The Ditch

by Herman Koch

  We still weren’t going anywhere, this was no normal rush-hour traffic jam; some people had already climbed out of their cars: probably an accident ahead—and indeed, the next moment an ambulance passed us on the shoulder, its lights flashing.

  “And after that,” my father said, “what I’m going to do after my birthday, I’ve thought about that too. I know the countryside like the back of my hand. They’ve got a gorge there, that’s what the French call it, a narrow ravine with cliffs on both sides and a river down below, sort of the Grand Canyon in miniature. A road runs through it, a narrow road with lots of curves, high above that river. That’s what I’m going to do. In fact, it’s just death by natural causes. Man with poor eyesight, just turned ninety-five, drives too fast, smashes through the guardrail, and plunges into the ravine. Dead. Maybe I’ll have a bottle of wine first, to screw up my courage. Whatever I do, they’ll find too much alcohol in my blood. That suits me better than dying quietly in bed. Going out with a bang. What do you think? I mean, I know what you think, what you’ve been thinking the whole time since your mother died but didn’t dare to say out loud. Didn’t dare to ask. Well, this is my answer.”

  27

  “Don’t stay up there too long, okay?” my wife said. “Dinner will be ready in a bit.”

  I mumbled something, or at least I made a sound that told Sylvia (and her brother) that I’d heard her. They were sitting at the kitchen table when I got home, a bottle of red wine and two glasses in between them, and they made no bones about the fact that I was interrupting their conversation. The sort of silence with an almost audible static in the background, like when you hit the pause button on the DVD player because you have to go to the toilet.

  My wife had picked up her brother at Schiphol Airport that afternoon. His suitcase was still beside his chair, and he was still wearing his brown leather jacket.

  When he stood up to hug me, the cheap leather of his jacket made a crackling sound, like when you crush a plastic bottle in your hands. We didn’t exchange kisses, but our cheeks—his unshaven—brushed in a fleeting and clumsy greeting.

  Upstairs in my study, I opened the balcony doors and stepped outside. The sun had already disappeared behind the houses, but it was still light; a thin, blue column of smoke rose up from a few gardens down.

  I looked at the lawn but didn’t see the thrush right away, not in the bushes or flowerbeds either, so I leaned out as far as I could to see if he might be sitting on the kitchen windowsill. That’s where he had been that morning—that’s where he had been every morning, ever since our cat ran away. The way he sat there, with his yellow beak and his head tilted a little to one side, attentively, inquisitively, you almost couldn’t help but think that he was looking inside.

  I had seen the thrush at other times of day too; a few days ago, as I was carrying a crate of empty beer bottles to the little shed at the back of the garden, the bird had suddenly hopped out of the bushes onto the lawn and followed me all the way to the shed and back—as though he were walking along with me.

  Yes, I had even spoken to the thrush—“Hello there, how are things with you?”—in the same way I had wished him a good morning on other occasions. Yesterday at breakfast, as I was standing at the counter waiting for the coffee to drip through and my slice of bread to pop out of the toaster, he had been sitting there too. I leaned forward slowly and brought my face up closer to the window. I was expecting him to fly away at any moment—that he wouldn’t understand the glass was enough protection against the big, human face coming toward him from the other side—but he didn’t. I came right up close, looked into his one eye that gleamed black as coal without reflecting anything. There was an orange circle around that eye, as though the thrush had applied makeup.

  That afternoon, on the ring road with my father, there had been a brief but heavy cloudburst. It could have turned into a scene straight out of a slapstick movie: ninety-four-year-old driver of a red sports car can’t find the button that will raise the top of the convertible, beside him sits his sixty-year-old son, the mayor of Amsterdam; within a matter of seconds, they are both soaked to the skin. I had seen quite a few motorists sneaking glances at me in the traffic jam already, and I regretted not having brought along my sunglasses and woolen cap.

  But faster than I ever would have expected, my father found the right button. As though he had done it often, that was the first thing that came to my mind. How long had he had this car anyway? Did it matter? He had shown it to me today for the first time, but did that mean anything? Maybe he had bought it a long time ago. Ordered it a long time ago. Unless I was mistaken, you had to order a car like this months in advance.

  It was possible that he had ordered the car six months ago already. But a red sports car would have been harder to hide from my mother than an iPhone.

  back at the house he took a new bottle of young gin out of the freezer. “You want to stay for dinner?” he asked. “I don’t have a lot, just some leftover mashed potatoes with raw endive. And half a smoked sausage.”

  I told him that my brother-in-law was arriving later, that I would be heading home after our drink. I looked at him as he nipped at his glass. I tried to imagine him shifting down on a curvy road in France, then punching it and breaking through the guardrail.

  “When were you supposed to go in and have your license renewed?” I asked—just to have something to say, or in any case not to have to hear more details about his upcoming vacation. “In June, right?”

  “Ach,” he said, “that really doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “No, maybe not.”

  He knocked back his gin and banged his glass down on the table. “It doesn’t matter because I lost my license more than a year ago. So now you’re all caught up.”

  I stared at him.

  “I went to see our doctor,” he continued, screwing the top back on the gin bottle. “I asked him if he knew a friendly ophthalmologist who could help me renew my license, but he wasn’t having any of it. That would be unethical, he said. But six months ago, when I went to him for the first time to ask how your mother and I could put a decent end to it all, he was suddenly all generous with brochures and suchlike. He was almost itching to come by and do it himself. That’s the way things are in this country these days, son. When you want to die, they can’t wait to come by and help. But if you want to enjoy driving for another year, suddenly there are all kinds of ethical objections.”

  “But…” I felt I had to say something, to raise an objection. I thought about our drive along the Amstel in February, to the graveyard in Ouderkerk, about the group of cyclists he had mistaken for a truck.

  “If you’re going to say that it’s completely irresponsible, you’re completely right, of course,” he said. “I know. The insurance, all that fuss. That’s why I didn’t tell you before.”

  He had lowered his eyes; he held the base of his gin glass between his fingers and turned it around slowly on the tabletop. There was a little notepad on the table, beside his car keys. I looked at the logo on it, I didn’t recognize it immediately, but then I did. Peugeot. Tomorrow morning, I would call the Peugeot garage. I looked at the notepad. There were things jotted down on it that I couldn’t read upside down, probably a shopping list, or other things my father didn’t want to forget.

  In the upper left-hand corner of the notepad, though, someone had made a drawing. A bird, I saw.

  “Could I look at that?” I said, fingering the notepad and starting to turn it toward me. “Or is it private?”

  “Huh, what? No, it’s something your mother did. I just left it here. I mean, that notepad’s been here for weeks.”

  I brought my face down closer to the drawing. It was, indeed, a bird. My mother had always been good at drawing, but at one point she had stopped doing it much. Bread, coffee, eggs, Ketel 1, I read in my father’s furious handwriting below the drawing.

  “She started draw
ing again more often, there at the end,” he said, as though reading my mind. “Especially things in the garden. Birds, flowers, a spiderweb, that’s what I remember. You’ve got all kinds of things here. Robins, jays, a stork even landed on the shed a while back. That’s because the earth is heating up. All kinds of things heading north from down south. Plants you never used to see here. All kinds of animals. Foreigners…”

  I looked up at him.

  “I’m just kidding, pal! Don’t put on such a serious face, it doesn’t look good on you.”

  “And this,” I said, turning the notepad back so he could see it. “What kind of bird would you say this is?”

  He leaned down over the drawing and squinted.

  “That’s not too hard,” he said. “It’s done very, very well. In pencil, so you can’t see the colors, but there’s no doubt about it: it’s a thrush. A female. I can tell by the tail, and by the way your mother drew the plumage. In real life, the female thrush is brown and has a yellow beak.”

  after dinner, my wife announced that she was going to take her brother into town. “Just walk around a bit, go to a café or something. He’s been inside almost all day.”

  No one talked much at the table. I asked about my brother-in-law’s business—he dealt in used tractors and agricultural machinery—and he in turn asked me a few questions about the city and about my work. When I gave him a quick rundown on the windmills, he looked at me in disbelief and shook his head laughingly.

  I may have been mistaken, but I had the impression that he was drinking more wine than usual, or at least emptying his glass more quickly, and Sylvia refilled it each time.

  But during dessert, when I tried to give him a refill, he held his hand over his glass.

  “No thank you, Robert,” he said. “We should be going,” he said then to Sylvia.

  I waited till I heard the front door slam, then opened the door to the garden. Darkness was falling, a raveled red-and-pink contrail floated above the roofs of the houses across the way. From the garden of a few houses farther along came the sounds of laughter and quiet salsa music, the faint smell of seared meat.

  I sat down in one of the garden chairs, put my legs up on the table frame, and lit a cigarette. I had barely taken two drags when the bird, which I now knew to be a female thrush, settled down on the back of a garden chair. She remained there for a few seconds, then spread her wings and landed on the table. I heard the scratching of her claws on the tabletop as she hopped closer to the edge—closer to me.

  I looked at the bird, at the thrush—the female thrush!—and the thrush in turn looked at me. In any case, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was looking at me, her body turned to one side, her head tilted a bit, so that she at least had a better view of me with that one eye.

  “Hello,” I said.

  I thought about what Bernhard had asked me during our lunch at Dauphine. Have you noticed anything yet, with your mother? I looked at the thrush and thought about the last time I’d had lunch with my mother at Oriental City, about the white wisps of crabmeat on her cheeks and in her hair.

  “Daddy?”

  I shot half-upright in my chair. The thrush took off and landed one story higher, on the railing of our bedroom balcony.

  “Sorry, Dad, I didn’t mean to scare you,” my daughter said as she walked into the garden, pulled up a garden chair, and sat down across from me. Only at that moment did I realize that I was sitting there with a half-smoked cigarette still in my hand.

  “I…” I tried to grin as I crushed the cigarette against the bottom of the tabletop. “I suddenly felt this…urge. The urge for a cigarette.”

  My daughter held out her hand.

  “Give me one then too,” she said. “I could use it. Is there anything to drink? Preferably something strong.”

  “Your mother and your uncle were just drinking wine. But maybe that’s finished already? Look in the freezer otherwise, I always have a bottle of Grasovka in there.”

  I took the crumpled pack out of my pocket, pulled out two cigarettes, and held one out to Diana.

  “How long have you known?” I asked, giving her a light and then lighting my own.

  “What? That you’ve started smoking again? Since Christmas, right? Or am I mistaken?”

  She stood up and walked to the kitchen door. “Get a glass for me, too, would you?” I called after her.

  When I heard her rummaging about in the freezer, I looked up at our bedroom balcony, but the thrush had vanished.

  “How are things with…,” I started in, after she sat down and filled our glasses, but realized only too late that I couldn’t remember her boyfriend’s name.

  “We broke up,” she said.

  I said nothing.

  “Last night, at Club NYX,” Diana went on. “I went to the ladies’ room for a minute. When I came back he was kissing some girl on the dance floor.”

  I kept my mouth shut again, or rather: I was just about to say something about how much I liked her boyfriend, that I was sure he hadn’t meant anything by it, but stopped myself in the nick of time.

  Kissing someone else…Was that so bad, I asked myself? Was it bad enough to put an end to a relationship?

  “He’s really sorry now,” Diana said. “Outside the club, he got down on his knees. So embarrassing, everyone could see it! And now he keeps sending me messages. Listen, here comes another one…”

  She looked at the screen of her cell phone.

  “Love, my darling love,” she read aloud. “I’ll never do it again. I am sooooo sorry! Can you forgive me? I can’t live without you!!!!! Five exclamation marks! How horrible is that!”

  I had a hard time not laughing.

  “Yeah, you’re laughing, I can tell!” she said. “And that’s okay with me.”

  “So now what? What are you going to do now?”

  My daughter topped up our vodkas, then took another cigarette out of my pack.

  “First I’m going to let him flounder,” she said. “Let him thrash and beg. For starters, I’m not going to message him back. For three days. If he comes crying at the door, I’m not going to let him in. Don’t you let him in either, Daddy! You promise?”

  I nodded. “I promise. And after that? After three days, what are you going to do then?”

  “Then I’ll take him back.”

  I must have looked dumbfounded, because my daughter said: “Don’t look at me like that! Of course I’ll take him back, he’s too nice not to. But then on my own terms.”

  “And those being…?”

  “No more kissing other girls, of course. But also no more looking at other girls. I’m the only one, that’s the way I want it to feel, and that’s the feeling he has to be able to give me. If he can’t, then it’s over.”

  She picked up her glass, held it high in the air.

  “Down the hatch?” she said.

  I cleared my throat. For a split second I wondered whether I wouldn’t be better off keeping my mouth shut. On the one hand I felt admiration for my daughter, for the self-assured way she stood up for herself. On the other, though, I also thought about the boy—about the boy in me, I should really say; about all boys.

  “Isn’t that sort of one-sided?” I began. “Aren’t you coming down on him a little too hard?”

  My daughter looked at me questioningly. Or was she looking questioningly at my glass? Was I going to knock it back at one go, or was I an old man who preferred to take little sips?

  “You’ll take him back,” I said, “but then entirely on your own terms. From that moment on, he’s one rung lower on the ladder. Forever.”

  “And what would you suggest I do? Just agree with him that he didn’t mean anything by it? That he can go on kissing whoever he likes? That I won’t say anything about it? Who’ll be a rung lower on the ladder then, as you put it? Him? Or me?”

&nbs
p; “You could do the same thing back,” I said, before I’d even had time to think what I was going to say. “You could kiss someone else too. Then you’d be even…No, that’s not a good idea,” I added half a second later. “Not a good idea at all. Please, don’t listen to your father. Forget I said anything.”

  “Shall we drink to that, then?”

  “Okay. Bottoms up!”

  We knocked back our vodkas at the same time. Her phone beeped, twice…three times, in rapid succession.

  “I’m not going to look at his texts anymore either,” my daughter said. “And whatever I do, I’m not going to read them out loud to you, in case you start giving me all kinds of bad advice again.”

  We both laughed loudly at that.

  “Something else,” I said, after Diana had refilled our glasses. “Have you been in contact with Grandma lately?”

  My daughter stared at me.

  “I mean, before she died. Just before she died. Did the two of you talk? Did she send you an e-mail? Anything on Facebook?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Wait a minute. When did I…yeah, I remember now. In that last week, I…I biked over to their place once, after school. Grandpa was working in the garden. And Grandma…yeah, Grandma was in the garden, too, she was on a lounge chair with a sketchbook on her lap. She was drawing.”

  “Drawing.”

  I tried to sound as cool as I could, not to make it sound like a question, but apparently that didn’t work too well; my daughter frowned and looked at me questioningly.