Eurotrash by Christian Kracht

Author:Christian Kracht
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2024-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

VII.

We slept in our shared room although I did not sleep, my mother’s snoring gentle and fluttering. Nocturnal thoughts popped up incessantly, those spinning thoughts, a circling of the flame amid the darkness. I was sitting aboard a plane. I was lying in bed, which was a plane. Which river was that down below? Why did I like the name of the city Lahore so very much? There lay the Indus Valley, there the Sind Valley, there the Hindu Kush, Hindu-Killer. I could not sleep. I also could not really tolerate overt aggression very well. I had never seen my mother like that. I had always seen my mother just like that. The Hindu Kush. Perhaps I had also just simply never seen her. The Pamir Mountains, and Nanga Parbat. In the early 1960s, my mother had studied French, stenography, and etiquette as well as a bit of literature in Montreux.

What had it been like back then? Why did I harbor such a longing for this time, for silk-lined suits in polyester and wool? For the curvature of black mudguards, for the sans serif font of train station signage? For gentlemen smoking cigarettes while carrying umbrellas, for their flannel sleeves in light gray and the immaculate white of their dress shirts beneath? That intense desire for narrow ties, for the triangular folds of handkerchiefs protruding from the breast pockets of blazers, for spectacles made of Bakelite.

These men had read the newspaper while waiting for their engagements in Switzerland’s tearooms, in those forever bygone institutions of Calvinism. You did not go to bars or pubs in those days; you went to a tearoom in the evening, to drink tea with milk and sugar. Had my mother visited those tearooms, in Montreux, in the early sixties? Had she met young men her age there who paid her compliments behind their upraised teacups in the nightingalish singsong of Swiss French? Had they had curly hair, green eyes, a genial complexion, a thin mustache like David Niven, my potential fathers who never became my father?

Sleep, please come, I thought, at three thirty. Perhaps I should take one of my mother’s phenobarbital tablets. No, it was entirely out of the question for me to do that. Then I would be like her. How sad, I thought, that this commune I had looked forward to had turned out to be a bunch of Nazi fraudsters. I had wanted to meet good people and give them the contaminated money we had swindled from arms factories. And my mother, who was not in her right mind, had realized not only that these were not the right people, but the phoniest of the phony, and had put a stop to it. Where did this certainty in her come from?

I was lying on my back in bed, still wearing my clothes and shoes, unwashed like the billionaire Gustav Delbanco. I had stuffed the plastic bag with the money under my pillow.

And I suddenly realized that I had always, all my life, put everything under the bed.

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