by Herman Koch
They. Was this the first time I’d thought about it in the third-person plural? I wasn’t sure. During the rare moments in the last week when I had tried to form an image of how it must have gone—or rather, when I had allowed that image to enter my mind for a few seconds—it was always my wife’s brother who had acted alone. They were fuzzy images, badly underexposed black-and-white images, like the reconstruction of a crime in a most-wanted television program. Whatever the case, my wife’s brother had been alone as he waited for the alderman at the tunnel exit.
On my way to Maarten van Hoogstraten’s, I cycled through that same tunnel. At the exit I hopped off and looked around for a moment. Examined the paving stones in the bike path one by one. I don’t know exactly what I was looking for, a clue perhaps, the cap of a bicycle bell, spattered blood soaked into the pinkish paving stones, a coat button. In the old detective shows, the sleuth always finds something. A cigarette butt of a certain brand. An earring. A laundry ticket from a given dry-cleaner’s: a newly pressed pair of pinstriped trousers leads him to the culprit.
But I didn’t find anything. I tried to recall the police commissioner’s words, but I couldn’t remember whether he had said “at the end of the tunnel” or “as he was leaving the tunnel.” I looked around. If you were lying in wait for someone here, what would be the best place to hide? There were a few trees and some bushes, but no trees big enough to hide behind completely. There was a set of stone steps leading to the viaduct above the tunnel. I took a few steps back and looked up. I tried to imagine my wife up there, waiting, her hands on the railing, then signaling to her brother. He’s coming…
“Would you like some more tea, Maarten? And what about you, Robert? Tea as well, or something else? A glass of wine? A beer?”
I hadn’t heard the alderman’s wife come into the room. When she had opened the front door for me, fifteen minutes earlier, we’d hugged. I couldn’t remember us ever doing that before.
After I stepped back from the hug, I had looked her in the eye briefly. I was searching for something, without knowing whether I really wanted to find it. How much did she know, in fact? Did she suspect anything at all? Had she and Maarten van Hoogstraten had a serious talk, a talk full of long silences and the occasional bout of weeping, during which they had decided to separate as soon as he recovered? Which one of them would get the children during the week, and which one at the weekend?
In her eyes, though, I read only the emotions you would expect under these circumstances. Relief, because it could have turned out so much worse. No more, perhaps, than a certain resigned awareness that her husband pretty much had only himself to blame. How could you be dumb enough to fall off your bike? In any event, no reproach for my not having come to see him in the hospital. I could have done that. It was only normal for a mayor to visit one of his aldermen in the hospital, after he’d had a bad accident. But what had been normal about the last few weeks? What could I have said to his wife if she had reproached me? I had other things on my mind?
And now, too, as she went to the couch to fluff up his pillows and run her hand tenderly through his hair, everything seemed peachy-keen. But maybe they were putting on an act, a cold truce during which the Van Hoogstratens simply kept up appearances to the outside world. As soon as the guests were gone, only icy glances would be exchanged. A marriage like a winter landscape, a stubborn silence interrupted only by the howling of a bitter wind. Soon, once the alderman was back on his feet, the dissolution of the marriage could continue full steam ahead, and the glasses and plates would fly through the house.
“A beer for me, thanks,” I said.
I watched her as she left the room. When I turned back to the alderman, I saw that he had his eyes closed.
“Maarten,” I whispered. “Maarten…”
his wife was standing at the kitchen counter, her back half turned to me. Not to startle her, I knocked quietly on the frosted glass window in the kitchen door.
“Marianne,” I said, thankful now that I had asked my secretary to look up Mrs. Van Hoogstraten’s first name in the black notebook. She smiled, picked up the can of Jupiler that was ready on the counter, and handed it to me.
“Would you like a glass?”
I shook my head.
“Marianne,” I said. “I wanted to ask you something. Has he said anything yet? I mean, did he say anything after the accident? About…how it happened? I mean, I just cycled through that same tunnel. There are these bollards at the end of it. Did he run into one of those?”
“He really doesn’t remember a thing,” she said, taking the kettle off the stove and pouring boiling water into a mug. “Not even about the first three days in the hospital. All gone. I don’t know how that works. I asked the doctors about it. They say his memory may come back, but that for the same money it may never come back at all.”
From a little tin on the counter she produced a teabag and hung it in the mug. It was then, at that moment, that I saw the bag on the kitchen windowsill. A brown and yellow bag, I recognized it right away because I myself had bought so many of them at the pet store, the store called Animal Palace or Animal Paradise, I couldn’t remember which.
I automatically stepped to one side, to get a better look at the garden through the glass doors. But that wasn’t even necessary. From where I was standing, I could already see the hutch. It was about five meters from the door, on a patio of paving stones, up against a green wooden fence.
from that point on, my memory has lost its grip on chronology. I no longer know for sure which came first: the long telephone conversation with Sylvia in which we discussed the immediate future, not only our future together, the length of her stay in her native region, but also the future of our daughter, Diana.
“She’s coming down this summer for a few weeks’ vacation,” my wife said. “With her boyfriend. I’ve talked to her about it already.”
I remember, during those first weeks, that I asked my daughter regularly whether she’d heard anything from Mama. And that I always received an affirmative, albeit brief, reply. I never asked any further. I tried to let life go on as normally as possible. My daughter was in the middle of her finals. Her mother was tired. Overtired. I avoided the word “overstrung.” She missed her family. Her country. Why she couldn’t have postponed her bout of homesickness until her daughter was finished with her exams was a question I didn’t raise. As long as Diana didn’t raise it herself, there was no need to come up with an answer. Nor did I ask Sylvia about that.
“This summer?” I said, instead of asking the question I perhaps should have been asking. “But how long is this going to last, Sylvia? How long are you planning to keep this up?”
No, I didn’t call her by name. I said “sweetheart,” in her own language. Since my discovery of the rabbit hutch, I had started listening to her voice in another way. To all her intonations, and to what might be behind those intonations. Insofar as possible, I tried to run back through all the conversations we’d had in the last few months, starting with that evening at Café Schiller, after the New Year’s reception, when she told me that “funny story” about the rabbits chewing their way through the TV cables. I listened differently to her, the way you can never listen to a piece of music in the same way once it’s been played at the funeral of a friend or loved one. Her story in Paris about her betrayed Japanese girlfriend. Sadako! A name you would never forget—and that name, too, somehow sounded different than it had back then.
“You have to give me time, Robert,” my wife said. “Right now, it just feels better to me this way.”
And that’s what I did. I gave her time. I waited. I didn’t know exactly what for, only that it wasn’t what I’d been waiting for back before I discovered the rabbit hutch.
Sometime during that waiting I received a message from Bernhard. It was in the middle of the afternoon, I was at Van Dobben’s snack bar, having filet américain on a bun with chopped
onions. A WhatsApp message with a photo attached. A photo of the Grand Canyon. What we talked about not so long ago: our planet with no life on it. Beautiful, isn’t it?
On my way back to city hall, I suddenly heard a loud thud. A deep, heavy thud, like a single clap of thunder. But it was a clear day. I wasn’t the only one who stopped and peered up at the bright blue sky. And I also wasn’t the only one who finally picked out two white spots up there. White spots, occasionally a flash of silver, circling around each other—when I squinted a bit I could pick out the wings of both jet fighters.
At the pedestrian crossing to the Blauwbrug, I had to wait for a tour bus that was pulling out; across the street, a red sports car stopped to let a family with young children and a pram take the crosswalk.
I looked at the driver’s checkered cap, his sunglasses, the scarf around his neck—a “choker” was what they called a scarf like that, it was fashionable only among men of a certain age—and at his checkered tweed coat. Then I looked at the woman in the passenger seat. The sunglasses and the floral kerchief on her head made it hard to judge her age, her lipstick was a fiery red, but from this distance I couldn’t see whether the skin between her upper lip and nose was already wrinkled.
All in all, it didn’t seem completely real; this couple seemed to be reenacting something, a movie from the late fifties, early sixties. A French movie in which Alain Delon, driving a red sports car like this one, slowed on the boulevard to get a better look at the legs of the girls strolling by.
My telephone vibrated in my pocket. As the sports car accelerated and turned onto the Blauwbrug, I answered it.
“Hello?”
“Hello, is that you, Mr. Mayor?” said a somewhat older-sounding female voice. “This is Mrs. Drimmelen. You probably don’t remember me, but we ran into each other a while back, along the canal. You were hanging up posters for your missing cat.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Well, I found your cat. A few doors down. A lawyer and his wife. They haven’t lived there very long. But it looks like your cat has moved in with them. I was on my balcony, and I noticed it by accident. They were sitting in the garden, and your cat was lying on one of the lounge chairs. Like she’d been living there for years! I rang their bell this morning, and yes, they confirmed that your cat showed up at their door about a month ago.”
I picked up the pace and trotted across the crosswalk. By the time I got to the bridge, I was running. The red sports car was driving past city hall, headed toward Waterlooplein.
“Hello?” said the voice in my ear. “Are you still there?”
“Listen, could I call you back later?” I said and hung up without waiting for her reply.
The sports car slowed at the lights, but when the light turned green it shot ahead—the woman in the passenger seat placed a hand on her head to steady the flapping kerchief, while the car turned right onto Jonas Daniël Meijerplein and disappeared from sight.
This was all a couple of weeks after I’d visited Maarten van Hoogstraten, for I was barely in my office when he knocked quietly on the open door. Maybe it was his first day back at work, or his second—his face still bore vague traces of the accident, a dark stripe on his cheek, a white spot on his upper lip.
“Have you got a moment?” he asked.
I gestured to the chair in front of my desk; he sat down and crossed his legs.
“This is a sensitive matter, Robert,” he began. “And I hope you’ll treat it that way.”
I braced myself. What was this? He wasn’t suddenly going to come up with a confession, was he? A confession was the last thing I needed. It would, at a single blow, destroy almost everything I had built up so carefully in the last few weeks—a still-shaky framework to which I had nevertheless attached all my hopes for a future together with my wife.
But there was something else too. What was I going to do? How was I supposed to react to a confession? Was I to burst out in a rage? Rise from my chair and grab the alderman by his lapels?
Yes, I could take all the necessary steps, perform all the actions given and granted to a deceived husband. A fist in his face—his already battered face popped into my mind—would be viewed with clemency. “Mayor KOs Alderman.” A nice headline. An incomprehensible headline too—until you read the article that followed. I could count on leniency. The media would pounce on the story, the same way they had pounced on other mayors caught up in a scandal.
I thought about my wife’s country. We were all familiar with the footage of members of parliament who engaged in fistfights, who tossed water on each other or sprayed tear gas in their opponents’ faces. That happened in countries about which we couldn’t care less. Countries we could laugh at.
But in those same countries, a cuckolded husband was also cut more slack. The leniency didn’t stop at a punch in the face. I thought about the Jericho in my desk drawer. It would be easy enough to lean forward and open the drawer. I have that dossier in here somewhere… It wouldn’t take me more than thirty seconds to load the clip. In my wife’s country, I would be let off scot-free. Mitigating circumstances. In Holland, I would go to prison for years. That wouldn’t do anyone any good. I thought about my daughter. About Diana. She would go on visiting me faithfully, I was sure of that. But it would also be a burden for her, she had just finished her finals, she was still much too young. I tried to adopt an interested expression and waited for what was to come.
“Before long, they’ll be talking about a third term, Robert,” the alderman continued. “I know how you feel about that. I know you’d be pleased to go for another six years. And your popularity in the city is unequaled, I know that too. But now something has come up…something that…I saw it. A journalist showed it to me. And now I’m wondering whether that won’t have a disastrous effect on your plans for a third term.”
I breathed a sigh of relief, not too loudly, not too visibly relieved, but still: the shaky framework was not going to collapse. At least not today.
“I wondered whether you had seen it too,” Van Hoogstraten said, looking at me gravely. “At least that’s what that journalist told me, that she was going to show them to you too. I assume you know what I’m talking about.”
“Yes, of course, Maarten. I saw that photo series too. And I made my decision a long time ago. I had been meaning to tell you about it, but just then you got…you had that accident, and I didn’t get around to it.”
I kept my eyes fixed on the alderman as I pronounced the word “accident,” but nothing in his eyes or in his expression changed.
“It would be giving the wrong signal,” I went on. “A mayor who was a delinquent as a young man—well, we could overlook that. But a policeman crippled for life, that’s going too far. I think resigning right now would also be going too far, but—as long as this remains strictly between the two of us—I can tell you here and now that I won’t be seeking a third term.”
Part
IV
30
This morning, by way of the dry ditch at the back of the garden, I climbed the narrow, winding path to the top of the hill. There, in a cleft in the rock, is a big boulder that is almost flat on top. That’s where I sat down.
The old, dusty hotel where Bernhard and I took a room thirty years ago is still there. It doesn’t get a lot of visitors, that’s my impression—this is still a region skipped by mass tourism.
This morning, at the top of the hill—from here I could see only the red tiles on the roof of that hotel—I thought back on the evening when Bernhard had to talk me into going out somewhere for a drink.
Very briefly, for no more than five seconds, I’d guess, I entertained the thought: What if we had stayed in our room that evening? We would have traveled on to the capital the next day, as planned, and I would not be sitting on this boulder right now.
Diana would not have been born, would not exist.
For the next fiv
e seconds I thought about my daughter’s face, her laughing face, her head of long black hair that she had a way of tossing back when she thought I had said something stupid.
Who, then, would have pointed out my stupid comments? A different child, other children, a child of a woman other than Sylvia.
That other life would simply have been lived out, too, albeit at another spot. That other woman would perhaps have asked me, at a certain point, what I was thinking about, at a breakfast table somewhere in Holland. And what would my reply have been? The truth? That I was thinking about a different life, the life I hadn’t led because, thirty-three years earlier, I had remained lying in a hotel room with a headache?
The café that Sylvia and her eighteen-month-older sister had come out of was still there, too, even though I couldn’t see it from here. The chairs outside were a newer model now, albeit still plastic.
I closed my eyes. Bernhard went into the other café, the café that had closed down about a year ago and then reopened as a sort of kiosk where you can buy nuts, candy, and soda pop—in any case, thirty-three years ago Bernhard went in there to buy a pack of cigarettes.
In that other, parallel life with the Dutch wife and children, he would have had enough cigarettes already and we would have strolled together to that deserted patio on the far side of the dusty square. Of the two of us, Sylvia immediately thought he was the cuter.
Having arrived at that point, I thought no further. I thought about Bernhard’s funeral; or rather, about the brief ceremony during which his ashes were scattered to the wind. He had, as it turned out, left detailed instructions about where and how this was to be done, about who was to be invited and who definitely not.
Our little group stood there at the edge of the salt flats at the entrance to Death Valley. The same salt flats that Bernhard and I had driven past eighteen years earlier—where we had seen the mock dogfight between two circling jet fighters. Where we had talked about the existence of God and the right to bear arms. And now, here we were again. A little group of us, as I said. Christine, Bernhard’s children from his two earlier marriages, two colleagues from Harvard, and Stephen Hawking. The way it goes with people you recognize from countless photos and television footage, and recently from a film version of his life as well, it was hard to see the scholar in his specially adapted wheelchair as a person. It was as though he never stepped away from his public persona, not for a moment—I caught myself looking around to see if there was a camera somewhere, and a director who was going to yell “Action!” at any moment.