But now he wants to know. Kraft shoves a pillow behind his back, though the pressure of the cast-iron bed frame against his spine is still pleasant, and leafs systematically through the book. Purple finch, page 102. Again he compares the illustration in the book with one of the countless birds on the wall. Yes, without a doubt, purple finches. Satisfied, he replaces the book and turns off the light with the switch near the door.
On his way back into bed, the light-colored carpet again intrudes unpleasantly on his awareness, but now, in his more conciliatory mood, disgust does not get the upper hand. Instead, Kraft thinks of the plump, tender little-girl feet that must have trodden this path countless times. Thus at peace with himself, with theory, with the wallpaper and the carpeting, Kraft slips back under the colorful quilt and closes his eyes in the certainty that sleep will mercifully descend on him and, indeed, the heaviness creeps from his limbs and pools behind his eyelids before sloshing through his optic nerve and into his excited brain like oil on troubled waters.
He almost, almost falls asleep. But then: the little-girl feet. He sees them clearly and in minute detail and the clarity of the image rips his eyes open and brings everything back, the purple finches, the wild strawberries, the sports trophies, and the basketball players. Little-girl feet. What’s with the little-girl feet? It makes him uncomfortable. He is far too well versed in cultural theory, aesthetics, literature, pornography, and psychoanalysis not to understand immediately that he is entering treacherous waters. But he’d never had the slightest interest in anything like this. He doesn’t want to entertain the thought again, and yet, nevertheless, he focuses as long as he can on that very image, in reality so alien to him, because he wants even less to think about the topic he should actually be focusing on. It’s perfectly clear to him that this, unfortunately, is not a matter of forbidden lust. This has nothing to do with McKenzie’s innocent little-girl feet. Although Kraft does not doubt that McKenzie, whom he knows only from the framed photographs lining the stairway wall, has charming feet and has surely grown into a charming woman who performs her duties well in the Ann Arbor treasury. However, not even thinking of the taxman helps at the moment. It’s obvious what the little-girl feet are referring to but he can’t let himself think of the twins now because then he would have to think of Heike, too, and that is something he cannot afford to do, not after the past few nights, not in the state he’s in.
Whatever you do, don’t think of little-girl feet now.
Still, that was a good moment. With him, Kraft, and his daughters’ four small feet. The twins were in the habit of soiling their diapers at the same time, so Kraft built an extra-wide changing table by hand, which, mind you, he was not allowed to use until Heike had summoned a carpenter to certify that the table’s load capacity was sufficient. Kraft had hung a mirror over the table in which the twins could see each other, so they wouldn’t need to keep turning to look at each other; they stayed nicely on their backs and communicated with their eyes open wide and their little arms outstretched above the straps.
Kraft will always remember that moment when he grabbed the four wriggling little feet and rubbed them one after the other with Nivea cream and made the twins giggle by tickling their fat tummies. I am a good father after all shot through his head and this thought took him so much by surprise that he repeated it several times in a childish voice, nodding vigorously and raising his eyebrows at his daughters, who beamed at him with their blue eyes and clumsily grabbed at his fingers.
Why did this thought surprise him so? Because until that moment Kraft had not once felt it was justified, which is not exactly a credit to him given that the man we’re dealing with here is by no means a modest one and he had at that point already been a father for twenty years, although to be fair, we shouldn’t count the six years during which he’d had no idea he even had a child.
In any case, that thought and the memory of it had evolved over time, for if that notion had always brought him a feeling of consolation in the twins’ early years, it now brought only feelings of uncertainty and occasionally even—like right now, in McKenzie’s room—a sense of failure. And that is why Kraft does not want, on any account or under any circumstances, to think of little-girl feet. Not now, not in this state, ideally never again.
At least one thing hasn’t changed, Kraft thinks as he looks at the small birds he had night after night mistaken for robin redbreasts. The twins still like to get themselves in deep shit at the same time. Just three weeks ago, for example, a store detective had called from the H&M in the pedestrian zone and asked him to come pick up his two daughters. And after he had made his way, accompanied by the sales clerks’ sympathetic looks, to a small back office, he found the two maddeningly relaxed girls explaining to a young man with heavily gelled hair that anyways they had nothing to worry about because they couldn’t be charged until they turned fourteen, which wasn’t for two months. It wasn’t the shoplifting that worried him, or the two pairs of identical, purposely frayed hot pants the girls had clumsily shoved into their oversize fake leather handbags because they wanted to save the 9.90 euros, even if it rankled him that they had been dressing exactly alike for a year, the source of one of the biggest fights he’d ever had with Heike. He had even won that fight, since he believed they had to raise two independent people, not the Kessler twins, but Heike was too young to know who the Kessler twins were and countered that there’s nothing in the world cuter than two identically dressed blond twin girls, an argument he parried by pointing out that the Kessler twins had never married, a fate Heike didn’t want to be guilty of inflicting on her girls and so she dressed the two girls differently from the start, although Heike always made sure that the colors didn’t clash, until their daughters decided a year ago, from one day to the next, always to wear matching outfits.
That wasn’t what worried him as he ushered the girls out of the back room with a severe look and serious words after forcing them to apologize to the man with the hair gel, something they did reluctantly, rolling their kohl-lined eyes and telling him, Kraft, their father, that the young man was hardly the one they should apologize to since he was not the injured party, or maybe he thought this guy was the famous Mr. Hennes or rather Mr. Mauritz; on the contrary, in fact, this guy should be grateful that they let themselves be caught stealing because if there were no more shoplifters, he’d be out on the street without a job. No, what worried Kraft was the fact that they weren’t the slightest bit contrite, not at all sheepish, but already negotiating, maneuvering strategically, and denying everything.
They haggled over the most minute attribution of guilt, introduced completely irrelevant sideshows, weighed every word on a jeweler’s scale. These were all techniques, he was perfectly aware, they had learned from their parents, for this was the principle by which Kraft and Heike steered their marriage once their shared enthusiasm for their “family” project had waned, right about the time Heike went back to work and the rope they had been pulling together had unraveled into a tangle of pettiness, thwarted desires, pride, and priorities toward which each brought a personal tally of sacrifices and efforts made.
An almost complete absence of generosity, that’s the root of the problem. But where can you find any, Kraft wonders, where can you turn if there’s none left in your own heart? Maybe there’s still some generosity slumbering deep inside him, Kraft hopes, just submerged, and all it needs is a small sign from Heike, a hint of generosity on her part, and he would be able to be generous in turn. But why wait for Heike? Doesn’t it work both ways? No, not in this case. Heike, he was certain, would shamelessly exploit any sign of generosity and construe it as her victory and his defeat. They had been fighting this battle for a long time and whoever let their guard down first would lose.
Kraft squeezes the white enameled bars of the bed frame one by one between his toes, presses his feverish soles against the cool iron, and notes with a pall of disappointment how quickly the metal warms up and the sensory discrepancy between his organic warmth and the lifeless
cold he craves disappears. His craving is so acute and the certainty of disappointment so great that tonight he abandons his search for fleeting happiness on the last six bars of the bed’s footboard. Kraft throws off the quilt, swings his legs over the edge of the mattress, sits up, turns on the night table lamp, and fishes yesterday’s socks out of the laundry bag. Anyway, sleep is out of the question. Besides, he has a job to do. The question about the origin and purpose of evil and why whatever is, is nonetheless right is waiting for an answer, no, for his answer. And the beauty of it all is that this answer will solve their family problem, something that has become increasingly urgent since, despite their mutual assurances, they are obviously incapable of leaving the girls out of it.
In his socks, boxers, and T-shirt, he sits on the lacquered chair at the small, white desk, pulls from his backpack his laptop and the thin pile of papers he has Ivan’s secretary print out fresh for him every day even though he rarely adds anything new, and as he reads his notes, as useless as they are fragmentary since they do not marshal a shred of support for optimism, he feels his creative energy dissipate. Brooding gloomily, he sits in the light of the desk lamp. Maybe he should read Poser’s technodicy essay again? Yes, that’s the right approach. There, right on the first page, the problem of evil is presented in its simplest form, in the words of the Church Father Lactantius in his treatise On the Anger of God:
Kraft either wants to eliminate evil and cannot, or he can but does not want to, or he neither can nor wants to, or he both can and wants to. If he wants to but cannot, then he is weak, which does not apply to Kraft; if he can but does not want to, then he is spiteful, which is equally foreign to Kraft’s nature. If he neither wants to nor can, then he is both spiteful and weak and therefore not Kraft. But if he wants to and can, which is the only fitting thing for Kraft, where then does evil come from and why does he not eliminate it?
Yes, indeed, why does Kraft not eliminate it? Because he lacks optimism. He falls into gloomy brooding again. But as he sits there, all the heaviness seeps out of his body and is replaced by a clayey emptiness. He suddenly feels very light. Now, right now, he could fall asleep, if only he could sleep sitting up since on no account does he want to return to the finches and wild strawberries. So he remains seated and slips into a kind of trance in which four little pink feet slathered in skin cream dance before his eyelids. Kraft will get no closer to sleep tonight.
chapter three
Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. He moveth his tail like a cedar.
—JOB 40:16–17
Breakfast is a ceremony. A beloved tradition, a family ritual, so why should we give it up just because our daughter has moved out? Ivan asked on the first morning. Ivan, Kraft has to admit, is always in a good mood early in the morning and try as he might, he can’t remember this ever being the case with István. Ivan’s wife, Barbara, sits at the breakfast table in checked flannel pajamas, a suggestively unattractive outfit that strikes Kraft as inappropriately private and that creates a sense of intimacy he finds hard to bear, so he concentrates on the rapidly lengthening bar on his tablet indicating its progress downloading the latest edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and starts hectically tapping the link to the lead story with his middle finger, making the picture of the federal minister of finance jump out at him and shrink back in quick succession until he energetically swipes it to the left into his device’s working memory, which creates the momentary illusion that the minister’s wheelchair is rolling backward off the stage at the World Economic Forum. Ivan, meanwhile, drapes the bacon strips he dried out on a strip of parchment paper in the microwave over the fried eggs in an X and puts the plate in front of his wife, brightening her morning with sunnyside-ups as he does every day, upon which she assures him once again that he is an angel. Then he sits at the table satisfied, sips from his Mexican-stoneware mug, and remarks that now that they have Kraft with them at the breakfast table, things are a bit like they used to be. Kraft is reasonably certain that Ivan is not thinking of their days eating yogurt from the carton while standing in the kitchen on Grunewaldstraße; he smiles a rather strained smile and despite his best efforts can’t prevent a quick glance at Barbara’s feet, which she has propped on the edge of the chair, her knees bent. Ivan looks around him in delight and wipes a tear from the corner of his left eye, slipping his napkin under the steel frame of his eyeglasses in a practiced gesture.
This is no tear of emotion, just one of the innumerable tears that regularly drip from Ivan’s bleary eye and have ever since June 11, 1982, when Ruth flailed István’s face with a yellow gerbera daisy, shouting, “Peace without weapons!”
* * *
And yet, that day had begun so well. István and Kraft were among the handpicked happy few allowed to watch the landing of Air Force One on the Tempelhof airfield. They no doubt owed this distinction to the city fathers’ wish not to give the dynamic American president, who seemed almost youthful despite his seventy years, the false impression that West Berlin was populated only by older ladies whose lives were shaped by the triad of seduction, punishment, and redemption: seduced by the fascist promise of purity, grandeur, and eternity, followed closely by the punishment inflicted through the brutality of the Red hordes, a punishment many of them suffered with their own bodies, and then the subsequent healing process through internal and external application of colorful products that the economic miracle rained down on them in the form of raisins and pantyhose in an inexhaustible stream that only the American spirit coupled with German diligence could guarantee, which was the reason why they were all too ready to pay homage to this diligent spirit by waving little star-spangled banners. Having a throng of seniors represent a city that occasionally seemed about to suffocate under the burden of its history would give the wrong picture: that much was clear to those in charge. And so they were desperately seeking students willing to cheer Ronald and Nancy Reagan; however, most students had neither the time nor the desire and were already busy digging up the paving stones on Nollendorfplatz. The authorities were, therefore, happy to grant István’s request that he be allowed, as a direct beneficiary, so to speak, to express his gratitude in person to the leader of the free world.
The light blue airplane slowed to a stop, rolling stairs were drawn up to it, secret service agents in brown suits exited the plane, and this alone was already enough to elicit exclamations of enthusiasm from István. A photographer with a fussy hairdo followed the agents, military music played, flags fluttered in the warm wind, and then the representative of the tutelary power emerged onto the stairs at 9:47, his hand in Nancy’s, and she in a white dress suit. Reagan waved briefly, descended the stairs, stepped on Berlin soil, and at the foot of the rolling stairs saluted the officers of the American forces, shook Mayor von Weizsäcker’s hand, inspected the regiment of GIs standing at attention, and shook hands over the barrier with a few Berliners, among them the ecstatic shirt-washer Pánczél and the promising student Kraft, who made their way after this uplifting moment back through the crowd as ruthlessly as they had earlier pushed their way to the front row, treading on old ladies’ feet and separating from their families small children who had been clinging to their mothers’ hands. They ran to their bicycles and raced past the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church to the Charlottenburg Palace to ensure they had the best seats there, as well.
* * *
Kraft was suffering. As he always did when he had to share something important to him with too many other people: twenty-five thousand Berliners listening to the president’s speech and cheering in chorus. Even for a good cause, this was too much conformism for Kraft. Naturally it was an exhilarating feeling to be on the right side of history, but did it really have to be so crowded there? István, on the other hand, was completely euphoric. He sang “Börlin bleibt doch Börlin” with an American accent the whole way home and came up with the disastrous idea of paying a visit to the women demonstrating for peace on the Theodor-Heuss-Pla
tz so he could straighten out their twisted view of the world with the authority of someone able to speak from direct experience.
It was nothing less than his duty, of this he was convinced, and Reagan’s words had filled with him the courage of a lion. Thus equipped, he was ready to confront a horde of hysterical communist shrews, unprotected and wielding his fate and his intellectual superiority as his only weapons. You could say he was fortunate that the invention of social networks and the internet was nowhere near the horizon that day and as a result the two companions didn’t have the vaguest idea of the dramatic events taking place on Nollendorfplatz. Otherwise, Kraft would never have been able to keep István from facing down a shower of paving stones armed only with his fate and intellectual superiority and he would have walked away with more than a damaged eye. On the other hand, they knew the location of the women’s demonstration from the newspaper because it was the one demonstration the authorities had not, in their solicitude, categorically prohibited.
With fluttering quiff and large half-moons of sweat under his arms, István, ready for action, cycled down Ahornallee and shouted over his shoulder to the reluctant Kraft that he was planning on asking the women demonstrating if they had ever thought to wonder whether they would still be allowed, under the political regime they were so avidly supporting, to do what they were doing right now? A formulation with which Reagan would conclude, almost verbatim, his second Berlin speech almost five years later, causing István, in his London flat, to leap off the sofa in front of the television and call out to Kraft that he had always suspected it, but now he had proof that the Americans had bugged him, the Hungarian dissident refugee, during his Berlin years, and had apparently kept the very highest levels informed.
Kraft Page 3