The Dinner (22 page)

And after that? After that, everything went wrong. Or rather, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. A second operation followed the first, then a third. More and more monitors were clustered around her bed, tubes emerged from her body and went back into it at other places. Tubes and monitors that were supposed to keep her alive, but after that first day the surgeon dropped his cheerful tone. He still kept saying that they were doing everything they could, but by then Claire had lost almost twenty kilos, she could no longer even raise herself up to lean against the pillows.

I was glad that Michel didn’t see her like that. At first I had acted chipper and suggested that we go together to see her at visiting hours, but he acted as though he hadn’t heard me. On the day itself, the day his mother had gone out the door but not come back in the evening, I had emphasized the festive aspect, the uniqueness of the situation, like sleeping over at a friend’s house or a field trip. We went out to eat together at the café-restaurant for regular people, spare-ribs with fries was his favourite meal back then, and I did my best to explain to him what had happened. I explained it to him and talked around it at the same time. I omitted things, mostly my own fears. After dinner we rented a movie at the video shop; he was allowed to stay up longer than normal, even though he had to go to school the next day (he was no longer at the daycare centre by then, he was in first grade at elementary school).

‘Is Mama coming later?’ he asked when I kissed him goodnight.

‘I’ll leave the door open a crack,’ I answered. ‘I’m going to watch TV, that way you can hear me.’

I didn’t call anyone that first evening. Claire had made me promise not to. ‘No reason to make a fuss,’ she’d said. ‘Maybe it will all turn out to be nothing and I can come home in a couple of days.’ I had already talked to the surgeon in the corridor by that time.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘No reason for a fuss.’

The next afternoon, after school, Michel didn’t ask about his mother. He asked me to take the training wheels off his bike. I had done that once a few months earlier, but then, after a few lurching attempts, he had ended up cycling into the low fence around the park. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. It was a lovely day in May and he went riding off, without wobbling even once, all the way to the corner and then back. When he passed me, he let go of the handlebars and raised his hands in the air.

‘They want to operate tomorrow,’ Claire told me that evening. ‘But what are they going to do, exactly? Did they tell you anything?’

‘Did I tell you that Michel had me take the training wheels off his bike today?’ I said.

Claire closed her eyes for a moment; her head was resting deep among the pillows, as though it were heavier than usual. ‘How’s he doing?’ she asked quietly. ‘Does he miss me terribly?’

‘He’s so anxious to come and see you,’ I lied. ‘But I think it would be better to wait a little bit.’

I’m not going to mention the name of the hospital where Claire was. It was fairly close to our home, I could get there by bike, or by car if the weather was bad, but either way it never took me more than ten minutes. During visiting hours Michel stayed with the woman next door, who had children as well; sometimes our babysitter came over, a fifteen-year-old girl who lived around the corner. I don’t feel like going into detail about everything that went wrong at the hospital, I would only like to urgently advise those who attach any value to life – their own, or that of their family and loved ones – to never let themselves be admitted there. That, by the same token, is my dilemma: it’s nobody’s business which hospital Claire was in, but at the same time I want to warn everyone to stay as far away from it as possible.

‘How are you coping?’ Claire asked one afternoon, I think it was after the second or third operation. Her voice was so weak that I had to put my ear almost to her lips. ‘Don’t you need any help?’

At the word ‘help’, a muscle or a nerve under my left eye began to twitch. No, I didn’t want any help, I could manage quite well by myself, or perhaps I should say: I amazed myself, above all, with how well I was able to manage. Michel got to school on time, his teeth brushed and his clothes clean. More or less clean: I was less critical of a few spots on his trousers than Claire would have been, but then I was his father. I’ve never tried to be ‘both father and mother’ to him, the way some half-assed, home-made-sweater-wearing head of a single-parent household put it once in some bullshit programme I saw on afternoon TV. I was busy, but busy in a good way. The last thing I needed was for people, with or without the best of intentions, to take work off my hands so that I would have more time for other things; I was grateful to have every moment accounted for.

Sometimes I would sit in the kitchen with a beer in the evening, after having kissed Michel goodnight, the dishwasher was zooming and bubbling, the newspaper lay unread on the table before me, and then suddenly I would feel uplifted, I don’t know how else to put it: it was a feeling of lightness, above all, extreme lightness; had someone pursed their lips and blown at me right then I would undoubtedly have gone floating off, up to the ceiling, like a down feather from a pillow. Yes, that was it: weightlessness, I’m deliberately not using words like happiness, or even satisfaction. I sometimes heard the parents of Michel’s playmates sigh about how, after a busy day, they really needed ‘a moment to themselves’. The children were in bed at last, and then came the magic moment, and not a minute earlier.

I’ve always thought that was strange, because for me that moment began much earlier. When Michel came home from school, for example, and everything was as it should be. My own voice, above all, asking him what he wanted in his sandwich, also sounded as it should have. The larder was full, I had done all the shopping that morning. I took care of myself as well, I looked in the mirror before leaving the house: I made sure my clothes were clean, that I had shaved, that my hair didn’t look like the hair of someone who never looks in the mirror – the people in the supermarket would have noticed nothing unusual, I was no divorced father reeking of alcohol, no father who couldn’t handle things. I clearly remember the goal I set for myself: I wanted to keep up the appearance of normality. As far as possible, everything had to remain the same for Michel as long as his mother wasn’t around. A hot meal every day, for a start. But also in other aspects of our temporary single-parent family, there shouldn’t be too many visible changes. Normally, it wasn’t my habit to shave every day; I didn’t mind walking around with stubble. Claire had never made a big deal out of that either, but during those weeks I shaved every morning. I felt that my son had a right to sit at the table with a clean-smelling, freshly shaven father. A freshly shaven and clean-smelling father would not prompt him to think the wrong things, would in any case not cause him to doubt the temporary character of our single-parent family.

No, on the outside there was nothing for anyone to notice about me. I remained one pillar of a trinity, another pillar was lying only temporarily (temporarily! temporarily! temporarily!) in the hospital, I was the pilot of a three-engine aircraft, one of whose engines had stalled: there is no reason to panic, this is not a crash landing, the pilot has thousands of flight hours behind him, he will land the plane safely on the ground.

One evening, Serge and Babette showed up. Claire was going to be operated on again the next day. I remember it well, that evening I had made macaroni, macaroni alla carbonara, to be honest the only dish I have ever mastered down to the smallest detail. Along with the spare-ribs from the café-restaurant for regular people, it was Michel’s favourite dish, which was why I made it every day during the weeks that Claire was in hospital.

I was just about to put the food on the table when the bell rang. Serge and Babette didn’t ask to come in; before I knew it they were already in the living room. I saw how Babette in particular looked around the room, then the whole house. During those weeks we didn’t eat in the kitchen, the way we usually did; I had set up trays in the living room, in front of the TV. Babette looked at the trays and cutlery and then at the television that was already on, because the weekly sports news was going to start in a few minutes. Then she looked at me, with a special look, I don’t know how else to describe it.

That special look, as I can still recall, made me feel as though I had something to explain. I mumbled something about the festive aspect of the meals we took together; there were, after all, occasions on which I did depart from the normal run of things, the household didn’t have to be a carbon copy of the way Claire ran it, as long as there were no visible traces of decline. I believe that in explaining this to Babette I used the phrase ‘male household’, and even ‘holiday feel’.

That was pretty stupid; looking back on it now I could kick myself. I didn’t owe anyone an explanation. But by then Babette had climbed the stairs and was standing in the doorway to Michel’s room. Michel was sitting on the floor amid his toys, he was in the process of lining up hundreds of dominoes, in imitation of World Domino Day
,
but when he saw his aunt he jumped up and leaped into her outstretched arms.

A little too enthusiastically, if you ask me. He was very fond of his aunt, it’s true, but the way he wrapped both arms around her thighs, making it look like he would never let go, still created the impression that he missed having a woman around the house. A mother. Babette cuddled him and ran her fingers through his hair. Meanwhile she looked around the room, and I looked with her.

The space on the floor was not fully occupied by dominoes. There were toys everywhere, toys had been slung all over the room, perhaps that’s more like it, there was almost no place to put a foot down. To say that Michel’s room was a mess would be an understatement, I saw that myself, now that I looked at it through Babette’s eyes. There was the explosion of toys, of course, but that wasn’t all. The two chairs, the couch and Michel’s bed were all covered in clothing, both clean and dirty clothing, and on his little desk and on the stool beside his (unmade) bed were plates with crumbs and half-empty glasses of milk and soda pop. Worst of all, perhaps, was the apple core that wasn’t on a plate at all, but lying on an Ajax football jersey with the name Kluivert on it. The apple core, like all apple cores exposed for more than a few minutes to sunlight and air, was a dark brown. I remembered having given Michel an apple and a glass of soda pop that very afternoon, but now you couldn’t tell that the apple core had been there for only a couple of hours, like all apple cores it looked as though it had been lying on top of that jersey for days, rotting away.

I also recalled having said to Michel that morning that later in the day we would clean up his room together. But for a variety of reasons, or rather, due to the comforting thought that there was plenty of time to clean up later on, it hadn’t happened.

As she stood there, still holding my son and running one hand affectionately over his back, I looked at Babette’s eyes and again I saw that special look. I’ll clean it up! I felt like screaming at her. If you had come by tomorrow, you could have eaten off the floor in this room. But I didn’t, I only looked at her and shrugged. It’s a bit of a mess, my shoulders said, but who cares? There are more important things to think about at the moment than a messy or tidy room.

Again, that need to explain! I didn’t want to explain, no explanations were needed, I told myself. They had dropped in without calling first. Let’s turn this around, I thought to myself, let’s turn this thing around and imagine what would happen if I suddenly showed up at my brother and sister-in-law’s door, while Babette was shaving her legs, for example, or while Serge was clipping his toenails. Then I would also see something that was essentially private, that normally wasn’t meant for the eyes of outsiders. I shouldn’t have let them in, I thought then. I should have said it was a bad moment.

On the way downstairs, after Babette had promised Michel that later, when he was finished, she would come back and watch the dominoes fall, and after I had told him that dinner was almost ready, that we were going to eat in a minute, we walked past the bathroom and the bedroom, Claire’s and my bedroom. Babette glanced at each of them quickly, she barely tried to disguise those glances, particularly at the overflowing laundry basket and the unmade bed strewn with newspapers. This time she didn’t look at me, though – and that was perhaps even more painful, more humiliating, than the special look. I had been very clear in saying to Michel, and only to Michel, that we were going to eat in a minute, I wanted to broadcast the unambiguous signal that my brother and his wife would not be invited to eat with us. They had come at a bad moment, and it was high time for them to leave.

Downstairs, in the living room, Serge was standing in front of the television with his hands in his pockets; the weekly sports news had already begun. More than anything else – more than the brazen way my brother stood there, hands in his pockets, his feet planted squarely on the carpet, as though it were his living room and not mine; more than my sister-in-law’s special looks at Michel’s room, at our room, at the laundry basket – it was the footage on the sports news, of a group of football players running laps around a sunny pitch, that told me now that my plan for the evening was about to fall to pieces; no, that it had already fallen to pieces. My evening together with Michel in front of the TV, our plates of macaroni alla carbonara on our laps, a normal evening, without his mother of course, without my wife, but a festive evening nonetheless.

‘Serge …’ Babette had walked over to my brother and laid her hand on his shoulder.