Jonathan Franzen - Purity

Cutting the cord with Katya wasn’t as easy. He deleted her phone messages without listening to them, and when she came to him in person he closed his door in her face and threw the bolt loudly; a week later, he moved to a new and more secure flat in Kreuzberg. But it wasn’t hard to find his phone number, and later in the fall, after he’d been in the headlines for breaking the news of German computer sales to Saddam Hussein, one of his first big Internet leaks, he got a call from a man who said he had a document of interest to him.

“If it’s paper, put it in the mail,” Andreas said. “If it’s digital, email it to me.”

The caller had a Berlin accent and vocal cords that sounded slack with age. “I’d prefer to bring it to you in person.”

“No. As you might imagine, I have some fear for my personal safety these days.”

“I’m not bringing you a bomb. Just a document. It concerns you personally.”

“Mail it.”

“I’m not sure you understand. The revelations in this document refer to you personally.”

Andreas didn’t know who besides Tom Aberant could still expose his old crime. Captain Wachtler, who’d brought him his files at Stasi headquarters, was long dead — Andreas had used his position on the Gauck Commission to track the downward progress of Wachtler’s health — but there were an indeterminate number of nameless functionaries above and below him on the old chain of command. They would all be older men with Berlin accents. It was possible that he was speaking to one of them now.

“What exactly do you want?” he said as levelly as he could.

“I want you to help me publish the document.”

“Even though it concerns me.”

“Yes.”

Andreas agreed to meet the caller at the Amerika Haus library, where security was heavy. The man he found waiting there, the following afternoon, had a handsome, ruined, clean-shaven drinker’s face. He looked to be in his late sixties and was dressed in tired Beatnik garb, a red turtleneck, a leather-elbowed corduroy blazer. Emphatically not former Stasi. There was a briefcase in front of him on the library table.

“So we meet again,” he said, with a smile, when Andreas was seated across from him.

“We’ve met?”

“I was younger. I had a beard. I’d spent a week sleeping under a bridge.”

Andreas never would have recognized him.

“How are you, my son?” his father said.

“Not so bad, until this moment.”

“I’ve been following your exploits. I hope you won’t mind that I’ve permitted myself some pride in you. Pride and a certain gloating satisfaction, given that the last time we met, you were so uninterested in learning secrets. How the world turns, eh? Now secrets are your business.”

“I’m aware of the irony. What do you want?”

“Some occasional contact with you wouldn’t be unwelcome.”

How to explain the distaste he felt at the prospect? It wasn’t just the red turtleneck, the elbow patches. It was that he sided with the memory of his other father. “Not interested,” he said.

His father’s smile became more pained. “Of course you’re an arrogant son of a bitch. You grew up privileged, everything’s always gone your way. How could you be anything else?”

“That pretty well sums it up.”

“You’re still on good terms with your mother, I suppose?”

“Hardly.”

“It’s shocking how little she’s changed.”

“You’ve seen her?”

“Through her doorway, briefly.”

“What do you want?”

His father opened his briefcase and took out a manuscript three fingers thick. “You’re not curious,” he said. “But I can tell you that not everything has gone my way. I was sent back to prison. Got out again and drove a taxicab until the Stasi was no more. Married a girl who was kind but a drinker. Became quite a drinker myself. I’m sober now — thank you for asking. I have a son — another son — with serious congenital disabilities. My wife took care of him until she died, two years ago. Our boy is in a facility now, not a very nice one, but the best I could manage. After the Turn, I was able to get work teaching English to eighth and ninth graders. I have a bit of a pension now from that, but mostly I live on federal charity.”

“That’s a tough story,” Andreas said with feeling. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your responsibility. I didn’t come here to accuse you. I’m sure it wasn’t easy having Katya as a mother. I was destroyed after only six years of her. Or, no, that’s not fair. I was crazy about her the whole time. The side of her she’d never show a child was really something.”

“I think I saw some of that side.”

“She’s sublime in her way. But, of course, she also destroyed me.”

“So…”

With a trembling hand, his father pushed the manuscript across the table. “In my retirement, I’ve taken to writing. This is my memoir. Have a look.”

The Crime of Love . By Peter Kronburg. Andreas was sorry to see his father’s name. Without a name, his existence had been conveniently spectral.

“I want you to read it,” Peter Kronburg said. “It won’t be a chore — I’m a good, clear writer. Your mother always said so.”

“No doubt. And presumably there are detailed scenes of sex with her? The very title seems to promise it.”

Peter Kronburg reddened slightly. “Only as pertinent to a larger story about the private life of the Central Committee.”

“My mother wasn’t on it.”

“Her husband was. The descriptions of sex stay within bounds of good taste, and that’s only half the book anyway. The rest is about prison and socialist ‘justice.’”

“And me. You said it pertained to me.”

Peter Kronburg reddened further. “At the end, I tell the story of our first meeting, and I admit that I’ve mentioned this aspect in my inquiries to publishers. I’m told it’s important to describe a potential marketing plan in the query letter.”

“ The untold story of Wolf’s sordid origins. And you want my help?”

“With your name attached to the marketing plan, I believe the book could be a bestseller. I have a disabled son to provide for when I’m gone. The book simultaneously partakes of Ostalgie and represents a searing critique of it. We’re at a perfect historical moment for publishing it.”

“It’s astonishing that you haven’t created a bidding war.”

Peter Kronburg shook his head. “I get the same answer again and again. It seems that every publisher already has too many East memoirs coming out. Only one publisher even asked to see the manuscript, and some very young-sounding woman sent it back with the comment that it wasn’t enough about you .”

Andreas was feeling sad for his father. For his smallness in relation to the largeness of his son. For his grasping after the main chance from a position of marginality, his talk of a marketing plan . It was heartbreaking to see old Ossis trying to ape the thinking of Wessis, trying to master the lingo of capitalist self-promotion.

“ I met my son a second time, at the Amerika Haus library ,” Andreas said. “This meeting itself could be the coda to your book.”

Peter Kronburg shook his head again. “The purpose of the book isn’t to shame you. I’m not angry at you. At your mother, at your father, at the Stasi, yes. But not at you. Unless you care about protecting Katya, the book won’t hurt you in the slightest. Quite the contrary, I think.”

“How does that work?”

“As I understand it, your own marketing plan is sunlight. If you endorse the book, if you help me present it to publishers again — to high-level editors, not frightened twenty-three-year-olds — you’ll demonstrate that no secret is so sacred that you won’t expose it. You’ll be even more famous. Your legend will only grow.”