Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  The mist had given way to a warmer fog that made the arrival of daylight curiously sudden. Fog was not a bad thing. He policed the back yard for footprints and wheelbarrow tracks. Only when the light was nearly full-strength did he return to the back steps to remove the trip wire. There was more blood than he’d expected on the steps, less vomit than he’d feared on the bushes by the railing. He was seeing everything now as if through a long tube. He filled and refilled a watering can at the outside spigot, to wash away blood.

  The last thing he did was to check the kitchen for signs of disturbance. All he found was wetness in the sink from the drink he’d taken. It would be dry by evening. He locked the front door behind him and set out walking toward Rahnsdorf. By eight thirty he was back in the basement of the rectory. Peeling off his jacket, he realized that he still had the dead man’s wallet and jewelry, but he could sooner have flown to the moon than dispose of them now; he could barely untie his muddy boots. He lay down on his bed to wait for the police.

  * * *

  They didn’t come. Not that day, that week, or that season—they never came at all.

  And why didn’t they? Among the least plausible of Andreas’s hypotheses was that he and Annagret had committed the perfect crime. Certainly it was possible that his parents hadn’t seen what a wreck he’d made of the dacha’s back yard; the first heavy snow of the season had come the following week. But nobody had noticed the unforgettably beautiful girl on either of her train trips? Nobody in her neighborhood had seen her and Horst walking to the station? Nobody had looked into where she’d been going in the weeks before the killing? Nobody had questioned her hard enough to break her? The last Andreas had seen of her, a feather would have broken her.

  Less implausible was that the Stasi had investigated the mother, and that her addiction and pilferage had come to light. The Stasi would naturally have interested itself in a missing informal collaborator. If the mother was in Stasi detention, the question wasn’t whether she’d confess to the murder (or, depending on how the Stasi chose to play it, to the crime of assisting Horst’s flight to the West). The only question was how much psychological torture she’d endure before she did.

  Or maybe the Stasi’s suspicions had centered on the stepdaughter in Leipzig. Or on Horst’s co-workers at the power plant, the ones he’d reported on. Maybe one of them was already in prison for the crime. For weeks after the killing, Andreas had looked at the newspapers every day. If the criminal police had been handling the case, they surely would have put a picture of the missing man in the papers. But no picture ever appeared. The only realistic explanation was that the Stasi was keeping the police out of it.

  Assuming he was right about this, he had a further hypothesis: the Stasi had easily broken Annagret, she’d led them to the dacha, and they’d discovered who owned it. To avoid public embarrassment of the undersecretary, they’d accepted Horst’s sexual predation as a mitigating circumstance and contented themselves with scaring the daylights out of Annagret. And to torture Andreas with uncertainty, to make his life a hell of anxiety and hypercaution, they’d left him alone.

  He hated this hypothesis, but unfortunately it made more sense than any of the others. He hated it because there was an easy way to test it: find Annagret and ask her. Already scarcely an hour of his waking days passed without his wanting to go to her, and yet, if he was wrong about his hypothesis, and if she was still under suspicion and still being closely watched, it would be disaster for them to meet. Only she could know when they were safe.

  He went back to counseling at-risk youths, but there was a new hollowness at his core which never left him. He no longer taught the kids levity. He was at risk himself now—at risk of weeping when he listened to their sad stories. It was as if sadness were a chemical element that everything he touched consisted of. His mourning was mostly for Annagret but also for his old lighthearted, libidinous self. He would have imagined that his primary feeling would be anxiety, the feverish fear of discovery and arrest, but the Republic appeared to be intent on sparing him, for whatever sick reason, and he could no longer remember why he’d laughed at the country and its tastelessness. It now seemed to him more like a Republic of Infinite Sadness. Girls still came to his office door, interested in him, maybe even all the more intrigued by his air of sorrow, but instead of thinking about their pussies he thought about their young souls. Every one of them was an avatar of Annagret; her soul was in all of them.

  Meanwhile in Russia there was glasnost, there was Gorby. The true-believing little Republic, feeling betrayed by its Soviet father, cracked down harder on its own dissidents. The police had raided a sister church in Berlin, the Zion Church, and earnestness and self-importance levels were running high on Siegfeldstraße. There was a wartime mood in the meeting rooms. Secluding himself, as always, in the basement, Andreas found that his sorrow hadn’t cured him of his megalomaniacal solipsism. If anything, it was all the stronger. He felt as if his misery had taken over the entire country. As if the state were choking on his crime; as if, unable or unwilling to arrest him, it were determined to rain misery down on everyone else. The embarrassments upstairs were surprised, and perhaps secretly disappointed, when the police failed to raid their own church. But he wasn’t. The state avoided him like a toxin.

  Late in the spring of 1989, his anxiety returned. At first he almost welcomed it, as if it were the companion of his AWOL libido, reawakened by warm nights and flowering trees. He found himself drawn to the television in the rectory’s common room to watch the evening news, unexpurgated, on ZDF. The embarrassments watching with him were jubilant, predicting regime collapse within twelve months, and it was precisely the prospect of regime collapse that made him anxious. Part of the anxiety was straightforward criminal worry: he suspected that only the Stasi was keeping the criminal police at bay; that he was safe from prosecution only as long as the regime survived; that the Stasi was (irony of ironies) his only friend. But there was also a larger and more diffuse anxiety, a choking hydrochloric cloud. As Solidarity was legalized in Poland, as the Baltic States broke away, as Gorbachev publicly washed his hands of his Eastern Bloc foster children, Andreas felt more and more as if his own death were imminent. Without the Republic to define him, he’d be nothing. His all-important parents would be nothing, be less than nothing, be dismal tainted holdovers from a discredited system, and the only world in which he mattered would come to an end.

  It got worse through the summer. He could no longer bear to watch the news, but even when he locked himself in his room he could hear people in the hallway yammering about the latest developments, the mass emigration through Hungary, the demonstrations in Leipzig, the rumors of a coming coup, because they were all that anyone was talking about. People were still cowed by Honecker and still afraid of Mielke, but Andreas knew in his bones that the jig was almost up. Beyond his anxiety, and aside from his having had not one single thought about what he might do when the regime fell, he felt sadness and pity for the earnest little German socialist boy abandoned by the Soviets. He wasn’t a socialist, but he might as well have been that little boy himself.

  On a Tuesday morning in October, after the largest demonstration yet in Leipzig, the young vicar came tapping on his door. The guy ought to have been in giddy spirits, but something was troubling him. Instead of sitting down cross-legged, he paced the room. “I’m sure you heard the news,” he said. “A hundred thousand people in the street and no violence.”

  “Hooray?” Andreas said.

  The vicar hesitated. “I need to come clean with you about something,” he said. “I should have told you a long time ago—I guess I was a coward. I hope you can forgive me.”

  Andreas wouldn’t have figured the guy for an informant, but his preamble had that flavor.

  “It’s not that,” the vicar said, reading his thought. “But I did have a visit from the Stasi, about two years ago. Two guys who looked the part. They had some questions about you, and I answered them. They implied that I’d be
arrested if you found out they’d been here.”

  “But now it turns out that their guns are loaded with daisy seeds.”

  “They said it was a criminal matter, but they didn’t say what kind. They showed me a picture of that pretty girl who came here. They wanted to know if you’d spoken to her. I said you might have, because you’re the youth counselor. I didn’t say anything definite. But they also wanted to know if I’d seen you on some particular night. I said I wasn’t sure—you spend so much time alone in your room. The whole time we were having this conversation, I’m pretty sure you were down here, but they didn’t want to see you. And they never came back.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Nothing happened to you, nothing happened to any of us, and so I assumed that everything was OK. But I felt bad about talking to them and not telling you. I wanted you to know.”

  “Now that the ice is melting, the bodies are coming to the surface.”

  The vicar bristled. “I think we’ve been good to you. It’s been a good arrangement. I know I probably should have said something earlier. But the fact is we’ve always been a little afraid of you.”

  “I’m grateful. Grateful and sorry for any trouble.”

  “Is there anything you want to tell me? Did something bad happen to the girl?”

  Andreas shook his head, and the vicar left him alone with his anxiety. If the Stasi had come to the church, it meant that Annagret had been questioned and had talked. This meant that the Stasi had at least some of the facts, maybe all of them. But with a hundred thousand people assembling unhindered on the streets of Leipzig, the Stasi’s days were obviously numbered. Before long, the VoPos would take over, the real police would do police work …

  He jumped up from his bed and put on a coat. If nothing else, he now knew he had little to lose by seeing Annagret. Unfortunately, the only place he could think of to look for her was the Erweiterte Oberschule nearest to her old neighborhood in Friedrichshain. It seemed inconceivable that she’d proceeded to an EOS, and yet what else would she be doing? He left the church and hurried through the streets, taking some comfort in their enduring drabness, and stationed himself by the school’s main entrance. Through the high windows he could see students continuing to receive instruction in Marxist biology and Marxist math. When the last hour ended, he scanned the faces of the students streaming out the doors. He scanned until the stream had dwindled to a trickle. He was disappointed but not really surprised.

  He returned to the school the next morning, again with no luck. He went to the office of a family-services caseworker he particularly trusted, waited while she checked the central registry, and left empty-handed. For the next week, every afternoon and evening, he loitered outside judo clubs, at sports centers, at bus stops in Annagret’s old neighborhood. By the end of October, he’d given up hope of finding her, but he continued to wander the streets. He trawled the margins of protests, both planned and spontaneous, and listened to ordinary citizens risking imprisonment by demanding fair elections, free travel, the neutering of the Stasi. Honecker was gone, the new government was in crisis, and every day that passed without violence made a Tiananmen-style crackdown seem less likely. Hungary had already liberated itself, the others would surely soon follow. Change was coming, and there was nothing he could do but wait to be engulfed by it. The Berlin air tasted hydrochloric to him.

  And then, on November 4, a miracle. Half the city had bravely taken to the streets. He was moving through crowds methodically, scanning faces, smiling at a loudspeakered voice of reason rejecting reunification and calling for reform instead. On Alexanderplatz, toward the ragged rear of the crowd, among the claustrophobes and undecideds, his heart gave a lurch before his brain knew why. There was a girl. A girl with spikily chopped hair and a safety-pin earring, a girl who was nonetheless Annagret. Her arm was linked with the arm of a similarly coiffed girl. Both of them blank-faced, aggressively bored. She’d ceased to be the good girl.

  WE MUST FIND OUR OWN WAY, WE MUST LEARN TO TAKE THE BEST FROM OUR IMPERFECT SYSTEM AND THE BEST FROM THE SYSTEM WE OPPOSED …

  As if seeking relief from the boringness of the amplified voice, Annagret looked around the crowd and saw Andreas. Her eyes widened. He was smiling uncontrollably. She didn’t smile back, but she did put her mouth to the ear of the other girl and break away from her. As she approached him, he could see more clearly how changed her demeanor was, how unlikely it was that she might still love him. She stopped short of embrace range.

  “I can only talk for a minute,” she said.

  “We don’t have to talk. Just tell me where I can find you.”

  She shook her head. Her radical haircut and the safety pin in her ear were helpless against her beauty, but her unhappiness wasn’t. Her features were the same as two years ago, but the light in her eyes had gone out.

  “Trust me,” he said. “There’s no danger.”

  “I’m in Leipzig now. We’re only up for the day.”

  “Is that your sister?”

  “No, a friend. She wanted to be here.”

  “I’ll come and see you in Leipzig. We can talk.”

  She shook her head.

  “You don’t want to see me again,” he said.

  She looked carefully over one shoulder and then over the other. “I don’t even know. I’m not thinking about that. All I know is we’re not safe. That’s all I can think about.”

  “We’re safe as long as there’s a ministry.”

  “I should go back to my friend.”

  “Annagret. I know you talked to the ministry. They came to the church and asked about me. But nothing happened, they didn’t question me. We’re safe. You did the right thing.”

  He moved closer. She flinched and edged away from him.

  “We’re not safe,” she said. “They know a lot. They’re just waiting.”

  “If they know so much anyway, it doesn’t matter if we’re seen together. They’ve already waited two years. They’re not going to do anything to us now.”

  She looked over her shoulder again. “I should go back.”

  “I have to see you,” he said for no reason except honesty. “It’s killing me not to see you.”

  She hardly seemed to be listening; was lost in her unhappiness. “They took my mother away,” she said. “I had to tell them some kind of story. They put her in a psychiatric hospital for addiction, and then she went to prison.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “But she’s been writing letters to the police. She wants to know why they didn’t investigate the disappearance. She gets released in February.”

  “Did you talk to the police yourself?”

  “I can’t see you,” she said, her eyes on the ground. “You did a big thing for me, but I don’t think I can ever see you again.”

  “Annagret. Did you talk to the police?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then maybe we can fix it. Let me try to fix it.”

  “I had the most horrible feeling when I saw you. Desire and death and that thing. It’s all mixed up and horrible. I don’t want to want things like that anymore.”

  “Let me make it go away.”

  “It will never go away.”

  “Let me try.”

  She murmured something he couldn’t hear above the noise. Possibly I don’t want to want it. Then she ran back to her friend, and the two of them walked away briskly, without looking back.

  But there was hope, he decided. Buoyed by it, he started running and kept running all the way to Marx-Engels Platz. Every single person in the street was a hindrance to him. All he cared about was seeing Annagret again. The reason he had to make the murder case go away was that he couldn’t have Annagret unless he did.

  But her mother, to whom he now saw that he’d given insufficient thought, was a serious problem. The mother would have no reason to stop pushing for an investigation, and she would soon be out of prison. Pushing, pushing. When the Stasi collapsed, the police could take the case f
ile and initiate their own investigation. Even if he stayed ahead of them, even if he could somehow move the body, the file was bound to surface when the government went down. And what was in the file? He realized that he should have asked Annagret what exactly she’d told the Stasi. Did they know about the dacha? Or had they shut down their investigation as soon as they’d traced her to him?

  He went back to Alexanderplatz, hoping to find her again. He searched the crowds until nightfall, to no avail. He considered going to Leipzig—it wouldn’t be hard to locate her sister’s flat, where she presumably was living—but he was afraid he would lose her altogether, lose her permanently, if he tracked her down and pestered her with questions.

  And so began two months of impotence and dread. On the night the Wall was breached, he felt like the one sober man in a city of falling-down drunks. Once upon a time, he would have laughed at how ridiculously twenty-eight years of national internment had ended, an improvised remark by an exhausted Schabowski demolishing the entire apparatus, but in the event, when he heard the shouting in the rectory, and when the vicar came running downstairs to break the blessed news to him, he might have been a cosmonaut hearing a space rock puncture the metal skin of his capsule. Air whooshing out, the void invading. While the rectory emptied, everybody hastening to the nearest checkpoint to see for themselves, he stayed huddled in a corner of his bed, his knees drawn up to his chin.

  He had not one particle of desire to cross the border. He could have gone to Leipzig and found Annagret, the two of them could have crossed over to the West and never come back, could have found a way to go and live in Mexico, Morocco, Thailand. But even if she wanted a life on the lam, what would be the point? Only in his motherland did his life make sense. It didn’t matter that he hated her, he still couldn’t leave her. In his mind, the only way to save himself was to come to Annagret as the man who’d guaranteed her safety, so that the two of them could walk in public with their heads held high. More than ever, in the chaotic days following the breach, he saw in Annagret his only hope.