The Ditch

by Herman Koch

  The sign was still there, announcing that there was no gas to be had for the next hundred and fifty miles. Eighteen years earlier, Bernhard and I had stopped here to look out over the endless white flats, at the two glistening dots of the fighter planes high in the clear blue sky, and today we were scattering his ashes here. For the last time, those were the words that came to my mind at that moment, and absurd as it may sound, they were the only true words.

  A little over a week before, Bernhard had left his hotel in Las Vegas, where he’d arrived two days earlier to attend a conference about the bending of time. He rented a car and drove to the Grand Canyon. When he didn’t return to the hotel that evening, no alarm was raised. Early the next morning, in the parking lot on the North Rim, two rangers noticed that a car was parked there, the only one at that hour. An initial search party found nothing. Only when a helicopter was called in did they find his body. Slipped and fell: that, in the absence of a note or anything else pointing to suicide, was the tentative conclusion.

  “He wasn’t depressed, was he?” I asked Christine—needlessly—once the ashes had been scattered and I took her briefly in my arms.

  “Bernhard? Depressive? Are you kidding?”

  I thought about the last time we’d talked, at Dauphine, when he asked whether I’d noticed anything special after my mother’s death. And about how he had gone on to describe the Grand Canyon as “the best evidence” that a planet without human life, without any life whatsoever, might have been the idea all along, that what we had now was all one big misunderstanding.

  Now, when I look back on it, I know for a certainty that my mother was already dead when I went downstairs that night to look for the picture in the box of photos. The thrush was already waiting for me in the garden; that had been my initial impression, too, when I opened the back door—in retrospect, the only true impression.

  At 21:45 my father had sent me the text message saying that they were going to do it that day, the next day. But at 06:41 he had sent another message. Or received one. In any case, at that point he had been online.

  On his birthday I thought about calling him, but in the end I didn’t. I was afraid of hearing something, or rather, of hearing nothing at all. An unnatural silence, the kind of silence that falls when someone has emphatically asked you to be still. A finger held to the lips. In this version of events, I always saw (and see) in my mind the floral kerchief. The same kerchief I saw five years ago, beside my father in the red sports convertible crossing the Blauwbrug. In my thoughts it was draped (and is still draped) casually over the back of a chair in some French hotel room.

  Next week my father will turn one hundred. I still remember what he said, the last time I visited him, a couple of months ago. “On my hundredth birthday, we’ll have our picture taken together,” he said. “Whenever someone turns a hundred, they always have their picture taken with the mayor.” I didn’t contradict him. I didn’t say that I’m not the mayor anymore. But even when I still was the mayor, there was no longer any way to deal with it: every two or three weeks we got a request from the family of a centenarian. Five years ago, those requests were already being deflected politely.

  His comment about the mayor was made during one of his moments of clarity. It’s not as though my father doesn’t recognize me anymore. It’s just that he loses track of things every now and again.

  The last time I visited, we had dinner together downstairs, in the restaurant of the nursing home. A meatball, mashed potatoes, and applesauce, vanilla pudding for dessert. The kind of meal that disgusts people in my circles, that they shake their heads and act sarcastic about. But I remember how it went with me. With every bite I took, I sank further and further into a time that I had thought was gone forever. When was the last time, in the last fifty years, that I’d eaten a meatball like this? Mashed potatoes? Applesauce? I looked at my father, at how he spooned up the last bits of his vanilla pudding in deep concentration. I was, at one and the same time, there and somewhere else.

  “Well,” I said, once our bowls were completely empty and I had slid my chair back. “Shall I walk you to your room?”

  “My room?” he said. “Do I have a room here?”

  I explained to him that his room was on the first floor, that an hour ago we had taken the elevator down from there to eat in the restaurant.

  “The restaurant,” he said, looking deep in thought. “You mean this restaurant. But what I can’t figure out is, where is this restaurant then?”

  That’s what I mean when I say he has clear and less-clear moments. Another moment—but I still can’t decide whether it was a clear or a less-clear one—came along, as a sort of curtain call, as I was releasing the hand brake on his chair and turning it toward the elevator.

  “Your mother and I are going to climb the mountain tomorrow,” he said. “You were always too lazy for that.”

  Five years ago he had driven back from France to Holland. Whenever I imagined that journey home, one time I would see him all alone in the red sports car, the next time I would see the woman in the floral kerchief beside him. Whatever the case, he had not driven off the road, not crashed through the guardrail and plummeted into the ravine.

  “I don’t know, buddy,” he’d said to me a few days later, when I invited him to have lunch with me at Dauphine. “It just felt weird, I don’t know how else to put it. I hiked all over the place there, through dry riverbeds, past waterfalls…I climbed the mountain to the eleventh-century castle your mother and I went to last year. It’s so beautiful there, you can see around you for a hundred kilometers in all directions. Not a sound, nothing, only the wind blowing past those old walls. And while I was standing there, I thought: Did we do the right thing? Wasn’t it stupid of us to want to take things into our own hands? Maybe even arrogant? To try to beat God, even though I don’t believe in God, at his own game? While I was standing there, I thought about all that. I could have been standing there with your mother too; I thought about that also. On top of that mountain, I asked her forgiveness. Just in case we, I, had done things wrong. But something else occurred to me too. Could it be? I thought. Could it be that, here in France, on top of this mountain, I’ve started to feel like living again? And should I feel guilty about that for the next few years?”

  This morning I looked out over the town, first off in the distance at the fields where the buildings stopped, and at the hazy, grayish-blue silhouettes of the mountains on the horizon; and after that I looked at the parts that were closer by, at the red roofs, at our own house. The garden where we’d celebrated our wedding, thirty-four years ago. I’m going to raise a corner of the veil here. The animal, the entire animal rotating slowly on the spit back then, was a pig. The sausages and hams hanging in the shed, and that are still hanging there today, come from pigs. I remember the fat dripping into the flames, a tuft of bristles crackling as it caught fire, the men with their long knives. There was music, children were playing hide-and-seek behind the trees and in the bushes.

  Four years ago, right after I moved here, I found myself sitting with Sylvia’s brother at the bottom of this hill, in the dry ditch. It’s become the spot we go to whenever we have something to discuss. We sit there and smoke a couple of cigarettes—in the meantime I have really started smoking again, I no longer have to sneak off somewhere to light one up, everyone here smokes—and talk about the affairs of the day. Simple things, how business is going, the new supermarket in the provincial capital sixty kilometers away, a shop in the village that’s closing down, the Champions League matches that are coming up.

  Four years ago, her brother—I still feel bad about not being able to mention his name, it would explain a lot, maybe even everything, and that’s why I won’t do it—had placed his hand on the back of my neck again, just as he had on the afternoon of the wedding.

  “Robert,” he said; he didn’t knead my shoulders this time, just laid his hand there. “Of course, things have
happened. We don’t have to go into the whole thing, and after today we don’t have to talk about it anymore either.”

  I said nothing, I had promised myself to say as little as possible, not to Sylvia and not to anyone else either—the less said, the less that would have happened in the long run, that’s the way I saw it back then, already.

  “Here, with us…,” her brother went on slowly, “no one would blame you if you…if you were to do something.”

  I kept my mouth shut, I felt the weight of his hand on my neck, but I didn’t dare to move.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “It’s my own sister. If you were to…to do something, I in turn would feel the need to do something. But I would contain myself, not with my feelings, but with my mind, with my understanding of how things go here. How balance is restored here.”

  I felt flushed, I wanted to move, what I really wanted was to get up and pretend as though this conversation had never taken place. One afternoon, I can’t remember whether it was just before or just after the wedding, in any case, one afternoon Sylvia had told me what had happened in this ditch, years ago, at a time—and I have to be careful here, an all-too-specific allusion would be a grave misstep, the story about the pig is enough for the time being—when this country, my wife’s native country, the region where she was born, had gone through a period of unrest. Sylvia’s parents were very young at the time, not even in their twenties. They lived in the house that belonged to her father’s parents. They had left for the market in the provincial capital very early that morning. It was midsummer, and they got back only very late in the afternoon.

  They saw the smoke from a long way off. A column of smoke was rising from their house; it had not burned to the ground, but everything inside was covered in ash, the outside walls were black with smoke above the windows.

  They didn’t have to look for very long. Sylvia’s grandparents were lying beside each other in the dry ditch, peaceful and still, as though they had just lain down for a nap. But there were already flies buzzing around, not a lot, just a little more than normal on a hot summer evening.

  Later, Sylvia told me, when the situation had changed, they had done something in response, something similar, in another village—or in the same village, I can no longer remember.

  After that talk with my brother-in-law, there had been perhaps one single moment. It was on an evening when the hot wind off the flats to the south was roaring around the house, rattling at the shutters. The warm wind they have a name for around these parts; freely translated, it’s called “the Sigher.” People become more irritable when the Sigher is blowing, I’ve experienced it a few times myself; it starts with a slight pressure behind the eyes and ends with a piercing headache. In court cases, the Sigher is often advanced as a mitigating circumstance: perhaps the defendant would not have reached for the axe if no wind had been blowing that day.

  Sylvia was busy hanging the framed photographs of the American freight train. Except for about thirty pictures of our daughter, those were the only photos I had brought with me from Amsterdam. It had taken a few months, but one day Sylvia came home with the picture frames. She distributed the boxcars across twenty frames or so, about three cars to a frame, and hung them up at regular intervals, five centimeters apart. From the kitchen wall, across one wall of the living room, to our bedroom.

  I was standing in the doorway, my hands in my pockets. First she asked me whether the final frame was hanging straight. Then she turned to me.

  “Do you remember the noise that train made?” she asked. “The way it blew its whistle? Three times. The engineer was saying hello to us, and we waved back.”

  The shutters rattled. Somewhere out in the yard, a bucket or some other metal object had been caught by the wind; it blew across the gravel and then came to a halt against the outside wall.

  “What is it?” Sylvia whispered; her eyes got big, she raised her hands to her face. “Robert, please, what is it?”

  I said nothing. If there had been anything, it was over. My wife no longer looked at me in shock, but coolly, challengingly. She shook her head. She was married to a Dutchman. Dutchmen get ideas, too, she said with that cool, challenging look, with that shake of her head. But in the end, they don’t actually do anything.

  That was the moment. The only moment. Later, we stood close together at the kitchen sink. Sylvia rinsed off our two plates, two glasses, two forks, and two knives under the tap. I dried it all. That has become our regular ritual. We have talked about buying a dishwasher once or twice, but the idea always fades as quickly as it came. I think we are both afraid of the same thing—afraid of disturbing something.

  We don’t say much, more often we say nothing at all. We don’t talk as much as we used to. But we are together. We stand close together.

  This morning I sat on the boulder at the top of the hill and saw Sylvia come out of the house. She walked into the garden and looked around. Then she looked up. I waved; she waved back.

  There she is, I thought. My wife.

  I stood up; I went down the hill.

  about the author

  herman koch is the author of seven novels and three collections of short stories. The Dinner, his sixth novel, has been published in twenty-five countries and was the winner of the Publieksprijs in 2009. He currently lives in Amsterdam.

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