The Ditch

by Herman Koch

  Solid evidence would be sure to destroy things. An incriminating e-mail or explicit text message would cause irreparable damage. For the rest of my life I would be able to reproduce the text word-for-word. At unsuspecting moments, those words would work their way to the fore and go on sullying our future—our future together, I allowed myself to think now, the happiness we’d regained. Three or four years from now I would watch from the beach as my wife waded carefully into the surf, and suddenly the text More and more kisses! See you on Monday, Maarten would appear as a caption at the bottom of the screen. As long as there was no evidence, I reasoned, anything was still possible.

  And as long as everything was still possible, the whole thing could also suddenly be over. That’s the agreement I made with myself. The agreement I wanted with all my might to make with myself. If—between today and a point in the not-so-distant future—it should suddenly be over, I would never go on blaming her. I didn’t know if I was capable of that, but it was worth a try. I would give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it had never happened at all. As long as I didn’t start in about it, it had never happened.

  The past, though, that was what troubled me most. To what extent had our shared past been tainted by this? I thought about the things we’d done together in the last few months. Whether they still held the same meaning, now that they were covered in a shimmer of suspicion. The possibility of a double life. My wife who smiled at me—but a smile meant only to throw dust in my eyes.

  Last autumn, we went to the Kröller-Müller Museum together for a long weekend. Four days off, just the two of us. On short vacations like that we usually went to our house in the country, or to Barcelona, London, or Paris, but this time we headed into the Dutch backcountry. Sometimes Sylvia complained that she had never seen the Netherlands at all. “I know Amsterdam,” she said, “but I’ve never seen the rest.” That wasn’t completely true; during her first couple of years here we went everywhere: to Schiermonnikoog, to Groningen, to South Limburg—but after those first couple of years we had indeed stopped doing that. Traveling around the Netherlands is like running on the treadmill at the gym: when you get off after half an hour, you’re still right where you started.

  We walked around the galleries. Truth be told, I rarely look at the works on exhibit. My impatience wins out over my feelings of guilt about my lack of interest. My wife is very different when it comes to this. There was a long corridor with little galleries on both sides. I prefer to walk past galleries like that as fast as I can, at most I poke my head inside and then pull it back, like a doctor in a hospital who’s walked into the wrong room. But my wife goes into each and every gallery. She stands and looks at each individual painting for more than two minutes on the average. I could call that loitering, but I know that’s not the case: I’m the one who goes too quickly, no two ways about it. On the rare occasion I’ll follow her in half-heartedly; I stand beside her, looking at a dark painting in which a brightly lit ship is docked at a quay half-hidden by mist. I look along with her, I try to see the ship, the mist, through her eyes. Following her example, I lean forward to look at the little information card posted on the wall, giving the painter’s name, the title of the painting, and the year in which it was made. When my wife is finished reading the card, she doesn’t walk away; she takes a step back and looks at the painting again. For me, reading the card is the last stop, the final mandatory act before bidding a definitive farewell to the painting, but for her it seems to be a summons to take another look—through other eyes, with new information. By that time she has usually forgotten all about me, but sometimes she’ll look over and smile gratefully: the same grateful smile she gives me when I’ve waited patiently in front of the dressing room at the boutique.

  “Lovely, isn’t it?” she says then. Or: “You can almost hear the silence through that mist.” For me, that’s the signal to turn to the next painting. Or rather, to let my gaze glide over all the other paintings in the gallery. In parting. More ships. A battle at sea. A shipwreck. Starving sailors on an island in the Barents Sea.

  After a while, I would end up a few galleries away from her. When you don’t stop in front of each painting, you see something very different, though: all of art history in a nutshell. That’s the way the galleries at the Kröller-Müller were laid out, from past to present. From paintings with recognizable boats, skating scenes, and fruit bowls to paintings that gradually turned their backs on the recognizable world. By way of fading contours, riverine landscapes made of hundreds of dots, and ballerinas composed of square planes and cubes to a total lack of recognizability. Squares. Colors. Lovely colors, true enough, lovely squares too—but it was time to wind up my visit to the museum and get back to the outside world, which was still recognizable as ever.

  I went back six galleries and found her on a bench before a painting of a group of men and women, a few of them holding parasols, who were picnicking on the grass along a riverbank. Still painted recognizably as people, as grass and a river, but with a first, tenuous distortion of reality. The faces almost without the familiar features, precursors of the abstract planes, circles, and squares, the grass not the color of grass but lighter than that, the light alkaline green of pistachio ice cream.

  In fact, of course, I didn’t look at the painting first, I looked at my wife. I had seen the painting before. It was the painting where I’d dropped out, the gallery where I had left her behind.

  She was sitting on the bench, typing something into her phone, she hadn’t seen me yet. I stopped and looked at her face.

  She was smiling. She smiled as she wrote. Our daughter, I thought—I thought at the time, an eternity ago. Sylvia and Diana often texted each other when they were apart for a few days. That’s why Sylvia was smiling, of course, because she was thinking about Diana as she wrote. Or because Diana had just written something funny that still had her smiling.

  At that moment she glanced up from the screen of her iPhone and saw me. In retrospect, I can’t say that she looked startled. No, she looked more like someone who has just woken up, who doesn’t know for a brief moment which bedroom, which bed, she’s in.

  “Hey…”

  Even without the hindsight, I remember how her smile began to fade when she caught sight of me. That she blinked her eyes, like someone suddenly opening the curtains in a darkened room.

  I nodded at her phone. “Diana?” I asked.

  Our daughter was at home alone, the new boyfriend had yet to arrive on the scene. “Everything okay with her?”

  My wife shook her head. “No, a girlfriend. But you don’t know her.”

  A girlfriend. But you don’t know her… Where had I heard that before? No, I hadn’t heard it anywhere before. I would hear it later, about six months later, at the Parisian brasserie.

  The girlfriend I hadn’t known back then in the museum, was that Sadako too? The same imaginary or real Japanese Sadako who was already, or only six months later, being cheated on by her husband? By her imaginary husband, I couldn’t help thinking now. An imaginary girlfriend with an imaginary husband—a nonexistent act of adultery.

  With Sylvia and me, it’s very simple: Wherever we are, it’s nice. Wherever the two of us are together, we’re happy. Our interests are quite different, but our interest in each other always remains at the same high pitch, wherever we are. Paintings, in and of themselves, may not interest me much, but a painting with Sylvia standing in front of it is always more than just a naval battle, landscape, or still life with fruit and a dead hare.

  Wherever we were, it was nice; that was the thought that forced itself on me now. Back then, yes, during those four days in autumn. In my thoughts I heard myself formulating a hideous question. A question to which I was not completely sure I wanted to hear the answer. How long? was the question I hoped I would never ask. How long has this been going on?

  I was afraid of defiling the past. Deception that tarnishes the present, I could probab
ly live with that. I was already living with that. But not the past, please, not the past.

  How many of those moments could I now reconstruct, in retrospect? How many did I want to reconstruct? Moments that might now mean something different.

  The time she walked out of the room before answering the phone. That other time, when she…No, I didn’t want to think like that. I didn’t want to color in the past, to color it in retrospectively with incriminating moments. There were, as I’ve said, at least no outward signs of adultery. No sudden and inexplicable weight loss, no excessive makeup—and then, out of the blue, I suddenly thought of something else. How many people knew already? How many girlfriends had she already told about it? I have to tell someone, I’ll go nuts if I keep it to myself any longer. Can you keep a secret?

  How many people had Maarten van Hoogstraten told already? That was my next thought. How many colleagues, secretaries, town hall messengers, doormen already knew all the ins and outs of the affair? The affair that would make waves if leaked to the media. The cuckolded mayor. Even worse: the oblivious mayor. Almost everyone at city hall knew about it, he was the only one who hadn’t figured it out.

  That happened sometimes. An old high school friend I still see on occasion. About ten years ago, his wife became involved with the husband of a couple they were on friendly terms with. Everyone knew about it. For years. I knew. Sylvia knew. But were we going to open our friend’s eyes to the truth? No, he had to find out for himself, didn’t he? Was he blind or something?

  The simple fact that the media hadn’t picked up on the affair yet, I thought then, might mean there was no affair at all. Or that no one had noticed anything.

  No, I would leave everything intact, I decided. The past, first and foremost. The past contained no omens, as long as you didn’t go looking for them. Or, to put it differently: all omens—including the smile on her face in that gallery at the Kröller-Müller Museum—could, by the same token, be no omens at all.

  As far as the present was concerned, from now on I would do things differently. What’s more: I already was doing things differently. I had already tried the undercover agent approach. But as of today, I would be the mole in my own life. Visible and invisible, at one and the same time. The last person people would expect to be the mole.

  From now on, I would do nothing but observe Maarten van Hoogstraten, too, in a way he wouldn’t recognize as being observed. I mustn’t change my behavior, my attitude toward him, otherwise he might suspect something. I didn’t like him, I had never liked him. So I shouldn’t suddenly act buddy-buddy with him or laugh at his lousy jokes. My expression had to show the same faint aversion as before. Aversion, if not quite contempt, although it was awfully close. Naive people drove me crazy. Maarten van Hoogstraten radiated the unrestrained cheerfulness of the ignorant. Of those who do not get it. His face, those oversized blue eyes, were on the side of the right. Against pollution. Concerned about global warming. The rising sea level. All of which were indeed things you could be against, things you could worry about. But people like him were awfully sloppy about the way they profited from issues like that. They borrowed credence from them. They were in the right—so how could you possibly contradict them?

  Are you in favor of flooding? Would you rather see the sky darkened with pollution? And then, without blinking an eye: So, are you against the fair distribution of wealth, doesn’t it bother you that more and more people are dying of starvation so that you can enjoy a steak? Do you want to ruin our lovely planet even further?

  Even though you had never said anything like that at all. You wouldn’t dream of it. You gave in to the terror. The terror of what was generally accepted as right, the terror of perpetual correctness.

  No, from now on I would block his every move. I had always blocked his moves, but from now on I would do so less openly. I would adopt an interested expression when he unfolded his plans for a wind-turbine park at the city’s edge. At regular intervals during his plea I would nod understandingly, raise my hand to my chin, and look attentive—as if I were actually listening to him.

  As if that wind-turbine park ever stood a chance in hell, I thought the next moment—and was startled by my own laugh, which was just a little too loud.

  18

  All signs indicated that the female journalist across from me in my office was about to ask one final question, when there was a knock at the door and my secretary stuck her head inside.

  “We’re almost finished,” I said.

  Mrs. Schreuder and I always agreed beforehand that, one hour after an interview started, she would knock on my door to say that I was expected at the next meeting or at the opening of a new bridge. But my sense of time told me that that hour wasn’t over yet. It was a tough call, though; to my taste, all interviews last too long anyway. I always tried to outwit time by not looking at my watch, and my secretary always popped in to rescue me earlier than I’d expected.

  “It’s your father,” she said, glancing at the journalist.

  “Tell him I’ll call him right back.”

  Mrs. Schreuder raised a hand to her mouth, cleared her throat, and looked at the journalist again. “He’s not on the phone. He’s…he’s here. He’s waiting outside, at the reception desk.”

  This was something new. This had never happened before. In all my years as mayor, he had never shown up unannounced at city hall.

  “Just tell him that I’ll be…” But I didn’t finish my sentence. Something, a premonition that felt as though my heart had sagged a few inches, made me get up out of my chair.

  For the space of half a second, I thought about asking the journalist whether she would mind waiting in the hall, so I could talk to my father in here—but that was not a good idea. Maybe she would want to include it as an “atmospheric detail” in the interview. Maybe it would annoy her. A hint of that annoyance would seep into the article.

  “Do you have a moment?” I said, smiling at the journalist. “I’m sure this won’t take long.”

  She didn’t smile back at me: she glanced at her iPhone, which she was using to record our conversation, and tapped the screen with her thumb. “I was actually more or less finished,” she said. “There’s just one little thing…No, go ahead. I’ll wait.”

  My father was standing beside my secretary’s office, his hands in his pockets, in front of the king’s portrait in the hall. That portrait was originally meant for my office, but I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing that face first thing each morning. I knew what would happen then. In the course of time, maybe after only a couple of weeks, I would grow accustomed to that face, and I wanted to avoid this at all costs. In our former home we’d had a bathroom from the 1970s, brown tiles with a floral motif. That’s the first thing we’ll rip out, we told each other during the viewing. But it didn’t happen. We kept postponing it. Renovating a bathroom is different from painting over floral wallpaper. You can’t shower there for a few weeks, you actually have to look for a place to stay temporarily, or else you have to let the builders come in while you’re on vacation. What happened was that we grew accustomed to taking a shower in a bathroom so hideous that it hurt your eyes. And we never used the tub—you never wanted to stay in there long enough for a bath.

  After a while, we couldn’t help but feel that something of the bathroom’s ugliness had seeped into our inner selves. And so the king’s portrait hung in the hall now. I hurried past it each morning, the way you skirt someone at a party whom you’d really rather not see.

  “Robert…” My father tried on a grin, but I saw right away that he wasn’t his usual self. His eyes darted back and forth from me to my secretary, who had come out with me and was standing at her office door.

  “Come on,” I said, laying a hand on his shoulder, “let’s go down this way.” I looked to one side and nodded to Mrs. Schreuder, a reassuring nod: It’s all right, I’ll be back in a flash, I won’t let the journali
st wait too long.

  “I won’t beat around the bush,” he said, even before we had turned the corner to another, wider corridor; at the end of it, on the right, was the canteen. We could sit there, if there weren’t too many people, but I suddenly wondered whether that was such a good idea. “We’re going to move it up,” he said. He had stopped walking, his hands were still in the pockets of his trousers, the kind of trousers my father had worn almost all the time for the past ten years: khaki, with lots of zippered pockets down the seams, active trousers, trousers to wear when you’re working in the garden or clambering over boulders in a dry riverbed.

  I knew right away what he was talking about, of course, although I’d tried to think about it as little as possible in the last few months—thought about it so little that there were moments when I forgot about the whole plan. At those rare moments when I did think about it, my only conclusion had been that they had probably called it off. During our visits to my parents’ house, or on the occasional Sunday afternoon when they came by our place, no one had brought it up again.

  Just in case it actually was going to happen, though, I’d told Sylvia about their plan; not right after my father and I visited the graveyard in Ouderkerk, but much later, almost too late, while I was already parking the car in front of their house, just before we were going to ring my parents’ bell.

  “By the way,” I’d said as casually as I could. “My parents may start talking about something that’s fairly bizarre, to put it mildly. Just so you don’t act too amazed. I meant to tell you about it before, but I never got around to it.”

  And I told her. Sylvia just shook her head. “What is it with you?” she asked, and I knew that by “you” she meant, as she did so often, you Dutch people. “Why can’t you let life go the way it goes? Why does everything have to be arranged, from cradle to grave? I don’t get it, I really don’t, you people have lost all touch with reality.”