Jonathan Franzen - Purity

It was curious, in retrospect, how little I’d identified with my father; how wholly I’d sided with my mother. But now she was dead, and as I walked into the dark Tiergarten with Andreas I could have been my dad on the night he’d met her. A chance meeting, a tall young woman from the East, a city alive with possibility. He must have been amazed to have her at his side.

We sat down on a bench.

“This is not for publication,” Andreas said. “This is simply to help you understand.”

“I’m here as a friend.”

“A friend. Interesting. I’ve never had a friend.”

“Never?”

“When I was in school, people liked me. But I found them contemptible. Cowardly, boring. And then I became an outcast, a dissident . No one trusted me, and I trusted them even less. They were cowardly and boring, too. A person like you couldn’t have existed in that country.”

“But now the dissidents have won.”

“Can I trust you?”

“You have no way of knowing it, but, yes, you absolutely can.”

“See if you still want to be my friend when you hear what I have to tell you.”

In the darkness, in the center of a city too diffuse and underpopulated to fill the sky with its noise, he told me how well connected his parents had been. How privileged he himself had been until he’d thrown away his life with an act of political defiance. And how, after his expulsion from the university, he’d drifted into a Milan Kundera world of pussy; how he’d then met a girl who’d changed his life, a girl whose soul he loved, and how he’d tried to save her from the stepfather who’d abused her. How the stepfather had pursued them to his parents’ dacha. How he’d killed the stepfather in self-defense, with a shovel that happened to be at hand, and buried the body behind the dacha. He told me about his subsequent paranoia and his good fortune in retrieving his police and surveillance files from the Stasi archives.

“I did it to protect her,” he said. “My life is not worth protecting, but hers is.”

“But it was self-defense. Why didn’t you just report it?”

“For the same reason she hadn’t gone to the authorities. The Stasi protect their own. The truth is whatever they want it to be. We both would have gone to prison.”

I’d interviewed convicted murderers in the past. I’d been a little scared of each of them, in an purely instinctive way, as if their history might repeat itself on me. But in the state I was in, after so much beer and conversation, I found myself strangely envious of Andreas, for the largeness and extremity of the life he’d led.

He’d begun to cry, voicelessly.

“It was bad, Tom,” he said. “It never goes away. I didn’t mean to kill him. But I did it. I did it…”

I put my arm around his shoulders, and he turned to me and clung to me.

“It’s all right,” I said.

“Not all right. Not all right.”

“No, no. It’s all right.”

He cried for a long time. I stroked his head and held him close. If he’d been a woman, I would have kissed his hair. But strict limits to intimacy are the straight man’s burden. He pulled away and composed himself.

“So that’s my story,” he said.

“You got away with it.”

“Not quite. She won’t see me until I know we’re safe. We’re almost safe, but there’s still a body in my parents’ yard.”

“Jesus.”

“Worse than that. They may be selling the house to speculators. There’s talk of digging up the ground. If I want to see her again, I have to move the body.”

“I’m sorry I can’t help you with that.”

“No, you’re clean. I would never involve you.”

There was a note of tenderness in his voice. I asked what he planned to do about the body.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I could learn to drive a car, but that would take time. I’m worried that I’m going to lose her. I guess I could do it with two suitcases, a trip on a train.”

“That would be some high-stress train trip.”

“I have to see her again. Whatever is needed, I’ll do it. That’s my only plan — to see her again.”

I felt another twinge of jealousy. Of exclusion; of competition with the girl. How else to explain what I said then?

“I can help you.”

“No.”

“I just cremated my mother. I’m up for it.”

“No.”

“I’m an American. I have a driver’s license.”

“No. It’s a dirty business.”

“If you’ve been telling me the truth, it’s a thing worth doing.”

“I have to do it alone. I have no way to repay you.”

“No repayment necessary. I’m offering as a friend.”

Somewhere in the distance, in the dark trees and bushes behind us, a cat cried out faintly. Then there came a second cry, somewhat louder, not a cat. It was a woman receiving pleasure.

“What about the archives,” Andreas said.

“What about them?”

“The committee is going to Normannenstraße again on Friday. I could get you in.”

“I don’t see them letting an American do that.”

“Your mother was German. You represent the people who escaped. They have files, too.”

“This doesn’t have to be a quid pro quo.”

“Not quid pro quo. Friendship.”

“It would certainly be a journalistic coup.”

Andreas jumped up from the bench. “Let’s do it! Both things.” He leaned over me and clapped me on the arms. “Shall we do it?”

The woman in the distance was crying out again. I had the thought that I could have this very woman, or one just like her, if I stayed with Andreas in Berlin.

“Yes,” I said.

Early the next morning, in Friedrichshain, I woke up in a state of remorse. The linens on my bed hadn’t been clean to begin with, and I’d never washed them; had simply accustomed myself to squalor. If the person I’d fallen for had been female, and had been lying next to me in bed, naked, I might have been able to block out thoughts of Anabel. As it was, the only way I could get back to sleep was to resolve to call Anabel later in the day and try to make amends for what I’d said to Andreas about her.

But when I did get up, around noon, the prospect of hearing her voice, its tremolo of injury, was repellent to me. The voice I wanted to hear and the face I wanted to see were Andreas’s. I went over to West Berlin and rented a car, making sure I was permitted to take it outside the city limits. Returning home, I found a telegram addressed to me on the floor of the vestibule.

CALL ME.

I lay down in my unclean bed, the telegram beside me, to wait for the city’s coal smoke to thicken into darkness and the post offices to drop their shutters.

Driving out to the suburbs, under the cover of night, I swerved around a stopped streetcar and nearly mowed down the riders who came bursting out of its doors. They shouted angrily, and I waved my hands in American apology. With the help of my father’s old patented-fold Berlin map, I navigated through endless neighborhoods of German penitence. The streets near the Müggelsee were more built up and heavily trafficked than I’d imagined; I was relieved to find the Wolfs’ summer house secluded by overgrown conifers.

I cut the lights and drove the car onto the frozen lawn and around behind the house, as Andreas had instructed me. From there I could see the iced-over lake, mottled white beneath a dome of urban cloud, and a toolshed in the rear corner of the lot. Andreas was standing by the shed with a shovel and a tarp.

“Any trouble?” he said cheerfully.

“A near-fatal accident, but no.”

“You’re good to do this for me.”

“Thank me later.”

He led me into the woods behind the shed. There was a pile of dirt and a corresponding hole. “My hands are terrible,” he said. “The dirt on top was frozen hard. But now I think we can just lift the thing out by the clothes. I already lifted up both ends.”