The Dinner by Herman Koch

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