by Herman Koch
Another thing was that the rabbits started growing; within two weeks they were twice their original size. The hutch was actually too small for them now. Still, it took a few weeks for us to realize that one rabbit could only turn around if the other one did so at the same time.
“Pygmy rabbits?” Sylvia said, and I could tell she was trying hard not to laugh. “Did you keep the receipt? I’d go back to that pet shop if I were you.”
But of course I didn’t. There was no use. The mayor coming in to complain about a pair of overgrown rabbits? Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist back then, but the good old, perhaps even more reliable “grapevine” did. No, the rabbits would have to disappear from our lives without a stir. Found dead in their hutch was probably the best solution, but of course we weren’t going to actively facilitate that by denying them food or water.
Deliverance finally came in the form of one of Sylvia’s girlfriends, who lived outside of town and had a run with chickens and a goat and a few other obscure creatures. “Rabbits in the city, that’s not really right,” she said, pushing a fresh leaf of lettuce through the wire door. The rabbits were not interested.
One week later, we said farewell. Diana—purely as a formality—shed a few tears as the woman slid the cardboard box into the back of her Volvo. I put an arm around her, squeezed her, and mumbled something about the “better life” they would have in the country.
Maybe we should have made the leap to a dog right then and there. But that second chance to fulfill our daughter’s dearest wish was one we ignored. The cat we have today made its appearance on her very next birthday. Months beforehand, Diana had already come up with a name for it: Eminem. And when it turned out not to be a tom, she changed the name, without thinking about it for more than three seconds, to Emmy.
the garbage bag in the pedal bin was still too light to act as a credible excuse, so I gathered together a few old newspapers and magazines too. A plastic bag from the Albert Heijn supermarket with five empty bottles (two red wines, two whites, and a Grasovka vodka) and the picture was complete: another breadwinner, just doing his part around the house.
“I’m going up to the bins on the corner,” I said, sticking my head around the kitchen door. Per usual, my daughter was lying on the couch with her laptop on her lap, a pair of headphones clamped over her ears. My wife had her back to me, she was standing in front of the bookcase, her head tilted a little to one side—she was running her finger over the spines of the books.
“Any idea where Anna Karenina is?” she asked without turning her head. “We have it, don’t we? I just can’t seem to find it anywhere.”
Our bookcase is one of those good resolutions incarnate that have never been carried out. Alphabetical order. By country. By genre. For a long time, I kidded myself into thinking that I would systematize it soon, but I’ve postponed it so often that I’m now simply resigned to the mess. Sometimes I go looking for a book, too, then I start at the top left and skim over all the spines until I’ve found it. A mind more orderly than my own would pick that book off the shelf right away—but something would be lost then, too, I tell myself in an attempt to gloss over my procrastination.
“I suddenly thought: I read that book years ago, when I was eighteen, I think,” Sylvia went on. “I remember almost nothing, except the story. If I read it in Dutch this time, that might sort of give me something to hold on to.”
I took a step into the room, intentionally bumping the bag of empty bottles against the door. This time my wife really did turn to look at me.
“I’m going to take these up to the corner,” I said, lifting the supermarket bag and the garbage bag. My wife and I looked at each other. I tossed a meaningful-looking glance at our daughter, then looked at my wife again. I could have winked, but I didn’t. Diana might look up from her laptop at that very moment and wonder what the winking was all about. “I’ll be back in about fifteen minutes,” I said. “Then I’ll help you look.”
On my way to the containers, two cyclists passed me from the other direction, a boy and a girl—in their early twenties, I guessed. They were busy talking, the girl laughed at something the boy said, and when they came past the boy looked over at me. I saw it happen before my eyes, the way it happened so often, the whole thing took no more than a couple of seconds: something in the boy’s eyes changed from looking to brooding. He saw a famous face but couldn’t quite place it. An actor? An anchorman? A politician? As they rolled past I turned my head to follow them and saw the boy lean over to the girl. They both looked back at the same time. Yes, now they knew, that’s right, it was him. I raised my hand, the one holding the half-empty garbage bag. They smiled and waved back—and then they biked on. How nice. How normal. The mayor taking out his own garbage.
When I got to the containers, I found what I usually found there. A couple of torn-open garbage bags, the contents of which (orange peels, wet coffee grounds, flattened milk cartons) had already spread halfway across the sidewalk. There were shards of glass, too, from a mirror that had apparently shattered, or else been kicked to pieces by children, a couple of planks, and a microwave oven. The remarkable fact of the matter is that in the major cities of the world—Paris, London, Madrid, Barcelona, Rome, Moscow, New York, and I should know, I’ve been to all those places myself—the garbage is collected on a daily basis, that is to say, every day, but in Amsterdam that happens only once or twice a week. In all the other cities I mentioned, that collection also takes place at night, so that daytime traffic won’t be held up by garbage trucks stopping at every corner. Amsterdam is one of the filthiest towns in Europe, yea, in the whole Western and Westernized world. In Tokyo you never see a scrap of paper on the street, in Paris and London the streets and sidewalks are hosed down each day, even when it’s been raining. In Rome, unemployed young people empty the trash containers that the tourists have jammed full of empty pizza boxes. I could never claim that household rubbish was a policy spearhead for me. Boris Johnson, my London colleague, had recently spoken disparagingly of Amsterdam, particularly about all the filth on the streets: I needed to call him about that, but still hadn’t gotten around to it. What, after all, was I supposed to say? He was absolutely right, of course. Here in Amsterdam it was Wim Pijbes, the general director of the Rijksmuseum, who sent a letter to a leading daily newspaper complaining about how all the trash blowing around was going to chase away the tourists. Tomorrow I had a lunch date with him, we were going to discuss the festivities surrounding the opening of the new Rembrandt exhibition, but the litter he’d talked about would undoubtedly come up as well.
With a sigh, I put the half-empty garbage bag down beside the two torn ones. I knew without even checking that the swing-up mechanism on both containers was jammed. Then I tossed the pile of newspapers into the paper igloo, pulling my fingers back—the way I always did—just in time to keep the lid from falling shut on them. Should I light a cigarette yet, or wait until I’d thrown the empty bottles into the bottle bank? I stuck my hand in my left pants pocket and, to my horror, pulled out only the pack of cigarettes, no lighter—or had I tucked the lighter into the pack?
I felt a wave of desperation rolling in. I had walked up here with the garbage and the bottles because I wanted to be out of the house when I made the call I was going to make. In fact, all I had done was cover up one lie with another.
Strictly speaking, I could of course have withdrawn to my study or to our bedroom, but then my wife or daughter might walk in on me. (Could you just take one more look? I really can’t find Anna Karenina anywhere.) What’s more, I couldn’t smoke in the study or the bedroom. And during this phone call, I had to smoke, no two ways about it. Allen Carr was right: stress combined with boredom.
I hadn’t told Sylvia about my father’s visit to city hall this morning. And I’d said nothing at all about the journalist and the photos that showed someone other than me beating a policeman into a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Ever since t
he conversation with my father, though, the interview and the photos had seemed of lesser importance. In fact, the photographs suited me just fine. If I were caught doing something, something unworthy of a mayor, it wouldn’t be nearly as bad. The embezzlement of public funds, a 100,000-euro kickback for granting a harbor concession to a transshipment company, coke abuse, an orgy, whores from the Dominican Republic at an after-party in city hall—all of that would be bearable. I would be brought down. I would have to resign my post. Or not. Mayors get away with a lot. I thought with envy of my former colleague in Toronto. Rob Ford had stepped down already by then, but before he did he got away with everything: drugs, public drunkenness, and obesity had only boosted his popularity. In any case, a scandal affecting me as mayor was far preferable to the broadcasting of an affair between my wife and an alderman like Maarten van Hoogstraten. In the event of a political scandal, my fall wouldn’t damage us personally. A down-and-out, unemployed former mayor, but still the one with that lovely (foreign) wife. That couple who you could tell from a mile away were still deeply in love. (“In love!” Bernhard had said during our recent dinner at home. “In love, that’s ridiculous! You don’t think anyone believes that? After six months, the infatuation is over, everybody knows that. Something else takes its place: fondness, mutual respect.” Then he had glanced over at his wife, but Christine was pretending to fish a piece of cork out of her wineglass.) A couple totally wrapped up in each other, who needed no one else.
I hadn’t told Sylvia about my conversation with my father that morning; I wanted to call my mother first. To arrange to meet her, tomorrow or the next day, in the course of the week in any event. I wasn’t sure where we should meet, though. Her favorite Chinese restaurant might be a weird place for a final goodbye. Something like a park, perhaps. Or the beach. There was no “beach weather” predicted for tomorrow, but then a deserted beach with lots of wind, gray waves, and whipping foam might be even more fitting for a talk about parting and a self-selected death.
“Good evening.” The voice, which seemed to be coming from right beside my left ear, put a rude end to my musing. When I turned my head, I found myself looking at a man in his sixties. A broad smile, the reflection of the streetlamp in eyes that sparkled with amusement. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” the man said. “But I wanted to throw away my bottles, too, and you’re standing in the way.” He gave me what you might call a searching glance. For the second time this evening, I saw it happen right in front of me; at that moment, TV footage and newspaper photos were probably being shuffled around in the man’s mind. I’ve seen this face before, but where? “Oh, now I know,” he said, and he breathed an audible sigh of relief. “Sure, I’ve seen you around before. On the bike. I live over there.” He pointed to a spot on the far side of the canal. “I see you biking past sometimes, when I look out the window.”
“Excuse me,” I said, stepping aside. “Help yourself.”
“No hurry, I’m in no hurry. Why don’t you go first?”
The telephone in my pocket started vibrating. Bernhard, the screen said. Not a good moment. I ditched the call.
“Look,” the man said, pointing at the bottle bank. “Do you see this? Not so long ago there was a bottle bank with one hole for green glass, one for brown, and another one for white, meaning transparent. I don’t know how you dealt with that? Did you obediently put the bottles in the hole they were supposed to go in? I live just across from here, like I said. I have a perfect view of the bottle bank. Once every two weeks, or maybe once a month, I don’t remember, they came and emptied it. A hell of a racket. But I paid attention. Maybe we were all good little boys and girls and put the wine bottles in the green hole and the gin bottles in the white one, but when they hoisted up that bottle bank to empty it, they dumped everything into the truck, all together. From my bedroom window I could look right into the bed of the truck, but there weren’t three compartments for green, brown, and white glass. All the colors were dumped onto a pile. So why did they want us to separate all those colors, if it didn’t make a damn bit of difference afterward? Now we’ve got new bottle banks where all the colors go in one hole. So why did I go to the trouble all those years to separate them?”
My phone buzzed again. Maybe it was the voice mail, I thought, maybe Bernhard had left a message, but when I looked at the display I saw his name again. I hesitated for a moment—then ditched the call again.
“It would be easier to take, though, if they’d only do something about this,” the man went on, pointing at the garbage lying around the containers. “I don’t know how many times I’ve had to go back home with a full garbage bag because the lid was stuck or the container was completely full. Three flights of stairs back up. Sure, it’s a privilege to live here on the canal, but I don’t have an elevator and my balcony is small, so the garbage bags really start stinking once the sun hits them. And if you leave them beside the container, you can get a fine. It happened to me once, the city’s got officials who walk around and cut open the garbage bags, and I guess they found something. I don’t remember what it was, a tax assessment, don’t ask me, but that’s how they got my address. In fact, it was a dual offense; tax assessments are supposed to go in the paper igloo.”
When he fell silent for a moment, I breathed in deeply, through my nose. I could smell it, right through the odor rising off the torn-open garbage bags. It wasn’t a stench, not even a sweaty smell. No, men like this one would always be sure to put on clean clothes, to shower regularly and shave each morning. It was more like the antiseptic odor you smell in hospital corridors, a cleaning product meant to hide other odors.
I could ask him about it, indirectly of course, after making a wager with myself that I would undoubtedly win. But the man began talking again; he had now started tossing his bottles into the bottle bank. “You’re allowed to do this now, see, but after I got that fine I started throwing all my bottles, the green ones, the brown ones, and the transparent ones, into the same hole of that old bottle bank, as a sort of final act of defiance. Someone called me on it once. A lady on a carrier bike, you know, one of those eco types who always know better. ‘Hey,’ she yelled at me. ‘You’re throwing the green ones in with the brown bottles, you’re not allowed to do that!’ ”
My phone vibrated again, and I pulled it out of my pocket. “Bernhard, have you got a moment? I’ll call you back in five minutes.”
It was quiet at the other end, then I heard my friend’s voice, as clear as though he were standing right beside me.
“Robert, I need to…You remember what we were talking about before? In your garden?”
At that very moment, the man dropped two bottles into the container, one right after the other. With all the banging and the sound of breaking glass, I couldn’t tell whether Bernhard had said something else. I turned my back on the bottle bank and pressed two fingers against my left ear.
“Listen, Bernhard, I can’t right now…I’ll call you back in five minutes…in ten…”
And before he could reply, I hung up.
“I won’t keep you any longer,” the man said. “Come over for a cup of coffee sometime,” he went on, pointing at the far side of the canal. “That house over there, sort of behind the tree, the third floor, my name’s not on the door, but there are only three bells. It’s the top one, so you can’t miss it.” He mentioned the house number. “Anytime in the morning, doesn’t matter when; well, not too early, not before eleven. I tend to sleep in, ever since my wife died.”
Bingo! I thought, despite myself. I’d seen it correctly, smelled it correctly; this man lived alone, and probably had for years.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, and right away I heard the artificial undertone in my voice, the phrase borrowed from American TV shows—and badly subtitled to boot—to express one’s condolences. “I mean, your wife, have you been…Have you been living alone for a long time?”
I felt my face getting r
ed, I could tell that I might start blushing. A couple of years ago I was on Time magazine’s list of the one hundred most influential people in the world. As the only mayor, and the only Dutch person too. People who had made their mark on the year gone by. I checked it later. I was not only the first, but also the only Dutchman to ever make the list. (And the last one to date.) But here in Holland, that fact produced mostly laughter or a shake of the head. It had to be some kind of mistake. The American weekly probably hadn’t heard about all the cups of tea I’d drunk in Amsterdam’s mosques. About the downward spiral the city had gone into during my mayoralty. All those years the Rijksmuseum had been closed. Seven years, no less! Unworthy of a metropolis, my detractors smirked. Meanwhile, though, the Rijksmuseum has opened its doors again, and that shut them up. On the outside it still looks like a train station, but inside, everything—from the majestic entrance hall to the cloakroom and the restaurant—is of a grandeur more reminiscent of the British Museum and the Louvre. There, in front of The Night Watch, is where we received Barack Obama. In what other metropolis could an American president have his own helicopter land on the square in front of the door?