The Ditch

by Herman Koch

  “What?” I said. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, you look so…the way you look all the time lately. As though something…as though there’s something wrong. Is there something wrong?”

  I put my glass down on the garden table.

  “I’m feeling the vodka,” I said. “I need to be a little more careful with that stuff.”

  My daughter shook her head, she looked at me almost regretfully, as though she was disappointed in me.

  “That’s not what I mean,” she said. “What I mean is that you…”

  “What was Grandma drawing?” I interrupted her.

  “How should I know? Things in the garden.” She screwed up her eyes, pulled her hair back in a ponytail and then shook it loose. “No, I remember now. Birds. Little birds. She showed them to me. They were really good. She could draw really well.”

  “What kind of birds?” I concentrated on my expression, I tried as hard as I could to look as though nothing was wrong.

  “What kind of birds?”

  “Yes,” I said. “What kind of birds?”

  i lay in bed and looked at the display on my phone: 01:15, and Sylvia and her brother still weren’t back. At midnight I had almost sent her a message, but I stopped myself. I could see it in my mind’s eye, the two of them sitting at a table in a café somewhere, my wife looking at her phone. Robert. Why have we been gone so long…He’s probably bored without us.

  No, I didn’t want to be that kind of spouse. That was the kind of spouse I’d never been. I knew them all too well from our circle of friends: the husbands who couldn’t leave their wives alone for half an evening, the wives who resented their husband’s only evening out with other men.

  Where are you? I texted her at 01:27.

  Stay lighthearted, I told myself. I wasn’t worried. I was not a control freak. But not contacting her at all wasn’t good either. The wrong kind of signal. It’s like he doesn’t care at all where I am or how late I stay out.

  I looked at the display. One check mark: the message had been sent but not yet received. Maybe she had turned her phone off, it wouldn’t be the first time.

  I’m going to call it a day. Sleep well. Have fun! X

  I heard footsteps on the stairs, and then in the hall—they stopped at the bedroom door.

  “Daddy?” Diana opened the door quietly. “Are you asleep yet?”

  She sat down on the edge of my bed and opened the cover of her laptop.

  “I just wanted to show you this,” she said. “You know, what we were talking about in the garden?”

  I clicked on the reading light. My daughter looked at the duvet, folded back only on my side.

  “Where’s Mama?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully.

  “Look,” Diana said. “This is Grandma, it’s her Facebook page and it’s still active. And this is the picture I took of her, the last time I went by there. You see, she’s holding up that sketchbook, like a kid showing off a drawing.”

  I put a hand on my daughter’s shoulder and looked along with her.

  “Can you zoom in on that photo?”

  “Only a little. But wait a minute, I’ve got it on my phone.”

  A few quick swipes of the finger and there it was, on the display. She zoomed in even farther with her thumb and index finger.

  “See, they’re little birds.”

  The lines had grown fuzzy, but there were clearly three separate birds on the sketchpad. Three of the same kind of bird, only from different angles.

  “And this?” I asked, pointing at the screen of her laptop. “What’s this?”

  “That’s her profile picture. Oh, but this one’s new. It wasn’t there last time.”

  She clicked on the photo. It was a photograph of a thrush, taken from a website about birds or from a photo album. Female Thrush, read the caption beneath the photo, on which Diana had now zoomed in.

  28

  It was at 10:35 the next morning that my secretary gave me the news. I remember it so clearly because it was at the exact same time that I glanced at my phone to see if Sylvia had left a message. She should have been landing around then.

  There was no message; of course not. Otherwise I would have heard a beep. I checked whether I’d accidentally turned off the sound. Or whether, in a moment of distraction, I had activated airplane mode.

  “Do you have a moment?” Mrs. Schreuder was standing in the doorway. I hadn’t heard her knock, but from her expression I could tell right away this was news that made knocking unnecessary.

  I hadn’t slept that night. Hadn’t slept a wink. At seven o’clock I’d gotten up. A cup of coffee. A fifteen-minute, piping hot shower. But it didn’t really wake me up.

  The door to Diana’s room was open. Her bed had not been slept in. It took a few moments for me to realize that this was as it should be, that my daughter had told me last night that she was going to go by her boyfriend’s—at that point, in fact, her ex-boyfriend’s.

  “I don’t know, Daddy,” she’d said, “he sounds really desperate. I shouldn’t push it too far, I think.”

  She looked at me with her big dark eyes. What do you think? her look was asking me.

  “You have to be careful not to let him blackmail you,” I said. “Emotional blackmail. You have men who start weeping or get down on their knees and beg. If you give in, he knows that he can always get you back by doing that. Then you’ve overplayed your hand. Then you don’t get the result you were after to start with.”

  “No,” Diana had said. “It’s not quite that bad. He says he misses me. And to be perfectly honest, I miss him too.”

  At three in the morning I had sent a message. Sylvia? Sweetheart (I used the word for “sweetheart” in her own language), please get in touch. I’m worried. All I want to know is that everything is okay. X

  At four o’clock, I called her. Within two seconds, her phone switched to voice mail.

  I turned on the reading light on her side of the bed too. I sat up, fished the pack of cigarettes and lighter out of my pants pocket. Smoking in bed! When was the last time I’d done that? I took out the three remaining cigarettes and used the pack as an ashtray.

  Two cigarettes later, it must have been around four thirty, Sylvia called.

  “Robert, were you asleep?”

  “No, I was awake, I haven’t been able to sleep at all. Where are you?”

  “Robert, I’m sorry, I meant to call you earlier. I was hoping you had gone to sleep. But then I saw your messages, that you’d called. I had my phone in my bag, I didn’t hear it.”

  In spite of myself, I breathed a deep sigh that could probably be heard at the other end of the line. “Where are you?” I asked again.

  “Listen, sweetheart” (she also used the word for “sweetheart” in her own language, a good sign somehow—or so I thought at the time), “I’m at Schiphol. We’re at Schiphol. Robert, are you still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, you were so quiet, I thought maybe we’d been cut off. Listen. We heard about it tonight. We were at Schiller. Or actually, Schiller was just closing. You remember Damian?”

  “Sure.” About five years ago my brother-in-law got married again, to a woman thirty years younger, and soon after that their only child was born. A boy.

  “His wife called, she was in a complete panic,” Sylvia went on. “Damian came back from school yesterday, he was running a high fever. She put him to bed, but last night he suddenly broke out in all these brown spots. On his back, his arms, his legs. She drove him to the hospital right away. You remember the hospital, the one that’s about sixty kilometers from their house?”

  I remembered it. We had taken Diana there one time, during a vacation, when she was stung by a wasp and broke out in a rash all over. She was five at the time.

  “My
brother wanted to go back home right away. We took a taxi from Rembrandtplein. I’d checked my phone already, there was a late flight. But he just missed it. Another one will be leaving in a little while, at seven forty. He calls his wife every half hour, but they still don’t know what it is, and he’s not showing any signs of improvement. Oh, Robert, it’s so horrible. He’s sitting here, crying. That’s what I wanted to tell you too. I can’t let him go alone like this. I can’t let him get on the plane alone, and then drive all that way back home. All the way to that hospital. So I bought a ticket too. He says it’s ridiculous, but I know how he is. We’re family, Robert. At moments like this, we don’t let each other down.”

  my secretary took a few steps into the office. There were only the two of us, but she still spoke quietly, almost at a whisper.

  “It’s Maarten,” she said. “He had a meeting at nine thirty. At ten, when he still didn’t show up, I called him. And because I couldn’t reach him, I tried to call his wife, but she wasn’t answering either. Ten minutes later, she called back. He…Maarten has had an accident, Robert.”

  My eyelids were heavy from a night of no sleep. All I did was stare at Mrs. Schreuder.

  “I don’t know all the details, but they found him last night. In a bicycle underpass, not far from his house. With his bike. He probably fell or ran into something; his wife doesn’t know yet either. He’s at the medical center now, still unconscious. It doesn’t look good. There’s no reason for you to go to him, Robert, not yet. They’re keeping everyone at a distance for the moment. But I just need to talk to you about how we’re going to handle the media. Do you want me to wait with a press release? They’ll find out soon enough themselves. What do you think?”

  29

  It took me a couple of weeks to realize that Sylvia wasn’t coming back. At first we texted each other a few times a day, but halfway through the third week, when she hadn’t reacted to my latest message after three days, I called her.

  “I hope you understand that, with things the way they are now, it might be better for me to stay here for a while, Robert,” she said. That was probably the longest sentence she spoke.

  I said that I understood. I remember thinking, for the first time in my life, or perhaps it would be better to say for the first time since I’d been in office, that a mayor’s phone could be tapped too. I wondered whether “with things the way they are now” sounded vague enough, or whether it might lead to more questions from the police commissioner.

  In my mind, I could picture him standing in my office, holding a transcript of our call, his straight-arrow expression. Are you sure you’ve told me everything, Robert?

  “Do you know whether Maarten van Hoogstraten has any enemies?” That’s what the police commissioner had asked me that first afternoon, after the alderman’s accident.

  “Enemies?” I asked.

  “We’re viewing it as an accident, for the time being,” he said. “But we can’t rule anything out. You’ve got those bollards at the end of the underpass. Anything’s possible, of course, but the doctor in charge says that not all of his injuries can be attributed to falling from a bicycle. He can’t remember anything himself, not even whether he fell or whether he ran into something.”

  of those first weeks without Sylvia, I remember very little else. A month had gone by since the journalist showed me the photos of someone other than myself beating a policeman with a brick, so I called De Volkskrant to ask when the interview would be published. After being redirected a few times, I got someone on the line who asked for my phone number and assured me that they would call back as quickly as possible.

  Unexpectedly, the call came within five minutes. A man’s voice, introducing itself as the editor in chief.

  “It’s an extremely sensitive matter, sir,” he said. “I’m hoping you’ll understand, but first I hope you’ll let me explain the situation a bit more.”

  “Of course,” I said. I thought about the pictures, about the immediate consequences they could have for my job. “Go right ahead.”

  “It’s like this: Not so long ago we had to deal with a similar situation,” the editor in chief said. “A work student who turned out to have copied most of his articles from other media. In this case, though, it’s much worse than that. The journalist in question seems to have simply made up whole sections of her articles. And she’s been doing that for years. I won’t bore you with an exhaustive account of exactly which articles I’m talking about, but take it from me, these were some very controversial pieces. Situations within the royal family, a bank director in possession of child pornography, an interview with Hillary Clinton, fabricated from start to finish. That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about.”

  “All right,” I said. I thought about the photos again, but differently now—as though they were in a box somewhere—where exactly, even I couldn’t remember.

  “Two scandals like that within such a short period, that’s one too many,” he went on. “We’ve put the journalist on non-active, of course, and we’ve agreed with her to keep the whole affair quiet for as long as possible. And actually, that’s what I’d like to ask you too.”

  “But that interview with me,” I said. “That wasn’t made up. It actually happened just that way.”

  I thought I heard the editor in chief sigh, but it could also have been the wind in the background, maybe he was sitting beside an open window. Looking back on it, I have to admit that I’d known for a long time that the interview wasn’t going to be published. That it would never be published. I thought about my wife. I had been hoping that a controversial interview, one that would probably lead to my resignation in the longer term, might get her to come back.

  “That’s right,” he said. “But I also hope that you’ll understand that we can’t take any risks at this point. The journalist is ‘home on sick leave,’ that’s the explanation we’ll give if anyone asks why none of her articles or interviews are appearing in the paper. I could have told you the same thing, but in light of your special position and the nature of the interview, I thought I should make an exception.”

  “And what about the photos?” I asked. “What are you going to do with the photos?”

  “We can use the portrait series made in your office and at your home on some other occasion, of course. At least, if that’s all right with you.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. There were other pictures too.” Now it was my turn to sigh. Quite audibly; there could be no mistaking it at the other end. “Photos of hooligans,” I went on. “A group of delinquents assaulting a police officer.”

  I spoke intentionally of “delinquents,” a word I would ordinarily never use, to make it clear from the start that I disapproved of the boys with the scarves and crash helmets. But maybe the editor in chief hadn’t read the interview at all.

  “I don’t have that series right here,” he said, “but if you like, I can look for them. Delinquents, is that what you said? And what did that have to do with the article?”

  “Oh, no, forget it,” I said. “It’s not really important.”

  Suddenly, I knew for a certainty that the photo series wouldn’t be in there with the portraits. After all, what else could you expect from a journalist who had made up an interview with Hillary Clinton? I was overcome by a deep fatigue, like at the start of a flu. I remembered the editor in chief’s words. According to the press release the journalist hadn’t been fired or put on non-active, no, she was “home on sick leave.” Maybe that would be the best thing for me, too, to call in sick and stay at home. Sylvia, unlike most women who start sighing whenever their husbands show signs of a flu and in fact believe that their “whiny men” are pretty much acting like babies, was a natural-born nurse. Whenever I coughed a little or simply sniffed loudly, she would start insisting that I stay home from work. And when I had a real flu, she would spend all day trundling back and forth with bouillon, antipyreti
cs, and hot milk with brandy. She would bring me the newspaper to read in bed and place her cool hand on my feverish brow.

  Might that work? I wondered. If I got on the phone and faked a sore throat and a sickly voice, might that get her to come home?

  I assured the editor in chief of my discretion and hung up.

  about ten days after the incident in the bicycle underpass, Maarten van Hoogstraten was released from the hospital.

  “It’s so strange, Robert,” he said when I went to see him at his home a few days later. “It’s like a section of your life has disappeared. Have you ever had that?”

  He was lying prostrate on a light-blue sofa in the living room, his head propped up by two white pillows. That white and that light blue probably threw his face into darker contrast than a more neutral background would have. It lit up a whole host of variegations and patterning—an oil painting, that was my first association, a Vincent van Gogh. Deep yellow ochre just below his left eye, dark-blue streaks on his left cheek, a black blotch on his forehead, above his right eyebrow. There were brown crusts on his upper lip.

  Sections missing from your life—the final hours of a party at our house, my sixtieth birthday. The next day my wife told me what had gone on during those deleted hours. “You should be ashamed of yourself, Robert,” she’d said, and I was—and then, right away, she burst out laughing. “On the other hand, though, it was awfully funny,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned, you should do it more often.”

  “I can’t even remember where I was coming from, or where I was going,” the alderman continued. “Only a few snatches of that afternoon, a cup of coffee in the canteen, a map being unfolded on my desk. The map of a square. Something about refurbishing that square, I think that’s what it was. But which square…It’s all been knocked into kingdom come.”

  It was perhaps typical of Maarten van Hoogstraten’s straight-arrow ways that he didn’t catch the irony in his own words. Knocked into kingdom come. Yes, it could have ended that way too. They could also have knocked him into kingdom come.