The Ditch

by Herman Koch

  “Could we also get two beers?”

  “Two beers, coming up.”

  The boys and girls on the waitstaff did not feign boredom when they showed a famous face to his or her table, but having the mayor in their restaurant didn’t make them needlessly nervous either. Not like the panic on the faces in one of the city’s hipper eateries the time I showed up unannounced, without a reservation. When I came in and asked cautiously whether “there might be a chance” of them having a table for my wife and me, we were given the nicest table at the window, and the cooks hurried out of the kitchen to shake my hand—after that one time, I never went back there again.

  “I hope you’re still willing to do this for me,” Bernhard said, picking a French fry off his plate, swishing it through his cup of mayonnaise, and putting it in his mouth. “If you’re not, I’ll understand, we’ll just drop the whole thing. But we can make history, Robert, really. Normally speaking, I don’t like sweeping phrases like that, but this is a unique opportunity. We can make history together.”

  “No, sure,” I said. “I’ll do it, I already promised you I would, you can count on me.”

  “Great,” he said, and he glanced at the tables to the left and to the right of us—a mother and daughter, and two men with laptops, iPads, and phones beside their plates of salad—before leaning across to me: “Listen up. Here’s the idea.”

  And he started in. First he gave me a brief recap of what he’d told me in our garden a few months earlier. The incomprehensibility of the beginning and end of the universe, and then the equally incomprehensible mystery of death. What if these two major mysteries were closely connected, he’d said. Our brain, ingenious as it may be, is a limited instrument. Our powers of imagination are limited. Remember the deaf people who are incapable of hearing. With our limited understanding, we can’t grasp the two great mysteries of life. Not only of life, but also of nonlife, because of course the entire cosmos has no need of us. The universe got along without us for billions of years, and for more billions of years, after we’re gone, it won’t miss us for a moment either.

  “My theory’s quite simple, really,” he had told me in the garden that night. I wasn’t able to see his face, I listened to his voice and saw only the glowing tip of his cigarette. “The way all major theories are always simple. Archimedes, Newton, Einstein. I could put on the false modesty now and say that of course I don’t mean to compare myself to those bigwigs, but I’m not going to do that. If my theory isn’t correct, it can go right in the trash. I can go right in the trash. Maybe no one will ever know about it, I leave that completely up to you, Robert. As far as I’m concerned, you’re free to use it as an anecdote to tell your friends and family, and you can all have a big laugh about it. ‘You remember Bernhard Langer? Do you remember what he thought?’ But”—and here he paused to pull another cigarette out of the pack—“if I’m right, if what I’m thinking is right, it’s going to be bigger than Einstein. It will be no less than the explanation of how the world works. I’ll get the Nobel Prize. Posthumously, but in the context of completely explaining life and death, that makes absolutely no difference anymore. You know what I’m like, Robert. I don’t give a fuck about Nobel Prizes. About recognition. Even without prizes, my life is interesting enough. But will you promise me one thing? If I get it, will you go to Stockholm to pick it up for me? Whatever the case, it will belong to both of us. You can give a nice speech, you’re good at that. Tell them about our friendship. Friendship that extends beyond the grave.”

  During our lunch at Dauphine, though, the Nobel Prize didn’t come up again. Bernhard emphasized how he had kept his distance from wishy-washy stuff his whole life. After our joint teenage experiments with Ouija boards and tarot cards, and devouring books that were popular back when we were about seventeen, books with titles like Chariots of the Gods? and The Morning of the Magicians, his career in the natural sciences and astronomy had kept him down to earth for years. He had become convinced that the palpable world contained mysteries enough, and that there was no need to go rummaging around in what he called the “immaterial” world.

  “Still, you never shake it off completely,” he said now, dipping a piece of rib eye into the bowl of Béarnaise sauce. “Once you’ve believed in life being brought to Earth by alien cosmonauts, you can never completely go back. Of course, it’s all a load of rubbish, that’s what you tell yourself, but then all the great discoveries were considered rubbish at first, too, by most people. That the earth is not the center of the universe, that it’s not flat, that there may be a western passage to India—all truths we now accept as self-evident, but they brought only ridicule to their first proponents, and led quite a few of them to the stake as well. I’ve immersed myself in black holes, concentrations of matter that exert such a powerful attraction that even light disappears into them. Why, I kept on asking myself? Why are there black holes? Isn’t the cosmos puzzling enough as it is? Stephen Hawking once said to me: ‘You know, Bernhard, sometimes I think about a future in which all the research we’re doing now will be seen as child’s play. As the preparation for something much bigger. As though we’re proud of having invented the safety match, and then they show us an atomic explosion.’ I’ve never forgotten that. We discover something—the roundness of the earth, the theory of relativity, the cell phone—but it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s only the beginning. Not even one half of one percent of the discoveries that are still coming.”

  He paused for a moment, signaled to the waitress, and pointed to our empty beer glasses. “Getting back to how it all started,” he went on. “With The Morning of the Magicians and Chariots of the Gods? Like I said, you never completely get over something like that. Do you remember how we read that book by Thor Heyerdahl, about the voyage of the Kon-Tiki? How he tried to prove that the ancient Egyptians, long before the start of our calendar, must have crossed the Atlantic, that they must have helped the Aztecs, the Mayans, and the Incas to build their pyramids? It’s not about whether it’s true or not, it’s that you don’t start laughing at a theory like that right away, that you’re provisionally prepared to accept it at face value. They’ve got a fashionable term for it these days: ‘thinking out of the box.’ People always laugh, and most of the time rightly so, at quasi-scientific experiments with thought waves, near-death experiences, and reincarnation. You can dismiss it all as nonsense, that’s usually safe, because no conclusive proof has ever been offered for those phenomena. When you’re a scientist, you have to watch your step. One dubious, wishy-washy experiment and you’re on the sidelines for years, maybe forever. You remember Rupert Sheldrake? He showed that the sparrows of Northern England had discovered a trick to remove the caps from milk bottles. The milk bottles delivered by the milkman and left on the stoop for a while, unattended. Less than six months later, the sparrows in the south of England knew the same trick. Without a single sparrow having flown down from the Far North to teach them: he actually had sound scientific evidence for that. His theory was that when intelligence increased within a small group, intelligence throughout the group as a whole increased too. And where is Rupert Sheldrake these days? Is he still alive? Do you have any idea? Do I have a clue?”

  The waitress came to ask if we were finished. She didn’t ask whether we had enjoyed our meals, not the way they did in some places after you’d only had a cheese sandwich. She simply asked whether everything had been okay, and whether we wanted to see the dessert menu.

  Bernhard and I didn’t even have to look at each other before I ordered two espressos and two grappas. “The clear one,” I added. “The normal one.”

  “It’s sort of like having believed in Communism,” Bernhard went on. “We used to believe in that, didn’t we? The Che Guevara posters on the wall, the Viet Cong, who we didn’t call the ‘Viet Cong’ the way the supporters of American imperialism did, but the ‘National Liberation Front of Vietnam.’ As time goes by you gradually lose that belief, but it n
ever goes away completely. Who was it who said: ‘If you’re not a Communist at the age of eighteen, you have no heart; if you are still a Communist at the age of twenty, you have no brain’?”

  “George Bernard Shaw?”

  “No, he went on believing till the bitter end, didn’t he? Anyway, it doesn’t matter, what I’m trying to say is that your sympathies remain with the bearded revolutionaries for the rest of your life, even if you’ve come to know better. You never swing all the way to the other side. You don’t suddenly become enamored of generals with stupid hats and dozens of medals pinned to their chests.”

  The table next to ours was empty. Not so very long ago, my bodyguards would have been sitting there. Back when there were still four of them, one always stood close to the door, the second one sat at the bar and scanned the customers in the restaurant from behind his sunglasses, a measured sweep, never any faster or any slower, like a radar scoop or a lighthouse. Numbers three and four sat at the table beside mine and acted like they weren’t listening to the conversation between me and my guest or guests. But it was always striking to see how little they had to say to each other. A few tables farther along I’d once had lunch with Bill Clinton, who hadn’t been president for very long by then. It was one of the rare occasions on which I felt the presence of a personality stronger than my own. Or at least a personality that seemed to gobble up other personalities. A sort of turbo-version of myself. Bill Clinton makes you feel as though you’re the only one who matters, that nothing exists outside the conversation he’s having with you at that moment; the outside world literally falls into nothingness. I’m not the only one who’s experienced a meeting with the former American president in that same way. Everyone who has ever been around him describes the experience in those same words. My two bodyguards were seated at the table to the right of us; to the left of us was a table with four Secret Service agents. They looked exactly the way they do on TV or in movies: white shirts, black suits, sunglasses, earpieces. Somehow, in a way I can’t really describe, they looked more plausible than my own bodyguards. Bill Clinton, too, seemed realer than most of the Dutch politicians I’d had lunch with at Dauphine. “Larger than life,” they call that. Maybe it was a matter of the TV footage racing out ahead of the former president himself, but he literally towered over the little table, his upper body was out of proportion to the tabletop, he grasped the edges of it firmly with his big hands, as though he might pick it up at any moment and hurl it across the restaurant.

  I remember quite clearly what we talked about. I can’t repeat it all here, not without getting myself into serious trouble. That morning, in The Hague, he’d had a meeting with our then prime minister. “Could I ask you something?” he’d asked me. “And I expect an honest answer.” His question had to do with the prime minister, I regret not being able to reproduce it here, but it was a private conversation and I can’t quote from it without permission from the former president himself, I can imagine he might not like that. Suffice it to say that Bill Clinton’s eyes grew wide when I tried to answer him as honestly as possible. Then he made a disgusted face. “Really?” he said. He shook his head and burst out laughing. “Unbelievable! I suspected something like that, but this is really unbelievable, Bob.” That’s right, he called me Bob, after he had said that I should call him Bill and I had said that he should call me Robert. It was hilarious, the former president of the United States took it for granted that here in Holland we shortened Robert to “Bob” too. Then Bill said something about Queen Beatrix, in whose company he’d had dinner the night before. He said it very quietly, almost at a whisper, I thought for a moment that I’d heard him wrong, but when he saw my expression he said it again.

  At that moment, I remember quite well, I glanced off to one side, at the table where my bodyguards were seated. They stirred their coffee in silence, there was nothing to indicate that they’d heard anything of our conversation. I could only admit that Clinton was right. Kings and queens. You’ll rarely find a personality among them. They never have to do their best. Unlike John F. Kennedy or Barack Obama (or Clinton himself), they don’t have to barnstorm around the country, trying to win votes. They get it all handed to them on a silver platter. You can tell by their faces. With every successive generation, the faces grow emptier. Stupider. Queen Juliana was already hard enough to take seriously: in her grandson’s face there’s almost nothing going on anymore. There’s no more hiding it: from generation to generation, the quality of the bloodline plummets. The only ones with anything that looks a bit like a personality are the princes- and princesses-by-marriage. They’re smarter. More ambitious. Marrying a future king or queen will open every door. They enter into matrimony with a man or woman no one would hook up with voluntarily. The princesses-by-marriage shine beside the empty faces of their husbands. From the steps of the royal palace they wave to the cheering crowds. The princes-by-marriage are now in uniform. The grins on their faces are 100 percent authentic. On their wedding night and a couple of times after that, they perform their duty. The lineage. A successor to the throne. New princes and princesses. Faces increasingly pappy and nondescript. Shortly after the honeymoon, the prince consort goes elephant hunting, flips a speedboat on the Mediterranean close to Cannes, crashes three or four sports cars, and hops from cocktail party to cocktail party aboard the yachts at anchor around the bay. There he hits on everything that isn’t already nailed to the deck: movie stars, duchesses, millionaires’ daughters. The queen knows about all this. She doesn’t need to know all the ins and outs, to hear all the juicy details. She knows that there’s no getting around it, that this is the tacit agreement. At home, in a room of the palace lit only by a single floor lamp, she watches the last edition of the evening news at midnight. She dabs at her eyes with a white lace handkerchief. A valet pokes his head in through the door to ask if she’d like another glass of young gin.

  “Two parallel lines intersect in infinity,” Bernhard was saying. “Do you still remember that, Robert? Second-year physics at the Spinoza Lyceum? Mr. Karstens?”

  I wondered whether I might have missed something; my senses told me that my thoughts had been elsewhere for quite some time now.

  “Yes, I remember that,” I said. “Parallel lines never intersect.”

  “Because it’s unimaginable.”

  “That’s right.” I was sure about it now, something was missing, a piece was gone for good, the way you sometimes doze off during a movie and then can’t figure out how the main character suddenly got from the casino to the desert somewhere outside Las Vegas.

  “That’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to make the unimaginable imaginable,” Bernhard said. “Make the parallel lines intersect. Mark off the beginning and the end of the universe. Or not, of course. The chance that nothing at all can be made imaginable is infinitely greater. But if you don’t try, you’ll never know. As far as that goes, I feel a bit like Columbus. You have to dare to go to sea without knowing where you’ll end up.”

  “When are you…When are you going to do it?” I had caught myself on the point of saying, When are you planning to leave?

  “The babies are due in four months. So before then anyway. It’s bad enough for Christine as it is. Having to raise twins on her own. It would be unthinkable, having to care for a dying man alongside that.”

  I looked at our empty espresso cups and glasses of grappa, then flagged down the waitress. It seemed much longer than a week ago that Bernhard had called to tell me about his impending death. A routine examination at the university, the mandatory annual checkup, had revealed anomalies in his blood sugar levels. How long have I got? Bernhard asked them. I wish I could give you a more hopeful prognosis, Mr. Langer, but at this stage it’s more like a matter of months.

  “I’m flying back to Boston tomorrow,” Bernhard told me. “I want to be with her for as long as possible.”

  Our second round of espressos and grappas came, a brief silence during whic
h we didn’t look at each other and I nodded courteously at the waitress. I still had a couple of questions for Bernhard, but he himself seemed to have nothing more to say.

  “And how about you?” he asked. “Anything new? Any juicy gossip?”

  We had already talked briefly, at the start of the lunch, about my parents, about my mother’s funeral. About my father, and how painful it was to ask him about his plans for the immediate future. Bernhard agreed with me that it was better to wait until he started talking about it himself.

  “You were very close with your mother, weren’t you?” he asked me at one point. “I mean, more so than with your father, right?”

  “Yeah, I think so. In fact, I’m sure so. My mother was always calm, such a good listener too. My father was, is, more the hyperactive type. You remember that; I always got tired when I was around him, even when I was a kid. We would rent a house in the Dordogne and then, early in the morning, I would see him unfolding a map on the table, out on the patio, and flipping madly through all these guidebooks. I would hope, pray, that we wouldn’t have to go off to some church or ruin somewhere, that we could just spend the whole day sitting on the patio.”

  Bernhard laughed. “Yeah, I remember that, he was always that way. And have you noticed anything yet, with your mother?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Whether you’re already feeling her absence. Or not. I mean, it hasn’t been that long. Maybe you wake up in the morning and for a couple of seconds or more you have the feeling that she’s still around. I had that with my father when he died. It lasted a pretty long time, for months, maybe a year. Every day, all over again, I had to get used to the fact that he wasn’t there anymore. And I saw things the way he would have seen them. In everything I did, I asked myself whether he would have approved.”