Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  By rights, Andreas ought to have grown up in Hessenwinkel or even Wandlitz, the enclave where the Party leadership had its villas, but his mother had insisted on living closer to the city center, on Karl-Marx-Allee, in a high-floor flat with big windows and a balcony. Andreas suspected that her real objection to the suburbs was bourgeois-intellectual—that she found the furnishings and conversations out there unbearably spießig, dowdy, philistine—but she was no more capable of uttering this truth than any other, and so she claimed to be pathologically prone to carsickness, hence unable to commute by car to her important job at the university. Because Andreas’s father was indispensable to the Republic, nobody minded that he lived in town or that his wife, again on grounds of carsickness, had selected the Müggelsee as the site of the dacha where they went for weekends in the warmer months. As Andreas came to see it, his mother was not unlike a suicide bomber, forever carrying the threat of crazy behavior fully armed and ready to detonate, and so his father acceded to her wishes as much as possible, asking only that she help him maintain the necessary lies. This was never a problem for her.

  The dacha, walkable from the train station, was set on a large plot of piney land sloping gently to the lake shore. By feel, in the dark, Andreas located the key hanging from the customary eave. When he went inside with Petra and turned on a light, he was disoriented to find the living room outfitted with the faux-Danish furniture of his childhood in the city. He hadn’t been out to the dacha since the end of his homeless period, six years earlier. His mother had apparently redecorated the city flat in the meantime.

  “Whose house is this?” Petra said, impressed with the amenities.

  “Never mind that.”

  There was zero danger of her finding a photograph of him. (Sooner a portrait of Trotsky.) From the tower of beer crates he took two half liters and gave one to Petra. The topmost Neues Deutschland on the outgoing stack was from a Sunday more than three weeks earlier. Imagining his parents alone here on a winter Sunday, childless, their conversation infrequent and scarcely audible, in that older-couple way, he felt his heart veer dangerously close to sympathy. He didn’t regret having made their later years barren—they had no one but themselves to blame for that—but he’d loved them so much, as a child, that the sight of their old furniture saddened him. They were still human beings, still getting old.

  He turned on the electric furnace and led Petra down the hall to the room that had once been his. The quick cure for nostalgia would be to bury his face in her pussy; he’d already touched it, through her pants, while they were making out on the train. But she said she wanted to take a bath.

  “You don’t have to on my account.”

  “It’s been four days.”

  He didn’t want to deal with a damp bath towel; it would have to be dried and folded before they left. But it was important to put the girl and her desires first.

  “It’s fine,” he assured her pleasantly. “Take a bath.”

  He sat down with his beer on his old bed and heard her lock the bathroom door behind her. In the weeks that followed, the click of this lock became the seed of his paranoia: why would she have locked the door when he was the only other person in the house? It was improbable for eight different reasons that she could have known or been involved in what was coming. But why else lock the door, if not to protect herself against it?

  Then again, maybe it was just his bad luck that she was immobilized in the bathtub with the water still running, her splashing and the flow in the pipes loud enough to have covered the sound of an approaching vehicle and footsteps, when he heard a pounding on the front door and then a barking: “Volkspolizei!”

  The water in the pipes abruptly stopped. Andreas thought about making a run for it, but he was trapped by the fact that Petra was in the tub. Reluctantly, he heaved himself off the bed and went and opened the front door. Two VoPos were backlit by the flashers and headlights of their cruiser.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Identification, please.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “Your identification, please.”

  If the policemen had had tails, they wouldn’t have been wagging; if they’d had pointed ears, they would have been flattened back. The senior officer frowned at Andreas’s little blue book and handed it to the junior, who carried it back toward the cruiser.

  “Do you have permission to be here?”

  “In a certain sense.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “As you find me.” Andreas beckoned politely. “Would you care to come in?”

  “I’ll need to use the telephone.”

  “Of course.”

  The officer entered circumspectly. Andreas guessed that he was more wary of the house’s owners than of any armed thugs who might be lurking in it.

  “This is my parents’ place,” he explained.

  “We’re acquainted with the undersecretary. We’re not acquainted with you. No one has permission to be in this house tonight.”

  “I’ve been here for fifteen minutes. Your vigilance is commendable.”

  “We saw the lights.”

  “Really highly commendable.”

  From the bathroom came a single plink of falling water; in hindsight, Andreas would find it noteworthy that the officer had shown no interest in the bathroom. The man simply paged through a shabby black notebook, found a number, and dialed it on the undersecretary’s telephone. In the moment, Andreas’s main feeling was a wish that the police would go away and let him get on with eating little Petra. Everything else was so unfortunate that he didn’t want to think about it.

  “Mr. Undersecretary?” The officer identified himself and tersely reported the presence of an intruder who claimed to be a relative. Then he said “Yes” several times.

  “Tell him I’d like to speak to him,” Andreas said.

  The officer made a silencing gesture.

  “I want to talk to him.”

  “Of course, right away,” the officer said to the undersecretary.

  Andreas tried to grab the receiver. The officer shoved him in the chest and knocked him to the floor.

  “No, he’s trying to take the phone … That’s right … Yes, of course. I’ll tell him … Understood, Mr. Undersecretary.” The officer hung up the phone and looked down at Andreas. “You’re to leave immediately and never come back.”

  “Got it.”

  “If you ever come back, there will be consequences. The undersecretary wanted to make sure you understand that.”

  “He’s not really my father,” Andreas said. “We just happen to have the same last name.”

  “Me personally?” the officer said. “I hope you come back, and I hope I’m on duty when you do.”

  The younger officer returned and handed Andreas’s ID to the senior, who examined it with his lip curled. Then he flipped it into Andreas’s face. “Lock the door behind you, asshole.”

  When the police were gone, he knocked on the bathroom door and told Petra to turn off the light and wait for him. He turned off the other lights and went out into the night, heading toward the train station. At the first bend in the lane, he saw the cruiser parked and dark and gave the officers a little wave. At the next bend, he ducked behind some pine trees to wait until the cruiser drove away. The evening had been damaging, and he wasn’t about to waste it. But when he was finally able to creep back into the dacha and found Petra cowering on his boyhood bed, mewling with fear of the police, he was too angry about his humiliation to care about her pleasure. He ordered her to do this and do that, in the dark, and it ended with her weeping and saying she hated him—a feeling he entirely reciprocated. He never saw her again.

  Three weeks later, the German Christian Youth Conference invited him to speak in West Berlin. He presumed (though you could never know for sure; that was the beauty of it) that the conference had been thoroughly infiltrated by his cousin once removed, the spymaster Markus Wolf, because the invitation came forwarded from the Foreign Mini
stry with a notice to pick up a visa that had already been granted. It was laughably obvious that if he crossed the border he wouldn’t be allowed to reenter the country. Equally obvious was that the invitation was a warning from his father, a punishment for his indiscretion at the dacha.

  Everyone else in the country wanted permission to travel even more than they wanted cars. The bait of attending some miserable three-day trade conference in Copenhagen was enough to entice the ordinary citizen to rat out colleagues, siblings, friends. Andreas felt singular in every way, but in none more than his disdain for travel. How the royal Danish poisoner and his lying queen had wanted their son out of the castle! He felt himself to be the rose and fair expectancy of the state, its product and its antic antithesis, and so his first responsibility was to not budge from Berlin. He needed his so-called parents to know that he was still there on Siegfeldstraße, knowing what he knew about them.

  But it was lonely to be singular, and loneliness bred paranoia, and he soon reached the point of imagining that Petra had set him up, the whole rigmarole about sex in churches and the need for a bath a ruse to lure him into violating his tacit agreement with his parents. Now every time another at-risk girl appeared at his office door with that familiar burning look in her eyes, he remembered how uncharacteristically selfish he’d been with Petra, and how humiliated he’d been by the police, and instead of obliging the girl he teased her and drove her away. He wondered if he’d been lying to himself about girls forever—if the hatred he’d felt for number fifty-three was not only real but retroactively applicable to numbers one through fifty-two. If, far from indulging in irony at the state’s expense, he’d been seduced by the state at his point of least resistance.

  He spent the following spring and summer depressed, and therefore all the more preoccupied with sex, but since he suddenly distrusted both himself and the girls, he denied himself the relief of it. He curtailed his individual conferences and ceased trolling the Jugendklubs for at-risk kids. Though he was jeopardizing the best job an East German in his position could hope to find, he lay on his bed all day and read British novels, detective and otherwise, forbidden and otherwise. (Having been force-fed Steinbeck and Dreiser and Dos Passos by his mother, he had little interest in American writing. Even the best Americans were annoyingly naïve. Life in the U.K. sucked more, in a good way.) Eventually he determined that what had depressed him was his childhood bed, the bed itself, in the Müggelsee house, and the feeling that he’d never left it: that the more he rebelled against his parents and the more he made his life a reproach to theirs, the more deeply he rooted himself in the same childish relation to them. But it was one thing to identify the source of his depression, quite another to do anything about it.

  He was seven months celibate on the October afternoon when the church’s young “vicar” came to see him about the girl in the sanctuary. The vicar wore all the vestments of renegade-church cliché—full beard, check; faded jean jacket, check; mod copper crucifix, check—but was usefully insecure in the face of Andreas’s superior street experience.

  “I first noticed her two weeks ago,” he said, sitting down on the floor. He seemed to have read in some book that sitting on the floor established rapport and conveyed Christlike humility. “Sometimes she stays in the sanctuary for an hour, sometimes until midnight. Not praying, just doing her homework. I finally asked if we could help her. She looked scared and said she was sorry—she’d thought she was allowed to be here. I told her the church is always open to anyone in need. I wanted to start a conversation, but all she wanted was to hear that she wasn’t breaking any rules.”

  “So?”

  “Well, you are the youth counselor.”

  “The sanctuary isn’t exactly on my beat.”

  “It’s understandable that you’re burned out. We haven’t minded your taking some time for yourself.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “I’m concerned about the girl, though. I talked to her again yesterday and asked if she was in trouble—my fear is that she’s been abused. She speaks so softly it’s hard to understand her, but she seemed to be saying that the authorities are already aware of her, and so she can’t go to them. Apparently she’s here because she has nowhere else to go.”

  “Aren’t we all.”

  “She might say more to you than to me.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Young. Fifteen, sixteen. Also extraordinarily pretty.”

  Underage, abused, and pretty. Andreas sighed.

  “You’ll need to come out of your room at some point,” the vicar suggested.

  When Andreas went up to the sanctuary and saw the girl in the next-to-rear pew, he immediately experienced her beauty as an unwelcome complication, a specificity that distracted him from the universal female body part that had interested him for so long. She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, unrebelliously dressed, and was sitting with a Free German Youth erectness of posture, a textbook open on her lap. She looked like a good girl, the sort he never saw in the basement. She didn’t raise her head as he approached.

  “Will you talk to me?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “You talked to the vicar.”

  “Only for a minute,” she murmured.

  “OK. Why don’t I sit down behind you, where you don’t have to see me. And then, if you—”

  “Please don’t do that.”

  “All right. I’ll stay in sight.” He took the pew in front of her. “I’m Andreas. I’m a counselor here. Will you tell me your name?”

  She shook her head.

  “Are you here to pray?”

  She smirked. “Is there a God?”

  “No, of course not. Where would you get an idea like that?”

  “Somebody built this church.”

  “Somebody was thinking wishfully. It makes no sense to me.”

  She raised her head, as if he’d slightly interested her. “Aren’t you afraid of getting in trouble?”

  “With who? The minister? God’s only a word he uses against the state. Nothing in this country exists except in reference to the state.”

  “You shouldn’t say things like that.”

  “I’m only saying what the state itself says.”

  He looked down at her legs, which were of a piece with the rest of her.

  “Are you very afraid of getting in trouble?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “Afraid of getting someone else in trouble, then. Is that it?”

  “I come here because this is nowhere. It’s nice to be nowhere for a while.”

  “Nowhere is more nowhere than this place, I agree.”

  She smiled faintly.

  “When you look in the mirror,” he said, “what do you see? Someone pretty?”

  “I don’t look in mirrors.”

  “What would you see if you did?”

  “Nothing good.”

  “Something bad? Something harmful?”

  She shrugged.

  “Why didn’t you want me to sit down behind you?”

  “I like to see who I’m talking to.”

  “So we are talking. You were only pretending that you weren’t going to talk to me. You were being self-dramatizing—playing games.”

  Sudden honest confrontation was part of his bag of counseling tricks. That he was sick of these tricks didn’t mean they didn’t still work.

  “I already know I’m bad,” the girl said. “You don’t have to explain it to me.”

  “But it must be hard for you that people don’t know how bad you are. They simply don’t believe a girl so pretty can be so bad inside. It must be hard for you to respect people.”

  “I have friends.”

  “So did I when I was your age. But it doesn’t help, does it? It’s actually worse that people like me. They think I’m funny, they think I’m attractive. Only I know how bad I am inside. I’m extremely bad and extremely important. In fact, I’m the most important person in the country.”
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  It was encouraging to see her sneer like an adolescent. “You’re not important.”

  “Oh, but I am. You just don’t know it. But you do know what it’s like to be important, don’t you. You’re very important yourself. Everyone pays attention to you, everyone wants to be near you because you’re beautiful, and then you harm them. You have to go hide in a church to be nowhere, to give the world a rest from you.”

  “I wish you’d leave me alone.”

  “Who are you harming? Just say it.”

  The girl lowered her head.

  “You can tell me,” he said. “I’m an old harmer myself.”

  She shivered a little and knit her fingers together on her lap. From outside, the rumble of a truck and the sharp clank of a bad gearbox entered the sanctuary and lingered in the air, which smelled of charred candle wick and tarnished brass. The wooden cross on the wall behind the pulpit seemed to Andreas a once magical object that had lost its mojo through overuse both for and against the state; had been dragged down to the level of sordid accommodation and dreary dissidence. The sanctuary was the very least relevant part of the church; he felt sorry for it.