Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  * * *

  The apartment on Adalbertstraße was hostage to a stomach. When Clelia closed her eyes at night, she could picture it hovering in the darkness above her cot. Outwardly taut and glossy, a pale pink digestive aubergine with darkish veins stemming off it, the stomach was red and shredded on the inside, awash in caustic liquids and liable to convulse like a raging baby at any hour, especially a wee one. This unhappy organ had its residence in the body of Clelia’s mother, Annelie. Clelia slept in the corner of the living room nearest to her mother’s bedroom, so that when Annelie called out for milk and zwieback in the night she wouldn’t wake the younger children or her brother, Rudi, in their bedrooms, only Clelia.

  The stomach was keenly attuned to Clelia’s self-pity. It could hear her when she cried herself to sleep, it didn’t like her doing this, it threw up blood and bile onto her mother’s bedsheets, which Clelia then had to strip and soak. There was no arguing with blood. No matter how cruel her mother was to her, she held the bloody trump card of actually being ill.

  Nor was there any arguing that Clelia needed to have a job. Even if she hadn’t been denied entry to the university—the university that her father had attended, the four-hundred-year-old university that she passed every morning on her way to the bakery—the family couldn’t have afforded to let her go full-time. Uncle Rudi worked for the city in a street-paving capacity, proud in his bright blue coveralls, the German worker’s uniform, the true uniform of tyranny in the socialist workers’ state, and he took care of his ailing sister to the extent of paying the rent. But he drank and had girlfriends, and so it fell to Clelia to put food on the table. Her brother was fifteen and her sister was still a little girl.

  By day Clelia waited on customers at the bakery, by night she waited on the stomach. Only on Saturday afternoons and Sundays did she have a few hours to herself. She liked to walk along the river and, if the day was sunny, find a patch of clean grass to lie down on and close her eyes. She didn’t need to see more people, she took money from hundreds of people at the bakery, men who stared at her indecently, old women who tweezed coins from cloth pouches as if picking a nose with thumb and finger. Most of Clelia’s Oberschule friends were now at the university and strangers to her, the rest kept their distance because her father’s family was bourgeois, and she preferred to be by herself anyway, so she could dream of the man who would take her away from Adalbertstraße to Berlin, to France, to England, to America. A man like her father, whom she could still remember following up their building’s stairs and hearing gently say, through the grudging one centimeter that their upstairs neighbor had opened his door, “My wife is very sick tonight. Her stomach. If you could not be quite so loud?” A man like that.

  On a very warm June Saturday, not long after Clelia had turned twenty, she took off her apron at the bakery and told the manager she was leaving early. Already, in 1954, workers in Jena were learning that no harm would come of leaving early; all it meant was that customers had to wait in longer lines, at worst at the cost of work time at their own jobs, where it likewise didn’t matter if they were absent. Clelia hurried home and changed into her favorite old faded lavender summer dress. Her uncle had taken her brother and sister fishing and left her mother, whom the stomach had kept awake all night, asleep in bed. Clelia made a pot of the blackberry tea that her mother claimed was calming to the stomach, although it contained tannic acid and caffeine, and took it to her bedroom with a plate of dry biscuits. She sat on the edge of her mother’s bed and stroked her hair the way she remembered her father doing. Her mother awoke and pushed her hand away.

  “I brought you some tea before I go out,” Clelia said, standing up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out.”

  Her mother’s face was still pretty when the stomach was off duty. She’d suffered for enough years to be ancient now, but she was only forty-three. For a moment, it seemed that she might be about to smile at Clelia, but then her eyes fell to Clelia’s body, and her face immediately assumed its customary contours. “Not in that dress you’re not.”

  “What’s wrong with this dress? It’s a hot day.”

  “If you had any sense, the last thing you’d do is call attention to your body.”

  “What’s wrong with my body?”

  “Its chief defect is that there’s rather a lot of it. A girl with any intelligence would seek to minimize its effect.”

  “I’m very intelligent!”

  “No, in fact,” her mother said, “you’re a stupid goose. And I predict with some confidence that you’ll make a present of yourself to the first stranger who says two kind words to you.”

  Clelia blushed and, blushing, felt herself to be unquestionably a stupid goose: breasty and tall and absurd, with long feet and too much mouth. Goose that she was, she persisted in honking: “Two kind words is more than I ever heard in my whole life with you!”

  “That’s unjust, but never mind.”

  “I wish some stranger would say kind words to me. I would love to hear kind words.”

  “Oh, yes, it’s very nice,” her mother said. “Every once in a long while, the stranger might even be sincere.”

  “I don’t care if he’s sincere! I just want to hear kind words!”

  “Listen to yourself.” Her mother felt the pot of tea and filled her cup. “You haven’t cleaned the bathroom yet. Your uncle makes a mess of the toilet. I can smell it from in here.”

  “I’ll do it when I get back.”

  “You’ll do it now. I don’t understand this ‘pleasure first and duty second.’ You’ll clean the bathroom and wash the kitchen floor, and then, if there’s time, you can change your clothes and go out. I don’t see how you can enjoy a pleasure when you know there’s work to do.”

  “I won’t be gone long,” Clelia said.

  “Why the hurry?”

  “It’s such a beautiful warm day.”

  “Are you going to buy something? Are you worried that the store will close?”

  Annelie was good at intuiting the one question Clelia didn’t want to answer truthfully, and asking it.

  “No,” Clelia said.

  “Bring me your pocketbook.”

  Clelia went to the parlor and came back with the pocketbook, which contained some small bills and change. She watched while her mother counted pfennigs. Although her mother hadn’t hit her since she became the family’s breadwinner, Clelia’s expression was all animal edginess, the distraction of cornered prey.

  “Where is the rest of it?” her mother said.

  “This is all there is. I gave you the rest of it.”

  “You’re lying.”

  All of a sudden, in the left cup of Clelia’s bra, six twenties and eight tens began to stir like crisp-winged insects preparing for flight. She could hear the rustle of their paper wings, which meant that her sharp-eared mother could hear them too. Their scratchy legs and hard heads dug into Clelia’s skin. She willed herself not to look down.

  “It’s the dress,” her mother said. “You want to buy the dress.”

  “You know I can’t afford that dress.”

  “They’ll take twenty marks and let you pay installments.”

  “Not for this, they won’t.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Because I went and asked! Because I want a nice dress!” Clelia looked down in dismay as her right hand, entirely of its own volition, rose from her side and came to rest on the guilty bra cup. She was such an open book, such a guileless and everywhere-spilling mess, that her mother simply said:

  “Show me what you have there.”

  Clelia took the bills from her bra and gave them to her mother. In the rear of the clothing shop on their street was a particular sundress cut Western or what passed for Western in godforsaken Jena, certainly too Western to be placed on display. Clelia brought the shop lady fresh pastries that she said were old and had to be disposed of, and the shop lady was kind to her. But Clelia was such a stupid goose that
she’d described the sundress to her little sister, as an example of what could be found in the rear of stores in the socialist republic, and her mother, though no fan of the socialist republic, had taken note. She was better at surveillance than the socialist republic was. Calm in victory, she put the money in the pocket of her robe, took a sip of tea, and said, “Did you want the dress for some particular assignation? Or just for walking the streets?”

  The money didn’t rightfully belong to Clelia and was, to this extent, unreal to her, and she felt that she deserved the punishment of having it taken away from her—indeed, she’d reached into her bra with a sense of penitent relief. But seeing the money disappear into her mother’s pocket made it real to her again. Six months it had taken her to save it up without being caught. Her eyes filled.

  “You’re the streetwalker,” she said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Horrified with herself, she tried to take it back. “I meant, you like to walk in the street. I like to walk in the park.”

  “But the word you just used. It was?”

  “Streetwalker!”

  Warm dark tea slapped Clelia full across the bodice of her lavender dress. She looked down, wide-eyed, at the destruction.

  “I should have let you starve,” her mother said. “But you ate and ate and ate, and now look at how much there is of you. Was I supposed to let my children starve? I couldn’t work, and so I did the only thing I could. Because you ate and ate and ate. You have no one but yourself to blame for what I did. It was your appetite, not mine.”

  It was true enough that her mother had no appetite. But she spoke with such fairy-tale cruelty, in a voice so exacting and controlled, that it was as if there were no mother there at all: as if the person in bed were merely a flesh-and-blood dummy through which the vengeful stomach spoke. Clelia waited to see if some human remnant of her mother might reconsider what she’d said and apologize for it, or at least mitigate it; but her mother’s face distorted with a sudden writhing of the stomach. She gestured feebly toward the teapot. “I need hot tea,” she said. “This isn’t hot enough.”

  Clelia fled the bedroom and hurled herself onto her cot.

  “You’re a dirty—whore!” she whispered. “A dirty whore!”

  Hearing herself, she immediately sat up and clamped her mouth shut with her fingers. Tears in her eyes gave trembling, diaphanous wings to the bars of sunlight leaking in around the heavy curtains that the stomach insisted be kept closed. My God, she thought. How can I say that? I’m a terrible person! And then, throwing herself back down on the narrow mattress, she expelled more words into her pillow: “A whore! A whore! A filthy whore!” At the same time, she beat on her head with her knuckles. She felt herself to be the world’s most terrible person, also one of the most unlucky and ridiculous. Her legs were so long that to sleep on the cot she had to bend them or leave her feet hanging off the end. She was more than one and three-quarters meters tall, a ridiculous goose in the too-small cage of her cot, with the ugliest name any girl was ever given. People at the bakery had the impression that she was stupid because she giggled for no reason and tended to blurt out whatever came into her head.

  She wasn’t stupid. She got excellent marks in school and could have been taking classes at the university if the committee had let her. The official word was that her father was bourgeois, but her father was dead and her mother and uncle came from the correct social class. The real stigma was that her mother had granted favors to one and then another black-uniformed officer in the worst years. Clelia’s little sister was the daughter of the second one. And, yes, Clelia had eaten the meat and butter and candy, but she’d been a child, unversed in evil. It was to the evil stomach that one of the officers had brought an entire case of authentic Pepto-Bismol. Annelie had sold herself for the stomach, not for her children.

  In my mother’s many tellings of this story to me, she always stressed that when she’d changed out of her ruined dress and dropped one hard roll and two books into her purse, she hadn’t been intending to abandon her siblings, hadn’t been acting on any long-contemplated plan. She just wanted an evening away from the stomach, at most a night and day of relief from an apartment that made her both wholly conscious of the misery of being German and wholly unable to imagine not being German. Until that Saturday in June, the worst thing she’d ever plotted was to buy a Western sundress. Now she’d never have the dress, but she could still go walking in the West, the American sector was only a train ride away.

  With thirty marks in her shoulder bag, she hurried downhill to the center of town, which was still being rebuilt, with socialist unhurry, from the pummeling it had received for harboring the manufacturer of bomb sights and rifle scopes for the war. The round-trip ticket to Berlin cost her nearly all her money. With the little that remained she bought a small bag of candy that left her all the hungrier by the time the train reached Leipzig. So little had she planned to run away, one dry roll was the only other food she had. But what she mainly yearned for now was fresh air. The air in her train compartment stank of socialist underarm, the air from the open window was hot and rank with heavy industry, the air at the Friedrichstraße station was befouled with cheap tobacco smoke and bureaucratic ink. She had no sense of being one drop in the bucket of brains and talent that was draining out of the republic in those years. She was just a blindly running goose.

  The West was even more ruined than the East, but the air really was a little fresher, if only because night had fallen. The impression Clelia had on Kurfürstendamm was of a place that had experienced a hard winter, not permanent socialist ruination. Already, like the first green shoots of spring, like snowdrops and crocuses, the vital signs of commerce were emerging on the Ku’damm. She walked up the length of it and back down again, never stopping, because to stop would mean to think about how hungry she was. She walked and walked, through darker streets and neighborhoods more demolished. Eventually she became aware that, in some unthinking animal way, she was looking for a bakery, because bakeries dumped their stale Schrippen after closing hour on Saturdays. But why, when a person was desperately seeking one particular kind of store in an unfamiliar city, did she invariably choose the best route to not find it? Every intersection was another opportunity for error.

  Error by error, Clelia blundered into the extremely dark and deserted neighborhood of Moabit. A light rain had started falling, and when she finally stopped walking, under a mutilated linden tree, she had no idea where she was. But the city seemed to know—seemed only to have been waiting for her to stop walking. A black sedan, windows open, roof poxed with raindrops, pulled up alongside her, and a man leaned out from the passenger side.

  “Hey there, Legsy!”

  Clelia looked around to see if the man might be addressing someone else.

  “Yes—you!” the man said. “How much?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How much for the two of us?”

  Smiling politely, because the two men were smiling in such a friendly way themselves, Clelia glanced over her shoulder and started walking again in that direction. She stumbled and began to hurry.

  “Oh, hey, wait, you’re fantastic—”

  “Come back—”

  “Legsy—Legsy—Legsy—”

  She felt she was being impolite, even though the two men appeared to have mistaken her for a prostitute. It was an honest mistake and understandable given the circumstances. I should go back, she thought. I should go back and make sure it really was a mistake, and try to think of the right thing to say, because otherwise they’re going to feel embarrassed and ashamed, even though it’s my own stupid fault for walking on this street … But her legs kept carrying her forward. She could hear the sedan turning around and coming after her.

  “Apologies for the misunderstanding,” the driver said, slowing the car to match her pace. “You’re a decent girl, aren’t you?”

  “Pretty girl,” the other man averred.

  “This is no kind of neighborho
od for a decent girl to walk in. We’ll give you a ride.”

  “It’s raining, sweetheart. Don’t you want to get out of the rain?”

  She kept moving, too embarrassed to look in their direction, but also unsure of herself, because it really was raining and she was very hungry; and maybe this was how it had started for her mother, too, maybe her mother had once been a girl like she was now, lost in the world and needing something from a man …

  On the dark sidewalk in front of her another man loomed up. She stopped and the car stopped. “You see what I mean?” the driver said to her. “It isn’t safe to walk alone here.”

  “Come, come,” the other one urged. “Come with us.”

  The man on the sidewalk wasn’t physically imposing, but he had a broad, honest face. And this would have been my father: even on a dark and rainy night in sinister Moabit, he was unmistakably trustworthy. I’m helpless to picture him on that street in anything but cheerfully terrible clothes, his L.L.Bean walking shoes, his khaki high-water pants, and one of those fifties sport shirts whose collar tabs opened wide and flat. After sizing up the situation with a frown, he spoke to Clelia in self-taught German: Entshooldig, fraulein. Con ick dick helfen? Ist allus okay here? Spreckinzee english?

  “A little,” she said in English.

  “D’you know these guys? D’you want ’em here?”

  After a hesitation, she shook her head. Whereupon my father, who was in any case physically fearless, and who believed, moreover, that if you treated people in a rational and friendly manner they would treat you the same way, and that the world would be a better place if everyone would do this, went over to the sedan and shook the men’s hands, introduced himself in German as Chuck Aberant of Denver, Colorado, and asked them if they lived in Berlin or were just visiting like he was, listened with genuine interest to their answers, and then told them not to worry about the girl; he would personally vouch for her safety. It was exceedingly improbable that he would ever see the men again, but, as my father said, you never knew. Always worth approaching every man you met as if he might become your best friend in the world.