The Dinner by Herman Koch Read Free Book Online Page B

was something pitiful about it, this dumb resolve that would make him forget everything else – his surroundings, the people he was with – and focus on only one objective: sating his own hunger. At moments like this he reminded me of an animal that encounters an obstacle in its path: a bird that doesn’t understand that the glass in the windowpane is made of solid matter and flies into it again and again.
    And when we would finally find a place to eat, it was never a pretty sight. He would eat the way one fills the tank with petrol: he would devour his cheese sandwich with white bread or his almond cake quickly and efficiently, to make sure the fuel reached his stomach as soon as possible; without fuel there was no way you could go on. The real fine dining came much later, like his knowledge of wine; at a certain point he decided it was necessary, but the speed and efficiency remained: even these days, he was always the first to empty his plate.
    I would have paid a fortune to see and hear just once how things went in the bedroom between him and Babette. On the other hand, there is a part of me that would actually resist that with every fibre of my being, that would pay an equally great fortune never to have to find out.
    ‘I need to fuck.’ And then Babette saying she has a headache, that she’s having her period or that this evening she doesn’t even want to think about it, about his body, his arms and legs, his head, his smell. ‘But I need to fuck right now.’ I bet my brother fucks the way he eats, that he stuffs himself into a woman in the same way he stuffs a beef croquette into his mouth – and that his hunger is then stilled.
    ‘So you were mostly sitting there looking at Scarlett Johansson’s tits,’ I say, much more crudely than I’d planned. ‘Or do you mean something else when you say “a masterpiece”?’
    A miraculous kind of silence fell then, the kind you hear only in restaurants: a sudden, raised awareness of the presence of others, the buzzing and the click of cutlery on plates at thirty other tables, the one or two becalmed seconds when background noises become foreground noises.
    The first thing to break the silence was Babette’s laughter; I glanced up at my wife, who was staring at me in dismay, and then back at Serge; he was trying to laugh too, but his heart wasn’t in it – what’s more, he still had food in his mouth.
    ‘Come, come, Paul, not so holier-than-thou!’ he said. ‘She just happens to be a babe, a man has eyes in his head, doesn’t he?’
    ‘A babe,’ Claire wouldn’t like that one either, I knew that. She would always say ‘a good-looking man’, never ‘tasty’, let alone ‘nice ass’. ‘All that fashionable talk about “nice asses”, it’s too contrived for me, when women start talking like that,’ she’d said once. ‘It’s like when women suddenly start smoking pipes or spitting on the ground.’
    Through and through, Serge had remained a yokel, a boorish lout: the same boorish lout who used to get sent from the table for farting.
    ‘I also think Scarlett Johansson is a very attractive woman,’ I said. ‘But it sounded sort of like you thought that was the most significant thing about the film. Do correct me if I’m wrong.’
    ‘Well, things go completely wrong with that, what’s his name, that Englishman, the tennis teacher, because he can’t get her off his mind. He even has to shoot her just to get what he wants.’
    ‘Hey!’ Babette said. ‘Don’t say that, that ruins it if you haven’t seen it yet!’ Another brief silence descended, during which Babette looked from Claire to me. ‘Oh shit, I think I must have been asleep, you two did see it already!’

 
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    We all laughed, all four of us, a moment of release – but too much release was not good, one had to remain on one’s toes. The simple truth was that Serge Lohman had a nice ass himself, you heard women say it often enough. He was all too aware that they found him