Jonathan Franzen - Purity

That summer, I started eating meat again. I went to Nevada and wrote a story for Esquire about the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository. I also nursed my mother through her radiation sickness and saw a lot of Cynthia and her little girl. Now it was Anabel to whom I made Sunday-night phone calls. She claimed to be having productive thoughts, and only when she said things like “Don’t forget me, Tom” was it less than nice to hear her voice. She wouldn’t have guessed that I was eating meat again, and I didn’t mention it.

My mother continued to surprise me. After she’d recovered from her second, conclusively discouraging surgery, in October, she asked me to take her to Germany before she died. She’d been following the political developments there, the swelling exodus of East Germans through Czechoslovakia, and for the first time in many years she’d tried sending another letter to her family at its old address. Three weeks later, she got a long letter back from her brother. He and his wife were still living in the old place, his mother had died in 1961, his little sister was twice divorced, his older son had been admitted to the university. At least as my mother translated it to me, his letter was devoid of resentment, as if her disappearance were just another fact from a difficult childhood he’d long since put behind him. There was no mention of the many earlier letters he hadn’t answered. I wondered if he might never have been resentful, only fearful that the Stasi would frown on his corresponding with an escapee. And now people had stopped being afraid of the Stasi.

On the strength of my three semesters of college German and my mother’s story, I contracted with Harper’s to write a firsthand account of communism’s collapse. My mother had lost a lot of weight and was looking truly scarecrowish, but her bowel was still functioning somehow, and she didn’t have a stoma. One evening, when I was helping her put her simple affairs in order, she set down her pen and said to me, “I think I’m going to die in Germany.”

“You don’t know that,” I said.

“I’m done here,” she said. “Cynthia is a good mother, a fine person, and you’re on your way to a fine career. I think Denver and I have had enough of each other. A life is a funny thing, Tom. People talk about putting down roots, but people aren’t trees. If I have any roots, they aren’t here.”

She worried that she’d forgotten her German, but she was so good at language, had learned English so well, that I considered this unlikely. On our last night in Denver, Cynthia came over to our house without her daughter. When it was time for her to say good-bye, forever, I tried to leave her alone with my mother.

“No, stay with us,” my mother said. “I want you to hear what I have to say.” She turned to Cynthia. “I want to apologize for not being a better mother to you when you were young. I made excuses for it, but that’s all they were, excuses, and I don’t deserve any of what you’ve done for me since then. You’ve been the best daughter a mother could ever ask for. You were the great gift your father gave me. If I’ve been lucky in nothing else, I’ve been lucky in you and Tom. I want you to know how deeply I appreciate everything you’ve done, and how sorry I am that I was ever unkind to you. You’re a wonderful person, more wonderful than I deserve.”

Cynthia’s face had crumpled, but my mother remained dry-eyed, dignified. German. In the shadow of death, she was no longer the person I’d known. She’d become the person I hadn’t known, the German person. The decades of her unhappiness, the years of her dronings, now seemed like a long failure to find a good way to be American.

By the time we left for Berlin, the Wall had been breached. (I mentally rearranged my unwritten story, as journalists do, to make it more about young Clelia.) After resting for a day in Berlin, we proceeded by train to Jena. Looking out the window at a town shrouded in coal smoke, my mother commented, “Thirty-five years they’ve had to make it even uglier. Thirty-five years, my God, of manufacturing ugliness. People will forget, but I don’t want you to forget: this part of Germany paid for its guilt.”

I wrote this down in a notebook. East Germany may have been a giant penitentiary administered by the Russians, the Stasi may have embodied the worst excesses of German authority and bureaucratic thoroughness, and anyone with brains or spirit may have fled the country before the Wall went up, but the inmates who’d remained behind to expiate the country’s collective guilt had paradoxically been liberated from their Germanness. The ones I met in Jena were humble, unpunctual, spontaneous, and generous with what little they had. The country’s economy had been a sham from the start, and although the inmates had played along with the rules, attending the political-education meetings, licking their attendance stamps and pasting them into little books that reminded me of the Green Stamps of my youth, their real loyalties were to one another, not to the state. My uncle Klaus and his wife cleared out of the bedroom that had once been Annelie’s and gave it to my mother. They had a telephone but rarely used it. Friends simply appeared at the door and were ushered in to the weeklong house party with which my mother’s return was celebrated. There was endless beer and bad white wine and cream cakes. My presence was awkward, since I couldn’t understand much of the conversation, and I was relieved when, at the end of the week, my mother proposed that I leave her alone with her brother and come back to visit only on Saturday nights and Sundays. “You need to write your article,” she said. “They’ve offered to take care of me, but I want them to have a break every week.”

“You’re sure this is what you want to do.”

“That’s how they do things here,” she said. “They take care of each other.”

“You’re sounding like an old Communist.”

“It’s been forty years of terrible waste,” she said, “a whole country of wasted lives. It’s a country of big children, people being naughty behind the teacher’s back, people tattling on each other, people getting their dumb certificates for being good little socialists. People submitting to the system because they’re German and because it’s a system. The whole thing was stupid and a lie. But they’re not arrogant, not know-it-alls. They give what they have and they take me the way I am.”

The closer she came to dying, the more sure of herself she became. She’d concluded that the meaning of a life was in the form of it. There was no answering the question of why she’d been born, she could only take what she’d been given and try to make it end well. She intended to die in her mother’s bedroom, in the company of her brother and her only offspring, without the indignity of a colostomy bag.

I went back to Berlin, teamed up with a couple of young French journalists I’d met, and ended up squatting with them in a Friedrichshain apartment whose tenants had simply walked away from it and showed no sign of returning. For a month I made the weekly trip down to Jena, with an extra trip at Christmas, while my mother grew ever thinner and grayer. Thankfully, her pain was mostly tolerable. When she had a sharper attack of it, she rubbed her gums with the morphine that Dr. Van Schyllingerhout had given her to smuggle along with us.

My last meal with her was breakfast on the second Sunday of January. She’d been up a few times in the night, doing things that her dignity precluded my witnessing, and her eyes were hollow, the contours of her skull crisply visible beneath her thin skin, but she was still bright Clelia, her heart still beating, her brain still oxygenated and filled with her life. I was happy to see her eat an entire hard roll with butter.