Free The Dinner by Herman Koch Page B

objectionably young girlfriend at the table next to ours. Just then, the man looked over too. We both nodded vaguely, as is customary when two men stand three feet apart to take a piss. From within the beard, the man’s mouth twisted into a grin. A triumphant grin, I couldn’t help thinking, the typical grin of a man with a powerful jet, a grin that was amused by men who had more trouble peeing than he did.
    After all, wasn’t a powerful jet also a sign of manliness? Didn’t it, perhaps, give its owner right of primacy when it came to the available women? And, conversely, wasn’t a cowardly dribble an indication that there were probably other things that didn’t flow right down there? Indeed, that the survival of the species would be endangered were women to shrug indifferently at such dribbling and no longer let themselves be drawn to the healthy sound of a powerful jet?
    There were no partitions between us; all I would have had to do was lower my eyes to catch sight of the dick that went along with the bearded man. Judging from the clatter, it had to be a big dick, I thought to myself, a big cock of the shameless variety, with thick blue veins right below the surface of darkish-grey skin that was ruddily healthy yet still rather rough: the sort of dick that might tempt a man to spend his holidays at a nudist camp, or in any event to purchase the smallest model slip de bain , of the flimsiest material possible.
    The reason why I had excused myself and gone to the men’s room was because it was all becoming too much for me. By way of holiday destinations and the Dordogne, we had ended up at racism. My wife had supported me in my position that muffling away racism and pretending it wasn’t there only made the problem worse. Out of the blue, and without even looking at me, she came to my aid. ‘I think that what Paul means is …’
    That was how she started: by putting into words what she thought I was trying to say. Coming from anyone but Claire, it could have sounded denigrating, or patronizing, or condescending, as though I were unable to express my own opinions in words another person could understand. But coming from Claire, ‘I think that what Paul means is …’ meant nothing more and nothing less than that the others were too slow on the uptake, too thick to grasp a point that her husband was holding up before their eyes in an extremely clear and obvious fashion – and that she was starting to lose patience.
    After that we went back to films for a little bit. Claire said that Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? was ‘the most racist movie ever’. Everyone knows the story. The daughter of a wealthy white couple (played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) brings her new fiancé home to meet her parents. To their great dismay, the fiancé (played by Sidney Poitier) turns out to be black. During dinner, the truth gradually becomes clear: the black man is a good black man, an intelligent black man in a nice suit, a university professor. In intellectual terms, he is far superior to the white parents of his fiancée, who are mediocre, upper-middle-class types chock-full of prejudices concerning blacks.
    ‘And that’s precisely where the racist hook comes in, in those prejudices,’ Claire had said. ‘The black people that the parents know about, from TV and the neighbourhoods where they’re afraid to go, are poor and lazy and violent criminals. But their future son-in-law, fortunately, is a well-adapted black man who has put on the white man’s neat, three-piece suit. In order to look as much like the white man as he can.’
    Serge gazed at my wife with the look of an interested listener, but his body language betrayed the fact that he found it hard to listen to any woman he couldn’t immediately place in simple categories like ‘tits’, ‘nice ass’ or ‘wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers’.
    ‘It wasn’t until much later that the first unadapted blacks appeared in movies,’ Claire