The Ditch

by Herman Koch

  in the speeches at Hans van Wezel’s funeral, too, one heard mostly incomprehension and perplexity. A former classmate talked about the city manager’s “keenness.” I don’t know if everyone picked up on it, but at the word “keenness” I’m sure the silence in the chapel deepened a notch. There were plenty of things you could say about Hans van Wezel, but keenness was probably the last trait you’d associate with that wet blanket. Unless his passion for cashboxes and stray laptops fell within the category of “keenness.” While one of Hans’s older sisters was giving her speech, I asked myself what he had told them at home. Nothing at all, I suspected. His sister related an anecdote about him: something about a sandbox and a puppy—and, for the first time, cautious laughter was heard in the chapel.

  Then it was my turn. The sister wasn’t very tall, I had to bend up the mike stand on the lectern first. I coughed, I cleared my throat. I leaned on the lectern with both hands, I had no notes to read from. I am the mayor known for his off-the-cuff speeches. I looked into the chapel, first at the row all the way in the back, then my gaze moved up, traveling over the people’s heads, until finally it rested on the bereaved family. I looked at the city manager’s wife for a moment, and she looked back at me, without lowering her eyes. She had not been weeping, her eyes were dry, she was sitting straight up in the uncomfortable wooden pew, she bore her sorrow with dignity. I had probably seen her before at some reception at city hall, I knew her name, her age, her date of birth. But I couldn’t remember her face. It was not an unattractive face, but also not one you’d necessarily remember. A woman like so many others. Women who marry a man because otherwise that man would have no wife. I looked at the daughters too. I knew their names as well, their birthdays, only from the big black notebook (I had looked them up that morning), but I knew which school they went to. I nodded to them, something that was meant to look like an encouraging nod—but encouraging in what sense, I asked myself the very next moment. Was it in the sense of Chin up, it’s a huge shock right now, but I’m sure you’ll get over it. You all have a long and happy life in front of you, right? I hoped that was the way it would go, that they would get over it, maybe even sooner than they could imagine at this point. But I also knew that wasn’t true. The children of suicides never get over it. I guess we weren’t important enough to keep living for, that was the thought that would accompany them from this day forward.

  I tapped my finger against the microphone, as though checking whether it was turned on. Of course it was, the city manager’s sister had just used it to give her speech, and that had been clearly audible and amplified. It’s just a tic of mine, I always start my speeches by tapping on the mike. Stalling for time, getting into speech mode, the way a soccer player genuflects before running out onto the pitch, the way a tennis player bounces the ball a few times, adjusts his sweatband, and plucks at the seat of his pants before the service.

  How much might the city manager have told them at home? I asked myself briefly as I leaned toward the microphone. Nothing—suddenly I knew that for sure. What was he supposed to tell them? I got caught stealing things and they fired me, but I’m going to tell the mayor that I’ll hang myself unless they give me another chance: that will make him change his mind. No, his wife and children would never know about that. They would spend their whole lives wondering why he did it. Maybe they would come up with all kinds of wild speculations. Had the city manager been a habitué of sites with child pornography? Did he use his lunch breaks to drive out to the pickup spot for gay men along the big lake south of town? Did he make a detour after office hours to the western docklands, where he paid a Ukrainian streetwalker to suck his dick? Here, once again, scandal raised its hoary head. Which of those acts was scandalous enough to leave a woman widowed and two children fatherless?

  I took a deep breath, one last time. While the chapel descended into true silence—when the mayor gets up to speak, that’s of a different order than when a former colleague or a big sister does—I paused for a moment and thought about the question of guilt. Did I feel guilty? Was I in some way co-responsible for the city manager’s death? During the last few days, of course, I had asked myself that any number of times. Once, about ten years ago, I came back to our house from some shopping in Hulst, in Zeelandic Flanders. We used to have a house along the dike in Graauw, at the edge of the village. I always parked on the left shoulder of the road, in the grass. This time, though, a cat, which had apparently been sleeping there, shot out onto the road and ended up under the left rear wheel of the car coming up behind me. The driver didn’t notice a thing and drove on. As I turned off the engine and opened the door, my hands were shaking. The cat was lying in the tall grass right beside the road. It was writhing, there was no blood, the cat didn’t make a sound. “Take it easy now,” I said. “Calm down, I’m not going anywhere, I’ll stay with you.” The cat squinted and looked at me, its body went on writhing. It was as though the cat was smiling at me. I looked up and down the road, but there was no one else out on the street. “I’ll stay with you,” I said to the cat, but it was already still, it had stopped moving, the smiling eyes had closed.

  If I hadn’t laughed in Hans van Wezel’s face a little less than a week ago, when he showed me that rope from the hardware store, his bereaved family wouldn’t be sitting here today in the front pew of this chapel at Nieuwe Ooster. But was that observation the same as feeling guilty? Deep in my heart, I was convinced that people with the city manager’s personality structure would all end up at the cash register of the hardware store sooner or later, to pay for their length of rope.

  I turned my gaze to the back rows. I saw my wife, my secretary, a couple of aldermen and council members—it took a moment for me to finally home in on Maarten van Hoogstraten. He had taken a seat at a far remove from my wife, almost on the other side of the chapel, close to the door.

  There you go, I thought. If they had nothing to hide, they would probably be sitting closer together or maybe even right beside each other. Now it was almost as though they were ignoring each other. They were acting like nothing was going on, which meant something was going on. It was clear as a bell, I realized; preposterous, in fact, that they themselves didn’t see the kind of farce they were putting on for everyone here.

  I spoke my first words. I addressed the dearly beloved, the family of the deceased, I mentioned his wife and daughters by name. “On this tragic day,” I said. “A loyal employee on whom I could always count.” It went well, it went smoothly, I was not quite on automatic pilot, not entirely, but whenever I stick to a certain pace then one sentence almost seems to trigger the next. I’m what people call a “gifted speaker,” there’s no reason to feign modesty about that. I always find the right tone, even at the funeral of a grown man who blackmails his employer with a length of rope and then, when he is laughed at, can’t figure out anything else to do but carry through with his threat. I noticed it happening this time too; the chapel was quieter than it had been yet today, there had been more coughing during the earlier speeches, more shifting about in the pews. I saw it happen right in front of me, a man raised his hand to his mouth but didn’t dare to cough. They were all wide awake. It isn’t every day that you get to be present at a speech from the mayor. A politician with a nationally famous face. But you have mayors and then you have mayors, you have politicians and then you have politicians: most of them will bore you to tears. Anyone who has tried to follow a parliamentary debate knows how bad it can be. When the current prime minister is speaking, the chambers ring with vicarious embarrassment. Why does he keep on smiling the whole time? Why does he act so jovial when he really isn’t? Who is he trying to fool with his boyish behavior? I have, as I said before, seen my own speeches, or snippets of them, on the nightly news any number of times. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a narcissist. I also feel a certain embarrassment when I see myself standing at a lectern. That lock of hair behind my left ear is sticking up just a little too much; someone, my secretary for
example—my city manager!—should have warned me about that. My posture is perhaps a little stooped, I probably look a little too angry—but I stand my ground. People listen to me attentively. There were no scraps of paper or crib sheets on the lectern, I looked straight at the audience the whole time, talked off the top of my head. Not too hurriedly, not as though I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible, and not too slowly, either, not so that the listeners started yawning one by one and sneaked a glance at their watches or telephones. No, for as long as it lasted I commanded their full attention. And I never go on too long. I know when to stop. You have people who love to hear themselves talk, preferably for as long as possible. They have no sense of their audience’s attention span.

  And then suddenly, without warning, I remembered the brief conversation I’d had with my city manager just a week prior. What else was I supposed to say, when he clicked open that satchel and took out the rope? What could I have said? Hans, listen, it’s not all that bad, a little money and a couple of iPads and phones. If you pay it all back and return the stuff, we’ll forget about it. But that was precisely what I didn’t want. It was the combination of the worn brown satchel, the unmistakably brand-new rope, and Hans van Wezel’s imploring, canine look—the look of a dog that hopes it will be the one the visitor to the pound takes home, and not the dog in the next kennel. “Put that rope away, you idiot! I won’t let myself be blackmailed with a rope! Please, Hans, do me a favor, get out of my sight and never come back.”

  And that’s what he had done. He had taken my words to heart, and never came back again.

  It was possible, I thought. I could do it. It would come as a relief to everyone, not least of all the family. After the initial shock they could come to terms, as they say, with the planned death of their husband and father. After the dismay would come the rage. And then, probably, closure. Maybe we’re ultimately better off without the kind of idiot who hangs himself for a couple hundred euros and a few stray phones and iPads. I hope you’re satisfied with your decision, I thought. I hope you’re somewhere and can see what you’ve caused.

  But I kept my mouth shut. For the first time during my speech, I sought eye contact with my wife. Perhaps not because I actually needed to see her, but because I suddenly remembered telling her yesterday that I wanted to see a familiar face in the crowd.

  It took me a couple more seconds to realize that she was no longer in the chapel. At least not at the same spot where she’d been a few minutes earlier—that was my first, optimistic thought, but I couldn’t immediately locate her anywhere else. Automatically, I looked at the back row, the pew closest to the exit.

  Alderman Van Hoogstraten wasn’t in his seat either. Fast as lightning, I scanned each row. Every face. But not a single one of them belonged to my wife or to the alderman.

  I began to wind things down. “We’ll always remember our Hans as a particularly pleasant and conscientious colleague.” The doors of the chapel opened, leaf-filtered sunlight fell on the gravel walkway. The gravediggers raised the coffin to their shoulders. My secretary popped up, to the left of me. “Lovely,” she said. “Very good.”

  Birds warbled, white clouds floated across a blue sky. I put on my sunglasses and looked over my shoulder, but my wife was nowhere. The alderman, too, seemed to have vanished. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket.

  Where are you? I typed.

  I was just about to send the text when I saw that I had two unread messages.

  Sweetheart, Diana asked what was taking so long. She’s waiting for me down at the Bijenkorf, the whole thing’s dragging along so slowly here. I hope you don’t mind. You were good. X

  The second message had been sent less than a minute later.

  Too good. That man was an asshole. See you tonight. X

  8

  It was on a weekday in mid-February, around one in the afternoon, when I felt the phone vibrate in my pocket. I had just stopped by Van Dobben for a liver-and-salt-beef sandwich and their “special” (tartar, hardboiled egg, onions, and a glop of mayonnaise on a soft white bun), and now I was crossing Rembrandtplein, on my way back to city hall.

  Dad, I read on the display.

  For about three seconds I considered not answering it, but I did anyway.

  He came straight to the point. “Have you got anything going tomorrow?”

  “All kinds of things,” I said. “The usual end-to-end. So what is it?”

  “I wanted to ask you to come with me and pick out a grave.”

  “A grave?”

  “I saw this beautiful cemetery,” he said. “In Ouderkerk aan de Amstel. But your mother doesn’t want to go. ‘What do I care where I am when I’m dead,’ she says. You know how your mother is.”

  There were all kinds of things I could have said. I could have said that I was way too busy tomorrow. An obvious question would have been why this couldn’t wait until the weekend. On the other hand, I can’t deny that my curiosity was piqued. Never in his long life had my father talked about a grave or anything that had to do with dying. Being buried or being cremated: I can’t remember the subject ever coming up.

  “Tomorrow, early in the afternoon?” I said. “Shall I pick you up around two?”

  One of my strong points is that I always know by heart most of my appointments for the next three or four days. Tomorrow at two I was scheduled for a visit to a scandal-stricken day care center.

  “No, I’ll swing by and pick you up,” my father said. “Make sure you’re on the square at two. I can’t stop there for very long.”

  I wanted to object but couldn’t come up with anything that fast. In the last five years, I had tried to reduce to a bare minimum the time I spent in the passenger seat beside my father. But it didn’t matter anymore, he had already hung up.

  Ouderkerk wasn’t all that far away—somehow this felt more like a plea than a reassurance.

  sunlight was flashing on the water the next afternoon as we drove out of town past the old windmill and the statue of Rembrandt kneeling in the grass with his sketchbook, along the narrow two-lane road beside the Amstel. It was, as I’ve said, mid-February, but it felt like spring—the warmest February days since 1914, I remembered hearing on the news the night before.

  “What’s that truck doing there?” my father asked; he had slowed for a curve, now he leaned up over the wheel and was squinting through the windshield, like someone trying to read the small print at the bottom of a contract.

  I followed his gaze, but the only thing on the road in front of us was a group of cyclists. I was just about to tell him that there wasn’t any truck, but he had already accelerated and passed the cyclists without knocking even one of them into the ditch.

  “When are you supposed to go in for that physical, to renew your license?” I asked him, after letting about a minute go by in silence.

  “What do you mean?” he said. “Why are you asking me that? You think I’m too old to drive a car?”

  I decided not to answer him, to let him come up with it himself.

  “End of June,” he said at last. “That’s why your mother and I are going to the South of France this spring, one last time. For the last time.”

  “The last time? What do you mean, the last time?”

  “What’s that sign say? How fast are you allowed to go here anyway? Sixty? Eighty?”

  “Fifty.”

  He breathed a deep sigh. “I know, buddy. I can’t read the signs anymore. I’ll never pass that exam. In June they’re going to take my license away. But I’ve never been in an accident. Never in my whole life. When I drive through a town, I slow to fifty. Out on the road I never drive faster than a hundred and twenty. It’s the bureaucracy. Old people, they strip us of everything, one thing at a time. The subtext is clear enough: Please, drop dead, you’re only getting in the way. You’re taking up space a young person could use.”

 
“But why did you say ‘the last time’? You two can take the train to the South of France, can’t you? Or fly? Why not just start flying now, instead of driving the whole twelve hundred kilometers?”

  We were stopped at a light; when it turned green, my father’s car didn’t move. I was about to warn him, but at that moment someone behind us started honking.

  “All right already!” he shouted, twisting his arm around to give the man the finger. “What’s the big deal? You in such a hurry to get someplace where nobody wants to see you anyway, dickhead?”

  Without using his blinker, he turned left over a bridge and then left again right away on the other side—again without using his blinker. He moved his face back up close to the windshield.