Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  “No.”

  “I’m an American. I have a driver’s license.”

  “No. It’s a dirty business.”

  “If you’ve been telling me the truth, it’s a thing worth doing.”

  “I have to do it alone. I have no way to repay you.”

  “No repayment necessary. I’m offering as a friend.”

  Somewhere in the distance, in the dark trees and bushes behind us, a cat cried out faintly. Then there came a second cry, somewhat louder, not a cat. It was a woman receiving pleasure.

  “What about the archives,” Andreas said.

  “What about them?”

  “The committee is going to Normannenstraße again on Friday. I could get you in.”

  “I don’t see them letting an American do that.”

  “Your mother was German. You represent the people who escaped. They have files, too.”

  “This doesn’t have to be a quid pro quo.”

  “Not quid pro quo. Friendship.”

  “It would certainly be a journalistic coup.”

  Andreas jumped up from the bench. “Let’s do it! Both things.” He leaned over me and clapped me on the arms. “Shall we do it?”

  The woman in the distance was crying out again. I had the thought that I could have this very woman, or one just like her, if I stayed with Andreas in Berlin.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Early the next morning, in Friedrichshain, I woke up in a state of remorse. The linens on my bed hadn’t been clean to begin with, and I’d never washed them; had simply accustomed myself to squalor. If the person I’d fallen for had been female, and had been lying next to me in bed, naked, I might have been able to block out thoughts of Anabel. As it was, the only way I could get back to sleep was to resolve to call Anabel later in the day and try to make amends for what I’d said to Andreas about her.

  But when I did get up, around noon, the prospect of hearing her voice, its tremolo of injury, was repellent to me. The voice I wanted to hear and the face I wanted to see were Andreas’s. I went over to West Berlin and rented a car, making sure I was permitted to take it outside the city limits. Returning home, I found a telegram addressed to me on the floor of the vestibule.

  CALL ME.

  I lay down in my unclean bed, the telegram beside me, to wait for the city’s coal smoke to thicken into darkness and the post offices to drop their shutters.

  Driving out to the suburbs, under the cover of night, I swerved around a stopped streetcar and nearly mowed down the riders who came bursting out of its doors. They shouted angrily, and I waved my hands in American apology. With the help of my father’s old patented-fold Berlin map, I navigated through endless neighborhoods of German penitence. The streets near the Müggelsee were more built up and heavily trafficked than I’d imagined; I was relieved to find the Wolfs’ summer house secluded by overgrown conifers.

  I cut the lights and drove the car onto the frozen lawn and around behind the house, as Andreas had instructed me. From there I could see the iced-over lake, mottled white beneath a dome of urban cloud, and a toolshed in the rear corner of the lot. Andreas was standing by the shed with a shovel and a tarp.

  “Any trouble?” he said cheerfully.

  “A near-fatal accident, but no.”

  “You’re good to do this for me.”

  “Thank me later.”

  He led me into the woods behind the shed. There was a pile of dirt and a corresponding hole. “My hands are terrible,” he said. “The dirt on top was frozen hard. But now I think we can just lift the thing out by the clothes. I already lifted up both ends.”

  I looked down into the hole. There was enough ambient light to see that the body’s coveralls, now impregnated with sandy mud, had once been blue. They gave the bones the shape and some of the bulk of a body. There looked to be some shreds of skin still on the hand bones. The smell wasn’t bad, a faint rot on rot, like moldy cheese. Only one thing was missing.

  “Where’s the head?”

  Andreas nodded over his shoulder. “In a plastic bag. No need for you to see that.”

  I appreciated his consideration. Having sat so recently with my mother’s body, I was still in a penumbra of inurement to death. But a skull, perhaps with bits of hair on it, would have been a bad sight. The bones were more safely abstract without it. I felt that in making myself look at them, I was ensuring that I could never go back to Anabel.

  Nevertheless, my jaw was shuddering, and not simply from the cold. Andreas spread the tarp, and we straddled the hole and tugged on the coveralls. They must have been rotten underneath. They came apart in the middle, dumping bones and various lumps of unidentifiable substance.

  “Fuck this,” I said.

  “Yeah, OK. Leave it to me.”

  I stood at the edge of the lake while Andreas heaved and shoveled things out of the hole. I didn’t go back until he’d rolled up the tarp and was filling the hole with dirt again. I helped him with that, to speed things along.

  “I got us some sandwiches,” he said when we’d stowed the tarp and its contents in the trunk of the car.

  “I can’t say I have much appetite.”

  “Force yourself. We have a long drive.”

  We washed our hands with a bottle of mineral water and ate the sandwiches. I was cold again, and in the cold it occurred to me, as it somehow hadn’t before, that I was about to commit a serious crime. I felt a pang, not a large one, but a definite pang of homesickness for Anabel. Bad as our life had become, it was domestic, predictable, monogamous, uncriminal. In a corner of my mind, a rat of a thought scurried: that I’d met Andreas forty-eight hours ago, that I didn’t really know him, and that he might have not told me the whole truth; that, indeed, he might have been working me all along, as his ticket back to Annagret.

  “Reassure me about the police,” I said. “I’m picturing a routine traffic stop. Please open the trunk.”

  “The police have bigger things to worry about these days.”

  “I did almost kill about six people on the way over here.”

  “Would you be happier if I said I’m scared out of my mind?”

  “Are you?”

  “A little bit, yeah.” He punched me in the arm. “You?”

  “I’ve had funner evenings.”

  “I won’t forget what you’re doing for me, Tom. Never.”

  In the car, with the heat blasting, I felt better. Andreas told me more about his life, the bizarrely literary terms in which he understood it, and his yearning for a better, cleaner life with Annagret. “We’re going to find a place to live,” he said. “You can stay with us for as long as you want. It’s the least we can do for you.”

  “And you’ll do what for a living?”

  “I haven’t thought so far ahead.”

  “Journalism?”

  “Maybe. What’s it like?”

  I told him what it was like, and he seemed interested, but I sensed a faint, unspoken distaste, as if he had grander ambitions that he was tactfully refraining from mentioning. It was the same sense I’d had when he looked at Anabel’s picture: he was happy to admire what I had as long as what he had was even better. This might not have boded well for a future friendship of equals, but there at the beginning, in the very warm car, it was consonant with my experience of crushes—the feeling of inferiority, the hope of being found worthy nonetheless.

  “The Citizens’ Committee is meeting tomorrow morning,” he said. “You should come along with me, so they know who you are on Friday. How’s your German?”

  “Eh.”

  “Sprich. Sprich.”

  “Ich bin Amerikaner. Ich bin in Denver geboren—”

  “The r is wrong. Say it more in the throat. Amerikaner. Geboren.”

  “My r’s are the least of my problems.”

  “Noch mal, bitte: Amerikaner.”

  “Amerikaner.”

  “Geboren.”

  “Geboren.”

  For a good hour, we worked on my pronunciation.
It makes me sad to think of that hour. Judging from his arrogant street presentation, I would never have guessed what a patient teacher he was. We were already assuming that I would stay on in Berlin, but I could also feel that he liked both me and his language and wanted us to get along.

  “Let’s work on your English accent,” I said.

  “My accent is flawless! I’m the son of an English professor.”

  “You sound like the BBC. You’ve got to flatten your a’s. You haven’t really lived until you’ve said a like an American. They’re one of the glories of our nation. Say can’t for me.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Aaaaa. Caaaan’t. Like a bleating goat.”

  “Caaaaan’t.”

  “There you go. The British have no concept of what they’re missing.”

  On the outskirts of a no-account town, we stopped at a shuttered gas station so that Andreas could dig into a trash bin and bury the skull in it. Waiting in the car, I felt convinced that I was performing a good deed. If my mother hadn’t emigrated, if I’d been born in a Stasi-shadowed country, I might have killed a Stasi rat in self-defense myself. Helping Andreas seemed to me a way of atoning for my American advantages.

  “You didn’t leave the engine running,” he remarked when he was back in the car.

  “Didn’t want to be conspicuous.”

  “It’s a question of efficiency. Now you have to warm it up again.”

  I put the car in gear and smiled at knowing better. “In the first place,” I said, “what heats a car is excess engine heat. The added fuel use is zero. You might know this if you’d ever driven one. More to the point, it’s never efficient to maintain heat in a cold environment.”

  “That’s completely false.”

  “No, in fact it’s true.”

  “Completely false.” He seemed eager to spar. “If you’re heating a house, it’s much more efficient to maintain a temperature of sixteen degrees overnight than to raise the temperature from five degrees in the morning. My father always did it at the dacha.”

  “Your father was wrong.”

  “He was the chief economist of a major industrialized nation!”

  “I’m understanding better why the nation failed.”

  “Trust me, Tom. You’re wrong about this.”

  It happened that my own father had explained to me the thermodynamics of home heating. Without mentioning him, I pointed out to Andreas that the rate of caloric transfer is proportional to temperature differential—the warmer the house, the more profusely it bleeds calories on a cold night. Andreas tried to fight me with integral calculus, but I remembered the basics of that, too. We tussled while I drove. He advanced ever-more esoteric arguments, refusing to accept that his father had been wrong. When I finally defeated him, I could feel that something had changed between us, some hook of friendship set. He seemed both confounded and admiring. Until then, I don’t think he’d believed I was a worthy intellectual adversary.

  It was after midnight when we reached the Oder valley. We crossed a decrepit wooden bridge to an island used only in the summer, by farmers growing hay. The crusted snow on the dikes between frozen marshes was virgin. I didn’t like the tracks we were leaving, but Andreas said that the forecast was for rain and warmer weather. On the far side of the island was a tangle of woods that he remembered from a nature walk he’d taken while attending an elite summer camp. “It was the height of privilege,” he said. “We had border guards with us.”

  Whatever the East German army was doing now, it was doing it somewhere else. We hustled the rolled-up tarp and two shovels up into a ravine where our footprints wouldn’t be visible. From there, we struggled through leafless brambles and into the woods.

  “Here,” he said.

  The digging was hard but also warming. I was ready to stop when we were one foot down, but Andreas insisted on digging deeper. An owl was calling from somewhere near, but the only other sound was the crunch of our shovels and the crack of the tree roots we encountered.

  “Now leave me alone,” he said.

  “I don’t mind helping. It’s not like not helping will lessen my criminal offense.”

  “I’m burying what I was before I knew Annagret. This is personal.”

  I walked away from the grave and stayed away until he was throwing dirt on the remains. Then I helped him finish the burial and cover the spot with leaves and dirty snow. By the time we returned to the road, a fog had gathered, brighter in the east where the night was ending. We stowed the shovels in the trunk. After Andreas had slammed down the lid, he let out a falsetto whoop. He jumped up and down and whooped again.

  “Jesus, shut up,” I said.

  He grasped me by the arms and looked me in the eye. “Thank you, Tom. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  “You need to understand what this means to me. To have a friend I can trust.”

  “If I tell you I understand, can we hit the road?”

  His eyes were shining strangely. He leaned into me, and for a moment I thought he might kiss me. But it was merely a hug. I returned it, and we stood for a while in awkward embrace. I could feel him breathing, feel the humidity of his sweat escaping from beneath his army jacket. He put a hand on the back of my head, his fingers closing around my hair the way Anabel’s might have. Then, abruptly, he broke away from me. “Wait here.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “One minute,” he said.

  I watched him run back up the ravine and kick through the brambles. I hadn’t liked his whooping, and I liked this additional delay even less. I lost sight of him in the trees, but I could hear sticks snapping, the rustle of his jacket on branches. Then a deep rural silence. And then, faintly but distinctly, the clink of a belt buckle. The sound of a zipper.

  To avoid hearing more, I walked up the road in the direction of our tire tracks. I tried to put myself in Andreas’s position, tried to imagine the relief and exhilaration he was feeling, but there was simply no squaring his avowed remorse with defiling his victim’s final grave.

  His business was done in a few minutes. He came running up the road, running and jumping. When he reached my side, he turned in a complete circle with his arms in the air and the middle finger of each hand extended. He whooped again.

  “Can we leave?” I said coolly.

  “Absolutely! You can drive twice as fast now.”

  He seemed not to notice that my mood had changed. In the car, he was manically voluble, bouncing from subject to subject—how it could work for me to live with him and Annagret, how exactly he was going to get me into the archives, and how the two of us could collaborate, him unlocking the forbidden doors, me writing the stories. He urged me to drive faster, to pass trucks on blind curves. He recited old poems of his and explicated them. He recited long passages of Shakespeare in English, banging out the blank-verse rhythm on the dashboard. Every now and then, he paused to whoop again, or to pummel me in the arm with two fists.

  When we finally reached his church in Berlin, on Siegfeldstraße, my mouth tasted metallic with exhaustion. He wanted to grab a quick breakfast and go straight to the Citizens’ Committee meeting, but I said, truthfully, that I had to lie down.

  “Leave it to me, then,” he said.

  “OK.”

  “I’m never forgetting this, Tom. Never, never, never.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  I popped the trunk lid and got out of the car. Seeing Andreas take out the shovels in full daylight, I wondered, belatedly, which one of them had been the murder weapon. In my sleep-deprived state, it seemed very bad that I might have used that particular shovel.

  He clapped me on the shoulder. “You all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Get some sleep. Meet me here at seven. We’ll have dinner.”

  “Sounds good.”

  I never saw him again. When I awoke, in my filthy sheets, it was an hour before the rental-car office closed. I returned t
he car and walked back to my squat in the dark. I still had a hankering to see Andreas’s face and hear his voice—I have it even as I write this—but the sadness from which I’d been running was hitting me so hard that I could barely stand upright. I lay down on the bed and wept for myself, and for Anabel, and for Andreas, but above all for my mother.

  * * *

  The approach of thunderstorms was making the New Jersey sky three-dimensional, a many-tiered vault of variously shaded cloud, gray and white and hepatic green, when Anabel led me out of the woods and up through a pasture to Suzanne’s parents’ house. She claimed that she wanted to show me something quickly before taking me back to catch my bus, but I knew that my actually catching the 8:11 bus was as arrant a fantasy as our ever finding a way to live together again, if only because the business of escaping from her, of enforcing my right to leave, was so painful that I shied from it like a brutalized animal. Anything at all was preferable, and there was also the prospect of further sex, which promised minutes of relief from consciousness.

  And still I balked at the door of the house. It was a sixties-modern summer place with a mountain view and some apple trees behind it. Anabel went right in, but I hung in the doorway, my stomach suddenly upset like the sky, my heart racing with what I now think was straightforward PTSD.

  “Won’t you come inside with me?” she said in a tone whose very sweetness was insane.

  “I think after all maybe not.”

  “Do you realize you left your toothbrush here last time?”

  “My dentist keeps me well supplied.”

  “The man who ‘forgets’ his toothbrush in a woman’s house is a man who wants to come back.”

  My panic intensified. I looked over my shoulder and saw a fractal of lightning on the next ridge over; I waited for the thunder. When I looked into the house again, Anabel was not in sight. I considered, quite seriously, strangling her to death while I fucked her and then throwing myself in front of the 8:11 bus. The idea was not without its logic and appeal. But there were the bus driver’s feelings to consider …

  I stepped into the house and closed the screen door behind me. With my help, she’d cleared the furniture from the living room, leaving only a mat for her yoga and meditation. She hadn’t officially abandoned her film project, it was merely on hold while she sought to regain her calm and centeredness. She was living on the half of my inheritance I’d given her as part of our divorce settlement. After returning from Berlin, I’d needed no more than a day with her to recognize that my homesickness had been grounded in a fantasy. She’d said she wasn’t spaghetti with eggplant, but to me she really was. And so I’d built us a new fantasy of divorce as our only hope of reuniting.