The Dinner (18 page)

At that point we were very close to something, I realized. Something that couldn’t be undone later on. I took my hand off his arm.

‘Michel, there’s something else,’ I said.

‘Dad, please.’

‘Someone called you.’

He stared at me; it wouldn’t have surprised me much to have felt his fist in my face a moment later: his knuckles hard against my upper lip, or higher, against my nose, blood would flow, but it would make a number of things clearer. More out in the open.

But nothing happened. ‘When?’ he asked quietly.

‘Michel, I hope you’ll forgive me, I shouldn’t have, but … it was because of those films, I wanted to … I was trying to …’

‘When?’ My son took his foot off the pedal and planted both feet firmly on the gravel.

‘A little while ago, it was a message. I listened to the message.’

‘Who was it from?’

‘From B— from Faso.’ I shrugged, I grinned. ‘That’s what you guys call him, right? Faso?’

I saw it plainly, there could be no mistake about it: my son’s expression hardened. There wasn’t enough light here, but I could have sworn that his face also turned a few shades paler.

‘What did he want?’

He sounded calm. Or no, not calm. He was trying to sound casual, bored almost, as though the fact that his adopted cousin had called him tonight was of no significance.

But he had given himself away. The significance lay in something very different: in the fact that his father had been listening to his messages. That wasn’t normal. Any other father would have thought twice before doing that. In fact, that’s what I had done. I had thought twice. Michel should have been enraged, he should have screamed: what gives you the right to listen to my voicemail? That would have been normal.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘He asked you to call back.’ In that fake, chummy tone of his, I almost added.

‘Okay,’ Michel said. He nodded slightly. ‘Okay,’ he said again.

Suddenly, I remembered something. Just a while ago, when he had called his own phone and got me on the line, he had said he was looking for a number. That he was coming to get his cell phone because he needed a number. I thought I knew now which number that was. But I didn’t ask him. Because there was something else I remembered too.

‘You said I wasn’t listening,’ I said. ‘But I did listen. When we were talking about the two of you putting that video up on YouTube.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You said that wasn’t you.’

‘That’s right.’

‘So who was it? Who put it there?’

Sometimes you answer a question by asking it out loud.

I looked at my son. And he looked back.

‘Faso?’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

In the silence that fell then, the only sounds were those from the park and the street across the water: the brief flap of birds’ wings in the branches, a car accelerating, a church bell striking once – a silence during which my son and I looked at each other.

I couldn’t be absolutely certain, but I thought I saw a moistness in Michel’s eyes. His look, in any case, left no room for misinterpretation. You finally get it? that look said.

During the same silence, a cell phone began ringing, in my left pocket. Ringing and buzzing. My hearing seemed to be getting worse lately, so I had chosen
Old Phone
as my ringtone, an old-fashioned ringing that reminded you of a classic, black Bakelite telephone, and that I could hear no matter what.

I pulled the phone out of my pocket, intending to dismiss the call, until I saw the name on my screen: Claire.

‘Hello?’

I gestured to Michel not to go, but he had already crossed his arms and leaned them on the handlebars; suddenly he seemed in less of a hurry to get away.

‘Where are you?’ my wife asked. Her voice was quiet but insistent, the restaurant noises in the background almost drowned it out. ‘What’s taking you so long?’

‘I’m outside.’

‘What are you doing out there? We’ve almost finished the main course. I thought you were going to come back right away.’

‘I’m out here with Michel.’

I had actually meant to say ‘with our son’, but I didn’t.

We were silent for a moment.

‘I’m coming,’ Claire said.

‘No, wait! He’s got to … Michel was just getting ready to go …’

But the connection had already been broken.

Your father doesn’t know about any of this, and I want to keep it that way. I thought about my wife who would be coming out the door of the restaurant any moment, and about the way I would look at her then. Or rather, whether I would be able to look at her in the same way I had a couple of hours ago, in the café for regular people, when she’d asked if I also thought Michel had been acting strange lately.

I was wondering, in other words, whether we were still a happy family.

My next thought was about the video of the homeless woman who had been set on fire. And then, most of all, about how it got onto YouTube.

‘Is Mama coming?’ Michel asked.

‘Yeah.’

Maybe I was imagining things, but I thought I heard relief in his voice when he asked whether ‘Mama’ was coming. As though he’d been standing here with his father long enough. His father who couldn’t do anything for him anyway. Is Mama coming? Mama’s coming. I had to be quick. I had to look out for him, in the only department in which I could still look out for him.

‘Michel,’ I said, laying my hand on his forearm again. ‘What does Beau … Faso … How did Faso find out about that video? He had already gone home, right? I mean …’

Michel glanced at the entrance, as though hoping that his mother was already coming out to save him from this painful tête-à-tête with his father. I looked over at the door too. Something had changed, but I didn’t know right away what it was. The smoking man, I realized the next instant. The smoking man was gone.

‘Just did,’ Michel said.

Just did. The same two words he used to say when he had lost his coat, or left his book bag somewhere on a playground and we asked him how he could have done that. Just did … Just forgot. Just left it lying there.

‘I mailed those videos to Rick. And then Faso saw them too, he pulled them off of Rick’s computer. He put some of it on YouTube, and now he says he’s going to put the rest on there too if we don’t pay him.’

There were any number of questions I could have asked then: for a full second I asked myself which one other fathers would have asked.

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘Three thousand.’

I looked at him.

‘He wants to buy a scooter,’ he said.

‘Mama.’

Michel threw his arms around Claire’s neck and buried his face in her hair. ‘Mama,’ he said again.

Mama had come. I looked at my wife and at my son. I thought about the happy families. About how often I had looked at Michel and his mother – and how I had never tried to come between them; that, too, was a part of the happiness.

After she had caressed Michel’s back and the back of his head – over the black cap – Claire raised her eyes and looked at me.

How much do you know? that look asked.

Everything, I looked back.

Almost everything, I corrected myself then, thinking about Claire’s voicemail message to her son.

Claire took him by the shoulders and kissed his forehead.

‘What are you doing here, sweetheart?’ she asked. ‘I thought you were meeting someone.’

Michel’s eyes sought mine; Claire, I knew there and then, knew nothing about the videos. She knew a great deal more than I had thought, but about the videos she knew nothing.

‘He came to get some money,’ I said, keeping my eyes on Michel. Claire raised her eyebrows. ‘I borrowed some money from him. I was going to pay him back tonight, before we left for the restaurant, but I forgot.’

Michel lowered his eyes and scraped his feet on the gravel. My wife stared at me, but said nothing. I felt around in my inside pocket.

‘Fifty euros,’ I said; I pulled out the banknote and handed it to Michel.

‘Thanks, Dad,’ he said, stuffing the money in his coat pocket.

Claire breathed a deep sigh, then took Michel’s hand. ‘Weren’t you going to …’ She looked at me. ‘It would be better if we went back inside. They were wondering what was taking you so long.’

We hugged our son, Claire kissed him three more times on his cheeks, then we stood and watched as he cycled off along the path to the bridge. Halfway there it looked as though he were going to turn and wave, but he only raised one arm in the air.

After he had disappeared from view, through the bushes and across the canal, Claire asked: ‘How long have you known?’

I suppressed my initial urge to come back with ‘And what about you?’ Instead, I said: ‘Ever since
Opsporing Verzocht
.’

She took my hand, exactly as she had done with Michel just now.

‘Oh, honey,’ she said.

I turned slightly, so I could see her face.

‘And you?’ I asked.

Now my wife took my other hand as well. She looked at me and made a sorry attempt at a smile: it was a smile that, while knowing better, wanted to take us back in time.

‘I want you to know that I was thinking of you first and foremost, in all of it, Paul,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want … I thought maybe it would be too much for you. I was afraid … I was afraid it would make you go, all over again … well, you know.’

‘Since when?’ I asked quietly. ‘When did you find out?’

Claire squeezed my fingers.

‘On the night itself,’ she said. ‘The same night they were at the ATM machine.’

I stared at her.

‘Michel called me,’ Claire said. ‘It had just happened. He wanted to know what they should do.’

Back when I was still working, one day I stopped in the middle of a sentence about the Battle of Stalingrad and looked around the class.

All these heads, I thought. All these heads into which everything disappears.

‘Hitler had his sights set on Stalingrad,’ I said. ‘Even though, strategically speaking, it would have been wiser for him to press straight on to Moscow. But for him it was all about the name of the town: Stalingrad, the city that bore the name of his great opponent, Joseph Stalin. That city had to be conquered first. Because of the psychological impact that victory would have on Stalin.’

I paused and looked around the classroom again. Some of the students were writing down what I was telling them, others were looking at me; there were both interested and glassy gazes turned on me – more interested ones than glassy ones, I tried to tell myself, realizing at the same time that it no longer made much difference to me.

I thought about their lives, about all their lives that would just go on.

‘It’s on the basis of irrational considerations like that that wars are won,’ I said. ‘Or lost.’

Back when I was still working – it’s still hard for me to say that phrase out loud. I could go on here and explain that once, in a distant past, I’d had other plans for my life, but I’m not going to do that. Those other plans really existed, but precisely what they involved is nobody’s business. ‘Back when I was still working …’ at least appeals to me more than ‘When I was still standing before a class …’ or – the most horrible of all, the favourite phrase of the worst-of-the-worst, the former teachers who say of themselves that teaching is their blood – ‘Back when I was still in education …’

I would have preferred not to mention which subject I taught. That, too, is nobody’s business. It becomes a label so quickly. Oh, he’s a … teacher, people say. That explains a lot. But when you ask what it actually explains, they usually can’t tell you. I teach history. Taught history. These days, not any more. I stopped about ten years ago. Had to stop – although in my case I still believe that both ‘stopped’ and ‘had to stop’ are equally far from the truth. At equal and opposite ends of it, indeed, but the distance between them and the truth is almost the same.

It started in the train, the train to Berlin. The beginning of the end, let’s say: the start of (being forced into) stopping. Counting back, it seems the whole process took barely two or three months. Once it started, it was quick. Like someone who is diagnosed with a malignant illness and is gone six weeks later.

In retrospect, what I feel most is pleasure and relief; my days before a class had lasted long enough. I sat by myself at the window of my otherwise empty compartment and looked outside. The only thing that rolled by for the first half-hour were birch trees, but now we were moving through the outskirts of some town. I looked at the houses and the flats, the houses with their little gardens that often ran all the way up to the rail embankment. In one of those gardens white sheets were hanging out to dry, in another there was a swing. It was November and it was cold. There were no people in the gardens.