Free The Dinner by Herman Koch

‘Milord’ was booming from the loudspeakers. Dancing. To dance on the grass with my brother’s wife. Happy as God in France. I looked around and saw Claire standing at the table with the cheeses – and at that same moment she saw me.
    She was talking to the unemployed actress and threw me a desperate glance. At parties back in Holland, that meant ‘Can’t we go home, please?’ But we couldn’t go home, we were doomed to press on to the bitter end. Tomorrow. Tomorrow we would be allowed to go away. Help, was all Claire’s look was saying now.
    I gestured to my sister-in-law, a gesture that said something like ‘I can’t right now’, but that later I would be sure to come and dance with her across the lawn, and I walked towards the table with the cheeses. ‘Allez riez! Milord … Allez chantez! Milord!’ Edith Piaf sang . There were, of course, stubborn characters among all those hundreds of Dutch people with summer homes in the Dordogne, I thought to myself. Characters who closed their eyes to the truth, who simply wouldn’t admit the fact that they were unwanted foreigners around here. Who, despite all evidence to the contrary, kept insisting that it was all the work of a ‘tiny minority’, the smashed windows and the acts of arson and the battered and run-over countrymen. Perhaps those last bullheads would have to be freed from their illusions with a little more force.
    I thought about Straw Dogs and Deliverance , films that come to mind whenever I am out in the sticks, but never more than here, in the Dordogne, on the hilltop where my brother and his wife had created what they called their ‘little French paradise’. In Straw Dogs , the local population – after limiting themselves at first to a little badgering – take horrible revenge on the newcomers who think they’ve bought a cute house in the Scottish countryside. In Deliverance , it’s the American hillbillies who rudely interrupt a group of city slickers on a canoeing trip. Rape and murder feature prominently in both films.
    The actress looked me over from head to toe before speaking. ‘Your wife tells me you will be leaving us tomorrow.’ Her voice had something artificially sweet to it, like the substance in Cola Light, or the filling they use in diabetic chocolates, which say on the package that they won’t make you fat. I looked at Claire, who rolled her eyes slightly, up at the star-studded sky. ‘And that you’re going to Spain, of all places.’
    I thought about one of my favourite scenes from Straw Dogs . What would this artificial voice sound like if its owner were to be dragged into a barn by a pair of drunken French bricklayers? So drunk they could no longer tell the difference between a woman and the ruins of a cottage with only the walls still standing. Would she still be shooting her mouth off when the bricklayers set about rectifying her foundation? Would the voice come loose of its own accord once it was being peeled off, layer by layer?
    At that very moment, a commotion arose at the edge of the garden, not the darkened edge with bushes where the choreographer had been groping the younger of the two writers, but closer to the house, along the pathway leading to the paved road.
    It was a group of about five men. Frenchmen, I saw right away, although I’d be hard pressed to say why: their clothes probably, which had something rural about them without being as emphatically sloppy and dishevelled as these Dutch people playing at being in France. One of the men had a shotgun slung over his shoulder.
    Perhaps the children really had said something, maybe they actually had asked permission to leave the party and go ‘into the village’, as our Michel continued to insist the following day. On the other hand, I hadn’t really noticed that they had been gone for the last few hours. Serge’s daughter, Valerie, had been in the kitchen for most of the evening, watching TV; at a certain point she had come out and said goodnight to