The Ditch

  also by herman koch

  Dear Mr. M

  The Dinner

  Summer House with Swimming Pool

  The Ditch is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Sam Garrett

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  hogarthbooks.com

  crownpublishing.com

  hogarth is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in Dutch in the Netherlands as De Greppel by Ambo Anthos, Amsterdam, in 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Herman Koch. This translation originally published in the UK by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, London.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  Hardcover ISBN 9780525572381

  Ebook ISBN 9780525572398

  Cover design by Christopher Brand

  Cover photograph by Alan Thornton/Stone/Getty Images

  v5.4

  prh

  Contents

  Also by Herman Koch

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part II

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part III

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Part IV

  Chapter 30

  About the Author

  Part

  I

  1

  Let me call her Sylvia. That’s not her real name—her real name would only confuse things. People make all kinds of assumptions when it comes to names, especially when a name isn’t from around here, when they don’t have a clue about how to pronounce it, let alone spell it. So let’s just say that it’s not a Dutch name. My wife is not from Holland. Where she is from is something I’d rather leave up in the air for the time being. Those in our immediate surroundings, of course, know where she’s from. And people who read the newspaper and watch the news with any regularity can’t really have missed it either. But most people have bad memories. They may have heard it once, then forgotten.

  Robert Walter? His wife’s foreign, right?

  Yes, that’s right, she’s from…from…Come on, help me out here…People associate all kinds of things with countries of origin. To each country its own prejudices. It starts as soon as you get to Belgium. Do I need to repeat here the kinds of prejudices we Dutch people have when it comes to Belgians? When it comes to the Germans, the French, the Italians? Go a bit farther east and a bit farther south and the people gradually change color. At first it’s only their hair: it gets darker, and finally it turns black altogether. After that, the same process repeats itself, but now with their skin. To the east it turns yellower, to the south it gets blacker and blacker.

  And it gets hotter. South of Paris, the temperature starts to rise. When the weather’s hot, it becomes a lot harder to work. One feels more like sitting in the shade of yonder palm. Even farther south, one stops working altogether. Mostly, one just takes a breather.

  When our daughter was born, the name “Sylvia” was the second on our list of names. The second on a list of three, the name we would have given her if we hadn’t named her Diana. Or to put it differently: if we’d had three daughters instead of only one, they would have been named Diana, Sylvia, and Julia. We also had three names ready for any boys who came along, but I won’t list them here. We don’t have boys. We also don’t have daughters. We have only Diana.

  It’s probably clear to you by now that Diana isn’t our daughter’s real name either. First of all, for reasons of privacy—she has to be able to live a life of her own, which is hard enough already when a girl has a father like me. But it’s no coincidence that all three of those names have three syllables and that they all end in an a. When it came time to choose our daughter’s name (her real name), I made a concession. I felt that my wife had a tough enough time of it as it was, in a country not her own. That I shouldn’t go burdening her on top of all that with a daughter with a Dutch name. It would be a name from her country. A girl’s name she could say out loud each day, a familiar name, a warm sound in the midst of all that harsh gargling and bleak hawking we call the Dutch language.

  The same goes for my wife’s name. In addition to her person, I also fell in love right away with her name. I say it as often as I can—long ago, too, in the middle of the night, all on my lonesome, in the boarding house where I had to spend the night because there was no room for me at her parents’. It’s something in the sound of it: somewhere between melting chocolate and a wood fire, in terms of the taste and the aroma. When I don’t call her by her first name, I call her “sweetheart”—not in Dutch, no, in Dutch I’d have a hard time getting the word out of my mouth, only ironically at best, as in: But sweetheart, you should have thought about that beforehand.

  “Sweetheart” in my wife’s language, though, sounds precisely the way “sweetheart” should sound. Like the name of a dessert, or more like a hot, sticky beverage that leaves a warm, tingling trail behind as it goes down your throat, but also like the warmth of a blanket someone lays over your shoulders: Come to me now, sweetheart.

  My wife—Sylvia! Her new name is starting to grow on me—is from a country that shall remain unnamed for the time being. A country about which a lot of preconceived notions exist. Notions both favorable and unfavorable. From “passionate” and “temperamental,” it’s only a small step to “hot-tempered.” A crime passionel (the term says it already) is a crime we tend to situate more readily in the south and east than in northern climes. In some countries, they just happen to lose their tempers more quickly than we do; at first it’s only voices shouting in the night, but then suddenly there is the glint of moonlight on a drawn blade. The standard of living is lower there, the discrepancies between rich and poor are immense, stealing is viewed with more sympathy than in our country, but the culprits are viewed with less—they consider themselves lucky if the police get to them before the injured party arrives to settle accounts.

  I myself am absolutely not free of preconceived notions.

  In light of my official capacity, though, I’m supposed to be—and I just happen to make a good show of it. In the last few years I’ve had a cup of tea (or a beer, or something stronger) with every minority group our city has on offer. I’ve swung along with music not my own, raised a slice of some vague meat dish to my lips—but that doesn’t make me free of prejudices. I’ve always cherished my preconceived notions as something bound up inextricably with my own person. Or, to put it more precisely: without those prejudices, I would have been a different person. That,
in the first instance, is how I look at the foreigner: with the naturally suspicious eye of the farmer who sees a stranger entering his yard. Is the stranger coming in peace, or shall I turn the dogs on him?

  But now something has happened that has thrown everything for a loop, something with my wife. Something that perhaps has more to do with her country of origin, her place of birth, than I care to admit—with her cultural background, I venture cautiously, in order to say nothing of that dubious concept of “national character.” At least, not for the time being.

  I ask myself to what extent I can hold her responsible, and to what extent it might be the fault of her native country.

  I wonder whether I’m capable of telling the two apart—whether I ever will be capable of that. Whether I would have reacted differently if Sylvia had been just another Dutchwoman. Sometimes a prejudice can serve as a mitigating circumstance, sometimes as a damning one. That’s just the way those people are, it’s in their blood. What it is precisely that is in their blood, well, everyone can fill that in for themselves: the thievery, the knife fighting, the lying, the wife-beating, the bashing of other population groups that don’t belong in their backward village, the cruel games with animals, the religious customs involving the shedding of blood, the intentional mutilation of one’s own body, the overabundance of gold teeth, the arranged marriages of sons and daughters; but on the other hand also the food that tastes so much better than it does here, the parties that go on all night, the sense of “we only live once, tomorrow we may die,” the music that seems much more stirring, more melancholy, closer to the heart, the men who let their eye fall on a woman and can never be discouraged, the women who want one specific man, only that one, you can see it in their gaze, in the fire in their eyes—but when they catch their husband with another woman they jam a knife between his ribs or cut off his balls while he’s asleep.

  And that’s as it should be too, I think to myself, I who try to remain free of prejudices but am not—and never have been either. And what if those prejudices suddenly turn against you? How do you react then? As the Dutchman who wants to be seen as tolerant of other peoples and cultures? Or as something a little more in line with the country of origin, with the national character, of the other?

  Until now, the two have always been good bedfellows. Night after night I’ve shared my bed with those preconceived notions. But what if you wake up early one morning to find the sheets beside you cold and unused? It is still dark, through the curtains a crack of light from a streetlamp shines on the turned-back feather bed. What time is it, for God’s sake? She should have been home ages ago.

  You prick up your ears, you hear bare feet padding down the hallway, but it’s your daughter, who’s now knocking on the bedroom door.

  “Where’s Mama?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” you answer truthfully.

  2

  It happened at the New Year’s reception, on Thursday, January 16. Why does it have to be so late in the month? I asked the first time after my appointment, and at least once more after that. Why so far along into the new year, just when we’re breathing a sigh of relief because the New Year’s receptions are—at least for another year—over at last? I’ve forgotten what the exact answer was. Something about tradition. “That’s the way we’ve always done it,” I recall the city manager replying vaguely (the former city manager, that is; one of our first tasks in the new year was to find a suitable replacement for him). He shrugged as he said it, but in his eyes I saw something else. Because! That’s why! is what his look said, as though speaking to a child who wants to know why it can’t go outside and play for five minutes before dinner.

  Everyone was there. Of the “triad”—which is what they call the three-man team of police commissioner, district attorney, and myself—I caught sight only of the DA. He was standing beside the table full of hors d’oeuvres, sliding a handful of salt peanuts or cocktail snacks into his mouth. On the table were wooden serving trays with cheese cubes, and platters with pieces of raw herring that had little cocktail sticks with red, white, and blue Dutch flags stuck into them.

  As far as I could tell at a glance, all the aldermen were already there, and most of the council members too. For the rest, a few representatives of trade and industry, people from the art world, the club president of Ajax. Without a doubt, at some point he was going to start in about the national championship celebration. About last year’s celebration, to be more precise. Which, for the third year in a row, had been held in an open lot beside the Amsterdam ArenA, jammed in between the Heineken Music Hall and the office tower of Deutsche Bank. ArenA Boulevard sucks in air like a wind tunnel; the tower and the stadium do the rest. On calm days it’s the ideal playground for wind funnels and mini-tornadoes. Sand, newspapers, empty French-fry and hamburger containers are drawn into the air. There they hang, orbiting around, until the wind gets bored and smacks them down a few hundred meters farther—often enough, right on the heads of the shoppers headed for Mediamarkt, Decathlon, and Perry Sport.

  Catcalls had been my due. And rightly so. I realized that it had been a hopeless error of judgment on my part, that I had given in too quickly to the arguments advanced by the other two members of the triad. The city. Downtown. The safety risks. Of course, a team that has just won the national championship should have its victory celebration downtown. At Leidseplein, on the balcony of the municipal theater, players and trainer holding aloft the champion’s cup for the cheering supporters to admire. But in preceding years those celebrations had all ended in disturbances. Smashed bus shelters, concrete planters thrown through shopwindows. Looting. Groups of drunken and high hooligans climbing the light towers. And then, as the crowning touch—like in a Western, when the cavalry arrives at the fort beleaguered by Indians—the charges carried out by the mounted police. “Potentially fatal” situations had arisen, that was how the next day’s papers quoted the police commissioner. Things could have spun even further out of control. Serious injuries. Perhaps even a fatality.

  Hence the vacant lot with whirlwinds. Not much to vandalize there. ArenA Boulevard, with its tempting array of plate-glass windows, could easily be blocked off by a few platoons of riot police. That was a lot harder in downtown Amsterdam, with its tangle of narrow streets and alleyways. But despite the red flares and the smoke, the celebration really did look horribly dismal, with the beats of Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” drifting away feebly amid the office towers. That’s how it seemed to me, especially when I played back the news footage that evening, footage that would travel all around the world: Ajax may no longer have been the superpower it was in the 1970s and mid-1990s, but it was still very much a legendary club, one whose name was spoken with respect. The whole world would see that Holland’s best soccer club was celebrating its championship on a dismal concrete lot.

  My wife always goes with me to the New Year’s reception. Even though she detests them—in fact, she detests all occasions that smack of officialdom. Sylvia has never wanted to be “the wife of,” the woman in the shadows; she prefers to live her own life, and we try to keep her public appearances to a minimum. But the New Year’s reception is an exception. She knows how bored I get at things like that. It’s inevitable. The glass in the hand. The dish of salted nuts. The babbling on about nothing—and I know that other people can see it miles away too, my desire to get out of there as quickly as possible shines right through me. “Just tell me if you want me to go along,” she always says. “If you really want me to be there, then I will. For you.”

  That’s how we’ve divided up our roles. That’s our agreement. As soon as I put on my most pitiful expression and look at her with the hammy, imploring look that I save for special occasions, Sylvia knows how things stand. I never have to say anything more. “Okay, don’t start crying,” she says. “I’ll go along. What should I wear?”

  Foreign heads of state I can deal with on my own, the opening of a new subway st
ation, the farewell party for a museum director, a symphony conductor’s seventieth birthday. The heads of state tend to walk around looking a little forlorn; by the time they get here they’ve already spent half the day in The Hague, in the company of our prime minister. But after that half a day, the visiting head of state and our prime minister clearly have nothing more to say to each other. The boredom hangs in the air like an odorless but deadly gas. I feel sorry for them, for the heads of state. I too have spent the occasional half-day with the prime minister. No, not half a day, a couple of hours at most; during a dinner, a boat tour of the canals, a film premiere. You toss a coin in his slot and something always rolls out—but rarely anything useful. You’ve got people like that: you talk to them and they answer you right away, a little too readily perhaps, they don’t take time to think about it. Maybe they’re afraid of silence, I don’t know, even half a second of silence seems to feel like an eternity to them. In any case, I’m not the only one; after a few hours in the company of our prime minister, the foreign heads of state go looking for someone else too—for a breath of fresh air.

  Now it’s time for me to tell you something about myself. Something which, lacking proper explanation, might sound like pure vanity, but which definitely isn’t that. I’ll try to stick to the facts. Fact is, for example, that you won’t feel bored any too quickly when I’m around. I see the way the heads of state cast about. They may be standing beside the prime minister and the minister of foreign affairs, but they’re dying to get out of there, they’ve stopped listening already, mostly they wear this glassy-eyed stare. Maybe what they really feel like doing is taking a little nap, but—that being out of the question—they’ll settle for a double vodka or a cigarette out on the balcony. All I have to do is wait until that restless, glassy-eyed look settles on me, you can set your watch by it. I radiate it, I don’t have to put any effort into it at all, it’s written all over my face: that I’ve had enough of this too, that I’m just as fed up as they are. They step away from the circle of blowhards and come over to me.