Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  “So,” Andreas said, “I’m not very hungry, and I have a lot of work to do.”

  “Yes, all right. Silly me for thinking you might spend a few hours with your only parent.”

  “You know you’d rather read about me than experience me in person. Why pretend?”

  The dog had its paws on her thigh again. She gave it more potato.

  “I’ll come to the point,” she said. “I’m concerned about Annagret.”

  Dulled though he was, spent though he was, it occurred to him that if the lunch were a short one he might still have some free hours with his computer before Annagret came home. There was certainly nothing to like about the real world he was inhabiting.

  “Andreas,” Katya said. “I think she might have to leave you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know how fond I’ve always been of her—almost as if she were my own daughter. In a sense, she’s been my daughter. She really doesn’t have another mother.”

  “So—what? I’ve been sleeping with my sister?”

  “Leave it to you to have a thought like that and say it out loud. You know that’s not what I meant. I meant that we’ve become very close.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “And I also know you better than anyone else in the world does.”

  “So you like to say.”

  “I never worry about what will happen to you. You’re a dominant person, born to dominate, and everyone can sense it. You can do whatever you want, and somehow the world will find a way to love you for it. You’ve been extraordinary since the day you were born.”

  He pictured this extraordinary, dominant person forty-five minutes earlier, pants down, whacking away. “So you like to say,” he said.

  “Well, Annagret isn’t like you. She’s bright but not brilliant. She admires you but isn’t like you. And I’m afraid—I can only assume—that she’s decided she doesn’t belong with a person so brilliant and dominant. There’s no other explanation. And—” Katya’s face hardened. “I hate to say this. But I think she’s right.”

  “Do go on,” Andreas said.

  “We’re speaking in confidence.”

  “Of course.”

  “Lessing—” She gave an entire pork cutlet to the dog, which scampered away with it. “Are you happy now?” she called after it mockingly.

  “It’s becoming less of a mystery how you stay so trim,” Andreas said.

  “Annagret confessed something to me.”

  He felt light-headed.

  “I promised her I wouldn’t tell you. I’m breaking that promise now, but I won’t apologize for it. Those that betray them do no treachery.” Katya was quoting something in English. “Besides which, I think she knew I would tell you. She said it was weighing on her conscience—but why tell me? She knows very well that I’m your mother.”

  He frowned.

  “She isn’t right for you, Andreas. I thought I would be the last person ever to say that. But she’s not right, and I’m very angry with her now. In a sense, she betrayed me, too.”

  “What exactly are we talking about?”

  “I’m sure there are strains in your life with her. No couple can live for ten years without any strains at all. But look at you!” She sized him up with a fanatical blaze in her eyes. “She shouldn’t love anyone but you!”

  There seemed to be no end to the ways his mother could disturb him. He kept thinking that he must have seen it all, that she’d finally exhausted her supply. But there was always more.

  “Annagret thinks better of me than I deserve,” he said quietly. “I’m not an entirely well person.”

  “I can only imagine what she was thinking, but she appears to be in some sort of relationship with a woman at her community center. I don’t know how far it’s gone, but obviously it’s far enough that she needed to confess it—to me. Well, I didn’t know what to say. I asked her if she thought she might be a lesbian. She said she didn’t think she was. It didn’t really make sense, what she was saying, but I gather that the woman is older and they have some sort of friendship-that’s-more-than-just-friendship. She kept using the phrase a special kind of closeness, whatever that means. And she wanted me—me!—to tell her what it meant.”

  He knew the person in question. “The woman’s name is Gisela?”

  “Andreas, I’ve been studying literature my entire life. I know a thing or two about human psychology. What I’m seeing is that Annagret isn’t right for you and she knows it. But I’m not the one to tell her that. In fact, I’m not sure I ever need to see her again.”

  If Katya was to be believed (admittedly a big if), Annagret had given him an amazing gift, a deus ex machina, a way out of the trap. But he was wary of it. It seemed as if Annagret knew more about him than he’d realized, and was disgusted by him, and had consciously gone to someone else for what he wasn’t giving her. Would she feel guilty enough to keep her mouth shut after she was free of him?

  “People have affairs all the time,” he said. “You had affairs and stayed married. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

  “If you were the one doing it,” Katya said, “it wouldn’t necessarily mean anything. You have the soul of an artist, beyond good and evil. But she’s too small for you. She knows it. She’s said it to me herself, how hard it is to live in your shadow.”

  “I haven’t seen any sign of that.”

  “She wouldn’t tell you. She did tell me. And she turned for comfort to this special friend of hers, and she told me about that, too. You’re gifted at math—you tell me what two plus two is.”

  “This is so sick. That we’re having this conversation.”

  “I’m sorry. I know how much you care about her. But I really don’t think I need to see her anymore. My loyalty is to you, not to the person who finds it necessary to betray you.”

  He stood up and walked away from the table. If Katya was to be believed, Annagret blamed herself and still idealized him. The exit door was open wide. But all at once he felt terribly sorry for her. That she still revered him and considered herself small by comparison and had been so lonely that she crawled to Gisela: he felt restored to the sweet compassion he’d experienced in the church sanctuary on Siegfeldstraße, and with it to all the hope he’d invested in Annagret, to the innocence of his yearning to be a better person, before he’d descended into filth and doubt. His darling lost judo girl.

  “Andreas,” his mother said softly.

  He turned to her, struggling not to cry. “It was wrong of you to tell me.”

  “Nothing a person does out of love can be wrong.”

  “Wrong! Wrong!”

  He fled through the front door, past the elevator, and into the stairwell, where he could sob without fear of being discovered by his mother. It was years since there had been a shred of evidence that he was happy with Annagret. Everything about his miserable existence, down to the rawly chafed dick in his underpants at this very moment, argued against them. He couldn’t be any more miserable without her than he already was, and she’d be happier without him, too. But none of this lessened his grief. He’d never experienced grief like this. It seemed as if he really loved her after all.

  Grief passed, however. Before he was even home again, he could see his future. He would never again make the mistake of trying to live with a woman. For whatever reason (probably his childhood), he wasn’t suited for it, and the strong thing to do was to accept this. His computer had made a weakling of him. He also had a vague, shameful memory of climbing onto Annagret’s lap and trying to be her baby. Weak! Weak! But now his mother, with her meddling, had given him the pretext he needed to be free of both her and Annagret. A double deus ex machina—the good luck of a man fated to dominate. It was ironic, of course, that the person who’d recalled him to his stronger self and made his weakness visible to him was Katya. Ironic that, although she was a liar, he’d recognized the truth of her description of him. Ironic that he would owe his new freedom to her. But this didn’t make her meddli
ng any less despicable. She’d played herself out of any future with him.

  At home, he cleansed his hard drive of downloaded obscenity. His new sense of purpose and sobriety felt well worth the compulsive binge it had cost him to attain it. He washed the dishes in the sink and dried them. He saw that he would soon be bringing other women to wherever he lived, one after another—the repetition of a strong man—and that his new place would have to be clean and orderly, to signify self-mastery.

  He was sitting straight-backed at the computer, bringing self-mastery to bear on his email queue, when Annagret came home with some dismal “bio” vegetables in a string bag.

  “I’m only here to change clothes,” she said. “We have a protest for the rent strikers.”

  “That’s fine,” he said. “But sit down for a minute first.”

  She sidled into the living room and perched on the edge of a chair and fixed her eyes on the floor. It seemed to him that she was radiating guilt. Interesting that he hadn’t perceived it sooner. He’d carefully thought through the wording of what he had to say to her, but now that it was time to say it, he hesitated. He still had grief in him, and he wondered if he shouldn’t be saying something very different with his newly regained sense of command: Enough bullshit, enough cuddling. Strip naked for me. We’re going to do things differently now. Conceivably she might welcome it; conceivably it could save them. But more likely she’d refuse, which would hurt him and shame him, and there were, in any case, many other women to whom he could speak like that. Their appeal, too, was perceptible in a way it hadn’t been before.

  “We’re not happy together,” he said.

  She bowed her head and shifted uncomfortably. “It’s been difficult lately, I know. We haven’t been so close. I know that. But…”

  “I know about you and Gisela.”

  She blushed intensely, and he felt another surge of compassion for her, but also, for the first time, anger. She’d betrayed him, just as Katya had said. Until this moment, he hadn’t been angry at all.

  “Go to her,” he said coldly. “Stay with her. I’ll find another place to live.”

  She bowed her head further. “It’s not what you think…”

  “I don’t care what it is. It’s just a pretext anyway. We shouldn’t be together.”

  “But who told you?”

  “People come to me with dirt. It’s my job to know things.”

  “Did Katya tell you?”

  “Katya? No. It doesn’t matter anyway. Do you honestly like being with me?”

  It was a while before she answered. “It used to be better,” she said, “when we felt closer … I think you’re a good person … A great person. It’s just…”

  “What?”

  “Sometimes I wonder why you wanted to be with me in the first place.”

  Hearing this, the Killer in him became alert.

  “You were the one who said we had to be together,” she said. “I knew in my heart that it was wrong. I thought there was a way for us to not be so guilty, if we stayed apart, but as soon as we got together it meant we’d been guilty from the beginning.”

  “I was in love with you. I made a mistake.”

  “I was in love with you, too. But it was never right, was it.”

  “No.”

  She began to cry. “And now we’ll never get over what we did.”

  “Not as long as we stay together.”

  “I’m so tired of living with it. I’m sorry I did this new bad thing, it’s not even what you think. I guess I thought, ‘I’m guilty anyway—what does it matter what I do?’”

  “It’s good you did it. I wouldn’t have had the guts.”

  He wondered if he should go ahead and mention the computer now, make a clean breast of his own transgressions and give her some consoling company in her guilt. But the Killer said no. The Killer had only one objective now: to make sure she never had moral cause to betray him by telling someone else about the killing. Although it pained him to see her crying and apologizing, it was also reassuring. She still suffered from a sense of worthlessness for having wanted Horst, for having been abused, and even as Andreas was pitying her for this he was savoring his coming freedom. The sweet freedom of getting away with everything, of never having to see her dowdy and earnest friends again, of never having to have another discussion.

  “We could have spent ten years in prison,” he said. “Instead we spent ten years together. Maybe that was our prison. Maybe we’ve served our sentence. You’re only twenty-eight—you can do whatever you want now.”

  “You’re right. It did start to feel like prison. It … Oh! I’m sorry!”

  “Things will be better when you’re out of it.”

  “I’m sorry!”

  “Don’t be sorry. Just go. Go to your protest.”

  The grief returned when she was gone. He welcomed it, almost luxuriated in it, because it was a real emotion, untainted by doubt about his secret motives. Like the compassion it grew out of, it suggested that there might not, after all, be anything so wrong with him. Maybe, if he took care never to live with another woman, he could succeed in living up to the image other people had of him. Maybe the Killer had been merely a figment, a projection of his embattled but still fundamentally sound moral sense, an artifact of the misfortune that the love of his life was also the person with whom he’d committed a murder. A misfortune, certainly. But maybe it was enough to explain his vile feelings, his rage, his jealousy, his radical doubt, his sick urges. Maybe, with self-mastery, he could put all that behind him now.

  After the planes hit New York and Washington, Annagret ran home to make sure he was OK. This was irrational but not unusual that day; there was a sense that with crazy things happening in America they could be happening anywhere, to anyone. But he and Annagret had been growing apart for so long that when the thread of togetherness was snapped they elastically sprang even farther apart, finding themselves with no friends or even any interests in common. All he had left, really, was the sentimental and periodically grief-inducing conviction that she had been the love of his life.

  Cutting the cord with Katya wasn’t as easy. He deleted her phone messages without listening to them, and when she came to him in person he closed his door in her face and threw the bolt loudly; a week later, he moved to a new and more secure flat in Kreuzberg. But it wasn’t hard to find his phone number, and later in the fall, after he’d been in the headlines for breaking the news of German computer sales to Saddam Hussein, one of his first big Internet leaks, he got a call from a man who said he had a document of interest to him.

  “If it’s paper, put it in the mail,” Andreas said. “If it’s digital, email it to me.”

  The caller had a Berlin accent and vocal cords that sounded slack with age. “I’d prefer to bring it to you in person.”

  “No. As you might imagine, I have some fear for my personal safety these days.”

  “I’m not bringing you a bomb. Just a document. It concerns you personally.”

  “Mail it.”

  “I’m not sure you understand. The revelations in this document refer to you personally.”

  Andreas didn’t know who besides Tom Aberant could still expose his old crime. Captain Wachtler, who’d brought him his files at Stasi headquarters, was long dead—Andreas had used his position on the Gauck Commission to track the downward progress of Wachtler’s health—but there were an indeterminate number of nameless functionaries above and below him on the old chain of command. They would all be older men with Berlin accents. It was possible that he was speaking to one of them now.

  “What exactly do you want?” he said as levelly as he could.

  “I want you to help me publish the document.”

  “Even though it concerns me.”

  “Yes.”

  Andreas agreed to meet the caller at the Amerika Haus library, where security was heavy. The man he found waiting there, the following afternoon, had a handsome, ruined, clean-shaven drinker’s face. He loo
ked to be in his late sixties and was dressed in tired Beatnik garb, a red turtleneck, a leather-elbowed corduroy blazer. Emphatically not former Stasi. There was a briefcase in front of him on the library table.

  “So we meet again,” he said, with a smile, when Andreas was seated across from him.

  “We’ve met?”

  “I was younger. I had a beard. I’d spent a week sleeping under a bridge.”

  Andreas never would have recognized him.

  “How are you, my son?” his father said.

  “Not so bad, until this moment.”

  “I’ve been following your exploits. I hope you won’t mind that I’ve permitted myself some pride in you. Pride and a certain gloating satisfaction, given that the last time we met, you were so uninterested in learning secrets. How the world turns, eh? Now secrets are your business.”

  “I’m aware of the irony. What do you want?”

  “Some occasional contact with you wouldn’t be unwelcome.”

  How to explain the distaste he felt at the prospect? It wasn’t just the red turtleneck, the elbow patches. It was that he sided with the memory of his other father. “Not interested,” he said.

  His father’s smile became more pained. “Of course you’re an arrogant son of a bitch. You grew up privileged, everything’s always gone your way. How could you be anything else?”

  “That pretty well sums it up.”

  “You’re still on good terms with your mother, I suppose?”

  “Hardly.”

  “It’s shocking how little she’s changed.”

  “You’ve seen her?”

  “Through her doorway, briefly.”

  “What do you want?”

  His father opened his briefcase and took out a manuscript three fingers thick. “You’re not curious,” he said. “But I can tell you that not everything has gone my way. I was sent back to prison. Got out again and drove a taxicab until the Stasi was no more. Married a girl who was kind but a drinker. Became quite a drinker myself. I’m sober now—thank you for asking. I have a son—another son—with serious congenital disabilities. My wife took care of him until she died, two years ago. Our boy is in a facility now, not a very nice one, but the best I could manage. After the Turn, I was able to get work teaching English to eighth and ninth graders. I have a bit of a pension now from that, but mostly I live on federal charity.”