Jonathan Franzen - Purity

I looked down into the hole. There was enough ambient light to see that the body’s coveralls, now impregnated with sandy mud, had once been blue. They gave the bones the shape and some of the bulk of a body. There looked to be some shreds of skin still on the hand bones. The smell wasn’t bad, a faint rot on rot, like moldy cheese. Only one thing was missing.

“Where’s the head?”

Andreas nodded over his shoulder. “In a plastic bag. No need for you to see that.”

I appreciated his consideration. Having sat so recently with my mother’s body, I was still in a penumbra of inurement to death. But a skull, perhaps with bits of hair on it, would have been a bad sight. The bones were more safely abstract without it. I felt that in making myself look at them, I was ensuring that I could never go back to Anabel.

Nevertheless, my jaw was shuddering, and not simply from the cold. Andreas spread the tarp, and we straddled the hole and tugged on the coveralls. They must have been rotten underneath. They came apart in the middle, dumping bones and various lumps of unidentifiable substance.

“Fuck this,” I said.

“Yeah, OK. Leave it to me.”

I stood at the edge of the lake while Andreas heaved and shoveled things out of the hole. I didn’t go back until he’d rolled up the tarp and was filling the hole with dirt again. I helped him with that, to speed things along.

“I got us some sandwiches,” he said when we’d stowed the tarp and its contents in the trunk of the car.

“I can’t say I have much appetite.”

“Force yourself. We have a long drive.”

We washed our hands with a bottle of mineral water and ate the sandwiches. I was cold again, and in the cold it occurred to me, as it somehow hadn’t before, that I was about to commit a serious crime. I felt a pang, not a large one, but a definite pang of homesickness for Anabel. Bad as our life had become, it was domestic, predictable, monogamous, uncriminal. In a corner of my mind, a rat of a thought scurried: that I’d met Andreas forty-eight hours ago, that I didn’t really know him, and that he might have not told me the whole truth; that, indeed, he might have been working me all along, as his ticket back to Annagret.

“Reassure me about the police,” I said. “I’m picturing a routine traffic stop. Please open the trunk .”

“The police have bigger things to worry about these days.”

“I did almost kill about six people on the way over here.”

“Would you be happier if I said I’m scared out of my mind?”

“Are you?”

“A little bit, yeah.” He punched me in the arm. “You?”

“I’ve had funner evenings.”

“I won’t forget what you’re doing for me, Tom. Never.”

In the car, with the heat blasting, I felt better. Andreas told me more about his life, the bizarrely literary terms in which he understood it, and his yearning for a better, cleaner life with Annagret. “We’re going to find a place to live,” he said. “You can stay with us for as long as you want. It’s the least we can do for you.”

“And you’ll do what for a living?”

“I haven’t thought so far ahead.”

“Journalism?”

“Maybe. What’s it like?”

I told him what it was like, and he seemed interested, but I sensed a faint, unspoken distaste, as if he had grander ambitions that he was tactfully refraining from mentioning. It was the same sense I’d had when he looked at Anabel’s picture: he was happy to admire what I had as long as what he had was even better. This might not have boded well for a future friendship of equals, but there at the beginning, in the very warm car, it was consonant with my experience of crushes — the feeling of inferiority, the hope of being found worthy nonetheless.

“The Citizens’ Committee is meeting tomorrow morning,” he said. “You should come along with me, so they know who you are on Friday. How’s your German?”

“Eh.”

“ Sprich. Sprich .”

“ Ich bin Amerikaner. Ich bin in Denver geboren —”

“The r is wrong. Say it more in the throat. Amerikaner. Geboren .”

“My r ’s are the least of my problems.”

“ Noch mal, bitte: Amerikaner .”

“ Amerikaner .”

“ Geboren .”

“ Geboren .”

For a good hour, we worked on my pronunciation. It makes me sad to think of that hour. Judging from his arrogant street presentation, I would never have guessed what a patient teacher he was. We were already assuming that I would stay on in Berlin, but I could also feel that he liked both me and his language and wanted us to get along.

“Let’s work on your English accent,” I said.

“My accent is flawless! I’m the son of an English professor.”

“You sound like the BBC. You’ve got to flatten your a ’s. You haven’t really lived until you’ve said a like an American. They’re one of the glories of our nation. Say can’t for me.”

“Can’t.”

“Aaaaa. Caaaan’t. Like a bleating goat.”

“Caaaaan’t.”

“There you go. The British have no concept of what they’re missing.”

On the outskirts of a no-account town, we stopped at a shuttered gas station so that Andreas could dig into a trash bin and bury the skull in it. Waiting in the car, I felt convinced that I was performing a good deed. If my mother hadn’t emigrated, if I’d been born in a Stasi-shadowed country, I might have killed a Stasi rat in self-defense myself. Helping Andreas seemed to me a way of atoning for my American advantages.

“You didn’t leave the engine running,” he remarked when he was back in the car.

“Didn’t want to be conspicuous.”

“It’s a question of efficiency. Now you have to warm it up again.”

I put the car in gear and smiled at knowing better. “In the first place,” I said, “what heats a car is excess engine heat. The added fuel use is zero. You might know this if you’d ever driven one. More to the point, it’s never efficient to maintain heat in a cold environment.”

“That’s completely false.”

“No, in fact it’s true.”

“Completely false.” He seemed eager to spar. “If you’re heating a house, it’s much more efficient to maintain a temperature of sixteen degrees overnight than to raise the temperature from five degrees in the morning. My father always did it at the dacha.”

“Your father was wrong.”

“He was the chief economist of a major industrialized nation!”

“I’m understanding better why the nation failed.”

“Trust me, Tom. You’re wrong about this.”

It happened that my own father had explained to me the thermodynamics of home heating. Without mentioning him, I pointed out to Andreas that the rate of caloric transfer is proportional to temperature differential — the warmer the house, the more profusely it bleeds calories on a cold night. Andreas tried to fight me with integral calculus, but I remembered the basics of that, too. We tussled while I drove. He advanced ever-more esoteric arguments, refusing to accept that his father had been wrong. When I finally defeated him, I could feel that something had changed between us, some hook of friendship set. He seemed both confounded and admiring. Until then, I don’t think he’d believed I was a worthy intellectual adversary.

It was after midnight when we reached the Oder valley. We crossed a decrepit wooden bridge to an island used only in the summer, by farmers growing hay. The crusted snow on the dikes between frozen marshes was virgin. I didn’t like the tracks we were leaving, but Andreas said that the forecast was for rain and warmer weather. On the far side of the island was a tangle of woods that he remembered from a nature walk he’d taken while attending an elite summer camp. “It was the height of privilege,” he said. “We had border guards with us.”