The Dinner by Herman Koch Page B

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?’

 
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    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