Free The Dinner by Herman Koch Page A

all of us, and given her Uncle Paul two pecks on the cheek.
    Now Michel was standing between two Frenchmen, his head bowed. His black hair, which he had let grow to shoulder-length that summer, hung lankly along his face, and one of the two men was holding him by the upper arm. Serge’s son, Rick, was being held too, albeit a bit more loosely; one of the Frenchmen had his hand resting lightly on his shoulder, as though he no longer posed a threat.
    It was, in fact, Beau – the adopted son from Burkina Faso who had arrived here among the Dutch people in the Dordogne by way of the relief project for his corrugated-iron school building and his new parents, with a layover in Holland – who had to be held tight. He was kicking and flailing; two other Frenchmen had twisted his arms up behind his back and finally got him onto the ground, face down in the grass of my brother’s garden.
    ‘Messieurs …! Messieurs!’ I heard Serge call out as he hurried with giant steps towards the group. But he had already knocked back quite a bit of the local red and was clearly having a hard time walking straight at all. ‘Messieurs! Qu’est-ce qu’il se passe?’

 
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    I went to the men’s room, but when I came back the main course still hadn’t arrived. A new bottle of wine, however, was already on the table.
    The furnishings of the men’s room had been thought about a bit too much; one could even wonder whether terms like ‘men’s room’ or ‘toilet’ quite fitted the bill. Water was gurgling everywhere, not only along the stainless-steel peeing wall, but also down the full-length mirrors in their granite frames. You could say – rightly – that it was all consistent parts of a whole: consistent with the waitresses’ tight ponytails, their black pinafores, the Art Deco lamp on the lectern, the organic meat and the manager’s pinstripe suit – the only problem being that it was never exactly clear what that whole might boil down to. It was sort of like certain designer glasses, glasses that add nothing to the personality of the person wearing them; on the contrary, they draw attention first and foremost to themselves: I am a pair of glasses, and don’t you ever forget it!
    It wasn’t that I’d really needed to go to the toilet, I just had to get away for a moment, away from our table and all the gabbing about movies and holiday destinations. But when I took up position at the stainless-steel urinal, purely for form’s sake, and opened my fly, the gurgling water and the tinkling of piano music in the background suddenly made me have to go really badly.
    It was at that moment that I heard the door open and a new visitor enter the men’s room. Now I’m not one of those men who suddenly can’t pee any more when someone else is in the room, but it does take longer: it takes longer, above all, for me to get going. I cursed myself for having gone to the urinal and not into a stall.
    The new visitor cleared his throat a couple of times; he was also humming something that sounded vaguely familiar, a melody I recognized only a second later as ‘Killing Me Softly’.
    ‘Killing Me Softly with His Song’ … by … goddam it, what was that woman’s name again? Roberta Flack! Bingo! I prayed to God that the man would go and find a toilet of his own, but from the corner of my eye I saw him step up to the peeing wall barely a metre away from me. He made the usual motions, and after only a few seconds I heard the sound of a steady, powerful jet of urine clattering against the water streaming down the wall.
    It was the sort of jet that seems particularly pleased with itself, that wants nothing more than to demonstrate its own boundless good health and which probably, once, back in primary school, belonged to the little boy who could pee further than anyone else, all the way across the ditch.
    I looked up and saw that the owner of the jet was the man with the beard, the man with the beard who had been sitting with his