The Ditch

by Herman Koch

  “I was wondering about something. The old bottle banks used to have three holes. One for transparent glass, one for brown, and one for green. But as far as I know, the beds of the trucks, the ones they used to use to empty the bottle banks, didn’t have three separate compartments. Am I right about that? What I mean to say is: If all that glass was thrown together in the back of the truck, why did we ask people to divide their bottles over three different holes?”

  Was I imagining things, or did I see something like a flicker of relief in his eyes? Had he been expecting a different question? Different questions? Recently—no, not at all recently, ever since the Christmas recess in fact, he had stopped shaving. Like so many men his age, he probably thought a beard would make him look like a movie star or soccer player, that it would make him younger and therefore automatically more attractive to young people—to younger voters. The beard was largely gray, and translucent at the cheeks, like a newly mown field where you can see the soil amid the stubble. Like so many men his age, he didn’t realize that a beard only made him look older. If you were asked to name this man’s profession, your first guess would probably be: a high-school German teacher.

  “Yes, that’s correct,” he said. “I’ve heard how that went. They set aside a budget for the separated collection of glass. About ten years ago it was, I think. The bottle banks were manufactured in Poland. With three holes in them. But by the time the bottle banks were delivered, the money was finished. It was more expensive than they’d thought. The city had no more budget to outfit the trucks with three separate compartments. ‘That will come later,’ that’s what we must have figured back then. Or what my predecessor must have figured back then, actually, because I wasn’t here yet. But it never came later.”

  There was something about his voice. I’d noticed it before. Not exactly a lisp, but too much air came out of his mouth, he made a quiet hissing sound with every f and s, like someone opening the valve on a bicycle tire.

  “But people actually thought it mattered, which hole they threw their bottles into,” I said. In my mind I caught a flash of the woman on the carrier bike, the eco type who had upbraided my neighbor for not putting his glass in the right opening. “That’s peculiar, isn’t it?”

  Alderman Van Hoogstraten narrowed his eyes; maybe it was body language, maybe he was going to try to deny it. But there really wasn’t anything to deny, he had already more or less admitted to the whole thing.

  “The idea was important, though,” he said. “It was a good thing that people back then started to get used to the idea that everything would soon be collected separately. And with today’s bottle banks, you don’t have to separate the colors anymore. So, looking back on it, trucks with separate compartments weren’t really necessary anyway.”

  I stared at him. I was suddenly reminded of the fountain. The fountain in my old neighborhood. The unveiling of it, when I had given a short speech. Everyone was pleased with the fountain, but what I remembered most was the folder the people in the neighborhood had received in their mailboxes and that landed on my desk, too, a few days before the unveiling. The construction itself: that was what the folder talked about. About the material that had been used—granite—and about the Chinese laborers in Fujian province who had cut and rounded the granite blocks. About the working conditions in the granite quarry, the inadequate safety measures, the long working days, the months on end that the workers had to spend away from home.

  The alderwoman at the time had gone to China, along with other city officials, to view the situation with her own eyes. Despite the starvation wages and slave labor, they came to the conclusion that the laborers had worked on the project “with dedication and pleasure.” The most remarkable thing about the folder was that it described everything in such detail, that it didn’t try to hide anything. An alderman found to have frequented a pickup spot in order lay his hands on two-bit hookers had been forced to resign; an alderwoman who had a fountain built by slaves, just like the ancient Egyptians, received applause from the neighborhood at the unveiling.

  I could have gone on questioning Alderman Van Hoogstraten. About the torn garbage bags and shards of glass beside the containers, for example. Why was there enough money to pay public overseers to cut garbage bags open and uncover an offender’s identity, but no money to empty the containers more than twice a week? How did one go about explaining that to one’s friends and family, that one cut open garbage bags for a living?

  I could have come back at him with something about the fraudulence of having people drop different colors of glass through different holes in the bottle bank; about how peculiar it was, to say the very least, that everyone in town could see with their own eyes that they were being bamboozled. But no, I realized the next moment: only those who lived higher than the bed of the truck itself, who could look down on it from the second, third, or fourth floors, had been able to see that with their own eyes. And even then, you could wonder whether it had sunk in right away—the way it had with my neighbor across the canal.

  And then again: What was I whining about? The ordinance concerning the separated collection of glass had been axed years ago.

  “Is everything okay, Robert?”

  I had thought I was still looking the alderman in the eye, but it was probably in a way that no longer conveyed anything like attention. Maybe I had wandered off into my own musings too far and for too long; in any case, I realized that I was blinking my eyes, as though Van Hoogstraten had awakened me from an afternoon nap.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was thinking about something else for a moment there.”

  Maarten van Hoogstraten raised his eyebrows. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I asked whether you’re feeling all right, Robert. You look…You look tired. And not just tired…I mean, are you ill? Do you have a fever? That’s what it looks like, like you’re running a fever.”

  “No, I don’t have a fever. Tired, yes, probably. I didn’t get quite enough sleep last night.”

  That morning, Sylvia had found me beside our bed. On the wooden floor. It was around six in the morning when I’d finally gone back to our bedroom. An hour before the alarm would go off. I suspected that I’d tried my old getting-to-sleep trick, but that I’d been too exhausted to get back into bed on time.

  “And you said something…”

  “We were talking about the bottle banks.”

  “No, I mean after that. You whispered something, I couldn’t hear you very well, as though you were talking to yourself, Robert. So I wondered—”

  “Rabbits,” I interrupted him. “I wanted to ask you something about rabbits.”

  What had I been mumbling, for God’s sake? I had to be careful about that, it had happened with Diana once, too, that I started thinking out loud without realizing it. Like the faithless husband who moans the name of his mistress in bed, at home, rather than that of his wife. And was Van Hoogstraten really telling the truth when he said he couldn’t hear me well? Maybe he had heard something that absolutely was not intended for his ears.

  “Rabbits,” I said. “I said something about rabbits.”

  This was not going according to plan, not at all. I’d meant to ask the alderman about the rabbits, but casually, parenthetically—now, though, there was no going back.

  “We’re thinking about getting a pet,” I said. “For Diana’s sake, mostly. And we were thinking about a rabbit. Maybe even more than one.”

  Did that sound implausible? Being honest with myself, I could only say it did. The alderman opened his mouth, he seemed about to say something, but I beat him to it.

  “Diana, our daughter,” I said quickly. I couldn’t automatically assume that he knew our daughter’s name. And if I was lucky, he didn’t know her age either. Rabbits for a daughter who was almost twenty, how plausible was that? “Someone told me, I don’t remember who, that you have r
abbits at home. I was wondering, how do you like that? I mean, do you think it’s a good idea to have rabbits, or do they actually belong in the wild?”

  I looked into his eyes. Did I see perplexity there, or was Maarten van Hoogstraten starting to suspect which direction this implausible rabbit story was taking? I had a sudden flash of intuition, maybe the wrong kind of intuition, but that would become clear enough soon.

  Once I’d dealt with the rabbit issue, I would be done with the whole thing. The way you might wake up in the middle of the night, you’ve been having strange dreams, your forehead is covered in a cold sweat—the realization that you have to throw up comes only then. For a few minutes you try as hard as you can to keep it back, and then you remember: the shawarma pizza you had earlier in the evening. Maybe it was the sauce, maybe it was the meat itself; in a few steps you reach the toilet.

  When it’s over, there is relief. You’re filthy, you stink, you have chunks of shawarma in your throat and in your sinuses, but you’re done with it.

  “I remember now,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the alderman. “I remember who told me. My wife. Sylvia. According to Sylvia, you told her something about rabbits once.”

  “Could I talk to the two of you for a moment?” Alderman Hawinkels suddenly appeared at my side and seized me by the upper arm. He did the same to Alderman Van Hoogstraten. “I’m sorry if I’m intruding, but I really need to talk to both of you. Before we get started on the wind turbines, I mean.”

  “Of course,” Van Hoogstraten said. “Robert and I were just discussing…Well, it doesn’t really matter, it wasn’t that important.”

  Right then, my cell phone beeped. Diana, I read on the screen after pulling it out of my pocket. There are people—names—who can always wait. As a rule, I almost never answer my phone right away, I use it more as a sort of mobile voice mail. Or maybe not even that; the old habit of actually leaving a message has pretty much died out: it’s enough to see that they called. After that, the ball is in your court, it’s your turn to knock it back.

  Diana, though, is the exception to that rule. Even when I see my wife’s name on the display, I don’t always answer right away. Sometimes I’m on my way home on the bike and she asks me to pop by the drugstore to buy honey licorice, or toothpaste. Much better, then, not to respond, to say when you get home that you didn’t hear the phone because you were on the bike.

  I remember the time Diana called from the airport in Budapest because she’d lost her passport and all her bank cards; or that other time, when I was trying on a pair of trousers in a fitting room in Milan and Diana called to say that she’d left her keys that night in the front door of our house in Amsterdam. You always have to answer. Always. Preferably within five seconds.

  “Excuse me,” I said to both aldermen. “I really have to take this.”

  I turned my back on them, then stepped aside and opened the WhatsApp message; my heart was already pounding.

  Daddy

  That’s the way my daughter always started off: first that one word, to get my attention, then the actual message itself, often sent in three or four separate blocks of text.

  typing…, I read at the top of the screen.

  Did you see Emmy this morning?

  Emmy. I thought quickly. We let our cat out into the garden fairly regularly, but only when she stood meowing at the door. A few years ago we had bolted closed the cat flap in the kitchen door, because we were kept awake at night by other cats who came in and started fighting for Emmy’s territory; to mark their claims, they also pissed all over the couches, chairs, and rugs.

  From that time on, Emmy had taken to meowing at the garden or kitchen door until someone let her out.

  Because I got up at ten, and she wasn’t there.

  The cat usually came back after a couple of hours, often sooner than that. The evening before, when I came back from my conversation at the containers, it had been around eleven. Diana was already upstairs. Sylvia was lying on the couch, reading Anna Karenina.

  And the cat? Had the cat been lying on her lap, or beside her on the couch? I closed my eyes, but I had the feeling I was receiving only old images. Images in which Emmy was somewhere in the living room, as always. On the couch, or lying on one corner of the rug. As close to us as she could get, in any case. Never in a room that was deserted at that moment.

  And now it’s two and she’s still not here.

  Last night, after looking at the pictures in the box of photos, I had gone into the garden. It was too cold for just a T-shirt and underpants, in fact, but I felt like having a cigarette. It turned out to be three, which I smoked leaning back and looking up at the night sky and the moon that was almost full—before going up the stairs again, teeth chattering and shivering all over. Apparently, though, I hadn’t had my fill of the cold, because at seven this morning Sylvia had found me on the floor beside our bed.

  Had I seen our cat then, in the living room, or in the kitchen, where I lit my first cigarette off the gas burner? I couldn’t remember, and the fact that I didn’t remember could only mean that I hadn’t seen Emmy at all.

  Suddenly, though, I remembered something else. When I opened the sliding doors and stepped into the garden, a bird had flown up in front of me. Right in front of my feet—almost as though it had been waiting for me there. A thrush, or a blackbird, I know nothing about birds. It was a little brown bird, in any case, with a yellow beak, I saw later, after my eyes grew accustomed to the dark and the bird had perched on the back of a chair, across from where I was sitting. The sudden movement at my feet, the flapping when the thrush or blackbird flew up and landed on the table, had startled me badly. From there it hopped twice and landed on the chair.

  The bird’s presence also meant something else, I realized now, as I also had the previous night, after I lit my second cigarette off the first and was looking at the bird. And the bird at me: yes, I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that it was observing me, its head tilted a little to one side, the way birds do when they’ve caught sight of a worm or some other edible thing wriggling around on the ground.

  That a thrush or a blackbird was sitting calmly on the garden chair could only mean that our cat was not in the garden at that moment; not in the living room either—I hadn’t closed the sliding doors behind me. Looking back on it, there was no way she could have been there. If Emmy had spotted me leaning back and having a cigarette, sitting in one of the garden chairs (I had my legs up, so I could rest my feet on the wooden table frame), she would never have missed such a golden opportunity. She would have come after me and settled down purring on my lap.

  The only other possibilities, that the cat was somewhere else in the house or prowling around in the neighboring gardens the whole time, seemed improbable.

  Where’s Mama? I messaged back, trying to win time.

  No, Emmy would definitely have heard me come down the stairs; while I was sitting on the couch with the box of photos on my lap, she would have been nuzzling up against my ankles.

  For the first time, I thought about a third possibility: that our cat had slipped outside earlier that evening, on the canal side, when I opened the door to take out the empty bottles, the garbage bag, and the pile of old newspapers. Or later, after I had already come back. I could hardly imagine it; in all the years we had lived there, Emmy had snuck out onto the street in an unguarded moment only four or five times at most. Usually she ran straight to the waterside. There she would stand for a few seconds, petrified, between the parked cars, her back arched and her tail puffy with fright, before shooting right back inside.

  And what about when I came back in? After my phone call with Bernhard. No, that’s not the way it went, I was still talking to Bernhard when I put the key in the lock. Leaning against the door, with one foot outside and the other on the doormat in our hallway, we had gone on talking for ten minutes or so.

  I don’t know where M
ama is

  . . . typing…

  She was gone when I came down

  . . . typing…

  Where are you?

  While I was reading these lines I noticed that, at the top left-hand corner of the display, under the heading Chats, there was a “1” in a circle: an unread message.

  I clicked on Chats. The unread message was in between Diana and Sylvia, in fact under Diana and above Sylvia. Not from a known sender on my list of contacts; it was a number I didn’t recognize. There was no profile photo either.

  Dear Robert, I read in the notification bar. Dear Robert, we’re going to do it tomorrow. Wait for 24

  Yesterday, it said at the top right-hand side.

  I tapped the screen to open the entire message.

  Dear Robert, we’re going to do it tomorrow. Wait for 24 hours. Try not to see it as a sad thing. Our lives have been more than rewarding. All the best to you, Sylvia, and Diana. Your parents.

  Below the message, to the right, there now stood—instead of Yesterday—the exact time when it was sent: 21:45.

  I tried a reconstruction. Where had I been right then? I hadn’t looked at my watch the previous night, but in all probability I was still outside at the containers, talking to the neighbor, or else on my way back to the house, talking to Bernhard on the phone.

  That was the most logical explanation for why I hadn’t heard the beep or felt the vibration in my pocket.

  Or had I…

  I saw Alderman Hawinkels gesturing to me, acting as though he was looking at his watch. Yes, it was time, time for the windmill debate.

  I wasn’t going to be there.

  “Listen,” I said, stepping up to the aldermen—there was something humiliating about having to say what I was about to say now in front of Maarten van Hoogstraten. I was going to have to choose my words carefully. I’m sorry, but I can’t take part in the debate. My parents, you see, have just committed suicide. That was out of the question. For a brief moment I considered saying it was something with my daughter, but that wasn’t good either. They would be bound to remember something like that and ask me about it tomorrow.