Kraft

by Jonas Lüscher

  It has to be!

  Kraft has thought himself into a state of ecstasy. Beads of sweat pearl on his brow. His writing hand has cramped up. He’s been writing faster and faster, leaving behind his pen an increasingly illegible trace of his exuberant enthusiasm. Is it possible that in just three hours he has succeeded in doing what he failed to do day after day for weeks?

  Kraft leafs back to the first page, where he wrote the essay question out in capital letters in the top margin, and begins reading his work. He makes a few notes here and there, adds a sentence or two, crosses some out. But before long he sets down his pen, wipes his forehead with his shirtsleeve, and then about halfway through gives up entirely … what a load of pretentious bullshit.

  There is absolutely no way he’ll deliver anything like this. He’s not that desperate. And then his new iPhone buzzes on the table and the panic that grips him when he sees Heike’s number on the screen and declines the call proves one thing: he definitely is that desperate.

  Maybe, he tries to convince himself, it’s just a question of tone. Maybe he can still salvage it. Maybe it’ll all be slightly less unbearable if he can bring himself to create a kind of mash-up and season this wretched forced optimism with a pinch of his good old skepticism.

  He borrows scissors and Scotch tape from an obliging librarian and pulls the thin sheaf of papers with his notes and fragments from his backpack. Page by page, he searches for sentences he can use, here and there he finds an entire paragraph that still seems workable, and one or another of his formulations even inspires a bit of hope.

  With the scissors he cuts what is usable from the manuscript and spreads the snippets out before him, arranged thematically. Then he starts cutting up the pages he’s just filled with writing. For a while he moves the fragments here and there on the tabletop, searching for a meaningful order. This, he mutters to himself, needs to be at the beginning … and then I can bring in Schopenhauer … He painstakingly searches for the edge of the roll of adhesive tape with his fingernail, scratches at it, tears off a piece with his teeth, and sticks Schopenhauer right on the scrap he’s chosen for the opening. For a while, things go smoothly. Kraft snips and splices, struggles with the tape, and is filled with optimism at the sight of something completely new and tangible taking shape before him—until he manages to rip a patch of skin from his lip with the Scotch tape. Alarmed, he kneads the painful spot between thumb and forefinger, glances up and becomes aware that all the heads in the reading room have been raised from their screens and books and are following his battle with his material with incredulous fascination. What’s the problem? he wants to lob at these young faces that, caught out, turn back to their work; of course he knows the key commands for cut and paste—sometimes thinking has to manifest itself in solid matter, but no, these people long ago lost their sense for the haptic, for the tangible. He even harbors the suspicion that they’re afraid of its durability, that only the ephemeral, the digital doesn’t threaten them. He, on the other hand, shares Derrida’s dream of a fountain pen that also functions as a syringe and leaves an indelible subcutaneous trace of the mind in the body. It’s probably this last thought—the realization that he shares a dream with Derrida—that throws him so much off-balance that for the blink of an eye he slips out of his own body and can observe himself from a slightly elevated perspective. What he sees isn’t a pretty picture. An aging man—although his hair is still full and curly, he’d like to point out—sitting hunched over his desk, blood dripping from his lip and staining the meager fruits of his work, the crudely taped bricolage of his overstretched intellect, as outrageously fantastical ressentiments of modernity rattle around in his empty skull like rancid peanuts … One thing is certain, if Erkner were to see him the way he’s just seen himself, plying his scissors and Scotch tape, it would have been goodbye to the million.

  Kraft flees to the top of the tower; this time he’s not seeking refuge from the vacuum cleaner and its Mexican housekeeper, but from himself, so his flight is in vain. It’s hot on the observation platform and uncomfortably bright. Kraft stands at the grille on the north side, shades his eyes from the sun, and looks for the skyline on the bay in the distance. The trembling California sun reflects off the distant glass facades and produces a pulsating mist that makes him dizzy. Kraft closes his eyes and traces the yellow reflections that writhe like worms in the obscurity. Ah, Johanna, what did I do to make you so furious?

  And suddenly it seems to him as if he’s been dragging this question behind him all these years like a prisoner his ball and chain, and as if it alone has prevented him from walking with the fox’s fleet-footed gait, the springy step that radiates all necessary optimism.

  chapter thirteen

  Where force does not suffice, ruse steps in.

  —PIETRO METASTASIO

  Kraft is glad that he has a story to tell.

  He wouldn’t have dared duck Heike’s call one more time. Sooner or later he had to answer. After years of employing various strategies of evasion, dishonesty, and repression with Heike, he has learned that telling his lies as soon as possible in the process was an especially effective technique. When Kraft decides on a course of action that he must keep from Heike for tactical reasons, experience has taught him that an early lie is a more credible lie. Best of all is to establish his falsehood even before he acts, because then he can persuade himself, even as he lies, that he can still turn his fiction into the truth by changing his plan at the very last moment.

  In this respect, Heike’s call was opportune. He was able to tell her he was sitting on the Caltrain to San Francisco: a tedious experience, he explained, since the train had already come to a complete stop twice between stations, the air-conditioning was broken, and anyhow, the lines and rolling stock are in a state that defies description, but since Ivan had needed to leave early in the morning for San Francisco for a daylong meeting at a cybersecurity firm whose scientific advisory board he’s on, Kraft couldn’t borrow Ivan’s car today, and as a result he’s now stuck on the tracks in a sheet-metal carriage without AC. Up to this point, it was all true. Having made his decision, Kraft had descended the book-filled tower, carelessly stuffed his bricolage into his backpack, and caught the first Stanford shuttle bus to the Palo Alto train station, where he stood on a platform almost entirely without shade, wondering if he wasn’t old enough to wear a hat after all, because then he would have some relief, and on top of that, he’d look damn good next to this station with its aerodynamic 1940s architecture.

  But when Heike inevitably asks why he’s going to San Francisco, Kraft claims he’ll continue on to Berkeley to consult some notebooks in the archives of a long-dead philosopher of science, a lie that came easily to him since in San Francisco he could still decide, instead of looking for Johanna, to change to BART and ride it, under the bay, to Berkeley. For now, it was merely the description of a possibility he could still turn into a reality—even if he didn’t have the slightest intention of doing so—and thus it wasn’t really a lie.

  All the same, he’s glad he has a story to tell and to distract him from the real reason for his trip. Caltrain in general, he hastens to add, is a peculiar organization. After waiting for a long time on the hot platform, he saw an enormous diesel locomotive with chimneys spewing billows of exhaust filled with dancing flakes of black soot slowly push enormous, two-level chrome wagons into the station, clanging and hooting, before squealing brakes brought it to a stop. The few noticeboards on the platform unfortunately offered insufficient and rather cryptic information as to whether it was an express train or a local with stops at every station, so everyone just boarded the train and stood in the narrow entryways craning their heads as they tried to understand the blaring, garbled announcement coming over the PA. After that, about half the people who had gotten on the train pushed their way back off, asking questions and talking; then they ran along the platform to ask a uniformed conductor. The whole business went on for quite a long time and was repeated at every station. />
  In any case, with loud hooting and clanging, the train began to move jerkily and Kraft looked for a seat on one of the upper levels that ran along both sides of the wagon like galleries. There was no chance of reading, the train swayed so much and flung the passengers to this side and that, and on top of it all the old-fashioned vehicle made such an infernal noise—it was almost intolerable even inside the car itself. At some point along the way, the train just stopped between stations. An odd collection of office buildings and shopping centers stretched to the right and left. Sweaty conductors in gray shirts with rattling key rings hanging from their belts pushed their heavy bodies wearily through the narrow corridors, feverishly trying to make sense of their radios’ incomprehensible squawking. After some ten minutes the train began to move again, clanging on its way, but then, a few minutes later, that was it, the train stopped again in resigned immobility. The scenery outside the window had hardly changed, the same faceless buildings and here and there a testament to the dream of a single-family home in Victorian or Spanish style. Then the air conditioner failed and it soon became unbearably hot, at which point something strange occurred: one of the conductors made an announcement that they were regrettably unable to determine when the train would get moving again or why they had been given the signal to stop because the range of their handheld radios unfortunately wasn’t wide enough for the next station to send information. This announcement just reinforced Kraft’s feeling that he was trapped in a time machine.

  Handheld radios, Kraft snorts. Walkie-talkies! In the middle of Silicon Valley. Somewhere out there was the Google campus, and a few kilometers farther, Apple, and on the other side he could see the Oracle towers. Facebook, Netflix, Tesla, all just a stone’s throw away, but at Caltrain they were still using radio transceivers the size of shoeboxes that couldn’t even reach the next station. And the joke is, Kraft says to Heike, that in the middle of it all the two of them are having a private conversation an ocean apart with excellent sound quality. Heike listens without a word. She had liked this about Kraft from the very beginning, how precisely and incisively he could speak about the shortcomings of others, and she still enjoys listening to him even if he’s only describing a ramshackle Californian rail line. But when he starts to place his observations in a larger political and cultural theoretical context and to philosophize about the discrepancy between the decrepit state of the infrastructure and the technological sophistication of his fellow travelers’ personal gadgets, she quickly loses patience and ends the conversation by mentioning an imminent meeting. She knew what was coming. Lately Kraft has been making particularly critical comments about the effects of privatization, out of character for him, and has even gone so far as to express open approval of greater government support, even if it means raising taxes. She wants none of that. In such moments, Kraft seems to be mellowing with age, and Heike has no time for age or leniency.

  * * *

  At some point—steaming in his own juices, Kraft has lost all sense of time—the train starts up again and the diesel locomotive pushes the wagons like oversize ovens past the auto body and automotive paint shops that line the tracks in San Bruno, alternating with shabby wooden houses with old sofas rotting next to cars propped up on concrete blocks and worn-out children’s trampolines in their parched yards.

  In San Francisco he gives the taxi driver the address he found on the website of an association whose members meet regularly in their free time to eradicate the invasive plant species that are killing off the native flora of Northern California. The contact address given was that of a certain Johanna Heuffel, who lived on the corner of Folsom and Stoneman, and Kraft hopes it’s the same Johanna, because of whom even today the smell of baking pastries fills him with an emotion he finds hard to place, a conflicted mixture of lovelorn melancholy and plaintive sentimentality, of nebulous guilt and shadowy innocence.

  The air-conditioning in the taxi dries his shirt, leaving behind faint clouds of salt on the light blue fabric. He gets out of the car on a steep street, in the shade of elm trees that tower over the tiny wooden houses. Heart beating wildly and ears burning, Kraft looks at the mint-green facade, checks the bay window for signs of life, and eyes the wooden staircase, the brown front door decorated with a bouquet of dried flowers. Just when he’s made up his mind and starts to climb the stairs, the door of the adjacent pink house opens and out steps an elderly woman in checked flannel pajamas, her puffy face crowned by an extravagant turban and sporting a nasal oxygen cannula, the tubes of which disappear into an Indian shoulder bag. On a leash, she leads an animal, and Kraft, who’s never had much of an interest in zoology, can’t tell if it’s a young ocelot or a house cat. The woman and the creature examine Kraft with interest and a not-unfriendly air. The animal sidles up to him in a long-legged prance, the woman lets it lead, and Kraft takes a step back. No need to worry, the woman reassures him, Tabby just wants to smell you. So Kraft lets it sniff the backs of his knees, which the animal can reach without stretching, and as it sniffs, Kraft asks about the cat, since he’s never seen one like it, either of that size or with such predatory markings. It’s an easy conversation to start, because on the one hand he’s always happy to learn something new and is already picturing himself telling the twins about the animal and describing its elegant gait, and then, on the other, he’s happy to delay the encounter with Johanna a bit longer. Maybe he can find out about her living situation from her neighbor—should he expect to meet a husband, are or were there children?

  The woman in the turban, which Kraft assumes conceals a bald head, because her eyebrows consist of two unsteadily drawn arcs and her eyelashes are missing, is happy to provide information. Tabby is a Savannah cat, a cross between a serval, an African wild cat, and a domestic cat. Then the woman launches into a long lecture on breeding difficulties, on F1 to F5 generations, hybrids, characteristics, and prices, which strike Kraft as indecently high for a house pet and immediately make clear to him why the animal is only allowed outside on a leash. He bends down, fondles Tabby’s striped ears, repeats several times how interesting it all is, and asks if a Johanna Heuffel lives in the house next door. Yes, the woman confirms, someone by that name does live there, and because Kraft believes he detects a hint of mistrust, he scratches Tabby’s chin as well and explains that he’s known Johanna since they were students but does not elaborate on the nature of their friendship. Anyhow, he’s in San Francisco on business—at Stanford University, actually, he adds, hoping to win her confidence with the university’s illustrious name—and he decided to pay a visit to his old friend, whom he hasn’t seen since she left Germany.

  The neighbor is deeply moved by this story, which Kraft embellishes with a few well-targeted exotic details from the Swiss border city and long trips through East and West Germany, and she tells him regretfully that sadly he won’t find Joan here. They own a house in Sonoma County, on the coast, and spend most of their time there. The third-person plural roars in Kraft’s ears but he doesn’t dare ask why she uses it. And why should he, was he such a fool to think that Johanna had waited for him all these years?

  * * *

  He rents a car downtown. ESCAPE is written on the back. Is our man Kraft on the run? Isn’t it rather the opposite? Does he not finally want to face something he’s been fleeing for thirty years? Kraft himself isn’t sure, and when he sits down behind the steering wheel of the oversize vehicle, he no longer knows why it was so important to see Johanna. What on earth is he doing here?

  Kraft enters the address he got from the neighbor into the car’s GPS and leaves navigation to the friendly female voice. Follow Fourth Street, then turn right on Harrison. Now turn right. Actually, he had thought he would leave the city on the Golden Gate, but the GPS has chosen the Bay Bridge instead. It seems to be the shorter route. So be it, he didn’t come here to play the tourist and it’s nice to let someone else make the decisions. For the first time, he understands the appeal of driverless cars. He’d never understood all the hype. Who wa
nts to be driven around by a computer, to hand over the reins? he’d always wondered. He certainly wouldn’t, he could barely stand sitting in the passenger seat. But now he would gladly let go of the steering wheel and put himself in the hands of this friendly voice. Maybe she knows what he does not: this whole trip isn’t leading anywhere good. Maybe she knows where he should really be headed. Maybe she might, quite intentionally, ignore the bridge’s gentle curve and, together with Kraft, crash straight through the white railing and vault in a high arc over the bay’s blue water.

  Kraft crosses another bridge, drives past a large prison, through industrial zones, and down streets filled with shopping centers. He passes small towns, villages, and residential areas, drives through marshes and grasslands, guided by the friendly voice, now right, now left, often straight ahead. She leads him northward, always northward, then she tells him to take another left and an immediate right, and Kraft passes vineyards, burned grasslands, isolated farms, and red barns. Fences and telephone wires line the roads, the hills roll gently, and the cattle chew stoically. The bushes grow more densely, now and again a small coniferous forest offers a little shade, the colors change, more green, one with a silvery sheen and one the same shade as the Neckar River, sometimes a red the color of the tile roofs in Tübingen appears, and a yellow like lichen. Kraft smells the ocean long before he sees it. After Bodega Bay, the road follows the coast. At Duncans Landing he turns off into a rest stop and stares out the open window at the rough water, trying in vain to feel an appropriate emotion, and his companion loses patience: Turn around and follow the Shoreline Highway. Kraft obeys. At some point, just before Russian River, he is told to turn left, toward the Pacific, and then right, up a small hill with individual homes, their verandas bleached by the sun, dotting its flank. Kraft parks behind one of the houses next to a Toyota Prius. You have reached your destination, the voice tells him, and sets Kraft to brooding about the English language and the shared etymology of destiny and destination, which doesn’t exist in German, but the thought doesn’t lead anywhere and he has no choice but to turn off the motor and get out of the car.