Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  “I remember that.” She wouldn’t look at him. “I remember everything. Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Because we’re safe now. We’re safe and I love you.”

  She stared for a while at the tabletop. Then she nodded.

  “Do you want to know why we’re safe?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I have the case files, and I’ve moved what needed to be moved.”

  She nodded again.

  “You’re not happy to hear that?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of what we did.”

  “Annagret. Please look at me.”

  She shook her head, and he understood that the problem had never been that they weren’t safe. The problem was that he reminded her of what he’d put her through.

  “It’s better if you just go,” she said.

  “I can’t go,” he said. “I can’t imagine life without you.”

  Before she could reply, the front door squeaked open and two women came in, talking about the New Forum. Annagret jumped up and disappeared into the kitchen. Soon other regulars arrived, all women. Though they didn’t seem actively hostile, Andreas felt like a foreign body in an organism quietly trying to rid itself of him. A midge in a watering eye.

  A girl he recognized, the friend he’d seen with Annagret in Berlin two months ago, arrived and joined her in waiting tables. The friend asked him if he wanted anything.

  “Nothing, thank you.”

  “I don’t want to be rude,” the friend said. “But maybe you should leave now.”

  “Yeah, OK.”

  “It’s not personal. It’s just the kind of place we are.”

  The midge was as relieved to be expelled as the watering eye was to expel it. Outside, in a cold drizzle, he considered taking the train back to Berlin and resuming his role as a PROMINENT EAST GERMAN DISSIDENT, giving Annagret more time to think. If Tom Aberant hadn’t vanished on him, he might have done it. Having even one real friend, a friend who knew his secret and had volunteered to help him bury it forever, might have lessened the urgency of his need for Annagret. But Tom hadn’t kept his date for dinner. Andreas had waited for hours for him to show up. The next day, returning from a round of interviews, he’d asked every person at the church whether an American had come around to look for him. He hadn’t had the sense, not at all, that Tom was merely seducing him for journalistic purposes. Even if he was, it made no sense for him to disappear before Andreas had got him into the Stasi archives. The explanation had to be that Tom had gone home to his wife: he hadn’t liked Andreas as much as he liked the woman he supposedly was sick to death of. The sting of this rejection was a measure of the swiftness and depth of the liking Andreas had taken to him. To be rejected by Annagret as well was simply not an option.

  He went to the Leipzig train station and fished newspapers from trash cans and read them, feeling fortified when he saw his own name. Who could resist the temptation of believing one’s own press? In the evening, he returned to the teahouse and waited outside until it went dark and Annagret and her friend were lowering its shutters.

  “Go away,” the friend said to him. “She doesn’t want to see you.”

  “That sounds personal,” he said.

  “Yes, now it’s personal.”

  “I have to go back to Berlin. There’s a lot going on, and I need to be part of it. My name is Andreas, by the way.”

  “I know who you are. We saw you on TV.”

  “Annagret,” he said. “I have to go back. Won’t you at least take a walk with me?”

  “She doesn’t want to,” the friend said.

  “A short walk,” he said. “We have some private family things to talk about. The three of us can get together later on.”

  “All right,” Annagret said suddenly, pulling away from the friend.

  “Annagret—”

  “He’s not like the others. And he’s right—there is a family thing.”

  Andreas noted, not for the first time, that she had some skill at lying. When he and she were alone, walking under umbrellas, she apologized for the friend. “Birgit is just very protective.”

  “She seems particularly good at keeping men away.”

  “I can do that myself. But it gets tiring, the constant attention. It’s nice to have some help.”

  “The attention is that constant?”

  “It’s disgusting. It’s actually been worse in Leipzig. Yesterday a guy pulled up next to me on his bike and asked me if I’d marry him.”

  Although Andreas would have liked to break the guy’s nose, he couldn’t help feeling proud of the testament to Annagret’s beauty. “That’s very hard,” he said. “It’s hard to be you.”

  “He didn’t even know me.”

  They walked in silence for a while.

  “The thing we did,” she said. “I did it for you.”

  He was sorry to hear it, but also the opposite of sorry.

  “I was out of my mind,” she said. “I was crazy for you. And I did a thing that ruined my life, and now it’s all I can think of when I see you. The thing I did for you.”

  “But I did what I did for you, too. I’d do it again right now. I’d do anything to protect you.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Come to Berlin with me. Leipzig is a shithole.”

  “You’re not going to leave me alone, are you.”

  “There’s no other way. We were meant to be together.”

  She stopped walking. No one else was on the sidewalk, and he’d already lost track of where they were. “The most terrible thing of all?” she said. “I like that you’re a killer.”

  “I think I’m more than that.”

  “But that’s the reason I’ll go with you, if I go. Isn’t that terrible?”

  It did seem a little terrible, because only now, when she called him a killer, was he overcome with lust for her. He steeled himself against the urge to take her in his arms.

  “We have to try to make amends,” she said. “We have to do good things.”

  “Yes.”

  “Lots and lots of good things. Both of us.”

  “That’s what I want. To be good with you.”

  “Oh God.” A sob escaped her. “Please go back to Berlin. Please, An—”

  She’d been about to say his name. He realized that he’d never heard her say it.

  “Can you say my name?” he said, pursuing an instinct.

  She shook her head.

  “Just look at me and say my name. Then I’ll go back to Berlin. I’ll wait however long I have to.”

  She ran away from him. Suddenly, full speed, holding her umbrella to one side. He lost a few seconds in deciding to chase after her, and she was so young and so fleet, his judo girl, that he would never have caught up with her if she hadn’t come to a red light and taken too sharp a turn at the corner. The drizzle must have frozen there. Her feet went out from under her, and it sickened him to see her fall.

  She was still on the ground, clutching her hip, when he reached her.

  “Are you all right?”

  “No. Or actually, yes. I’m all right.” And there it was—the smile he’d longed to see. “You told me not to self-dramatize. Do you remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “I remember everything. Every word.”

  He crouched down and took her cold hands in his and let her look into his eyes. He saw that he could have her. But instead of a symphony of joy and gratitude, he heard a horrid little voice of doubt: Are you sure you really love her? No sooner does she chide herself for being self-dramatizing than she claims to remember every single word you ever said to her! She has no sense of humor—don’t you think this might become oppressive? He tried to deafen himself to the voice. She was, after all, uniquely beautiful. Two years ago, when he’d presented her with a menu of options that included murder, she’d picked murder. She was a good girl who was also dirty and
a liar. Other men’s interest disgusted her, but somehow his didn’t. She knew he’d been bad and she wanted him anyway; was offering him a better life.

  “Let’s go to your place and pack your bags,” he said.

  “Birgit will hate me.”

  “Not as much as she hates me.”

  For two or three years, he was happy with her. She was very young and didn’t know anything about anything, certainly not how to share a life with a man, and although he himself had never shared a life with a woman, he was older and she presumed that he knew everything. She had a way of gazing solemnly into his eyes while he was on top of her, inside her, completely having her, and the mere recollection of this gaze turned him on for reasons he was slow to understand. As long as her idealistic ardor lasted, he let her buy little things, bedspreads, earthenware mugs, lampshades, that he knew were ugly. He praised the dismal Indian meals she’d taught herself to cook. He took pleasure in watching her find her way in Berlin, making new friends and reuniting with old ones, joining collectives, going to work at a women’s support services center. When they were out together, he felt proud, not oppressed, that she held him by the arm and never looked at any man but him. When they were at home, she was heartbreakingly eager to please. She seemed to have the idea that the more they made love, the more it confirmed that they were meant to be a couple and that she hadn’t done a bad thing in succumbing to the killer of her stepfather. For two or three years, he was the happy beneficiary of this idea more nights than not.

  But the problem with sex as an idea was that ideas could change. By and by, Annagret developed a different and much drearier idea, of total honesty in bed, with heavy emphasis on discussion. He indulged it at first, trying to be a good man, trying to live up to an ideal image that he, too, still had of himself, but there was finally no way around it: endless discussion with a humorless twenty-three-year-old bored him. During the day, when they were apart, he kept picturing her solemn gaze, but when he came home he found a person with no resemblance to the object he’d desired. She was tired, had cramps, had evening plans, some needy woman’s hand to hold somewhere, some no-chance cause to organize another protest for. Or, even worse, wanted to discuss her feelings. Or, worst of all, wanted to discuss his feelings.

  To escape domestic boredom, he attended overseas conferences, in Sydney and São Paulo and Sunnyvale. Besides his work on the Gauck Commission, administering the Stasi archives, he did transitional-justice consulting all over the former Eastern Bloc, sitting in overlit conference rooms identical in every respect but the languages on the mineral-water bottles from which unreconciled antagonists were pouring. Because reporters and cameras were so fond of him, he was starting to hear directly from corporate and governmental whistle-blowers in reunified Germany, and because committee work didn’t suit his personality (he was singular, not collegial) he was thinking about setting up on his own, becoming a clearinghouse for secrets, omitting the committees and dealing directly with the media. But his domestic problem, the disparity between the nighttime object he desired and the daylight actuality of Annagret, followed him everywhere. Even when he was alone in a hotel room in Sydney, turned on by the recollection of her solemn gaze, he had only to call home and hear her voice for two minutes to be bored with her. The boredom was immediate and overwhelming. Whatever they were talking about was wildly irrelevant, intolerably irrelevant, to what he wanted.

  He saw that he’d trapped himself. He’d set up house less with a woman than with a wishful concept of himself as a man who could live happily ever after with a woman. And now he was bored with the concept. Although he never raised his voice with Annagret, he began to sulk and take offense at inoffensive things. He made subtly mocking comments about her work and was unfair to her female friends, whom he considered losers and resented for exploiting the weak link of Annagret to latch on to his fame. He gave lame excuses for avoiding them, and when a social outing couldn’t be avoided he was alternately cold, silent, or insulting. He behaved like a jerk and paid a price for it in self-regard, but he persisted in it, hoping that she would recognize it as a well-known sign of trouble in a relationship, and that maybe, eventually, he would be able to escape the trap.

  But she was relentlessly good to him. When she got angry, it was rarely for long. She, who was otherwise a stalwart feminist, surrounded by man-distrusters, continued to carve out an exception for him. She took his work seriously and gave him helpful advice. She washed the dirty clothes and dishes he’d taken to leaving scattered around the flat. And the nicer she was, the more deeply he was trapped. Trapped by his gratitude for her high esteem and his fear of forfeiting it, trapped also by the early promises and avowals he’d made, the fuel with which he’d fired her idealism (and, for a while, his own). And because there were very few women who could top her combination of beauty and youth, and none at all from whom he wouldn’t have had to conceal that he was a murderer, and because he was in any case already famous enough that word of an affair was liable to get back to Annagret and shatter her idealization of him, other women seemed foreclosed to him.

  Completing his entrapment was Annagret’s friendship with his mother. Back in 1990, after they’d set up house in Berlin and accustomed themselves to appearing in public together, unlearning the fear of incriminating themselves by doing so, he’d taken her to meet his parents. For the sake of his father, to whom he felt grateful and whose good opinion he prized, he ran the risk that his mother would be jealous of Annagret and cruel to her. But Katya was charming. She seemed to welcome Annagret’s beauty, which made her a suitable Wolf ornament, and Annagret’s youthful pliancy, which made Andreas’s own hostility seem perverse. She wanted Annagret to go back to school, and when Annagret demurred, saying she preferred to roll up her sleeves and help other people, Katya gave her a wink and said, “We’ll allow that. But you have to promise to attend my university instead. You can study with me in your free time, we’ll work on your English, and everything you learn will be interesting. Believe me, I know where the boring things are.” She winked again.

  Instinctively alarmed by the proposal, Andreas took Annagret home and told her his worst Katya stories, the ones he’d been holding back for fear that they’d reveal the family sickness in him. Annagret listened earnestly and said she liked Katya anyway. She liked her for having given birth to him. She liked her—no matter what he said—for obviously loving him as much as she did. And he was still so new to the miracle of possessing Annagret’s body, the miracle of feeling capable of love, that he assented to the proposal. He managed to imagine that he might solve the problem of Katya by farming it out to Annagret.

  Annagret’s own mother was a disaster. As threatened, she’d pushed the police to investigate her husband’s disappearance, but she was a known thief and drug addict, fresh out of prison, and made a poor impression. The police said honestly that the case file was lost and there was little they could do except circulate her husband’s photograph. The mother tried to enlist the help of her husband’s widowed mother and learned that the Stasi, two years earlier, had told his mother that he’d escaped to the West; she was still waiting to hear from him. Soon enough, Annagret’s mother was using again. She came to Annagret and Andreas and badgered them for money. Annagret coldly suggested that her mother get sober and look for work in a foreign country where nurses were in short supply. Annagret’s hatred of her was both genuine and convenient, since it protected her from the guilt of having had her husband murdered. The mother continued to harass them, turning up at their door to descant on Annagret’s ingratitude, until she succeeded in trading her looks for drugs and lodging with a Polish carpenter who also used.

  Katya, by comparison, was an angel to Annagret. After Andreas’s father died, in 1993, she kept the old flat on Karl-Marx-Allee. She’d resigned from the university and endured a decent two-year interval of rehabilitation before resuming work as a Privatdozent and publishing a book-length study of Iris Murdoch to admiring reviews. She power walked eight kilom
eters every morning and traveled often to London with her Lhasa apso, Lessing. Annagret saw her at least once a week when she was in Berlin. The arrangement that Andreas had envisioned, whereby Annagret took over the distasteful job of keeping up family appearances, was working out much the way he’d hoped—except that he became insanely jealous of how close the two women were.

  He hadn’t seen this coming. Annagret’s earnestness was never more unbearable to him, their wrongness as a couple never more evident, than on the evenings when she was at his mother’s. He blamed her both for liking his mother and for being liked by her. And he had no acceptable outlet for his jealous rage. Even when they fought, his voice merely became chalkily rational. She detested this chalky voice, but it was effective in contrast to her red-faced blurting: he was a good man, in firm control of his temper and everything else. But if she happened to stay at Katya’s even half an hour later than expected, he descended into a state of such eye-widened, heart-thudding rage that all he could do was sit with his arms pressed to his sides and try not to explode. It was so extreme that he began to suspect there was something inside him, some other self that had always been in him, that wasn’t in other people. Was very unusual and sick and particular to him.

  This thing, which he came to think of as the Killer, was like a neutrino or an esoteric boson, detectable only by inference. Observing his subatomic self with rigorous honesty, investigating the deep structure of his unhappiness, taking note of certain strange and evanescent fantasies, he slowly pieced together a theory of the Killer and the paradoxical equivalencies and time-bendings that characterized it. Boredom and jealous rage, for example, were equivalent. Both had to do with the Killer’s frustration at not getting its object of desire. The Killer was enraged with Katya for depriving him of the object and no less enraged with Annagret herself. And what was this object? According to his theory, it was the fifteen-year-old girl he’d killed for. He’d believed he was attracted to her goodness, for its potential to redeem him, but to the Killer she was a fellow killer and liar and seducer. Her solemn gaze turned him on because it took him back to the night behind his parents’ dacha, to the body of the man whom she’d seduced and lied to and helped him kill. The more she became her own person, became his mother’s friend and many other women’s friend, the harder it was to see her as that fifteen-year-old.