The Ditch

by Herman Koch

  “But people who are in a lot of pain and know that they don’t have long to live…,” I sputtered, for form’s sake, because I knew she was right.

  “That’s different. Are your parents in pain? Is their suffering unbearable? You know what it is, Robert? It’s really childish. It’s just clamoring for attention. They say they want to leave life in a dignified fashion. But it’s nothing but vanity. They want to avoid having you watch them go into decline. They want to stage-direct your memories. These are energetic parents who go hiking in the mountains. Not parents you have to lift out of bed and take to the toilet. There’s nothing dignified about it. It’s a misconception that going downhill is undignified. A deathbed, troubled breathing, last words, a final sigh: that’s the real dignity. Here, in this country, it’s all about toys. A theme park. Even death.”

  During that visit, though, no one talked about the plan, and not on later occasions either. “So?” Sylvia would ask from time to time. “Is it still going ahead?” And after I told her that I didn’t know, that neither of my parents had mentioned it lately, she would say: “See what I told you? It’s just clamoring for attention.”

  But now my father was walking here beside me—we were almost to the door of the canteen—and he said: “Sometime in the next couple of weeks. We don’t have an exact date. There are a couple of things we have to arrange first, and we’re not going to let that rush us. There’s no hurry.”

  “But…,” I started in, but I didn’t know how to go on. Three of the tables in the canteen, I saw, were occupied by about ten council members, aldermen, and civil servants. I stopped in my tracks. My father walked on; in the doorway, he turned to me.

  “But I thought the two of you were going to France first,” I said.

  “What are you standing there for? I thought you were going to buy me a cup of coffee.”

  i tried to sneak a glance at my watch, but he noticed right away. We had found a table at the window, the one farthest from the others. Out of earshot, or at least that’s what I hoped—but my father had never been very conscious of his volume. Not so loud, not so loud, my mother often said. We can hear you just fine.

  “You have to get going already?” he said. “This won’t take long. I just figured it wasn’t something to tell you about over the phone.”

  Two civil servants, at a table a little farther along, looked over and nodded to me.

  “Anyway, about that vacation,” he went on, after sipping quickly at his coffee. “Your mother and I have talked about that at some length. It just didn’t feel right. Why go on a trip when you know it’s going to be the last one? Too melodramatic, we realized that all of a sudden. Kind of like a prisoner on death row being served his favorite meal, I’ve never understood that either. If they asked me, I’d say forget it. The things they ask for are usually pretty banal, too, I read an article about it once. The biggest steak you can buy, or a Double Whopper with cheese and bacon from Burger King. This coffee is tepid.”

  He knocked back the rest of his cup and set it down on the saucer with a loud tick. People at the tables farther back were looking at us now too.

  “But…” I really had to watch out now, not to start every sentence with a “but.” When someone was planning to put an end to their life, it was probably natural to try to talk them out of it, even if they were almost ninety-five. The fact is, at the same time I felt something else: the same thing I’d felt at the graveyard in Ouderkerk. A slight tingling in my fingertips and at the back of my neck. The foreboding of something new. The end of an era.

  “And what about your birthday?” I said. “I thought you were at least going to celebrate that.”

  He took his cookie from the saucer and breathed a deep sigh. The cookie was packaged in see-through plastic, which he yanked on a few times. Then he rubbed it between his fingers and tried again.

  “What the hell!” he said. “Do they really have to do that? Does everything have to be wrapped in plastic? A cookie, for God’s sake! We talked about that too,” he went on. “You have landmark years. Seventy-five. Eighty. At eighty-five it starts feeling uncomfortable. As though someone who has come back three times for a standing ovation comes back again for a fourth. After that, it starts getting normal. Ninety, if you think about it, is already an obscene age. Yeah, I know, I’m guilty of it too. I’ve asked people: How old do you think I am? But I stopped doing that a couple of years ago. Besides, a birthday is always an ordeal. Back then, it was because of all the people who showed up. These days, it’s because of how many people don’t show up. It’s turned into a contest. A knockout race. And, right, I’ve won. No one shows up anymore because there’s no one left to show up. So who am I doing it for anyway? For you guys? For your mother? Give me a break! It’s no landmark anymore, Robert. We’ve reached the finish. There’s no use sprinting another hundred meters.”

  I said nothing. I fumbled with my left sleeve, tried to pull back my shirt and coat a little, so I could check my watch.

  “Yeah, I know, you have to get going,” he said. “We’re finished anyway. No vacation. No birthday. No more Christmas dinners. No New Year’s. What a glorious prospect! Paradise exists, even in this lifetime.”

  “And what about Mama? I’d like to ask Mama—”

  “You don’t have to look so pained. We’re not gone yet. Meet up with her. Come by the house. Give her a call. Call her tonight.”

  “Tonight? But you said ‘sometime in the next couple of weeks.’ ”

  “Only after a manner of speaking. Don’t take everything so literally, Robert. Just one thing, though: Don’t make a big, dramatic thing out of it, neither of us wants that. No teary farewells. We want it to go as naturally as possible. As of today, you know what’s going on. But we’ll just keep on acting normal, as though we’re going to see each other again tomorrow or next week sometime. So call her tonight. Talk to her. You both know how things stand. We both think it will be a fine way to die. The way I always hoped it would be. You go for a walk in the woods. That evening you sink down in your easy chair with a double whiskey. And the next moment you’re gone. ‘Do you want another whiskey?’ your wife asks. But no answer ever comes.”

  I looked at him, I tried to look him straight in the eye, but my father averted his gaze and looked out the window. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  “And then a couple of practical points,” he said. “On the day itself I’ll send you a text message. Then you have to wait twenty-four hours and then come and take a look. Do you still have a copy of the front-door key, or would you have to look for it forever? I brought one with me, just in case.”

  when i got back to my office a little less than fifteen minutes later, the journalist didn’t seem annoyed; she was keying something into her phone, and looked up only once I was sitting at my desk again.

  “Sorry about that,” I said, glancing at my watch by way of formality. “That was sort of urgent.”

  “No problem,” she said. “We’re pretty much finished. In fact, there’s just one thing I wanted to show you.”

  From her bag she took out a sheet of A4 paper in a clear plastic pouch, stood up, and laid it on my desk.

  Pictures, a photo series: it took a few seconds before I realized what I was seeing. There were about ten photos in all. In the first one, a policeman in riot gear, carrying a wicker shield and with his truncheon drawn, was rushing out from between two parked cars. Old-model cars, I saw, cars that told you right away that the photos had been taken somewhere in the early 1970s. I wasn’t exactly sure what they were, Fords perhaps, or maybe Opels? Squarer, more blockish than they are these days; all cars are roundish now. Standing in the middle of the street were three men, just boys maybe, wearing heavy knee-length coats and scarves. The scarves were pulled up over their noses, all three of them were wearing motorcycle or motor-scooter crash helmets. In the next two photos you saw the policeman swinging his truncheon,
but the boys didn’t run away, it looked like they were dodging the blows and actually crowding around the man. Then there were a couple of photos with the cop on the ground, halfway between the parked cars; he still had his shield, but he’d lost his truncheon. One of the boys had something in his hand, a brick, his arm was raised high. In the final picture you saw the boys running away. All you could see of the policeman were his legs, sticking out from between the parked cars.

  “Okay?” I said to the journalist, who had taken the chair across from my desk and was looking at me attentively. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “You don’t have any idea? You don’t recognize anything?”

  I looked at the photographs again. There were no faces to be seen, not the policeman’s, not the three boys’ either.

  “Does the name Mark Vader mean anything to you?”

  I shook my head.

  “It was front-page news back then. A nasty story. During a demonstration against the war in Vietnam, Mark Vader, an agent with the Special Patrol Group, is thrown to the ground by three men, just boys really, and receives blows to the head and the back of his neck with a brick. He remained paralyzed for the rest of his life.”

  It started coming to me: headlines, the general outcry about the “defenseless” policeman being beaten when he was already down.

  “Yes, I remember now,” I said. “And those pictures, they were in the paper then, too, weren’t they?”

  “The series won an award at the time. World Press Photo of the Year in the news category. The culprits were never found. They never turned themselves in either. They could have, though. Or else people could have found out who they were. All it would take was for one of the three to start bragging in a café about being in the winning World Press photo. But that didn’t happen either.”

  I suddenly sensed the direction this was taking. I felt it at the back of my neck, first cold, then hot, the hairs on my neck standing up.

  “Okay?” I said. “But what does this have to do with me?”

  I was on my guard now. I was sitting here across from a journalist, after all. A journalist who was going to describe my reaction in a full-spread article in her paper. An interview with the mayor of Amsterdam. A revealing interview. Even if I denied everything, the denial might still be used against me. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, that’s what they say. It was like being accused of sexual intimidation, of rape, of storing a distasteful brand of pornography on the hard disk of your computer. You could deny everything. Someone else had messed with your computer, the woman who accused you of rape is erratic and has been out to get you for years, your hand accidentally touched that buttock in the elevator—but there are no other witnesses, it’s your word against hers.

  “One of the three boys has come forward, after all these years,” the journalist said then, not surprisingly. “Anonymously. He doesn’t want to turn himself in, he just wants to tell his story.”

  I said nothing; I pretended to be examining the photos again.

  “This man,” she went on, “says that you are the boy with the brick. The boy who beat Officer Mark Vader into a wheelchair.”

  I leaned my elbows on the table, clasped my hands, and rested my chin on them. I tried to smile as I looked at the journalist.

  “My my, is that what he says?”

  “Yes, he’s a hundred percent sure.”

  I’m not the demonstrating type. Once in my life I took part in an anti-Vietnam protest and shouted “Johnson, murderer!” But that was an otherwise peaceful demonstration. Later, in the early 1980s, I had a girlfriend who demonstrated against everything. Everything that was fashionable at the time: nuclear power plants, cruise missiles. To keep the peace, I once marched along in one of the big demonstrations against the stationing of cruise missiles. Out of love for her. But I hated it. Especially the cheerfulness. The cheerfulness of all those thousands of people who never for a moment doubted that they were demonstrating for the right cause.

  While I looked at the journalist and kept smiling, I ran through my options.

  This was not me. I was not the boy with the brick in the photo. If I denied it, that was what the paper would say. Mayor denies dealing fatal blow.

  “So this man now claims that he is in these pictures, along with me?” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “And that I am the boy with the brick?”

  “I take it you’re now going to try to tell me that this isn’t you? That that boy—this man—is mistaken? That he laid that policeman low back then along with two completely different people? And that that one boy may look a lot like you, but in reality it’s someone else?”

  I looked straight at her, I was still smiling, I had to give it my all not to blink my eyes. Blinking always makes the papers.

  I wanted something else, though. I wanted the journalist to remember it all clearly, later on. To put my response, in all its details, into her interview.

  “He’s not mistaken,” I said without blinking. “It was a long time ago, but I remember it as if it were yesterday. Yes, that’s me. I’m the boy in the pictures. The boy with the brick.”

  19

  I’m old enough, I remember the days when you were still allowed to smoke on planes. Only in the last ten rows, so there was always a cozy crowd of smokers back there. The ones who hadn’t been able to get a smoking seat stood in the aisle. Those were always the ten most convivial rows on the plane, in the same way the most convivial people at a party always gather in the kitchen. Smoking and flying: the ideal combination. As Allen Carr writes in his bestseller The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, it is particularly those moments of stress associated with boredom that get us smoking: driving, talking on the phone, flying. I started again during the Christmas holidays. On the sly, I was almost going to say, but there was nothing sly about it.

  “You’ve started smoking again,” Sylvia had said not long before that, when she kissed me good night.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Not much, a cigarette every now and again. Does it bother you?”

  She sniffed, put her nose up close to my lips, and sniffed again. “Actually, I think it’s nice,” she said. “I think it smells nice. Manly.”

  Ever since then I’d stopped being furtive. At least as far as my wife was concerned. We decided, though, that it was better to keep it hidden from our daughter. So as not to set a bad example. I would wink at my wife whenever I announced that I was going to take the garbage out to the container on the corner. I waited for the day when my daughter, too, would ask me the inevitable question. But so far that hadn’t happened. My daughter and I kissed each other at least once a day, a peck or two on the cheek. When we did that I would hold my breath, the way you do when they pull you over for an alcohol screening. Briefly, at one point, I thought about buying a dog. There were moments, after all, when there were no full garbage bags to take to the corner. “I left something in the car,” I’d say then. “A dossier, I have to run through it for tomorrow morning.” My wife and daughter would be sitting beside each other on the couch. My wife would glance up for a moment and frown when I winked at her. There was little chance that my daughter had even heard me. “It wasn’t in the car,” I would say for form’s sake, when I came back ten minutes later. “It’s probably upstairs somewhere.”

  That’s right, now that I’d started smoking again there were moments when I wished we had a dog. When you have a dog, there is no need to fib. “I’m going to take the dog for a walk.” What could sound more natural than that? While walking the dog, you could easily smoke three or four cigarettes. I still remember what it was like, back before I quit. Time took on another perspective. After walking the dog for twenty minutes or so, a nonsmoker has had enough. When you’re waiting for a tram or a bus, you experience that same, automatically decelerating sense of time. Everything takes too long. Time coagulates. There is only the waiting. B
ut waiting in and of itself is nothing. At the bus stop I always lit up a cigarette. Or, even better: I rolled a cigarette. I still remember how disappointed I would be when the bus or tram would show up after the very first puff. When you smoke, you make time go to work for you. The smoker never waits. The smoker smokes.

  Diana was about seven when she first started talking about a pet. Yeah, yeah, of course, we said, that’s wonderful, but who’s going to take care of it? You? And what kind of pet are we talking about? we asked, even though we already knew the answer. A dog. “I really wish I could have a puppy.” And who’s going to let that puppy out? Are you going to do that? “Yeah, sure,” she said, “every day.” But a dog has to be let out twice a day. How are you going to do that? Before you go to school? Then you’ll have to get up half an hour earlier. We went on like that. We went on so long that the dog slowly disappeared from the picture. As I remember it, most of those conversations took place in the car, Diana in the back seat, her face in my rearview mirror. How the expression on that little face changed from cheerful and hopeful to disappointed and resigned. I could never keep looking at it for very long. A dog was not feasible. But were there pets that might be feasible, or just barely? When I brought up the goldfish, there was no reaction from the back seat. When a turtle was mentioned, she bit her lower lip. Boring. A guinea pig? A hamster? I hated the thought of it, I’d had a friend in elementary school who had guinea pigs (or were those hamsters?). The stench from the sawdust-lined terrarium brought tears to your eyes. And there was a little wheel that the hamster (or guinea pig) ran itself silly on, for hours on end, until one morning my friend actually found it dead on the treadmill. Deep in my heart, I was proud of my daughter for refusing to settle for a goldfish or a turtle. A rabbit? Rabbits? We went to a pet shop, where the salesman talked us into buying two (“then they’re not as alone”) pygmy rabbits and a hutch. It was a hutch on legs that we set up outside on the patio, close to the sliding doors, where we could see it from the dining room table. The rabbits stared out through the mesh in the door, and that was really almost all they did. Diana felt sorry for them, so we occasionally gave them run of the garden or the living room, where they crept under the couch right away, all the way to the back, so the only way you could chase them out was with a stick or a broom. But it was above all their total lack of interest in my daughter that finally put an end to their stay with our family. “I think they don’t know who I am yet,” my daughter said hopefully at first, when she would take one of them in her arms to cuddle and the animal would struggle to get away and then bite her on the finger.