The Dinner (31 page)

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On the morning of our dinner I had withdrawn five hundred euros from a cash machine.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.

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.