The Ditch

by Herman Koch

  He raised the glass of gin to his lips and knocked it right back. Then he wiped the drops off his lips with the back of his hand—but not the spot of toothpaste beside them, that was still there. If it had been my mother sitting across from me, I would have wiped the spot away with my thumb, the way I plucked the little pieces of crab out of her hair at Oriental City, but I would never have dreamed of doing that with my father: that’s just the way it was, that’s the way it had always been and always would be.

  “It was time for me to say goodbye. Looking back on it, probably a good thing, too, because what are you supposed to do after that? I mean: I’m perfectly aware that that’s all it’s going to be, a little flirting and glowing cheeks, I’m not an idiot. But I got such a kick out of it, I don’t know how else to put it; a good mood that’s just indestructible. But your mother is, your mother was, really good at that, at destroying my good moods. What exactly did you think you were doing back there? How old are you anyway? No, she couldn’t see the humor in it. All the way home she just kept going on about how immature I was. At a certain point, I couldn’t take it anymore. I knew I’d be able to subsist for days on my success with those girls, but then she was going to have to stop nagging. Sorry, son, but that’s the way I felt right then. So what did I do? I’d had a bit to drink, of course. And back at Elsa’s maybe a couple of beers too many. And too fast. I was a little rocky already, but I could still more or less walk straight, and then I came up with this priceless flash of intuition. ‘I’m not feeling too well,’ I said, and right away I let myself fall down between two parked cars. That put an end to your mother’s nagging. From then on I was a patient, a sorry patient, an old man in his cups. I let her help me up, I tried not to lay it on too thick. Like I said, I’d had too much to drink, but I couldn’t go on playing the drunk all the way home, at some point I was sure to blow it. But it went well, I had awakened the nurse in your mother. When we got home she helped me onto the couch and took off my shoes. And she made two toasted cheese sandwiches for me. ‘Everything’s spinning,’ I said, but then I realized I shouldn’t overdo it.”

  He shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and raised the glass to his lips again, but seemed not to notice that it was empty.

  “After that I did something I’m not proud of,” he went on. “The next day, at breakfast, your mother started in again. About those girls and how drunk I was. But I’d had enough. I wanted to keep those girls for myself. So I acted as though I couldn’t remember any of it. ‘I must have been completely smashed,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember any of that. What age did you say those girls were?’ I asked her. And then I did what she was probably hoping I would do. I acted as though I was dying of shame. ‘Oh, sweetheart, that’s terrible!’ I said. ‘That must have been so embarrassing. Can you forgive me?’ And I bowed my head, I made myself look like the husband caught red-handed, the contrite husband. But when I closed my eyes the very next moment, I saw those girls again. That pretty girl, the one who looked at me for such a long time with that look that left no room for misinterpretation. Ah, I thought, now they’re all mine again.”

  “my brother’s coming next week,” Sylvia said.

  After a few more cutting remarks about my father, our conversation entered smoother waters and a real fight seemed to have been averted. We talked a bit about Emmy; it had been a couple weeks since she’d gone missing. “It’s time to hang up some new posters,” she said. “Diana said something about it yesterday. The old ones have almost all faded or been blown away. I printed a new photo from my phone, it’s a little clearer and it’s in color too. But Diana’s going to be starting exams soon, I’d really rather not have her cell number on the posters. It’s a distraction, and it wouldn’t be good for her right now.”

  I didn’t reply; I waited for my wife to say that she’d put her own number under the picture of our cat. But that’s not what she said. “Maybe you could do it this time, Robert? Normally I don’t mind dealing with callers, you know that. But could you maybe do it this time?”

  She didn’t look at me when she asked it, her hands were folded in her lap and she was rubbing her thumbs together. The way she said it—“dealing with callers”—made it sound as though tomorrow, or the day after, scores of people would start calling about the whereabouts of our cat.

  At first, I didn’t reply. I observed her, her folded hands and the rubbing of her thumbs, I waited for a sign, a moment of weakness—it wouldn’t have surprised me if she had broken into tears. He dumped me, Robert! How dare he! He said I’d become too much of a burden, that he could never explain it to his wife.

  I caught myself in the midst of a sudden swell of rage against Alderman Van Hoogstraten. Indeed, how dare he? How dare he suddenly dump my wife, without a word of warning? But the next moment I had myself under control again.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll see to the cat. But can you make those posters? And just put my cell number on them?”

  I don’t know exactly what I was hoping for. Gratitude, for having given in so quickly? A warm smile, a hand on my forearm, fingers softly squeezing my wrist? Thanks, you’re such a dear. Or was it something very different, a little tear running down her cheek, a blurted-out confession. I don’t know what got into me! Oh, please, can you ever forgive me, darling?

  For the first time, I thought about the alternative scenario. A scenario in which it was not the alderman but my wife who put an end to the relationship. A desperate Van Hoogstraten who went on blowing up her inbox with text messages, who waited for my wife in a doorway farther down our street, who stalked her—a hysterically weeping alderman who threatened to make the whole affair public if she wouldn’t have him back.

  Forgive her? Yes, I could do that. Were she to confess everything right now, my first reaction would be to explode in a rage. No, not explode, more like descend into an enraged silence. That had always been more my style: the pursed lips, the head in hands, the occasional deep sigh. I would pace the room with my hands in my pockets, pause at the window, stare outside motionlessly while, behind my back, her sobs and pleas grew ever louder. But I would forgive her. I had already forgiven her, even as I looked at her, at her nervous thumb-rubbing, at the hair fallen over her face. Something would be damaged irreparably, a crack in a vase too dear to you to simply throw away. Vase and crack would remain visible for all time, every day I would see it perched on the table, with a new bouquet each time—but the crack would remain the same. I already knew how I would manage to go on living with the crack. I would be thankful. Thankful that the vase had not shattered and gone out with the trash. That was my usual tack, when people or things conspired against me. Sometimes I would lie awake half the night, after a jealous remark from a fellow party member. A fellow party member who would never, ever become mayor of Amsterdam. No, what am I saying: who wouldn’t even become mayor of some whistle-stop of four hundred souls hunched up against the German border. Never, not now, and not in the next life either. Fuming with anger, I would think about how to get back at my fellow party member. How, during some meeting in the future, I would drop some oblique innuendo, oblique but deadly.

  And then, suddenly, with no apparent transition, I would switch to thinking about what I already had. About my only real and most cherished possessions. My wife. My daughter. Sylvia. Diana. I listened to my wife’s breathing, I heard my daughter rummaging about downstairs in the kitchen, after coming home from some party at six in the morning. That was enough. By comparison, for a few seconds, my fellow party member was only to be pitied, and the next moment he had disappeared from sight altogether.

  Yes, that’s the way I would do it. I would clutch the vase to my breast, with the crack turned toward me, so no one else could see it.

  26

  And so it happened, in the early morning hours of the next day, that I found myself walking the canals of Amsterdam with a pile of photocopies, a box of thumbtacks, and a roll of
adhesive tape. I started as far from home as possible, at the corner of Utrechtsestraat and Prinsengracht (I had decided to limit myself today to two or three blocks), and I pinned a poster to every other tree.

  LOST CAT

  [photo]

  MY NAME IS “EMMY.”

  [phone number]

  My phone number. I asked myself, and not for the first time that morning, exactly what I was doing. I had put on my sunglasses and my black knitted North Face cap especially for this occasion. It was the same outfit I wore around town sometimes, on days when I didn’t feel like saying hello to someone every twenty meters. As a disguise, though, it was not watertight. At the corner of Keizersgracht and Reguliersgracht, I saw a lady of a certain age coming toward me, walking a nondescript little black-and-white dog.

  “Good morning, Mr. Mayor!” she said cheerily; the dog sniffed at the tree to which I had just pinned a picture of our cat and lifted its hind leg. “Aw, is that your cat?” she asked, moving her face up closer to the tree. “You know, I live just down the canal here, in the same block you do, and I used to see your cat in our garden all the time. What I mean is: I didn’t know at the time that it was your cat, but there’s no mistaking it, that black stripe across her head, just like a lock of hair. I’ll keep my eyes open. Maybe she’s locked up in a shed somewhere. They go into sheds all the time, out of curiosity. Or other houses with cats and a cat flap. Is that your phone number?”

  “Yes,” I said, a bit too quietly, reluctantly even—I suddenly had the fearful premonition that this woman would be calling me soon, cat or no cat.

  A few days later, at the end of the afternoon, I was cycling down Hogeweg when a red sports car passed me with the roof down. Passed me so close—as though the driver hadn’t seen me at all—that I had to yank on the handlebars to keep his mirror from smacking into me.

  “Hey!” I shouted, and before I could reflect on whether it was advisable for a mayor to do so, I had already raised my hand and showed the driver my middle finger. “Look out, would you, grandpa!?”

  The man—an old man, I’d noticed that already, whose close-cut, stubbly gray hair reminded me of my father’s—apparently hadn’t noticed anything unusual in his rearview mirror: taking it easy, he entered the traffic square with the fountain, first a short right, then a left—and it was at those two points that I caught a brief glance of his profile.

  I never know exactly whether, at such moments, one’s heart beats faster or actually slows down, or whether it just beats louder. Maybe I was wrong, I told myself, even though I knew better. Maybe the driver of the red sports car was simply an old man who looked a lot like my father.

  But when the car turned right at the next corner, down Pythagorasstraat, and I could see his face from the side again, all my doubts vanished. It was something in the way the old man, in the way my father, ground his teeth as he drove, as though he were chewing on something, a piece of gristle. That’s what he did whenever he was concentrating deeply: the two of us used to play chess often, and the grinding of his molars was always a sign to me that a decisive move was on its way.

  Let me clarify things right now: this was not a Lamborghini or a Ferrari, no, not even a Jaguar or a Porsche, more like something French, I guessed—and that turned out later to be true. I know nothing about cars, but I do like them. When a Bentley or an Aston Martin drives by, I always turn my head and watch it go, the way other men turn their heads when a woman walks by. I look them, too, of course, but if being mayor had provided me with one sixth sense, then it was the ability to determine the exact moment when no one would see me do that.

  I kept enough distance between us, and when I turned down Pythagorasstraat, too, the red sports car was already on the next block, past Copernicusstraat.

  Later—a few minutes later, but looking back on it, too, in the days, months, even years afterward—I asked myself whether my father had parked the red, eye-catching sports convertible right in front of his house on purpose; whether he was bound and determined to have everyone see it, above all everyone in this neighborhood, where everyone saw almost everything. It was like the bare windows that the Dutch specialize in, the curtains that are always parted to show that you have nothing to hide.

  He could just as easily have parked the car a few blocks away or put it in a garage somewhere. My visit was unannounced. There was no way he could have known that I would see him driving the car past the fountain. A red sports car parked in front of his door didn’t necessarily mean anything, it could just as well have belonged to someone else.

  Those are the things that went through my mind before I rang the bell, before he opened the door in surprise and invited me in. Had he been acting guilty, I asked myself later, or was he only just surprised? There was, after all, no reason for him to act guilty; the red car parked in front of his house didn’t have his name on it. No, there was no reason for him to act that way, not unless he had looked in his mirror and seen me somewhere close to the fountain, or later, when he turned down Pythagorasstraat. That, too, was something I wondered about much later.

  Whatever the case, he first pulled the bottle of young gin out of the freezer, poured us both a little tulip-shaped glass full, sat down, leaned over his glass, slurped off the top layer of liquor, and only then looked up at me.

  “I want to show you something,” he said.

  A few seconds later, we were out on the street. It was a bright sunny day, he had simply left the top down. Maybe he was going somewhere later on, I thought later.

  He pointed out the various buttons and switches on the steering column and dashboard and gave a brief explanation of how they worked. “This here’s the cruise control, and that S is the sports mode; it’s an automatic, but sports mode makes the car more fun to drive than it is in D.” Then he suggested that we go for a ride. When he saw the look on my face, he said: “Just around the block here. I think maybe I know what you’re thinking, but there’s something I want to tell you.”

  The prospect of a drive—a “test drive,” that was the first term that came to mind—with my father behind the wheel of a sports convertible expressed itself as a heavy sensation in the pit of my stomach. But we were already seated, and he had already started the engine and gunned it a few times before moving the shift to S.

  “You should have seen the neighbors’ faces the first time I parked this baby in front of the house,” he said, braking for the first of many speed bumps on Pythagorasstraat and then turning a little too fast, a little too sportily, down Copernicusstraat. “They didn’t say anything, of course not, but I could see them thinking: Wife barely dead and in her grave, widower goes on a spree. Well, ever since that first time I always gun it hard before I drive off. Let them think whatever they want, I really don’t give a shit anymore.”

  I kept my mouth shut. I thought about the last time I’d had lunch with my mother at Oriental City, when she’d told me about my father and his dream of buying a new car; a dream she had laughed off at the time as typical of a ninety-four-year-old adolescent who had never grown up.

  “I thought you said just a spin around the block,” I said as he rounded Galileïplantsoen and pulled out onto Wethouder Frankeweg.

  “No use in that, my boy,” he said. “With all those fucking speed bumps, you can’t tell what this baby is really capable of. If you want a horse to gallop you have to let it run, that’s what I always say.”

  On Middenweg he gave it a little more gas, and I felt my head being pushed back against the headrest as we shot ahead, past Oosterbegraafplaats cemetery and Betondorp, and then up the entrance ramp to the ring road. “He can smell the open road now, buddy,” he said, slapping my knee.

  It was rush hour: to my considerable relief, traffic in all four lanes was moving at a crawl.

  “Goddamn it!” he shouted, smacking the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. With two brusque jerks on the wheel he swung the car out into
the middle lane, right in front of a truck that honked and flashed its brights. “We’re in Holland, of course, I forgot about that for a moment. Around here the horses are confined to their stalls. Cruelty to animals, that’s what it is.”

  A few hundred meters farther, the neon traffic indicators above the road began to blink: 50. Within seconds, we came to a complete halt. My father sighed deeply.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I’ve thought about it. About my birthday, I mean.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve decided to make one grand, sweeping gesture. To celebrate life one last time, life the way it ought to be lived. Next week I’m going to drive down to France. To the same hotel where your mother and I spent so many happy vacations in the last twenty years. In style. I mean: I’m going to drive there in style, hence this car. Your mother would have disapproved of my buying it anyway. Am I right, or am I right?”

  I stared straight ahead, at the motionless sea of cars; above the neon indicators, the sky was turning a dark gray.

  “I’m going to do some hiking there, for a week,” he went on. “Have some nice meals, a good bottle of wine every day. But I won’t tell them. I won’t tell anyone there that it’s my birthday. Otherwise they may show up with a birthday cake. Or they’ll think I’m to be pitied. They’ll probably think that anyway. I’m not sure how I’m going to handle it, not yet. They’ve known us for years. That nice, vivacious old couple. I think I’ll just give it to them straight. I’m on my own this year. My wife died, I’m sorry to say. To be honest, I’m kind of looking forward to that. To those somber faces. The waiters and the hotel owner, mumbling their condolences in French. Maybe after that they’ll leave me alone a bit.”