohol, that evening he had had a couple of beers. Just like the other two. Both cousins had danced with girls. Not their steady girlfriends, because they didn’t have them at that point – all different girls. The adopted brother did have a steady girlfriend. He spent most of the evening kissing her in a darkened corner.

The girlfriend had not gone along when the three boys left; they all had to be home by one. The girl was waiting for her father to come and pick her up.

It was, in fact, already one-thirty, but the boys knew that this fell within the limits their parents allowed. It had been agreed beforehand that the cousin would sleep over at the home of the two brothers – the cousin’s parents were spending a few days in Paris.

They had decided to drink one last beer at a café on their way back. But because they didn’t have enough money on them, they needed to stop first at a cash machine. A few streets further down – they were now about halfway between the school and home – they found an ATM. It was one of those with an outer door made of safety glass; the machine itself was inside, in a cubicle.

One of the two brothers, the biological brother as it were, goes in to withdraw cash. The adopted brother and the cousin wait outside. But then the biological brother comes back outside almost immediately.

So quick? the other two ask.

No, man, the brother says, man, I flipped my shit.

What is it? the others ask.

Inside there, the brother says. There’s someone lying there. Someone’s lying there asleep, in a sleeping bag. Jesus, man, I almost stepped on his head.

As to what precisely happened after that, and above all as to who was the first to come up with the disastrous plan, accounts differ. All three of them agreed that it stank inside the ATM cubicle. A horrible stench: a mixture of barf and sweat, and something else that one of the three described as being like the smell of a rotting corpse.

That stench is significant; a person who stinks cannot count on as much sympathy; a stench can be blinding; no matter how human those odours are, they can actually obscure the perception of the one who stinks as a real person of flesh and blood. That is no excuse for what happened, but it would also not be right simply to omit it.

Three boys are out to get some cash, not a lot, a few ten-euro notes for a final beer at the café. But there was no way they were going to hang around in that stench, you couldn’t be around it for more than ten seconds without gagging, it was like a torn-open garbage bag was lying there.

But what is lying there is a person: a person who breathes, yes, who even snores and snorts in his sleep.

Come on, we’ll find another ATM, the adopted brother says.

Forget it, say the other two. That’s crazy, if you can’t even get some cash because someone’s lying in front of the machine, stinking and sleeping off his rotgut.

Come on, the adopted brother says again, let’s go.

But the other two think that’s spineless, they’re going to withdraw their money here, they’re not going to go off and walk how many blocks to some other machine. Now the cousin goes inside, he starts yanking on the sleeping bag. Hey, hey, wake up! Get up!

I’m leaving, says the adopted son. I’m not into this.

Don’t be such a wimp, say the other two, we’ll be done in a minute, and then we’ll grab a beer.

But the adoptive brother says again that he’s not into it, that he’s tired anyway and doesn’t feel like a beer any more – and then he goes off on his bike.

The biological brother tries to stop him. Wait a minute, he shouts after him.

But the adopted brother only waves back, then disappears around the corner.

Let him go, the cousin says. He’s a bore. He’s squeaky clean. He’s a boring asshole.

The two of them go back inside. The brother tugs at the sleeping bag. Hey, wake up! Oh, blecch, man, that stinks, he says. The cousin kicks the foot end of the sleeping bag. It’s not really the smell of a corpse, more like garbage bags, that’s right, garbage bags full of leftover food, gnawed-off chicken bones, mouldy coffee filters. Wake up! A kind of stubbornness comes over both of them now, the cousin and the brother, they’re going to withdraw cash here, at this ATM, and nowhere else. Of course they’d had a little to drink at the school party. And it is in fact that same stubbornness, the stubbornness of the tipsy driver who says he’s perfectly capable of taking the wheel himself – and the stubbornness of the guest who hangs around too long at the end of your birthday party, who grabs one last beer (‘one for the road’), then tells you the same story for the seventh time that evening.

You gotta to get up, mister, this is a cash machine. They remain polite: despite the stench, so horrific it brings tears to their eyes, they still call him mister. The stranger, the invisible man in the sleeping bag, is undoubtedly older than they are. A mister, in other words, probably a tramp, but still a mister.

Now, for the first time, sounds start to come from inside the sleeping bag. They are the kinds of sounds you’d pretty much expect in the circumstances: moaning, groaning, unintelligible mumbling. It is coming to life. It still sounds like a child who doesn’t want to get up yet, who maybe doesn’t really want to go to school today, but then the sounds are followed by movements: someone or something stretches and seems about to poke a head or some other body part out of the sleeping bag.

They don’t have a clear plan, the brother and the cousin, they realize perhaps too late that they really don’t want to know precisely what’s hidden away inside the sleeping bag. So far it has been only an obstacle, something that was in the way, it gave off a monstrous stench, it didn’t belong there, it had to go away, but now they actually have to talk to that something (or someone) who’s been woken up against its will, woken from its dreams; who knows what the stinking homeless dream about, about a roof over their head probably, a warm meal, a wife and children, a house with a driveway, a sweet dog wagging its tail and running towards them across a lawn complete with sprinkler.

Fuck off!

It’s not the curse that shocks them so much at first, but the voice. It shatters certain expectations. You would expect to see something unshaven appear from the sleeping bag: sweaty hair glued to the skull, a mouth toothless but for a couple of black stumps. But this sounds almost like a woman …

But what if it was a – at that same moment, the sleeping bag starts moving even more: a hand, another hand, a whole arm, and then a head. You can’t really tell right away, or yes you can, because of the hair with bald spots: black hair, grey here and there, with the scalp shining through. A man goes bald differently. The face itself is grimy, unshaven, or no, it has facial hair, but clearly not like a man’s. Fuck off! Bastards! The voice is shrill, the woman flails around with one arm, the way you chase away flies. A woman. The brother and the cousin look at each other. It’s time to knock off. Later, they will both recall that exact same moment. The discovery that it is a woman in the sleeping bag changes everything.

Come on, let’s go, the brother actually says.

Goddam it! the woman screams. Fuck off! Fuck off!

Shut your face! the cousin says. I said, shut your face!

He kicks the sleeping bag hard, but there isn’t much space for kicking, he can barely keep his balance, and he slips, his foot shoots out too far, the tip of his shoe grazes the sleeping bag and hits the woman right under the nose. A hand with greasy, swollen fingers and black nails is raised to the nose. There is blood. Bastards! they hear, the voice is now so loud and shrill that it seems to fill everything. Murderers! Scumbags! The brother pulls the cousin towards the door. Come on, let’s get out of here. Then they are out the door and standing outside. Dirty, rotten bastards, they can still hear from the cash-machine cubicle, a bit quieter now, but probably still loud enough to be heard down at the corner. It’s late though, the street is deserted, there are only three or four windows still lit in the entire area.

I wasn’t going to … the cousin said. My foot slipped. Jesus Christ, what a filthy bitch!

Sure, the brother says. Of course you didn’t. Jesus, I wish she’d shut up!

Noise is still coming from the cubicle, but the door has fallen shut now, it’s already more muffled, a spluttering, a vague, injured spluttering.

Then suddenly they can’t help laughing; later they’re able to remember precisely the way they looked at each other, their own indignant, flushed faces; that, and the muffled grumbling from behind the glass door, and how they had burst out laughing. In stitches. There’s no stopping it, they have to lean against the wall to keep from falling down, and then they lean on each other. They throw their arms around each other’s necks, their bodies shaking with laughter. Bunch of scumbags! The brother imitates the woman’s shrill voice. Bastards! The cousin squats down, then falls to the ground. Stop it please! Please! You’re killing me!

Leaning against a tree are a few garbage bags, and a couple of other objects obviously put there for the morning trash collection: an office chair on casters, a cardboard box that once contained a wide-screen TV, a desk lamp and a picture tube. They’re still laughing as they pick up the office chair and carry it over to the cubicle. Dirty, rotten shit-whore! They throw the chair, in as far as that can go into the little cubicle, at the sleeping bag, which the woman has now crawled back into. The cousin holds the door open, the brother goes back for the desk lamp, and two full garbage bags. The woman pokes her head out of the sleeping bag again, her hair really is stuck together in thick, greasy mats, she has a beard, or else it’s just caked-on filth. She tries to push the office chair away with one hand, but doesn’t really succeed. Then the first garbage bag hits her full in the face, her head rocks back, strikes hard against the steel wastepaper container on the wall. Now the cousin throws the desk lamp. It’s an old-fashioned kind with a round shade and a retractable arm. The metal shade hits the woman on the nose. It is perhaps strange that she has stopped screaming, that the brother and the cousin are no longer hearing her shrill voice. She merely sits there, nodding groggily when the second garbage bag hits her in the face. Stupid whore, go pass out somewhere else then! Get a job! That ‘Get a job!’ cracks them up again. Get a job! the brother shouts. Get a job, job, job!

The cousin is back outside again, he goes over to the tree where the garbage bags were. He pushes aside the wide-screen box and sees the jerrycan. It’s one of those army jerrycans, a green one like the kind you see on the backs of jeeps. The cousin picks up the jerrycan by the handle. Empty. What else would he have expected, who would put a full jerrycan out with the trash?

No, no, what do you think we’re gonna do? the brother cries when he sees the cousin coming with the jerrycan.

Nothing, man, it’s empty, right?

The woman has come back to her senses a little. You delinquents, you should be ashamed of yourselves, she says in a voice that is suddenly and unexpectedly prim, a voice from the distant past perhaps, before the free fall started.

It stinks in here, the cousin says, we’re going to smoke it out a little bit. He holds up the jerrycan.

Cute, she says, but can I go back to sleep now? The blood under her nose has already dried up. The cousin throws the empty jerrycan – perhaps on purpose, who knows – beside her head, at a safe distance, it makes a lot of noise, it’s true, but all things being equal it’s not as bad as the garbage bags and the desk lamp.

Later – a few weeks later – the footage on Opsporing Verzocht, a Dutch version of the Most Wanted series, clearly showed how both boys, after throwing the jerrycan, go back outside. They remain off-camera for a fairly long time. The images registered by the camera in the cash-machine cubicle never actually show the woman in the sleeping bag. The camera is pointed at the door, at the people who come in for money, you can see those who make a withdrawal, but it’s a fixed camera, the rest of the cubicle is out of sight.

The evening that Claire and I saw that footage for the first time, Michel was upstairs in his room. We were sitting next to each other on the couch in the living room, with the newspaper and a bottle of red wine left over from dinner. The story had been in all the papers, it was on the evening news a number of times, but it was the first time the footage itself was broadcast. The images were jerky, out of focus, immediately recognizable as a security camera. Until then, the general reaction had been one of outrage. What was the world coming to? A defenceless woman … young people … stiffer sentences – yes, even the appeal to restore the death penalty had raised its hoary head again.

That was all before that evening’s broadcast. Until then it had been little more than a news report, a shocking report, true enough, but still – like all news reports – one that was fated to wear thin: with the passing of time the sharp edges would be dulled, until the story finally disappeared altogether, not important enough in any case to be stored in our collective memory.

But the security-camera footage changed all that. The boys – the offenders – were given a face, albeit a face that was hard to recognize due to the bad quality of the images and the fact that both wore knitted caps pulled down over their eyebrows. What the viewers did recognize, however, was something else: they saw all too clearly that the boys were having a good time, that they almost creased up with laughter as they pelted their helpless – or at least invisible – victim, first with the office chair, then the garbage bags, the desk lamp and finally the empty jerrycan. You saw – jerkily, in black and white – them high-five each other after throwing the garbage bags, how they screamed things, undoubtedly abuse, at the homeless woman off-camera, even though there was no sound.

Above all, you saw them laughing. That was the moment when the collective memory came into play. It was the key moment: the laughing boys demanded their place in that collective memory. In the top ten of the collective memory they came in at number eight, probably right below the Vietnamese colonel summarily executing a Vietcong soldier with a bullet through the head, but perhaps even above the Chinese man with his carrier bags trying to stop the tanks at Tiananmen Square.

And there was something else that played a role. The two were wearing knitted caps, but they were upper-middle-class boys. They were white. It wasn’t easy to say how you could tell, it was hard to put your finger on it: something about their clothing, their movements. The boys down the street. Not the kind of trash who torch cars in order to start a race riot. Comfortably enough off, well-to-do parents. Boys like the ones we all know. Boys like our nephew. Like our son.

Looking back, I can recall the exact moment when I realized that this was not about boys like our nephew or our son, but about our son himself (and about our nephew). It was a cold and deathly quiet moment. Down to the very second, I could still point out the moment in the footage when I tore my eyes away from the TV and looked at Claire’s face in profile. Because the investigation is still under way, I’m not going to talk here about what made me realize, with a shock of recognition, that I was sitting on the couch watching our own son pelt a homeless woman with office chairs and garbage bags. And laughing. I’m not going into it any further, because technically I can still deny everything. Do you recognize this boy as Michel Lohman? At this point in the proceedings I can still shake my head. That’s hard to say … the images are pretty unclear, I couldn’t swear to it.

More images came afterwards: a compilation, the moments when little was happening had been edited out. You saw the two boys come back into the cubicle again and again and throw things.

The worst part came at the end, the key image as it were: the picture that caught the attention of half the world. First you saw the jerrycan being thrown – the empty jerrycan – and then, after they had gone outside again and come back, something else; on film it was hard to see what it was: a lighter? a match? You saw a flash of light, a flash that overexposed everything at once, that blinded you for a few seconds. The screen turned white. When the picture came back you could just see the boys beating a hasty retreat.

They didn’t come back. The final images registered by the security camera didn’t show much at all. No smoke or flames. The explosion of the jerrycan had not been followed by a fire. Yet it was precisely this seeing-nothing that made the images so terrifying. Because the most important thing was happening off-camera, and you had to fill in the rest for yourself.

The homeless woman was dead. Died right then and there, most probably. At the moment the gas vapours from the jerrycan exploded in her face. Or at most a couple of minutes later. Perhaps she had tried to wriggle out of the sleeping bag – perhaps not. Off-camera.

I looked, as I said before, at Claire’s face in profile. If she turned her head and looked at me, I would know. Then she would have seen the same thing I did.

Claire turned her head and looked at me.

I held my breath – or rather, I took a deep breath, so that I could be the first to say something. Something – I didn’t know exactly which words I would use – that would change our lives.

Claire held up the bottle of red wine: there was only a bit left in the bottom, just enough for half a glass.

‘Do you want this?’ she asked. ‘Or should I open another one?’

Michel put his hands in his coat pockets: it was hard to tell whether he had gone for my lie. When he turned his head to one side, his face was lit by the glow from the restaurant.

‘Where’s Mama?’ he asked.

Mama. Claire. My wife. Mama had told her son that his father didn’t know about any of this. And that she wanted to keep it that way.

Earlier in the evening, at the regular-people café, my wife had asked whether I too thought our son had been acting strangely of late. Distant, that was the word she’d used. The two of you talk about things Michel and I don’t talk about, she had said. Could it have something to do with a girl?

Had Claire been feigning concern about Michel’s behaviour? Were her questions meant only to get me to reveal how much I knew: whether I had any idea at all what our son and nephew were up to in their spare time?

‘Mama is inside,’ I said. ‘With …’

I started to say ‘with Uncle Serge and Aunt Babette’, but, in the light of recent events, that suddenly sounded so ridiculously childish. ‘Uncle’ Serge and ‘Aunt’ Babette were things of the past: the distant past, when we were still happy, it crossed my mind, and I had to bite my tongue. I had to be careful not to let my lip start trembling, or to let Michel see my wet eyes.

‘… Serge and Babette,’ I finished my sentence. ‘The main course just arrived.’

Was I mistaken, or did I see Michel feeling around for something in his coat pocket? For his cell phone, perhaps? He didn’t wear a watch, he used his phone to tell the time. I’ll make sure we stay away till after midnight, Claire had assured him on his voicemail. So you two have to do it tonight. Did he, at this moment, after my announcement that the main course had just arrived, feel the need to check the time? The amount of time left until ‘after midnight’, to do what they had to do?

When he asked about his mother, the tone that had frightened me only thirty seconds earlier vanished from Michel’s voice. Where’s Mama? ‘Uncle’ and ‘aunt’ were childish, reminiscent of birthday parties and questions like ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ But ‘Mama’ was Mama. Mama would always remain Mama.