Christian Kracht // Joseph — КИПЕНЬ SPUME

Christian Kracht

Joseph

This is something I understand.
I understand it.
It is also something I covet, as in a dream.
There are animals involved, at a distance.
We do not see them.

The artist is scratching things into the sand in East Africa.
He is very tanned, almost indecently so.
The artist is my father, as shaman.
Poor me.
In my twenties, I may have been more muscular.

All this is kept in a box.
A carton of sorts.
Along with a brittle document, shocking in its clarity of purpose
German clarity.
Which is itself kept in a glass cabinet we call our museum.
Which in turn was bought in Buenos Aires.

I expected someone like you.
What did you expect?
A glass encasement?

Subzero air, high above the Crimea.
Creaking leather gloves in the cold.
Knobs and dials covered in hoary frost, some of them red.
Black bakelite, phenolic resin, which I love of course.

One of those German fighter planes with gull wings.
Flowers of ice.
A falling star.
Nurtured back to life by tatars.
Which may or may not have been entirely true.

So the entire century is sucked into this vortex.
Of a star falling.
And not falling.

And so it is no longer a German century.
As some people expected.
Or the story of a dive bomber.
Or of fire in their jackboots.
Or of burning eastern wheat fields, and black smoke.
Or of pain, years and years of pain.
Or of groping, on your knees, for ashes in the dark.
From horizon to horizon.

But the story of a rabbit.
And of trees.
Of a thousand acorns.
Planted.
And growing.
As I caught a glimpse of your face.

Christian Kracht is a Swiss novelist and journalist, born in 1966. His debut novel, Faserland (1995), was followed by 1979, Imperium (Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize), Die Toten (Swiss Book Prize and Hermann Hesse Award), Eurotrash (2021; its English translation by Daniel Bowles was longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize) and Air (2025). His books have been translated into more than thirty languages.