The Dinner

He drummed with his fingers on the desk. And he blinked his eyes again! Yes, something had changed, the pedantic tone in which he’d tried to sell me his wishy-washy theories about capital punishment had disappeared as well.

I could smell it clearly now, above the odour of compost: fear. The way a dog can smell when someone is afraid, I detected a vague, sourish smell that hadn’t been there before.

I believe that was the moment when I started to get up from my chair, I don’t remember exactly, there’s a blank in there somewhere, a gap in time. I don’t remember whether anything else was said. Whatever the case: suddenly I was on my feet. I had stood up from my chair and was looking down at the principal.

What happened after that had everything to do with the difference in elevation, with the fact that the principal was still sitting and I was looking down on him – towering over him, that might be more like it. It’s a sort of unwritten law, the way water runs to the lowest level or, to employ a canine analogy, the fact that the principal was at a disadvantage in his chair, that he found himself as it were in a position of submissive vulnerability. Dogs do the same thing: for years they let their owners feed and pet them, they’re as gentle as lambs, they are really lovely animals, but then one day the owner suddenly loses his balance, he trips and falls. Within seconds the dogs are on him, they sink their teeth into his neck and bite him to death, sometimes they even tear him completely to pieces after that. It’s instinct: that which falls is weak, that which lies on the ground is prey.

‘I insist that you show me that,’ I said, purely for the sake of formality, pointing at the piece of paper that was lying in front of the principal, and which he now covered with both hands. Purely a formality, because it was too late now to put anything right.

‘Mr Lohman,’ he said. Then I punched him squarely in the nose. Right away there was blood, lots of blood: it sprayed from his nostrils and spattered across his shirt and the desktop, and then on the fingers with which he pawed at his nose.

By that time I had come around the desk and hit him in the face again, lower down this time, his teeth hurt my knuckles as they broke off. He screamed, he shouted something unintelligible, but I had already pulled him up out of his chair. Undoubtedly, people would be alarmed by the principal’s scream, within thirty seconds the door to his office would fly open, but in thirty seconds you can do a lot of damage, thirty seconds seemed like enough to me.

‘You dirty, filthy, stinking pig,’ I said, before simultaneously planting a fist in his face and a knee in his gut. But then I made a mistake. I hadn’t thought it was possible that the principal would have any strength left; I thought I could calmly take him apart before the teachers burst in and put an end to the performance.

With great speed, he swung up his head and butted me on the chin, then wrapped his arms around my calves and pulled, causing me to lose my balance and fall over backwards. ‘Fucking shit!’ I yelled.

The principal ran, not to the door, but to the window. He had it open before I could get to my feet. ‘Help!’ he screamed out the window. ‘Help!’

But I was already on him. I grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head back, then brought it down hard on the windowsill. ‘We’re not done yet!’ I shouted in his ear.

There were a lot of people in the schoolyard, most of them students, it must have been lunch break. They all looked up – at us.

I picked the boy in the black cap out of the crowd almost immediately; there was something comforting, something reassuring, about seeing a familiar face amid all those other faces. He was standing in a little group, off to one side, close to the steps that led to the front entrance, along with a couple of girls and a boy on a scooter. The boy in the black Nike cap had a pair of headphones slung around his neck.

I waved. I remember that clearly. I waved to Michel, and I tried to smile. The wave and the smile were meant to show that, from out there, it probably looked worse than it was. That I’d had an argument with the principal about his, Michel’s, essay, but that in the meantime everything had come closer to being sorted out.

41

‘That was the prime minister,’ Serge said returning to the table; he sat down and put his cell phone back in his pocket. ‘He wanted to know what the press conference was going to be about tomorrow.’

Any one of the three of us could have asked at that point: ‘Well? What did you tell him?’ But no one at the table spoke a word. Sometimes people allow silences like that to fall: when they don’t feel like saying the obvious. If Serge had told a joke, a joke that started with a question (Why can’t two Chinamen go to the barber at the same time?), a comparable silence would probably have ensued.

My brother looked at his dame blanche, which, probably out of courtesy, still had not been removed. ‘I told him that I didn’t want to tell him anything about it, not yet, not this evening. He hoped it was nothing serious. Like me withdrawing from the race. Those were his exact words: “It would bitterly disappoint me, on both our behalves, were you to throw in the towel at this point, seven months before the elections.”’ Serge made an attempt to imitate the prime minister’s accent, but so poorly that it seemed more like a crudely drawn version, a political cartoon badly traced, rather than the cartoon itself. ‘I told him the truth, that I’m still talking to my family. That I’m keeping a number of options open.’

When the prime minister was only newly elected, the jokes had never stopped: about his appearance, his wooden way of speaking in public, his numerous – often literal – slip-ups. Since then, however, a process of habituation had taken place. You got used to it, like a stain on the wallpaper. A stain that seemed simply to belong there, and which could surprise you only by one day not being there at all.

‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ Claire said. ‘So you’re keeping your options open. I thought it was all cut and dried for you. For all of us.’

Serge tried to make eye contact with his wife, but she acted as though she were more interested in the cell phone on the table in front of her. ‘Yes, I’m keeping my options open,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I want us to do this together. As … as a family.’

‘The way we’ve always done things,’ I said. I thought about the scorched macaroni alla carbonara, the pan I’d smashed in his face when he tried to take my son away, but apparently Serge’s memory was not as keen as mine, because he actually smiled warmly.

‘Yes,’ he said – he looked at his watch – ‘I have to … we really have to go now. Babette … What’s taking so long with that check?’

Babette got up.

‘Yes, let’s go,’ she said; she turned to Claire. ‘Are the two of you coming?’

Claire held up her half-full glass of grappa. ‘Go ahead, both of you. We’ll be there in a bit.’

Serge held out his hand to his wife. I thought Babette was going to ignore him, but she didn’t. She even offered Serge her arm.

‘We can …’ he said. He was smiling, yes, almost beaming as he took his wife by the elbow. ‘We’ll talk more about this later. We can have another at the café, and then we’ll talk about it some more.’

‘That’s fine, Serge,’ Claire said. ‘Just run along, the two of you. Paul and I will finish our grappa, then we’ll be there.’

‘The check,’ Serge said. He patted his coat pockets, as though searching for a wallet or a credit card.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Claire said. ‘We’ll take care of it.’

And then they actually left. I watched as they walked towards the exit, my brother holding his wife by the arm. Only a few guests looked up or turned their heads as they passed. A process of habituation seemed to be taking place here as well; if you stayed in one place long enough, you became a face like all the rest.

As they passed the open kitchen, the man in the white turtleneck hurried up to them: Tonio – the name in his passport had to be Anton. Serge and Babette stopped. Hands were shaken. Waitresses came rushing over with their coats.

‘Are they gone yet?’ Claire asked.

‘Almost,’ I said.

My wife knocked back the rest of her grappa. She laid her hand on mine.

‘You have to do something,’ she said, applying a little pressure with her fingers.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘We have to stop him.’

Claire took my hand now.

‘You have to stop him,’ she said.

I looked at her.

‘Me?’ I said, even though I could feel something coming: something to which I might not be able to say no.

‘You have to do something to him,’ Claire said.

I just stared at her.

‘Something that will keep him from holding that press conference tomorrow,’ Claire said.

It was at precisely that moment, from somewhere close by, that a cell phone began to beep. First only a few quiet beeps, which grew louder and merged into a tune.

Claire looked at me questioningly. And I looked back. We both shook our heads at the same time.

Babette’s phone was lying half hidden under her napkin. Automatically, I looked towards the exit first: Serge and Babette were gone. I put out my hand, but Claire was too quick for me.

She slid open the phone’s cover and looked at the screen. Then she slid it closed. The beeping stopped.

‘Beau,’ she said.

42

‘His mother’s too busy to talk to him right now,’ Claire said, putting the cell phone back where it had been. She even tucked it under the napkin.

I didn’t reply. I waited. I waited to see what my wife was going to say.

Claire breathed a deep sigh. ‘Do you know that he …’ She didn’t finish her sentence. ‘Oh, Paul,’ she said. ‘Paul …’ She tossed her head and shook back her hair. I saw a wetness in her eyes, something glistening, tears not of sorrow or despair, but of rage.

‘Do you know that he what …?’ I said. Claire knew nothing about the videos, I’d been telling myself all evening. I still hoped I was right.

‘Beau is blackmailing them,’ Claire said.

I felt a cold stab in my chest. I rubbed my hands over my cheeks, so that if I blushed it wouldn’t give me away.

‘Oh yeah?’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’

Claire sighed again. She clenched her fists and drummed them on the tabletop.

‘Oh, Paul,’ she said. ‘I wanted so badly to keep you out of this. I didn’t want it to happen … for you to get upset. But now everything has changed. It’s too late anyway.’

‘What do you mean, he’s blackmailing them? Beau? With what?’

From under the napkin came a beep. A single beep this time. A little blue light was now flashing on and off on the side of Babette’s cell phone: it looked as if Beau had left a message.

‘He was there. At least, that’s what he claims. He says he was planning to go home, but then he changed his mind and decided to go back. That’s when he saw them. As they came out of that bank cubicle. He says.’

The coldness in my chest was gone. I felt something new, a feeling almost like happiness: I had to be careful not to start grinning.

‘And now he wants money. Oh, the hypocritical little prick! I always did … You did too, right? You thought he was horrid, you said one time. I remember that clearly.’

‘But does he have proof? Can he prove that he saw them? Can he prove that Michel and Rick threw that jerrycan?’

That last question I asked only to reassure myself once and for all: the final check. Inside my head, a door had opened. A crack. And through that crack, light was shining. Warm light. Behind the door was the room with the happy family.

‘No, he has no proof,’ Claire said. ‘But maybe he doesn’t need it. If Beau were to go to the police and point to Michel and Rick as the culprits … The pictures from that security camera are awfully vague, but if they can compare them to real people … I don’t know.’

Your father doesn’t know about any of this. You two have to do it tonight.

‘Michel wasn’t there, was he?’ I said. ‘When you called him just now. When you kept asking Babette what time it was.’

A smile appeared on Claire’s face. She took my hand again and squeezed it.

‘I called him. You all heard me get him on the line. I talked to him. Babette is the impartial witness who heard me talking to my son at a fixed point in time. They can check my phone’s memory to see that that call was made and how long it lasted. All we have to do is erase the answering machine on the phone at home when we get back.’

I looked at my wife. There must have been admiration in my look. I didn’t even have to fake it. I really did admire her.

‘And now he’s with Beau,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘And with Rick. Not at Beau’s house. They agreed to meet somewhere. Somewhere outside.’

‘And what are they going to talk to Beau about? Are they going to try to change his mind?’

My wife now laid her other hand on mine as well.

‘Paul,’ she said. ‘I already told you that I wanted to keep you out of this. But we can’t go back now. You and me. It’s about our son’s future. I told Michel that he should try to talk reason to Beau. And that if that didn’t work, he should do whatever seemed best. I told him that I don’t need to know what that is. He’s going to turn sixteen next week. He doesn’t have to wait for his mother to tell him everything. He’s old and wise enough to decide for himself.’

I stared at her. There may still have been admiration in my look, but it was a different type of admiration from a few minutes earlier.

‘Whatever the case, it’s better if you and I can say that Michel was at home all evening,’ Claire said. ‘And if Babette can confirm that.’

43

I called the manager over.

‘We’re still waiting for the check,’ I said.

‘Mr Lohman took care of it, sir.’

It could have been my imagination, but it seemed as though he relished being able to say that to me. Something about his eyes, as though he were laughing at me only with his eyes.

Claire rummaged through her bag, pulled out her cell phone, looked at it and put it back.

‘It’s too damn much, isn’t it?’ I said when the manager had left. ‘He claims our café. Our son. And now this. And the worst thing about it is, it doesn’t mean anything. That he can pick up a check doesn’t mean a goddam thing.’

Claire took my right hand, then my left.

‘You only have to hurt him,’ she said. ‘He’s not going to hold a press conference with a damaged face. Or a broken arm in a sling. That’s too much to explain, all at the same time. Even for Serge.’

I looked into my wife’s eyes. She had just asked me to break my brother’s arm. Or damage his face. And all that out of love, love for our son. For Michel. I had to think about that mother, years ago in Germany, who had shot and killed her child’s murderer in the courtroom. That’s the kind of mother Claire was.

‘I haven’t taken my medication,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ Claire didn’t seem surprised, she ran one fingertip gently across the back of my hand.

‘I mean, not for a long time. It’s been months.’

It was true: shortly after that episode of Opsporing Verzocht, I had stopped. I had the feeling that I would be of less use to my son when my emotions were blunted, day in and day out. My emotions and my reflexes. If I wanted to help Michel to the fullest of my ability, I first had to recover my old self.

‘I know,’ Claire said.

I looked at her.

‘Maybe you think other people don’t notice,’ Claire said. ‘Well, I mean, other people … your own wife. Your own wife notices right away. There were things … that were different. The way you looked at me, the way you smiled at me. And then there was that time when you couldn’t find your passport. Do you remember? When you started kicking your desk drawers? From then on, I began paying attention. You took your medication with you when you went out and threw it away somewhere. Didn’t you? I took your trousers out of the wash one time, the pocket had turned completely blue! Pills you’d forgotten to throw away.’

Claire had to laugh – she laughed only briefly, then looked serious again.

‘And you didn’t say anything,’ I said.

‘At first I thought: what’s he up to? But suddenly, I saw my old Paul again. And then I knew: I wanted my old Paul back. Including the Paul who kicks his own desk drawers to bits, and that other time, when that scooter cut you off on the road. When you took off after it …’

And that time you battered Michel’s principal into the hospital, I thought Claire would say then. But she didn’t. She said something else.

‘That was the Paul I loved … that I love. That’s the Paul I love. More than anything or anyone else in the world.’

I saw something glistening in the corners of her eyes, my own eyes were smarting now as well.

‘You, and Michel, of course,’ my wife said. ‘You and Michel, I love you both just as much. Together, you two are what makes me the happiest.’

‘Yeah,’ I said; my voice sounded hoarse, it had a little squeak in it. I cleared my throat.

‘Yeah,’ I said again.

We sat across from each other in silence like that for a while, my wife’s hands still clasping mine.

‘What did you say to Babette?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘In the garden. When the two of you went for a walk. Babette looked so happy when she saw me. “Dear, sweet Paul …” she called me. What did you say to her?’

Claire took a deep breath. ‘I told her you would do something. That you would do something to make sure that press conference didn’t go ahead.’

‘And Babette thought that was okay?’

‘She wants Serge to win the election. But what hurt Babette most was that he only told her about it in the car on the way over here. So that she wouldn’t have enough time to talk him out of his nonsense.’

‘But here at the table, just now, she said—’

‘Babette is smart, Paul. It wouldn’t do for Serge to suspect anything later on. When Babette becomes the First Lady, maybe she’ll hand out soup at a shelter for the homeless. But there is one homeless person about whom she cares as little as you or I do.’

I pulled my hands away. That is to say, I pulled my hands from my wife’s and clasped them in my own.

‘It’s not a good idea,’ I said.

‘Paul—’

‘No, listen. I’m me. I am who I am. I haven’t been taking my pills. Right now, you and I are the only people who know that. But things like that get found out. They’ll dig around and they’ll find out. The school psychologist, my being on non-active, and then that principal at Michel’s school … it would all be out on the table, like an open book. To say nothing of my brother. My brother will be the first to say that something like that, coming from me, doesn’t surprise him at all. Maybe he won’t say it out loud, but his little brother has done things to him before. His little brother who suffers from something he needs medication for. Pills, which he then flushes down the toilet.’

Claire said nothing.

‘He won’t let anything I do change his plans, Claire. It would be the wrong signal.’

I waited a moment, I tried not to blink.

‘It would be the wrong signal if I did it,’ I said.

44

About five minutes after Claire had left, I heard another beep coming from under Babette’s napkin.

We’d both stood up at the same moment. My wife and I. I put my arms around her and held her against me. I buried my face in her hair. Very slowly, without making a sound, I’d breathed in through my nose.

Then I sat down again. I watched my wife go, until she disappeared from sight somewhere around the lectern.

I picked up Babette’s phone, opened the cover and looked at the screen.

‘Two new messages.’ I pressed Display. The first was a text message from Beau. It contained only one word. One word, without a capital and without a full stop: ‘mama’.

I pressed Delete.

The second message said there was a voicemail message in her inbox.

Babette used a different carrier. I didn’t know which number I needed to use for voicemail. On a hunch I looked in Contacts, and under the ‘V’ I found Voicemail. I couldn’t suppress a smile.

After the voicemail lady’s announcement that there was one new message, I heard Beau’s voice.

I listened. As I listened I closed my eyes briefly once, then opened them again. I closed the cover. I didn’t put Babette’s cell phone back on the table, but stuck it in my pocket.

‘Your son doesn’t like restaurants like this?’

I was so startled that I sat bolt upright in my chair.

‘Oh, excuse me,’ the manager said. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you. But I saw you talking to your son in the garden. At least, I assume it was your son.’

At first, for a moment, I had no idea what he was talking about. But then, right away, I knew.

The smoking man. The man smoking outside the restaurant. The manager had seen Michel and me this evening, in the garden.

I felt no panic – to be honest, I felt absolutely nothing.

Only then did I see that the manager was holding a saucer, a saucer containing the bill.

‘Mr Lohman forgot to take the check with him,’ he said. ‘So I thought I’d give it to you. Perhaps you’ll see him again before long.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I saw you standing there like that with your son,’ the manager said, ‘there was something in your posture. In both of your postures, I should say, something identical. Something you’d only see in a father and son, I thought.’

I looked down at the saucer, the saucer with the check on it. What was he waiting for? Why didn’t he go away, instead of hanging around here, blathering about people’s postures?

‘Yes,’ I said again; it was not meant as a confirmation of the manager’s assumptions, only as a polite way to fill the silence. I had nothing else to say to him anyway.

‘I have a son too,’ the manager said. ‘He’s only five. But still, sometimes I’m surprised by how much he looks like me. How he does certain things exactly the way I do. Little gestures. I often touch my hair, for example, twist it between my fingers when I’m bored, or worried about something … I … I also have a daughter. She’s three, she’s the spitting image of her mother. In everything.’

I took the check from the saucer and looked at the total. I won’t go into all the things you could do with a sum of money like that, or about how many days a normal person would have to work to earn it – if they weren’t forced by the tortoise in the white turtleneck to spend weeks washing dishes in the open kitchen. And I won’t mention the figure itself, the kind of sum that would make you burst out laughing. Which was precisely what I did.

‘I hope you had an enjoyable evening,’ the manager said – but still he didn’t go away. He brushed the edge of the empty saucer with his fingertips, slid it a few inches across the tablecloth, picked it up and put it back down.

45

‘Claire?’

For the second time that evening I opened the door of the ladies’ room and called her name. But there was no answer. From somewhere outside I heard the sound of a police siren.

‘Claire?’ I called again. I took a few steps forward, until I was past the vase of white daffodils, and noted that all the cubicles were empty. I heard the second siren as I walked past the cloakroom and the lectern to the exit, and then outside. Through the trees I could now see the flashing lights in front of the regular-people café.

A normal reaction would have been for me to walk faster, to start running – but I didn’t. True, I felt something dark and heavy at the place where my heart should have been, but the heaviness was a calm heaviness. The dark feeling in my chest, too, had everything to do with a sense of inevitability.

My wife, I thought.

Again I felt a powerful urge to start running. To arrive at the café out of breath – where I would almost certainly not be allowed in.

My wife! I’d pant. My wife is in there!

And it was precisely that scene projected on my mind’s eye that made me slow down. I reached the gravel path that led to the bridge. By the time I got there, I was no longer walking slowly in any natural sense, I could tell that by the sound my soles made on the gravel, by the pauses between my steps – I was walking in slow motion.

I put my hand on the balustrade and stopped. The flashing lights were reflected in the dark surface beneath my feet. Through the opening between the trees on the far side I now had a clear view of the café. Pulled up onto the kerb, in front of the outdoor tables, were three police Volkswagens and an ambulance.

One ambulance. Not two.

It was pleasant to feel such calm, to be able to see all these things in this way – almost independently of each other – and to draw my own conclusions. I felt the way I had before at moments of crisis (Claire’s hospitalization; Serge and Babette’s failed attempt to take away my son; the footage from the security camera): I had felt, and I felt again now, that from within my calmness I could take action. Promptly and efficiently.

I looked back towards the restaurant entrance, where a few waitresses had now gathered, apparently drawn by the sirens and flashing lights. I thought I also saw the manager there, at least I saw a man in a suit lighting a cigarette.

They probably couldn’t see me from there, I thought for a moment, but then realized that a few hours ago I had actually seen Michel come cycling across this very bridge.

I had to move on. I couldn’t stand still any longer. I couldn’t run the risk of having one of the waitresses testify that she had seen a man on the bridge. ‘So weird. He was just standing there. Do you think that might be important?’

I took Babette’s cell phone out of my pocket and held it above the water. At the sound of the splash, a duck came swimming up. Then I stepped away from the railing and began moving. No longer in slow motion, but at the most normal pace I could: not too slowly, not too fast. On the far side of the bridge I crossed the bicycle path, looked to the left, and walked on to the tram stop. Some spectators had already gathered, not really a crowd at this hour, no more than twenty onlookers. To the left of the café was an alley. I made for the alley.

I had barely reached the kerb when the café’s swinging doors flew open, quite literally flew open with two loud bangs. A stretcher came out, a stretcher on wheels, pushed and pulled at each end by two paramedics. One of the paramedics at the back was holding up a plastic IV bag. Behind him came Babette, she wasn’t wearing her glasses any more and was pressing a handkerchief to her eyes.

The head of the person on the stretcher was the only thing sticking out from beneath the green sheet. I’d known it the whole time, in fact, but still I breathed a sigh of relief. The head was covered with compresses and gauze. Blood-stained compresses and gauze.

The paramedics pushed the stretcher through the back of the ambulance, which was already open and waiting. Two of them climbed in front, the other two in the back, along with Babette. The door closed and the ambulance raced away from the kerb and turned right, towards the centre of town.

The siren came on, which was a good sign.

Or not: it depended on how you looked at it.

I didn’t have much time to think about the immediate future, though, because the swinging doors opened again.

Claire walked out between two uniformed officers; she wasn’t handcuffed, in fact they weren’t even holding her. She looked around, she searched the faces in the little crowd, looking for that one familiar face.

Then she found it.

I looked at her and she looked at me. I took a step forward, or at least my body betrayed the fact that I wanted to take a step forward.

It was at that moment that Claire shook her head.

Don’t, she was saying. She was almost at one of the patrol cars already, the back door was being held open by a third policeman. I glanced around to see if anyone in the crowd might have noticed who Claire had shaken her head at, but no one had eyes for anything but the woman being led to the patrol car.

When she arrived at the cruiser, Claire stopped for a moment. She searched for and found my eyes again. She made a movement with her head, to an outsider it might have looked as though she were simply ducking in order not to collide with the door, but to me Claire’s head was unmistakably pointing in a given direction.

To something just behind her and to one side, to the alley, the shortest way to our house.

Home, my wife had said. Go home.

I didn’t wait for the police car to drive away. I turned around and walked off.

46

What kind of tip are you supposed to leave at a restaurant where the bill makes you burst out laughing? I could remember our talking about that before, quite often, not only with Serge and Babette, but also with other friends with whom we’d eaten in Dutch restaurants. Let’s say that after a dinner with four people you are asked to pay four hundred euros – mind you, I’m not saying our dinner cost four hundred euros – and you count on giving a tip of ten to fifteen per cent. The logical consequence is that you’d be expected to leave behind a sum of no less than forty and no more than sixty euros.

A sixty-euro tip – I can’t help it, it makes me giggle. I had to be careful at times like that, if I wasn’t careful it would make me burst out laughing all over again. A rather nervous laugh, like laughing at a funeral, or in a church where you’re supposed to be silent.

But our friends never laughed. ‘These people have to live off their tips, don’t they?’ a good friend said once during a meal at a comparable restaurant.

On the morning of our dinner I had withdrawn five hundred euros from a cash machine. I had sworn to pay the entire bill, including the tip. I would do it quickly, I would lay the ten fifty-euro notes on the saucer before my brother had time to produce his credit card.

At the end of the evening, when I laid the remaining four hundred and fifty euros on the saucer anyway, the manager thought at first that I had misunderstood. He was about to say something. Who knows, maybe he was going to say that a one-hundred-per-cent tip was really too much of a good thing, but I beat him to the punch.

‘This is for you,’ I said. ‘If you promise me that you never saw me with my son in the garden. Never. Not now. Not in a week’s time. And not a year from now either.’

Serge lost the election. At first there had been some voter sympathy for the candidate with the battered face. A glass of white wine – a glass of white wine broken off just above the stem, I should really say – leaves peculiar wounds. The way they heal is particularly peculiar, leaving lots of excrescences and blank patches where the old face never comes back. Over the first two months, they operated on him three times. After the final operation he wore a beard for a while. Looking back on it now, I think the beard marked the turning point. There he stood, at the street market, at the construction site, outside the factory gates, handing out flyers in his windbreaker – with a beard.

Serge Lohman began to plummet in the polls. What had seemed like a done deal only a few months earlier now became a free fall. One month before the elections, Serge shaved off his beard. It was a final act of desperation. The voters saw the scarred face. But they also saw the empty areas. It’s amazing, and in some sense unfair, what a damaged face can do to a person. You look at the blank patches and can’t help wondering what used to be there.

The beard, though, was definitely the coup de grâce. Or rather, first the beard, then the shaving it off. When it was already too late. Serge Lohman doesn’t know what he wants, that was the voters’ conclusion, and they cast their votes for what they already knew. For the stain on the wallpaper.

Serge, of course, never pressed charges. To press charges against his sister-in-law, his brother’s wife, that would indeed have given the wrong signal.

‘I think he understands now,’ Claire said a few weeks afterwards at the café. ‘He said it himself: he wanted to solve this as a family. I think he understands now that some things simply have to stay within the family.’

Whatever the case, Serge and Babette had other things on their minds. Things like the disappearance of their adopted son, Beau. They made a real effort. An ad campaign in newspapers and magazines, posters all over the country, and an appearance on the TV show Missing.

During the TV programme, they played back the message Beau had left on his mother’s voicemail before he went missing. Babette’s cell phone was never recovered, but the message had been saved, although it had now taken on a different portent from the evening of our dinner.

‘Mama, whatever happens … I just want you to know that I love you …’

You could say they moved heaven and earth in order to find Beau, but there were doubts as well. One of the opinion weeklies was the first to suggest that Beau might have grown tired of his adoptive parents, that he had returned to his native country. ‘Often, during “the difficult years”,’ the magazine wrote, ‘adopted children go looking for their natural parents. Or at least become curious about the place where they were born.’

A newspaper dedicated a full-page article to the case, in which the question was publicly raised for the first time of whether biological parents would put more effort into looking for their child than adoptive parents did. Examples were given of adoptive parents with troubled children who finally distanced themselves from those children. The problems that accompanied the raising of such children were often due to a combination of factors. The inability to find a niche in a foreign culture was mentioned as the primary one, followed by the biological aspects: the ‘flaws’ that those children had inherited from their natural parents. And, in the case of adoption at a more advanced age, the things that might have happened to the child before being absorbed into their new family.

I thought about that time in France, the party in my brother’s garden. When the French farmers caught Beau stealing one of their chickens and Serge had said that his children would never do something like that. His children, he had said, without drawing any distinction.

I was reminded again of an animal shelter. There too you have no idea what has happened to a dog or cat before you take it home with you, whether it has perhaps been beaten or locked up for days in a darkened cellar. It doesn’t matter much in that case. If the dog or cat turns out to be unmanageable, you take it back.

At the end of the article, the writer wondered whether biological parents would tend to be less likely to distance themselves from an unmanageable or otherwise troubled child.

I knew the answer, but I gave the article to Claire to read first.

‘What do you think?’ I asked when she had finished. We were sitting at our little kitchen table, over the remains of breakfast. Sunlight was falling on our garden and on the kitchen counter. Michel had gone to soccer practice.

‘I’ve often wondered whether Beau would have tried to blackmail his brother and cousin if he had really been a part of their family,’ Claire said. ‘Of course, natural brothers and sisters fight sometimes, sometimes they even refuse to see each other any more. But still … when it comes right down to it, in matters of life or death, then they’re still there for each other.’

Claire started laughing.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘No, I just suddenly heard myself talking,’ she said, still laughing. ‘About brothers and sisters. And listen who I’m talking to!’

‘Yeah,’ I said. I was laughing now too.

Then, for a little while, we said nothing. We only looked at each other now and then. As man and woman. As two parts of a happy family, I thought. Of course things had happened, but lately I had been reminded more often of a shipwreck. A happy family can survive a shipwreck. I’m not trying to say that the family will be happier afterwards, but in any case not unhappier.

Claire and I. Claire and Michel and I. We shared something. Something that hadn’t been there before. All right, we didn’t all share the same thing, but maybe that’s not necessary. You don’t have to know everything about each other. Secrets didn’t get in the way of happiness.

I thought about that night, after our dinner. I had been alone in the house for a while before Michel got home. In our living room there is an antique wooden chest of drawers in which Claire keeps her things. Even as I opened the first drawer, I had the feeling I was going to do something that I would regret later.

I couldn’t help thinking about when Claire had been in the hospital. At one point they had performed an internal examination on her while I was there. I sat in a chair beside her bed and held her hand. The doctor invited me over to look at the monitor while they put something into my wife – a tube, a catheter, a camera – I looked for only a moment before averting my eyes. It wasn’t that the images were too much for me, or that I was afraid of fainting, no, it was something else. I don’t have the right, I thought.

I was already on the point of stopping my search when I found what I was looking for. The top drawer contained a few old pairs of sunglasses, barrettes and earrings she no longer wore. But the next drawer down was full of papers: a membership card for the tennis club, an insurance policy for her bicycle, an expired parking permit and a window envelope with the name of a hospital in the lower left-hand corner.

The name of the hospital where Claire had been operated on, but also the hospital where Michel had been born.

‘Amniotic fluid test’ was printed across the top of the sheet of paper that I pulled from the envelope. Right below that were two little boxes, one with ‘boy’, the other ‘girl’.

The box with ‘boy’ had been checked.

Claire had known that we were going to have a boy, that was the first thing that came into my mind. But she had never told me. What’s more, we had gone on coming up with girls’ names until the day before she went into labour. There was never any question about a boy’s name; that had been ‘Michel’ years before Claire even got pregnant. But in the event of a girl, we were still wavering between ‘Laura’ and ‘Julia’.

There was a whole column of handwritten figures on the form. A few times I also saw the word ‘good’.

Close to the bottom, under the heading ‘details’, was a box of about two by four inches. That box was completely filled by the same, almost illegible hand that had written the figures and checked the box that said ‘boy’.

I started to read. And stopped again right away.

This time it wasn’t that I felt I didn’t have the right. No, it was something else. Do I need to know this? I thought. Do I want to know this? Will it make us happier as a family?

Beneath the box with the handwritten account were two smaller boxes. ‘Decision physician/hospital’ was printed beside one of them, and ‘Decision parents’ beside the other.

The box with ‘Decision parents’ had been checked.

Decision parents. It didn’t say ‘Decision parent’ or ‘Decision mother’. It said ‘Decision parents’.

Those are the two words I will carry with me from now on, I thought as I folded the form back into the envelope and tucked it under the expired parking permit.

‘Decision parents,’ I said to myself out loud as I closed the drawer.

After he was born, everyone, including Claire’s parents and other members of her immediate family, said that Michel was the spitting image of me. ‘A copy!’ the visitors to the recovery room cried out as soon as Michel was lifted from his cot.

Claire had to laugh about it too. The resemblance was too strong to deny. Later things changed slightly; as he grew older you could, with a healthy effort and a dose of goodwill, also detect some of his mother’s features. His eyes in particular, and something in that little space between nose and upper lip.

A copy. After I closed the drawer, I went and listened to the answering machine.

‘Hi, sweetheart!’ I heard my wife’s voice say. ‘How are you doing? You’re not too bored, are you?’ In the silence that followed then I could clearly hear the sounds of the restaurant: the murmur of human beings, a plate being piled onto another plate. ‘Okay, we’re just going to drink our coffee, we’ll be home in about an hour. So you have time to clean up your own mess. What did you have for dinner …?’

Again, silence.

‘Yes …’ Silence. ‘No …’ Silence. ‘That’s right.’

I was familiar with the menu on our home phone. If you pressed the three, the message would be erased. My thumb was already resting on the three.

‘Bye, dearest, love you.’

I pressed it.

Half an hour later, Michel came home. He kissed me on the cheek and asked where Mama was. I told him she’d be home a little later, that I would explain it all soon. The knuckles of Michel’s left hand were barked, I noticed, he was left-handed just like me, and on the back was a rivulet of dried blood. Only then did I look at him from head to toe. I saw blood on his left eyebrow as well, there was dried mud on his coat and even more mud on his white tennis shoes.

I asked him how it had gone.

And he told me. He told me that Men in Black III had been taken down from YouTube.

We were still standing in the hallway. At a certain point, halfway through his story, Michel stopped and looked at me.

‘Dad!’ he said.

‘What? What is it?’

‘Now you’re doing it again!’

‘What?’

‘You’re laughing! You did that then too, the first time I told you about the cash machine. You remember? Up in my room? When I told you about the desk lamp you started laughing, and when I got to the jerrycan you were still laughing.’

He looked at me. I looked back. I looked into my son’s eyes.

‘And now you’re laughing again,’ he said. ‘You want me to go on? Are you sure you want to hear everything?’

I didn’t say anything. I just looked.

Then Michel took a step forward, he threw his arms around me and hugged.

‘Dear old dad,’ he said.

Note on the Author

Herman Koch, born in 1953, is a Dutch actor and writer. He studied at the Montessori Lyceum before finishing his schooling in Russia. Koch is a renowned television actor on the series Jiskefet and a columnist for the newspaper Volkskrant. The Dinner is his sixth novel and has already won the prestigious Publieksprijs Prize in 2009. Herman Koch currently lives in Spain.

Sam Garrett, translator, writer and two-time winner of the Society of Authors’ Vondel Prize for Dutch-English translation, is an American who currently divides his time between Amsterdam and the French Pyrenees. As well as work by Herman Koch, he has translated books by Arnon Grunberg, Tommy Wieringa, Tim Krabbé, Geert Mak and Frank Westerman among others.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

THE DINNER

CONTENTS

APERITIF

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

APPETIZER

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

MAIN COURSE

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

DESSERT

36

37

38

39

DIGESTIF

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

Note on the Author