Read Online The Dinner by Herman Koch - Free Book Online

it was becoming almost embarrassing to put it off any longer.
    The house was in a lovely location, on a hill, tucked away amid the trees. Glinting in the distance through the branches, in the valley below, you could see a bend in the Dordogne River. It was muggy the whole time we were there, not a breath of wind. Huge beetles and blowflies, of a size never seen in the Netherlands, buzzed loudly amid the leaves, or flew against the windows with smacks so hard they made the glass rattle in its sashes.
    We were introduced to the ‘mason’ who had built the open kitchen for them, to the ‘madame’ who ran the bakery, and to the owner of a ‘completely ordinary little restaurant’ along a tributary of the Dordogne, ‘where all the locals go’. Serge introduced me to everyone as ‘mon petit frère’. He seemed at ease among the French, each and every one of them just regular people, after all: regular people were his specialty in Holland, so why not here as well?
    What barely seemed to register with him was that those regular people were earning large sums of money off of him, off the Dutchman with his summer home and his money, and it was in part for that reason that they continued to exercise a modicum of courtesy.
    ‘So kind,’ Serge said. ‘So normal. Where would you find that in Holland these days?’
    He failed to notice, or maybe he just shut his eyes to it, how the ‘mason’ hocked a green tendril of chewing tobacco onto their tiled patio after mentioning the price of a shipment of authentic, rural roofing tiles for the lean-to above their outdoor kitchen. How the madame at the bakery actually wanted to go on serving her customers, but stood waiting while Serge introduced his petit frère , and how those same customers exchanged knowing nods and winks: nods and winks that spoke volumes concerning the despicable boorishness of these Dutch people. How the jovial owner of the little restaurant squatted beside our table and said in a conspiratorial tone that he had, that very day, received a bag of escargots from a local farmer who normally kept them for himself. This time he had been able to buy some, though, and the owner wanted to offer them exclusively to Serge and his ‘sympathetic family’ at a ‘special price’; the taste was something we would encounter nowhere else. Meanwhile, Serge overlooked the fact that the French customers were all handed a simple menu showing the relais du jour , an inexpensive three-course menu at less than half the price of a single helping of snails. And concerning the wine-tasting in that little restaurant, I prefer to say nothing at all.
    Claire and I stayed for three days. During those three days we also visited a chateau, where we had to stand in line in front of a house with hundreds of other foreigners, mostly Dutch, before being guided through twelve swelteringly hot rooms with old poster beds and tub chairs. The rest of the time we spent largely in the airless garden. Claire tried to do some reading; it was too hot for me to even open a book, the white of the pages hurt your eyes – but it was difficult to do nothing at all: Serge was always busy with something; there were things around the house he did himself, things for which he did not have a local craftsman at his beck and call.
    ‘The people here start to respect you when you work on your own house,’ he said. ‘You notice that after a while.’
    And so he pushed his wheelbarrow forty times back and forth between the outdoor kitchen and the provincial highway, where the rural roofing tiles had been dropped. It never occurred to him for a moment that his do-it-yourselfing might be cheating the local mason out of a considerable chunk of his paid working hours.
    He sawed his own wood for the fireplace as well; sometimes it looked almost like a publicity shot for his election campaign: Serge Lohman, the people’s candidate, with a wheelbarrow, a saw and burly blocks of wood, a regular man like any other, the