Kraft

by Jonas Lüscher

  The difficulty of the task itself

  Kraft’s inability to get over his jet lag

  Kraft’s family situation

  Kraft’s financial situation

  The existential necessity of impressing the jury as a consequence of points 3 and 4

  Kraft’s accommodations

  The constant vacuuming

  Kraft himself would probably agree with this list, although he would certainly change the order of importance.

  You know, he’d said on the evening of his arrival, to István, who now went by Ivan and whose American wife had already gone to bed, leaving the two men alone at the dining table with a Californian red wine and dense chocolate cake, you know, I need the money. More than any of the others. I need it to buy my freedom. I’ll leave Heike, it won’t break her heart, and I’ll give them a shitload of money, all three of them, Heike and the girls. I’ll buy my freedom, he said, and only the slightly forced ardor with which he described his plan would have alerted an attentive listener—which Ivan was not, nor had István ever been, Kraft had no need to worry—that this plan was not Kraft’s idea.

  * * *

  Fine, Heike had said when she suddenly appeared in his office and tore him from the work he had taken up at a very late hour after having sat with one of the twins over a Latin translation while the other, following his repeated orders, sullenly manhandled the piano as Heike sat ensconced on the settee with her legs drawn in and her bandaged index finger held reproachfully aloft, staring fixedly at the television screen, on which a dwarf was cavorting between bearskins with two bare-breasted women. Fine, she’d said, go to Stanford and win the ridiculous competition, at least then we’ll be able to put an end to this experiment.

  Calling the last fourteen years an experiment struck him as unwarranted, so it took him a moment to realize that she was referring to their marriage and while he was deliberating whether he should express his hurt or rather, in light of this unexpected way out, ignore her remark, Heike was once again too quick for him and had already vanished from his office by the time he had decided on the first option, which he had calculated to be a stronger position for the negotiations that would inevitably follow. And so he’d had to follow her into the bathroom, where all his hopes crumbled since he found Heike ministering to her finger with a large bottle of antiseptic and demonstrating very clearly their injury deadlock.

  * * *

  Kraft had just reached this bathroom scene in his recollections when he caught sight of Newfoundland below him and the North American continent soon after. He recalled the undignified negotiations with reluctance. Four weeks, he had stipulated, he needed four weeks in Stanford to prepare the presentation. At least it was clear even to Heike that there wasn’t the slightest chance he would win if he had to write his essay for the competition at home, squeezing it in between familial and professional duties, that he needed quiet and distance to answer the difficult question What is the source of evil and what can be done about it? He would have to marshal whatever shreds of optimism he had left to justify why whatever is, is right; and it was also clear to Heike that the farther away from her he was, the better he would do it. She conceded him two weeks, those were her terms, and not even his eloquent description of how elegantly a victory would solve the practical problems of their broken home—he surprised even himself by mentioning it—could persuade her to change them. This, my dear Kraft, she said, addressing him for the first time by their shared family name, is not the best of all possible worlds, and left the bathroom.

  That night Kraft wrote a long e-mail to Ivan accepting the invitation to participate in the contest and asking if he might stay with him for two weeks before he lay down, back to back, next to his sleeping wife and, unable to fall asleep for a long time, gradually worked himself into a state of rage as the bells of the Collegiate Church tolled every quarter of an hour, a rage stoked by the regularity of Heike’s breathing, which struck him as unsuitably serene, and by the sense of failure that came from his realization that the way out of the dead end into which he had maneuvered his life had not come through incisive critical reflection about the world—that was how he liked to describe his profession, which he also considered a way of life—but instead, as was now undeniably clear, from the world of finance, even if—and this seemed to add insult to injury—that liberating sum had first to be won through incisive critical reflection.

  And because he had managed to keep a small ember of this rage glowing through the weeks and across the Atlantic, it was easy to rekindle the fire during the interminable wait on arrival in Atlanta as a beagle in a chest harness from border control insisted on sniffing urgently and for the third time Kraft’s backpack, which he had set down between his feet on the worn carpet. This gave the dog’s ponytailed mistress grounds for a thorough inspection of his bag, an inspection from which she would not be dissuaded by Kraft’s explanation in a remarkably nervous, even guilty tone that the dog was probably agitated by the smell of a mortadella sandwich that one of his daughters, he couldn’t determine which because as usual they’d accused each other, had left in this very backpack—his own, he stressed—after she had borrowed it without permission for the May hike—here Kraft couldn’t think of the English word, so he first tried May perambulation, then seeing the officer’s uncomprehending look, followed with spring … or let’s say early summer stroll, an expression that, as soon as he’d said it, sounded to him improper in connection with his daughter and left him worried that it somehow made him appear even more suspicious. The officer, however, seemed far less concerned with his daughter than with the health of her dog, who, tail wagging, had taken advantage of the brief conversation to bury his nose in Kraft’s backpack before being pulled back by his mistress who asked Kraft in a surprisingly matter-of-fact tone without the slightest hint of disgust for information about the mortadella sandwich, whether it was still in the backpack, which Kraft indignantly denied, adding that he would hardly be traveling around in September with a sausage sandwich from the month of May; as was proper, he had disposed of it, or rather, what was left of it, but the smell had obviously penetrated the fabric of the backpack. For a moment he was tempted to describe the state of mummification in which he had found the snack after it had spent the entire summer in said backpack in the attic, which was often unbearably hot and arid, but since the dog and his mistress were losing interest in him, Kraft bit his tongue and turned his attention back to his rage, which had been further fanned by the vague sense of humiliation he experienced after every meeting with uniformed authorities and that was now burning freely. On the connecting flight, with the help of a scotch and a pack of wasabi peas, Kraft’s rage mutated into a sense of inevitable victory that led him to greet Ivan in the arrivals hall of the San Francisco airport so extravagantly, as if he were hugging his trainer in the Roubaix velodrome, that the backslapping seemed a bit excessive even to his friend Ivan, formerly known as István.

  * * *

  For the rest, it wasn’t easy for the two men to recover their former closeness, which had worn away to a meager remnant over years of encounters as irregular as they were haphazard, at conferences and congresses in far-flung towns between Bielefeld, Tampere, and Canberra, and the more they felt obligated by the loss of a sense of solidarity to celebrate and glorify their old intimacy the shabbier that remnant appeared to each of them individually, of course, since neither would ever mention it to the other.

  Theirs had been a “thumbs up each other’s ass” kind of intimacy as Schlüti, Richard’s roommate at the time, characterized it at the top of his voice before slamming the door behind him on the first warm spring day in 1981 and storming down the still clammy stairwell of the house on Grunewaldstraße in Berlin’s Steglitz district. Schlüti wasn’t entirely wrong, even if his words did betray the bitterness of a roommate grown obsolete. Richard Kraft and István Pánczél did, in fact, demonstrate their attachment with an obtrusively staged physical proximity that would have at least theoretical
ly allowed for such an unusual placement of thumbs, although it was the furthest thing from their minds; their love was of a purely political and ideological nature.

  * * *

  Kraft, who was registered as studying economics, philosophy, and German literature but was also assiduously attending lectures in the history, sociology, and political science departments, enjoyed a reputation in the Free University of Berlin at the time as a brilliant thinker who, at twenty-three, had already read almost everything you had to read and as one of those students who was destined for an impressive academic career. However, because he was merely one of several such students, he looked for an effective way to distinguish himself from the others and to this end he turned to Thatcherism, an ideological current that was sure to isolate him sufficiently from the rest of the student body and make him the most unusual of the most promising students and thereby, in a mysterious way, make him come off as the most promising of the most promising.

  Naturally, he was shocked on the morning of January 20, 1981, when a young man unknown to everyone in the auditorium took the floor during a lecture on Althusser, identified himself as a Hungarian dissident and political refugee, and in broken German began a loud and rather off-topic defense of Ronald Reagan, extolling his swearing-in as a historic moment and turning point in world history, a beacon in the fight against the communist oppressors and their subservient lackeys in the humanities faculties in the free world. At first Kraft was afraid this man would usurp his territory and with it his unique selling point, but he quickly realized that this István Pánczél with his hair pressed flat against the back of his head was, in fact, a marvelous ally who would lend Kraft’s lonely struggle against the powerful state not only the legitimacy of injustice inflicted on his own body, but also the intellectual sheen of an Eastern European chess master. István was, after all, a member of the Hungarian delegation sent to West Berlin for the university chess championship, where he had taken advantage of the opportunity to defect.

  At least, that was Pánczél’s version of the story, which he eagerly recounted at every possible occasion, and which was by no means a fabrication; not, that is, if one took a rather flexible approach to the truth, since István withheld the fact that he owed his spot on the chess delegation to the ivory-colored polyester jerseys with which the Hungarian Chess Federation outfitted its players, because after two hours the shirts began to smell as if the wearers were not moving little wooden figures over a board, but were competing in a wrestling match. István, who had failed spectacularly in the qualifying tournament, was only brought along to Berlin because they needed someone to wash the players’ sweaty shirts in the hotel sink at night.

  When the noise of an Ikarus tour bus woke him before dawn on January 20, István looked out the hotel room window and saw his teammates, who had come in last place in the championship, boarding the bus with tired faces. By the time he ran down to the parking lot, still half-dressed and carrying a pile of freshly washed jerseys and a hastily packed suitcase, all he could do was watch the light blue bus thread its way through traffic toward Budapest. His absence was not noticed until the bus was outside Prague and so the trainer, the surveillance officer, and the players took turns blaming each other in a Czechoslovakian highway rest stop for forgetting to wake the shirt-washer Pánczél until they agreed on an adventurous tale of how the young man had defected using the most refined and subtle of ploys.

  All the while, István sat on his bed in the West Berlin hotel room and waited in vain for the blue bus’s return. In the dawning light, he cobbled together a story with astonishing similarities to the one his teammates had constructed at almost the same time, stuffed the ivory-colored jerseys into a large plastic bag, grabbed his small suitcase, and snuck out the hotel’s rear exit. He wandered aimlessly for two hours through wintry Berlin sometimes feeling like a sock left behind under the bedspread, sometimes feeling his chest swell with the presentiment of a new freedom. He found refuge from the cold at last in an empty university auditorium and in the room’s silence made the story he had just invented his own; and when the room began to fill and a lecturer who struck him as unbearably effusive began to speak of a French Marxist confined to a psychiatric asylum, István sealed the deal by screwing up his courage, interrupting the speaker, and presenting himself to the public for the first time as a Hungarian political refugee.

  chapter two

  We see precisely this most characteristic look just before the perpetrator enters the cross aisle! He keeps his head facing forward, only his eyes flit over the shopping carts. This […] glance is so peculiar, it has so far never been observed in any honest customer.

  —RICHARD THIESS

  What particularly torments Kraft is that he cannot theoretically comprehend the wallpaper. He is convinced he should be able to make something of it. The same goes for all the furnishings, from the aforementioned eggshell-colored wallpaper on which robin redbreasts, beaks wide open, keep company with delicately drawn wild strawberries in an irritatingly regular pattern, to the sports trophies carefully aligned on the white rattan shelves, the modest narrow bed under the sloping ceiling of the attic room with its white enameled iron bed frame on which Kraft cools his overheated feet at night, and the similarly white lathe-turned child’s desk across from a refurbished antique dresser. What is hidden behind it all is completely obvious: the idea of a happy childhood, an ideal family, and the firm conviction that the memory of this happiness can be preserved forever in this little girl’s room. Just like the posters of enormous, sweat-drenched, long-retired basketball players that still adorn the walls of McKenzie’s room, players she must have worshipped in the years before she left her parents’ home for college in Poughkeepsie. Kraft had the sense that a happy childhood of this kind was a very American idea. It wouldn’t make an impression on anyone in Europe, Kraft thinks, at least not in Germany and certainly not in Austria. Quite the opposite, in fact. Too carefree a childhood seems to him almost a guarantee for a future flippancy, which strikes him as frivolous and certainly not conducive to incisive critical reflection about the world.

  He knows, however, that this theory is too vaguely formulated, not rigorously defensible. At least, he lacks reliable data. He is usually untroubled by such scruples when, finding himself yet again too far on the periphery in debates with his colleagues, he throws out an all-too-precipitous proposition he cannot support ad hoc with any data but that will nonetheless catapult him back to the center of the discussion. For that he can always rely on a theory jerry-rigged from his inexhaustible mental reserves. For compatibility, a common thread woven from late Heidegger, Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer, then for a border, some edging from Huntington’s thick undercoat, for the weft, a few suitable stitches from an obscure, no doubt justly forgotten Chilean economist of the Chicago school he’d read in the early ’80s and could still quote now, thirty years later, thanks to his phenomenal memory, along with a half-needle’s length of Finkielkraut for indignation and a half-needle’s length of Hölderlin for soul, for authenticity, a few loops from his essay, just published in Merkur, and as an ironic sealant, but also as a precautionary escape route, he drops in a few stitches of Karl Kraus. Kraft usually excelled at doing all of this off the cuff and engagingly enough to draw everyone’s attention back to him, admittedly with a collective eye roll but rarely any substantial objections. Tonight, however: nothing. No matter how assiduously he clicks his needles, theory leaves him without a stitch. Was it the lack of an audience? But that’s usually no problem since he can always conjure one up, imagine one into existence to suit his needs or mood, either a group nodding in agreement, with one or two pairs of eyes fixed on him, the speaker, wide with admiration and preferably blue, or the so-called pearls-before-swine scenario: a herd of individuals shaking their heads in disagreement, too trapped in their ideological obstinacy to even want to try to understand, thus spurring him to surpass himself. But not tonight.

  Not tonight and not on the previous nights either, nigh
ts when, even before ten o’clock, he had crept with leaden limbs under the quilt hand-sewn by Ivan’s wife and immediately drifted into a light sleep, plagued by abstract dreams that got tangled in loops and feedback, only to wake with a start each night punctually at half past midnight and then spend the remaining hours until dawn in the company of the basketball players and robin redbreasts stretching their beaks in mute longing toward the ever unattainable baskets and berries on the pitched ceiling an arm’s length above his head.

  The discrepancy between Kraft’s nightly state of exquisite emotional tension and the heavy, pervasive exhaustion of his aging body is intolerable. Eyes open wide, he stares into the semidarkness as if hoping to discover something, but he simply can’t theoretically comprehend the wallpaper. And tonight, his seventh night here, he’s suddenly no longer sure if those really are robins, so he turns on the light on the night table and searches the bookshelves, between Van Allsburg’s The Polar Express and Oates’s Big Mouth & Ugly Girl, for the paperback edition of All About Birds he had noticed two nights earlier.

  Book in hand, he sits on the edge of the bed, looks in the index for robin, finds the entry on page 62, holds the book up to the wallpaper for a more exact comparison, but still isn’t sure so he turns on the glaring ceiling light; no, not a robin redbreast. Definitely not. How could he have been so mistaken? For seven long nights. He exhorts himself to be more alert. The carpet under his bare feet suddenly seems suspicious to him; he’d rather climb back into bed.