Eurotrash

by Christian Kracht

An infection which only surfaced after her spinal surgery, and which so strained her diminished resistance that she fell into a coma, had to be put on a ventilator through a tracheotomy, and thus lay vegetating for months in the ICU of the private clinic near Zurich, connected to various tubes, surrounded by pumping machines and grotesquely wheezing devices, by more or less well-meaning nurses and attending physicians who did their best not to let her die. This was in fact unusual in Switzerland, which has always had a special relationship with death.

For everything that does not rise into consciousness will return as fate.

The past was always much more real and elastic and present than the now. I lived in films.

Zurich was claustrophobic; the little flower shop made me claustrophobic, the old city made me claustrophobic, the fifteenth-century buildings, never destroyed in World War II, made me claustrophobic, the ladies with their shopping bags from Kaufhaus Grieder made me claustrophobic and cut me off, the streetcars made me claustrophobic and cut me off, the bankers walking to their banks to accumulate more gold beneath Paradeplatz made me claustrophobic and cut me off.

Recently, a few months earlier, I had seen a banana peel lying on the cobblestones, and I’d stood awhile to wait and see what would happen, but no one slipped on it. The residents of Zurich were of course too shrewd to slip on a banana peel. They were too superior, too confident, too steeped in that grand Zurich world of theirs, in which they shopped in boutiques whose vertiginous monthly rents continued to sustain this, their Zurich.

What luck, I thought, what luck, how lucky that I was in Switzerland.

I noticed as I always did, as I had known for years, that the conversation simply couldn’t be directed or shifted to something positive; it was a constant losing, a constant loss, a constant capitulation.