The Dinner (14 page)

Fuck off!

It’s not the curse that shocks them so much at first, but the voice. It shatters certain expectations. You would expect to see something unshaven appear from the sleeping bag: sweaty hair glued to the skull, a mouth toothless but for a couple of black stumps. But this sounds almost like a woman …

But what if it was a – at that same moment, the sleeping bag starts moving even more: a hand, another hand, a whole arm, and then a head. You can’t really tell right away, or yes you can, because of the hair with bald spots: black hair, grey here and there, with the scalp shining through. A man goes bald differently. The face itself is grimy, unshaven, or no, it has facial hair, but clearly not like a man’s. Fuck off! Bastards! The voice is shrill, the woman flails around with one arm, the way you chase away flies. A woman. The brother and the cousin look at each other. It’s time to knock off. Later, they will both recall that exact same moment. The discovery that it is a woman in the sleeping bag changes everything.

Come on, let’s go, the brother actually says.

Goddam it! the woman screams. Fuck off! Fuck off!

Shut your face! the cousin says. I said, shut your face!

He kicks the sleeping bag hard, but there isn’t much space for kicking, he can barely keep his balance, and he slips, his foot shoots out too far, the tip of his shoe grazes the sleeping bag and hits the woman right under the nose. A hand with greasy, swollen fingers and black nails is raised to the nose. There is blood. Bastards! they hear, the voice is now so loud and shrill that it seems to fill everything. Murderers! Scumbags! The brother pulls the cousin towards the door. Come on, let’s get out of here. Then they are out the door and standing outside. Dirty, rotten bastards, they can still hear from the cash-machine cubicle, a bit quieter now, but probably still loud enough to be heard down at the corner. It’s late though, the street is deserted, there are only three or four windows still lit in the entire area.

I wasn’t going to … the cousin said. My foot slipped. Jesus Christ, what a filthy bitch!

Sure, the brother says. Of course you didn’t. Jesus, I wish she’d shut up!

Noise is still coming from the cubicle, but the door has fallen shut now, it’s already more muffled, a spluttering, a vague, injured spluttering.

Then suddenly they can’t help laughing; later they’re able to remember precisely the way they looked at each other, their own indignant, flushed faces; that, and the muffled grumbling from behind the glass door, and how they had burst out laughing. In stitches. There’s no stopping it, they have to lean against the wall to keep from falling down, and then they lean on each other. They throw their arms around each other’s necks, their bodies shaking with laughter. Bunch of scumbags! The brother imitates the woman’s shrill voice. Bastards! The cousin squats down, then falls to the ground. Stop it please! Please! You’re killing me!

Leaning against a tree are a few garbage bags, and a couple of other objects obviously put there for the morning trash collection: an office chair on casters, a cardboard box that once contained a wide-screen TV, a desk lamp and a picture tube. They’re still laughing as they pick up the office chair and carry it over to the cubicle. Dirty, rotten shit-whore! They throw the chair, in as far as that can go into the little cubicle, at the sleeping bag, which the woman has now crawled back into. The cousin holds the door open, the brother goes back for the desk lamp, and two full garbage bags. The woman pokes her head out of the sleeping bag again, her hair really is stuck together in thick, greasy mats, she has a beard, or else it’s just caked-on filth. She tries to push the office chair away with one hand, but doesn’t really succeed. Then the first garbage bag hits her full in the face, her head rocks back, strikes hard against the steel wastepaper container on the wall. Now the cousin throws the desk lamp. It’s an old-fashioned kind with a round shade and a retractable arm. The metal shade hits the woman on the nose. It is perhaps strange that she has stopped screaming, that the brother and the cousin are no longer hearing her shrill voice. She merely sits there, nodding groggily when the second garbage bag hits her in the face. Stupid whore, go pass out somewhere else then! Get a job! That ‘Get a job!’ cracks them up again. Get a job! the brother shouts. Get a job, job, job!

The cousin is back outside again, he goes over to the tree where the garbage bags were. He pushes aside the wide-screen box and sees the jerrycan. It’s one of those army jerrycans, a green one like the kind you see on the backs of jeeps. The cousin picks up the jerrycan by the handle. Empty. What else would he have expected, who would put a full jerrycan out with the trash?

No, no, what do you think we’re gonna do? the brother cries when he sees the cousin coming with the jerrycan.

Nothing, man, it’s empty, right?

The woman has come back to her senses a little. You delinquents, you should be ashamed of yourselves, she says in a voice that is suddenly and unexpectedly prim, a voice from the distant past perhaps, before the free fall started.

It stinks in here, the cousin says, we’re going to smoke it out a little bit. He holds up the jerrycan.

Cute, she says, but can I go back to sleep now? The blood under her nose has already dried up. The cousin throws the empty jerrycan – perhaps on purpose, who knows – beside her head, at a safe distance, it makes a lot of noise, it’s true, but all things being equal it’s not as bad as the garbage bags and the desk lamp.

Later – a few weeks later – the footage on
Opsporing Verzocht
, a Dutch version of the
Most Wanted
series, clearly showed how both boys, after throwing the jerrycan, go back outside. They remain off-camera for a fairly long time. The images registered by the camera in the cash-machine cubicle never actually show the woman in the sleeping bag. The camera is pointed at the door, at the people who come in for money, you can see those who make a withdrawal, but it’s a fixed camera, the rest of the cubicle is out of sight.

The evening that Claire and I saw that footage for the first time, Michel was upstairs in his room. We were sitting next to each other on the couch in the living room, with the newspaper and a bottle of red wine left over from dinner. The story had been in all the papers, it was on the evening news a number of times, but it was the first time the footage itself was broadcast. The images were jerky, out of focus, immediately recognizable as a security camera. Until then, the general reaction had been one of outrage. What was the world coming to? A defenceless woman … young people … stiffer sentences – yes, even the appeal to restore the death penalty had raised its hoary head again.

That was all before that evening’s broadcast. Until then it had been little more than a news report, a shocking report, true enough, but still – like all news reports – one that was fated to wear thin: with the passing of time the sharp edges would be dulled, until the story finally disappeared altogether, not important enough in any case to be stored in our collective memory.

But the security-camera footage changed all that. The boys – the offenders – were given a face, albeit a face that was hard to recognize due to the bad quality of the images and the fact that both wore knitted caps pulled down over their eyebrows. What the viewers did recognize, however, was something else: they saw all too clearly that the boys were having a good time, that they almost creased up with laughter as they pelted their helpless – or at least invisible – victim, first with the office chair, then the garbage bags, the desk lamp and finally the empty jerrycan. You saw – jerkily, in black and white – them high-five each other after throwing the garbage bags, how they screamed things, undoubtedly abuse, at the homeless woman off-camera, even though there was no sound.

Above all, you saw them laughing. That was the moment when the collective memory came into play. It was the key moment: the laughing boys demanded their place in that collective memory. In the top ten of the collective memory they came in at number eight, probably right below the Vietnamese colonel summarily executing a Vietcong soldier with a bullet through the head, but perhaps even above the Chinese man with his carrier bags trying to stop the tanks at Tiananmen Square.

And there was something else that played a role. The two were wearing knitted caps, but they were upper-middle-class boys. They were white. It wasn’t easy to say how you could tell, it was hard to put your finger on it: something about their clothing, their movements. The boys down the street. Not the kind of trash who torch cars in order to start a race riot. Comfortably enough off, well-to-do parents. Boys like the ones we all know. Boys like our nephew. Like our son.

Looking back, I can recall the exact moment when I realized that this was not about boys like our nephew or our son, but about our son himself (and about our nephew). It was a cold and deathly quiet moment. Down to the very second, I could still point out the moment in the footage when I tore my eyes away from the TV and looked at Claire’s face in profile. Because the investigation is still under way, I’m not going to talk here about what made me realize, with a shock of recognition, that I was sitting on the couch watching our own son pelt a homeless woman with office chairs and garbage bags. And laughing. I’m not going into it any further, because technically I can still deny everything. Do you recognize this boy as Michel Lohman? At this point in the proceedings I can still shake my head. That’s hard to say … the images are pretty unclear, I couldn’t swear to it.

More images came afterwards: a compilation, the moments when little was happening had been edited out. You saw the two boys come back into the cubicle again and again and throw things.

The worst part came at the end, the key image as it were: the picture that caught the attention of half the world. First you saw the jerrycan being thrown – the empty jerrycan – and then, after they had gone outside again and come back, something else; on film it was hard to see what it was: a lighter? a match? You saw a flash of light, a flash that overexposed everything at once, that blinded you for a few seconds. The screen turned white. When the picture came back you could just see the boys beating a hasty retreat.

They didn’t come back. The final images registered by the security camera didn’t show much at all. No smoke or flames. The explosion of the jerrycan had not been followed by a fire. Yet it was precisely this seeing-nothing that made the images so terrifying. Because the most important thing was happening off-camera, and you had to fill in the rest for yourself.

The homeless woman was dead. Died right then and there, most probably. At the moment the gas vapours from the jerrycan exploded in her face. Or at most a couple of minutes later. Perhaps she had tried to wriggle out of the sleeping bag – perhaps not. Off-camera.

I looked, as I said before, at Claire’s face in profile. If she turned her head and looked at me, I would know. Then she would have seen the same thing I did.

Claire turned her head and looked at me.

I held my breath – or rather, I took a deep breath, so that I could be the first to say something. Something – I didn’t know exactly which words I would use – that would change our lives.

Claire held up the bottle of red wine: there was only a bit left in the bottom, just enough for half a glass.

‘Do you want this?’ she asked. ‘Or should I open another one?’

Michel put his hands in his coat pockets: it was hard to tell whether he had gone for my lie. When he turned his head to one side, his face was lit by the glow from the restaurant.

‘Where’s Mama?’ he asked.

Mama. Claire. My wife. Mama had told her son that his father didn’t know about any of this. And that she wanted to keep it that way.

Earlier in the evening, at the regular-people café, my wife had asked whether I too thought our son had been acting strangely of late. Distant, that was the word she’d used. The two of you talk about things Michel and I don’t talk about, she had said. Could it have something to do with a girl?

Had Claire been feigning concern about Michel’s behaviour? Were her questions meant only to get me to reveal how much I knew: whether I had any idea at all what our son and nephew were up to in their spare time?

‘Mama is inside,’ I said. ‘With …’

I started to say ‘with Uncle Serge and Aunt Babette’, but, in the light of recent events, that suddenly sounded so ridiculously childish. ‘Uncle’ Serge and ‘Aunt’ Babette were things of the past: the distant past, when we were still happy, it crossed my mind, and I had to bite my tongue. I had to be careful not to let my lip start trembling, or to let Michel see my wet eyes.

‘… Serge and Babette,’ I finished my sentence. ‘The main course just arrived.’

Was I mistaken, or did I see Michel feeling around for something in his coat pocket? For his cell phone, perhaps? He didn’t wear a watch, he used his phone to tell the time. I’ll make sure we stay away till after midnight, Claire had assured him on his voicemail. So you two have to do it tonight. Did he, at this moment, after my announcement that the main course had just arrived, feel the need to check the time? The amount of time left until ‘after midnight’, to do what they had to do?

When he asked about his mother, the tone that had frightened me only thirty seconds earlier vanished from Michel’s voice. Where’s Mama? ‘Uncle’ and ‘aunt’ were childish, reminiscent of birthday parties and questions like ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ But ‘Mama’ was Mama. Mama would always remain Mama.