The Dinner by Herman Koch Read Free Book Online

charges for it, and that’s why they always wait so long between bringing the appetizer and taking orders for the entrée: people will order more wine out of pure boredom, just to kill time, that’s the way they figure it. The appetizer usually arrives quite quickly, my friend said, because if the appetizer takes too long people start complaining. They start to doubt their choice of restaurant, but after a while, when they’ve had too much drink between appetizer and entrée, they lose track of time. He knew of cases where the entrées had been ready for a long time, but remained on the plates in the kitchen because the people at the table in question weren’t complaining. Only when there was a lull in the conversation and the customers began to look around impatiently were the plates shoved into the microwave.
    What had we been talking about before the appetizers came? Not that it really mattered, it couldn’t have been anything important, but that was what made it so irritating. I could remember what we’d said after all the fuss with the cork and the placing of our orders, but I had no idea what had been going on right before our plates arrived.
    Babette had joined a new gym, we’d talked about that a bit: about losing weight, the importance of remaining active and which sport was best for which person. Claire was thinking about joining a health club, and Serge had said he couldn’t stand the obtrusive music at most places like that. That’s why he had taken up running, he said, where you could be out on your own in the fresh air, and he acted as though he had come up with the idea all by himself. He conveniently forgot that I had started running years ago, and how he had never missed an opportunity to make snide comments about his ‘little brother out trotting around’.
    Yes, that’s what we had talked about at first, for rather too long for my taste, but an innocent subject to be sure, a fairly typical prelude to a standard restaurant evening. But for the rest of the evening? Not if my life depended on it. I looked at Serge, at my wife, and then at Babette. At that moment, Babette jabbed her fork into her vitello tonnato, cut off a slice and raised it to her mouth.
    ‘But now I’ve completely forgotten,’ she said, the fork poised in the air. ‘Did you say you two have already seen the new Woody Allen, or not?’

 
10
     
    When the conversation turns too quickly to films, I see it as a sign of weakness. I mean: films are more something for the end of the evening, when you really don’t have much else to talk about. I don’t know why, but when people start talking about films I always get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, like when you wake up after a bad night and find that it’s already getting dark outside.
    The worst are those people who describe entire films; they get right into it, they have no qualms about taking up fifteen minutes of your time – fifteen minutes per film, that is. They don’t really care whether you haven’t yet seen the film in question, or whether you saw it a long time ago: such considerations don’t bother them, they’re already right in the middle of the opening scene. To be polite you feign interest at first, but soon you bid farewell to courtesy, you yawn openly, stare at the ceiling and squirm around in your chair. You do everything in your power to make the narrator shut up, but nothing helps; they’re too far gone to notice the signals; above all, they’re addicted to themselves and their own crap about films.
    I believe it was my brother who started in about the new Woody Allen.
    ‘A masterpiece,’ he said, without asking whether we – that is, Claire and I – might have seen it already. Babette nodded emphatically at this; they had seen it together last weekend, they were in agreement about something for a change.
    ‘A masterpiece,’ she said. ‘Really, you two have to go.’
    To which Claire said that we had already been. ‘Two months