The Ditch

by Herman Koch

  “It must be here somewhere. Past those houses, I think.”

  “So why did you just say ‘for the last time’?”

  “What?”

  “What you just said: that this spring will be the last time you and Mama go to the South of France. I don’t think you meant the last time by car, I think you really meant the last time.”

  “Here. This is it.”

  He pulled over to the right. I noticed that he tried to do it nonchalantly, but the front wheel hit something, a curb or some other obstacle, and we came to a halt beside a big tree—so close to it that there was no way I could open my door.

  “When the summer’s over, we’re going to cash in our chips,” my father said. “Your mother and I. We’ve been talking about it for a long time, and it seems like the best solution. So we’re going to do everything one last time. Go to the South of France, have dinner at the Amstel Hotel, we’ve drawn up a whole list of things. In May I’ll turn ninety-five. That’s going to be my last birthday. I want to talk to you about that too. That we should make something special out of it. The whole family, a restaurant, something extra maybe, a boat ride, don’t ask me, something everyone will remember later on. After that we pull the plug. Not right away. In September or October. Autumn, a nice time of year for a double funeral. In any case, before the Christmas holidays, at least then we won’t have to go through that misery again. Luckily, our final Christmas is already behind us.”

  “But why, for Christ’s sake? You’re both in perfect health.”

  I tried the car door, but couldn’t open it farther than ten centimeters or so.

  “Which is why it’s precisely the right moment,” he said. “We’ve both lived our lives. We’ve had great lives. So why finish that off in a nursing home? Why let things get to the point where the nurses have to help you take a shit? If you actually happen to make it all the way to the pot. All that misery, pal, I don’t even want to think about it. And to be frank: as far as this goes, we’ve been thinking mostly of ourselves, but you should also stop and think what it can mean for you. For you and Sylvia. No needy, demented parents you have to go and visit every Sunday afternoon. No father who shits his pants during Christmas dinner, no mother who doesn’t even recognize you anymore. Because that’s where it’s headed. Your mother is only a little forgetful these days, but those are only the first signs. Try to imagine what a load off your minds that would be. And what a lovely finale: a big, bang-up birthday party. And a couple of months later, a funeral. Nobody even has to cry. ‘They lived a wonderful life,’ write that one down already for your speech. ‘They lived life the way it should be lived, right up till the end.’ ”

  I protested a little—for form’s sake, I admit; I told him a couple of times that it was a ridiculous plan, that they might live to be a hundred without seeing their health decline; but from the very start I couldn’t deny that it sounded like an attractive idea to me. A life without parents. Orphaned at sixty.

  “What is it?” my father asked.

  “I can’t open my door,” I said.

  in the weeks just before this I had acted as normal as possible—as far as the situation allowed. I had vowed not to let it show, or at least not to ask any direct questions.

  It was a lot harder than I’d figured. I had to be careful not to act too normal, because that would definitely arouse suspicion—from my wife, primarily; my daughter was another matter.

  “Did you two have any luck?” I asked Diana the evening after Hans van Wezel’s funeral. She was lying on the couch, her notebook on her lap, she had to take off her headphones first.

  “What did you say?”

  “I asked whether you two had any luck this afternoon. Buying clothes. Did you guys buy anything? At the Bijenkorf?”

  “Mama was late. They were almost closed. It didn’t matter. I was tired. We’re going to go again next Thursday, then they do late-night shopping.”

  I could hear my wife in the kitchen: the sounds of clattering plates and cups—she was filling the dishwasher. How late was she? I could have asked my daughter. What time was it when Mama got to the Bijenkorf? But I didn’t. Ask no questions that might seem overly inquisitive. What does it matter what time it was? How should I know? I counted back. What time had it been when the gravediggers raised the city manager’s coffin to their shoulders? What time had I started in on my speech? My daughter put on her headphones again.

  In any case, it wasn’t like the whole story was made up, I thought with a certain amount of relief. My wife really had agreed to meet Diana at the Bijenkorf. But how much time had passed between my daughter’s phone call or text message and the moment, just before closing time, when Sylvia actually arrived at the department store?

  An hour? Half an hour? Had my wife and Alderman Van Hoogstraten spent that half hour French kissing, somewhere behind one of the big trees? I tried to picture it, but only half succeeded. The alderman was at least a foot taller than Sylvia, he took her face in his hands, his lips approached hers…

  I tried to stop my imagination at that point, but by then the image was more powerful than I was. I kept looking, I couldn’t take my eyes off it, the way you’ll watch open-heart surgery or an eye operation on TV, even though you know you shouldn’t, the remote in your hand, your thumb on the button, ready to zap away, but you wait too long: the shot of the sawed-open rib cage, the surgeon’s hands in their green plastic gloves holding the throbbing heart, the white eyeball hanging out of its socket, attached to the head by only a few bloody threads, will remain tattooed on your retinas for the rest of your life.

  I saw hands fumbling beneath clothes. First only a coat, but then in the opening between two buttons of a shirt. Fingers—a woman’s fingers—behind a belt, the shirttail half out of the trousers, a button popping; the fingertips—the nails—tickled the downy growth below the navel and then went down farther.

  “What is it?” Diana asked.

  I looked at my daughter; she had pulled her headphones up off one ear.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  She sighed.

  “You said something,” she said.

  I kept looking at her. I tried to smile. “No, really, I didn’t.”

  “But I heard you, really I did.” She shook her head, then slid her headphones back down and returned to her notebook.

  i went undercover in my own home. From behind my newspaper, I kept a close watch on my wife. I let my gaze glide over the articles, but I read nothing, only made sure I turned the pages every now and again. At the most natural pace possible. I was a plainclothes cop, the head of a family who had assumed the guise of a head of a family, who had adopted the appearance and behavior of a loving husband and father. It was a role that didn’t differ essentially from the one I had been playing in this family for years. But from the New Year’s reception on, and particularly after the city manager’s funeral, it became a role. It no longer went automatically; I had to make sure I played it to the hilt, so you couldn’t tell it from the real thing.

  “When do your exams start?” I asked my daughter. “Monday, right?”

  “What am I tasting?” I asked my wife as I chewed on a meatball; Sylvia’s meatballs, made according to a recipe from her home country, from her own region, were one of my daughter’s and my favorite dishes. “Mustard, or some kind of spice?”

  I had to be careful, in other words, not to play my role with too much pizzazz, not to lay it on too thick. Sometimes I caught myself on the verge of becoming just a little bit too much of a wonderful head of the family. Too attentive. Too interested. A father with an above-average interest in his daughter’s social and academic life. A husband who tries to give his wife her way in everything. I knew why I was doing it: my senses were stretched to the limit, I saw and heard everything. From the tiniest shifts in my wife’s behavior, I was trying to deduce whether my worst fears were based in the truth.
/>   Yes, that’s how it felt: as though everything was wide open. Not only my eyes and ears, but my taste, smell, and tactile functions also seemed poised to register even the slightest nuance. The sensation that accompanied eating a piece of chocolate was almost painfully intense. I stuck my nose in our cat’s fur as it sat purring in my lap, and I knew for a certainty that I was smelling things I’d never smelled before: grass, flowers, earth—the odors the cat picked up as she wandered through the gardens behind our house. Everything I touched seemed electrically charged. It used to be that I sometimes got a shock when letting go of a metal door handle or the back of a chair; now sparks flew even when I picked up a pen or a coffee cup.

  Whenever I heard the ringtone of Sylvia’s phone, I turned down the TV. I used to do that, too, but only to be accommodating. Now I did it mostly to hear who was calling. I had to watch out not to appear more attentive than I normally was, not to turn down the TV even lower than I used to.

  Before the New Year’s reception, before the city manager’s funeral, I had not only been attentive but also grouchy and preoccupied at times; I had not always focused my full attention on the things my wife and daughter said or asked. I had listened with half an ear, nodded a few times by way of an answer, often realizing only too late that, had one of them insisted, I couldn’t have told them what they’d just said.

  But now I was no longer preoccupied. It was physically impossible for me to simulate a dreamy, vacant look. I tried to, by thinking about other things, but just as I had once tended to let my mind wander, now I was unable to do that—unable to pretend that my thoughts were elsewhere.

  It started becoming obvious. “What’s with the look?” my daughter would ask sometimes. “What do you mean, what look?” I asked. “You know, the way you just looked,” she said.

  And she was right. While brushing my teeth at night, I could see it with my own eyes. My look in the mirror could only be described as intense. Because of that, I no longer dared to look directly at my wife when I slipped into bed beside her at night. For fear that she would see it too.

  “G’night,” I would say, and quickly turn off my reading light. And right away I would ask myself whether I had ever, in the past—the very recent past, the past of only a few weeks back—turned off my reading light so quickly. Probably not, but the worst of it was that I wasn’t entirely sure.

  In the dark, I waited for the question I feared most. Is something wrong? Or was that, in fact, the last thing she would ask, because she was every bit as guilty as I imagined? And how would I respond to that question?

  Mostly silence, though, was what came from her side of our bed. Sometimes she would read a little; at other times, after only a few minutes, I would hear her regular breathing shift into the quiet, reassuring snore that I had never, in almost thirty years of marriage, found irritating. Only endearing.

  So I lay with my eyes open in the dark, and came to the hideous conclusion that her snoring no longer sounded reassuring. That it was anything but reassuring. And then on to the even more hideous realization that it might never sound reassuring again.

  “Never again,” I whispered aloud, in spite of myself, and I felt my eyes sting.

  Only when the first beams of morning light fell through a crack in the curtains did I finally fall asleep.

  9

  I was born in this city. Amsterdam, of course, is not a real city, except in the eyes of people from outside. We, the ones who were born here, immediately recognize the provincial from the way he moves, the way he walks, the way he holds his head. The man from the provinces who thinks he’s ended up in a real city. He walks as though he were in Paris or Rome. He admires his reflection in the store windows and congratulates himself on his decision to exchange his provincial life for a stay in this city, which is not a real city at all.

  That is how he sits at the sidewalk cafés, how he eats in the restaurants (always, and without exception, the wrong restaurants), how he strolls through the museums, visits the movies and the plays at the municipal theater: as though he has freed himself from the mud-and-manure pong of his native village, from the chains of a petty existence.

  “I’ll never go back there again!” he declares resolutely—but a man from the provinces in Amsterdam is like the prisoner who digs a tunnel only to discover that, instead of outside the penitentiary walls, it surfaces in the exercise yard. Amsterdam is a toy city, a ball pit for grown-ups, an open-air museum that exhibits traditional arts and crafts.

  I could take the easy way out and say that it was mostly his accent that gave Alderman Van Hoogstraten away. But that would indeed be too easy. After all, my wife’s accent gave her away too. You had people who started talking more loudly as soon as they heard her accent, as though they automatically assumed she must be deaf, or retarded. The same loud tone that ambulance personnel use when addressing an old lady along the highway. Can you still hear me, ma’am? Hello, ma’am? How many fingers am I holding up?

  Whatever the case, it remained a strange and wondrous thing to hear Alderman Van Hoogstraten say something about Amsterdammers in a speech. Especially about Amsterdammers who included himself. “We Amsterdammers,” he would say, for example—but the way he pronounced “Amsterdammers” reminded you more of pitchforks, pigs, and rubber boots in the mud. On the nightly news, people with accents less pronounced than his were subtitled often enough.

  The alderman acted like a little boy visiting the big city for the first time. He had moved here about five years earlier, but still couldn’t believe his eyes. He went on being amazed at all the neon signs, the number of motor scooters—he still jumped every time a tram screeched through a curve. At the same time, you could see how pleased he was with himself, that he had left the barnyard and the village pump behind and actually dared to sit at an outdoor café in this big city.

  Why does someone cheat on their partner? Out of lust; for the sake of variety; because the opportunity presents itself. I crossed lust off the list right away. Even I, a man after all, the injured male party, the cuckold, could summon up enough objectivity to see that the alderman was no lust object.

  What does Maarten van Hoogstraten have that I don’t? Only a few weeks earlier, if someone had suggested I ask myself that, I would have said they were insane.

  I wonder if—no, I know for a fact that I wouldn’t have minded as much if my wife had started something with an American movie star. With Brad Pitt or Ryan Gosling. Matthew McConaughey? Or someone a little more her own age: George Clooney. Or ten, twenty years older, what do I care: Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, Sean Connery. That would have been easier to accept, because each of those men is objectively, demonstrably better-looking than I am. More glamorous. In some ways, it would have been more to her detriment than to mine. She’s trying to move up in the world, people would have said, being the wife of the mayor of Amsterdam apparently isn’t enough for her.

  But Maarten van Hoogstraten, no matter how you looked at it, was a few giant steps back. Less attractive, on the sliding scale of male attractiveness, than I was. In every way, in terms of both status and physical appearance.

  What’s more, the alderman stood for everything my wife despised. Normally speaking, she joked about people like him, or even laughed right in their faces. Maarten van Hoogstraten was a staunch environmentalist. He sincerely believed in global warming. And he was so passionate about it that he tried not to travel by plane. Whenever possible, he would pick a holiday destination you could get to by train.

  “But what do you actually think?” I asked him one time. “Do you think the airlines are really going to change their itineraries because they know you’re not on that flight or something? That they’re going to say: Let’s cancel that route, Maarten van Hoogstraten is taking the train?”

  He didn’t appreciate that at all. He tried to laugh it off a bit—it was right after the Monday council meeting and we were standing around with a lit
tle group in the coffee corner, but I could tell right away that it bothered him.

  “Well, but if everyone thought about it the way I do, there really would be a lot fewer flights,” he said.

  Since when had my wife been able to stand the company of humorless men for more than ten minutes? The story about the rabbit and the chewed cable didn’t seriously count as humor, did it? Maarten van Hoogstraten was an advocate of windmills. He wanted to ruin the whole Amsterdam skyline with those feeble sails on a stick. The urban planners on the project had played it smart. The whole thing was put together in a way that you could barely get an objection in edgewise. No turbines in residential neighborhoods or too close to buildings, no, all of it out at the edge: along the IJsselmeer, in Amsterdam-Noord, out along the ring road on the south side. The result, though, was that the windmills would be the first thing you saw as you came into Amsterdam. Just when we were off to such a good start creating a real skyline. A miniature skyline, true enough, but still. No self-respecting city could let itself be surrounded by windmills, not if you ask me.

  Maarten van Hoogstraten believed in organic meat, he made a huge detour just to buy all his meat at an organic butcher shop, he didn’t know yet that the organic meat myth had been debunked long ago. Organic meat was a direct appeal to the meat-eater’s guilt feelings. But there was a price tag attached.

  Since when had my wife been able to stand, for more than ten minutes, the company of men who used no deodorant because it’s better for the environment? Because of the much-vaunted ozone layer. I’m not stupid, I’m perfectly aware that aerosols affect the ozone layer, but that’s no reason to make the people in your immediate surroundings—your own biotope—suffer from an armpit odor most reminiscent of a stagnant pond full of dead frogs. I’m sure he used something: a deo-stick or roller from the health food store, a fragrance based on algae, seaweed, and ground sunflower seeds, but whatever it was, it wasn’t very long-lasting. By the time lunch break came around, Maarten van Hoogstraten had already started stinking of himself. The greenhouse effect began with him.