The Dinner by Herman Koch Page B

tense silence that tells you right away that you’ve missed something important.
    I had come back into the dining room along with the beard; he was in front of me, so I noticed the silence only once I was already close to our table.
    Or no, there was something else that I noticed first: my wife’s hand, reaching out diagonally across the tablecloth, holding Babette’s. My brother was staring at his empty plate.
    And it was only after I settled down in my chair that I realized Babette was crying. A soundless weeping, a barely perceptible shaking of the shoulders, a tremble in her arm – the arm attached to the hand that Claire was holding.
    I sought and made eye contact with my wife. Claire raised her eyebrows and tossed a meaningful glance in the direction of my brother. At that same moment, Serge raised his head, looked at me sheepishly and shrugged. ‘Well, Paul, you’re in luck,’ he said. ‘Maybe you should have stayed in the bathroom a little longer.’
    Babette yanked her hand away from Claire’s, seized her napkin from her lap and tossed it on her plate.
    ‘You are such an unbelievable shithead!’ she said to Serge, sliding back her chair. The next moment she was walking past the other tables, heading for the toilets – or the exit, I thought. But it didn’t seem likely that she would leave us. Her body language, the subdued pace at which she moved past the tables, told me she was hoping one of us would come after her.
    And, indeed, my brother began getting up from his chair. Claire laid a hand on his forearm. ‘Let me go to her for a moment, Serge,’ she said, and stood up. She too hurried off past the other tables. By now Babette had disappeared from view, so I couldn’t tell whether she had gone to the toilets or for a breath of fresh air.
    My brother and I looked at each other. He made an attempt at a feeble smile, but it didn’t really work. ‘It’s …’ he began. ‘She has …’ He looked around, then brought his head closer to mine. ‘This isn’t what you think,’ he said, so quietly that I could barely understand him.
    There was something about his head. About his face. It was still the same head (and the same face), but it was like it was suspended in air, with no clear link to a body, without even a coherent thought. He reminded me of a cartoon character who has just had a chair kicked out from under him. The cartoon character remains hanging in space for a moment before he realizes that the chair is no longer there.
    If he wore this face while passing out flyers on the street, I thought, flyers calling upon ordinary, everyday people to be sure and vote for him in the coming elections, no one would give him a second look. The face made you think of a brand-new car, fresh from the showroom, that rounds the first corner, swipes a lamppost and gets a big scratch down the side. No one would want a car like that.
    Serge got up and moved to the chair across from me. The chair was Claire’s, it belonged to my wife. Without a doubt, he could now feel her body heat, left behind on the seat, right through the cloth of his trousers. The thought of it made me furious.
    ‘Okay, that makes it easier for us to talk,’ he said.
    I didn’t say a thing. I won’t deny that this was how I liked to see my brother: floundering. I wasn’t about to throw him a lifebuoy.
    ‘She’s been having a hard time lately with, well, you know, I’ve always hated that word,’ he said. ‘The menopause. It sounds like something that would never happen to our wives.’
    He paused. The pause was probably meant for me to say something about Claire. About Claire and the menopause. ‘Our wives’: that’s what he’d said. But it was none of his business. Whatever was wrong or right with Claire, that was private.
    ‘It’s the hormones,’ he went on. ‘First the room’s too warm and all the windows have to be opened, the next moment she’s suddenly all weepy.’ He turned his head, his still visibly shaken