Jonathan Franzen - Purity

He saw that he’d trapped himself. He’d set up house less with a woman than with a wishful concept of himself as a man who could live happily ever after with a woman. And now he was bored with the concept. Although he never raised his voice with Annagret, he began to sulk and take offense at inoffensive things. He made subtly mocking comments about her work and was unfair to her female friends, whom he considered losers and resented for exploiting the weak link of Annagret to latch on to his fame. He gave lame excuses for avoiding them, and when a social outing couldn’t be avoided he was alternately cold, silent, or insulting. He behaved like a jerk and paid a price for it in self-regard, but he persisted in it, hoping that she would recognize it as a well-known sign of trouble in a relationship, and that maybe, eventually, he would be able to escape the trap.

But she was relentlessly good to him. When she got angry, it was rarely for long. She, who was otherwise a stalwart feminist, surrounded by man-distrusters, continued to carve out an exception for him. She took his work seriously and gave him helpful advice. She washed the dirty clothes and dishes he’d taken to leaving scattered around the flat. And the nicer she was, the more deeply he was trapped. Trapped by his gratitude for her high esteem and his fear of forfeiting it, trapped also by the early promises and avowals he’d made, the fuel with which he’d fired her idealism (and, for a while, his own). And because there were very few women who could top her combination of beauty and youth, and none at all from whom he wouldn’t have had to conceal that he was a murderer, and because he was in any case already famous enough that word of an affair was liable to get back to Annagret and shatter her idealization of him, other women seemed foreclosed to him.

Completing his entrapment was Annagret’s friendship with his mother. Back in 1990, after they’d set up house in Berlin and accustomed themselves to appearing in public together, unlearning the fear of incriminating themselves by doing so, he’d taken her to meet his parents. For the sake of his father, to whom he felt grateful and whose good opinion he prized, he ran the risk that his mother would be jealous of Annagret and cruel to her. But Katya was charming. She seemed to welcome Annagret’s beauty, which made her a suitable Wolf ornament, and Annagret’s youthful pliancy, which made Andreas’s own hostility seem perverse. She wanted Annagret to go back to school, and when Annagret demurred, saying she preferred to roll up her sleeves and help other people, Katya gave her a wink and said, “We’ll allow that. But you have to promise to attend my university instead. You can study with me in your free time, we’ll work on your English, and everything you learn will be interesting. Believe me, I know where the boring things are.” She winked again.

Instinctively alarmed by the proposal, Andreas took Annagret home and told her his worst Katya stories, the ones he’d been holding back for fear that they’d reveal the family sickness in him. Annagret listened earnestly and said she liked Katya anyway. She liked her for having given birth to him. She liked her — no matter what he said — for obviously loving him as much as she did. And he was still so new to the miracle of possessing Annagret’s body, the miracle of feeling capable of love, that he assented to the proposal. He managed to imagine that he might solve the problem of Katya by farming it out to Annagret.

Annagret’s own mother was a disaster. As threatened, she’d pushed the police to investigate her husband’s disappearance, but she was a known thief and drug addict, fresh out of prison, and made a poor impression. The police said honestly that the case file was lost and there was little they could do except circulate her husband’s photograph. The mother tried to enlist the help of her husband’s widowed mother and learned that the Stasi, two years earlier, had told his mother that he’d escaped to the West; she was still waiting to hear from him. Soon enough, Annagret’s mother was using again. She came to Annagret and Andreas and badgered them for money. Annagret coldly suggested that her mother get sober and look for work in a foreign country where nurses were in short supply. Annagret’s hatred of her was both genuine and convenient, since it protected her from the guilt of having had her husband murdered. The mother continued to harass them, turning up at their door to descant on Annagret’s ingratitude, until she succeeded in trading her looks for drugs and lodging with a Polish carpenter who also used.

Katya, by comparison, was an angel to Annagret. After Andreas’s father died, in 1993, she kept the old flat on Karl-Marx-Allee. She’d resigned from the university and endured a decent two-year interval of rehabilitation before resuming work as a Privatdozent and publishing a book-length study of Iris Murdoch to admiring reviews. She power walked eight kilometers every morning and traveled often to London with her Lhasa apso, Lessing. Annagret saw her at least once a week when she was in Berlin. The arrangement that Andreas had envisioned, whereby Annagret took over the distasteful job of keeping up family appearances, was working out much the way he’d hoped — except that he became insanely jealous of how close the two women were.

He hadn’t seen this coming. Annagret’s earnestness was never more unbearable to him, their wrongness as a couple never more evident, than on the evenings when she was at his mother’s. He blamed her both for liking his mother and for being liked by her. And he had no acceptable outlet for his jealous rage. Even when they fought, his voice merely became chalkily rational. She detested this chalky voice, but it was effective in contrast to her red-faced blurting: he was a good man, in firm control of his temper and everything else. But if she happened to stay at Katya’s even half an hour later than expected, he descended into a state of such eye-widened, heart-thudding rage that all he could do was sit with his arms pressed to his sides and try not to explode. It was so extreme that he began to suspect there was something inside him, some other self that had always been in him, that wasn’t in other people. Was very unusual and sick and particular to him.

This thing, which he came to think of as the Killer, was like a neutrino or an esoteric boson, detectable only by inference. Observing his subatomic self with rigorous honesty, investigating the deep structure of his unhappiness, taking note of certain strange and evanescent fantasies, he slowly pieced together a theory of the Killer and the paradoxical equivalencies and time-bendings that characterized it. Boredom and jealous rage, for example, were equivalent. Both had to do with the Killer’s frustration at not getting its object of desire. The Killer was enraged with Katya for depriving him of the object and no less enraged with Annagret herself. And what was this object? According to his theory, it was the fifteen-year-old girl he’d killed for. He’d believed he was attracted to her goodness, for its potential to redeem him, but to the Killer she was a fellow killer and liar and seducer. Her solemn gaze turned him on because it took him back to the night behind his parents’ dacha, to the body of the man whom she’d seduced and lied to and helped him kill. The more she became her own person, became his mother’s friend and many other women’s friend, the harder it was to see her as that fifteen-year-old.

Denied this particular satisfaction, he was prone to Killer-sponsored fantasies, some of them so offensive to his self-image (for example, the fantasy of coming on Annagret while she was sleeping) that it took a huge exertion of honesty to clock them before he suppressed them. All of the fantasies, without exception, involved darkness at night, the darkness at his parents’ dacha, the darkness of a hallway down which he was eternally walking to a bedroom. In his subatomic self, no chronology was stable. The object he wanted predated the piercings, the hair choppings, the gauzy Indian smocks she’d taken to wearing, and not because he “secretly” preferred fifteen-year-olds (if he ever had, he’d outgrown it) but because it was Annagret the socialist judo girl who’d helped him kill. Had made him kill; was equivalent to killing. The older Annagret, who was going to absurdly altruistic lengths to atone for the murder, didn’t suit the Killer’s purposes one bit, and so the Killer, in its fantasies, reversed the arrow of time and made her fifteen again. And more than that: when he examined certain fantasies closely, it was sometimes not he but her stepfather who walked down the dark hallway to the bedroom where she was sleeping. He was at once the man he’d killed and the man who’d killed him, and since another dark hallway existed in his memory, the dark hallway between his childhood bedroom and his mother’s, there was a further twisting of chronology whereby his mother had given birth to the monster who was Annagret’s stepfather, he was that monster, and he’d killed him in order to become him. In the shadowy world of the Killer, nobody was ever dead.