Kraft abandons his dark city and his moldy cave and, ignoring the pain, he rises and totters toward the call. He finally also notices the sound of an outboard motor and sees a beam of light sweeping over the marsh. There, in the canal, Herb stands at the wheel of an inflatable dinghy shouting Kraft’s name at the top of his voice. Here, here, Kraft shouts, and sees Herb heave to and run the boat’s rubber bow aground. Kraft covers the last few meters and feels the cone of light catch him. He freezes like an animal surprised by a flashlight and drops his arms. Herb leaps out of the boat and approaches him. You’ve lost your pants, buddy, he says, and spreads a blanket over his shoulders. Kraft weeps.
chapter five
In all the different countries fate has had me travel through, and in the taverns where I have been a servant, I have met a vast number of people who loathed their existences; but I have only met a dozen who have voluntarily put an end to their misery: three black men, four Englishmen, four Genevans, and a German professor named Robeck.
—VOLTAIRE
The shame doesn’t come till later, along with his astonishment that he broke down so quickly and so completely and let himself fall on all fours. It only hits him the morning after, when he sits down very early at his desk in the Hoover Tower reading room, surprisingly well rested—for the first time since his arrival in California he doesn’t feel tired—and is confronted anew by the former secretary of defense’s scornful look.
* * *
Herb had returned him to the dock without a word and once Kraft had reassured him that he really didn’t require any medical treatment, he let Kraft take a long hot shower. Afterward, they sat facing each other in the boathouse’s common room for a long time. Herb made cocoa and Kraft drank it despite his dislike of milk. Good old Herb, whose white beard, in the light of recent events, now struck Kraft as reassuring and benevolent. Kraft was grateful to Herb for keeping silent and not delivering any lectures, something he could not have borne. But after a while it was Kraft who could no longer stand the silence. He broke into nervous laughter and launched into a half-hearted self-justification, but broke off in the middle of the first sentence. Herb sipped his cocoa and said, Shit happens. They sat in silence a while longer until Herb cleared his throat, set down his cup with an anyway, and informed Kraft that unfortunately he would have to charge Kraft for the boat and the oars, an amount slightly higher than Kraft’s monthly income. This wrung another bout of nervous laughter from Kraft and he tried to relativize it in turn with his own, Shit happens.
* * *
When he got back to the house, Ivan and Barbara were at a university soiree. Kraft lay down on McKenzie’s bed, leafed through a few pages of All About Birds, fancied he recognized a few of the birds he had seen, especially the duck that, it had seemed to him, had laughed at him when he dropped his phone, but exhaustion soon overcame him and with it, mercifully, a deep, dreamless sleep.
At breakfast, the unfamiliar feeling of being well rested allowed him to depict the experiences of the day before as an adventure, with him playing the lead, and his self-confidence was restored to such an extent that he did not omit the detail of the lost shorts. He conjured up the image of a naked warrior, standing tall, his chest out, wrestling with pitiless nature, a depiction that brought a blush to Barbara’s cheeks over her flannel pajamas, a blush Kraft completely misinterpreted, and swelling with a small, foolish sense of pride, he put more fuel on his story’s fire.
* * *
His restored equilibrium, however, proves fragile and no match for Rumsfeld’s cold eyes, which seem to be searching deep inside Kraft for the diffuse sense of guilt that infused him in the marsh at the thought of Johanna. And because this threatens to undermine his foundations once again, Kraft taps, so to speak, his opponent’s aggressive energy by reaching for the former secretary of defense’s shameless rhetoric, and he tries to dismiss his rattling at the doors of the City of Guilt the night before as an encounter with an unknown unknown, a categorization that strikes him at the moment as particularly judicious, given that until he’d experienced that sense of guilt, he hadn’t known that there was such an emotion in him, not to mention the fact that he had no idea what he should be feeling guilty about, but here Kraft’s erudition once again gets in his way. He’s familiar with the objections raised by Žižek—a thinker he profoundly disdains for clinging to Marxism and whom he envies just as deeply for his brazen indulgence, even celebration of his own tics as well as for his marriage to an underwear model trained in Lacanian psychoanalysis. In Žižek’s view, the mention of the unknown unknown usually indicates a denial of the unknown known, that is, of the Freudian unconscious, or as Lacan called it, “knowledge that does not know itself.” Thus did Kraft’s own knowledge catch him out and leave him no choice but to drop that painful subject and turn to an even more painful one that he had so far successfully suppressed—the financial damage he had inflicted on himself with his careless and, yes, idiotic actions.
Have we not already presented Kraft’s financial situation as one of the reasons for his writer’s block? Made clear the existential necessity of impressing the prize jury as a result of his familial and financial circumstances? Is it not perfectly understandable that he would be paralyzed with shame at the thought of returning to Heike, not simply empty-handed, but with a debt for the sunken carbon-fiber boat amounting to a month’s salary, and that this paralysis is hardly propitious for his efforts to formulate an argument proving that whatever is, is right?
Go, win, come back with the prize money so we can all have our freedom again, Kraft can hear Heike saying, and can’t help but think of her bunion.
Considering the immensity of the task, we must, indeed, have compassion for Kraft. Many before him have buckled under such pressure.
Kraft can no longer withstand the former secretary of defense’s gaze. He lowers his eyes in defeat, closes his laptop, and shuffles out of the reading room. In the lobby of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace he meets two nervous security guards in red jackets listening raptly to voices coming from their two-way radios. They only notice him when he begins rattling the locked door. Sir, they call, Sir, and it takes him a moment to realize they’re talking to him: Sir, you can’t leave now. We must ask you to stay inside. Had he not seen the crime alert sent to all members of the Stanford community by text as well as by e-mail? No, Kraft had not, and because he doesn’t like to be locked in and fundamentally dislikes being told what he has to do or cannot do, he answers rudely that his phone is unfortunately lying on the bottom of the San Francisco Bay and it’s very possible that an impertinent crested grebe has read the crime alert in his stead and is now in a state of panic, and besides, on principle, he only checks his e-mail after lunch. Sir, one of the guards says, you have to keep your phone with you at all times. For safety reasons, the other one adds. Kraft says that he is precisely on his way to replace his phone, something that will be hard to do if he can’t leave the building. Unfortunately, that’s not possible at this time, he is told, a gunman has been spotted on campus and Kraft is asked to remain in the building and away from any windows until the police have clarified the situation. Kraft notices that the key is in the door’s lock and as the two men in red windbreakers turn their attentions back to their crackling radios, he seizes the moment, reaches the door in three long strides, turns the key in the lock, yanks the door open, and flees, all to the security guards’ frantic cries. On the stairs, he looks over his shoulder but sees only one of the guards peering fearfully through the gap of the door before closing it quickly.
Emboldened by this act of self-determination, Kraft crosses the deserted campus with measured steps. Why not? Being shot down by a madman on one of America’s elite university campuses hardly seems like one of the worst conclusions to his biography and as he thinks of how difficult this would make it for his colleagues to defend optimism at the conference and to defend the claim that whatever is, is right just days after one of their own has been murdered in co
ld blood, he feels a thrill, steps out of the building’s shadow, and ambles across the broad oval lawn in front of the main entrance, offering an ideal target to any gunman.
Kraft is all alone. The students on their bicycles are gone, the young men lounging on the grass, baring their chests to the sun, have vanished. The circle of dreadlocked hacky-sack players has disbanded and taken refuge indoors. Fled, too, are the families posing proudly with their freshman students in front of the university logo of red and white flowers. In the distance a campus security SUV drives slowly past. Kraft stops in the middle of the green lawn and spins around once. A shiver runs down his spine; a faint emotion washes over him; nothing happens. He continues on, crosses the parking lot on the edge of the oval, lingers in the shadow of the tall eucalyptus trees, and breathes in their cough-drop scent. The Rodin figures sit, abandoned, on their pedestals in the Cantor Arts Center sculpture garden. Kraft stops in front of The Gates of Hell and under the brooding gaze of The Thinker he tries to lose himself in looking at the figures, but he can’t get free of himself, can’t find the necessary remove from his own present required for the contemplation of such a masterpiece and that is why he also can’t leave behind his store of knowledge, which collapses over him like an old card catalog and buries him under a mountain of index cards: the fall of the angels, Dante, Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal, and his brain starts buzzing, I have but one hope / It is that my Death, hovering like a new-formed sun / will coax the flowers of my brain to bloom, and It is Death that consoles, alas! and that makes me live; / My life’s only goal, my only hope, and while he’s at it, he yields completely to the temptation to fraternize with Baudelaire and release The Thinker from his pose. The world will end, Kraft declaims. And because this fellow Kraft considers an obvious kindred spirit does not raise his bronze head from his fist, he adds: What’s the problem? Has the California sun, beating down on your head day in, day out, dried up your brain? That can’t be healthy for a Frenchman. The mechanical, he continues, again seeking refuge in Baudelaire, though not quite to the point—still, it’s important to him to unburden himself of the thought at this moment—will have Americanized us to such an extent and progress will have so atrophied in us all that is spiritual, that nothing in the Utopians’ dreams, however blood-soaked, sacrilegious, or unnatural, can be compared to the positive results. The bronze statue, as is hardly surprising, remains silent and still, doesn’t even flinch when a shot rings out very nearby. Kraft, however, is terrified. In anticipation of the bullet drilling between his shoulder blades, ripping his chest open, spattering his flesh over the Rodin and spraying his blood into the Inferno, he squeezes his eyes shut; nothing happens.
He walks along the deserted Quarry Road toward the shopping center and feels like a deer in the crosshairs, but since this image doesn’t appeal to him, he corrects himself and tries to imagine he’s a stag as tall as a man with fuzzy shreds of velvet hanging from his antlers. He even believes he can feel the weight of his mighty twelve-point rack; a heavy load, as he can tell from his straining neck muscles. Admittedly, this strain, like the burning sensation in his knee, is a vestige of yesterday’s adventure, and because these pains remind him of his humiliation, his inexplicable collapse, his helplessness, and the eight thousand dollars for the boat, which in turn makes him think of Heike, waiting at home for the prize money, he longs again for the bullet to his heart and listens for the liberating shot. Then again, he reasons, if all goes well, he won’t even hear the shot. Kraft doesn’t understand the first thing about ballistics, but he is certain the bullet will travel faster than sound and hopes that he’ll be dead before the latter reaches him. Mulling such considerations, he reaches the shopping center and is rather disappointed to note the buzz of activity there. Either the alert doesn’t apply to this area or an all clear has already been issued. In any case, he has to admit that bleeding to death between a Victoria’s Secret store and a Dunkin’ Donuts would not be a particularly dignified end to his biography, or at least a much less suitable one than dying on a university campus.
Kraft enters the Apple store, a glass hall with a suspended roof of very thin steel and two long rows of refectory tables. The dully gleaming devices are spread out on the tables, screens smeared with greasy traces of innumerable fingers. Kraft looks for the table with the iPhones and leans over the devices, his hands behind his back. He doesn’t want to touch them after having read an article in the Deutsche Bahn magazine that vividly described the microbiological life on touchscreens. Diarrhea instead of a gunshot to the head: not an option. A young man in a royal blue T-shirt bearing the image of an apple with a bite taken out of it offers his help and apparently his friendship as well, at least he insists on knowing Kraft’s first name after introducing himself as Brad. Heart pounding, Kraft points to the most expensive model and in reply to Brad’s question of which color he would like, he shrugs. Take the silver one, Dick, Brad advises, that’s the classic. Kraft agrees, although he objects to a telephone being spoken of as a classic.
His relationship to digital progress—some even speak of a digital revolution, a concept Kraft rejects because as a rule in revolutions blood flows in the streets and men lose their heads, which, fortunately, one cannot say yet about what’s happening here, apart, that is, from all those unhappy souls who end up under the wheels of a streetcar while staring at their smartphones or jump off the roof at Foxconn—Kraft’s relationship to digital progress is, thus, an ambivalent one. At least that’s the term he would use if anyone were to ask him about the apparent contradictions in his behavior, which, to his great astonishment, no one ever does. In public he likes to put up a front of disdainful scorn for the digital world and take every opportunity to stress how much it dabbles in formalism by throwing ever more refined and varied designs and distribution methods onto the market, kicking up a fair amount of mud in the process that in turn obscures—for those who are more easily blinded than Kraft—the fact that this oh-so-powerful revolution avoids almost all questions of content. No computer was necessary for the Odyssey to be written nor for Eschenbach’s Parzival, or even Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Kraft likes to argue, whereas it remains to be proven that a comparable masterpiece, shining brightly in the history of ideas, can be created in or despite the digital age and its tools. He is always ready to point out the superficiality of every manifestation of the digital, which he sees in a sharp contrast to the profundity of the enlightened mind.
On the other hand, he’s an avid early adopter. Although he wrote both of his initial doctoral theses on a typeball electric typewriter he would wrap in a blanket on the back seat of his Ford Fiesta for the drives between Berlin and Basel, when it came to organizing the three thousand five hundred footnotes in his habilitation thesis, he used a Macintosh Plus, for which he’d had to take out a personal loan. He was also the first one in the university to parade the halls with a mobile telephone and he was filled with malicious glee when it rang in the middle of a faculty meeting, a tolling that to the other attendees sounded the decline of the West.
Kraft considers it his duty as a citizen to support the economy by acquiring electronic devices and he counters all skeptics by asking what society would otherwise do with all those young men from the south who, thanks to the phenomenal success of mobile telephones, show up in the most dismal pedestrian zones every morning, cheerful and motivated, their beards neatly trimmed, to fill the poorly paid positions offered by the mobile telephone stores.
* * *
In the back room, a glass-roofed cathedral, Kraft’s heart breaks out in palpitations again when his credit card is swiped through the reader and Brad, visibly disappointed that their brief friendship is about to end, wishes him a lot of fun with his purchase.
Equipped with a new SIM card, Krafts sits in the shade of a green umbrella at Starbucks, logs on to the free Wi-Fi, and types his access code into the new phone. A raft of e-mails floods in, from his secretary in Tübingen, from a few students, from Heike, who wants to know if he’s ord
ered their heating oil yet, it’s not going to get any cheaper, and then the three most recent ones, all with the subject line AlertSU. The first, sent at 9:15 a.m., warns of an armed man on campus. Everyone is urgently advised to remain indoors and to stay away from windows. The second e-mail offers more detailed information: At approximately 9:45 a.m., behind Cantor Arts Center, a male fired one shot into his head in what appears to be a suicide attempt. There is no threat to the Stanford community at this time. A third, sent twenty minutes ago, lifts the alert, announces that the man had no connection to the university, and concludes with a long list of telephone numbers one can call in complete confidence in order to prevent one’s own suicide or that of a fellow student.
Kraft finishes his coffee and heads back to campus, but when he sees the tower with all the books about war, revolution, and peace loom in front of him and thinks of the desk waiting for him on its ground floor, he sits down on the closely mown grass. Now that the chance of getting shot has disappeared and in light of the fact that Tobias Erkner, the generous donor of the increasingly elusive million-dollar prize, has invited him to dinner, he desperately needs a complete intellectual and moral turn.
Kraft Page 6