Jonathan Franzen - Purity

Whatever the East German army was doing now, it was doing it somewhere else. We hustled the rolled-up tarp and two shovels up into a ravine where our footprints wouldn’t be visible. From there, we struggled through leafless brambles and into the woods.

“Here,” he said.

The digging was hard but also warming. I was ready to stop when we were one foot down, but Andreas insisted on digging deeper. An owl was calling from somewhere near, but the only other sound was the crunch of our shovels and the crack of the tree roots we encountered.

“Now leave me alone,” he said.

“I don’t mind helping. It’s not like not helping will lessen my criminal offense.”

“I’m burying what I was before I knew Annagret. This is personal.”

I walked away from the grave and stayed away until he was throwing dirt on the remains. Then I helped him finish the burial and cover the spot with leaves and dirty snow. By the time we returned to the road, a fog had gathered, brighter in the east where the night was ending. We stowed the shovels in the trunk. After Andreas had slammed down the lid, he let out a falsetto whoop. He jumped up and down and whooped again.

“Jesus, shut up,” I said.

He grasped me by the arms and looked me in the eye. “Thank you, Tom. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“You need to understand what this means to me. To have a friend I can trust.”

“If I tell you I understand, can we hit the road?”

His eyes were shining strangely. He leaned into me, and for a moment I thought he might kiss me. But it was merely a hug. I returned it, and we stood for a while in awkward embrace. I could feel him breathing, feel the humidity of his sweat escaping from beneath his army jacket. He put a hand on the back of my head, his fingers closing around my hair the way Anabel’s might have. Then, abruptly, he broke away from me. “Wait here.”

“Where are you going?”

“One minute,” he said.

I watched him run back up the ravine and kick through the brambles. I hadn’t liked his whooping, and I liked this additional delay even less. I lost sight of him in the trees, but I could hear sticks snapping, the rustle of his jacket on branches. Then a deep rural silence. And then, faintly but distinctly, the clink of a belt buckle. The sound of a zipper.

To avoid hearing more, I walked up the road in the direction of our tire tracks. I tried to put myself in Andreas’s position, tried to imagine the relief and exhilaration he was feeling, but there was simply no squaring his avowed remorse with defiling his victim’s final grave.

His business was done in a few minutes. He came running up the road, running and jumping. When he reached my side, he turned in a complete circle with his arms in the air and the middle finger of each hand extended. He whooped again.

“Can we leave?” I said coolly.

“Absolutely! You can drive twice as fast now.”

He seemed not to notice that my mood had changed. In the car, he was manically voluble, bouncing from subject to subject — how it could work for me to live with him and Annagret, how exactly he was going to get me into the archives, and how the two of us could collaborate, him unlocking the forbidden doors, me writing the stories. He urged me to drive faster, to pass trucks on blind curves. He recited old poems of his and explicated them. He recited long passages of Shakespeare in English, banging out the blank-verse rhythm on the dashboard. Every now and then, he paused to whoop again, or to pummel me in the arm with two fists.

When we finally reached his church in Berlin, on Siegfeldstraße, my mouth tasted metallic with exhaustion. He wanted to grab a quick breakfast and go straight to the Citizens’ Committee meeting, but I said, truthfully, that I had to lie down.

“Leave it to me, then,” he said.

“OK.”

“I’m never forgetting this, Tom. Never, never, never.”

“Don’t mention it.”

I popped the trunk lid and got out of the car. Seeing Andreas take out the shovels in full daylight, I wondered, belatedly, which one of them had been the murder weapon. In my sleep-deprived state, it seemed very bad that I might have used that particular shovel.

He clapped me on the shoulder. “You all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Get some sleep. Meet me here at seven. We’ll have dinner.”

“Sounds good.”

I never saw him again. When I awoke, in my filthy sheets, it was an hour before the rental-car office closed. I returned the car and walked back to my squat in the dark. I still had a hankering to see Andreas’s face and hear his voice — I have it even as I write this — but the sadness from which I’d been running was hitting me so hard that I could barely stand upright. I lay down on the bed and wept for myself, and for Anabel, and for Andreas, but above all for my mother.

* * *

The approach of thunderstorms was making the New Jersey sky three-dimensional, a many-tiered vault of variously shaded cloud, gray and white and hepatic green, when Anabel led me out of the woods and up through a pasture to Suzanne’s parents’ house. She claimed that she wanted to show me something quickly before taking me back to catch my bus, but I knew that my actually catching the 8:11 bus was as arrant a fantasy as our ever finding a way to live together again, if only because the business of escaping from her, of enforcing my right to leave, was so painful that I shied from it like a brutalized animal. Anything at all was preferable, and there was also the prospect of further sex, which promised minutes of relief from consciousness.

And still I balked at the door of the house. It was a sixties-modern summer place with a mountain view and some apple trees behind it. Anabel went right in, but I hung in the doorway, my stomach suddenly upset like the sky, my heart racing with what I now think was straightforward PTSD.

“Won’t you come inside with me?” she said in a tone whose very sweetness was insane.

“I think after all maybe not.”

“Do you realize you left your toothbrush here last time?”

“My dentist keeps me well supplied.”

“The man who ‘forgets’ his toothbrush in a woman’s house is a man who wants to come back.”

My panic intensified. I looked over my shoulder and saw a fractal of lightning on the next ridge over; I waited for the thunder. When I looked into the house again, Anabel was not in sight. I considered, quite seriously, strangling her to death while I fucked her and then throwing myself in front of the 8:11 bus. The idea was not without its logic and appeal. But there were the bus driver’s feelings to consider …

I stepped into the house and closed the screen door behind me. With my help, she’d cleared the furniture from the living room, leaving only a mat for her yoga and meditation. She hadn’t officially abandoned her film project, it was merely on hold while she sought to regain her calm and centeredness. She was living on the half of my inheritance I’d given her as part of our divorce settlement. After returning from Berlin, I’d needed no more than a day with her to recognize that my homesickness had been grounded in a fantasy. She’d said she wasn’t spaghetti with eggplant, but to me she really was. And so I’d built us a new fantasy of divorce as our only hope of reuniting.

Anabel was convinced that I’d been unfaithful to her in Berlin — that this was why I hadn’t called her. To defend myself against this baseless charge, I’d told her more about Andreas than I should have. Not about the murder, not about my having been an accessory after the fact, but enough about his personality and history to explain both why I’d been attracted to him and why I’d run away from him. She’d concluded that he was a jerk who’d brought out the jerk in me, the jerk who’d returned from Berlin and asked for a divorce. But the person I’d actually been a jerk to was Andreas. I’d stood him up for our dinner date, and then I’d waited two months before sending him a stilted letter of apology, reassurance, and “warm wishes.”