The Ditch

by Herman Koch

  “Something’s happened,” I said. “I have to go right now.”

  Both aldermen looked at me. “Something bad?” Hawinkels asked.

  “My wife,” I said, looking only at Alderman Van Hoogstraten—let him worry about it all through the windmill debate, I thought. “Sylvia. I really have to go.”

  22

  Most days I covered the short distance from the mayor’s residence to city hall on foot, but that morning I had taken the bike; the first item on my agenda had been a lunch with Pijbes, the director of the Rijksmuseum. It was a lively lunch; the museum director spent the first half hour giving me a crash course in art history, from the first rock drawings all the way to Jackson Pollock and Jeff Koons. Then he got down to brass tacks, to the real reason why he had invited me to lunch.

  Might it be an idea, he started in enthusiastically—we were seated in the museum garden and had opened a second bottle of red—to use Barack Obama’s visit as a way to promote Amsterdam? In the form of merchandising? He was thinking, more specifically, in terms of coffee mugs, cookie tins, T-shirts, beer coasters, shot glasses, the whole kit and caboodle that already bore the likenesses of The Night Watch and The Milkmaid.

  By then the second bottle was half finished; when the director tried to refill my glass, I held my hand above it. It was okay to be a bit tipsy during the windmill debate, but not flushed or otherwise visibly under the influence. Just the right, relaxed demeanor, that was the ticket; if I was 100 percent sober, I wouldn’t be able to sit through the debate anyway.

  “The pictures of President Obama in front of The Night Watch were seen all around the world,” the museum director was saying. “Fantastic free advertising for the product Amsterdam. Why not make use of that? A cookie tin and a T-shirt with Obama and The Night Watch as background. Who wouldn’t want to have one of those? That way the picture would go all over the world again, but this time the museum would make a little money on it too.”

  The look on my face gave me away, I suspect. I told him I needed to think about it for a bit. That I wasn’t sure whether you could just do that, without permission from the president himself.

  “Of course, that’s why I came to you first,” Pijbes said. “I saw how the two of you clicked, I saw the chemistry. The way you winked at him during the prime minister’s speech. Maybe what we need is the direct approach. From mayor to president.” And, with a malicious smile, he added: “I would never dream of asking our prime minister to do something like that. No,” he said, shaking his head. “Perish the thought.”

  On my way back, I cycled along the Amstel. In front of the Carré theater, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and looked at my father’s message again. All the best to you, Sylvia, and Diana. Your parents. I’d never known that my father (or my mother) used WhatsApp. They had kept up with the times in every other way, though. E-readers, iPads, cell phones held no secrets for them. My mother had had her own Facebook account for the last five years or so. Not me. But my daughter was one of her friends. Sometimes I would hear Diana laughing on the couch beside me, and when I asked what was so funny she would say: “It’s Grandma again. She’s so hilarious!” But there was one area in which they had remained “old-fashioned”: neither of their cells were smartphones; they were old Nokias, fit only for text messaging at best.

  Just past the Amstel Hotel, halfway through the tunnel under the side canal, I stopped and looked again at the message, which was easier to see there in the shadows. I didn’t know my father’s cell number by heart, but this one seemed different to me in any case.

  Again, I checked the time—21:45—when the message was sent. And suddenly I knew…A little beep during a phone call.

  The kind of beep that lets you know someone else is trying to reach you—or that a new message has come in.

  Knowing that, what had I done? Nothing, apparently. Last night I had listened to Bernhard and told myself that, as soon as our conversation was over, I would find out who had tried to call or text me.

  In the end, though, I’d forgotten all about it. I got to the house, remained standing in the doorway for a while, went on talking, and then went upstairs to where my wife was reading Anna Karenina on the couch.

  And after that? After that, I’d gone to my study for a bit. To prepare for the debate, I consulted a couple of American websites about wind turbines. Admittedly, I looked mostly for the disadvantages of wind turbines, but, admittedly as well, I didn’t find them. A few minor disadvantages at most. Besides the well-known visual pollution, both sites emphasized the large number of birds that, unable to judge the speed of the rotating vanes, were chopped to pieces. I went in search of reference material. Exactly how many birds were killed by planes, trains, or cars? But I couldn’t find those figures either.

  From my trip with Bernhard through the western United States, I remembered a wind park in California, not far from the town of Mojave. In an otherwise empty landscape, without a single building, there were thousands of turbines scattered across a dozen low hills on the horizon. It was an impressive, perhaps even a lovely sight, insofar as you might think of thousands of spinning vanes as “lovely.” At least it didn’t hurt your eyes: the emptiness there could accommodate it. During the debate, without using the word “lovely,” I would emphasize that emptiness. In Holland, emptiness had been banished at least half a millennium ago.

  Then I would switch to the sea. Where, in these surroundings, did one find real, endless emptiness? At sea. A few thousand wind turbines in the sea, far enough from the coast that you couldn’t see them. Anyone who didn’t actually go to sea would never be confronted with the presence of those wind turbines. Who knows, for the crews of passing ships it might even be a lovely sight.

  I had forgotten about the beep. It was that simple; what’s more, it wasn’t the first time either. To leave a message unanswered was not uncommon for me. One of the disadvantages of WhatsApp was that it beeped only once; after that, you had to figure it out for yourself.

  Later last night as well, in the garden, I hadn’t looked at my cell phone. In fact, I had actually left my cell beside the bed when I went downstairs to look for the photograph of my wife in the redwood forest.

  Yesterday afternoon was when my father had come by city hall to tell me that they were going to carry out their plan a bit earlier. Sometime in the next couple of weeks, he’d said. And then? Yes, now I remembered: when I told him that I wanted to talk to my mother before then, he acted casual and said I could call her that evening.

  Tonight, he’d said. Literally “tonight.”

  Call her tonight.

  And the next moment I knew it with such certainty that it felt like a sudden change in temperature running down my spine; not a shiver, more like someone had dropped a popsicle down the back of my shirt

  He had known already, that afternoon…He had come to me at the last possible moment, so that I couldn’t interfere anymore, so that I couldn’t try to make them change their minds.

  Or at least try to make my mother change her mind. Call her tonight. In the end, though, I hadn’t. I had taken the garbage out to the containers, intending to call her when I got back.

  But then Bernhard’s phone call came in and interrupted things. 21:45. Back at the house, I hadn’t thought about the beep anymore, and not about my mother either. Yes, later on I did, I remembered now, too late: I had thought of her while I was brushing my teeth, it must have been around eleven thirty. There was still plenty of time, I thought, I would call her the next day.

  I looked at the display again. For the first time I turned my attention to the ciphers at the top of the message, which showed when someone had most recently been online. Sylvia and I always checked those when Diana was out late. Sometimes she would send a message at four thirty in the morning, saying she was sleeping over at a girlfriend’s (never at the new boyfriend’s, his house was too crowded for that, she claimed, but we figured
it was more likely that his parents wouldn’t allow it, because of their cultural background), but sometimes she forgot. It was always reassuring then, the next day, to at least see that she had been online at 07:02 that morning.

  last seen today at 06:41, said the little timestamp under the number I didn’t recognize, above the only, and most probably the last, WhatsApp message my father had ever sent me.

  Today. I checked the time at the top of my display: 14:35. I’ve said it before, I’m no good at math. I first had to convert the ciphers in my mind to “around six thirty” and “a little past two thirty” After that, it took me at least fifteen seconds to realize that about eight hours lay between the two.

  Eight hours ago, my father had used WhatsApp. Eight hours ago, he was still alive—they were still alive.

  I brought my weight down on the pedal, got the bike moving, and cycled out of the tunnel. Eight hours. I saw people sitting on the patio outside De Ysbreeker. In blissful ignorance. From that moment, and maybe even from the moment I first read the message and ran out of city hall, a parallel world had been set in motion.

  On the one hand there was the normal, visible world, the world of people blissfully drinking their coffee or walking the dog; on the other there was the real world in which things happened. Real things. Life and death. A plane exploding in midair, a ship full of refugees capsizing and sinking a few miles off the coast, two old people giving each other a final kiss, a final hug, and then dying.

  At first I cycled at top speed, but on Weesperzijde, across from the rowing club, I let the bike freewheel and gradually slowed down.

  Why was I hurrying? Twenty-four hours, that’s what my father had said. Then you have to wait twenty-four hours and then come and take a look. I automatically put my hand in my right pocket, I knew I had it with me, I almost never forgot my key ring. “Key ring” was actually a pretty grand word for the two keys I needed to open our front door, and the other two for my parents’.

  Eight hours ago. No, there was no sense in hurrying, I would get there too late anyway. Sometime this morning, before or after their final breakfast in bed or at the little table in the kitchen, my parents had taken what they had to take to put an end to their lives. How fast did that work? I realized that I had never asked him about it, about whether they were planning to use pills or something else (a potion?). Or how they had come up with the idea; no, that was another subject I felt I could never bring up myself.

  Twenty-four hours. We’re going to do it tomorrow. Was I supposed to start counting off those twenty-four hours from 21:45, or from 06:41? Strictly speaking, wouldn’t it be better to just turn around and wait until tomorrow morning?

  But there was another factor in play. Maybe there was no reason to hope that I would still find them alive, but now, as I turned left past Café Hesp and the Portuguese restaurant, I thought for the first time about the possibility that maybe they hadn’t completely succeeded.

  Maybe they had taken the wrong dose, too much or too little; maybe they had vomited up half of it but were too weak to call—to ask someone (their only son) for help.

  I crossed Wibautstraat and raced down the incline, along the Ringdijk and into the deeper-lying polder of Watergraafsmeer. Four meters. The polder there is four meters under sea level. If the dikes broke, the ground floors of the houses in Watergraafsmeer would be completely underwater. At the bottom, though, at the deepest point, I stopped pedaling. I went slowly, in a way visible to all. More than on other days, I was conscious of my visibility as a famous face. Look, there goes the mayor. For the first time since leaving city hall, I asked myself how I would go about it: how I was going to bike down the street where my parents lived, lock my bike, and then open the front door of their house.

  It’s a street where privacy is less of an issue than in other neighborhoods in Amsterdam, that’s one way of putting it. There are benches in the front gardens, on sunny days everyone sits out on the street side. Maybe not yet, not now, most people were still at work. Sometimes the neighbors barbecued in front of their houses. Children scribbled with colored chalk all over the sidewalks. When the weather was nice, to the outside world it looked almost idyllic. “Fantastic, the way people live out on the street like that, isn’t it?”

  No, we haven’t seen your parents since last night. The curtains are closed, you’re right, we noticed that too. Let’s wait until five, we were saying to each other, then we’ll call the police.

  The neighbors didn’t just sit on the benches and drink beer, no, they literally occupied the whole street, they appropriated the sidewalks. The public space no longer belonged to everyone, the paving stones served as chalkboards for their children.

  What are you doing here, stranger? That’s not only the way they looked at people from outside the neighborhood, no, that’s the way they acted too—they even dressed like that, in shorts and unwashed T-shirts, or with nothing covering their upper bodies at all. As though you’d walked into their bedroom. With their scantily clothed bodies, their white, hairy bellies, they encouraged you to move on as fast as you could, because you had no business being here anyway.

  Before my parents moved into the house, before I was appointed mayor, the two of us had lived in it for almost fifteen years. I, too, dressed in a way that bordered on the decent, used to sit on the bench in front of that house, a bench we bought at the Intratuin garden store on Nobelweg that very first summer. Diana was only eighteen months old. We had a sandbox in our 1,400-square-foot garden, but from the very first day she played only on the street. She made friends easily there, learned to ride a bike, it was there on a warm Saturday afternoon, shortly after her fourth birthday, that I took the training wheels off her bicycle. I no longer sat in the back garden to read my newspaper, but on the bench by the front door. To keep an eye on our daughter as she was playing, I told myself. And that was true, of course, but only partly so. I was also sitting there to keep an eye on the street, the sidewalk, my sidewalk. From behind my newspaper I greeted my fellow sentries, my neighbors—and neglected to greet the people who weren’t from around here.

  At the end of the Ringdijk I turned right onto Middenweg, then left at the lights onto Hogeweg. I was cycling a little more hunched over than on the first stretch along the Amstel, bent down a bit more over the handlebars, so that not everyone would recognize my face right away.

  So that they wouldn’t say, later on: Yeah, the day those two old people were found dead in their house, we saw the mayor there too. Close to there. Those were his parents, weren’t they? Didn’t he go inside? Didn’t he come out the front door?

  I cycled past the fountain at the corner of Hogeweg and Linnaeusparkweg, chiseled from granite by Chinese slave laborers, and one block later I turned right, down Pythagorasstraat.

  So far, there was no one out on the street. Still, I remained bent as low as I could, like a bicycle racer; I breathed in and out deeply. I tried to breathe as normally as possible, I didn’t want to sound out of breath, not if I had to say hello to one of the neighbors, an old acquaintance, and be forced to exchange a few words with them. No exchange at all would be seen later, in hindsight, as abnormal.

  But I was in luck. By the time I placed my bike in the rack in front of the house and locked it, I still hadn’t seen anyone. In theory, though, there could always be someone sitting at a window, half hidden behind the drapes, the lace curtains or venetian blinds, but I had to keep going. If I hesitated too much, if I looked left and right too often, the neighbor behind the lace curtains might describe that later as strange behavior.

  After a bit of fiddling with the key, I stepped inside.

  “Hello?” I shouted—not too loudly, not too quietly: normally.

  In fact, I knew right away. It was the silence. The kind of silence.

  The bedroom door was closed.

  “Hello?”

  I pushed the handle, opened the door a crack.

 
My parents were lying beside each other in their double bed. On their backs, their heads on the pillows.

  My mother’s mouth was open slightly, but it took no practiced eye to see that there was no breath passing through that mouth.

  I don’t know what it was that alerted me, when I turned my gaze to my father. Maybe the color in his face. It also reminded me of all those times I had climbed out of bed in the middle of the night and gone to Diana’s crib. From the day she was born until her first birthday, maybe once each night. I listened and I looked. I tried to pick up the sound of her breathing, to tell from the slightest movement of her little blanket that she was still alive.

  Now I was standing here, in my parents’ bedroom, the same bedroom that once, long ago, had been our bedroom—Diana’s crib stood at the foot of the bed for the first few months—and stared at the duvet on my father’s side.

  For the space of maybe five seconds—it could also have been three—I thought I was imagining it. The way you sometimes think that the train you’re in has started pulling away, but it’s a different train, the one on the track beside yours, that is in motion.

  No, I wasn’t imagining it.

  There was movement beneath the duvet.

  The movement of respiration that was weak, perhaps, but undeniably regular.

  Part

  III

  23

  What form would fascism take these days, were it to present itself to us anew? Wind, I have often thought. The new fascism will tolerate no back talk, and who would be foolish enough to talk back to the wind? To wind energy, to be more precise. Indeed, who would have the gall to protest against clean energy sources? Water and wind, nature in all its purity, vast forests, unaffected by the blight of acid rain—those have always been the natural allies of fascism. Dark, eternally green forests where you can walk with your dog for hours without seeing another person, where you can set your thoughts free. Thoughts about a massacre, for example—no animals being slaughtered, of course, only humans.