Jonathan Franzen - Purity

And yours along with it , Andreas thought. Maybe his father wasn’t quite as clueless as he’d imagined. Not quite so different from him. Maybe not different at all, just less lucky.

“And if I don’t help you?” he said. “You’ll go to Stern and tell them I’m a hypocrite?”

“I’m doing this for my son — my other son — and for justice. And I’m not sure that justice is so important at this point. It isn’t news to anyone that the Stasi and people like your parents were evil. But in the world that’s come after them, money is very important.”

“I have no money for you.”

“I suspect in time you will.”

Andreas riffled the dot-matrixed pages of the manuscript. His eye fell on the sentence She was a wildcat on her hands and knees . No need to read any more of that. But he was curious, a little bit, about the red-turtlenecked man across the table from him. Had he always been on the make? Had he imagined that he could ride Katya’s coattails, as her lover, to power and prestige within the socialist system? To be sent to prison as a state-subverter wasn’t an injustice if you really were a state-subverter. Injustice was to have been an apparatchik and not received your promised reward.

“I won’t give you money,” he said. “I don’t want to see you again, either. I buried my father, and I don’t need another one. But I’ll read the book and do what I can.”

With evident emotion, Peter Kronburg extended a trembling hand across the table. Andreas grasped the hand, as a parting gift to him. Then he took the manuscript and left without another word.

A decade earlier, he’d carefully read his own Stasi file. It was mostly tedious, because he’d never been the target of a full operation, but there were some surprises. At least two of the fifty-three “at-risk” girls he’d slept with had been unofficial collaborators, confounding his theory that the Stasi rarely employed females and never such young ones. One of the informants had reported that he told inappropriate jokes at the expense of the state, sowed disrespect for Scientific Socialism among his counselees, and exploited his church authority to prey on them sexually; that after endeavoring to gain his more complete trust by submitting to relations with him and discovering that he had aberrant sexual tendencies (by which she’d presumably meant that he preferred eating her state-subverting pussy to kissing her state-sanctioned mouth), she’d feigned a strong interest in environmental activism; and that he’d laughed and said the only green thing that interested him was pickles . It turned out that this informant had been twenty-two; he remembered only her name, not her face. The other one, whom he remembered better, had been legitimately seventeen. She’d reported that he didn’t fraternize with other antisocial elements at the church , didn’t encourage questioning of the guiding principles of Marxist-Leninist thought , and presented himself as a monitory example of the consequences of frivolously counterrevolutionary behavior . Not coincidentally, she’d had no complaints about the sex, either.

The other small surprise in his file was that, until September 1989, his mother had received a visit from the Stasi on the first Friday of every month, simply to attest that she’d had no contact with her son. The reports on those visits, of which there were more than a hundred, were brief and basically identical, except that for the first three years they’d included annotations, typed on a different typewriter, confirming that the wiretap on her office telephone was negative for communication with AW. On the first report without an annotation, someone had scrawled telephonic monitoring of KW suspended at request of Undersecy W .

Andreas had been moved, in spite of himself, to learn of the extent to which Katya herself had been oppressed by the Stasi. He could never quite blind himself to the many ways in which she was a victim — of her own mental instability, of parents who’d dragged her back to the Republic instead of leaving her in England, of a secret police that had exiled and possibly killed those parents, of a husband she didn’t love but was compelled to obey, of a system that stifled her native brilliance, of a lover who’d come back to Berlin to turn her son against her, and, finally, of that son himself. Mostly he hated her, but the potential for compassion continued to lurk in him. Compassion for the broken, lost, victimized girl she’d been. Sometimes he even wondered if he’d seen a young Katya in the fifteen-year-old Annagret; if this was the real idea behind his idea of her.

As he carried Peter Kronburg’s manuscript home to his flat, his compassion was afoot. Although he could see that Kronburg was right, that getting The Crime of Love published might help his own career, he could also see that he wasn’t going to read it himself. Partly he felt squeamish, but mostly he felt protective. The few friends Katya had nowadays were Brits and old Wessis — she wanted nothing to do with Ostalgie —and she would probably lose them if they read the book. Even in an era of forgive and forget, collaborating to put an innocent man in prison for ten years, as she must have done, could not, once remembered, be so easily forgiven. The proud mother of the Bringer of Sunlight would become the reviled mother.

And so, although he’d vowed to himself not to, he went to see her one more time. When she came to the door, she was pouty about his having avoided her for three months, but her pouting turned to anger after he’d sat her down and explained the situation.

“It’s because I refused to see him again,” she said. “He must have gone home and taken the only revenge he could.”

“My understanding is that money is his motive.”

“He preyed on me before, and now he’s doing it again.”

“ It takes two to tango ,” Andreas said in English.

“I’m not going to discuss this with you. I just shudder to think of you reading his version.”

“Truth is a tricky thing, isn’t it?”

“He had subversive levels of contact with the West. He was infatuated with America, the music especially. He’s lying if he says there was any other reason for his heavy sentence.”

“Oh, Mother.”

“What?”

“That’s the best you’ve got? He deserved ten years in prison for being an Elvis fan?”

Katya tossed her head. “It was a very frightening time, and he was disloyal. He wanted to leave the country with me, and then, when the Wall went up, he became desperate. He tried to destroy me. Destroy us , your father and me. I don’t imagine you read any of this in his version.”

Again and again, her dishonesty was the acid dissolving his compassion. He’d come to her with a wish to protect her from embarrassment. If she’d been authentic for just one moment, if she’d admitted that she’d made a mistake and regretted what she’d done to Peter Kronburg, he would have protected her.

“You loved him enough to keep his baby,” he suggested.

“Don’t say ‘his.’ You were my baby, not his.”

“Ha. If I could have resigned from that position, I’d have done it in a heartbeat.”

“You’re thriving. You’re magnificent. How bad a childhood could you have had?”

“Good point. I’m a famous credit to your mothering skills. But if I don’t help him publish his memoir, he can make me look like a hypocrite. Would you like that?”

She shook her head. “It’s an empty threat. He wouldn’t do that. Just burn the manuscript and ignore him. People have stopped caring about our dirty laundry. This will blow over.”

“Possibly. But here’s a thought experiment for you: would you rather that I look bad, or that you look bad? Think about it carefully before you answer.”