Kraft

by Jonas Lüscher

  Kraft was now completely confused since after he’d received the invitation to Stanford he naturally had studied Erkner’s Wikipedia page, where he learned that Erkner had worked for a considerable time in the financial sector and had bet against currencies and energy prices using his own funds and had landed in a precarious state during the financial crisis. At a loss, Kraft looked at Ivan, but the latter seemed to be avoiding eye contact. Apparently indifferent, he just sat next to Erkner and watched the ice cubes in his glass melt. In these dire times of abstract optimism, Erkner continued, lawyers and bankers are the leaders. That said, an inclination toward concrete optimism and the belief in a future that can actually be planned for are essential, and at the end of this cultural revolution in which mankind will shake off the yoke of chance, engineers will once again be the spearhead of mankind. With these words, a flash of enthusiasm sailed past Kraft’s right ear for the first time.

  Hah, chance, Kraft thinks, that’s one thing this Erkner doesn’t like. He stands up and starts to pace back and forth across McKenzie’s room in his underwear. Naturally he doesn’t like it, because chance is at odds with his elitism. Life is not a game of chance, Erkner had declared and quoted a few authorities in support of his convictions. Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. That strong men believe in cause and effect is something Emerson knew. And Amundsen believed that success awaited those who had put their affairs in order. Others call it luck … But a tweet by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was also quoted as proof: “success is never accidental…”

  Erkner wasn’t content to invoke only these authorities, but—before Kraft could counter with Jonathan Swift’s comment that the “power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable; for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit”—he made sure to bring in the Pareto principle or, broadly speaking, the power law, according to which, inequality in the distribution of wealth is an unavoidable worldwide phenomenon: yes, it’s abundantly clear that our world is governed by power law in both its natural and social dimensions; for example, Pareto had already been able to show that land ownership in Italy followed the classic 80/20 rule, that is, 80 percent of the land is owned by 20 percent of the population, which was demonstrated just as naturally as the fact that 80 percent of the peas in Vilfredo Pareto’s garden were produced by 20 percent of the pea pods. From this Erkner easily deduced that among men too there is a mere handful of productive individuals and geniuses whose actions bring about progress for all mankind. Thus by recognizing the Pareto principle as a governing law of the universe, we can establish that economic disparity is a law of nature.

  Kraft interrupts his pacing in front of the posters of basketball players, which set him thinking. Although he is blessed with a slightly taller than average height, these giants would tower head and shoulders over him. Nature grants only very few the stature of a basketball player, but not everyone who is six feet eight can play basketball well. No, that takes hard work. On the other hand, there are talented basketball players of average height, and anyway it’s not a good example because height is not determined by exponential distribution, as Kraft knows. But does this speak for or against Erkner’s argument?

  Ah, once again our Kraft hears the faint call over the battlements: It’s not that simple, nothing ever is … But why does he hear the call right now, at this very moment? Why does his laboriously constructed intellectual fortress reveal its vulnerability in Erkner’s presence? Well, we already have our suspicions as to the answer: various elements of Erkner’s thought and personality are not entirely foreign. Despite all their apparent differences, Kraft and Erkner have more in common than Kraft is comfortable admitting and we can assume that Kraft’s antipathy is fed to a significant extent precisely by this fact. Kraft has never yet met anyone in whom the natures of the hedgehog and the fox are in such open conflict. As he sat across from Erkner in the bar and had to listen meekly to his harangue, it seemed obvious to him that Erkner was essentially vulpine, but suffered, at the same time, from such longing for clarity and unambiguity that he found refuge in erinaceidaeness, which must have been a great torment for the man, since it isn’t possible for a fox to be a hedgehog, as Kraft was well aware. As a result he stretched and extended himself back into his fox shape, which he also hardly seemed able to bear. Erkner was like a fox chasing its own tail, spinning faster and faster like a dervish until his nimble body—which was able to trot at such a fleet-footed, springy pace that it even seemed capable of running over water—began to get denser and denser, whirling in an ever faster pirouette until it whirred itself into a hedgehog, but still the spinning didn’t stop and the hedgehog rolled itself into such a tight ball that its quills pierced its own soft underbelly and it flinched, stretched, and extended itself in all directions, flinging its limbs outward and so turning back into a fox chasing its own tail … It’s no wonder someone like that is so profoundly disoriented that he doesn’t realize he’s lost his bearings and even the most blatant contradictions strike him as compatible. Over time, such oscillation must wear down one’s soul. Kraft almost feels sorry for him and this, for Kraft, is certainly a rare sensation. He would have liked for Erkner to have an István of his own, someone who could have opened Erkner’s eyes to the porcupine option, but for that Kraft is sure it’s too late. Erkner is too old and presumably also too wealthy.

  Lord knows, Kraft is no stranger to the cult of genius … But let’s not go overboard … And this return to the so-called laws of nature, which, however, are only valid when they’re useful … And that unpleasantly unapologetic elitism … But hang on! Isn’t there something to be squeezed out of this? Isn’t there something on this in Pope? Kraft turns on the desk lamp and searches excitedly through his stacks of books for Pope’s Essay on Man. In the third epistle, maybe? No, the fourth. Kraft doesn’t actually need to look it up, thanks to his phenomenal memory, it’s been buzzing in his head for some time, but he wants to see it in black-and-white. Let’s see … Here it is:

  Order is Heav’n’s first law; and this confest,

  Some are, and must be, greater than the rest,

  More rich, more wise …

  Suddenly he knows what he has to do. He sets his alarm for seven, smooths out the rumpled sheets, spreads the patchwork quilt over them, turns out the light, and crawls into bed. For a brief moment, he is torn between euphoric drive for action and boundless relief, but the latter soon wins the upper hand and releases Kraft into slumber.

  * * *

  Knowing what he has to do. What a sweet sensation for our Kraft. It’s a fleeting sensation, Kraft knows, and that’s precisely why he has to seize the moment, for all too often doubts soon return and steadily gnaw away at one’s strength.

  Did he know what he had to do when, after the cheering for David Hasselhoff had died away, Ruth Lambsdorff laid her hands on her son’s shoulders, turned him to face Kraft, and introduced him by saying that this was Daniel, whom she had named after Cohn-Bendit?

  Ivan’s lips trembled. Dumbfounded, he looked from the boy’s face to his friend’s and back again, swept his good eye over Ruth’s ample bosom and up to her broad features, pointed an accusing finger at her, followed by an American swear word, then leaped off the wall and fled east. Kraft did not hold him back. Instead, he jumped down on the other side of the wall, pushed his way through the jubilant crowd without looking back and disappeared into the gloom of the Tiergarten.

  It took Kraft six days—one day for each year of his son’s life—to forgive Ruth for not telling him that he was a father and three additional days for him to forgive her for naming their son after Cohn-Bendit. Then he set out in search of her. No one in the Diener remembered the woman he described to the staff and the guests as not a classical beauty but a striking personality, as with awkward gestures he tried to convey what it was he found so striking about her. No, no one knew of any such woman in the Diener, nor, therefore, of the young boy who might occasionally have been with her, whom Kraft also mentioned; a you
ng boy who was his spitting image.

  He had more luck at the School of Fine Arts. In a studio with grimy windows, where the plaster dust dirtied his freshly polished shoes, they remembered Ruth Lambsdorff very well. She had worked as Günther Ackerknecht’s assistant until just a few months ago but then the two of them had an argument and he’d fired her, a young man whose skin, hair, and coveralls were coated with a dusting of white powder that looked like mold, confided in a whisper. No, unfortunately he didn’t have Lambsdorff’s home address, but surely the professor could help, he added, his thin face contorted into a malicious grin, his expression just like the one on the gaunt face of the plaster figure he’d been scratching at with a rusty nail.

  Kraft found Ackerknecht sitting outdoors behind the studio building. Despite the cold he wore only a vest of coarse corduroy over his carpenter’s pants and he didn’t appreciate being disturbed while smoking. The professor sullenly scraped his boots in the mud and rubbed a hand over the sparse gray bristles on his massive skull, crowning his head with cigarette ash. Kraft clutched his briefcase to his chest. This was exactly the kind of man who intimidated him: beefy, pink, crude. He tentatively made his request: he had been told that the professor might know Mrs. Lambsdorff’s home address. Ackerknecht coughed. Yes, absolutely, he knew the address. Then he coughed again and said nothing. Might it be possible to get it from him? Kraft was subjected to a perusal that seeped through his short wool coat like the winter chill. He didn’t seem stupid enough to be the police and wasn’t unfriendly enough either, for that matter—was he a debt collector? No, no, Kraft hastened to reassure the professor, his acquaintance with Mrs. Lambsdorff was of a strictly personal nature. Ackerknecht tilted his head to the side and scrutinized him further with narrowed eyes, then tapped his temple with two fingers clamped on a self-rolled cigarette. You’re little Danny’s father, aren’t you? he asked. Yes, as a matter of fact, he did have reason to think so. Think so? Ackerknecht snorted, Breker himself couldn’t have created a better likeness of you two. He didn’t think it would be right to divulge Ms. Lambsdorff’s address. Ackerknecht dropped his cigarette and ground it roughly into the dirt. And yet that was exactly why he was happy to do it. With a chewed-up pencil stub he first licked, he wrote the address on a slip of paper Kraft hurriedly pulled from his briefcase. As he handed Kraft the paper he said, Don’t forget to tell her that you got her address from me. Good luck. He coughed and walked off with a tired wave of his meaty paw.

  Ruth was, in fact, anything but delighted when Kraft showed up outside her door in Kreuzberg; nevertheless, she invited him into her small apartment that smelled of coal heating. Kraft took from his briefcase the Ninja Turtle action figure he had bought on the way and, under Ruth’s disapproving gaze, he held it out to his son, who clung tightly to the doorframe of his room. The boy took the stranger’s unfamiliar present without a word and disappeared into his bedroom. Ruth asked Kraft into the kitchen, put the kettle on, and listened silently to his reproaches as she waited for the water to boil. She didn’t try to defend herself, since she had wondered over the years whether it was right to deprive the boy of his father and even sometimes if it was wrong to keep Kraft’s son a secret from him, but that was rare, since she hardly ever thought of Kraft at all. In any event, she wasn’t one to apologize.

  Ruth sat down across from Kraft and blew on her tea. She felt tired. Exhausted, somehow. If Kraft had shown up a few months earlier, she probably wouldn’t have let him over the threshold. But right then she didn’t have the energy to stop him. As it was with Ivan, although for very different reasons, the turn taken by German history was not to her advantage. She’d already sensed that her Berlin and her West Berlin life were doomed, and even though she certainly wasn’t uncritical of the Eastern Bloc regimes, she was sorry that history was rushing toward this inevitable end. She knew that living in this enclave was like living in a bubble and that the way of life she’d chosen could only be realized here because the necessary attitude could only be preserved in these unique historical circumstances. Ruth was, accordingly, profoundly torn. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc, and German reunification, which seemed ever more likely, threatened her niche, yet at the same time, she was ashamed of this small-minded egoism because she thought she ought to be happy for the millions who would, as it were, become free. Still, she intuited that the breakdown of socialism would result in a reduction of alternatives, and could see that this reduction would only encourage those forces intending to impose an interpretation of freedom different from hers.

  And then there was her falling-out with Ackerknecht. Ackerknecht, who had encouraged her when she was still a student and had offered her a position as his assistant—for which she had been duly grateful—after she received her degree. Soon she was more than just his assistant because Ackerknecht was just another windbag, albeit of a somewhat more taciturn sort. He beleaguered Ruth and everyone around him with his inexhaustible creative drive. Laconic and uncommunicative verbally, he released an endless stream of larger-than-life sculptures from his studio into the world. Untold depictions of his daughter who had died in an automobile accident, which he angrily hacked from marble, cut from rusty car bodies with a welding torch, or roughly hewed from the trunks of oak trees with a chain saw. On good days he created mawkish sculptures of girls, on bad days he devoted himself to creating mangled bodies of children, and when he was drinking, he fashioned both with stylized angel wings. Even in his most depressed phases, during which he became completely mute and didn’t say a word for days on end, his creative drive didn’t flag. At a table in his studio, he wordlessly filled casts of his scrotum—creating these molds from plaster dressing was one of Ruth’s duties as assistant—with miniature filigree scenes in silver thread, from his dreams, which was his way of processing the testicular cancer he had developed shortly after his daughter’s death. After the operation he’d had his empty scrotal sac filled with two marble balls he’d polished himself, and their soft clicking had a wonderfully soothing effect on Ruth when, her head resting on Ackerknecht’s meaty thigh, she gently weighed the now useless organ in the hollow of her hand.

  It was thus Ackerknecht’s manic productivity that triggered Ruth’s well-known weakness and unfortunately also crippled her own creative energy, even though, to his credit, Ackerknecht tried to support and encourage her work as best he could in his dour way, which was the only way he had. Ackerknecht’s volubility in clay and plaster, in marble and silver thread, in sheet metal and oak, mowed her down and left her feeling utterly wrung out and incapable of action.

  She would never have gotten away if she hadn’t realized one morning that she couldn’t possibly impose life with Ackerknecht on Danny any longer—or rather life with Ackerknecht’s dead daughter, versions of whom streamed out of the studio in various degrees of infirmity and in numbers fit to fill a regiment—because her son was becoming increasingly withdrawn and anemic, for which latter ailment the doctors could find no cause.

  With his second cup of tea, Kraft left the past behind and turned without ado to the future, in which he saw himself playing an important role in his son’s life, a role to which he was clearly entitled and which he intended to take up immediately. With these words he stood up and, ignoring Ruth’s weak protestations, strode into his son’s room to join again what nature had never intended, he supposed, to be sundered. He had often pictured this reunion over the previous days with the hope that it would prove a moment of sublimity with the cathartic power to transform fear and dread into pity and return things in his life to a state of beauty.

  The moment didn’t turn out to be quite as sublime as he’d imagined it, because kneeling before the child, he was overtaken by stammering embarrassment, which was reflected in Danny’s face as fear and dread and in the end it was the sheer wretchedness of the scene that woke a feeling of pity in Ruth and this prompted her to leave her monitoring post in the doorway and enter the room. She took her son’s hand, sat next to him on the edge of the bed, an
d explained in a straightforward way that this was his father, whom she’d mentioned now and again, back in Berlin from his long trip far away, and now, if it was all right with Danny, he’d like to do things with him once in a while. The child nodded mutely and kneaded the face of the green rubber reptile.