Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“She doesn’t want to,” the friend said.

“A short walk,” he said. “We have some private family things to talk about. The three of us can get together later on.”

“All right,” Annagret said suddenly, pulling away from the friend.

“Annagret—”

“He’s not like the others. And he’s right — there is a family thing.”

Andreas noted, not for the first time, that she had some skill at lying. When he and she were alone, walking under umbrellas, she apologized for the friend. “Birgit is just very protective.”

“She seems particularly good at keeping men away.”

“I can do that myself. But it gets tiring, the constant attention. It’s nice to have some help.”

“The attention is that constant?”

“It’s disgusting. It’s actually been worse in Leipzig. Yesterday a guy pulled up next to me on his bike and asked me if I’d marry him.”

Although Andreas would have liked to break the guy’s nose, he couldn’t help feeling proud of the testament to Annagret’s beauty. “That’s very hard,” he said. “It’s hard to be you.”

“He didn’t even know me.”

They walked in silence for a while.

“The thing we did,” she said. “I did it for you.”

He was sorry to hear it, but also the opposite of sorry.

“I was out of my mind,” she said. “I was crazy for you. And I did a thing that ruined my life, and now it’s all I can think of when I see you. The thing I did for you.”

“But I did what I did for you, too. I’d do it again right now. I’d do anything to protect you.”

“Hmm.”

“Come to Berlin with me. Leipzig is a shithole.”

“You’re not going to leave me alone, are you.”

“There’s no other way. We were meant to be together.”

She stopped walking. No one else was on the sidewalk, and he’d already lost track of where they were. “The most terrible thing of all?” she said. “I like that you’re a killer.”

“I think I’m more than that.”

“But that’s the reason I’ll go with you, if I go. Isn’t that terrible?”

It did seem a little terrible, because only now, when she called him a killer, was he overcome with lust for her. He steeled himself against the urge to take her in his arms.

“We have to try to make amends,” she said. “We have to do good things.”

“Yes.”

“Lots and lots of good things. Both of us.”

“That’s what I want. To be good with you.”

“Oh God.” A sob escaped her. “Please go back to Berlin. Please, An—”

She’d been about to say his name. He realized that he’d never heard her say it.

“Can you say my name?” he said, pursuing an instinct.

She shook her head.

“Just look at me and say my name. Then I’ll go back to Berlin. I’ll wait however long I have to.”

She ran away from him. Suddenly, full speed, holding her umbrella to one side. He lost a few seconds in deciding to chase after her, and she was so young and so fleet, his judo girl, that he would never have caught up with her if she hadn’t come to a red light and taken too sharp a turn at the corner. The drizzle must have frozen there. Her feet went out from under her, and it sickened him to see her fall.

She was still on the ground, clutching her hip, when he reached her.

“Are you all right?”

“No. Or actually, yes. I’m all right.” And there it was — the smile he’d longed to see. “You told me not to self-dramatize. Do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“I remember everything. Every word.”

He crouched down and took her cold hands in his and let her look into his eyes. He saw that he could have her. But instead of a symphony of joy and gratitude, he heard a horrid little voice of doubt: Are you sure you really love her? No sooner does she chide herself for being self-dramatizing than she claims to remember every single word you ever said to her! She has no sense of humor — don’t you think this might become oppressive? He tried to deafen himself to the voice. She was, after all, uniquely beautiful. Two years ago, when he’d presented her with a menu of options that included murder, she’d picked murder. She was a good girl who was also dirty and a liar. Other men’s interest disgusted her, but somehow his didn’t. She knew he’d been bad and she wanted him anyway; was offering him a better life.

“Let’s go to your place and pack your bags,” he said.

“Birgit will hate me.”

“Not as much as she hates me.”

For two or three years, he was happy with her. She was very young and didn’t know anything about anything, certainly not how to share a life with a man, and although he himself had never shared a life with a woman, he was older and she presumed that he knew everything. She had a way of gazing solemnly into his eyes while he was on top of her, inside her, completely having her, and the mere recollection of this gaze turned him on for reasons he was slow to understand. As long as her idealistic ardor lasted, he let her buy little things, bedspreads, earthenware mugs, lampshades, that he knew were ugly. He praised the dismal Indian meals she’d taught herself to cook. He took pleasure in watching her find her way in Berlin, making new friends and reuniting with old ones, joining collectives, going to work at a women’s support services center. When they were out together, he felt proud, not oppressed, that she held him by the arm and never looked at any man but him. When they were at home, she was heartbreakingly eager to please. She seemed to have the idea that the more they made love, the more it confirmed that they were meant to be a couple and that she hadn’t done a bad thing in succumbing to the killer of her stepfather. For two or three years, he was the happy beneficiary of this idea more nights than not.

But the problem with sex as an idea was that ideas could change. By and by, Annagret developed a different and much drearier idea, of total honesty in bed, with heavy emphasis on discussion. He indulged it at first, trying to be a good man, trying to live up to an ideal image that he, too, still had of himself, but there was finally no way around it: endless discussion with a humorless twenty-three-year-old bored him. During the day, when they were apart, he kept picturing her solemn gaze, but when he came home he found a person with no resemblance to the object he’d desired. She was tired, had cramps, had evening plans, some needy woman’s hand to hold somewhere, some no-chance cause to organize another protest for. Or, even worse, wanted to discuss her feelings. Or, worst of all, wanted to discuss his feelings.

To escape domestic boredom, he attended overseas conferences, in Sydney and São Paulo and Sunnyvale. Besides his work on the Gauck Commission, administering the Stasi archives, he did transitional-justice consulting all over the former Eastern Bloc, sitting in overlit conference rooms identical in every respect but the languages on the mineral-water bottles from which unreconciled antagonists were pouring. Because reporters and cameras were so fond of him, he was starting to hear directly from corporate and governmental whistle-blowers in reunified Germany, and because committee work didn’t suit his personality (he was singular, not collegial) he was thinking about setting up on his own, becoming a clearinghouse for secrets, omitting the committees and dealing directly with the media. But his domestic problem, the disparity between the nighttime object he desired and the daylight actuality of Annagret, followed him everywhere. Even when he was alone in a hotel room in Sydney, turned on by the recollection of her solemn gaze, he had only to call home and hear her voice for two minutes to be bored with her. The boredom was immediate and overwhelming. Whatever they were talking about was wildly irrelevant, intolerably irrelevant, to what he wanted.