The Ditch

by Herman Koch

  Did she look at it guiltily? Or with a smile? Because she had succeeded so well in deceiving her husband with someone else? Without him having noticed anything yet? Or was it only a smile of infatuation? Was she in love? That was the first time the thought came up. In love. It was almost unbearable. Inadmissible, even. For about ten seconds I struggled to think about something else: about the president of Ajax, the moment when he had slipped a handful of salted nuts into his mouth, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed, but before the ten seconds were over the alderman’s face loomed up again. His silly face, I thought right away, but no, I shouldn’t think that way: I had to remain objective. I had to try to understand. To apply all the capacities at my disposal in figuring out why my wife would want to take that silly face in her hands, and then press her lips against the alderman’s flabby, always a bit too moist, and unmanly lips.

  I didn’t hear Sylvia come into the room—and I hadn’t seen her either: apparently I’d been lying there with my eyes closed, pondering. Before I knew what was happening, she had turned back the featherbed and crawled in beside me.

  She placed her iPhone on the nightstand, then clicked off her reading light.

  “Good night,” I said.

  “Oh, I thought you were asleep already.”

  I turned off my reading lamp too.

  What I had to say now was better said in the dark.

  “Sylvia?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I have to go to a funeral tomorrow. Hans van Wezel, you know, the city manager?”

  It remained quiet for a moment.

  “Oh, yes, that horrible business.”

  I took a deep breath—I tried not to inhale too loudly. “Normally speaking, I wouldn’t ask you, but would you please go along with me?”

  “Robert…”

  “It’s just that I suddenly realized that I would really like to have you with me. I have to speak at the funeral. A few words. I mean, it’s bad enough as it is. If I…I’d really like to see your face. Everyone will be there. I’d really like to be able to look up at you every once in a while, while I’m giving my speech.”

  I heard my wife sigh.

  “I’ve got something tomorrow afternoon. Diana and I agreed to go shopping for clothes. Is this really…It’s such a nasty story, too, Robert. Do I really have to be there?”

  I rolled onto my side, placed my hand carefully on her stomach.

  “I wasn’t planning to ask you. It’s because of tonight, all those faces at the reception…Please? Will you please go with me? For me?”

  I had put on my begging tone—in my thoughts, I was down on my knees in front of her.

  “What time does it start? I mean, maybe I can go into town with Diana when it’s over. I don’t have to hang around there for hours afterward, do I?”

  i lay on my back with my eyes open and listened to my wife’s measured breathing. Sometimes she snored a little, but it was a cute kind of snore: not the sawing-through-giant-redwoods kind of snoring that has destroyed so many marriages, no, more like a quiet whistle or creak—a rural sound, like a barn door or a shutter moving in the wind. But tonight there was only her breathing, her regular breathing: in and out, like the ticking of a clock. When I’m having a hard time getting to sleep, I sometimes pay attention to my own breathing. I’m rarely able to keep that up for more than thirty seconds, but I know that I’ve felt my eyelids droop any number of times while listening to my wife’s breathing.

  Tomorrow afternoon I would put an end to all the uncertainty. Everyone would be at the funeral: most of the council members, almost all the aldermen. A chance was sure to present itself at some point, when Sylvia and Alderman Van Hoogstraten were standing next to each other. Right at the start, maybe, when the family was welcoming the mourners; or later, in the procession to graveside—and otherwise at the kaffeeklatsch afterward.

  This time I would look at them differently. I would look at them through the eyes of a husband who knows he is being deceived.

  6

  The former city manager is no longer with us. Hans van Wezel did not resign, and we did not fire him either. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say: he didn’t give us a chance. He could have, he could have resigned. He would not have received an honorable discharge, that was impossible, it would have leaked out sooner or later anyway, but at least we could have done it discreetly, we wouldn’t have had to make a production out of it.

  “Have you been taking more money out of the cashbox lately?” my secretary had asked me one day, shortly after the Christmas recess.

  “No, not that I know of,” I said. “Actually, never. I mean, I take some out every once in a while, but never more than ten or fifteen euros for a sandwich and a cup of coffee along the way.”

  The cashbox. I need to explain that. The cashbox is a little, red metal box with a lock on it. It probably looks more like a breadbox than anything else, and it’s in the bookcase in my office. In plain sight. Ready cash, that’s what it’s for. Even a mayor needs a little ready cash. My secretary puts a few hundred euros in it now and then, in small denominations: tens, twenties. When the money’s almost gone, she fills it again.

  I keep the key to the cashbox in the top drawer of my desk. A drawer that can be locked, too, but I almost never do. My office door has a lock on it, of course, but I never use that during the day, only when I go home at night.

  To make a long story short, my secretary had noticed that, in the last three months, the cashbox needed filling all the time. Hence her asking me whether I was using it more than usual. But my spending patterns hadn’t changed, I was 100 percent sure of that. I preferred not to use the cashbox. It was something instinctive: Why, with my salary, should I declare every single cup of coffee? I preferred to pay for my own coffee, toasted cheese and tartar sandwiches, out of my own pocket, and I never asked for a receipt. The fact of the matter was, I took a little money out of the cashbox every now and then, but only to please my secretary. When I did that I would ask for a receipt and put it in the compartment in the right side of the box, along with the other receipts. The compartment on the left was for the tens and twenties.

  My secretary, the city manager, and I were the only ones with a key to my office. The office I almost never locked during the day. In theory, anyone could have walked into my office, taken the key from my desk drawer, and pulled money out of the cashbox—but only in theory.

  “How much is missing?” I asked my secretary.

  “During the last three months, somewhere between six and eight hundred euros. That is, if you’re sure you didn’t take out more than thirty a month. For the months before that, I’d have to figure it out.”

  We thought the city manager would deny everything, but as soon as we confronted him he burst into tears. “I don’t know,” he whimpered when we asked him why he’d done it. “I really don’t know.”

  For a moment, we were dumbstruck. I was just about to ask him what he had done with the money, whether he had gambled it away or just bought a new TV, when he said he would give it all back.

  “All of it,” Hans van Wezel blubbered. “Not just the money. The laptops and cell phones too. I didn’t sell any of it. It’s all at my place, in the storage closet.”

  Later on, my secretary and I tried to reconstruct whether one of us, directly or indirectly, had asked about anything but the money from the cashbox, but we couldn’t. Things were stolen all the time at city hall anyway, nothing was safe there: laptops, iPads, and phones even disappeared from the council chambers. We decided not to go to the police with it. We settled for firing him, effective the end of the month. A letter of recommendation was, of course, out of the question.

  A few days after our decision was made, the city manager knocked on my office door.

  “Couldn’t you reconsider?” he asked, after closing the door behind him and sinking into th
e chair across from my desk. “I can really give it all back. The money too. I’ve still got it.”

  “That’s not the point, Hans,” I said. “But it might not be a bad idea to get help. To go into therapy, I mean.”

  His lower lip began to quake. I thought he was going to burst into tears again, but he took a few deep breaths and looked at me.

  “There’s no way I can do that,” he said. “My wife would never understand. And my children. How am I supposed to explain this to my children?”

  I vaguely recalled that the city manager had two children in their teens. A boy and a girl…No, two girls. I always made a point of remembering such things: the names of wives and children, birthdays and anniversaries. Not that I knew all that by heart, of course, my secretary did it for me. Mrs. Schreuder had a big fat notebook for that very purpose. A black, rectangular notebook. At around ten each morning, when she came in with my second cup of coffee of the day, she would have that notebook under her arm. “Alderman Hawinkels’s son turns eighteen today,” she would read aloud. “His name is Pieter. The wife of Theo, the doorkeeper—her name is Annie—will be released from the hospital tomorrow. But don’t ask him any more than that. Finished with active treatment, I think they call it. But let him tell you about it himself, if he feels like it.”

  So when I ran into Alderman Hawinkels during the course of the day, in the hall or at the self-service buffet in the cafeteria, I would casually shake his hand. “Congratulations with Pieter. You think he’s ready for his finals?” I would lean over the doorkeeper’s counter and pull a packet of tissues out of my inside pocket. “I understand, Theo. I understand very well. You know, why don’t you just take the day off tomorrow, the whole day? You’re needed at home more than we need you here. We’ll muddle along without you for a day.”

  The mayor with the human face, that’s what they called me once in a four-page profile in Het Parool. That was the headline above the interview: “Robert Walter: The Mayor with the Human Face.” It was sort of strange; I’d been in office for less than a year, it seemed to imply that my predecessor’s face had been somehow less than human. Which wasn’t all that farfetched, in fact. Mayor Jan van Hiemstra–Henegouwen had had an aristocratic air about him, and that’s putting it mildly. As though he felt he was too good for a city like Amsterdam. A man who shakes his head and actually pulls up his pant legs as he steps over a dog turd. On Queen’s Day, at a stand selling hot dogs and hamburgers, he had asked for a knife and fork. And at one of the annual memorial services for the victims of the El Al jet that crashed into the flats in the Bijlmer, he had said: “They were also our people. No matter how you look at it, they were from Amsterdam too.”

  Maybe I was remote, strict, maybe I did have a short fuse—all qualities that appeared more than once in the course of the interview—but I had my face going for me. It often looked grouchy, angry even, but when I suddenly laughed or told a joke, you could see the people relax.

  Now, to my horror, or my amazement—it’s hard to pinpoint the exact emotion anymore (and besides, aren’t horror and amazement simply two branches off the same emotional trunk?)—I saw that the city manager was leaning down to get something out of his bag. His bag, which was leaning against one leg of his chair. No, I can’t recall my exact emotion, but I do remember the details of what happened. The way the only thing you might remember about an accident is that hubcap, the windshield wipers that went on sweeping back and forth senselessly, even though it had stopped raining a long time ago. The radio that went on broadcasting live coverage of a football match.

  The city manager’s bag was one of those brown leather school satchels, with worn spots. The kind of satchel that stupid boys took to school with them long ago, boys who parted their hair on the side, who rooted for the Americans instead of the Vietcong. These days you saw satchels like that only in the hands of certain unworldly schoolteachers, civil servants, or bookkeepers, men over fifty who also tended to view the cell phone as a diabolical contraption.

  Hans van Wezel leaned down and took a rope out of the satchel. When it comes to the rope, too, everything in my memory zooms in on the details. It was a fairly thick rope, the kind they use to hang swings on, a little less thick than the climbing ropes in a gym. It was brand-new, never been used, bought this morning or yesterday afternoon at a hardware store for the sole purpose of pulling it out of the worn brown leather satchel here, today, before my eyes.

  “I’m desperate,” the city manager said. “You better realize what you’re doing to me. If you stick to your decision, I’ll go out today and hang myself.”

  7

  The funeral was at Nieuwe Ooster, my favorite cemetery. People who consider themselves important often sign up for the waiting list at Zorgvlied instead, even before they’re dead. There’s no denying that Zorgvlied is a lovely cemetery, too, but it’s too crowded for my taste. I don’t know how it works with cemeteries and waiting lists, but a day will have to come when there’s just no room left for anyone else there. When they’ll have to hang a sign out by the gate: no vacancy. A backlit sign, like the ones at motels and boardinghouses. At Nieuwe Ooster, though, they can go on socking them away for years. There’s plenty of room and more between the thick, old trees. It’s got light and shadow. It breathes. Zorgvlied is more like a country town, a village, a holiday park where they’ve built the bungalows close together to boost turnover.

  I’ve been to these funerals often enough before, funerals for suicides. Sometimes the act itself had been in the air for years, other times it came as a complete surprise. On the surface, everything is just the way it is at other funerals: the flowers, the ribbons, the carefully chosen clothing, the sunglasses when the weather’s nice, the refreshment room afterward, the slices of cake, the flimsy sandwiches, the occasional guest—it’s eleven o’clock in the morning—knocking back his first vino blanco of the day. But the speeches echo with incomprehension. With wondering why. We respect your decision. Okay, that’s what they say in the death notices sometimes, it’s the code that lets the outsider know that one is talking about a self-chosen death, words that come back in the funeral speeches.

  But when you look at it in the cold, clear light of day, there’s nothing to respect. We tie ourselves in knots trying to give the suicide a dignified send-off. To bring them to their final resting place, as they put it so nicely. But what about the others, the ones who have stayed behind? With their perplexity? With their anger?

  How could you, you dirty, egotistical bastard! is what we actually feel like shouting at the coffin. What made you think you could duck out and leave this mess behind? Just because His Highness “couldn’t face it anymore”? “I saw no other way out,” that’s what your suicide note said. But what made you think that? Of course there was another way out. You were just too lazy, you didn’t feel like listening to us, you always were a lousy listener. Chickenshit! Piss off to your grave, you!

  That’s the crux of it, after all; the best thing is to simply look it in the eye. Suicides, with the exception of the psychiatric cases—the patients with psychoses, the bipolar—rarely stand out by virtue of their exceptional backbone. That’s hard to explain, hard to say out loud: at least if you want to spare the survivors. Although I sometimes have the feeling that the survivors are the ones who understand best. People who take their own lives aren’t the smartest of the bunch. It took me years, half my life, to figure that out. It’s the thread that connects all suicides. Average intelligence. Or a little less than average. No clever clogs, in any case. However, a pinhead with an IQ of zero is too stupid to even come up with the idea. Or too lazy. He’d rather loll around on the couch a little longer, rather than try to figure out how many sleeping pills you need in order never to wake up again.

  For the sake of argument, see me as the measure of an above-average intelligence. Would I ever take my own life? No. Never. No matter what. I have, however, toyed with the thought of suicide. Not so often
these days, though. More when I was back in my twenties. But I think all intelligent people do that, toy with the thought. It’s sort of like being up on top of a tall building and looking over the edge, the miniature cars far below, the people the size of ants, the sounds of fire engines and ambulance sirens in the distance. Then the fantasy of climbing over the balustrade, onto the roof: the last tumble you’ll ever take has started, the ultimate free fall.

  What suicides don’t understand is that life has to be lived down to the butt-end, that’s all. Maybe your family finds out that you’re nothing but a common thief, but no amount of shame can offset life itself. Even through the bars of our cell we can see the sun come up, hear a bird sing. From the prison kitchen, the smell of food reaches our nostrils: not very nice food, sure, but when you’re dead you can’t smell anything at all. Why else would death row prisoners try to prolong their lives for as long as possible? Why are they grateful for every stay of execution? Because they’d rather be given life imprisonment. “Life imprisonment”—the term says it all. For as long as your life goes on. Someone embezzles ten million euros and, rather than be unmasked, tosses himself from the tenth floor of an office building. Not very smart. In fact, just plain stupid. Someone loses the love of their life. I can’t live without him/her, the widow or widower says. But that’s not true. There is mourning, there is bereavement, there is pain—but mourning, bereavement, and pain actually give you back the sense of being alive. Maybe even more alive than you were before your loss. Without him/her, life has no meaning, the survivors say; but if life has ever had any meaning, it’s now. A man takes a little money out of a cashbox, he stuffs a wayward iPad into his brown book bag, in the cloakroom he may rummage through coat pockets to see if there’s anything valuable in them. He gets caught, he gets fired. No charges are pressed against him. He is given the chance to lose gracefully. Dishonorably, but without disgrace. Then he makes a crucial mistake. He threatens to commit suicide. He doesn’t dare to face up to his family. He doesn’t understand that his life will only be enriched by facing up to his family. His wife will realize that he’s less of a bore than she always thought. His children will see that their father is no paragon of virtue. They themselves have probably stolen the occasional Mars bar or bag of potato chips from the supermarket, or taken a couple of euros out of their father’s or mother’s wallet. But you knew it was wrong, didn’t you, Dad? Yes, I knew that, but it was stronger than I was. Disgrace doesn’t exist. Animals don’t experience disgrace. It’s a human invention. Those who live without disgrace are freer, closer to nature. A grown man is caught stealing money and electronic equipment. At the home improvement center he buys a length of rope, puts it in his satchel, goes to his employer and threatens to take his own life. It’s a scene from a comedy. Only people with no sense of humor actually hang themselves after a scene like that. Stupid people.