Although the yeasts had been the indirect agents of their love, they were nonetheless by and large the source of not inconsiderable difficulty. On the one hand, they left Johanna little time for her private life and Kraft always had to compete for what little free time she had, which she devoted, and here he couldn’t complain, reliably and exclusively to him, and when they were together she was always completely present. All the same, Kraft occasionally suspected her of using the extensive care her yeasts required and their fragility as a cover story and he felt it would be more honest of her to admit that she had a level of interest in her work that she could not summon for him. In any case, she rarely visited him in Berlin and so it was Kraft who undertook the long journey as often as possible, and this put an enormous strain on his budget—which consisted solely of his stipend from the Friedrich Naumann Foundation—and put further distance between him and István.
Johanna’s relationship with her yeasts, on the other hand, was utterly uncomplicated, marked by a steadfast scientific pragmatism and supported by clear questions she directed at her single-celled organisms and the equally clear answers she received in return. She moved, she was told by a Kraft who knew every trick in the book of the philosophy of science, entirely within the narrow limits of a paradigm and was therefore still in that “normal science” phase, which genetics had meanwhile also reached, and so was busy solving puzzles. Johanna took note of this description impassively, to Kraft’s disappointment, since he had meant it as a provocation. Kraft envied her for being so comfortably and unquestioningly at home in her “thought collective” and its “thought style” and for simply doing her work in perfect methodical and theoretical accord, with passion but completely free of any epistemological doubt. Her assurance, in contrast to his present hesitancy, made him feel even less self-assured and so it was rather an act of defiance when he decided, after completing his master’s in economics—a degree he received, true to form, with distinction, and despite an attractive thesis project proposed by one of his professors—to devote himself entirely to his minor fields of study, of which there were more than enough, what with German literature, philosophy, political science, sociology, and history, thus forgoing the opportunity to enter the fold of a field that claimed to be an exact science, a claim Kraft had in any case never accepted even though his public insistence on specific theories might have led to the opposite conclusion. But at least, and this we must keep in mind, he could have had a brilliant career in economics. Beginning, no doubt, with a painless Ph.D. thesis, and then, his name preceded by the title of doctor, he could have taken up a mid-level position in a large bank or insurance company and rocketed to the head of the business; the only problem was that Kraft had too little interest in money, had never had any interest, really. Instead, he decided to pursue an ambitious double doctorate in German literature and philosophy.
The fox, as he had read in an essay by Isaiah Berlin, who was quoting a fragment by Archilochus, knows many things but the hedgehog one big thing and Kraft found this essay so comforting that he chose the difference between the fox’s knowledge and that of a hedgehog as the topic of his dissertation at the Free University. From the very first sentences, he was on familiar territory again in the great intellectual historian’s skeptical thinking—conveniently enough also appreciated by Margaret Thatcher—since Berlin believed Archilochus’s enigmatic sentence about the hedgehog and the fox could easily be understood to mean that the fox, for all his cunning, is no match for the one defense of the hedgehog, a defense that was, at least in Kraft’s view, repellently straightforward. However, because things are never simple—again, in Kraft’s own interpretation—the sentence could also be understood quite differently to mean that thinking human beings could be divided roughly into two categories, into hedgehogs and foxes: the hedgehogs are those who subordinate the entirety of their thought to a single, universal, organizing principle and thus adhere to a system that alone gives significance to all that they are and say, whereas the foxes refuse to subordinate their thought to a system and instead, free-floating, they seize upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without any hope of finding one unchanging, all-embracing whole, free of contradictions. There exists a great chasm between these two kinds of human beings, Kraft read in Berlin’s essay, and he agreed with all his heart. Yes, indeed, and he, Kraft was undeniably a fox, and it would be his task, he was convinced, to bring serious and scientifically rigorous support to that intellectual fidibus, Berlin—that is, to delineate the chasm historically and buttress it with a watertight epistemological foundation—but over the following years it became clear that this endeavor was more difficult than he’d anticipated, because Isaiah Berlin didn’t actually need his support, and furthermore, Kraft pursued this endeavor, as he himself had to admit, with growing frustration and despair, like a hedgehog-in-chief, by trying to systematically demonstrate the fox’s unsystematic thought. It also didn’t help that Kraft was essentially following a hidden agenda in that he wasn’t merely trying to establish objectively the difference between hedgehogs and foxes, far from it, but wanted above all to demonstrate that the latter were somehow more clear-sighted in their perception of the true essence of things; and that, in itself, was a rather hedgehog-like thing to do.
He had no such difficulties with his German literature dissertation, which he had begun working on in parallel at the University of Basel so as to have a good reason to spend more time with Johanna. He completed his thorough if rather conventional study of Ernst Jünger’s poetics without agony except for the time it was the spark of his first real fight with Johanna, when he read passages from On the Marble Cliffs to her in bed in a solemn voice and she broke out in laughter and refused to believe that Jünger had meant any of it seriously.
Despite such occasional irritations and although Kraft never did find out what Johanna saw in him, they endured each other for four years. In the good moments, Johanna gave him a sense of security. In the bad ones, she made him feel even more insecure.
* * *
And then, Kraft thinks, when he watches the first lights of the city emerge, then I made her so furious she disappeared to San Francisco for good.
chapter nine
The man was all wind … Oh no! If only it had been wind; instead it was a blowing vacuum.
—GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
Kraft feels the security glass, cool and hard, against his temple. When he closes his eyes the endless chain of red taillights seeps into the darkness in his skull. It is quiet in Ivan’s car. They have hardly spoken since they left Stanford. In stops and starts interrupted by excruciating moments of complete immobility, they creep through the luminous valley in their capsule of metal, glass, and worn leather.
Ivan drums his fingers on the steering wheel.
Less than twenty-four hours have passed since Kraft, stark naked, with the damp soil of the marshlands under his feet, broke down at the sight of these lights, overcome with a vague sense of guilt.
In the ten days that he’s been in Silicon Valley, Kraft has easily managed to avoid visiting San Francisco. After all, he had work to do in the library, work that became more and more urgent with each passing day of idleness, and a visit to Fog City … No, no, he had no time for that. But today he could no longer avoid it. Tobias Erkner had invited them, flashing his million dollars, so Ivan and Kraft climbed into the SUV in the early evening and joined the line of programmers, techies, and entrepreneurs heading home.
A silence separates them. They’ve hardly been alone together for more than a minute since the first evening of Kraft’s visit, when they sat across from each other over red wine and chocolate cake, and they haven’t recovered any of the closeness they shared in the days when they cheered the leader of the free world on his first visit to Berlin. Instead, a sense of awkwardness fills the space between them. Kraft takes a sidelong look at his friend. They’re no longer twenty, that’s true, and that kind of friendshi
p, Kraft knows, is no longer an option for men of their age; only those whose lives have as yet been relatively humiliation free can still believe that having a friend they can share everything with is a beautiful thing. But still, Kraft remembers, when Johanna disappeared, István was the one who helped him recover from his state of confusion and self-dissolution, and if Kraft were someone generous enough to recognize the important contributions others make to one’s own biography, then this would be the proper moment to acknowledge that no other person has had as great an influence on his life as the shirt-washer Pánczél. But Kraft is not a generous man, never was. Not out of hard-heartedness. No, but because he sees himself, and always has, as someone who doesn’t have much to give others. And that’s why he is suddenly flooded with a strong emotion and has to turn away quickly and stare out his window. If we were sitting in the back seat right now, we would catch them both wiping away a tear, one automatically, the other furtively.
After Johanna, carrying two giant, heavy suitcases, slammed the door behind her—which, we must assume, she only did in Kraft’s memory of the event, because we’d like to hear him explain how exactly a woman as delicate as Johanna could slam a door with a suitcase in each hand—Kraft had fled to István in London, who was studying at the London School of Economics and Political Science to make a name for himself as a nuclear strategist thanks to a stipend from a stinking-rich Hungarian who had emigrated to America yet retained a soft spot for Eastern European dissidents. Kraft arrived in London in an advanced state of breakdown and took over the sofa in István’s kitchen. Years of insecurity had worn him down, four years of feeling inferior to Johanna, years during which he never did find out what she actually saw in him or what she wanted from him, a period during which he envied her work in the natural sciences, four years during which the ground had swayed under his feet, during which all his beautiful intellectual constructs began to show cracks and flaws as soon as he built them and large chunks of their lovely plasterwork fell to the ground. Kraft, stretched out on István’s sofa, was the survivor of an earthquake.
For four years he had tried to prove that the fox’s way of contemplating the world was the reasonable one and he became more and more of a hedgehog in the process, fighting against this transformation so forcefully that he lacerated himself with his own spines. What made him most insecure was that no one seemed to notice this but him. He had failed in his own eyes; his doctoral thesis was a patch-up job, underpinned by a system in which he himself had so little confidence that he spread it out in all directions and welded onto it any number of reinforcements and pointless rivets to disguise any resemblance to a system he found so repugnant. He had plastered it with his stupendous knowledge of the relevant secondary literature and in a final show of strength had applied the varnish of rhetoric that was apparently eloquent enough to win the praise of the professors at the Free University, and even a commendation. You hedgehog, thought Kraft when the dean handed him his diploma in front of the festively dressed audience. He accepted it with a hint of a bow and joined the circle of Erinaceidae with a smile of resignation. Although he wasn’t yet thirty, Kraft was tired of the battle. So be it, he’d be a hedgehog. Trying to be a fox exhausted him. Nothing was simple, not ever. He had talked himself hoarse and racked his brains. He longed for solid ground, longed to only have to know one thing on which all else was based, to which everything was related.
Disheartened and abandoned by Johanna, Kraft buried his face in the brown cushions that smelled of rancid fat on István’s sofa and hoped sleep would console him.
But that’s not what happened. István didn’t let him sleep. Kraft’s Hungarian friend was full of energy, he had settled himself comfortably in the promised land of Margaret Thatcher, was living his dream of real existing economic libertarianism, as he called it, was passionate about his studies and bursting with an optimism Kraft could not escape. István would not accept his friend’s capitulation. Sure, nothing was ever simple, and hedgehogs were wrong, but occasionally rightness and wrongness weren’t relevant, as István never failed to remind his friend, because you simply have to make a political point. If it’s a matter of defending freedom, then there’s no room for doubt, and all you need is a Here I stand, I can do no other. And when István saw that his friend was still not entirely convinced and still longed for eternal sleep, he explained to Kraft that true foxes—which is what the two of them indisputably were—well, among all the things true foxes know is also the one thing the hedgehogs know and the only thing foxes don’t know: that is, what it feels like to be a hedgehog. Even so, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t able, when necessary, to behave like hedgehogs: to turn their backs on the world and bristle their rhetorical quills.
A fox with quills? A porcupine? Kraft asked doubtfully. But the longer he considered the idea, the better he liked it. A porcupine, yes, maybe that was the solution, you could escape contingency and find refuge in the knowledge of facts, and if that wasn’t enough, there was always discourse, and if you doubted your own words too much, then you had recourse to self-defense and could retreat to a firm stance from which you could overlook the fact that nothing is simple. Kraft found new hope and they sat fraternally side by side on the sofa just as they had on Grunewaldstraße, and turned on the television. It was June 12, 1987, and Reagan was visiting Berlin for the second time. This time they’d set up his podium in front of the Brandenburg Gate. Amazingly, the president looked almost as jaunty as he had that summer five years earlier. Seated to his right was unfortunately no longer the elegant Schmidt, but the massive Kohl, who prompted a snort of disgust from István, because the chancellor had completely fallen from István’s favor when he was reported to have said he feared the British prime minister like the devil fears holy water. As well he should, as well he should, was István’s retort. Relaxed, Kraft listened to the speech, happy not to have to stand in a crowd of flag-wavers. And when, at the end of his speech, Reagan directly addressed the demonstrators, who once again filled the streets of Berlin in great number, István jumped up in outrage and accused Reagan of plagiarism. Kraft was grateful to his friend and in a conciliatory mood, so he neglected to point out that he couldn’t remember seeing an agent following them on bicycle down Ahornallee, trench coat flapping, but instead nodded in agreement to István’s great delight.
* * *
Again Ivan drummed his fingers lightly on the steering wheel. Kraft looked intently out of the passenger-side window. They were never again as close as they were on István’s brown London sofa. He’d like to share this memory with Ivan, but he doesn’t dare. It’s his memory, not Ivan’s, and besides, right now, Ivan looks like he’s somewhere else completely.
Kraft left London after a few days. Back in Berlin, full of István’s contagious optimism, he plunged into his work: a postdoctoral thesis on the sublime, decked out with so many historical details, and indeed an overabundance of factual knowledge, that it swelled to three volumes and assured its author, through sheer weight, stupendous scholarly virtuosity, and 3,500 footnotes, a secure place in the landscape of German thinkers, making it just a matter of time before Herr Professor Dr. Dr. Kraft would command a prestigious professorial chair.
* * *
Ivan exits the highway and they drive through a residential area, up a perfectly straight, steep street, over the top of a hill with a view of the city and the bay, and down again, past small wooden houses. This is Kraft’s first time in San Francisco, but it’s one of those places whose strong presence in pop culture has left such a thick sediment of cinematic and literary images in his memory that he now feels the wildly contradictory emotions of returning to a well-known place and of entering uncharted territory overlap, and with the knowledge that Johanna lives somewhere in these hills, it gives rise to a distant echo of the confusion he suffered over their years together. A confusion whose inception he associates with the ironic smirk under the sparse blond mustache of the chancellor’s son and whose end he feels was marked by Reagan’s seco
nd visit to Berlin. He’d thought he had left this confusion behind long ago, had shut it out of his life with a solid wall of ideas, reinforced with battlements of persuasion and a broad moat brimming with knowledge. Only seldom, very seldom, did the distant, unsettling cry reach him over the parapets: It’s not that simple, Kraft, nothing ever is. But generally, the cry was soft enough for Kraft to ignore it.
* * *
Erkner is waiting for them on the corner of Valencia and Twenty-First, accompanied by a young woman who is introduced as Gwen Ives and who beams at them with wide open eyes as if she had been waiting her entire life to meet them. Kraft, caught off guard by so much warmth, also widens his eyes, tries to show a few teeth, and watches in irritation as Ivan hands her the car keys and thoughtlessly turns his back on her. Gwen is apparently only there to spare them the inconvenience of looking for a parking spot because Kraft doesn’t see her again until hours later on the other side of the city when she drives up in Ivan’s car with a beaming smile and looks deep into Kraft’s eyes as if she had thought of nothing and no one but him the entire time. Maybe, Kraft thinks, Gwen was not hired merely to spare her boss the trouble of parking, but also to offer his guests an appropriate dose of eye contact. Erkner is not one for eye contact. Not that he seems unfriendly or insecure. Quite the contrary, he stands up straight, shoulders back, in a slim tailor-made suit that reveals a fair amount of his well-toned, tanned chest; he speaks loudly and without stumbling or hesitating, yet not once does he meet the eye of the person he is speaking to. Often Erkner keeps his eyes fixed on a distant point just over Kraft’s shoulder then quickly sweeps them over his face as if they were skidding, and steadies them again over his other shoulder, so that all evening Kraft has the unpleasant feeling that something is happening behind him that is more worthy of Erkner’s attention.
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