Johanna’s house makes an effort to blend into the landscape. It huddles in a pine forest brushed by the wind. From the road, only a rough weather-beaten plank wall is visible, windowless and gray. Through a gap in the wall, Kraft slips into an inner courtyard of monastic severity. Moss and bamboo, a rustic birdbath of Japanese stoneware, a path paved with slate slabs leads him to the door. Kraft rings the bell, listens, peeks through the narrow window next to the door, and wipes the palms of his hands dry on his trousers one more time. Johanna, Johanna … She opens the door.
The same haircut, as if it had been trimmed with kitchen scissors, but completely white now, the same narrow shoulders, and she still wears boat shoes. Yes, she says, how can I help you? Kraft has to clear his throat. It’s me, Richard.
Good Lord, she cries in a hoarse voice, Richard! Richard Kraft! Closely watching her reaction, he mainly sees surprise. To his relief and to his astonishment he sees no trace of anger. Her surprise quickly gives way to a heartiness Kraft distrusts because it seems very American. An impression that is reinforced by the strong English coloring her Swabian has taken on over the decades. Words tumble awkwardly from her mouth, as if her slender face were too small for them.
Kraft is invited into her house, its interior bearing no trace of the courtyard’s simplicity. He follows her through spacious rooms with views of the Pacific out large picture windows. She leads him to a big kitchen with laminated-wood cabinetry and a central island, offers him an iced tea, and while she fills two glasses and decorates them with sprigs of mint, Kraft stiffens, because he has the feeling that this is the moment she will ask after the reason for his visit. Instead she turns to face him and switches back into English. What a surprise, she says, and Kraft notices that her skin, which he remembers as pale and fine and prone to rashes, has been saturated by the California sun and taken on a leathery tan. He’s still searching for a sign of disappointment or bitterness, of burgeoning rage provoked by his appearance, but Johanna seems as relaxed as the large, shaggy sheepdog stretched out on the terrace doorstep, over which she steps agilely.
Come, she says, and Kraft follows her clumsily because the knee that got battered during his rowing adventure has started to ache again. He feels unsteady on his feet in general, as if he were standing for the first time after a long illness. As he takes a large step over the sleeping dog, he’s struck by a wave of dizziness and has to grab on to the doorframe. The dog opens one eye briefly and thumps its tail on the floor. Mimi, Johanna says, we have an unexpected guest.
Mimi, a heavyset woman in cargo shorts, a tank top, and sandals closes her issue of The New York Review of Books and rises from her wooden reclining chair. Is this why the neighbor used the plural? Kraft wonders. Mimi, this is Richard, an old friend from Germany. From my time in Basel, she specifies. Mimi pushes her sunglasses into her thick white curls and offers her hand. Oh, she says, looking at Johanna, this is who tried to seduce you with On the Marble Cliffs? A moment of silence follows and Kraft is sure the question will come now. He feels nauseated and is worried his legs will buckle.
Sit, sit, Mimi says, and points to one of the white wooden chairs. Kraft gratefully sinks into the chair and sets his iced tea on the broad armrest, glad that he can stop the nervous clinking of the ice cubes. He looks around admiringly. Beautiful, he says, amazing, the house, the garden, the view, the ocean, very beautiful, and he points at each thing as he names it as if he has to inform the women what there is to see.
But now, Johanna begins, tell us—now, right now, she’s going to ask the question he will have to parry with another question, one for which he may prefer not to have an answer … and anyway, what could he possibly say? Johanna, Johanna, how did I make you so angry?—how did you find us? Oh, that one he can answer! Happy for the reprieve, he goes into great detail about the website on which he found their address in San Francisco—alien plant species, very interesting, he’d like to hear more about that later—and how he didn’t find Johanna there—obviously, he adds with a nervous laugh—but he did meet a neighbor with a gigantic cat, about the size of a lynx, it was on a leash and the woman was friendly enough to give him their address. Oh, Mimi says, that’s Joyce and her cat Tabby. Then … another moment of silence.
The dog yawns. Mimi sighs. She doesn’t have much longer to live. Kraft expresses his regret and says that she didn’t give that impression, quite the contrary, in fact, since she had sniffed the backs of his knees enthusiastically and was very lively. Oh, no, not the cat, Joyce, Mimi corrects him. Ah, Kraft says, of course, she had an oxygen tank with her. Cancer, Mimi says. And we’re going to inherit the cat, Johanna sighs, a ten-thousand-dollar cat you have to keep on a leash and feed special food flown in from Denmark, and the vet she needs to see once a month is in Fresno. But they promised Joyce that they would take care of Tabby after her death. Johanna gives a shrug of resignation and her laughter is at once so bright and so hoarse that for a moment Kraft feels transported back thirty years to an attic apartment in Basel.
Kraft sips his iced tea. Now that he’s seated, he feels a bit stronger and decides to gain time by going on the offensive and asks Johanna bluntly how things have gone for her all these years. After lighting a cigarette, she tells him with good grace that she worked several years for the biotech company for which she had left Basel back then and then founded a gene-sequencing software company with two partners in the late ’90s. The dot-com bubble almost did them in, but business recovered and three years ago they sold the company to a large corporation and she retired, so to speak. And now, she says, we’re sitting here with more money than two old girls like us can possibly spend in the years we have left.
Kids? Kraft is bold enough to ask, feeling very progressive because he thinks the question will show him to be particularly open-minded about their lifestyle, which does surprise him somewhat, perhaps even unnerves him. No, Johanna waves the question away, no kids, but we have the dog. Kraft isn’t sure if she means this seriously; her smile is so mischievous, perhaps even mocking. And instead of asking Kraft about his life, she offers to show him the beach as if she suspects he has something he would rather discuss with her alone.
Johanna goes into the house to get a leash, at the sight of which the dog jumps up eagerly. A steep footpath leads down to the ocean. The dog runs ahead, Johanna follows easily, and Kraft makes an effort to keep up.
* * *
Kraft feels stunned, defeated. Unused to driving such a big car, he can hardly stay in his lane. He’s turned off the friendly female voice and is driving south somewhat haphazardly; as long as he keeps the Pacific to his right, he’ll reach San Francisco somehow. But what for? Right … he has to return the rental car. The road winds its way down in sweeping curves, past tsunami warning signs and parking areas with young people sitting on the tailgates of their pickups, their neoprene suits rolled down to their hips, then it climbs again in switchbacks along steep cliffs. How long has he been driving? He doesn’t know. Kraft can’t feel anything below his hips, but his feet do their duty, accelerating and braking on their own. His ears, on the other hand, burn with shame. They hang from his skull like pulsating slabs of meat while a storm rages in their sinuous canals.
* * *
Johanna had energetically waved the insects away from a pile of rotten kelp and pulled from the organic mess a tubular stalk with a fist-size air bladder on one end. She twirled it over her head and launched it into the rough surf. The dog leaped after it. So, she asked, what brings you here?
Kraft began telling her about his invitation to Stanford, explained the essay competition, elucidated the problematics of the topic, described Erkner, but Johanna didn’t let him off, interrupted his account, and asked to know what had brought him here, to her? Were you hoping to find an answer to the theodicy questions? Kraft laughed nervously. Well, yes, in a way … that is … at least, she was right in thinking he had come to her with a question. Johanna bent down to the stalk of seaweed the dog had laid at her feet and flung it back
into the waves. Shoot! she prompted him, and gave an encouraging look. Well, Kraft answered, he was afraid he no longer knew why the question had seemed so important, but since he was here … then, fine … he had urgently needed to know, for reasons that were hard to describe, what it was he’d done, back then in June of ’87, to make her so angry that she left for America and disappeared forever.
Johanna was visibly perplexed. She didn’t understand the question, she said. Well, that is, Kraft offered … he knew it was his job to remember why and he was perfectly aware that this gap in his memory didn’t put him in the best light, but maybe that was exactly why it was so important?
But Richard, she said, I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about. Your rage … Kraft insisted, what did I do that made you so angry? She was never angry, she assured him, she didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. But she did throw her clothes in a suitcase and slam the door behind her, after all …
Johanna was silent for a moment. Is that really how he remembers it? she wanted to know. Kraft nodded mutely. Interesting, because she was confident that he was the one who, in a fit of rage, threw his books and his clothes into two suitcases and slammed the door behind him. Kraft stared into the milky bank of clouds that lay over the water on the horizon as if hoping the past would reveal itself there and give the lie to Johanna’s version.
But … he began again before lapsing into silence. After she got her doctorate, she was offered a position in San Francisco, Johanna reminded him, speaking to him like an intractable patient, and it was out of the question that she refuse it and it had been perfectly clear to her that he wouldn’t follow her since his professional future lay in Germany. To her surprise he had then told her his dream of starting a family with her, and today, with distance, she had to admit that it must have been very vexing to him that she didn’t take his dream seriously, and the obvious misunderstanding, or more precisely, the asymmetry that had underlain their relationship from the beginning must have then become crystal clear. He was hurt and, yes, furious, downright furious. But she, and she’s sorry she has to admit it at this point, went off to America with a light heart and without the slightest rancor, delighted to be starting a new phase in her life. Johanna bent down again for the seaweed and flung it into the Pacific.
Kraft watched the spinning object as it soared and splashed into the ocean. She just throws everything away, without a second thought, he reflected.
After this, there wasn’t much left to say and they climbed the steep path in single file. Johanna walked him to his car and after he was seated behind the wheel and she lobbed a “drive safely” through the window he reared up one last time and had the presumption to ask if he was the one who had turned her off men. Johanna burst into laughter. Oh, my dear Kraft, she said, you weren’t really that bad …
… and above all not that important. Did she really say that? Or was that just how he heard it? When the red pylons and the white city in the hills behind them appear, he’s no longer sure exactly how things went. He parks the car in the lot at the entrance to the bridge, walks under the bridge, and climbs to the lookout. Under normal circumstances he would avoid this kind of place, filled with mobile homes, noisy families, and so many cameras, but the visit to Johanna’s had completely spun him around, and now the sum of his misanthropic resources was concentrated on himself, as if he were the last man alive and therefore the only one left to hate.
Kraft stands in the crowd of tourists and, one sheep in a herd, looks up at the Golden Gate, that elegant bridge over which endless streams of traffic flow in both directions, and at the islands in the bay, Angel Island, almost at his feet, and behind it Alcatraz, where evil had once been locked away.
So, then, can he no longer trust his own memory? Had he been mistaken? Like with the robin redbreasts? Maybe, in the tower filled with books on war, revolution, and peace, there’s a reference work called All About Kraft, in which he can read about how things really went.
And how about with Ruth? Is his memory faulty there, too? No, there we can assume things really did happen as he remembers them.
* * *
Kraft was at a conference in the Canadian Rocky Mountains and so Ruth had a few days of peace and quiet in the Tübingen apartment with a view of the Stift and the Hölderlin Tower for the first time since she had left Berlin four years earlier. Daniel, who’d just started his first year of high school, was away for a few days on a class trip to the Black Forest, and Adam (yes, Kraft had prevailed in the choice of names—he’d claimed it was his right since he’d been so shamefully disregarded with his first son and Ruth had little to say in her defense, especially since she was thankful that he had accepted her veto of Otto), Adam, then, was finally in kindergarten. So now, because Kraft was traveling and had taken the hectic hustle and bustle he cultivated whenever he was home for a few hours in order to emphasize his entitlement, despite his frequent absences, to his role as head of the family, with him to the Canadian mountains, where he could plague his colleagues with it, a heavenly calm reigned in the rooms with French doors, gleaming parquet flooring, and the stucco of Protestant dignity. Ruth spent the first three days stretched out on the couch, with her eyes closed and a book on her stomach, searching the silence for her lost strength, and listening to her own breath, which she hadn’t heard for a long time. On the fourth day, she rose, threw the unread book on the floor, and climbed the narrow flight of stairs to the attic. She was greeted by a suffocating, unbearably dry heat. The late-summer sun streamed through the large skylights and baked the tiles, and the hot roof beams gave off a musty smell of old fir wood. Big rolls of wool insulation were piled behind the door. Kraft had ordered them four years earlier, but had always found one more talk he had to write, one more lecture he had to prepare, one more set of proofs he had to read over immediately, a pile of term papers to correct, all sorts of reasons why he wasn’t able to take up the promised construction—much to his regret, as he occasionally added when the topic came up, because he could certainly see how exciting it would be if Ruth were able to enrich their family life with her art. In fact, he especially enjoyed having a woman at his side at social events whom he could introduce as a sculptor from Berlin and thus bring a hint of Bohemia to dowdy Tübingen academic circles, although he was naturally aware that it was primarily due to his own ambition and egoism that Ruth hadn’t touched a file, a chisel, or a lump of clay since the day she’d moved in.
Ruth pushed to the side a few discarded toys and some winter sports equipment that had been carelessly piled in the storage space and walked past the long row of BILLY shelving on which Kraft had—only temporarily, mind you—placed the books for which there was no room in his office. She searched all the way in the back for the boxes containing her art supplies. A large bag of clay slabs lay on top of them, baked by the heat of the uninsulated attic into useless tiles. Ruth stood looking at them for a long time then spun energetically on her heel without opening a single box; she climbed back down to the silent apartment, looked for a thick marker, packing tape, and paper, returned to the attic, and wrote the address of a friend’s studio in Berlin on the boxes. On her way down, she grabbed a few empty moving boxes and two large suitcases. She began packing hurriedly. She was afraid she would lose her courage and determination when Adam got home from kindergarten because Adam was just like his father, a big chatterbox, had been since day one, a babbler and blatherer, who started talking unconscionably early, forming sentences, asking questions he would answer himself, exuding knowledge as soon as he acquired it, and accompanying the day-to-day of his childish life with an unquenchable torrent of noises, words, and sentences, as if he were providing commentary for a football game. But it would be a mistake to assume that Kraft appreciated this quality in his son. In fact, it seemed to Ruth that Kraft was more inclined to compete with his son for the last word and felt challenged in a field that was once his alone because his firstborn son, driven into inner emigration by Ackerknecht and the
representations of his dead daughter, had not found his voice again in Tübingen and remained a pale, silent child, with whom Kraft never was able to connect, despite his sincere efforts whenever he found the time.
Ruth let her friend in Berlin know she was coming, handed the smaller of the two suitcases to her older son when he returned from his class trip, before he’d even taken off his backpack, took Adam’s hand with her left hand and the other suitcase with her right and disappeared to Berlin forever.
When Kraft arrived home, he found a note on the kitchen table asking him to let the moving company she had hired into the apartment and to make sure they took the boxes with her sculpting tools, and he felt such a strong sense of relief that the bursting of his bourgeois dreams didn’t upset him for the time being.
We may well assume that his momentary relief sprang from the euphoria the days in the Rocky Mountains had inspired in him and that the collapse of his marriage and his family’s departure appeared to him as a liberation and the new start he’d been yearning for.
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