The Dinner

  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.

  Copyright © Herman Koch, 2009

  Translation Copyright © Sam Garrett, 2012

  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.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  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

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  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

  APERITIF

  1

  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.

  2

  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 fas
t 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?

  3

  ‘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.