Kraft by Jonas Lüscher

Author:Jonas Lüscher
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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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 friendship, 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.

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