Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  However much Andreas had hated Katya in the past, he’d never hated her more than he did right now. “So, wait,” he said. “You’re saying you know what I’m here for.”

  “She mentioned it,” his father said, withholding eye contact.

  “But she didn’t care about me. She just cared about protecting herself.”

  “She did intercede on your behalf as well, once we had her records.”

  “First things first!”

  “She is my wife. You need to understand that.”

  “And I’m not really your son.”

  His father shifted uncomfortably. “I suppose that may be correct, in a technical sense.”

  “So I’m fucked. She fucked me over.”

  “You chose not to play by society’s rules, and you don’t seem to have repented of it. When your mother is her true self, she repents of what she’s done when she was not herself.”

  “You’re saying there’s nothing you can do for me.”

  “I’m reluctant to go back to a well I fear is dry now.”

  “Do you know why it matters to me?”

  His father shrugged. “I have guesses, based on your past behavior. But, no, I don’t.”

  “Then let me tell you why,” Andreas said. He was furious with himself for having waited five weeks for his mother to rescue him—would he ever stop being the dumbfuck four-year-old? But he was down to only two choices, either get out of the country or trust the man who wasn’t really his father, and so he told him the story. Told it with major embellishments and omissions, carefully framing it as a parable of a good socialist judo girl who had followed all the rules and been raped by a Stasi-abetted incarnation of pure evil. He made a case for his own reformation, spoke of his good work with at-risk youth, spoke of his successes, his genuine service to society, his refusal to mix with the dissidents: his attempt to become, in the church basement, a son worthy of his father. He cast his state-subverting poetry as a regrettable response to having had a mentally ill mother. He said he did repent of it now.

  When he was finished, his father said nothing for a long time. Cars were still honking in the street now and then, the pool of cold blood sausage darkening toward black.

  “Where did this … event occur?” his father said.

  “It doesn’t matter. A safe place in the countryside. Better if you don’t know where.”

  “You should have gone straight to the Stasi. They would have punished the individual severely.”

  “She wouldn’t do it. She’d followed the rules all her life. She just wanted to have a good life in society as it existed. I was trying to give her that.”

  His father went to a sideboard and returned with two glasses and a bottle of Ballantine’s. “Your mother is my wife,” he said, pouring. “She will always come first.”

  “Of course.”

  “But your story is affecting. It puts a different light on things. It makes me question, to some extent, the idea I’ve had of you. Should I believe it?”

  “The only things I left out were to protect you.”

  “Did you tell it to your mother?”

  “No.”

  “Good. It would only upset her, to no purpose.”

  “I’m more like you than I am like her,” Andreas said. “Can you see that? We’re both dealing with the same difficult person.”

  His father emptied his glass with one gulp. “These are difficult times.”

  “Can you help me?”

  His father poured more scotch. “I can ask. I fear the answer will be no.”

  “That you would even ask—”

  “Don’t thank me. I would be doing it for your mother, not for you. The law is the law—we can’t take it into our own hands. Even if I’m successful, you should go to the police and make a full confession. The act would be all the more commendable if you performed it when you no longer had to fear discovery. If the facts really are the way you’ve represented them, you can count on considerable leniency, especially in the current climate. It would be hard on your mother, but it would be the right thing to do.”

  Andreas thought, but didn’t say, that in fact he was more like his mother, not his father, because he had no interest at all in doing the right thing if the wrong thing would save him from public shame and prison time. His life seemed to him a long war between two sides of him, the sick side that he had from his mother, the scrupled side that he had from a nongenetic father. But he feared that at base he was all Katya.

  He’d taken leave of his father and was walking to the elevator when the door of the flat opened behind him. “Andreas,” his father called after him.

  He went back to the door.

  “Tell me the name of the individual,” his father said. “It occurs to me that you’ll also want the file on his disappearance.”

  Andreas searched his father’s face. Did the old man intend to turn him in? Unable to find an answer, Andreas spoke the full name of the man he’d killed.

  Late the following afternoon, the vicar came down to his room to tell him that he had a phone call.

  “I think I’ve done it,” his father said, on the phone. “You won’t be sure until you actually go to the archive. They wouldn’t remove the files from there, and it’s quite possible that you won’t be allowed to take them with you. But they will show them to you. So, at least, they say.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Thank me by never speaking of it again.”

  At eight o’clock in the morning, following his father’s instructions, Andreas went back to Normannenstraße and presented himself at the front gate. A television crew was eating hard rolls by a van. He gave the name he’d been told to give, Captain Eugen Wachtler, and submitted to a pat down, relinquishing the knapsack in which he’d hoped to carry the files away.

  Captain Wachtler came to the gate twenty minutes later. He was bald and precancerously gray and had the faraway expression of someone enduring chronic pain. There was a small stain on the lapel of his suit jacket. “Andreas Wolf?”

  “Yes.”

  The captain gave him a security pass on a lanyard. “Put this on and follow me.”

  Without further words, they crossed the courtyard and went through an unlocked gate and then a gate that Wachtler unlocked and relocked behind them. There were further locks at the entrance of the main archive building, one that Wachtler had a key for, another operated by a guard behind a thick glass window. Andreas followed the captain up two flights of stairs and down a corridor of closed doors. “Exciting times here,” Andreas ventured to say.

  Wachtler didn’t respond. At the end of the hall, he unlocked yet another door and beckoned Andreas into a small room with a table and two chairs. On the table were four file folders, neatly stacked.

  “I will be back in exactly one hour,” Wachtler said. “You are not to leave this room or remove any materials from it. The pages are numbered. Before we leave, I will examine them to make sure that nothing is missing.”

  “Got it.”

  The captain left and Andreas opened the topmost folder. There were only ten pages in it, pertaining to the disappearance of Unofficial Collaborator Horst Werner Kleinholz. The second folder also contained ten pages, a carbon copy of the first file. As soon as Andreas saw the carbon copy, he knew that there was hope. He’d been instructed not to remove anything, but there was no reason to give him the duplicate if they expected him to follow the instruction. The carbon copy was a clear signal that this was all they had and they were giving it to him. He was flooded with love and pride and gratitude. His father had worked for forty years within the system, playing by the rules, to bring about this moment. His father still had influence, and the Stasi had come through for him.

  He took out the plastic shopping bag that he’d stuffed in his boot and put both copies of the investigation file in it. The other two folders on the table were thicker. They contained the two halves of his own file, continuously numbered. These, too, he put in the plast
ic bag.

  His heart was pounding and he was getting a major stiffy, because the rest was a game. The rules of the game were that he was breaking the rules, stealing materials without the Stasi’s knowledge or consent, materials that he was only supposed to look at, not take with him. It wouldn’t be the Stasi’s fault if they went missing.

  He had a flicker of worry that the captain had locked him in the room, but the door wasn’t locked, the game was on. He stepped out into the corridor. The building was weirdly silent, not a voice to be heard, just a low institutional humming. He retraced his steps to the stairs and down the two flights. From the main hallway he heard footsteps and voices, employees arriving for work. He stepped boldly into it and headed for the front door. Incoming workers gave him cold, incurious looks.

  He tapped on the window at the door where the guard sat. “Can you let me out?”

  The guard half stood to read the pass hanging from Andreas’s neck. “You’ll have to wait for your escort.”

  “I’m not feeling well. I might throw up.”

  “There’s a bathroom down the hall to your left.”

  He went to the bathroom and locked himself in a stall. If the game was on, there had to be some way for him to escape. He still had his stiffy, and he felt a curiously strong impulse to take it out and ejaculate, most gloriously, into a Stasi toilet. It had been three years since he’d felt so wildly aroused, but he told himself—spoke it out loud—“Wait. Soon. Not yet. Soon.”

  Returning to the hallway, he saw an open door with daylight spilling through it, suggesting a window he might climb out of. Again boldly, he walked to the door. It was a conference room, with windows on the courtyard. The windows had heavy grates, but two of them had been opened, as if to let in more light. When he stepped into the room, a female voice spoke sharply, “Can I help you?”

  A thick middle-aged woman was placing biscuits on a glass plate.

  “No, sorry, wrong room,” he said, retreating.

  More workers were entering the building, dispersing into stairwells and side hallways. He stationed himself at the end of the main hallway, keeping an eye on the conference room, waiting for the woman to step out. He was still waiting when a commotion developed at the far end of the hall, at the entrance. He hurried toward it, plastic bag in hand.

  Eight or ten men and women, manifestly not Stasi, were making their way through the portal. A smaller group of Stasi officers, in decent suits, was standing inside to greet them. Andreas recognized several of the visitors’ faces—this had to be the ad hoc Citizens’ Committee of Normannenstraße, making its first inspection of the archives, under strict supervision. The committee members were holding themselves erect, with self-importance but also with awe and trepidation. Two of them were shaking Stasi hands when Andreas pushed past them and through the inner door.

  “Stop,” came the voice of the guard behind glass.

  An officer was locking the outer door but hadn’t got the job done yet. Andreas shoved him aside, turned the handle, and pushed through. He sprinted across the courtyard with his plastic bag. There was shouting behind him.

  The gate in the fence was locked, but there was no barbed wire, no concertina. He scrambled up and vaulted down and sprinted for the main gate. The guards merely watched as he ran out to the street.

  And there were the TV cameras. Three of them, pointing at him.

  A phone was ringing at the guard station.

  “Yes, he’s right here,” a guard said.

  Andreas glanced over his shoulder and saw two guards coming for him. He dropped his bag, raised his hands, and addressed the cameras. “Are you rolling?” he shouted.

  One television crew was scrambling. A woman in another gave him a thumbs-up. He turned to her camera and began to speak.

  “My name is Andreas Wolf,” he said. “I am a citizen of the German Democratic Republic, and I am here to monitor the work of the Citizens’ Committee of Normannenstraße. I’m coming directly from the Stasi archives, where I have reason to fear that a whitewash is occurring. I’m not here in an official capacity. I’m not here to work with, I’m here to work against. This is a country of festering secrets and toxic lies. Only the strongest of sunlight can disinfect it!”

  “Hey, stop,” called a member of the crew that had been scrambling. “Say that all again.”

  He said it all again. He was utterly improvising, but the longer he spoke and the more his image was recorded, the safer he was from being seized by the guards behind him. It was his first moment of media fame, the first of many. He spent the rest of the morning on Normannenstraße, giving interviews and rallying onlookers, demanding that sunlight be shined on the abscess of the Stasi. By the time the members of the Citizens’ Committee emerged from the compound, they had no choice but to welcome him to their cause, because he’d already stolen their media moment.

  His plastic shopping bag was visible in thousands of frames of video that day. It was firmly under his arm when, late in the afternoon, he ran home to the basement of the church. He was almost free. His only worry now was the unsecurely buried body, he was very close to having Annagret, his libido was back. He didn’t even glance at the files in the bag, just shoved them under his mattress and ran outside again. In a state of sex-mad lightness, he crossed the old border at Friedrichstraße and made his way west to the Kurfürstendamm, where he met the good American Tom Aberant.

  Too Much Information

  Ordinarily, Leila looked forward to traveling on assignment. She was never more of a professional, never more defensibly excused from her caretaking duties in Denver, than when she was locked in a hotel room with her green-tea bags, her anonymized Wi-Fi connection, her two colors of ballpoint, her Ambien stash. But from the moment she arrived in Amarillo, on a commuter jet from Denver, something felt different. It was as if she didn’t even want to be in Amarillo. The normally pleasurable economies of her competence, the preferred-customer getaway from the rental-car lot, the optimal route she took to the small house of Janelle Flayner, the swiftness with which she secured Flayner’s trust and got her talking, weren’t pleasurable. Late in the afternoon, she stopped at a Toot’n Totum convenience mart and bought a chef salad in a polyethylene box. In her hotel room, which a recent occupant had smoked in, she uncapped the cup of salad dressing and felt nailed by the product’s targeting of her demographic: the solitary 50+ female looking for something sensible to eat. It occurred to her that what she was feeling wasn’t generic loneliness. She had a new research assistant, Pip Tyler, and she was wishing she could have brought the girl along.

  With a little ache in her throat, for which only work was a remedy, she set out after dinner to meet the former girlfriend of Cody Flayner. She left her room lights burning and the privacy card on her doorknob. Outside, the sky was cloudless and nicked with random dull stars, their contextualizing constellations obscured by light and dust pollution. The Texas Panhandle was in year five of a drought that might soon be upgraded to permanent climate change. Instead of April snowmelt, dust.

  While she drove, she Bluetoothed her phone into the car stereo and listened uncomfortably to her interview of Cody Flayner’s ex-wife. She considered herself a good-hearted person, an empathetic listener, but in playback she could hear herself manipulating.

  Helou—what kind of last name is that?

  It’s Lebanese … Christian. I grew up in San Antonio.

  You know, I was just sitting here thinking you sound Texan.

  But Leila no longer sounded Texan, except when she was interviewing Texans.

  Layla, if you don’t mind my saying, you don’t strike me as the kind of gal who picks wrong.

  Ha. Take a closer look.

  So you know what cheated-on feels like.

  Anything that’s unhappy and has to do with marriage—yes.

  It’s a sisterhood, all right. That phone of yours close enough?

  We don’t have to use it if—

  I told you, I want it on. It’s about time somebod
y listened to me—I’d started thinking nobody cared. If you want to put me on the Internet saying Cody Flayner is a DEADBEAT CHEATER MORON, you be my guest.

  I hear he’s become very active in a Baptist church.

  Cody? Gimme a break. The Ten Commandments is like his personal to-do list. I know for a fact he’s having relations with a nineteen-year-old girl in that congregation. He only joined that church because his daddy made him.

  Tell me about that.

  Well, you know. We wouldn’t be talking if you didn’t know. They caught him with his pants down. He could of started World War Three, taking that thing home on his precious Ram truck. And the plant didn’t even fire him! Fired his boss, but all Cody got was “reassignment.” It sure helps when your dad’s a muckety-muck at the plant. And I’ll say this for the old man, he drove a good bargain. First time I been getting my payments since the day Cody walked out on us.

  He’s started paying child support.

  For now. We’ll see how long his newfound faith’ll last. I reckon about as long as his little buddy in Christ don’t completely blimp out.

  Does this girl have a name?

  Porky Bonehead.

  But on her driver’s license?

  Marli Copeland. Just an “i” at the end. You’re probably thinking it’s bad of me to even have that information.

  No, I totally get it. He’s the father of your children.

  But that girl won’t talk to you, no way. Not if Cody don’t.

  To drive east on Amarillo Boulevard was to pass, in quick succession, the high-security Clements Unit prison complex, the McCaskill meat-processing facility, and the Pantex nuclear-weapons plant, three massive installations more alike than different in their brute utility and sodium-vapor lighting. In the rearview mirror were the evangelical churches, the Tea Party precincts, the Whataburgers. Ahead, the gas and oil wells, the fracking rigs, the overgrazed ranges, the feedlots, the depleted aquifer. Every facet of Amarillo a testament to a nation of bad-ass firsts: first in prison population, first in meat consumption, first in operational strategic warheads, first in per-capita carbon emissions, first in line for the Rapture. Whether American liberals liked it or not, Amarillo was how the rest of the world saw their country.