Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“I need to know what you and Anabel are going to do,” she said.

“I’m not thinking about that now.”

“Yes, but you’ll have to think about it soon.”

“She needs to finish her project, and then we’re still hoping to have a family.”

“Is that what you want?”

I thought about this and said, “I want to see her happy again. She used to be amazing, and now she’s all beaten down. I think if she were happy and successful I’d be happy with her.”

“Your happiness shouldn’t depend on hers,” my mother said. “You were a happy little boy, and I know your father and I weren’t the easiest parents, but I don’t think you were harmed. You have a right to be happy for yourself. If you’re with someone who can’t be happy, you need to think about what you’re going to do.”

I promised to think about it, and my mother went to lie down in her mother’s bedroom while I struggled to read a German newspaper. Half an hour later, I heard her go into the bathroom. A while after that, I heard her scream. The scream has stayed with me, I can still play it in my head exactly as I heard it.

She was on the toilet, doubled over and rocking with agony. She’d been on a toilet in distress countless times in her life, but this was, remarkably, the first time I’d ever seen her on one. She would have wished that I hadn’t, and I was and remain sorry, for her sake, that I did. She looked up at me, wild-eyed, and said, with a gasp, “Tom, my God, I’m dying.”

I helped her up by the armpits and half carried her into the bedroom, leaving behind a bowl of blood and worse. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. Some part of her jerry-rigged colon had ruptured, and she was dying of sepsis. I rubbed morphine into her gums and stroked her fragile head. Her head was still so warm, I wondered what was happening inside it, but she didn’t speak to me again. I said it was OK, I said I loved her, I said not to worry about me. Her breathing became slower and more labored, and then, just past noon, it stopped altogether. I laid my cheek on her chest and held her for a long time, not thinking anything, just being an animal that had lost its mother. Then I got up and called the number my uncle had given me to get a message to him at his little weekend cottage.

Klaus and I thought it was better to have no funeral than a tiny funeral. After the cremation, he and I walked along the river, among the lawns where my mother had sunned herself as a girl, and scattered half of the ashes along the riverbank. The other half I put aside for scattering in Denver with Cynthia. On the morning I left Jena, I thanked Klaus, in halting German, for everything he’d done. He shrugged and said my mother would have done the same for him. It occurred to me to ask what she’d been like as a girl.

“ Herrisch! ” He laughed. “Now you see why I had to help her.”

I looked up the unfamiliar word later. Bossy .

On the train back to Berlin I stood at the rear of the last car the whole way, watching the receding track signals change from red to green. It didn’t feel so bad to be an orphan. It felt like the first day of a long vacation, a day as empty as the January sky was clear and sunny. The only cloud, Anabel, was in a different hemisphere. My sense of liberation was partly financial — Cynthia and Ellen and I would divide an estate worth more than $400,000—but it was larger than that. My parents had both bowed out now, leaving the entire field to me, and I could see that I’d been hobbling myself for Anabel’s sake, for fear of getting too far ahead of her.

I’d promised to call her that afternoon, but scattering my mother’s ashes had made me aware of something childish and fundamentally irrelevant in the body-filming project, and I was afraid of betraying this if we spoke. My own body felt so vital, so far from its own death, that I went out walking instead, retracing my mother’s long-ago steps, mingling with foreign gawkers along the Wall in Moabit and then finding my way to the Kurfürstendamm.

Near the western end of it, I stopped in a pub to eat a sausage and record my journalistic impressions in a notebook. At some point I noticed a man alone at the next table, a young German with a high forehead and loosely curly hair. He was watching the pub’s television with his arms draped across the chairs on either side of him. The wide-openness of his posture, the sense of ownership it broadcast, kept drawing my eyes to him. Finally he saw me looking and gave me a smile. As if letting me in on a joke, he pointed up at the TV screen.

His face was on the screen as well. He was being interviewed on a city street, above a tag of ANDREAS WOLF, DDR SYSTEMKRITIKER. I couldn’t make out much of what he was saying, but I caught the word sunlight . When the news program cut away to a wide shot of what I recognized as the national headquarters of the Stasi, I looked over and saw that he’d spread his arms even wider. I stood up with my notebook and went over to his table. “ Darf ich? ”

“Certainly,” he said in English. “You’re an American.”

“That’s right.”

“Americans are entitled to sit wherever they want.”

“I don’t know about that. But I’m curious what you were saying there. My German isn’t great.”

“Your notebook,” he said. “Are you a journalist?”

“I am.”

“Excellent.” He extended a hand. “Andreas Wolf.”

I shook his hand and sat down across from him. “Tom Aberant.”

“Can I buy you a beer?”

“Let me buy you one.”

“I’m the person celebrating. Never been on television, never been in the West, never spoken to an American. It’s my lucky night.”

I bought us some beers and got him talking. He told me he’d been part of the storming of Stasi headquarters, where he’d found himself the de facto spokesman of the Citizens’ Committee demanding oversight of the archives, and had rewarded himself by making his first trip out of the East. He’d barely slept in sixty hours, but he didn’t seem tired. I was feeling similarly buoyant. The luck of meeting an East German dissident in his first hours in the West, before any other Western journalist had had a crack at him, was making my mood on the train from Jena seem prophetic.

We finished the beers and went out to the street. Andreas didn’t walk so much as strut , in his tight jeans and army jacket, with his shoulders thrown back. The city’s atmosphere was still lingeringly festive, and he kept tossing his head at the foreigners and East Berliners on the Ku’damm, as if daring them not to recognize him. When we passed good-looking women, he pivoted sharply to stare after them. I had a feeling that Anabel wouldn’t like him, not one bit, and that I was furthering my liberation simply by walking with him.

On a quieter block, he stopped in front of a BMW showroom. “What do you think, Tom? Should I try to want one of these cars? Now that there’s no East, only West?”

“It’s your duty as a consumer to want them.”

He gazed at the ultimate driving machines. “I’ve never seen anything more terrifying in my life. Everyone else couldn’t wait to come here. Everyone else was too stupid to be terrified.”

“How would you feel about my writing down what you’re saying?”

“That’s what you want?”

“You seem like a person with stories to tell.”

He laughed. “ And let me speak to the yet unknowing world how these things came about: so shall you hear of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts … Who am I quoting?”

“I believe that is Horatio’s final speech.”

“Very good!” He hit me, flat-handed, on the shoulder. “Is it just you, or am I going to like every American?”