Jonathan Franzen - Purity

There were a lot of could-be Snowdens inside the New Regime, employees with access to the algorithms that Facebook used to monetize its users’ privacy and Twitter to manipulate memes that were supposedly self-generating. But smart people were actually far more terrified of the New Regime than of what the regime had persuaded less-smart people to be afraid of, the NSA, the CIA — it was straight from the totalitarian playbook, disavowing your own methods of terror by imputing them to your enemy and presenting yourself as the only defense against them — and most of the could-be Snowdens kept their mouths shut. Twice, though, insiders had reached out to Andreas (interestingly, both worked for Google), offering him dumps of internal email and algorithmic software that plainly revealed how the company stockpiled personal user data and actively filtered the information it claimed passively to reflect. In both cases, fearing what Google could do to him, Andreas had declined to upload the documents. To salvage his self-regard, he’d been honest with the leakers: “Can’t do it. I need Google on my side.”

Only in this one respect, though, did he consider himself an apparatchik. Otherwise, in interviews, he disdained the rhetoric of revolution, and he inwardly winced when his workers spoke of making the world a better place. From the example of Assange, he’d learned the folly of making messianic claims about his mission, and although he took ironic satisfaction in being famed for his purity, he was under no illusions about his actual capacity for it. Life with Annagret had cured him of that.

Three days after Tom Aberant had helped him bury the bones and rotted clothes of her stepfather in the lower Oder valley, he’d gone to Leipzig to look for her. He’d intended to go even sooner, but he was already much in demand for interviews with the Western press. Already, on the strength of his once having published a few naughty poems in Weimarer Beiträge , lived in a church basement, and blundered out of Stasi headquarters at the right moment, he was labeled PROMINENT EAST GERMAN DISSIDENT. Already, too, there were grumblings among the old embarrassments on Siegfeldstraße, mutterings that he’d done little but sleep with teenagers while the others were risking persecution. But none of them had a father on the Central Committee, none of them a résumé as sexy as the story of his acrostic poems, and by giving a dozen interviews back to back, always under the label of PROMINENT DISSIDENT (and always taking care to acknowledge the bravery of his Siegfeldstraße comrades), he made himself so much realer than the embarrassments that they had little choice but to accept the media’s version. His fame soon changed even their memories of him.

Annagret didn’t live with her sister in Leipzig, but the sister directed him to a teahouse frequented by feminists, a group until recently even more demoralized than environmentalists; polluted though it was, the Leipzig sky was less gray than the Republic’s leadership was grayly male. It was two in the afternoon when he pushed open the teahouse’s squeaky door. Annagret came out from the kitchen in back, wiping her hands on a dish towel.

Smile , Andreas thought.

She didn’t smile. She looked around the room, which was empty. On the walls were a picture of Rosa Luxemburg, a poster celebrating Women of Heavy Industry, and slightly more daring images of Western female musicians and activists. Everything faded and filmed over with the sadness he’d once mistaken for ridiculousness. A Joan Baez tape played quietly.

“We don’t have to talk now,” he said. “I just want you to know I’m here.”

“Now is fine,” she said, not looking at him. “We may not have much to say.”

“I have things to say.”

She faintly smirked. “‘Good news.’”

“Yes, good news. Should I come back later?”

“No.” She sat down at a table. “Just tell me your good news. I think I already know some of it. I saw you on TV.”

“I know,” he said, sitting down, “I’m an overnight sensation. And you didn’t believe me when I said I was the most important person in the country. Do you remember that?”

“I remember that.” She wouldn’t look at him. “I remember everything. Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because we’re safe now. We’re safe and I love you.”

She stared for a while at the tabletop. Then she nodded.

“Do you want to know why we’re safe?”

“No,” she said.

“I have the case files, and I’ve moved what needed to be moved.”

She nodded again.

“You’re not happy to hear that?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because of what we did.”

“Annagret. Please look at me.”

She shook her head, and he understood that the problem had never been that they weren’t safe. The problem was that he reminded her of what he’d put her through.

“It’s better if you just go,” she said.

“I can’t go,” he said. “I can’t imagine life without you.”

Before she could reply, the front door squeaked open and two women came in, talking about the New Forum. Annagret jumped up and disappeared into the kitchen. Soon other regulars arrived, all women. Though they didn’t seem actively hostile, Andreas felt like a foreign body in an organism quietly trying to rid itself of him. A midge in a watering eye.

A girl he recognized, the friend he’d seen with Annagret in Berlin two months ago, arrived and joined her in waiting tables. The friend asked him if he wanted anything.

“Nothing, thank you.”

“I don’t want to be rude,” the friend said. “But maybe you should leave now.”

“Yeah, OK.”

“It’s not personal. It’s just the kind of place we are.”

The midge was as relieved to be expelled as the watering eye was to expel it. Outside, in a cold drizzle, he considered taking the train back to Berlin and resuming his role as a PROMINENT EAST GERMAN DISSIDENT, giving Annagret more time to think. If Tom Aberant hadn’t vanished on him, he might have done it. Having even one real friend, a friend who knew his secret and had volunteered to help him bury it forever, might have lessened the urgency of his need for Annagret. But Tom hadn’t kept his date for dinner. Andreas had waited for hours for him to show up. The next day, returning from a round of interviews, he’d asked every person at the church whether an American had come around to look for him. He hadn’t had the sense, not at all, that Tom was merely seducing him for journalistic purposes. Even if he was, it made no sense for him to disappear before Andreas had got him into the Stasi archives. The explanation had to be that Tom had gone home to his wife: he hadn’t liked Andreas as much as he liked the woman he supposedly was sick to death of. The sting of this rejection was a measure of the swiftness and depth of the liking Andreas had taken to him. To be rejected by Annagret as well was simply not an option.

He went to the Leipzig train station and fished newspapers from trash cans and read them, feeling fortified when he saw his own name. Who could resist the temptation of believing one’s own press? In the evening, he returned to the teahouse and waited outside until it went dark and Annagret and her friend were lowering its shutters.

“Go away,” the friend said to him. “She doesn’t want to see you.”

“That sounds personal,” he said.

“Yes, now it’s personal.”

“I have to go back to Berlin. There’s a lot going on, and I need to be part of it. My name is Andreas, by the way.”

“I know who you are. We saw you on TV.”

“Annagret,” he said. “I have to go back. Won’t you at least take a walk with me?”