Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  And yet: guilt must be the most monstrous of human quantities, because what I did to relieve my guilt then—stay in the marriage—was precisely the thing I felt guiltiest about later, when the marriage was over. After the night of spaghetti and eggplant, as if she’d seen for the first time that I might leave her, she began to speak of a date, eighteen months in the future, when she and I could set about having a little baby girl (she never imagined a boy). The idea was partly to give herself a goal and deadline for advancing her project above her abdomen, but she was also trying, for my sake, to be more realistic; we couldn’t wait forever to get pregnant. I could see that a baby might be just what we needed, a baby might save us, but I could also see that I was likely to be doing the bulk of the child care as long as her project was unfinished. And so, whenever she brought up the baby question, I changed the subject to her project. Whether I wanted her to hurry up and finish it so that we could share the care of a baby, or whether I just wanted her to be OK enough that I could safely divorce her, I honestly can’t remember. But I do know that I could summon up the sickening smell of fried eggplant simply by thinking of it. If I’d heeded my stomach and cut her loose, she might have had time to find someone else to have her baby with.

  “Bold proposal,” I’d said in her workroom, the morning after the spaghetti night. “You increase the size of your ‘cuts’ by a factor of ten. I can help you plan the whole thing, I can draw it out for you so it’s not all in your head. And then you do it in two years and you’re done.”

  She shook her head dismissively. “I can’t change the size of the cuts halfway in.”

  “But if you make them ten times bigger, you can redo the whole leg in two months. You can cherry-pick the best nonbody shots you already have.”

  “I’m not throwing away eight years of work!”

  “But it’s not even finished work.” I gestured toward her towers of processed but unopened film boxes. “You need to do whatever it takes to be finished.”

  “You know I’ve never finished anything in my life.”

  “Good time to start, don’t you think?”

  “I know what I’m doing,” she said. “What I need your help with isn’t throwing away eight years of work. It’s helping me organize the ideas I already have. And it was obviously a mistake to ask you. Oh! Oh! I’m so stupid.”

  She beat her fists on her offending head. It took me two hours to talk her down and then a further hour to emerge from the sulk she’d put me in by suggesting that my aesthetic was vulgar. Then, for three hours, I helped her block out a rough schedule for completing her project, and then, for another hour, I began the transfer of important thoughts from the first of her forty-odd notebooks into a new notebook, written by me. Then it was time for her three hours of exercise.

  We had many days like this in the year that followed. For ten hours I worked out sequences for her, sequences that seemed to me totally doable, only to hear her say, when it was time for her to exercise, that we seemed to be making my journalistically organized film, not her film, which led to another day of discussion in which she tried to describe the sequences she wanted, and I couldn’t follow her overall logic, and she explained it all again, and I still couldn’t follow it, and it was time for her to exercise. I cut back on my own work, passing up an opportunity to follow the Dukakis campaign for Rolling Stone, and I was losing friends the way addicts do, by canceling dates at the last minute. We’d entered the squalid maintenance phase of our addiction, not a particle of pleasure in the morning, just a sick sense of unresolved issues from the day before. It went on and on and on and would have gone on even longer if my mother hadn’t gotten a death sentence.

  She called, unusually, on a weekday afternoon. “Oh, this terrible body of mine,” she said. “It’s given me nothing but trouble, and now it’s going to kill me. Tom, I’m so sorry. I’m letting you down, I’m letting Cynthia down, I’m letting everyone down. Dr. Van Schyllingerhout has been so patient with me, he’s tried so hard, he says I’m one of the reasons he won’t retire. He’s almost eighty, Tom, and still seeing patients. I’m such a disappointment to you all. But your dumb old mother has cancer.”

  More pitiable even than her cancer was her impulse to apologize for it. I probed her news for a silver lining, but apparently there wasn’t one. She’d simply had rotten luck. Because the steroids had put her at high risk for cancer, Dr. Van Schyllingerhout had been giving her biennial colonoscopies, but the cancer must have appeared immediately after her previous one. In two years it had spread beyond her colon and was likely inoperable. They were going to open her up to relieve her blockage, blast her with radiation, and then do further surgery to see what could be salvaged, but the prognosis was poor.

  “I’ll be there tomorrow,” I said.

  “Tom, I’m so sorry. I hate to burden you with this. I want to live to see you happy and successful. But this dumb old body of mine, always the same dumb thing…”

  I walked into Anabel’s workroom and sat down and cried. Anabel later told me that my tears had terrified her—she was afraid I’d come in to say I couldn’t live with her anymore—but once I gave her the news she put her arms around me and cried with me. She even offered to come to Denver.

  “No,” I said, drying my face. “You stay here. This will be good for both of us.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about,” she said. “That I’m going to work better without you, and you’re going to be happier without me. And that’ll be the end of us. You’ll think, Why am I with this crazy woman who can’t do her work? And I’ll remember how much better I worked when I got to be alone all the time.” She began to cry again. “I don’t want to lose you.”

  “You won’t lose me,” I said. “It’s just some time apart.”

  The argument I made to her, and to myself, was that we needed to reconstruct our separate identities in order to go on together. I genuinely believed this, but my reasons for believing it were bad. I was postponing for as long as possible the guilt of abandoning her. I was also hoping, unrealistically, that she might spare me from this guilt by being the one to leave.

  In a hospital corridor in Denver, while my mother was in post-op, I conferred with Dr. Van Schyllingerhout. He was a compassionate-eyed bald man with an aquiline nose. He’d been good to my mother, but he was unmistakably pissed off about her cancer. “The surgeon is unhappy,” he said in an accent less like Leonard’s than I’d remembered. “He wanted to take more, but your mother is adamant about not wanting a stoma. It’s a quality-of-life choice we have to respect. She doesn’t want the bag. But you hate to tie a surgeon’s hands. Her chances are worse now.”

  “How bad?”

  He shook his head, pissed off. “Bad.”

  “I appreciate your respecting her wishes.”

  “Your mother is a fighter. I’ve had many patients not as sick as her give up and take the colostomy. And of course you know the story of her leaving Germany. She was in a situation of indignity that she refused to accept. With the will she has, she should have lived another thirty years.”

  So began my admiration of my mother. It’s odd to say this, given how sick she was, but she gave me hope about my own life. My situation with Anabel was surely no more of a torment to me than her bowel was to her, and abandoning her mother and siblings couldn’t have been easier than what I had to do to Anabel. If my mother could fight through it, so might I.

  Her surgery seemed to have excised the phrase dumb old mother from her vocabulary, along with others like it. She came home from the hospital without her self-deprecation. Under the influence of Cynthia, who was now a single mom and living in Denver with her daughter, her political views had also softened. “I’m starting to think that money really is the root of all evil,” she said to me one night. “As soon as you have money, you have envy. That’s the problem with the Communists, they envy the rich, they’re obsessed with redistributing money. And, I’m sorry, but I look at Anabel’s family and all I see is the harm the money did
to it.”

  “That’s why she rejected it,” I said.

  “But rejecting money is just another way to be obsessed with it. It’s just like the Communists. The productive workers get exploited by the lazy ones. I’m sorry to say this, but it’s not right that Anabel doesn’t work—that you’re the one who has to make up for her obsession. She would have been better off not having money in the first place.”

  “Her family is messed up, for sure. But she’s not lazy.”

  “When I’m gone, you’re going to have a little money from this house. And I do not want that money going to support Anabel. That money is for you. It’s not much, but your father worked hard, I worked hard. Please promise me you won’t give it to the daughter of a billionaire.”

  I considered my hardworking parents. “All right,” I said.

  “Do you promise?”

  I made the promise, but I wasn’t sure I would keep it.

  That summer, I started eating meat again. I went to Nevada and wrote a story for Esquire about the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository. I also nursed my mother through her radiation sickness and saw a lot of Cynthia and her little girl. Now it was Anabel to whom I made Sunday-night phone calls. She claimed to be having productive thoughts, and only when she said things like “Don’t forget me, Tom” was it less than nice to hear her voice. She wouldn’t have guessed that I was eating meat again, and I didn’t mention it.

  My mother continued to surprise me. After she’d recovered from her second, conclusively discouraging surgery, in October, she asked me to take her to Germany before she died. She’d been following the political developments there, the swelling exodus of East Germans through Czechoslovakia, and for the first time in many years she’d tried sending another letter to her family at its old address. Three weeks later, she got a long letter back from her brother. He and his wife were still living in the old place, his mother had died in 1961, his little sister was twice divorced, his older son had been admitted to the university. At least as my mother translated it to me, his letter was devoid of resentment, as if her disappearance were just another fact from a difficult childhood he’d long since put behind him. There was no mention of the many earlier letters he hadn’t answered. I wondered if he might never have been resentful, only fearful that the Stasi would frown on his corresponding with an escapee. And now people had stopped being afraid of the Stasi.

  On the strength of my three semesters of college German and my mother’s story, I contracted with Harper’s to write a firsthand account of communism’s collapse. My mother had lost a lot of weight and was looking truly scarecrowish, but her bowel was still functioning somehow, and she didn’t have a stoma. One evening, when I was helping her put her simple affairs in order, she set down her pen and said to me, “I think I’m going to die in Germany.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said.

  “I’m done here,” she said. “Cynthia is a good mother, a fine person, and you’re on your way to a fine career. I think Denver and I have had enough of each other. A life is a funny thing, Tom. People talk about putting down roots, but people aren’t trees. If I have any roots, they aren’t here.”

  She worried that she’d forgotten her German, but she was so good at language, had learned English so well, that I considered this unlikely. On our last night in Denver, Cynthia came over to our house without her daughter. When it was time for her to say good-bye, forever, I tried to leave her alone with my mother.

  “No, stay with us,” my mother said. “I want you to hear what I have to say.” She turned to Cynthia. “I want to apologize for not being a better mother to you when you were young. I made excuses for it, but that’s all they were, excuses, and I don’t deserve any of what you’ve done for me since then. You’ve been the best daughter a mother could ever ask for. You were the great gift your father gave me. If I’ve been lucky in nothing else, I’ve been lucky in you and Tom. I want you to know how deeply I appreciate everything you’ve done, and how sorry I am that I was ever unkind to you. You’re a wonderful person, more wonderful than I deserve.”

  Cynthia’s face had crumpled, but my mother remained dry-eyed, dignified. German. In the shadow of death, she was no longer the person I’d known. She’d become the person I hadn’t known, the German person. The decades of her unhappiness, the years of her dronings, now seemed like a long failure to find a good way to be American.

  By the time we left for Berlin, the Wall had been breached. (I mentally rearranged my unwritten story, as journalists do, to make it more about young Clelia.) After resting for a day in Berlin, we proceeded by train to Jena. Looking out the window at a town shrouded in coal smoke, my mother commented, “Thirty-five years they’ve had to make it even uglier. Thirty-five years, my God, of manufacturing ugliness. People will forget, but I don’t want you to forget: this part of Germany paid for its guilt.”

  I wrote this down in a notebook. East Germany may have been a giant penitentiary administered by the Russians, the Stasi may have embodied the worst excesses of German authority and bureaucratic thoroughness, and anyone with brains or spirit may have fled the country before the Wall went up, but the inmates who’d remained behind to expiate the country’s collective guilt had paradoxically been liberated from their Germanness. The ones I met in Jena were humble, unpunctual, spontaneous, and generous with what little they had. The country’s economy had been a sham from the start, and although the inmates had played along with the rules, attending the political-education meetings, licking their attendance stamps and pasting them into little books that reminded me of the Green Stamps of my youth, their real loyalties were to one another, not to the state. My uncle Klaus and his wife cleared out of the bedroom that had once been Annelie’s and gave it to my mother. They had a telephone but rarely used it. Friends simply appeared at the door and were ushered in to the weeklong house party with which my mother’s return was celebrated. There was endless beer and bad white wine and cream cakes. My presence was awkward, since I couldn’t understand much of the conversation, and I was relieved when, at the end of the week, my mother proposed that I leave her alone with her brother and come back to visit only on Saturday nights and Sundays. “You need to write your article,” she said. “They’ve offered to take care of me, but I want them to have a break every week.”

  “You’re sure this is what you want to do.”

  “That’s how they do things here,” she said. “They take care of each other.”

  “You’re sounding like an old Communist.”

  “It’s been forty years of terrible waste,” she said, “a whole country of wasted lives. It’s a country of big children, people being naughty behind the teacher’s back, people tattling on each other, people getting their dumb certificates for being good little socialists. People submitting to the system because they’re German and because it’s a system. The whole thing was stupid and a lie. But they’re not arrogant, not know-it-alls. They give what they have and they take me the way I am.”

  The closer she came to dying, the more sure of herself she became. She’d concluded that the meaning of a life was in the form of it. There was no answering the question of why she’d been born, she could only take what she’d been given and try to make it end well. She intended to die in her mother’s bedroom, in the company of her brother and her only offspring, without the indignity of a colostomy bag.

  I went back to Berlin, teamed up with a couple of young French journalists I’d met, and ended up squatting with them in a Friedrichshain apartment whose tenants had simply walked away from it and showed no sign of returning. For a month I made the weekly trip down to Jena, with an extra trip at Christmas, while my mother grew ever thinner and grayer. Thankfully, her pain was mostly tolerable. When she had a sharper attack of it, she rubbed her gums with the morphine that Dr. Van Schyllingerhout had given her to smuggle along with us.

  My last meal with her was breakfast on the second Sunday of January. She’d been up a few times in the night,
doing things that her dignity precluded my witnessing, and her eyes were hollow, the contours of her skull crisply visible beneath her thin skin, but she was still bright Clelia, her heart still beating, her brain still oxygenated and filled with her life. I was happy to see her eat an entire hard roll with butter.

  “I need to know what you and Anabel are going to do,” she said.

  “I’m not thinking about that now.”

  “Yes, but you’ll have to think about it soon.”

  “She needs to finish her project, and then we’re still hoping to have a family.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  I thought about this and said, “I want to see her happy again. She used to be amazing, and now she’s all beaten down. I think if she were happy and successful I’d be happy with her.”

  “Your happiness shouldn’t depend on hers,” my mother said. “You were a happy little boy, and I know your father and I weren’t the easiest parents, but I don’t think you were harmed. You have a right to be happy for yourself. If you’re with someone who can’t be happy, you need to think about what you’re going to do.”

  I promised to think about it, and my mother went to lie down in her mother’s bedroom while I struggled to read a German newspaper. Half an hour later, I heard her go into the bathroom. A while after that, I heard her scream. The scream has stayed with me, I can still play it in my head exactly as I heard it.

  She was on the toilet, doubled over and rocking with agony. She’d been on a toilet in distress countless times in her life, but this was, remarkably, the first time I’d ever seen her on one. She would have wished that I hadn’t, and I was and remain sorry, for her sake, that I did. She looked up at me, wild-eyed, and said, with a gasp, “Tom, my God, I’m dying.”

  I helped her up by the armpits and half carried her into the bedroom, leaving behind a bowl of blood and worse. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. Some part of her jerry-rigged colon had ruptured, and she was dying of sepsis. I rubbed morphine into her gums and stroked her fragile head. Her head was still so warm, I wondered what was happening inside it, but she didn’t speak to me again. I said it was OK, I said I loved her, I said not to worry about me. Her breathing became slower and more labored, and then, just past noon, it stopped altogether. I laid my cheek on her chest and held her for a long time, not thinking anything, just being an animal that had lost its mother. Then I got up and called the number my uncle had given me to get a message to him at his little weekend cottage.