The Ditch

by Herman Koch

  I cursed myself and my faulty French. For a moment I thought about Miss Kalb, my French teacher in high school. She was almost seven feet tall, and like all women that size, she was single. Miss Kalb drove a green Renault 4—probably because it had such a high roof.

  What was it that Hollande had asked me? Whether this was the same room where William of Orange had been assassinated? Or if Anne Frank had hid from the Germans in the attic above us? As far as I knew, he might have been asking where the first Huguenot refugees had been hanged, back in 1792. French dates, that was another thing! To start with, you never heard them right the first time, and after that you had to start the arithmetic. One thousand seven hundred four times twenty and twelve, the French said without blinking an eye, and then you were supposed to know right away that they meant seventeen hundred and ninety-two.

  At that point, a girl came by with a tray full of glasses. My salvation! Red wine, white wine, orange juice, water. First take a glass, then change the subject right away. A little too quickly, I grabbed a glass of red. First of all, that was impolite, but second, I had now missed the opportunity to wait and see what President Hollande would choose—and then accommodate myself to him.

  He took a glass of water. De l’eau! It was only a little past noon, it’s true, but one of the things I’ve always found so charming about the French is that they never look at the clock before bringing in a carafe of wine. François Hollande took his glass from the tray, cocked his head, and smiled at the girl.

  “Merci, mademoiselle,” he said.

  Then the girl smiled too. She was an extremely Dutch Dutch girl, pretty in the way to which our country holds the patent rights, in a way that ought to make the Dutch nation feel proud. So white, so blonde: creamy white. A full and rosy face that could have figured on a pack of butter. She was as tall as me, she too looked down on the French president from a height. And she was, as I mentioned, blonde; her hair was tied back, but in a loose way that showed how much hair she really had: it was full and thick, with little curls, held together with an elastic band—at least that’s what I assumed, for the elastic itself was hidden from view.

  I realized that now—in a moment, once the girl had walked away, and if my French could handle it—I could try a jovial comment. That’s right, Mr. Hollande, they don’t make them like that in France! A comment that was sort of questionable, covered in a thin layer of machismo—but something you should be able to get away with when talking to a president who visited his sweetheart in the middle of the night with a crash helmet on.

  The detail about the crash helmet had won me over for François Hollande from the very start. I had seen the pictures. The Dutch newspapers, with the exception of De Telegraaf, were much too reticent, so I downloaded a couple of French magazines on my iPad mini. That particular issue of Closer, the one that got the whole affair rolling, as well as Paris Match. Grainy photos of the president on the back of a motorbike, wearing a regulation helmet, shot from a great distance with a telephoto lens. Anyone who has seen the movie The Day of the Jackal knows that all you would have had to do was replace the telephoto lens with a rifle and a telescopic sight, and the French would have had to elect a new president. That was also the general gist of the articles that went with the photos, to the extent that I could follow them: that the president, with his puerile behavior, had placed himself unnecessarily at risk. But it was precisely these details, the explicitly boyish disguise and the even more juvenile mode of transport, that made me identify with François Hollande. He became a boy who snuck out at night with a flashlight, on his way to the girls’ dormitory. In The Day of the Jackal, the assassin played by Edward Fox practiced on watermelons. He put a melon on a pole and fixed his telescopic sight. The watermelon was not merely punctured by the bullet and knocked off the pole; no, it blew apart completely, there was nothing left of it—that was the way the head of the French president (the movie was set in the time of Charles de Gaulle) would blow apart later on, you kept thinking during the rest of the film.

  I looked at François Hollande’s head and raised my glass of red wine. “Santé!” I said. We clinked glasses: my wine against the president’s water. If this man had been a bank teller, or the floor manager of a supermarket, would any woman have turned her head to watch him walk past? No; if ever the eroticizing power of fame had been made manifest, it was here, in the bland face of François Hollande. It wasn’t like with Mitterrand, Chirac, or Sarkozy. They were all womanizers, too, but with those three you could easily imagine that they would have gone around chasing women all their lives, even if they hadn’t become the president of France. After seeing the nocturnal telelens photos of François Hollande on the back of the motorbike, I spent a long time looking at those of his sweetheart, Julie Gayet. An actress I’d never heard of before. In the few pictures printed by the Dutch newspapers, she looked fairly normal. Nothing special. No Carla Bruni. A normal, not even particularly young woman; exactly the kind of woman you would have imagined at the side of insurance salesman François Holland. But in Closer and Paris Match, as well as in the French edition of Elle that I had downloaded in the meantime, there were other pictures of Julie Gayet. The photo of the actress on the red carpet at Cannes, in a red dress with lots of bare back—just above the curve of her rear end you could see a tiny tattoo—made it particularly clear what a stunning beauty she was. There was yet another photo in Elle, which the caption said had been taken at the film festival in San Sebastián, in which Julie Gayet was sitting in an old-fashioned chair, probably in some hotel lobby, almost without makeup, in trousers, her legs crossed, wearing sports shoes. She was in her early forties, I knew by then, but in the picture in the hotel lobby she looked no older than twenty-eight. A girl, a very normal girl even, but of a normalcy that would make any boy want to go sneaking off to the girls’ dormitory.

  And then you had the two pictures that were in almost all the papers. A photograph of a conference hall and an audience, some party congress from the looks of it. François Hollande was sitting in the front row. A little farther along was Ségolène Royal, his ex. It wasn’t completely clear which picture had been taken first. In the one, Hollande and Ségolène Royal, four chairs down, are listening attentively; in the other, the French president is looking up at a woman standing in front of him and to one side, with her back to us: Valérie Trierweiler, his girlfriend—but for how long? Hollande looks ruffled, perhaps even irritated. What are you doing here? Drawing attention to yourself? Julie Gayet was also in both pictures. She was sitting two rows back from Hollande. In the one picture she is smiling, in the other she stares pensively into space. If you look closely at the two photos, at the actress’s face, at her body language, to the extent you can read body language from a still photo, you see that she’s probably just being herself—that above all. Doing her best to be herself, you might say. Meanwhile, though, we all knew that it had been going on for months. That Julie Gayet glanced in the mirror and let her hair down whenever she heard the motorbike on the street below. Maarten van Hoogstraten, too, had acted as normal as he could at the New Year’s reception; this was the thought that forced itself on me now. The double-dealers always tried to act as normal as possible, and it was precisely that normalcy that sometimes gave them away.

  From our fight the night before, I had drawn the conclusion that my wife still cared about me. Today I realized that this, in itself, didn’t necessarily mean anything. Why, after almost thirty years, should Sylvia suddenly stop caring about me? Even if she had a secret affair going with an Amsterdam alderman?

  It was at that exact moment, as I felt my face grow hot and my heart grow cold as ice, that François Hollande winked at me. He had turned his head to follow the tall blonde girl with the serving tray, the Dutch butter girl who had walked on and was now standing with her back to us, a few yards away. In that one moment it was not the French president on a state visit to Amsterdam who was winking at me, but the man in the crash helmet, the en
amored president who slipped out a back door of his palace at night to pay a secret visit to his lover.

  After the wink, he said something in French, something I understood right away this time, but which I won’t repeat here, so as not to damage the French president’s reputation.

  I knew what I had to do. I winked back and I said something too. A comment that wasn’t really my style—like a too-flashy article of clothing you put on even though you know better, a leather jacket with too many zippers and shiny press-studs. A comment that could pass muster only when you made it plain as day it was meant ironically…and even then, only barely.

  François Hollande cocked his head a little and looked at me. For a moment I thought perhaps he hadn’t understood me, but then he started to laugh, raised both hands to his jowls, and pretended he was taking off a crash helmet.

  11

  The next day, my mother and I met for a late lunch at Oriental City on Damstraat.

  “You look tired,” she said after we had ordered and handed the menus back to the waitress. “You’re not working too hard, are you?” She removed the paper wrapper from her chopsticks, took them between her fingers, and made a few pincer movements. “I’m sorry, Robert, that was a silly question. Of course you’re working too hard.”

  Our table was on the second floor, at the window; sunlight fell at an angle across my mother’s face, making her wrinkles look even deeper than normal. I had to admit, my father was right about what he’d said to me a few times in the past: she had indeed “aged beautifully.” My mother had never struggled against growing old, she let nature take its course, the way you might decide one day to no longer mow the grass in a garden, to abandon the planters to their own devices and let the ivy go ahead and overrun everything. That’s why she now had the kind of face you rarely see on old people these days, especially not on older women. Just old, really old, with no structural alterations. No lifted eyelids that had then started drooping again anyway, no permanently amazed look in the eyes themselves, with pupils dilated to the size of egg yolks floating in ponds of oyster-colored sclera.

  The faces of women who had undergone remodeling often had something empty about them; something had been erased for good—as though they had pushed the delete button, so that we can never really read the first (or second, or third) version of their life stories. My mother’s face was more like a manuscript or typescript: old, yellowed, with countless strike-throughs and grainy, dried-up Tipp-Ex corrections, from a time when life stories were still written by hand or on typewriters.

  A few hairs stuck out of a light-brown mole on her left cheek, and something almost like a downy mustache darkened her upper lip. But still, it was not an untended face. Something silvery shimmered on her eyelids, something that matched the silvery-gray of her hair. That silvery-gray was not her natural color. And that was precisely what gave her such sophistication. Had she chosen dark blonde or brown, the combination with her wrinkled face would have told everyone that it was dyed, the color would have accentuated her age rather than make her look younger. No, it was exactly the opposite: the way a man who is going bald can always shave his head, so my mother looked “younger than her years”: years she did not try to muffle away by dying her hair a color that would have been biologically implausible in combination with the landscape of clefts and dry riverbeds that crisscrossed her face these days. “Erosion” was the first word that came to mind when I kissed my mother on her rough and, at the same time, remarkably soft cheeks.

  Had the suspicion concerning Alderman Van Hoogstraten and my wife left visible traces on my own face? Could it really be? I asked myself. Traces I myself hadn’t noticed, the way everyone who looks in the mirror on a daily basis thinks he hasn’t grown any older? Only when we see people at greater intervals do the changes become noticeable. The age, the suddenly visible decline. Or a new pair of spectacles, for that matter. A different hairdo. “Have you lost weight?” we ask. We mean it as a compliment, yet still, caution is advised: the person in question may also have a nasty disease.

  I rubbed my eyes, squeezed the bridge of my nose between thumb and middle finger. I knew my mother well enough: if she said I looked tired, I looked tired. There was no use denying it.

  “Yes, I really am a little tired,” I said. “A hectic schedule. Obama’s visit. Then François Hollande. The windmill debate. You know how it goes. You have to play the perfect host. Sometimes that’s no effort; other times, it just isn’t my day.”

  “Yes, I know you. You can’t hide it, you see it on your face right away. As far as that goes, you’re the image of your father.”

  “So how’s he getting along?” I asked, grateful for a chance to change the subject. “I mean, I saw him not so long ago, but I’d like to hear it from you.”

  I didn’t know what I would do if my mother went on asking about my fatigue. Is everything else all right, at home? With Sylvia? Is Diana getting along well at school? It wasn’t that my mother saw right through me. I wasn’t an open book to her, but there was also no use in trying to put one over on her. If I didn’t want to lie about something, I had to be sure to avoid the subject completely.

  “Your father’s getting old,” she said. “Really old, I mean.”

  For the last few years, this had become her regular approach to old age. By calling my father “really old,” she herself remained out of range. In that way, the concern about my father getting old became our common concern: hers and mine. My mother and I were the “younger ones,” we were younger than my father, she by a year, I by thirty-five, but we were above all in full possession of our faculties, with no physical complaints worth mentioning. There was only her forgetfulness, but so far there was nothing alarming about that.

  “Oh, really?” I said as the waitress placed our starters on the table: siu mai for her, wonton soup for me.

  The morning after my father and I visited the graveyard, I had suddenly asked myself what my mother thought about their plans for the immediate future. I assumed that the two of them had talked about it at length, that they had made the decision together. Whatever the case, it had never occurred to me to ask my father about it. What does Mama think about this? A simple question that I forgot to ask. I racked my brain: Could I have asked him that, but forgotten in the meantime? Did the two of you decide on this together, this business about taking fate into your own hands? Did Mama think it was a good idea right away, or did she hesitate at first?

  No, I was pretty sure of it: neither of us had brought up my mother’s thoughts on the matter. We had strolled around amid the tombstones and headstones. It was a lovely cemetery, with an old part and a new part. The old section was marked by thick, overhanging trees; the epitaphs on the headstones went back to the late eighteenth century. With me it’s automatic—no, obsessive: I stop, I read the name or names, and then the dates. These were often family graves, or at least graves with a married couple in them. The man usually dies first. I always look at the final year on a gravestone, I think everyone does that. Only then at the date of birth—and then the arithmetic starts. How much older was the husband? How many years later did she finally die?

  “Come on,” my father shouted. “Stop dawdling! This is it.”

  We had arrived at the new section. Fewer headstones, more markers on the ground. The trees here were thinner. It reminded me of a new housing development. The same rectilinearity, everything seemed to have been laid out according to a street plan.

  Gradually, the dates of death came closer—the people became older, too, lived longer on the average. In the old section the headstones were still carved from local stone, worn by the elements, green with moss, but here you saw more and more marble and decorative stone, apace with the increasing prosperity in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. Somehow, it didn’t seem fitting for my parents to end up in this new residential tract. Unfair. In view of their ages, they bel
onged in the old section, amid the listing stones, the worn letters, and the moss.

  “You know how your father is,” my mother said. “He thinks he can do anything. And not so long ago, he still could. You know how I’ve always depended on him. On his energy. A hike around the IJsselmeer? A monastery on a six-thousand-foot mountain in the Pyrenees? I’d let it cow me before I even started. But I knew there was no talking him out of it. He always gloried in that kind of thing. I didn’t want to be a party pooper. And you know what would happen then? I would always be thankful to him. Somewhere halfway up the mountain trail I would stop, huffing and puffing, and look down into the valley, and then I knew that I would never have been there without him. I was sweating, I was covered in mosquito bites, I would rather have stayed down below, but I also knew that I should be glad to be standing there now, looking down from above. When we went to the beach, do you remember how your father was always the first one to dive into the water? Even when it was cold as ice? He’d shout: ‘Come on, come on in, it’s wonderful!’ and I was always just relieved to be finally sitting on the beach—you were, too, I think. But there was no getting out from under your father’s enthusiasm. Do you remember?”

  “Yes, I remember,” I said. “Sometimes it was exhausting, literally, just being around him. I always felt like a dud when I was with him. I was a dud too—compared to him. Everyone was more of a dud than he was. I know exactly what you mean. It was tiring, often, but you did end up in places you would never have ended up in otherwise.”

  At a cemetery, for example. To help pick out a grave, for the two of you—for my parents. But I couldn’t remember whether he had told my mother about our visit. Wait—he’d said something, I remembered then, about how my mother didn’t care where she ended up after she was dead.