The Ditch

by Herman Koch

  Before I could reply, however, I heard the key turn in the lock of the front door, and a few seconds later Diana and her boyfriend came into the dining room. While Bernhard and Christine were getting up to hug Diana and kiss her cheeks, I tried as hard as I could to remember the boy’s name. But I couldn’t. In fact, it didn’t matter all that much; I would only have to give him a different name here anyway, an alias, like the one I’ve given my wife. Again, upon hearing the name of my daughter’s boyfriend, everyone would know right away who we were dealing with. Preconceptions stuck to his cultural background, too, like dust particles to a staticky wool sweater. That explains a lot, people might not quite say aloud, but they would definitely think it when they read newspaper reports of a shooting or stabbing involving people who shared that particular cultural background.

  “Diana, aren’t you looking lovely!” Christine said as she hugged my daughter. “And you’re so big! Sorry, I’m sorry, I know I sound like some maiden aunt.”

  “And you are…?” Bernhard held out his hand to the boy and tossed me a questioning glance.

  “This is…,” I started in—but fortunately Diana’s boyfriend spoke his own name, and I vowed to myself never to forget it again.

  “Pleased to meet you, sir,” the boy said.

  “Would you two like some of my delicious dessert?” Sylvia asked.

  “No thanks, Mom,” Diana said. “We’re going upstairs to watch the rest of True Detective.”

  “Goodbye, ma’am, sir,” the boy said before they got to the stairs. “Very nice to have met you. Sylvia,” he said to my wife. “Sir.” That last one was directed at me.

  “What a nice girl she’s become,” Bernhard said once Diana and the boy had left. “Or actually, not a girl anymore, a young woman already.”

  The nuance did not escape me. Bernhard always talked about pretty or ugly women, no other category existed for him. Nice wasn’t really part of his vocabulary.

  I was a proud father, of course. After Sylvia—no, besides Sylvia, Diana was the prettiest woman in my direct surroundings. She had her mother’s eyes, the same deep, dark sheen to her black hair. Raven-haired—if that adjective applied to anything at all, it was to the color of my wife’s and daughter’s hair. But she was definitely no fashion model, even the proud father could see that. My wife’s native language had one adjective more than our own to denote someone’s attractiveness. The sliding scale of attractiveness that began at the bottom with repugnant, ugly, unsightly and then rose by way of nice (as in “what a nice girl”) on its way to attractive, pretty, beautiful, irresistible…What comes after irresistible? Ravishing, perhaps?

  In my wife’s language there is, besides beautiful, attractive, ugly, a second term for attractive that means something different than it does with us. Our attractive actually means only one thing: that someone may not be a ravishing beauty (fashion model), but that they still look very good. With the emphasis on look. In our language, attractive has to do only with appearances; in my wife’s language, it is concerned primarily with the inner person. In other words: someone may have a nose that is too large, that throws their whole face out of kilter, they may have buck teeth and all-too-prominent gums, skin that is blemished by spots, hairs, or eczema, a body that could stand to lose twenty kilos, but despite all these glaring defects they can be extraordinarily attractive. First of all, because of what are actually outward traits anyway: an irresistible smile that makes us forget the teeth and gums, a glance that forces us from the very first moment to stare only into those eyes, and pushes the surrounding face into the background, a voice so dark that all our fibers tremble at the sound of it, a voice that touches something deep inside us, that transports us—beside us in bed at night—to a country beyond the horizon where we wish we could spend the rest of our lives.

  Attractive, in my wife’s language, makes up for a great deal, perhaps for everything: one leg that is shorter and thinner than the other, or that even stops completely just below the knee, missing fingers, or a thumb that looks more like a finger or claw of some other species of animal than our own broad, human one. The almost total absence of hair growth in men, the almost total absence of breasts in women.

  “Yes, she’s nice isn’t she?” said Sylvia—the proud mother who I knew was now using nice to mean attractive, attractive in the sense it had in her own language.

  “I’d actually like to…,” Bernhard started in, pulling a pack of Marlboro Lights and a lighter from his pocket. “But I don’t know whether you would…”

  “Please, go do that in the garden!” Christine said, before Sylvia or I could open our mouths. Bernhard glanced at me, a little like a child who has just dropped a glass and broken it.

  “I’m pregnant,” Christine said.

  For a few seconds all was silent, a silence broken only when Sylvia put her dessert spoon back on her own plate.

  “We’re going to have twins,” Christine said.

  16

  We sat in the deck chairs in our garden, both of us smoking our second cigarette. It was perhaps a bit too cold to be sitting outside, but I had vowed not to go in until I had told Bernhard about my suspicions concerning Sylvia. As mentioned, I’d had doubts about whether I should do that at all, but this evening, after a couple of beers and half a bottle of wine, those doubts had disappeared into the background. Bernhard was my best friend. The day after tomorrow, he and his pregnant wife would leave for Boston. I would let him finish talking first, wait calmly for a pause in his discourse.

  “There are things we, as humans, simply can’t fathom,” Bernhard went on; his talk had started a while ago—exactly where I couldn’t remember anymore, probably with the vastness of the universe, with light being sucked into a black hole. “Think of it this way: It’s basically the same as if our eyes couldn’t perceive colors. As if we saw everything in black and white. In a world like that, a tulip is a light gray.”

  This was what Bernhard had mastered like no other: making the world around us exciting again. We could go out to dinner with a group of friends and spend the whole evening talking about soccer, women, politics, and the rise or fall of property values, but once Bernhard got rolling we all became little boys again, lying with our heads together in a field, chewing on a blade of grass and staring up at the blue sky. Boys who first try to pick out animals and other shapes in the clouds floating by, but go on after that to fantasize about what might be behind those clouds. How far away is the sun that we feel warming our faces? How long will it go on shining? Into eternity. But what’s eternity? Does eternity go on existing after you’re dead?

  “A deaf-mute person, for example, knows that sounds exist,” Bernhard went on. “Because we, the ones who can hear, have told them so. But now try to imagine that we were all born deaf and mute. You and me, Sylvia, Christine, all of us. We don’t have the faintest idea what sound is. We pound a hammer against a piece of iron, but we don’t hear it. We speak to each other in sign language, that’s all we know, that’s the way we’ve always done it. The wind doesn’t rustle through the trees. The waves hit the beach in total silence. As a matter of fact, we don’t need sound at all. Besides being empty, the cosmos is above all silent. It’s really interesting, as a thought experiment. How would the human race have evolved without sound? Would we have invented the same things? Or would they have been very different things, to help us get ahead in a world enveloped in silence? Would Columbus still have discovered America? And would that still have happened in 1492? Or fifty years later? How would we experience a war without sounds? Or a soccer match? We can’t be deafened by incoming artillery anymore, because we’re already deaf, we have been all our lives. The referee doesn’t hear us shouting ‘boo,’ because there’s nothing to shout. He can’t blow his whistle for a penalty either. But otherwise everything’s the same. The grass still smells like grass. The soldiers are still chased out of their trenches and run to their deaths. But they do
n’t scream when an artillery shell punctures their chest. The dying soldier doesn’t scream for his mother. He thinks about her, he still does that. He uses gestures to tell his comrades to leave him behind, that they should leave him here amid the blown-apart carcasses of the horses, the pools of mud and the barbed wire. With gestures he makes clear to them what they, if they get out of here alive, should tell his mother: that he didn’t suffer.”

  I leaned over to my friend to light his next cigarette and asked myself—not for the first time—how long he would have stuck it out with Sylvia if it had been him rather than me who had appeared on the scene first, amid the plastic tables on that dusty little square. In a separate reality, he would have had time to utter his corny opening lines. At the disco, which bore no signs of being a disco on the outside, where we went for a drink next, it would have been me rather than him who sat on the uncomfortable wooden bench beside the dance floor, next to Sylvia’s elder sister. I wasn’t like Bernhard; after a lot of waffling I probably would have asked the sister to dance. But would I have put an end to my travels for that sister, because I couldn’t imagine living a life without her? And how long would it have been before Bernhard had had enough of Sylvia? A day? Two days? A week? Or would he actually have married her in my stead? Would I have been his witness to their marriage, rather than the other way around? And—and here my imagination ground to a halt at times, in the middle of the night, on those half-sleepless nights when I stared wide-eyed at the ceiling and listened to Sylvia’s breathing, still reassuring at that time—would I simply have married the sister out of desperation, in order to at least be able to lead that parallel life, apart from but still close to the woman who really should have been mine?

  The wedding was held eight months after we met. In her hometown, at my request. I don’t know what it was, but I wanted to have as few people there as possible. As few people from Holland, in any case. Bernhard was, as I’ve said, my witness, but the rest of my circle of friends I left in the dark as much as I could. From the start, I also tried to discourage my parents from traveling off to the remote interior. “It’s really far away,” I said. “There’s nothing there, her parents’ house is small, you won’t be able to stay there, there’s only one hotel, but it’s not a place you’d want to spend the night.” What I forgot was that my parents, particularly my father, only felt encouraged by stories about remote, hot interiors and uncomfortable hotel rooms. “If our only son is getting married, we’ll be there,” my father said. “And that’s that.” My mother asked one last time about the beds in that hotel, whether they at least had clean sheets—I could have convinced her to stay at home, but my father had already gone to a special travel store and bought a hiking map of the surroundings. “Not far from there, there’s a medieval footpath to a twelfth-century Crusaders’ fortress,” he told my mother, “on a mountaintop six thousand feet high.” My mother only looked at me, sighed deeply, and lowered her eyes.

  I should be honest about my reasons for not wanting to get married in Holland. Sylvia’s parents hadn’t even considered the possibility, they simply assumed that their daughter would celebrate her wedding in the place where she was born. For me, the main point was not to introduce my bride-to-be to the Netherlands all too quickly. To the Dutch, to be more precise. Dutch men. So far, besides me, she had seen only Bernhard, a man more handsome than me by any standards, even though he wasn’t her type. There, in that hot interior of hers, we were the only tall, blond gods from the north, but in Holland she would immediately see that there were thousands of men like me. Better and worse versions of me, but all just as tall and just as blond. Wouldn’t there be, even if only from a purely statistical standpoint, plenty of better versions among those thousands who might also be her type?

  Of the wedding party itself, I remember mostly the things that didn’t happen. I don’t know exactly why it was, probably my own prejudices, but I had been half-expecting certain rituals that made you hope for as few lookers-on as possible. No countrymen, in any case. Countrymen who would go on for years telling juicy anecdotes, anecdotes that confirmed the preconceptions, stories in which the national character of my wife’s compatriots would serve as the radiant focal point. I knew full well that, had I been the only Dutch guest at our wedding, I myself would have wanted to go on for years dishing up anecdotes like that. I didn’t doubt that for an instant. But in the end, nothing I had feared actually happened. Or rather, nothing that could have made me dread the presence of my countrymen.

  On the spit in the garden, it’s true, an entire animal carcass revolved slowly—the carcass of an animal that could still easily be recognized as such, with legs, a head, and a tail, and here and there the remainder of a patch of hide that went up in flames, crackling and spattering fat all around, but as far as I could tell there had been no unusual cruelty involved in the animal’s demise. (I won’t name the species of animal here either; some species would rule out certain countries as the one my wife comes from.) There were also no rituals involving blood or intentional mutilation. No dishes were shattered, no glasses were thrown into the fire, the women were not separated from the men before the ceremony. It’s true, there were children running around the party grounds till far past midnight, until sunrise; in Holland a babysitter or overage relative would have brought them to bed long before that. An overage relative whose presence was no longer really considered desirable—in our own country, older people are seen mostly as annoying busybodies who you hope will piss off as soon as possible. In my wife’s hometown, the children ate and drank and danced along with us, the littlest among them fell asleep in the grass, but even the oldest relatives and villagers stuck with the party until the break of day. And finally, no bloodied sheets had to be hung out the window of our bedroom as proof my wife was still intact—all mine; that I was the first man to take her in his arms on that same particular night.

  “the most important challenge facing us since time immemorial has been the question Why?,” Bernhard said; behind the glowing cone of his cigarette, his face remained largely hidden in shadow. “Not just for the scientist, for all of us. First we explored the world, then the universe. We put people on the moon. People may land on Mars within the next fifty years. But believe me, what we find on Mars will hardly outclass our visit to the moon. Only more craters and rocks and dry riverbeds through which water may or may not have run long ago. It’s just farther away, that’s all. On the whole, an expedition to Mars will turn out to be a disappointment. No, our real objective is a lot closer than that. In fact, it’s all in here.” Bernhard tapped his finger against the side of his head. “In our minds. We have to be willing to think further than we’ve ever thought before. We have to be deaf people, but deaf people who want to be able to hear. For a deaf person who assumes that all mankind is deaf as well, hearing would be the greatest conceivable discovery. That’s where we have to get to. We have to stop wanting to travel farther all the time, but only to travel inside. We have to want to think what has been unthinkable until now.”

  Till then I hadn’t said a word, at most an affirmative grunt to show that I was still listening. I was reminded of Bernhard’s wedding; not one of his first two weddings, but this latest one, with Christine. In the last twenty-five years, marriages in the Netherlands have been celebrated only ironically, and Bernhard and Christine’s wedding was no exception. It was held here in Amsterdam, in the accommodations shared by both city hall and the opera house, in a special wedding room done up in green and orange pastels with a crooked chair sticking out of the wall. The table on which the marriage vows are confirmed stands atop a turntable, which revolves slowly during the signing of the register. The waiting list for this wedding room stretches out into eternity. But what are the crooked chair, the weird colors, and the turntable meant to say except that we shouldn’t take this marriage seriously? It’s marriage with a wink and a nudge. We get married, but in fact it doesn’t amount to anything, of course.

  It was at
the end of our own wedding party when it happened. Most of the guests had gone home. I walked out to the edge of the garden, and then farther still, past the chicken coop and the little shed where Sylvia’s parents kept their canned vegetables and cured meat, where the garden tools hung on the wall and the homemade sausages from the beams. There was no fence; the grass faded seamlessly into a plot of fallow land where only a few thistles and low shrubs grew amid the boulders. Here the terrain dipped at first, went down into a dry ditch, then climbed steeply on the far side. There was a little path there, I knew that, Sylvia and I had climbed it before. After a few hundred meters uphill you reached a point, a sort of hollow in the rocks, where you could see her parents’ house and almost the entire town far below.

  I had no real plan. No, in fact I did. But it was a plan that started taking form only once I had sunk to my knees and then carefully—one foot behind the other and my hands searching for a hold on the hard ground—began crawling down into the ditch. I was going to follow the winding path up to the hollow in the rocks. I was happy. At that moment I knew for sure that I had never been happier in my life. I felt a need for perspective, for distance, if you will. To the extent it was possible in the dark, I wanted to look down from that hollow, from that height, on my new life. On my newly won happiness. But I had barely reached the bottom of the ditch when I heard someone behind me quietly speak my name.

  “Robert…”

  Shall I throw caution to the wind and give my wife’s eldest brother a name that really fits him? The problem, though, is a different one. His real name fits him so well, fits him so perfectly, like a custom-tailored suit, that you can’t take it off of him with impunity. I’m quite content with the names I’ve come up with for my wife and daughter; in fact, the more I use them the more their real names recede into the background. Sylvia and Diana—I’ve already become attached to those names, it will be hard to ever say farewell to them.