Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  Klaus and I thought it was better to have no funeral than a tiny funeral. After the cremation, he and I walked along the river, among the lawns where my mother had sunned herself as a girl, and scattered half of the ashes along the riverbank. The other half I put aside for scattering in Denver with Cynthia. On the morning I left Jena, I thanked Klaus, in halting German, for everything he’d done. He shrugged and said my mother would have done the same for him. It occurred to me to ask what she’d been like as a girl.

  “Herrisch!” He laughed. “Now you see why I had to help her.”

  I looked up the unfamiliar word later. Bossy.

  On the train back to Berlin I stood at the rear of the last car the whole way, watching the receding track signals change from red to green. It didn’t feel so bad to be an orphan. It felt like the first day of a long vacation, a day as empty as the January sky was clear and sunny. The only cloud, Anabel, was in a different hemisphere. My sense of liberation was partly financial—Cynthia and Ellen and I would divide an estate worth more than $400,000—but it was larger than that. My parents had both bowed out now, leaving the entire field to me, and I could see that I’d been hobbling myself for Anabel’s sake, for fear of getting too far ahead of her.

  I’d promised to call her that afternoon, but scattering my mother’s ashes had made me aware of something childish and fundamentally irrelevant in the body-filming project, and I was afraid of betraying this if we spoke. My own body felt so vital, so far from its own death, that I went out walking instead, retracing my mother’s long-ago steps, mingling with foreign gawkers along the Wall in Moabit and then finding my way to the Kurfürstendamm.

  Near the western end of it, I stopped in a pub to eat a sausage and record my journalistic impressions in a notebook. At some point I noticed a man alone at the next table, a young German with a high forehead and loosely curly hair. He was watching the pub’s television with his arms draped across the chairs on either side of him. The wide-openness of his posture, the sense of ownership it broadcast, kept drawing my eyes to him. Finally he saw me looking and gave me a smile. As if letting me in on a joke, he pointed up at the TV screen.

  His face was on the screen as well. He was being interviewed on a city street, above a tag of ANDREAS WOLF, DDR SYSTEMKRITIKER. I couldn’t make out much of what he was saying, but I caught the word sunlight. When the news program cut away to a wide shot of what I recognized as the national headquarters of the Stasi, I looked over and saw that he’d spread his arms even wider. I stood up with my notebook and went over to his table. “Darf ich?”

  “Certainly,” he said in English. “You’re an American.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Americans are entitled to sit wherever they want.”

  “I don’t know about that. But I’m curious what you were saying there. My German isn’t great.”

  “Your notebook,” he said. “Are you a journalist?”

  “I am.”

  “Excellent.” He extended a hand. “Andreas Wolf.”

  I shook his hand and sat down across from him. “Tom Aberant.”

  “Can I buy you a beer?”

  “Let me buy you one.”

  “I’m the person celebrating. Never been on television, never been in the West, never spoken to an American. It’s my lucky night.”

  I bought us some beers and got him talking. He told me he’d been part of the storming of Stasi headquarters, where he’d found himself the de facto spokesman of the Citizens’ Committee demanding oversight of the archives, and had rewarded himself by making his first trip out of the East. He’d barely slept in sixty hours, but he didn’t seem tired. I was feeling similarly buoyant. The luck of meeting an East German dissident in his first hours in the West, before any other Western journalist had had a crack at him, was making my mood on the train from Jena seem prophetic.

  We finished the beers and went out to the street. Andreas didn’t walk so much as strut, in his tight jeans and army jacket, with his shoulders thrown back. The city’s atmosphere was still lingeringly festive, and he kept tossing his head at the foreigners and East Berliners on the Ku’damm, as if daring them not to recognize him. When we passed good-looking women, he pivoted sharply to stare after them. I had a feeling that Anabel wouldn’t like him, not one bit, and that I was furthering my liberation simply by walking with him.

  On a quieter block, he stopped in front of a BMW showroom. “What do you think, Tom? Should I try to want one of these cars? Now that there’s no East, only West?”

  “It’s your duty as a consumer to want them.”

  He gazed at the ultimate driving machines. “I’ve never seen anything more terrifying in my life. Everyone else couldn’t wait to come here. Everyone else was too stupid to be terrified.”

  “How would you feel about my writing down what you’re saying?”

  “That’s what you want?”

  “You seem like a person with stories to tell.”

  He laughed. “And let me speak to the yet unknowing world how these things came about: so shall you hear of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts … Who am I quoting?”

  “I believe that is Horatio’s final speech.”

  “Very good!” He hit me, flat-handed, on the shoulder. “Is it just you, or am I going to like every American?”

  “Probably somewhere in between.”

  “You’d laugh if you could see my image of America. Skyscrapers and a wretched underclass. Brechtian exploitation. Gorkian lower depths, Mick Jagger as the devil. Puerto Rican girls just dyin’ to meetchoo.”

  “I recommend lowering your expectations.”

  “Should I go there?”

  “To New York? Definitely. I can show you all around.”

  I was aware of benefiting, in his estimation, from being an American; aware also of the shame I would feel if he came to New York and witnessed the kind of life I had with Anabel. He gave the finger to the shiny BMWs and kept the finger raised above his shoulder as we proceeded down the sidewalk.

  What he’d told me already—that he’d spent his twenties as a designated antisocial citizen, living outside the socialist grid, in the basement of a church—was going straight into my Harper’s piece. And yet journalism was the least of the reasons why, when we parted ways at Friedrichstraße, I asked him to meet me there again the following afternoon. Andreas looked nothing like Anabel, except that he was skinny, but his self-assurance was so reckless that it gave the impression of something damaged or anguished underneath, something that reminded me of the charismatic damaged girl I’d fallen for. Or maybe he just reminded me of what a crush felt like.

  Like it or not, I absolutely had to call Anabel the next day. This could only be done from a booth at a post office, and while Andreas showed me around the center of East Berlin, pointing out the church where he’d counseled at-risk teens, the privileged Oberschule he’d attended, the youth club where frowned-upon bands had played, the bars where the Asoziale had congregated, I became nervous about finding a post office before closing time. Finally I said as much to him.

  “What will happen if you don’t call her?”

  “More trouble than not calling her is worth.”

  “OK, serious question: is this what being married is like?”

  “Why? Are you considering it yourself?”

  His expression became earnest. We were on a street in Prenzlauer Berg littered with the crap furniture that people had been throwing out their windows since the Wall came down. “Not marriage,” he said. “But there is a girl. She’s very young, I hope you’ll get to meet her. If you meet her, you’ll see why I’m asking.”

  It was a measure of how much I was liking him that his mention of a girl made me jealous. I had no doubt that she was unbelievably beautiful and as keen for sex as Anabel wasn’t. I envied him for that. Weirder, and indicative of the raw place where losing my mother had landed me, was that I also envied the girl for the entrée that being female gave her to his private life.

 
“Call your wife,” he said. “I’ll wait for you.”

  “No, fuck it,” I said. “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

  “Do you have a picture of her?”

  I did, in my wallet, a snapshot from Italy, a flattering picture. Andreas studied it and nodded with approval, but I saw or imagined that I saw something relax in him, as if he now knew for sure he had the better woman; had won that particular competition. I felt sorry for Anabel but sorry for myself as well, for having to be her defender.

  He handed back the snapshot. “You’re loyal to her.”

  “So far.”

  “Eleven years—fantastic.”

  “A vow is a vow.”

  “It won’t be easy for me to live up to your standard.”

  Already he, too, seemed to be thinking we might be friends. As we continued to walk, in the underlit streets, he alluded to his country’s pollution, its literal and spiritual pollution, and to his own personal pollution. “You don’t even know how clean you are.”

  “I haven’t had a bath in three days.”

  “You worry about calling your wife. You nurse your mother when she’s dying. These things seem obvious to you, but they’re not obvious to everyone.”

  “It’s more like a morbidly overdeveloped sense of duty.”

  “Your mother—how old was she?”

  “Fifty-five.”

  “Shit luck. Good mother?”

  “I don’t know. I always thought she was a problem, and now I can’t think of one bad thing she ever did to me.”

  “How was she a problem?”

  “She didn’t like my wife.”

  “And you were loyal to your wife.”

  “You’ve got me wrong,” I said. “I’m sick of clean. I’m sick of my marriage. I’ve been wasting my life.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “I’m so fucking sick of who I am.”

  “I know that feeling, too.”

  “Do you want to get a beer?”

  He stopped walking and looked at his watch. It hurt my pride to be so much the asker, but I was determined to be his friend. He had an irresistible magnetism and an air of secret sorrow, secret knowledge. Years later, when he became internationally famous, I wasn’t surprised. The whole world seemed to feel what I’d felt for him, and I was never able to begrudge him his success, because I knew that underneath, inside him, something was broken.

  “Yeah, OK, a beer,” he said.

  We went into a bar, aptly named the Hole, and there I proceeded to lacerate myself. I told Andreas how I’d ignored my mother’s warnings about Anabel and then all but abandoned her for eleven years. How I’d ignored Anabel’s father’s warnings, ignored my own instinctual liking for him, and pledged my allegiance to a nutty woman. I was betraying Anabel with every word I said, and the terrible thing was how good betrayal felt. It was as if all I’d needed was some plausible alternative to her, some potential male friend for whom I had a crushlike feeling, to admit to myself how angry I was at her; how angry I perhaps had always been.

  My confession was no less sincere for having a tactical dimension. I’d never spoken to a source about my marriage, but openness was my modus, my way of encouraging sources to open up in turn. It didn’t mean I was manipulative; it meant I had a personality made for journalism. And I could tell, from the raptness of Andreas’s attention, that my American style was effective with a German. It had been my father’s style, too, and my mother, at twenty, had been defenseless against it.

  “So what are you going to do?” Andreas said when I was finished.

  “Anything that’s not going back to Harlem sounds good to me.”

  “You should call her tomorrow. If you’re really not going back.”

  “Yeah, all right. Maybe.”

  He was looking at me intensely. “I like you,” he said. “I’d like to help you write the truth about my country. But I’m afraid that if you knew my own story, you wouldn’t like me.”

  “Why don’t you tell it and let me be the judge.”

  “If you could meet Annagret, you might understand. But I’m not allowed to see her yet.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes, really.”

  The bar had filled up with cigarette smoke, cancerous-looking men, and girls with haircuts that only a day ago I would have considered ghastly. Now, when I permitted myself to imagine sleeping with one of those haircuts, it seemed like something I would soon be doing, if I didn’t leave Berlin.

  “It’s good to talk about things,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I can’t tell you.”

  We were in territory familiar to a journalist. Sources who bothered to allude to stories they couldn’t tell me almost always ended up telling them. The important thing was to talk about anything that wasn’t the untold story. I bought us another round of beers and got him laughing with an attack on twentieth-century British literature, which he seemed to know inside out and was shocked by my dismissal of. Then I defended the Beatles while he extolled the Stones, and we found common ground in ridiculing the Dylan worshippers, both American and German. We talked for three hours, while the Hole emptied out and the untold story hovered in the vicinity. Finally Andreas covered his face and pressed hard on his closed eyes. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  It was curious, in retrospect, how little I’d identified with my father; how wholly I’d sided with my mother. But now she was dead, and as I walked into the dark Tiergarten with Andreas I could have been my dad on the night he’d met her. A chance meeting, a tall young woman from the East, a city alive with possibility. He must have been amazed to have her at his side.

  We sat down on a bench.

  “This is not for publication,” Andreas said. “This is simply to help you understand.”

  “I’m here as a friend.”

  “A friend. Interesting. I’ve never had a friend.”

  “Never?”

  “When I was in school, people liked me. But I found them contemptible. Cowardly, boring. And then I became an outcast, a dissident. No one trusted me, and I trusted them even less. They were cowardly and boring, too. A person like you couldn’t have existed in that country.”

  “But now the dissidents have won.”

  “Can I trust you?”

  “You have no way of knowing it, but, yes, you absolutely can.”

  “See if you still want to be my friend when you hear what I have to tell you.”

  In the darkness, in the center of a city too diffuse and underpopulated to fill the sky with its noise, he told me how well connected his parents had been. How privileged he himself had been until he’d thrown away his life with an act of political defiance. And how, after his expulsion from the university, he’d drifted into a Milan Kundera world of pussy; how he’d then met a girl who’d changed his life, a girl whose soul he loved, and how he’d tried to save her from the stepfather who’d abused her. How the stepfather had pursued them to his parents’ dacha. How he’d killed the stepfather in self-defense, with a shovel that happened to be at hand, and buried the body behind the dacha. He told me about his subsequent paranoia and his good fortune in retrieving his police and surveillance files from the Stasi archives.

  “I did it to protect her,” he said. “My life is not worth protecting, but hers is.”

  “But it was self-defense. Why didn’t you just report it?”

  “For the same reason she hadn’t gone to the authorities. The Stasi protect their own. The truth is whatever they want it to be. We both would have gone to prison.”

  I’d interviewed convicted murderers in the past. I’d been a little scared of each of them, in an purely instinctive way, as if their history might repeat itself on me. But in the state I was in, after so much beer and conversation, I found myself strangely envious of Andreas, for the largeness and extremity of the life he’d led.

  He’d begun to cry, voicelessly.

  “It was bad, Tom,” he said. “It never goes away. I didn’t m
ean to kill him. But I did it. I did it…”

  I put my arm around his shoulders, and he turned to me and clung to me.

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “Not all right. Not all right.”

  “No, no. It’s all right.”

  He cried for a long time. I stroked his head and held him close. If he’d been a woman, I would have kissed his hair. But strict limits to intimacy are the straight man’s burden. He pulled away and composed himself.

  “So that’s my story,” he said.

  “You got away with it.”

  “Not quite. She won’t see me until I know we’re safe. We’re almost safe, but there’s still a body in my parents’ yard.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Worse than that. They may be selling the house to speculators. There’s talk of digging up the ground. If I want to see her again, I have to move the body.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t help you with that.”

  “No, you’re clean. I would never involve you.”

  There was a note of tenderness in his voice. I asked what he planned to do about the body.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I could learn to drive a car, but that would take time. I’m worried that I’m going to lose her. I guess I could do it with two suitcases, a trip on a train.”

  “That would be some high-stress train trip.”

  “I have to see her again. Whatever is needed, I’ll do it. That’s my only plan—to see her again.”

  I felt another twinge of jealousy. Of exclusion; of competition with the girl. How else to explain what I said then?

  “I can help you.”

  “No.”

  “I just cremated my mother. I’m up for it.”