Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  “That’s what you want.”

  She shook her head. “I wouldn’t be here if that was what I wanted. But now I see that nobody can help me.”

  Andreas didn’t know what to say. What he wanted was for her to come and live in the basement of the rectory with him. He could protect her, homeschool her, practice English with her, train her as a counselor for at-risk youth, and be her friend, the way King Lear imagined life with Cordelia, following the news of the court from a distance, laughing at who was in, who was out. Maybe in time they’d be a couple, the couple in the basement, leading their own private life.

  “We can find room for you here,” he said.

  She shook her head again. “He’s already upset that I don’t come home until midnight. He thinks I’m out with boys. If I didn’t come home at all, he’d turn my mother in.”

  “He said that to you?”

  “He’s an evil person. For a long time, I thought the opposite, but not anymore. Now everything he says to me is some kind of threat. He’s not going to stop until he gets everything he wants.”

  A different sensation, not tears, a wave of hatred, came over Andreas. “I can kill him,” he said.

  “That’s not what I meant by helping me.”

  “Somebody’s life has to be ruined,” he said, pursuing the logic of his hatred. “Why not his and mine? I’m already in a kind of prison. The food can’t be any worse in a real prison. I can read books at state expense. You can go to school and help your mother with her problem.”

  She made a derisive sound. “That’s a good plan. Trying to kill a bodybuilder.”

  “Obviously I wouldn’t warn him in advance.”

  She looked at him as if he couldn’t possibly be serious. All his life, until now, she would have been right. Levity was his métier. But it was harder to see the ridiculous side of the casual destruction of lives in the Republic when the life in question was Annagret’s. He was already falling in love with this girl, and there was nothing he could do with the feeling, no way to act on it, no way to make her believe that she should trust him. She must have seen some of this in his face, because her own expression changed.

  “You can’t kill him,” she said quietly. “He’s just very sick. Everyone in my family is sick, everyone I touch is sick, including me. I just need help.”

  “There is no help for you in this country.”

  “That can’t be right.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  She stared for a while at the pews in front of them or at the cross behind the altar, forlorn and murkily lit. After a time, her breaths became quicker and sharper. “I wouldn’t cry if he died,” she said. “But I should be the one to do it, and I could never do it. Never, never. I’d sooner be his girlfriend.”

  On more careful reflection, Andreas didn’t really want to kill Horst, either. He could imagine surviving prison, but the label murderer didn’t accord with his self-image. The label would follow him forever, he wouldn’t be able to like himself as much as he did now, and neither would other people. It was all very well to be a Assibräuteaufreißer, a troller for sex with the antisocial—the label was appropriately ridiculous. But murderer was not.

  “So,” Annagret said, standing up. “It’s nice of you to offer. It was nice of you to listen to my story and not be too disgusted.”

  “Wait, though,” he said, because another thought had occurred to him: if she were his accomplice, he might not automatically be caught, and even if he were caught her beauty and his love for her would forever adhere to what the two of them had done. He wouldn’t simply be a murderer; he’d be the person who’d eliminated the molester of this singular girl.

  “Can you trust me?” he said.

  “I like that I can talk to you. I don’t think you’re going to tell anyone my secrets.”

  These weren’t the words he wanted to hear. They made him ashamed of his fantasy of homeschooling her in the basement.

  “I don’t want to be your girlfriend,” she added, “if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t want to be anyone’s girlfriend.”

  “You’re fifteen, I’m twenty-seven. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “I’m sure you have your own story, I’m sure it’s very interesting.”

  “Do you want to hear it?”

  “No. I just want to be normal again.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  Her expression became desolate. The natural thing would have been to put his arms around her and console her, but nothing about their situation was natural. He felt completely powerless—another new sensation and one he didn’t like one bit. He figured that she was about to walk away and never come back. But instead she drew a stabilizing breath and said, without looking at him, “How would you do it?”

  In a low, dull voice, as if in a trance, he told her how. She had to stop coming to the church and go home and lie to Horst. She had to say that she’d been going to a church to sit by herself and pray and seek God’s guidance, and that her mind was clearer now. She was ready to give herself fully to Horst, but she couldn’t do it at home, out of respect for her mother. She knew a better place, a romantic place, a safe place where some of her friends went on weekends to drink beer and make out. If he cared about her feelings, he would take her there.

  “You know a place like that?”

  “I do,” Andreas said.

  “Why would you do this for me?”

  “Who better to do it for? You deserve a good life. I’m willing to take a risk for that.”

  “It’s not a risk. It’s guaranteed—they’d definitely catch you.”

  “OK, thought experiment: if it were guaranteed they wouldn’t, would you let me do it?”

  “I’m the one who should be killed. I’ve been doing something terrible to my sister and my mother.”

  He sighed. “I like you a lot, Annagret. I’m not so fond of the self-dramatizing, though.”

  This was the right thing to have said—he saw it immediately. Not a full-bore burning look from her but unmistakably a spark of fire. He almost resented his loins for warming at the sight; he didn’t want this to be just another seduction. He wanted her to be the way out of the wasteland of seduction he’d been living in.

  “I could never do it,” she said, turning away from him.

  “Sure. We’re just talking.”

  “You self-dramatize, too. You said you were the most important person in the country.”

  He could have pointed out that such a ridiculous claim could only be ironic, but he saw that this was only half true. Irony was slippery, the sincerity of Annagret was firm. “You’re right,” he said gratefully. “I self-dramatize, too. It’s another way the two of us are alike.”

  She gave a petulant shrug.

  “But since we’re only talking, how well do you think you could ride a motorbike?”

  “I just want to be normal again. I don’t want to be like you.”

  “OK. We’ll try to make you normal again. But it would help if you could ride his motorbike. I’ve never been on one myself.”

  “Riding it is sort of like judo,” she said. “You try to go with it, not against it.”

  Sweet judo girl. She continued like this, closing the door on him and then opening it a little, rejecting possibilities that she then turned around and allowed, until it got so late that she had to go home. They agreed that there was no point in her returning to the church unless she was ready to act on their plan or move into the basement. These were the only two ideas either of them had.

  Once she stopped coming to the church, Andreas had no way to communicate with her. For the following six afternoons, he went up to the sanctuary and waited until dinnertime. He was pretty sure he’d never see her again. She was just a schoolgirl, she didn’t care about him, or at least not enough, and she didn’t hate her stepfather as murderously as he did. She would lose her nerve—either go alone to the Stasi or submit to worse abuse. As the afternoons passed, Andreas felt so
me relief at the prospect. In terms of having an experience, seriously contemplating a murder was almost as good as going through with it, and it had the added benefit of not entailing risk. Between prison and no prison, no prison was clearly preferable. What tormented him was the thought that he wouldn’t lay eyes on Annagret again. He pictured her studiously practicing her throws at the Judo Club, being the good girl, and felt very sorry for himself. He refused to picture what might be happening to her at home at night.

  She showed up on the seventh afternoon, looking pale and starved and wearing the same ugly rain jacket that half the teenagers in the Republic were wearing. A nasty cold drizzle was falling on Siegfeldstraße. She took the rearmost pew and bowed her head and kneaded her pasty, bitten hands. Seeing her again, after a week of merely imagining her, Andreas was overwhelmed by the contrast between love and lust. Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jacket to escape through. Touching her was the farthest thing from his mind. The impulse was to throw himself at her feet.

  He sat down not very close to her. For a long time, for several minutes, they didn’t speak. Love altered the way he perceived her uneven mouth-breathing and her trembling hands—again the disparity between the largeness of her mattering and the ordinariness of the sounds she made, the everydayness of her schoolgirl fingers. He had the strange thought that it was wrong, wrong as in evil, to think of killing a man who, in however sick a way, was also in love with her; that he instead ought to have compassion for that man.

  “So I have to be at the Judo Club,” she said finally. “I can’t stay long.”

  “It’s good to see you,” he said. Love made this feel like the most remarkably true statement he’d ever made.

  “So just tell me what to do.”

  “Maybe now is not a good time. Maybe you want to come back some other day.”

  She shook her head, and some of her hair fell over her face. She didn’t push it back. “Just tell me what to do.”

  “Shit,” he said honestly. “I’m as scared as you are.”

  “Not possible.”

  “Why not just run away? Come and live here. We’ll find a room for you.”

  She began to shiver more violently. “If you won’t help me, I’ll do it myself. You think you’re bad, but I’m the bad one.”

  “No, here, here.” He took her shaking hands in his own. They were icy and so ordinary, so ordinary; he loved them. “You’re a very good person. You’re just in a bad dream.”

  She turned her face to him, and through her hair he saw the burning look, the full-bore burning look. “Will you help me out of it?”

  “It’s what you want?”

  “You said you’d help me.”

  Could anyone be worth it? He did wonder, but he set down her hands and took a hand-drawn map from his jacket pocket.

  “This is where the house is,” he said. “You’ll need to take the S-Bahn out there by yourself first, so you’ll know exactly where you’re going. Do it after dark and watch out for cops. When you go back there on the motorcycle, have him cut the lights at the last corner, and then go all the way back behind the house. The driveway curves around behind. And then make sure you take your helmets off. What night are we talking about?”

  “Thursday.”

  “What time does your mother’s shift start?”

  “Ten o’clock.”

  “Don’t go home for dinner. Tell him you’ll meet him by his bike at nine thirty. You don’t want anyone to see you leaving the building with him.”

  “OK. Where will you be?”

  “Don’t worry about that. Just head for the back door. Everything will be like we talked about.”

  She convulsed a little, as if she might retch, but she mastered herself and put the map in her jacket pocket. “Is that all?” she said.

  “You suggested it to him. The date.”

  She nodded quickly.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “Is that all?”

  “Just one other thing. Will you look at me?”

  She remained hunched over, like a dog that had been bad, but she turned her head.

  “You have to be honest with me,” he said. “Are you doing this because I want it, or because you want it?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “A lot. Everything.”

  She looked down at her lap again. “I just want it to be over. Either way.”

  “You know we won’t be able to see each other for a very long time, whichever way it goes. No contact of any kind.”

  “That’s almost better.”

  “Think about it, though. If you came here instead, we could see each other every day.”

  “I don’t think that’s better.”

  He looked up at the stained ceiling of the sanctuary and considered what a cosmic joke it was that the first person his heart had freely chosen was someone he not only couldn’t have but wouldn’t even be allowed to see. And yet he felt all right about it. His powerlessness itself was sweet. Who would have guessed that? Various clichés about love, stupid adages and song lyrics, flashed through his head.

  “I’m late for judo,” Annagret said. “I have to go.”

  He closed his eyes so that he didn’t have to see her leave.

  * * *

  It was so easy to blame the mother. Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death: why not blame the person who’d stuck you with a life? OK, maybe it was unfair. But your mother could always blame her own mother, who herself could blame the mother, and so on back to the Garden. People had been blaming the mother forever, and most of them, Andreas was pretty sure, had mothers less blameworthy than his.

  An accident of brain development stacked the deck against children: the mother had three or four years to fuck with your head before your hippocampus began recording lasting memories. You’d been talking to your mom since you were one year old and listening to her for even longer, but you couldn’t remember a single word of what you or she had said before your hippocampus kicked into gear. Your consciousness opened its little eyes for the first time and discovered that you were headlong in love with your mom. Being an exceptionally bright and receptive little boy, you also already believed in the historical inevitability of the socialist workers’ state. Your mother herself, in her secret heart, might not have believed in it, but you did. You’d been a person long before you had a conscious self. Your little body had once been deeper inside your mother than your father’s dick had ever gone, you’d squeezed your entire goddamned head through her pussy, and then for the longest time you’d sucked on her tits whenever you felt like it, and you couldn’t for the life of you remember it. You found yourself self-alienated from the get-go.

  Andreas’s father was the second-youngest Party member ever elevated to the Central Committee, and he had the most creative job in the Republic. As the chief state economist, he was responsible for the wholesale massaging of data, for demonstrating increases in productivity where there weren’t any, for balancing a budget that every year drifted farther from reality, for adjusting official exchange rates to maximize the budgetary impact of whatever hard currency the Republic could finagle or extort, for magnifying the economy’s few successes and making optimistic excuses for its many failures. The top Party leaders could afford to be stupid or cynical about his numbers, but he himself had to believe in the story they told. This required political conviction, self-deception, and, perhaps especially, self-pity.

  A refrain of Andreas’s childhood was his father’s litany of the unfairnesses with which the German workers’ state contended. The Nazis had persecuted the Communists and nearly destroyed the Soviet Union, which had then been fully justified in exacting reparations, and America had diverted scarce resources from its own oppressed working class and sent t
hem to West Germany to create an illusion of prosperity, luring weak and misguided East Germans across the border. “No state in world history has ever started at a greater disadvantage than ours,” he liked to say. “Beginning with sheer rubble, and with every hand raised against us, we’ve succeeded in feeding and clothing and housing and educating our citizens and providing every one of them with a level of security that only the wealthiest in the West enjoy.” The phrase every hand raised against us never failed to move Andreas. His father seemed to him the greatest of men, the wise and kindhearted champion of the conspired-against and spat-upon German worker. Was there anything more worthy of sympathy than a suffering underdog nation persevering and triumphing through sheer faith in itself? With every hand raised against it?

  His father was overworked, however, and traveled a lot to Moscow and to other Eastern Bloc countries. Andreas’s real love affair was with his mother, Katya, who was no less perfect and much more available. She was pretty and lively and quick; rigid only in her politics. She had boyishly short hair of unrivaled redness, blazing but natural-looking redness, the product of a Western bottle obtainable only by the very privileged. She was a jewel of the Republic, a person of great physical and intellectual charm who’d elected to stay behind while others like her were getting out. Nobody toed the Party line with greater ease. Andreas had gone to lectures of hers and seen the hold she had on her classes, the way she mesmerized them with the redness of her hair and the torrent of words she delivered without notes. She could quote whole chunks of Shakespeare from memory, whatever random lines her thought process happened to call for, and then freely translate them into German for the slower students, and everything she said was shot through with orthodoxy: the Danish tragedy a parable of false consciousness and its downfall, Polonius a travesty of the bourgeois intelligentsia, the blond prince a prophetic prefigurement of Marx, Horatio his Engels, and Fortinbras the Lenin-like fulfiller and guarantor of revolutionary consciousness, arriving at the Danish equivalent of the Finland Station. If anyone was put off by how obviously well Katya thought of herself, if anyone found her liveliness unsettling (safety lay in drabness), she had her position as chair of her division’s political oversight committee to set their minds at rest.