* * *
The hundred or so police officers on the Theodor-Heuss-Platz had no trouble keeping the demonstration of the “women in mourning” under control. They stood calmly in loose formation before the five hundred for the most part young women, waving banners they’d lovingly decorated with images of doves holding olive branches in their beaks, pictures that betrayed a fair amount of artistic talent, and chanting, “Sonne statt Reagan!”* It may even be that the police were a bit bored, especially since they’d just learned over the radio that their colleagues on the other side of the city were facing a completely different situation and surely would have more opportunity to demonstrate their courage and let their truncheons speak. Perhaps that’s why they let István, who harangued them while pointing again and again at the big REAGAN button on his lapel and waving his little American flag, walk through the security cordon with Kraft in his wake all the way up to the waist-high barrier, where he stridently served the women a taste of his intellectual superiority. They, however, seemed unimpressed, so he dished out some choice insults instead as the police officers looked on, amused. Kraft, meanwhile, sized up the misguided women and, shaking his head, thought up a few observations on the role of women in society. István, his courage fanned by the presidential words, ventured within an arm’s length of the pacifists and chose as the target for his insults the one woman whose political and moral misguidedness Kraft regretted the most, since her broad face, her hair tied up in a bun, and her ample bosom, well-defined under her violet T-shirt—a hideous piece of clothing he attributed to her political confusion—radiated a maternal, fecund air. Kraft was enchanted. Just as he was wondering if she might eventually show herself receptive to his arguments and allow him to lead her back to the path of righteousness, István appeared to have gone a step too far with his politically inflected obscenities; at any rate, the woman in question blew her top and whipped István in the face with her yellow gerbera daisy, shouting, “Peace without weapons!”
Tears flowed and blood spurted. Unfortunately, István’s vitreous humor also spurted, his eye perforated by the wire a prudent florist had used to reinforce the gerbera, spattering its contents over István’s shirt and his little portrait of the laughing president. Kraft dragged István, bellowing like a stuck pig and spouting Hungarian curses, to an ambulance standing nearby as the police took advantage of the opportunity to club away at the front row of the women. Kraft held István’s hand as two paramedics tried to stop more gel escaping from his eye with gauze bandages, then strapped the young man to a stretcher and roared off to the Steglitz clinic, blue lights flashing. Kraft watched the ambulance pull away and suddenly Ruth appeared beside him. She was devastated, on the brink of tears; what had she done? And Kraft seized the moment, stoked her feelings of guilt by recounting István’s spectacular escape at great length and in vivid detail—an account that he himself didn’t know was completely fabricated—and described the manifold forms of repression István must have suffered in his homeland, until the stricken Ruth believed she had just blinded the unofficial leader of the Hungarian intelligentsia. She gratefully accepted the scrap of paper with Kraft’s telephone number so she could call him that evening and enquire about the courageous dissident’s condition.
When Kraft was finally admitted to visit his friend that evening, he found István rather taciturn under a blue blanket, a thick bandage wrapped at a slant around his head. Kraft tried to cheer him up by telling him he looked exactly like Moshe Dayan in the photograph that showed the general waiting stoically hour after hour on the edge of the Lītānī River to be evacuated, but he’d forgotten that István had crossed the Israeli off his list of personal heroes last year for being politically unreliable. Kraft protested, but was thankful that the nurses soon sent him home because he didn’t want to miss Ruth’s call. And so he waited impatiently by the phone on the sofa that had served as István’s bed for the first few years of their friendship until Schlüti gave up in aggravation, stormed down the staircase shouting crude insults, and moved out, abandoning his room to the refugee Hungarian chess master. Ruth did, in fact, call and was very relieved to hear that István’s eye could be saved and asked if she could accompany Kraft to the hospital the following day in order to apologize in person.
* * *
Kraft waited for Ruth at the clinic entrance. She showed up with a bouquet of yellow gerbera daisies, proof of a quirky sense of humor, a trait to which Kraft was particularly susceptible. Everything about her entranced him. He looked favorably on the broad hips and generous bosom, which had struck him the day before and over which she now wore a much more acceptable black blouse. A visit today, he was sorry to have to tell her, would not be possible since István had just been taken into the OR for a new procedure. In Kraft’s defense, this was true. Kraft was a bit alarmed on finding that Ruth seemed much more self-possessed than the day before, so he decided to inform her of his suspicion that his friend had an extremely difficult relationship with hospitals, or at least such was the conclusion he’d drawn from a nasty scar on István’s groin, the result of a traumatic experience his friend only ever alluded to obscurely. Kraft, however, could not have known that István never mentioned it because he didn’t like to explain that he’d suffered an inguinal hernia while trying to lift a kitchen cupboard and after the operation the scar became infected due to inadequate hygiene. As a result, István became monosyllabic whenever he was asked about the pink bulge a full handbreadth wide and muttered something about the horrors of socialism, by which he meant the squalid condition of the Budapest clinic, but in Kraft’s mind called up vivid images of the secret police’s dismal cellars. Kraft described those images so graphically that he soon had Ruth in a state similar to the one she’d been in the day before and so willing to accept his invitation to go out for ice cream.
* * *
What was it about Ruth that appealed so strongly to Kraft? Well, for one, her maternal side. Not that she treated Kraft maternally, not at all; that would have had the opposite effect. No, she was, to his mind, a maternal figure. She seemed to him to be perfectly cast for motherhood and because he believed the family was the indisputable foundation of bourgeois life as well as the soul of the state, he intended to do his part in building a stable nation as soon as possible, and furthermore, because he couldn’t do this without the active participation of a woman, a mother, he was smitten with Ruth. One could object that it all perhaps had less to do with the bourgeois soul of the state and more with the difficult personality of Kraft’s mother, but that would be unfair to the young Kraft, given that, at the time he was eyeing Ruth’s breasts over his coffee ice cream, he not only didn’t think much of the Viennese quack, he held the doctor’s writings in outright contempt. In any case, his enthusiasm for Ruth turned to rapture when she admitted tentatively—because in her circles such an attitude was frowned upon—that she didn’t approve of day-care centers, not that she was fundamentally opposed to them, of course, because childcare played an important role in the liberation of women, but for her personally, putting children in a stranger’s care was out of the question; for her, motherhood was simply too appealing. Kraft endorsed her view with vehement nods and had he deigned to read Cohn-Bendit’s great word bazaar of a memoir at the time instead of waiting for the scandalized press to run excerpts thirty years later, he certainly would have asserted that children in day-care centers were fundamentally at the mercy of unwashed lefties and their grabby hands fumbling at the little ones’ flies, and with this assertion he would have spared a number of people some trouble. But, as it was, Ruth was spared this hard-hitting argument, one she presumably would have found unappetizing enough to turn her back on Kraft and her half-eaten banana split. Instead, she told him about studying to be a sculptor, which fanned Kraft’s ardor even more as he found artistic people exciting and he immediately told himself that being a sculptor was a profession that could be easily cut back in the case of motherhood, both in the size and weight of the individual works
and in terms of the time devoted to it. Kraft succumbed completely when Ruth told him her family name: she was a Lambsdorff. Kraft was over the moon despite her assurances that she was only very distantly related to the illustrious count and federal minister for economic affairs he idolized and that she had never met him personally, nor did she have the slightest desire to, unless it were to whack him in the eye with a gerbera daisy.
* * *
Kraft was in love. And so it was that every third night he slipped out of the apartment on Grunewaldstraße under the pretext of devoting a few more hours to studying a work on double-entry bookkeeping by the Franciscan monk Luca Pacioli, a tome that was unfortunately only available for consultation in the reading room, and so left István behind on the sofa with a thick gauze bandage over his left eye and the Knight Rider videocassettes he owed to his acquaintance with a nurse of American descent. It was a betrayal, Kraft knew this, a double betrayal. Not only was he lying to his friend in such a difficult time and leaving him on his own, but, much worse, he was meeting with his friend’s attacker, the woman completely and solely responsible for his sorry state—even if Kraft had in the meantime come to the conclusion that István shared some of the blame because of his provocations. But István would have none of it. He swore that as soon as he could see with both eyes again, he would search all Berlin for that socialist battle-ax—and he meant all Berlin, in case she’d defected to the East since the attack—and bring her to justice. Kraft didn’t contradict him but excused himself again for his rendezvous with Pater Pacioli. The impossibility of balancing his moral debit and amorous credit almost tore him apart. He loved his valiant and clever comrade in arms István Pánczél, who had had to endure so many difficulties, but he also loved the very maternal future mother of his future children, his own personal Lambsdorff. It almost tore Kraft apart, but didn’t prevent him from taking advantage of the opportunity, when István had to undergo another procedure, in which an ophthalmologist from the Federal Republic definitively ruined the shirt-washer Pánczél’s left eye in a West Berlin hospital supported by American aid, presented by the sofa now freed up for two days to deluge Ruth with a stream of blather until she finally yielded to him and conceived their first child.
* * *
We know why Kraft was so smitten with Ruth, but we don’t know what it was Ruth saw in him. Difficult to say. It wasn’t his looks, even though Kraft was an attractive young man and attractive young men weren’t exactly lining up to admire her broad behind. No, nor was it his compliments, even though she wasn’t immune to them. Was she attracted by their differences? Differences that were most obvious in the political and ideological spheres? No, it wasn’t their differences either; these only left her muttering a litany of what-on-earth-am-I-doings into her quilt. When all was said and done, Ruth had a soft spot. Not for Kraft, even if that’s what it looked like. No, it wasn’t at all a soft spot for anything in particular. It was a soft spot that is best described as, simply, a soft spot. A fundamental soft spot. An existential soft spot. A soft spot that occasionally overpowered her, floored her, hit her like a steamroller and left her powerless to resist anyone who came along to pick her up. She was well aware she had this weakness biding its time inside her, waiting only to seize its moment, but what she didn’t yet know was that it had something to do with men and with a particular kind of man at that; she was susceptible to the biggest windbags around, and she succumbed to them without a word and in almost no time at all. She found their blathering so terribly exhausting that for her it was always too late from the start and she rarely escaped. But at the time she met Kraft, she did not yet understand the nature of her weakness. The scales only fell from her eyes on her fortieth birthday when she found herself trembling in front of Louise Bourgeois’s The Destruction of the Father in Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen, but by then she had read Freud. That, in fact, was one of the first things she did after divorcing Kraft.
As a result, she often yielded to windbags in those days, but it was rarely the case that those windbags, like Kraft, kept up a continuous stream of babbling, even in moments of passion, and left her so weak that for three weeks she didn’t have the strength to leave her room, least of all to see Kraft, or even talk to him on the phone. Nor did she have the energy to open his daily letters. This left Kraft cut to the quick, his dreams of an ideal bourgeois family life fizzling like farts in the void, seated on the couch next to István, with whom he could not share his heartache for obvious reasons, letting himself be enticed by Michael Knight into shallower but much less painful realms.
* * *
One day Ruth was suddenly certain she was pregnant. She was certain but she took a pregnancy test just to make sure and then summoned Kraft to the Diener on Grolmanstraße to inform him of his paternity and take the subsequent unavoidable steps toward family life. Kraft, full of hope, arrived at the restaurant a quarter of an hour early and because he didn’t know anyone in the Diener—it wasn’t on his beat—he was forced to keep silent for a full fifteen minutes. An eternity, during which he prepared arguments to persuade Ruth of their shared future, such that Kraft’s brain and heart brimmed like a reservoir about to overflow and the dam burst while Ruth was still taking off her raincoat, only to put it right back on, because for one brief, inexplicable moment her soft spot turned into a source of strength and as she looked down at the blathering Kraft the advantages of day care were suddenly crystal clear. She fled without a word into the summer rain. Kraft trotted home, and sat, his heart a gaping wound, next to his half-blind friend, whom he talked into watching the entire Knight Rider series again. He would not learn he was a father for six years.
chapter four
Strength does not exist without kindness.
—HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Kraft likes to row. In a single. Having to match anyone else’s cadence is not for him. And because he so dearly misses his daily ritual of slicing silently through the water of the Neckar River in the early morning hours, the rapid, determined gliding, and the satisfaction of advancing solely under his own power, he begins to attribute the cause of his intellectual crisis to its absence, and the half hour
spent on white lacquered machines set up in fixed rank and file in the Arrillaga Family Sports Center is, at best, a pitiful substitute and may even be exacerbating the crisis, so he borrows Ivan’s old Ford Bronco and drives late in the afternoon to the university’s boathouse, located on the shallow bay of the Redwood City port.
* * *
A student assigns him a sculling boat, and as they carry the slender, nearly weightless craft to the water, he conspicuously contracts his arm muscles and puffs up his broad chest under the tank top with the cardinal-red Stanford logo.
Kraft had bought the shirt that morning in the campus bookstore because the memory of the night before was throbbing so insistently in the back of his mind that no amount of the vacuum cleaner’s howling and humming could drown it out until he came up with the idea of seeking deliverance in consumption, a strategy that occasionally worked because buying things requires at least a rudimentary level of optimism—indeed, why buy the most recent critical edition of Henry James’s complete works in a linen slipcase if you’re not assuming that life will go on, one way or another? Kraft hoped he could use that feeling as a foundation from which to struggle upward, step by laborious step, until he reached a level where pondering why whatever is, is right did not seem utterly ridiculous. But when he broke into a sweat while waiting in line for the cash register with the thirty volumes—in six shrink-wrapped linen slipcases—despite the frigid air streaming down from the air-conditioning vents, it was the purchase itself that suddenly seemed ridiculous. Ridiculous and witless. He would have to pay at least eighty dollars for excess baggage weight, not to mention the fact that he would also need a new suitcase for the books and, besides, the mere thought of having to read thirty volumes of Henry James made new beads of sweat pearl on his forehead.
He reluctantly put the books back, fully aware t
hat his failure with this purchase had irrevocably ruined the day. He therefore used the opportunity to find a present for the twins in the Stanford merchandise section. As he made his way between the stands with key rings, the shelves of coffee mugs, the cardinal-red shower curtains, and miles of sportswear, he grew more uncertain with each step of what he could give his girls to make them happy, especially since he had no idea what size T-shirt or hoodie they wore, and with every piece of clothing he held tentatively in the air, the contours of his daughters’ bodies in his mind’s eye changed shape so that he no longer had any idea whether they came up to his chest or just to his waist or whether their slender shoulders were wider or narrower than a clothes hanger. At some point he grabbed a cardinal-red baseball cap and a nylon backpack embroidered with the university logo—a backpack would be useful, that much he knew—and headed back to the cashier with a tank top for himself as well. The student in front of him in line was wearing the outfit that was practically the school uniform and somehow got under Kraft’s skin. Sneakers, T-shirt, and athletic shorts—particularly short shorts, he could not help noticing. The young woman’s shorts were made of gray jersey emblazoned with the university’s logo in large red letters and barely covered her rear end. Not that Kraft found this outfit especially tantalizing, nor did he find it at all outrageous—he was happy to leave outrage over barely dressed students to others. But somehow this getup seemed inappropriate because this hypertrophied sportiness was not compatible with intellectual labor, even if in this country there seemed to be a closer connection between training the body and training the mind than in Germany; he had, in fact, witnessed Ivan promise the students in his seminar that by the end of the semester they could be confident they would be well trained in late Heidegger, an adjective that Kraft did not associate with the thinker from Todtnauberg, but instead with javelin throwing and jumping hurdles. What caught his attention were not her shorts first and foremost, but her spindly legs, limbs that looked like they had grown too long and too fast, protruding from her shorts like the legs of a deer—like his girls’ legs. Kraft turned away, pushed his way out of line with murmured apologies, hung the cap and backpack on the closest rack, and went off to find the cotton shorts. He headed back toward the cashier with a light blue and a gray pair, but turned around halfway there and exchanged the gray ones for a second, identical light blue pair. This purchase satisfied Kraft far more deeply than a complete edition of Henry James ever could.
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