The Ditch

by Herman Koch

  “But you were a lot younger then. Seventeen, right?”

  “Eighteen. A week after my eighteenth birthday.”

  “That’s exactly the age when kids start to rebel against their parents’ authority. Or when they’re just getting over doing that. So it’s only logical that you thought his approval was important. But with my mother…I don’t know, this morning it did occur to me that, normally speaking, I would be having lunch with her today, instead of with you.”

  “All I’m saying is that you should pay close attention. You two had a strong bond. The same way we have a strong bond, but with a mother that’s even stronger, by definition. It’s all still very fresh, you’re still open to it. To little changes. Things you couldn’t explain unless, of course, your mother had something to do with it.”

  That had been the moment when they brought our food, and we’d segued seamlessly into Bernhard’s theory about the possible connection between the finiteness of the universe and the finiteness of human life.

  During the second grappa I felt the alcohol kicking in for the first time. Afraid that, in a fit of false alcoholic candor I would surely regret later, I might start in about Sylvia and Alderman Van Hoogstraten, I gave Bernhard a brief rundown on the windmill debate.

  “The most frustrating thing about it is that I wasn’t there,” I ended my account. “Because I…Well, because it just happened to be the day that it happened with my parents.”

  Bernhard knocked back his grappa in a single go; his gaze may have been a bit more watery than at the start of our lunch, but he had always been able to hold his alcohol better than I could.

  After the grappa, he raised the espresso cup to his lips and knocked that back too.

  “You know what it is?” he said. “This whole climate discussion has been carried out all wrong, ever since the very beginning. Carried out misleadingly. They emphasize all the wrong things. Wind turbines, solar panels, that’s fine, they don’t do much damage. But in fact, we don’t need them at all. Did you know that if everyone in Holland would turn down the heat by one degree Celsius in the winter, we could save the energy produced by ten thousand wind turbines? Ten thousand! One degree, don’t get me wrong, I’m not out to get people to sit around in a cold house. It’s about a change in mentality. We turn the thermostat up to twenty-two degrees and lie around on the couch in our pajamas. In shorts and a T-shirt. Because that’s the way we want to live. Because that’s what we’re used to. But no government, no political party is going to try to get people to wear a sweater around the house. In fact, it would be much better if we didn’t put on a sweater at all. Turn down the heating two degrees and the fat metabolism kicks in automatically. The best diet there is. You can eat as much as you want, as long as you always keep the heating down to twenty.”

  “But then what is it?” I asked. “Why does it seem as though the windmill advocates are always right?”

  “Do you have any idea how much money is involved there? Have you ever taken a good look at the calculation models? It’s all been in the newspapers. The whole setup is incredibly expensive, in comparison to what it yields. But everyone’s earning a lot of money on it. The turbine manufacturers, but also the farmers who let them put one of those things on their land, get huge amounts of money from the government. And those turbines don’t last that long. Not as long as the average nuclear power plant. There was an article about it in the newspaper not so long ago. About the companies that are going to make a fortune on that later on, when they have to tear down all those turbines. And we’re not even talking about the foreign market. We’ve got the technology, the know-how—we’re working on it already—to shove wind turbines down the throat of the entire Third World. Even after expenses, it still adds up to a lot more than all the natural gas reserves we’ve still got in the ground.

  “You know, Robert,” he went on, after raising the empty grappa glass to his lips and trying to flag down the waitress. “The worst of it is that none of it makes any difference. And that the people who dare to say anything else are called ‘climate skeptics.’ We live in a democracy, but dissent is not really appreciated. It doesn’t matter who’s right. Maybe it’s going to get colder in the next five hundred years. But there could also be a scorching global heat wave. Those couple of degrees of man-made warming really aren’t going to make the difference. In the Middle Ages, there were icebergs drifting off the coast of Majorca; a century before that, there were vineyards in the north of England. None of it under the influence of greenhouse gases. The fluctuations on Earth have always taken place on a scale much larger than the human one. On a scale like that, ten thousand or a hundred thousand wind turbines are only a drop in the bucket. Literally a drop in the bucket: one drop makes no difference, but if you pour the whole thing full of ice water it’s the bucket itself that cools down. We may be heading for a future in which we’ll have to produce as much greenhouse gas and CO2 as we can, just to stay a bit warm. One volcanic explosion and it will be two degrees cooler here for the next century. I’m talking about a real volcano, a bruiser, like the Krakatoa. For the first eight years after it erupted, people here in Holland could go skating from September to the middle of May. You see that in the paintings from back then: all those winter landscapes. Or what about the Ice Age? There was no environmental movement back then, only the environment. And that environment did whatever it pleased. Later, when our country is covered in a mile-thick layer of ice, what environmental movement is going to organize a protest march against the new ice age? Earth is an indifferent planet, Robert. When it comes right down to it, she couldn’t care less whether she’s inhabited by humans or not. Sea level rise? A tsunami? So what? Who told those people to build their houses so close to the coast? Earth is feeling hemmed in, something’s too tight. Something pinches somewhere. She stretches a little, and two tectonic plates slide over each other with a crash. That’s better, now she can breathe again, that hemmed-in feeling is over. But no one’s told her that she’s inhabited by people. That their houses collapse when she stretches. The earth shivers like a horse trying to shoo flies off its flanks. She waves her tail, but can’t shake more than a few tens of thousands, at most a couple hundred thousand humans, off her back. Sometimes I ask myself whether this is how it was supposed to be, this human life. We’ve gone in search of voices from space, but just imagine that we are really alone. A hugely empty cosmos with somewhere, almost indiscernible in our galaxy, one tiny little planet where things have spun out of control. A mistake. A chain reaction. We talk about pollution all the time these days, but what if we ourselves just happen to be the pollutant? Not only us: life itself. A fungus on the face of a planet that never asked for that life in the first place. I’ve tried to imagine that sometimes. Our earth with no life on it. No trees, no grass, nothing at all. You’ve got places like that in Iceland. Or the Grand Canyon. It’s not sad at all, it’s actually very beautiful.”

  i walked bernhard across the street to Amstel Station, where he was going to take the train to Schiphol. I consulted my public transport app.

  “The best thing would be to change trains at Duivendrecht,” I said. “That’s faster than going by way of Central Station.”

  On the platform, we hugged.

  “This isn’t goodbye,” he said. “Let’s not overdramatize it. We can call, write, text…If I get the chance, I’ll warn you in time, in the next couple of weeks.”

  “Weeks?” I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes.

  “At the end of the month there’s a conference in Las Vegas that I have to go to. I think I’ll take the opportunity to visit the Grand Canyon. The North Rim, I’ve never been there before.”

  I put my glasses back on, but the lenses were fogged over. The train was pulling in.

  “You know, Robert,” Bernhard said, patting me on the shoulder, “deep in my heart I believe that, in the end, there’s nothing. If human life is a mistake, then life after death would
be an even bigger mistake. If you hear nothing from me later on, that will be the ultimate proof that there’s really nothing at all.”

  25

  And then? Then my wife’s behavior really did change—there was no mistaking it this time.

  You’ve been picnicking in the park. Sun, and the occasional cloud. But then suddenly the wind comes up. The branches start to sway, a cold shiver blows through the grass. You have just enough time to fold the blanket and stuff the half-empty bottles and the remains of your meal back in the basket. Then, too close for comfort, you hear the first thunderclap. Fat drops of rain are held back by the leaves at first, but out in the open there’s no stopping it. Soaked to the skin, you make it to the parking lot where you left the car.

  “I texted you!” she said and heaved a deep sigh. We were standing, facing off, in the kitchen. “Didn’t you get my message? Toothpaste and honey-licorice drops. How hard can that be?”

  I sputtered something, for form’s sake: that I never hear my phone when I’m on the bike. But meanwhile, all my senses were tingling. It was the third time that week that she had yelled at me, the second time in the last two days. Normally speaking, when that happens I ask her whether something’s wrong. Whether this irritation is perhaps only a surface thing, whether the cause doesn’t actually lie deeper.

  But I didn’t do that. Or no, let me put that differently: We never asked each other whether there was “something wrong.” Never. We waited patiently until the other person took the initiative. Not out of a lack of interest, but out of respect. Sometimes the other person was just in a bad mood that day, how irritating then to be asked if maybe there was something wrong. The next day it would probably be over anyway.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked now, and with that I violated our unspoken agreement. “I don’t know, but you’ve been so irritable the last few days. I mean, toothpaste: how important can that be?”

  Sylvia looked away quickly and pretended to be studying the best-before date on a can of tuna fish. “Don’t worry about me, Robert. I think I’m just a little tired. But it also annoys me so much that I can’t even count on you to go to the store for me.”

  So that time I dropped the subject. But the next day it happened again. The two of us were on the couch, watching the news. Something about a paralyzed woman in Texas who was demanding her right to euthanasia.

  “Isn’t it about time you called your father?” she asked, in a tone that made it clear she was itching for a fight. “Postponing it for a little while, okay, but that was already a couple of weeks ago.”

  At that moment, I could have said something conciliatory. Or come up with some hackneyed cliché. Don’t you think we should actually have a talk, the two of us? Because I think this is about something very different.

  But I didn’t do either of those things. I felt more like forcing the issue.

  “So be glad,” I said. “You thought it was so spoiled and childish of my parents to want to put an end to it all, didn’t you? So very Dutch of them? Well, maybe he’s more attached to living than he realized. Maybe he’s actually rediscovered life.”

  At the moment I said it I realized that, until then, I had never considered that possibility myself. I had called my father a couple of times in the last few weeks and went by to see him once. He seemed more downhearted to me than anything else, almost as though he was ashamed of still being around. I never asked him about it directly, but the last time I called he had started talking about it himself.

  “I’ve been thinking…,” he said. “What if I were to do something, one last time. I mean, something major. A real farewell. It’s so strange, buddy. Life is horrible without your mother around, but still, I notice that I’ve started becoming attached to the little things. The sun coming up, the birds in the garden, that kind of thing. I was lying in bed a few days ago, I didn’t feel like getting up yet, and at a certain point I realized that I’d been staring at a branch outside for at least half an hour. The leaves on that tree. That’s life, too, I thought. You see, those are the kinds of banal thoughts your father has these days. But I did ask myself right away whether it wasn’t maybe all one big mistake.”

  A few days later, I dropped by to see him. You couldn’t really say the house was a mess, there were no piles of dirty dishes in the sink, and he himself looked fairly tidy. No, it was something in the details, the things that weren’t there anymore: a vase of fresh-cut flowers, a bowl of fruit, the bed—which was made, it’s true, but not as neatly as my mother used to. My father was wearing a pair of gray sweatpants and his favorite brown sweater; maybe he hadn’t shaved that morning, but he had yesterday or the day before. There was a white spot of toothpaste at the left-hand corner of his lips. That meant he was still brushing his teeth, but he’d apparently stopped looking in the mirror afterward.

  “You said something on the phone a few days ago, about doing something major,” I said. “About doing something big, one last time.”

  “That’s right.”

  We were sitting in the kitchen, both with a glass of young gin in front of us.

  I sipped at mine. “Your birthday is coming up soon. Might that be something? We could go somewhere. Out of town. To the beach, for example. Have a nice dinner someplace. Just with Sylvia, Diana, and me. Or something here at the house? Sylvia could make something nice. You could invite a couple of people.”

  “Are you nuts, Robert? Throwing a party after something like this? I can just see the looks on their faces. Maybe they wouldn’t dare to ask directly, but you can bet they’d all be thinking the same thing. No, pal, that’s the last thing I need.”

  He glanced at his phone, which was on the table beside his glass of gin. A brand-new iPhone. “It was time for me to get a new phone,” he had told me soon after my mother’s funeral. “But your mother…You know how your mother is. Was. She thought that was all nonsense, a waste of money. What’s wrong with your old phone? You can just hear her say it, can’t you? Then I saw an ad for a special offer. You had to take a new number, that was the thing. But I figured: Who am I going to give that new number to anyway? To the three of you. But nobody else.”

  At home, and when my mother was around, he had gone on using his old Nokia, he told me. He hadn’t felt like defending his purchase. “Maybe that’s childish,” he said. “I could also have just come out and told your mother about it. But you know her, she could look so disapproving sometimes. And I felt I had a right to something for myself, without having to justify everything all the time.” He topped up our half-empty glasses, all the way to the brim. “Sometimes that got really tiring, it was as though she didn’t grant me my little pleasures anymore. There was this one time—stop me right away if I’ve told you this before—but in any case, there was this time on Queen’s Day, or maybe by then they were already calling it King’s Day, don’t ask me. At my age, I figure I have the right to go on calling it Queen’s Day. We went out to walk around the neighborhood, and so we finally got to that café, to Elsa’s.”

  He leaned down, lowered his lips to his glass, and slurped off the top layer of gin. “Anyway, at one point your mother went off to the ladies’ room, she was gone for a pretty long time; who knows, maybe there was a long line. I started talking to these two girls outside, on the patio. Cute girls. I mean: I’d had a few myself, but those two were knocking back their white wine twice as fast as I could drink my beer. There was one of them, she was really pretty, and that other girl was more usual, but also just cute, if you know what I mean. Anyway, to make a long story short: At a certain point, I noticed something. I noticed that the pretty one kept narrowing her eyes whenever she looked at me. I was telling some silly story, I don’t even remember what it was about, but so that girl kept kind of shutting her eyes, and when she laughed she threw her head back, and then she would shake her hair in a way…you know, that can mean only one thing. That girl was flirting with me, right out in the open. With me, s
ome ninety-four-year-old guy! What have I done to deserve this, I thought. But at the same time, I thought something else too. I thought: It’s not really all that weird. I’m just a nice guy, I tell stories that make nineteen-year-old girls laugh, not every man can say that. And maybe they just looked right past this old face of mine. I know exactly how old I am, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I have to think too lowly of myself; if you do that, you start off with the hand brake on, and you never experience anything again.”

  I looked at him, at his old face, and I had to admit he was probably right. He looked good for his age. And I could imagine it clearly: how, with his easy patter, he had charmed the socks off of two nineteen-year-old girls—I was just glad I hadn’t been around to see it.

  “It was exciting as hell. I loved it. I acted as though I liked the plainer one the most, I paid more attention to her. That’s what I always used to do, too, when there were two girls at the same time. Any other man would go right for the prettiest one. Not me. I let the flirty one play her little game, with her laughing and throwing her head back and shaking her hair. But I could see the way she was glowing. You know what I mean, Robert, when the girls start to glow? That’s the greatest thing there is, as a man, that’s what you do it for. Both of them, actually, were standing there glowing. That other girl too. Sometimes they literally start glowing, then they get those red blushes on their cheeks; other times it’s more a kind of sultriness, then the glowing takes place mostly in and around the eyes. But anyway, I lost track of time. I got to the point where I would let the plainer one go and turn all my attention to the pretty girl. So I kind of turned to one side, I don’t completely turn my back on her, but my body language tells her that from here on out she doesn’t really count. And while I’m doing that, I suddenly see your mother standing there. She was standing at one of those high tables all covered in empty plastic glasses, all alone, and the way she was looking at me, buddy, I don’t think I have to tell you that. She was too far away, but I could almost see her turning up her nose. The same way she would have turned up her nose at this thing”—he tapped the iPhone with his index finger—“Toys! Can’t you hear her saying that? Let him go and play with his toys, in his heart he’s never really grown up.”